Gregory David Roberts - Shantaram

When I reached the bike I kept walking on into the slum. I wasn't sure why. I was following an instinct, and drawn, perhaps, by the swollen moon. The narrow lanes, those writhing alleys of struggle and dream, were so familiar to me and so comfortingly safe that I marvelled at the fear I'd once felt there. I wandered without purpose or plan, and moved from smile to smile as men and women and children who'd been my patients and neighbours looked up to see me pass. I moved in mists of cooking scent and shower soap, of animal stalls and kerosene lamps, of frankincense and sandalwood streaming upward from a thousand tiny temples in a thousand tiny homes.

At a corner of one lane I bumped into a man, and as our faces rose to their apologies we recognised one another in the same instant. It was Mukesh, the young thief who'd helped me in the Colaba lock-up and the Arthur Road jail: the man whose freedom I'd demanded when Vikram had paid me out of prison.

"Linbaba!" he cried, seizing my upper arms in his hands. "So good to see you! Arrey! What's happening?"

"I'm just visiting," I answered, laughing with him. "What are you doing here? You look great! How the hell are you?"

"No problem, baba! Bilkul fit, hain!" I'm absolutely fit!

"Have you eaten? Will you take chai?"

"Thank you, baba, no. I am late for a meeting."

"_Achcha?" I muttered. Oh, yes?

He leaned in close to whisper.

"It is a secret, but I know I can trust you, Linbaba. We are meeting with some of those fellows who are with Sapna, the king of thieves."

"What?"

"Yes," he whispered. "These fellows, they actually know that Sapna. They speak to him almost of every day."

"That's not possible," I said.

"Oh yes, Linbaba. They are his friends. And we are making the army-the army of poor fellows. We will teach those Muslims who is the real boss here in Maharashtra! That Sapna, he killed the mafia boss, Abdul Ghani, in his own mansion, and put the pieces of his body all around his house! And the Muslims, after that they are learning how to fear us. I must go now. We will see us, before too much time, isn't it? Goodbye, Linbaba!"

He ran off through the lanes. I turned away, to walk unsmiling into a sudden mood that was anxious and angry and forlorn. And then, as it always did, the city, Bombay, my Mumbai, held me up on the broad back of a nourishing constancy. I found myself at the edge of a devoted crowd gathered before the new, large hut belonging to the Blue Sisters. Men and women stood at the rear of the crowd, while others sat or knelt in a semi-circle of soft light at the threshold of the hut. And there in the doorway, framed by haloes of lamplight and wreathed about with streamers of blue incense smoke, were the Blue Sisters themselves. Radiant.

Serene. Beings of such lambent compassion, such sublime equanimity, that in my broken, exiled heart I pledged to love them, as every man and woman who saw them did.

At that moment I felt a tug at my shirtsleeve and I turned my head to see what seemed to be the ghost of a gigantic smile with a very small man attached to it. The ghost shook me, grinning happily, and I reached out to enclose it in a hug and then bent forward quickly to touch its feet, in the traditional greeting to a father or mother. It was Kishan, Prabaker's father. He explained that he was in the city for a holiday with Rukhmabai, Prabaker's mother, and Parvati, his widow.

"Shantaram!" he admonished me when I started speaking to him in Hindi. "Have you forgotten all your lovely Marathi?"

"Sorry, father!" I laughed, switching to Marathi. "I'm just so happy to see you. Where is Rukhmabai?"

"Come!" he answered, taking my hand as if I was a child, and leading me through the slum.

We arrived at the little group of huts, including my own, that clustered around Kumar's chai shop near the crescent of the sea.

Johnny Cigar was there, with Jeetendra, Qasim Ali Hussein, and Joseph's wife, Maria.

"We were just talking about you!" Johnny cried as I shook hands and nodded my greetings. "We were just saying that your hut is empty again-and we were remembering the fire, on that first day.

It was a big one, na?"

"It was," I muttered, thinking of Raju and the others who'd died in that fire.

"So, Shantaram," a voice scolded in Marathi from behind me, "now you are too big a fellow to speak to your simple village mother?"

I swung round to see Rukhmabai standing close to us. I bent to touch her feet, but she restrained me, and joined her hands together in a greeting. She looked sadder and older within the soft endearments of her smile, and grieving had put a swipe of grey in the black pelt of her hair. But the hair was growing back. The long hair I'd seen falling like a shadow dying was growing back, and there was living hope in the thick, upward sweep of it.

Then she directed my gaze to the woman in widow's white standing beside her. It was Parvati, and a child, a son, was standing with her. He was clinging to her sari skirt for support. I greeted Parvati, and when I gave my attention to the boy and looked into his face I was so shocked that my jaw dropped open. I turned to the adults and they all smiled, waggling their heads in the same wonder, for the child was the image of Prabaker. More than merely resembling him, the boy was the exact duplicate of the man we'd all loved more than any other we knew. And when he smiled at me it was his smile, Prabaker's vast, world-encompassing smile, that I saw in that small, perfectly round face.

"Baby dijiye?" I asked. Can I hold him?

Parvati nodded. I held my arms out to him, and he came to me without protest.

"What's his name?" I asked, jigging the boy on my hip and watching him smile.

"Prabu," Parvati answered. "We called him Prabaker."

"Oh Prabu," Rukhmabai commanded, "give Shantaram-uncle a kiss."

The boy kissed me on the cheek, quickly, and then wrapped his tiny arms around my neck with impetuous strength, and squeezed me. I hugged him in return, and held him to my heart.

"You know, Shantu," Kishan suggested, patting at his round belly, and smiling to fill the world, "your house is empty. We are all here. You could stay with us tonight. You could sleep here."

"Think hard, Lin," Johnny Cigar warned, grinning at me. The full moon was in his eyes, and pearling his strong white teeth. "If you stay, word will get out. First, there'll be a party tonight, and then, when you wake up, there'll be a damn long line of patients, yaar, waiting to see you."

I gave the boy back into Parvati's arms, and wiped a hand across my face and into my hair. Looking at the people, listening to the breathing, heaving, laughing, struggling music of the slum, all around me, I remembered one of Khaderbhai's favourite phrases.

Every human heartbeat, he'd said many times, is a universe of possibilities. And it seemed to me that I finally understood exactly what he'd meant. He'd been trying to tell me that every human will has the power to transform its fate. I'd always thought that fate was something unchangeable: fixed for every one of us at birth, and as constant as the circuit of the stars. But I suddenly realised that life is stranger and more beautiful than that. The truth is that, no matter what kind of game you find yourself in, no matter how good or bad the luck, you can change your life completely with a single thought or a single act of love.

"Well, I'm out of practice sleeping on the ground," I said, smiling at Rukhmabai.

"You can have my bed," Kishan offered.

"Oh no you don't!" I protested.

"Oh yes I do!" he insisted, dragging his cot from outside his hut to mine while Johnny, Jeetendra, and the others hugged and mock wrestled me into submission, and our cries and laughter rolled away toward the time-dissolving everness of the sea.

For this is what we do. Put one foot forward and then the other.