Gregory David Roberts - Shantaram

And it had to be me. Another man, with my first-aid training or better trained, wouldn't have been forced by crime and a prison- break to live in the slum. Another criminal, ready to live there with the poor, wouldn't have had my training. I couldn't make sense of the connection on that first morning. I didn't get the joke, and fate didn't make me laugh. But I knew there was something-some meaning, some purpose, leading me to that place, and that job, at exactly that time. And the force of it was strong enough to bind me to the work, when every intuition tried to warn me away.

So, I worked into the day. One by one, the people gave me their names and their smiles and, one by one, I did my best to treat their wounds. At some point during the morning, someone put a new kerosene stove in my hut. Someone else provided a metal box for rat-proof storage of food. A stool found its way into my hut, and a water pot-the ubiquitous matka-and a set of saucepans, and a few pieces of cutlery.

As evening throbbed in a scarlet arch of sky, we sat in a group, near my hut, to eat and talk. Sadness lingered in the busy lanes, and memories of those who'd died receded and returned like waves moving on the great ocean of the heart. Yet carried on that sadness, a part of sorrowing itself, was the determination of those who'd endured. The scorched earth had been cleared and cleaned, and many of the huts were already rebuilt. Hopes rose with every humble home that was restored.

I looked at Prabaker, laughing and joking as he ate, and I thought of our visit with Karla to the Standing Babas. One moment from that evening, one heartbeat's length of time as the crazed man had charged at us with a sword, was stretched in my memory. At the precise instant when I took that step backwards and raised my hands in a boxing stance to fight, Prabaker took a step to the side, and stood in front of Karla. He wasn't in love with her, and he wasn't a fighter. Yet his first instinct was to step sideways and protect Karla by shielding her with his body, while my first thought was to step back and fight.

If the mad swordsman hadn't been tripped, if he'd reached us, I would've been the one to fight him. And, probably, I would've saved us: I'd fought men with fists, knives, and clubs before, and I'd won. But even then, even if it had gone that far, Prabaker would've been the real hero, for the bravery of that little, instinctive, sideways step.

I'd grown to like Prabaker. I'd learned to admire his unshakeable optimism. I'd come to depend on the comforting warmth his great smile provided. And I'd enjoyed his company, day and night, through the months in the city and the village. But in that minute, on my second night in the slum, as I watched him laughing with Jeetendra, Johnny Cigar, and his other friends, I began to love him.

The food was good, and there was enough for all. Music played on a radio somewhere. It was the fine, almost unbearably sweet soprano and happy, boasting tenor of a duet from an Indian movie.

The people talked, nourishing one another with their smiles and conversation. And some time during the course of that love-song, somewhere in the landscape of the slum-dwellers' reassurances, somehow through the fact of our survival, their world enfolded my life within its dreams, as gently and completely as a swollen tide doses over a stone that stands upon its shore.

I escaped from prison in broad daylight, as they say, at one o'clock in the afternoon, over the front wall and between two gun-towers. The plan was intricate and meticulously executed, up to a point, but the escape really succeeded because it was daring and desperate. The bottom line for us, once we started, was that the plan had to succeed. If it failed, the guards in the punishment unit were quite capable of kicking us to death.

There were two of us. My friend was a wild, big-hearted twenty- five year old serving a life sentence for murder. We tried to convince other men to escape with us. We asked eight of the toughest men we knew, all of them serving ten straight years or more for crimes of violence. One by one, they found an excuse not to join in the attempt. I didn't blame them. My friend and I were young first-offenders with no criminal history. We were serving big years, but we had no reputation in the prison system. And the escape we'd planned was the kind that people call heroic if it succeeds, and insane if it fails. In the end, we were alone.

We took advantage of extensive renovations that were being carried out on the internal security-force building-a two-storey office and interrogation block near the main entrance gate at the front wall. We were working as maintenance gardeners. The guards who pulled shifts in the area saw us every day. When we went to work there, on the day of the escape, they watched us for a while, as usual, and then looked away. The security-force building was empty. The renovation workers were at lunch. In the few long seconds of the little eclipse created by the guards' boredom and their familiarity with us, we were invisible, and we made our move.

Cutting our way through the chain-link fence that closed off the renovation site, we broke open a door to the deserted building and made our way upstairs. The interior was hollowed out by the renovation. Unplastered walls showed the skeleton structure of uprights and load-bearing beams. The bare, wooden steps on the stairway were white with dust, and littered with fragments of brick and plaster. There was a manhole in the ceiling on the top floor.

Standing on my friend's strong shoulders, I punched out the wooden trapdoor in the manhole and climbed through. I had an extension cord with me, wrapped around my body under my coveralls. I uncoiled it and pulled it free, fixed one end to a roof beam, and passed the other down to my friend. He used it to climb up into the roof-space with me.

The roof stretched out in zigzag waves. We scrambled toward the narrowing pinch of space where the roof met the front wall of the prison. I chose a spot on one of the troughs to cut our way through, hoping that the peaks on either side would conceal the hole from the gun-towers. It was dark everywhere in the roof- space, but in that narrow wedge near the wall it was blacker than a guard's baton.

With a cigarette lighter for a lantern, we worked to cut our way through the double-thickness of hardwood that separated us from the tin on the outside of the roof. A long screwdriver, a chisel, and a pair of tin snips were our only tools. After fifteen minutes of hacking, scraping, and stabbing at the wood, we'd cleared a little space about the size of a man's eye. Waving the flame of the hot cigarette lighter back and forth, we could see the glint of the metal roof beyond the small hole. But the wood was too hard and too thick. With the tools we had, it would take us hours to make a man-sized hole.

We didn't have hours. We had thirty minutes, we guessed, or maybe a little more, before the guards did a routine check of the area.

In that time we had to get through the wood, cut a hole in the tin, climb out on the roof, use our power extension cord as a rope, and climb down to freedom. The clock was ticking on us. We were trapped in the roof of the security building. And any minute, we knew, the guards might notice the cut fence, see the broken door, and find the smashed manhole. Any minute they could come up through the manhole into that black, sweating cave, and find us.

"We've gotta go back," my friend whispered. "We'll never get through the wood. We've gotta go back, and pretend it never happened."

"We can't go back," I said flatly, although the thought had screamed through my mind as well. "They'll find all the broken stuff, the fence we cut, and they'll know it was us. We're the only ones allowed in the area. If we go back, we're in the Slot for a year."