Gregory David Roberts - Shantaram

"This man is Omar," Khaderbhai said, pausing with the chillum almost to his lips. "He is the best maker of the chillum in all Bombay."

Omar lit the chillum for Khaderbhai, breaking into a toothless grin and basking in the praise. He passed it to me, studied my technique and lung-power with a critical eye, and grunted a sort of approval. After Khader and I had smoked twice, Omar took the chillum and finished it with gigantic puffs that swelled his thin chest to bursting. When he was finished, he tapped out a small residue of white ash. He'd sucked the chillum dry, and proudly accepted a nod of acknowledgement from Khaderbhai. Despite his great age, he rose easily from the seated position without touching his hands to the floor. He hobbled away as the singers returned to the stage. Abdullah rejoined us, bringing a cut-glass bowl filled with slices of mango, papaya, and watermelon. The scents of the fruits surrounded us as their tastes dissolved in our mouths. The singers began their next performance, singing just one song that continued for almost half an hour. It was a lush, tripartite harmony built upon a simple melody and improvised cadenzas. The musicians accompanying the singers on the harmonium and the tablas were animated, but the singers themselves were expressionless, motionless, with their eyes closed and their hands limp.

As before, the silent crowd in the club broke out in rowdy chatter when the singers left the small stage. Abdullah leaned across to speak to me.

"While we were driving here in the car, I was thinking about being brothers, Mr. Lin. I was thinking about what Khaderbhai said."

"That's funny, so was I."

"My two brothers-we were three brothers in my family in Iran, and now my two brothers, they are dead. They were killed in the war against Iraq. I have a sister, in Iran, but I have no brother. I am just one brother now. One brother is a sadness, isn't it?"

I couldn't answer him directly. My own brother was lost to me. My whole family was lost, and I was sure I would never see them again.

"I was thinking that perhaps Khaderbhai saw something true.

Perhaps we really are looking like brothers."

"Maybe we are."

He smiled.

"I have decided to like you, Mr. Lin."

He said it with such solemnity, despite the smile, that I had to laugh.

"Well, I guess in that case you'd better stop calling me Mr. Lin.

It gives me the heebie-jeebies, anyway."

"Jeebies?" he asked, earnestly. "It is an Arabic word?"

"Don't worry about it. Just call me Lin."

"Okay. I will call you Lin. I will call you Lin brother. And you will call me Abdullah, isn't it so?"

"I guess it is."

"Then we will remember this night, at the concert of the blind singers, because it is the night we begin brothering for each other."

"Did you say, the blind singers?"

"Yes. You don't know them? These are the Blind Singers of Nagpur.

They are famous in Bombay."

"Are they from an institution?"

"Institution?"

"Yeah, a school for the blind, maybe. Something like that."

"No, Lin brother. At one time they could see, just as we are seeing. But in a small village, near Nagpur, there was a blinding, and these men became blind."

The noise around me was dizzying, and the once pleasant smell of the fruits and the charras was beginning to cloy and stifle.

"What do you mean, there was a blinding?"

"Well, there were rebels and bandits, hiding in the mountains, near that village," he explained in his slow, deliberate way.

"The villagers had to give them food, and other help. They had no choice. But when the police and soldiers came to the village, they made twenty people blind, as a lesson, as a warning to other people, in other villages. This happens sometimes. The singers were not from that village. They were visiting there, to sing at a festival. It was just bad luck. They were made blind, with the rest. All of them, those men and women, twenty people, were tied on the ground, and their eyes were put out, with sharp pieces of bamboo. Now they sing here, everywhere, and are very famous. And rich also..."

He talked on. I listened, but I couldn't respond or react.

Khaderbhai sat next to me, conversing with a young, turbaned Afghan. The young man bent low to kiss Khader's hand, and the butt of a gun appeared within the folds of his robe. Omar returned and began to prepare another chillum. He grinned up at me with his stained gums, and nodded.

"Yes, yes," he lisped, staring into my eyes. "Yes, yes, yes."

The singers came back to sing again, and smoke spiralled up into the slash of slowly revolving fans, and that green silk room of music and conspiracies became a beginning for me. I know now that there are beginnings, turning points, many of them, in every life; questions of luck and will and fate. The naming day, the day of the flood sticks in Prabaker's village, when the women gave me the name Shantaram, was a beginning. I know that now. And I know that everything else I'd been and done in India up to that night and the concert of the blind singers, perhaps even the whole of my life, was a preparation for that beginning with Abdel Khader Khan. Abdullah became my brother. Khaderbhai became my father. By the time I realised that fully, and knew the reasons for it, my new life as brother and son had taken me to war, and involved me in murder, and everything had changed forever.

Khaderbhai leaned across after the singing stopped. His lips were moving, and I knew he was speaking to me, but for a moment I couldn't hear him.

"I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you."

"I said that the truth is found more often in music," he repeated, "than it is in books of philosophy."

"What is the truth?" I asked him. I didn't really want to know. I was trying to hold up my end of the conversation. I was trying to be clever.

"The truth is that there are no good men, or bad men," he said.

"It is the deeds that have goodness or badness in them. There are good deeds, and bad deeds. Men are just men-it is what they do, or refuse to do, that links them to good and evil. The truth is that an instant of real love, in the heart of anyone-the noblest man alive or the most wicked-has the whole purpose and process and meaning of life within the lotus-folds of its passion. The truth is that we are all, every one of us, every atom, every galaxy, and every particle of matter in the universe, moving toward God."

Those words of his are mine forever now. I can hear them. The blind singers are forever. I can see them. The night, and the men that were the beginning, father and brother, are forever. I can remember them. It's easy. All I have to do is close my eyes.

Abdullah took his brothering seriously. A week after the Night of the Blind Singers, he arrived at my hut in the Cuffe Parade slum carrying a satchel filled with medicines, salves, and bandages.

He also brought a small metal case containing a few surgical instruments. We went through the bag together. He asked me about the medicines, wanting to know how useful they were and what quantities I might need in the future. When he'd satisfied himself, he dusted off the wooden stool and sat down. He was silent for a few minutes, watching me pack the supplies he'd brought into a rack of bamboo shelves. The crowded slum chattered, brawled, sang, and laughed around us.

"Well, Lin, where are they?" he finally asked.

"Where's who?"

"The patients. Where are they? I want to see my brother healing them. There can't be healing, without sick people, isn't it?"

"I, er, I don't have any patients just now."

"Oh," he sighed. He frowned, drumming his fingers on his knees.

"Well, do you think I should go and get you some?"