Gregory David Roberts - Shantaram

He half rose from his seat, and I had a vision of him dragging sick and injured people to my hut by force.

"No, no, take it easy. I don't see people every day. But if I do see people, if I'm here, they usually start coming around two o'clock. They don't come this early in the morning. Nearly everyone works until at least noon. I'm usually working myself. I have to earn money too, you know."

"But not this morning?"

"No, not today. I made some money last week. Enough to last me for a while."

"How did you make this money?"

He stared at me ingenuously, unaware that the question might embarrass me or be taken as rude.

"It's not polite to ask foreigners how they make their money, Abdullah," I informed him, laughing.

"Oh, I see," he said, smiling. "You made it by the illegal means."

"Well, that's not exactly the point. But yes, now that you mention it. There was this French girl who wanted to buy half a kilo of charras. I found it for her. And I helped a German guy get a fair price for his Canon camera. They were both commission jobs."

"How much did you make with this business?" he asked, his eyes not wavering. They were a very pale brown, those eyes, almost a golden colour. They were the colour of sand dunes in the Thar Desert, on the last day before it rains.

"I made about a thousand rupees."

"Each business, one thousand?"

"No, both jobs together made a thousand."

"This is very little money, Lin brother," he said, his nose wrinkling and his mouth puckering with contempt. "This is tiny, tiny, very small money."

"Well, it might be tiny to you," I mumbled defensively, "but it's enough to keep me going for a couple of weeks or so."

"And now you are free, isn't it?"

"Free?"

"You have no patients?"

"No."

"And you have no little commission business to do?"

"No."

"Good. Then we go together, now."

"Oh, yeah? Where are we going?"

"Come, I will tell you when we get there."

We stepped out of the hut and were greeted by Johnny Cigar, who'd obviously been eavesdropping. He smiled at me, and scowled at Abdullah, then smiled at me again with traces of the scowl in the shadows of his smile.

"Hi, Johnny. I'm going out for a while. Make sure the kids don't get into the medicines, okay? I put some new stuff into the shelves today, and some of it's dangerous."

Johnny thrust his jaw out to defend his wounded pride.

"Nobody will touch anything in your hut, Linbaba! What are you saying? You could put millions of rupees in there, and nobody would touch anything. Gold also you could put in there. The Bank of India is not as safe as this, Linbaba's hut."

"I only meant that..."

"And diamonds, also, you can leave in there. And emeralds. And pearls."

"I get the picture, Johnny."

"No need to worry about all that," Abdullah interjected. "He makes such tiny money that nobody would have the interest to be taking it. Do you know how much money he made last week?"

Johnny Cigar seemed suspicious of Abdullah. The hostile scowl pinched his face a little tighter, but he was intrigued by the question, and his curiosity got the better of him.

"How much?"

"I don't think we need to go into this right now, guys," I grumbled, struggling to head off what I knew could become a one- hour discussion of my tiny money.

"One thousand rupees," Abdullah said, spitting for emphasis.

I seized him by the arm and gave him a shove along the path between the huts.

"Okay, Abdullah. We were going somewhere, weren't we? Let's get on with it, brother."

We took a few steps, but Johnny Cigar came after us and tugged at my shirtsleeve, pulling me a pace or two behind Abdullah.

"For God's sake, Johnny! I don't want to talk about how much money I made, right now. I promise, you can nag me about it later but..."

"No, Linbaba, not about that," he rasped, in a scratchy whisper.

"That man, that Abdullah-you shouldn't trust him! Don't do any business with him!"

"What is this? What's the matter, Johnny?"

"Just don't!" he said, and might've said more, but Abdullah turned and called to me, and Johnny sulked off, vanishing in a twist of lane.

"What is the problem?" Abdullah asked as I drew level with him, and we set off between the snaking lines of huts.

"Oh, no problem," I muttered, knowing that there was. "No problem at all."

Abdullah's motorcycle was parked on the roadway, outside the slum, where several kids were watching over it. The tallest of them snapped up the ten-rupee tip Abdullah gave them, and then led his ragged urchin band away at a whooping run. Abdullah kicked the engine over, and I climbed up onto the pillion seat behind him. Wearing no helmets, and only thin shirts, we swung out into the friendly chaos of traffic, heading parallel to the sea towards Nariman Point.

If you know bikes at all, you can tell a lot about a man by how he rides. Abdullah rode from reflex rather than concentration.

His control of the bike in motion was as natural as his control of his legs in walking. He read the traffic with a mix of skill and intuition. Several times, he slowed before there was an obvious need, and avoided the hard braking that other, less instinctive riders were forced to make. Sometimes he accelerated into an invisible gap that opened magically for us, just when a collision seemed imminent. Although unnerving at first, the technique did soon inspire a kind of grudging confidence in me, and I relaxed in the ride.

At Chowpatty Beach, we turned away from the sea, and the cool breeze from the bay was stilled and then choked off by streets of tall terraces. We joined shoals of traffic in a steamy drift towards Nana Chowk. The architecture there was from the middle period of Bombay's development as a great port city. Some of the buildings, constructed in the sturdy geometries of the British Raj, were two hundred years old. The detailed intricacies of balconies, window surrounds, and stepped facades reflected a luxurious elegance that the modern city, for all its chrome and glamour, rarely afforded itself.

The section from Nana Chowk to Tardeo was known as a Parsee area.

It had surprised me, at first, that a city so polymorphous as Bombay, with its unceasing variety of peoples, languages, and pursuits, tended to such narrow concentrations. The jewellers had their own bazaar, as did the mechanics, plumbers, carpenters, and other trades. The Muslims had their own quarter, as did the Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs, Parsees, and Jains. If you wanted to buy or sell gold, you visited the Zhaveri bazaar, where hundreds of goldsmiths competed for your custom. If you wanted to visit a mosque, you found several of them within walking distance of one another.

But after a while I realised that the demarcations, like so many other long and short lines of division in the complex, culturally polyglot city, were not as rigid as they'd seemed. The Muslim quarter had its Hindu temples, the Zhaveri bazaar had its vegetable sellers among the glittering jewels, and almost every tower of luxury apartments had its adjacent slum.

Abdullah parked the bike outside the Bhatia Hospital, one of several modern hospitals and clinics which were endowed by charitable Parsee trusts. The large building housed expensive wards for the rich, and free treatment centres for the poor. We climbed the steps and entered a spotlessly clean marble foyer pleasantly cooled by large fans. Abdullah spoke to the receptionist and then led me down a corridor to the busy casualty and admissions section. After more questions to a porter and a nurse, he finally located the man he sought-a short and very thin doctor who sat at a cluttered desk.

"Doctor Hamid?" Abdullah asked.

The doctor was writing, and didn't look up.

"Yes, yes," he answered testily.