Gregory David Roberts - Shantaram

"I have come from Sheik Abdel Khader. My name is Abdullah."

The pen stopped at once, and Doctor Hamid slowly lifted his head.

He stared at us with a look of apprehensive curiosity. It was a look you see sometimes on the faces of bystanders witnessing a fight.

"He telephoned to you yesterday, and told you to expect me?"

Abdullah prompted quietly.

"Yes, yes of course," Hamid said, regaining his composure in an easy smile. He stood up to shake hands across the desk.

"This is Mr. Lin," Abdullah introduced me, as the doctor and I shook hands. It was a very dry and fragile hand. "He is the doctor in the Colaba hutments."

"No, no," I protested. "I'm not a doctor. I've just been sort of co-opted into helping out there. And I'm... I'm not trained for it, and... not really very good at it."

"Khaderbhai tells me that when you spoke to him, you complained about the referrals you're making to the St. George and other hospitals," Hamid said, getting down to business, and ignoring my protest with the air of a man who was too busy to indulge another's modesty. His eyes were dark brown, almost black, and glistening behind the polished lenses of his gold-framed glasses.

"Well, yes," I replied, surprised that Khaderbhai had remembered my conversation with him, and that he'd found it important enough to tell the doctor. "The problem is that I'm flying blind, if you know what I mean. I don't know enough to cope with all the problems people come to me with. When I come across illnesses that I can't identify, or what I think are probably illnesses, I send them to the diagnostic clinic at St. George Hospital. I don't know what else to do with them. But a lot of the time they come back to me without having seen anyone-no doctors, no nurses, no-one."

"These people are not feigning illness, you think?"

"No. I'm sure." I was a little offended for myself, and even more indignant for the slum-dwellers. "They've got nothing to gain by pretending to be sick. And they're proud people. They don't ask for help lightly."

"Of course," he murmured, removing his glasses to rub at the deep ridges they'd imposed on his nose. "And have you been to the St.

George yourself? Have you seen anyone there to ask them about this?"

"Yes. I went there twice. They told me they're swamped with patients, and they do the best they can. They suggested that if I could get referrals from licensed medical practitioners, then the slum-dwellers could jump the queue, so to speak. I'm not complaining about them, at the St. George. They've got their own problems. They're under-staffed and overcrowded. In my little clinic, I look at about fifty patients a day. They get six hundred patients every day. Sometimes as many as a thousand. I'm sure you know how it is. I think they're doing the best they can, and they're pushed to the limit just trying to treat the emergency cases. The real problem is that my people can't afford to see a real doctor, to get the referral that would help them jump the queue at the hospital. They're too poor. That's why they come to _me."

Doctor Hamid raised his eyebrows, and offered me that easy smile.

"You said my people. Are you becoming such an Indian, Mr. Lin?"

I laughed, and answered him in Hindi for the first time, using a line from the theme song to a popular movie that was showing, then, in many cinemas.

"In this life, we do what we can to improve ourselves."

Hamid also laughed, clapping his hands together once in pleased surprise.

"Well, Mr. Lin, I think I may be able to help you. I am on duty here two days a week, but the rest of the time I can be found at my surgery, in Fourth Pasta Lane." "I know Fourth Pasta Lane. That's very close to us."

"Precisely, and, after speaking to Khaderbhai, I have agreed that you should begin referring your patients to me, when you need it, and I will arrange treatment at St. George Hospital when I think it is required. We can begin from tomorrow, if you wish."

"Yes, I do," I said quickly. "I mean, it's great, thank you, thank you very much. I don't know how we're going to go about paying you but..."

"No need for thanks, and no need to worry about payment," he replied, glancing at Abdullah. "My services will be free for your people. Perhaps you would like to join me for tea? I take a break here soon. There is a restaurant across the road from the hospital. If you can wait for me there, I will come across and join you. We have, I think, much to discuss."

Abdullah and I left him, and waited for twenty minutes in the restaurant, watching through a large window as poor patients hobbled to the entrance of the hospital, and rich patients were delivered in taxis and private cars. Doctor Hamid joined us, and outlined the procedures I was to follow in referring the slum- dwellers to his practice in Fourth Pasta Lane.

Good doctors have at least three things in common: they know how to observe, they know how to listen, and they're very tired.

Hamid was a good doctor, and when, after an hour of discussion, I looked into his prematurely lined face, the eyes burned and reddened by lack of sleep, I felt shamed by his honest exhaustion. He could accumulate wealth, I knew, and surround himself with luxury, in private practice in Germany or Canada or America, yet he chose to be there, with his own people, for a fraction of the reward. He was one of thousands of health professionals working in the city, with careers as distinguished in what they denied themselves as in what they achieved every working day. And what they achieved was no less than the survival of the city.

When Abdullah took us into the plaited traffic once more, his bike weaving a haphazard progress through the threads of buses, cars, trucks, bicycles, bullock wagons, and pedestrians, he called over his shoulder to tell me that Doctor Hamid had once lived in a slum himself. He said that Khaderbhai had taken especially gifted slum children from several slums throughout the city, and paid for their enrolment in private colleges. Through secondary and then tertiary studies, the children were provided for and encouraged. They graduated to become physicians, surgeons, nurses, teachers, lawyers, and engineers. Hamid was one of those gifted children who'd been selected more than twenty years before. In response to the needs of my small clinic, Khaderbhai was calling in some dues.

"Khaderbhai is a man who makes the future," Abdullah concluded, as we stopped for a traffic signal. "Most of us-me and you, my brother-we wait for the future to come to us. But Abdel Khader Khan dreams the future, and then he plans it, and then he makes it happen. That is the difference between him and the rest of us."

"What about you, Abdullah?" I asked him in a shout as we roared off with the traffic once more. "Did Khaderbhai plan you!"

He laughed out loud, his chest heaving with the pleasure and the force of the laugh.

"I think he did!" he replied.

"Hey! This isn't the way back to the slum. Where are we going now?"

"We are going to visit the place where you will be getting your medicines."

"My what?"

"Khaderbhai has arranged for you to get medicines, every week.

The things I brought you today-those are the first. We are going to the medicine black market."

"A black market for medicine? Where is it?"

"In the slum of the lepers," Abdullah answered, matter-of-factly.

Then he laughed again as he pushed the bike to greater speed through a gap in the traffic that opened for him, even as he reached it. "Just leave it to me, Lin brother. Now you are part of the plan, isn't it so?"

Those words-now you are part of the plan-should've woken some fear in me. I should've sensed... something... even then, right at the start. But I wasn't afraid. I was almost happy. The words seemed exciting. They rushed my blood. When my fugitive life began, I was exiled from my family, homeland, and culture. I thought that was the whole of it. Years into the banishment, I realised that I was exiled _to something, as well. What I escaped to was the lonely, reckless freedom of the outcast. Like outcasts everywhere, I courted danger because danger was one of the few things strong enough to help me forget what I'd lost. And staring into the warmth of the afternoon wind, riding with Abdullah into the web of streets, I fell as fearlessly into my fate, that afternoon, as a man falls into love with a shy woman's best smile.