Gregory David Roberts - Shantaram

"We are always happy to help lord Abdel Khader," the two voices said. "I have the honour to serve him. We can give you much medicine, every week, no problem. First-class stuff, as you see."

He shouted a name, then, and a tall boy in his early teens pushed through the crowd to lay a canvas bundle at my feet. He knelt to roll out the canvas, and revealed a collection of ampoules and plastic bottles. There was morphine hydrochloride, penicillin, and antibiotics for staph and strep infections. The containers were labelled and new.

"Where do they get this stuff?" I asked Abdullah as I examined the medicines.

"They steal it," he answered me, in Hindi.

"Steal it? How do they steal it?"

"Bahut hoshiyaar," he replied. Very cleverly.

"Yes, yes."

A chorus of voices surrounded us. There was no humour in that concord. They accepted Abdullah's praise solemnly, as if he was admiring some work of art they'd collectively produced. Good thieves, clever thieves, I heard people mutter around me.

"What do they do with it?"

"They sell it on the black market," he told me, still speaking in Hindi, so that all those present could follow our conversation.

"They survive nicely from this, and other very good stealing."

"I don't get it. Why would anyone buy medicine from them? You can buy this stuff from just about any chemist."

"You want to know everything, brother Lin, isn't it? Well then, we must have another cup of tea, because this is a two-cups-of- tea story."

The crowd laughed at that, and pressed a little closer, picking out places to sit near us for the story. A large, empty, unattended goods wagon rumbled past slowly on an adjacent track, perilously close to the huts. No-one gave it more than a cursory glance. A railway worker, dressed in khaki shirt and shorts, strolled between the lines, inspecting the rails. He looked up at the lepers' camp from time to time, but his mild curiosity faded as he passed us, and he never looked back. Our tea arrived, and we sipped it as Abdullah began his story. Several of the children were sitting against our legs, their arms wrapped around one another compan- ionably. One little girl slipped her arm around my right leg, and hugged me with artless affection.

Abdullah spoke in very simple Hindi, repeating some passages in English, when he perceived that I hadn't understood. He began by talking of the British Raj, the time when Europeans controlled all of India from the Khyber Pass to the Bay of Bengal. The firengi, the foreigners, he said, gave lepers the lowest priority on their scale of privileges and entitlements. As the last in line, lepers often missed out on the limited supply of medicines, bandages, and medical treatment. When famine or flood struck, even the traditional medicines and herbal remedies were in short supply. The lepers became skilled at stealing what they couldn't obtain by other means-so skilled, in fact, that they accumulated surpluses, and began to sell medicines in their own black market.

In India's vastness, Abdullah went on, there were always conflicts-brigandage, rebellions, wars. Men fought, and blood was spilled. But many more men died through the festering of wounds and the ravages of disease than were killed in battles.

One of the best sources of intelligence available to police forces and governments lay in the control of medicines, bandages, and expertise. All sales from chemists, hospital pharmacies, and pharmaceutical wholesalers were registered. Any purchase or string of purchases significantly greater than the established norm attracted attention that sometimes led to captures or killings. A telltale trail of medicines, particularly of antibiotics, had led to the downfall of many dacoits and revolutionaries. In their black market, however, the lepers asked no questions, and sold to anyone who could pay. Their networks and secret markets existed in every great city in India. Their customers were terrorists, infiltrators, separatists, or just more than usually ambitious outlaws.

"These people are dying," Abdullah concluded, with the colourful turn of phrase that I was learning to expect from him, "and they steal life for themselves, and then they sell life to others who are dying."

When Abdullah finished speaking, there was a dense and ponderous silence. Everyone looked at me. They seemed to want some response, some reaction, to the story of their sadness and skill, their cruel isolation and violent indispensability. Whistling hisses of breath came through the clenched teeth of lipless mouths. Patient, serious eyes fixed me with expectant concentration.

"Can I... can I have another glass of water, please?" I asked, in Hindi, and it must've been the right thing to say because the whole crowd started laughing. Several children rushed off to fetch the water, and a number of hands patted me on the back and shoulder.

Ranjitbhai explained, then, how Sunil, the boy who'd showed us the canvas bundle of medicines, would make deliveries to my hut in the slum as and when I required them. Before we could leave, he asked that I remain seated for a while longer. Then he directed every man, woman, and child in his group to come forward and touch my feet. It was mortifying, a torment, and I entreated him not to do it. He insisted. A stern, almost severe expression burned in his eyes, while the lepers hobbled forward, one by one, and tapped their leathery stumps or the blackened, curled claws of their fingernails to my feet.

An hour later, Abdullah parked his bike near the World Trade Centre. We stood together for a moment, and then he reached out impulsively and enclosed me in a warm, bearish hug. I laughed as we came apart, and he frowned at me, clearly puzzled.

"Is it funny?" he asked.

"No," I reassured him. "I just wasn't expecting a bear hug, that's all."

"Bare? Do you mean it is naked?"

"No, no, we call that a bear hug," I explained, gesturing with my hands, as if they were claws. "Bears, you know, the furry animals that eat honey and sleep in caves. When you hold someone like that, we say you're giving them a bear hug."

"Caves? Sleeping in caves?"

"It's okay. Don't worry about it. I liked it. It was... good friendship. It was what friends do, in my country, giving a bear hug like that."

"My brother," he said, with an easy smile, "I will see you tomorrow, with Sunil, from the lepers, with new medicine."

He rode off, and I walked alone into the slum. I looked around me, and that place I'd once regarded as grievously forlorn seemed sturdy, vital, a miniature city of boundless hope and possibility. The people, as I passed them, were robust and invigorated. I sat down in my hut, with the thin plywood door closed, and I cried.

Suffering, Khaderbhai once told me, is the way we test our love, especially our love for God. I didn't know God, as he'd put it, but even as a disbeliever I failed the test that day. I couldn't love God-anyone's God-and I couldn't forgive God. The tears stopped after a few minutes, but it was the first time I'd cried for too long, and I was still deep in the mud of it when Prabaker came into my hut and squatted down beside me.

"He is a danger man, Lin," he said without preamble.

"What?"

"This Abdullah fellow, who came here today. He is a very danger man. You are better not for any knowing of him. And doings with him are even worsely dangerous, also."

"What are you talking about?"

"He is..." Prabaker paused, and the struggle was explicit in his gentle, open face. "He is a killing man, Lin. A murdering fellow.

He is killing the people for money. He is a goonda-a gangster fellow-for Khaderbhai. Everybody knows this. Everybody, except of you."

I knew it was true without asking any more, without a shred of proof beyond Prabaker's word. It's true, I said in my mind. In saying it, I realised that I'd always known, or suspected it. It was in the way other people treated him, the whispers he inspired, and the fear I'd seen in so many of the eyes that looked into his. It was in the ways that Abdullah was like the best and most dangerous men I'd known in prison. That, or something like that, had to be true.