Gregory David Roberts - Shantaram

I trailed off a little lamely into the silence that greeted my suggestion, but moments later I was rewarded with a warmly approving smile from Khaderbhai.

"It is a good theme, Lin. I knew that you would not disappoint us. Majidbhai, I will call on you to start us on this talk."

Madjid cleared his throat and turned a gruff smile on his host.

He scratched at his bushy eyebrows with thumb and forefinger, and then plunged into the discussion with the confident air of a man much used to expressing his opinions.

"Suffering, let me see. I think that suffering is a matter of choice. I think that we do not have to suffer anything in this life, if we are strong enough to deny it. The strong man can master his feelings so completely that it is almost impossible to make him suffer. When we do suffer things, like pain and so, it means that we have lost control. So I will say that suffering is a human weakness."

"Achaa-cha," Khaderbhai murmured, using the repetitive form of the Hindi word for good, which translates as Yes, yes, or Fine, fine. "Your interesting idea makes me ask the question, where does strength come from?"

"Strength?" Madjid grunted. "Everyone knows that it... well... what are you saying?"

"Nothing, my old friend. Only, is it not true that some of our strength comes from suffering? That suffering hardship makes us stronger? That those of us who have never known a real hardship, and true suffering, cannot have the same strength as others, who have suffered much? And if that is true, does that not mean that your argument is the same thing as saying that we have to be weak to suffer, and we have to suffer to be strong, so we have to be weak to be strong?"

"Yes," Madjid conceded, smiling. "Maybe a little bit is true, maybe a little bit of what you say. But I still think it is a matter of strength and weakness."

"I don't accept everything that our brother Madjid said," Abdul Ghani put in, "but I do agree that there is an element of control that we have over suffering. I don't think you can deny that."

"Where do we get this control, and how?" Khaderbhai asked.

"I would say that it is different for all of us, but that it happens when we grow up, when we mature and pass from the childishness of our youthful tears, and become adults. I think that it is a part of growing up, learning to control our suffering. I think that when we grow up, and learn that happiness is rare, and passes quickly, we become disillusioned and hurt.

And how much we suffer is a mark of how much we have been hurt by this realisation. Suffering, you see, is a kind of anger. We rage against the unfairness, the injustice of our sad and sorry lot.

And this boiling resentment, you see, this anger, is what we call suffering. It is also what leads us to the hero curse, I might add."

"Hero curse! Enough of your hero curses! You bring every subject back to this," Madjid growled, scowling to match the smug smile of his portly friend.

"Abdul has a pet theory, Lin," said Khaled, the dour Palestinian.

"He believes that certain men are cursed with qualities, such as great courage, that make them commit desperate acts. He calls it the hero curse, the thing that compels them to lead other men to bloodshed and chaos. He might be right, I think, but he goes on about it so much he drives us all crazy." "Leaving that aside, Abdul," Khaderbhai persisted, "let me ask you one question about what you have said. Is there a difference, would you say, between suffering that we experience, and suffering that we cause for others?"

"Of course, yes. What are you getting at, Khader?"

"Just that if there are at least two kinds of suffering, quite different to each other, one that we feel, and one that we cause others to feel, they can hardly both be the anger that you spoke of. Isn't it so? Which one is which, would you say?"

"Why... ha!" Abdul Ghani laughed. "You've got me there, Khader, you old fox! You always know when I'm just making an argument for the sake of it, _na? And just when I thought I was being bloody clever, too! But don't worry, I'll think it around, and come back at you again."

He snatched a chunk of sweet barfi from the plate on the table, bit a piece of it, and munched happily. He gestured to the man on his right, thrusting the sweet in his pudgy fingers.

"And what about you, Khaled? What have you to say about Lin's topic?"

"I know that suffering is the truth," Khaled said quietly. His teeth were clenched. "I know that suffering is the sharp end of the whip, and not suffering is the blunt end-the end that the master holds in his hand."

"Khaled, dear fellow," Abdul Ghani complained. "You are more than ten years my junior, and I think of you as dearly as I would of my own younger brother, but I must tell you that this is a most depressing thought, and you're disturbing the good pleasure we've gained from this excellent charras."

"If you'd been born and raised in Palestine, you'd know that some people are born to suffer. And it never stops, for them. Not for a second. You'd know where real suffering comes from. It's the same place where love and freedom and pride are born. And it's the same place where those feelings and ideals die. That suffering never stops. We only pretend it does. We only tell ourselves it does, to make the kids stop whimpering in their sleep."

He stared down at his strong hands, glowering at them as if at two despised and defeated enemies who were pleading for his mercy. A gloomy silence began to thicken in the air around us, and instinctively we looked to Khaderbhai. He sat cross-legged, stiff-backed, rocking slowly in his place and seeming to spool out a precise measure of respectful reflection. At last, he nodded to Farid, inviting him to speak. "I think that our brother Khaled is right, in a way," Farid began quietly, almost shyly. He turned his large, dark brown eyes on Khaderbhai. Encouraged by the older man's nod of interest, he continued. "I think that happiness is a really thing, a truly thing, but it is what makes us crazy people. Happiness is a so strange and power thing that it makes us to be sick, like a germ sort of thing. And suffering is what cures us of it, the too much happiness. The-how do you say it, bhari vazan?"

"The burden," Khaderbhai translated for him. Farid spoke a phrase rapidly in Hindi, and Khader gave it to us in such an elegantly poetic English that I realised, through the haze of the stone, how much better his English was than he'd led me to believe at our first meeting. "The burden of happiness can only be relieved by the balm of suffering."

"Yes, yes, that is it what I want to say. Without the suffering, the happiness would squash us down."

"This is a very interesting thought, Farid," Khaderbhai said, and the young Maharashtrian glowed with pleasure in the praise.

I felt a tiny twitch of jealousy. The sense of well-being bestowed by Khaderbhai's benignant smile was as intoxicating as the heady mixture we'd smoked in the hookah pipe. The urge to be a son to Abdel Khader Khan, to earn the blessing of his praise, was overwhelming. The hollow space in my heart where a father's love might've been, should've been, wrapped itself around the contours of his form, and took the features of his face. The high cheekbones and closely cropped silver beard, the sensual lips and deep-set amber eyes, became the perfect father's face.

I look back on that time now-at my readiness to serve him as a son might serve a father, at my willingness to love him, in fact, and at how quickly and unquestioningly it happened in my life- and I wonder how much of it came from the great power that he wielded in the city, his city. I'd never felt so safe, anywhere in the world, as I did in his company. And I did hope that in the river of his life I might wash away the scent, and shake off the hounds. I've asked myself a thousand times, through the years, if I would've loved him so swiftly and so well if he'd been powerless and poor.