Gregory David Roberts - Shantaram

He interrupted or interjected when he pleased, and he ate more, drank more, and smoked more than any man in the room. He was especially, irreverently, affectionate with Khaderbhai, and it was certain that they were close friends.

Khaderbhai asked questions, probed, made comments upon what was said, but never added another word to his own position. I was silent; drifting, tired, and grateful that no-one pressured me to speak.

When Khaderbhai finally adjourned the meeting, he walked with me to the door that opened into the street beside the Nabila Mosque, and stopped me there with a gentle hand on my forearm. He said he was glad I'd come, and that he hoped I'd enjoyed myself. Then he asked me to return on the following day because there was a favour I could do for him, if I was willing. Surprised and flattered, I agreed at once, promising to meet him at the same place on the following morning. I stepped out into the night, and almost put it out of my mind.

On the long walk home, my thoughts browsed among the ideas I'd heard presented by that scholarly group of criminals. I recalled other, similar discussions I'd shared with men in prison. Despite their general lack of formal education, or perhaps because of it, many men I'd known in prison had a fervent interest in the world of ideas. They didn't call it philosophy, or even know it as such, but the stuff of their conversations was often just that- abstract questions of moral and ethic, meaning and purpose.

It had been a long day, and an even longer night. With Madame Zhou's photograph in my hip pocket, my feet pinched by shoes that had been bought to bury Karla's dead lover, and my head clogged with definitions of suffering, I walked the emptying streets and remembered a cell in an Australian prison where the murderers and thieves I'd called my friends often gathered to argue, passionately, about truth and love and virtue. I wondered if they thought of me from time to time. Am I a daydream for them now, I asked myself, a daydream of freedom and flight? How would they answer the question, what is suffering?

I knew. Khaderbhai had dazzled us with the wisdom of his un- common sense, and the cleverness of his talent for expressing it.

His definition was sharp, and barbed enough-suffering is happiness, backwards-to hook a fish of memory. But the truth of what human suffering really means, in the dry, frightened mouth of life, wasn't in Khaderbhai's cleverness that night. It belonged to Khaled Ansari, the Palestinian. His was the definition that stayed with me. His simple, unbeautiful words were the clearest expression of what all prisoners, and everyone else who lives long enough, know well-that suffering, of every kind, is always a matter of what we've lost. When we're young, we think that suffering is something that's done to us. When we get older-when the steel door slams shut, in one way or another-we know that real suffering is measured by what's taken away from us.

Feeling small and alone and lonely, I walked by memory and touch through the dark, lightless lanes of the slum. As I turned into the last gully where my own empty hut waited, I saw lamplight. A man was standing not far from my door with a lantern in his hand.

Beside him was a small child, a little girl, with knotted, teased hair. I drew near and saw that the man with the lantern was Joseph, the drunkard who'd beaten his wife, and that Prabaker was with him in the shadows.

"What's going on?" I whispered. "It's late."

"Hello, Linbaba. Nice clothes you're wearing for changes,"

Prabaker smiled, his round face floating in the yellow light. "I love it, your shoes-so clean and shining. Just in time you are.

Joseph is doing it good things. He has paid money, to have it the good luck sign put on everybody his doors. Since not being a badly drinking fellow any more, he has been working full overtimes, and with some of his extra money he paid for this, to help us all with good luck."

"The good luck sign?"

"Yes, look here at this child, look at her hand." He lifted the little girl's wrists, and exposed the hands. In the feeble light, it wasn't clear what I was supposed to see. "Look, here, only four fingers she has. See that! Four fingers only. Very good luck, this thing."

I saw it. Two fingers on the child's hands were joined, imperceptibly, to make just one thick finger between the index and middle fingers. Her palms were blue. Joseph held a flat dish of blue paint. The child had been dipping her hands into it, and making handprints on the door of every hut in our lane to bring protection against the many afflictions attributed to the Evil Eye. Superstitious slum-dwellers apparently deemed her to be especially blessed because she was born with the rare difference of only four fingers on each hand. As I watched, the child reached over to press her small hands against my flimsy door. With a brief, serious nod, Joseph led the girl away to the next hut.

"I am helping that used-to-be-beating-his-wife-and-badly drinking-fellow, that Joseph," Prabaker said, in a stage whisper that could be heard twenty metres away. "You are wanting any things, before I'm going?"

"No. Thanks. Good night, Prabu."

"Shuba ratri, Lin," he grinned. Good night. "Have it sweet dreams for me, yes?"

He turned to leave, but I stopped him.

"Hey, Prabu."

"Yes, Lin?"

"Tell me, what is suffering? What do you think? What does it mean, that people suffer?"

Prabaker glanced along the dark lane of ramshackle huts to the hovering glow-worm of Joseph's lamp. He looked back at me, only his eyes and his teeth visible, although we were standing quite close together.

"You're feeling okay, Lin?"

"I'm fine," I laughed.

"Did you drink any daru tonight, like that badly-drinking Joseph?"

"No, really, I'm fine. Come on, you're always defining everything for me. We were talking about suffering tonight, and I'm interested to know, what do you think about it?"

"Is easy-suffering is hungry, isn't it? Hungry, for anything, means suffering. Not hungry for something, means, not suffering.

But everybody knows that."

"Yes, I guess everybody does. Good night, Prabu."

"Good night, Lin."

He walked away, singing, and he knew that none of the people sleeping in the wretched huts around him would mind. He knew that if they woke they would listen for a moment, and then drift back to sleep with a smile because he was singing about love.

"Wake up, Lin! Hey, Linbaba, you must awake up now!"

One eye opened, and focused on a hovering, brown balloon that had Johnny Cigar's face painted on it. The eye closed again.

"Go away, Johnny."

"Hello to you, too, Lin," he chuckled, infuriatingly happy. "You have to get up."

"You're an evil man, Johnny. You're a cruel and evil man. Go away."

"One fellow has an injury, Lin. We need your medicine box, and your good medical self also."

"It's still dark, man." I groaned. "It's two o'clock in the morning. Tell him to come back in the daylight, when I'm alive."

"Oh, certainly, I will tell him, and he will go, but I think you should know that he is bleeding very swiftly. Still, if you must have more sleep, I will beat him away from your door, this very instant, with three-four good shots from my slipper."

I was leaning out over the deep pool of sleep but that word, bleeding, pulled me back from the edge. I sat up, wincing at the numbed stiffness of one hip. My bed, like most of the beds in the slum, was a blanket, folded twice and placed on the hard-packed earth. Kapok mattresses were available, but they were impractical. They took up too much space in the small huts, they quickly became infested with lice, fleas, and other vermin, and rats found them irresistible. After long months of sleeping on the ground, I was as used to it as a man gets, but there wasn't much flesh on my hips, and I woke up sore every morning.