Gregory David Roberts - Shantaram

"You should've insisted that he go to a hospital!" I snapped at Johnny Cigar. "This is ridiculous!"

"You're doing very excellent sewing, Lin," he countered. "You could make up a very fine shirt, with stitches like that."

"It's not as good as it should be. He'll have a big scar. I don't know what the fuck I'm doing here."

"Are you having trouble with toilet, Lin?"

"What?"

"Are you not going to toilet? Are you having it hard motions?"

"For Chrissakes, Johnny! What are you babbling about?"

"Your bad temper, Lin. This is not your usual behaviour. Maybe it is a problem with hard motions, I think so?"

"No," I groaned.

"Ah, then it is loose motions you're having, I think."

"He had it loose motions for three days last month," one of my neighbours chipped in from the open doorway. "My husband told me that Linbaba was going three-three-four times to toilet every day then, and again three-three-four times every night. The whole street was talking."

"Oh yes, I remember," another neighbour recalled. "Such pain he had! What faces he pulled when he was at toilet, yaar. Like he was making a baby. And it was a very runny, loose motion. Like water, it was, and it came out so fast, like when they explode the cannons on Independence Day. Da-dung! Like that, it was! I recommended the drinking of chandu-chai that time, and his motions became harder, and a very good colour again."

"A good idea," Johnny muttered appreciatively. "Go and get it some chandu-chai for Linbaba's loose motions." "No!" I moaned. "I don't have loose motions. I don't have hard motions. I haven't had a chance to have any motions at all yet.

I'm only half awake, for God's sake! Oh, what's the use? There, it's finished. You'll be okay, Ameer, I think. But you should have a tetanus injection."

"No need, Linbaba. I had it injections before three months, after the last fighting."

I cleaned the wound once more and dusted it with antibiotic powder. Covering the twenty-six stitches with a loose bandage, I warned him not to get it wet, and instructed him to come back within two days to have it checked. He tried to pay me, but I refused the money. No-one paid for the treatment I dispensed.

Still, it wasn't principle that made me refuse. The truth was that I felt curiously, inexplicably angry-at Ameer, at Johnny, at myself-and I ordered him away curtly. He touched my feet, and backed out of the hut, collecting a parting slap on the head from Johnny Cigar.

I was about to clean up the mess in my hut when Prabaker rushed inside, grasped at my shirt, and tried to drag me out through the door.

"So good that you are not sleeping, Linbaba," he gasped breathlessly. "We can save the time of waking you up. You must come now with me! Hurry, please!"

"For God's sake, what is it now?" I grumbled. "Let go of me, Prabu. I've got to clean up this mess."

"No time for mess, baba. You come now, please. No problem!"

"Yes problem!" I contradicted him. "I'm not going anywhere until you tell me what the hell is going on. That's it, Prabu. That's final. No problem."

"You absolutely must come, Lin," he insisted, dragging at my shirt. "Your friend is in the jail. You must help!"

We abandoned the hut and rushed out through the narrow, shadow clogged lanes of the sleeping slum. On the main street outside the President Hotel we caught a cab, and swept along the clean, silent streets past the Parsee Colony, Sassoon Dock, and the Colaba Market. The cab stopped outside the Colaba police station, directly across the road from Leopold's. The bar was closed, of course, with the wide metal shutters rolled down to the pavement.

It seemed preternaturally quiet: the haunted stillness of a popular bar, closed for business.

Prabaker and I passed the gates of the police station and entered the compound. My heart was beating fast, but I looked outwardly calm. All the cops in the station spoke Marathi-it was a requirement of their employment. I knew that if they had no special reason to suspect or challenge me, my proficiency with the Marathi language would please them as much as it surprised them. It would make me popular with them, and that small celebrity would protect me.

Still, it was a journey behind enemy lines, and in my mind I pushed the locked, heavy box of fear all the way to the back of the attic.

Prabaker spoke quietly to a havaldar, or police constable, at the foot of a long flight of metal stairs. The man nodded, and stepped to the side. Prabaker wagged his head, and I followed him up the steel steps to a landing, with a heavy door, on the first floor. A face appeared at the grille set into the door. Large brown eyes stared left and right, and then the door opened for us. We stepped into an antechamber that contained a desk, a small metal chair, and a bamboo cot. The guard who opened the door was the watchman on duty that night. He spoke briefly with Prabaker and then glared at me. He was a tall man with a prominent paunch and a large, expressively bristly moustache, tinged with grey.

There was a metal gate made from hinged, concertina-style lattices behind him. Beyond the gate, the faces of a dozen prisoners watched us with intense interest. The guard turned his broad back on them, and held out his hand.

"He wants you to-" Prabaker began.

"I know," I stopped him, fishing into the pocket of my jeans. "He wants baksheesh. How much?"

"Fifty rupees," Prabaker grinned, looking up with his biggest smile into the face of the tall officer.

I handed over a fifty-rupee note, and the watchman palmed it. He turned his back to me and approached the metal gate. We followed him. More men had gathered there, all wide awake and chattering, despite the late hour. The watchman stared at them, one by one, until all were silent. Then he called me forward. When I faced the bars of the steel gate, the crowd of men parted and two fantastic figures pushed their way to the front. They were the bear-handlers, the blue-skinned men who'd brought Kano the bear to my slum at Abdullah's request. They reached the gate and grasped at the bars, chattering at me so quickly and urgently that I only caught every fourth or fifth word.

"What's going on, Prabu?" I asked, completely mystified. When Prabaker told me that my friend was in jail, I'd assumed that he'd meant Abdullah. I was expecting to find Abdullah behind the bars, and I moved left and right, trying to see beyond the bear-handlers and the other men crowding at the gate.

"These are your friends, isn't it?" Prabaker asked. "Don't you remember, Lin? They came with Kano to have your bear hugs."

"Yes, sure, I remember them. Did you bring me to see them?"

Prabaker blinked at me, and then turned quickly to check the expressions on the faces of the watchman and the bear-handlers.

"Yes, Lin," he said quietly. "These men were asking you to come.

Do you... do you want to leave?"

"No, no. I just... never mind. What do they want? I can't make out what they're saying."

Prabaker asked them to explain what they wanted, and the two blue-skinned men shouted their story, clutching at the lattices of the gate as if they were the boards of a raft on the open sea.

"They say, they tell it, that they are staying near to the Navy Nagar, and they found there some other fellows, who also are bear handling fellows, and having it one very sad and skinny bear,"

Prabaker explained, urging the men to be calm and to speak more slowly. "They say that these others were not treating their bear with respect. They were beating that bear with a whip, and that bear was crying, with pains all over him."

The bear-handlers spoke in a rush of words that kept Prabaker silent, listening and nodding, with his mouth open to speak.

Other prisoners approached the gate to listen. The corridor beyond the gate had long windows on one side covered by a metal grille. On the other side of the crowded prison corridor there were several rooms. Men streamed from those rooms, swelling the throng at the gate to a hundred or more prisoners, all of them listening with fascination to the bear-handler's story.