Gregory David Roberts - Shantaram

As exhaustion finally claimed me, submerging my doubts and confusions, the shrewd clarity of near-sleep suddenly showed me what it was that those new friends-Khaderbhai, Karla, Abdullah, Prabaker, and all the others-had in common. They were all, we were all, strangers to the city. None of us was born there. All of us were refugees, survivors, pitched up on the shores of the island city. If there was a bond between us, it was the bond of exiles, the kinship of the lost, the lonely, and the dispossessed. Realising that, understanding it, made me see the hard edges of the way I'd treated the boy, Tariq, himself a stranger in my raw and ragged fragment of the city. Ashamed of the cold selfishness that had stolen my pity, and pierced by the courage and loneliness of the little boy, I listened to his sleeping breath, and let him cling to the ache in my heart. Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears. In the end that's all there is: love and its duty, sorrow and its truth. In the end that's all we have-to hold on tight until the dawn.

"The world is run by one million evil men, ten million stupid men, and a hundred million cowards," Abdul Ghani pronounced in his best Oxford English accent, licking the sweet honey cake from his short, thick fingers. "The evil men are the power-the rich men, and the politicians, and the fanatics of religion-whose decisions rule the world, and set it on its course of greed and destruction."

He paused, looking toward the whispering fountain in Abdel Khader Khan's rain-splashed courtyard as if he was receiving inspiration from the wetness and the shimmering stone. He reached out with his right hand and took another honey cake, popping it whole into his mouth. The little beseeching smile he gave me as he chewed and swallowed seemed to say, I know I shouldn't, but I really can't help it.

"There are only one million of them, the truly evil men, in the whole world. The very rich and the very powerful, whose decisions really count-they only number one million. The stupid men, who number ten million, are the soldiers and policemen who enforce the rule of the evil men. They are the standing armies of twelve key countries, and the police forces of those and twenty more. In total, there are only ten million of them with any real power or consequence. They are often brave, I'm sure, but they are stupid, too, because they give their lives for governments and causes that use their flesh and blood as mere chess pieces. Those governments always betray them or let them down or abandon them, in the long run. Nations neglect no men more shamefully than the heroes of their wars."

The circular courtyard garden at the heart of Khaderbhai's house was open to the sky at its centre. Monsoon rain fell upon the fountain and surrounding tiles: rain so dense and constant that the sky was a river, and our part of the world was its waterfall.

Despite the rain, the fountain was still running, sending its frail plumes of water upward against the cascade from above. We sat under cover of the surrounding veranda roof, dry and warm in the humid air as we watched the downpour and sipped sweet tea.

"And the hundred million cowards," Abdul Ghani continued, pinching the handle of the teacup between his plump fingers, "they are the bureaucrats and paper shufflers and pen-pushers who permit the rule of the evil men, and look the other way. They are the head of this department, and the secretary of that committee, and the president of the other association. They are managers, and officials, and mayors, and officers of the court. They always defend themselves by saying that they are just following orders, or just doing their job, and it's nothing personal, and if they don't do it, someone else surely will. They are the hundred million cowards who know what is going on, but say nothing, while they sign the paper that puts one man before a firing squad, or condemns one million men to the slower death of a famine."

He fell silent, staring into the mandala of veins on the back of his hand. A few moments later, he shook himself from his reverie and looked at me, his eyes gleaming in a gentle, affectionate smile.

"So, that's it," he concluded. "The world is run by one million evil men, ten million stupid men, and a hundred million cowards.

The rest of us, all six billion of us, do pretty much what we are told!"

He laughed, and slapped at his thigh. It was a good laugh, the kind of laugh that won't rest until it shares the joke, and I found myself laughing with him.

"Do you know what this means, my boy?" he asked, when his face was serious enough to frame the question.

"Tell me."

"This formula-the one million, the ten million, the hundred million-this is the real truth of all politics. Marx was wrong.

It is not a question of classes, you see, because all the classes are in the hands of this tiny few. This set of numbers is the cause of empire and rebellion. This is the formula that has generated our civilisations for the last ten thousand years. This built the pyramids. This launched your Crusades. This put the world at war, and this formula has the power to impose the peace."

"They're not my Crusades," I corrected him, "but I get your point."

"Do you love him?" he asked, changing the subject so swiftly that he took me by surprise. He did that so often, shifting the ground of his discourses from theme to theme, that it was one of the hallmarks of his conversation. His skill at performing the trick was such that even when I came to know him well, even when I came to expect those sudden deviations and deflections, he still managed to catch me off guard. "Do you love Khaderbhai?"

"I... what sort of question is that?" I demanded, still laughing.

"He has great affection for you, Lin. He speaks of you often."

I frowned, and looked away from his penetrating gaze. It gave me a rush of intense pleasure to hear that Khaderbhai liked me and spoke of me. Still, I didn't want to admit, even to myself, how much his approval meant to me. The play of conflicting emotions- love and suspicion, admiration and resentment-confused me, as it usually did when I thought of Khader Khan, or spent time with him. The confusion emerged as irritation, in my eyes and in my voice.

"How long do you think we'll have to wait?" I asked, looking around at the closed doors that led to the private rooms of Khaderbhai's house. "I have to meet with some German tourists this afternoon."

Abdul ignored the question and leaned across the little table separating our two chairs.

"You must love him," he said in an almost seductive whisper. "Do you want to know why I love Abdel Khader with my life?"

We were sitting with our faces close enough for me to see the fine red veins in the whites of his eyes. The embroidery of those red fibres converged on the auburn iris of his eyes like so many fingers raised to support the golden, red-brown discs. Beneath the eyes were thick, heavy pouches, which gave his face its persistent expression of an inwardness filled with grieving and sorrow. Despite his many jokes and easy laughter, the pouches beneath his eyes were swollen, always, with a reservoir of unshed tears.

We'd been waiting half an hour for Khaderbhai to return. When I'd arrived with Tariq, Khader had greeted me warmly and then retired with the boy to pray, leaving me in the company of Abdul Ghani.

The house was utterly silent, save for the splash of falling rain in the courtyard and the bubble of the fountain's over-burdened pump. A pair of doves huddled together on the far side of the courtyard.

Abdul and I stared at one another in the silence, but I didn't speak, I didn't answer his question. Do you want to know why I love this man? Of course I wanted to know. I was a writer. I wanted to know everything. But I wasn't so happy to play Ghani's question-and answer game. I couldn't read him, and I couldn't guess where it was going.