Shantaram (3 page)

It was a large room, with three single beds covered by sheets, one window to the seaward side, and a row of windows that looked down upon a busy street. Each of the walls was painted in a different shade of headache-green. The ceiling was laced with cracks. Papery scrolls of paint dangled from the corners. The cement floor sloped downwards, with mysterious lumps and irregular undulations, toward the street windows. Three small plywood side-tables and a battered wooden dressing table with a cracked mirror were the only other pieces of furniture. Previous occupants had left evidence of their tenure: a candle melted into the neck of a Bailey's Irish Cream bottle; a calendar print of a Neapolitan street scene taped to one wall; and two forlorn, shrivelled balloons hanging from the ceiling fan. It was the kind of room that moved people to write their names and other messages on the walls, just as men do in prison cells.

"I'll take it," I decided. "Yes!" Prabaker cried, scurrying away at once toward the foyer.

My companions from the bus looked at one another and laughed.

"I can't be bothered arguin' with this dude. He's crazy."

"I hear ya," the shorter one chuckled. He bent low and sniffed at the sheets before sitting down gingerly on one of the beds.

Prabaker returned with Anand, who carried the heavy hotel register. We entered our details into the book, one at a time, while Anand checked our passports. I paid for a week in advance.

Anand gave the others their passports, but lingered with mine, tapping it against his cheek thoughtfully.

"New Zealand?" he murmured.

"So?" I frowned, wondering if he'd seen or sensed something. I was Australia's most wanted man, escaped from a jail term of twenty years for armed robberies, and a hot new name on th Interpol fugitive list. What does he want? What does he know?

"Hmmm. Okay, New Zealand, New Zealand, you must be wanting something for smoke, some lot of beer, some bottles whisky, change money, business girls, good parties. You want to buy something, you tell me, na?"

He snapped the passport back into my hand and left the room, glaring malevolently at Prabaker. The guide cringed away from him in the doorway, cowering and smiling happily at the same time.

"A great man. A great manager," Prabaker gushed, when Anand was gone.

"You get a lot of New Zealanders here, Prabaker?"

"Not so many, Mr. Lindsay. Oh, but very fine fellows they are.

Laughing, smoking, drinking, having sexes with women, all in the night, and then more laughing, smoking, and drinking."

"U-huh. I don't suppose you'd happen to know where I could get some hashish, Prabaker?"

"Noooo problem! I can get it one tola, one kilo, ten kilos, even I know where it is a full warehouse..."

"I don't need a warehouse full of hash. I just want enough for a smoke."

"Just it happens I have it one tola, ten grams, the best Afghan charras, in my pocket. You want to buy?"

"How much?"

"Two hundred rupees," he suggested, hopefully. I guessed that it was less than half that price. But two hundred rupees-about twelve dollars American, in those years-was one- tenth of the price in Australia. I tossed a packet of tobacco and cigarette papers to him. "Okay. Roll up a joint and we'll try it out. If I like it, I'll buy it."

My two roommates were stretched out on their parallel beds. They looked at one another and exchanged similar expressions, raising their foreheads in sedimentary wrinkles and pursing their lips as Prabaker pulled the piece of hashish from his pocket. They stared with fascination and dread while the little guide knelt to make the joint on the dusty surface of the dressing table.

"Are you sure this is a good idea, man?"

"Yeah, they could be settin' us up for a drug bust or somethin'!"

"I think I feel okay about Prabaker. I don't think we'll get busted," I replied, unrolling my travel blanket and spreading it out on the bed beneath the long windows. There was a ledge on the window sill, and I began to place my keepsakes, trinkets, and lucky charms there-a black stone given to me by a child in New Zealand, a petrified snail shell one friend had found, and a bracelet of hawk's claws made by another. I was on the run. I had no home and no country. My bags were filled with things that friends had given me: a huge first-aid kit that they'd pooled their money to buy for me, drawings, poems, shells, feathers.

Even the clothes I wore and the boots on my feet were gifts that friends had given me. Every object was significant; in my hunted exile, the windowsill had become my home, and the talismans were my nation.

"By all means, guys, if you don't feel safe, take a walk or wait outside for a while. I'll come and get you, after I have a smoke.

It's just that I promised some friends of mine that if I ever got to India, the first thing I'd do is smoke some hash, and think of them. I mean to keep that promise. Besides, the manager seemed pretty cool about it to me. Is there any problem with smoking a joint here, Prabaker?"

"Smoking, drinking, dancing, music, sexy business, no problem here," Prabaker assured us, grinning happily and looking up momentarily from his task. "Everything is allow no problem here.

Except the fighting. Fighting is not good manners at India Guest House."

"You see? No problem."

"And dying," Prabaker added, with a thoughtful wag of his round head. "Mr. Anand is not liking it, if the people are dying here."

"Say what? What is he talking about dying?"

"Is he fuckin' serious? Who the fuck is dyin' here? _Jesus!"

"No problem dying, baba," Prabaker soothed, offering the distraught Canadians his neatly rolled joint. The taller man took it, and puffed it alight. "Not many people are dying here in India Guest House, and mostly only junkies, you know, with the skinny faces. For you no problem, with your so beautiful big fat bodies."

His smile was disarmingly charming as he brought the joint to me.

When I returned it to him, he puffed at it with obvious pleasure, and passed it to the Canadians once more.

"Is good charras, yes?"

"It's real good," the taller man said. His smile was warm and generous-the big, open-hearted smile that the long years since then have taught me to associate with Canada and Canadians.

"I'll take it," I said. Prabaker passed it to me, and I broke the ten-gram lump into two pieces, throwing one half to one of my roommates. "Here. Something for the train ride to Poona tomorrow."

"Thanks, man," he answered, showing the piece to his friend.

"Say, you're all right. Crazy, but all right."

I pulled a bottle of whisky from my pack and cracked the seal. It was another ritual, another promise to a friend in New Zealand, a girl who'd asked me to have a drink and think of her if I managed to smuggle myself safely into India with my false passport. The little rituals-the smoke and the drink of whisky-were important to me. I was sure that I'd lost those friends, just as I'd lost my family, and every friend I'd ever known, when I'd escaped from prison. I was sure, somehow, that I would never see them again. I was alone in the world, with no hope of return, and my whole life was held in memories, talismans, and pledges of love.

I was about to take a sip from the bottle, but an impulse made me offer it to Prabaker first.

"Thank you too much, Mr. Lindsay," he gushed, his eyes wide with delight. He tipped his head backward and poured a measure of whisky into his mouth, without touching the bottle to his lips.

"Is very best, first number, Johnnie Walker. Oh, yes."

"Have some more, if you like."

"Just a teeny pieces, thank you so." He drank again, glugging the liquor down in throat-bulging gulps. He paused, licking his lips, then tipped the bottle back a third time. "Sorry, aaah, very sorry. Is so good this whisky, it is making a bad manners on me."

"Listen, if you like it that much, you can keep the bottle. I've got another one. I bought them duty free on the plane."

"Oh, thank you..." he answered, but his smile crumpled into a stricken expression.

"What's the matter? Don't you want it?"

"Yes, yes, Mr. Lindsay, very yes. But if I knew this was my whisky and not yours, I would not have been so generous with my good self in the drinking it up."

The young Canadians laughed.

"I tell you what, Prabaker. I'll give you the full bottle, to keep, and we'll all share the open one. How's that? And here's the two hundred rupees for the smoke."

The smile shone anew, and he swapped the open bottle for the full one, cradling it in his folded arms tenderly.

"But Mr. Lindsay, you are making a mistake. I say that this very best charras is one hundred rupees, not two."

"U-huh."

"Oh, yes. One hundred rupees only," he declared, passing one of the notes back to me dismissively.

"Okay. Listen, I'm hungry, Prabaker. I didn't eat on the plane.

Do you think you could show me to a good, clean restaurant?"

"Very certainly, Mr. Lindsay sir! I know such excellent restaurants, with such a wonder of foods, you will be making yourself sick to your stomach with happiness."

"You talked me into it," I said, standing and gathering up my passport and money. "You guys coming?"

"What, out there? You gotta be kidding."

"Yeah, maybe later. Like, much later. But we'll watch your stuff here, and wait for you to come back."

"Okay, suit yourselves. I'll be back in a couple of hours."

Prabaker bowed and fawned, and politely took his leave. I joined him, but just as I was about to close the door, the tall young man spoke.

"Listen... take it easy on the street, huh? I mean, you don't know what it's like here. You can't trust no-one. This ain't the village. The Indians in the city are... well, just be careful, is all. Okay?" At the reception desk, Anand put my passport, travel cheques, and the bulk of my cash in his safe, giving me a detailed receipt, and I stepped down to the street with the words of the young Canadian's warning wheeling and turning in my mind like gulls above a spawning tide.

Prabaker had taken us to the hotel along a wide, tree-lined, and relatively empty avenue that followed a curve of the bay from the tall, stone arch of the Gateway of India Monument. The street at the front of the building was crammed with people and vehicles, however, and the sound of voices, car horns, and commerce was like a storm of rain on wood and metal roofs.

Hundreds of people walked there, or stood in talking groups.

Shops, restaurants, and hotels filled the street side by side along its entire length. Every shop or restaurant featured a smaller sub-shop attached to the front of it. Two or three attendants, seated on folding stools, manned each of those small encroachments on the footpath. There were Africans, Arabs, Europeans, and Indians. Languages and music changed with every step, and every restaurant spilled a different scent into the boiling air.

Men with bullock wagons and handcarts wound their way through heavy traffic to deliver watermelons and sacks of rice, soft drinks and racks of clothes, cigarettes and blocks of ice. Money was everywhere: it was a centre for the black-market trade in currencies, Prabaker told me, and thick blocks of bank notes were being counted and changing hands openly. There were beggars and jugglers and acrobats, snake charmers and musicians and astrologers, palmists and pimps and pushers. And the street was filthy. Trash tumbled from the windows above without warning, and garbage was heaped in piles on the pavement or the roadway, where fat, fearless rats slithered to feast.

Most prominent on the street, to my eyes, were the many crippled and diseased beggars. Every kind of illness, disability, and hardship paraded there, stood at the doorways of restaurants and shops, or approached people on the street with professionally plaintive cries. Like the first sight of the slums from the windows of the bus, that glimpse of the suffering street brought a hot shame to my healthy face. But as Prabaker led me on through the roistering crowd, he drew my attention to other images of those beggars that softened the awful caricature presented by the performance of their piteousness. One group of beggars sat in a doorway, playing cards, some blind men and their friends enjoyed a meal of fish and rice, and laughing children took turns to ride with a legless man on his little trolley.

Prabaker was stealing sideways glances at my face as we walked.

"How are you liking our Bombay?"

"I love it," I answered, and it was true. To my eyes, the city was beautiful. It was wild and exciting. Buildings that were British Raj-romantic stood side to side with modern, mirrored business towers. The haphazard slouch of neglected tenements crumbled into lavish displays of market vegetables and silks. I heard music from every shop and passing taxi. The colours were vibrant. The fragrances were dizzyingly delicious. And there were more smiles in the eyes on those crowded streets than in any other place I'd ever known.

Above all else, Bombay was free-exhilaratingly free. I saw that liberated, unconstrained spirit wherever I looked, and I found myself responding to it with the whole of my heart. Even the flare of shame I'd felt when I first saw the slums and the street beggars dissolved in the understanding that they were free, those men and women. No-one drove the beggars from the streets. No-one banished the slum-dwellers. Painful as their lives were, they were free to live them in the same gardens and avenues as the rich and powerful. They were free. The city was free. I loved it.

Yet I was a little unnerved by the density of purposes, the carnival of needs and greeds, the sheer intensity of the pleading and the scheming on the street. I spoke none of the languages I heard. I knew nothing of the cultures there, clothed in robes and saris and turbans. It was as if I'd found myself in a performance of some extravagant, complex drama, and I didn't have a script.

But I smiled, and smiling was easy, no matter how strange and disorienting the street seemed to be. I was a fugitive. I was a wanted man, a hunted man, with a price on my head. And I was still one step ahead of them. I was free. Every day, when you're on the run, is the whole of your life. Every free minute is a short story with a happy ending.