Shantaram полностью

I looked at the back of her head, at the small part of her profile, at the barely perceptible bump of her breasts beneath the green shawl, and the long, thin fingers making prayer in her lap, and I couldn’t imagine her living with someone. Breakfast and bare backs, bathroom noises and bad moods, domestic and demi-married: it was impossible to see her in that. Perversely, I found it easier to imagine Ahmed, the Afghan roommate I’d never met, than it was to imagine her as anything but alone and… complete.

We sat in silence for five minutes, a silence calibrated by the slow metronome of the taxi’s meter. An orange banner hanging from the dashboard of the car proclaimed that the driver, like many others in Bombay, was from Uttar Pradesh, a large and populous state in India’s north-east. Our slow progress through the traffic jam gave him many chances to study us in the rear-vision mirror. He was intrigued. Karla had spoken to him in fluent Hindi, giving him precise, street-by-street directions to the Palace. We were foreigners who behaved like locals. He decided to test us.

‘Sister-fucking traffic!’ he muttered in street Hindi, as if to himself, but his eyes never left the mirror. ‘The whole fucking city is constipated today.’

‘A twenty-rupee tip might make a good laxative,’ Karla fired back, in Hindi. ‘What are you doing, renting this taxi by the hour? Get a move on, brother!’

‘Yes, miss!’ the driver replied in English, through delighted laughter. He applied himself with more energy to bullying his way through the traffic.

‘So what did happen to him?’ I asked her.

‘To who?’

‘To the other guy you lived with-the one who didn’t break a mess of laws.’

‘He died, if you must know,’ she said, her teeth clenched.

‘So… how did he die?’

‘They say he poisoned himself.’

‘They say?’

‘Yeah,’ she sighed, looking away to let her eyes drift in the shuffle of people on the street.

We drove in silence for a few moments, and then I had to speak.

‘Which… which one of them owned this outfit I’m wearing? The law-breaking one, or the dead one?’

‘The dead one.’

‘O… kay’

‘I bought it for him to get buried in.’

‘Shit!’

‘Shit… what?’ she demanded, turning to face me again, and frowning hard.

‘Shit… nothing… but remind me to get the name of your dry cleaner.’

‘We didn’t need it. They buried him in… in a different outfit of clothes. I bought the suit, but in the end we didn’t use it.’

‘I see…’

‘I told you that you didn’t want to know.’

‘No, no, it’s okay,’ I mumbled, and in fact I felt a cruel, secret relief that the former lover was dead, gone, no competition to me. I was too young, then, to know that dead lovers are the toughest rivals. ‘Still, Karla, I don’t mean to be picky, but you’ve got to admit it’s just a tad creepy-we’re off on a dangerous mission, and I’m sitting here in a dead guy’s burial suit.’

‘You’re just being superstitious.’

‘No I’m not.’

‘Yes you are.’

‘I’m not superstitious.’

‘Yes you are.’

‘No I’m not.’

‘Of course you are!’ she said, giving me her first real smile since we’d started in the taxi. ‘Everyone in the whole world is superstitious.’

‘I don’t want to fight about it. It might be bad luck.’

‘Don’t worry,’ she laughed. ‘We’ll be okay. Look, here are your business cards. Madame Zhou likes to collect them. She’ll ask you for one. And she’ll keep it, in case she needs a favour from you. But if it ever comes to that, she’ll find that you’re long gone from the embassy.’

The cards were made of pearl-white, textured, linen paper, and the words were embossed in liquid black italic. They declared that Gilbert Parker was a consular under-secretary at the embassy of the United States of America.

‘Gilbert?’ I grunted.

‘So what?’

‘So, this taxi crashes, and they gouge my body out of the wreckage, wearing these clothes, and they identify me as Gilbert. I’m not feeling any better about this, Karla, I have to say.’

‘Well, you’ll have to settle for Gilbert at the moment. There really is a Gilbert Parker at the embassy. His tour of duty in Bombay finishes today. That’s why we picked him-he goes back to the States tonight. So everything will check out okay. I don’t think she’ll be checking up on you too much, anyway. Maybe a phone call, but she might not even do that. If she wants to get in touch with you, she’ll do it through me. She had some trouble with the British embassy last year. It cost her plenty. And a German diplomat got into a real mess at the Palace a few months ago. She had to call in a lot of dues to cover that up. The embassies are the only people who can really hurt her, so she won’t be pushing it. Just be polite and firm when you speak to her. And speak some Hindi. She’ll expect it. And it’ll smooth over any trouble with your accent. That’s one of the reasons why I asked you to help me with this, you know? You’ve picked up a lot of Hindi, for someone who’s only been here a year.’