Shantaram полностью

‘Why… ha!’ Abdul Ghani laughed. ‘You’ve got me there, Khader, you old fox! You always know when I’m just making an argument for the sake of it, na? And just when I thought I was being bloody clever, too! But don’t worry, I’ll think it around, and come back at you again.’

He snatched a chunk of sweet barfi from the plate on the table, bit a piece of it, and munched happily. He gestured to the man on his right, thrusting the sweet in his pudgy fingers.

‘And what about you, Khaled? What have you to say about Lin’s topic?’

‘I know that suffering is the truth,’ Khaled said quietly. His teeth were clenched. ‘I know that suffering is the sharp end of the whip, and not suffering is the blunt end-the end that the master holds in his hand.’

‘Khaled, dear fellow,’ Abdul Ghani complained. ‘You are more than ten years my junior, and I think of you as dearly as I would of my own younger brother, but I must tell you that this is a most depressing thought, and you’re disturbing the good pleasure we’ve gained from this excellent charras.’

‘If you’d been born and raised in Palestine, you’d know that some people are born to suffer. And it never stops, for them. Not for a second. You’d know where real suffering comes from. It’s the same place where love and freedom and pride are born. And it’s the same place where those feelings and ideals die. That suffering never stops. We only pretend it does. We only tell ourselves it does, to make the kids stop whimpering in their sleep.’

He stared down at his strong hands, glowering at them as if at two despised and defeated enemies who were pleading for his mercy. A gloomy silence began to thicken in the air around us, and instinctively we looked to Khaderbhai. He sat cross-legged, stiff-backed, rocking slowly in his place and seeming to spool out a precise measure of respectful reflection. At last, he nodded to Farid, inviting him to speak.

‘I think that our brother Khaled is right, in a way,’ Farid began quietly, almost shyly. He turned his large, dark brown eyes on Khaderbhai. Encouraged by the older man’s nod of interest, he continued. ‘I think that happiness is a really thing, a truly thing, but it is what makes us crazy people. Happiness is a so strange and power thing that it makes us to be sick, like a germ sort of thing. And suffering is what cures us of it, the too much happiness. The-how do you say it, bhari vazan?’

‘The burden,’ Khaderbhai translated for him. Farid spoke a phrase rapidly in Hindi, and Khader gave it to us in such an elegantly poetic English that I realised, through the haze of the stone, how much better his English was than he’d led me to believe at our first meeting. ‘The burden of happiness can only be relieved by the balm of suffering.’

‘Yes, yes, that is it what I want to say. Without the suffering, the happiness would squash us down.’

‘This is a very interesting thought, Farid,’ Khaderbhai said, and the young Maharashtrian glowed with pleasure in the praise.

I felt a tiny twitch of jealousy. The sense of well-being bestowed by Khaderbhai’s benignant smile was as intoxicating as the heady mixture we’d smoked in the hookah pipe. The urge to be a son to Abdel Khader Khan, to earn the blessing of his praise, was overwhelming. The hollow space in my heart where a father’s love might’ve been, should’ve been, wrapped itself around the contours of his form, and took the features of his face. The high cheekbones and closely cropped silver beard, the sensual lips and deep-set amber eyes, became the perfect father’s face.

I look back on that time now-at my readiness to serve him as a son might serve a father, at my willingness to love him, in fact, and at how quickly and unquestioningly it happened in my life-and I wonder how much of it came from the great power that he wielded in the city, his city. I’d never felt so safe, anywhere in the world, as I did in his company. And I did hope that in the river of his life I might wash away the scent, and shake off the hounds. I’ve asked myself a thousand times, through the years, if I would’ve loved him so swiftly and so well if he’d been powerless and poor.

Sitting there, then, in that domed room, feeling the twinge of jealousy when he smiled at Farid and praised him, I knew that although Khaderbhai had spoken of adopting me as his son, on our first meeting, it was really I who’d adopted him. And while the discussion continued around me, I spoke the words, quite clearly, in the secret voice of prayer and incantation… Father, father, my father…

‘You do not share our joy at the speaking of English, Sobhan Uncle,’ Khaderbhai said, addressing the tough, grizzled older man on his right. ‘So please, permit me to answer for you. You will say, I know, that the Koran tells us how our sin and wrong-doing is the cause of our suffering, isn’t it so?’