Shantaram полностью

I pressed my lips against the sky, and licked the stars into my mouth. She took my body into hers, and every movement was an incantation. Our breathing was like the whole world chanting prayers. Sweat ran in rivulets to ravines of pleasure. Every movement was a satin skin cascade. Within the velvet cloaks of tenderness, our backs convulsed in quivering heat, pushing heat, pushing muscles to complete what minds begin and bodies always win. I was hers. She was mine. My body was her chariot, and she drove it into the sun. Her body was my river, and I became the sea. And the wailing moan that drove our lips together, at the end, was the world of hope and sorrow that ecstasy wrings from lovers as it floods their souls with bliss.

The still and softly breathing silence that suffused and submerged us, afterward, was emptied of need, and want, and hunger, and pain, and everything else except the pure, ineffable exquisiteness of love.

‘Oh, shit!’

‘What?’

‘Oh, Jesus! Look at the time!’

‘What? What is it?’

‘I’ve gotta go,’ I said, jumping out of the bed and reaching for my wet clothes. ‘I’ve got to meet someone, at Leopold’s, and I’ve got five minutes to get there.’

‘Now? You’re going now?’

‘I have to.’

‘Leopold’s will be shut,’ she frowned, sitting up in the bed and leaning against a little hill of pillows.

‘I know,’ I muttered, pulling on my boots and lacing them. My clothes and boots were soaking wet, but the night was still humid and warm. The storm was easing, and the breeze that had stirred the languid air was dying. I knelt beside the bed, and leaned across to kiss the soft skin of her thigh. ‘I’ve gotta go. I gave my word.’

‘Is it that important?’

A twitch of irritation creased my forehead with a frown. I was momentarily annoyed that she should press the point when I’d told her that I’d given my word: that should’ve been enough. But she was lovely in that moonless light, and she was right to be annoyed, while I wasn’t.

‘I’m sorry’ I answered softly, running my hand through her thick, black hair. How many times had I wanted to do that, to reach out and touch her, when we’d stood together?

‘Go on,’ she said quietly, watching me with a witch’s concentration. ‘Go.’

I ran to Arthur Bunder Road through the deserted market. White canvas covers on the market stalls gave them the appearance of shrouded cadavers in the cool-room of a morgue. My footsteps running made scattered echoes, as if ghosts were running with me. I crossed Arthur Bunder Road and entered Mereweather Road, running along that boulevard of trees and tall mansions, with no sight or sound of the million people who passed there during each busy day.

At the first crossroad I turned left to avoid the flooded streets, and I saw a cop riding a bicycle ahead. I ran on in the centre of the road, and a second bicycle cop pulled out of a dark driveway as I passed. When I was exactly half way into the side street, the first police jeep appeared at the end of the street. I heard the second jeep behind me and then the cyclists converged. The jeep pulled up beside me, and I stopped. Five men got out and surrounded me. There was silence for a few seconds. It was a silence of such delicious menace that the cops were almost drunk with it, and their eyes were lit with riot in the softly falling rain.

‘What’s happening?’ I asked, in Marathi. ‘What do you want?’

‘Get in the jeep,’ the commander grunted, in English.

‘Listen, I speak Marathi, so can’t we-’ I began, but the commander cut me off with a harsh laugh.

‘We know you speak Marathi, motherfucker,’ he answered, in Marathi. The other cops laughed. ‘We know everything. Now get in the fucking jeep, you sisterfucker, or we’ll beat you with the lathis, and then put you in.’

I stepped into the back of the covered jeep, and they sat me on the floor. There were six men in the back of the jeep, and they all had their hands on me.

We drove the two short blocks to the Colaba police station, across the road from Leopold’s. As we entered the police compound, I noticed that the street in front of Leopold’s was deserted. Ulla wasn’t there, where she’d said she would be. Did she set me up? I wondered, my heart thumping with dread. That made no sense, but still the thought became a worm that gnawed through all the walls I put up in my mind.

The night duty officer was a squat, overweight Maharashtrian who, like many of his colleagues in the police force, squeezed himself into a uniform that was at least two sizes too small for him. The thought occurred to me that the discomfort it must’ve caused might help to explain his evil disposition. There was certainly no humour in him or any of the ten cops who surrounded me, and I felt a perverse urge to laugh out loud as their scowling, heavy-breathing silence persisted. Then the duty officer addressed his men, and the laughter in me died.