Shantaram полностью

‘That’s funny-I thought we just signed a two-year contract with Mehta and his production company. You know, the let’s-get-on-with our-lives contract.’

‘Fuck the contract.’

‘Come on, Lin.’

‘Fuck the contract. You’ve gotta get out of this. We don’t know what the fuck’s going on. We don’t know why Abdullah’s dead. We don’t know what he did do, or what he didn’t do. If he wasn’t Sapna, then things are bad. If he was Sapna, things are much worse. You should take the money and just… go.’

‘And go where?’

‘Anywhere.’

‘Are you going?’

‘No. I’ve got unfinished business here. And I’m… I’m finished myself, in a way. But you should go.’

‘You don’t get it, do you?’ she demanded. ‘It’s not about the money. If I go back now, I’ll put the lot of it in my arm. I’ve gotta have something more than money. I’m trying to build something here with this business. And I can do it here. I’m something here. I’m somebody. The people look at me, when I just walk down the street, because I’m different.’

‘You’d be something, wherever you are,’ I said, grinning at her.

‘Don’t make fun of me, Lin.’

‘I’m not, Lisa. You’re a beautiful girl, and you’ve got heart-that’s why people stare at you.’

‘This can work,’ she insisted. ‘I can feel it in my bones. I don’t have any education, Lin, and I’m not smart like you. I’m not trained to do anything. But this… this could be big. I could, I don’t know… I could start producing movies, maybe, one day. I could… do something good.’

‘You are good. You’ll do good wherever you go.’

‘No. This is my chance. I’m not going back-I’m not going anywhere -until I’ve made it. If I don’t do that, if I don’t try, then the whole thing will be for nothing. Maurizio… and everything else that’s happened will be for nothing. If I leave here, I want to do it with my head on straight, and a pocket full of money that I earned myself.’

I looked into the wind, feeling the day alternately warm and cool and warm again on my face and arms as the breeze turned and returned across the bay. A small fleet of fishing canoes drifted past us on their way back to the fishermen’s sandy refuge near the slum. I suddenly remembered the day in the rain, sailing in a canoe across the flooded forecourt of the Taj Mahal Hotel and beneath the booming, resonant dome of the Gateway Monument. I remembered Vinod’s love song, and the rain that night as Karla came into my arms.

And staring, then, at the ceaseless, eternal waves, I remembered all that had been lost since that storming night: prison, torture, Karla gone, Ulla gone, Khaderbhai and his council gone, Anand gone, Maurizio dead, Modena probably dead, Rasheed dead, Abdullah dead, and Prabaker-it was impossible-Prabaker, also dead. And I was one of them: walking and talking and staring at the wilding waves, but as dead in my heart as all the rest.

‘And what about you?’ she asked. I could feel her eyes on me, and I could hear the emotions in her voice: sympathy, tenderness, maybe even love. ‘If I stay-and I’m definitely going to stay-what are you going to do?’

I looked at her for a while, reading the runes in her sky-blue eyes. Then I stood from the wall, held her in my arms, and kissed her. It was a long kiss. We lived out a life together in that kiss: we lived and loved and grew old together, and we died. Then our lips parted, and that life we might’ve had retreated, shrinking to a spark of light we would always recognise in one another’s eyes.

I could’ve loved her. Maybe I already did love her a little. But sometimes the worst thing you can do to a woman is to love her. And I still loved Karla. I loved Karla.

‘What am I going to do?’ I said, repeating her question. I held her shoulders in my hands, keeping her at the distance of my arms. I smiled. ‘I am going to get stoned.’

I rode away, and never looked back. I paid three months’ rent on my apartment, and paid substantial baksheesh to the watchman in the car park and the watchman in the building. I kept one good, forged passport in my pocket, put all my spare passports and a bundle of cash into a satchel, and left it with my Enfield Bullet bike in Didier’s care. Then I took a cab to Gupta-ji’s opium den near the Street of Ten Thousand Whores, Shoklaji Street. I climbed the worn wooden steps to the third floor and walked into the cage that junkies build for themselves, one shiny, sharp, steel bar at a time.