Shantaram полностью

‘For Christ’s sake, tell him to stop!’ I shouted as the cab accelerated into a squall of traffic, lurching in the swerve left and right. ‘He’s going to kill us!’

‘Band karo!’ Prabaker shouted. Stop!

He added a pithy curse, for good measure, but the driver only became more enraged. With the car hurtling along at top speed, he turned his head to snarl at us. His mouth was wide open, and his teeth were bared. His eyes were huge, their blackness streaked with rage.

‘Arrey!’ Prabaker shrieked, pointing past the driver.

It was too late. The man turned quickly. His arms stiffened at the wheel, and he hit the brakes hard. There was a skating, sliding second… two seconds… three seconds. I heard a guttural gasp of air from deep in his throat. It was a sucking sound, like the lifting of a flat stone from the moist clay on the edge of a riverbed. Then there was the whump and crash as we slammed into a car that had stopped in front of us to make a turn. We were thrown forward into the back of his seat, and heard two thumping explosions as two other cars rammed into us.

Shattered glass and chrome fragments rattled on the road like thin metallic applause in the sudden silence that followed the impacts. My head had hit the door in the tumble spill of the accident. I felt blood flowing from a cut above my eye, but I was otherwise unhurt. As I wriggled myself up from the floor, and onto the back seat once more, I felt Prabaker’s hands on me.

‘Nothing broken you are, Lin? You are okay?’

‘I’m okay, I’m okay.’

‘You are sure? Everything not broken?’

‘Jesus, Prabu, I don’t care how good this guy’s spitting is,’ I said, laughing nervously, and ragged with relief, ‘he doesn’t get a tip. Are you all right?’

‘We must get out, Lin!’ he answered, his voice rising to a hysterical whine. ‘Out! Out of here! Now!’

The door on his side was jammed shut, and he began to push at it with his shoulder. He couldn’t budge it. He reached across me to try the door on my side, but saw at once that another car was jammed against it, pinning it shut. Our eyes met, and there was such fear in him, such terror in the white-rimmed bulge of his eyes, that I felt the coldness of it deep in my chest. He turned at once, and threw himself again at the door on his side.

My mind was muddy water, and one idea splashed up from it, clear and exclusive: FIRE. Is that what he’s afraid of? Once I’d asked myself the question I couldn’t stop thinking it. I looked at the terror that pulled at Prabaker’s gasping mouth, and I was sure the taxi was going to catch fire. I knew we were trapped there. The rear windows, in all the Bombay taxis I’d seen, didn’t open beyond a few centimetres. The doors were jammed, and the windows wouldn’t open, and the taxi was going to explode in fire, and we were trapped. Burned alive… Is that why he’s so scared?

I looked to the driver. He was slumped, awkwardly, between the steering wheel and the door. His body was still, but I heard him moaning. Beneath the thin shirt, the abacus ridge of his spine rose and fell with each slow and shallow breath.

Faces appeared at the windows of the cab, and I heard excited voices. Prabaker looked out at them, turning this way and that, his face cramped in an expression of terrible anguish. Suddenly, he clambered over the seat into the front of the car and wrestled the passenger door open. Turning swiftly and grabbing at my arms with surprising strength, he tried to drag me by main force over the seat that divided us.

‘This way, Lin! Get out, now! Hurry! Hurry!’

I climbed up and over the seat. Prabaker got out of the car, pushing his way into a crowd of onlookers. I reached out to the driver, trying to prise him from the obstructing rim of the steering wheel, but Prabaker’s hands were on me again, brutally rough. The fingernails of one hand tore into the skin of my back, and the other wrenched at the collar of my shirt.

‘Don’t touch him, Lin!’ he almost screamed. ‘Don’t touch him! Leave him and get out. Get out now!’

He dragged me from the car and through the hedge of bodies pressing in on the accident. On a footpath nearby, we sat beneath a fringe of hawthorn leaves that overhung a fence of wrought-iron spears, and inspected one another for injuries. The cut on my forehead, above my right eye, wasn’t as serious as I’d thought. The bleeding had already stopped, and it began to weep a clear, plasmic fluid. I was sore in a few places, but it was no cause for concern. Prabaker cradled his arm-the same arm that had pulled me from the car with such irresistible power-and it was obvious that he was in pain. A large swelling had already formed near the elbow. I knew it would leave a nasty bruise, but nothing seemed to be broken.

‘Looks like you were wrong, Prabu,’ I chided, smiling as I lit a cigarette for him.

‘Wrong, baba?’