Shantaram полностью

His spirits were relatively high, however, and he was anxious to return to Bombay-so anxious, in fact, that his fretting attention to my slower recovery became irritating. I snapped at him a couple of times when his solicitous urging-You better? You come now? We go now?-became unendurably annoying. I didn’t know then that he had a mission, Khader’s last mission, waiting for him in Bombay. The mission was all that held his grief and his shame at surviving Abdel Khader in check. And every day, as our health improved, the obligations of Khader’s last command to him grew more suffocating; and his dereliction, as he saw it, more profane.

I had preoccupations of my own. The wounds on my legs were healing readily enough, and the skin on my forehead closed safely over a small, lumpy ridge of bone, but my ruptured eardrum became infected, and it was the source of a constant and almost unbearable pain. Every mouthful of food, every sip of water, every word I spoke, and every loud noise that I heard sent piercing little scorpion stings along the nerves of my face and throat, and deep into my fevered brain. Every movement of my body, or turn of the head, stabbed into that sweating excruciation. Every inward breath, and sneeze or cough, magnified the torment. Shifting accidentally in my sleep and bumping the damaged ear sent me starting up from the cot with a shout that woke every man for fifty metres around.

And then, after three weeks of that maddening, torturous pain and massive, self-medicated doses of penicillin and hot antibiotic washes, the wound healed and the pain receded from me just as memories do, like landmarks on a distant, foggy shore.

My hands healed around the deadened tissue on the knuckle joints. Truly frozen tissue never really heals, of course, and the injury was one of many that settled in my flesh in those exile years. I took the suffering from Khader’s mountain into my hands, and every cold day sends me back there with my hands aching, just as they did when I clutched at the gun before the battle. Nevertheless, in the warmer air of Pakistan my fingers flexed and moved and obeyed me. My hands were ready for the work I had waiting; the little matter of revenge in Bombay. Although my body was thinner after the ordeal, it was harder and tougher than it had been all those plump months before, when we’d first set out for Khader’s war.

Nazeer and Mahmoud organised our return trip by a series of connecting trains. They’d acquired a small arsenal of weapons in Pakistan, and were intent on smuggling them into Bombay. They concealed the guns in bales of fabric, and shipped them in the care of three Afghans who were fluent in Hindi. We rode in different carriages, and never acknowledged the men, but the illicit cargo was always on our minds. The irony of it-we’d set off to smuggle guns into Afghanistan, and we were returning to smuggle guns into Bombay-made me laugh, when it occurred to me, as I sat in my first-class carriage. But the laughter was bitter, and the expression it left on my face turned the eyes of my fellow passengers away.

It took us a little over two days to get back to Bombay. I was travelling on my false British book, the one I’d used to enter Pakistan. According to the entries in the book, I’d overstayed on my visa. Using the little smiling charm I could muster and the last of the money Khader had paid me, the last American dollars, I bribed the officials on both the Pakistani and Indian sides of the border without raising so much as the flicker of an eye. And an hour after dawn, eight months after we left her, we walked into the deep heat and frantic, toiling fervency of my beloved Bombay.

From a discreet distance, Nazeer and Mahmoud Melbaaf supervised the unloading and transport of their military cargo. Promising Nazeer that I would meet up with him that night at Leopold’s, I left them at the station.

I took a cab. I felt drunk on the sound and colour and gorgeous flowing kinesis of the island city. But I had to concentrate. I was almost out of money. I directed the driver to the black-market currency-collection centre in the Fort area. With the taxi waiting below, I ran up the three narrow wooden flights to the counting room. A memory of Khaled wrung out my heart-I used to run up these stairs with Khaled, with Khaled, with Khaled-and I clenched my jaw against it, just as I bit down on the pain in my wounded shins. The two big men, loitering with intent on the landing outside the room, recognised me. We shook hands, all of us smiling widely.

‘What’s the news of Khaderbhai?’ one of the men asked.