Shantaram полностью

I remembered turning away from their stony, closed, embarrassed smiles that day. I remembered the question that had knotted into a fist in my mind, right behind the eyes: Was I so far out of touch with the thoughts and feelings of decent men? The question still rankled six months later. The answer still stared back at me from the mirrored windows of the shops we passed as we walked.

‘If those guys of yours had worked out,’ Salman continued, ‘I wouldn’t have put Farid with you. And I’m damn glad that I did put him with you. He’s a much happier guy now. He’s a much more relaxed kind of guy. He likes you, Lin.’

‘I like him, too,’ I replied quickly, smiling through my frown. And it was true. I did like Farid, and I was glad that we’d become close friends.

Farid, the shy but capable youngster I’d met on my first visit to Khader’s mafia council more than three years before, had toughened up to a hard, fearless, angry man whose sense of loyalty assumed the full measure of his young life. When Johnny Cigar and Kishore rejected my offers of work, Salman had put Farid and the Goan, Andrew Ferreira, to work with me. Andrew had been genial and talkative, but he’d moved only reluctantly from the company of his young gangster friends, and we hadn’t become close. Farid, however, had spent most days and many nights with me, and we liked and understood one another.

‘He was right on the edge, I think, when Khader died and we had to clean out Ghani’s guys’ Salman confided. ‘It got pretty rough-you remember-we all did some… unusual things. But Farid was wild. He was starting to worry me. You have to get heavy sometimes in our business. That’s just how it is. But you got a problem on your hands when you start to enjoy it, na? I had to talk to him. “Farid”, I said to him, “cutting people up should not be the first option. It should be a long way down the list. It shouldn’t even be on the same page as the first option.” But he went right on doing it. Then I put him with you. And now, after six months, he’s a much calmer guy. It worked out well, yaar. I think I’ll just have to put all the really bad and mad motherfuckers with you, Lin, to straighten them out.’

‘He blamed himself for not being there when Khader died,’ I said as we rounded the curve of the domed Jehangir Art Gallery. Seeing a small gap in the traffic, we jogged across the roundabout at Regal Circle junction, dodging and weaving between the cars.

‘We all did,’ Salman muttered softly when we took up a position outside the Regal Cinema.

It was a tiny phrase, three small words, and it said nothing new, nothing more than I already knew to be true. Yet that little phrase thundered in my heart, and an avalanche of grieving began to tremble, shift, and slide. For almost a year, and until that very moment, my anger at Khaderbhai had shielded me from the pain of grieving for him. Others had crumbled and withered and raged in their shock and sorrow at his death. I’d been so angry with him that my share of grief was still up there, beneath the smothering snow, in those mountains where he’d died. I’d felt a sense of loss. I’d suffered almost from the start. And I didn’t hate the Khan-I’d loved him, always, and still loved him in that instant as we stood outside the cinema, waiting for our friends. But I hadn’t really grieved for him-not in the way that I’d grieved for Prabaker or even Abdullah. Somehow, Salman’s casual remark that we all blamed ourselves for not being with Khader when he died had shaken my frozen sorrowing free, and the slow, inexorable snowslip of its heartache began, right there and then.

‘We must be a bit early,’ Salman observed cheerily, and I flinched as I forced myself into the moment with him.

‘Yeah.’

‘They’re coming by car, we’re walking, and still we beat them here.’

‘It’s a good walk. At night it’s even better. I do that walk a lot: the Causeway to V.T. and back. It’s one of my favourite walks in the whole city.’

Salman looked at me, a smile on his lips and a frown exaggerating the slightly crooked tilt of his almond-brown eyes.

‘You really love this place, don’t you?’ he asked.

‘Sure I do,’ I replied, a little defensively. ‘That doesn’t mean I like everything about it. There’s a lot that I don’t like. But I do love the place. I love Bombay, and I think I always will.’

He grinned and looked away down the street. I struggled to hold the set of my features, to keep my expression calm and even. But it was too late. The heartgrief had already begun.