Shantaram полностью

They’d seen us coming, and must’ve passed the word because, as we approached the hut, a man crawled out and stood to greet us. Two children came at once and supported him. He was tiny, reaching to just above my waist, and severely stricken with the disease. His lips and the lower part of his face were eaten away to a hard, knobby ridge of dark flesh that extended downwards from the cheeks to the hinges of his jaw. The jaw itself was exposed, as were the teeth and gums, and the gaping holes where his nose had been.

‘Abdullah, my son,’ he said, in Hindi. ‘How are you? Have you eaten?’

‘I am well, Ranjitbhai.’ Abdullah replied in respectful tones. ‘I have brought the gora to meet you. We have just now eaten, but we will drink tea, thank you.’

Children brought stools to us, and we sat there in the open space in front of Ranjit’s hut. A small crowd gathered and sat on the ground, or stood around us.

‘This is Ranjitbhai,’ Abdullah told me, in Hindi, speaking loudly enough for all to hear. ‘He is the boss here, the senior fellow, in the slum of the lepers. He is the king here, in this club for kala topis.’

Kala topi means black hat in Hindi, and it’s a phrase used, sometimes, to describe a thief, referring to the black-banded hats that convicted thieves were forced to wear in Bombay’s Arthur Road Prison. I wasn’t sure exactly what Abdullah had meant by the remark, but Ranjit and the other lepers took it well enough, smiling and repeating the phrase several times.

‘Greetings, Ranjitbhai,’ I said, in Hindi. ‘My name is Lin.’

‘Aap doctor hain? he asked. You are a doctor?

‘No!’ I almost shouted in panic, disconcerted by the disease and my ignorance of it, and afraid he would ask me to help them. I turned to Abdullah, and switched to English. ‘Tell him I’m not a doctor, Abdullah. Tell him I just do a little first aid, and treat rat bites and scratches caused by the barbed wire, and things like that. Explain to him. Tell him that I haven’t had any real training, and I don’t know the first thing about leprosy.’

Abdullah nodded, and then faced Ranjitbhai.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He is a doctor.’

‘Thank you very much, Abdullah,’ I gnashed out through clenched teeth.

Children brought full glasses of water for us, and tea in chipped cups. Abdullah drank his water in quick gulps. Ranjit tilted his head back, and one of the children tipped the water in a gurgle down his throat. I hesitated, fearful of the grotesque sickness around me. One of the slum words in Hindi for lepers can be translated as the undead, and I felt that I was holding the nightmares of the undead in my hands. All the world of suffering disease was concentrated in that glass of water, it seemed to me.

But Abdullah had drunk his glass. I was sure he’d calculated the risks, and decided it was safe. And every day of my life was a risk. Every hour had its hazards, after the big gamble of escape from prison. The voluptuous recklessness of a fugitive moved my arm to my mouth, and I drank the water down. Forty pairs of eyes watched me drink.

Ranjit’s own eyes were honey-coloured, and clouded by what I judged to be incipient cataracts. He examined me closely, those eyes roving from my feet to my hair and back, several times, with unshy curiosity.

‘Khaderbhai has told me that you need medicines,’ he said slowly in English.

His teeth clicked together as he spoke, and with no lips to help him form the words, his speech was difficult to understand. The letters B, F, P, and V were impossible, for example, with M and W coming out as other sounds altogether. The mouth forms more than just words, of course: it forms attitudes and moods and nuances of meaning, and those expressive hints were also missing. And he had no fingers, so even that aid to communication was denied him. Instead, there was a child, perhaps his son, who stood at his shoulder and repeated his words in a quiet but steady voice, one beat behind the rhythm of his speech, just as a translator might.

‘We are always happy to help lord Abdel Khader,’ the two voices said. ‘I have the honour to serve him. We can give you much medicine, every week, no problem. First-class stuff, as you see.’

He shouted a name, then, and a tall boy in his early teens pushed through the crowd to lay a canvas bundle at my feet. He knelt to roll out the canvas, and revealed a collection of ampoules and plastic bottles. There was morphine hydrochloride, penicillin, and antibiotics for staph and strep infections. The containers were labelled and new.

‘Where do they get this stuff?’ I asked Abdullah as I examined the medicines.

‘They steal it,’ he answered me, in Hindi.

‘Steal it? How do they steal it?’

‘Bahut hoshiyaar,’ he replied. Very cleverly.

‘Yes, yes.’