Qasim Ali Hussein watched us for a short while, and then left to supervise the erection of emergency shelters, the rationing of remaining water supplies, the preparation of food, and the dozen other tasks that would fill the night to morning and beyond. A cup of tea appeared beside me. My neighbour Radha had made it and brought it to me. It was the first thing I ate or drank in the slum, and it was the best chai I ever tasted in my life. An hour later, she forced her husband and two other young men to drag me from the injured people to eat a meal of roti bread, rice, and bhajee. The curried vegetables were deliriously spiced, and I cleaned the plate with the last bite of roti.
And again, hours later, after midnight, it was Radha’s husband, Jeetendra, who pulled at my arm and drew me into my hut, where a hand-crocheted blanket had been spread out on the bare earth. Unresisting, I collapsed on the blanket for my first night of sleep in the slum.
Seven hours later—hours that passed as if they were minutes—I woke to see Prabaker’s face hovering in the air. I blinked, and squinted, and realised that he was squatting on his haunches, with his elbows on his knees, and his face cupped in his hands. Johnny Cigar was squatting beside him, on his left, and Jeetendra was on his right.
‘Good morning, Linbaba!’ he said, cheerfully, when my eyes settled on his. ‘Your snorings is a fabulous thing. So loud! Like having a bullock in this hut, Johnny said so.’
Johnny nodded his agreement, and Jeetendra wagged his head from side to side.
‘Old Sarabai is having a first-class cure for snorings,’ Prabaker informed me. ‘She can take one very sharp pieces of bamboo, about same as long as my finger, and push it up inside of your nose. After that, no more snoring. Bas! Kalaass!’
I sat up on the blanket, and stretched the stiffness from my back and shoulders. My face and eyes were still gritty from the fire, and I could feel that the smoke had stiffened in my hair. Lances of morning light stabbed through holes in the walls of the hut.
‘What are you doing, Prabu?’ I asked irritably. ‘How long have you been watching me sleeping?’
‘No so very long, Lin. Only for the half hours or so.’
‘It’s not polite, you know,’ I grumbled. ‘It’s not nice to watch people when they’re sleeping.’
‘I’m sorry, Lin,’ he said quietly. ‘In this India we can see everybody sleeping, at some times. And we say that the face, when it is in sleeping, is the friend of the world.’
‘Your face is so kind when you are sleeping, Lin,’ Johnny Cigar added. ‘I was very surprised.’
‘I can’t begin to tell you what this means to me, guys. Can I expect to find you in the hut, every morning, when I wake up?’
‘Well, if you really, really want, Lin,’ Prabaker offered, jumping to his feet. ‘But this morning we only came to tell you that your patients are ready.’
‘My … patients?’
‘Yes. Come and see.’
They stood, and opened the door of the hut. Sunlight splintered into my burning eyes. I blinked, and stepped through, following the men into the brilliant, bayside morning to see a line of people squatting on the ground outside my hut. There were thirty or more of them forming a queue along the length of the lane to the first turn.
‘Doctor … doctor …’ people murmured and whispered when I emerged from the hut.
‘Come on!’ Prabaker urged, tugging at my arm.
‘Come on where?’
‘First to toilet,’ he replied, happily. ‘You must make a motions, isn’t it? I will show you how we make a motions, into the sea, on the long cement jetty. That is where the young men and boys make their motions, every morning, into the oceans—motions into the oceans, isn’t it? You just be squatting down, with your buttocks pointing on the oceans. Then you wash your good self with a shower, and you have it a happy breakfast. Then you can easily fix up all your patients. No problem.’
We walked along the length of the queue. They were young and old, men and women. Their faces were cut, bruised, and swollen. Their hands were blackened, blistered, and bloody. There were arms in slings, and legs in splints. And at the first turn, I saw to my horror that the queue extended into the next lane, and was longer, much longer.
‘We’ve got to … do something …’ I mumbled. ‘They’re all … waiting.’
‘No problem, waiting, Lin,’ Prabaker replied, airily. ‘The people are waiting more than one hour already. If you are not with us, they would still be waiting, but waiting for nothing only. Waiting for nothing, that is what kills the heart of a man, isn’t it? Now the people are waiting for something. Waiting for you, they are. And you are a really something, Lin-Shantaram, if you don’t mind I’m saying it to your smoky face and sticking-up hairs. But first, you must make it motions, and then washing, and then breakfast. And we have to get going—some young fellows are waiting down there on the jetty, and wanting to see you make your motions.’
‘They what?’
‘Oh yes! They are a fascinating for you. You are like a movie hero for them. They are dying to see how you will make your motions. And then, after all these things, you will return, and fix the patients, like a really hero, isn’t it so?’
And in that way was my role in the slum created. If fate doesn’t make you laugh, Karla said, in one of my first conversations with her, then you just don’t get the joke. As a teenager I’d trained in first-aid treatment. The formal course of study had covered cuts, burns, sprains, breaks, and a wide range of diagnostic and emergency procedures. Later, I’d earned my nickname, Doc, by using my training in CPR to pull junkies out of overdoses, and save their lives. There were hundreds of people who only knew me as Doc. Many months before that morning in the slum, my friends in New Zealand had given me the first-aid kit as a going-away present. I was sure those threads—the training, the nickname, the firstaid kit, the work as unofficial doctor in the slum—were all connected in some way that was more than accident or coincidence.
And it had to be me. Another man, with my first-aid training or better trained, wouldn’t have been forced by crime and a prison-break to live in the slum. Another criminal, ready to live there with the poor, wouldn’t have had my training. I couldn’t make sense of the connection on that first morning. I didn’t get the joke, and fate didn’t make me laugh. But I knew there was something—some meaning, some purpose, leading me to that place, and that job, at exactly that time. And the force of it was strong enough to bind me to the work, when every intuition tried to warn me away.
So, I worked into the day. One by one, the people gave me their names and their smiles and, one by one, I did my best to treat their wounds. At some point during the morning, someone put a new kerosene stove in my hut. Someone else provided a metal box for rat-proof storage of food. A stool found its way into my hut, and a water pot—the ubiquitous matka—and a set of saucepans, and a few pieces of cutlery.
As evening throbbed in a scarlet arch of sky, we sat in a group, near my hut, to eat and talk. Sadness lingered in the busy lanes, and memories of those who’d died receded and returned like waves moving on the great ocean of the heart. Yet carried on that sadness, a part of sorrowing itself, was the determination of those who’d endured. The scorched earth had been cleared and cleaned, and many of the huts were already rebuilt. Hopes rose with every humble home that was restored.
I looked at Prabaker, laughing and joking as he ate, and I thought of our visit with Karla to the Standing Babas. One moment from that evening, one heartbeat’s length of time as the crazed man had charged at us with a sword, was stretched in my memory. At the precise instant when I took that step backwards and raised my hands in a boxing stance to fight, Prabaker took a step to the side, and stood in front of Karla. He wasn’t in love with her, and he wasn’t a fighter. Yet his first instinct was to step sideways and protect Karla by shielding her with his body, while my first thought was to step back and fight.
If the mad swordsman hadn’t been tripped, if he’d reached us, I would’ve been the one to fight him. And, p
robably, I would’ve saved us: I’d fought men with fists, knives, and clubs before, and I’d won. But even then, even if it had gone that far, Prabaker would’ve been the real hero, for the bravery of that little, instinctive, sideways step.
I’d grown to like Prabaker. I’d learned to admire his unshakeable optimism. I’d come to depend on the comforting warmth his great smile provided. And I’d enjoyed his company, day and night, through the months in the city and the village. But in that minute, on my second night in the slum, as I watched him laughing with Jeetendra, Johnny Cigar, and his other friends, I began to love him.
The food was good, and there was enough for all. Music played on a radio somewhere. It was the fine, almost unbearably sweet soprano and happy, boasting tenor of a duet from an Indian movie. The people talked, nourishing one another with their smiles and conversation. And some time during the course of that love-song, somewhere in the landscape of the slum-dwellers’ reassurances, somehow through the fact of our survival, their world enfolded my life within its dreams, as gently and completely as a swollen tide closes over a stone that stands upon its shore.
CHAPTER NINE
I ESCAPED FROM PRISON in broad daylight, as they say, at one o’clock in the afternoon, over the front wall and between two gun-towers. The plan was intricate and meticulously executed, up to a point, but the escape really succeeded because it was daring and desperate. The bottom line for us, once we started, was that the plan had to succeed. If it failed, the guards in the punishment unit were quite capable of kicking us to death.
There were two of us. My friend was a wild, big-hearted twenty-five year old serving a life sentence for murder. We tried to convince other men to escape with us. We asked eight of the toughest men we knew, all of them serving ten straight years or more for crimes of violence. One by one, they found an excuse not to join in the attempt. I didn’t blame them. My friend and I were young first-offenders with no criminal history. We were serving big years, but we had no reputation in the prison system. And the escape we’d planned was the kind that people call heroic if it succeeds, and insane if it fails. In the end, we were alone.
We took advantage of extensive renovations that were being carried out on the internal security-force building—a two-storey office and interrogation block near the main entrance gate at the front wall. We were working as maintenance gardeners. The guards who pulled shifts in the area saw us every day. When we went to work there, on the day of the escape, they watched us for a while, as usual, and then looked away. The security-force building was empty. The renovation workers were at lunch. In the few long seconds of the little eclipse created by the guards’ boredom and their familiarity with us, we were invisible, and we made our move.
Cutting our way through the chain-link fence that closed off the renovation site, we broke open a door to the deserted building and made our way upstairs. The interior was hollowed out by the renovation. Unplastered walls showed the skeleton structure of uprights and load-bearing beams. The bare, wooden steps on the stairway were white with dust, and littered with fragments of brick and plaster. There was a manhole in the ceiling on the top floor. Standing on my friend’s strong shoulders, I punched out the wooden trapdoor in the manhole and climbed through. I had an extension cord with me, wrapped around my body under my coveralls. I uncoiled it and pulled it free, fixed one end to a roof beam, and passed the other down to my friend. He used it to climb up into the roof-space with me.
The roof stretched out in zigzag waves. We scrambled toward the narrowing pinch of space where the roof met the front wall of the prison. I chose a spot on one of the troughs to cut our way through, hoping that the peaks on either side would conceal the hole from the gun-towers. It was dark everywhere in the roof-space, but in that narrow wedge near the wall it was blacker than a guard’s baton.
With a cigarette lighter for a lantern, we worked to cut our way through the double-thickness of hardwood that separated us from the tin on the outside of the roof. A long screwdriver, a chisel, and a pair of tin snips were our only tools. After fifteen minutes of hacking, scraping, and stabbing at the wood, we’d cleared a little space about the size of a man’s eye. Waving the flame of the hot cigarette lighter back and forth, we could see the glint of the metal roof beyond the small hole. But the wood was too hard and too thick. With the tools we had, it would take us hours to make a man-sized hole.
We didn’t have hours. We had thirty minutes, we guessed, or maybe a little more, before the guards did a routine check of the area. In that time we had to get through the wood, cut a hole in the tin, climb out on the roof, use our power extension cord as a rope, and climb down to freedom. The clock was ticking on us. We were trapped in the roof of the security building. And any minute, we knew, the guards might notice the cut fence, see the broken door, and find the smashed manhole. Any minute they could come up through the manhole into that black, sweating cave, and find us.
‘We’ve gotta go back,’ my friend whispered. ‘We’ll never get through the wood. We’ve gotta go back, and pretend it never happened.’
‘We can’t go back,’ I said flatly, although the thought had screamed through my mind as well. ‘They’ll find all the broken stuff, the fence we cut, and they’ll know it was us. We’re the only ones allowed in the area. If we go back, we’re in the Slot for a year.’
The Slot was prison slang for the punishment unit. In those years, that unit, in that prison, was one of the most inhumane in the country. It was a place of random, brutal beatings. A failed attempt to escape through the roof of the security-force building—their building, the head office for the punishment unit guards—would ensure that the beatings were less random and more brutal.
‘Well what the fuck are we gonna do?’ my friend demanded, shouting with everything but his voice. Sweat dripped from his face, and his hands were so wet with fear that he couldn’t hold the cigarette lighter.
‘I think there’s two possibilities,’ I declared.
‘What are they?’
‘First, we could use that ladder—the one that’s chained to the wall downstairs. We could go down again, break the chain off the ladder, tie the extension cord to the top of it, slam it up against the wall, climb up, and throw down the cord on the other side. Then we can slide down to the street.’
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s the first plan.’
‘But … they’ll see us,’ my friend protested.
‘Yeah.’
‘And they’ll start shooting at us.’
‘Yeah.’
‘They’ll shoot us.’
‘You said that.’
‘Well, fuck me,’ he hissed. ‘I think it bears repeating. It’s a fuckin’ salient point, don’t you think?’
‘I figure that one of us will get through, maybe, and one of us will get shot. It’s fifty-fifty.’
We considered the odds in silence for a while.
‘I hate that plan,’ my friend shuddered.
‘So do I.’
‘What’s the second plan?’
‘Did you notice that buzz saw, on the ground floor, as we came up here?’
‘Yeah …’
‘If we bring it up here, we could use the buzz saw to cut through the wood. Then we can use the tin snips to cut through the tin. After that, it’s back to the original plan.’
‘But they’ll hear the thing,’ my friend whispered fiercely. ‘I can hear them talking on the fuckin’ telephone. We’re that close. If we drag the saw up here, and fire it up, it’ll sound like a fuckin’ helicopter.’
‘I know. But I think they’ll just figure it’s the workers, doing more work.’
‘But the workers aren’t here.’
‘No, but the shift at the gate is changing. There’s new guards coming on duty. It’s a big chance to take, but I think if we do it they’ll just hear the noise, as usual, and think it’s the workers. They’ve been listening to drills and hammers and buzz saws for weeks. And there’s no way they could imagine
that it’s us doing it. They’d never figure that crims would be crazy enough to use a power saw, right next to the main gate. I think it’s our best shot.’
‘I hate to be Mister-fuckin’-Negative here,’ he objected, ‘but there’s no electricity in this building. They shut it off for the renovating. The only power point is outside. The extension cord is long enough to reach down there, I think, but the power is outside the building.’
‘I know, I know. One of us will have to go down, creep out the door we busted open, and plug the extension cord into the outside power outlet. It’s the only way.’
‘Who goes down there?’
‘I’ll do it,’ I said. I tried to sound confident and strong, but there are some lies that the body just won’t believe, and the words came out as a squeak.
I scrambled over to the manhole. My legs were stiff with dread and tension-cramp. I slid down the extension cord and crept down the stair-way to the ground floor, playing the cord out all the way. It reached to the door, with plenty to spare. The buzz saw was resting near the door. I tied the extension cord around the handle of the saw, and ran back up the stairs. My friend pulled the saw up into the manhole and then passed the cord back to me. Once more I crept down to the door. With my body pressed flat against a wall, I breathed hard, and tried to find the courage to open the door. At last, with a heart-wrenching rush of adrenaline, I pushed the door aside and stepped out into the open to plug the cord into the socket.
The guards, armed with pistols, were talking among themselves, not twenty metres from the door. If one of them had been facing my way, it would’ve been over. I glanced up to see that they were looking in every direction but mine. They were talking and walking about in the gate area, and laughing at a joke someone had just cracked. No-one saw me. I slipped back inside the building, crawled like a wolf on all fours up the stairs, and dragged myself up the cord to the manhole.
In the dark corner near the trough in the zigzag roof space, my friend lit the cigarette lighter. I saw that he’d connected the power saw to the cord. He was ready to make the cut. I took the lighter, and held it for him. Without a second of hesitation, he hoisted the heavy saw and clicked it to life. The machine screamed like the whine of a jet engine on a runway. My friend looked at me, and a huge grin tore his mouth open. His teeth were clenched in the smile, and his eyes were glittering with the reflected fire. Then he drove the saw into the thick wood. With four swift, ear-splitting cuts, he made a perfect hole that revealed a square of gleaming tin.
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