The Enfield of India 350cc Bullet was a single-cylinder, four-stroke motorcycle, constructed to the plans of the original 1950s’ model of the British Royal Enfield. Renowned for its idiosyncratic handling as much as for its reliability and durability, the Bullet was a bike that demanded a relationship with its rider. That relationship involved tolerance, patience, and understanding on the part of the rider. In exchange, the Bullet provided the kind of soaring, celestial, wind-weaving pleasure that birds must know, punctuated by not infrequent near-death experiences.
I spent the day cruising the beaches, from Calangute to Chapora. I checked every hotel and guesthouse, sprinkling the arid ground with a shower of small but tempting bribes. I found local moneychangers, drug dealers, tour guides, thieves, and gigolos at each of the beaches. Most of them had seen foreign girls who answered her description, but none could be sure that he’d seen Karla. I stopped for tea or juice or a snack at the main beach restaurants, asking waiters and managers. They were all helpful, or tried to be helpful, because I spoke to them in Marathi and Hindi. None of them had seen her, however, and when the few leads I did get came to nothing, the first day of my search ended in disappointment.
The owner of the Seashore Restaurant in Anjuna, a heavy-set young Maharashtrian named Dashrant, was the last local I spoke to, as the sun began to set. He prepared a hearty meal of cabbage leaves stuffed with potatoes, green beans with ginger, aubergines with sour green chutney, and crisp-fried okra. When the meal was ready, he brought his own plate to my table, and sat with me to eat it. He insisted that we finish the meal with a long glass of the locally brewed coconut feni, and followed that with an equally long glass of cashew feni. Refusing to accept payment for the meal from a gora who spoke his native Marathi, Dashrant locked the restaurant and left with me, as my guide, on the back of my motorcycle. He saw my quest to find Karla as very romantic—very Indian, he said—and he wanted me to stay nearby, as his guest.
‘There are a few pretty foreign girls in the area,’ he told me. ‘One of them, if the Bhagwan wills it, might be your lost love. You sleep first, and search tomorrow—with a clean mind, isn’t it?’
Paddling, with our legs outstretched from the bike, along a soft, sandy avenue between tall palms, I followed his directions to a small house. The square structure was made from bamboo, coconut poles, and palm leaves. It stood within sight of his restaurant, and with a wide view of the dark sea. I entered to find a single room, which he lit with candles and lamps. The floor was sand. There was a table and two chairs, a bed with a bare rubber mattress, and a metal rack for hanging clothes. A large matka was filled with clean water. He announced, with pride, that the water had been drawn that day from a local well. There was a bottle of coconut feni on the table, with two glasses. Assuring me that the bike and I would be safe there, because it was known by all in the area to be his house, Dashrant handed me the key to the door’s chain and padlock, and told me to stay until I found my girl. Winking a smile at me, he left. I heard him singing as he walked back between the slender palms to his restaurant.
I pulled the bike in against the hut, and tied a length of cord from it to the leg of the bed, covering it with sand. I hoped that if someone tried to steal the bike, the movement would wake me. Exhausted and disappointed, I fell onto the bed and was asleep in seconds. It was a nourishing, dreamless sleep, but I woke after four hours, and I was too alert, too restless, to find sleep again. I pulled my boots on, took a can of water, and visited the toilet at the back of the hut. Like many toilets in Goa, it was nothing more than a smooth, steep slope behind the squatting keyhole. Waste matter rolled down the slope to a narrow lane. Wild, hairy, black Goan pigs roamed the lanes, eating the waste. As I walked back to the house to wash my hands, I saw a herd of the black swine trotting along the lane. It was an efficient and environmentally benign method of waste disposal, but the sight of those pigs, feasting, was an eloquent argument in favor of vegetarianism.
I walked down to the beach, only fifty paces from Dashrant’s hut, and sat on the dunes to smoke a cigarette. It was close to midnight, and the beach was deserted. The moon, almost full, was pinned like a medal to the chest of the sky. A medal for what? I thought. Wounded in action, maybe. A Purple Heart. Moonlight rushed with every rolling wave to the shore, as if the light itself was pulling the waves, as if the great net of silver light cast by the moon had gathered up the whole of the sea, and was hauling it to the shore, wave by wave.
A woman approached me, carrying a basket on her head. Her hips rolled and swayed in time to the running wavelets that lapped at her feet. She turned from the sea toward me and dropped the basket at my feet, squatting to look into my eyes. She was a watermelon seller, about thirty-five years old, and clearly familiar with tourists and their ways. Chewing forcefully on a mouthful of betel nut, she gestured with an open palm toward the half watermelon that remained in her large basket. It was very late for her to be on the beach. I guessed that she’d been baby-sitting, or nursing a relative, and was returning home. When she saw me sitting alone, she’d hoped for one lucky-last sale for the night.
I told her, in Marathi, that I would be glad to buy a slice of melon. She reacted with happy surprise and, when the routine questions about where and how I’d learned Marathi were resolved, she cut me a generous slice. I ate the delicious sweet kalinga, spitting the seeds onto the sand. She watched me eat, and tried to resist when I forced a note rather than a coin into her basket. As she rose, lifting the basket to her head, I began to sing an old, sad, and much-loved song from a Hindi movie.
Ye doonia, ye mehfil
Mere kam, ki nahi…
All the world, all its people
Mean nothing to me …
She yelped in appreciation, and danced a few slick moves before walking away slowly along the beach.
‘This is why I like you, you know,’ Karla said, sitting down beside me in one quick, graceful movement. The sound of her voice and the sight of her face pulled all the air from my lungs, and set my heart thumping. So much had happened since the last time I’d seen her, the first time we’d made love, that a fevered squall of emotion stung my eyes. If I’d been a different man, a better man, I would’ve cried. And who knows, it might’ve made the difference.
‘I thought you didn’t believe in love,’ I answered, straining against my feelings, and determined not to let her know the effect that she had on me, the power she had over me.
‘What do you mean, love?
‘I … I thought that’s what you were talking about.’
‘No, I said that’s why I like you,’ she said, laughing and looking up at the moon. ‘But I do believe in love. Everyone believes in love.’
‘I’m not so sure. I think a lot of people have stopped believing in love.’
‘People haven’t stopped believing in love. They haven’t stopped wanting to be in love. They just don’t believe in a happy ending anymore. They still believe in love, and falling in love, but they know now that … they know that romances almost never end as well as they begin.’
‘I thought you hated love. Isn’t that what you said, at the Village in the Sky?’
‘I do hate love, just like I hate hate. But that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in them.’
‘There’s no-one in the world like you, Karla,’ I said softly, smiling at her profile as she stared at the night and the sea. She didn’t reply. ‘So … why do you?’
‘Why do I what?’
‘Why do you like me—you know, what you said before.’
‘Oh, that,’ she smiled, facing me, and raising one eyebrow as her eyes met mine. ‘Because I knew you’d find me. I knew I didn’t have to send you any message, or let you know where I was. I knew you’d find me. I knew you’d come. I don’t know how I knew, but I just knew. And then, when I saw you singing to that woman on the beach—you’re a very crazy guy, Lin. I love that. I think that’s where your goodness comes from—your craziness.’
‘My goodness?’ I asked, genui
nely surprised.
‘Yes. There’s a lot of goodness in you, Lin. It’s very … it’s a very hard thing to resist, real goodness, in a tough man. I didn’t tell you, did I, when we worked together, in the slum—I was so proud of you. I knew you must’ve been scared, and very worried, but you only smiled for me, and you were always there, every time I woke up, every time I went to sleep. I admire what you did there, as much as anything I’ve ever seen in my life. And I don’t admire much.’
‘What are you doing here in Goa, Karla? Why did you leave?’
‘It would make more sense to ask why you stay there.’
‘I’ve got my reasons.’
‘Exactly. And I had my reasons for leaving.’
She turned her head to watch a lone, distant figure on the beach. It seemed to be a wandering holy man, carrying a long staff. I watched her watching the holy man, and I wanted to ask her again, to find out what had driven her from Bombay, but the set of her features was so tense that I decided to wait.
‘How much do you know about my stint at Arthur Road?’ I asked.
She flinched, or perhaps it was a shiver in response to the breeze from the sea. She was wearing a loose, yellow singlet top, and a green lungi. Her bare feet were buried in the sand, and she hugged her knees.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, the cops picked me up the night I left your place to meet Ulla. They got me, right after I left you. What did you think happened to me when I didn’t come back?’
‘I didn’t know, that night. I couldn’t guess.’
‘Did you think I … did you think I just ditched you?’
She paused, frowning pensively.
‘At first, I did think that. Something like that. And I think I hated you. Then I started asking around. When I found out you didn’t even come back to the slum clinic, and that nobody saw you, I thought you must’ve been … doing something … important.’
‘Important,’ I laughed. It wasn’t a good laugh. It was bitter, and angry. I tried to push those feelings away. ‘I’m sorry, Karla. I couldn’t get a message out. I couldn’t let you know. I was out of my mind with worry that you … that … you’d hate me, for leaving you like that.’
‘When I heard about it—that you were in the jail—it kind of broke my heart. It was a very bad time for me. This … business, I was doing … it was starting to go wrong. It was so wrong, so bad, Lin, that I think I’ll never come back from it. And then, I heard about you. And I was so … well … everything changed, just like that. Everything.’
I couldn’t understand what she’d said. I was sure it was important, and I wanted to ask her more, but the lone figure was only a few metres away, and he approached us with slow, dignified steps. The moment was lost.
He was indeed a holy man. Tall, lean, and tanned to a dark, earthbrown, he wore a loincloth and was adorned with dozens of necklaces, amulets, and decorative bracelets. His hair was matted in dreadlocks that reached to his waist. Balancing the long staff against his shoulder, he clasped his hands together in a greeting and a blessing. We greeted him in turn, and invited him to sit with us.
‘Do you have any charras?’ he asked, in Hindi. ‘I would like to smoke on this beautiful night.’
I fished a lump of charras from my pocket, and tossed it to him, with a filter cigarette.
‘The Bhagwan’s blessing be upon your kindness,’ he intoned.
‘And a blessing of the Bhagwan upon you also,’ Karla replied in perfect Hindi. ‘We are very happy to see a devotee of the Lord Shiva at this full moon.’
He grinned, showing gaps in his teeth, and set to preparing a chillum. When the clay pipe was ready, he raised his palms to gain our attention.
‘Now, before we smoke, I want to give you a gift in return,’ he said. ‘Do you understand?’
‘Yes, we understand,’ I said, smiling to match the light in his eyes.
‘Good. I give you both a blessing. My blessing will always stay with you. I give you this blessing in this way …’
He raised his arms above his head, and then bent over on his knees, touching his forehead to the sand, with his arms outstretched. Kneeling upright again and raising his hands, he repeated the gesture several times while mumbling indistinct words.
Eventually, he sat back on his feet, smiled the gap-toothed smile at us, and nodded for me to light the pipe. We smoked in silence. When the pipe was finished, I refused to accept the return of the lump of charras. Acknowledging the gift with a solemn bow of his head, the holy man stood to leave. As we looked up at him, he slowly raised his staff to point it at the almost full moon. At once, we saw and understood what he meant—the pattern on the surface of the moon, that in some cultures is called the rabbit, suddenly looked to both of us like a kneeling figure raising his arms in prayer. Chuckling happily, the sadhu walked away along the gentle dunes.
‘I love you, Karla,’ I said when we were alone again. ‘I loved you the first second I saw you. I think I’ve loved you for as long as there’s been love in the world. I love your voice. I love your face. I love your hands. I love everything you do, and I love the way you do everything. It feels like magic when you touch me. I love the way your mind works, and the things you say. And even though it’s all true, all that, I don’t really understand it, and I can’t explain it—to you or to myself. I just love you. I just love you with all my heart. You do what God should do: you give me a reason to live. You give me a reason to love the world.’
She kissed me, and our bodies settled together on the yielding sand. She clasped her hands in mine, and with our arms outstretched above our heads we made love while the praying moon seduced the sea, luring the waves to crash and crumble on the charmed, unfailing shore.
And for a week, then, we played at being tourists in Goa. We visited all the beaches on the coast of the Arabian Sea, from Chapora to Cape Rama. We slept for two nights on the white gold wonder of Colva Beach. We inspected all the churches in the Old Goa settlement. The Festival of St. Francis Xavier, held on the anniversary of the saint’s death, every year, bound us in immense crowds of happy, hysterical pilgrims. The streets were thronged with people in their Sunday-best clothes. Merchants and street-stall operators came from all over the territory. Processions of the blind, the lame, and the afflicted, hoping for a miracle, rambled toward the basilica of the saint. Xavier, a Spanish monk, was one of the seven original Jesuits in the order founded by his friend Ignatius Loyola. Xavier died in 1552. He was just forty-six years old, but his spectacular proselytising missions to India, and what was then called the Far East, established his enduring legend. After numerous burials and disinterments, the much-exhumed body of St. Francis was finally installed in the Basilica of Bom Jesus, in Goa, in the early seventeenth century. Still remarkably—some would say miraculously—well preserved, the body was exposed to public view once in every ten years. While seemingly immune to decay, the saint’s body had suffered various amputations and subtractions over the centuries. A Portuguese woman had bitten off one of the saint’s toes, in the sixteenth century, in the hope of keeping it as a relic. Parts of the right hand had been sent to religious centres, as had chunks of the holy intestines. Karla and I offered outrageously extravagant bribes to the caretakers of the basilica, laughing all the while, but they steadfastly refused to allow us a peek at the venerable corpse.
‘Why did you do the robberies?’ she asked me on one of those warm nights of satin sky and rolling, mellisonant surf.
‘I told you. My marriage broke up, and I lost my daughter. I cracked up, and got into drugs. Then I did the robberies to feed my heroin habit.’
‘No, I mean why robberies? Why not something else?’
It was a good question, and one that no-one in the justice system—cops, lawyers, judge, psychiatrist, or prison governors—had ever asked me.
‘I’ve thought about it. I’ve thought about it a lot. It sounds weird, I know, but I think TV had a lot to do with it. Every hero on TV had a gun. And there was somethin
g … brave… about armed robbery. I know there really isn’t anything brave about it—it’s a gutless thing to do, scaring people with a gun—but it seemed the bravest way to steal money, then. I couldn’t bring myself to hit old ladies over the head and steal their hand-bags, or break into people’s private houses. Robbery seemed fair, somehow, as if I took a fair chance, every time I did it, of being shot dead—by the people I robbed, or by the cops.’
She watched me in silence, almost matching her breathing to mine.
‘And something else—there’s this one special hero in Australia …’
‘Go on,’ she urged.
‘His name was Ned Kelly. He was a young guy who found himself on the wrong side of the local lawmen. He was tough, but he wasn’t really a hard man. He was young and wild. He was set up, mostly, by cops who had a grudge against him. A drunken cop had a crush on his sister, and tried to molest her. Ned stopped it, and that’s when his trouble started. But there was more to it than that. They hated him for a lot of reasons—mostly for what he represented, which was a kind of spirit of rebellion. And I related to him, because I was a revolutionary.’
‘They have revolutions, in Australia?’ she asked, with a puzzled laugh. ‘I never heard this.’
‘Not revolutions,’ I corrected her, ‘just revolutionaries. I was one of them. I was an anarchist. I learned how to shoot, and how to make bombs. We were ready to fight, when the revolution came—which it didn’t, of course. And we were trying to stop our government from fighting the Vietnam War.’
‘Australia was in the Vietnam War?’
It was my turn to laugh.
‘Yeah. Most people outside Australia don’t know it, but we were in the war, all the way with the USA. Australian soldiers died beside American soldiers in Vietnam, and Australian boys were drafted to fight. Some of us refused to go, just like the American draft resisters. A lot of guys went to jail because they wouldn’t fight. I didn’t go to jail. I made bombs, and organised marches, and fought the cops at the barricades, until the government changed and they pulled us out of the war.’
Shantaram Page 62