And I fired the silver bullet into my arm again, and fell back on the floating raft. And I saw the answer in the rafters overhead. And I was sure I would understand it with a little more dope, and a little more, and a little more.
I woke to see a face glaring at me and speaking fiercely in a language I couldn’t understand. It was an ugly face, a scowling face, defined by deep lines that descended in curved chines from his eyes and nose and mouth. Then the face had hands, strong hands, and I found myself lifted from the raft of my bed and propped unsteadily on my feet.
‘You come!’ Nazeer growled in English. ‘You come, now!’
‘Fuck …’ I said slowly, pausing for maximum effect,’… off.’
‘You come!’ he repeated. The anger in him was so close to the surface that he trembled with it, and opened his mouth unconsciously to bare his teeth in an underbite.
‘No,’ I said, turning to the bed once more. ‘You … go!’
He pulled me around to face him again. There was enormous power in his arms. He clamped the metal grapples of his hands on my arms.
‘Now! You come!’
I’d been three months in the room at Gupta-ji’s. They were three months of heroin every day, and food every other day, and the only exercise a short walk to the toilet and back. I didn’t know it then, but I’d lost twelve kilos—the best thirty pounds of muscle on my body. I was thin and weak and still stupid on drugs.
‘Okay,’ I said, feigning a smile. ‘Okay, let me go, will ya. I have to get my stuff.’
He relaxed his grip as I nodded toward the little table where my wallet, watch, and passport rested. Gupta-ji and Shilpa waited in the corridor beyond. I gathered up the possessions and put them into my pockets, pretending to co-operate with Nazeer. When I judged the moment to be right, I swung round at him with an overhand right. It should’ve hit him. It would’ve hit him when I was healthy and sober. I missed him completely, and threw myself off balance. Nazeer drove a fist into my solar plexus, just under the heart. I doubled over, winded and helpless, but my knees locked stiffly and my legs wouldn’t fold. He raised my head, with his left hand locked into a patch of my hair, pulled his right fist back at shoulder height, hesitated in the precision of his aim, and then rammed his fist into my jaw. The full force of his neck, shoulders, and back were in the blow. I saw Gupta-ji’s lips pout and his eyes squint in a wince, and then his face exploded in a shower of sparks that left the world darker than a cave full of sleeping bats.
It was the only time in my life I was ever knocked out cold. It seemed that I was falling forever, and the ground was impossibly far away. After a time I was dimly aware of movement, floating through space, and I thought, It’s okay, this is all a dream, a drug dream, and I’m going to wake up any minute now, and take more drugs.
Then I came down with a rumpled crash on the raft once more. But the raft-bed that I’d floated on for three long months had changed. It was different, somehow—soft and smooth. And there was a new and wonderful smell, a gorgeous perfume. It was Coco. I knew it well. It was Karla. It was the perfume on Karla’s skin. Nazeer had carried me over his shoulder all the way down the flights of stairs and out into the street, where he’d dumped me into the back seat of a taxi. Karla was there. My head rested in her lap. And I opened my eyes to look into her lovely face. And her green eyes looked back at me with compassion and concern and something else. I closed my eyes, and in the moving darkness I knew what it was, that something else in her eyes. It was disgust. She was disgusted by my weakness, my heroin habit, my stink of neglect and self-indulgence. Then I felt her hands on my face, and it was like crying, and her fingers moving the caress across my cheek were the tears.
When the taxi finally stopped, Nazeer carried me up two flights of steps as easily as he might’ve lugged a sack of flour. I came to consciousness again draped over his shoulder, looking down at Karla as she climbed the steps behind us. I tried to smile at her. We entered a big house through a back door that led to a kitchen. Beyond the large, modern kitchen, we came into an enormous, open-plan living room, with one wall of glass that looked out upon a golden beach and the dark sapphire sea. Flipping me over his shoulder, Nazeer lowered me with more gentleness than I’d expected to a pile of cushions near the glass feature wall. The last hit I’d injected, just before he’d kidnapped me from Gupta-ji’s, was a big dose. Too big. I was groggy and lapsing. The urge to close my eyes and surrender to the stone swept over me in almost irresistible, immersible waves.
‘Don’t try to get up,’ Karla said, kneeling beside me and washing my face with a wet towel.
I laughed, because standing was the last thing on my mind. In the laugh I felt the soreness, dimly, through the stone, on the point of my chin and the hinge of my jaw.
‘What’s going on, Karla?’ I asked, hearing my voice crack and warble as I spoke. Three months of utter silence and soul-fog had distorted my speech with dysphasic lapses and creaking fumbles. ‘What are you doing here? What am I doing here?’
‘Did you think I would leave you there?’
‘How did you know? How did you find me?’
‘Your friend Khaderbhai found you. He asked me to bring you here.’
‘He asked you?’
‘Yes,’ she said, staring into my eyes with such intensity that it cut through the stone like sunrise piercing the morning’s hazy mist.
‘Where is he?’
She smiled, and the smile was sad because it was the wrong question. I know that now. I’m not stoned now. That was my chance to know the whole of the truth, or as much of the truth as she knew. If I’d asked her the right question, she would’ve told me the truth. That was the power behind her intense stare. She was ready to tell me everything. She might’ve even loved me, or begun to love me. But I hadn’t asked the right question. I hadn’t asked about her. I’d asked about him.
‘I don’t know,’ she answered, raising herself with her hands to stand beside me. ‘He was supposed to be here. I think he’ll be here soon. I can’t wait, though. I have to go.’
‘What?’ I sat up, and tried to push the stone curtains aside in order to see her, to speak to her, to keep her with me.
‘I have to go,’ she repeated, walking briskly to the door. Nazeer waited for her there, his thick arms jutting out from the swollen trunk of his body. ‘I can’t help it. I’ve got a lot of things to do before I leave.’
‘Leave? What do you mean, leave?’
‘I’m leaving Bombay again. I’ve got some work. It’s important, and I … well, I have to do it. I’ll be back in about six or eight weeks. I’ll see you then, maybe.’
‘But this is crazy. I don’t get it. You should’ve left me there, if you’re only going to leave me now.’
‘Look,’ she said, smiling patiently, ‘I just got back yesterday, and I’m trying not to stay. I’m not even going back to Leopold’s. I saw Didier this morning—he says hello, by the way—but that’s it. I’m not sticking around. I agreed to help get you out of that little suicide pact you had going with yourself at Gupta-ji’s. Now you’re here, you’re safe, and I have to go.’
She turned and spoke to Nazeer. They were speaking Urdu, and I understood only every third or fourth word of their conversation. He laughed, listening to her, and turned to look at me with his customary contempt.
‘What did he say?’ I asked her when they fell silent.
‘You don’t want to know.’
‘Yes I do.’
‘He doesn’t think you’ll make it,’ she replied. ‘I told him that you’ll do cold turkey here, and be waiting for me when I come back in a couple of months. He doesn’t think so. He says you’ll run out of here to get a fix the first minute the turkey begins. I made a bet with him that you’d make it.’
‘How much did you bet?’
‘A thousand bucks.’
‘A thousand bucks,’ I mused. It was an impressive stake, against the odds.
‘Yes. It’s all the cash he has—a kind of nest egg. He’s
betting it all that you’ll break down. He says you’re a weak man. That’s why you take drugs.’
‘What do you say?’
She laughed, and it was so rare to see and hear her laugh that I took those bright, round syllables of happiness into me like food, like drink, like the drug. Despite the stone and the sickness, I knew with perfect understanding that the greatest treasure and pleasure I would ever know was in that laugh; to make that woman laugh, and feel the laughter bubbling from her lips against my face, my skin.
‘I told him,’ she said, ‘that a good man is as strong as the right woman needs him to be.’
Then she was gone, and I closed my eyes, and an hour or a day later I opened them to find Khaderbhai sitting beside me.
‘Utna hain,’ I heard Nazeer’s voice say. He’s awake.
I woke unwell. I woke alert and cold and needing heroin. My mouth was filthy and my body ached everywhere at once.
‘Hmmm,’ Khader murmured. ‘You have the pain already.’
I pulled myself up on the pillows and looked around the room. It was the beginning of evening, and night’s long shadow was creeping across the sandy beach beyond the window. Nazeer sat on a piece of carpet near the entrance to the kitchen. Khader was dressed in the loose pantaloons, shirt, and tunic-vest of the Pathans. The clothes were green, the favourite colour of the Prophet. He looked older, somehow, after just those few months. He also looked fitter, and more calm and determined than I’d ever seen him.
‘Do you need food?’ he asked when I stared at him without speaking. ‘Do you want to take your bath? There is everything here. You can bath as often as you like. You can eat food—there is plenty. You can put on new clothes. I have them for you.’
‘What happened to Abdullah?’ I demanded.
‘You must get well.’
‘What the fuck happened to Abdullah?’ I shouted, my voice breaking.
Nazeer watched me. He was outwardly calm, but I knew that he was ready to spring.
‘What do you want to know?’ Khader asked gently, avoiding my eyes, and nodding his head slowly as he stared at the carpet between his crossed knees.
‘Was he Sapna?’
‘No,’ he replied, turning to meet my hard stare. ‘I know the people say this, but I give you my word that he was not Sapna.’
I exhaled a full breath in an exhausted sigh of relief. I felt tears stinging my eyes, and I bit the inside of my cheek to kill them.
‘Why did they say he was Sapna?’
‘Abdullah’s enemies made the police believe that he was.’
‘What enemies? Who are they?’
‘Men from Iran. Enemies from his country.’
I remembered the fight; the mysterious fight. Abdullah and I—we’d fought with a group of Iranian men on the street. I tried to remember other details from that day, but I couldn’t think past the sharp, guilty twist of regret that I’d never asked Abdullah who the men were or why we’d fought them.
‘Where’s the real Sapna?’
‘He is dead. I found the man—the real Sapna. Now he is dead. That much is done, for Abdullah.’
I relaxed against the cushions, and closed my eyes for a moment. My nose was beginning to run, and my throat was clogged and sore. I’d built up a big habit in those three months—three grams of pure Thai-white heroin every day. The turkey was coming on fast, and I knew that it would be two weeks in Hell’s punishment unit.
‘Why?’ I asked him, after a time.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Why did you find me? Why did you have him—Nazeer—bring me here?’
‘You work for me,’ he answered, smiling. ‘And now, I have a job of work for you to do.’
‘Well, I’m afraid I’m not up to it, just at the minute.’
The cramps were creeping into my stomach. I groaned, and looked away.
‘Oh, yes,’ he agreed. ‘You must be well first. But then, in three or four months, you will be the right man to do this job for me.’
‘What … what kind of a job?’
‘It is a mission. A kind of holy mission, you might call it. Do you know how to ride a horse?’
‘A horse? I don’t know anything about horses. If I can do the job on a motorcycle—when I get well, if I get well—I’m your man.’
‘Nazeer will teach you to ride. He is, or he was, the best horseman in a village of men who are the best horsemen in Nangarhar province. There are horses stabled near here, and you can learn to ride on the beach.’
‘Learn to ride …’I muttered, wondering how I was going to survive the next hour, and the hour after that, and the worse that would come.
‘Oh, yes, Linbaba,’ he said, reaching out with the smile and touching my shoulder with his palm. I flinched at the touch, and shivered, but the warmth of his hand seemed to enter me, and I was still. ‘You cannot reach Kandahar in any other way but by horse, at this time, because the roads are all mined and bombed. So you see, when you go with my men to the war in Afghanistan, you must know how to ride a horse.’
‘Afghanistan?’
‘Yes.’
‘What … what the hell makes you think I’m going to Afghanistan?’
‘I don’t know if you will do it or not,’ he replied with what seemed to be genuine sadness. ‘I am going on this mission myself. To Afghanistan—my home, that I have not seen for more than fifty years. And I am inviting you—I am asking you—to go with me. The choice, of course, is yours to make. It is a dangerous job. That much is certain. I will not think less about you, if you decide not to go with me.’
‘Why me?’
‘I need a gora, a foreigner, who is not afraid to break a large number of international laws, and who can pass for an American. Where we will go there are many rival clans, and they have fought with one another for hundreds of years. They have long traditions of raiding one another and taking whatever they can as plunder on their raids. Only two things unite them, just at this time—love for Allah, and hatred for the Russian invaders. At the moment, their chief allies against the Russians are the Americans. They are fighting with American money and American weapons. If I have an American with me, they will leave us alone, and let us pass, without molesting us or stealing more than a reasonable amount from us.’
‘Why don’t you get an American—a real one, I mean?’
‘I tried. I could not find one crazy enough to take the risk. That is why I need you.’
‘What are we smuggling on this mission to Afghanistan?’
‘The usual things that one smuggles into a war—guns, explosives, passports, money, gold, machine parts, and medicines. It will be an interesting journey. If we pass through the heavily armed clans who would like to take what we have, we will deliver our goods to a unit of mujaheddin fighters who are putting siege to Kandahar city. They have been fighting the Russians in the same place for two years, and they need the supplies.’
Questions writhed in my shivering mind, hundreds of them, but the cold turkey was crippling me. Cold, greasy sweat from the struggle smothered my skin. The words, when they came at last, were rushed and faltering.
‘Why are you doing this? Why Kandahar? Why there?’
‘The mujaheddin—the men at the siege of Kandahar—they are my people, from my village. They are from Nazeer’s village also. They are fighting a jihad, a holy war, to drive the Russian invaders out of the homeland. We have helped them in many ways, up to this time. Now it is time to help them with guns, and with my blood, if it is necessary.’
He looked at the sickness trembling across my face, and cutting facets from my eyes. He smiled again, pressing his fingers into my shoulder until that pain, that touch, his touch, was all I felt for a moment.
‘First you must be well,’ he said, releasing the pressure of his fingers and touching his palm to my face. ‘Allah be with you, my son. Allah ya fazak!’
When he left me, I went to the bathroom. Stomach cramp stabbed me with eagle’s claws, and then twisted my insides with talons of a
gony. Diarrhoea shook me with convulsive spasms. I washed myself, shivering so violently that my teeth clattered together. I looked in the mirror and saw my eyes, the pupils so large that the whole iris was black. When the light comes back, when the heroin stops and the turkey starts and the light returns, it rushes in through the black funnels of the eyes.
Wearing a towel around my waist, I walked back to the big main room. I looked thin. I was stooped, and shivering, and moaning involuntarily. Nazeer looked me up and down, with a sneer curling his thick upper lip. He handed me a pile of clean clothes. They were exact copies of Khader’s green Afghan costume. I dressed, shaking and trembling and losing my balance a few times. Nazeer watched me, his knotty fists balled at his hips. The sneer rippled his lip like the opening ridges of a clamshell. His every gesture was so loud and broad that it had the exaggeration of pantomime, but his dark eyes were fierce with menace. I suddenly realised that he reminded me of the Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune. He was an ugly, troll-like caricature of Mifune.
‘Do you know Toshiro Mifune?’ I asked him through a desperate, pain-smeared laugh. ‘You know Mifune? Huh?’
His answer was to walk to the front door of the house and throw it open. He pulled some fifty-rupee notes from his pocket, and hurled them onto the floor.
‘Jaa, bahinchudh!’ he snarled, pointing out the open door. Go, sisterfucker!
I staggered to the pile of cushions heaped against the great window and collapsed there. I pulled a blanket over myself, cringing in the flaying wrench and cramp of the craving. Nazeer closed the door of the house and took up his position on the patch of carpet, sitting cross-legged and straight-backed as he watched me.
Shantaram Page 79