‘No,’ I lied. ‘There’s no-one waiting, and no-one I should go to.’
‘And don’t you have any wie soll ich das sagen, any program? Any plan?’
‘Not really. I’m working on a book.’
During the time since the escape, I’d learned that telling people a small part of the truth—that I was a writer—provided me with a useful and flexible cover story. It was vague enough to explain extended stays or sudden departures, and the word research was comprehensive enough to account for inquiries about certain subjects, such as transport and travel and the availability of false documents, that I was sometimes forced to make. Moreover, the cover story guaranteed me a measure of privacy: the simple threat to tell people, at length, of my work in progress usually discouraged all but the most persistently curious.
And I was a writer. In Australia I’d written since my early twenties. I’d just begun to establish myself through my first published work when my marriage collapsed, I lost the custody of my daughter, and I lost my life in drugs, crime, imprisonment, and escape. But even as a fugitive, writing was still a daily custom and part of my instinctual routine. Even there, in Leopold’s, my pockets were full of notes, scribbled onto napkins, receipts, and scraps of paper. I never stopped writing. It was what I did, no matter where I was or how my circumstances changed. One of the reasons I remember those early Bombay months so well is that, whenever I was alone, I wrote about those new friends and the conversations we shared. And writing was one of the things that saved me: the discipline and abstraction of putting my life into words, every day, helped me to cope with shame and its first cousin, despair.
‘Well, Scheisse, I don’t see what’s to write about in Bombay. It’s no good place, ja. My friend Lisa says this is the place they were thinking about, when they invented the word pits. And I think it is a good place for calling a pits. Better you should go somewhere else to write about, like Rajasthan maybe. I did hear that it’s not a pits there, in Rajasthan.’
‘She’s right, Lin,’ Karla added. ‘This is not India. There are people here from every part of India, but Bombay isn’t India. Bombay is an own-world, a world in itself. The real India is out there.’
‘Out there?’
‘Out there, where the light stops.’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ I answered, smiling in appreciation of the phrase. ‘But I like it here, so far. I like big cities, and this is the third-biggest city in the world.’
‘You’re beginning to sound like your tour guide,’ Karla joked. ‘I think, maybe, Prabaker has been teaching you too well.’
‘I guess he has. He’s been filling my head with facts and figures every day for two weeks—quite amazing really, for a guy who left school when he was seven, and taught himself to read and write here on the streets.’
‘What facts and figures?’ Ulla asked.
‘Well, for instance, the official population of Bombay is eleven million, but Prabu says the guys who run the illegal numbers racket have a better idea of the real population, and they put it at anything from thirteen to fifteen million. And there are two hundred dialects and languages spoken in the city every day. Two hundred, for God’s sake! It’s like being in the centre of the world.’
As if in response to that talk of languages, Ulla spoke to Karla quickly and intently in German. At a sign from Modena she stood, and gathered her purse and cigarettes. The quiet Spaniard left the table without a word, and walked toward the open archway that led to the street.
‘I have a job,’ Ulla announced, pouting winsomely. ‘See you tomorrow, Karla. About eleven o’clock, ja? Maybe we’ll have dinner together tomorrow night, Lin, if you’re here? I would like that. Bye! Tschus!’
She walked out after Modena, followed by leers and admiring stares from many of the men in the bar. Didier chose that moment to visit several acquaintances at another table. Karla and I were alone.
‘She won’t, you know.’
‘Won’t what?’
‘She won’t have dinner with you tomorrow night. It’s just her way.’
‘I know,’ I grinned.
‘You like her, don’t you?’
‘Yeah, I do. What—does that strike you as funny?’
‘In a way, yes. She likes you, too.’
She paused, and I thought she was about to explain her remark, but when she spoke again it was to change the subject.
‘She gave you some money. American dollars. She told me about it, in German, so Modena wouldn’t understand. You’re supposed to give it to me, and she’ll collect it from my place at eleven tomorrow.’
‘Okay. Do you want it now?’
‘No, don’t give it to me here. I have to go now. I have an appointment. I’ll be back in about an hour. Can you wait till then? Or come back, and meet me then? You can walk me home, if you like.’
‘Sure, I’ll be here.’
She stood to leave, and I stood also, drawing back her chair. She gave me a little smile, with one eyebrow raised in irony or mockery or both.
‘I wasn’t joking before. You really should leave Bombay.’
I watched her walk out to the street, and step into the back of a private taxi that had obviously been waiting for her. As the cream-coloured car eased into the slow stream of night traffic, a man’s hand emerged from the passenger window, thick fingers clutching a string of green prayer beads, and warning away pedestrians with a wave.
Alone again, I sat down, set my chair against the wall, and let the activity of Leopold’s and its clamorous patrons close over me. Leopold’s was the largest bar and restaurant in Colaba, and one of the largest in the city. The rectangular ground-floor room occupied a frontage equal to any four other restaurants, and was served by two metal doors that rolled up into wooden arches to give an expansive view of the Causeway, Colaba’s busiest and most colourful street. There was a smaller, more discreet, airconditioned bar on the first floor, supported by sturdy columns that divided the ground floor into roughly equal sections, and around which many of the tables were grouped. Mirrors on those pillars, and on much of the free wall space, provided the patrons with one of the bar’s major attractions: the chance to inspect, admire, and ogle others in a circumspect if not entirely anonymous fashion. For many, the duplication of their own images in two or more mirrors at the same time was not least among the pleasures of the pastime. Leopold’s was a place for people to see, to be seen, and to see themselves in the act of being seen.
There were some thirty tables, all of them topped with pearl-smoked Indian marble. Each table had four or more cedar chairs—sixty-minute chairs, Karla used to call them, because they were just uncomfortable enough to discourage customers from staying for more than an hour. A swarm of broad fans buzzed in the high ceiling, stirring the white-glass pendulum lights to a slow, majestic sway. Mahogany trim lined the painted walls, surrounded the windows and doors, and framed the many mirrors. Rich fruits used in desserts and juices—paw paw, papaya, custard apples, mosambi, grapes, watermelon, banana, santra, and, in the season, four varieties of mango—were displayed across the whole surface of one wall in gorgeous abundance. A vast, solid-teak manager’s counter presided, like the bridge of a sailing ship, over the busy deck of the restaurant. Behind that, along a narrow corridor, one corner of the frantic kitchen was occasionally visible beyond the scurry of waiters and the sweating clouds of steam.
A faded but still sumptuous elegance struck and held the eyes of all who walked through those wide arches into Leopold’s little world of light, colour, and richly panelled wood. Its chief splendour was truly admired by none but its humblest workers, however, for it was only when the bar was closed, and the cleaners removed all the furniture each morning, that the beauty of the floor was exposed. Its intricate tile-work replicated the pattern used in a north Indian palace, with hexagons in black, cream, and brown radiating from a central sunburst. And thus a paving designed for princes, all but invisible to the tourists with their eyes on their own reflections in the dazzling
mirrors, revealed its luxurious perfections only in secret to the naked feet of cleaners, the city’s poorest and meekest working men.
For one cool, precious hour each morning after it opened, and the floors had been cleaned, Leopold’s was an oasis of quiet in the struggling city. From then, until it closed at midnight, it was constantly crowded with visitors from a hundred countries, and the many locals, both foreign and Indian, who came there from every part of the city to conduct their business. The business ranged from traffic in drugs, currencies, passports, gold, and sex, to the intangible but no less lucrative trade in influence—the unofficial system of bribes and favours by which many appointments, promotions, and contracts were facilitated in India.
Leopold’s was an unofficial free zone, scrupulously ignored by the otherwise efficient officers of the Colaba police station, directly across the busy street. Yet a peculiar dialectic applied to the relationships between upstairs and down, inside and outside the restaurant, and governed all of the business transacted there. Indian prostitutes, garlanded with ropes of jasmine flowers and plumply wrapped in bejewelled saris, were prohibited downstairs, and only accompanied customers to the upstairs bar. European prostitutes were only permitted to sit downstairs, attracting the interest of men who sat at other tables, or simply paused on the street outside. Deals for drugs and other contraband were openly transacted at the tables, but the goods could only be exchanged outside the bar. It was common enough to see buyer and seller reach agreement on price, walk outside to hand over money and goods, then walk back inside to resume their places at a table. Even the bureaucrats and influence peddlers were bound by those unwritten rules: agreements reached in the dark booths of the upstairs bar could only be sealed, with handshakes and cash, on the pavement outside, so that no man could say he’d paid or received bribes within the walls of Leopold’s.
While the fine lines that divided and connected the legal and illegal were nowhere more elegantly drawn, they weren’t unique to the diverse society of Leopold’s. The traders in the street stalls outside sold counterfeits of Lacoste, Cardin, and Cartier with a certain impudent panache, the taxi drivers parked along the street accepted tips to tilt their mirrors away from the unlawful or forbidden acts that took place on the seats behind them, and a number of the cops who attended to their duties with diligence, at the station across the road, had paid hefty bribes for the privilege of that lucrative posting in the city centre.
Sitting at Leopold’s, night after night, and listening to the conversations at the tables around me, I heard many foreigners and not a few Indians complain about the corruption that adhered to every aspect of public and commercial life in Bombay. My few weeks in the city had already shown me that those complaints were often fair, and often true. But there’s no nation uncorrupted. There’s no system that’s immune to the misuse of money. Privileged and powerful elites grease the wheels of their progress with kickbacks and campaign contributions in the noblest assemblies. And the rich, all over the world, live longer and healthier lives than the poor. There is a difference between the dishonest bribe and the honest bribe, Didier Levy once said to me. The dishonest bribe is the same in every country, but the honest bribe is India’s alone. I smiled when he said that, because I knew what he meant. India was open. India was honest. And I liked that from the first day. My instinct wasn’t to criticise. My instinct, in the city I was learning to love, was to observe, and become involved, and enjoy. I couldn’t know then that, in the months and years to come, my freedom and even my life would depend on the Indian willingness to tilt the mirror.
‘What, alone?’ Didier gasped, returning to the table. ‘C’est trop! Don’t you know, my dear friend, it is faintly disgusting to be alone here? And, I must tell you that being disgusting is a privilege I reserve, exclusively, for myself. Come, we will drink.’
He flopped into a chair beside me, calling his waiter to order more drinks. I’d spoken to him at Leopold’s almost every night for weeks, but we’d never been alone. It surprised me that he’d decided to join me before Ulla, Karla, or another of his friends returned. In a small way, it was a kind of acceptance, and I felt grateful for it.
He drummed his fingers on the table until the whisky arrived, drank half his glass in a greedy gulp and then relaxed at last, turning to me with a narrow-eyed smile.
‘You are heavy in thoughts.’
‘I was thinking about Leopold’s—looking around, and taking it all in.’
‘A terrible place,’ he sighed, shaking his head of thick curls. ‘I hate myself for enjoying it so much here.’
Two men, wearing loose trousers gathered tightly at the ankles and dark green vests over their long-sleeved, thigh-length shirts, approached us, and drew Didier’s keen attention. They nodded to him, provoking a broad smile and a wave, and then joined a group of friends at a table not far from our own.
‘Dangerous men,’ Didier muttered, the smile still creasing his face as he stared at their backs. ‘Afghans. Rafiq, the small one, he used to run the black market in books.’
‘Books?’
‘Passports. He was the boss. A very big fellow, previously. Now he runs brown sugar through Pakistan. He makes a lot more money from the brown sugar, but he is very bitter about this losing of the book business. Men were killed in that struggle—most of them his men.’
It wasn’t possible that they could’ve heard the remark, but just then the two Afghans turned in their seats and stared at us with dark, serious expressions, as if responding to his words. One of their companions at the table leaned close, and spoke to them. He pointed at Didier, then at me, and they shifted their gaze to look directly into my eyes.
‘Killed …’ Didier repeated softly, smiling even more broadly until the two men turned their backs to us once more. ‘I would refuse to do business with them, if only they did not do such good business.’
He was speaking out of the corner of his mouth, like a prisoner under the eyes of the warders. It struck me as funny. In Australian prisons, that whispering technique is known as side-valving. The expression spoke itself clearly in my mind and, together with Didier’s mannerism, the words put me back in a prison cell. I could smell the cheap disinfectant, hear the metal hiss of the keys, and feel the sweating stone under my fingertips. Flashbacks are common to ex-prisoners, cops, soldiers, ambulance drivers, fire fighters, and others who see and experience trauma. Sometimes the flashback is so sudden, and so inappropriate to the surrounding circumstance, that the only sane reaction is foolish, uncontrollable laughter.
‘You think I’m joking?’ Didier puffed indignantly.
‘No, no, not at all.’
‘This is the truth, I assure you. There was a small war over this business. See, here, even now as we speak, the victors arrive. That is Bairam, and his men. He is Iranian. He is an enforcer, and one of those who works for Abdul Ghani, who, in his turn, works for one of the great crime lords of the city, Abdel Khader Khan. They won this little war, and now it is they who control the business in passport books.’
He gestured with a slight nod of his head to point out a group of young men, dressed in stylish western jeans and jackets, who’d just entered through one of the arches. They walked to the manager’s desk and greeted the owners of Leopold’s warmly before taking a table on the far side of the room. The leader of their group was a tall, heavy-set man in his early thirties. He lifted his plump, jovial face above the heads of his friends and swept the room from right to left, acknowledging deferential nods and friendly smiles from a number of acquaintances at other tables. As his eyes found us, Didier waved a greeting.
‘Blood,’ he said softly, through his bright smile. ‘For a time yet, these passports will be stamped in blood. For me it is nothing. In matters of food I am French, in matters of love I am Italian, and in matters of business I am Swiss. Very Swiss. Strictly neutral. But there will be more blood on these books, of that I am sure.’
He turned to me and blinked once, twice, as if severing the thread of
daydream with his thick lashes.
‘I must be drunk,’ he said with pleasurable surprise. ‘Let’s have another drink.’
‘You go ahead. I’ll sit on this one. How much do these passports cost?’
‘Anything from one hundred to one thousand—dollars, of course. Do you want to buy one?’
‘No …’
‘Ah. This is a Bombay gold dealer’s no. It is a no that means maybe, and the more passionate the no, the more definite the maybe. When you want one, come to me. I will arrange it for you—for a small commission, of course.’
‘You make a lot of … commissions here?’
‘Mmm, it goes. I cannot complain,’ he grinned, his blue eyes gleaming through lenses of pink, alcoholic wetness. ‘I make ends meet, as they say, and when they meet I get a payment from both of the ends. Just now, tonight, I made the arrangements for a sale—two kilos of Manali hashish. You see those Italian tourists, over there, by the fruits, the fellow with the long, blonde hair, and the girl in red? They wanted to buy. Someone—you see him, out there on the street, the one with a dirty shirt and no shoes, waiting for his commission—he put them to me, and then I in my turn put them to Ajay. He makes hashish business, and he is an excellent criminal. See now, he sits with them, and all are smiling. The deal is done. My work for this night is finished. I am a free man!’
Shantaram: A Novel Page 6