Chapter fourteen

"Come in, come in, Mr. Lin. No, please, sit here. We have been expecting you." Abdel Khader waved me to a place at his left hand. I kicked off my shoes at the doorway, where several other pairs of sandals and shoes had been discarded, and sat down on the plush, brocade cushion he'd indicated. It was a large room- nine of us, seated in a circle about a low marble table, occupied no more than a corner of it. The floor was surfaced with smooth, cream, pentagonal tiles. A square of Isfahan carpet covered the tiles in our part of the room. The walls and vaulted ceiling featured a mosaic of pale blue and white miniatures, presenting the effect of a sky with drifts of cloud. Two open arches connected the room to wide passageways. Three picture-seat windows overlooked a palm-filled courtyard. They were all framed with sculptured pillars and topped with minaret-shaped domes inscribed with Arabic lettering. The spill, splash, and stir of water in a cascade fountain came to us from beyond those windows, somewhere in the courtyard.

It was a room of diligently austere splendour. The only furniture was the low marble table and our nine cushions evenly arranged around the carpet. The only decoration was a framed black and gold-leaf depiction of the Kaaba at Mecca. The eight men who sat or reclined there seemed comfortable in that inornate simplicity, however, and certainly they were free to choose any style that they wanted, for there was the wealth and power of a small empire between them: an empire of crime.

"Are you feeling quite refreshed, Mr. Lin?" Khaderbhai asked.

When I'd arrived at the building beside the Nabila Mosque, in Dongri, Nazeer had shown me at once to a large, well-appointed bathroom, where I'd used the toilet and then washed my face and hands. Bombay, in those years, was the most voluptuously dirty city in the world. It wasn't only hot and cloyingly humid: in the eight rainless months of the year it was constantly aswirl with grimy dust clouds that settled on and smeared every exposed surface with a catholic variety of filths.

If I wiped my face with a handkerchief after only half an hour's walk along any street, the cloth was streaked with black.

"Thank you, yes. I felt tired, when I arrived, but now I'm revived by a combination of politeness and plumbing." I was speaking in Hindi, and it was a struggle to carry the humour, sense, and good intentions in the small phrase. We can't really know what a pleasure it is to run in our own language until we're forced to stumble in someone else's. It was a great relief when Khaderbhai spoke in English.

"Please speak English, Mr. Lin. I am very happy that you are learning our languages, but today we would like to practise yours. Each of us here can speak and read and write English, to some extent. In my own case, I have been educated in English, as well as in Hindi and Urdu. In fact, I often find myself thinking first in English, before other languages. My dear friend, Abdul, sitting near you, would call English his first language, I think.

And all of us, no matter what our level of learning, are enthusiastic about the study of English. It is a critical thing for us. One of the reasons why I asked you to come here, this evening, was so that we might enjoy the speaking of English with you, a native of the language. This is our monthly discussion night, you see, and our little group talks about-but wait, let me first introduce you."

He reached over to lay an affectionate hand on the bulky forearm of the heavy-set, elderly man who sat on his right. He was dressed in the green pantaloons and long tunic of Afghan traditional dress.

"This is Sobhan Mahmoud-let us use first names, after our introductions, Lin, for we are all friends here, yes?"

Sobhan wagged his grizzled, grey head at me in greeting, fixing me with a look of steely enquiry, perhaps to make sure that I understood the honour implied in the use of first names.

"The very ample and smiling gentleman next to him is my old friend from Peshawar, Abdul Ghani. Next to him is Khaled Ansari, originally from Palestine. Rajubhai, next to him, is from the holy city of Varanasi-have you seen it? No? Well, you must make the time to do so before too long."

Rajubhai, a bald, thick-set man with a neat, grey moustache, smiled in response to Khaderbhai's introduction, and turned to me with his hands joined together in a silent greeting. His eyes, above the gentle steeple of his fingers, were hard and wary.

"Next to our dear Raju," Khaderbhai continued, "is Keki Dorabjee, who came to Bombay from Zanzibar, with other Indian Parsees, twenty years ago, when they were driven from the island by the nationalist movement."

Dorabjee, a very tall, thin man in his middle fifties, turned his dark eyes on me. His expression seemed fixed in such distressing melancholy that I felt compelled to offer him a small, comforting smile in return.

"Next to our brother Keki is Farid. He is the youngest of our group, and the only one of us who is a native Maharashtrian, by virtue of being born in Bombay, although his family came here from Gujarat. Sitting next to you is Madjid, who was born in Teheran, but has lived here, in our city, for more than twenty years."

A young servant entered with a tray of glasses and a silver pot of black tea. He served us, beginning with Khaderbhai and ending with me. He left the room, returned momentarily to place two bowls of ladoo and barfi sweets on the table, and then left us once more.

Immediately afterward, three men joined us in the room, making a place for themselves on another patch of carpet that was near, but a little apart from us. They were introduced to me-Andrew Ferreira, a Goan, and Salman Mustaan and Sanjay Kumar, both from Bombay-but from that moment they never spoke again. They were, it seemed, young gangsters on the next rung below council membership: invited to listen at the meetings, but not to speak.

And they did listen, very attentively, while watching us closely.

I turned, often, to find their eyes on me, staring out from the kind of grave appraisal I'd come to know too well in prison. They were deciding whether to trust me or not, and how hard it would be-as a purely professional speculation-to kill me, without a gun.

"Lin, we usually talk about some themes, at our discussion nights," Abdul Ghani said in a clipped, BBC-accented English, "but first we would like to ask you what you make of this."

He reached across, pushing toward me a rolled poster that was lying on the table. I opened it out and read through the four paragraphs of large, bold typeface.

SAPNA

People of Bombay, listen to the voice of your King. Your dream is come to you and I am he, Sapna, King of Dreams, King of Blood. Your time is come, my children, and your chains of suffering will be lifted from you.

I am come. I am the law. My first commandment is to open your eyes. I want you to see your hunger while they waste food. I want you to see your rags while they wear silk. See that you live in the gutter while they live in palaces of marble and gold. My second commandment is to kill them all. Do this with cruel violence.

Do this in memory of me, Sapna. I am the law.

There was more, a lot more, all of it in the same vein. It struck me as absurd at first, and I started to smile. The silence in the room and the stares of tense concentration they turned on me stifled the smile to a grimace. They took it very seriously, I realised. Stalling for time, because I didn't know what Ghani wanted from me, I read through the ranting, insane tract again.

While I read the words, I remembered that someone had painted the name Sapna on the wall at the Village in the Sky, twenty-three floors off the ground. I remembered what Prabaker and Johnny Cigar had said about brutal murders done in Sapna's name. The continuing silence and expectant seriousness in the room filled me with a chill of menace. The hairs on my arms tingled with it, and a caterpillar of sweat inched down the groove of my spine.

"Well, Lin?"

"Sorry?"

"What do you make of it?"

The stillness was so complete that I could hear myself swallowing. They wanted me to give them something, and they expected it to be good.

"I don't know what to say. I mean, it's so ridiculous, so fatuous, it's hard to take it seriously."

Madjid grunted, and cleared his throat loudly. He drew his thick black eyebrows down over a thick black scowl.

"If you call cutting a man from the groin to the throat, and then leaving his organs and his life's blood all around his house serious, then it is a serious matter."

"Sapna did that?"

"His followers did it, Lin," Abdul Ghani answered for him. "That, and at least six more murders like it, in the last month. Some were even more hideous killings."

"I've heard people talking about Sapna, but I thought it was just a story, like an urban legend. I haven't read anything about it in any of the newspapers, and I read them every day."

"This matter is being handled in the most careful way,"

Khaderbhai explained. "The government and the police have asked for co-operation from the newspapers. They have been reported as unrelated things, as deaths that happened during simple, unconnected robberies. But we know that Sapna's followers have committed them, because the blood of the victims was used to write the word Sapna on the walls and the floors. And despite the terrible violence of the attacks, not much of any real value was stolen from the victims. For now, this Sapna does not officially exist. But it is only a matter of time before everyone knows of him, and of what has been done in his name."

"And you... you don't know who he is?"

"We are very interested in him, Lin," Khaderbhai answered. "What do you think about this poster? It has been seen in many markets and hutments, and it is written in English, as you see. Your language."

I sensed a vague hint of accusation in those last two words.

Although I had nothing whatsoever to do with Sapna and knew almost nothing about him, my face reddened with that special guilty blush of the completely innocent man.

"I don't know. I don't think I can help you with this."

"Come now, Lin," Abdul Ghani chided. "There must be some impressions, some thoughts, that occur to you. There is no commitment here. Don't be shy. Just say the first things that come to your mind."

"Well," I began reluctantly, "the first thing is, I think that this Sapna-or whoever wrote this poster-may be a Christian."

"A Christian!" Khaled laughed. He was a young man, perhaps thirty-five, with short dark hair and soft green eyes. A thick scar swept in a " smooth curve from his left ear to the corner of his mouth, stiffening that side of his face. His dark hair was streaked with premature white and grey. It was an intelligent, sensitive face, more scarred by its anger and hatreds than it was by the knife-wound on his cheek. "They're supposed to _love their enemies, not disembowel them!"

"Let him finish," Khaderbhai smiled. "Go on, Lin. What makes you think Sapna is a Christian fellow?"

"I didn't say Sapna is a Christian-just that whoever wrote this stuff is using Christian words and phrases. See, here, in the first part, where he says I am come... and...Do this in memory of me-those words can be found in the Bible. And here, in the third paragraph... I am the truth in their world of lies, I am the light in their darkness of greed, my way of blood is your freedom-he's paraphrasing something... I am the Way and the Truth and the _Light... and it's also in the Bible. Then in the last lines, he says...

Blessed are the killers, for they shall steal lives in my name- that's from the Sermon on the Mount. It's all been taken from the Bible, and there's probably more in here that I don't recognise.

But it's all been changed around, it's as though this guy, whoever wrote this stuff, has taken bits of the Bible, and written it upside down."

"Upside down? Explain please?" Madjid asked.

"I mean, it's against the ideas of the words in the Bible, but uses the same kind of language. He's written it to have exactly the opposite meaning and intention of the original. He's kind of turned the Bible on its head."

I might've said more, but Abdul Ghani ended the discussion abruptly.

"Thank you, Lin. You've been a big help. But let's change the subject. I, for one, do sincerely dislike talking about such unpleasantness as this Sapna lunatic. I only brought it up because Khader asked me to-and Khader Khan's wish is my command.

But we really should move on now. If we don't get started on our theme for tonight, we'll miss out altogether. So, let's have a smoke, and talk of other things. It's our custom for the guest to start, so will you be so kind?"

Farid rose and placed a huge, ornate hookah, with six snaking lines, on the floor between us next to the table. He passed the smoking tubes out, and squatted next to the hookah with several matches held ready to strike. The others closed off their smoking tubes with their thumbs and, as Farid played a flame over the tulip-shaped bowl, I puffed it alight. It was the mix of hashish and marijuana known as ganga-jamuna, named after the two holy rivers, Ganges and Jamner. It was so potent, and came with such force from the water-pipe, that almost at once my bloodshot eyes failed in focus and I experienced a mild, hallucinatory effect: the blurring at the edges of other people's faces, and a minuscule time-delay in their movements. The Lewis Carrolls, Karla called it. I'm so stoned, she used to say, I'm getting the Lewis Carrolls. So much smoke passed from the tube that I swallowed it and belched it out again. I closed off the pipe, and watched in slow motion as the others smoked, one after another.

I'd just begun to master the sloppy grin that dumped itself on the plasticine muscles of my face when it was my turn to smoke again. It was a serious business. There was no laughing or smiling.

There was no conversation, and no man met another's eye. The men smoked with the same mirthless, earnest impassiveness I might've found on a long ride in an elevator full of strangers.

"Now, Mr. Lin," Khaderbhai said, smiling graciously as Farid removed the hookah and set about cleaning the ash-filled bowl.

"It is also our custom for the guest to give us the theme for discussion. This is usually a religious theme, but it need not be so. What would you like to talk about?"

"I... I... I'm not sure what you mean?" I stammered, my brain soundlessly exploding in fractal repetitions of the pattern in the carpet beneath my feet.

"Give us a subject, Lin. Life and death, love and hate, loyalty and betrayal," Abdul Ghani explained, waving a plump hand in effete little circles with each couplet. "We are like a debating society here, you see. We meet every month, at least one time, and when our business and private matters are finished, we talk about philosophical subjects and the such-like. It's our amusement. And now we have you, an Englishman, to give us a subject to discuss, in your language."

"I'm not English, actually."

"Not English? Then what are you?" Madjid demanded to know. Deep suspicions were planted in the furrows of his frown.

It was a good question. The false passport in my backpack in the slum said that I was a New Zealand citizen. The business card in my pocket said that I was an American named Gilbert Parker.

People in the village at Sunder had re-named me Shantaram. In the slum they knew me as Linbaba. A lot of people in my own country knew me as a face on a wanted poster. But is it my own country, I asked myself. Do I have a country?

It wasn't until I'd asked myself the question that I realised I already had the answer. If I did have a country, a nation of the heart, it was India. I knew that I was as much a refugee, a displaced and stateless person, as the thousands of Afghans, Iranians, and others who'd come to Bombay across the burning bridge; those exiles who'd taken shovels of hope, and set about burying the past in the earth of their own lives.

"I'm an Australian," I said, admitting it for the first time since I'd arrived in India, and obeying an instinct that warned me to tell Khaderbhai the truth. Strangely, I felt it to be more of a lie than any alias I'd ever used. "How very interesting," Abdul Ghani remarked, lifting one eyebrow in a sage nod to Khaderbhai. "And what will you have as a subject, Lin?"

"Any subject?" I asked, stalling for time.

"Yes, your choice. Last week we discussed patriotism-the obligations of a man to God, and what he owes to the state. A most engaging theme. What will you have us discuss this week?"

"Well, there's a line in that poster of Sapna's... our suffering is our religion-something like that. It made me think of something else. The cops came again, a few days ago, and smashed down a lot of houses in the zhopadpatti, and while we were watching it one of the women near me said... our duty is to work, and to suffer-or as near to that as I can make out. She said it very calmly and simply, as if she accepted it, and was resigned to it, and understood it completely. But I don't understand it, and I don't think I ever will. So, maybe the question could be about that. Why do people suffer? Why do bad people suffer so little? And why do good people suffer so much? I mean, I'm not talking about me-all the suffering I've gone through, I brought most of it on myself. And God knows, I've caused a lot of it to other people. But I still don't understand it-especially not the suffering that the people in the slum go through. So... suffering. We could talk about that... do you think?"

I trailed off a little lamely into the silence that greeted my suggestion, but moments later I was rewarded with a warmly approving smile from Khaderbhai.

"It is a good theme, Lin. I knew that you would not disappoint us. Majidbhai, I will call on you to start us on this talk."

Madjid cleared his throat and turned a gruff smile on his host.

He scratched at his bushy eyebrows with thumb and forefinger, and then plunged into the discussion with the confident air of a man much used to expressing his opinions.

"Suffering, let me see. I think that suffering is a matter of choice. I think that we do not have to suffer anything in this life, if we are strong enough to deny it. The strong man can master his feelings so completely that it is almost impossible to make him suffer. When we do suffer things, like pain and so, it means that we have lost control. So I will say that suffering is a human weakness."

"Achaa-cha," Khaderbhai murmured, using the repetitive form of the Hindi word for good, which translates as Yes, yes, or Fine, fine. "Your interesting idea makes me ask the question, where does strength come from?"

"Strength?" Madjid grunted. "Everyone knows that it... well... what are you saying?"

"Nothing, my old friend. Only, is it not true that some of our strength comes from suffering? That suffering hardship makes us stronger? That those of us who have never known a real hardship, and true suffering, cannot have the same strength as others, who have suffered much? And if that is true, does that not mean that your argument is the same thing as saying that we have to be weak to suffer, and we have to suffer to be strong, so we have to be weak to be strong?"

"Yes," Madjid conceded, smiling. "Maybe a little bit is true, maybe a little bit of what you say. But I still think it is a matter of strength and weakness."

"I don't accept everything that our brother Madjid said," Abdul Ghani put in, "but I do agree that there is an element of control that we have over suffering. I don't think you can deny that."

"Where do we get this control, and how?" Khaderbhai asked.

"I would say that it is different for all of us, but that it happens when we grow up, when we mature and pass from the childishness of our youthful tears, and become adults. I think that it is a part of growing up, learning to control our suffering. I think that when we grow up, and learn that happiness is rare, and passes quickly, we become disillusioned and hurt.

And how much we suffer is a mark of how much we have been hurt by this realisation. Suffering, you see, is a kind of anger. We rage against the unfairness, the injustice of our sad and sorry lot.

And this boiling resentment, you see, this anger, is what we call suffering. It is also what leads us to the hero curse, I might add."

"Hero curse! Enough of your hero curses! You bring every subject back to this," Madjid growled, scowling to match the smug smile of his portly friend.

"Abdul has a pet theory, Lin," said Khaled, the dour Palestinian.

"He believes that certain men are cursed with qualities, such as great courage, that make them commit desperate acts. He calls it the hero curse, the thing that compels them to lead other men to bloodshed and chaos. He might be right, I think, but he goes on about it so much he drives us all crazy." "Leaving that aside, Abdul," Khaderbhai persisted, "let me ask you one question about what you have said. Is there a difference, would you say, between suffering that we experience, and suffering that we cause for others?"

"Of course, yes. What are you getting at, Khader?"

"Just that if there are at least two kinds of suffering, quite different to each other, one that we feel, and one that we cause others to feel, they can hardly both be the anger that you spoke of. Isn't it so? Which one is which, would you say?"

"Why... ha!" Abdul Ghani laughed. "You've got me there, Khader, you old fox! You always know when I'm just making an argument for the sake of it, _na? And just when I thought I was being bloody clever, too! But don't worry, I'll think it around, and come back at you again."

He snatched a chunk of sweet barfi from the plate on the table, bit a piece of it, and munched happily. He gestured to the man on his right, thrusting the sweet in his pudgy fingers.

"And what about you, Khaled? What have you to say about Lin's topic?"

"I know that suffering is the truth," Khaled said quietly. His teeth were clenched. "I know that suffering is the sharp end of the whip, and not suffering is the blunt end-the end that the master holds in his hand."

"Khaled, dear fellow," Abdul Ghani complained. "You are more than ten years my junior, and I think of you as dearly as I would of my own younger brother, but I must tell you that this is a most depressing thought, and you're disturbing the good pleasure we've gained from this excellent charras."

"If you'd been born and raised in Palestine, you'd know that some people are born to suffer. And it never stops, for them. Not for a second. You'd know where real suffering comes from. It's the same place where love and freedom and pride are born. And it's the same place where those feelings and ideals die. That suffering never stops. We only pretend it does. We only tell ourselves it does, to make the kids stop whimpering in their sleep."

He stared down at his strong hands, glowering at them as if at two despised and defeated enemies who were pleading for his mercy. A gloomy silence began to thicken in the air around us, and instinctively we looked to Khaderbhai. He sat cross-legged, stiff-backed, rocking slowly in his place and seeming to spool out a precise measure of respectful reflection. At last, he nodded to Farid, inviting him to speak. "I think that our brother Khaled is right, in a way," Farid began quietly, almost shyly. He turned his large, dark brown eyes on Khaderbhai. Encouraged by the older man's nod of interest, he continued. "I think that happiness is a really thing, a truly thing, but it is what makes us crazy people. Happiness is a so strange and power thing that it makes us to be sick, like a germ sort of thing. And suffering is what cures us of it, the too much happiness. The-how do you say it, bhari vazan?"

"The burden," Khaderbhai translated for him. Farid spoke a phrase rapidly in Hindi, and Khader gave it to us in such an elegantly poetic English that I realised, through the haze of the stone, how much better his English was than he'd led me to believe at our first meeting. "The burden of happiness can only be relieved by the balm of suffering."

"Yes, yes, that is it what I want to say. Without the suffering, the happiness would squash us down."

"This is a very interesting thought, Farid," Khaderbhai said, and the young Maharashtrian glowed with pleasure in the praise.

I felt a tiny twitch of jealousy. The sense of well-being bestowed by Khaderbhai's benignant smile was as intoxicating as the heady mixture we'd smoked in the hookah pipe. The urge to be a son to Abdel Khader Khan, to earn the blessing of his praise, was overwhelming. The hollow space in my heart where a father's love might've been, should've been, wrapped itself around the contours of his form, and took the features of his face. The high cheekbones and closely cropped silver beard, the sensual lips and deep-set amber eyes, became the perfect father's face.

I look back on that time now-at my readiness to serve him as a son might serve a father, at my willingness to love him, in fact, and at how quickly and unquestioningly it happened in my life- and I wonder how much of it came from the great power that he wielded in the city, his city. I'd never felt so safe, anywhere in the world, as I did in his company. And I did hope that in the river of his life I might wash away the scent, and shake off the hounds. I've asked myself a thousand times, through the years, if I would've loved him so swiftly and so well if he'd been powerless and poor.

Sitting there, then, in that domed room, feeling the twinge of jealousy when he smiled at Farid and praised him, I knew that although Khaderbhai had spoken of adopting me as his son, on our first meeting, it was really I who'd adopted him. And while the discussion continued around me, I spoke the words, quite clearly, in the secret voice of prayer and incantation... Father, father, my father...

"You do not share our joy at the speaking of English, Sobhan Uncle," Khaderbhai said, addressing the tough, grizzled older man on his right. "So please, permit me to answer for you. You will say, I know, that the Koran tells us how our sin and wrong-doing is the cause of our suffering, isn't it so?"

Sobhan Mahmoud wagged his head in assent, his gleaming eyes nesting under a tufted ledge of grey eyebrows. He seemed amused by Khaderbhai's guess at his position on the theme.

"You will say that living by right principles, according to the teachings of the Holy Koran, will banish suffering from the life of a good Muslim, and lead him to the eternal bliss of heaven when life is at an end."

"We all know what Sobhan Uncle thinks," Abdul Ghani cut in, impatiently. "None of us will disagree with your arguments, Uncle-_ji, but you must permit me to say that you are inclined to be a little extreme, na? I well remember the time that you beat young Mahmoud with a rod of bamboo because he cried when his mother died. It is, of course, true that we should not question the will of Allah, but a touch of sympathy, in these matters, is only human, isn't it? But be that as it may, what I am interested in is your opinion, Khader. Please tell us, what do you think about suffering?"

No-one spoke or moved. There was a perceptible sharpening of focus and attention in the few silent moments as Khaderbhai gathered his thoughts. Each man had his own opinion and level of articulacy, yet I had the clear impression that Khaderbhai's contribution was usually the last word. I sensed that his response would set the tone, perhaps even becoming the answer those men would give, if the question about suffering were asked again. His expression was impassive, and his eyes were modestly cast down, but he was far too intelligent not to perceive the awe he inspired in others. I thought that he was far too human, as well, not to be flattered by it. When I came to know him better, I discovered that he was always avidly interested in what others thought of him, always acutely aware of his own charisma and its effect on those around him, and that every word he spoke, to everyone but God, was a performance. He was a man with the ambition to change the world forever. Nothing that he ever said or did-not even the quiet humility in his deep voice as he spoke to us then-was an accident, a chance, or anything but a calculated fragment of his plan. "In the first place, I would like to make a general comment, and then I would like to follow it with a more detailed answer. Do you all allow me this? Good. Then, to the general comment-I think that suffering is the way we test our love. Every act of suffering, no matter how small or agonisingly great, is a test of love in some way. Most of the time, suffering is also a test of our love for God. This is my first statement. Does anyone wish to discuss this point, before I proceed?"

I looked from one face to another. Some men smiled in appreciation of his point, some nodded their agreement, and some others frowned in concentration. All of them seemed eager for Khaderbhai to continue.

"Very well, I will move on to my more detailed answer. The Holy Koran tells us that all things in the universe are related, one to another, and that even opposites are united in some way. I think that there are two points about suffering that we should remember, and they have to do with pleasure and pain. The first is this: that pain and suffering are connected, but they are not the same thing. Pain can exist without suffering, and it is also possible to suffer without feeling pain. Do you agree with this?"

He scanned the attentive, expectant faces, and found approval.

"The difference between them is this, I think: that what we learn from pain-for example, that fire burns and is dangerous-is always individual, for ourselves alone, but what we learn from suffering is what unites us as one human people. If we do not suffer with our pain, then we have not learned about anything but ourselves. Pain without suffering is like victory without struggle. We do not learn from it what makes us stronger or better or closer to God."

The others wagged their heads at one another in agreement.

"And the other part, the pleasure part?" Abdul Ghani asked. A few of the men laughed gently, grinning at Ghani as he looked from one to the other. He laughed at them in return. "What? What?

Can't a man have a healthy, scientific interest in pleasure?"

"Ah," Khader continued, "I think that it's a little bit like what Mr. Lin tells us this Sapna fellow has done with the words from the Christian Bible. It is the reverse. Suffering is exactly like happiness, but backwards. One is the mirror image of the other, and has no real meaning or existence without the other."

"I am sorry, I do not understand," Farid said meekly, glancing at the others and blushing darkly. "Please can you explain it?" "It is like this," Khaderbhai said gently. "Take my hand, as an example. If I open my hand out like this, stretching the fingers and showing you the palm, or if I open my hand and put it on your shoulder, my fingers stretched out like this-that is happiness, or we may call it so for the sake of this moment. And if I curl my fingers, and close them tightly into a fist, just so, we may call that suffering. The two gestures are opposite in their meaning and power. Each one is completely different in appearance and in what it can do, but the hand that makes the gesture is the same. Suffering is happiness, backwards."

Each man was then given another turn to speak, and the discussion itself moved backwards and forwards, reversing on itself as arguments were embellished or abandoned for two long hours.

Hashish was smoked. Tea was served twice more, Abdul Ghani choosing to mix a small pellet of black opium in his, and drinking it down with a practised grimace.

Madjid modified his position by agreeing that suffering was not necessarily a sign of weakness, but insisting that we could toughen ourselves against it with a strong will; strength of will coming from strict self-discipline, a kind of self-imposed suffering. Farid added to his notion of suffering as an anti toxin to the poison of happiness by recalling specific incidents from the lives of his friends. Old Sobhan whispered a few sentences in Urdu, and Khaderbhai translated the new point for us: there are some things we human beings will never understand, the things only God can understand, and that suffering may well be one of them. Keki Dorabji made the point that the universe, as those of the Parsee faith see it, is a process of struggle between opposites-light and darkness, hot and cold, suffering and pleasure-and that nothing can exist without the existence of its opposite. Rajubhai added that suffering is a condition of the unenlightened soul, locked within the wheel of Karma. Khaled Fattah said nothing more, despite the artful urgings of Abdul Ghani, who teased and cajoled him several times before finally giving up the attempt, visibly piqued by the stubborn refusal.

For his part, Abdul Ghani emerged as the most vocal and likeable of the group. Khaled was an intriguing man, but there was anger- too much anger, perhaps-brooding in him. Madjid had been a professional soldier in Iran. He seemed brave and direct, yet given to a simplistic view of the world and its people. Sobhan Mahmoud was undoubtedly pious, but there was a vaguely antiseptic scent of inflexibility about him. Young Farid was openhearted, self-effacing and, I suspected, too easily led. Keki was dour and unresponsive, and Rajubhai seemed to be suspicious of me, almost to the point of rudeness. Of all of them, only Abdul Ghani displayed any sense of humour, and only he laughed aloud. He was as familiar with younger men as he was with those senior to him. He sprawled in his place, where others sat.

He interrupted or interjected when he pleased, and he ate more, drank more, and smoked more than any man in the room. He was especially, irreverently, affectionate with Khaderbhai, and it was certain that they were close friends.

Khaderbhai asked questions, probed, made comments upon what was said, but never added another word to his own position. I was silent; drifting, tired, and grateful that no-one pressured me to speak.

When Khaderbhai finally adjourned the meeting, he walked with me to the door that opened into the street beside the Nabila Mosque, and stopped me there with a gentle hand on my forearm. He said he was glad I'd come, and that he hoped I'd enjoyed myself. Then he asked me to return on the following day because there was a favour I could do for him, if I was willing. Surprised and flattered, I agreed at once, promising to meet him at the same place on the following morning. I stepped out into the night, and almost put it out of my mind.

On the long walk home, my thoughts browsed among the ideas I'd heard presented by that scholarly group of criminals. I recalled other, similar discussions I'd shared with men in prison. Despite their general lack of formal education, or perhaps because of it, many men I'd known in prison had a fervent interest in the world of ideas. They didn't call it philosophy, or even know it as such, but the stuff of their conversations was often just that- abstract questions of moral and ethic, meaning and purpose.

It had been a long day, and an even longer night. With Madame Zhou's photograph in my hip pocket, my feet pinched by shoes that had been bought to bury Karla's dead lover, and my head clogged with definitions of suffering, I walked the emptying streets and remembered a cell in an Australian prison where the murderers and thieves I'd called my friends often gathered to argue, passionately, about truth and love and virtue. I wondered if they thought of me from time to time. Am I a daydream for them now, I asked myself, a daydream of freedom and flight? How would they answer the question, what is suffering?

I knew. Khaderbhai had dazzled us with the wisdom of his un- common sense, and the cleverness of his talent for expressing it.

His definition was sharp, and barbed enough-suffering is happiness, backwards-to hook a fish of memory. But the truth of what human suffering really means, in the dry, frightened mouth of life, wasn't in Khaderbhai's cleverness that night. It belonged to Khaled Ansari, the Palestinian. His was the definition that stayed with me. His simple, unbeautiful words were the clearest expression of what all prisoners, and everyone else who lives long enough, know well-that suffering, of every kind, is always a matter of what we've lost. When we're young, we think that suffering is something that's done to us. When we get older-when the steel door slams shut, in one way or another-we know that real suffering is measured by what's taken away from us.

Feeling small and alone and lonely, I walked by memory and touch through the dark, lightless lanes of the slum. As I turned into the last gully where my own empty hut waited, I saw lamplight. A man was standing not far from my door with a lantern in his hand.

Beside him was a small child, a little girl, with knotted, teased hair. I drew near and saw that the man with the lantern was Joseph, the drunkard who'd beaten his wife, and that Prabaker was with him in the shadows.

"What's going on?" I whispered. "It's late."

"Hello, Linbaba. Nice clothes you're wearing for changes,"

Prabaker smiled, his round face floating in the yellow light. "I love it, your shoes-so clean and shining. Just in time you are.

Joseph is doing it good things. He has paid money, to have it the good luck sign put on everybody his doors. Since not being a badly drinking fellow any more, he has been working full overtimes, and with some of his extra money he paid for this, to help us all with good luck."

"The good luck sign?"

"Yes, look here at this child, look at her hand." He lifted the little girl's wrists, and exposed the hands. In the feeble light, it wasn't clear what I was supposed to see. "Look, here, only four fingers she has. See that! Four fingers only. Very good luck, this thing."

I saw it. Two fingers on the child's hands were joined, imperceptibly, to make just one thick finger between the index and middle fingers. Her palms were blue. Joseph held a flat dish of blue paint. The child had been dipping her hands into it, and making handprints on the door of every hut in our lane to bring protection against the many afflictions attributed to the Evil Eye. Superstitious slum-dwellers apparently deemed her to be especially blessed because she was born with the rare difference of only four fingers on each hand. As I watched, the child reached over to press her small hands against my flimsy door. With a brief, serious nod, Joseph led the girl away to the next hut.

"I am helping that used-to-be-beating-his-wife-and-badly drinking-fellow, that Joseph," Prabaker said, in a stage whisper that could be heard twenty metres away. "You are wanting any things, before I'm going?"

"No. Thanks. Good night, Prabu."

"Shuba ratri, Lin," he grinned. Good night. "Have it sweet dreams for me, yes?"

He turned to leave, but I stopped him.

"Hey, Prabu."

"Yes, Lin?"

"Tell me, what is suffering? What do you think? What does it mean, that people suffer?"

Prabaker glanced along the dark lane of ramshackle huts to the hovering glow-worm of Joseph's lamp. He looked back at me, only his eyes and his teeth visible, although we were standing quite close together.

"You're feeling okay, Lin?"

"I'm fine," I laughed.

"Did you drink any daru tonight, like that badly-drinking Joseph?"

"No, really, I'm fine. Come on, you're always defining everything for me. We were talking about suffering tonight, and I'm interested to know, what do you think about it?"

"Is easy-suffering is hungry, isn't it? Hungry, for anything, means suffering. Not hungry for something, means, not suffering.

But everybody knows that."

"Yes, I guess everybody does. Good night, Prabu."

"Good night, Lin."

He walked away, singing, and he knew that none of the people sleeping in the wretched huts around him would mind. He knew that if they woke they would listen for a moment, and then drift back to sleep with a smile because he was singing about love.

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Дата добавления: 2015-10-26