‘There’s not a lot more you can do for someone than die for them,’ I replied, grinning at his earnestness as much as the strangeness of his idea.
‘Oh yes,’ he said, putting an arm around my shoulder and leading us back towards the car. ‘There is a lot more.’
‘You are making a friendship with our Abdullah, Mr. Lin?’ Khaderbhai said as we climbed back into the car. ‘This is a good thing. You should be close friends. You look like brothers.’
Abdullah and I looked at one another, and laughed gently at the words. My hair was blond, and his was ink black. My eyes were grey, and his were brown. He was Persian, and I was Australian. At first glance, we couldn’t be more dissimilar. But Khaderbhai stared from one to the other of us with such a puzzled frown, and was so genuinely bewildered by our amusement, that we swallowed our laughter in smiles. And as the car headed out along the Bandra road, I thought about what Khader had said. I found myself thinking that, for all the differences between us, there just might be some perceptive truth in the older man’s observation.
The car drove on for almost an hour. It slowed, at last, on the outskirts of Bandra, in a street of shops and warehouses, and then bumped into the entrance to a narrow lane. The street was dark and deserted, as was the lane. When the car doors opened, I could hear music and singing.
‘Come, Mr. Lin. We go,’ Khaderbhai said, feeling no compulsion to tell me where we were going or why.
The driver, Nazeer, remained with the car, leaning against the bonnet and finally allowing himself the luxury of unwrapping the paan that Abdullah had bought for him at Haji Ali. As I passed him to walk down the lane, I realised that Nazeer hadn’t spoken a single word, and I wondered at the long silences so many Indian people practised in that crowded, noisy city.
We passed through a wide stone arch, along a corridor and, after climbing two flights of stairs, we entered a vast room filled with people, smoke, and clamorous music. It was a rectangular room, hung with green silks and carpets. At the far end there was a small, raised stage where four musicians sat on silk cushions. Around the walls there were low tables surrounded by comfortable cushions. Pale green, bell-shaped lanterns, suspended from the wooden ceiling, cast trembling hoops of yellow-gold light. Waiters moved from group to group, serving black tea in long glasses. At some of the tables there were hookah pipes, pearling the air with blue smoke, and the perfume of charras.
Several men rose immediately to greet Khaderbhai. Abdullah was also well known there. A number of people acknowledged him with a nod, wave, or spoken greeting. I noticed that the men in that room, unlike those at Haji Ali, embraced him warmly, and lingered as they held his hand between their own. I recognised one man in the crowd. It was Shafiq Gussa, or Shafiq The Angry, the controller of prostitution in the navy barracks area near the slum where I lived. I knew a few other faces—a well-known poet, a famous Sufi holy man, and a minor movie star—from photographs in newspapers.
One of the men near Khaderbhai was the manager of the private club. He was a short man, plumply buttoned into a long Kashmiri vest. The white lace cap of a hajji, one who’d made the pilgrimage to Mecca, covered his bald head. His forehead was discoloured by the dark, circular bruise some Muslims acquire through touching their foreheads to a stone in their devotions. He shouted instructions, and at once waiters brought a new table and several cushions, setting them up in a corner of the room with a clear view to the stage.
We sat cross-legged, with Khader in the centre, Abdullah at his right hand, and me at his left. A boy, wearing a hajji cap and Afghan pants and vest, brought us a bowl of popped rice, sharply spiced with chilli powders, and a platter of mixed nuts with dried fruits. The chai waiter poured hot, black tea from a narrow-spouted kettle through a metre of air without spilling a drop. He placed the tea before each of us and then offered sugar cubes. I was about to drink the tea without sugar, but Abdullah stopped me.
‘Come, Mr. Lin,’ he smiled, ‘We are drinking Persian tea, in the real Iranian style, isn’t it?’
He took a sugar cube and placed it in his mouth, holding it firmly between his front teeth. He lifted the glass then, and sipped the tea through the cube. I followed suit, imitating the steps. The sugar cube slowly crumbled and melted away and, although the taste was sweeter than I preferred, I enjoyed what was for me the strangeness of a new custom.
Khaderbhai also took a sugar cube and sipped his tea through it, endowing the little custom with a peculiar dignity and solemnity, as in fact he did with every expression and even the most casual gesture. He was the most imperial human being I’d ever met. Looking at him, then, as he inclined his head to listen to Abdullah’s light-hearted conversation, the thought came to me that in any life, and in any world, he would command men, and inspire their obedience.
Three singers joined the musicians, and sat a little in front of them. A gradual silence settled in the room, and then all of a sudden the three men began to sing in powerful, thrilling voices. It was a luscious sound—a layered and gorgeous music of passionate intensity. The men weren’t just singing, they were crying and wailing in song. Real tears ran from their closed eyes and dripped onto their chests. I was elated, listening to it; and yet, somehow, I felt ashamed. It was as if the singers had taken me into their deepest and most intimate love and sorrow.
They sang three songs then quietly left the stage, disappearing through a curtain into another room. No-one had spoken or moved during the performance, but then everyone spoke at once as we forced ourselves to break the spell that had enveloped us. Abdullah stood up and crossed the room to talk with a group of Afghans at another table.
‘How do you like the singing, Mr. Lin?’ Khaderbhai asked me.
‘I like it very much. It’s incredible, amazing. I’ve never heard anything like it. There was so much sadness in it, but so much power as well. What language was it? Urdu?’
‘Yes. Do you understand Urdu?’
‘No, I’m afraid I don’t. I only speak a little Marathi and Hindi. I recognised it as Urdu because some of the people speak it around me, where I live.’
‘Urdu is the language of gazals, and these are the best gazal singers in all Bombay,’ he replied.
‘Are they singing love songs?’
He smiled, and leaned across to rest his hand on my forearm. Throughout the city, people touched one another often during their conversations, emphasising the points they made with a gentle squeeze of pressure. I knew the gesture well from daily contact with my friends in the slum, and I’d come to like it.
‘They are love songs, yes, but the best and most true of all love songs. They are love songs to God. These men are singing about loving God.’
I nodded, saying nothing, but my silence prompted him to speak again.
‘You are a Christian fellow?’ he asked.
‘No. I don’t believe in God.’
‘There is no believing in God,’ he declared, smiling again. ‘We either know God, or we do not.’
‘Well,’ I laughed, ‘I certainly don’t know God, and frankly I’m inclined to think that God is impossible to believe in, at least most of the notions of God that I’ve come across.’
‘Oh, of course, naturally, God is impossible. That is the first proof that He exists.’
He was staring at me intently, his hand still resting warm on my arm. Be careful, I thought. You’re getting into a philosophical discussion with a man who’s famous for them. He’s testingyou. It’s a test, and the water’s deep.
‘Let me get this straight—you’re saying that because something is impossible, it exists?’ I asked, pushing a canoe of thought out into the uncharted water of his ideas.
‘That is correct.’
‘Well, wouldn’t that mean that all the possible things don’t exist?’
‘Precisely!’ he said, smiling more widely. ‘I am delighted that you understand.’
‘I can say those words,’ I answered, laughing to match his smile, ‘but that doesn’t mean I understand them.’
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‘I will explain. Nothing exists as we see it. Nothing we see is really there, as we think we are seeing it. Our eyes are liars. Everything that seems real, is merely part of the illusion. Nothing exists, as we think it does. Not you. Not me. Not this room. Nothing.’
‘I still don’t get it. I don’t see how possible things don’t exist.’
‘Let me put it another way. The agents of creation, the energy that actually animates the matter and the life that we think we see around us, cannot be measured or weighed or even put into time, as we know it. In one form, that energy is photons of light. The smallest object is a universe of open space to them, and the entire universe is but a speck of dust. What we call the world is just an idea—and not a very good one, yet. From the point of view of the light, the photon of light that animates it, the universe that we know is not real. Nothing is. Do you understand now?’
‘Not really. It seems to me that if everything we think we know is wrong, or is an illusion, then none of us can know what to do, or how to live, or how to stay sane.’
‘We lie,’ he said with a flash of real humour in the gold-flecked amber of his eyes. ‘The sane man is simply a better liar than the insane man. You and Abdullah are brothers. I know this. Your eyes lie, and tell you that this is not so. And you believe the lie, because it is easier.’
‘And that’s how we stay sane?’
‘Yes. Let me tell you that I can see you as my son. I was not married, and I have no son, but there was a moment of time, yes, when it was possible for me to be married, and to have a son. And that moment of time was—how old are you?’
‘I’m thirty.’
‘Exactly! I knew it. That moment of time, when I could have been a father, was exactly thirty years ago. But if I tell you that I see it clearly, that you are my son, and I am your father, you will think that it is impossible. You will resist it. You will not see the truth, that I see now, and that I saw in the first moments when we met, a few hours ago. You will prefer to make a convenient lie, and to believe it—the lie that we are strangers, and that there is no connection between us. But fate—you know fate? Kismet is the word, in the Urdu language—fate has every power over us, but two. Fate cannot control our free will, and fate cannot lie. Men lie, to themselves more than to others, and to others more often than they tell the truth. But fate does not lie. Do you see?’
I did see. My heart knew what he was saying, even as my rebellious mind rejected the words and the man who spoke them. Somehow, he’d found that sorrow in me. The hole in my life that a father should’ve filled was a prairie of longing. In the loneliest hours of those hunted years, I wandered there, as hungry for a father’s love as a cellblock full of sentenced men in the last hour of New Year’s Eve.
‘No,’ I lied. ‘I’m sorry, but I just don’t agree. I don’t think you can make things true, just by believing them.’
‘I have not said that,’ he replied, patiently. ‘What I am saying is that reality—as you see it, and as most people see it—is nothing more than an illusion. There is another reality, beyond what we see with our eyes. You have to feel your way into that reality with your heart. There is no other way.’
‘It’s just … pretty confusing, your way of looking at things. Chaotic, in fact. Don’t you find it chaotic, yourself?’
He smiled again.
‘It is strange, at first, to think in the right way. But there are a few things we can know, a few things to be sure of, and it is relatively easy. Let me show you. To know the truth, all you have to do is close your eyes.’
‘It’s that easy?’ I laughed.
‘Yes. All you have to do is close your eyes. We can know God, for example, and we can know sadness. We can know dreams, and we can know love. But none of these are real, in our usual sense of things that exist in the world and seem real. We cannot weigh them, or measure their length, or find their basic parts in an atom smasher. Which is why they are possible.’
My canoe of thought was taking water, and I decided to bail out, fast.
‘I’ve never heard of this place before. Are there many places like this?’
‘Perhaps five,’ he replied, accepting the change of topic with tolerant equanimity. ‘Is that many, do you think?’
‘I guess it’s enough. There aren’t any women. Are women not allowed to come here?’
‘Not forbidden,’ he frowned, casting about for the right words. ‘Women are permitted here, but they do not want to come. There are other places where women gather, to do their own things and to hear music and singers, and no man would want to disturb them there, either.’
A very elderly man approached us and sat at Khaderbhai’s feet. He wore the simple cotton shirt and thin baggy pants known as a kurtapyjama. His face was deeply lined, and his white hair was cropped into a short, punk cut. He was thin and stooped and obviously poor. With a curt but respectful nod to Khader, he began to mull tobacco and hashish in his gnarled hands. In a few minutes he passed a huge chillum to Khader, and waited with matches ready to light it.
‘This man is Omar,’ Khaderbhai said, pausing with the chillum almost to his lips. ‘He is the best maker of the chillum in all Bombay.’
Omar lit the chillum for Khaderbhai, breaking into a toothless grin and basking in the praise. He passed it to me, studied my technique and lung-power with a critical eye, and grunted a sort of approval. After Khader and I had smoked twice, Omar took the chillum and finished it with gigantic puffs that swelled his thin chest to bursting. When he was finished, he tapped out a small residue of white ash. He’d sucked the chillum dry, and proudly accepted a nod of acknowledgement from Khaderbhai. Despite his great age, he rose easily from the seated position without touching his hands to the floor. He hobbled away as the singers returned to the stage.
Abdullah rejoined us, bringing a cut-glass bowl filled with slices of mango, papaya, and watermelon. The scents of the fruits surrounded us as their tastes dissolved in our mouths. The singers began their next performance, singing just one song that continued for almost half an hour. It was a lush, tripartite harmony built upon a simple melody and improvised cadenzas. The musicians accompanying the singers on the harmonium and the tablas were animated, but the singers themselves were expressionless, motionless, with their eyes closed and their hands limp.
As before, the silent crowd in the club broke out in rowdy chatter when the singers left the small stage. Abdullah leaned across to speak to me.
‘While we were driving here in the car, I was thinking about being brothers, Mr. Lin. I was thinking about what Khaderbhai said.’
‘That’s funny, so was I.’
‘My two brothers—we were three brothers in my family in Iran, and now my two brothers, they are dead. They were killed in the war against Iraq. I have a sister, in Iran, but I have no brother. I am just one brother now. One brother is a sadness, isn’t it?’
I couldn’t answer him directly. My own brother was lost to me. My whole family was lost, and I was sure I would never see them again.
‘I was thinking that perhaps Khaderbhai saw something true. Perhaps we really are looking like brothers.’
‘Maybe we are.’
He smiled.
‘I have decided to like you, Mr. Lin.’
He said it with such solemnity, despite the smile, that I had to laugh.
‘Well, I guess in that case you’d better stop calling me Mr. Lin. It gives me the heebie-jeebies, anyway.’
‘Jeebies?’ he asked, earnestly. ‘It is an Arabic word?’
‘Don’t worry about it. Just call me Lin.’
‘Okay. I will call you Lin. I will call you Lin brother. And you will call me Abdullah, isn’t it so?’
‘I guess it is.’
‘Then we will remember this night, at the concert of the blind singers, because it is the night we begin brothering for each other.’
‘Did you say, the blind singers?’
‘Yes. You don’t know them? These are the Blind Singers of Nagpur. ‘They
are famous in Bombay.’
‘Are they from an institution?’
‘Institution?’
‘Yeah, a school for the blind, maybe. Something like that.’
‘No, Lin brother. At one time they could see, just as we are seeing. But in a small village, near Nagpur, there was a blinding, and these men became blind.’
The noise around me was dizzying, and the once pleasant smell of the fruits and the charras was beginning to cloy and stifle.
‘What do you mean, there was a blinding?’
‘Well, there were rebels and bandits, hiding in the mountains, near that village,’ he explained in his slow, deliberate way. ‘The villagers had to give them food, and other help. They had no choice. But when the police and soldiers came to the village, they made twenty people blind, as a lesson, as a warning to other people, in other villages. This happens sometimes. The singers were not from that village. They were visiting there, to sing at a festival. It was just bad luck. They were made blind, with the rest. All of them, those men and women, twenty people, were tied on the ground, and their eyes were put out, with sharp pieces of bamboo. Now they sing here, everywhere, and are very famous. And rich also …’
He talked on. I listened, but I couldn’t respond or react. Khaderbhai sat next to me, conversing with a young, turbaned Afghan. The young man bent low to kiss Khader’s hand, and the butt of a gun appeared within the folds of his robe. Omar returned and began to prepare another chillum. He grinned up at me with his stained gums, and nodded.
‘Yes, yes,’ he lisped, staring into my eyes. ‘Yes, yes, yes.’
The singers came back to sing again, and smoke spiralled up into the slash of slowly revolving fans, and that green silk room of music and conspiracies became a beginning for me. I know now that there are beginnings, turning points, many of them, in every life; questions of luck and will and fate. The naming day, the day of the flood sticks in Prabaker’s village, when the women gave me the name Shantaram, was a beginning. I know that now. And I know that everything else I’d been and done in India up to that night and the concert of the blind singers, perhaps even the whole of my life, was a preparation for that beginning with Abdel Khader Khan. Abdullah became my brother. Khaderbhai became my father. By the time I realised that fully, and knew the reasons for it, my new life as brother and son had taken me to war, and involved me in murder, and everything had changed forever.