Shantaram: A Novel by Gregory David Roberts

Author:Gregory David Roberts
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780312330521
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2004-10-12T21:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

‘WHEREVER YOU GO in the world, in any society, it is always the same when it comes to questions of justice,’ lord Abdel Khader Khan, my mafia boss and my surrogate father, told me when I’d been six months in his service. ‘We concentrate our laws, investigations, prosecutions, and punishments on how much crime is in the sin, rather than how much sin is in the crime.’

We were sitting in the busy, steamy, wondrously aromatic Restaurant Saurabh, in the Sassoon Dock area. The Saurabh served what many regarded as Bombay’s best masala dhosas, in a city where five thousand restaurants vied for the honour. Despite that distinction, or because of it, the Saurabh was small and relatively unknown. Its name didn’t appear in any of the guidebooks for tourists or the epicure columns in the daily newspapers. It was a worker’s restaurant, and it was full, from morning until evening, with working men and women who cherished it and kept its secret to themselves. Accordingly, the meals were cheap and the decor was a functional minimum. Nevertheless, the restaurant was spotlessly clean, and the spectacular, baroque sails of the crispy dhosas, swept to the tables by waiters who worked at a run, housed the most delicious mixes of spices that could be found in any dish, anywhere in the city.

‘For me,’ he went on as we ate, ‘the opposite is true. For me, the most important thing is the amount of sin that is in the crime. You asked me, just now, why we do not make money from prostitution and drugs, as the other councils do, and I tell you it is because of the sin that is in those crimes. It is for this reason that I will not sell children, or women, or pornography, or drugs. It is for this reason that I will not permit those businesses in any of my areas. In all of these things, the sin in the crime is so great that a man must give up his soul for the profit he makes. And if a man gives his soul, if he becomes a soul-less man, it takes nothing less than a miracle for him to regain it.’

‘Do you believe in miracles?’

‘Certainly, I do. In our hearts, we all believe in miracles.’

‘I’m afraid ί don’t,’ I stated, smiling.

‘I’m sure that you do,’ he insisted. ‘Wouldn’t you say that your rescue from the prison at Arthur Road was a miracle, for example?’

‘It felt like a miraculous thing at the time, I have to admit.’

‘And when you escaped from the prison in your home country, Australia—was that not a miraculous thing?’ he asked quietly.

It was the first time he’d ever mentioned the escape. I was sure that he knew, of course, and I was sure he must’ve thought about it many times. But by broaching the subject with me he was raising the real nature of the rescue from Arthur Road Prison. The fact was that he’d rescued me from two prisons—one in India and one in Australia—and I owed him a double debt.

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