Shantaram

The slums went on, and their sheer ubiquity wore down my foreigner's pieties. A kind of wonder possessed me. I began to look beyond the immensity of the slum societies, and to see the people who lived within them. A woman stooped to brush forward the black satin psalm of her hair. Another bathed her children with water from a copper dish. A man led three goats with red ribbons tied to the collars at their throats. Another man shaved himself at a cracked mirror. Children played everywhere. Men carried water in buckets. Men made repairs to one of the huts. And everywhere that I looked, people smiled and laughed.

The bus stopped in a stutter of traffic, and a man emerged from one of the huts near my window. He was a foreigner, as pale- skinned as any of the new arrivals on the bus, and dressed only in a wrap-around sheet of hibiscus-patterned cotton. He stretched, yawned, and scratched unselfconsciously at his naked belly. There was a definitive, bovine placidity in his face and posture. I found myself envying that contentment, and the smiles of greeting he drew from a group of people who walked past him to the road.

The bus jerked into motion once more, and I lost sight of the man. But that image of him changed everything in my attitude to the slums. Seeing him there, a man as alien to the place as I was, let me picture myself in that world. What had seemed unimaginably strange and remote from my experience suddenly became possible, and comprehensible, and, finally, fascinating.

I looked at the people, then, and I saw how busy they were-how much industry and energy described their lives. Occasional sudden glimpses inside the huts revealed the astonishing cleanliness of that poverty: the spotless floors, and glistening metal pots in neat, tapering towers. And then, last, what should've been first, I saw how beautiful they were: the women wrapped in crimson, blue, and gold; the women walking barefoot through the tangled shabbiness of the slum with patient, ethereal grace; the white- toothed, almond-eyed handsomeness of the men; and the affectionate camaraderie of the fine-limbed children, older ones playing with younger ones, many of them supporting baby brothers and sisters on their slender hips. And half an hour after the bus ride began, I smiled for the first time.

"It ain't pretty," the young man beside me said, looking at the scene beyond the window. He was Canadian, the maple leaf patch on his jacket declared: tall and heavy-set, with pale eyes, and shoulder-length brown hair. His companion looked like a shorter, more compact version of himself; they even wore identical stonewashed jeans, sandals, and soft, calico jackets.

"Come again?"

"This your first time?" he asked in reply. I nodded. "I thought so. Don't worry. From here on, it gets a little better. Not so many slums and all. But it ain't good anywheres in Bombay. This here is the crummiest city in India, y'can take my word."

"You got that right," the shorter man agreed.

"But from here on in, you got a couple nice temples and some big British buildings that are okay-stone lions and brass street lights and like that. But this ain't India. The real India is up near the Himalayas, at Manali, or at the holy city of Varanasi, or down the coast, at Kerala. You gotta get outta the city to find the real India."

"Where are you guys headed?"

"We're going to stay at an ashram," his friend announced. "It's run by the Rajneeshis, at Poona. It's the best ashram in the country."

Two pairs of clear, pale-blue eyes stared at me with the vague, almost accusatory censure of those who've convinced themselves that they've found the one true path.

"You checkin' in?"

"Sorry?"

"You checkin' into a room, or you passin' on through Bombay today?"

"I don't know," I replied, turning to look through the window once more. It was true: I didn't know whether I wanted to stay in Bombay for a while or continue on to... somewhere else. I didn't know, and it didn't matter to me. Just at that moment, I was what Karla once called the most dangerous and fascinating animal in the world: a brave, hard man, without a plan. "I haven't really got any plans. But I think I'll stay in Bombay for a while."

"Well, we're stayin' overnight, and catchin' the train tomorrow.

If you want, we can share a room. It's a lot cheaper with three."

I met the stare in his guileless, blue eyes. Maybe it would be better to share a room at first, I thought. Their genuine documents and their easy smiles would smother my false passport.

Maybe it would be safer.

"And it's a lot safer," he added.

"Yeah, right," his friend agreed.

"Safer?" I asked, assuming a nonchalance I didn't feel.

The bus was moving more slowly, along narrow channels of three- and four-storey buildings. Traffic churned through the streets with wondrous and mysterious efficiency-a ballistic dance of buses, trucks, bicycles, cars, ox-carts, scooters, and people.