Читаем Shantaram полностью

‘The guy’s history’ I answered without hesitation.

‘Just so,’ he sighed, perhaps wishing that I’d wrestled with the decision a little longer before pressing the button. ‘And if you did this, if you saved your mother from this vicious killer, would you be doing the wrong thing or the right thing?’

‘The right thing,’ I said just as swiftly.

‘No, Lin, I’m afraid not,’ he frowned. ‘We have just seen that in the terms of this new, objective definition of good and evil, killing is always wrong because, if everyone did it, we would not move toward God, the ultimate complexity, with the rest of the universe. So it is wrong to kill. But your reasons were good. So therefore, the truth of this decision is that you did the wrong thing, for the right reasons…’

As I rode the wind, a week after Khader’s little lecture on ethics, weaving the bike through ancient-modern traffic beneath a darkening, portentous tumble of clouds, those words echoed in my mind. The wrong thing, for the right reasons. I rode on and, even when I stopped thinking about Khader’s lesson, those words still murmured in the little grey daydream-space where memory meets inspiration. I know now that the words were like a mantra, and that my instinct-fate’s whisper in the dark-was trying to warn me of something by repeating them. The wrong thing… for the right reasons.

But on that day, an hour after Didier’s confession, I let the murmured warnings fade. Right or wrong, I didn’t want to think about the reasons-not my reasons for doing what I did, or Khader’s, or anyone’s. I enjoyed the discussions of good and evil, but only as a game, as an entertainment. I didn’t really want the truth. I was sick of truth, especially my own truth, and I couldn’t face it. So the thoughts and premonitions echoed and then whipped past me into the coils of humid wind. And by the time I swept into the last curve of coast near the Sea Rock Hotel, my mind was as clear as the broad horizon clamped upon the limit of a dark and tremulous sea.

The Sea Rock, which was as luxurious and opulently serviced as the other five-star hotels in Bombay, offered the special attraction that it was literally built upon the sea rocks at Juhu. From all its major restaurants, bars, and a hundred other windows, the Sea Rock scanned the endlessly shifting peaks and furrows of the Arabian Sea. The hotel also offered one of the best and most comprehensively eclectic smorgasbord lunches in the city. I was hungry, and glad to see that Lisa was waiting for me in the foyer. She wore a starched, sky-blue shirt with the collar turned up, and sky-blue culottes. Her blonde hair was wound into the praying-fingers of a French braid. She’d been clean, off heroin, for more than a year. She looked tanned and healthy and confident.

‘Hi, Lin,’ she smiled, greeting me with a kiss on the cheek. ‘You’re just in time.’

‘Great. I’m starving.’

‘No, I mean you’re just in time to meet Kalpana. Just a minute-here she comes now.’

A young woman with a fashionably western short haircut, hipster jeans, and a tight, red T-shirt approached us. She wore a stopwatch around her neck on a lanyard, and carried a clipboard. She was about twenty-six years old.

‘Hello,’ I said when Lisa introduced us. ‘Is that your rig outside? The broadcast vans, and all the cables? Are you shooting a movie?’

‘Supposed to be, yaar,’ she replied in the exaggerated vowels of the Bombay accent that I loved and found myself unconsciously imitating. ‘The director has gone off somewhere with one of our dancers. It’s meant to be a secret, yaar, but the whole damn set is talking about it. We’ve got a forty-five minute break. Although, mind you, that’s about ten times as long as our guy will need, from what all I’m told about his prowess.’

‘Okay’ I suggested, smacking my hands together. ‘That gives us time for lunch.’

‘Fuck lunch, let’s get stoned first, yaar,’ Kalpana demurred. ‘Have you got any hash?’

‘Yeah,’ I shrugged. ‘Sure.’

‘Did you bring a car?’

‘I’m on a Bullet.’

‘Okay let’s use my car. It’s in the car park.’

We left the hotel, and sat in her new Fiat to smoke. While I prepared the joint, she told me that she was an assistant to the producer of that and several other films. One of her duties was to oversee the casting of minor roles in the films. She’d subcontracted the task to a casting agent, but he was experiencing difficulty in finding foreigners to fill the small, non-speaking, decorative roles.

‘Kalpana got talking about this at dinner last week,’ Lisa summed up when Kalpana began to smoke. ‘She told me that her guys couldn’t find foreigners to play the parts in the movies-you know, the people at a disco or a party scene or, like, British people, in the time of the British Raj and like that. So… I thought of you.’

‘U-huh.’