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.

Khaderbhai leaned across after the singing stopped. His lips were moving, and I knew he was speaking to me, but for a moment I couldn’t hear him.

‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you.’

‘I said that the truth is found more often in music,’ he repeated, ‘than it is in books of philosophy.’

‘What is the truth?’ I asked him. I didn’t really want to know. I was trying to hold up my end of the conversation. I was trying to be clever.

‘The truth is that there are no good men, or bad men,’ he said. ‘It is the deeds that have goodness or badness in them. There are good deeds, and bad deeds. Men are just men-it is what they do, or refuse to do, that links them to good and evil. The truth is that an instant of real love, in the heart of anyone-the noblest man alive or the most wicked-has the whole purpose and process and meaning of life within the lotus-folds of its passion. The truth is that we are all, every one of us, every atom, every galaxy, and every particle of matter in the universe, moving toward God.’

Those words of his are mine forever now. I can hear them. The blind singers are forever. I can see them. The night, and the men that were the beginning, father and brother, are forever. I can remember them. It’s easy. All I have to do is close my eyes.

CHAPTER TEN

ABDULLAH TOOK HIS BROTHERING SERIOUSLY. A week after the Night of the Blind Singers, he arrived at my hut in the Cuffe Parade slum carrying a satchel filled with medicines, salves, and bandages. He also brought a small metal case containing a few surgical instruments. We went through the bag together. He asked me about the medicines, wanting to know how useful they were and what quantities I might need in the future. When he’d satisfied himself, he dusted off the wooden stool and sat down. He was silent for a few minutes, watching me pack the supplies he’d brought into a rack of bamboo shelves. The crowded slum chattered, brawled, sang, and laughed around us.

‘Well, Lin, where are they?’ he finally asked.

‘Where’s who?’

‘The patients. Where are they? I want to see my brother healing them. There can’t be healing, without sick people, isn’t it?’

‘I, er, I don’t have any patients just now.’

‘Oh,’ he sighed. He frowned, drumming his fingers on his knees. ‘Well, do you think I should go and get you some?’

He half rose from his seat, and I had a vision of him dragging sick and injured people to my hut by force.

‘No, no, take it easy. I don’t see people every day. But if I do see people, if I’m here, they usually start coming around two o’clock. They don’t come this early in the morning. Nearly everyone works until at least noon. I’m usually working myself. I have to earn money too, you know.’

‘But not this morning?’

‘No, not today. I made some money last week. Enough to last me for a while.’

‘How did you make this money?’

He stared at me ingenuously, unaware that the question might embarrass me or be taken as rude.

‘It’s not polite to ask foreigners how they make their money, Abdullah,’ I informed him, laughing.

‘Oh, I see,’ he said, smiling. ‘You made it by the illegal means.’

‘Well, that’s not exactly the point. But yes, now that you mention it. There was this French girl who wanted to buy half a kilo of charras. I found it for her. And I helped a German guy get a fair price for his Canon camera. They were both commission jobs.’

‘How much did you make with this business?’ he asked, his eyes not wavering. They were a very pale brown, those eyes, almost a golden colour. They were the colour of sand dunes in the Thar Desert, on the last day before it rains.

‘I made about a thousand rupees.’

‘Each business, one thousand?’

‘No, both jobs together made a thousand.’