Shantaram Read Online Free PDF Page A

it?"
    "Yes, yes, Mr. Lindsay, very yes. But if I knew this was my whisky and not yours, I would not have been so generous with my good self in the drinking it up."
    The young Canadians laughed.
    "I tell you what, Prabaker. I'll give you the full bottle, to keep, and we'll all share the open one. How's that? And here's the two hundred rupees for the smoke."
    The smile shone anew, and he swapped the open bottle for the full one, cradling it in his folded arms tenderly.
    "But Mr. Lindsay, you are making a mistake. I say that this very best charras is one hundred rupees, not two."
    "U-huh."
    "Oh, yes. One hundred rupees only," he declared, passing one of the notes back to me dismissively.
    "Okay. Listen, I'm hungry, Prabaker. I didn't eat on the plane.
    Do you think you could show me to a good, clean restaurant?"
    "Very certainly, Mr. Lindsay sir! I know such excellent restaurants, with such a wonder of foods, you will be making yourself sick to your stomach with happiness."
    "You talked me into it," I said, standing and gathering up my passport and money. "You guys coming?"
    "What, out there? You gotta be kidding."
    "Yeah, maybe later. Like, much later. But we'll watch your stuff here, and wait for you to come back."
    "Okay, suit yourselves. I'll be back in a couple of hours."
    Prabaker bowed and fawned, and politely took his leave. I joined him, but just as I was about to close the door, the tall young man spoke.
    "Listen... take it easy on the street, huh? I mean, you don't know what it's like here. You can't trust no-one. This ain't the village. The Indians in the city are... well, just be careful, is all. Okay?" At the reception desk, Anand put my passport, travel cheques, and the bulk of my cash in his safe, giving me a detailed receipt, and I stepped down to the street with the words of the young Canadian's warning wheeling and turning in my mind like gulls above a spawning tide.
    Prabaker had taken us to the hotel along a wide, tree-lined, and relatively empty avenue that followed a curve of the bay from the tall, stone arch of the Gateway of India Monument. The street at the front of the building was crammed with people and vehicles, however, and the sound of voices, car horns, and commerce was like a storm of rain on wood and metal roofs.
    Hundreds of people walked there, or stood in talking groups.
    Shops, restaurants, and hotels filled the street side by side along its entire length. Every shop or restaurant featured a smaller sub-shop attached to the front of it. Two or three attendants, seated on folding stools, manned each of those small encroachments on the footpath. There were Africans, Arabs, Europeans, and Indians. Languages and music changed with every step, and every restaurant spilled a different scent into the boiling air.
    Men with bullock wagons and handcarts wound their way through heavy traffic to deliver watermelons and sacks of rice, soft drinks and racks of clothes, cigarettes and blocks of ice. Money was everywhere: it was a centre for the black-market trade in currencies, Prabaker told me, and thick blocks of bank notes were being counted and changing hands openly. There were beggars and jugglers and acrobats, snake charmers and musicians and astrologers, palmists and pimps and pushers. And the street was filthy. Trash tumbled from the windows above without warning, and garbage was heaped in piles on the pavement or the roadway, where fat, fearless rats slithered to feast.
    Most prominent on the street, to my eyes, were the many crippled and diseased beggars. Every kind of illness, disability, and hardship paraded there, stood at the doorways of restaurants and shops, or approached people on the street with professionally plaintive cries. Like the first sight of the slums from the windows of the bus, that glimpse of the suffering street brought a hot shame to my healthy face. But as Prabaker led me on through the roistering crowd, he drew my attention to other images of those beggars that softened