A beautiful and overwhelming passage from ‘Shantaram’ (Gregory David Roberts) describing Leopold’s bar at Colaba Mumbai .This is India gone by as it emerges from the grips of corruption and laundering…however the clutches are still strong enough like the betel spit that stays to mark a memorial around every corner only to reek with fresh urine instead. As the new India sees Anna Hazare and the young blood scream out honesty in common man’s morning tea, the following is where India emerges from. The precarious journey at every step, under black hoods, in the narrow ‘galis’, under every man whose only desire is to feed his family well and rear his children into a better world, a quote marks the soul of the country very well “There is a difference between the dishonest bribe and the honest bribe…The dishonest bribe is the same in every country, the honest bribe is India’s alone.”

Here is the passage:

…For one cool, precious hour each morning after opened, and the floors had been cleaned, Leopold’s was an oasis of quiet in the struggling city. From then, until it closed at midnight, it was constantly crowded with visitors from a hundred countries, and many locals, both foreign and Indian, who came there from every part of the city to conduct their business. The business ranged from traffic in drugs, currencies, passports, gold, and sex, to the intangible but no less lucrative trade in influence—the unofficial system of bribes and favors by which man appointments, promotions, and contracts were facilitated in India.

Leopold’s was an unofficial free zone, scrupulously ignored by the otherwise efficient officers of the Colaba police station, directly across the busy street. Yet a peculiar dialectic applied to the relationships between upstairs and down, inside and outside the restaurant, and governed all of the business transacted there. Indian prostitutes, garlanded with ropes of jasmine flowers and plumply wrapped in bejeweled saris, were prohibited downstairs, and only accompanied customers to the upstairs bar. European prostitutes were only permitted to sit downstairs, attracting the interest of men who sat at other tables, or simply paused on the street outside Deals for drugs and other contraband were openly transacted a the tables, but the good could only be exchanged outside the bar. It was common enough to see buyer and seller reach agreement on price, walk outside to hand over money and goods, and then walk back inside to resume their places at a table. Even the bureaucrats and influence peddlers were bound by those unwritten rules: agreements reached in the dark booths of the upstairs bar could only be sealed, with handshakes and cash, on the pavement outside, so that no man could say he’d paid of received bribes within the walls of Leopold’s.

While the fine lines that divided and connected the legal and illegal were nowhere more elegantly drawn, they weren’t unique to the diverse society of Leopold’s. The traders in the street stalls outside sold counterfeits of Lacoste, Cardin, and Cartier with a certain impudent panache, the taxi drivers parked along the street accepted tips to tilt their mirrors away from the unlawful or forbidden acts that took place on the seats behind them, and a number of the cops who attended to their duties with diligence, at the station across the road, had paid hefty bribes for the privilege of that lucrative posting in the city center.

Sitting at Leopold’s, night after night, and listening to the conversations at the tables around me, I heard many foreigners and not a few Indians complain about the corruption that adhered to every aspect of public and commercial life in Bombay. My few weeks in the city had already shown me that those complaints were often fair, and often true. But there’s no nation uncorrupted. There’s no system that’s immune to the misuse of money. Privileged and powerful elites grease the wheels of their progress with kickbacks and campaign contributions in the noblest assemblies. And the rich, all over the world live longer and healthier lives that the poor. There is a difference between the dishonest bribe and the honest bribe, Didier Levy [often sat with the author at Leopold’s] once said to me. The dishonest bribe is the same in every country, but the honest bribe is India’s alone. I smiled when he said that, because I knew what he meant. India was open. India was honest. And I liked that from the first day. My instinct wasn’t to criticize. My instinct, in the city I was learning to love, was to observe, and become involved, and enjoy. I couldn’t know then that, in the months and years to come, my freedom and even my life would depend on the Indian willingness to tilt the mirror…

Here is a link to Leopold’s now, a very popular restaurant in the bustling Colaba: http://www.leopoldcafe.com/

Here is Leopold’s on wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Cafe

Gregory Roberts in an interview with The Sunday Tribune: http://www.tribuneindia.com/2005/20050417/spectrum/book5.htm