The Mountain Shadow (101 page)

‘I loved her,’ she said, the domes bursting. ‘You only used her, while you waited for Karla.’

‘This is the ideal moment, with foresight, to stop this, and focus on the occasion,’ Karla said at last. ‘Stop this bickering, both of you, and be gracious guests. We’re not here for us. We’re here for Diva, who suffered a lot as well.’

I pretended to eat, for a while, and Kavita pretended to stop. Neither one of us managed it.

‘It should be you who died on that bed, all alone,’ Kavita spat at me, losing control.

‘Stop this, Kavita,’ Karla said.

‘Nothing to say, Lin?’

‘Stop it, Kavita,’ I said.

‘That all you got?’

I started to get up, but she pulled at my sleeve.

‘You want to know what she said about
you
, while she was making love to me?’

I should’ve stopped. I didn’t.

‘You know, Kavita, you work at a newspaper that sells white-skin potions to a country full of brown-skinned people,’ I said. ‘You talk about the environment, and you take money from oil companies and coal companies for advertising. You lecture people who wear fur, and accept advertising from battery-fed chicken chains and hormone hamburgers. Your economists forgive bankers no matter what they do, your opinion pages shrink opinion, and your criticism is a flea on the elephant of intolerance. The women in your pages are dolls, while the men are sages. You cover up as many crimes as you report, and you’ve campaigned against innocent men just for ratings, and we both know it. Come down off your throne, Kavita, and leave me alone.’

She looked at me with a determination that revealed nothing, but maybe nothing was all she had, because she was silent.

I stood, excused myself, and walked back through the slum alone. Naveen caught up with me in a lane filled with small shops.

‘Lin,’ he said. ‘Wait up.’

‘How you doing with lost love?’ I asked.

I touched a nerve without knowing it. He let the anger-face out of the cage.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ he growled.

‘You know what, Naveen, I like you. But this really isn’t a good night to play sulky.’

I walked off alone, but when I reached my bike on the wide street outside, where children were still playing, someone came up behind me quickly and quietly.

I spun around, grabbed a throat in one hand and had my knife in the other before I knew it was Karla.

‘You got me there, Shantaram,’ she said, as I released her.

‘I always get you there.’

She didn’t pull away from me.

‘Sneaking up on people like that will buy you conniptions, girl,’ I said, my hands in the small of her back.

‘Conniptions? How American of you.’

‘You have no idea how American I could get tonight.’

‘Would that fix my conniptions?’

‘Maybe not. Maybe I should put a bell on your bracelet.’

‘Maybe you should,’ she purred.

I kissed her, leaning against the bike, praying that she’d never leave me.

‘Whoa,’ she said, easing away. ‘You’re ready to invade Troy, and the ships haven’t even landed.’

‘Whatever that means,’ I said, ‘can you explain it horizontally?’

‘
My
current place, or
your
current place?’ She laughed.

‘Any current place,’ I said.

She laughed again.

‘That didn’t come out right,’ I said quickly. ‘We haven’t been together since the mountain. Does that seem like a long time, to you? It seems like a really long time, to me.’

I might’ve been telling jokes. She laughed harder with every word I said. She actually pleaded with me to stop, because she was choking.

‘You’re driving me crazy, Karla. That thing you feel, when something makes you feel completely right? I only feel that, with you.’

She stopped laughing, and looked me up and down. I don’t know what it is about me that makes people look me up and down, but I’ve had my share.

She kissed me. I kissed her. Rain, wave, and that place inside where we dance better than we dance: she kissed me.

She slapped me.

‘Damn! What was that for?’

‘Pull yourself together,’ she said. ‘I thought we had this talk. I told you. We’re in this game together, or I’m in it alone. They’re
your
options, not mine.’

‘Fair enough. Agreed. What game?’

‘I love you, Shantaram,’ she said, slipping away. ‘I need Kavita, at the moment. I’ve got a plan, and I can’t tell you about it, remember? I need her, and I need you to rise above, and be the better man.’

Dogs barked, as she trotted back to the slum.

I didn’t understand any of it except my part, and I wasn’t really sure about my part. But at least I knew that I was back in Karlaville. I could still feel her slap, and her kiss.

Chapter Sixty-Four

I
DIDN’T SEE
O
LEG FOR TWO WEEKS AFTER THAT NIGHT.
He found a new couch, for a while, and the Diva girls found a new plaything. I took a taxi, the day after he vanished, and collected the banger bike he’d left by the side of the road. I talked to the bike for a while and assured her, even though my heart belonged to another machine, that I’d protect her in future, especially from Russian writers. She carried me home without incident, her engine humming a song the whole way: a brave motorcycle, not ready to die.

I did my rounds day to night, helped decent people out with loans and collected money from indecent defaulters, swapped funny jokes and funnier insults, smacked a cheeky money changer on the ear from time to time and knelt in prayer with others, bribed cops and Company soldiers for blessings from below, dropped donations into churches and temples for blessings from above, fed beggars outside mosques, chased a brutal pimp from my collection area, and came third in a knife-throwing competition, which I’d entered to find out who was better at a throwing a knife than I was: always a handy thing to know. In one way and another, golden days became silvered nights.

A couple of weeks after Oleg’s olfactory defection I was swinging back toward Leopold’s one day, thinking of their veg curry rice and hungry enough to eat it, when a man ran onto the causeway, stopping me in traffic.

It was Stuart Vinson.

‘Lin!’ he shouted. ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Park the fucking noisy bike, man.’

‘Steady on, Vinson,’ I said, patting the gas tank of my bike. ‘Language, man.’

He blinked at me, and at the bike.

‘What?’

‘Calm down. You’re a one-man traffic jam.’

Cars were moving around us, and the Colaba police station wasn’t far enough away.

‘It’s serious, Lin! Please, meet me at Leopold’s. I’ll go there right now.’

He scampered away through the traffic toward Leopold’s, and I made the traffic scamper around me while I did an illegal turn, and parked the bike.

I found Vinson pestering Sweetie for a table. There was nothing at Didier’s table but a
Reserved
sign. I handed the sign to Sweetie, and sat down. Vinson joined me.

He didn’t look good. His surfer-healthy face was thinner than I’d seen it, and there were dark rings on the high cheekbones where optimism used to play.

‘Looks like beer,’ I said to Sweetie.

‘You think you’re the only customers I have to serve?’ Sweetie asked himself, walking back to the kitchen.

‘Do you wanna do this
before
the beer, or
after
?’ I asked.

It seemed like a reasonable question, to me. I’ve seen both, and I know what it’s like: the same story, told by different maniacs.

‘She’s disappeared,’ he said.

‘Okay,
before
the beer. Are you talking about Rannveig?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Disappeared . . . how?’

‘She was there one minute, and gone the next. I’ve searched everywhere for her. I don’t know what to do. I was, like, hoping she might’ve contacted you.’

‘I haven’t seen her,’ I said. ‘And I have no idea where she is. When did this happen?’

‘Three days ago. I’ve been searching everywhere, but –’

‘Three days? What the fuck, man? Why didn’t you tell me before?’

‘You’re my last resort,’ he said. ‘I’ve tried everything, and everyone else.’

The last resort: the last person who might help you. I’d never thought of myself as that. I’d never been that. I was always one of the first called, when someone needed help.

The beer arrived. Vinson drank it fast, but it didn’t help.

‘Oh, my God! Where is she?’ he wailed.

‘Look, Vinson, you could ask Naveen for help. It’s his job to find lost loves.’

‘Can you call him for me?’

‘I don’t use the phone,’ I said. ‘But I can take you there, if you like.’

‘Please,’ he said. ‘Anything. I’m so worried about her.’

We stood up to leave, my beer untouched. I left a tip for Sweetie. It wasn’t sweet enough.

‘Fuck you, Shantaram,’ he said, replacing the
Reserved
sign on the table. ‘Who’s going to drink your beer? Tell me that?’

I delivered lost-love Vinson to the Lost Love Bureau, two doors along from my own, and left him with Naveen.

Things had been cooler between Naveen and me. I’d hurt him, somehow, I was sure of it, but I had no idea how. I brought Vinson to the office because I trusted Naveen, and I hoped he saw that.

He smiled vacantly at me as I walked back to my room, then he turned to Vinson, serious questions writing themselves on his face.

I ate a can of cold baked beans, drank a pint of milk and settled the emergency ration lunch with half a glass of rum. I left the door open, and sat in my favourite chair. It was a curved captain’s chair, padded with faded, dark blue leather. It was the manager’s chair. Jaswant Singh had inherited it from the previous manager, who’d inherited it from someone with damn good taste in writer’s chairs. I’d bought it from Jaswant and replaced it for him with a shiny new manager’s chair.

Jaswant loved his new chair, and had put coloured lights around it. I put my old chair in a corner, where I had a view of the balcony, and a clear line of sight into the hallway, the manager’s desk and the stairs leading up to it. I did some of my best writing there.

I was doing some of my best writing, when Naveen tapped on the door.

‘Got a minute?’ he asked.

He was intelligent, brave and devoted. He was kind and honest. He was all the things we’d wish a son or a brother to be. But I was writing.

‘How many a minute?’

‘A couple.’

‘Sure,’ I said, putting my journal away. ‘Come in, and sit down.’

He sat on the couch, and looked around. There wasn’t much to see.

‘You always leave your door open?’

‘Only when I’m awake.’

‘Your place is . . . ’ he began, searching for a clue in a room that was packed for flight. ‘It’s kinda boot camp, if you know what I mean. I thought it would get warmer, you know, the longer you lived here. But . . . it didn’t.’

‘Karla calls it Fugitive Chic.’

‘Does she like it?’

‘No. What’s on your mind, Naveen?’

‘Diva,’ he said, sighing the name, his head sagging.

‘What about her?’

‘She offered me a job,’ he said, his face stretched and creased with distress. ‘That’s why I’ve been so touchy lately.’

‘Not such a bad thing, a job.’

‘You don’t understand. She called me to a meeting. One of her people took me all the way up to the roof of her building, on Worli Seaface. She has offices there. I hadn’t seen her for a while. She’s . . . we’ve both been busy.’

He pressed his mouth shut on whatever it was that he’d been about to say. I waited, and then nudged him.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘She . . . she looked amazing. She cut her hair. It looks great. She was wearing red. There was wind, on the roof. I looked at her. For a second I let myself believe that she’d called me there to tell me that she . . . ’

His head dropped, and he stared at his hands.

‘But she called you there to offer you a job, instead.’

‘Yeah.’

‘For a lot of money?’

‘Yeah. Too much, really.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘She’s trying to protect you. She’s kinda stuck on you. The two of you went through some stuff together. She’s worried, now that the Lost Love Bureau is putting you back on the street.’

‘You really think so?’

‘I think it’s her way of saying that she cares about you. It’s not a bad thing, it’s a good thing.’