The Mountain Shadow (128 page)

‘But it
is
my fault. If I hadn’t been searching for that holy man, Gemini wouldn’t have got dengue fever, and we’d be okay, like before.’

‘No-one loves Gemini more than you do,’ Karla replied, as she opened the door. ‘He knows that.’

Gemini was in a fully adjustable hospital bed, with tubes coming from too many places. A new plastic tent covered his bed. There were two nurses attending to him, checking data on machines arranged around the left side of the bed.

He smiled at us as we approached. He looked bad. His thin body was the colour of a cut persimmon, and his face revealed the skull beneath the smile.

‘Hello, Karla,’ he said cheerily, although the sound of his voice was weak. ‘Hello, Lin, mate. So glad you’ve come.’

‘Damn good to see you again, man,’ I said, waving at him through the plastic tent.

‘How about a game?’ Karla purred. ‘Unless you think those meds you’re on stole your edge.’

‘Can’t play cards yet, although I’d love to. I’m in this plastic tent for a few weeks, you see, and they daren’t take it off. My immune system’s down, they say. I think the machines are just for show. They’re keeping me alive with rubber bands and kindness. Me organs are shuttin’ down, one by one, like people leaving a train, you know?’

‘Are you in pain, Gemini?’ Karla asked.

He smiled, very slowly: sunlight burning shadows from a meadow.

‘I’m right as rain, love,’ he said. ‘They’ve got me on a drip. That’s when you know you’re dyin’, innit? When all the best drugs are suddenly legal, and you can have as much as you want. It’s the upside of the downside, so to speak.’

‘I’d still like to play a few hands,’ Karla smiled, ‘while we’re all on the upside.’

‘Like I said, it’s my immune system that’s up the spout. That’s why I got this tent. It’s actually
you
that could hurt
me
. Funny, innit?’

‘Gemini George, a quitter?’ Karla teased. ‘Of
course
you can play cards with us. We’ll deal you a hand, and I’ll hold the cards up for you without looking. You trust me, don’t you?’

Karla never cheated at any game, and Gemini knew it.

‘You’ll have to clear it with
them
first,’ Gemini said, nodding at the nurses. ‘They’ve got me on a pretty tight rein.’

‘Why don’t we start?’ Karla replied, winking at the nurses. ‘And if they get worried, we’ll stop. Where are the cards?’

‘In the top drawer of the cabinet, just beside you.’

I opened the drawer. There was a deck of cards, a cheap watch, a small bell from a charm bracelet, a war medal that might’ve been his father’s, a cross on a chain, and a wallet worn thin with patient penury.

Karla pulled three chairs close to the bed. I gave her the cards, and she shuffled them, spilling out hands on the spare chair. She held Gemini’s hand up to the plastic shield.

The nurses checked the hand as closely as Gemini did.

‘We’ll call your cards one-to-five, your left to your right,’ Karla said. ‘Anything you want to throw, call it by number. When you have your hand, call it by number, and I’ll rearrange it for you, okay?’

‘Got it,’ Gemini said. ‘I sit pat.’

One of the nurses made a noise, clicking her tongue against her teeth. Gemini turned to her. Both nurses were shaking their heads. Gemini turned back again.

‘On second thoughts,’ he said, ‘throw one and four, and give me two cards, please, Karla.’

The nurses nodded. Karla withdrew the unwanted cards, dealt two more into his hand, and showed them to him. They must’ve been good cards, because Gemini and the nurses poker-faced us.

‘I bet fifty,’ Gemini said. ‘Fight it out and stretch it out for me, Karla. I’ve got nowhere else to be, but in this game.’

‘I’ll see your fifty, and raise you a hundred,’ Karla said, ‘if you’ve got the stomach tubes for it.’

‘I’m out,’ I said, throwing in my cards, and leaving the duel to Karla and Gemini.

‘I’m so ready for this,’ Gemini laughed, and coughed. ‘Do your worst.’

‘I only play to win, Gemini. You know that.’

‘You remember that night,’ Gemini said, his smile a sunset in the valley of yesterday. ‘The housewarming party we threw, me and Scorpio? Remember that night?’

‘Great party,’ I said.

‘Good fun,’ Karla added.

‘That was a great party. The best ever. That was the time of my life.’

‘You’ll pull through,’ Karla said. ‘There’s plenty of pavement left in you, Gemini. Money time. Put up or shut up, street guy.’

We did the best we could for Gemini, and with a little help from his nurses he managed to cheat, for old times’ sake, every time we played.

We visited often, but at the end of every visit, away from Gemini’s room, we argued with Scorpio that his Zodiac twin should be in a hospital. Every time, Scorpio refused. Love has its own logic, just as it has its own foolishness.

In another room of life and death, across the city, Farzad, the young forger, responded to treatment. As the blood clot on his brain dissolved, he recovered his speech and movement.

A tremor that twitched his left eye closed, from time to time, reminded him that making cheeky remarks to vicious men ends viciously. The mysterious disappearance of Lightning Dilip reminded him, with a happier smile, that no-one escapes karma.

The three families shared the treasure, leaving a portion in a collective account to pay for the redecoration of their combined homes. They retained the domed space as the common area it had been, but took down the scaffolding, one freshly painted or remodelled section at a time, revealing the small basilica that it had become in the search.

Karla liked the scatter of catwalks, reaching three floors above us, and she liked the happy mix of Parsis, Hindus and Muslims even more.

While I went through paperwork with Arshan, once a week, bringing the illegal documents I’d created for him into line with his newly legal ones, Karla worked on the scaffolding with the families, paintbrush or power drill in hand.

She was a river, not a stone, and every day was another curve in tomorrow’s plain. She was pulled from a family she loved, and that loved her, she thought, until they took the word of a man, a friend and neighbour, who raped her. Years later, when she killed the rapist and went on the run, she severed every connection to her own life.

She was runaway tough, a dancing cat, a green witch, and safe from everything but herself, like me.

She used the money she’d made on the stock market to hire people, new friends and not-quite strangers, giving them office space she’d rented in the Amritsar hotel. She was gathering a new family around her, as so many in the old family she’d found in Bombay left the Island City, or died, or were dying, like Gemini George.

I didn’t know how much of the gathering she did at the Amritsar hotel was considered, and how much was unconscious instinct. But when she worked with the three families in the treasure-hunters’ palace, she settled quickly and happily into their routine, and I saw the hunger for it, in both of us: the desire that had matured into need.

The word
family
is derived from the word
famulus
, meaning a servant, and in its early usage,
familia
, it literally meant the servants of a household. In its essence, the longing for family, and the ravenousness that the loss of family creates in us, isn’t just for belonging: it’s for the grace that abides in serving those we love.

Chapter Eighty-Seven

I
T WAS A SEASON OF CHANGE,
and the Island City seemed to be sprucing itself up for a parade that hadn’t been called. Road dividers wore gleaming new coats, painted by men who risked their lives at every stroke. Shops redecorated, and shoppers redecorated with them. New signs announced old privilege on every corner. And beloved mould, nature’s comment on our plans, was scraped from buildings and painted over.

‘Why don’t you like the new makeover?’ a friend who owned a restaurant asked me, staring up at his freshly painted enterprise from the pavement.

‘I liked the
old
makeover. Your paint job is dandy, but I liked the one made by the last four monsoons.’

‘Why?’

‘I like things that don’t resist nature.’

‘You’ve gotta keep up with the times, man,’ he said, holding his breath as he entered his renovated restaurant, because it was impossible to breathe and stay conscious at the same time, so close to the drying paint.

Fashion is the business end of art, and even Ahmed’s House of Style finally succumbed to the tyranny of assimilation. His hand-painted sign was corporatised into the stigmata of avarice, a logo. Straight razors and angry bristle brushes were gone, replaced by a selection of hair-care chemicals that signs assured us hadn’t been tested on baby rabbits, and wouldn’t blind or kill the people who used them.

Even the aftershave,
Ambrosia de Ahmed
, had vanished, but I was lucky enough to arrive in time to save the mirror, starred with pictures of Ahmed’s free haircuts, each one like the death photo of an outlaw, murdered by justice.

‘Not the mirror!’ I said, stopping small men with big hammers from smashing it off the wall.

‘
Salaam aleikum
, Lin,’ Ahmed said. ‘The whole place is being renovated, for Ahmed’s New House of Style.’

‘
Wa aleikum salaam
. Not the mirror!’

I had my back to the mirror, my arms wide to stop the hammers. Karla was standing beside Ahmed, her arms folded, a cheeky smile playing in the garden of her eyes.

‘The mirror has to go, Lin,’ Ahmed said. ‘It doesn’t fit with the new look.’

‘This mirror goes with
every
look,’ I protested.

‘Not with
this
look,’ Ahmed said, sliding a brochure from a pile, and handing it to me.

I looked the picture over, and handed it back.

‘It looks like a place to eat sushi,’ I said. ‘People can’t argue politics and insult each other in a place like that, Ahmed, even with the mirror.’

‘New policy,’ he said. ‘No insults. No politics, religion or sex.’

‘Are you mad, Ahmed? Censorship, in a barber shop?’

I looked at Karla, and she was having a pretty good time.

‘Come on,’ I pleaded. ‘There has to be at least
one
place where nobody kisses anybody on the ass.’

Ahmed gave me a stern look.

It wasn’t his own stern look: it was the stern look on a handsome face beneath a pompadour haircut, in a catalogue of cuts and styles for the New House of Style.

I flipped through the pictures, knowing that Ahmed was probably proud of it, because he’d illegally included photos of movie stars and prominent businessmen to give the collection currency.

I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but for me the catalogue was the wrong set of victims.

‘You can’t break the mirror, Ahmed.’

‘Will you sell it to me, exactly as it is?’ Karla asked.

‘Are you serious?’

‘Yes, Ahmed. Is it for sale?’

‘It would take me some time, to clean off the pictures,’ he said thoughtfully.

‘I’d like it
with
the pictures, if you don’t mind, Ahmed. It’s perfect as it is.’

I love you, Karla
, I thought.

‘Very well, Miss Karla. Would, say, a thousand rupees, including transport and installation, be acceptable to you?’

‘It would,’ Karla smiled, handing him the money. ‘I’ve got a free wall in my place, and I’ve been trying to think what to put on it. If your men can remove it carefully, and set it up for me again at the Amritsar hotel today, I’d be much obliged.’

‘Done,’ Ahmed said, signalling the hammer-men to stand down. ‘I’ll walk you out.’

On the street, Ahmed looked left and right to make sure that no-one could hear, and leaned close.

‘I will still do
house calls
,’ he whispered. ‘Strictly off the books, of course, and top secret. I don’t want people thinking I’m not wholehearted, in the
New
House of Style.’

‘Now,
that’s
good news,’ I said.

‘So,’ Karla whispered, ‘if we were to gather a group of argumentative, very insulting men at our place, you’d be happy to come by and create Ahmed’s
Old
House of Style?’

‘You’ve already got the mirror,’ Ahmed smiled. ‘And I will really miss the dangerous discussions, in the New House of Style.’

‘Done,’ Karla said, shaking hands with him.