The Mountain Shadow (17 page)

The boy hunted around the space for the empty glasses of the last round, filling his wire baskets as he went. He noticed that one of the glasses was missing.

‘Glass!’ he growled, in a feral percolation of whatever it was that accumulated in his throat.

He held up one of the baskets, showing the offending empty space where the last glass should’ve rested.

‘Glass!’

Gangsters immediately scrambled to find the missing glass, turning over empty cartons and shoving aside heaps of rags and rubbish. Danda found it.

‘
Hain! Hain!
’ he said, revealing the glass with a flourish.
It’s here! It’s here!

He handed it to the boy, who snatched it suspiciously and left the warehouse. Danda looked at Vishnu quickly, his eyes bright with grovelling:
Did you see that, boss? Did you see it was me who found the glass?

When I was sure that I could move without trembling, I put my glass of chai on the ground beside me. It wasn’t all pride and anger: my lips were split and swollen. I knew I’d be drinking blood as well as chai.

‘Can you stand?’ Vishnu asked, setting his empty glass aside.

I stood. I started to fall.

The big man who’d slapped me around rushed to catch me, his strong arms encircling my shoulders with solicitous care. With help, I stood again.

‘You can go,’ Vishnu said.

He shifted his eyes toward Danda.

‘Give him the keys to his bike, yaar.’

Danda fished the keys from his pocket on impulse, but approached Vishnu, rather than me.

‘Please,’ he begged. ‘He knows something. I know it. Just . . . just give me a little more time.’

‘It’s okay,’ Vishnu replied, smiling indulgently. ‘I already know what I need to know.’

He took the keys from Danda and threw them to me. I caught them against my chest with both numbed hands. I met his gaze.

‘Besides,’ Vishnu said, looking at me, ‘you don’t even know about Pakistan, do you? You don’t have any damn idea what we’re talking about, isn’t it?’

I didn’t answer.

‘That’s it, my friend.
Ja!
’
Go!

I held his eyes for a moment, and then held out my hand, palm upwards.

‘My knives,’ I said.

Vishnu smiled, folding his arms again.

‘Let’s call that a fine, shall we? Your knives will go to Hanuman, as a fine for that shot you took at him. Take my advice. Go now, and keep this place a secret. Don’t tell Sanjay or anyone else about it.’

‘A secret?’

‘I let you know about this place, because you can use it to contact us. If you leave a message here, it will get back to me, very quickly.’

‘Why would I wanna do that?’

‘Unless I have misjudged you, and I’m really quite good at judging characters, you may decide, one day, that you have more in common with us than you think now. And you may want to talk to us. If you’re smart, you won’t tell anyone about this address. You’ll save it, for a rainy day. But for now, for today, as the Americans say,
fuck off
!’

I walked with Danda to the side door, stepping through as he opened it for me. He cleared his throat noisily, and spat on the leg of my trousers before slamming the door shut.

On the ground, beside my bike, I found a scrap of paper, and used it to wipe the mess of spit from my jeans. I put the key into the ignition of the bike. I was about to kick-start the engine, when I caught sight of my battered face in the rear-view mirror. My nose wasn’t broken, for once, but both eyes were pulpy and swollen.

I kicked the bike alive, but left her in neutral gear, resting on the side-stand with the engine turning over slowly. I twitched a control lever on a panel beneath one long edge of the seat. The panel dropped down, showing my Italian stiletto knife.

I hammered on the door of the warehouse with the butt of the knife. I heard an angry voice inside as someone approached the door, cursing whoever was disturbing the peace. It was Danda. I was glad.

The door opened. Danda was swearing angrily. I grabbed at the front of his shirt, slammed him against the doorjamb, and jabbed
the stiletto against his stomach. He tried to break free, but I pushed the point deeper into his stomach until the knife spit red onto his pink shirt.

‘
Okay! Okay! Okay!
’ he shouted. ‘
Fuck! Arey, pagal hai tum?
’
Have you gone mad?

Several men began to approach me. I pressed the knife a little harder.

‘
No! No!
’ Danda shouted. ‘Get the hell back, you guys! He’s
cutting
me here!’

The men stopped. Without taking my eyes off Danda’s face, I spoke to Vishnu.

‘My knives,’ I mumbled, my lips as numb as the heel of a bricklayer’s hand. ‘Bring them here. Give them to me.’

Vishnu hesitated. I saw the terror in Danda’s sweat. He was more afraid of his employer’s disregard than he was of my anger.

At last, Vishnu slouched toward us with the two knives. When he handed them to me, I shoved them into the belt at the back of my trousers, holding the stiletto at Danda’s belly.

Vishnu began to tug on Danda’s shirt, wanting to pull him away from me, and back into the warehouse. I resisted, pressing the knife just a little harder against Danda’s soft stomach. A half-centimetre of the blade was inside his body. One centimetre more would penetrate an organ.

‘
Wait! Wait!
’ Danda shrieked in panic. ‘I’m bleeding! He’s gonna
kill
me!’

‘What do you want?’ Vishnu asked.

‘Tell me about Pakistan,’ I said.

Vishnu laughed. It was a good laugh, clear and clean. It was the kind of laugh that would’ve endeared him to me on another day, when he hadn’t introduced me to his pool furniture.

‘I
like
you, and I feel like killing you, at the same time,’ he said, his dark-rimmed eyes gleaming. ‘That’s a peculiar talent you’ve got.’

‘Tell me about Pakistan,’ I said.

‘You really don’t know anything, do you?’ Vishnu sighed, as his smile died. ‘We saw that you went to a Council meeting, and with your Goa trip and all, we assumed, like, that you must be knowing what’s going on. Your guys are really keeping you in the dark, my friend. That’s dangerous, for you. Not to mention a little . . .
insulting
,
na
?’

‘Your man here will be in the dark any second now, if you don’t answer my question. I wanna know what this was all about. Tell me about
Pakistan
.’

‘If I tell you what I know, you’ll tell Sanjay,’ he replied, stifling a yawn.

There was a fine but deep scar over his right eye. He rubbed a fingertip along the cicatrice as he spoke.

‘That would give Sanjay an advantage. I can’t allow that. Let Danda go. Get on your motorcycle and go. If you kill Danda, I’ll have to kill you. He’s my cousin. And I don’t want to kill you. I don’t want to kill anyone. Not today. It’s my wife’s birthday, you know, and there’s a party.’

He shifted his gaze to stare at the sodden clouds overhead.

‘Go fast,’ he said, looking back at me. ‘We thought you knew something, but it’s obvious that you don’t. When you know more, and you want to talk, you know where to contact me. No hard feelings. These things happen. As the Americans say, I am owing one on you.’

‘Not as much as I’m owing one on you,’ I said, stepping away from Danda, and backing toward the bike.

He laughed again.

‘Let’s call this even, and start fresh and clean. Leave me a message here, when you want to get in touch. One way or another, I’ll come to know.’

Chapter Eleven

E
VERY MAN TAKES A BEATING IN HIS OWN WAY.
My way, in those years, was to learn everything I could about the men who beat me, and then wait for Fate to meet me halfway.

When I escaped from prison, I punched a hole in the ceiling of an office, climbed through to the roof, and escaped over the front wall in broad daylight, with my friend. The ceiling we escaped through was in the office of the Chief Security Officer, the man responsible for having my friend, and me, and dozens of other men beaten, beyond reason or law.

I’d watched him for months. I’d studied his habits and moods. And I knew the seven-minute window, every day, when he’d be out of his office, leaving the door unlocked. We stood on his desk to punch the hole to freedom. He lost his job, when we escaped, and Fate took a holiday.

I don’t like being slapped around. I wanted to know about the men who’d done it. I wanted to know everything about them.

At the second gap in the road divider I turned the bike around, and rode back the way I’d come. I parked in the shade of some trees beside a little row of shops, on the opposite side of the street from the warehouse.

I turned off the engine. Passers-by and shopkeepers stared at my bloody face, but hurried away or averted their eyes when I stared back at them. After a time, a man selling cleaning cloths for cars and motorcycles approached me. I bought one of the longest cloths, but before giving the cloth-seller his money, I asked him to run some errands for me.

In five minutes he returned with a packet of codeine tablets, some adhesive bandages, a bottle of vodka, and two clean towels.

I paid the cloth-seller, found an open drain, and washed my face with a cloth soaked in vodka, cleaning off the running wounds with dabs from the clean towel.

A barber serving clients beneath a conversation-tree offered me his mirror. I fixed it to a ribbon on the tree, and dressed the two worst cuts on my face. Finally I took the cloth-seller’s black rag, and wound it around my forehead in an Afghan turban.

The clients and friends squatting around the barber’s chair in the shade nodded and wagged varying degrees of disapproval or consolation.

I took an empty glass, poured myself a shot of vodka and drank it. Holding bottle and glass in one hand, I ripped open a packet of codeine tablets with my teeth, shook four into the glass, and half-filled it with vodka. The level of approval rose among the shaving club. When I drank the glass down and offered the men the rest of the bottle, a little cheer went up.

I went back to sit on my bike, out of view, and stared through desert-dry leaves of sun-withered trees at the warehouse, where my blood was still wet on the floor.

They came out in a laughing, joking group, shoving and teasing the thin man with the moustache, Danda. They squeezed into two Ambassador cars, and drove out into the flow of traffic heading toward Tardeo.

Giving them half a minute, I followed the cars, careful to stay out of mirror range.

They passed through Tardeo, kept on through Opera House junction and into the main road. It was a long, leafy boulevard, running parallel to one of the city’s main train lines.

The cars stopped at the gate of a mansion complex, not far from the main station at Churchgate. The high, metal gates opened quickly, the cars drove inside, and the gates swung shut again.

I rode past, glancing up at the tall windows of the triple-fronted mansion. Wooden storm shutters covered all the windows. Dusty, blood-red geraniums spilled over the rail of the first-floor balcony. They dripped all the way to the rusted iron spears on top of a security wall, concealing the ground floor.

I slammed the bike into the heavy traffic, moving toward Churchgate station and beyond, past the thirsting, ochre playing fields of Azad Maidan.

I took my rage and fear out on the road, cutting between cars, fighting back against the city by challenging and beating every other bike that I passed.

I pulled up near KC College, close to Sanjay’s mansion. The school was one of Bombay’s finest. Well-dressed, fashion-conscious students crowded the street, their young minds glittering in the compass of their smiles. They were the hope of the city: the hope of the world, in fact, although not many knew it, at the time.

‘I swear,’ a voice from behind me said. ‘Fastest white man in Bombay. I’ve been trying to catch you for the last five –’

It was Farid the Fixer, the young gangster who blamed himself for not being with Khaderbhai at the end, in the killing snows of Afghanistan. He broke off suddenly as I removed the soft black cloth I’d used as a turban.

‘Oh,
shit
, man! What happened to you?’

‘Do you know if Sanjay’s at home?’

‘He is. Sure. Come on, let’s get inside.’

When I made my report to Sanjay, sitting at the glass and gilt table in his dining room, his expression was calm and almost dismissive. He asked me to repeat the names I’d heard them use, and the faces I’d seen.

‘I’ve been expecting this,’ he said.