The Mountain Shadow (80 page)

‘A man of taste and distinction,’ she smiled, accepting the gifts. ‘Sit down, Shantaram, and join us. The girls were just about to explain whose ass you have to kiss, just to take a shit around here.’

‘I’ll take a raincheck, Diva,’ I smiled, ‘but I’m gonna stick around for a bit with Naveen and Didier, until you sleep, so I won’t be far. Is there anything else I can get you?’

‘No, man,’ she said. ‘Not unless you can bring my dad here.’

‘That would be kinda defeating the purpose,’ I smiled again. ‘But as soon as this situation with your dad settles down, I’m sure Naveen will put you together again.’

‘I hope so,’ she said. ‘When I first looked at these skinny girls, I thought they could sell their slimming diet for millions, to my friends alone. But then I realised that they’re hungry. What the hell is going on here?’

‘Welcome to the other side.’

‘Well, if I stay here for a week, that’s more than enough time to change all that,’ Diva said.

One of the girls translated her English words into Hindi, as she spoke. The girls all applauded and cheered. Diva was triumphant.

‘You see? The revolution has already started.’

The impish rebel fire was still in her eyes, but her face couldn’t hide the fear that crouched in her heart.

She was an intelligent girl. She knew that Naveen, Didier and I wouldn’t insist on something as drastic as a week in the slum, if we didn’t fear something more drastic on the open street.

I was sure she missed the cosseting luxury of the family mansion, the only home she’d ever known. Naveen said it was always well stocked with friends, food, drink, entertainment and servants. And maybe, in part, she felt that her father had deserted her, by banishing her to Naveen’s care.

I watched her smiling that stiff, unflinching smile, and talking with the girls. She was afraid for her father, that much was clear: perhaps more than for herself. And she was alone, and in a different world: a foreign tourist in the city where she was born.

I went to the hut next door, and settled down on a well-worn blue carpet beside Didier and Naveen. They were playing poker.

‘Will you play a hand, Lin?’ Didier asked.

‘I don’t think so, Didier. I’m kind of scattered tonight. Can’t think straight enough to play in your class.’

‘Very well,’ Didier smiled good-naturedly. ‘Then I shall continue the lesson. I am teaching Naveen how to cheat with honour.’

‘Honourable cheating?’

‘Cheating honourably,’ Didier corrected.

‘How to
spot
a cheat, as well,’ Naveen added. ‘Did you know there’s exactly one hundred and four ways to cheat? Two for every card in the deck. It’s fascinating stuff. Didier could teach a university course in this.’

‘Cheating at cards is simply magic,’ Didier said modestly. ‘And magic is simply cheating at cards.’

I let them play, sitting beside them and sipping one of Didier’s emergency flasks. It was a difficult night for me, too, although not the mind-shock that it was for Diva.

I felt the dome of the slum community beginning to close over me with sounds, smells and a swirl of defiant memories. I was back in the womb of mankind. I heard a cough nearby, a man crying out in sleep, a child waking, and a husband talking softly to his wife about their debts in Marathi. I could smell incense, burning in a dozen houses around us.

My heartbeat was trying to find its synchrony with twenty-five thousand others, fireflies, uneven until they learn to flash and fade in the same waves of light. But I couldn’t connect. Something in my life or my heart had changed. The part of me that had settled so willingly in the lake of consciousness that was the slum, years before, was missing.

When I escaped from prison I searched for a home, wandering from country to city, hoping that I’d recognise it when I found it. When I met Karla, I found love, instead. I didn’t know then that the search for one always leads to the other.

I said goodnight to Didier and Naveen, checked on Diva, already asleep in the arms of new Diva girls, and walked those lanes feeling sadder than I could understand.

A small pariah dog joined me, skipping ahead and then running back to collide with my legs. When I left the slum and started my bike, she joined a pack of street dogs, howling provocatively.

I headed to the Amritsar hotel to do some writing. As I cruised along the empty causeway I noticed Arshan, Farzad’s father, the nominal head of the three families that were looking for treasure.

Arshan wasn’t treasure hunting: he was staring fixedly at the Colaba police station, across the road from where he stood. I wheeled the bike around in a circle, and pulled up beside him.

‘Hi, Arshan. How’s it going?’

‘Oh, fine, fine,’ he said absently.

‘It’s kinda late,’ I observed. ‘And this is a rough neighbourhood. There’s a bank, a police station and a fashion brand store, all within twenty metres.’

He smiled softly, but his eyes never wavered from the police station.

‘I’m . . . I’m waiting for someone,’ he said vaguely.

‘Maybe he isn’t coming. Can I offer you a lift home?’

‘I’m fine,’ he said again. ‘I’m fine, Lin. You go on.’

He was so distracted that his hands were twitching, reflexes driven by violent thoughts, and his expression had unconsciously settled into a grimace of pain.

‘I’m gonna have to insist, Arshan,’ I said. ‘You don’t look good, man.’

He gradually brought himself back to the moment, shook his head, blinked the stare from his eyes, and accepted the ride.

He didn’t say a word on the way home, and only muttered thanks and farewell abstractedly, as he walked toward the door of his home.

Farzad opened for us, gasping in concern for his dad.

‘What is it, Pop? Are you okay?’

‘I’m fine, boy,’ he replied, resting on his son’s shoulder.

‘Lin, will you come in?’ Farzad asked.

It was a brave offer, because the kid was still in the Company, and we both knew Sanjay wouldn’t approve of him hosting me.

‘I’m good, Farzad,’ I said. ‘Let’s catch up, one of these days.’

At the Amritsar I threw everything off and took a long shower. Diva, who must’ve enjoyed baths foaming with scented oils in her father’s mansion, would have to wash in a small dish of water in the slum, and like the other girls, she’d have to wash fully clothed.

Poor kid
,
I thought, as I dressed again, but reminded myself that Naveen was never more than a call for help away. And I wondered how long it would take the Indian-Irish detective to admit that he was in love with her.

I made a no-bread sandwich of tuna fish, tomato and onion between slices of Parmesan cheese, drank two beers, and looked over Didier’s black market scams for a while.

He’d made pages of notes, with profiles on the key players, profit margins per month, salaries, and bribery payoffs. When I’d read them, I shoved the papers to the end of the bed, and picked up my journal.

There was that new short story I’d been trying to write, about happy, loving people doing happy, loving things. A love story. A fable. I tried to put a few more lines into the stream of words I’d already composed. I reread the first paragraph.

When it comes to the truth, there are two kinds of lovers: those who find truth in love, and those who find love in truth. Cleon Winters never sought the truth in anything, or anyone, because he didn’t believe in truth. But then, when he fell in love with Shanassa, truth found him, and all the lies he’d told himself became locusts, feeding on fields of doubt. When Shanassa kissed him, he fell into a coma, and was unconscious for six months, submerged in a lake of pure truth.

I persisted with the story for a while, but the characters began to change, following their own morphology, and became people I knew: Karla, Concannon, Diva.

The faces blurred, my eyes drooped, and every return to a line was another wave of will. I began to float on the sea of them, real faces and imagined.

The journal fell beside the bed. Loose pages from the notebook swirled free. The overhead fan scattered pages of my happy, loving story into Didier’s crime synopses. His pages settled on mine and mine joined his, and the wind wrote crime as love, and love as crime, as I slept.

Chapter Forty-Nine

T
HERE WILL BE CONSTANT AFFIRMATIONS,
Idriss had said, again and again. If they were there, I didn’t see them, even in dreams. Idriss talked of spiritual things, but the only thing that came to mind for me, in the word spiritual, was nature. I hadn’t found my connection to his tendency field, and out there on that fringe of the world, I didn’t feel that I belonged to anything but Karla.

I’d searched the faiths I could find. I learned prayers in languages I couldn’t speak, and prayed with believers whenever they invited me to join them. But I always connected to the people and the purity of their faith, rather than the religious code they followed. I often had everything in common with them, in fact, but their God.

Idriss spoke of the Divine in the language of science, and spoke of science in the language of faith. It made a strange kind of sense to me, where Khaderbhai’s lectures on cosmology only ever left me with good questions. Idriss was a journey, like every teacher, and I wanted to learn on the way, but the spiritual path I could see always led to forests, where talking stopped long enough for birds to find trees, and to oceans and rivers and deserts. And each woken beautiful day, each lived and written night, carried inside it a small, ineffaceable emptiness of questions.

I showered, drank coffee, tidied my rooms and went down to my bike, parked in the alleyway under the building. I had a breakfast meeting with Abdullah. I wanted to see him, and I was afraid to see him: afraid that friendship had faded in his eyes. So I rode and thought of Diva Devnani, the rich girl in a very poor slum, whose father was watching the sand run through his fingers. I made a note to buy her some Kerala grass and a bottle of coconut rum for when I checked on her.

When I parked my bike beside Abdullah’s, across the street from the Saurabh restaurant, I looked up slowly and reluctantly, but the eyes that met mine were as true as they’d always been. He hugged me, and we squeezed onto a small bench behind a table that gave us both a view of the door.

‘You are the subject of discussion,’ he said, as we worked our way through
masala dosas
and dumplings in mango sauce. ‘DaSilva made a bet that you would not live to see the end of the month.’

‘Anyone take the bet?’

‘Of course not,’ Abdullah said, between mouthfuls. ‘I beat DaSilva with a bamboo rod. He withdrew the wager.’

‘Solid.’

‘The talk from Sanjay is what counts, for now, and Sanjay wants you to live.’

‘In the way a cat wants a mouse to live?’

‘More like a tiger and a mouse,’ he replied. ‘He thinks the Scorpions are cats, and that they hate you more than DaSilva does.’

‘So, am I a target or a useful distraction, for Sanjay?’

‘The last. He does not expect that you will survive outside the Company for a long time. But you are useful, in a unique way.’

‘Uh-huh?’

‘While you live, you are irritating.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Don’t mention. In fact, I think you will probably be irritating, even after you are dead. It is a rare quality.’

‘Thanks again.’

‘Don’t mention.’

‘Where do I stand with business?’

‘He does not think you will survive long enough, to establish a business.’

‘I got that. But if I do survive, say, until the day after tomorrow, when I’d like to get started, how do I stand?’

‘Sanjay assured me that he would license you, like everyone else, but at a higher percentage.’

‘And they say mafia dons have no heart. Can I do my own passports?’

‘He does not think you will –’

‘– survive long enough. But if I do?’

‘Sanjay has said that you are banned from the passport factory. Your young man there, Farzad, came to see Sanjay personally, asking that he be permitted to learn from you privately. Sanjay said that he did not think –’

‘– I’d survive long enough, right, but he didn’t rule it out?’

‘No. He ordered Farzad not to contact you, or speak to you.’

‘And if I bought my own kit, and started modifying books?’

‘He does not think –’

‘Abdullah,’ I sighed, ‘I don’t care if Sanjay thinks I won’t last the winter. The only opinion I respect on that subject is my own. Just tell Sanjay, when you get a minute, that one of these days he might need a good passport from me himself. If he’s cool with it, I’d like to start making books. I’m good at it, and it’s an anarchist crime. See if you can get him to agree, okay?’

‘
Jarur
, brother.’

It was good to hear him call me brother, but I didn’t know if he was accepting my defection from the Company, or if his disaffection was driving him closer to my renegade side of the line.