The Mountain Shadow (98 page)

‘What are you doing?’

‘Playing the guitar,’ he said happily.

‘Why are you playing the guitar in the middle of the road?’

‘The acoustics are perfect here,’ he smiled, infuriatingly. ‘The sea behind me, and the buildings in front. It’s perfect. Do you play guitar? We should play here together. We could –’

I rode away and reached Nariman Point before I turned back, and drew up beside him again.

‘You wanna get drunk?’ I asked, the bike rumbling.

‘With you?’ he asked, suspiciously.

I rode away again and reached Nariman Point before I turned back, and drew up beside him again.

‘Yes! I’d love to get drunk,’ he said.

‘Get on the bike, Oleg.’

‘Can I drive?’

‘Don’t ever talk about my motorcycle like that again.’

‘Okay,’ he said, climbing up behind me, the guitar slung at his side. ‘Just so long as we know where the boundaries are.’

‘Hang on tight.’

‘Are we going to fight someone, when we get drunk?’

‘No.’

‘Not even each other?’

‘Get off the bike, Oleg.’

‘No, no,’ he said. ‘It’s just that I’ll stay sober if we’re going to fight each other, because you fight dirty.’

‘Fuck you.’

‘We Russians can’t fight dirty. That’s why we’re such pushovers.’

‘Oleg, if you say the word
Russian
once more, I’ll throw you off in a curve.’

‘What am I supposed to say? I’m Russian, after all.’

‘Let’s call them R-people.’

‘Got it,’ he said, holding on. ‘We R-people are quick on the uptake.’

He was a good passenger, and it was fun, riding with him. I was in a good mood as we parked the bike and climbed the stairs to my rooms at the Amritsar hotel.

Just as we approached my door, Karla opened hers, going somewhere else.

She was in a sleeveless evening dress, and high sneakers. Her hair was twisted into a knot, and fixed with a swordfish rib-bone she’d bought at the fish market. She’d cleaned it, polished it, and fixed one of her jewelled rings to the wider end. It reflected the lights of the room behind her.

‘Wow,’ Oleg said, peering into the Bedouin tent.

‘Karla, this is Oleg. He’s a Russian writer, and a good man in a bad corner. Oleg, this is Karla.’

Karla looked me up and down, her head tilting like the woman in the glittering black burkha in the Tuareg’s house of arches. Something was wrong: more wrong than usual. She looked at Oleg. She smiled.

‘Bad corners, huh?’

‘Karla,’ Oleg said, kissing her hand. ‘What a lovely name. I have a special love, and I call her Karlesha. It’s my love name for her. It’s an honour to meet you. And if I flirt with you, your boyfriend says he will cut me.’

‘Oh, he will, huh?’ Karla smiled.

‘You know what,’ I said, ‘Oleg and I came here tonight to get drunk, in my room. It’s been a long night. A rough night. Would you like to join us?’

‘Would I
like
to, or would I be
willing
to?’

‘Karla.’

‘It’s a fair question,’ Oleg said.

I looked at him.

‘I’m only saying . . . ’

‘No, thanks,’ Karla said, switching off the lights, slamming shut the door to her room and locking several locks. ‘But, you know what, I’ve got an offer for
you
, Oleg.’

She turned to face him, all sixteen queens.

‘What kind of an offer?’ Oleg asked amiably.

‘We need field agents, and you look right.’

‘Field agents?’

‘Let’s open that bottle of oblivion, Oleg,’ I suggested. ‘And get drunk.’

‘We’ve got a bureau, one door along from mine,’ Karla said, leaning against the doorframe. ‘And we need field agents with spike. Have you got spike, Oleg?’

‘I can be spiky,’ Oleg said. ‘But what makes
you
think I’ve got the right stuff?’

She jerked her thumb at me.

‘He wouldn’t introduce you to me, if you didn’t. Are you in?’

He looked at me.

‘Will you cut me, if I accept?’

‘Of course he won’t,’ Karla said.

He looked back at Karla.

‘Great!’ Oleg said. ‘Fired and employed twice, in the same day. I knew I’d get rich in this city. When do I start?’

‘Ten,’ Karla said. ‘Put on a nice shirt.’

Oleg smiled engagingly. Karla smiled back. I wanted to choke Oleg with a nice shirt.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘So, I’ll see you soon.’

I went to kiss her, to hug her, to smell the ocean, to go home, but she held me back, her hands on my chest.

‘Go inside, Oleg,’ I said, throwing him the keys.

He opened the door, and gasped.

‘Holy minimalism,’ he said, alone with my decor. ‘It’s Solzhenitsyn in here, man!’

‘What’s going on, Karla?’ I asked her, when we were alone with whatever was going on.

She looked at my face as if it was a maze, and she’d found her way out of it before. She stared at my lips, my forehead, and my eyes.

‘I’m going away for a couple of weeks,’ she said.

‘Where?’

‘Do you know that it’s lovable and maddening at the same time, that I knew you’d ask me that?’

‘Stop trying to put me off. Where are you going?’

‘You don’t want to know,’ she said, burning queens.

‘I
do
want to know. I wanna know where to break the door down, if you need me.’

She laughed. People laugh so often, when I’m being serious.

‘I’m gonna spend a couple weeks with Kavita,’ she said. ‘Alone.’

‘What the hell?’ I said, speaking my think.

She cocked her head to the side again.

‘Are you jealous, Shantaram?’

I wasn’t. I think back, now, and I know I was more jealous of the Russian writer, because he was a pretty cool guy, than I was of Kavita.

But Kavita had spoken harm at me, and I suddenly realised that it still hurt me. Karla wasn’t going to another lover, in my mind: she was going to someone who hated me.

I didn’t tell Karla then, that night, what Kavita had said to me. I should’ve said something. I should’ve told her. But it had been a rough night.

‘Madame Zhou paid a visit to the alley under this building, and warned me to stay away from Kavita. Do you really think it’s safe to be going away with her?’

‘What do you want from me?’ she snapped, all fire and furious pride.

‘What I want is to be the closest thing to you, Karla. It’s a sin for you to use that against me. Stop playing games with me. Tell me to leave you alone, or tell me to love you, with everything I’ve got.’

She was stung. I hadn’t seen it often: a reaction in her face or her body that she couldn’t hide.

‘I told you before about trusting me, and how it might get harder to do.’

‘Karla, don’t go.’

‘I’m staying with Kavita,’ she said, turning away from me. ‘Don’t wait up.’

She walked away. I watched her to the stairs, and then raced through my apartment to catch a glimpse of her as she walked to the taxi stand at Metro cinema.

Oleg came to stand beside me. She got in a taxi, and she was gone.

‘You’ve got it bad, bro,’ Oleg said sympathetically. ‘Your vodka is shit, by the way, but your rum is okay. Drink up.’

‘I gotta get clean, first,’ I said. ‘I’ll leave the shower ready for you. Make yourself at home.’

He cast a glance around him at the sparse room, the wooden floors gleaming like the lid on a lacquered coffin.

‘Okay,’ he said.

I stood in the shower, turning it on in bursts, fits and starts. The water in our building was carried in trucks, and pumped upwards into gravity feed tanks on the roof. Everyone in the building shared those tanks.

Trying not to waste water, I shut the shower off from time to time, leaning against the wall until everything that had happened with Concannon came back so hard that I shuddered, retching, and turned on the healing water again.

In the world we created for ourselves, it’s a lie to be a man, and a lie to be a woman. A woman is always more than any idea imposed on her, and a man is always more than any duty imposed on him. Men empathise, and women lead armies. Men raise infants, and women explore the exosphere. We’re not one thing or the other: we’re very interesting versions of each other. And men, too, cry in the shower, sometimes.

It took me a while to scrub the emotion from my face. Afterwards, while Oleg showered, I cleaned my gun as meditation, and stashed it in a hidden shelf beside my bed.

‘Your soap is shit,’ Oleg said, drying himself off. ‘I’ll get you some R-soap. It will scrape the barnacles off you.’

‘I’m relatively barnacle-free,’ I said, offering him the bottle. ‘And I like my soap.’

He offered me the bottle back, and I drank and offered it back, and he drank and offered it again, and I drank it back.

‘That’s my T-shirt,’ I noticed, mid-swappery.

‘I hope you don’t mind,’ he said. ‘It’s so nice to put on something clean. I lived in the last one through a geological age.’

‘Keep it,’ I said. ‘I’ve got another one, where that one came from.’

‘I saw that. And two pairs of jeans. You travel light, man. If I borrow a pair of yours, do you mind if I roll the bottoms up? I really like that look.’

‘Roll them up to the Urals, Oleg. But turn down the smiling. If we get any drinkier than this, it’ll start to freak me out.’

‘Got it, man. Smiling less. We R-people are nothing if not adaptive. Do you have music?’

‘I’m a writer,’ I said, passing back the bottle. ‘Of course I have music.’

I had a CD system, wired into aftermarket Bollywood speakers. I liked the way they blended everything I played into the same sound-ocean, the same whale of signals from some not entirely air-breathing place.

‘Your system is shit,’ he said.

‘You’re a critical motherfucker, Oleg.’

‘Actually, I’m just making mental notes, you know, of things I get for you that are better than shit.’

‘Whaddaya wanna hear, Oleg?’

‘Got any Clash?’

I played
Combat Rock
, and he jumped up to grab his guitar.

‘Cut to the last track, “Death Is a Star”,’ he said. ‘I know how to play that. Let’s play it together.’

We strummed Russian–Australian–Indian acoustic together, jamming with the faraway Clash in a hotel room in Bombay. We played the song again and again until we got the timing just right, and laughed like kids when we did. And the strings reopened the cuts on my fingers, and blood from the fight with Concannon stained the body of my guitar.

We got too drunk to play, and we were just beginning to stop caring about that, or anything else, when I found a messenger in my room. He was dressed in the khaki uniform of a messenger, and was holding a message in his hand.

‘Where did
you
come from?’ I asked, swaying to keep him in focus.

‘From outside, sir,’ he said.

‘Well, that’s alright then. What can I do for you?’

‘I have a message for you, sir.’

‘I don’t like messages.’

‘But it’s my job, sir.’

‘You’ve got a point. How much do I owe you?’

I paid the messenger and sat down, looking at the message. I didn’t want to read it. The English say no news is good news. The Germans say no news is no bad news. I’m with the Germans on that one. Something inside me, and I still don’t know if it’s the part that saves me or damns me, always says that I should tear the message up before reading it, no matter who sent it, and sometimes I do. But I had to read it, in case it had something to do with Karla. It didn’t. It was from Gemini George.

Dear Lin, old mate. Scorp and me have gone jungle. We’re searching for this guru, to lift the curse. Naveen gave us a good lead, and we’re starting on the canals of Karnataka tomorrow. Fingers crossed. Love you, mate.

I thought it was a happy, hopeful letter, and I was glad. I didn’t realise that it was a cry for help. I dropped the letter on my table, put good reggae music on my bad sound system, and we danced. Oleg danced for the fun of it, I think, but maybe the smiling Russian had demons of his own to release. I was thinking of the fight with Concannon, and I danced for absolution from victory: for defeating a foe, and regretting it.

The moon, our lonely sister, filters pain and harm from sunlight, and reflects it back to us safely, free of burn and blemish. We danced in moonlight on the balcony that night, Oleg and I, and we sang and shouted and laughed, hardening ourselves to what we’d done in life, and what we’d lost. And the moon graced two fallen fools, on a fallen day, with sunlight purified by a mirror in the sky, made of stone.