‘I brought … I brought your shirt …’ he said falteringly.
‘What … what are you doing here?’
‘A friend sent me,’ he replied. ‘A very good friend of yours. Oh, fuck, Lin. You look like dogs have been chewing on you. I don’t want to freak you out or nothing, but you look like they dug you up, after they fuckin’ killed you, man. Just stay cool. I’m here, man. I’m gonna get you the fuck outta this place.’
Taking that as his cue, the official coughed, and gestured toward the cop. The cop gave the lead back to him, and he addressed Vikram, a kind of smile pinching the soft skin around his eyes.
‘Ten thousand,’ he said. ‘In American dollars, of course.’
‘Ten fuckin’ thousand?’ Vikram exploded. Are you crazy? I can buy fifty guys out of this place with ten thousand. Fuck that, man.’
‘Ten thousand,’ the official repeated, with the calm and authority of a man who knows that he brought the only gun to a knife-fight. He rested his hands flat on the metal desk, and his fingers rolled through once in a little Mexican wave.
‘No fuckin’ way, man. Arrey, take a look at the guy. What are you giving me, yaar? You fuckin’ destroyed the guy. You think he’s worth ten thousand, in this condition?’
The cop took a folder from a slender vinyl briefcase, and slid it across the desk to Vikram. The folder contained a single sheet of paper. Reading it quickly, Vikram’s lips pressed outward, and his eyes widened in an expression of impressed surprise.
‘Is this you?’ he asked me. ‘Did you escape from jail in Australia?’
I stared at him evenly, my feverish eyes not wavering. I didn’t reply.
‘How many people know about this?’ he asked the plain-clothes cop.
‘Not so many’ the cop replied in English. ‘But, enough to need ten thousand, for keeping this information a private matter.’
‘Oh, shit,’ Vikram sighed. ‘There goes my bargaining. Fuck it. I’ll have the money in half an hour. Clean him up, and get him ready.’
‘There’s something else,’ I interrupted, and they all turned to look at me. ‘There are two men. In my dormitory. They tried to help me, and the overseers or the guards gave them six months more. But they finished their time. I want them to walk out the gate with me.’
The cop gave an inquiring look at the prison official. He responded by waving his hand dismissively and wagging his head in agreement. The matter was a mere trifle. The men would be freed.
‘And there’s another guy’ I said flatly. ‘His name’s Mahesh Malhotra. He can’t raise his bail. It’s not much, a couple of thousand rupees. I want you to let Vikram pay his bail. I want him to walk out with me.’
The two men raised their palms, and exchanged identical expressions of bewilderment. The fate of such a poor and insignificant man never intruded upon their material ambitions or their spiritual disenchantments. They turned to Vikram. The prison official thrust out his jaw as if to say, He’s insane, but if that’s what he wants…
Vikram stood to leave, but I raised my hand, and he sat down again quickly.
‘And there’s another one,’ I said.
The cop laughed out loud.
‘Am ek?’ he spluttered, through the laugh. One more?
‘He’s an African. He’s in the African compound. His name’s Raheem. They broke both his arms. I don’t know if he’s alive or dead. If he’s alive, I want him, too.’
The cop turned to the prison official, hunching his shoulders and raising the palm of his hand in a question.
‘I know the case,’ the prison official said, wagging his head. ‘It is … a police case. The fellow carried on a shameless affair with the wife of a police inspector. The inspector quite rightly arranged to have him put in here. And once he was here, the brute made an assault on one of my overseers. It is quite impossible.’
There was a little silence, then, as the word impossible swirled in the room like smoke from a cheap cigar.
‘Four thousand,’ the cop said.
‘Rupees?’ Vikram asked.
‘Dollars,’ the cop laughed. ‘American dollars. Four thousand extra. Two for us and our associates, and two for the inspector who’s married to the slut.’
‘Are there any more, Lin?’ Vikram muttered, earnestly. ‘I’m just asking, like, because we’re workin’ our way up to a group discount here, you know.’
I stared back at him. The fever was stinging my eyes, and the effort it took to sit upright in the chair was causing me to sweat and shiver. He reached out, leaning over so that his hands were resting on my bare knees. I had the thought that some of the body lice might creep from my legs onto his hands, but I couldn’t brush that reassuring touch aside.
‘It’s gonna be cool, man. Don’t worry. I’ll be back soon. We’ll get you the fuck outta here within the hour. I promise. I’ll be back with two taxis, for us and your guys.’
‘Bring three taxis,’ I answered, my voice sounding as though it came from a new, dark, deep place that was opening up as I began to accept that I might be free.
‘One taxi for you, and the other two for me and the guys,’ I said. ‘Because … body lice.’
‘Okay’ he flinched. ‘Three taxis. You got it.’
Half an hour later, I rode with Raheem in the back of a black-and-yellow Fiat taxi through the tectonic spectacle and pedestrian pageant of the city. Raheem had obviously received some treatment—his arms were encased in plaster casts—but he was thin and sick, and horror clogged his eyes. I felt nauseous just looking into those eyes. He never said a word, except to tell us where he wanted to go. He was crying, softly and silently, when we dropped him off at a restaurant that Hassaan Obikwa owned in Dongri.
As we drove on, the driver kept staring at my gaunt, starved, beaten face in his rear-vision mirror. Finally, I asked him in rough, colloquial Hindi if he had any Indian movie songs in his cab. Stunned, he replied that he did. I nominated one of my favourites, and he found it, cranking it up to the max as we buzzed and beeped our way through the traffic. It was a song that the prisoners in the long room had passed from group to group. They sang it almost every night. I sang it as the taxi took me back into the smell and colour and sound of my city. The driver joined in, looking often into the mirror. None of us lie or guard our secrets when we sing, and India is a nation of singers whose first love is the kind of song we turn to when crying just isn’t enough.
The song was still soaring in me as I shed my clothes into a plastic bag for disposal, and stood under the strong warm jet of water in Vikram’s shower. I tipped a whole bottle of Dettol disinfectant over my head, and scrubbed it into my skin with a hard nailbrush. A thousand cuts and bites and gashes cried out, but my thoughts were of Karla. Vikram told me she’d left the city two days before. No-one seemed to know where she’d gone. How will I find her? Where is she? Does she hate me now? Does she think I dumped her, after we made love? Could she think that about me? I have to stay in Bombay—she’ll come back here, to the city. I have to stay and wait for her.
I spent two hours in that bathroom, thinking, scrubbing, and clenching my teeth against the pain. My wounds were raw when I emerged to wrap a towel round my waist and stand in Vikram’s bedroom.
‘Oh, man,’ he groaned, shaking his head and cringing in sympathy.
I looked into the full-length mirror on the front of his wardrobe. I’d used his bathroom scales to check my weight: I was forty-five kilos—half the ninety kilos I’d been when I was arrested four months before. My body was so thin that it resembled those of men who’d survived concentration camps. The bones of my skeleton were all visible, even to the skull beneath my face. Cuts and sores covered my body, and beneath them was the tortoise-shell pattern of deep bruises, everywhere.
‘Khader heard about you from two of the guys who got out of your dormitory—some Afghan guys. They said they saw you with Khader, one night, when you went to see some blind singers, and they remembered you from there.’
I tried to picture t
he men, to remember them, but I couldn’t. Afghans, Vikram had said. They must’ve been very good at keeping secrets because they’d never spoken to me in all those months in the locked room. Whoever they were, I owed them.
‘When they got out, they told Khader about you, and Khader sent for me.’
‘Why you?’
‘He didn’t want anyone to know that he was the one getting you out. The price was steep enough, yaar. If they knew it was him paying the baksheesh, the price would’ve been a lot higher.’
‘But how do you know him?’ I asked, still staring with fascinated horror at my own torture and emaciation.
‘Who?’
‘Khaderbhai. How do you know him?’
‘Everybody in Colaba knows him, man.’
‘Sure, but how do you know him?’
‘I did a job for him once.’
‘What sort of a job?’
‘It’s kind of a long story.’
‘I’ve got time, if you have.’
Vikram smiled and shook his head. He stood, and crossed the bedroom to pour two drinks at a small table that served as his private bar.
‘One of Khaderbhai’s goondas beat up a rich kid at a nightclub,’ he began, handing me a drink. ‘He did him over pretty bad. From what I hear, the kid had it coming. But his family pressed charges, with the cops. Khaderbhai knew my dad, and from him he found out that I knew the kid—we went to the same damn college, yaar. He got in touch with me, and asked me to find out how much they wanted to drop the case. Turns out they wanted plenty. But Khader paid it, and a little more. He could’ve got heavy with them, you know, and scared the shit out of them. He could’ve fuckin’ killed them, yaar. The whole fuckin’ family. But he didn’t. His guy was in the wrong, na? So, he wanted to do the right thing. He paid the money, and everyone ended up happy. He’s okay, that Khaderbhai. A real serious type, if you know what I mean, but he’s okay. My dad respects him, and he likes him, and that’s saying quite a lot, because my pop, he doesn’t respect many members of the human race. You know, Khader told me he wants you to work for him.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Don’t ask me,’ he shrugged. He began to toss some clean, pressed clothes from his wardrobe onto the bed. One by one I accepted the shorts, trousers, shirt, and sandals, and began to dress. ‘He just told me to bring you to see him when you feel well enough. I’d think about it if I was you, Lin. You need to feed yourself up. You need to make some fast bucks. And you need a friend like him, yaar. All that stuff about Australia—it’s a fuckin’ wild story, man. I swear, being on the run and all, it’s damn heroic. At least with Khader on your side, you’ll be safe here. With him behind you, nobody will ever do this shit to you again. You got a powerful friend there, Lin. Nobody fucks with Khader Khan in Bombay.’
‘So why don’t you work for him?’ I asked, and I knew that the tone of my voice was harsh—harsher than I’d intended it to be—but everything I said sounded like that then, with memories of the beatings and the body lice still slicing and itching across my skin.
‘I never got invited,’ Vikram replied evenly. ‘But even if I did get invited to join him, I don’t think I’d take him up on it, yaar.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t need him the way you do, Lin. All those mafia guys, they need each other, you know what I mean? They need Khaderbhai as much as he needs them. And I don’t need him like that. But you do.’
‘You sound very sure,’ I said, turning to meet his eye.
‘I am sure. Khaderbhai, he told me that he found out why you got picked up and put in jail. He said that someone powerful, someone with a lot of influence, had you put away, man.’
‘Who was it?’
‘He didn’t say. He told me he doesn’t know. Maybe he just didn’t want to tell me. Whatever the case, Lin my brother, you’re paddling in some fuckin’ deep shit. The bad guys don’t fuck around in Bombay—you know that much by now—and if you’ve got an enemy here, you’re going to need all the protection you can get. You got two choices—get the fuck out of town, or get some firepower on your side, like the guys at the OK Corral, you know?’
‘What would you do?’
He laughed, but my expression didn’t change, and he let the laughter quickly fade. He lit two cigarettes and passed one to me.
‘Me? I’d be fuckin’ angry, yaar. I don’t wear this cowboy stuff because I like cows—I wear it because I like the way those cowboy fuckers handled things in those days. Me, I’d want to find out who tried to fuck me over, and I’d want to get some damn revenge on him. Me, when I was ready, I’d accept Khader’s offer, and go to work for him, and get my revenge. But hey, that’s me, and I’m an Indian madachudh, yaar. And that’s what an Indian madachudh would do.’
I looked in the mirror once more. The new clothes felt like salt on the raw wounds, but they covered the worst of it, and I looked less alarming, less confronting, less hideous. I smiled at the mirror. I was practising, trying to remember what it was like to be me. It almost worked. I almost had it. Then a new expression, not quite my own, swirled into the grey of my eyes. Never again. That pain wouldn’t happen to me again. That hunger wouldn’t threaten me. That fear wouldn’t pierce my exiled heart. Whatever it takes, my eyes said to me. Whatever it takes from now on.
‘I’m ready to see him,’ I said. ‘I’m ready right now.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
WORKING FOR ABDEL KHADER KHAN was my first real instruction in organised crime—until then I’d been no more than a desperate man, doing stupid, cowardly things to feed a stupid, cowardly heroin habit, and then a desperate exile earning small commissions on random deals. Although they were crimes that I’d committed, and some of them were very serious, I was never really a criminal until I accepted Khaderbhai as my teacher. I’d been a man who committed crimes, up to then, rather than a criminal, and there’s a difference between the two. The difference, as with most things in life, lay in the motive and the means. Being tortured in Arthur Road Prison had given me the motive to cross the line. Another man, a smarter man than I was, might’ve run away from Bombay as soon as he was freed from the prison. I didn’t. I couldn’t. I wanted to know who’d put me in there, and why. I wanted revenge. The safest and fastest way to that vengeance was to join Khaderbhai’s branch of the mafia.
His instruction in the lawbreaker’s arts—he sent me first to the Palestinian, Khaled Ansari, to learn the black-market money trade—gave me the means to become what I’d never tried or wanted to be: a professional criminal. And it felt good. It felt so good within the protective circle of that band of brothers. When I rode the train to Khaled’s apartment every day, hanging out the door of a rattling carriage in the hot, dry wind with other young men, my heart swelled with the excitement of freedom’s wild, reckless ride.
Khaled, my first teacher, was the kind of man who carried his past in the temple fires of his eyes, and fed the flames with pieces of his broken heart. I’ve known men like Khaled in prisons, on battlefields, and in the dens where smugglers, mercenaries, and other exiles meet. They all have certain characteristics in common. They’re tough, because there’s a kind of toughness that’s found in the worst sorrow. They’re honest, because the truth of what happened to them won’t let them lie. They’re angry, because they can’t forget the past or forgive it. And they’re lonely. Most of us pretend, with greater or lesser success, that the minute we live in is something we can share. But the past for every one of us is a desert island; and those like Khaled, who find themselves marooned there, are always alone.
Khaderbhai had told me some of Khaled’s history when he’d briefed me for my first lessons. I’d learned that Khaled, at only thirty-four, was alone in the world. His parents, both renowned scholars, had been prominent in the Palestinian struggle for an independent nation-state. His father had died in prison, in Israel. His mother, his two sisters, his aunts and uncles, and his mother’s parents had all been killed in the massacres at Shatila, in Lebanon. Khaled,
who’d trained with Palestinian guerrilla units in Tunisia, Libya, and Syria, and had fought for nine years in dozens of operations across a score of conflict zones, broke down after the bloody deaths of his mother and all the others at the refugee camp. His Fattah Group commander, knowing the signs of that breakdown and the risks it posed, had released him from duty.
Although still devoted to the cause of Palestinian statehood in his words, he was in fact lost to any cause but the suffering he’d endured and the suffering he lived to inflict. He’d drifted to Bombay on the recommendation of a senior guerrilla fighter who knew Khaderbhai. The mafia don took him in. Impressed with his education, language skills, and obsessive dedication, the permanent members of Khaderbhai’s council had rewarded the young Palestinian with successive promotions. Three years after Shatila, at the time that I met him, Khaled Ansari was in charge of Khaderbhai’s black-market currency operation. The position carried with it a place on the council. And when I felt strong enough to put in a full day of study, not long after my release from Arthur Road Prison, the bitter, lonely, battle-scarred Palestinian began my instruction.
‘People say that money is the root of all evil,’ Khaled told me when we met in his apartment. His English was rich with accents of New York and Arabic and the Hindi that he spoke reasonably well. ‘But it’s not true. It’s the other way round. Money isn’t the root of all evil. Evil is the root of all money. There’s no such thing as clean money. All the money in the world is dirty, in some way, because there’s no clean way to make it. If you get paid in money, somebody, somewhere, is suffering for it. That’s one of the reasons, I think, why just about everybody—even people who’d never break the law in any other way—is happy to add an extra buck or two to their money on the black market.’
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