by Ings, Simon
It missed Rishi Ansari by inches.
He cracks open a can of Thums Up, the local cola. He’s lying in his hammock on the verandah of his workshop: a smart concrete bunkhouse overlooking the final resting place of the Greek reefer ship Frio Dolphin, built in 1979. To its left lie the remains of the British general cargo ship Kerie, built in 1978. The empty space to its right is reserved for the German general cargo ship Mercs Wadduwa, built in 1967. A pilot will run it aground sometime tonight.
‘What you environmentalists don’t understand...’ Rishi treats Roopa Vish to his orientation speech. Ship-breaking is a necessary industry, and from politicians to foremen to cutters, the people of Mumbai speak of it with pride, impervious to the West’s nannying. Rishi’s the same: he assumes anyone in Western clothing is an eco-fascist and setting outsiders right about the view – the flames, the smoke, the stench of bilge and solvent and hot oil – is a task he has performed many times.
‘Mohinder Gidh sent me.’
Now Rishi understands, or he thinks he does. Mohinder has told him to expect a prospective client, a professional woman who requires a speedy, discreet service: documents and identifying materials.
Rishi Ansari is not in the scrapping business. Dominating his workshop is a government security press. Roopa can tell that’s what it is because a stamped metal plate on the side reads: India Security Press – Brigadier Road. It’s a measure of Rishi’s confidence that he hasn’t even prised off the badge. On a table covered with newspapers sits an Alps MD-5000 printer, a laminator, a box of 5 mil pouches, a bottle of Interference Gold paint, a can of Damar spray varnish, Mylar, latex paste...
Mostly, Rishi Ansari works for the shipping industry. Worldwide, one in ten seafarers admits to using counterfeit certificates. Many more – one in five – are happy to shop their friends. Fraudulent papers are most often wielded by the officer class. Many seafarers are keen to start earning money as soon as possible; others are desperate to obtain a quick promotion. Many wish to hide awkward facts about their health or age. In the course of a career at sea most hands have stumbled across at least one junior officer who’s yet to learn the difference between port and starboard. Since 9/11 Rishi has been exceptionally busy. Watermarks, laminated cards, magnetic readers, holograms, computer databases. Between them, bin Laden and Bush have created the conditions for a minor economic miracle in Darukhana. Every month some bright bureaucrat in the International Chamber of Commerce dreams up another security measure, and within weeks it has become just another veil for the stowaway, pirate or terrorist to hide behind.
Roopa’s parking permit is not yet ready. The yellow ribbon of Rishi’s MD-5000 has fused to the print head. The cheapest replacement he can find on the Internet is $700 – a swingeing amount of money – and there is no guarantee he will receive the goods. ‘eBay is full of tricky people,’ he says, with not a trace of irony.
He’s had more luck with her ATM card. The hologram is impressive. He basks in Roopa’s attention: ‘HG-107 diffractive film. Great under a desk lamp but be careful, the hologram vanishes under diffuse light.’
Roopa doesn’t care one way or the other and hands him 2000 rupees for a piece of fake ID that won’t work on a cloudy day. She knows what she’s doing. She lays her hand on Rishi’s arm. ‘That’s wonderful,’ she says – and smiles. Twenty thousand rupees these cost her: the smallest, whitest and most even teeth in her extensive dental arsenal. ‘Rishi, I remember you.’
Rishi’s shoulders stiffen.
‘I met you in Chhaphandi’s brickworks.’
His fear is palpable.
‘After the rail crash. When Vinod was in hospital, having his stump seen to. Do you remember? A policewoman came round to see him about a family of scheduled-caste labourers. You were there to fob me off.’
Rishi makes to move past her, towards the door, out of there. Roopa lays her hand on his chest. ‘It’s all right, Rishi,’ she croons. ‘It’s okay.’
‘What do you want?’ A small, high voice.
She knows what makes him tick. ‘I want what you want,’ she says. Surreptitiously, she flicks her tongue round her upper gum, the left side, above her tiny porcelain canine. There’s a fragment bursting through. She can taste the blood. She’s tanked with codeine today, half off her face. ‘I want the man who killed your sister and your brother-in-law.’
Rishi blinks at her.
‘It’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Yash’s little helper.’
Rishi tries to swallow.
‘Don’t you see? You’re just like me.’
‘I am?’ He stares around the room: this little wainscot empire he’s built under the shadow of the Yash family syndicate: ‘I don’t know who you mean.’
‘Together,’ Roopa whispers in his ear. Touches it with her tongue. Explores it. Paints a little pinkish blood inside it. Laughs. ‘Together we can kill him. Would you like that? Rishi? Would you?’
Nothing.
‘It’s why you’re here. It’s why you’re working for him. Shielding him.’ Something comes out on her tongue. A tiny bit of grit. ‘Isn’t it?’
He shakes his head. He can’t believe his luck.
‘You don’t fool me,’ she says.
EIGHTEEN
There are indigents tottering around Mumbai’s port sector who have had their arms boiled off, their feet hoofed lengthways with roofing shears. You do not fuck with the Yadavs, and if they ever find out who Roopa Vish really is, and that she has a score to settle with Yash, the Yadav syndicate’s new, elusive and all-powerful boss, they will take their time killing her. Rishi knows the fun they’ll have with her, before their graceless coup de grâce. Poor Rishi: he wishes with all his heart he’d never got Roopa into this. There it is. She’s in it now, has been for nearly a decade, and nothing to be done.
Convincing Roopa that he is Yash Yadav’s creature, his gatekeeper and private secretary, has been the acme of Rishi’s career, centrepiece of his forger’s art. With one perfectly turned lie, he’s turned Roopa from a liability into his most reliable helper! Poor Roopa, who thinks she’s spent all these years working her way up through the organization to become Yash’s most trusted courier. Poor Roopa, who imagines she has come ever closer, through Rishi, to a man fifteen years dead!
Strange, that Roopa’s well-being should have come to matter so much to him. He is not without feeling. He is not without conscience, or regret. He is not, all in all, a bad man. He is just bad enough.
Poor Roopa. Rishi wonders: at what point, in all these years of deception, did Roopa cease to be a game for him? At what point did she become more than a counter for him to move around at will? Ruined as Roopa is, driven as she is, dangerous as she is, Rishi’s spent the best years of his life asking himself: dare I let her see more? Dare I invite her back to my apartment? Dare I show her my boat? Dare I cook her a meal? It’s taken him a long time to build up the courage. Absurd how long it’s taken him. Years. Evenings round at her place in front of the television. Meals out. Visits to the fair. Treats for Nitesh, a teenager now. Poor Rishi, edging with a painful slowness into someone else’s life, and no one’s getting any younger here.
Every quarter Rishi relays a mythical order from his mythical boss, Yash Yadav, and sends Roopa on a mission to the UAE. Every quarter she bears hawala notes and documentation across the Indian Ocean. Coordinates. SIM chips. Account numbers. Maritime documents of all kinds. Even cash money.
She waits. (This is her plan.) She waits. She works. She waits. One day she will meet Yash Yadav again, in person. Then, she’ll kill him.
Any streetwise crew of twenty years ago would have picked up Roopa’s scent in days. They would have found her son, her mum, her family’s home in Thane, her ACB profile, the registration number of her car. But the syndicate’s old street-corner crews, its has-been razormen and shooters, are following barrow-boys and trimmers, firemen and stevedores, into the same quaint dockyard oubliette. Origins hardly matter these days and the Yadav family is a ‘Mumbai sy
ndicate’ in name only. From its paymasters to its deckhands, there’s not one in the firm who does not work out of a mobile phone, and all the smart money lives in Toronto. The distributed nature of modern piracy is keeping Roopa alive, but this cuts both ways, and Roopa, though safe enough, is no nearer to the truth about Yash Yadav than she was when she first visited Darukhana nearly nine years ago. She is wasting her life away on a vendetta that no longer makes any sense – and Rishi is helping her waste it.
He presses a slip of paper into her hand. ‘The documents will be PDF’d inside Ester’s BlackBerry. Email them to me on this number. Memorize it. When you’ve made the call, take the chip out of the phone and throw the phone and the chip into the creek.’
Roopa says nothing.
He puts his arm around her shoulders, drawing her in. ‘Yes?’ It is a role Rishi has got down pat and he is so very good at it and, oh, so very weary of it: Yash Yadav’s little helper.
They are sitting together on the threadbare sofa in his workshop in Darukhana, under the pitiless overhead lights Rishi needs for the close work he does: weaving money out of paper, foils, thread, ink. Rain hammers against the workshop walls. Roopa spent the afternoon helping him lay canvas offcuts over the worktables, printers, screens and tablets, cutting mats and laminator. Together, they’ve waterproofed what they can against the coming storm. Now the wind is driving the rain under the wooden shingles of the roof. In one corner of the hut it’s actually raining. Raindrops wind down plastic wires and drop, fizzing, on to the naked bulbs that light the room. Rishi’s had to turn off the fan because the air it blew was so damp that it started to short and filled the hut with the smell of burning. Roopa can still taste it on the roof of her mouth.
‘How much longer, Rishi?’
He kisses her.
‘How many more?’
He runs his fingers through her hair ‘Roopa. Darling. Something will turn up.’
Roopa leans into his hands. A strange ménage, this must seem to her: two broken people, both with reasons to see Yash Yadav expunged, both nudging each other nervously towards the point of action, both becalmed. She will not take much more of this, but what else can Rishi do? Yash cannot be killed twice.
By now, Roopa has pretty much reconciled herself to the idea that Rishi is and always will be Yash Yadav’s creature. A coward. Roopa does not trust him. She thinks that if Yash Yadav ever left his Western eyrie and visited Mumbai, Rishi would shop her to him in seconds. Not because he does not love her, but because he fears Yash Yadav more.
After all these years of waiting it’s got to the point where Roopa, unillusioned, is pretty much relying on Rishi betraying her. It’s the only way she can see to draw Yash Yadav into the open.
Does Rishi see yet how this works? Does he see how elegant this is?
He unbuttons her. He bares her. He encircles her with his arms. He brings his mouth down to her breast. Poor Rishi: it’s not going to make a blind bit of difference. We’re going to strip him of every comfort. We’re going to rob him of every happiness. Because he deserves it, yes. But most of all because this is our idea of fun.
In the 1970s, when neighbours like Abu Dhabi were letting their harbours silt up, confident that all the wealth they’d ever need would well up out of the ground for ever, Dubai’s Sheikh Rashid chose to play the long game. He kept his city’s harbour dredged. He built up imports, offered tax breaks and brought the builders in. Now the clothes on every Middle Eastern back and every luxury good, not to mention every bite of food they eat, passes through Dubai.
Whole nation states have been suckered into Dubai’s fantasy. Ukrainians. Iranians. India thinks it runs Dubai: who else builds its buildings? China thinks it owns Dubai: who else lays its roads? Nobody runs Dubai. No surprise, then, that it’s the money-laundering capital of the world. Occasionally armed police raid an attic in Deira, Dubai’s old quarter. A man is led away and sometimes shot. Now and again a headless corpse is found slumped in a pool of blood in one of the city’s subterranean car parks, and children fishing in the creek watch as a heron rips beakfuls of hair from a human head. In Dubai everyone is anonymous and significant at the same time. Roopa feels it. Roopa loves it. Bent on killing Yash Yadav, who ruined her and all her hopes, still, Roopa allows him this: she enjoys working for him. Yes, she loves her job!
Now, here come the Jumeirah Janes. Ex-pat TEFL-ers, HR managers, trophy wives close to expiry date. They run things in Dubai. They’re the Emirates’ unacknowledged power, First Ladies all. Only they’re not getting any younger.
From the shadows of the surf shop, half-concealed and unremarkable, Roopa Vish watches them. Yash Yadav had her beaten long ago into such a shape no observer can ever hold her in mind for long. She could sneer at these white bitches if she wanted: they would pay her no attention. She could laugh and spit at all that vanity on depilated legs. She does not sneer. She does not envy them or think them spoiled. She understands. She knows they know that age will do to them, and soon, what Yash’s pliers did to her years ago: their every smile will break. Unnoticed, disregarded, crouched there in her grim blue salwar and baggy kameez, Roopa feels for them, that they have to cross this sandy lot on their way to nips and tucks (it’s wall-to-wall plastic surgeons round here), and run the gamut of all the twenty-something hardbodies strolling in and out of the surf store, bronzed muscles quivering, unbrassiered breasts gambolling like puppies under Rip Curl vests. When the surfer chicks pass by, Roopa imagines she hears the Janes clench their capped and whitened teeth in rage.
It’s not their fault: Dubai has maddened them. In the car here, as Nitesh drove – at fourteen, an adept at the wheel, and Rishi has cooked him an international licence the fiercest traffic cop would pass – Roopa remarked the adverts on Dubai’s towers: ‘Live the Life’, ‘We’ve set our vision higher’. Even the white-goods retailers have names like Better Life and New Hope.
Their mark parked up in front of the surf shop and Nitesh parked three rows down and stayed in the car while his mother got out and crossed the lot and settled herself in the shadows of the shop; and now even Nitesh, even her own son, finds it hard to spot her in the rear-view mirror, or even to hold in memory that she’s there.
Every once in a while Roopa turns and looks in through tinted plate glass.
Ester’s toying with a wind-meter.
She’s buying herself some heel straps.
She’s leaving the shop.
She’s wearing cut-off jeans and a running bra. Over her shoulder she’s lugging along her kitesurfing bag: a black flying fish against bright red and white. She’s young – young as Roopa was when her looks were torn out with pliers. She has her more than sun-bleached hair done up in a fussy topknot. From her features Roopa can see what she will look like when she’s old. If she lives that long. She’s far too young for this game. White, besides – an outlier in the pirate demographic. She’ll be some nigger’s moll, is Roopa’s guess, playing above her age. Then again, what is the right age to be carrying stolen shipping information through Dubai? The thugs that form Yadav’s front line – gambol-toed monkeyboys swinging bolo swords and box-cutters – they’re barely in their teens. Give her another year and Ester will be capable of anything. ‘Radicalized’ is today’s buzzword. A pirate queen, shackling Bangladeshis to an anchor chain.
Roopa follows Ester to her car and walks on past to where Nitesh is waiting. Traffic’s heavy: they join the stream two vehicles behind their mark and trickle after her in second gear. Again, Roopa’s eye is drawn to the messages on Dubai’s innumerable hoardings, and here and there covering entire faces of a complete but empty high-rise. Every time she visits Dubai – three, four times a year – Roopa finds the ads have grown yet more extreme, evoking, with a welling hysteria, the dream-logic of this fabricated place. Aspiration as an endless Jacob’s ladder. Perfect your car, your phone, your home, your face. Perfect your labia. Plastic surgeons line the way to erotically sterile encounters at the Burj Al Arab hotel. Then what? Then where? The
elevators only go up. Take a helicopter ride into the future. Cheat death. Chrome the flesh. Every advert they ride past features a robot. A perfected man. A smoothly milled thigh or tit. A cyborg sits at the wheel of a latest-model four-wheel-drive, limbs webbed promiscuously around the controls. A phone blinks in a stainless-steel hand.
Dubai’s a vital entrepôt but most of its goods are containerized and handled by machines outside the city. A different, small-time trade holds sway along the creek road, in the centre. Its pavements and central reservations teem with tourists and Russian prostitutes in roughly equal numbers. Ester is heading back to her hotel. Nitesh parks up at the kerb. Roopa gets out and waits. Nitesh drives off. Across the creek, dhows packed to the gunwales with second-hand Toyota Hiluxes prepare for their voyage to Somalia. Piles of tyres, plucked off wrecked and defunct cars, are being hauled by hand and dropped into the rusted holds of boats bound for retreading factories in Navlakhi and Karachi.
Ester reappears. She’s changed her clothes. She’s wearing a white shirt, open at the collar, under a beige, loose-fitting trouser suit: clothing to blend her into that part of Dubai life lived almost exclusively by ex-pat men. Roopa crosses the road after her.
Some dhows are made of fibreglass these days, but there are plenty of wooden hulls left, white with lime, and plenty being built. The deckhouses are almost always wooden, cut here and there with repeated decorations. Easy to imagine that these tiny break-bulk ships are the last survivors of a dying trade, but they’re no such thing. Container shipping serves the great ports of the earth, but there are few enough of them, and none in northern Africa. For the behemoths of Maersk and Moyse, Hapag-Lloyd and Evergreen, that coast offers no haven. So, with no deep harbours, north Africa depends on little ships, and all of them, every few months or so, tie up along the creek in Dubai. From China, mattresses. Piles of flashlights. Chairs, tables, oxytetracycline injections. Chilean softwoods. Foam mattresses. Drums of sorbitol from Mumbai.