On a small table stood a stunted line of framed photos, desolate as a late-night bus stop. Mother—featured twice, once in her glad rags at Ascot, once asleep in a deck chair in our garden, exhausted from pruning and deadheading. Me on a wind-surfer, hitting the beach in Corfu. Granny, liver-spotted, just before she died, smiling strongly, afalse-toothed smile, smiling for all of us, like we weren’t capable of doing it for ourselves. A misty shot of the Brooklyn Bridge. And Chuff, the smelly basset hound, the one paid for by Clay & Westminster, forever shadowed by my mother with her air freshener. He’d outlive us all.
I looked at the photo of the Brooklyn Bridge again. Just the bridge—no people. I realized that there wasn’t a single photo of me in New York. When friends visited from England, I was the one holding the camera. If there were any of me, I hadn’t seen them. Five years in a place and no evidence of it, apart from an impending sprawl of lawsuits.
I opened the drawer beneath. A few keys, a can opener, an AOL CD ROM—early version. And another framed photograph. A nice frame, bird’s-eye maple, something like that. My father. Same beach in Corfu. Blue Hackett shorts, little round John Lennon sunglasses. Tanned, glazed, muscular, pointing at the camera. Saying something, I couldn’t remember what. But it would have been smart and funny. Dad was funny on vacation. He could make us all laugh with his well-remembered jokes, his stories, his easy way with strangers. By the end of a trip we would always have a long list of new friends, new Christmas cards, new do-not-bend envelopes bursting with vacation photos. In the gathering gloom of Hampton Court, though, these trophies of his social skill looked strangely out of place.
I took the photo out of the drawer and set it up alongside the rest. Somehow his smiling presence made the little group look less wretched. He cheered them up, inflated them.
If I had not hung up on that final call. If the “click—you’re dead,” hadn’t happened. What then, I wondered? Would it have been different? Would the events of the last week have happened to someone else?
I recalled the scampering wood nymph: mute, grotesque, beautiful. She’d been a harbinger. I should have recognized her for what she was.
PART II
TWENTY-SIX
Delta Air Lines, Flight 106.
On time.
But we weren’t. Not if we wanted to catch the flight with a comfortable margin, without chasing the 767 down JFK’s runway number one.
We scanned the boards for our check-in. Letters of the alphabet, numbers, hieroglyphs. The language of airports.
The man at the check-in desk saw our panic as we approached and looked at his watch. He shook his head.
“You got any luggage to check in today?” His eyes were reproachful as they scanned his computer screen, his fingers dancing across the keyboard.
“Nope,” Carol said.
“Then you’re just okay.” He sounded disappointed, as if it was good for first-class passengers to learn they had to organize their lives a little, once in a while, just like the rest of us.
He took our passports. He handed Carol’s straight back to her. Mine he opened at the page with my US visa and held it flat with a stapler while he attacked his keyboard. He peered at his screen.
How would I feel if he pressed a button under the counter and immigration officials showed up, polite but implacable, telling me that the US was my home for the time being? More hammering on the keyboard, a hand sliding under the counter.
He pulled out two boarding passes.
“You’re all set. Go straight to Gate 42. You have preassigned seats, 2A and B. Have a good flight.”
We ran.
“This is your fault,” Carol hissed as we made our way to the head of a long line at security, ignoring the hostile glares along the way.
Itwasmy fault. A call from Raj Shethia, a junior counsel from Askari in Bombay. Sunil Askari’s gopher. Up at 6:00A.M.,Bombay time, to tell me that everything was set for our arrival.
“You could have spoken to him from the car.”
I could have, but I didn’t.He just wouldn’t stop talking. The guy was excited, wanted to go througheverything.It hadn’t seemed right to cut him off.
Our hand luggage emerged from its chamber full of x-rays and slid onto the rollers.
We were off again.
“What time did he say? For the meeting.” Carol hurled the question over her shoulder.
“EightA.M.at the offices of Ketan Securities.”
There would be virtually no time for rest before the factory gates opened.
Another passport inspection at the ramp. Maybe they’d called through from check-in. Stop that man.
“You guys sure cut it fine.” The stewardess smiled as she snapped off a section of boarding pass and handed the smaller stub back, together with our passports.
We found our seats and sat back heavily, looking at each other. Carol mouthed the wordassholeat me and hit me with the in-flight magazine. She then turned to look out of the window.
When we reached cruising altitude, we arranged our nests, clogging our living space with stuff from our bags that would end up in dark recesses around our seats, unused and most likely left there.
Carol took her sleeper suit out of its plastic bag.
Suddenly she pointed at the two black files at my feet.
“You going to do some work?”
At the start of a flight I was always committed to the prospect of work, but it usually just didn’t happen.
“I might try.” I’d see how endless the next thirteen hours turned out to be.
Carol caught the attention of a stewardess. She quickly scanned the entertainment guide and, leaning across me, pointed out the film she wanted. She had almost chosen it at random. “Can I have this video?”
“Sure, Miss.”
I looked at the movie menu. Nothing appealed.
“You know that the Bombay film industry is the largest in the world,” I said.
“No shit?” Carol didn’t sound interested.
“Bollywood. It makes thousands of films a year. Soppy musicals, mostly.”
“People like musicals. I guess that’s why they make so many, Fin. Why so patronizing?”
Was I? Maybe I was.
I picked up my sleeper suit and amenity bag. “I’m going to get changed.”
When I got back, Carol had laid out her seat flat into a bed. All I could see of her was a small tassel of hair poking from the blanket she’d wrapped around herself. She was shut in and I was shut out. Her movie lay on the armrest.
I flipped out my TV screen and put on the headphones. The news. I pressed the program key quickly.
Then the food started to arrive. White linen was placed before me, an armory of silverware, condiments, a saucer of scrolled butter.
Two hours catered for.
I nursed a brandy balloon half full of Remy XO. I drained it. I would sleep now.
But I couldn’t. I tried all the positions, the seat was perfectly accommodating, but sleep wouldn’t come.
I sat up and looked around. Everyone else was either watching a movieor sleeping. I set my seat upright and picked the two black files off the floor.
The deal file, Project Badla. I put it back down; I knew its contents, I’d written most of it.
Terry’s file. A small white sticker on the spine:India, Reg. & Misc.Regulatory and Miscellaneous, I guessed, opening it.
A table of contents. Christ, the man must’ve had seventy files in his room. Were they all indexed? Probably.
The first part, theReg.part. I scanned the list of items: the stock exchanges, listing rules, capital raising, the money markets. The menu snaked down most of the page. Worthy but boring.
I knew the devil was in the detail. A fitting residence for the Prince of Darkness. Nobody ever went there, except attorneys.
Part two.Misc.Just one item: press cuttings. Living, breathing material, at least by comparison.
I heaved over Part One and started to riffle through the newspaper articles, all nea
tly photocopied with the date and source noted in black ink on the top of the page.Times of India, Times of London, New York Times, Financial Times, Timemagazine.Wall Street Journal, Herald Tribune,and its racier international counterpart,America Daily, Asia Week.Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta papers, and a whole lot more places I’d never heard of.
Coverage of deals mostly, some with Clay & Westminster involved, others that Terry must have found interesting, instructive. Worthy of his archive. Then a separately tabbed section.
Scams.
Dozens of them. Scams about illegal political contributions, scams about funding of insurgents, scams on the stock market, scams in forests, scams on public highways. Scams with names: the Bofors Scam, the Urea Scam. Scams by Non-Resident Indians. Scams against them.
Then the dark roots of scam, the offshore havens. The real ones first: Cayman, Cyprus, Antilles, Mauritius, Liberia. Then the made-up places, conjured by mad conartists who wanted their own realm and some sucker to pay for it: Utopia, the Kingdom of Enen Kio, Melchizidek. Crazy. How were people duped by these shysters? But they were. The lure of above-market returns, secrecy, and more besides.
And then,Gold.The glint of a word. Just a short article, more of asnippet. How Indian workers in the Gulf—waiters, engineers, taxi drivers, servants of the oil-rich—were used as couriers for running gold into India. How they would take their maximum allowance back home with them, then hand it over to middlemen—the havala traders—who would then sell it into the market. The couriers were paid a few rupees, the financiers of the gold made a fortune. Nod and wink illegality, low-grade villainy. The Indian government got the customs duty on the gold brought in, so they didn’t appear to mind too much.
But my father had minded, it seemed. He had minded himself into a despair of indigestion; an inedible compromise nestling like gristle in his half-eaten file.
I couldn’t quite believe there wasn’t more to it. Had a marginally illegal traffic of gold really driven Dad to the steps of the Towers of Silence?
I turned to Carol. Sleeping soundly.
Our lives had joined in bed. Where else did they join?
JJ Carlson. For each of us, JJ had been a catapult into another world where the old assumptions didn’t hold. It struck me that the events of five years before—my father’s Fall—hadn’t made me reevaluate anything. It had beenhisproblem, not mine. Something for my mother to sort out, not me. But now . . . The power to damage that had lain dormant all this time, was now stirring, was teaming up with JJ, coalescing with the contemporary, whispering with the conspirators in my chart. It was saying that it was time to conclude unfinished business.
I asked for a Coke. I let the bubbles bruise the roof of my mouth. Cleanse it. I sucked on the ice.
I looked at Carol again. Maybe she wasn’t sleeping at all. Perhaps, under the Delta blanket, her eyes bulged with terror, her heart pumped guilt, and her intestines knotted as terminally as a child’s shoelace. She seemed to edging away from me and a torrent of something was washing away the bridge between us.
“Are you awake?” I whispered as loudly as possible.
She moaned slightly and twisted her body into another position. Then nothing.
Terry’s file slid off my lap. I didn’t reach down for it; there had been enough work for one flight.
Finally, I felt like I might sleep.
TWENTY-SEVEN
You’re weird.”
Carol held out an orange juice in front of me. Her hair was scraped back into a ponytail, she had makeup on, and she’d changed into jeans and T-shirt, her sleeper suit now discarded on the floor.
“Why weird?” I managed. I felt like shit and the orange juice didn’t help much. Acid poured on acid.
She seemed to check that nobody was looking and ran her hand along the stubble on my chin.
“We spend five thousand dollars for a seat up front that turns into a queen-size bed and you sleep upright.” She laughed. “Is it some Indian thing, like a bed of nails?”
I looked at my watch—I’d slept nearly nine hours, best sleep in a week.
“You missed breakfast or second dinner or whatever,” she said. “Anyway, I got you this orange juice to revive you.” She twitched her nose. “You smell of booze a little.”
I called the stewardess and asked for another Coke. I let the bubbles blitz away in my mouth.
“Did you watch your movie?” I asked.
Carol nodded.
“Any good?”
“Uh-huh. What I needed, at least.”
The plane dipped slightly, the engines altered their tune.
Carol pulled up the blind. It was black outside.
“I guess we’re coming down.”
I’d forgotten how hard it could rain. By comparison, New York managed only a thin drizzle. This was the real thing. A chain mail downpour.
Our driver waded across the road outside the arrivals hall of Sahar Airport, parting a sea of people and water before us, trying to hold an umbrella above Carol, ignoring me. Young boys skipped around us like tadpoles, offering porterage, Chiclets, hotels, cars, their sister, anything our foreign hearts desired. Our driver cursed them, swatted them away. We edged through a flotilla of yellow and black Ambassador taxis, their drivers supervising the loading of impossible cargoes of luggage and humanity.
Five years earlier, I’d sat with my mother on the bench-hard back-seat of one of those cars and tried to explain where we wanted to go. The driver had told us wherehewanted us to go. The impasse of savvy local versus gullible new arrival.
This time it was simple. We were going to the Taj Hotel. The driver knew it, we didn’t have to explain anything. But the chaos was the same, the smell the same: damp barbecue laced with spice and sweat.
We got into the car, a Mercedes S Class. A huge metal haven made cozy by the sound of crashing rain on its roof, its enormous single windshield wiper only affording us stroboscopic visions of the drenched world outside.
“This is neat,” said Carol as the driver accelerated through a barrier of slow-moving trolleys.
It didn’t feel neat to me.
I wanted to talk: not the guidebook talk of an old Bombay hand pointing out smudged landmarks through the driving rain. I wanted to talk about Carol and me, where we were headed. I wanted to talk about Project Badla. JJ. My chart. My father. My fear. I wanted to fill our big German car with the comforting noise of talk. But I couldn’t. The driver sat in his seat like a huge black microphone, a recording machine that would carry the talk to somewhere it shouldn’t go. Paranoia? Maybe, but it gagged me nonetheless.
Carol looked out of the window, rubbing circles in the condensation, her neck turning with anything that caught her interest. Totally absorbed. I loved the way she folded herself into whatever she was doing, how her body found just the right position and how that position resulted in contours that made me want to hold her.
After a while she sat back, shook her head in disbelief. “How do all those people live like that on the streets?”
How indeed? How could Carol or I have any real conception of the day-to-day struggle of the poor in a city like Bombay?
“They just do, because they have to,” I said.
“I expect that a lot of them come in from the rural areas, don’t they? They’re lured by the city.” She paused. “But why do they stay? Why doesn’t someone tell them not to come in the first place?”
I didn’t know. It was stupid, that’s all, but there was even less for them in the countryside.
Maybe every society had its own analogy. I said, “Why do waitresses from Kansas pack up and go to LA, expecting to walk into Paramount and pick up the lead on the first day?”
Carol thought for a moment. “They believe in the dream,” she said. “And sometimes it really happens. Like those diets you know won’t work but buy into all the same. Like lottery tickets. People will always buy into hope, however hopeless.”
Maybe she was right. I conjured the image of Pablo Tochera crying “eureka�
� and chewing his nails while he waited for me to arrive at the hotel. Then he’d call me and tell me he’d sorted it out. All of it. A more realistic scene would be one with Pablo clutching his stomach with one hand and his heart with the other in the back of an ambulance on the way to the ER. A direct result of my telephonecall to him from the gate at the airport to tell him where I was going.
Carol rubbed a circle in the condensation on her window and went back to world watching.
“Look. A beach,” she said after a while.
That would be Chowpatty Beach. We were getting near the hotel. I leaned over Carol’s shoulder and looked through her porthole: a wasteland of hard compacted sand, the sea invisible beyond it, the heights of Malabar rising from one side of the sandy cove, the lights of the millionaire apartment blocks winking confidently above the treetops.
She pointed at the heights. “What’s that place?”
I could smell her as my chin rested on her shoulder. After a thirteen hour flight she still smelled good.
“Where the rich live. The Hanging Gardens are up there too.”
“The Hanging Gardens,” she repeated in a whisper. “How exotic.”
And next to the Hanging Gardens were the Towers of Silence. Dark stone amphitheaters for the Parsi dead. Hidden by a dense screen of trees, seen only by priests and vultures.
My father had wanted to die in one of these crumbling cauldrons. What madness had made him want to go anywhere near the place?
Carol sat back again and stared ahead of her, through the windshield.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“What for?”
She touched my hand, withdrawing quickly. “This. Bombay. Your father. It must be really hard for you. I should have been more sensitive.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “I can cope with it.”
Fifteen minutes later we drove along the huge floodlit frontage of the Taj Hotel. Carol craned her neck to get a view of a crazy three-domed Victorian cathedral to the hotel industry.
Walls of Silence Page 17