by Bajaj, Karan
Johnny Gone Down
KARAN BAJAJ
HarperCollins Publishers India
To my parents
for always supporting Johnny and his friends
So now, he is a legend when he would have
preferred to be a man.
Prologue
‘Stop staring,’ said the woman through clenched teeth.
The little boy, presumably her son, looked away reluctantly. He fixed his attention outside the window as the train sped through the vast, arid plains of central India.
My son would look like him perhaps, I thought suddenly. If he were alive, that is. In the part of the world where he was growing up, infant mortality is as common as UFO sightings in America. The son I abandoned without seeing his face, feeling his breath, or touching his fingers - yet another life I had destroyed in my Faustian journey. It didn’t hurt to think about it any more. Nothing hurt. I felt nothing, I thought nothing; just the moment now, the journey here. I would be crushed under the weight of my regrets if I allowed myself the luxury.
The boy, angelic face streaked with soot, soon began to tire of looking outside and started stealing glances at me once again.
‘His left arm is missing,’ he burst out finally. ‘He is an amputee, Mama, isn’t he? Amputated! The boy, seven, maybe eight years old, had clearly learnt a new word and was beside himself with joy to see a live example in front of him.
His mother, a tall, young, big-boned lady with a firm, determined jaw and hard cheekbones, pounced on him, slapping him across his face.
‘It’s all right. Please,’ I said. ‘He’s right. I don’t have a left arm.’ I took out my stump from my coat to show him.
It seemed strange to speak in Hindi after so many years. I had been gone far too long. I was back now, and it wasn’t a triumphant return by any means, but this was home.
Everything had changed, yet nothing had changed.
‘I’m really sorry,’ said the mother as the boy escaped her grasp, staring at me in frank admiration.
‘Not at all. He is very observant,’ I said, managing to smile at the boy.
His face lit up. He now had the licence to stare openly at me, and his eyes darted from my stump to the punctured holes in my right wrist where they’d forced in the tubes.
‘Are you going to Delhi?’ asked the mother, still frowning at her boy.
I nodded.
‘You live there?’
‘I used to,’ I replied. ‘A while ago.’
‘You live in Bombay now?’ she asked.
I smiled. If I had missed anything in the twenty years I’d been gone, it was this uniquely Indian gift for immediate familiarity, the unabashed probing followed by a quick judgement on another’s choices. In another life, I’d probably have warmed up to the interrogation. Now, every question unleashed an avalanche of memories - none of them pleasant.
‘No,’ I said shortly. ‘I am coming from overseas.’
A sophisticated but defeated looking middle-aged man, the fourth occupant of our second-class Bombay-Delhi train compartment, buried in his newspaper all this while, perked up suddenly. He put down his newspaper, adjusted his thick spectacles and stared at me, his thick lips and dark moustache quivering, perhaps in anticipation of a debate which would ease the monotony of the twenty-four-hour journey in the hot Indian summer.
‘What’s the use of going abroad nowadays?’ he said. ‘Everything is in India.’
He picked up his newspaper again and pointed to the picture of a short, dark man on the front page. ‘Look, Rahman is going to compose music on Broadway. Is he any less than Elton John? Is Shah Rukh Khan any less than Brad Pitt? All of Hollywood is coming to Bollywood now. India is going to be the next superpower. Why go anywhere else?’
I nodded noncommittally. None of these names sounded familiar. I had just risen from the dead. In the world I came from, there were no movies, no music, no life. Only time and darkness, boundless and pervasive, enough to last several lifetimes and then some more.
‘How long were you abroad? Where were you?’ the man asked; tall, erect body with just the beginnings of a paunch shifting as he spoke.
‘Twenty-five years,’ I said, wishing he would keep quiet. ‘I’ve been in different places.’
‘Twenty-five years!’ he exclaimed. ‘If I were to guess, you must be my age, forty or forty-five years old. That means you’ve been away since you were, what, fifteen or twenty.’
Unconsciously, he appraised me from top to bottom, glancing disdainfully at my worn-out shoes, frayed coat, unshaven face, amputated arm and long, matted hair streaked with grey.
‘What did you get from it?’ he asked.
Suddenly, I wanted to be alone in the darkness of my thoughts. I knew he didn’t mean to offend; he was just a bored, curious man, intending to provoke, discuss, argue - it helped kill the time. But I had nothing to say, no desire for this conversation, or any other conversation for that matter.
‘Arre,’ said the woman, breaking in before I got the chance to mutter a response, ‘not everything is about getting and giving, gaining and losing, victory and defeat. Imagine living twenty years in different countries! How much experience he has had; how many lives he has lived! Compared to him, we are to not like frogs in the well, jumping about in our tiny worlds without ever seeing the light outside.’
‘The deer wandered restlessly from forest forest, searching for the divine fragrance, knowing that the musk rested in his own belly,’ the man said smugly. ‘The only light that needs to shine is the one in your own mind.’
‘You are a strange one,’ said the woman condescendingly. ‘Not all who wander are lost. Besides, he must come back home to India almost every year. That’s what my sister in the US does. She spends more time with my parents than I do, though I live in India.’ She turned to me. ‘Don’t you?’
I shook my head.
‘How often do you come back?’ she asked.
‘Never,’ I said quietly.
‘You didn’t come to India even once in twenty-five years?’ she said incredulously.
I shook my head again. ‘I didn’t get a chance.’
The man looked at her triumphantly.
‘So what? He must have liked it there,’ she said defensively. She pointed to another picture in the forgotten newspaper. ‘Look at this woman. Would she ever want to come back? She is the CEO of the biggest company in the world. Like me, she is an MBA, but unlike me, she was smart enough to leave India. Women can’t get anywhere in this country, but look at her.’
I looked at the picture out of curiosity - and recognized her at once. She hadn’t changed much: the hard, determined look in her bright eyes; the angular face; the short hair that was so unfashionable back then - but she hadn’t cared.
‘I march to my own drummer,’ she used to say, and we would laugh because she played the drums in the college band, the only woman amidst the stoned grunge rockers.
Even her lovemaking was deliberate and measured and afterwards, when I would collapse on top of her, exhausted, she would methodically explain the latest positions she had read about in The Joy of Sex that she wanted to try next time. I had never seen her or spoken to her since that day in 1975 when we graduated. I never thought about how my life might have turned out if we had still been together. There had been too many wrong turns and missed opportunities for me to contemplate just one alternate universe.
‘Why are you smiling?’ asked the man, startling me a little.
‘Nothing,’ I replied, abashed by the sudden, clear memory.
‘She isn’t bad looking,’ he conceded.
‘She is the CEO of the biggest company in the world; Fortune’s most powerful woman; the first woman to break the American glass ceiling - bei
ng an Indian, that too - and all you can talk about is how she looks. No wonder you are in a second-class compartment while she travels in her corporate jet,’ said the woman in disgust.
The young boy, delighted that someone else was getting a lashing from his mother for a change, smiled conspiratorially at me.
‘And what about you, madam?’ the man said with a smirk. ‘You say you are an MBA like her. Why aren’t you travelling in your Gulfstream then? Some people are just lucky.’
‘She was in my class at MIT. She deserves all her success,’ I muttered, coming to the woman’s rescue.
There was a sudden silence as they both looked at me with expressions of absolute contempt (him) and pity (her). It was so ridiculous a statement coming from an obviously broke, middle-aged loser, that it didn’t even merit an acknowledgement or expression of disbelief. I bore them no ill-will; it sounded absurd even to me.
‘Well,’ said the man after a while. ‘I guess I should go back to my newspaper.’
My unintended comment had spoilt his moment by sweeping the discussion into the ludicrous. What was the fun in engaging in a debate with a lunatic?
The man opened his newspaper, hemming and hawing from time to time. The woman leaned back in her seat, only, this time she held her child closer. I had proven to be as unreliable as I looked. She watched me from the corner of her eye, keeping another eye on the red emergency chain above, ready to pull it if I acted suspicious.
To make them feel comfortable, I got up and made my way towards the door. No one in the crowded passage gave me a second glance as I shuffled past. This was a second-class train compartment in India; every face hid a thousand tragedies, and it took more to surprise a person than an armless man with a large, ugly scar on his face. I opened the door and sat quietly on the steps, wondering whether this was - and secretly hoping it was - the last journey of my life. I was tired. I had been running far too long, though I had nothing to show for it. The train swept past the landscape, dry, hot wind blowing against my face. Dhaulagiri, Ratnagiri, Chopan, Chunar, Aurangabad: names from another lifetime when the past wasn’t as desolate and the future still held hope. Twilight gave way to dusk and finally, the welcome blackness of night arrived as I continued to stare into the invisible landscape, devoid of thought, wondering only sparingly how I had ended up here on my fortieth birthday. It wasn’t meant to be this way, I thought briefly as I closed my eyes, although I knew sleep was an impossible luxury. I had been an insomniac for years, unable to get rid of the images of a happier past with its unfinished stories, lost chances and wrong turns. I had everything, I thought, and I threw it all away.
‘Oh my God! Are you crazy?’
Inadvertently, my hand reached for the Glock concealed in my coat pocket. It took me a second to recognize her as the woman from the compartment. I relaxed and took my hand out of my pocket.
She didn’t seem to notice the movement.
‘You will die here,’ she said. ‘This is summer in India, not California. Such a strong, hot Loo and you are sitting on the steps wearing this heavy overcoat. Shut the door and come inside!’
I stood up and pushed the door close.
She stared at me. ‘How did you get up? You didn’t even touch the floor with your hand. What are you? A kung fu master?’
Flashes from the past. Ten years in Rio de Janeiro, trained to fight like a dog - or a drug lord - by the best fighters in the business.
‘I’ve had to learn,’ I said.
‘Ufff… Can’t you close the door properly? I’m getting scalded. Aren’t you human?’ Another flash. Minnesota, homeless, sleeping under a bridge, shivering in my thin shirt and torn pants as the Arctic wind cut me in shreds. The body adapts, I had learnt.
‘You adapt,’ I told her.
She stared at me for a while. ‘I like you,’ she said finally. ‘I’m sorry I reacted that way inside. Did you really go to school with Lavanya Varma at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston?’
MIT. Placid, innocent, the lull before the angry storms that hadn’t stopped raging since.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I replied.
She looked curiously at me. ‘How did you lose your arm?’
Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The most dismal time of my life. Not because I hadn’t seen worse after, but because I was young then. I was twenty-two. I was invincible. I wasn’t supposed to get hurt. Once again, I felt that hollow, empty feeling in the pit of my stomach when I recalled the gangrene that ate up my hand.
‘You ask too many questions,’ I told her.
She laughed, the open, honest laughter of someone who has never known loss.
‘What to do? I am the cliché ofa bored housewife.’ She smiled petulantly, no longer compelled to play the model parent now that her kid was tucked in for the night. ‘I let go my job after Raja was born. My husband travels all the time, but he still doesn’t make any money.’
Strangers on a train, I thought. She was desperate to reveal herself to any willing ear and drop every mask, secure in the knowledge that there would never be a next time.
She waited with an expectant look on her face, as if wishing me to ask questions, to probe, or even to justify myself.
I didn’t say a word. Don’t ask, don’t judge, just accept - the first lesson I had learnt in the monastery. Eight years wasted; no monk could have walked farther away from the Buddha’s path than I had.
‘Sometimes I feel caged by my circumstances,’ she continued.
I shuddered as I recalled the small, dark cage where I had counted seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years, chained to the wall.
‘It’s getting late,’ I said.
She looked disappointed as I began to shuffle away from the train door.
‘Stay for a while. What’s early? What’s late? Do you have any work tomorrow in Delhi?’ She looked at me, half contemptuous, half teasing. What work could someone like you have that can’t wait?
‘Tomorrow is important,’ I said with a mirthless smile as I limped my way back to the compartment. ‘A matter of life and death.’
Another sleepless night staring into the darkness. I felt the train rumble beneath me, its motion elegant and rhythmic, a mockery of my own irregular journey. I had been running for twenty-five years, yet I was behind where I started. I closed my eyes and waited.
‘Are you asleep?’
She was back in the compartment. A tall woman, the top of her head almost reached the upper berth where I lay, and her hair brushed lightly against my face. A sweet fragrance filled the air. A familiar fragrance, a whiff of patchouli and sandalwood.
Lara.
Her memory struck me with a crushing, almost physical force. A dull pain seemed to pass from my scrotum to the inside of my stomach.
‘You are awake,’ the woman whispered.
She bent down, possibly to check if her son was still asleep. Seemingly reassured, she looked up at me again.
‘You aren’t sleeping. Do you want to talk for a bit?’ she asked.
I wished for her sake that loneliness would be the most serious problem she ever faced in her life.
‘It’s late,’ I repeated.
‘Not that late,’ she answered.
‘It’s 2:20 a.m. Isn’t that late for you?’
She checked her watch quickly and looked at me, a surprised expression in her narrowed eyes. ‘2:21,’ she said. ‘How did you know the time? You don’t wear a watch, you don’t have a cellphone, you… you don’t even have a bag.’
I didn’t say anything. I had counted every second in the years spent in captivity; old habits die hard.
‘You don’t even have a bag,’ she repeated slowly. ‘How can anyone travel from Delhi to Bombay without a bag?’
‘Look,’ I said. ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but I really need to sleep.’
I turned on my side and stared unblinking into the darkness. Forgive me, I said silently to her, but every word you say seems to bury me in an avalanche of regret - and after
all these years, I have lost the will to claw my way out again.
The train arrived on time at the New Delhi railway station the next day, and I searched for the handler among the hundreds of bewildered travellers, deformed beggars and smiling urchins. I had no idea what he looked like but I spotted him at once. He looked as I had expected him to look: short, squat, inconspicuous, of indeterminate ethnicity - as likely to be South American as Indian. He blended into the crowd easily; his eyes, intent and sharp, took in everything like a chameleon ready to pounce on his prey. He was trained by the best, and I knew that beneath his bulky, baggy shirt lay hard, taut muscles trained in advanced hand-to-hand combat and sharp shooting. He spotted me simultaneously and raised his left eyebrow. I responded to his gesture and walked up to him.
‘Good journey,’ he said, more an assertion than a question.
In our world, any journey you came back from alive was a good journey. Expertly, he guided me through the crowds. A cut here, a turn there and we were out of the station and into the waiting car. The car, nondescript from the outside, was fitted with all the equipment an operative needs to perform successfully. He rolled up the dividing screen between the driver and us, made a quick phone call in an unknown language from the phone affixed to the door, punched a few keys into his custom palm pilot, and we were on our way.
‘You’ve played before?’ he asked, his voice raspy, guttural and laboured.
I looked at his neck closely and spotted the wound. The bullet had probably punctured his lungs.
I shook my head.
‘It’s just like in the movies, except there is no need for drama,’ he said. ‘Don’t put on a performance. Just take the gun when it’s your turn, pull the trigger and pass it back.’
I nodded.
‘No drama,’ he repeated. ‘They’ve paid to see blood, they get blood. Nothing more, nothing less. This isn’t a circus.’
‘Okay,’ I said, glancing out the window to see roads and highways, large, cold buildings, faceless cars and the absence of shantytowns under the bridges. Twenty-five years, I reminded myself, things change.