JOHNNY GONE DOWN

by Bajaj, Karan

  Unwittingly, I had saved the life of a Brazilian slumlord, a smalltime Don. My only exposure to the mafia thus far had been the Godfather movies, but this setup didn’t seem as majestic. Instead of protecting the defenceless damsel-in-distress Lucia, Marco had shot her in the feet; the expensive suits of the movie Don’s henchmen had given way to tattoos, crosses and chains; and Marlon Brando’s meaningful pauses had been replaced with Marco’s wild laughter. The only thing I was sure of was that if I tried to escape, they would make me an ‘offer I couldn’t refuse’, and I didn’t particularly feel the desire to negotiate terms just now.

  We stopped in front of a large brick building that stood incongruously amidst several small wooden huts. The building’s façade was covered with colourful, arresting images of crying children, pregnant women and young men snorting drugs.

  ‘All done by the local favela artists,’ said Marco with a measure of pride.

  We entered the two-storied house and I was immediately struck by its contrast to the world outside. Fully air-conditioned, with elegant furniture, a variety of electronics, and tasteful art lining the walls.

  ‘You live here alone?’ I asked.

  Marco nodded. ‘Yes, but this whole street is ours. You don’t have a place, right?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Many strange creatures come here but I don’t think I’ve seen a stranger one,’ he said, more to himself than to me. ‘What work do you do, men?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I told you, I don’t have a job.’

  He laughed. ‘You have no house, no job, no shoes, no suitcase, not even an arm, men. Yet, you don’t look broke. You seem like a guy who should be living in an expensive apartment facing the Copacabana beach, but you wander around barefoot in Rio’s most feared favela, wearing circus clothes. You are not from Brazil yet I can’t recognize the accent, though I deal with all kinds of foreigners. Did you just drop off another planet, men?’

  ‘Something like that,’ I said.

  At this, he laughed even more and sprayed the beer he was drinking on the carefully upholstered wall. I noticed he had no pictures on the wall, neither of himself nor his family, and I felt a certain kinship with him.

  ‘What are you good at?’ he asked me.

  I was good at staring at walls, especially those covered with blood, I could sit in my faeces smelling decomposing bodies in airless rooms for years without going insane, I was something of a pro at escaping from jungles, I could survive without food or water for extended periods of time, and I could meditate without speaking to a soul for hours on end. Quite a skill set to have, wouldn’t you say? Even if it was completely, utterly useless.

  ‘I’m good at numbers,’ I said, suddenly reminded of my time at MIT.

  ‘You are not serious, men!’ he said. ‘I have enough thugs, what I don’t have is a good contador.’

  I looked at him blankly.

  ‘What do you call it in English… yes, an accountant,’ he said.

  The Buddha forbade me from working in any profession that hurt others - robbery and arms, for instance. A Brazilian Donos was likely to deal only in things that hurt others, yet I had somehow taken a liking to him despite everything I had seen. Or perhaps I was just too tired of moving from place to place rudderless, without an anchor.

  ‘What business are you in?’ I asked.

  ‘Is this your interview or mine?’ He laughed, the chains around his neck jiggling. Then, more seriously, he added, ‘How does that matter? You just do the numbers, we do the rest. You don’t need to know or care, men.’

  Why not, I thought. It would only be for a short while, just enough to earn my way back to the US, after which I would have the means to walk on the Buddha’s eightfold path once again.

  ‘Okay,’ I said quickly before I could change my mind.

  ‘Great.’ He smiled and gestured with his hand. ‘You can stay here.’

  ‘Here?’ I asked. ‘Won’t that disturb you?’

  He laughed again. ‘The work I do requires no concentration. Besides, I change my address every night to fox the policia and the local goons. I rarely sleep in my bed.’

  So he wasn’t as cool as he pretended to be. He must value his life to change his address every night. It made me feel more comfortable.

  ‘There are three rooms here,’ he continued. ‘One is for my personal use, one is for the business; you can take the third. Stay as long as you like. I will pay you anything you think is fair, men.’

  I was suddenly overwhelmed with gratitude. An hour ago, I had no money, no job, no home, and no future; now, I seemed to have a little bit of everything.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, shaking his hand. ‘I won’t overstay my welcome.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘You saved my life. You are my guest.’

  ‘Can you show me the account registers, cash slips, receipts, whatever you have?’ I asked him. I was determined to be the best accountant Marco had ever seen.

  He laughed. ‘Everything can wait in Rio, especially work. Why don’t you get ready? I will plan a small welcome party in your honour, men.’

  I was out of the monastery but the same uneasy feeling of living someone else’s life crept over me again. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, was it? I was supposed to be a white-collar cubicle-dweller in an engineering firm, with a house in an American suburb and a sweet, pregnant Indian wife. Why was I being welcomed by a drug lord into Rio de Janeiro’s most violent slum after spending ten years, first as a Cambodian genocide survivor, then as a Buddhist monk? Just what had happened? And what else was going to happen? More fundamentally, who was I?

  ‘…an idiot.’

  ‘Huh?’ I said.

  ‘Where are you lost?’ said Marco. ‘Go get ready now. You don’t want to go dressed like an idiot, men.’

  The small party turned out to be at least a few hundred people.

  ‘What is this?’ I asked in awe.

  Fresh from my first hot shower in years, dressed in Marco’s shiny shirt and tight pants and escorted by the gang in a Sedan, I was staring at a large football field with beautiful men and women dressed in slick, skimpy clothes, gyrating to the beats of the buoyant music coming from the thirty-foot-large speakers placed in every corner of the field.

  ‘Favela funk. We organize it every couple of weekends,’ said Marco as we got out of the car. ‘You got a hell of a lot to learn about rock and roll, boy.’

  The DJ, who was scratching and spinning records on the stage where the elaborate music system was set up, saw our entourage and shouted Marco’s name on the microphone. A huge cheer went up from the crowd. Much to my discomfiture, Marco dragged me onto the stage.

  ‘Jakeira knows how to party,’ he shouted into the mike.

  There were whoops of agreement from the crowd, and a few sharp gunshots.

  ‘Today, I want to welcome our friend from nowhere to Jakeira,’ Marco said and put his arm around my shoulder. ‘Welcome… Buddha, men.’

  I cringed at my new name. I had violated almost every tenet of Buddhism within hours of leaving the monastery.

  The crowd began chanting. ‘Buddha… Buddha… Buddha.’

  Marco dragged me off the stage and thrust a large glass into my hand.

  ‘Soak it up,’ he said. ‘It’s a Caipirinha. A few swigs and you can start a new religion, men.’

  So be it, I thought, perhaps the tenets of this religion would be easier to follow. I took a sip. It tasted sweet, tangy and harmless, so I took a larger sip. Someone grabbed Marco by the shoulder and he disappeared into the crowd. People came over and introduced themselves to me, slapped me enthusiastically on the back and left.

  I stood where I was, gulping down the sweet drink and watching the sensuous movements of the attractive, bronze-bodied couples dancing in front of me. Expertly, they swayed their hips and tapped their feet one in front of the other with the man twirling the woman in his arms.

  His arms. I suddenly felt sorry for myself. I would never be abl
e to dance this way.

  Someone handed me another drink and I took it happily as I continued to stare, as though hypnotized, at the Samba dancers. Maybe Lara was right, I thought. Love and passion, hope and longing, loss and redemption - these were what kept us alive. How could denial of the most basic human expressions be the greater truth? Lara, elusive and ethereal with her warm eyes, slight smile, long hair - our fleeting acquaintance probably meant nothing to her. The music picked up tempo and the couples grooved harder, hip to hip, fondling, even groping a little.

  I was thirty and I had achieved nothing, I thought suddenly. I had never even been in love, unless I counted the puppy love for Lavanya in college and lusting after a model who was unfortunate enough to sit next to me on a flight. I couldn’t even claim that I had let go of love to pursue my career; I had nothing to show on that front either. I felt very sorry for myself indeed.

  ‘You dance with me, Buddha?’

  A young woman with curly hair and smooth brown skin walked up to me. She was about a foot shorter than my six foot plus and looked stunning in her silky red dress.

  Who was I kidding, I thought. Just about everyone looked stunning to me. Either this country had the most gorgeous women in the world or I had lost the ability to discriminate because of my long dry spell.

  ‘Eu falar Portuguese,’ I said. ‘I speak Portuguese.’

  ‘Very sexy,’ she slurred. ‘Come dance with me.’

  I pointed to my missing arm.

  She shrugged and dragged me to the floor.

  Alex hooted and handed me another glass of Caipirinha. Balancing the glass in my hand, I drank quickly and followed her lead. She pressed her hips tightly against mine, and I found myself shamefully aroused. Round and round we twirled as I tried to match move for move until I ended up tippling the glass over her in an effort to keep pace.

  I watched the alcohol splash on her face and mingle with her sweat. It trickled down her neck and I turned away.

  ‘Lick me clean,’ she urged.

  I hesitated. ‘I can’t do that,’ I said unconvincingly.

  She pushed herself closer. ‘You made this mess. You need to clean it up.’

  I leaned forward and licked her neck gently. She kissed me softly on my earlobes. I couldn’t hold back any longer. Someone, probably Alex, cheered. Another glass was handed to me, the music picked up a notch, and we began to spin.

  ‘Not bad. He has a decent one for such a tall guy.’

  ‘Do tall guys have little ones?’

  ‘Mostly. And I think he is Asian; Asians have the smallest.’

  ‘Does it work as well as it looks, Maria?’

  I woke up with a start to find myself lying stark naked in an unfamiliar room, spooning an equally naked woman. I stared at her soft brown body in confusion, shrieks of laughter ringing in my ears. Marco, Alex and Maki were standing in front of us, fully dressed in sleeveless T-shirts and rugged jeans. I moved to cover myself and the woman, who had just stirred awake.

  She stretched and swung her legs off the bed unselfconsciously.

  ‘Bastards,’ she said to Marco and the others. ‘Will you ever grow up?’

  She didn’t make any attempt to cover herself, and I found myself aroused by her plump, curvaceous figure. Everyone howled, and she smiled.

  ‘You were not bad,’ she said. ‘You need help with Mr Johnson there any time, you know where to come.’

  Only, I didn’t. I had no memory at all of last night, except thrusting for an eternity and her writhing, moaning body underneath.

  The woman put on her red dress from yesterday.

  Much to everyone’s amusement, she came and playfully stroked my penis.

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ she said. ‘My name is Maria.’

  She left the room and I stared in embarrassment at Marco and his friends.

  ‘Can you show me the accounts please?’ I said in a rush.

  They laughed well into the morning.

  Chastened, showered, and with a fresh vow of Buddhist detachment, I knocked on the door of the room between mine and Marco’s - his office, as he called it. Alex opened the door. He had a big gun in his hand and a bigger frown on his face. He relaxed on seeing me and quickly pulled me inside.

  Five or six children, barely ten or twelve years old, were on the floor with their hands in heaps of white powder that had been placed on a rubber mat. They were taking powder from one pile and mixing it in with an identical looking powder in another pile.

  ‘Friends, this is Buddha,’ said Marco, who was standing near the window, a rifle slung over each shoulder. The children looked up in acknowledgment and went back to mixing the powder.

  ‘Mixing cocaine with talcum powder,’ Marco said matter-of-factly. ‘Important for the accountant to know - we get it at five hundred dollars a kilo, we add another kilo of talcum powder and sell it for a thousand dollars a kilo. What is our net profit, men?’

  ‘Three hundred per cent, assuming the talcum powder costs nothing,’ I said automatically.

  Marco looked at Alex triumphantly. ‘Didn’t I tell you? You would have taken a year to give me that answer. It took me a month to figure it out myself. We have a genius here, men.’

  ‘You deal in drugs?’ I asked quietly.

  Why was I surprised? Did I expect a Brazilian slumlord to deal in mutual funds, treasury bonds and credit derivatives? But dealing in drugs and arms was the lowest of sins in Buddhist teaching, was I really going to fall so low? I didn’t say anything but my disapproval must have been obvious.

  ‘We use this money to fund everything in the favelas - water, electricity, schools, roads, community projects,’ said Alex defensively. ‘In Brazil, the government doesn’t care about slums. Poverty is a disease here; if you are infected by it, you are shunned like a leper. It’s only because of the work we do that people in the community can live like humans.’

  Great, I thought, modern-day Robin Hoods. Marco, tattoos shining on his muscular arm, looked about as credible in the role of Mother Teresa helping the poor as I did as a Buddhist monk.

  ‘Don’t judge us before you know us, men,’ said Marco. ‘You don’t understand how things work around here.’

  I was about to tell him I had seen worse in India when I stopped. He was right. Secluded in my army schools and cantonments, how much of India’s poverty had I really experienced outside the voyeuristic school trips? The context mattered. Hadn’t I once almost willed Ishmael dead so I could eat his bowl of rice? From the little I had seen of Rio, the eruption of violence seemed as common as my frequent crises of faith in the monastery. Who was I to judge the impact of growing up in surroundings like these when I had spent eight years in meditation to get over two years of being locked up in a cell?

  ‘You don’t need to be involved in the business, men,’ said Marco. ‘You just look at the numbers. Make sure everything is fair and square.’

  What could ever be fair in this business, I wondered. But then, which business was fair?

  ‘This is the account register,’ Marco said.

  I took it in spite of myself. Numbers were scrawled uncertainly across every page. A few of the pages were torn in half and others blotted with water (or Caipirinha perhaps?) and casual bloodstains.

  ‘It’s a mess,’ he said, echoing my thoughts.

  ‘How do you keep track of the money?’ I asked.

  ‘Money comes, money goes,’ said Marco philosophically. ‘When it comes, we buy stuff; when it runs out, we don’t.’

  ‘What about your investments?’ I asked. ‘Is there a separate register for that?’

  ‘In our life, there are only two roads,’ he said. ‘Prison or death. What should we invest for?’

  ‘For the favela you take care of, perhaps? What happens when you go to prison or die?’ I said a little testily.

  ‘Look at these runts,’ said Marco, gesturing at the young boys, who had finished mixing the coke and were now packing it into small plastic bags. They looked up dutifully. ‘After me,
it’s them, and so it goes. No one is indispensable in this business, men.’

  The realization of the impermanence of life, I thought; the Buddha would have been proud.

  ‘Let me study this,’ I said and picked up the register.

  For the little time I was here, I would do my best to serve their needs, I decided. I began to walk out of the room.

  ‘Wait,’ he said. He opened a cupboard full of guns. ‘Choose your weapon.’

  No, not this, I thought.

  ‘I don’t need to shoot,’ I said firmly.

  ‘Self-defence,’ he told me. ‘You can’t step out for a minute unless you have a gun. Remember what happened that day? That sort of thing happens every day.’

  ‘Who were they?’ I asked.

  ‘That was Baz, a small-time goon in this favela, who wants to become the Donos. We killed him last night after the funk. But it could have been anyone - the police, a gang from another favela, someone I once shot, even Alex here.’

  ‘Donos, please,’ Alex protested.

  He raised his hand. ‘Don’t get me wrong. I trust everyone in the gang, but one day you may think I’ve become weak and senile; then I will need to be taken out. As I said before, in this life, it’s either prison or death.’

  ‘Not for you, though,’ he added as an afterthought. ‘No one kills the contador.’

  I looked at the guns in the cupboard; they all looked the same.

  ‘Choose carefully,’ said Marco. ‘Everyone has a special relationship with their gun. Soon, using someone else’s gun will feel as uncomfortable as wearing someone else’s underwear.’

  I moved towards the biggest one.

  Marco and Alex laughed.

  ‘Not that one, idiot,’ said Marco. ‘How will you carry that monster? You should stick to the handguns - pistols, revolvers or derringers.’

  ‘But you guys carry them,’ I said.

  He looked slightly abashed. I had forgotten I was a cripple.

  ‘Use one of these instead,’ he said. ‘The Anaconda, or the Python, the Beretta, the Glock… all are better for your purpose than the one you chose.’