‘I mean, stuff like this, it’s worse than the newspapers.’
‘It’s all in the newspapers, if you look past the stock market reports and the sports pages,’ I said, still not looking at him.
‘I’m not surprised. This is some damn depressing shit, yaar.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘I mean, a guy could get himself well and truly into a state of depression with stuff like this, day after day, and really need a break. Count on it.’
‘Okay,’ I said, pushing away the file I’d been reading. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘Problem?’
‘If there’s an ocean at the end of this stream of consciousness, you should start flowing into it. Right about now.’
‘The ocean?’ he asked, mystified.
‘The point, Farzad. Get to the point.’
‘Oh,’ he smiled. ‘The point. Yes. There’s definitely something quite like a kind of a point, that’s for sure. Count on it.’
He stared at me for a few moments, then lowered his eyes and began making circles on the surface of the wooden desk with his fingertip.
‘Actually,’ he said at last, still avoiding my eyes, ‘I was trying to find a way to ask you to . . . to come to my house for . . . for lunch or dinner, and to meet . . . to meet my parents.’
‘That’s it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why didn’t you just ask me?’
‘Well,’ he said, the little circles becoming smaller and smaller, ‘you’ve got a reputation, you know?’
‘What kind of a reputation?’
‘A reputation for being kind of a grouchy guy, yaar.’
‘Grouchy?’ I snarled. ‘Me?’
‘Oh, yes.’
We stared at one another. In the factory below, one of the large printing machines grumbled to life, dropping quickly into a chatter of metal clamps and rollers, advancing and retreating, rumbling and turning on a barrel drum.
‘Has anyone ever told you that you’re completely crap at this inviting-people-to-dinner thing?’
‘Well,’ he laughed, ‘this is really the first time I’ve ever asked anyone to my parents’ house in years. We’re kind of . . . private, if you know what I mean.’
‘I know private,’ I sighed. ‘Private is what I had, before you.’
‘So . . . will you come? My parents are really dying to meet you. My Uncle Keki used to talk about you a lot. He said you were –’
‘Grouchy. I know.’
‘Well, yes, that, too. But he also said you were big on philosophy. He said you were Khaderbhai’s favourite for arguing and talking philosophy. My pop is a great one for that. My Mom’s even worse. The whole family have these big philosophical discussions. Sometimes there’s thirty of us, arguing at the same time.’
‘Thirty of you?’
‘We have this . . . kind of . . . extended family. I can’t really describe it. You have to see it. I mean, see us. But you won’t be bored, that I can promise you. No way. Count on it.’
‘If I agree to visit your indescribable family, will you leave me alone and let me get back to work?’
‘Is that a yes?’
‘Yes, one of these days.’
‘Really? You’ll come?’
‘Count on it. Now get outta here, and let me get these books done.’
‘Great!’ he shouted, dancing a few steps left and right with his hips. ‘I’ll talk to my pop, and set it up for one day this week. Lunch or dinner! Great!’
He gave me a last smile and a wag of his head, and then closed the door behind him.
I pulled the file back toward me, the Nigerian’s file, and began to draw out the basic elements of the man’s new documented identity. A much kinder but completely artificial life began to develop on my sketchpad.
At one point I opened a drawer full of photographs of clients who wanted passports: the survivors, the lucky ones who weren’t shot, drowned, or imprisoned in the attempt to find a better life.
Those faces from war and torture, brushed and cleaned and smeared with artificial calm for our passport photo studio, held my eyes. Once we wandered a free Earth, carrying a picture of our God or king to ensure safe passage. Now the world is gated, and we carry pictures of ourselves, and nobody’s safe.
And the bottom line, for the Sanjay Company, was always black: black money. Every black market in the world is the child of tyranny, war or unpopular laws. We turned over thirty to forty passports per month, and the best of them sold for twenty-five thousand US dollars apiece.
Treat war like business, Sanjay once said to me, villainy bright as a newly minted coin in his eyes, and business like war.
When the background work on passports for current clients was done, I collected the files and photographs to take them down to the factory floor. I took my own passport, the new one I’d prepared for the trip to Sri Lanka, and shoved it into the centre draw of the desk. I knew that sooner or later I’d have to hand it over to my best counterfeiters, Krishna and Villu, who were, as Fate would have it, Sri Lankan refugees. But I wasn’t ready to face that journey yet.
I found Krishna and Villu sleeping on two couches I’d installed for them in a quiet corner, away from the printing machines. The challenges of new passport work always excited the Sri Lankan forgers, and quite often they’d work through the night without sleep, to complete an assignment.
I watched them for a while, listening to their snoring drift in and out of chorus, swelling sometimes to a grinding roar, in almost perfect unison and then separating once more into rasp and gasp. Their free arms hung loosely at their sides, hands open, receiving the blessing of sleep.
The two other workers who helped me were running errands, and at that moment the factory was silent. I stood for a few moments in that snoring, peaceful place, envying the sleepers.
They’d come to Bombay as refugees. When I’d met them, they were living as pavement-dwellers under a sheet of plastic with their families. Although their work for the Sanjay Company paid well, allowing them to move to comfortable, clean apartments not far from the factory, and they had flawless identity cards, forged by their own hands, they still lived in fear of deportation.
The loved ones they’d left behind were lost to them, perhaps never to be seen or heard from again. Yet despite everything they’d endured and continued to suffer, they slept like children in a placid, insensible peace.
I never slept as well as they did. I dreamt too often and too hard. I always woke in a thrashing struggle to be free. Lisa had learned that the safest way for her to sleep in the same bed was to hold me close, and sleep inside whatever circle my dreaming mind was trying to break.
I left the pile of documents on Krishna’s desk, and climbed the wooden stairs quietly. They had their own keys, so I locked the door behind me.
I’d arranged to meet Lisa, to visit the slum clinic with her and have lunch afterwards. She’d developed a relationship with our local pharmacist, who’d provided a few boxes of medicines. The medicines were packed into the saddlebags of my motorcycle, and she’d asked me to deliver them with her.
I cruised the gradual creep of noon traffic, because sometimes it’s enough of everything to be moving slowly on a motorcycle, on a sunny day.
In the rear-view mirror of my bike I saw a cop on a motorcycle quite similar to my own. He was drawing alongside me.
The peaked cap and a revolver in a leather holster at his side said that he was a senior officer. He raised his left hand, and pointed to the kerb with two outstretched fingers.
I pulled my bike into the kerb, behind his. He pushed out the side-stand on his bike, then swung a leg over the seat and turned to face me. With his right hand resting on the holster, he slid two fingers of his left hand across his throat. I killed the engine, and remained on the bike.
I was calm. Cops pulled me over
from time to time, wanting to talk or collect a bribe. I always kept a rolled-up fifty-rupee note in my shirt pocket for just that purpose. And I didn’t mind. Gangsters understand police graft: cops don’t get paid enough to risk their lives, so they tax the community the shortfall.
But something in the officer’s eyes, a glimmer reflected off a flaw more jagged than corruption, made me uneasy. He slipped the catch off the holster and slid his hand under the stiff cover, on to the butt of the revolver.
I stood from the bike. My hand began to move slowly toward the knives in the scabbards under the flap of my shirt. Cops didn’t just take bribes in Bombay in those years: they shot gangsters, from time to time.
A calm, deep voice spoke from very close behind me.
‘I wouldn’t be doing that, if I were you.’
I turned to see three men standing with me. A fourth man was at the wheel of a car, parked close behind them.
‘You know,’ I said, my hand on the knife, underneath my shirt, ‘if you were me, you probably would.’
The man who’d spoken looked away from me to nod his head at the policeman. The officer saluted, climbed back onto his bike, and rode away.
‘Nice trick,’ I said, turning back. ‘I must remember it, if I ever lose my balls.’
‘You can lose your motherfucking balls right here and now, gora,’ a thin man with a pencil moustache said, showing the blade of a knife he hid in his sleeve.
I looked into his eyes. I read a very short story, told by fear and hatred. I didn’t want to read it again. The leader raised an exasperated hand. He was a heavy-set man in his late thirties, and a quiet talker.
‘If you don’t get in the car,’ he said quietly, ‘I’ll shoot you in the knee.’
‘Where will you shoot me if I do get in the car?’
‘That depends,’ he replied, regarding me evenly.
He was magazine dressed: hand-tailored silk shirt, loose-fitting grey serge trousers, a Dunhill belt, and Gucci loafers. There was a gold ring on his middle finger that was a copy of the Rolex on his wrist.
The other men looked around at the flow of traffic and pedestrians in the gutters of the road. It had been a fairly long silence. I decided to break it.
‘Depends on what?’
‘On whether you do as you’re told or not.’
‘I don’t like being told what to do.’
‘Nobody does,’ he replied calmly. ‘That’s why there’s so much power attached to it.’
‘That’s pretty good,’ I said. ‘You should write a book.’
My heart was racing. I was scared. My stomach dropped like a body thrown in a river. They were the enemy, and I was in their hands. I was probably dead, whichever way you looked at it.
‘Get in the car,’ he said, allowing himself a little smile.
‘Get to the point.’
‘Get in the car.’
‘If we play it out here, you go with me. If I get in the car, I go out alone. Arithmetic says we should do it here.’
‘Fuck it!’ the pencil moustache snapped. ‘Let’s kill this chudh, and get it over with.’
The heavy-set leader thought about it. It took a while. My hand was still on my knife.
‘You’re a logical man,’ he said. ‘They say you argued philosophy with Khaderbhai.’
‘Nobody argued with Khaderbhai.’
‘Even so, you can see that your position is irrational. I lose nothing by killing you. You gain everything by staying alive long enough to find out what I want.’
‘Except for the part about you being dead. I’d lose that. And so far, that’s the best part.’
‘Except for that,’ he said, smiling. ‘But you’ve seen how much trouble I went to, just to talk to you. If I wanted you dead, I’d have run over your motorcycle with one of my trucks.’
‘Leave my motorcycle out of this.’
‘Your bike will be safe, yaar,’ he laughed, nodding at the thin man with the moustache. ‘Danda will ride it for you. Get in the car.’
He was right. There was no other logical choice. I let my hand fall from my knife. The leader nodded. Danda stepped forward at once, started the bike, and kicked back the stand. He gunned the engine, impatient to leave.
‘You hurt that bike –’ I shouted at him, but before I could finish the threat he tapped the bike into first gear, and roared off into the stream of traffic, the motor screaming in protest.
‘Danda has no sense of humour, I’m afraid,’ the leader said as we watched Danda sway and skid through the traffic.
‘Good, because if he hurts my bike, he won’t find it funny.’
The leader laughed, and looked me hard in the eyes.
‘How could you exchange philosophies with a man like Khaderbhai?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean that Khaderbhai was insane.’
‘Sane or not, he was never boring.’
‘What doesn’t bore us, in the long run?’ he asked, getting into the car.
‘A sense of humour?’ I suggested, getting in beside him.
They had me, and it was just like prison, because there was nothing I could do about it. He laughed again, and nodded to the driver, whose eyes filled the soft rectangle of the rear-view mirror.
‘Take us to the truth,’ he said to the driver in Hindi, watching me closely. ‘It’s always so refreshing, at this time of day.’
Chapter Ten
The driver bullied his way through tight, midday traffic, reaching a warehouse in an industrial area in minutes. The warehouse was freestanding, with a screaming space between it and the nearest buildings. Danda was already there. My bike was parked on the gravel driveway in front.
The driver parked the car. A roller door opened to a little over halfway. We got out, stooped under the door, and a chain clattered noisily as it rolled shut again.
There were two big worries. The first was that they hadn’t blindfolded me: they’d allowed me to see the location of the warehouse, and the faces of the eight men inside. The second worry was the supply of power tools, torches and heavy hammers arranged on benches along one wall of the warehouse.
It took an effort not to stare. Instead, I focused on the long low chair standing alone in the open space near the back wall of the small warehouse. It was a piece of pool furniture: a banana lounge, upholstered in strands of acid-green and lemon vinyl. There was a wide stain under the chair.
Danda, the skinny moustache with short-story eyes, gave me a thorough pat-down. He took my two knives and passed them on to the leader, who examined them for a moment, before putting them down carefully on the long bench.
‘Sit down,’ he said, turning to face me.
When I refused to move, he folded his arms patiently and nodded to a tall, powerfully built man who’d been with us in the car. The man came for me.
Hit first, and hit hard, an old con used to tell me.
As the big man stepped in quickly, swinging out with an open-handed slap to the right side of my head, I rolled with the blow, and hit him with a short, sharp uppercut. It good-luck connected with the point of his chin.
The big man stumbled back a step. Two of the men drew guns. They were old-fashioned revolvers, military issue from a forgotten war.
The leader sighed again, and nodded his head.
Four men rushed forward, pushing me onto the green and yellow lounge chair. They tied my hands to the rear legs of the chair with coconut-fibre ropes. Slipping another length of rope under the front, they tied down my legs.
The leader finally unfolded his arms and approached me.
‘Do you know who I am?’
‘A critic?’ I suggested, trying not to show the scared that I was feeling.
He frowned, looking me up and down.
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I know who you are. I know a Sco
rpion when I see one.’
The leader nodded.
‘They call me Vishnu,’ he said.
Vishnu, the man Sanjay spared after the war that cost so many, the man who came back with a gang called the Scorpions.
‘Why do so many gangsters name themselves after gods?’
‘How ’bout I name you dead, you bahinchudh!’ Danda spluttered.
‘Come to think of it,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘Danda’s not a god. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Danda’s just a demigod. Isn’t that right? A minor deity?’
‘Shut up!’
‘Stay cool, Danda,’ Vishnu soothed. ‘He’s just trying to keep the subject off the subject. Don’t let him bait you.’
‘A demigod,’ I mused. ‘Ever asked yourself how often you get the short stick around here, Danda?’
‘Shut up!’
‘You know what?’ Vishnu said, stifling a yawn. ‘Fuck him. Go ahead, Danda. Fuck his happiness, if you want.’
Danda rushed at me, swinging punches. As I moved my head quickly, left and right, he only connected with one in every three. Suddenly he stopped. When I held my head still long enough to glance up, I saw the big man, the man I’d hit on the point of the chin, pulling Danda away by the shoulder.
The big man punched at my face. He was wearing a brass ring on his middle finger. I felt it crunch along the curves of my cheek and jaw. The big man knew what he was doing. He didn’t break anything, he just made it unwell. Then he changed tactic, and smacked me hard on the sides of the head with open-handed slaps.
If you beat a man with your fists for long enough, your knuckles will shatter, or the man will die, or both. But if you break him up a little with your fists, to make sure that a good, hard slap is filled with pain, you can go on beating him all day long with an open hand.
Torture. It’s heavy and flat in that space. There’s a density to it, a centripetal pull so strong that there’s almost nothing you can take from it; so little you can learn that isn’t dark all the way through.
But one thing I came to know is that when the beating starts, you shut your mouth. You don’t speak. You keep your mouth shut, until it ends. And you don’t scream, if you can help it.
The Mountain Shadow Page 11