‘Fuck me, Sanjay?’ Farid spat at him. ‘That’s all the respect I get? How about I fuck your happiness right here and now?’
He took a step toward Sanjay but I stopped him, my hands on his chest.
‘Take it easy, Farid brother,’ I said. ‘This is just what they wanted, when they slapped me around today – us, falling out with each other.’
‘Fuck me?’ Farid snarled. ‘Say it again, boss. Say it again.’
Sanjay stared at the young fighter for a while, and then his cold eyes drifted to mine.
‘Tell me the truth, Lin. What did you tell them?’
It was my turn to anger. Rage drew in a breath. My lips widened, splitting cuts.
‘What are you trying to say, boss?’
He frowned, irritated.
‘Come on, Lin,’ he said. ‘This is the real world. People talk. What did you tell them?’
I was angry enough to beat him senseless; angrier at him, in fact, than the men who’d nearly beaten me senseless.
‘Of course he didn’t say anything!’ Farid said. ‘It’s not the first time he’s been kicked by the other side. Me, too. And you, too, Sanjay. Stop being so disrespectful. What’s the matter with you, boss?’
Sanjay flashed a look, exasperated to the point of being vicious, revealing how close he was to the edge. Farid held his gaze for a moment, but then looked away.
Sanjay turned back to me.
‘You can go, Lin,’ he said. ‘And whatever you did or didn’t say before, keep your mouth shut about this from now on.’
‘About what, Sanjay? About the act they put on today? One minute they’re gonna kill me, the next minute they’re letting me go. They wanted me to come back here, in this condition, and say the word Pakistan to you. It’s a message. I’m the message. This Scorpion guy, Vishnu, is big on messages.’
‘So am I,’ Sanjay smiled. ‘And I write messages in blood, like they do. In a time and manner of my own choosing.’
‘Whatever you do, don’t do it for me.’
‘Are you telling me what to do? Who the fuck do you think you are?’
There was a dragon inside me, all fire, but I didn’t want some other soldier to sit in a chair, as I’d done, until the ceiling turned red.
‘Don’t square up for me, boss. When the time comes, I’ll handle that myself.’
‘You’ll do what you’re told, and when you’re told.’
‘I’ll square this up myself, Sanjay,’ I repeated. ‘In a time and manner of my own choosing. Just so we’re clear that I told you, in advance.’
‘Get out,’ Sanjay said, his eyes narrowing. ‘Both of you. Don’t come near me, Lin, unless I send for you. Get out.’
On the street Farid stopped me, angrier than I was.
‘Lin,’ he said quietly, his eyes wider than rage. ‘I don’t give a shit what Sanjay says. He’s weak. He’s nothing. I have no respect for him any more. We’ll find Abdullah. We’ll go, just the three of us, without saying a thing. We’ll kill this Vishnu, the one in charge, and those other gandus, Danda and Hanuman.’
I smiled, bathing my wounded face in the warmth of his brave heart.
‘It’s okay. Leave it alone. Right place and right time, brother. One way or another, I’ll see those guys again, and if I need you, I’ll make sure to call you.’
‘Night and day, man,’ he replied, shaking hands.
He rode away, and I looked back at Sanjay’s mansion: another mansion, in a city of slums. The street windows were sealed, red metal shutters rusted into their slides. A withered hedge clung to a wrought-iron fence.
It was a lot like the house the Scorpions returned to, after they’d worked me over. It was too much like that house.
You can respect a man’s rights or opinions without knowing the man at all. But you can only respect the man himself when you find something in him that’s worthy of the word.
Farid didn’t look up to Sanjay, and it was clear that others on the Council felt the same way. I’d never looked up to Sanjay, but still I worked for him, under the protection of the Company that bore his name.
It was a matter of conscience for me, and perhaps for some of the others, but the erosion of authority was everything for Sanjay. Every gang is a totem of respect. Every leader is a portrait of faith.
Where was the rain? I felt dirty: beat up and dirty. I was falling. Everything was falling: everything but the rain. My heart was a hostage, somewhere, and I was writing the ransom note.
The world of weeks ago, when I’d left for Goa, was navigating by different stars. A weakened leader, propped up by Afghan guards, a fourteen-year-old boy, Tariq, dreaming of the power to command killers and thieves, the morning torture with the word Pakistan, Lisa, Karla, Ranjit: nothing was the same, and nowhere looked the same.
I was lost. And dirty. And beat up. I had to find my way. I had to stop falling. I turned my back on Sanjay’s mansion and rode away, pushing another raft of hope into that little ocean of minutes, my life.
Chapter Twelve
There was a note from Lisa on the kitchen table when I returned home. It said she’d missed me, and was going shopping with our friend, Vikram. She suggested that we should meet later, back at the apartment.
Relaxing for the first time since Vishnu’s men picked me up, I locked the door and leaned against the wall. It didn’t last long. I slid down the wall and sat on the floor.
It was still early. I’d forged three passports, been kidnapped, beaten, and debriefed, and it was still only two in the afternoon.
I’ve known friends who’ve gone through beatings, and don’t miss a step. I never learned to take the hits so easily. I could keep it inside and hold the line for as long as it took me to find a safe place, but as soon as I closed a sheltered door, the avalanche always began. And it took a while, that day, to get my heart under control, and stop my hands from shaking.
I had a shower, scrubbing at the cuts on my face and neck with a bristle brush and strong disinfectant. The wounds were clean, no small matter in a tropical city, but they began to bleed again. I drowned them in aftershave.
As the pain burned white dots in the space before my eyes, I filed it away for future reference: when the reckoning with Danda the moustache guy came, I had to remember to bring aftershave.
Bruises and welts were appearing in every place that Danda’s bamboo cane had struck. It was a forensic match for the marks I’d worn before, in prison: the marks I saw on other prisoners in the shower.
I looked away from the mirror, forcing myself to forget; another prison trick. In twenty minutes I was on my bike again, dressed in clean jeans and boots, a red T-shirt and my cut-off vest.
I rode along beside the fishermen’s coves to the Colaba Back Bay, to keep the appointment in the slum.
The land everywhere around me had been reclaimed from the sea, stone by stone. Tall, modern apartment buildings crowded together on the new stone ocean, and showered precious shade on wide, leafy streets.
It was an expensive, desirable area, with the President hotel as a figurehead on the prow of the suburb. The little shops that lined the three main boulevards were freshly painted. Flower boxes decorated many of the windows. The servants who moved back and forth from the residential towers to the shops were dressed in their best saris and bleached white shirts.
As the main road swung left and then right beside the World Trade Centre, the scene changed. The trees became more sparsely planted, and then stopped altogether. The shade began to fade as the last shadow cast by a tower surrendered to the sun.
And the heat from that sun, hovering, obscured by heavy clouds, beat down on the dust-grey ocean of the slum, where the ridges of low rooftops rolled away to the tattered horizon in ragged waves of worry and struggle.
I parked the bike, took the medicines and bandages from the saddlebags, and tossed a coin to o
ne of the kids who offered to watch the bike for me. There wasn’t really a need. No one stole anything in that area.
As I entered the slum, making my way along a wide, sandy, uneven path, the smell of the open latrine that lined the road flattened the breath in my lungs. A fist of nausea twisted my stomach.
The beating in the warehouse came back hard and fast. The sun. The beating. The sun was too hot. I staggered to the side of the path. The surge of nausea erupted and I stooped, my hands on my knees, and threw up anything I still had inside onto the weeds beside the road.
The children of the slum chose that moment to rush out of the lanes to greet me. Crowding around me as I shuddered and shivered, they tugged at the sleeves of my shirt and shouted my name.
‘Linbaba! Linbaba! Linbaba!’
Pulling myself together I allowed the children to drag me with them into the slum. We worked our way through the narrow, stumble-foot lanes between huts made from plastic sheets, woven mats and bamboo poles. The huts, covered in dust accumulated through eight months of the dry season, looked like desert dunes.
Gleaming towers of pots and pans, garlanded images of gods, and smooth, highly polished earthen floors glimpsed their way through low doorways, attesting to the neat, ordered lives that persisted within.
The children led me directly to Johnny Cigar’s house, not far from the seashore boundary.
Johnny, who was the head man in the slum, was born on the streets of the city. His father, a Navy man on temporary assignment in Bombay, had abandoned Johnny’s mother when he learned that she was pregnant. He left the city on a warship, bound for the Port of Aden. She never heard from him again.
Cast out by her family, Johnny’s mother had moved into a pavement-dweller settlement made from sheets of plastic strung across a section of footpath near Crawford Market.
Johnny was born in the day-long shout, shove and shuffle heard from one of Asia’s largest covered markets. His ears rang from early morning until last light with shrill or braying cadenzas of street sellers and stallholders.
He’d lived the whole of his life in pavement communities and crowded slums, and only ever seemed truly at home in the surge and swirl of the crowd. The few times I’d seen him alone, walking the strip of sea coast beside the slum, or sitting in a lull of afternoon outside a chai shop, he’d seemed diminished by the solitude; withdrawn into a smaller sense of himself. But in any crowd, he was a jewel of his people.
‘Oh, my God!’ he cried, when he saw my face. ‘What the hell happened to you, man?’
‘It’s a long story. How you doin’, Johnny?’
‘Oh, shit, man. You got a solid pasting!’
I frowned at him. Johnny knew that frown. We’d lived together as neighbours in the slum for eighteen months, and had continued as good friends for years.
‘Okay, okay, thik hai, baba. Come, sit down. Have some chai. Sunil! Bring chai! Fatafat!’ Super quickly!
I sat on an empty grain drum, watching Johnny give instructions to a team of young men, who were making final preparations for the coming rain.
When the previous head man of the slum retired to his village, he nominated Johnny Cigar as his successor. A few voices grumbled that Johnny wasn’t the ideal choice, but the love and admiration everyone felt for the retiring head man silenced their objections.
It was an honorary position, with no authority beyond that contained within the character of the man who held it. After almost two years in the job, Johnny had proven himself to be wise in the settlement of disputes, and strong enough to inspire that ancient instinct: the urge to follow a positive direction.
For his part, Johnny enjoyed the leadership role, and when all else failed to resolve a dispute, he went with his heart, declared a holiday in the slum, and threw a party.
His system worked, and was popular. There were people who’d moved into that slum because there was a pretty good party every other week to settle a dispute peacefully. People brought disputes from other slums, to have them resolved by Johnny. And little by little, the boy born on the pavement was Solomon to his people.
‘Arun! Get down to the mangrove line with Deepak!’ he shouted. ‘That flood wall collapsed yesterday. Get it up again, fast! Raju! Take the boys to Bapu’s house. The old ladies in his lane have no plastic on the roof. Those fucking cats pulled it off. Bapu has the sheets. Help him get them up. The rest of you, keep clearing those drains! Jaldi!’ Fast!
The tea arrived, and Johnny sat down to drink with me.
‘Cats,’ he sighed. ‘Can you explain to me why there are cat people in this world?’
‘In a word? Mice. Cats are handy little devils.’
‘I guess so. You just missed Lisa and Vikram. Has she seen your face like this?’
‘No.’
‘Hell, man, she’s gonna have a fit, yaar. You look like somebody ran over you.’
‘Thanks, Johnny.’
‘Don’t mention,’ he replied. ‘Hey, that Vikram, he doesn’t look too good either. He’s not sleeping well, I think.’
I knew why Vikram didn’t look too good. I didn’t want to talk about it.
‘When do you think?’ I asked, looking at the black, heaving clouds.
The smell of rain that should-but-wouldn’t fall was everywhere in my eyes, in my sweat, in my hair: first rain, the perfect child of monsoon.
‘I thought it would be today,’ he replied, sipping at his tea. ‘I was sure.’
I sipped my tea. It was very sweet, laced with ginger to defeat the heat that pressed down on every heart in the last days of the summer. The ginger soothed the cuts on the inside of my mouth, and I sighed with pleasure.
‘Good chai, Johnny,’ I said.
‘Good chai,’ he replied.
‘Indian penicillin,’ I said.
‘There is . . . there is no penicillin in this chai, baba,’ Johnny said.
‘No, I mean –’
‘We never put penicillin in our tea,’ he declared.
He seemed offended.
‘No, no,’ I reassured him, knowing that I was heading down a dead-end street. ‘It’s a reference to an old joke, a joke about chicken soup, a joke about chicken soup being called Jewish penicillin.’
Johnny sniffed at his tea charily.
‘You . . . you smell chickens in the tea?’
‘No, no, it’s a joke. I grew up in the Jewish part of my town, Little Israel. And, you know, it’s a joke everybody tells, because Jewish people are supposed to offer you chicken soup, no matter what’s wrong with you. You’ve got an upset stomach, have a little chicken soup. You’ve got a headache, have a little chicken soup. You’ve just been shot, have a little chicken soup. And in India, tea is like chicken soup for Jewish people, see? No matter what’s wrong, a strong glass of chai will fix you up. Geddit?’
His puzzled frown cleared in a half-smile.
‘There’s a Jewish person not far from here,’ he said. ‘He stays in the Parsi colony at Cuffe Parade, even though he’s not a Parsi. His name is Isaac, I believe. Shall I bring him here?’
‘Yes!’ I replied excitedly. ‘Get the Jewish person, and bring him here!’
Johnny rose from his stool.
‘You’ll wait for me here?’ he asked, preparing to leave.
‘No!’ I said, exasperated. ‘I was joking, Johnny. It was a joke! Of course I don’t want you to bring the Jewish person here.’
‘It’s really no trouble,’ he said.
He stared at me, bewildered, trapped a half-step away, uncertain whether he should fetch Isaac-the-Jewish-person or not.
‘So . . . ’ I said at last, looking at the sky for an escape from the conversational cul-de-sac, ‘when do you think?’
He relaxed, and scanned the clouds churning in from the sea.
‘I thought it would be today,’ he replied. ‘I was sure.’
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‘Well,’ I sighed, ‘if not today, tomorrow. Okay, can we do this now, Johnny?’
‘Jarur,’ he replied, moving toward the low doorway of his hut.
I joined him inside, closing the flimsy plywood door behind me. The hut, made of thin, tatami-style matting strung to bare bamboo poles, was paved on the bare earth with extravagantly detailed and coloured tiles. They formed a mosaic image of a peacock, with its tail fanned out against a background of trees and flowers.
The cupboards were filled with food. The large, metal, rat-proof wardrobe was an expensive and much-prized item of furniture in the slum. A battery-powered music system occupied a corner of a metal dresser. Pride of place went to a three-dimensional illustration of the flogged and crucified Christ. New floral-print mattresses were rolled up in a corner.
The traces of relative luxury attested to Johnny’s status and commercial success. I’d given him the money as a wedding present, to buy a small, legal apartment in the neighbouring Navy Nagar district. The gift was intended to allow him to escape the uncertainty and hardship of life in the illegal slum.
Aided by the enterprising spirit of his wife Sita, the daughter of a prosperous chai shop owner, Johnny used the apartment as collateral for a loan, and then rented it out at a premium. He used the loan to buy three slum huts, rented the three illegal huts at market rates, and was living in exactly the same slum lane where I’d first met him.
Moving a few things aside, Johnny made a place for me to sit. I stopped him.
‘Thanks, brother. Thanks. I don’t have time. I have to find Lisa. I’ve been one step behind her all day long.’
‘Lin brother, you’ll always be one step behind that girl.’
‘I think you’re right. Here, take this.’
I gave him the bag of medicines that Lisa had given me, and pulled a wad of money bound with tight elastic bands from my pocket. It was enough to pay two months’ wages for the two young men who worked as first aid attendants in the free clinic. There was also a surplus to cover the purchase of new bandages and medicines.
The Mountain Shadow Page 13