Through narrow lanes of sleeping trust I walked back to the rocks and the sea, as black as the sky. I stood watching and listening. In that spot Diva had heard, and realised, that she’d lost everything.
When I stood on the front wall of a prison, between the gun towers, I felt calm. All the terror drained from me, because I knew that if the guards shot me, I’d fall on the right side of the wall.
When I slid down my electric-cord rope to freedom and started running, the calm left me, and the realisation of what I’d lost hit me so hard that I couldn’t stop my hands from shaking for weeks.
But I’d chosen my exile, and Diva had hers forced on her. And it was too cruel: her father killed, and everyone else. It was the kind of too-cruel that makes a survivor fall. I hoped that the young socialite, hiding in the real world, had friends who wouldn’t let that happen, when she returned to the unreal world.
I heard a sound and turned to see Karla, standing on a rocky outcrop at the edge of the slum. She’d come to find me.
She waved to me, and a stray wave broke high against the rocks nearby. White rivulets of water streamed over black boulders to the shore. A second wave garlanded the rocks with surf as I climbed back toward the light, and love, one wet black stone at a time.
I paused with her at the top, and for a while we watched the sea spilling on the shore of Diva’s grief.
We walked back past huts humming and murmuring sleep: fathers sleeping outside to leave more room for the family inside, the silver moon bathing them in soft light.
And we talked softly with Didier, the Georges and Naveen in the hut beside Diva’s, all of us wanting to be close, in case she woke.
Diva’s Bombay would never be the same again: some of the people she’d known before the tragedy would become true friends, and some would become strangers in press paradise. Either way, when she returned to her destiny, everything would be changed. Naveen was a Bombay boy, and maybe he understood that in ways we couldn’t. But in our exile hearts, the Island City was home for all of us. And we waited together, that vigilant night, until the scarlet dawn helped a new exile wake, and struggle to the shore.
Part Nine
Chapter Fifty-One
The lull that followed the storm of Lisa’s death and the massacre at the Devnani estate lasted for long, busy, peaceful weeks. I liked it. I’d seen enough storms for one year.
Diva settled into her role as a slum girl, and the slum settled into its role as host to a Diva. Neither of them had much choice: the girls in the slum were star-struck over Diva, so they formed a permanent honour guard; and the killers of Diva’s father hadn’t been identified, so Diva stayed in the safest place in the city.
The newspapers still carried the story of the massacre, and the missing heiress. A court-appointed CEO administered the group of companies owned by Diva’s father, working with the various boards of directors until the heiress could be found.
There were twenty-five thousand people in the slum, and most of them knew who Diva was. Nobody called a reporter, or tried to claim the reward. She was under the protection of the slum, and in that avalanche of huts and shoulder-width lanes she was Aanu, one
of their own. She was safe from thugs with guns or magazine deadlines.
The Georges ran a semi-permanent party and fully permanent poker game from the top floor of the Mahesh hotel. Celebrities who’d closed their windows at traffic signals, when they were poor fixtures of the city, spent more time in the penthouse parties than they did with their therapists.
When the deputy mayor broke the bank, he declared the game a municipal recreation, exempting it from prosecution under gambling laws. When the ward tax collector won a similar pot, the poker game was registered as a charity. And when the prettiest starlet in Bollywood won six hands in a row, cleaning out everyone except the bank, she made the game so hot that one Bollywood actor after another tried, and failed, to restore male pride by beating her record.
For his part, Didier applied himself to the Lost Love Bureau with surprising diligence. He rose early, something so shocking that I jumped with fright the first time I saw him bright and active at eight in the morning. Didier had always said that an hour of sunlight a day is enough for anyone, and the hour before sunset was the only sunlight worth having.
The morning version of the night person I knew was strange, at first. He was punctual. He worked. He even told jokes.
‘You know,’ Naveen said, a few weeks after the bureau had opened for business, ‘I’m so glad that you put Didier and me together. He’s a hard-working stiff, if you’ll pardon the expression.’
‘Maybe. I don’t know.’
‘You’re just nostalgic.’
‘It isn’t nostalgia, if the first version is better. I don’t want Didier to get corporate on me.’
The new Didier did get corporate, and detectived seriously, and business at the bureau was brisk. He put an advertisement for the Lost Love Bureau in the biggest daily newspaper, one of Ranjit’s newspapers, offering a reward for information on the whereabouts of Ranjit, the missing owner of Ranjit Media, a Lost Love.
The notice didn’t bring any new leads, but it got everyone in town talking about the Lost Love Bureau, and it brought more than a dozen clients, each one clutching a file of photographs and police reports on missing loved ones. And when two of the missing loves were found in as many weeks, due to Didier’s street connections and Naveen’s deductive skills, the bureau attracted more clients, all of them willing to pay cash in advance.
Karla was right, of course: a market is a need, serving itself. Lost loves, forgotten or abandoned by overstretched police departments, are a constant ache in the heart, no less for the cops themselves, and a need that demands to be served. The bureau did well: lost loves were found, and reunited with the hearts that couldn’t stop searching for them.
Vinson and Rannveig dropped in at Gemini George’s parties from time to time. Vinson was happy, but never left Rannveig’s side unless she sent him away, or told him to wait somewhere.
The girl with the ice-in-a-blue-glass eyes seemed to have accepted the death of her boyfriend. She never mentioned him to me again. But while that ghost might’ve slipped away on a river of acceptance, some shadow remained in the young face. It was as if every changing expression or movement of a hand was clouded by irresolution.
Nevertheless, she looked healthy and well. And she’d taken to dressing as Karla did, in a thin sheath of salwar kameez and tight cotton leggings. It suited her, with her hair pulled back into a high ponytail. And when she smiled happily and openly, as she did from time to time, leaves of doubt parted, and a bright sky of what she could become shone through.
In the mysterious absence of Ranjit, the proprietor, Kavita Singh was promoted from banner journalist to deputy editor of the flagship newspaper. The fact that Karla had a deciding proxy vote in Ranjit Media was influential. The fact that Kavita’s columns were the most popular in the city was decisive.
Within two weeks under Kavita’s creative hand, the newspaper took a new turn, not left or right, but straight up into something else. The mood was upbeat. Bombay was a great, exciting place to live. Enough of this comparing ourselves to other places shit, she wrote in her first editorial. Open your eyes, and see how wonderful this gigantic social experiment you’re living in is, and see how much real love keeps it going.
People loved it. Sometimes, people born in a place need to have someone wake its beauty for them, and Kavita’s editorial started a fire in every Mumbaikar’s heart; a fire of pride that none of them knew they’d prepared inside themselves, until Kavita lit it. The newspaper’s circulation increased by nine per cent. Kavita was a hit.
Karla laughed, long and happily, when the civic pride campaign became a trend that tumbled into a cascade of social activities across the city. I didn’t ask her why, and she didn’t tell me.
She moved into th
e rooms next to mine and transformed them, during a week of deletions and deliveries. Her three rooms, a living room, a bedroom and a wardrobe corridor like mine, became a Bedouin tent.
Waves of sky-blue and white muslin, fixed from the light fittings in the centre of each room, hid the ceilings. The lights were stripped away and replaced by old railway lanterns.
She took all the furniture out of the rooms, except for the bed, and a writing table in the living room. She bought the table from the music store downstairs and had the legs sawn off, so that she could sit at it cross-legged in the middle of the floor.
She covered every linoleum inch of that floor, even the bathroom, with Turkish and Iranian carpets. They were lying on top of one another as if they’d exhausted themselves, wrestling for a place of prominence at her feet.
The balcony that looked out on Metro Junction, and connected with mine, was draped in red silk saris, softening the white heat of day to cooling troughs and stripes of crimson.
There weren’t any sleepovers, but it was okay. It was heaven, in fact: the happiest days I’d known since I’d thrown my life in a gutter of shame, nine years before.
Freedom and happiness and justice and even love are all parts of the same whole: peace, within. The first time I put fear into someone to get money for drugs, I crossed a line I’d drawn in the earth of my own life. But the shovel fell from my hand when Karla moved into the Amritsar hotel, and for a while I stopped digging graves of guilt. We ate breakfast, lunch and dinner together almost every day. We did the work we had to do separately, but got together every minute we could.
When we were free, we rode all the way around the Island City. When she felt like it, Karla drove her car, with Randall helping himself to a soda in the back. We saw a couple of movies, visited friends, and went to a few parties.
But any night together, every night together, she went back to the Bedouin tent alone, locking all those locks I’d put on her door.
She was driving me crazy, of course, but in the best possible way. People differ in things like this, I know, but for me it isn’t how long you wait for something that counts, it’s the quality of the wait. And hours alone with Karla every day was a quality wait.
Sometimes, in all that quality waiting, very occasionally, I found myself thinking about punching a new air vent in the wall of my room. And sometimes, being only a metre away from her behind a connecting wall every night, twisted the guitar string pretty tight. Mind you, there was always the black market, to wind the string tighter.
Crime is a demon, Didier once said, and adrenaline is his drug of choice. Every crime, even a little crime like black market money changing, comes with a measure of adrenaline. The people you’re doing business with are at least a little dangerous, the cops are more than a little dangerous, and every crime has its own species of predator and prey.
Black market money changing was all but legal in South Bombay in those years, operating openly in every second Colaba cigarette shop. South Bombay had two hundred and ten cigarette shops, all of them licensed by the Municipal Authority and the Sanjay Company. I ran fourteen of them, bought from Didier, and sanctioned by Sanjay. It was usually a safe trade, but criminals, by definition, are violently unpredictable.
I never took Karla on my rounds. I did one round between breakfast and lunch, another after lunch, and a late-night scout of the shops before sleep. It was important for the boss to be seen.
Running a crime franchise requires a sophisticated degree of cooperation, usually bought, and clearly defined roles and rules. I provided the finesse money. The Sanjay Company defined the roles, and enforced the rules.
But every trader changing black money at the street level has his own measure of pride. Rebellion, from frustration or fear, is a constant possibility. The defection of even one of my money changers would bring swift punishment from Sanjay, but it would also cost me the franchise. Making such uprisings impossible, by keeping the shopkeepers between fear and friendship, was my job.
Crime is feudal, and when you understand that, you actually understand quite a lot of it. The Sanjay Company was the castle on the hill, with a moat full of crocodile gangsters, and Sanjay was the feudal lord. If he wanted a girl, he took her. If he wanted a man dead, he killed him.
Because I’d purchased a franchise in the bazaar, that made me a kind of robber baron, and the shopkeepers were the serfs. They had no rights but those granted by the Company.
Crime is a medieval metropolis running parallel to the shining city, complete with absolute monarchy and public executions. And as a robber baron, riding from serf to serf on my steel pony, I had the right to assert my authority.
The first skill in running a crime franchise is projecting an air of unchallengeable entitlement. If you don’t believe it yourself, no-one else on the street will. They’re too smart. You have to own it, and own it in a way that stops people thinking about challenging you.
In Bombay that involves a lot of yelling and the occasional slap, usually over trivial things, until the air is clear and your voice is the last and the loudest.
After that, it’s a matter of observation. This one chews paan, this one hates paan, this one listens to holy songs from a speaker in the shape of King Kong. This guy likes boys, this guy likes girls, this guy likes girls too much, this guy is confident when he’s alone, and this one cowers until his confederates arrive, this one drinks, thinks, smokes, chokes, peeps, talks, walks, and this one is the only one who’ll still be standing toe to toe with you, till the last thrust of the knife.
‘You hear what happened to Abhijeet?’ Francis, my Regal Circle money changer asked, when I pulled up beside him.
‘Yeah.’
Abhijeet was a street kid, hustling tourists on the strip. He’d tried to run a police roadblock too fast on a stolen scooter. He crashed into a stone bridge support, and the bridge didn’t give way.
‘Bloody little prick,’ Francis said, handing me the pick-up money. ‘He’s annoying my mind more, now that he’s dead, than he did when he was alive. And when he was alive, he was the most annoying prick in the world.’
‘He’s annoying you so much that you’re light, Francis,’ I said, checking the money he gave me.
‘What light, baba?’ he said, raising his voice loud enough for the other traders near him to hear.
I looked around at the faces on the street.
‘Don’t do this, Francis.’
‘I’m not doing anything, baba,’ he shouted. ‘You are accusing me, and –’
I grabbed him by the collar and dragged him toward an alley, a few steps away.
‘My shop!’
‘Fuck the shop.’
I shoved him into the alley.
‘Let’s do it,’ I said.
‘Let’s do what?’
‘You’re cheating me, in front of your friends. Now we can be honest, alone. Where’s the money?’
‘Baba, you –’
I slapped him.
‘I didn’t –’
I slapped him harder.
‘In my shirt,’ he said. ‘Your money is inside my shirt.’
There was a lot of money inside his shirt. I took the money he’d skimmed, and left the rest.
‘I don’t care where you get your money, Francis, so long as you don’t skim it from me. And you’ll never make a show in front of your friends again. You see that, right?’
It’s an ugly thing, raw power: ugly enough to scare away scavengers. And it’s an ugly job, sometimes, keeping street criminals in line. They need to know that reaction will always be fast and violent, and they need to fear it. If they don’t, they all turn on you, and then things get bloody.
I did the rounds until I had enough foreign money to knock on the door of the black market bank in Ballard Pier.
Black bankers aren’t criminals: they’re civilians who commit crimes. By
staying on the safe side of the line, they don’t risk real prison time. They keep a low profile, when their wealth would bring them into the A-list, because the money’s more important. And they’re scrupulously apolitical: they hold black money for any party, whether in power or not.
The Sanjay Company used the black bank at Ballard Pier, and so did the Scorpions. But a lot of cops kept their loot there, and some heavy hitters in the armed services, and the politicians, of course. There was construction money, sugar baron money, oil money and slush fund money. In one way or another it was the best protected bank in town.
The bank cared for its customers in return. Whenever one of them messed up, the bank made the mess subside, for a fee. Each scandal was tagged and bagged and locked in the vault. There was more dirt in the black bank at Ballard Pier, it was said, than undeclared gold.
Everyone in town had something to gain from the bank’s invisible hand, and everyone had something to lose if the hand became a fist. The bank was so swollen with secrets and secret money that it was too crooked to fail.
For small hustlers like me, given access to a small sub-branch window, the black bank was a convenient way to hand in my US dollars and other currencies, take the equivalent in black rupees, and let the bank forward the foreign cash to the South Bombay buyers’ syndicate.
Nobody but partners with too much to lose knew who the buyers were. Some said that a wild bunch of movie producers and actors had set up the syndicate. One rumour insisted that it was a Bombay chapter of the Masonic Lodge.
Whoever they were, they were smart. They controlled eighty per cent of the black dollars in the south, made more profit than anyone in the chain, and never risked an hour behind bars.
After costs, in my small operation, I cleared twenty thousand rupees a month from the money changer operation. If I’d still been living in the slum, it would’ve made me a king. On the street, it was pin money.
The Mountain Shadow Page 59