‘Eeeuw!’
‘Aren’t you the babysitters?’ I asked innocently. ‘Didier said you’d do Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, for twenty rupees an hour.’
‘Eeeuw!’ they said as they skipped away in step to sit with two pretty, well-dressed boys playing tabla drums with the band.
‘Now, look what you’ve done!’ Didier protested.
‘The man I killed?’ I countered. ‘You’ll take it from there?’
‘Well, Lin,’ he grumbled, ‘Didier is an artist of spin, everyone acknowledges that, but let’s face it, you don’t give me much to work with. I used a little poetic licence. If I tell people the truth, only Naveen and I will find you interesting, and I am not completely sure of Naveen.’
‘What is this? Shit on Shantaram Week? Back up, Didier. I’ve been crowded all I can take for one day.’
He couldn’t reply, because there was a sudden shout.
‘It is a fire, I believe!’
We turned to see flames, rising from a place on the coast, not far away.
‘It’s the fishermen’s colony,’ Naveen said.
‘The boats are on fire,’ I agreed.
‘Stay with Diva!’ Naveen shouted to Didier, as I ran for my bike.
‘The girls are safe with me,’ he shouted back, his arms around Diva’s Divas. ‘But please, do not get yourselves killed!’
Chapter Fifty-Six
Naveen and I rode past crowds streaming from the big slum to the fire in the next cove. We stopped the bikes in the middle of the road, next to the concrete divider. From the road, we could see the long boats burning.
It was dark, on the beach, where the fishermen lived in their shamble of huts, but the cove faced a main road with an intersecting street, and the lights made cold pictures of the burning, only twenty metres away.
The boats were already blackened, shrivelled versions of the sturdy craft they’d been. Red-rimmed mouths of glowing coals still burned on their sides.
The boats were lost, but the fire hadn’t destroyed the houses, and people were working desperately to save them.
Naveen and I tied handkerchiefs around our faces, ran across the street, and joined the bucket brigades. I filled a space between two women, taking a bucket from one, and passing it to the other. They were fast, and it wasn’t easy to keep up with them.
We could hear women and children screaming from the beach, cut off by the fire. They’d saved themselves and the children in shallow waves.
Firemen ran through the flames and smoke to help them. Firemen ran into the burning huts to save children. Firemen caught fire, their sleeves and trousers bursting into quick flames from oil and kerosene spills among the crammed huts.
One rescuer emerged from the swirling smoke close to me with a child in his arms. His own hair was burning, but he ignored it. He passed beside me, but I couldn’t break the bucket-chain, and couldn’t help him.
The smell of burnt skin went into my mind while I was passing buckets of water and stayed there, like a dead horse found in a prairie of memory.
Is there a limit to the number of horrible things you can see, and experience, in any one life? Of course, there is: the limit is one, and none.
The buckets stopped. Everyone was kneeling, or looking at the sky. It was raining. I hadn’t noticed.
I was still smelling the burnt skin, and for some reason, I was remembering the severed head, on the side of the road, in Sri Lanka. I was still in yesterday’s prairie.
It poured. The fires sizzled. Firemen broke down the most dangerous structures, and contained the fire. People danced. If I’d been in a better mood, or if Karla had been there, I’d have danced with them.
I walked back along the beach and looked up, beyond the burnt boats, to the wall of trees at the far end of the beach. Grey figures began to walk out of the smoke and the shadows.
Greg figures, ghosts or demons, were coming toward us slowly.
The insides of the boats were saturated with a hundred years of fish oil, and the smoke all around us was blue-black as they burned and smouldered.
The men who stumbled through that black fog and rain toward us were stained with it, because they’d lit the fires. They were grey with ash and smoke and dust from the trees where they’d been hiding.
Rainwater striped their faces, making them grey tigers, moving slowly through a jungle of smoke. It took me a few seconds to realise that they were Scorpions.
Hanuman, as identifiable as a flagpole, and walking with a limp, was the last man out of the shadows.
Time really does slow down, sometimes, when love and fear combine with history, even if it’s only the history of a little place like the fishermen’s cove in Colaba. Heartbeats become hammers, and you can see everything at once. You’re somewhere else, already: somewhere dead, already. And you’re never sharper, never more aware of every swirl of smoke.
I saw the Scorpions coming toward us. I saw the people, still dancing behind me. I saw kids, dogs, and elderly people sitting on the sand. I saw firemen, standing amid the huts, steam coming off their burnt uniforms.
The Scorpions were still about sixty metres away. They were carrying knives and hatchets. They’d started the fire as Act One, and were coming to close the play.
I pulled my knives from their scabbards and started jogging toward them. I didn’t know what I was doing. The most important thing, it seemed to me at that moment, was to give the people behind me time to react, and run. I was shouting. I was screaming, I guess.
By the third or fourth step I stopped thinking, and something happened to the sound. I couldn’t hear anything. Wishes, wings without birds, passed through me like spears of light.
I had a knife in each hand and I was running through a tunnel, numbed of noise. I couldn’t even hear my own breathing. It seemed to take forever, but I knew that when I was close, it would be too fast.
There was somebody jogging with me. It was Naveen, but he wasn’t running with me, he was grabbing at my vest, he was pulling me to the ground. I hit the sand so hard that the world returned, and all the shouting and screaming and sirens came on at once. Naveen was half on top of me, where we fell.
He was pointing at something. I looked along his extended arm and saw cops, a lot of cops, running hard, and firing at will. Scorpions fell, or surrendered. Lightning Dilip was already kicking one of them.
Naveen and I were still lying on the ground. He was smiling and crying and laughing, all at the same time. He had his hand on my shoulder, the grip fierce.
He loved me after that night, that Indian-Irishman, and he never let me doubt it. Sometimes, the bravest thing we ever do is the thing we never get to do. And sometimes the spark that ignites a brother’s love, in men not born brothers, is nothing more than a pure intention.
We rode circles around the area of the cove until Abdullah, Ahmed and Tall Tony arrived. I gave Abdullah what I knew, and then we headed back to the jazz jam, on the Back Bay.
The band had left, and there were only a few kids still there. They told us that Didier, a favourite with the smokers, had left the message that he’d gone back to visit someone named Johnny Cigar.
Diva sat up quickly when we made our way through the slum to her hut.
‘What are you doing, you idiot?’ she demanded.
‘I’m fine,’ I said.
‘Not you!’ she snapped. ‘The other idiot. What do you think you’re doing, fighting bloody fires? Are you out of your tiny mind?’
‘You were safe, with Didier,’ Naveen protested. ‘I was only gone an hour.’
‘And who was keeping you safe?’ she asked, advancing to poke him in the chest.
Naveen grinned happily.
‘What are you so chirpy about?’
‘You care what happens to me,’ Naveen said, wagging his finger at her defiant nose. ‘You care about me.’
‘Of course I care about you. Some fucking detective, you are.’
‘Wow,’ Naveen said.
‘That’s all you’ve got to say?’
‘Wow.’
‘If you say that again, I’ll smack you with a pot,’ Diva said. ‘Shut your mouth, and kiss me with it.’
They almost did, but there was a fierce clatter of pots and pans, and a loud clamour of voices. Somebody was coming through the slum, and making a lot of noise about it.
Naveen put Diva in Sita’s hands, ready to make an escape through the back lanes on the sea coast. Johnny Cigar, Didier, Naveen and I faced the only path leading from the main part of the slum.
We heard a voice raised above all the others, shouting in English. It was Kavita Singh. When she came into the open space in front of Diva’s hut, we saw that she was smiling, and an honour guard of women was cheering her. Diva returned with Sita to greet her.
‘Just for you,’ Kavita said, handing Diva a newspaper. ‘Today’s front page. It’ll be on the stands in a few hours, but I thought you should be the first to see it.’
Diva read the lead article, looked at the photographs of her father, handed the paper to me, and fell into Naveen’s arms.
The gang responsible for the massacre at the Devnani mansion had been captured. They’d confessed to the crime, and were in prison. It was an African–Chinese crime syndicate, handling most of the pharmaceutical pleasures flowing illegally through Bombay to Lagos.
Smashing the gang and solving the murders was a triumph, the cops said, involving officers from several countries. The temporary CEO of Devnani Industries, Rajesh Jain, appealed once again for the missing heiress to come forward, and claim her inheritance.
For Diva, the threat was gone and she was free to leave the kerosene lamps, and live in the electric world again.
‘Lin,’ Didier said. ‘Can I offer you a flask?’
He’d been talking and joking with Kavita. Her expression said that I’d interrupted her, and it tested her patience.
‘How did you know Diva was here, Kavita?’
‘You and Karla are psychically connected,’ she snarled, taking a swig from Didier’s flask. ‘You tell me.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Why don’t you just go home, Lin,’ she said. ‘You do have a home, don’t you?’
I didn’t know what she was so angry about, and I didn’t care.
‘Bye, Kavita.’
I walked out to the street, and had just started my bike when a motorcycle pulled up beside me, and someone called my name. It was Ravi, the Company street soldier who’d ridden with me on the night of the contract.
‘Abdullah sent me to find you,’ he said, remaining on his bike, his hands on the high handlebars. ‘The Scorpions killed Amir. And Farid is dead.’
‘Peace be upon them,’ I said. ‘What happened?’
‘The Scorpions dragged Amir out of his house, and killed him in the street.’
‘Oh, shit.’
‘Farid went crazy. He shot his way into the police cells.’
‘What happened?’
‘The cops ran, and Farid killed three Scorpions who were in the cells for the fire. That big guy, Hanuman, he saved Vishnu. He took six bullets, but he’s gone for good, the big man. The moustache guy, Danda, he’s also gone.’
‘What happened to Farid?’
‘The cops came back with a lot of guns, and killed Farid. Shot him sixty times, they say.’
‘Y’Allah.’
‘Get the fuck off the street, man. It’s cowboys and Indians out there, and I’m too Indian for this shit.’
He rode away quickly, a lone despatch courier in a militarised zone. He was scared, and angry: always a bad combination in a man.
I’d never seen Ravi scared. He was one of the calm ones, and every gang has them. But the loss of blunt-headed Amir, the first to dance when any music played, the first to start punching when the action started, and Farid the Fixer, the champion boxer, both full Sanjay Council members, scared the young gangster.
Scorpions had already died. Company men had died. More would join them in the dark red fall. Ravi was living his life one night at a time. It was war. It was the failure of everything.
I rode back to the Amritsar. I needed to sleep, and then find out what hadn’t gone crazy on the street. I needed to know how much of my business was still running, and how much was running away.
I parked the bike in the alleyway that split the hotel. I’d parked there too often, I guess, because I wasn’t paying enough attention when I wiped the bike down for the night.
I stood up, and Madame Zhou was there, very close to me. The twins were also there, one on either side of her.
There were two other men: short and thin men, with the kind of hungry in their eyes that nothing can feed. They had their hands in the pockets of the jackets. They were her acid throwers.
‘Madame,’ I said. ‘No offence, but if your acid throwers start to take their hands out of their pockets, I’m gonna go crazy. And when it’s all over, I won’t be the only one dead or burned.’
She laughed. To be sure that I knew she was laughing, perhaps, she switched on a light beneath her veil. It was a battery-powered party tube-light, curved around her neck like a necklace, inside her black lace veil.
The veil was suspended from a rigid mantilla, high over her head, made from something black and shiny: dead spiders, was my guess. The lace veil met a black taffeta dress that brushed the ground, hiding her feet.
She must’ve been in very high platform shoes, because the tiny woman was almost eye to veil with me. The light shone through the lace, illuminating her face from below.
I think it was intended to be a devastating revelation of her famous beauty. It wasn’t. She was still laughing.
‘You know, I’m tired, Madame,’ I said.
‘Your friend, Vikram, died tonight,’ she replied quickly, turning off the light.
I got it. The light wasn’t for turning on: it was for turning off. In the sudden darkness her face was a shadow, breathing.
‘Vikram?’
‘The cowboy,’ she said. ‘He’s dead.’
I stared at her black-space face, angry, and thinking about her acid throwers, and Karla.
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘It is true,’ she said.
She cocked her head to the side a little, watching me with invisible eyes.
I was watching the acid throwers. I’d seen their victims. I knew some of them: people with faces smeared of feature, a stretched mask of skin, with holes cut for the vanished nose and mouth to breathe, and no eyes at all.
They begged along the strip, communicating through touch. Thinking about them made me angrier, which was good, because I was scared.
‘How do you know that?’
‘It is a matter of record, now,’ she replied. ‘It is a police case. He committed suicide.’
‘It can’t be.’
‘It can,’ she whispered, ‘and it is. He took a week’s supply of heroin, and he injected himself with it. There was a suicide note. I have a copy. Would you like to see it?’
‘You know, Madame, I’ve only met you twice, and I already wish I hadn’t met you the first time.’
‘I gave him the drugs,’ Madame Zhou said.
Oh, no, my mind pleaded. Please, no.
‘Cheapest murder I ever committed,’ she said. ‘I wish all the people I hate were junkies. It would make life so much easier.’
She laughed. I was breathing hard. It was a tough job keeping a close watch on four of them: five, if you counted the spider about the size of a small woman, named Madame Zhou.
The arched alleyway was dark, and empty. There was no-one on the streets.
‘He cheated me,’ she hissed,
‘and about jewellery. No-one cheats me. Especially not about jewellery. This is a warning, Shantaram. Stay away from her.’
‘Why don’t you come back, and talk to Karla about it in person? I’d like to watch.’
‘Not Karla, you fool, Kavita Singh. Stay away from Kavita.’
I drew my knives, slowly. The twins slipped clubs from their sleeves. The acid throwers shifted on the balls of their feet, ready to throw.
Madame Zhou was only a lunge away. With the right momentum, I could pick her up and throw her at the acid throwers. It was a plan. It was a plan that was a heartbeat away from happening.
‘Let’s do this,’ I said. ‘Let’s get this over with.’
‘Not tonight, Shantaram,’ she said, stepping away. ‘But I’m sure that’s not the first time you’ve heard those words.’
She backed off slowly, tottering on her platforms, her dress dragging across the ground, a taffeta shadow scaring rats back into their hollows.
The acid throwers scampered away. The twins backed off in step with Madame Zhou, scowling at me.
She’d threatened Karla, and her attention had shifted to Kavita. She was gone a long time before I stopped wanting to follow them, and finish it. But enough dead: enough dead, for one night.
I went back to my rooms, drank something, smoked the last tiny piece of Lisa’s heavenly dope, danced to music for a while, and then opened my journal to write.
Farid and Amir, gone. Hanuman and Danda, gone. Boats and huts on the beach burned. And Vikram, gone. Vikram, the love-train rider: Vikram, gone.
Change is the blood of time. The world was changing, out of time, and moving beneath me like a whale, soaring for air. The chess pieces were moving themselves. Nothing was the same, and I knew that nothing would be better, for a while.
The newly dead are ancestors, too. We respect the chain of life and love when we celebrate the life, not mourn the death. We all know that, and we all say it, when loved ones leave.
But even though we know that death is the truth, and we sing stories to ourselves, the pain of loss is something we can’t deny, except by wounding tenderness.
It’s a good thing, the crying. It isn’t rational, and it can’t be. It’s a purity beyond reason. It’s the essence of what we are, and the mirror of what we’ll become. Love.
The Mountain Shadow Page 64