‘A little more gap in the door, Jaswant,’ I said, still trying to squeeze through.
He eased the structure aside, I grabbled through, and he shoved it back into place again.
‘What do you have to report?’ he asked me, clapping dust from his hands.
‘Fuck you, Jaswant.’
‘Wait a minute!’ he said seriously. ‘I want to know what’s going on, out there. What’s your sit-rep?’
‘My sit-rep?’ I said, trying to pass him and get to my room.
‘Wait,’ he said, blocking my path.
‘What is it?’
‘You haven’t given your report! What’s going on out there? You’re the only one who’s been outside for sixteen hours. How bad is it?’
He was earnest. He meant it. People had walked down public streets, after the anti-Sikh riots, with severed Sikh heads in their hands, strung by the hair like shopping bags. It was an Indian tragedy. It was a human tragedy.
‘Alright, alright,’ I said, playing along. ‘The bad news, depending on how you look at it, is that I didn’t see any zombies. Not one, anywhere, unless you count drunks, and politicians.’
‘Oh,’ he said, a little defeated.
‘But the good news is that the city’s infested with rivers of rats, and packs of ravenous dogs.’
‘Okay,’ he said, smacking his hands together. ‘I’m gonna call my Parsi friend. He’s been nagging me about a Rat Plague Plan for years. He’ll be thrilled to hear this.’
We left him, dialling his Parsi friend.
‘The bodyguard standby charge still applies,’ he called to me, as he dialled. ‘I was on standby, even though Miss Karla came back with you. I’ll put it on your bill.’
The door to my room was unlocked. We heard strange noises coming from inside. I quietly opened it wide. From the doorway we saw Didier, speaking tongues to Charu on my mattress, while Oleg gambled his scent on Pari and my couch.
The strange noise we’d heard was Vinson, trying to play my guitar upside down. He was lying on his back, with his legs resting upright on the wall. No-one noticed us.
We walked in a step to look into my bedroom. Diva and Randall were stretched out on my wooden bed. They were kissing each other with their hands, as well as their lips.
I wanted to slap Randall away from a girl that I knew Naveen loved, but slapping Randall away was Diva’s job, if slapping was required.
Karla pulled my vest.
‘You are not riding out the apocalypse here,’ she whispered, leading me away by the hand.
We walked back to the door of her room. My heart was beating. She put the key in the lock, then stopped, turned, and looked at me.
I never took Karla for granted. But the key was in a lock that opened the door to her Bedouin tent, and my heart was too flooded with hope to doubt. I was hoping that a citywide lockdown and the small satyricon in my rooms might be what it took to make her open the tent.
She smiled, opened the door, and gently pushed me inside. She lit secret lights, and put incense in the right places. She took the collars of my vest, while I was goggling at the banners of red and blue silk above my head, and walked me backwards to the foot of her bed.
She kissed me, and used the advantage to shove me back on the bed, leaving my feet dangling over the edge.
She pulled an ottoman to the foot of the bed, sat down, and began to unlace one of my boots. Her fingers fretted at the knots, then loosened the laces and pulled off one boot. It hit the floor with a boot-thud, and she started on the other. It thumped the floor a few seconds later.
She pulled my vest and T-shirt off, unbuckled my jeans, and dragged me naked.
‘You know what your problem is?’ she said, looking me over. ‘You’re harder than you need to be.’
‘That’s your fault,’ I said, my hands behind my head, on Karla’s pillows, in Karla’s Bedouin tent.
‘Who said it’s a fault? It’s just that sometimes, a girl likes to provoke.’
I was confused again, but that was okay. I was very happy to be looking up at haloes of silk above her head.
‘You really came back for me?’ I asked. ‘You left the fetish party, and came looking for me?’
She was standing with her feet apart, her hands on her hips.
‘I’d swim the Colaba Back Bay for you, baby,’ she said, smiling at my confusion. ‘I mean, I might ask Randall to come with me, because I’m not a great swimmer, but I’d come for you, baby.’
‘Indians can’t swim like Australians,’ I said. ‘Australia has more sharks.’
She unbuttoned her black shirt, and threw it aside.
‘You know,’ she said, slipping off her jeans, and stripping naked, ‘it might be a lot easier for everybody, if I just keep you in sight from now on.’
She cocked her head to the side to study my reaction.
‘I think we should never be apart again,’ I said seriously. ‘What do you think, Karla?’
‘You’ll know exactly what I think,’ she said, creeping along my body to kiss me, ‘in about sixteen minutes.’
King of everything, and a beggar at her banquet at the same time. Thrown at her, thrown at me, turning, moving, changing, touching, and sweating too-long-alone.
My hands against the wall, pushing shadows away. Her feet against my chest, speaking softly, soles and toes, while harsher tongues shouted everywhere else.
The world rolling off the bed. My back on the floor. Her knees on the carpet, the coloured tent behind her head, fan-blades whirling doves of smoke from sandalwood incense.
Karla leaning over me, pressing her forehead to mine, eye for eye, subliming me with connected light. Lost in her pleasure, forgetting my own, finding it again in her eyes, coming home: Karla’s eyes, without fear or fences, coming home to me.
Arms entangled, fingers sewn together, legs in carnal coincidence we lay breath against breath, curled into one another like runaways, sleeping in a forest.
Chapter Seventy-One
Karla and I didn’t leave her tent again, during the lock-
down. On the first morning, I woke to see her walking toward me with coffee cups on a tray. I always woke before anybody, even in prison, especially in prison, and it was strange to wake with another consciousness already coffee-cool.
She was dressed in a kind of housecoat, but it was black, and completely sheer, and she was naked inside it. It was as if she was swimming in a shadow every time she moved, and I wanted to swim with her.
She set the tray down on a large street-drum she used as a night table, kissed me, and sat beside me on the bed.
‘Let me tell you what’s been going on,’ she said, her hand on my knee.
‘Going on now?’ I hoped.
‘Since the day I met Ranjit.’
‘I see. Not now.’
‘Not now. Do you know how Ranjit and I met?’
‘At a dog fight?’
‘You need this, Shantaram.’
‘No, Karla, I don’t. I just need you.’
‘Yes, you do need me, and you do need this.’
‘Why?’
‘Why do you need me, or why do you need this?’
‘I know why I need you – you’re the other half of everything. Why do I need to go back to you and Ranjit?’
‘The other half of everything,’ she smiled. ‘I like it. You need this talk because I’ve treated you bad, and I feel bad, even though I did the right thing, for you I mean, all the way along the line.’
‘Okay, but –’
‘I don’t like feeling bad, especially about you, so that has to be squared up, somehow. And the only way is for you to know what I’ve been doing, so you completely understand.’
‘I don’t care what you’ve been doing.’
‘You deserve to know.’
‘I don’
t want to know. And I really don’t care.’
She laughed, and ran her hand up to my chest.
‘Sometimes, you’re funnier than the truth.’
‘And happier,’ I added, kissing her, and swimming in the black shadow with her.
Some time later she brought new cups of coffee to the bedside, and started again.
‘I wanted to get slum resettlement on the political agenda in Bombay.’
‘This is really good coffee,’ I said. ‘Italian?’
‘Of course, and stay on the subject.’
‘Slum resettlement,’ I said. ‘I get it. I’m just not sure I want to get it.’
‘Want to get what?’
‘Karla, I love you. I honestly don’t care what you’ve been –’
‘Humane, well-compensated resettlement for slum dwellers,’ she said. ‘You get that, right?’
She was imitating me, and doing a pretty good job.
‘I get that. I just –’
‘Ranjit and I met in an elevator,’ Karla said.
‘Karla –’
‘In a stuck elevator, to be precise.’
‘That’s a pretty good Ranjit metaphor. A stuck elevator.’
‘The elevator got stuck between the seventh and eighth floors for an hour,’ she said, crowding me into her memory.
‘An hour?’
‘Sixty long minutes. There was just the two of us, Ranjit and me.’
‘Did he make a pass at you?’
‘Of course. He flirted with me, and made a pass, and I slapped it away. So he made another pass, and I slapped it a lot harder, and then he sat on the floor and asked me what I wanted to achieve in life.’
I drank coffee, slapping Ranjit twice, in my mind.
‘It was the first time in my life that anyone ever asked me that question,’ she said.
‘I’ve asked you that question. I’ve asked you more than once.’
‘You asked me what I want to do,’ she said, ‘just like I ask you what you want to do. He asked me what I want to achieve in life. It’s a different question.’
‘It’s the same question, in a different elevator.’
She laughed, and then shook her head.
‘I’m not getting into that now, much as I’d love to kick your koans in the ass.’
‘The ass kicks,’ I said, straight-faced. ‘When the burden is great.’
‘I’m not doing this, Lin. I’m going to tell you what you need to know, and then I’ll aphorism your ass so bad you’ll think you’re drunk on homemade wine.’
‘Promise?’
‘Go with me, here.’
‘Okay, so you’re locked in a marriage, sorry, an elevator, with Ranjit, and when he can’t achieve you, he asks you what you want to achieve. What did you say?’
‘I answered it without thinking. I said I want to achieve decent resettlement for slum dwellers.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said This is a fated connection. I’m going into politics, and I’ll make your program a priority, if you’ll marry me.’
‘He said this in the elevator?’
‘He did.’
‘And you accepted?’
‘I did.’
‘After an hour in an elevator?’
‘Yeah,’ she said, frowning.
She scanned my eyes, green queens prowling through my grey skies.
‘Hold it a minute,’ she demanded. ‘You don’t think a man would propose to me after an hour in a stuck elevator, is that it?’
‘I didn’t say –’
‘My fastest proposal was five minutes flat,’ she said.
‘I didn’t say –’
‘I’d defy you to beat that, but I know you can’t, and I wouldn’t let you try.’
‘No offence, but apart from you, what was his angle?’
‘He said that he wanted to piss off his family, and there was no better way. He’d been looking for someone just like me.’
‘Why did he want to piss off his family?’
‘Ranjit had control of the money, his family estate, but he had brothers and sisters who were snapping at his crooked deals. They’d taken him to court three times, trying to get control of the money he was misappropriating. He’d been looking for a wife he could weaponise.’
‘To antagonise them?’
‘Exactly. He couldn’t cut them off without a reason, and he knew they couldn’t keep their mouths shut about his foreign wife, especially if his foreign wife couldn’t keep her mouth shut about them.’
‘You cooked this up in an hour? You fix his problems, and he fixes yours. Strangers on an elevator, huh?’
‘Exactly. Each time I provoked one of them to insult me, he cut them off. I was his reverse pension plan.’
‘You’re pretty cute, even when you’re trying not to be,’ I smiled. ‘How did you get them to dislike you so much?’
‘They’re a nasty bunch. They hate easy. And Ranjit told me all their dirty secrets. I took an honesty pill every time I saw them. It made them sick.’
‘So, when you and Ranjit got all the way down to the ground floor, you married him?’
She was suddenly serious.
‘After what I did to you, with Khaderbhai, I thought you’d never speak to me again. And I was right, kind of. We were apart for two years without a word.’
‘I gave you space, because you married Ranjit.’
‘I married Ranjit to give you space,’ she said. ‘And I spent two years helping him cut family ties, and pushing him up a political hill that he was ill-equipped in anything but ambition to climb.’
‘So, you inappropriately alienated his family, so that he could misappropriate the family fortune, and in exchange he pushed your slum resettlement agenda? Am I getting this right?’
‘Substantially. At least, that was the deal, if he’d stuck to it.’
‘Karla, that’s . . . kinda nuts, what you were doing with Ranjit.’
‘And living with Lisa wasn’t nuts, in its own way?’
‘Not . . . every day.’
She laughed, and then looked away.
‘At the last moment, Ranjit ditched the resettlement program, and pulled out of the race, because of a few scares the other side threw at him.’
‘When did that happen?’ I asked, thinking that his withdrawal from politics might’ve had something to do with Lisa’s death.
‘That day at his office when you came in growling for me, I’d just had it out with him. It was all over. Everything I’d worked for. He’d withdrawn his nomination. He was shaking and sweating. He quit, and you know I can’t stand a quitter. I went and sat in the corner while he settled down, and I told him that if we ever found ourselves in the same room again, so long as we lived, we’d sit as far apart as possible.’
‘Neither one of us knew he was so scared that day because he thought I knew he’d been with Lisa at the end.’
‘I was so happy when you walked in.’
‘As happy as I am now?’ I asked, kissing her.
‘Happier,’ she purred. ‘I was sitting in the corner, with everything I’d planned and worked for in ruins around me, and then you walked in. I was never more glad to see anyone in my life. I thought, My hero.’
‘Let me get you something heroic to eat. I don’t know about you, but I’m starved.’
‘No, let me.’
She brought us a platter of dates, cheese and apples, and wine in long, red glasses with feet like a hawk’s claws.
She talked about Kavita Singh, and how Ranjit’s disappearance gave Karla one last hand to play, because she had a proxy vote on Ranjit’s shares, which he couldn’t rescind without resurfacing. Karla elevated Kavita to deputy editor, in exchange for a promise from Kavita to make slum resettlement a banner issue.
<
br /> Working together, Karla and Kavita developed a citywide beautification program to nudge public consensus toward humane resettlement of slum dwellers, as a matter of civic pride. They played it out on newspaper pages still technically owned by Ranjit.
‘The editor was a problem,’ Karla said. ‘We tried for weeks to get him on the team. He fought us to the fourth quarter on everything. But when he accepted an invitation to the fetish party, it was easy.’
‘What was easy?’
‘Compliance,’ she said. ‘Smoke a joint with me.’
‘Why were you on Benicia’s bike last night?’
‘Does it hurt more that I was with Benicia, or that I was on her very pretty motorcycle?’
‘It all hurts. I don’t ever want to see you on any motorcycle but mine, unless you’re riding it yourself.’
‘Then you’ll have to teach me to ride, renegade. You start with your legs wide, right?’
‘Wide enough to hold on,’ I smiled.
‘Smoke a joint with me,’ she said, lying back on the bed, her feet in my lap.
‘Now?’
‘Look, the city’s in lockdown. We can’t go anywhere. Jaswant has plenty of supplies. I’ve got a gun. Relax, and smoke a joint with me.’
‘I’m pretty relaxed, but okay, if you think it’s a good idea.’
‘Some doors,’ she said slowly, ‘can only be opened with the grace of pure desire.’
Some time later she brought us fruit on a blue glass tray, and fed me with her fingers, piece by piece. Love is connection, and happiness is the connected self. She kissed my hands, her hair like wings fanned for the sun. And an instant blessed by a woman’s love washed wounds away.
‘Compliance,’ Karla said, settling in beside me with a glass of wine.
‘Compliance?’
‘There’s nothing like a fetish, to get a man’s compliance point out in the open.’
‘The chief editor?’ I asked, still cocooned in the segue.
‘Are you zoning out?’ she asked. ‘Of course, the editor.’
‘How did you find out his fetish? Did he present a card, or something?’
‘When the guests arrived, we’d already supplied every fetish in the book, with girls in masks, dressed by damnation. We paraded them past him, until one got a reaction. It didn’t take long, actually.’
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