The Mountain Shadow

Chapter Sixty-Two

Oleg moved in. He asked if he could sleep on my couch, and I agreed, which meant that I had to buy a couch. He went with me, and it took him a long time to make up my mind. The one he chose was in green leather and long enough to stretch out on, which he often did, soon after it was delivered.

When he wasn’t a field agent, with spike, chasing down lost loves with Naveen and Didier, he was on the couch, his hands folded across his chest, and talking issues out of his own psychological steppes. The Tuareg would’ve loved it.

‘Did you say that you could change your dreams, the other day?’ he asked me, stretched out on the couch, a week after he started at the bureau. ‘Actually in the dream, while you’re dreaming it?’

‘Of course.’

‘You mean, while you’re dreaming, and completely asleep, you can alter the course of your dream?’

‘Yes. Can’t you?’

‘No. I don’t think many people can.’

‘Let me put it this way, a nightmare is a dream I can’t control, and a dream is a nightmare I can control.’

‘Wow. How does it work?’

‘I’m writing a story here, Oleg.’

‘Oh, sorry,’ he said, his bare feet tapping against one another at the other end of the couch. ‘Go back to work. Utter silence from me.’

I was working on a new story. I’d thrown the happy story away. It didn’t end well. I was sketching some paragraphs about Abdullah, and thinking about a couple of stories built around him. There were eagles of narrative in him, each tale a winged contradiction, but I’d never written anything about him.

That afternoon I felt compelled to capture him, to paint him with words, and the writing came fast. Paragraphs bloomed like hydrangeas on the pages of my journal.

Years after that sunny afternoon at the Amritsar hotel, a writer told me that it was bad luck for the living, to write about the living. I didn’t know that then, and I was happy, in the pages I had on Abdullah: happy enough to forget about threats and felonies, enemies who hide in a smile, Kavita and Karla, and everything in the world, so long as nothing disturbed me, and I could keep writing.

‘What’s the story about?’ Oleg asked.

I put the pen down.

‘It’s a murder mystery,’ I said.

‘What’s it about?’

‘It’s about a writer, who kills someone for interrupting him while he’s writing. You wanna know the mystery part?’

He swung his legs around, and sat with his forearms on his thighs.

‘I love mysteries,’ he said.

‘The mystery is why it took the writer so long.’

‘Sarcasm,’ he said. ‘You should read Lermontov. The Caucasus is notorious for its sarcasm.’

‘You don’t say?’ I said, picking up the pen.

‘Can you really change your dreams?’

The pen in my hand drifted toward him, hovering above my elbow on the desk. I was hoping that it would turn into a caduceus, and I could use it to make him go to sleep.

‘I mean, how does that work? I’d love to change my dreams. I have some dreams, you know, that I’d really, really like to put on repeat.’

I closed the pen, closed the journal and got two cold beers, throwing one to him. I sat back in my chair, and raised my can in a toast.

‘To mysteries,’ I said.

‘To mysteries!’

‘Now, sit back, relax, and tell me what’s up, Oleg.’

‘Your Karla,’ he said, taking a sip of beer. ‘I know what you’re feeling, because I have my Karlesha, back in Moscow.’

‘Why aren’t you back in Moscow?’

‘I don’t like Moscow,’ he said, taking another sip. ‘I’m a St Petersburg boy.’

‘But you love the girl.’

‘Yes. But she hates me.’

‘She hates you?’

‘Hates me.’

‘How do you know?’

‘She paid her father to have me killed.’

‘She had to pay him? What is he, a banker?’

‘No, he’s a cop. A pretty big cop.’

‘What happened?’

‘It’s a long story,’ he sighed, looking toward the breeze of white curtains, fluttering on the sunlit balcony.

‘Fuck you, Oleg. You killed my short story. You can fill the space with your long story.’

He laughed bitterly. One of our purest expressions, a thing of our human kind: the bitter laugh.

‘I slept with her sister,’ he said, staring at his beer.

‘Okay. Not classy, but there are worse things that people do to people’s sisters.’

‘No, it’s complicated. They’re twins. Non-identical twins.’

‘Where are you going with this, Oleg?’

There was a call from the hallway. It was Didier.

‘Hello? Are you home, Lin?’ he said, as he walked through the open door.

‘Didier!’ I said happily. ‘Grab a seat, and have a beer. Oleg is venturing into territory beyond my couch, and you’re just the man to guide the way.’

‘Lin, I am afraid that I have many appointments, and -’

‘My girlfriend in Moscow hates me,’ Oleg said flatly, helplessly, ‘because she’s a non-identical twin, and I slept with her and her non-identical sister, at the same time.’

‘Fascinating,’ Didier said, settling himself into a chair. ‘If it is not an indelicate question, Oleg, did they have the same… aroma?’

‘Indelicate?’ I mocked. ‘You, Didier?’

‘Funny you should say that,’ Oleg muttered, searching Didier’s face. ‘They did have the same smell. Exactly the same smell. I mean, the same smell… everywhere.’

‘That is indeed a rare phenomenon,’ Didier mused. ‘Exceedingly rare. Did you happen to notice the length of their ring fingers, compared to their index fingers?’

‘Can we get to the part where her father tried to kill you?’ I suggested, thinking that I had writing to do.

‘Marvellous,’ Didier said. ‘Tried to kill you, eh?’

‘Sure. See, it happened this way. I was in love with Elena, and nothing ever happened between me and her sister, Irina, until one night, when I was very drunk, totally razbit.’

‘Razbit?’ Didier asked.

‘Smashed, man, I was totally smashed, and Irina sneaked into my bed, naked, while Elena was at the neighbour’s place.’

‘Wonderful,’ Didier enthused.

‘It was completely dark,’ Oleg continued. ‘Very dark. We had blackout blinds on the windows. She smelled like Elena. She felt like Elena.’

‘Did she kiss you?’ Didier asked, a master of sexual forensics.

‘No. And she didn’t speak.’

‘Precisely. That would have given her away. She’s a clever girl.’

‘Elena didn’t think so, when she came back, switched the light on, and found us making love.’

‘No talking your way out of that one,’ I said.

‘She threw me out of my own apartment,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure that’s even legal. I mean, I’m still paying the rent from here. And her father put up the threat of prison bars, between me and the woman I love.’

‘I don’t think Elena felt very loved, Oleg.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I mean Irina. When we made love, drunk and all as I was, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. She was a maniac, in all the right ways. I was mad for her. I still am.’

‘Marvellous,’ Didier smiled. ‘But what happened?’

‘I managed to get a message to Irina, asking her to run away with me. She agreed, and we planned to meet at midnight, at Paveletsky Terminal. But she told Elena our plans, and Elena came to see me, asking me not to take Irina away. I talked to her, but I refused. I met Irina at the station, and we were running away together, then she stopped me and asked me if I was really sure that it was her I loved, and not her twin.’

He paused, searching for the right way through his hedge of recollection.

‘Yes?’ Didier asked, stamping his foot a little. ‘What happened?’

‘We were standing together, in the shadows. She asked me how I could be so sure that it was really her and not Elena that I loved. And, you know that moment when a woman asks you for the truth? And you know, you really, clearly know that it’s the last thing you should do?’

‘Yeah,’ we both agreed.

‘I told the truth.’

‘How bad?’ I asked.

‘I told her that I was absolutely sure that it was her I loved, because just to be completely certain, I had slept with Elena again, when she’d come to see me, two hours before. And it was nothing, with Elena. I hardly enjoyed it at all. So, I was certain that Irina was the one for me, and it wasn’t just the fact that I was pretty drunk that night, and I kind of hallucinated how good she was.’

‘Oh, shit.’

‘Merde,’ Didier agreed.

‘She took a swing at me,’ he said.

‘I want to swing at you myself,’ Didier said. ‘It is a disgrace to tell any woman the unembellished truth.’

‘You dug that grave yourself, Oleg,’ I laughed. ‘And neither one forgave you?’

‘Their father put professional bad people on my case. I had to run, and run fast.’

‘Tough break,’ I said. ‘Serves you right, for falling in love with a policeman’s daughters.’

I turned to Didier, who was sitting back in his chair, his legs crossed, and his hand supporting his chin.

‘Any advice?’

‘Didier has a solution,’ he declared. ‘You must wear two of those T-shirts, that common people wear, under your shirt, for two weeks. You must not wash with soap, or hair products. Only water. You must not wear scent of any kind, and you must not brush against any person wearing scent. And you must not wash the shirts.’

‘And then?’ Oleg asked.

‘And then you mail the T-shirts in two packages, one to each of the twins, with only two words on the back – Leopold’s, Bombay.’

‘And then?’

‘And then you give copies of Irina’s photograph to the waiters at Leopold’s, and offer a reward to the first man who identifies her, and calls you.’

‘What makes you think she’ll come?’ Oleg asked.

He had the same expression shining in his smile that the students on the mountain had, when they listened to Idriss.

‘The scent,’ Didier smiled back at him. ‘If she is yours, the power of your scent will bring her. She will come to you, like a pheromone pilgrim. But only if she is yours, and you are hers.’

‘Wow, Didier!’ Oleg said, slapping his hands together. ‘I’ll start right away.’

He jumped up, pulled my second T-shirt from my wardrobe, and pulled it on over my other one, which he was wearing.

‘Why a photograph of Irina, and not Elena?’ I asked Didier. ‘Or, why not photos of both?’

‘The sex,’ Didier frowned. ‘Did you not pay attention? Irina is Elena, without inhibitions.’

‘You got that right,’ Oleg said, straightening his T-shirts.

‘Exactly,’ Didier said, sniffing Oleg to make sure he wasn’t wearing scent. ‘The sex you had with Irina was exceptional. Do I need to say more?’

He stood up, brushing at his sleeves.

‘My work is done here,’ he said, pausing at the door. ‘Do physical sport, Oleg. Climb to high, dangerous places, jump off things, provoke a policeman, start a fight with a bully, and above all, flirt with women, but have sex with none of them, until you send the shirts. She must smell tiger on you, and wolf, and ape, and a man hungry for sex, and women hungry for him. Bonne chance.’

He swept out, flourishing his grey-blue scarf.

‘Wow,’ Oleg said.

‘You know,’ I said, ‘how I asked you not to use the R-word all the time?’

‘Yes… ’ he said uncertainly.

‘I’m adding Wow to the list.’

‘There’s a list?’

‘There is now.’

‘Shit, there’s a list of things I can’t say,’ he grinned. ‘You’re making me homesick for Moscow, and I don’t even like Moscow.’

He was right. A list of things not to say?

‘You know what, fuck it. Say anything you want, Oleg.’

‘You mean it?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Wow, I’m Russian again.’

‘You know what,’ I said. ‘You wanted to ride my bike, right?’

‘Can I?’

‘Never gonna happen. But there’s an old banger bike downstairs. I saw her neglected down there, where I park mine. She belonged to a waiter at Kayani’s. I didn’t like how he was treating her, so I bought her off him. I’ve been cleaning her up, the last couple of weeks.’

‘Kruto,’ Oleg said, finding his shoes.

‘What was that?’

‘That’s me, not saying Wow. Kruto means fucking cool, man.’

‘Kruto?’

‘That’s it. Kruto, man.’

‘Can you ride?’

‘Are you kidding?’ he scoffed, tying his sneakers. ‘We Russians can ride anything.’

‘Okay. I’ve gotta make some rounds, and you can come with me if you like, seeing as you have the day off.’

‘Great material for a story,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

‘Don’t mess with my material, Oleg. Just ride, and observe, and wipe the breathy window of recollection clean afterwards, okay?’

‘But what if I find a great character, someone I see you talking to, someone who’s really, you know, amazingly good?’

I thought about it. He was a decent guy.

‘I’ll let you have one character,’ I said.

‘Great!’

‘But not Half-Moon Auntie.’

‘Oh. She sounds like a good one.’

‘That’s why you can’t have her. Are you ready to ride, or not?’

‘I’m ready for anything, man. That’s my family motto.’

‘Please, please, don’t tell me about your Russian family.’

‘Okay, okay, but you’re missing a lot of great Russian characters, and I’d give them to you free.’

Chapter Sixty-Three

We rode two circuits of the south, touring the Island City at slow speeds. We rarely had to change gear, because we jumped every red light that could be jumped without a fine, and took every short cut unknown to man.

Oleg loved his visit to the black bank. He asked them if they had rooms to rent. And he loved Half-Moon Auntie. She liked Oleg, too: enough to take him through two lunar cycles.

I dragged him away at nine minutes and thirty seconds, the pair of us sliding away from Half-Moon Auntie in an escape that got slower, the faster we tried to run.

Night controlled the lights as we were completing a loop that took us near the President hotel, in Cuffe Parade. We heard the persistent blaring of a horn behind us.

I gestured with my right hand, giving the sign that it was okay to pass. The horn kept braying, so I slowed to a stop beneath a canopy of street-lit plane trees, still vivid green from the monsoon long gone.

There was a laneway beside me where I’d stopped. It was an escape route that a car couldn’t follow, if I needed it. Oleg pulled up close behind me. A limousine stopped beside us. I put my hand on a knife.

The tinted window slid down and I saw Diva, with the two Diva girls.

‘Hi, kid,’ I said. ‘How ya doin’?’

She got out of the car. The chauffeur scrambled to open the door for her but was too late, and she waved him away.

‘Don’t worry, Vinodbhai,’ she said, smiling at him. ‘I’m fine.’

He bowed, and glanced at the Diva girls quickly before lowering his eyes, as he waited beside the car.

It was significant that she’d added the honorific bhai to the end of his name. It was respectful, and probably the only other time he’d ever be addressed so respectfully, outside the circle of family and friends who knew the worth of the man inside the uniform.

It was superb, something beyond class, and I liked the young heiress for it.

‘Lin,’ she said, coming to hug me. ‘I’m so happy to see you.’

It was the first time she’d hugged me. It was the first time she hadn’t insulted me, in fact.

‘Kruto,’ I said. ‘Someone happy to see me, for a change.’

‘I just wanted to thank you,’ she said, placing her hand flat against my chest. ‘I never got to do it, after the fire, and getting back into Dad’s company and all. And I’ve been thinking about thanking you, and wanting to let you know how grateful I am to you, and Naveen, and Didier, and Johnny Cigar, and Sita, and Aanu, the real Aanu, and Priti, and Srinivasan the dudhwallah, and -’

‘You’re freaking me out, Diva,’ I said. ‘Where’s the tigress?’

She laughed. The Divas laughed, inside the air-conditioned limousine.

‘Who’s your friend?’ Diva asked, giving Oleg the twice over.

‘This is Oleg,’ I said. ‘He’s a Russian writer, and a field agent for the Lost Love Bureau.’

‘Diva Devnani,’ Diva smiled, offering her hand. ‘Very pleased to meet you.’

Oleg kissed her hand.

‘Oleg Zaminovic,’ he said. ‘We think our great grandfather made up the name, but, hey, he made all of us as well, so we don’t hold it against him.’

‘I’m Charu,’ one of the Divas said.

‘I’m Pari,’ the other said.

Oleg bowed gallantly from the seat of his motorcycle.

‘Get in,’ Charu said.

‘Absolutely,’ Pari said.

The door of the limousine opened silently, as if by an act of will.

‘What a splendid idea,’ Oleg said, looking at me hopefully.

‘Great!’ Diva said. ‘It’s all settled. I’ll go on ahead into the slum with Lin on the bike, and Oleg will go with the girls.’

‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘You’re forgetting something here.’

‘I’ll be fine, Lin,’ Diva said. ‘I rode on the petrol tank of our servant’s motorcycle from the age of three.’

‘I’m talking about the motorcycle he’s riding.’

Oleg looked into the limousine at the pretty girls, and their short dresses, much shorter on the back seat. He looked at me.

‘You don’t abandon a motorcycle, Oleg.’

‘Remember Didier’s advice?’ he asked limply, pleading with me, guy to guy. ‘You know what I mean, Lin. The smelly T-shirt thing. I think I should start tonight. What do… what do you think?’

He glanced back inside the limousine. They were undeniably pretty girls, and unambiguously interested in Oleg.

‘Park her over there on the footpath, next to that gate,’ I said. ‘Give the watchman a hundred roops to watch her, until I can pick her up.’

‘Great!’ he said, bristling the bike up onto the footpath, and smothering the watchman’s protest with a fair amount of money.

He sprinted back to the limousine, threw me the keys and ducked inside, pulling the door shut after him.

Diva was smiling at me. She was standing beside my bike. Night was a lizard crawling past us on the footpath. People recognised her, from time to time. Some of them stopped to look.

‘What are you smiling about?’ I asked her.

‘I’m smiling,’ she said, ‘because you have no idea what a nice man you are.’

I frowned. People, friends, enemies were changing too fast around me, as if I was the last man to wake during an attack.

‘Charu and Pari are single girls, with multiple minds,’ she said.

‘What the hell?’

‘They think you’re interesting, too,’ she said. ‘I haven’t disabused them of the notion.’

‘What?’

‘They think you’re interesting,’ she said. ‘That’s all I’m saying.’

‘Everybody’s interesting.’

‘You really do love Karla, don’t you?’ she asked, smiling again, not a tiger in sight.

‘Why are we going to the slum, Diva?’

‘There’s a women’s party. I’m the guest of honour, I’m honoured to say. I’d like you to come with me. Tell me that isn’t the best offer you’ve had in the last twenty minutes.’

My turn to laugh. Maybe she really had changed. People do.

‘Guest of honour, huh?’

‘Let’s go, Cisco,’ she smiled, swinging a leg behind me over the bike.

We parked the bike outside and walked through lanes decorated with flowers. Long, thick garlands linked every house. Johnny’s nephew, Eli, guided us with a torch in lamp-lit shadows. He paused at every spectacular bouquet, scanning the torch over the cordons of flowers, allowing us to admire every bloom. He was dressed in his finest clothes, suitable for devotion, as was everyone we passed in the lanes.

He finally led us to an open space, used in the slum for weddings and festival days. Plastic chairs had been arranged in a wide semicircle around a small stage. The space was becoming crowded.

Women gathered in a flame-lit garden of coloured dresses, their hair plaited with frangipani flowers, their talking laughter like birds at sunset.

Charu and Pari arrived with Oleg. Then Kavita joined the crowd, with Naveen and Karla a few steps behind.

Karla.

She saw me, and smiled. Those things inside, when the woman you love smiles at you: those spears of courage, that rain.

People called for Diva to speak. She found an open space, where all could see her short form, but her speech was even shorter.

‘I want to thank you all, so very, very much,’ she said in Hindi. ‘I know, because you saved my life here, that we can do anything, together. And from now on, I’m with you all the way. I’m supporting fair slum resettlement in decent, safe, comfortable homes across the city. I pledge myself to that, and I’m doing it with all the resources I have.’

The women cheered, the men cheered, and the children leapt about as if the earth was too hot to tolerate more than a frantic skip. The band played furiously until no-one could hear properly.

A place had been set out for a meal, with a long, blue plastic sheet on the ground. Authentic banana leaves were arranged, side by side, for guests to receive food. I’d already eaten, but it was impolite to refuse, and bad luck.

We all squatted beside one another. Charu and Pari had to sit side-saddle, because their designer skirts were too short, but they didn’t mind. Their eyes were as wide as if they were studying lions in Africa.

It was their first time on the wretched side of the line. They were repulsed, horrified, and terrified of germs in the food. But they were also fascinated: and a fascinated Indian is yours.

As Fate would have it, Kavita sat on my right, and Karla on my left.

Vegetable biryani was served, along with coconut paste, Bengali spices, Kashmiri refinements, tandoori-fired vegetables, cucumber and tomato yoghurt, yellow dhal, and wok-fried cauliflower, okra and carrot, offered by an endless line of people, smiling as they served us.

‘Funny time for a party,’ I said to Karla.

‘If you knew anything about this,’ Kavita said, leaning over to catch my eyes, or my soul, or something, ‘you’d know that this is the time between shifts, and the only time that day workers and night workers can join in together.’

It was silly. I’d lived in that slum, and Kavita hadn’t, and there wasn’t much she could teach me about it.

‘You really won’t let this go, will you, Kavita?’

‘Why should I, cowboy?’

‘How about you pass me the pungent chutney, instead?’ Karla said, playing peacemaker.

I passed it across, my eyes catching Karla’s for a moment.

‘Ran away, when Lisa died,’ Kavita said. ‘And running away now.’

‘Okay, Kavita, just get it off your chest.’

‘Is that a threat?’ she asked, squinting spite at me.

‘How can the truth be a threat? I’m just sick of the guilt games. I came to this city with my own crosses. I don’t need you making new ones for me.’

‘You killed her,’ she said.

I didn’t see it coming.

‘Calm down, Kavita,’ Karla said.

‘I wasn’t even here. I wasn’t even in the same country. That was on your watch, Kavita.’

She flinched. She was hurt, and I didn’t want to hurt her: I only wanted her to stop hurting me. Her eyes brimmed, like snow domes of the world inside, made of tears.

‘I loved her,’ she said, the domes bursting. ‘You only used her, while you waited for Karla.’

‘This is the ideal moment, with foresight, to stop this, and focus on the occasion,’ Karla said at last. ‘Stop this bickering, both of you, and be gracious guests. We’re not here for us. We’re here for Diva, who suffered a lot as well.’

I pretended to eat, for a while, and Kavita pretended to stop. Neither one of us managed it.

‘It should be you who died on that bed, all alone,’ Kavita spat at me, losing control.

‘Stop this, Kavita,’ Karla said.

‘Nothing to say, Lin?’

‘Stop it, Kavita,’ I said.

‘That all you got?’

I started to get up, but she pulled at my sleeve.

‘You want to know what she said about you, while she was making love to me?’

I should’ve stopped. I didn’t.

‘You know, Kavita, you work at a newspaper that sells white-skin potions to a country full of brown-skinned people,’ I said. ‘You talk about the environment, and you take money from oil companies and coal companies for advertising. You lecture people who wear fur, and accept advertising from battery-fed chicken chains and hormone hamburgers. Your economists forgive bankers no matter what they do, your opinion pages shrink opinion, and your criticism is a flea on the elephant of intolerance. The women in your pages are dolls, while the men are sages. You cover up as many crimes as you report, and you’ve campaigned against innocent men just for ratings, and we both know it. Come down off your throne, Kavita, and leave me alone.’

She looked at me with a determination that revealed nothing, but maybe nothing was all she had, because she was silent.

I stood, excused myself, and walked back through the slum alone. Naveen caught up with me in a lane filled with small shops.

‘Lin,’ he said. ‘Wait up.’

‘How you doing with lost love?’ I asked.

I touched a nerve without knowing it. He let the anger-face out of the cage.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ he growled.

‘You know what, Naveen, I like you. But this really isn’t a good night to play sulky.’

I walked off alone, but when I reached my bike on the wide street outside, where children were still playing, someone came up behind me quickly and quietly.

I spun around, grabbed a throat in one hand and had my knife in the other before I knew it was Karla.

‘You got me there, Shantaram,’ she said, as I released her.

‘I always get you there.’

She didn’t pull away from me.

‘Sneaking up on people like that will buy you conniptions, girl,’ I said, my hands in the small of her back.

‘Conniptions? How American of you.’

‘You have no idea how American I could get tonight.’

‘Would that fix my conniptions?’

‘Maybe not. Maybe I should put a bell on your bracelet.’

‘Maybe you should,’ she purred.

I kissed her, leaning against the bike, praying that she’d never leave me.

‘Whoa,’ she said, easing away. ‘You’re ready to invade Troy, and the ships haven’t even landed.’

‘Whatever that means,’ I said, ‘can you explain it horizontally?’

‘My current place, or your current place?’ She laughed.

‘Any current place,’ I said.

She laughed again.

‘That didn’t come out right,’ I said quickly. ‘We haven’t been together since the mountain. Does that seem like a long time, to you? It seems like a really long time, to me.’

I might’ve been telling jokes. She laughed harder with every word I said. She actually pleaded with me to stop, because she was choking.

‘You’re driving me crazy, Karla. That thing you feel, when something makes you feel completely right? I only feel that, with you.’

She stopped laughing, and looked me up and down. I don’t know what it is about me that makes people look me up and down, but I’ve had my share.

She kissed me. I kissed her. Rain, wave, and that place inside where we dance better than we dance: she kissed me.

She slapped me.

‘Damn! What was that for?’

‘Pull yourself together,’ she said. ‘I thought we had this talk. I told you. We’re in this game together, or I’m in it alone. They’re your options, not mine.’

‘Fair enough. Agreed. What game?’

‘I love you, Shantaram,’ she said, slipping away. ‘I need Kavita, at the moment. I’ve got a plan, and I can’t tell you about it, remember? I need her, and I need you to rise above, and be the better man.’

Dogs barked, as she trotted back to the slum.

I didn’t understand any of it except my part, and I wasn’t really sure about my part. But at least I knew that I was back in Karlaville. I could still feel her slap, and her kiss.

Chapter Sixty-Four

I didn’t see Oleg for two weeks after that night. He found a new couch, for a while, and the Diva girls found a new plaything. I took a taxi, the day after he vanished, and collected the banger bike he’d left by the side of the road. I talked to the bike for a while and assured her, even though my heart belonged to another machine, that I’d protect her in future, especially from Russian writers. She carried me home without incident, her engine humming a song the whole way: a brave motorcycle, not ready to die.

I did my rounds day to night, helped decent people out with loans and collected money from indecent defaulters, swapped funny jokes and funnier insults, smacked a cheeky money changer on the ear from time to time and knelt in prayer with others, bribed cops and Company soldiers for blessings from below, dropped donations into churches and temples for blessings from above, fed beggars outside mosques, chased a brutal pimp from my collection area, and came third in a knife-throwing competition, which I’d entered to find out who was better at a throwing a knife than I was: always a handy thing to know. In one way and another, golden days became silvered nights.

A couple of weeks after Oleg’s olfactory defection I was swinging back toward Leopold’s one day, thinking of their veg curry rice and hungry enough to eat it, when a man ran onto the causeway, stopping me in traffic.

It was Stuart Vinson.

‘Lin!’ he shouted. ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Park the fucking noisy bike, man.’

‘Steady on, Vinson,’ I said, patting the gas tank of my bike. ‘Language, man.’

He blinked at me, and at the bike.

‘What?’

‘Calm down. You’re a one-man traffic jam.’

Cars were moving around us, and the Colaba police station wasn’t far enough away.

‘It’s serious, Lin! Please, meet me at Leopold’s. I’ll go there right now.’

He scampered away through the traffic toward Leopold’s, and I made the traffic scamper around me while I did an illegal turn, and parked the bike.

I found Vinson pestering Sweetie for a table. There was nothing at Didier’s table but a Reserved sign. I handed the sign to Sweetie, and sat down. Vinson joined me.

He didn’t look good. His surfer-healthy face was thinner than I’d seen it, and there were dark rings on the high cheekbones where optimism used to play.

‘Looks like beer,’ I said to Sweetie.

‘You think you’re the only customers I have to serve?’ Sweetie asked himself, walking back to the kitchen.

‘Do you wanna do this before the beer, or after?’ I asked.

It seemed like a reasonable question, to me. I’ve seen both, and I know what it’s like: the same story, told by different maniacs.

‘She’s disappeared,’ he said.

‘Okay, before the beer. Are you talking about Rannveig?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Disappeared… how?’

‘She was there one minute, and gone the next. I’ve searched everywhere for her. I don’t know what to do. I was, like, hoping she might’ve contacted you.’

‘I haven’t seen her,’ I said. ‘And I have no idea where she is. When did this happen?’

‘Three days ago. I’ve been searching everywhere, but -’

‘Three days? What the fuck, man? Why didn’t you tell me before?’

‘You’re my last resort,’ he said. ‘I’ve tried everything, and everyone else.’

The last resort: the last person who might help you. I’d never thought of myself as that. I’d never been that. I was always one of the first called, when someone needed help.

The beer arrived. Vinson drank it fast, but it didn’t help.

‘Oh, my God! Where is she?’ he wailed.

‘Look, Vinson, you could ask Naveen for help. It’s his job to find lost loves.’

‘Can you call him for me?’

‘I don’t use the phone,’ I said. ‘But I can take you there, if you like.’

‘Please,’ he said. ‘Anything. I’m so worried about her.’

We stood up to leave, my beer untouched. I left a tip for Sweetie. It wasn’t sweet enough.

‘Fuck you, Shantaram,’ he said, replacing the Reserved sign on the table. ‘Who’s going to drink your beer? Tell me that?’

I delivered lost-love Vinson to the Lost Love Bureau, two doors along from my own, and left him with Naveen.

Things had been cooler between Naveen and me. I’d hurt him, somehow, I was sure of it, but I had no idea how. I brought Vinson to the office because I trusted Naveen, and I hoped he saw that.

He smiled vacantly at me as I walked back to my room, then he turned to Vinson, serious questions writing themselves on his face.

I ate a can of cold baked beans, drank a pint of milk and settled the emergency ration lunch with half a glass of rum. I left the door open, and sat in my favourite chair. It was a curved captain’s chair, padded with faded, dark blue leather. It was the manager’s chair. Jaswant Singh had inherited it from the previous manager, who’d inherited it from someone with damn good taste in writer’s chairs. I’d bought it from Jaswant and replaced it for him with a shiny new manager’s chair.

Jaswant loved his new chair, and had put coloured lights around it. I put my old chair in a corner, where I had a view of the balcony, and a clear line of sight into the hallway, the manager’s desk and the stairs leading up to it. I did some of my best writing there.

I was doing some of my best writing, when Naveen tapped on the door.

‘Got a minute?’ he asked.

He was intelligent, brave and devoted. He was kind and honest. He was all the things we’d wish a son or a brother to be. But I was writing.

‘How many a minute?’

‘A couple.’

‘Sure,’ I said, putting my journal away. ‘Come in, and sit down.’

He sat on the couch, and looked around. There wasn’t much to see.

‘You always leave your door open?’

‘Only when I’m awake.’

‘Your place is… ’ he began, searching for a clue in a room that was packed for flight. ‘It’s kinda boot camp, if you know what I mean. I thought it would get warmer, you know, the longer you lived here. But… it didn’t.’

‘Karla calls it Fugitive Chic.’

‘Does she like it?’

‘No. What’s on your mind, Naveen?’

‘Diva,’ he said, sighing the name, his head sagging.

‘What about her?’

‘She offered me a job,’ he said, his face stretched and creased with distress. ‘That’s why I’ve been so touchy lately.’

‘Not such a bad thing, a job.’

‘You don’t understand. She called me to a meeting. One of her people took me all the way up to the roof of her building, on Worli Seaface. She has offices there. I hadn’t seen her for a while. She’s… we’ve both been busy.’

He pressed his mouth shut on whatever it was that he’d been about to say. I waited, and then nudged him.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘She… she looked amazing. She cut her hair. It looks great. She was wearing red. There was wind, on the roof. I looked at her. For a second I let myself believe that she’d called me there to tell me that she… ’

His head dropped, and he stared at his hands.

‘But she called you there to offer you a job, instead.’

‘Yeah.’

‘For a lot of money?’

‘Yeah. Too much, really.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘She’s trying to protect you. She’s kinda stuck on you. The two of you went through some stuff together. She’s worried, now that the Lost Love Bureau is putting you back on the street.’

‘You really think so?’

‘I think it’s her way of saying that she cares about you. It’s not a bad thing, it’s a good thing.’

‘Maybe you’re right. She almost kissed me that night, remember?’

‘She told you to shut up, and kiss her. Maybe you should do that.’

‘You know,’ he mused, ‘the new Diva, man, she’s taking some getting used to. I always knew what the old Diva was thinking, and what she’d say. Happy, smiling Diva is impossible to read. It’s like snow on the radar. It’s like I have to fall in love with the same woman all over again.’

‘You know, I read a book once, called Women for Idiots.’

‘What did you find out?’

‘I couldn’t make head or tail of it. But it confirmed a point from my own messed-up experience, which is that you can’t know what’s in a woman’s mind, until she tells you. And to do that, you have to ask her. One of these days, you’ve gotta ask that girl if it’s a serious thing.’

‘You think I should take the job?’

‘Of course not. You worked for her father. Now, you’re on your own. She’ll respect a no more than a yes. She’ll probably find another way to keep you close.’

He stood to leave, offering to wash his glass. I put it back on the table.

‘You’re a good man, Naveen,’ I said. ‘And she knows how good you are.’

He turned to leave, but spun around quickly, boxer-ballet.

‘Hey, don’t forget the race tonight.’

‘What race?’

‘You haven’t heard? Charu and Pari went to the slum, and I challenged Benicia to race me. It’s all set.’

‘Benicia agreed?’

‘She’s into it.’

‘Did you meet her?’

‘Kind of. See you later.’

‘Wait a minute. Kind of?’

He relaxed again, but avoided my eyes as he leaned against the door jamb.

‘I set up a meeting with her, to buy jewellery,’ he said. ‘It’s the only way to see her. She’s not an easy girl to reach. She sat me down on a carpet, in this very old apartment. She rents it for her business. And she did the whole transaction in a niqab.’

‘The full black cover, or just the black mask?’

‘Just the mask. And those eyes, man, I swear.’

‘Is she a Muslim?’

‘No. I asked her that, and she said no. She just digs the niqab. It’s not really a niqab. It’s actually just sunglasses that cover her face, and only leave the eyes unshaded. She must’ve had them specially made. Those eyes, man, I swear.’

‘A masked hero. Karla’s gonna love her.’

‘Those eyes, man,’ he said again. ‘I swear.’

‘Settle down, Naveen. How did it go, with Benicia?’

‘I did the deal, and bought a bunch of Rajasthani jewellery as a show of good faith, and then explained the situation to her. She agreed, but on one condition.’

‘Ah, terms and conditions always apply.’

‘I have to go on a date with her.’

‘If you win, or if you lose?’

‘Win, lose or draw.’

‘Are you kidding?’

‘No, I’m serious.’

‘Damn, Naveen. Diva’s not gonna see it in a rosy light that you’re on a date with an enigma, who happens to ride a vintage 350cc motorcycle faster than anyone in Bombay.’

‘Anyone but me,’ Naveen said. ‘I’ve been practising, Lin. I’m fast.’

‘You better be fast, when Diva hears about the date.’

‘It’s a done deal,’ he said.

‘Well, Diva will definitely kick your ass for this, but you’re racking up some legend points with Didier, kid. He’s gonna go nuts when he hears about it.’

‘He already knows. Everybody knows. Everyone… but Diva. I thought you knew.’

I didn’t know. No-one had told me. Somehow, I was disconnected from a world of friendship I’d helped to build.

‘Where’s the race?’

‘Air India building, Marine Drive, Pedder Road, and back again, three times.’

‘Where are you turning on Pedder Road?’

‘The last signal before Haji Ali.’

‘When?’

‘At midnight.’

‘The cops are gonna love it.’

‘The cops are helping us. They’re maintaining traffic security, and we’re so grateful for their cooperation, so to speak, that we paid them what they asked, which wasn’t cheap. We had to bring them in. We needed their police radios to call the race. There’s a lot of money on this.’

‘Some of it mine,’ I laughed.

‘You know,’ he said hesitantly, ‘on the spur of the moment, with the race in my mind and all, I totally didn’t think about what Diva would make of it, if I went out with Benicia on a date.’

‘You can’t blame this on the moment, Naveen.’

‘But, if I was still with the old Diva, you know, who hit me in the balls every time I stood up, it couldn’t have happened.’

‘Bring new Diva along on the date. Benicia might like her. And Diva likes jewellery.’

‘It’s not that kind of date Benicia has in mind.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Those eyes,’ he said. ‘She did this… she was… you had to be there, but there’s no mistake. It’s more than a date she’s got in mind.’

‘And you agreed to that?’

‘I told you, I was carried away.’

‘Call off the bet.’

‘I can’t do that. Too many people have put too much money on the race. I’ve gotta give it all I’ve got.’

‘Well, when you have the date with Benicia, tell her you’re in love with another girl. Tell her then what you should’ve told her when she asked for a more-than-date, through her sunglasses niqab.’

‘I feel shitty,’ he said.

‘Don’t feel shitty. Win the race, and make it right.’

He hugged me so intensely that I was standing in a river, and water was rushing past me, chest high, just gently enough not to knock me off balance.

He dashed through the door.

‘See you there!’ he said, starting down the stairs.

‘Wait!’ I called, and he sprinted back to stand on the top step.

‘That girl, Vinson’s friend, Rannveig.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, standing on one foot, a deer waiting for velocity. ‘I spoke to him before. He’s with Didier, in the office.’

‘She’s a friend of mine as well. If you’re trying to find her, go spiritual. That’s where I’d start.’

‘Okay, spiritual. Got it. Anything else?’

‘No. Run.’

He jumped and bumped his way down the stairs.

For some reason, I wanted to close the door, lock the locks, clean my gun, sharpen my knives, write things, and get drunk enough to miss the race. In that moment, I didn’t want to know anything else, about anyone else’s love drama.

I stood up and walked toward the door, but Vinson beat me to it.

‘Got a minute?’

‘Fuck it, man, who hasn’t got a minute? And who doesn’t know that it’ll take a lot longer than a minute? Everybody. So leave your self-deprecating passive aggression at the door, come in, park your carcass on Oleg’s sofa, have a beer, and tell me what’s on your mind, or what’s on Oleg’s mind, if you’d care to guess.’

‘You’re in a mood,’ he said, sitting.

I threw him a beer.

‘Nice couch,’ he said. ‘Who’s Oleg?’

‘What’s on your mind, Vinson?’

He talked about her, that girl from the North Lands who carried the ice in her eyes wherever she went. He blamed himself for being overprotective, for making her feel like a prisoner, for withholding his affection, and for all the other wrong things.

‘You’re the prisoner, man,’ I said.

‘I’m the prisoner?’

‘You’re chained to what you do, Vinson. And she’s a free bird.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t want to talk about Rannveig unless she’s here to join in the conversation,’ I said. ‘But I’ll just say that I think she’s a sensitive person, and what you’re doing hurts something inside her. Her last boyfriend died at the business end of heroin, remember?’

‘I don’t take heroin.’

‘You’re a drug dealer, Vinson.’

‘I’ve kept her away from it,’ he said defensively. ‘She doesn’t know anything about what I do.’

‘Well, knowing that girl the little that I do, I think it matters to her what you do. I don’t know, Vinson, but I think it might come to a choice you’ll have to make, between the money and the girl.’

‘I can’t, like, live the way that I do, you know, without the money I make. I live big, Lin, and I like it.’

‘Live smaller.’

‘But Rannveig -’

‘Rannveig will love it, so long as you bring the maid. She likes your maid.’

‘I’ll have to find her, first.’

‘You’ll find her. Or she’ll find you. She’s a smart girl. She’s stronger than she looks. She’ll be alright.’

‘Thanks, Lin,’ he said, standing to leave.

‘What for?’

‘For not thinking I’m stupid to care so much. To love her so much. The cops think I’m crazy.’

‘The cops think that anyone who walks into a police station voluntarily is crazy, and they’ve got a point.’

‘Do you really think she’ll come back to me?’

‘She might come back to you, but not to what you do.’

He walked down the stairs slowly, shaking his worried head.

Faith is unconditional love, and love is unconditional faith. Vinson, Naveen and I were men in love, without the women we loved, and faith was a tree without shade. I hoped Vinson was lucky, and that Rannveig wanted to be found. I hoped that Diva would give Naveen the shelter of certainty. And I hoped that Karla’s scheme, whatever it was, wouldn’t cost us what we almost had.

Chapter Sixty-Five

I almost had the door closed, but Didier pressed his hand against it from the other side, and pushed it open.

‘I have a problem,’ he said, throwing himself on the couch.

‘I should charge this couch by the hour,’ I said. ‘It’s busier than I am.’

‘There is a special party, tonight.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘A costume party.’

‘I’m closing the door, Didier.’

‘There were only two costumes left, at the best costumier, and I have put them both on hold, but I cannot choose.’

‘What did they have?’

‘A gladiator, and a ballerina.’

‘I don’t see the problem.’

‘The problem? You do not see the problem? Didier is perfect for both roles, quite obviously, so it is impossible to decide between them.’

‘I see.’

‘Lin, what shall I do?’

‘My advice,’ I said, channelling the energy of Oleg’s couch, ‘is to wear the gladiator to the waist, and the ballerina from the waist down. You’ll be a gladerina.’

‘A gladerina,’ he said, rushing to the door. ‘I must try it on, immediately.’

He shuffled down the steps, and I shuffled to the door, finally succeeding in closing it for a while. And I should’ve been happy, but I wasn’t. I didn’t like closed doors, pretty much anywhere. I didn’t like the closed doors in my dreams: the ones I pounded on, night after night.

I settled in my chair, but I couldn’t write. I stared at the locked door for a minute too long, and I was all the way back there in a cage.

Every blow struck against a chained man, every injection to pacify rebellion, every electrocution of will is an insult to what we’ll be, when we become what we’re destined to be. Time is a membrane, a connective tissue, and it can be bruised. Time can’t heal all wounds: Time is all wounds. Only love and forgiveness heal all wounds.

Hatred always leaves a stain on the veil. But sometimes the hatred isn’t your own. Sometimes you’re chained, and the hatred beaten into you is another man’s, grown in a different heart, and it takes longer than a fading bruise to forget.

Even if we find a way, some day, to weave the strands of love and faith we find along the way, a blemish always remains on the skin of what can’t be forgotten: the yesterday that stares back at you, when you look at a closed door.

For a while I was a lost son, drifting away from friends, drifting away from love, turning a key in memories of fear, anger, uprising, a prison riot, the chapel burning, guards in armour, men willing to die rather than put up with another day of it, just as I was ready to die, when I stood on the wall, and escaped.

Time, too, will die, just as we do, when the universe dies, and is born again. Time’s a living thing, just as we are, with birth, longevity, and extinction. Time has a heartbeat, but it isn’t ours, no matter how much of ourselves we sacrifice to it. We don’t need Time. Time needs us. Even Time loves company.

I looked away from the door, and ran instead into fields of Karla, lakes of Karla, shorelines and trees of Karla, clouds of Karla, storms of Karla tearing everything apart, and when I got there, I wrote verses about Karla and Time, fighting it out with love at stake.

It didn’t work. But I marked the page when I closed the journal, because some of the best writing comes from things that don’t work yet.

I went to the balcony, and smoked one of Didier’s joints.

The intersection below was relatively empty. The frantic insect cars had returned to their hives in hordes. It was time for my last round, and Naveen’s race with Benicia wasn’t long away, but I didn’t want to move.

Karla, Didier, Naveen, Diva, Vinson, the Zodiac Georges, Kavita: I couldn’t understand what was going on. There was so much change, so much uncertainty, so many times that I felt that I was on the wrong side of a wall I couldn’t see.

I was lost in the mess of it all. I’d spent the evening giving advice to others, and I couldn’t advise myself. I could only follow an instinct to make Karla choose, once and for all: life with me, somewhere else, or life in the Island City without me.

Whatever she was doing in Bombay, it didn’t include me, and I felt that it should. I was ready to ride away alone, and wait for her somewhere else, if she wouldn’t leave with me. I knew that she’d be at the race. I wanted to be there. I had to talk to her, even if it was just to say goodbye.

When your life has no plan but the straightest road out of town, and your heart has waited too long for the truth, or your soul has waited too long for a new song, Fate sometimes strikes the ground with a sacred staff, and fire stands in your way.

Cars rushed past me at killing speed. I saw Hussein men and Scorpion men, speeding in different directions. A rider was approaching me. His bike had very high handlebars. I recognised him from two blocks away. It was Ravi.

I put my bike on the side-stand, and waved him down.

‘What’s up?’

‘Fire, at Khaderbhai’s house,’ he said quickly, as he drew alongside.

‘The mansion?’

‘Yeah, man.’

‘Is Nazeer okay? And Tariq?’

‘Nobody knows. They’re trying to save the mosque. That’s all I heard. Only bikes can get through. They say it’s jammed up on Mohammed Ali Road. Stay off the streets tonight, Lin.’

Khaderbhai’s mansion, burning.

I saw the boy in the emperor chair, his head cocked to the side, his long fingers supporting his forehead. I saw my Afghan friend, Nazeer, his grizzled face lit by dawn prayers.

And something was pulled from my chest, some inner thing that wasn’t mine any more, and I felt the connection blur. I felt love slip away, draining from me, as if sorrow cut a vein. And I was afraid, for all of us.

Ravi rode off and I started my bike, swinging after him.

Sometimes, in those years, the call to die was as strong as the will to live. And sometimes I climbed the mast of fear on my heart, that boat on the sea, and opened my arms to the tempest, breaking the world.

Chapter Sixty-Six

Ravi was fast, but I was only a few beats behind him. We rode easily along the dragon spine of Mohammed Ali Road at first, but finally hit a wall of cars, trucks and buses, all of them with their engines turned off.

We had to use the footpaths, filled with people who couldn’t walk on the blocked road. I was glad that Ravi was in front, as he nudged people out of the way with the wheel of his motorcycle. He negotiated the legs and arms and children’s bobbing heads with fluid respect, harming no-one, but maintaining a walking pace. And he repeated only one word, as he rode.

Khaderbhai!

He shouted it again and again, as an incantation. And people moved out of the way each time they heard it.

The Company that Khaderbhai created had become the chrysalis of the Sanjay Company and the calyptra of the Vishnu Company, but when blood was in the fire, only Khaderbhai’s name had the colour of instinct, and the power to part waves of hurrying people.

I was so afraid of losing contact with Ravi, and having my own wave of people to negotiate, that I rode too close to him and bumped his fender several times.

He sounded his horn calmly, to tell me to calm down, and then he went back to shouting that unforgotten name.

Khaderbhai!

We reached a corner close the mosque, but a high wall of motorcycles, handcarts and bicycles blocked the way forward on the footpath. The tide of people surged away, branching off through gaps in the cars on the road.

Through the arches of the pavement awnings we could see smoke, flames and fire trucks. The road beside us was a solid building made of cars and buses.

We shoved our bikes into a doorway, used my chain to lock them together, and climbed the accidental wall of bicycles, baskets and carts, dodging under signs strung outside shops.

We tumbled down the steep metal fall, landing behind a police line, where the jam ended. There was a piece of rope, suspended by the police between the fender of an Ambassador car and the handle of a handcart. It was all that had stopped the flood of people. We lifted the rope and slipped around the shops at the base of the mosque, heading to Khaderbhai’s mansion.

Fire trucks were training powerful hoses on the walls of the mosque, trying to stop the fire from spreading. The mosque seemed to be intact, but when we threaded our way through the black snakes of leaking fire hoses, we saw that Khaderbhai’s mansion was finished.

A lone unit of firemen was trying to slow the fire, but most of the resources had been diverted to stopping the fire from taking the mosque, and becoming a wider catastrophe in the street.

Men from several mafia Companies were already there, standing across the narrow street, staring at the flames painting rage on their faces. They were Hussein Company men, mostly, but there were a few Vishnu men and gangsters from other Companies. There were about twenty of them. Abdullah was in the centre, his eyes savage with fire.

Firemen were holding the gangsters back, pleading with them to withdraw and let them do their job. Abdullah broke ranks. He brushed three firemen aside and knocked out another, who’d tried to stop him entering the building. He disappeared in the flames.

Company men looked at the firemen, wondering if they were going to fight. Firemen wear uniforms. As far as the Company men were concerned, anyone who wears a uniform works for the other side.

The firemen backed away, taking their colleagues with them. They were paid to save people, not fight them. The men who were paid to fight people, the police, rushed toward the retreating firemen.

Fighting the cops is a tricky business. Lots of cops like to fight, but they’re sticklers for rules. No disfigurements, and no weapons: just fair, square, kick the shit out of each other. That pretty much covers it, except for two things. First, they have very long memories: longer than most criminals I’ve met, who are considerably more forgive-and-forget. And second, if things get out of hand, they can shoot you and get away with it.

The Company men put their weapons away, or threw them away, and stood in front of the burning building. The cops kicked in with everything they had, and the gangsters kicked back.

There’s a moment of choice, of course, every second that you live. I watched the fight begin, with fairly even numbers, the Company men holding their own. I saw a new gang of cops running to help their friends. Ravi stepped away from me with another gangster, Tricky, and they broke into a run, throwing their lives at the fight. I could’ve stayed there. I could’ve watched it happen. I didn’t. I dropped my knives behind a handcart, and ran into the mess of what none of us should be.

It was a short run. A cop hit me before I reached the line. He was good. He was quick. I heard the bell, and I didn’t know which round. I followed instinct: duck and cover, then lead with a combination. I came out swinging, but the cop was already at my feet. Tall Tony, tall, skinny Tony, had floored him.

We reinforced the Company line. Cops came to help cops. People were grappling and stumbling. Cops were hitting cops. Company men were hitting friends.

I had a cop by the shirt, and I was twisting it close to me. I figured that if he couldn’t hit me, he couldn’t hit anyone else.

I was wrong, on both counts. He swung a fist over my elbows and connected with some part of my head that shut things down: the part that plays the Clash, in a room somewhere, with a Russian writer, a long way away.

I fell backwards, my hands knotting instinct in his shirt, and he came with me. Other cops came with him, pulling gangsters down into the maul. The front of the mansion had burned, and was starting to collapse. We fell into cindered wood and ashes.

I don’t know how many people were on top of the cop who was on top of me: a tree of humanity had fallen. Incense burned my eyes, as if already lit for the dead, and filled the air around us as pieces of sandalwood smouldered.

Scorched pages from sacred texts burned in the rubble. I smelled hair burning, and too much sweat, from too many bodies, piled too high on top of me.

Bullets started firing from inside the mansion. I was suddenly glad to be covered by bodies.

‘Bullets are exploding in the heat!’ an officer said, in Marathi. ‘They’re going off at random. Hold your fire.’

The cops and Company men on top of me weren’t taking any chances. They hunkered down, pressing into the only hunkering they had, which was me. I was rabbit-breathing, in tiny gasps. The bullets stopped, as the ghost magazines ran their course. Then the arch above our heads gave way, at last. The fallen mob hunkered down a little further.

Fragments of scripture broke from the false arch, and fell on us. I couldn’t lift my arms. My hands were still locked in the cop’s shirt. I couldn’t see. I was breathing ash, in air, but glad to have any air at all.

And then it stopped. The cops and gangsters staggered and stumbled back, one by one. The cop on top of me was the last. He tried to crawl away, but I had his shirt. He kept lurching on his knees, not looking back at me, until I let go.

I got up, wiped my eyes, and looked at the burning house, the house, burning, where Khaderbhai had given me hours of instruction, hours of his life, to argue philosophy.

The arched courtyard was a shivering silhouette, drawn in red-yellow flames. The partitions of the mansion dropped away in sheets. The burning frame, just a star of wooden beams, was ablaze. And it was all gone. Gone.

I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t accept it. The place I’d thought of as eternal, somehow, was gone in flame and ash.

I turned, and saw Abdullah. He was on one knee in the open space, near the mosque. He had the boy king, Tariq, in his arms. People were standing back, awed by their own reverence. Abdullah cradled the boy, but Tariq’s head had already fallen toward the grave, and his strong young arms were seaweed in the ocean of time.

The fighting stopped. The cops established a new barricade a respectful distance away. People rushed through it to touch the dead boy’s cloak.

‘Nazeer?’ I asked Abdullah, when I could push through the thorn of mourners. ‘Did you see him, inside?’

‘I took his body from this boy’s,’ Abdullah said, still kneeling, still crying. ‘He is no more. I could not save his body. He was dead and burning, as I took Tariq.’

Abdullah was also a dying man, and we both knew it. He’d promised his life to Khaderbhai as a shield for the boy, and the boy was dead. The limp body was a tattered flag, draped on Abdullah’s knee. If it took his last breath, Abdullah would make the men who killed Tariq and Nazeer see the same flag in their eyes, before they died.

‘Are you sure he was dead?’

He looked at me, Iranian deserts drifting across his eyes.

‘Alright, alright,’ I said, too shocked to do anything but agree.

Nazeer was a pillar, a stone pillar: the man who tells you the story long after everyone else has died.

‘He was already dead, when you found him?’

‘Yes. His body was burned, on the back, but his sacrifice preserved the face and body of Tariq. They were shot, Lin. Both of them. And their guards are nowhere to be found.’

Mourners, mourning violently, shoved me aside to touch the fallen king. I scrambled through a quickly gathering crowd that no police rope could hold. People were coming from every stairway and narrow lane. I broke through to the main street and clambered over the collapsing wall of bicycles and handcarts to find Ravi, standing next to my bike.

‘Glad to see you, man,’ he said. ‘I need my bike. There’s gonna be hell tonight.’

If hell means fire and fury, he was right. Outrage breaks the dam of temper. The murder in the mansion, which also threatened a beloved mosque, would release waves of wolves, and we all knew it. The beautiful city, the tolerant Island City, wasn’t safe any more.

I wondered where Karla was, and if she was safe.

I unlocked my chain, set our bikes free, and we jammed our way back to Colaba. Ravi split away from me at Metro Junction to meet his brothers in arms. I ran up the stairs at the Amritsar hotel, checking to see if Karla was there.

‘You need a shower,’ Jaswant said. ‘And a change of clothes.’

My T-shirt was a mystery, ripped off in the fight. My vest was scorched and blackened. My bare arms and chest were covered in ash and scratches.

‘Have you seen her?’

‘She went to see the race.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Fuck you, baba,’ he said, as I took the steps four at a time.

I had to find the place where Karla would watch a legendary race. My guess was that she’d be drawn to the most dangerous turn on the course: the place where Fate and Death might watch together, with a picnic hamper.

It wasn’t easy to get there. The city was starting on lockdown, and I had to bribe cops at four checkpoints, just to keep my knives.

Inter-communal disharmony can cost lives in the thousands, anywhere in India, even in a tolerant city like Bombay. The cops locked the streets down tight, while a mosque was near to flames, and Hindus were thought to blame.

By the time I reached the vantage point the race was already run, and the traffic cops were responding to reports of a riot in Null Bazaar. A mob is coming from Dongri, I heard police radios saying, again and again in Marathi.

I rode down to the Haji Ali juice centre. I thought that Naveen might celebrate or commiserate the race there, because it was one of the few public places still publicly open.

There were people on the streets as I rode, running toward the Hindu temple, and the Muslim shrine. They’d heard that parts of the predominantly Muslim area of Dongri were in flames.

I had to weave between them, stopping now and then for panicked people who ran directly in front of me on the road. I slithered to a stop at Haji Ali, pulling my bike up some distance from a long line of foreign motorcycles, parked in front. I glanced inside the seated section of the juice bar, and saw Naveen, sitting with Kavita Singh.

I looked back to the biker boy group. There was a slim girl in niqab sunglasses, a red leather jacket, white jeans and red sneakers: Benicia. She was sitting on her bike, a matt black vintage 350cc with clip-on handlebars. The word Ishq, meaning Passionate Love, was painted on the petrol tank.

There were about a dozen people, all of them dressed in coloured leathers, despite the heat. I didn’t know any of them. A head turned toward me. It was Karla.

Karla smiled, but I didn’t know what her eyes said to me. It was either I’m so glad you’re here, or Don’t do anything stupid. I walked the distance between us, and took her arm.

‘I have to talk to you, Karla.’

The boy racers on Japanese motorcycles were looking me over. I was ashes, scratches, and burned-black marks.

‘What happened?’ she asked.

‘Khader’s house,’ I said. ‘It’s gone. Nazeer and Tariq, both gone.’

A psychic thing, but a thing real enough to make her shudder, forked through her body, jerking her head back in distress. She fell into me and slung her arm around my waist as we walked back to my bike. She sat on the bike, her back to the group outside the juice bar.

‘You look hurt,’ she said. ‘Are you okay?’

‘It’s nothing, I -’

‘Were you there, at the fire?’

‘Yeah, I -’

‘Lunatic!’ she snapped, simmering queens. ‘Things aren’t dangerous enough, without you have to go play with fire? Why am I taking all this trouble to keep you safe, when you take so much trouble to be unsafe?’

‘But I -’

‘Gimme a joint,’ she said.

We smoked. I was listening to the cops, in the police post nearby, talking about locking the whole city down as Plan B, if the rioting spread beyond Crawford market, which wasn’t far enough away from where we were.

I wanted to get her out of there. I wanted to take her home, dirty and all as I was. I wanted to take a shower and visit her in the Bedouin tent.

The biker boys were looking at us. They were hopped up on watermelon juice and someone else’s victory. Young men, with girls to impress: body language, looking for an offence no one committed.

Fire, I was thinking. It’s gone. All of it. Nazeer, Nazeer, Nazeer, they shot you, and burned you, my brother.

‘He’s dead, the boy?’ Karla asked, grabbing a rope of detail, and pulling me from the fire.

‘Yes. I saw him. He was dead, but untouched by the fire. Nazeer shielded his body. Abdullah brought Tariq’s body out of the building, but he had to leave Nazeer inside.’

‘May the universe comfort this young, returning soul,’ she said.

‘Comfort both their souls.’

‘Both their souls,’ she repeated.

‘They were shot, Karla, and their guards have disappeared.’

‘Are you sure?’

For a moment I looked at her as Abdullah had looked at me on the burning street, an extinct legacy in his arms.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Okay.’

A biker boy approached us. I moved around the bike.

‘Are you okay, Karla?’ the biker boy asked. ‘Is this guy bothering you?’

‘No, Jack,’ I said, unamiably. ‘You’re bothering me. Back off.’

He was a nice kid, probably, but it was the wrong moment on the wrong night. And besides, I was talking to my girl.

‘Who the fuck are you?’

‘I’m the guy who’s telling you to back off, Jack, while you can.’

‘Go and sit down, Abhay,’ Karla said, her back turned.

‘Anything for you, Karla,’ Abhay said, his shiny jacket creaking like stairs as he bowed. ‘If you need me, I’m just over here.’

He backed away, glaring at me until he rejoined his friends.

‘Nice kid,’ I said.

‘They’re all nice kids,’ she said. ‘And they’re all going to the party tonight.’

‘What party?’

‘The party that I uninvited you to.’

‘Uninvited me?’

‘You were invited, but I uninvited you.’

‘Who invited me, before you uninvited me?’

She turned her head a little to the side.

‘The hostess, if you must know.’

‘What party are we talking about, again?’

‘A special party, and believe it or not, I had to pull strings to cut you from the list. You should feel okay about that.’

‘I don’t feel okay about anything, right now.’

Another biker boy approached us behind Karla’s back, staring at me. The new biker boy was upset about something. I put my hand up, with a hard face behind it, and he stopped.

‘Don’t.’

He backed away again.

‘Take it easy, Lin,’ Karla said, close enough to kiss.

‘This is as easy as it gets, tonight.’

‘They’re friends. Not good friends, and not close friends, but useful friends.’

‘Come with me, Karla.’

‘I can’t -’ she began.

‘You can.’

‘I can’t.’

‘I won, Lin!’ Naveen said, running up to hug me. ‘What a race. That girl is phenomenal, but I won. Did you see it?’

‘Great, Naveen,’ I said. ‘Tell your biker boys to calm down.’

‘Oh, them?’ He laughed. ‘They’re hot-headed, but they just like to ride, man.’

‘Speaking of riding,’ Karla said, ‘I’m two-up with Benicia tonight.’

‘You’re… what?’

‘Naveen is bringing Kavita to the costume party, and I’m on Benicia’s back. I hope you’re good with that?’

I was so bad with it, I wanted to pick up motorcycles and throw them at God.

‘You know what,’ Naveen said, watching Karla and me. ‘I’ll just be over there, when we’re ready to roll.’

He backed away a few steps, and then jogged to meet his friends.

‘If I have to get burned or beat up to talk to you, Karla,’ I said, when we were alone, ‘we probably need counselling.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ she said, leaning away from me. ‘Counselling is for people too bored to tell the truth.’

‘That’s funny, coming from someone who won’t tell me the truth right now.’

‘I can’t tell you all of the truth. I thought you understood that?’

‘I don’t understand anything. Are you really going with those people tonight?’

She glanced over her shoulder, and turned back to me again.

‘This party is something different. Do you believe me, that I’m going to this party, and I uninvited you, because I love you?’

‘What I mean is, you’re going to a party, any party, no matter how important it is, after what happened tonight?’

She flared her lips for a second, showing her teeth, locked together. Her eyes opened wide. I knew the look. It wasn’t threatening: it was biting back something that would hurt me. I didn’t care.

‘You knew them, Karla. We’re talking about Nazeer. I don’t know about you, but all I want to do right now is be with you.’

‘It’s hard, what happened to the boy -’

‘And to Nazeer.’

‘And to Nazeer. Sweet Nazeer.’

She stopped, memories of the burly Afghan rubbing at the edges of her resolution. Karla and I both lit the same lamp when we saw Nazeer’s deeply lined face and his fierce, scowling smile, as he opened the door of the mansion.

She took a deep breath, smiled at me, and took my hand in hers.

‘This party really is important, Lin. It will open a lot of secret doors, and it’s gonna let me close a door that I probably shouldn’t have opened in the first place.’

‘What door?’

‘It’s too soon. Please, trust me. Please. Just trust me when I say that this party could give me a chance to walk away from all of this, and live with it, for a long time afterwards, without looking back.’

‘Why is the party so important?’

‘God! You won’t leave it alone, will you? And you won’t trust me.’

‘You give me so little, Karla. And this is a bad night. I’m sorry. I guess I’m a little faith-challenged.’

She looked at me, maybe a little disappointed, maybe simply looking at the disappointment on my face.

‘Alright,’ she said. ‘It’s a fetish party.’

‘And… so what?’

‘It’s the first of its kind in Bombay, and the veils will come down on a lot of the people there.’

‘How many veils?’

‘All of them, of course,’ she said softly, her hand on my cheek. ‘That’s why I uninvited you.’

‘What?’

‘I like you the way you are. I love you the way you are. That’s what this is all about, one way and another. I’m not about to compromise that by letting you loose in Babylon.’

‘But you’re going.’

‘I’m not you, baby,’ she said. ‘And you’re not me.’

‘Come with me, Karla.’

‘I have to go, Lin,’ she said. ‘I’ve got things I have to finish. Just trust me.’

‘Everything’s finished. Come with me.’

‘I have to go,’ she said, standing to leave, but I put fingers on her wrist where a bracelet might rest.

‘In case you didn’t hear it, the trumpet blew. The walls have fallen. It’s -’

‘A biblical reference,’ she smiled. ‘Tempting, Shantaram. More tempting than the damn party, but I gotta go.’

‘I’m not kidding. It’s not a time to party. It’s a time to fortify, and defend. It’s gonna get messy. Places are gonna burn. Streets will burn. We should get in some supplies, wait this out, and then find another town.’

She looked at me so lovingly that I was swimming in a river of honest affection, and had no idea how I’d left the shore.

‘It’s the things that make us one, that make us one worth having,’ she said.

I was all out. She was too close. The lights from the hectic drive-in juice bar lit neon fire in her eyes, and I was burning, again.

‘What does that mean?’

‘Don’t give up on me,’ she whispered.

‘But -’

‘Don’t you dare give up on me,’ she said.

She kissed me. She kissed me so truly that she was already gone when I opened my eyes.

She ran to join the biker boys. They were revving their engines. She climbed up behind Benicia.

The Spanish racer girl pulled on a full-face helmet and shut the visor: a black curve of lights where her eyes had been. She took her privacy seriously, and you can’t object to that. But Karla was on the back of her bike, and I wanted to object to that. Benicia leaned over to grip the low-slung handlebars, and Karla leaned in close to her.

Then she sat upright and look around, her eyes finding mine without searching. She smiled.

Don’t give up on me.

She folded herself against Benicia’s back.

Kavita got up behind Naveen. He made an artful loop in front of the juice bar, and pulled up beside me.

‘Why aren’t you coming, Lin?’ he asked, as the other biker boys revved their engines.

There was a fire, I was thinking. People died. Nazeer died. Parts of the city are locked down. But he was happy. He was a winner. I couldn’t take that away.

‘Have fun, Naveen. I’ll see you in a couple of days.’

‘Sure thing.’

He started revving his engine.

‘Behold, the Uninvited,’ Kavita said, as Naveen prepared to leave. ‘What thing, inside you, was too terrible to invite to a weekend party, Lin?’

Naveen thumped the gas and skidded off under clutch, and the biker boys followed him.

Karla threw her arms wide, as Benicia roared away.

Don’t give up on me.

I was burned, scratched, beat up, covered in ashes, and alone with the dead in a city going into lockdown.

Don’t you dare give up on me.

Chapter Sixty-Seven

I rode back to the Amritsar and climbed the stairs, one at a time, my body heavier than will.

‘You were right, Jaswant,’ I said, as I passed his desk on my way to my room. ‘I need a shower.’

‘I told you so! And there’s no hot water, now, and the whole city is going crazy, so serves you right, baba, and goodnight, sleep tight.’

I sat at my desk, opened my journal, and wrote what I felt and what I’d seen that night. Ash from my hand and arm smudged the pages. My left hand, pressing the journal flat, made fingerprints, perfectly arranged and deeply defined, while my right hand described the scene of the crime.

Black ink flames ran across the pages. Flames reflected in a policeman’s eye, flame reflecting chrome-blue off a wall of bicycles, neon flames from motorcycle exhausts and steel boots, scraping rebel sparks from the righteous roundabout of revenge.

When I couldn’t write any more I took a bottle and hit the shower prison style, with all my clothes on.

I drank some, and washed my dirty clothes, peeling them away one textured leaf at a time, and drank some more, and washed my dirtier body, my skin sour with the scents of fear, and her non-identical twin, violent fear.

They were shot. Killed. Burned. They’re dead.

Clean and dried and naked, I closed the curtains, banning the day to come, locked all my locks, put weapons around the room wherever I thought I might need them, played music on my bad sound system, said a prayer of thanks for my bad sound system, and I paced.

When you do enough time in a cell, you learn to walk, because walking stills the voice inside, calling you to run.

Don’t you dare give up on me.

I walked. I drank some more. The music got louder, or maybe it just sounded louder. I was riding a Bob Marley wave to a brighter shore, and I wanted to look at Karla’s smile, and I realised that I didn’t have a photograph of Karla.

I searched everything I had without success, and decided that a joint might help. The joint found lots of interesting stuff I didn’t know I had, including a friendly cricket that didn’t sing, which I relocated to the balcony, but there was no picture of Karla.

I was getting a little high, and the first thing I wrote in my journal, after the fruitless search, was a question.

Is Karla real?

I wrote a lot of other things. I recited poetry. When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I began, and I got to like him with friends possessed, when someone seemingly possessed started banging on the door.

I went on with my war dance for the dead, and the banging stopped, and the drumming in the music thumped me around the room, and I could write again.

I wrote pages of notes on Nazeer. Departed loved ones never leave the heart, but the living picture of them fades, paled in memory’s river. I wanted to write Nazeer, before I couldn’t. I wanted to write those eyes, so often like the eyes of an animal, a hunting animal, unknowable and capable of anything: those mountain eyes, born in sight of the planet’s peak, that were so seldom lamps inside the cave of his tenderness.

I wrote the humour, hidden in ravines of his grimacing. I wrote the shadow that covered his face in any light, as if the ashen end was stamped on his face from the beginning.

I wrote his hands, those Komodo claws, the dark earth of early labour years branding them for life: Martian canals of lines and wrinkles on his knuckled fingers, some of them as deep as cuts from a knife.

I wrote Tariq. I wrote about the little beads of sweat that broke out on his lip whenever he was pretending to be someone else. I wrote the precision in his movements, as if his life was a tea ceremony that never ended.

And I wrote how handsome he was. There was a handsome man already growing in the awkward boy: a face that would make girls think about him at least twice, and a brave eye that would challenge every man he met.

I tried to write him, to keep him, to save him, and Nazeer, in words that might live.

I wrote until something ran out, or everything ran out, and I reached that place where words stop and thinking stops and there’s only emotion, feeling, a lonely heartbeat sounding through colder depths of the ocean inside, and I slept, dreaming of Karla, pulling me from a house on fire, her kisses burning love on my skin.