The Mountain Shadow

Chapter Seventy-Eight

On the forest road to the mountain, soft leaves of new trees brushed our faces as we passed them, kissing away blue horizons with every curve in the road. Monkeys scattered to boulder perches, sitting in judgement. An omen of crows tried to worry us forward, swooping in phalanxes of feathered shields, and lizards scampered on crumbling trunks of fallen trees.

We were on the bike, Randall and the others behind us in the car. A wild tiger’s roar from the preserve, far away, shook coloured birds from trees. They flew into the open road, a cloud parting in flight around us as we reached the mountain car park.

We parked the bike and car behind the snacks and cold drinks shop, paying the attendant well to watch over them. I also told him that I’d be back every two days to check on my bike, and wouldn’t react happily if she were offended in any way while she was in his care. I didn’t worry about the car. The car was big enough to take care of itself.

We had a crew with us: Randall, Vinson, Ankit and Didier. Naveen and Oleg wanted to come, but the two lost lovers were holding down the fort at the Lost Love Bureau. When we reached the first steep climb, Didier asked if there was an alternative route.

Karla was about to tell him, I think, but I cut her off. I knew how sceptical and belligerent Didier could be in the presence of sanctity. I wanted him to sweat his way into Idriss’s camp on the summit, not stroll into it.

‘Are you saying you can’t make this climb?’ I challenged.

‘Certainly not!’ Didier snapped. ‘Show me the most difficult path. There is no mountain taller than Didier’s determination.’

We set off with Karla in the lead, me following, then Didier, Randall, Vinson and Ankit. Didier climbed well, with my hand pulling from above, and Randall pushing him from below.

Vinson clambered his way past us, enjoying the climb. I was surprised to see Ankit only a few steps behind him, vanishing above us in the seaweed smother of grass, bushes and vines.

Karla laughed at one point in the climb, and I thought of Abdullah, complimenting her by telling her that she was as agile as an ape.

‘Abdullah,’ I called out to her.

‘Exactly what I was thinking,’ she laughed.

Then we both shut down, thinking of the tall, brave, violent friend we loved. He’d vanished again, just as he’d done before. I wondered when we’d see him, and if we were ready for what we’d find, when we did.

We reached the summit in silence, joining Vinson and Ankit, who were standing with their hands on their hips, looking at the mesa, the school for the sage, Idriss.

There were strands of flowers strung from a new temporary pagoda made of bamboo poles. A canvas sheet in orange, white and green, the tricolour of the Indian flag, repeated itself in waves of wind in the canopy.

The pagoda provided a wide area of shade in the centre of the courtyard, which had been covered with fine carpets. Four wide, comfortable cushions were arranged in a semicircle around a small, fist-high wooden stage.

Beyond the pagoda, students were busy preparing for a significant event.

‘Is it always like this?’ Randall asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It must be some special occasion. I hope we’re not intruding.’

‘I hope they have a bar,’ Didier said.

I caught Karla’s eye.

‘You’re wondering who brought those carpets and bamboo poles up here, aren’t you?’ Karla asked me quietly, as our crew of city sinners took in the scene.

‘Someone had to drag that beauty up here for big shots to sit on,’ I smiled. ‘Even on the easy path, that’s either a lot of deference, or a lot of respect. I’m wondering which.’

Silvano came through the groups of people who were setting out decorations and preparing food on trays.

‘Come va, ragazzo pazzo?’ he asked me, as he approached. How you doing, crazy guy?

‘Respiro ancora,’ I replied. Still breathing.

He kissed Karla on both cheeks, and then hugged me.

‘It’s wonderful you’re here today, Lin,’ he said happily. ‘I’m so happy to see you. Who are your friends?’

I introduced Silvano, and he greeted everyone, his smile devotion-bright.

‘It’s the Divine that brought you all here today, Lin,’ Silvano said.

‘Oh, yeah? I thought it was Karla’s idea.’

‘No, I mean that there is a great debate today. Great sages, from four districts, have challenged Idriss to a discourse.’

‘A discourse on philosophy?’ Karla asked. ‘It’s the first one in more than a year, isn’t it?’

‘Indeed,’ Silvano answered. ‘And today we will have all the big questions at once, and all the answers. It is a great challenge, by great holy men.’

‘When does it start?’ Karla asked, queens warming up for battle.

‘It should be about an hour from now. We are still getting ready. There is plenty of time to get fresh, after your climb, and eat a snack, before the challenge begins.’

‘Is the bar open yet?’ Didier asked.

Silvano stared back at him, uncomprehending.

‘Yes, sir,’ Ankit said, rattling the backpack that he’d carried up the ragged slope.

‘Thank God,’ Didier sighed. ‘Where is the bathroom?’

I left Karla with Didier and the others, took a pot of water into the forest, found a secluded space that didn’t seem to mind too much, and washed myself.

As soon as Karla detached from me, after that long ride to the mountain, I began to hear the shriek of something breaking, somewhere. Climbing to the camp on the mesa with Karla, I realised that the shrieking I heard, and couldn’t stop hearing, was the acid throwers, breaking on revenge.

From the moment that Blue Hijab told me about the capture, and torture, and death of the acid throwers, I’d been feeling that red tide of burning souls, lapping at my feet.

On the ride to the mountain with Karla holding me, I’d drifted in love, a leaf on a Sunday pond. But when we detached, and as we climbed, memories crawled deeper into the flinch of fear. The bruise of the chain, worse than the bite: screams of surrender, always louder than screams of defiance.

At the summit, while everyone was getting ready for the great debate of wise thinkers, I went to the wise forest to clean myself, and to be alone, with memories of torture and submission.

I was hurting for Blue Hijab and her friend, the horribly burned comrade, and all the cousins and neighbours who were so outraged and angry that they did to the torturers what the torturers had done to them.

But every execution kills justice, because no life deserves to be killed. I survived the desert-inside of prison beatings, and stumbled on, because I forgave the men who tortured me. I learned that trick from tortured men, who felt it their duty to pass it on, when I was chained and beaten in my turn.

Let it go, those different wise men said. Hating them, like they hate us, will ruin your mind, and that’s the one thing they can’t hit.

‘Are you good, baby?’ Karla’s voice called from behind the trees. ‘The debate starts soon, and I’m gonna reserve seats for us.’

‘I’m good,’ I called back, not good, not even not-good-okay. ‘I’m good.’

‘Two minutes,’ she called back. ‘We can’t miss this. It’s made for us, Shantaram.’

I knew why Karla had brought us to the mountain and the fabled sage: she wanted to heal me. She wanted to save me. I was breaking inside, and she could see it. And maybe she was, too. Like Karla and every other soldier I knew, I joked and laughed about things that made other less wounded hearts weep, and I’d learned to harden myself against loss and death. I look back now, and the past is a slaughter: almost everyone I’ve ever loved is dead. And the only way to live with the constant cull of what you love is to take a little of that cold grave into yourself, every time.

When she left, I let my eyes drift into the maze of leaves that only trees understand. Hatred has its gravitational web, locking stray specks of confusion into spirals of violence. I had my own reasons to hate the acid throwers, if I wanted to hate them, and I wasn’t immune to the tremble in the web. But it wasn’t hatred that I tried to clean off myself, in that forest, on the mountain: it was a shame I didn’t create, but didn’t stop.

Sometimes, for some reason, I couldn’t stop it, or I didn’t stop it. Sometimes, for some reason, I was a part of something wrong, before I knew that I wasn’t right any more.

In the forest, alone, I forgave what was done to me. In the kneeling place within my own faults I forgave them for what they did, and hoped that someone, somewhere, would forgive me. And the wind in lavish leaves said, Surrender. One is all, and all is one. Surrender.

Chapter Seventy-Nine

Faith is honesty inside, a renegade priest once said to me. So, fill up whenever you can, son. Faithful students of the mystic teacher Idriss hoping that the exchange with his inquisitors would fill them with wisdom, gathered on the white-stone mesa in late-afternoon sunlight.

Some unfaithful observers gathered as well: a few followers of the great sages, who were hoping to see Idriss, the arrogantly humble thinker, tumble from a cliff of contumacy. Faith is also its own challenge, like sincerity, and purity draws swords in fearful hearts.

Didier, faithful to his own pleasures, found a hammock strung between trees, and wrestled with the alligator of knotted rope for a while, hoping to find a way to stay on it beneath a shady tree for the duration of the discourse.

Karla wouldn’t let him.

‘If you miss this,’ she said, pulling his jacket, ‘I won’t be able to talk to you about it. So you can’t miss it.’

She put our group together with a view of the questioning faces and the interrogated sage.

The spectators had made an arena of cushions, arranged around the pagoda close enough to hear every inflection or inference. Expectation, the ghost of reputation, moved through the crowd as students swapped stories about the legendary sages who’d challenged Idriss.

The holy men emerged from the largest cave, where they’d meditated together in preparation for the thought contest. They were senior gurus with their own followings, the youngest of them thirty-five, and the eldest perhaps seventy, a few years younger than Idriss.

They were dressed in identical white dhoti garments, wrapped luxuriously about their skin, and wore rudraksha beads in chains around their necks. The beads were reputed to have significant spiritual powers to detect positive and negative substances. As legend has it, rudraksha beads held over a pure substance rotate in a clockwise direction, and in an anticlockwise direction over negative substances, which is one of the reasons why no guru is far from a high-quality strand.

They also wore rings and amulets to maximise the power of friendly planets in their astrological charts, and minimise the harm of unfriendly spheres, far away, but never powerless.

The students had whispered that we were forbidden from speaking the names of the famous sages, because they wanted their challenge to Idriss to remain anonymous, out of modesty.

In my mind, as I saw them walk out to take their places on the large cushions, with students throwing rose petals in their path, I called them Grumpy, for the youngest one, Doubtful, for the next, Ambitious for the third, and Let Me See for the eldest in the group, who was the quickest to find his seat, and the first to reach for a lime juice and a piece of fresh papaya.

‘How long will this take?’ Vinson whispered.

‘Okay,’ Karla said, holding frustration at bay with very tight lips. ‘Do you want to spend seven years studying philosophy, and theology, and cosmology, Vinson?’

‘I’m gonna say No,’ he replied, uncertainly.

‘Do you wanna sound to Rannveig like you’ve done seven years of study?’

‘I’m gonna say Yes.’

‘Good, then be quiet, and listen. These challenges to Idriss only happen once a year or so, and this is my first. It’s a chance to get all of it in one shot, and I’m gonna hear it, from start to finish.’

‘Will there be an intermission?’ Didier asked.

Idriss knelt at the feet of each sage, eldest to youngest, and took their blessings before he took the small stage, settled himself, and greeted the assembly.

‘Let us smoke,’ he suggested gently. ‘Before we begin.’

Students brought a large hookah pipe into the pagoda, and gave a smoking hose to each of the sages. The longest hose reached to Idriss, who puffed the bowl alight.

‘Now,’ he said, when all had smoked, including Didier, who kept pace with the holy men on a finely tapered joint. ‘Please, challenge me with your questions.’

The sages looked at Let Me See, offering him the first assail. The elderly sage smiled, drew a breath, and waded into the shallows to skip a semantic stone across the water.

‘What is God?’ Let Me See asked.

‘God is the perfect expression of all the positive characteristics,’ Idriss answered.

‘Only the positive characteristics?’

‘Exclusively.’

‘Can God not do evil, then, or commit sin?’ Let Me See asked.

‘Of course not. Are you suggesting that God can commit suicide, or lie to an innocent heart?’

There was a conference among the holy men. I could see their problem. Gods in all ages, according to many sacred texts, kill human beings. Some gods torture human souls eternally, or permit it. Idriss’s version of a God incapable of evil was difficult to reconcile with some of the great books of faith.

The conference broke up, with the baton still in Let Me See’s hands.

‘And what is life, great sage?’ Let Me See asked.

‘Life is an organic expression of the tendency toward complexity.’

‘But are you saying that life was created by the Divine, or that it created itself?’

‘Life on this planet began from the strangely improbable but perfectly natural cooperation of inorganic elements, in alkaline vents under the seas, leading to the first bacterial cells. That process is both self-creating, and Divine, at the same time.’

‘You are speaking science, great sage?’

‘Science is a spiritual language, and one of the most spiritual pursuits.’

‘And what is Love, great sage?’

‘Love is intimate connection.’

‘I was speaking about the purest form of love, great sage,’ Let Me See replied.

‘As was I, great sage,’ Idriss answered. ‘A scientist applying her talents, trying to find a cure for a disease, is making an intimate connection, and is flooded with love. Walking a dog that trusts you through a meadow is an intimate connection. Opening your heart to the Divine, in prayer, is an intimate connection.’

Let Me See nodded, and chuckled.

‘I yield the floor, temporarily, to my younger colleagues,’ he said.

‘How can we know,’ Ambitious began, wiping sweat from his shaved head, ‘that there is an external reality?’

‘Indeed,’ Doubtful added. ‘Even if we allow cogito ergo sum, how can any of us know that the world beyond the mind that we think is real, isn’t just a very vivid dream?’

‘I invite anyone who does not believe in an external reality,’ Idriss said, ‘to accompany me to the edge of the ravine, not far from here, and then I invite you to jump into it. I will take the slow path, down the hill, and when I get to the bottom, I will continue the discussion about an external reality with any survivors.’

‘A good point,’ Let Me See, the eldest sage, said. ‘I, for one, am a survivor, and I am staying right here.’

I’d heard all the questions at one time or another on the mountain, and I knew most of Idriss’s answers by heart. His cosmology was conjectural, but his logic was elegant and consistent. His was an easy mind to remember.

‘Free will,’ Grumpy, the youngest of them, said. ‘Where do you stand, Idriss?’

‘Beyond the four physical forces, and matter, space and time, there are two great spiritual energies in the Universe,’ Idriss said. ‘The first of those energies is the Divine Source of all things, which is continuingly expressed since the birth of the Universe as a spiritual tendency field, something like a magnetic field of darker energy. The second invisible energy is Will, wherever it arises in the Universe.’

‘What is the purpose of this tendency field?’ Grumpy asked.

‘Its purpose is indeterminable, at this point in our awareness. But, as with energy, we know what it does, and how to use it, even though we don’t know what it is.’

‘But what is its value, sage?’ Grumpy asked.

‘Its value is inestimable,’ Idriss smiled. ‘The connection between the spiritual tendency field, and our human Will, is the purpose of life at our level.’

Idriss waved for a new hookah pipe, and Silvano brought it to the pagoda. The Italian acolyte had left his rifle outside the arena, but still moved his elbow as he bent to place the pipe, as if expecting the invisible weapon to fall from its sling.

‘Okay,’ Vinson said, whispering to Karla. ‘Like, I didn’t get any of that.’

‘You’re kidding, Stuart, right?’

‘Like, nada, man,’ Vinson whispered. ‘I hope the whole show’s not as brainiac as that part. How much did you follow?’

Karla looked at him compassionately. One of the things she loved most in the world, maybe the thing she did love most in the world, was a foreign language to him.

‘Why don’t you let me dial it down from ten for you,’ Karla suggested, her hand on his arm, ‘and give you the T-shirt version? Till you get on your feet.’

‘Wow,’ Vinson whispered back. ‘Would you really do that?’

Karla smiled at him, then looked at me.

‘Can you believe how cool this is?’ she asked.

‘Oh, yeah,’ I smiled back.

‘I told you we had to come up here.’

Idriss and the other sages emptied the burning inspiration from the bowl, and turned again to burning questions.

‘How so, master-ji?’ Doubtful asked quickly. ‘How can the connection to this tendency field, or to the Divine, explain the meaning of life?’

‘The question is invalid,’ Idriss said softly, being kind to a colleague who was also pursuing a truth worthy of penance. ‘Meaning is not an attribute of life. Meaning is an attribute of will. Purpose is an attribute of life.’

The sages conferred again, leaning toward Let Me See, who was facing Idriss directly. They shoved angels from the head of a pin, one by one, deciding which portion of the tiny dome would give them best purchase.

Idriss sighed, looking out at the faces of the students, dressed in white, a magnolia circle of fascination. The tallest trees braved the departing sun, shielding the holy men with shade.

‘So -’ Vinson began to ask.

‘Meaning of life, wrong question,’ Karla said. ‘Purpose of life, right question.’

‘Wow,’ Vinson said. ‘So, that’s, like, two questions.’

The sages drew apart. Doubtful cleared his throat.

‘Are you speaking of connecting with the Divine, or with other living creatures?’

‘Every true connection, honest and free, no matter where it occurs, with a flower or a saint, is a connection to the Divine, because every sincere connection automatically connects the connectors to the spiritual tendency field.’

‘But how can one know that one is connected?’ Doubtful asked doubtfully.

Idriss frowned, lowering his eyes, unable to suppress the sadness he saw waving from a lonely shore of Doubtful’s devotion. He looked up again, smiling at Doubtful kindly.

‘The tendency field affirms it,’ Idriss said.

‘How?’

‘Sincere penance, such as kindness, or compassion, connects us to the tendency field,’ Idriss said. ‘The tendency field always responds, sometimes with a message from a dragonfly, sometimes with the granting of a fervent wish, and sometimes with the kindness of a stranger.’

The sages conferred again.

Vinson used the break in the discourse to throw his arm around my shoulder and pull me into his confusion. He leaned us in to whisper to Karla, but she didn’t let him start.

‘The force is always with you, if you give up force,’ Karla said.

‘Oh.’

The sages coughed their way back into the debate politely.

‘You seek to wrap meaning up in a conundrum of intention,’ Grumpy replied. ‘But are we really free in what we decide, or are we determined by Divine knowledge of all that we do?’

‘Are we victims of God?’ Idriss laughed. ‘Is that what you’re suggesting? Then why give us free will? To torment us? Is that what you really want me to believe? Our will exists to ask questions of God, not just beg for answers.’

‘I want to know what you believe, Master Idriss.’

‘What I believe, great sage, or what I know?’

‘What you fervently believe,’ Grumpy replied.

‘Very well. I believe that the Source that birthed our Universe came with us into this reality as a spiritual tendency field. I believe that Will, our human will, is in a constant state of superposition, interacting with, and not interacting with the spiritual tendency field, like the photons of light from which it’s made.’

The sages conferred again, and Vinson almost asked what was going on.

‘The force is actually you,’ Karla whispered in summary, ‘if you’re humble enough for it.’

‘You are basing very much of what you say on the possibility of choice, master-ji,’ Ambitious said. ‘But many of the choices we make are trivial.’

‘There is no such thing as a trivial choice,’ Idriss said. ‘That is why so many powerful people try to influence all of our choices. If it were a trivial thing, they would not bother.’

‘You know the things of which I speak, master-ji,’ Ambitious said, a little irritated. ‘There are a thousand trivial choices that we make every day. Choice cannot be such an important factor, as you suggest, when so much of it is of trifling importance, or made without spiritual thinking.’

‘I repeat,’ Idriss smiled patiently, ‘there is no such thing as a trivial choice. Every choice is significant, no matter how unconsciously made. The choices we make, every time we make them, collapse the superposition that we call human life into one reality or another, and one perception or another, and that decision has minute or great but nonetheless eternal effects on the timeline.’

‘You call that power?’ Ambitious challenged.

‘This is energy,’ Idriss corrected. ‘Spiritual energy, sufficient to alter Time, which is no small thing. Time was the lord of all living things, for billions of years, until Will arose to greet him.’

Let Me See called the sages to confer. He was enjoying himself, even at the expense of his colleagues, or perhaps especially at the expense of his colleagues. It was impossible to tell if his tactical conclaves were designed to confound Idriss, or his fellow sages.

Vinson looked at Karla, and was about to speak.

‘Cover your karmic ass,’ Karla synopsised, ‘everything you do affects the timeline, dude.’

I kissed her quickly. I know it was a holy assembly of holy thinkers, but I was betting that they’d forgive me.

‘This is the second-best best date ever,’ she said, as the sages sat up straight, three intellectual corner-men leaning away from Grumpy, the youngest sage, with fresh energy for the challenge.

‘This is digressive,’ Grumpy began. ‘I have found your technique, master-ji. You divert from questions, through semantic tricks. Let us get down to sacred texts and instructions. If the human soul is an expression of our humanity, as you seem to suggest, is it essential to do one’s duty in life, as the sacred texts instruct us?’

‘Indeed,’ Ambitious added, hoping to trap Idriss in a snare of caste. ‘Can any of us escape the wheel of karma, and our Divinely appointed duties?’

‘If there is a Divine Source of all things, our rational and logical duty is to that Divine Source,’ Idriss replied. ‘Our only other duty is to the humanity that we share, and the planet that sustains us. Everything beyond that is a personal preference.’

‘Are we not born with a karmic duty?’ Ambitious pressed.

‘Humanity is born with a karmic duty. Human beings are born with a personal karmic mission, playing their individual part in the common karmic duty,’ Idriss said.

The sages looked at one another, ashamed, perhaps, that they’d tried to trap Idriss in the quicksand of religion, while he kept lifting himself free on a branch of faith.

‘Does a personal God speak to you?’ Let Me See asked, tangling his long grey beard with knotted fingers, bruised on the inside from years of counting red amber meditation beads in cycles of one hundred and eight.

‘Such a lovely question,’ Idriss laughed gently. ‘I presume that you mean a God that cares about me, personally, and that I can communicate with, personally, while that God, who dreamt the universe into creation, is busily connecting with every consciousness like mine, wherever it arises. Is that correct?’

‘Precisely,’ the elderly guru said.

Idriss laughed to himself.

‘What’s the question?’ Vinson asked.

‘Does God walk the talk?’ Karla whispered quickly, smiling encouragement at Vinson.

‘I get it,’ Vinson whispered back happily. ‘Like, does God pick up the phone?’

‘I see the Divine in every minute that I live,’ Idriss answered. ‘And I receive constant affirmations. It is a language uncommon, of course. It is a spiritual language of coincidence and connection. I think you know, great sage, of what I speak?’

‘I do, Idriss,’ he replied, chuckling. ‘I do. Can you give an example?’

‘Every peaceful encounter with nature,’ Idriss said, ‘is a natural conversation with the Divine, which is why it is advisable to live as near to nature as you can.’

‘A fine example, great sage,’ Let Me See replied.

‘Extending your heart to put the light of affection in the eyes of a new friend, is a conversation with the Divine,’ Idriss said. ‘Honest meditation is the same conversation.’

‘You were imprecise, before, Idriss,’ he said. ‘Tell us, succinctly, what the meaning and purpose of life is.’

‘There are two questions in your challenge, as I said before,’ Idriss said. ‘And only one of them is a valid question.’

‘We have touched on this, and I still do not understand,’ Grumpy pouted.

‘Without a fully conscious Will to ask about the meaning of anything,’ Idriss answered patiently, ‘the question is not just meaningless, but impossible.’

‘But surely, master-ji, this human Will that you champion cannot be meaning in and of itself?’ Doubtful asked, frowning hard.

‘I repeat, the question What is the meaning of Life? is an invalid question. Meaning is a property that emerges when a fully sentient Will exists to collapse the superposition state of possibilities, by making freely willed choices, and asking freely willed questions.’

There was a pause, and I was glad, because I knew that if Vinson disturbed her concentration at that moment, Karla might shoot him, after the debate.

‘Asking the question is the meaning,’ I whispered to him.

‘Thanks,’ Karla whispered, leaning against me.

‘Meaning is an attribute of Will,’ Idriss continued. ‘The valid question is what is the purpose of Life?’

‘Very well,’ Let Me See said, chuckling, ‘what is the purpose of life?’

‘The purpose of life is to express the set of positive characteristics to the most sophisticated degree that you can, by connecting with pure intention to others, and our planet, and to the Divine Source of all things.’

‘How do you define these positive characteristics, master-ji?’ Doubtful asked. ‘In which sacred texts can we find them?’

‘The set of positive characteristics is found everywhere, in every place where people live humanely with one another. Life, consciousness, freedom, love, justice, fairness, honesty, mercy, affinity, courage, generosity, compassion, forgiveness, empathy and many beautiful others. They are always the same, everywhere that kind hearts survive to preserve them.’

‘But what specific sacred texts do you refer to in your analysis, master-ji?’

‘Our common humanity is the sacred text of the peaceful human heart,’ Idriss said. ‘And we have only just begun to write it.’

‘And how does the expression of these positive characteristics lead us to purpose?’ Ambitious challenged.

‘We humans are born with the capacity to accumulate non-evolutionary knowledge, and the capacity to shape our behaviour as animals,’ Idriss said, reaching for a glass of water. ‘Which are very difficult things for other animals to do, but are very easy for us, thanks to the Divine.’

‘Can you be specific about this non-evolutionary knowledge, master-ji?’ Doubtful asked. ‘This is a term I am not familiar with.’

‘Things that we know, that we don’t have to know, in order to survive. Extra knowledge, about everything.’

‘We know things,’ Ambitious said. ‘That is hardly a revelation. And we can shape our behaviour. Where do you see purpose in this, master-ji?’

‘Without either one of those things,’ Idriss continued, ‘we could not claim to have a destiny. But with both of them in place, the fact of our destiny is undeniable.’

‘How, master-ji?’

‘We are not apes forever. We can change ourselves. We are changing, all the time. We will discover most of the laws of everything, and we will control our evolution. That is destiny controlling DNA, rather than DNA controlling destiny, as it did forever, until now.’

‘Can you define destiny?’ Ambitious demanded.

‘Destiny is the treasure we find in the awareness of death.’

‘Oh, yes!’ Karla shouted. ‘Sorry!’

‘Perhaps it is time,’ Idriss suggested, ‘that we take a break, and refresh ourselves for the challenge.’

The students rose to escort the sages to their cave. The sages walked away, frowning their thoughts.

Idriss looked around as Silvano offered his arm. He found Karla’s eyes, and smiled at us.

‘Glad you’re here, Karla,’ he said, as he walked back to his cave with Silvano. ‘So nice to see you two together.’

‘You know,’ Vinson said when we were alone. ‘I think I’m getting the hang of this. You’re on to something with the T-shirts, Karla. You’re keeping notes, Randall, right?’

‘Meticulous notes, Mr Vinson.’

‘I’d like to see those later, if it’s okay.’

‘Me too,’ Karla said.

‘Me three,’ I agreed.

‘I’m so happy we have that settled,’ Didier said. ‘Now, will someone please open the bar. My soul may be improved, but mind is screaming for mercy.’

Chapter Eighty

Doubtful had a question, after the contest resumed, but Idriss raised a soft hand of insistence, silencing everyone, and pushed on to the horizon of his thought.

‘So far as I can see,’ he said quietly, his raised hand like a trident made from pure patience, ‘we are the only species with the capacity to be more than we are, perhaps even more than we dream we are, and the potential to get wherever it is that we choose to go.’

He stopped for a moment.

‘Why do we let the few push the many to compete and consume and fight?’ Idriss said. ‘When will we demand peace, as passionately as we demand freedom?’

Sudden tears fell into his upturned palms, resting in his lap.

‘Forgive me,’ he said, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands.

‘Great sage,’ Let Me See said, crying sympathy with him. ‘We are all drawn here today by the power of love. Let us remain happy in our spiritual endeavours.’

Idriss laughed, clearing his eyes of moonstone tears.

‘That is a semantic error, great teacher,’ he said, composed again. ‘Love has no power, because it can only be freely given.’

‘Very well then,’ Let Me See smiled, ‘what is Power?’

‘Power influences or directs people or processes,’ Idriss said. ‘Power is a measure of control, and is always connected to authority. Power is fear, submitting to greed. There is no fear and there is no greed in love, just as there is no authority or control, which is why it is beyond illusions of power.’

‘But what about the power of healing?’ Grumpy asked. ‘Do you deny that?’

‘That is the energy of healing, master-ji. Every healer knows that there is no power in it, but that the energy is abundant. Energy is the process. Power is the attempt to influence, direct or control the process.’

‘Even the power of prayer, master-ji?’ Ambitious asked. ‘Is there no such thing?’

‘There is the spiritual energy of prayer,’ Idriss replied, ‘just as there is the spiritual energy of love, and both are reservoirs of grace, but there is no power. Energy is the process, and power is the attempt to control the process.’

Vinson was wriggling to speak.

‘Power bad, energy good,’ he whispered to Karla. ‘Absolute power corrupts.’

‘Very good, Stuart,’ Karla whispered happily.

‘Let us smoke again for a while,’ Idriss said to the sages.

‘Very good, Idriss,’ Didier whispered more happily, and the assembly relaxed, while the sages and my French friend sated themselves.

‘Shall I continue?’ Idriss asked, when the sages were high enough to get down to metaphysics again.

‘Certainly,’ the sages replied.

‘The fact that we are what we are,’ Idriss said, as if the discourse had never paused, ‘asking all the right questions, no matter how many centuries it takes us to get to the truth, is destiny itself. Destiny, too, like life, is an emergent phenomenon.’

Vinson leaned in to whisper a question, but Karla beat him to it.

‘Energy plus direction equals destiny,’ she said quickly, focusing on the debate.

‘But destiny?’ Doubtful said, his shaved head glistening with sweat in the warm evening. ‘Can you explain that again?’

‘Our human destiny is a fact, not a supposition,’ Idriss said. ‘Destiny is the ability to focus spiritual energy, in the form of will, to change the future course of our lives. We are all doing this, to a greater or lesser extent, in all our lives, and in the collective life of our species. We are living directed lives already, and it is up to us to realise it, and to direct them more positively.’

‘But realise it how?’ Let Me See asked.

‘Express the set of positive characteristics to the best of your ability,’ Idriss replied. ‘That is the realisation of the soul, expressed in human kindness and courage.’

‘Why?’ Ambitious asked. ‘Why should anyone ever bother to do good or positive things? Why not simply work for self-benefit? Since you are so much a man of science, isn’t that evolutionary?’

‘Not at all,’ Idriss smiled, answering a question he’d faced hundreds of times before. ‘Everywhere that some people look, they see a savage world, competing to the death. But there is also magnificent cooperation in the world, from ants in colonies, to trees in colonies, to human beings in colonies. Adaptability is exquisite cooperation. Cooperation is evolution.’

‘But surely the fittest survive,’ Ambitious pressed. ‘And the fittest rule. Do you mean to overturn the natural order of things?’

‘The natural order of things is cooperation,’ Idriss countered. ‘Molecules do not compete to form organic molecules, they cooperate to form them. And we, great sages, are very large collections of very cooperative organic molecules, thanks to the Divine. When they stop cooperating, we are in trouble.’

‘Since you like to take this discourse back to first principles,’ Let Me See observed, ‘can I ask if you are suggesting that there is a different moral order, beyond that found in the sacred texts?’

It was a trick question. I knew that Karla was itching to answer it, because we’d discussed it several times.

‘The sacred texts are there for us to know what we can become,’ Idriss said. ‘Until we get there, in our tragically long cultural evolution, until we get to a place that is worthy of such beautiful revelations, our common humanity is a very useful guiding star to the essential truth in all of them.’

‘Are you brushing the sacred texts aside?’ Let Me See asked.

‘You speak those words, not I. My advice, for what little it is worth, is simply that the sacred texts are like sacred places. Just as we should be clean when we enter sacred places, so should we be clean when we enter sacred texts. And the best way to present a clean soul to the great revelations of the Divine, is to be a clean human being in your dealings with others, and the world that sustains us.’

The sages conferred again, and Idriss took the opportunity to call for a new hookah pipe, puffing it alight for the sages contentedly.

‘Good heart, good faith?’ Vinson suggested during the pause.

‘You’re really getting this,’ Karla said quietly.

Randall was taking notes in his journal. Ankit was helping him, whispering the end of a half-remembered line from time to time.

‘How do you like it, guys?’ I whispered.

‘It’s like jumping up in a parachute,’ Randall replied. ‘Instead of down.’

‘We could use this teacher of yours in the Party,’ Ankit said admiringly.

‘There’s a party?’ Didier asked, brightening.

‘The Communist Party,’ Ankit whispered back drily. ‘But a small party might be arranged for you later tonight by the fire, Mr Didier, if you desire it.’

‘Superb,’ Didier enthused. ‘Oh, God, the holy men are talking again.’

‘I confess, great sage,’ Let Me See said modestly, ‘that you have lost me in the jungle of your imaginative ideas.’

‘Yes,’ Doubtful added. ‘I am also lagging behind, because your discourse on spiritual matters does not employ the usual spiritual language, Master Idriss.’

‘Everything is a spiritual language, noble thinker, but simply on a higher or a lower frequency of connection,’ Idriss replied. ‘This discourse that we share is but one of many.’

‘How can there be more than one spiritual language?’ Doubtful asked.

‘If there is a God, and a spiritual language that connects us to God, then by definition it is the only language of purpose, simply expressed in different ways.’

‘Even in negative ways?’ Grumpy asked, waking to the theme.

‘Wouldn’t you prefer to concentrate on the higher spiritual language, as we have done so far, and not on the lower?’ Idriss lamented.

‘Do you not have examples, then?’ Ambitious asked.

‘Much of the human world is an example,’ Idriss said, his face sombre.

‘Then it should not be a problem for you to provide spiritual languages other than our own,’ Ambitious retorted.

Idriss settled into a patient understanding of the younger man, and took a forgiving breath.

‘Very well,’ he said, ‘let us walk in the dark, for a while.’

He sipped at his lime juice, and began his answer to the challenge.

‘Exploitation is the spiritual language of profit,’ Idriss began sadly.

The students, who’d heard Idriss riff before, were already beginning to nod their heads in time to his ontological poetry.

‘Oppression is the spiritual language of tyranny,’ Idriss said.

The students began to mumble, wakening to Idriss’s chant.

‘Hypocrisy is the spiritual language of greed,’ Idriss continued. ‘Ruthlessness is the spiritual language of power, and bigotry is the spiritual language of fear.’

‘Are you taking notes, Randall?’ I asked, as Idriss took a breath.

‘Aye aye, sir,’ he replied.

‘Violence is the spiritual language of hate,’ Idriss said, ‘and arrogance is the spiritual language of vanity.’

‘Idriss!’ several students called out.

‘Wait!’ Idriss requested, his gentle hands parting the waters of interjection. ‘We are gathered here in the quest for understanding. Please, dear students and guests, do not call out in the presence of these great sages, even though I have encouraged you to call out freely in our discussions.’

‘Your wish, master-ji!’ Ankit called out in an unexpectedly commanding tone, his finger to his lips as he scanned the crowd, and all was silent again.

‘May I ask you to travel with me on a path of higher spiritual languages, great sages?’ Idriss asked.

‘Certainly,’ Let Me See said.

‘With what examples, master-ji?’ Doubtful asked.

‘I invite you to give them to me, great sage,’ Idriss replied. ‘Because I would love to see what happy birds fly from your mind.’

‘This is another trick,’ Ambitious interjected. ‘You have prepared your responses in advance, have you not?’

‘Of course,’ Idriss laughed softly. ‘And memorised them. Haven’t you?’

‘Once again I remind you, master-ji, that you are the answer on this occasion, and we are the question,’ Ambitious said, retiring behind a reputation-barricade.

‘Good,’ Idriss said, his back straight. ‘Are you ready for my response?’

‘We are ready, great sage,’ Let Me See replied.

‘Emotion is the spiritual language of music,’ Idriss said, ‘and sensualism is the spiritual language of dance.’

Idriss paused, waiting for comment, and then continued.

‘Birds are the spiritual language of the sky,’ Idriss said. ‘And trees are the spiritual language of the earth.’

He paused again, as if listening.

‘I think I died,’ Karla whispered, ‘and went to Smartass Heaven.’

‘Generosity is the spiritual language of love, humility is the spiritual language of honour, and devotion is the spiritual language of faith.’

Many of the students had seen Idriss face the fire before. And loving him as they did, they were joining with him innocently: not willing him to win, but willing him toward truth, no matter who uttered it in the séance.

‘Truth is the spiritual language of trust, and irony is the spiritual language of coincidence.’

Students swayed in place, obeying the silence.

‘Humour is the spiritual language of freedom,’ Idriss said, ‘and sacrifice is the spiritual language of penance.’

He stopped again, struggling with vanity, knowing that he could go on for a long time with the same poem. He looked at the students, his face lashing itself with a blush, and he smiled his way back.

‘Everything is spiritual, and everything is expressed in its own spiritual language. The connection to the Source can never be broken, only disturbed.’

The students shouted and applauded, then silenced themselves, proud and penitent at the same time.

‘If you do not mind,’ Idriss suggested, ‘I would appreciate another break, of an hour, perhaps, if it is agreeable.’

Students rose on instinct, guiding the sages back to their cave.

‘I don’t know about you,’ I said to Karla, glad of the break, ‘but I need something unholy.’

‘My thought exactly,’ she said. ‘And I don’t mind if I drink it or smoke it. My nerves are in my mouth.’

‘You wanted to be out there, didn’t you?’

‘That was some serious smartass shit,’ she said, her happy eyes gleaming.

Idriss was clever and charismatic, but he’d faced inquisitions many times. He knew where the solid ground was, and the philosophical sand. I’d brought questions to teachers before, many of them, and I found that sometimes cleverness covered a lack of principle, and charisma cloaked ambition. I liked the teacher, but he was a saint already in the eyes of his students, and that worried me a little, because every pedestal is taller than the man who sits on it.

The sages returned, and the discourse continued for three interrogative hours, until the sages ran out of questions. Then they knelt at Idriss’s feet, asking for a blessing in return for the one they’d given him at the start of the contest.

‘I do love our games, Idriss,’ Let Me See remarked, the last to part. ‘I am always grateful to the Divine that we are free to be generous with our ideas, and all the new ones to come, may we be so blessed.’

The sages left along the easier path, with rose petals protecting their feet. And they were thoughtful, perhaps, if not less doubtful, ambitious and grumpy.

Idriss retired to bathe and pray. We helped to pull the temporary pagoda down, and gathered up the carpets and trays.

Karla took over the kitchen as a volunteer, and cooked vegetarian pulao, cauliflower and potato pieces in coconut-cream gravy, green beans and peas in coriander and spinach sauce, carrot and pumpkin pieces foil-roasted in the fire, and basmati rice scented with almond milk.

Watching Karla operate large pots and woks of rice and vegetables on six gas jets at the same time, her mastery of taste and colour sizzling in hurricanes of steam, I was mesmerised, marvelling at it like an owl, until she pulled me in to wash the dishes.

We worked in the kitchen shelter with three young women from the community of students. They chatted with Karla about music, fashion and movies, while preparing food for twenty-eight devoted people. They regarded cooking for Idriss and the others on the mountain as a sacred duty, and they put their love in the food that their teacher would taste.

When not cooking, praying or studying, the devotees liked to eat, and not a crumb of Karla’s fragrant preparations remained when the feast ended. She didn’t eat much herself, but raised her glass to the many compliments, offering a toast at the sated end.

‘That’s it for me, for another year,’ she said. ‘To cooking once a year!’

‘To cooking once a year!’ devotees who cooked every day shouted.

When all was stacked in gleaming towers, and most of the devotees left the camp or went to sleep, the mountain sinners sat around the fire: Karla, Didier, Vinson, Randall, Ankit and me.

Didier suggested a suggestive game, where anyone who inadvertently said a suggestive word in the conversation had to take a drink. His theory was that the one who was most obsessed with sex would get drunk the fastest, and then we’d all know.

I already knew that it was Didier, who was also, as it happens, almost immune to alcohol. Karla knew it, too, and redirected the conversation.

‘How about this, guys,’ she suggested, standing to leave. ‘Why don’t you tell each other the true story of why you’re sitting here, and not sitting somewhere else, with the love of your life?’

‘Rannveig’s in an ashram,’ Vinson began without help. ‘And it’s my fault. I love her so much that I think I made her, like, holy, you know? And I don’t think there’s a reverse exorcism for that.’

‘I know exactly what you mean,’ Randall averred. ‘But I wish I didn’t.’

Karla and I said goodnight. I grabbed one of the rolls of carpet, a canvas sheet, a coil of rope, and my backpack of essential supplies. Karla carried two blankets and her own bag of indispensables. We walked by torchlight to the knoll, scaring ourselves with leaping shadows when the path turned suddenly.

‘You almost shot that shadow, didn’t you?’ I asked, tucked in beside her on the narrow path, the torch in her hand throwing circles of coherence on the dark canvas of night’s forest.

‘You’re the one who reached for a knife,’ she said, cuddling close.

I used the rope to set up a fairly decent shelter. With the right rope, the president of a trucker’s union once said to me, and enough of it, a trucker can do just about anything.

In my trucker’s tent we talked, and kissed, and went through every argument and reply we’d heard in the discourse.

‘You guys are so completely not getting it,’ Karla said sleepily, when we’d run through the valley of ideas together.

‘Us guys?’

‘You guys.’

‘Not getting what?’

‘The truth,’ she said.

‘What truth?’

‘The big truth.’

‘About what?’

‘That’s the point, exactly,’ Karla said, her eyes green mirrors.

‘The point about what?’

‘You men are obsessed with the truth,’ Karla said. ‘But the truth isn’t such a big deal. The truth is just inhibition, after three drinks.’

‘I don’t need a drink,’ I smiled, ‘to be disinhibited with you.’

We kissed and loved and kept talking, and arguing, working our way back to the end of the beginning until we slept, as a half-moon proclaimed the sky with fuzzy brilliance.

I woke suddenly, aware that we weren’t alone. I lifted my head slowly and saw Idriss, with his back turned. He was standing at the edge of the knoll a few metres away, and staring at the silver cup of the moon.

I glanced at Karla. She was still sleeping beside me, wearing my T-shirt like a nightdress.

‘I am glad that you see me,’ Idriss said, not turning around.

‘I’m always glad to see you, Idriss,’ I whispered. ‘I’d stand up, but I’m not dressed for it.’

He chuckled, leaning on his staff to look at the stars.

‘I am very happy that you and Karla are here,’ he said. ‘And I want you to understand that you’re welcome to stay, for as long as it pleases you to remain.’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

Karla woke beside me, and saw Idriss.

‘Idriss,’ she said, sitting up. ‘Please, sit and be comfortable.’

‘I am always comfortable, Karla, wherever I am,’ he said cheerfully, still not turning to face us. ‘And, I suspect that this is true for both of you as well, isn’t it?’

‘Can we offer you something?’ Karla asked, rubbing her eyes awake. ‘Some water or juice?’

‘In offering something to me with those words,’ Idriss said, ‘I am nourished already.’

‘We’ll get dressed, and join you,’ I suggested. ‘I can make you a cup of tea by the fire.’

‘I will leave, in a minute or two,’ he replied. ‘But there is something that I must tell you both, and my mind will not allow me to ignore it, so I must apologise for the intrusion.’

‘We’re the intruders,’ Karla said.

He laughed again.

‘Did you wish that you were beside me today, Karla,’ he said, ‘when I was facing the inquisitors?’

‘I did, Idriss,’ she laughed. ‘Pencil me in, next time.’

‘Done,’ he replied, already leaving us in his mind. ‘Are you two ready to receive my instruction?’

‘Yes,’ Karla whispered uncertainly.

‘You must renounce violence, both of you, and do whatever it takes to live peacefully.’

‘It’s hard to be non-violent in a violent world, Idriss,’ Karla said.

‘Violence, tyranny, oppression, injustice, these are all mountains on the topography of life’s journey,’ Idriss said. ‘Life is an encounter with those mountains. The safest way to pass beyond the mountain is to walk around it. But if you choose that path it becomes the whole of your life, because walking around becomes a circle that never stops, and one of those mountains becomes your destiny. The only way onwards, to something else beyond the circle, and to see clearly enough to avoid new mountains, is to climb the mountain and cross it from the peak. But the thing about a mountain is that no part of the climb is less dangerous than the part you just completed.’

‘Which means?’ I asked.

‘I worry about you both,’ he said. ‘I worry about you often. The view from the top, after the dangerous climb, is something you can’t have if you take the safer path within the circle, but it has great risks. And you must rely on each other and help each other more than ever before. You are already climbing through the mountain shadow, both of you.’

‘Have you climbed all your mountains, Idriss?’ Karla asked.

‘I was married once,’ he said softly and slowly. ‘A long time ago. And my wife, may her soul know happiness, was a constant companion in the spiritual search, as you are for one another. I would be nothing, without all the many things we learned together. And now I climb through the mountain shadow alone.’

‘You’re never alone, Idriss,’ Karla said. ‘Everyone who knows you carries you inside.’

He laughed softly.

‘You remind me of her, Karla. And you remind me of myself, Lin, in another life. I was not always the peaceful man you know. Never give up on the love you feel for one another. Never stop searching for peace, within yourselves.’

He turned silently, and walked back toward the camp.

Night noises returned, and a bell tolled at a railway signal somewhere far away. Karla was silent, staring at the leaf shadows where Idriss had vanished.

‘We’ve got some stuff to work out, you and me, if we’re gonna get this right,’ she said, looking back at me, her eyes green moonlight. ‘And I want to get this right, for once, with you.’

‘I thought we already had it pretty right.’

‘We just got started,’ she smiled, stretching sleepily, and snuggling in beside me. ‘Couple of months up here, like this, we’ll work all the kinks in just right.’

She pulled away from me suddenly, and fetched around among her things until she found the letter she’d been holding for me.

‘This is the right time for a mountain shadow letter, if ever there was,’ she said, giving me the letter and cuddling in beside me again.

She yawned, gorgeously, closed her eyes, and slept. I opened the single-page letter. It was from Gemini George. I read it by the light of the torch.

Hey, mate, Gemini here, letting you know that me and Scorpio haven’t found the guru that cursed him yet, but we’re still on the trail. We was in Karnataka, on a mountain, then Bengal, and somewhere in between I got sick, mate, and I’m not feeling too good, but I can’t let Scorpio down, so we’ll keep on searching. I just wanted someone who cares about me to know that I don’t have no regrets, if I don’t come back, because I love my life, and I love my friend Scorpio.

Yours sincerely,

Gemini

I put the letter away, and held Karla close until she slept deeply in my arms, but it took me a while to find sleep.

I was thinking of the men sitting together by the fire, Ankit and Vinson, Didier and Randall, separated from love but finding it again in shared stories, thrown into the fire one wooden tribute at a time.

I thought of Abdullah, who never lost his faith in anything, but was almost always alone. I saw Vikram in a dark lane of memory, as alone in death as he was in the half-life of addiction.

I thought of Naveen, knowing that he was in love with Diva Devnani, but that he was staring at her through a wall of thorns called polite society.

I thought of Ahmed, of the House of Style, who told me once, during a very close shave, that he’d loved the same young woman passionately all his life, though both his family and hers had torn them apart, and he hadn’t seen her since he was nineteen years old.

I thought of Idriss, alone, and Khaderbhai alone, and Tariq alone, and Nazeer alone, and Kavita, alone without Lisa, and all the others who were living and dying alone, but always in love, or believing in love.

The wonder isn’t that love finds us, as strange and fated and mystical as that is. The wonder is that even when we never find it, even when love waits in the wings of dream too long, even when love doesn’t knock on the door, or leave messages, or put flowers in our hands, so many of us never stop believing in love.

Lovers, too happy loving, don’t need to believe. Lives unloved that never stop believing are saints of affection, keeping love itself alive in gardens of faith.

I looked at Karla, breathing into my chest. She flinched in the corner of a dream. I soothed her until her breathing was my personal music of peace again.

And I thanked whatever Fate or stars or mistakes or good deeds gave me that beautiful peace, when she was with me. And I slept, at last, and the half-moon, a silver chalice, showered stars on our dreams of the mountain shadow.

Chapter Eighty-One

The mountain made its own place in time, marked by rituals and sunsets, meals and meditations, fires, penance, prayers and laughter. One by one our crew of friends left the teacher’s mesa, and finally only Karla and I remained with Idriss, Silvano and a few students.

And she’d been right to ask for the time away from the city: simplified living, strangely enough, added new complexities to our relationship, and the splinters of city life were slowly blunted on the handle of understanding. We talked for hours every day and night, visiting the past while the present escaped us.

‘He saved me,’ Karla said one day, weeks into the stay, when the conversation drifted into the Khaderbhai years.

‘You met him on the plane, when you were on the run.’

‘I did. I was a mess. I’d killed a man, a rapist, my rapist, and even though I knew I’d do it again if I had to, I was a mess. I made it to the airport, and I bought a ticket, and got on the plane, but I fell apart in the air, five miles above the earth. Khaderbhai was sitting beside me. He had a return ticket to Bombay, and I had a one-way ticket. He talked to me, and when the plane landed he brought me here, to the mountain. And I went to work for him the next day.’

‘You loved him,’ I said, because I’d loved him.

‘Yes. I didn’t like him, and I told him that, and I didn’t agree with his way of doing things, but I loved him.’

‘For better or worse, he was a force in the city, and in all of our lives.’

‘He used me,’ she said. ‘And I let him. And I used people that he asked me to use. I used you, for him. But I don’t feel anything but… love… for him, when I think of him. Is it the same for you?’

‘It is.’

‘I still feel him sometimes, standing beside me, when things get bad.’

‘Me, too,’ I said. ‘Me, too.’

Karla and I enjoyed the time on the holy mountain, but we still liked to stay in touch with the unholy city. A newspaper made its way up the mountain once a week, and occasional visitors brought news of friends and foes, but our best updates came from the young Ronin, Jagat, who was running my bing for me while I was on the mountain.

Jagat met us in the car park beneath the caves, every two weeks. The news that he brought from the city always made us feel good about the steep climb back to the peak.

Politicians and other fanatics, Jagat reported, were doing their best to ensure that cooperation was impossible, especially among friends. In some areas, plastic barricades had begun to segregate neighbours and neighbourhoods, sometimes on nothing more than food preferences, breaking the shell of tolerance.

In streets and slums and working places across the city, people of every inclination got along well, and did good work. But in political party offices, those elected to represent the people put up fences between the people wherever friendship threatened political war. And people rallied blindly on both sides of the line, forgetting that barricades only ever separate armies of the poor.

Vishnu completed his purge, and the fully Hindu 307 Company was blessed by holy men, in Vishnu’s new mansion on Carmichael Road, not far from the art gallery that Karla had abandoned to Taj, but much deeper in the deep-pocket belt of Bombay’s elite.

A lavish housewarming party warmed the frosty noses of local snobs, Jagat said, and some of the movie star guests remained regular visitors to Vishnu’s excess.

‘Vishnu put up the money for a really big Hindi picture,’ Jagat said. ‘They’re shooting it in Bulgaria, or Australia. One of those foreign places. His photo was in all the papers, at the big shot party, when they announced the new movie.’

‘And nobody moved to arrest him for killing the Afghan guards, killing Nazeer and Tariq, and starting the fire that ate Khaderbhai’s house, and a portion of the city?’

‘No witnesses, baba-dude. Charges dropped. The Assistant Commissioner was at the party to announce the new movie. The hero of the movie is a rough and ready cop, based on the Assistant Commissioner dude himself, and how tough he was on crime and criminals, and how many of them he killed in encounters. And Vishnu is paying for it. I don’t get it, man. It’s like robbing your own bank, somehow.’

‘I hear you,’ I said.

‘Funny guys,’ Karla laughed. ‘How many bodyguards did Vishnu have with him?’

‘Four, I think,’ Jagat said. ‘About the same as the Assistant Commissioner.’

‘Why the bodyguard question?’ I asked her.

‘It’s the Inverse Fair Law. The more bodyguards, the less integrity.’

‘And the Cycle Killers have totally changed their image,’ Jagat replied, shaking his head. ‘They got a complete new look.’

‘Recycled Killers,’ Karla said. ‘How’s the new look?’

‘Well, I guess you can say it’s better than the old look. They wear white slacks, and peppermint-coloured shirts.’

‘All of them?’

‘Yeah. They’re heroes, now.’

‘Heroes?’ I doubted.

‘I’m not kidding. People love those guys. Even my girlfriend bought me a peppermint shirt.’

‘Cycle Killers in Jeeps, huh?’

‘In Jeeps, with chrome bicycles attached on the roll bars.’

‘And they don’t kill people any more?’

‘No. They’re called No Problem now.’

‘No Problem?’ Karla asked, intrigued.

‘Yeah.’

‘That’s like calling yourself Okay,’ I said. ‘Everybody says no problem every three minutes, in India. People say no problem even when there is a problem.’

‘Exactly,’ Jagat replied. ‘It’s brilliant. No problem too big, or too small. No Problem.’

‘You’re kidding me, Jagat.’

‘No way, baba-dude,’ he insisted. ‘I swear. And it’s working. People are asking them to negotiate for the release of kidnap victims, and such. They got a kidnapped millionaire free last week, and the only fingers he had left were on his left hand. Those fingers were on the line, too, until No Problem got on the case. People are asking them to fix building and construction problems that have tied up crores of rupees for years, man. They’re working shit out, for anyone who pays them.’

‘Nice,’ Karla said.

‘Uh-huh,’ I said, not easy with what I’d heard.

Back Street, Main Street and Wall Street are the three big streets in every city, and none of them play well together on the shallower edges of tangled banks.

The streets are apart, and false distinctions keep them apart, because whenever they intersect eyes find love, and minds see injustice, and the truth sets them free. Power, in any street, has a lot to lose from free minds and hearts, because power is the opposite of freedom. As one of the powerless, I prefer the Back Street guys to stay out of Main Street, the cops to fund their own movies, and the Wall Street guys to stay out of everything, until all the streets become One Street.

I had to pull my thoughts away: I knew that every hour Jagat spent with us added traffic to his ride back to the city. Karla, thinking with me perhaps, brought me back.

‘Have you been checking on Didier for us?’ Karla asked the young Ronin.

‘Jarur,’ the young street soldier said, spitting. ‘He still hangs out at Leopold’s, and he’s fine.

‘Hey, those Zodiac guys,’ he said, ‘the millionaires, they’re back in town.’

‘Where?’

‘The Mahesh, man,’ he said. ‘I can’t check on anyone inside that place. Not born with the right barcode to get past that scanner, you know.’

‘If you find anything out, let me know.’

‘Sure. Hey, you know why people looked after those two foreigners so much when they lived on the street?’ he asked thoughtfully.

‘They’re very nice guys?’ I suggested.

‘Apart from that,’ he said, his foot making a pattern of swirls in the dust at our feet.

‘Please, tell us,’ Karla urged, always drawn to the sun inside.

‘They were called the Zodiac Georges,’ he said. ‘That’s why. In India, I mean, it’s like a really big deal, you know? It’s like calling yourself Karma, or something. Everywhere they went, they carried the Zodiac with them, in their names. When you fed them, you fed the Zodiac. When you offered them a safe place, you offered safety

to the Zodiac. When you protected them from bullies, you protected the Zodiac from negative energies. And making offerings to the planets that guide us and mess us up is, like, really important. There’s a lotta people out there, baba-dude, who miss the chance to offer something to the Zodiac guys, now that they’re so rich they don’t need it.’

India. Time measured in coincidence, and the logic of contradiction. Jagat pushed me off a perch of equilibrium I thought I’d claimed in India. But that shock happened almost every day, and shook the branch every time. The world I was living in, and not born into, rained strange flowers from every tree that gave me shelter.

‘That’s a lovely story, Jagat,’ Karla said.

‘It is?’ he asked, shyness hiding in a frown.

‘Yes. Thank you for sharing it.’

Jagat, whose name means The World, blushed and looked away, instinctively reaching for the handle of the knife in his belt.

‘Hey, listen, man,’ he said, turning back to me, his scarred young face telling the same stories every time someone looked at him. ‘I don’t feel right, taking all the money from your operation.’

‘You’re doing all the work,’ I said. ‘Why shouldn’t you take all the money? I’m the one who’s in your debt, for keeping it running. I owe you significant on this, Jagat-dude.’

‘Fuck you, man,’ he laughed. ‘I’m putting twenty-five per cent aside for you, every week, whether you like it or not, okay?’

‘Cool, jawan,’ I said, using the Hindi word for soldier. ‘I accept.’

‘When you get back from this spooky place full of tigers and holy men, there’ll be something there for you.’

‘When I get back to your spooky place full of businessmen and cops,’ I said. ‘I’ll be damn glad to get it.’

‘Let’s ride with Jagat to the highway and back,’ Karla suggested.

‘Good idea. Want some company, Jagat, or you wanna go fast?’

‘Let’s glide all the way down, baba-dude.’

‘Kruto!’ Karla said.

‘What’s this? Has Oleg been teaching you Russian?’ I asked, taking my bike off the stand.

‘Sprosite yego,’ she laughed.

‘Which means?’

‘Ask him.’

‘I will,’ I said, and she laughed harder.

A motorcycle is jealous metal. A motorcycle that loves you always knows when you even think about another motorcycle. And when she knows, she won’t start. And because I’d looked at Jagat’s bike, my bike didn’t start for me, even after three kicks.

Jagat thumped his bike into slow staccato motorcycle music, the 350cc single-piston engine like a drum that gets you from place to place, so long as you let it play its own tune.

I tried the kick-starter again, but all I got was a derisory cough.

Karla leaned over, hugging the tank of my bike, her arms around one of the handlebars.

‘A trip down the mountain and back again will be so good for you, baby,’ she said to the bike. ‘Let’s go for a ride.’

I kicked, and she started, jamming the throttle for a second, showing off.

We rode with Jagat, coasting downhill side by side on the deserted forest road, to the beginning of the fiercely determined highway. We waved him away, and turned back.

We rode through an evening forest, shifting from daytime daring to nighttime cunning. Birds were returning to roosts, insects were rising from slumber and bats as wide as eagles were waking for the feast.

We rode the long road to the caves as slowly as the bike would allow. We rode through soft wind in shadows, hiding and revealing the sky. The young night was clear. The first stars woke, rubbing their eyes. A leaf-fire somewhere sent earth perfumes into the air. And we were two happy fugitives, together and free.

Chapter Eighty-Two

We reached the summit car park, happy and free, and found Concannon waiting for us. He was sitting on the trunk of the red Pontiac Laurentian, and wearing a white shirt. I wanted it to match the car.

‘Hold on, baby,’ I said to Karla, sloping the bike to a stop.

I spun the bike around, and sped down the hill a few hundred metres before stopping again.

‘What are you doing?’

‘There’s a hollow tree just through there,’ I said. ‘Wait for me.’

‘Hide?’ she asked, as if I’d asked her to give blood to Madame Zhou.

‘Just wait. Until I get back.’

‘Are you crazy?’

‘That’s Concannon, back there.’

‘That’s Concannon?’ she said, intrigued by intriguing people.

‘Wait here, Karla,’ I said. ‘I’ll be back soon.’

‘I repeat, are you crazy? I’m the one with the gun, remember? And I’m a better shot. And I thought you said we were in this together, never apart.’

It was a tough call. When your enemy is ruthless, losing begins where mercy ends. But she was brave, and probably be the last woman standing in any fight.

‘Alright,’ I said reluctantly. ‘But don’t take any chances with this guy. He talks as good as he fights.’

‘Now I have to meet him,’ she said. ‘Let’s make an entrance, Shantaram.’

We rode back to the car park, and I slugged the bike onto the side-stand. Karla and I walked away while the bike was still breathing, the steps between Concannon and me shrinking at a motivated clip. I ran the last step hard, and hit him on the jump.

‘What the fuck?’ he said, holding the side of his head.

He rolled off the back of the car, and danced around me, feigning a few jabs. I rolled with him, but he covered up, breaking away fast.

He was dancing me away from Karla. He might’ve had friends somewhere. I stepped back slowly until I was beside her.

‘What are you doing up here, Concannon? Where are your goons?’

‘I came here alone, boyo,’ he said. ‘Which is more than I can say for you.’

He grinned at Karla, waving a hand.

‘Hello,’ he said.

Karla slid the gun from her bag, and pointed it at him.

‘If you’re carrying a gun,’ she said, ‘throw it away.’

‘I never carry a gun, miss,’ Concannon replied.

‘Good, because I always do. If you make a move, I’ll hit you twice before you get halfway.’

‘Understood,’ he grinned.

‘It’s not very smart, coming up here,’ she said. ‘There are tigers in this forest. That’s a good way to get rid of a body.’

‘If I thought I could bend my knee,’ Concannon grinned, ‘without your boyfriend kickin’ me in the undefended head, I’d do it, Miss Karla. It’s an honour. Concannon’s the name.’

‘My boyfriend got pretty upset,’ she said, ‘when I burned your letter, and I wouldn’t tell him what it said. I’ve been waiting for this chance, and I’m glad you gave it to me. Say it out loud, now, in front of him, if you’ve got the guts.’

‘Well, so it’s the letter that’s got you so upset, is it? No, no, I’ll decline your invitation to repeat my indecent proposals in front of this convict. I don’t think that would be wise.’

‘Like I thought,’ she smiled. ‘You wrote it, but you haven’t got the guts to say it.’

‘Did you not enjoy my little innuendos, then?’ Concannon asked. ‘I thought they were quite inventive, myself.’

‘Shut up,’ I said.

‘You see what I have to deal with?’ Concannon appealed to Karla.

‘Shut up,’ Karla replied. ‘Right now, you’re dealing with both of us. And not doing so good. What do you want here?’

‘I came to tell your boyfriend somethin’,’ Concannon said. ‘If I sit up there on the car, like I was before, will you not let me speak?’

‘I’d prefer you in the trunk, Concannon,’ I said. ‘With the car going over the cliff.’

Concannon smiled, and shook his head.

‘Hostility is ageing, you know,’ he said. ‘It adds years to your face. Can I sit peacefully on the fuckin’ car and talk to you like a fellow Christian, or can’t I?’

‘Sit,’ Karla said. ‘Christian hands where I can see them.’

Concannon sat on the trunk of the car, his feet resting on the bumper.

‘This would be a good time to talk your way out of this,’ Karla said.

Concannon laughed, looking Karla up and down, and then looked at me, blue eyes still bright in the faint light of the car park.

‘I didn’t have nothin’ to do with Lisa,’ he said quickly. ‘I never touched her. I only met her the once, well, the twice, I suppose you could say, but I liked her. She was a sweet thing. I’d never do anything like that. I only said it to get a rise out of you. I never touched her. And I never would’ve. It’s not my way.’

I wanted to stop him. I wanted to lift the curse that someone had put on me with the mention of his name. It was bad: everything connected to him was bad.

‘Keep talking,’ Karla said.

‘If I’d known what a sick thing Ranjit was, I’d have stopped him,’ Concannon said. ‘I swear it. I would’ve killed him myself, if I’d known what he was.’

His head was down. His guard was down. I wanted to run at him, and push him backwards through whatever malevolent window he’d jemmied open. But Karla wanted to know everything.

‘Keep talking,’ Karla continued. ‘Tell us everything you know.’

‘I didn’t find out until later,’ Concannon said. ‘If I’d known before, there wouldn’t have been any later.’

‘We got that. Go on,’ Karla said.

‘I met that maniac, Ranjit, through the drugs. The high and mighty don’t hesitate to come callin’ on my kind, when they need drugs. When he told me he was buying stuff to put Lisa to sleep, that night, I wanted to come along.’

‘Ranjit wanted the stuff, so he could put her to sleep?’ Karla asked, too gently, it seemed to me.

‘He did. Rohypnol tablets, he bought. I thought it was just a prank. He told me they were friends, and they were havin’ a private party.’

‘But why did you tag along with him?’

‘To torment your boyfriend,’ Concannon said, pointing at me. ‘That’s why I sent the dirty little letter to you, and put my filthy mind in yours for a while, to torment this berserk convict motherfucker.’

‘Shut up,’ we both said.

‘Well, you’re a fine pair of holy hooligans. A perfect match.’

‘Why were you there, Concannon?’ Karla asked, the mention of his name pulling his blue eyes to her.

‘I told you,’ he smiled. ‘I knew that if Lin, here, knew that I’d been in his home with his girl, while he was away, he’d be wilder than a stallion.’

‘Why did you want him wild?’

‘I did it to hurt him, because I knew that it would hurt that Iranian.’

‘Abdullah?’ Karla asked.

I hadn’t told her. I couldn’t betray the glory that Abdullah was, by speaking the truth of what he’d allowed himself to become that night, with Concannon.

‘We killed a few people together,’ Concannon replied casually. ‘No big deal. But he went native on me, and it became a war between us. Your boyfriend here was just collateral damage.’

‘Okay, that’s enough for me,’ I said.

‘Have you ever tried anger management?’ Concannon asked.

‘Go away, Concannon. I just ran out of shut-up.’

‘Before you go, if we let you go,’ Karla said. ‘Tell us what you know about Ranjit.’

I couldn’t understand it. I didn’t care about Ranjit, and I didn’t want Lisa’s name to slither from Concannon’s serpent lips again, ever. Knowing what Concannon was capable of inflicting, knowing that his pedigree was approved by the Tuareg, I wanted him unconscious or gone.

‘Don’t play games with us, Concannon,’ I said. ‘If you’ve got something to tell us, spit it out.’

‘I ran across Ranjit at a party, in Goa. He was wearing a wig, as a disguise, but I knew it was him right away. Seein’ as how he was a millionaire on the run and all, I thought he must have some money stashed away, so I got him wasted on cocaine and heroin, and persuaded him to take me back to his digs.’

‘Ranjit had a house in Goa?’ Karla asked.

‘He was rentin’ it, I think. A fine big place it was, though. A grand place. And all the while, I’m edgin’ him toward the safe, wantin’ him to open it for me, when he suddenly opens it himself, and says Would you like to see a movie?’

Karla put her hand on my arm gently.

‘What kind of movie?’

‘Sex tapes, it was,’ Concannon laughed. ‘Although it was very one-sided sex. The girls were all drugged senseless, you see. He wore a shower cap, and rubber gloves, leaving no trace of his sinfulness. He cleaned them and dressed them again, when he was done with them, and left them on his couch with a cosy blanket over their knees, so they woke up, and never even knew it happened.’

‘Ranjit did that?’

‘Yes, that he did,’ Concannon said. ‘You didn’t know?’

I just got back another shut up, but Karla squeezed my arm.

‘Did he tell you why he did it?’

‘He said his wife was frigid, if you’ll pardon me for his words, and she never had sex with him, so he used those sleepin’ girls, like, to pretend that he was having sex with her. With you, that is.’

Karla squeezed my arm.

‘You’re saying that’s what happened to Lisa?’

‘I think,’ he said, allowing his eyes to drift. ‘I think he drugged her with the Rohypnol, in a drink, but gave her too much. My stuff was pure, you see. I think she died, poor thing, before he used her.’

‘Who were the other girls?’

‘That, I don’t know.’ Concannon shrugged. ‘I only recognised one of them, and that’s because her face is in the papers, sometimes. But… I can tell you one thing. They all looked like you, and he dressed them all in a black wig, when he had his way with them.’

‘I’ve had enough of this,’ I said.

‘Don’t be tellin’ me to shut up again, boyo,’ Concannon said to me. ‘I didn’t come here to cause trouble. I’m sick of trouble, though I never thought I’d hear meself say it. I’m retired.’

‘This is a good place to make it permanent.’

‘You’re a wicked lad,’ Concannon said, smiling. ‘With wicked thoughts, in your wicked mind.’

‘What did you do, when Ranjit showed you the movies?’ Karla asked.

‘Well, I knocked him about quite a bit, of course, and left him senseless. I couldn’t kill him, though I wanted to, because too many people had seen me with him. Then I took all the money from the safe, and I also took that tape of him with the girl from the papers.’

‘What did you do with it?’

‘Now, that’s the funny part,’ Concannon said, folding his arms, his feet poised on the bumper.

‘Funny?’ I said. ‘You think any of this is funny?’

‘Hands where I can see them,’ Karla said, and Concannon lounged backwards on his hands. ‘Funny how?’

‘There’s this young fool who buys cocaine from me now and then. He’s not big, but he’s got a very bad temper. His own family put a restraining order on him. He wants to be a movie star, so he deals a little stuff to the real movie stars, and gets the odd part. The girl in Ranjit’s sick film is an actress, and he’s her bad-tempered boyfriend.’

‘Did you give him the film?’ Karla asked, her eyes gleaming.

‘I did, when he came to buy stuff,’ Concannon replied, grinning happily. ‘Ranjit used to sneak back into town, from time to time, and he always bought stuff from me. I told the violent lad that Ranjit would be ghostin’ around, in disguise, at a nightclub he liked in Bandra.’

‘So you told the kid where Ranjit would be.’

‘Not only that. I gave the young savage a present. Gift-wrapped it meself. There was the movie, Ranjit’s appointment at the nightclub, and an untraceable gun, full of untraceable bullets. Human nature took care of the rest.’

Karla squeezed my arm.

‘You came up here, to tell us that you set up my ex-husband?’ Karla asked.

‘I came up here to warn your boyfriend,’ Concannon said, straightening up.

‘And you’re gonna take a warning home again, Concannon.’

‘There you go again,’ he said, happily exasperated. ‘You are the hardest man in this whole city of screechin’ heathens to befriend. I know executioners who are more fun than you. I’m tryin’ to tell you, I’m a changed man.’

‘I don’t see a change,’ I said. ‘You’re still breathing.’

‘There’s those wicked thoughts again.’

‘Listen,’ he said calmly, ‘I’ve done with all that. I’m a businessman now, and legitimately so. The fact that I bear you no grudge for our last encounter should testify to that.’

‘You just never learn, do you?’

‘But I did learn,’ he insisted. ‘That’s what I’m tryin’ to say. After that fight we had, I thought about everything. I mean, everything. I got hurt, you see. My shoulder hasn’t healed well, and it doesn’t work the way it should. My timing’s off, and I’ll never again fight the way I did. See, I never before let anyone get close enough to best me, and it shook me up. My Road to Damascus experience was in a warehouse in Bombay, and it was an Australian convict who knocked me off my horse. I’ve changed. I’m a businessman, now.’

‘What kind of business?’ Karla asked, relaxing her grip on my arm.

‘I’ve put all my money into a venture with Dennis.’

‘The Sleeping Baba?’

‘The same. One fine day, I got to thinkin’ about that proverb, you know, that if you sit quietly by a river for long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.’

I wanted Concannon to float by, on the Ganges.

‘And it occurred to me, in another Road to Damascus moment, that the river isn’t made of water, it’s made of stainless steel. It’s the undertaker’s table, you see? So, Dennis and me, we bought an undertaking business, and now we’re undertakers. Already, since we started, one of my enemies floated by on the preparation table. A fine drunken laugh I had that night, dressin’ him up nicely for the drop.’

‘Dennis went for this?’ I asked.

‘We’re a natural fit. I know what dead looks like, and he knows what dead feels like. I’ve never seen a man more tender with a body. He calls them sleepers, and he talks to them like they’re just asleep. It’s very kind. Very tender. But I keep a baseball bat handy, in case one of them ever talks back.’

Concannon stopped, clapped his hands together, then put the swollen knuckles into a knotted pyramid of prayer.

‘I know it’s hard to think that a menace to the living and the dead, like me, can give the whole thing up, but it’s the truth. I’ve changed, and the proof of it is that I’ve come up here, riskin’ your temper, to tell you two things. The first, I’ve already told you, which is all that I know about Ranjit, and that sweet girl.’

‘And the second thing?’ Karla asked for me.

‘The second thing is that the 307 Company have hired some out-of-town goondas to kill that Iranian, Abdullah, tonight. And since Abdullah’s hiding out up here, that puts you two in the firing line.’

‘When will they come?’ I asked.

Concannon checked his watch, and grinned the reply.

‘In about three hours,’ he said. ‘You’d have had longer, if you weren’t so bloody obstreperous, and I could’ve cleared me mind without interruption.’

For all I knew, Concannon was setting us up. I didn’t like it.

‘Why are you telling us this?’ Karla asked.

‘I’m tyin’ up loose ends, miss,’ Concannon smiled. ‘I never had nothin’ against your man. I tried to recruit the stubborn fool, and I wouldn’t have done that, if I hadn’t taken a shine to ’im. I treated him poorly, when it was Abdullah that I hated, because he turned on me, and threatened my life.’

‘Stop talking about Abdullah,’ I said.

‘But I don’t hate him any more,’ he persisted. ‘He did nothin’ wrong, even if he is an Iranian… person. It was me that did wrong, and I admit it freely. Anyway, the Iranian will likely meet his end, tonight. And now I found a place where I feel at home, and in one way or another, I know I’ll find peace, as other people kill my enemies and send them to me. I’ll be with my own kind, so to speak. I don’t know if you understand.’

‘We understand,’ Karla said, although I didn’t.

‘Do you believe me, when I say that I have no quarrel with either of you, and that I wish you no harm?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Goodbye, Concannon.’

‘They say he’s a writer,’ Concannon winked at Karla. ‘They must be teenie weenie little books that he writes.’

‘He’s the big book,’ Karla gave back. ‘I’m the big character. Thank you, Concannon, for the heads-up. What’s your first name, by the way?’

‘Fergus,’ I said before he did, and he laughed, jumping from the car with his arms wide.

‘You do like me! I knew it! Will you stab me, if I give you a hug?’

‘Yes. Don’t come back.’

He let his arms fall slowly, smiled at Karla, and walked a few steps backwards to his car.

‘There’s no use in callin’ the police,’ he said at the car. ‘There’s a lot of money been paid to keep this mountain dark tonight, until the Iranian is dead, once and for all.’

He started the car, locked the wheel, hit the gas and spun around beside us, his arm resting on the open window.

‘Would you like some dynamite?’ he asked. ‘I’ve a box full in the back, and no purpose for it at all, now.’

‘Maybe next time,’ Karla smiled, waving him away.

The twinned tail-lights on either side of the car were bats, swooping into the first curve. She turned to me quickly, waking the queens.

‘We haven’t seen Abdullah up here, so he must be at Khaled’s. We’ve gotta warn him.’

‘Agreed, and then Silvano and the students. This might spill up the hill to Idriss.’

She braced herself for the run to Khaled’s mansion, but I held her back.

‘Can we talk about something, before we talk to Khaled?’

‘Sure,’ she said, relaxing from a run almost started. ‘What’s up?’

‘You know how we said we’ll always be together?’

She looked at me, hands on hips.

‘I’m not hiding in a hollow tree, Shantaram,’ she said, the squint in her smile scanning me.

‘I don’t mean that. I’m trying to explain something.’

‘Now?’

‘If things get rough tonight, don’t separate from me. Stick to my side, or my back. Lock your elbow in mine, if you have to. If we’re back to back, you shoot, and I’ll cut. But let’s be one thing, because if we’re not, I’ll go nuts worrying about you.’

She laughed, and hugged me, so I guess some part of it must’ve been right.

‘Let’s go,’ she said, getting ready for the run to Khaled’s.

‘Wait,’ I said.

‘Again?’

‘Maybe next time?’ I said, repeating her final words to Concannon.

‘What?’

‘You said Maybe next time to Concannon, when he offered us dynamite.’

‘Now? You’re bringing this up now?’

‘Concannon isn’t a next-time guy. He’s a one-time guy, and half a planet is almost far enough away.’

‘You don’t believe in redemption?’

She was adorable, when she teased, but we were talking about Concannon, and there were killers coming to the mountain to kill our friend.

‘I don’t believe Concannon,’ I replied. ‘The overtaking version, or the undertaking version. I don’t believe anything he says. This could be a trap.’

‘Good,’ she shouted, sprinting up the path. ‘Coming?’

Chapter Eighty-Three

We heard music and chanting, hundreds of voices in harmony, as we turned the last bend on the tree-lined path to Khaled’s mansion. It was lit like a prison, with spotlights fixed to trees.

‘His flock must’ve grown,’ Karla said quietly, as we stopped together on the path before the steps, looking at the floodlit veranda. ‘That’s quite a chorus.’

The trees around us, bleached of leaves by spotlights, were startled skeletons with their hands in the air. The chanting was intense, the singers drunk on devotion.

Khaled walked out through the wide doorway and onto the veranda, his hands on his hips.

He was a shadow figure, black against the lights that were slow-burning our eyes. He had two shadow figures with him.

He raised his hand, and the devoted chanting stopped. Insects sang the silence again.

‘Salaam aleikum,’ he said.

‘Wa aleikum salaam,’ Karla and I both said.

Very loud, very big dogs started barking somewhere. It was a sound that makes you think of sharp teeth, and running away. Karla slipped her elbow through mine. The barking was ferocious. Khaled raised his hand again, and the barking stopped.

‘Sorry, wrong tape,’ he said, handing a remote control to a shadow figure. ‘What are you doing here, Lin?’

‘We came to see Abdullah,’ Karla said.

‘What are you doing here, Lin?’

‘Like she said,’ I replied. ‘Where is he?’

‘Abdullah has cleansed himself for death, and is at prayer,’ Khaled replied. ‘No-one can disturb him. Not even me. He is alone with Allah.’

‘They’re coming for him,’ I said.

‘We know,’ Khaled said. ‘There are no students here. The ashram has been closed for some time. We are -’

The chanting started again. After a few frenzies it stopped, mid-mantra.

‘Stop playing with the remote, Jabalah!’ Khaled shouted over his shoulder.

Insects and frogs welcomed the silence again.

‘We are ready for war,’ Khaled said.

‘Now, where have I read that before?’ Karla said.

Khaled held up his hand imperially.

‘I am the one who spread the rumour that Abdullah is here. I am the one who provoked this attack, out of the city. This is a trap, Lin, and you are standing in it.’

Dogs barked again.

‘Jabalah!’ Khaled shouted, and tape stopped.

Khaled walked down the silence, to join us on the path. He’d lost half the weight he’d gained, and had been training again. He looked fit, strong, confident and dangerous. It seemed that he’d learned to love himself.

He took my hands in his, leaning close between us, but he spoke to Karla in whispers.

‘Hello, Karla,’ he said, embracing me. ‘I cannot greet you, directly, in front of my men, because you are a woman, in the company of a man who is not your family.’

He hugged me close to him, whispering into my ear for the sake of his men, but speaking to her.

‘My commiserations, on the loss of your husband. You must leave this place, now. There will be war tonight.’

He pulled away, but I held his arm.

‘You knew about this, and you didn’t warn us?’

‘You are warned now, Lin, and you should take that as a blessing. You must leave. My men are nervous. Let’s not have any accidents.’

‘Allah hafiz, Khaled,’ Karla said, dragging me away.

‘Tell Abdullah… tell him we’re here, on the mountain, if he needs us,’ I said.

‘I’ll tell him, but I can only speak to him when the fighting begins,’ Khaled answered sadly. ‘Peace be with you both tonight.’

He waved, because we were at the end of the path, and it was too far away for him to speak his mind. We waved back, and we jogged to the start of the long climb up the mountain.

I stopped her. It was dark, but reflections glittered in her eyes.

‘Can I tell you something?’

‘Again?’ She laughed.

‘It might get bad tonight,’ I said. ‘If you want to get far away, I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.’

‘Let’s go warn Idriss first,’ she smiled, starting on the path.

I chased her all the way up the slope, and we were puffing hard when we rushed onto the mesa, bright with students, talking late by the fire.

We found Silvano, and pushed him to a meeting with Idriss, in the big cave.

‘Killers,’ Idriss said, when the story told itself.

‘And pretty good at it,’ I said. ‘We’ve gotta get away from here, Idriss. At least for tonight.’

‘Of course. We must take the students to safety. I’ll give the instruction at once.’

‘I will stay and protect this place,’ Silvano said.

‘You must not,’ Idriss said. ‘You must come with us.’

‘I must disobey,’ Silvano replied.

‘You must come with us,’ Idriss repeated.

‘It’s just good sense, Silvano,’ I agreed. ‘If someone from down there tries to escape up here, and others start chasing him, nobody will be safe.’

‘I must stay, master-ji,’ Silvano said. ‘And you must go.’

‘It is possible to be too brave, Silvano,’ Idriss said. ‘Just as it is possible to be too loyal.’

‘All of your writings are here, master-ji,’ Silvano said. ‘More than fifty boxes of them, most of them unpacked for study. We cannot gather them together in the time we have. I will stay, and guard your work.’

I admired his dedication, but it seemed like too big a risk, to me: too high a price for the written word. Then Karla spoke.

‘We’ll stay with you, Silvano,’ she said.

‘Karla,’ I began, but she smiled true love at me, and, well, what can you do?

‘Looks like you’ve got company, Silvano,’ I sighed.

‘It is settled, then,’ Idriss said. ‘Come with me, now, and gather the students together with their valuables, as quickly as possible. We will walk the slow path to the Kali temple, where the highway begins. Send a message to us there, when all is quiet again in our sanctuary.’

‘Idriss,’ I said. ‘I feel bad that this has found its way up here. I’m sorry.’

‘Taking responsibility for the decisions and actions of others is a sin against Karma,’ Idriss said. ‘Equal, in gravity, to avoiding responsibility for your own decisions and actions. You did not cause this. It is not your karmic burden. Be safe tonight. You are blessed, all of you.’

He placed his hand on our heads, one by one, chanting mantras of protection.

The students tipped their personal belongings into shawls, tied them into bundles, and assembled at the entrance to the slow path downhill, the torches and lanterns in their hands whirling like fireflies.

Idriss joined them, turning to wave to us, and led the way, the long staff in his right hand.

Another student, named Vijay, had decided to stay with us. He was thin, tall, and dressed in white pyjama-style cotton shirt and pants. He was barefoot, and carrying a bamboo pole that reached to his shoulder.

His young face was expressionless, as he watched his teacher depart. He turned his fine features on me, eyes lit with India.

‘Are you fine?’ he asked.

I looked at his bamboo stick, remembering the men I’d fought in the last year, from Scorpions to Concannon, and thinking that it might be a good idea to tie a knife to the end of that stick.

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a spare knife, if you want to tie it to that stick.’

He stood back, began to whirl the stick around, jumped while he whirled, and brought the stick down a toe away from my boot.

‘Or… maybe not,’ I said.

‘Shall we split up, and take different vantage points?’ Silvano asked.

‘No!’ Karla and I said, together.

‘Anyone who comes up here, comes onto our ground,’ I said. ‘We find a position with cover, with an escape route, where we can see the top of the climbing path. If anyone comes into the open space, we can scare them away with gunfire, and noise.’

‘And if it becomes a fight?’

‘We kill them,’ Karla said, ‘before they kill us. You’re a dead shot, Silvano, and I’m not bad. We’re okay.’

‘Or,’ I suggested, ‘we could escape, regroup, and wait it out. There are plenty of places to hide, and they can’t stay on this mountain forever.’

‘I say we fight,’ the student with the stick said.

‘I say we decide to run or to fight, when we have to decide,’ I said.

‘I agree that we should have a good place of cover,’ Silvano mused. ‘The cave nearest to the path is the best place to see them coming.’

‘No exit strategy,’ I said. ‘I always like a way out.’

‘There is a way out,’ Silvano said. ‘Let me show you.’

There was a curtain at the far end of the cave. I’d seen it, but had always thought that it hung there to cover the bare cave wall.

Silvano pushed it aside, and led us by torchlight along a narrow channel that had formed or been carved between the first cave and the last.

We emerged from the passageway into Idriss’s cave, close to the ragged edge of the jungle: only a few steps from cover.

‘I like it,’ Karla said. ‘I’d buy it, and live here, if I could.’

‘Me, too,’ I agreed. ‘Let’s get set up in the first cave. We don’t have long.’

‘I don’t know about you,’ Silvano said, rubbing his belly, ‘but I’m hungry.’

We brought cold food, water, blankets and torches to the cave. I ate the plate of food Karla passed to me before I knew what it was. But when hunger was satisfied, fear started nagging.

Karla, sitting beside me, and killers on the way: my instincts were shouting to get the hell out of hell. But she was calm, and resolute. She’d finished her food, and was cleaning her gun. She was humming. And I guess, when I look back at it, she always had enough guts for both of us.

‘Where are the boxes of Idriss’s writings?’ I asked, looking away to Silvano.

‘In the main cave,’ Silvano replied, finishing his food.

‘Then let’s keep any action away from there. A stray bullet could start a fire.’

‘Agreed.’

Vijay took Karla’s plate and stacked it with the others, outside the cave.

‘I know this forest,’ Silvano said, standing and stretching. ‘I will make a search of the area, with Vijay. And I need to visit the bathroom.’

He walked out to join Vijay quickly, and they passed from sight, moving to the right. The point where the path led onto the mesa was to our left.

So many feet had moved across the ridge that only wild grasses grew here and there. There was no moon yet, but it was a clear night, and we had a good view of the flattened space, fifty metres away.

My heart was beating fast. I slowed it down, willing it calm, but thoughts of Karla hurt or captured pulled the heartbeat back again. She looked at me, and she knew how afraid I was for her.

‘Make a big noise, and run and hide?’ she said, her mouth a beautiful sneer. ‘That’s your strategy?’

‘Karla -’

‘Chee, chee! Can you keep that one to yourself at the next meeting?’

‘I say we fight, the guy with the bamboo stick says,’ I laughed. ‘That’s a better strategy? I just don’t think it’s worth fighting for.’

‘A writer who doesn’t think written wisdom is worth fighting for?’

‘No. I’ve escaped through windows, because the cops were chasing me, and I had to leave everything behind. It’s all gone, that work, but I’m still here, and I’m still writing. No life is worth the written word.’

‘How so?’

Karla didn’t ask How so unless it was a challenge.

‘It’s not because the texts are sacred that life is important. It’s because life is sacred that the texts are important.’

She grinned happy queens at me.

‘That’s my guy. Let’s get ready.’

We piled boxes and sacks in the entrance to the cave, and stretched out with a view of the open ridge. She held my hand.

‘I wouldn’t be anywhere else on this planet, right now,’ she said.

I couldn’t reply, because we heard the first shot.

The further you are from a gunshot, the feebler the fear. The blast that deafens you, close to your ear, is a click of the fingers from far away. We heard the first shots, sounding like handclaps, and then it became volleys of applause.

Silvano and Vijay scampered back to the cave, squatting down beside us.

‘There’s an army down there,’ Silvano said, listening to the spatters of gunfire.

‘Two armies,’ I said. ‘And let’s hope they stay there.’

The fusillades finally subsided. There was silence, and then single shots snapped, one after another, a few steps apart. There were quite a lot of them.

We waited in the dark, listening hard to every broken twig or shuffle of wind. Minutes passed in threatening silence, and then we heard noises, grunting and moaning, coming from the steep path.

Silvano and Vijay were up and running before I could caution them. Karla made to leave as well, but I held her down beside me.

A man appeared at the summit of the path, crawling on hands and knees. Silvano was a shadow, standing to his right, aiming the rifle at his head. The man staggered to his feet. He had a pistol in his hand.

Vijay swung his stick, disarming the man, but the pistol fired, and a bullet hit the wall of the cave not far from where we hunkered down.

‘Good call, Shantaram,’ Karla said. ‘That bullet had my name on it, if I was standing there.’

The man hovered on wavering legs for a second and then fell, face flat to the ground. Vijay turned him over as Karla and I arrived.

The man was dead.

‘You better check there wasn’t a tail wagging on this one, Silvano,’ I said.

‘You know him?’

‘His name’s DaSilva.’

‘Which side was he on?’

‘The wrong side,’ I said. ‘Right to the end.’

Silvano and Vijay trotted away down the path to check for stragglers.

Staring at the body, I knew that I couldn’t let it be found in the camp where Idriss taught. There was no choice. I had to move it. Karla had moved two bodies in her life: two that I knew about. I’ve moved three: one in prison, one in a friend’s house, and the dead gangster who hated me, DaSilva. He was the hardest of them for both of us.

‘We can’t leave him here for the cops to find,’ I said.

‘You’re right,’ she replied. ‘This is the kind of scandal that kills cleverness.’

‘Not gonna be easy. That’s a steep climb, with a dead body.’

‘Yeah,’ she said, looking around, her hands on her hips.

We wrapped him in a student’s sari, and tied him securely. We fastened ropes for us to hold, at both ends.

We were just finished, when Silvano and Vijay arrived. Vijay’s eyes were oysters of dread.

‘A ghost?’

He was trembling, pointing at DaSilva’s wrapped body.

‘I hope so,’ I said. ‘We’re taking him down to the house. There’s no need for the cops to know he was up here.’

‘Thank you,’ Silvano said quickly. ‘Let us help you.’

‘We got this,’ Karla said. ‘They’re our friends down there. They know us, but they don’t know you, and they might start shooting if they see you. It’ll be safer if we do this without you. Stay here and guard those books.’

‘Okay,’ Silvano smiled, doubtfully. ‘Okay. If you insist.’

‘Presto,’ Karla said, tugging on the dead man’s rope. ‘This ghost has a way to go yet.’

Chapter Eighty-Four

We dragged DaSilva’s body to the ridge, and started down the path. I went first, taking most of the weight, while Karla held on as best she could from above.

I felt ashamed that I hadn’t protected her from that sad and criminal thing we had to do: more ashamed, in fact, than I was of doing the sad and criminal thing. I thought of Karla’s hands, and the rough rope shredding her skin, and scratches and grazes wounding her feet with every second step.

‘Stop!’ she said when we were just past halfway.

‘What is it?’

She took a few deep breaths, and shook the tension from her arms and shoulders.

‘Okay, this,’ she puffed, one hand wiping hair from her forehead, the other holding a dead man, ‘is officially the best date ever. Now, let’s get this corpse down this fucking hill.’

At the base of the mountain, I carried DaSilva’s body on my back along the path to Khaled’s mansion. The path was still lit, and the door of the mansion was open. It seemed deserted.

We climbed the stairs together, and walked into the vestibule. I slipped DaSilva’s body to the floor, and we began to untie him.

‘What are you doing?’ Khaled asked, from behind me.

I spun round to face him. He had a gun in his hand.

‘Salaam aleikum, Khaled,’ Karla said, and she had a gun in her hand.

‘Wa aleikum salaam,’ he responded. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Where’s Abdullah?’ I asked.

‘He’s dead.’

‘Ah, no, no,’ I said. ‘Please, no.’

‘May Allah take his soul,’ Karla said.

‘Are you sure he’s dead?’ I asked, choking the words. ‘Where is he?’

‘There were four other dead men on top of him, when I found him. One of them was Vishnu. I knew that arrogant thug would come here in person, to gloat. Now he’s dead, and my Company will take everything he had.’

‘Where’s Abdullah’s body?’

‘With the bodies of my dead men,’ Khaled said. ‘In the dining room. And I ask you, for the last time, what are you doing here?’

‘This miscreant wandered too far,’ I said, pulling the cover back to reveal DaSilva’s face. ‘We’re wandering him back. Is he one of yours, or theirs?’

‘He’s the man we used to set up the trap,’ Khaled said. ‘I shot him myself, after he served his purpose, but he got away.’

‘He got back,’ Karla said. ‘Can we leave him here, Khaled? We want to keep Idriss out of this.’

‘Leave him. My men will be back, soon, with the trucks. I’ll put this one with the bodies we’re throwing into the sewer tomorrow.’

‘I don’t want to see Abdullah’s body, Khaled,’ I said. ‘Do you swear to me that he’s dead?’

‘Wallah!’ he replied.

‘I want to see him,’ Karla said to me. ‘But you don’t have to come.’

Everywhere together, never apart: but sometimes the two of you is something that only one of you must do.

‘I’ll come,’ I said, feeling sick already. ‘I’ll come.’

Khaled led us through a drawing room to the main dining room. Four bodies were lying on the table neatly, like pavement dwellers sleeping together on the street.

I saw Abdullah at once, his long black hair trailing over the edge of the table. I wanted to turn away. I wanted to run. That beautiful face, that lion heart, that fire in the sky: I couldn’t bear to see it emptied, and cold.

But Karla went to him, put her head on his chest, and wept. I had to move. I drifted along the table, dead men’s heads a breeze against my fingers, and took Abdullah’s hand.

The face was stern, and I was comforted to see it. He was wearing white, and it showed blood everywhere. A clear line crossed his brow, where his white cap had been, but his proud face, all eyebrows, nose and beard like a king of Sumer, was speckled and blotched everywhere else.

He’d been shot, and stabbed, but his reddened face was unmarked.

It hurt inside like a cramp to see his time stopped. My own threads of time vibrated within me, one strand of the harmony silenced.

It hurt to see no breath, no life, no love. It was hard to stare at a man still there, and already suffered for, and already missing.

She was right, to make us cry. If you don’t say goodbye, an Irish poet once said to me, you never say goodbye. And it took a long time to cry goodbye.

Finally I let the dead hand fall, and let the myth of the man fall with it. Each one that leaves us, leaves an unfillable space. She came back with me to the veranda in control again, but grieving, and knowing that there was an empty cave inside both of us: a cave that would draw us again and again to sorrow, and remember.

Khaled was waiting for us.

‘You should hurry,’ he said. ‘My Company is very jumpy tonight.’

‘Your Company?’

‘The Khaled Company, Lin,’ Khaled replied, frowning. ‘This night, we took Vishnu’s life, and now we take everything that Vishnu had. This night, the Khaled Company is born. That was the plan. Abdullah’s plan, in fact, to use himself as the bait.’

‘You know what, Khaled -’ I started to end it with him, but I stopped, because just then a man stepped out of a shadow.

‘Salaam aleikum, Shantaram,’ the Tuareg said.

‘Wa aleikum salaam, Tuareg,’ I said, standing closer to Karla.

‘The Tuareg has been freelancing for me,’ Khaled said. ‘He set all of this up. And now he’s back home, in the Khaled Company.’

‘You set this up, Tuareg?’

‘I did. And I kept you out of it, by sending you after the Irishman,’ the Tuareg said. ‘Because you shook my hand.’

‘Goodbye, Khaled,’ I said.

‘Allah hafiz,’ Karla said, taking my arm on the steps, because we were both unsteady on our feet.

‘Khuda hafiz,’ Khaled replied. ‘Until we meet again.’

When we reached the base of the mountain, Karla stopped me.

‘Do you have the keys to State of Grace?’

‘I always have the keys to my bike,’ I said. ‘You wanna ride?’

‘Oh, yeah, let’s ride,’ she said. ‘I’m so messed up that only freedom can save me.’

We rode to the temple, where Idriss and the students were sheltering for the night, and told them that the danger was over. Idriss sent a fit, young student to tell Silvano the news. We took a blessing from the sage, and left.

We rode the last hours before dawn, going nowhere the long way, the bike chattering machine talk on empty boulevards, with signals on both sides flashing green, because nobody in Bombay stopped, at that hour, for red.

We parked the bike at the entrance to the slower, softer path to the mountain. I chained the bike to a young tree, so she wouldn’t be afraid, and we walked the long, gentle, winding path to the mesa.

Karla clung to me. I put an arm around her waist, supporting her, and making her steps a little lighter.

‘Abdullah,’ she said softly, a few times.

Abdullah.

I remembered when she said it to make us laugh, on the steep climb. I remembered when Abdullah was a friend I could laugh with, and tease. We cried together as we walked.

We reached the camp, and found students there, already bringing things back to function and faith.

‘Okay, this is too busy,’ Karla said, leaning against my shoulder. ‘Let’s hit the grassy knoll.’

We headed for our makeshift tent on the knoll. I set her down there, unresisting, falling back onto a cushion as if into a dream, and within a minute she was asleep.

We had a large water bottle in our kit of supplies. I soaked a towel, and cleaned the cuts and grazes that I’d already imagined, and then found, on her hands and feet.

She moaned, from time to time, when cloth and water sent streaks into her sleeping mind, but didn’t wake.

When the wounds on her hands and feet were clean, I rubbed them with turmeric oil. It was the medicine that everyone on the mountain used for cuts and scratches.

When I finished massaging oil into her scraped and cut feet, she curled onto her side, and went deeper into that annihilating sleep.

Abdullah. Abdullah.

I took water into the forest, emptied myself, cleaned myself, scrubbed myself, and returned to find her sitting up, staring at our patch of sky.

‘Are you okay?’ I asked.

‘I’m okay,’ she said. ‘Where were you?’

‘Cleaning up.’

‘After you cleaned the cuts on my hands and feet.’

‘I’m a sanitary guy.’

I settled in beside her, and she settled in beside me.

‘He’s gone,’ she said, her face against my chest.

‘He’s gone,’ I echoed.

Day raised the blue banner, and sounds of life shuddered from sleep: a shout, a laugh, bird cry brazen in the light, and doves trembling stories of love.

She slept again, and I was calm with her, in the peace that only sleeping love creates, while thoughts of Abdullah, bullet wounds in the mind, kept bleeding.

He was self-discipline, he was kindness unto blood for a friend, and he was ruthless enough to shame his own honour, which I was, too, in my own way.

I slept, at last, riding a wave of consolation in words, words Idriss spoke, running through my mind again and again, sheep counting sheep.

The mystery of love is what we will become, the phrase repeated. The mystery of love is what we will become. And the susurrus of syllables became the first gentle rain of the new monsoon, as we woke the next morning.

Still wounded by the night we returned to the camp as heavy rain filled the sky with seas, purified in ascension and pouring from tree-shoulders, shaken in the wind.

Rivulets played, making their own way through prior plans, and birds huddled on branches, not risking freedom’s flight. Plants that had been thin apostrophes became paragraphs, and vines that had slumbered like snakes in winter writhed insolent in vivid new green. Baptised by the sky, the world was born again, and hope washed a year’s dust and blood from the mountain.