The Mountain Shadow

Chapter Eighty-Five

At the end of that first week of rain, after watching Silvano

dance with students in a rare, sunny shower, and even Idriss shake a step or two, leaning on his long staff, Karla and I made our way down the mountain for the last time.

We didn’t know that the steep path we took would vanish, in a year or so, erased by nature. We didn’t know that the mesa, and the caves, too, would be overgrown not long after Idriss and his students dismantled their camp and left for Varanasi.

We didn’t know that it was the last time we’d ever see him. We were bubbling stories about him all the way down to the highway, unaware that he was already a ghost of philosophy, continuing in us through memories and ideas alone. We didn’t know that Idriss was already as lost to us in time as Abdullah.

We raced a black cloud all the way back to the birth of the peninsula, at Metro, and parked the bike under the arch beneath the Amritsar hotel, just as a new storm hit.

The tempest came at us from both sides of the archway, and we clung together, laughing as torrents scourged us. When the storm passed, we wiped the bike down together, Karla talking to her all the while like a psychic mechanic.

We climbed the stairs to the lobby, and found it changed, after our weeks on the mountain. There was a glass refrigerator door, where Jaswant’s secret cabinet had been. He still had his swanky chair, but a swanky new glass and synthetic laminate counter replaced the wooden reception desk.

Jaswant himself was in a swanky suit, complete with a tie.

‘What the hell, Jaswant?’ I said.

‘You’ve got to embrace change, man,’ Jaswant said. ‘Hello, Miss Karla. How lovely to see you again.’

‘Nice suit, Jaswant,’ she replied.

‘Thank you, Miss Karla. Do you think it fits okay?’

‘Very slimming. Come, say hi. But be careful, I’m dripping wet.’

I was still frowning old doubt on the new desk.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

‘Your reception desk looks like an airline counter.’

‘So?’

‘An airline counter is something you go to because you have to, not because you want to.’

‘You can visit the old desk, any time you want. Oleg bought it. It’s in your rooms.’

‘Oleg! Damn, he’s good. He beat me to it.’

‘The new desk’s okay, Jaswant,’ Karla said. ‘Put a plant on the top shelf, and a nice big shell beside it, and maybe a blown-glass paperweight on the second shelf. It’ll soften things. I’ve got a shell you can borrow, if you like, and a paperweight that has a dandelion in it.’

‘Really? I’d love that.’

‘There’s no rum in here,’ I said, wiping condensation off the glass door of his new refrigerated cabinet. ‘And no cheese.’

‘There’s a new menu,’ Jaswant said, flipping a laminated card on the laminated airline counter.

I didn’t look at it.

‘I liked the old menu.’

‘We didn’t have an old menu,’ Jaswant frowned.

‘Exactly.’

‘The Lost Love Bureau is bringing a lot of people through the door now, and I have to present the right corporate image. You’ve got to get with the times, Lin.’

‘I prefer it when the times get with me.’

‘Heads-up, Jaswant,’ Karla said. ‘I’ve been thinking of making some changes to my rooms.’

‘Changes?’ Jaswant asked, commerce tightening his new tie.

Karla dismantled the Bedouin tent over the next few days, and we painted her rooms red, with black trim on the doors and doorways. Jaswant couldn’t complain, because he’d sold us the paint.

She cut pictures from science magazines, and had them mounted in Bollywood-gold frames. She framed a feather, and a leaf, and a page from a book of poems that she found floating in the breeze in a quiet street:

The Begging Rain

Afterwards

when I am not with you

and you are alone enough

to count the nails in your heart,

studded like a treasure house door,

when you arrange your silence

in the vase of an hour,

memories of our hands,

and a spike of laughter

colouring of my eyes,

when you sit within the swell

of heartbeat,

the purple tide of daydream

lapping at the shores of love,

and your skin sings, perfume-pierced,

surrender to this thought of me:

as mimosas long for monsoon,

I long for you,

as crimson cactus flowers long for Moon

I long for you,

and in my afterwards,

when I am not with you,

my head turns to the window of life

and begs for rain.

She put up large pictures of Petra Kelly and Ida Lupino, two of her heroes, in black baroque frames. She took her balcony plants inside, and filled every corner with them, leaving a few outside to rotate in sunlight.

I think she tried to recreate the mountain forest in a hotel suite, and she did a good job. No matter where you sat in the main room you were looking at plants, or touched by them.

And she installed a long, thin, stylised sculpture of a Trojan soldier, sculpted by Taj. I tried to put a plant in front of it, but she wouldn’t let me.

‘Really? It’s because of this guy that you left the gallery.’

‘He’s a good sculptor,’ Karla said, arranging the doomed soldier, ‘even if he’s not a terrific guy.’

I used it as a hat stand. I had to buy a hat, but it was worth it. And little by little, things settled down to the semblance of peace that’s good enough, when you know enough about bad enough.

Oleg’s green rooms, as my rooms became to match the couch, were popular. Karla and I went to a few of his parties, and had a good time. We laughed our way through several more parties, listening to the crazy conversations being shouted next door, transmitted through our wall in high infidelity.

The young Russian had given up on Irina, the girl he called his Karlesha, and as the pictures he’d given to the waiters at Leopold’s faded and wrinkled, he stopped asking them if they’d seen her.

‘Why do you call Irina Karlesha,’ I asked him once.

‘I was in love with another girl named Irina,’ he replied, his perpetual smile fading in the half-light of reflection. ‘She was my first love. It was the first time I ever really fell down, inside, with love for a girl. We were both sixteen, and it was over within a year, but I still felt unfaithful to her, the first Irina, by using the name. Karlesha was a pet name that my father used for his sister, my aunt, and I always liked it.’

‘So… you didn’t feel unfaithful to Elena by going with Irina, but you felt unfaithful to your childhood sweetheart, by using the same name?’

‘You can only be unfaithful to someone you love,’ he said, frowning at my ignorance. ‘And I was never in love with Elena. I was in love with Irina, and I’m in love with Karlesha.’

‘And the girls who come and go in your green room?’

‘I’ve given up hope that I will see Karlesha again,’ he replied, looking away. ‘Didier’s T-shirt strategy didn’t work. Maybe it’s just not meant to be.’

‘Do you think love might spark with one of these girls?’

‘No,’ he answered quickly, brightening again. ‘I’m Russian. We R-people love very hard and very deeply. It’s why our writing and our music is so mad with passion.’

He worked madly and passionately with Naveen, and they became an intuitive team. Didier worked with them on a case that drew publicity, when they reunited lost lovers and uncovered a slavery ring at the same time, leading to arrests and the break-up of the gang.

The dangerous, debonair Frenchman devoted more time and seriousness to the Lost Love Bureau after that, and when he wasn’t holding court at Leopold’s, he was always with the young detectives, working on a shockingly urgent case.

Vinson sold his drug racket to a competitor, and went back to the ashram with Rannveig. He sent a letter to Karla, after a few weeks of penitent floor scrubbing, saying that he didn’t really connect with the holy men at the ashram, but he got on well with the gardeners who grew their marijuana for them. He was happy, and he was working on a new business plan, with Rannveig.

The Khaled Company didn’t fund any movies, and when a cop was killed in the south the truce between the police gang and the mafia gang was broken. Lightning Dilip worked triple shifts, as the prisoner count grew.

A journalist was beaten on her doorstep for telling the truth, and a politician was beaten in his home for not telling a lie. Skirmishes between the police and the Khaled Company at court hearings were commonplace, and sometimes turned into riots. The Company blamed every prosecution on religious bias, and the cops blamed every punch on criminal intent.

Khaled’s crown was slipping, and Abdullah wasn’t there to set it straight. The mystic-turned-mafia-don was losing control: his unnecessary violence was an insult to dishonest lawlessness, and everyone on Back Street wanted him to stop.

We couldn’t stop Khaled, but we did stop Lightning Dilip. Karla said that she had a birthday present for me, and she wanted to give it to me early.

‘I don’t celebrate -’

‘Your birthday, I know. You wanna know what the present is, or not?’

‘Okay.’

‘The cop that we got on the fetish tapes,’ Karla said. ‘It’s Lightning Dilip.’

Karma’s a hammer, not a feather, I remembered Karla saying.

‘Very interesting.’

‘Wanna know what his fetish was?’

‘No.’

‘It involved a lot of sandwich wrap,’ Karla said.

‘Please, stop.’

‘Leaving only his insubordinates and his mouth exposed.’

‘Okay, enough.’

‘And in one part, the girl had to swat his privates with a flyswatter.’

‘Karla.’

‘A plastic one, of course, and then -’

I put my fingers in my ears and said la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la until she stopped. It was childish, and beneath us both, and it worked.

‘Okay. Seeing as how it’s your birthday present, and we can make him do anything that we want,’ Karla asked, a wicked smile shining from insurgency, ‘what do you want to do with the Lightning Dilip film?’

‘I’m guessing you’ve already thought it through.’

‘I was thinking he should retire,’ Karla said. ‘Citing his remorse, for having mistreated prisoners. Demoted, disgraced, and without a pension.’

‘Nice.’

‘Lightning Dilip has been digging his own grave for years, one kick at a time,’ Karla said. ‘I think he’s about ready to fall into it.’

‘When?’

‘I’ll ask No Problem to deliver the message tomorrow, with a deadline for him to resign in twenty-four hours, or we go public. Sound right to you?’

‘No problem,’ I smiled, glad to be rid of him, and wondering who the next Lightning Dilip would be, and how much more we’d have to pay.

‘I was also thinking he should retire to a village somewhere, far away,’ Karla mused. ‘The one he came from might be nice. I’m pretty sure the people who watched him grow up will know what to do with him when he comes back.’

‘They’ll do it in an isolated spot, if they know him well.’

Chapter Eighty-Six

Gemini George was in a specially equipped room on the penthouse floor of the Mahesh hotel, watched over by Scorpio George and a prestige of doctors. The hotel had provided specialists through international contacts, and Scorpio hired medical expertise from the best hospitals in India.

It seemed that it might be too late for Gemini, whose thin body failed and faded day by day, but he always greeted each new expert with a joke, and a smile.

Scorpio made us suffer to see Gemini, because no-one else stayed still long enough to suffer listening to him.

‘I’ve been off my food,’ Scorpio said, as we stood outside the door to Gemini’s room. ‘And I’ve got a blister on my foot from pacing up and down, worrying about Gemini. And I deserve it, because it’s all my fault.’

‘It’s okay,’ Karla said, taking his hand. ‘No-one blames you, Scorpio.’

‘But it is my fault. If I hadn’t been searching for that holy man, Gemini wouldn’t have got dengue fever, and we’d be okay, like before.’

‘No-one loves Gemini more than you do,’ Karla replied, as she opened the door. ‘He knows that.’

Gemini was in a fully adjustable hospital bed, with tubes coming from too many places. A new plastic tent covered his bed. There were two nurses attending to him, checking data on machines arranged around the left side of the bed.

He smiled at us as we approached. He looked bad. His thin body was the colour of a cut persimmon, and his face revealed the skull beneath the smile.

‘Hello, Karla,’ he said cheerily, although the sound of his voice was weak. ‘Hello, Lin, mate. So glad you’ve come.’

‘Damn good to see you again, man,’ I said, waving at him through the plastic tent.

‘How about a game?’ Karla purred. ‘Unless you think those meds you’re on stole your edge.’

‘Can’t play cards yet, although I’d love to. I’m in this plastic tent for a few weeks, you see, and they daren’t take it off. My immune system’s down, they say. I think the machines are just for show. They’re keeping me alive with rubber bands and kindness. Me organs are shuttin’ down, one by one, like people leaving a train, you know?’

‘Are you in pain, Gemini?’ Karla asked.

He smiled, very slowly: sunlight burning shadows from a meadow.

‘I’m right as rain, love,’ he said. ‘They’ve got me on a drip. That’s when you know you’re dyin’, innit? When all the best drugs are suddenly legal, and you can have as much as you want. It’s the upside of the downside, so to speak.’

‘I’d still like to play a few hands,’ Karla smiled, ‘while we’re all on the upside.’

‘Like I said, it’s my immune system that’s up the spout. That’s why I got this tent. It’s actually you that could hurt me. Funny, innit?’

‘Gemini George, a quitter?’ Karla teased. ‘Of course you can play cards with us. We’ll deal you a hand, and I’ll hold the cards up for you without looking. You trust me, don’t you?’

Karla never cheated at any game, and Gemini knew it.

‘You’ll have to clear it with them first,’ Gemini said, nodding at the nurses. ‘They’ve got me on a pretty tight rein.’

‘Why don’t we start?’ Karla replied, winking at the nurses. ‘And if they get worried, we’ll stop. Where are the cards?’

‘In the top drawer of the cabinet, just beside you.’

I opened the drawer. There was a deck of cards, a cheap watch, a small bell from a charm bracelet, a war medal that might’ve been his father’s, a cross on a chain, and a wallet worn thin with patient penury.

Karla pulled three chairs close to the bed. I gave her the cards, and she shuffled them, spilling out hands on the spare chair. She held Gemini’s hand up to the plastic shield.

The nurses checked the hand as closely as Gemini did.

‘We’ll call your cards one-to-five, your left to your right,’ Karla said. ‘Anything you want to throw, call it by number. When you have your hand, call it by number, and I’ll rearrange it for you, okay?’

‘Got it,’ Gemini said. ‘I sit pat.’

One of the nurses made a noise, clicking her tongue against her teeth. Gemini turned to her. Both nurses were shaking their heads. Gemini turned back again.

‘On second thoughts,’ he said, ‘throw one and four, and give me two cards, please, Karla.’

The nurses nodded. Karla withdrew the unwanted cards, dealt two more into his hand, and showed them to him. They must’ve been good cards, because Gemini and the nurses poker-faced us.

‘I bet fifty,’ Gemini said. ‘Fight it out and stretch it out for me, Karla. I’ve got nowhere else to be, but in this game.’

‘I’ll see your fifty, and raise you a hundred,’ Karla said, ‘if you’ve got the stomach tubes for it.’

‘I’m out,’ I said, throwing in my cards, and leaving the duel to Karla and Gemini.

‘I’m so ready for this,’ Gemini laughed, and coughed. ‘Do your worst.’

‘I only play to win, Gemini. You know that.’

‘You remember that night,’ Gemini said, his smile a sunset in the valley of yesterday. ‘The housewarming party we threw, me and Scorpio? Remember that night?’

‘Great party,’ I said.

‘Good fun,’ Karla added.

‘That was a great party. The best ever. That was the time of my life.’

‘You’ll pull through,’ Karla said. ‘There’s plenty of pavement left in you, Gemini. Money time. Put up or shut up, street guy.’

We did the best we could for Gemini, and with a little help from his nurses he managed to cheat, for old times’ sake, every time we played.

We visited often, but at the end of every visit, away from Gemini’s room, we argued with Scorpio that his Zodiac twin should be in a hospital. Every time, Scorpio refused. Love has its own logic, just as it has its own foolishness.

In another room of life and death, across the city, Farzad, the young forger, responded to treatment. As the blood clot on his brain dissolved, he recovered his speech and movement.

A tremor that twitched his left eye closed, from time to time, reminded him that making cheeky remarks to vicious men ends viciously. The mysterious disappearance of Lightning Dilip reminded him, with a happier smile, that no-one escapes karma.

The three families shared the treasure, leaving a portion in a collective account to pay for the redecoration of their combined homes. They retained the domed space as the common area it had been, but took down the scaffolding, one freshly painted or remodelled section at a time, revealing the small basilica that it had become in the search.

Karla liked the scatter of catwalks, reaching three floors above us, and she liked the happy mix of Parsis, Hindus and Muslims even more.

While I went through paperwork with Arshan, once a week, bringing the illegal documents I’d created for him into line with his newly legal ones, Karla worked on the scaffolding with the families, paintbrush or power drill in hand.

She was a river, not a stone, and every day was another curve in tomorrow’s plain. She was pulled from a family she loved, and that loved her, she thought, until they took the word of a man, a friend and neighbour, who raped her. Years later, when she killed the rapist and went on the run, she severed every connection to her own life.

She was runaway tough, a dancing cat, a green witch, and safe from everything but herself, like me.

She used the money she’d made on the stock market to hire people, new friends and not-quite strangers, giving them office space she’d rented in the Amritsar hotel. She was gathering a new family around her, as so many in the old family she’d found in Bombay left the Island City, or died, or were dying, like Gemini George.

I didn’t know how much of the gathering she did at the Amritsar hotel was considered, and how much was unconscious instinct. But when she worked with the three families in the treasure-hunters’ palace, she settled quickly and happily into their routine, and I saw the hunger for it, in both of us: the desire that had matured into need.

The word family is derived from the word famulus, meaning a servant, and in its early usage, familia, it literally meant the servants of a household. In its essence, the longing for family, and the ravenousness that the loss of family creates in us, isn’t just for belonging: it’s for the grace that abides in serving those we love.

Chapter Eighty-Seven

It was a season of change, and the Island City seemed to be sprucing itself up for a parade that hadn’t been called. Road dividers wore gleaming new coats, painted by men who risked their lives at every stroke. Shops redecorated, and shoppers redecorated with them. New signs announced old privilege on every corner. And beloved mould, nature’s comment on our plans, was scraped from buildings and painted over.

‘Why don’t you like the new makeover?’ a friend who owned a restaurant asked me, staring up at his freshly painted enterprise from the pavement.

‘I liked the old makeover. Your paint job is dandy, but I liked the one made by the last four monsoons.’

‘Why?’

‘I like things that don’t resist nature.’

‘You’ve gotta keep up with the times, man,’ he said, holding his breath as he entered his renovated restaurant, because it was impossible to breathe and stay conscious at the same time, so close to the drying paint.

Fashion is the business end of art, and even Ahmed’s House of Style finally succumbed to the tyranny of assimilation. His hand-painted sign was corporatised into the stigmata of avarice, a logo. Straight razors and angry bristle brushes were gone, replaced by a selection of hair-care chemicals that signs assured us hadn’t been tested on baby rabbits, and wouldn’t blind or kill the people who used them.

Even the aftershave, Ambrosia de Ahmed, had vanished, but I was lucky enough to arrive in time to save the mirror, starred with pictures of Ahmed’s free haircuts, each one like the death photo of an outlaw, murdered by justice.

‘Not the mirror!’ I said, stopping small men with big hammers from smashing it off the wall.

‘Salaam aleikum, Lin,’ Ahmed said. ‘The whole place is being renovated, for Ahmed’s New House of Style.’

‘Wa aleikum salaam. Not the mirror!’

I had my back to the mirror, my arms wide to stop the hammers. Karla was standing beside Ahmed, her arms folded, a cheeky smile playing in the garden of her eyes.

‘The mirror has to go, Lin,’ Ahmed said. ‘It doesn’t fit with the new look.’

‘This mirror goes with every look,’ I protested.

‘Not with this look,’ Ahmed said, sliding a brochure from a pile, and handing it to me.

I looked the picture over, and handed it back.

‘It looks like a place to eat sushi,’ I said. ‘People can’t argue politics and insult each other in a place like that, Ahmed, even with the mirror.’

‘New policy,’ he said. ‘No insults. No politics, religion or sex.’

‘Are you mad, Ahmed? Censorship, in a barber shop?’

I looked at Karla, and she was having a pretty good time.

‘Come on,’ I pleaded. ‘There has to be at least one place where nobody kisses anybody on the ass.’

Ahmed gave me a stern look.

It wasn’t his own stern look: it was the stern look on a handsome face beneath a pompadour haircut, in a catalogue of cuts and styles for the New House of Style.

I flipped through the pictures, knowing that Ahmed was probably proud of it, because he’d illegally included photos of movie stars and prominent businessmen to give the collection currency.

I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but for me the catalogue was the wrong set of victims.

‘You can’t break the mirror, Ahmed.’

‘Will you sell it to me, exactly as it is?’ Karla asked.

‘Are you serious?’

‘Yes, Ahmed. Is it for sale?’

‘It would take me some time, to clean off the pictures,’ he said thoughtfully.

‘I’d like it with the pictures, if you don’t mind, Ahmed. It’s perfect as it is.’

I love you, Karla, I thought.

‘Very well, Miss Karla. Would, say, a thousand rupees, including transport and installation, be acceptable to you?’

‘It would,’ Karla smiled, handing him the money. ‘I’ve got a free wall in my place, and I’ve been trying to think what to put on it. If your men can remove it carefully, and set it up for me again at the Amritsar hotel today, I’d be much obliged.’

‘Done,’ Ahmed said, signalling the hammer-men to stand down. ‘I’ll walk you out.’

On the street, Ahmed looked left and right to make sure that no-one could hear, and leaned close.

‘I will still do house calls,’ he whispered. ‘Strictly off the books, of course, and top secret. I don’t want people thinking I’m not wholehearted, in the New House of Style.’

‘Now, that’s good news,’ I said.

‘So,’ Karla whispered, ‘if we were to gather a group of argumentative, very insulting men at our place, you’d be happy to come by and create Ahmed’s Old House of Style?’

‘You’ve already got the mirror,’ Ahmed smiled. ‘And I will really miss the dangerous discussions, in the New House of Style.’

‘Done,’ Karla said, shaking hands with him.

Ahmed looked at me, frowned, and straightened my collar so that it stood up at the back of my neck.

‘When are you going to buy a jacket with sleeves in it, Lin?’

‘When you start selling them at the New House of Style,’ I said. ‘Allah hafiz.’

‘Salaam, salaam,’ he laughed.

We rode away, and then Karla told me that the mirror was my second birthday present, reminding me, again, that it was my birthday, which I’d happily forgotten.

‘Please don’t tell anyone else,’ I called over my shoulder.

‘I know,’ she called back. ‘You like celebrating other people’s birthdays, and forgetting your own. Your secret’s safe with me.’

‘I love you, Karla. I was thinking that, just before. And thanks, for the mirror. You really got me there.’

‘I always get you there.’

We had more time to get one another, and ride and share a drink and eat meals together, because I sold my money-change operation to Jagat, for the twenty-five per cent he was already giving me. He managed the racket better than I did, and earned more money, respect and discipline from the shopkeeper changers. The fact that a year or so before he ran my bing he’d cut the little finger off a thief who stole from him added a certain sting to his slap.

I couldn’t visit Half-Moon Auntie in the fish market again, because Karla recruited her.

‘You want me to run your books?’ Half-Moon Auntie asked.

‘Who knows more about keeping people’s money safe than you do, Half-Moon Auntie?’ Karla said, facing pointed quarters of the moon.

‘That’s true,’ Half-Moon Auntie replied, considering. ‘But it could be a big job.’

‘Not that big,’ Karla said. ‘We only keep one set of books.’

‘I am accustomed to my regular visitors,’ Half-Moon Auntie said, leaning forward and beginning an orbital drift toward half-moon.

‘What you do behind your closed door is your business,’ Karla said. ‘What you do when the door is open is our business. If you’re interested, I have a friend, named Randall, who has a limousine. It’s parked below my building, most of the time.’

‘A limousine,’ Half-Moon Auntie said thoughtfully.

‘With blackout windows, and a long mattress in the back.’

‘I will consider it,’ Half-Moon Auntie replied, lifting one foot effortlessly behind her head.

And a few days later she considered her way into an apartment office, under our rooms at the Amritsar hotel, where Karla had rented the whole floor.

Half-Moon Auntie’s office was next to two others, already painted and furnished. One room bore the title Blue Hijab Marriage Counselling Services. The Muslim communist, or communist Muslim, had reunited with Mehmu earlier than expected, and she’d called Karla, asking if the offer of a partnership was still open.

‘She’s not here, yet,’ I said, when the brass sign was attached to the door.

‘She will be,’ Karla smiled. ‘Inshallah.’

‘What’s the third office for?’

‘Surprises,’ she purred. ‘You have no idea what surprises I have in store for you, Shantaram.’

‘Can you surprise me with dinner? I’m starving.’

We were having dinner in the front garden of a Colaba Back Bay bistro, when we heard shouting from the street, a few steps away.

A car had stopped beside a man walking on the road. The men in the car were shouting for money he owed them. Two of the men got out of the car.

As we looked at the commotion, I saw that the man was Kesh, the Memory Man. He had his hands over his head as the two thugs began to hit him.

Karla and I got up from the table and joined Kesh. We made enough noise for them to get back in the car, and drive away.

Karla helped Kesh to sit with us, at the table.

‘A glass of water, please!’ she called to the waiter. ‘Are you alright, Kesh?’

‘I’m okay, Miss Karla,’ he said, rubbing a knot of bad debt on the top of his head. ‘I’ll go, now.’

He stood to leave, but we pulled him back into his chair.

‘Have dinner with us, Kesh,’ Karla said. ‘You can test your memory against ours. You’re pretty good, but my money’s on us.’

‘I really shouldn’t -’

‘You really should,’ I said, waving the waiter to our table.

Kesh looked at the menu carefully, closed it and made his choices.

‘The zucchini, black olive and crushed artichoke paste risotto,’ the waiter repeated. ‘The iceberg, seasoned with cracked pepper, ginger and pistachio sauce, and a tiramisu.’

‘You’re incorrect,’ Kesh said. ‘The cracked pepper, ginger and pistachio sauce is with the rocket salad, which is number seventy-seven on your menu. The iceberg is with lemon-garlic, chilli pepper and walnut-avocado sauce, which is number seventy-six on your menu.’

The waiter opened his mouth to reply, but his mental scan of the menu confirmed Kesh’s correction, and he walked away, shaking his head.

‘What’s the problem, Kesh?’ I asked.

‘I owe money,’ he said, smiling from the side of his disillusion. ‘The Memory Man business isn’t what it used to be. People are using phones for everything, now. Pretty soon, the whole world will be able to communicate with anyone, so long as they’re not actually there.’

‘You know what?’ I suggested, as the food arrived. ‘Grab a taxi, and come to the Amritsar hotel after this. We’ll be there ahead of you, on the bike.’

‘What have you got in mind?’ Karla squinted at me, lashes like lace.

‘Surprises,’ I tried to purr. ‘You have no idea what surprises I have in store for you, Karla.’

Didier was certainly surprised when I brought Kesh into his office, next to Karla’s at the Amritsar.

‘I do not see the… requirement for his services,’ Didier said, sitting professionally at his desk beside Naveen’s.

‘Kesh is the best Memory Man in the south, Didier,’ Naveen observed, sitting professionally at his own desk. ‘What did you have in mind, Lin?’

‘You know how you said that people always freeze up when you record their witness statements? They see the recorder and they freeze up?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Kesh can be your recorder. He remembers every conversation he hears. He can be your human recorder, and people will talk naturally in front of him.’

‘I like it,’ Karla laughed.

‘You do?’ Didier doubted.

‘I’ll hire him right now if you don’t, Didier.’

‘Hired,’ Didier said. ‘We have an interview with a millionaire and his wife, tomorrow morning at ten. Their daughter has gone missing. You can attend. But your mode of dress must be more… executive… in appearance.’

‘See you guys later,’ I said, pulling Kesh with us from their office.

In the corridor outside I gave him some money. He tried to stop me.

‘You have to clear all your debts tonight, Kesh,’ I said. ‘We don’t want those guys showing up around here. And you’re going straight tomorrow morning, remember? Go around and pay everyone off. Get clean, and be here at nine. Be the first one here, and the last to leave. You’ll do fine.’

He started to cry. I stepped back a pace, and let Karla take over. She hugged him, and he calmed down quickly.

‘You know what Didier said, about dressing like an executive?’ I said.

‘Yes. I’ll try to -’

‘To hell with that. Dress like you are. Act like you are. People will talk to you, just like I’m talking to you, and you’ll be good at this. If Didier hassles you, tell him I ordered you not to dress like a slave.’

‘He’s right, Kesh,’ Karla said. ‘Just be yourself, and everything will be fine.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Go and pay those debts tonight, man. Get yourself clear.’

He took each downward step on the stairway as if it was a new level of consideration, pausing before taking the next pondered step. His head bobbed out of sight around the curved staircase.

I watched him out of sight thoughtfully, and then turned to see Karla smiling at me.

‘I love you, Shantaram,’ she said, kissing me.

Some time later, Kesh solved two cases within two weeks, and became the star of the Lost Love Bureau. His attention to detail, and retention of detail, proved decisive in solving cases, and no interview proceeded without him.

Half-Moon Auntie and her intrepid clerk did the accounts for the bureau, and safeguarded sums of money for clients from time to time. She was an astute businesswoman, and spent long hours redesigning the business plan, saving money and hours for everyone else.

Her private sessions in Randall’s limousine kept her lunar-starved visitors content. A talent is how you use it, she said to me once, using her talents to illustrate the point.

Vinson and Rannveig returned from the ashram bleached of pride, but we didn’t see them often, because they were busy with their plans to open a coffee shop, and the necessary renovations.

When we did manage to catch them mid-renovation for a few minutes, Karla took Rannveig’s arm, leading her to girl talk, and leaving me with Vinson in the unfinished coffee shop.

‘It’s… like, you know that wave, that perfect wave, that just keeps on going, and won’t let you fall?’ Vinson said.

‘No, but I ride a motorcycle, and that’s like surfing civilisation.’

‘You know that totally, like, forever wave?’

‘I have a gas tank. I know how far forever is.’

‘No, I mean, it’s like that tendency field jelly that Idriss was talking about.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘I’m, like, surfing the superposition, you know, between equally surfable waves. Rannveig and Idriss, they really opened my mind up so much, man. Sometimes, I feel like I’m so full of ideas they’re falling out of my head.’

‘I’m glad you’re happy, Vinson. And it’s great, the coffee bar thing. Really happy, for you and Rannveig. Well, guess I’d better be getting along. We -’

‘This coffee thing is amazing,’ he said, gesturing toward large sacks, arranged against a wall. ‘I mean, like, if I just explain the difference between Colombian and Ghanaian blends to you, it’ll blow your mind wide open.’

‘Thanks for the warning. But you know, Karla will be along any minute, so I doubt we’ll have time to get into a big story like that.’

‘If she comes back, I’ll start it again,’ he said unhelpfully.

‘How’s Rannveig?’ I asked helpfully.

‘You know that wave, man, the perfect wave that, like, won’t let you fall?’

‘So glad you’re happy. Where do you think Karla and Rannveig got to?’

‘Just smell these fresh beans up close once,’ Vinson said, opening a sack. ‘They’re so good, you’ll never drink another cup of coffee again.’

‘Is that your slogan?’

‘No, man, our slogan is our name, man. Love & Faith, that’s the name of the place, and that’s the slogan.’

There was an innocence in Vinson that Rannveig had lost, when her boyfriend had died from the same drugs Vinson unthinkingly sold. And the innocence she found again, in his willingness to change, was the tender truth in the name they’d chosen for their business, Love & Faith.

‘Smell my beans,’ he insisted.

‘Ah… I’m good.’

‘Smell them!’ Vinson said urgently, dragging a dead body of beans toward me.

‘I’m not smelling your beans, Vinson, no matter how Colombian they are. Stop dragging that carcass.’

He shoved the bag against the wall again, just as Karla and Rannveig came back to join us.

‘He won’t smell my beans,’ Vinson complained.

‘He won’t?’ Karla scoffed. ‘The Lin I know is a bean fanatic.’

‘Stuart made a special blend,’ Rannveig said proudly. ‘I think it’s the best coffee I ever tasted.’

‘I’ve got it in the other room,’ Vinson said, ready to leave. ‘You can smell it, if you like.’

‘I’m good,’ I said quickly. ‘I can smell it from here.’

‘I told you, my Easter Bunny,’ Vinson said, hugging Rannveig. ‘People will smell our coffee from the street outside, and they’ll be, like, hypnotised or something.’

‘Good luck, guys,’ I said, drawing Karla out of the renovated shop.

‘Opening is at full moon,’ Rannveig said, mid-hug. ‘Don’t forget.’

On the street, we climbed onto the bike, but Karla stopped me before I could start the engine.

‘What did you feel from Vinson?’ she asked, her arm on my shoulder.

‘Waves of beans,’ I said. ‘What did you feel from Rannveig?’

‘Did he tell you what they’re calling the place?’

‘Yeah. Love & Faith. Why?’

‘Far as I can see,’ Karla said, ‘he’s the love, and she’s the faith.’

A car pulled up beside us, blocking the way. It was a hearse, in fact, with Dennis, the Not-Sleeping Baba, at the wheel. Concannon was in the passenger seat. Billy Bhasu and Jamal, the One Man Show, were sitting in the back, beside a shop window mannequin laid out in what looked like a clear plastic coffin.

Concannon had his elbow on the window.

‘Wanted,’ he said, grinning at Karla. ‘Dead or alive.’

‘Move,’ I said.

‘Hello, Karla,’ Dennis said. ‘So nice to meet you, awake. Did we meet, when I was on the other side?’

‘Hi, Dennis,’ she laughed, her arm around my shoulder. ‘You were certainly high, the first time I saw you. What the hell are you doing?’

‘We are testing the movements of Sleepers, while they are transported in a sleeping chamber,’ he said patiently. ‘I have attached sensitive strips to the mannequin. They will indicate bruises, of varying degree. That will help us to determine the most comfortable inner cushioning of the sleeping chambers we will have made for them.’

‘You’re making your own coffins?’ Karla asked.

‘Indeed,’ he said, passing a chillum to Concannon. ‘We must do it. Current sleeping chambers force the Sleepers to have their legs pressed together. Our sleeping chambers will have a wider stance. It’s very important for the comfort of Sleepers.’

‘I see,’ Karla smiled.

‘They will have the softest silk lining, padded with feathers,’ Dennis continued, his hands on the steering wheel. ‘And they will be made of glass, so that the Sleepers can have plants, small animals and insects roaming about in the earth, all around them, to keep them company while they sleep.’

‘Nice,’ Karla smiled.

‘May I present Billy Bhasu and Jamal, the One Man Show?’ Dennis said. ‘Boys, this is Karla-Madame.’

Billy Bhasu waved a smile at Karla, while Jamal wagged his head, jangling chained gods.

I couldn’t help myself.

‘One Man Show,’ I said, nodding at Jamal.

‘One Man Show,’ he repeated.

I looked at Karla, and she understood.

‘One Man Show,’ she said, smiling at him.

‘One Man Show,’ Jamal replied on cue, smiling back.

I looked at Concannon, wanting him to leave, but he was talking, instead.

‘The dead can dance, you know,’ he said conversationally.

I moved my eyes to Dennis, at the wheel of the hearse.

‘Are you sure you should be driving, Dennis?’ I asked, trying to shut Concannon down.

‘I must drive,’ Dennis intoned, his rumbling voice echoing in the hearse. ‘Concannon is not stoned enough to drive a hearse.’

‘The dead can dance,’ Concannon repeated, smiling happily. ‘They really can, you know.’

‘You don’t say,’ Karla said, leaning against me.

‘I do say,’ Concannon grinned. ‘I’ve learned a lot on this job. It’s been a real education. I usually walked away, you see, while they were still twitchin’, and never looked back.’

‘Concannon,’ Dennis said. ‘You’re killing my high, man.’

‘I’m only havin’ a conversation, Dennis. Just because we’re undertakers, doesn’t mean we can’t be sociable.’

‘True,’ Dennis said. ‘But how do you expect me to test-drive this new hearse, if I’m not high?’

‘I’m only sayin’, like,’ Concannon persisted. ‘They wriggle around, dead bodies, long after they’re gone, shakin’ about on the table all of a sudden like. One body we had, yesterday, danced better than I do. But I was never the one for dancin’, truth be told, when there was fightin’ or kissin’ to be had.’

‘Light the next chillum,’ Dennis said, putting the hearse into gear. ‘If you don’t care for my high, listen to the mannequin. He’s screaming for it.’

They pulled away, the slogan of their company streaming past us slowly on the long windows of the hearse: Peace In Rest.

‘Now, that’s an interesting team.’

‘A marriage made in Limbo,’ I said. ‘But the mannequin seemed like a nice guy.’

Chapter Eighty-Eight

Diva Devnani called us to a meeting at her corporate office. It was on the Worli Seaface, a long slow smile of buildings beaming at the sea from a wide, curved boulevard. Diva’s building was like the upper deck of an ocean liner, with tall, rounded windows in full sail, and a continuous balcony serving as the rail.

When the elevator doors closed, I offered Karla my flask. She took a swig, and handed it back. The elevator operator glanced at me. I offered him the flask, and he took a swig, dripping the rum into his mouth without touching it to his lips. He passed it back, wagging his head.

‘God bless everyone,’ he said.

‘Speaking for everyone,’ Karla said, ‘God bless you back.’

The doors opened onto a marble and glass prairie, with several very pretty girls in very tight skirts grazing at desks of distraction.

While Karla spoke to the receptionist, I wandered among the glass and steel desks, glancing over shoulders. The girls were listening to music on their headphones, playing video games and reading magazines.

One of the girls looked up at me mid-flip in her magazine. She turned down the volume on her headset.

‘Can I help you?’ she threatened, her eyes fierce.

‘I’ll… you know… I’ll just be over there,’ I said, backing away.

The receptionist took us to an alcove with a view of the door to Diva’s office, where we sat in plush chairs. There was a side table, with business newspapers and magazines, soda water in a glass jug, and some peanuts, offered in a bronze cast of a human hand.

The palm of peanuts drew my eye as we sat down. I pointed at it, trying to figure out the message.

‘This is what we’re gonna pay you?’ I whispered to Karla. ‘Or maybe, this is what happened to the last guy who asked for a raise?’

‘Beggars can’t be choosers,’ Karla said.

‘Damn good,’ I smiled, my eyes applauding.

A tall, pretty girl appeared at our side.

‘Can I get you a cup of coffee?’ the girl asked.

‘Maybe later, with Diva,’ Karla said. ‘Thanks.’

The girl left, and I turned to Karla.

‘It’s pretty weird, out there in reception.’

‘It’s still a marble tile or two short of weird.’

‘No, I mean the girls. They’re not doing anything.’

‘What do you mean, they’re not doing anything?’

‘It’s a jive of inactivity.’

‘So? Maybe it’s a slow day.’

‘Karla, come on. There are seven very pretty girls out there, and not one of them is doing anything. It’s kinda weird.’

‘It’s kinda weird that you counted them,’ she smiled.

‘I -’

The door to Diva’s office opened. It was exactly one minute before our meeting. A grasp of businessmen filed out, wearing similar suits and identical stares of ambition, fed.

‘Punctuality is the time of thieves,’ Karla said, glancing at the clock, and standing.

Diva came to the door of the office, her hands on her hips.

‘Come in,’ she said, kissing Karla on both cheeks. ‘I’ve missed you both so much. Thanks for coming.’

She flopped into an immense chair, behind the curve of a black grand piano that she’d shortened, and converted into a desk.

A photograph of her father in a silver frame rested on the piano-desk. Flowers trailed over the picture, spilling yellow against lacquered black. Incense burned in a tray shaped like a peacock’s tail.

It was a big room, but there were only two chairs facing her desk. All those blank-eyed businessmen had stood, during the meeting with Diva. Tough girl, I thought, and who can blame her?

‘That was something,’ she said. ‘Can I get you guys a drink? God knows, I need one.’

She pressed a button on a console, and the door opened a second later. A very pretty girl walked across the large room, stalking the slippery floor on hysterical heels. She stopped at the desk with a flourish of her short skirt, long legs stiff.

‘Martini,’ Diva said, ‘I want you to meet Miss Karla and Mr Shantaram.’

Karla waved hello. I stood, put my right hand over my chest, and inclined my head. It’s the most polite way to greet any woman in India, because many women don’t like to shake hands. Martini inclined her head at me, and I sat down again.

‘I’ll have a Manhattan,’ Diva said. ‘What about you, Karla?’

‘Two jiggers of vodka over two cubes, please.’

‘A lime soda, for me.’

Martini spun on a fifty-calibre heel, and stalked away slowly, a giraffe in a glass zoo.

‘I suppose you’re wondering why I called you here,’ Diva said, giving me a different wondering, because I wasn’t.

‘I’m wondering,’ Karla said, ‘but not about that. You’ll get to the point when it’s sharp enough, right? How are you, Diva? It’s been weeks.’

‘I’m good,’ she smiled, straightening up in the chair that looked like half a bed for her small frame. ‘I’m tired, but I’ve been working on that. I sold everything today. Just about everything. That was the last, in a very long line of meetings I’ve had, yesterday and today.’

‘Sold everything how?’ Karla asked.

‘All the men who actually run the companies, in my portfolios, have tranches of shares as bonuses. I told them that if I sold my portfolio in one hit, their shares would be worthless. But if they gave the shares back to me, they could take the companies and run them with their own boards, and give themselves sweaty-palm bonuses, without spending a dollar, and I would resign.’

‘Smart move,’ Karla said. ‘As principal shareholder, you have an annual general meeting to use against them. But you skip the day-to-day. It’s like getting drunk without the hangover.’

‘Precisely,’ Diva said, as Martini arrived with the drinks.

‘Have you got a joint?’ Diva asked.

‘Yes,’ Karla and Martini said at the same time, turning their heads instantly to look at one another.

It looked tense, to me. But silent struggles between beautiful women are feminal magician’s tricks, faster and subtler than male eyes and instincts can follow. I couldn’t be sure what was going on, so I smiled at everybody.

Karla took a slender joint from her case, and passed it to Diva. Martini glowered, all legs and no pockets, and whirled away, the frills of her skirt like a creature designed by a reef.

‘Thanks, Karla,’ Diva said. ‘I’m a free woman, as of this minute. If the sun was down, I’d be drinking champagne. I can drink cocktails all day, but when I start on champagne my IQ drops twenty points, and that’s a stupidity I’m keeping in reserve, for later tonight. Meanwhile, to freedom for women!’

‘Freedom for women!’ Karla toasted.

Diva was silent for a while. Karla brought her back.

‘How bad was it?’

‘They all wanted control,’ Diva said, turning her drink in her hands. ‘They couldn’t bear to see it, a woman in control, when they’d all happily licked a man’s boot.’

‘They let you know?’ Karla asked.

‘I saw it in their eyes, at every meeting. And the whispering always came back to me, from men who betrayed men. Power, in my hands, was a declaration of war to them. These parasites that my father let infest the companies, these men who looked the other way when black money almost ruined us, they started getting nasty. Even threatening. You know what I mean, Karla?’

‘Men like that you crush, or you leave behind,’ Karla said. ‘You could’ve crushed them, Diva, because your father left you the power to do it. Why are you walking away?’

‘My dad was into energy stocks in a big way. That’s all we’ve got left, while the construction business pays off debts, and those stocks are still paying well. I wouldn’t have made those bets on oil and coal, but he did, and he locked me onto a wheel that thousands of people are running on. I can’t just turn it off.’

‘So you’re still in the game?’ Karla asked.

‘I’m stepping out, but I told the new managers that for every year they get cleaner, and better at what they do, they get a tranche of their shares back.’

‘What are your plans?’ I asked.

‘I kept one company, and quarantined it from the sale. I kept the combined modelling agency and bridal boutique, the one I told you about. I added a wedding advice service, and I’ve renamed it. I’m going to run it.’

‘Ah,’ I said, ‘so the girls you’ve got here are models, waiting for assignments.’

‘You could say that,’ Diva replied, turning to Karla. ‘I know it’s a while since we talked about this, Karla, but I was hoping you’re still interested. I’d love to have your ideas in this. What do you think?’

‘I liked it when it was just an idea,’ she said. ‘And I’m happy to see you make it real. Count us in, for as long as we’re here in town. Let’s talk about it next week, over dinner at our place, okay?’

‘Yeah,’ Diva said vaguely, her eyes drifting to the garlanded photograph of her father.

We let her have some time, both of us content to wait until her trance ended.

‘You know why I insisted that everyone call me Diva?’ she asked after a while, still staring at the photograph. ‘I was in the bathroom, at a party, and I heard what my own friends called me, behind my back. Trivia Divya, they said. Trivia Divya. And you know what? They were right. I was. I was trivial. So I changed my name to Diva, that night, and made everybody call me that. But this is the first time that I’ve felt untrivial, if there’s such a word.’

‘Essential is the word, Diva,’ Karla said.

The young heiress turned her face to Karla’s and smiled, laughing softly.

‘It’s all good,’ she said, standing from her chair with a stretch and a yawn.

We stood with her, and she walked us to the tall doors of her office.

‘So glad you’re free,’ Karla said, hugging her as we left. ‘Fly high, baby bird.’

We roamed free on the bike, at slow speed, thinking different thoughts. I was thinking of the poor little rich girl, who’d lived in a slum and given away a fortune. Karla was thinking something else.

‘They’re all very classy ex-callgirls,’ she said over my shoulder.

‘What?’

‘They’re all ex-callgirls.’

‘Who?’

‘The pretty girls back at the office, who were doing nothing, very prettily. They’re all ex-callgirls. Dominatrices, actually. Experts in fetish. Diva hired them for the fetish party, but after the party, offered them jobs. They all came. They’re not modelling for Diva. They’re running the marriage and wedding agency.’

‘They should do fine,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you tell me, when I brought it up?’

‘Stop the bike,’ she said, leaning away from me.

I pulled into the exit lane, near a bus stop.

‘Are you seriously asking me,’ she asked, her breath on my neck, ‘why I didn’t tell you that we were going to a carnival of ex-callgirls?’

‘Well… ’

I swung back into the traffic and rode for a while, but then stopped again, because Oleg was sitting in the middle of the road divider, playing the guitar. We pulled up beside him.

‘What are you doing, Olezhka?’ Karla asked, smiling a handful of queens.

‘Playing guitar, Karla,’ he grinned back, Russianly.

‘See you round, Oleg,’ I said, revving the engine.

Karla pressed a finger gently on my shoulder, and the engine cooled down.

‘Why here?’ Karla asked.

‘The acoustics are perfect,’ he said, smiling, deliberately. ‘The sea behind me, and the buildings -’

‘What are you playing?’ Karla asked.

‘It’s a song called “Let the Day Begin”, by The Call. This guy, Michael Been, he’s like a saint of rock and roll. I love him. Can I play it for you?’

‘See you round, Olezhka,’ I said, revving again.

‘Why don’t you hop on board,’ Karla said.

‘Really?’ Oleg and I said at the same time.

‘We’ll drop you at home,’ she said. ‘We’re on our way to Dongri.’

Oleg climbed up behind Karla. We rode with her legs wrapped around me on the petrol tank. She was leaning against Oleg, who had his guitar strung on his back.

We cruised past a group of traffic cops, waiting at a crossing to bring down a zebra or two in the jungle street.

‘Vicaru naka,’ I said in Marathi. Don’t ask.

Chapter Eighty-Nine

Karla hadn’t visited the perfume bazaar in Dongri, or

anywhere in the area, since the fire at Khaderbhai’s mansion. But she mixed her own perfume, and needed her special fragrances. When she finally felt ready to face a page she’d turned without reading, we became a thread in the tightly woven carpet of traffic to visit her favourite shop, just off Mohammed Ali Road.

Great Ali, one of three cousin-brothers named Ali in his family, the others being Sad Ali and Considerate Ali, welcomed us into his shop, settling us on cushions.

‘I’ll pour some tea, Karla Madame,’ Considerate Ali said.

‘It has been so long,’ Sad Ali said. ‘We’ve missed you.’

‘I have your private selection ready for you, Karla Madame,’ Great Ali said.

We drank tea, while Karla examined her special essences and listened to a story about a rare perfume, carried from a rare corner of the rarefied world.

As we were leaving, the large elderly merchant, dressed in white, asked if he could inhale Karla’s own perfume, but once. Karla obliged, extending the frond of her slender wrist, the palm of her hand falling like a leaf in the rain.

The perfume traders all inhaled several times professionally, and then shook their heads doubtfully.

‘One of these days,’ Great Ali said, as we left, ‘I will discover the secret of your bouquet.’

‘Never say die,’ Karla replied.

We walked the street again, on the way back to the bike, Karla’s small vials of precious scents and oils jingling softly in a black velvet bag. After a few steps, we saw two men we knew well from the old days of the Khaderbhai Company. They crossed to the footpath near us.

Salar and Azim were street guys, who’d spent years on the lowest tier of Company condescension. While favoured sons died, they survived there in the shallows long enough to find higher positions in the new Khaled Company, desperate to replace its fallen soldiers.

They wore new Company clothes, and fidgeted with their new gold chains and bracelets, still finding the right place to carry the burden of obedience.

They’d known Karla since before my time with the Company, and liked her. They told her a scary-funny gangster story, because they knew she’d like it. She did, and responded with a scary-funny bad-girl story. They laughed, throwing their heads back, their gold necklaces catching the evening light.

‘So long, guys,’ I said. ‘Allah hafiz.’

‘Where you going?’ Salar asked.

‘Back to the bike, on Mohammed Ali Road.’

‘We’ll walk with you. There’s a short cut, through here. We’ll show you.’

‘We’re going this way,’ I said. ‘Might do some more shopping. Allah hafiz.’

‘Khuda hafiz,’ Azim replied, waving goodbye.

I didn’t want to walk anywhere with Khaled Company men, or any soldiers, from any Company. I didn’t want to reminisce. I didn’t even want to remember.

For the thousandth time, I thought about leaving the Island City with Karla, and setting up somewhere else on a remote beach. You can’t escape the Company in the city. The Company is the city. You can only escape the Company in a place where there’s nothing left to own.

We walked through thin crowds, and we were about to cross the cobbled entrance to a side alley, when screams ripped silken peace, and people ran panicked from the entrance to the alleyway.

I glanced at Karla, wanting to be somewhere else. We both knew, or suspected, that Salar and Azim must be involved. We’d known them for years, but Company street wars weren’t my problem any more, and I was ready to leave.

Karla wasn’t: she urged me forward, and we edged closer to look. A man came staggering out of the alley and stumbled into me. It was Salar. He was bloody, all over. He’d been stabbed several times in the chest and stomach. He collapsed against me, and I held him in my arms.

I glanced past him and saw Azim, face down, and pulsing the last of his blood into the stones of the alley.

‘I’ll get a cab,’ Karla said, darting away.

Salar lifted his hand, with effort, and tugged at his gold neck-chain until it broke.

‘For my sister,’ he said, pressing it against me.

I put the chain in my pocket, and took a firm grip around his waist.

‘I can’t let you lie down, brother,’ I said. ‘I wish I could, but I’ll never get you up again in one piece, if I do. Karla’s got a taxi coming. Hold on, man.’

‘I’m done for, Lin. Leave me. Y’Allah, the pain!’

‘I don’t know how, but they missed your lungs, Salar. You’re still breathing air. You’re gonna make it, man. Just hold on.’

Karla arrived in two minutes, swinging the door of the taxi open. We bundled Salar into the back with me, while Karla gave instructions from the front seat.

I don’t know how much she paid the taxi driver, but he didn’t blink at the blood, and got us to GT Hospital in record time, driving against the flow of traffic.

At the hospital entrance, orderlies and nurses put Salar on a gurney, and wheeled him inside. I started to go with them into the hospital, but Karla stopped me.

‘You can’t go anywhere looking like that, my love,’ she said.

The shirt and T-shirt under my cut-off vest were smothered in blood. I took the vest off, but it only made the splash of blood across my T-shirt look worse.

‘To hell with it. We’ve gotta stay with Salar until the Company gets here. The guys who did this might try again, and we can’t call the cops to help.’

‘Just a minute,’ Karla said.

She stopped a lawyer, walking toward us briskly, his white court-collar stiff with presumptions and his client papers bunched against his arm to prevent escape.

‘I’ll give you ten thousand rupees for your jacket,’ Karla said, waving a fan of notes.

The lawyer looked at the money, squinted at her, and started emptying the pockets of his one-thousand-rupee jacket. Karla dressed me with crossed lapels, and a turned-up collar. She cleaned the smudges off, licking her fingers and wiping them over my face.

‘Let’s go see how Salar is doing,’ she said, leading me into the hospital.

We waited in a corridor, near the operating theatre. Black and white tiles, begging for a pattern unsquared, met grey-green walls showing low-tide marks from the hypnotic mops of tired cleaners. Function is servant or master, and wherever it rules, suffering sits in corridors purged of consideration.

‘Are you okay, kid?’

‘I’m good,’ she smiled. ‘You?’

‘I’m -’

Four young Khaled Company gangsters clamped along the corridor, pushing attitude. Their leader, Faaz-Shah, was a hothead, and for some reason it got hotter when he saw me.

‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ he demanded, stopping a few paces away.

I stood up in front of Karla, my hand on a knife. She knew most of the older gangsters in the Company, but not many of the young volcanoes.

‘Salaam aleikum,’ I said.

Faaz-Shah hesitated, looking for something he couldn’t find in my eyes. I’d fought beside two of his older brothers, in battles with other gangs. And I’d fought beside Khaled, their new leader. I’d never fought beside Faaz-Shah.

‘Wa aleikum salaam,’ he said more softly. ‘What happened to Salar? Why are you here?’

‘Why weren’t you here?’ I asked. ‘How did you hear about it?’

‘We have people in the hospital,’ he said. ‘We have people everywhere.’

‘Not in the alley, where Azim and Salar got knifed.’

‘Azim?’

‘He was gone, bled-out, when I saw him.’

‘Where was this?’

They were hard young gangsters, the kind who always find a bad mood, no matter how hard you try to hide it, and they were angry. I was safe, because I was the guy who simply did the right thing, and sooner or later they’d know that. But none of them were safe, if they got angry enough to get mouthy with Karla.

‘Karla,’ I said, smiling her with me, ‘can you please find out if there’s some tea, somewhere?’

‘Be a pleasure,’ she said, smiling back mystery as she walked past the young gangsters.

‘It was the first open gully, on Mohammed Ali,’ I said, when Karla left. ‘Coming from the perfume bazaar, heading back to the city. I met them, just before it happened.’

‘You what?’

‘We were in the bazaar, and we ran across Salar and Azim. We talked, and we kept walking. They took a short cut, through the alleys. By the time we walked around to the open gully, it was all over. Salar fell into my arms. Someone was waiting for them.’

I opened the black jacket, showing the blood, and closed it again. They were abashed, as gangsters are, when they realise that they’re in a debt of honour.

‘We got him here in a taxi,’ I said, sitting down. ‘We’ve been waiting, to see if he’s okay, after surgery. You can join us, if you like. Karla’s bringing tea.’

‘We’ve got things to do,’ Faaz-Shah said.

‘We’ve also been waiting for someone from the Company to sit with Salar. He’s not safe here. Leave a man with him, Faaz-Shah.’

‘I need every man I’ve got. And you’re here. You’re still loyal to the Company, aren’t you?’

‘Which Company is it now?’

He laughed, and then stopped hard on a different thought.

‘I really do need all my men tonight. He’s family, you know.’

‘Salar?’

‘Yes. He’s an uncle of mine. His family’s on the way. I’d appreciate it, if you’d stay until they get here.’

‘Done. And keep this for him,’ I said, pulling the chain from my pocket. ‘He wants it to go to his sister, if he doesn’t make it.’

‘I’ll give it to her.’

He accepted the chain gingerly, as if he expected it to move in his hand, and then scrunched it into a pocket. He looked at me, his eyes floating on reluctant shores.

‘I owe you on this, Lin,’ he said.

‘You don’t.’

‘I do,’ he said, clenching his teeth.

‘Okay then, transfer the debt to Miss Karla. If you ever hear anything that might harm her, warn her about it, or me, and we’ll be square. Okay?’

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Khuda hafiz.’

‘Allah hafiz,’ I replied, watching them stamp out, shields of revenge in their eyes.

I was glad to be out. I was glad to be carrying the wounded, instead of wounding them, I guess, just as Concannon was glad to be burying them, instead of killing them. In that grey-green silence, the smell of disinfectant, bleached linen and bitter medicine was suddenly too medical, and my heart was beating fast.

For a few seconds, emotions running on habit had stamped out into the night with Faaz-Shah and the others, riding to war before we knew it was declared. All that fight and fear rushed back into me, as if I’d already fought a battle. And then I realised that I didn’t have to fight it. Not this time. Not ever again.

Chapter Ninety

I looked up from brutal thoughts and saw Karla, walking toward me slowly down the long hospital corridor. She had a man with her. He was a cleaner, dressed in the working clothes of a peon, or someone who does menial work. Karla’s face was brilliant with light, her smile a secret, waiting to be told.

She sat the man next to me.

‘You absolutely have to meet this man, and hear his story,’ Karla said. ‘Dev, meet Shantaram. Shantaram, meet Dev.’

‘Namaste,’ I said. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

‘Please tell him, Dev,’ Karla said, smiling at me.

‘But it is not a very entertaining story, and it is sad. Perhaps another time.’

He started to rise from the seat, but we eased him down gently again.

‘Please, Dev,’ Karla urged. ‘Just tell him, as you told it to me.’

‘But I could lose my job,’ he said uncertainly, ‘if I don’t return to my duties.’

‘Good,’ Karla said. ‘Because, when we leave here, you’re coming with us.’

He looked at me. I smiled back.

‘Whatever she says,’ I said.

‘I can’t do that,’ he said. ‘I have a shift to finish.’

‘First the story, please, Dev,’ Karla said. ‘Then we’ll finish at the start.’

‘Well, as I was telling you while we were waiting for the chai,’ he began, looking at his hands. ‘My name is Dev, and I am a sadhu.’

His head was shaved, and he wore no amulets or bracelets. Beyond his uniform, he was stripped clean. He was a very simple, lean man, with a cap on his head and bare feet.

His face was stronger than the man, though, and his eyes, when he raised them, still burned fires on beaches.

Shiva sadhus cover themselves with ashes from the crematoria, talk to ghosts, and summon demons, even if only in their own minds. The body language was submissive, but the face was indomitable.

‘I had long dreadlocks once,’ he mused. ‘They’re antennae, you know, for people who smoke. I never went without a smoke, with my dreads. Now, with shaved head, no stranger will share a glass of water with me.’

‘Why did you shave them off, Dev?’ I asked.

‘I shamed myself,’ he said. ‘I was at the peak of my powers. Lord Shiva walked step by step with me. Snakes could not bite me. I slept with them, in the forest. Leopards visited me, waking me with kisses. Scorpions lived in my hair, but never stung me. No man could look into the eyes of my penance without flinching.’

He stopped, and looked at me, his eyes still roaming with the wild, and the dead.

‘It’s greed, you know,’ he said. ‘Greed is the key. Follow the greed to the sin. I was greedy for more power. I cursed a man, a foreigner, who challenged me on the street. I cursed him, told him that his riches would bring him ruin, and when I did that, every one of my powers drained from me like rain on a window.’

The hairs on my arms were standing up, and I looked at Karla, sitting on the other side of the holy-man-cleaner. She nodded.

‘Were there two foreigners that day?’ I asked.

‘Yes. One of them was very kind. An Englishman. The other was very rude, but I regret what I did. I regret any harm I may have caused him. I regret my betrayal of my own penance. I tried to find the man, but I couldn’t, although I searched everywhere, and I couldn’t lift my own curse.’

‘Dev,’ Karla said. ‘We know this man. We know the man you cursed. We can take you there, to meet him.’

The shaven sadhu crumpled, taking short breaths, and then slowly sat upright again.

‘Is it true?’

‘Yes, Dev,’ Karla said.

‘Are you okay, Dev?’ I asked, a hand on his thin shoulder.

‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘Maa! Maa!’

‘Do you want to lie down for a while?’ I asked.

‘No, I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m… I… lost my way, and I started drinking alcohol. I wasn’t used to it. I’d never had it in my life. I did bad things. Then a great saint stopped me, in the street, and took me to his Kali temple.’

He looked up quickly, as if breaking the surface for air.

‘Do you really know this man I cursed?’ he asked, his voice trembling.

‘We do,’ I said.

‘And will he see me? Will he allow me to lift the curse?’

‘I think he will,’ Karla said, smiling.

‘They say Maa Kali is terrifying,’ he said to me, his hand on my arm. ‘But only to hypocrites. If your heart is innocent, She cannot help but love you. She’s the Mother of the universe, and we are Her children. How could She not love us, if we make a place of innocence for Her inside ourselves?’

He was silent, breathing hard for a moment before he calmed himself, a hand on his heart.

‘Are you sure you’re quite well, Dev?’ Karla asked.

‘I am,’ he said. ‘Thanks to Maa, I’m well. It’s just a bit of a shock.’

‘How did you come to be here, Dev?’ I asked.

‘I shaved my head, and I came to this place, doing the most humble job I could find, serving the helpless and afraid. And now my question has been answered, because you found me here, to bring me to this man. Please, take this.’

He handed me a laminated card that was blank on one side, and had a design on the other. I slipped it into my vest pocket.

‘What is it, Dev?’ Karla asked.

‘It’s a yantra,’ he replied. ‘If you look at it with a truthful heart, it will clear the negative from your mind, so that you can make wise, caring choices.’

‘We’re waiting for news of our friend,’ I said. ‘Can we get anything for you, Dev?’

‘I’m very fine,’ he said, sitting back against the bench. ‘Am I really resigning from my job?’

‘It would seem so, Dev,’ Karla said.

Salar’s relatives arrived, escorted by two Company men, and the news came through that Salar was going to live.

We took Dev, the penitent holy man, to the penthouse floor of the Mahesh hotel. We watched Scorpio fall to his knees, and the sadhu fall with him, and we turned and went back to the elevator.

‘You know,’ she said, as we waited. ‘This might be just the thing to give Gemini’s immune system a jolt.’

‘It just might,’ I said, as the elevator pinged.

‘I know where we’re going,’ Karla said, passing the flask back to me on the way down.

‘You think you’re so smart,’ I said, pulling the lawyer’s black jacket around my blood-stained shirt.

‘We’re going to get your bike,’ she said. ‘She’s still on Mohammed Ali Road, and you care more about her than you do about getting cleaned up.’

She was so smart, and reminded me from time to time on the ride back to the Amritsar hotel. My happily rescued bike hummed machine mantras all the way home.

When we tumbled into her rooms, Karla freshened up, and left the bathroom for me.

I emptied my pockets onto the wide porcelain bench beneath the mirror. The money in my pockets was stained with blood. My keys were red, and the coins I spilled on the bench were discoloured, as if having been in a wishing fountain too long.

I put the knives and scabbards on the bench, dropped the lawyer’s suit jacket on the floor, and let the bloody shirt slide off my just as bloody T-shirt.

As I tossed it away, I noticed the card that Dev had given me. I picked it up, and placed it on the bench. I looked into the mirror for the first time, meeting myself like a stranger in a meadow.

I looked away from my own stare, and tried to forget what I couldn’t stop thinking.

The T-shirt was a gift from Karla. One of her artist protégées had made it, copying the knife-work of an artist known for biting the canvas that feeds him.

There were slashes, rips and tears all over the front. Karla liked it, I think, because she liked the artist who made it. I liked it, because it was incomplete, and unique.

I pulled it off carefully, hoping to soak the blood from it, but when I looked into the mirror, I let it fall into the sink.

The T-shirt had left a mark in blood on my chest. It was a triangle, upside down, with star-shapes around it. I looked at the card that Dev had given me. It was almost the same design.

India.

I let the card fall from my fingers, and stared into what I’d let myself become. I looked at the design on my chest. I asked the question we all ask sooner or later, if we stay in India long enough.

What do you want from me, India? What do you want from me, India? What do you want from me?

My heart was breaking on a wheel of coincidence, each foolish accident more significant than the next. If you look at it with a truthful heart, the sadhu said when he gave me the card. Wise, caring choices.

I escaped from a prison, where I had no choice, and cut my life down to a single choice, everywhere, with everyone but Karla: stay, or go.

What do you want from me, India?

What did the blood-design mean? If it was a message, written in another man’s blood, was it a warning? Or was it one of those affirmations that Idriss talked about? Was I going mad, asking the question, and searching for a significance that couldn’t exist?

I stumbled into the shower, watching red water run into the drain. The water ran clean at last, and I turned it off, but leaned against the wall, my palms flat against the tiles, my head down.

Was it a message? I heard myself asking without asking. A message in blood on my chest?

My knives clattered off the bench onto the tiled floor, startling me. I stepped out of the shower to pick up the knives, and slipped on the wet floor. Clutching at the knives as I steadied myself, I cut the inside of my hand.

I put the knives down, and cut myself again. I hadn’t cut myself with those knives in a year of practice. Blood ran into the basin, spilling onto the card I’d dropped. I scooped the card out of the basin, and dried it off.

I ran my hand under the cold tap, and used a towel to press the cuts closed. I cleaned my knives and put them away safely. And I stared at the card, and into the mirror, for quite a while.

I found Karla on the balcony, a thin blue robe over her shoulders. I wanted to see her like that every day, for the rest of my life, but I had to go out. I had something to do.

‘We gotta go out again,’ I said. ‘I’ve got something I have to do.’

‘A mystery! Hey, speaking of, is that a bandage on your hand?’

‘It’s nothing,’ I said. ‘Are you up for another ride? The sun will be up soon.’

‘I’ll be ready before you are,’ she said, slipping off the robe. ‘I hope you haven’t got anything scary in mind.’

‘No.’

‘It’s just finding Dev for Scorpio and Gemini, by taking Salar to the hospital, by being in the perfume bazaar, I think we’ve used up our quota of karmic coincidence, Shantaram. We shouldn’t push our luck.’

‘Nothing scary, I promise,’ I said. ‘Unsettling, maybe. But not scary.’

By the time we reached the shrine at Haji Ali, pearl banners announced the Sun, the sky-king, waking devotion. Early pilgrims, pleaders and penitents were on the path to the shrine. Beggars with no arms or legs, arranged in a ring by their attendants, chanted the names of Allah, as passers-by put coins or notes in their circle of necessity.

Children visiting the shrine for the first time wore their best clothes: the boys in sweating suits, copied from movie stars, the girls with their hair pulled fiercely into decorated traps at the back of their heads.

I stopped us, halfway to the shrine, halfway to the sleeping saint.

‘This is it,’ I said.

‘You’re not going to pray today?’

‘Not… today,’ I said, looking left and right at the people passing by.

‘So, what are you going to do?’

There was a pause in the flow of people, and we were alone for a few seconds. I pulled my knives from their scabbards and threw them into the sea, one at a time.

Karla watched the knives whirl through the air. It was the best whirling I ever did, it seemed to me, before they whirled into vanishing sea.

We stood for a while, watching the waves.

‘What happened, Shantaram?’

‘I’m not sure.’

I handed her the card with the yantra design that Dev had given to me.

‘When I took my shirt off, that design was on my chest. It was almost exactly the same, painted on me in Salar’s blood.’

‘You think it’s a sign?’ she asked. ‘Is that it?’

‘I don’t know. I… I was asking myself that same question, and then I cut my hand on my knife. I just… I think I’m done with this. It’s weird. I’m not the religious type.’

‘But you are the spiritual type.’

‘I’m not. I’m really not, Karla.’

‘You are, and you just don’t know it. That’s one of the things I love most about you.’

We were silent again for a while, listening to the waves: the sound that wind makes, surfing through trees.

‘If you think I’m throwing my gun in there,’ she said, breaking the silence, ‘you’re crazy.’

‘Keep your gun,’ I laughed. ‘Me, I’m done. If I can’t fix it with my hands, from now on, then I probably deserve what’s coming. And anyway, you’ve got a gun, and we’re always together.’

She wanted the long way home, even though we were stamp-foot tired, and she got it.

When we’d ridden long enough with her new understanding of a slightly different me, we returned to the Amritsar, and showered off the last dust of doubt. I found her smoking a joint on the same balcony we’d left, an hour before, in the same blue robe.

‘You could’ve hit a fish on the head with one of those knives,’ she said. ‘When you threw them in the sea.’

‘Fish are like you, baby. They’re pretty quick.’

‘What you did before, with the knives. Did you mean it?’

‘I mean to try.’

‘Then I’m in it with you,’ she said, kissing my face. ‘All the way.’

‘Even if it takes us out of Bombay?’

‘Especially if it takes us out of Bombay.’

She drew the curtains to hide the day, and slipped off her robe to try out the mirror from Ahmed’s Old House of Style. They both looked good. She put some funk on her music system and funked at me, all mermaid arms and hips. I held her. She put her hands around my neck, and swayed in front of me.

‘Let’s go a little nuts,’ she said. ‘I think we deserve it.’

Chapter Ninety-One

Love and faith, like hope and justice, are constellations in the infinity of truth. And they always pull a crowd. So many excited coffee devotees crowded into the Love & Faith café on its opening night that Rannveig called and told us to come a little later, because love and faith alone couldn’t guarantee a place.

We found Didier at Leo’s, happily insulted by two waiters at the same time, and giving the service that he got. Leopold’s was sit-down jumping. People laughed at anything and shouted at nothing with happy determination. It looked like fun, but we had somewhere to go.

‘Just one drink,’ Didier pleaded. ‘Love & Faith has no alcohol. Have you ever heard of such a thing?’

‘One drink,’ Karla said, sitting beside him. ‘And not a mood-fluctuation more.’

‘Waiter!’ Didier called.

‘You think you’re the only customer who ever got thirsty in this place?’ Sweetie asked, flicking a rag at the table.

‘Bring alcohol, you fool!’ Didier snapped. ‘I have a curfew.’

‘And I have a life,’ Sweetie said, slouching away.

‘Gotta give you credit, Didier,’ I said. ‘You got things back to normal. I’ve never seen Sweetie surlier.’

‘What is credit,’ Didier preened, ‘but something you have to give back, with interest.’

‘Lin’s unarmed, Didier, and naked to the world,’ Karla said. ‘He threw his knives into the sea this morning.’

‘The sea will throw them back again,’ Didier said. ‘The sea can’t get over it that we crawled onto the land. Mark my words, Lin. The sea is a jealous woman, without the charming personality.’

A man approached our table carrying a parcel. It was Vikrant, the knife-maker, and for a second I felt a twinge of guilt that his superbly made instruments, my knives, were on the bottom of a shallow sea.

‘Hi, Karla,’ he said. ‘I’ve been looking for you, Lin. Your sword is finished.’

He unwrapped the calico parcel, revealing Khaderbhai’s sword. It had been repaired with gold rivets, and they’d been moulded into the eyes of two dragons, meeting at the tail.

It was beautiful work, but it was a painful thing to remember the sword. I’d forgotten it, in the year of mountains and burning mansions, and it shamed me to know that I had.

‘I rest my case,’ Didier said. ‘The sea is a jealous woman. Didier is never wrong.’

‘You can take the boy from the sword,’ Karla said, ‘but you can’t take the sword from the boy.’

‘It’s beautiful work,’ I said. ‘How much do I owe you, Vikrant?’

‘That was a true labour of love,’ he said, moving away. ‘It’s on me. Don’t kill anyone with it. Bye, Karla.’

‘Bye, Vikrant.’

The drinks arrived, and we were about to toast, but I stopped us with a raised hand.

‘Take a look at that girl over there,’ I said.

‘Lin, it is hardly gallant to remark on another woman, when a woman is in your -’

‘Just take a good look at her, Didier.’

‘Do you think it’s her?’ Karla asked.

‘Oh, yeah.’

‘Who?’ Didier demanded.

‘Karlesha,’ Karla said. ‘It’s Oleg’s Karlesha.’

‘Is it really!’

The girl was tall and looked a little like Karla, with black hair and pale green eyes. She was wearing skin-tight black jeans, a black motorcycle shirt and cowboy boots.

‘Karlesha,’ Karla muttered. ‘Not bad style.’

‘Sweetie,’ I called, and the waiter shuffled over to me. ‘Have you still got that picture Oleg gave you?’

He scraped through his pockets petulantly, and produced a wrinkled photo. We held it up against the face of the girl, sitting five tables away.

‘Call Oleg, and get your reward,’ I said. ‘That’s the girl he’s been waiting for, over there.’

He goggled at the photograph for a while, looked at the girl, and scurried away to the phone.

‘Are we about done?’ I asked.

‘You don’t want to stay, and see Oleg and Karlesha reunited?’ Karla teased.

‘I’m tired of being Fate’s unwilling accomplice,’ I said.

‘I must see the reunion,’ Didier said. ‘And I will not move from this spot until I have witnessed it with my own eyes.’

‘Okay,’ I said, ready to leave.

A man approached our table. He was short, thin, dark-skinned and confident.

‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘are you the one they call Shantaram?’

‘Who wants to know?’ Didier snapped.

‘My name is Tateef, and I have something to discuss with Mr Shantaram.’

‘Discuss away,’ Karla said, waving a hand at me.

‘I hear you are a man who will do anything for money,’ Tateef said.

‘That’s a mighty offensive thing to say, Tateef,’ Karla said, smiling.

‘It certainly is,’ Didier agreed. ‘How much money?’

I held up my hand to stop the auction.

‘We’ve got an appointment, Tateef,’ I said. ‘Come back at three, tomorrow. We’ll talk.’

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Goodnight to all.’

He slipped between the tables, and out into the street.

‘You don’t even know what he has in mind, this, this, Tateef,’ Didier warned.

‘I liked the look of him. Didn’t you?’

‘I did,’ Karla said. ‘And I think we’re gonna see him again.’

‘Certainly not,’ Didier puffed. ‘Did you not see his shoes?’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Military half-boot, white on the sides with salt, and on the edges of his jacket. My guess is that he’s spent a lot of time at sea, recently.’

‘I mean the style, Lin,’ Didier sighed. ‘They were hideous. I have seen taxidermy with more style.’

‘Bye, Didier,’ Karla said, standing. ‘See you at the opening.’

Karla and I rode beside the crowded night causeway, and found a bigger crowd a few blocks away at the opening of the Love & Faith coffee shop, spilling onto the footpath and a splash of the road. We parked the bike outside, and sat there for a while.

The sign over the door, showing symbols from all faiths and written in Hindi, Marathi and English, was lit with a circle of white magnolia lights.

A crimson halo of frangipani lights framed the street window, showing customers inside drinking espresso, while Vinson and Rannveig worked the Italian coffee machine, steam rising industrially.

There were three empty stools in the curved counter of fifteen. Rannveig had reserved them for us, but I wasn’t ready, yet, to go into that corner of affection they’d created.

My thoughts were of a girl from Norway, seen in a locket one hour, and seen standing in Fate’s shadow an hour later. I looked at her, smiling in love and faith’s window, already in her own forever. Vinson exchanged a quick glance with her, smiled quickly, and talked happily to a customer.

I didn’t want to go inside. There was a purity in the thing they’d become together that I didn’t want to disturb.

‘I’m staying here, for a minute,’ I said, standing beside the bike. ‘You can go ahead. I’ll be there in a minute.’

‘Always together,’ Karla said, sitting on the bike again, and lighting a joint.

Didier joined us, a calming hand against his breathless chest.

‘What happened?’ Karla asked.

Didier held a hand out to stop her, regaining his breath.

‘Is… is… is my place still reserved, inside?’ Didier gasped.

‘Front and centre,’ I said. ‘What happened, with Oleg and Karlesha?’

‘Oleg ran inside,’ Didier replied, his heart slowing to medicated levels again, ‘and he just picked her up, like a sack of onions, and walked out with her into the night.’

‘You didn’t follow them?’ Karla asked, laughing.

‘Of course,’ Didier said. ‘Didier is a detective of the Lost Love Bureau, after all.’

‘Where did they go?’ I asked.

‘He disappeared,’ Didier hissed, ‘in Randall’s limousine. He is exasperating, that Randall.’

‘In the nicest possible ways,’ Karla said.

‘Are you not going inside?’ Didier asked, looking at the crowd laughing in the new café.

‘We’re gonna sit here for a while,’ Karla said. ‘Go ahead, Didier. Class the joint up.’

‘Then it is Didier who must raise the flag for love and faith,’ he said, draping his scarf over his shoulder. ‘We live in the age of opening your mouth as wide as you can. Watch me, as I scream and shout for us.’

He straightened his jacket, crossed the footpath and embraced his way inside. He sat beside a young businessman, stumbling into the handsome victim as he sat. The businessman liked it, and began talking brightly.

We sat down and we watched the bustling, successful opening for a while in silence, and then Karla leaned against me.

‘I like bike-talk,’ she said. ‘Even when we’re side by side.’

‘So do I.’

‘You wanna know who Kavita Singh’s new silent partner is?’ she asked softly.

‘Will it scare me?’

‘Probably,’ she replied.

‘Good. Tell me.’

‘Madame Zhou,’ Karla said.

‘How did that happen?’

‘Madame Zhou wanted to blackmail her former clients, and make a comeback as a power broker in Bombay. Fate, with a little help, brought her to Kavita. Zhou has a book, with a record of every customer she ever had, and every sexual preference. I’d like to read it, actually, when they’re done with it.’

‘Why did Zhou come to Kavita for help?’

‘I put the idea in her head.’

‘How?’

‘You want all the answers, don’t you?’

‘I want all the everything, when it comes to you,’ I laughed.

‘I knew about the book, and I knew she was weakened, without the Palace, but still ambitious. I also knew the name of her most loyal patron. He’s a businessman, and I bought his business. In exchange, he suggested that the ideal person to broker the blackmail ring was Kavita Singh. That’s when Madame Zhou started getting interested in Kavita.’

‘And when the twins were killed, she went to Kavita for help.’

‘Just as I’d hoped she would. Vices live in habits, and habits make people predictable.’

‘What does Kavita get out of it?’

‘Apart from the sex?’

‘Please, Karla, don’t -’

‘I’m kidding. I told Kavita, six weeks ago, that it was Madame Zhou who killed her boyfriend. Her fiancée, actually. He objected to Madame Zhou’s bribery of officials, in his area. He was getting a following. She killed him for it.’

‘How did you know who did it?’

‘Do you really wanna know?’

‘Well, I… ’

‘It was Lisa.’

‘Okay, Lisa? How did she know?’

‘She was working for Madame Zhou at the time, at the Palace of Happy. It was before I got her out of there.’

‘And burned the place down.’

‘And burned the place down. Lisa couldn’t tell Kavita what she knew, so she told me.’

‘Why couldn’t Lisa tell Kavita?’

‘You know how Lisa was. She couldn’t talk to anyone she was having sex with.’

‘I’m beginning to think you knew her better than I did.’

‘No,’ she said, smiling softly. ‘But we did have an understanding about you.’

‘She said something to me about that. How she met you at Kayani’s, and talked about us.’

She laughed gently.

‘You really wanna know what happened?’

‘Again, with the really wanna know?’ I smiled.

‘I kept tabs on you, from the moment you walked away from me. At first, I was happy for you, because you seemed to be happy with Lisa. But I knew Lisa, and I knew she’d mess it up.’

‘Wait a minute. You were checking on me, for two years?’

‘Of course. I love you.’

So clear, so light: trust in a human eye.

‘How does this… ’ I began, recollecting myself, ‘connect to your little understanding with Lisa?’

She smiled, sadly.

‘I heard that Lisa was back to her wicked ways, and was running around on you, a lot, and that you didn’t know about it.’

‘I didn’t ask about it.’

‘I know that,’ she said. ‘But everyone was talking about it. Everyone except you.’

‘It doesn’t matter. It didn’t matter.’

‘It wasn’t right, because you’re better than that, and you deserve better than that. So, I walked up behind her one day, at her favourite dress shop, and tapped her on the shoulder.’

‘And what did you say to her?’

‘I told her to tell you exactly what she was doing, and let you decide if you wanted to stay, or to stop slutting around.’

‘Slutting around? That’s pretty harsh.’

‘Harsh? There wasn’t a man or a woman safe at that art gallery, including the customers. I could have cared less, except that she was doing it to you.’

‘And you made some kind of agreement with her?’

‘Not then. I gave her a chance. I loved her. You know how easy it was to love her, when you were looking at her. But she didn’t change. So I sat down with her at Kayani’s and told her that I love you, and I didn’t want her to hurt you any more.’

‘What did she say?’

‘She agreed to let you go. She wasn’t in love with you, but she was deep in like with you. She said she wanted to do it a piece at a time, and not just disappear in a cold break.’

‘You broke us up, Lisa and me?’ I asked, disturbed by a gust of truth. ‘Is that what happened?’

‘Not exactly,’ she sighed. ‘I can see her face, when I found her, on the bed. I remember what I said to her. If you don’t tell the truth, and you keep on hurting him, I’ll stop you.’

‘And you meant it? Even though you loved her?’

‘Every dinner you went to with Lisa in that last year,’ she said quietly, ‘you were dining with her lovers, husband and wife both, sometimes, and you were the only one at the table who didn’t know it. I’m sorry.’

‘She was out a lot, and I never asked her. I was away a lot, and I couldn’t tell her where I’d been, or what I’d been smuggling. She was in trouble, and I didn’t realise it.’

‘She wasn’t in trouble, she was trouble. When she agreed to stop messing with you that day at Kayani’s, she made a pass at me.’

‘She did?’ I laughed.

‘Hell, yeah. She was Lisa. Beautiful, crazy and popular.’

‘That she was.’

‘You know, at first I thought you were naïve. But you’re not. You’re trusting, and I love that about you. I love being trusted. Trust is the soul’s drug of choice. It meant so much to me that you didn’t give up on me. It meant more to me that we did it apart on trust, than if we’d done it together. Do you know what I mean?’

‘I think I do. But we’re in it together from now on, Karla.’

‘In it together from now on,’ she repeated, leaning against me.

‘You really watched out for me, all that time?’

‘I did. And you never left the city, as you said you might.’

‘I couldn’t. Not while you were still here.’

In front of us people were laughing and joking on the footpath outside Love & Faith. I scanned the street for threats, taking in every pickpocket, drug dealer and racketeer working the edges of the herd. It was okay: illicitly quiet.

‘You never told anyone what Lisa said, that Madame Zhou ordered the killing?’

‘I kept the secret to myself, until the time was right. Now Kavita knows, and she’ll keep Madame Zhou close, until she has the book. Then she’ll introduce Madame Zhou to her little friend, karma.’

Madame Zhou and Kavita? It seemed to me like a double-headed coin, fixed to hurt someone no matter how it landed.

‘Let me get this straight: Madame Zhou doesn’t know that Kavita is the fiancée of a guy she killed, what, four years ago?’

‘That’s right. Kavita Singh isn’t her real name. She was in London, freelancing, when her boyfriend was killed. She came back, used a byline name, and worked for Ranjit. She always hoped to find out what happened to her boyfriend one day, working as a journalist. I waited until Kavita was strong enough to confront and defeat Madame Zhou, and get away with it. I built her up, and gave her power. And then, the day she was waiting for came knocking, and I told her.’

‘So, Kavita’s watching Madame Zhou, who’s using her to shake down people in the book to get back the power she lost, and when Kavita gets the book, she’ll get rid of Madame Zhou?’

‘That’s it. Chess, played by dangerous women.’

‘How long till Kavita gets that book?’

‘Not long.’

‘Will Kavita use the book, once she gets it?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ Karla laughed. ‘Making ocean-going vessels of change.’

‘I don’t know which one of them is scarier, Kavita or Madame Zhou.’

‘I told you that you misjudged Kavita,’ she said.

‘I don’t judge anyone. I want a world without stones, or people to throw them at.’

‘I know that,’ she laughed.

‘What’s so funny?’

‘Something Didier said, about you.’

‘What?’

‘Lin has a good heart, which is inexcusable.’

‘Thank you, I think.’

‘You wanna know who’s got the third office, downstairs?’

‘This is certainly a night for revelations. You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?’

‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘You wanna know who’s behind door number three, or don’t ya?’

‘Of course I do. I wanna see the tunnel, which I still haven’t seen.’

‘You won’t sign the non-disclosure agreement.’

‘Every time you sign a legal document, Fate takes a day off.’

‘It’s Johnny Cigar,’ she said.

‘In room number three?’

‘Yeah.’

‘When will you stop stealing my characters? You’ve got half a novel at the Amritsar, and I haven’t even written it yet.’

‘Johnny’s starting a real estate business,’ she said, ignoring me adorably. ‘He’s specialising in slum relocation.’

‘Here comes the neighbourhood.’

‘I financed him,’ she said. ‘With the last of Ranjit’s baptism money.’

I thought for a while about the multiplying ménage at the Amritsar hotel.

‘Even with Karlesha back,’ I said, ‘Oleg’s not leaving, is he?’

‘I hope not,’ she smiled. ‘And so do you. You like that guy.’

‘I do like him. And I’d like him better one degree less chirpy.’

‘Is Naveen coming tonight?’

‘He’s working on a case, for Diva. One way or another, that girl manages to keep Naveen busy, and close.’

‘You think they’ll get together?’

‘I don’t know,’ I replied, trying not to hope for something I wasn’t sure they wanted. ‘But I know Naveen will never give up on Diva. No matter what he says, he’s crazy about her. And if you put an Indian and an Irishman together, like him, you get a guy who can’t give up on love.’

Customers of Love & Faith gathered on the footpath, holding up T-shirts, and occasionally exchanging them.

‘What’s that about?’

‘Remember the T-shirt version of what Idriss was saying? The one that we gave Vinson?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Vinson and Rannveig used Randall’s notes, from what Idriss said, and they put his quotes on T-shirts. They’re giving them away as opening-night gifts.’

A young man, not far from us, was holding a T-shirt up to read it. I read it with him, over his shoulder.

A heart

filled with greed, pride or hateful feelings

is not free.

When I heard Idriss say it, on the mountain, I agreed with it, and I was glad to see it preserved and living, somehow, in the world, even just on a T-shirt. And I also had to admit that I’d found shares of greed and pride inside myself, and too often.

But I wasn’t alone any more. As Rannveig said, I’d reconnected.

‘What do you think?’ Karla asked me, watching people swap quotations from Idriss on their free T-shirts.

‘Teachers, like writers, never die while people still quote them.’

‘I love you, Shantaram,’ she said, cuddling in beside me.

I looked at the happy, laughing group, crammed into the narrow coffee shop. The people we’d lost, in our Island City years, would fill the same space.

Too many, too many dead who were still alive, whenever I thought of them. And almost all of them were lives that humility or generosity would’ve saved. Vikram, Nazeer, Tariq, Sanjay, Vishnu, and all the other names chanted at me, always ending in Abdullah, my brother, Abdullah, my brother.

Karla relaxed against me, her foot tapping to the music coming from Love & Faith. I tipped her face to the light until she was the light, and kissed her, and we were one.

Truth is the freedom of the soul. We’re very young, in this young universe, and we often fail, and dishonour ourselves, even if only in the caves of the mind. We fight, when we should dance. We compete, cheat and punish innocent nature.

But that isn’t what we are, it’s simply what we do in the world that we made for ourselves, and we can freely change what we do, and the world we made, every second that we live.

In all the things that really matter, we are one. Love and faith, trust and empathy, family and friendship, sunsets and songs of awe: in every wish born in our humanity we are one. Our humankind, at this moment in our destiny, is a child blowing on a dandelion, without thought or understanding. But the wonder in the child is the wonder in us, and there’s no limit to the good we can do when human hearts connect. It’s the truth of us. It’s the story of us. It’s the meaning of the word God: we are one. We are one. We are one.