The Mountain Shadow

Chapter Nine

Stories from the wounds of seven wars and power struggles gushed across the blotter on my desk in the passport-counterfeiting factory.

An Iranian professor, a scholar of pre-Islamic texts who’d escaped the Revolutionary Guard’s purges, required a full work-up: false birth certificate, false international motor vehicle licence, bank documents, and a false passport, complete with a travel history covering the last two years, supported by valid visa stamps.

The documents had to be good enough to pass close inspection, and get the customer on a plane. When he got wherever he was going, on my false documents, he planned to ditch them, and appeal for asylum.

The marks of torture on him were severe, but he had to take a chance with a false passport because no legal authority would give him a genuine one, except the legal authority that wanted him back in chains.

A Nigerian, an Ogoni activist who’d campaigned against government collusion with oil powers to exploit Ogoni resources, had become a target. He’d survived an assassination attempt, and had arrived in Bombay, in the cargo hold of a freighter, without papers, but with money from supporters in his community.

He bribed the cops at the port, who followed procedure and sent him to us. He needed a new identity, with a passport that changed his nationality and kept him safe.

A Tibetan nationalist had escaped from a Chinese work camp, and had walked across snow-covered peaks into India. He’d made his way to Bombay, where Tibetan exiles provided the money and the contact to the Sanjay Company for new documents.

And there were others: an Afghan, an Iraqi, a Kurdish activist, a Somali, and two men from Sri Lanka, all of them trying to avoid, escape, or survive the bloody dehiscence of wars they didn’t start, and couldn’t fight.

But wars are good for bad business, and we didn’t just work for good guys. The Sanjay Company was an equal opportunity exploiter. There were crooked businessmen wanting to hide their profits, and thugs who needed a new reputation to ruin, and runaway generals, and people who faked their own deaths, and they always bought their way to the front of the line.

And to one side, there was another passport. It was a Canadian book, bearing my photograph, and with a new visa stamp for Sri Lanka. It had a Reuters News Agency press card attached.

While I was preparing documents that enabled others to escape from wars and vicious regimes, I was making the document that would carry me into a conflict that had cost tens of thousands of lives.

‘Do you actually read all this?’ my new assistant asked, picking up the pages of biographical notes that had been prepared for us by the Ogoni activist.

‘Yeah.’

‘All of it?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Really? I mean… it’s pretty gruesome stuff, man.’

‘That it is, Farzad,’ I said, not looking up.

‘I mean, stuff like this, it’s worse than the newspapers.’

‘It’s all in the newspapers, if you look past the stock market reports and the sports pages,’ I said, still not looking at him.

‘I’m not surprised. This is some damn depressing shit, yaar.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘I mean, a guy could get himself well and truly into a state of depression with stuff like this, day after day, and really need a break. Count on it.’

‘Okay,’ I said, pushing away the file I’d been reading. ‘What’s the problem?’

‘Problem?’

‘If there’s an ocean at the end of this stream of consciousness, you should start flowing into it. Right about now.’

‘The ocean?’ he asked, mystified.

‘The point, Farzad. Get to the point.’

‘Oh,’ he smiled. ‘The point. Yes. There’s definitely something quite like a kind of a point, that’s for sure. Count on it.’

He stared at me for a few moments, then lowered his eyes and began making circles on the surface of the wooden desk with his fingertip.

‘Actually,’ he said at last, still avoiding my eyes, ‘I was trying to find a way to ask you to… to come to my house for… for lunch or dinner, and to meet… to meet my parents.’

‘That’s it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why didn’t you just ask me?’

‘Well,’ he said, the little circles becoming smaller and smaller, ‘you’ve got a reputation, you know?’

‘What kind of a reputation?’

‘A reputation for being kind of a grouchy guy, yaar.’

‘Grouchy?’ I snarled. ‘Me?’

‘Oh, yes.’

We stared at one another. In the factory below, one of the large printing machines grumbled to life, dropping quickly into a chatter of metal clamps and rollers, advancing and retreating, rumbling and turning on a barrel drum.

‘Has anyone ever told you that you’re completely crap at this inviting-people-to-dinner thing?’

‘Well,’ he laughed, ‘this is really the first time I’ve ever asked anyone to my parents’ house in years. We’re kind of… private, if you know what I mean.’

‘I know private,’ I sighed. ‘Private is what I had, before you.’

‘So… will you come? My parents are really dying to meet you. My Uncle Keki used to talk about you a lot. He said you were -’

‘Grouchy. I know.’

‘Well, yes, that, too. But he also said you were big on philosophy. He said you were Khaderbhai’s favourite for arguing and talking philosophy. My pop is a great one for that. My Mom’s even worse. The whole family have these big philosophical discussions. Sometimes there’s thirty of us, arguing at the same time.’

‘Thirty of you?’

‘We have this… kind of… extended family. I can’t really describe it. You have to see it. I mean, see us. But you won’t be bored, that I can promise you. No way. Count on it.’

‘If I agree to visit your indescribable family, will you leave me alone and let me get back to work?’

‘Is that a yes?’

‘Yes, one of these days.’

‘Really? You’ll come?’

‘Count on it. Now get outta here, and let me get these books done.’

‘Great!’ he shouted, dancing a few steps left and right with his hips. ‘I’ll talk to my pop, and set it up for one day this week. Lunch or dinner! Great!’

He gave me a last smile and a wag of his head, and then closed the door behind him.

I pulled the file back toward me, the Nigerian’s file, and began to draw out the basic elements of the man’s new documented identity. A much kinder but completely artificial life began to develop on my sketchpad.

At one point I opened a drawer full of photographs of clients who wanted passports: the survivors, the lucky ones who weren’t shot, drowned, or imprisoned in the attempt to find a better life.

Those faces from war and torture, brushed and cleaned and smeared with artificial calm for our passport photo studio, held my eyes. Once we wandered a free Earth, carrying a picture of our God or king to ensure safe passage. Now the world is gated, and we carry pictures of ourselves, and nobody’s safe.

And the bottom line, for the Sanjay Company, was always black: black money. Every black market in the world is the child of tyranny, war or unpopular laws. We turned over thirty to forty passports per month, and the best of them sold for twenty-five thousand US dollars apiece.

Treat war like business, Sanjay once said to me, villainy bright as a newly minted coin in his eyes, and business like war.

When the background work on passports for current clients was done, I collected the files and photographs to take them down to the factory floor. I took my own passport, the new one I’d prepared for the trip to Sri Lanka, and shoved it into the centre draw of the desk. I knew that sooner or later I’d have to hand it over to my best counterfeiters, Krishna and Villu, who were, as Fate would have it, Sri Lankan refugees. But I wasn’t ready to face that journey yet.

I found Krishna and Villu sleeping on two couches I’d installed for them in a quiet corner, away from the printing machines. The challenges of new passport work always excited the Sri Lankan forgers, and quite often they’d work through the night without sleep, to complete an assignment.

I watched them for a while, listening to their snoring drift in and out of chorus, swelling sometimes to a grinding roar, in almost perfect unison and then separating once more into rasp and gasp. Their free arms hung loosely at their sides, hands open, receiving the blessing of sleep.

The two other workers who helped me were running errands, and at that moment the factory was silent. I stood for a few moments in that snoring, peaceful place, envying the sleepers.

They’d come to Bombay as refugees. When I’d met them, they were living as pavement-dwellers under a sheet of plastic with their families. Although their work for the Sanjay Company paid well, allowing them to move to comfortable, clean apartments not far from the factory, and they had flawless identity cards, forged by their own hands, they still lived in fear of deportation.

The loved ones they’d left behind were lost to them, perhaps never to be seen or heard from again. Yet despite everything they’d endured and continued to suffer, they slept like children in a placid, insensible peace.

I never slept as well as they did. I dreamt too often and too hard. I always woke in a thrashing struggle to be free. Lisa had learned that the safest way for her to sleep in the same bed was to hold me close, and sleep inside whatever circle my dreaming mind was trying to break.

I left the pile of documents on Krishna’s desk, and climbed the wooden stairs quietly. They had their own keys, so I locked the door behind me.

I’d arranged to meet Lisa, to visit the slum clinic with her and have lunch afterwards. She’d developed a relationship with our local pharmacist, who’d provided a few boxes of medicines. The medicines were packed into the saddlebags of my motorcycle, and she’d asked me to deliver them with her.

I cruised the gradual creep of noon traffic, because sometimes it’s enough of everything to be moving slowly on a motorcycle, on a sunny day.

In the rear-view mirror of my bike I saw a cop on a motorcycle quite similar to my own. He was drawing alongside me.

The peaked cap and a revolver in a leather holster at his side said that he was a senior officer. He raised his left hand, and pointed to the kerb with two outstretched fingers.

I pulled my bike into the kerb, behind his. He pushed out the side-stand on his bike, then swung a leg over the seat and turned to face me. With his right hand resting on the holster, he slid two fingers of his left hand across his throat. I killed the engine, and remained on the bike.

I was calm. Cops pulled me over from time to time, wanting to talk or collect a bribe. I always kept a rolled-up fifty-rupee note in my shirt pocket for just that purpose. And I didn’t mind. Gangsters understand police graft: cops don’t get paid enough to risk their lives, so they tax the community the shortfall.

But something in the officer’s eyes, a glimmer reflected off a flaw more jagged than corruption, made me uneasy. He slipped the catch off the holster and slid his hand under the stiff cover, on to the butt of the revolver.

I stood from the bike. My hand began to move slowly toward the knives in the scabbards under the flap of my shirt. Cops didn’t just take bribes in Bombay in those years: they shot gangsters, from time to time.

A calm, deep voice spoke from very close behind me.

‘I wouldn’t be doing that, if I were you.’

I turned to see three men standing with me. A fourth man was at the wheel of a car, parked close behind them.

‘You know,’ I said, my hand on the knife, underneath my shirt, ‘if you were me, you probably would.’

The man who’d spoken looked away from me to nod his head at the policeman. The officer saluted, climbed back onto his bike, and rode away.

‘Nice trick,’ I said, turning back. ‘I must remember it, if I ever lose my balls.’

‘You can lose your motherfucking balls right here and now, gora,’ a thin man with a pencil moustache said, showing the blade of a knife he hid in his sleeve.

I looked into his eyes. I read a very short story, told by fear and hatred. I didn’t want to read it again. The leader raised an exasperated hand. He was a heavy-set man in his late thirties, and a quiet talker.

‘If you don’t get in the car,’ he said quietly, ‘I’ll shoot you in the knee.’

‘Where will you shoot me if I do get in the car?’

‘That depends,’ he replied, regarding me evenly.

He was magazine dressed: hand-tailored silk shirt, loose-fitting grey serge trousers, a Dunhill belt, and Gucci loafers. There was a gold ring on his middle finger that was a copy of the Rolex on his wrist.

The other men looked around at the flow of traffic and pedestrians in the gutters of the road. It had been a fairly long silence. I decided to break it.

‘Depends on what?’

‘On whether you do as you’re told or not.’

‘I don’t like being told what to do.’

‘Nobody does,’ he replied calmly. ‘That’s why there’s so much power attached to it.’

‘That’s pretty good,’ I said. ‘You should write a book.’

My heart was racing. I was scared. My stomach dropped like a body thrown in a river. They were the enemy, and I was in their hands. I was probably dead, whichever way you looked at it.

‘Get in the car,’ he said, allowing himself a little smile.

‘Get to the point.’

‘Get in the car.’

‘If we play it out here, you go with me. If I get in the car, I go out alone. Arithmetic says we should do it here.’

‘Fuck it!’ the pencil moustache snapped. ‘Let’s kill this chudh, and get it over with.’

The heavy-set leader thought about it. It took a while. My hand was still on my knife.

‘You’re a logical man,’ he said. ‘They say you argued philosophy with Khaderbhai.’

‘Nobody argued with Khaderbhai.’

‘Even so, you can see that your position is irrational. I lose nothing by killing you. You gain everything by staying alive long enough to find out what I want.’

‘Except for the part about you being dead. I’d lose that. And so far, that’s the best part.’

‘Except for that,’ he said, smiling. ‘But you’ve seen how much trouble I went to, just to talk to you. If I wanted you dead, I’d have run over your motorcycle with one of my trucks.’

‘Leave my motorcycle out of this.’

‘Your bike will be safe, yaar,’ he laughed, nodding at the thin man with the moustache. ‘Danda will ride it for you. Get in the car.’

He was right. There was no other logical choice. I let my hand fall from my knife. The leader nodded. Danda stepped forward at once, started the bike, and kicked back the stand. He gunned the engine, impatient to leave.

‘You hurt that bike -’ I shouted at him, but before I could finish the threat he tapped the bike into first gear, and roared off into the stream of traffic, the motor screaming in protest.

‘Danda has no sense of humour, I’m afraid,’ the leader said as we watched Danda sway and skid through the traffic.

‘Good, because if he hurts my bike, he won’t find it funny.’

The leader laughed, and looked me hard in the eyes.

‘How could you exchange philosophies with a man like Khaderbhai?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that Khaderbhai was insane.’

‘Sane or not, he was never boring.’

‘What doesn’t bore us, in the long run?’ he asked, getting into the car.

‘A sense of humour?’ I suggested, getting in beside him.

They had me, and it was just like prison, because there was nothing I could do about it. He laughed again, and nodded to the driver, whose eyes filled the soft rectangle of the rear-view mirror.

‘Take us to the truth,’ he said to the driver in Hindi, watching me closely. ‘It’s always so refreshing, at this time of day.’

Chapter Ten

The driver bullied his way through tight, midday traffic, reaching a warehouse in an industrial area in minutes. The warehouse was freestanding, with a screaming space between it and the nearest buildings. Danda was already there. My bike was parked on the gravel driveway in front.

The driver parked the car. A roller door opened to a little over halfway. We got out, stooped under the door, and a chain clattered noisily as it rolled shut again.

There were two big worries. The first was that they hadn’t blindfolded me: they’d allowed me to see the location of the warehouse, and the faces of the eight men inside. The second worry was the supply of power tools, torches and heavy hammers arranged on benches along one wall of the warehouse.

It took an effort not to stare. Instead, I focused on the long low chair standing alone in the open space near the back wall of the small warehouse. It was a piece of pool furniture: a banana lounge, upholstered in strands of acid-green and lemon vinyl. There was a wide stain under the chair.

Danda, the skinny moustache with short-story eyes, gave me a thorough pat-down. He took my two knives and passed them on to the leader, who examined them for a moment, before putting them down carefully on the long bench.

‘Sit down,’ he said, turning to face me.

When I refused to move, he folded his arms patiently and nodded to a tall, powerfully built man who’d been with us in the car. The man came for me.

Hit first, and hit hard, an old con used to tell me.

As the big man stepped in quickly, swinging out with an open-handed slap to the right side of my head, I rolled with the blow, and hit him with a short, sharp uppercut. It good-luck connected with the point of his chin.

The big man stumbled back a step. Two of the men drew guns. They were old-fashioned revolvers, military issue from a forgotten war.

The leader sighed again, and nodded his head.

Four men rushed forward, pushing me onto the green and yellow lounge chair. They tied my hands to the rear legs of the chair with coconut-fibre ropes. Slipping another length of rope under the front, they tied down my legs.

The leader finally unfolded his arms and approached me.

‘Do you know who I am?’

‘A critic?’ I suggested, trying not to show the scared that I was feeling.

He frowned, looking me up and down.

‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I know who you are. I know a Scorpion when I see one.’

The leader nodded.

‘They call me Vishnu,’ he said.

Vishnu, the man Sanjay spared after the war that cost so many, the man who came back with a gang called the Scorpions.

‘Why do so many gangsters name themselves after gods?’

‘How ’bout I name you dead, you bahinchudh!’ Danda spluttered.

‘Come to think of it,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘Danda’s not a god. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Danda’s just a demigod. Isn’t that right? A minor deity?’

‘Shut up!’

‘Stay cool, Danda,’ Vishnu soothed. ‘He’s just trying to keep the subject off the subject. Don’t let him bait you.’

‘A demigod,’ I mused. ‘Ever asked yourself how often you get the short stick around here, Danda?’

‘Shut up!’

‘You know what?’ Vishnu said, stifling a yawn. ‘Fuck him. Go ahead, Danda. Fuck his happiness, if you want.’

Danda rushed at me, swinging punches. As I moved my head quickly, left and right, he only connected with one in every three. Suddenly he stopped. When I held my head still long enough to glance up, I saw the big man, the man I’d hit on the point of the chin, pulling Danda away by the shoulder.

The big man punched at my face. He was wearing a brass ring on his middle finger. I felt it crunch along the curves of my cheek and jaw. The big man knew what he was doing. He didn’t break anything, he just made it unwell. Then he changed tactic, and smacked me hard on the sides of the head with open-handed slaps.

If you beat a man with your fists for long enough, your knuckles will shatter, or the man will die, or both. But if you break him up a little with your fists, to make sure that a good, hard slap is filled with pain, you can go on beating him all day long with an open hand.

Torture. It’s heavy and flat in that space. There’s a density to it, a centripetal pull so strong that there’s almost nothing you can take from it; so little you can learn that isn’t dark all the way through.

But one thing I came to know is that when the beating starts, you shut your mouth. You don’t speak. You keep your mouth shut, until it ends. And you don’t scream, if you can help it.

‘Okay,’ Vishnu said, when the month of two minutes ended.

The big man stepped back, accepted a towel from Danda and wiped his sweat-soaked face. Danda reached up to rub the big man’s shoulders.

‘Tell me about Pakistan,’ Vishnu demanded, holding a cigarette to my lips.

I drew in the smoke with dribbles of blood, and then puffed it out. I had no idea what he was talking about.

‘Tell me about Pakistan.’

I stared back at him.

‘We know you went to Goa,’ Vishnu said slowly. ‘We know you picked up some guns. So, I will ask you again. Tell me about Pakistan.’

Guns, Goa, Sanjay: it was all coming home with one turn of the karmic wheel. But there’s a voice inside my fear, and sooner or later it says, Let’s get it over with.

‘A lot of people think the capital of Pakistan is Karachi,’ I said, through swollen lips. ‘But it’s not.’

Vishnu laughed, and then stopped laughing.

‘Tell me about Pakistan.’

‘Great food, nice music,’ I said.

Vishnu glanced at the tip of his cigarette, and then raised his eyes to the big man.

And it started again. And I limped through thick mud as each new slap on the side of my head smacked me closer to the fog.

When the big man paused, resting his hands on his thighs, Danda seized the moment to flog me, with a thin bamboo rod. It left me soaking wet with suffered sweat, but woke me up.

‘How are your balls now, madachudh?’ Danda screamed at me, kneeling so close that I could smell mustard oil and bad-fear sweat in the armpits of his shirt.

I started laughing, as you do sometimes, when you’re being

tortured.

Vishnu waved his hand.

The sudden silence that followed the gesture was so complete that it seemed the whole world had stopped for a moment.

Vishnu said something. I couldn’t hear him. I realised, slowly, that the silence was a ringing in my ears that only I could hear. He was staring at me, with a quizzical expression, as if he’d just noticed a stray dog, and was wondering whether to play with it or kick it with his Gucci loafers.

Another man wiped the blood from my face with a rag smelling of petrol and rotting mould. I spat out blood and bile.

‘How do you feel?’ Vishnu asked me, absently.

I knew the survivor’s rules. Don’t speak. Don’t say a word. But I couldn’t stop anger writing words, and couldn’t stop saying them once they were in my head.

‘Islamabad. The capital of Pakistan,’ I said. ‘It’s not Karachi.’

He walked toward me, drawing a small semi-automatic pistol from his jacket pocket. The star sapphire in his eyes showed a tiny image of my skull, already crushed.

The entry door of the warehouse opened. A chai wallah, a boy of perhaps twelve, stepped through from the bright light of the street, bringing six glasses of tea in one wire basket, and six glasses of water in another.

‘Ah, chai,’ Vishnu said, a sudden wide smile smoothing out wrinkles of rage.

He put the pistol away, and returned to his place near the long bench.

The chai boy handed out glasses. His ancient street-kid eyes drifted over me, but showed no reaction. Maybe he’d seen it before: a man tied to an acid-green and lemon-yellow banana lounge, and covered in blood.

The gangster who’d smeared some of the blood from my face untied my legs and hands. He took a glass of chai from the boy, and handed it to me. I struggled to hold it in both numbed hands.

Other gangsters took their glasses of chai, courteously working their way through the ritual of refusing, so that others could drink, and then accepting the compromise of half-shares, spilled into emptied water glasses.

It was a polite and convivial scene. We might’ve been friends, sitting together at Nariman Point, and admiring the sunset.

The boy hunted around the space for the empty glasses of the last round, filling his wire baskets as he went. He noticed that one of the glasses was missing.

‘Glass!’ he growled, in a feral percolation of whatever it was that accumulated in his throat.

He held up one of the baskets, showing the offending empty space where the last glass should’ve rested.

‘Glass!’

Gangsters immediately scrambled to find the missing glass, turning over empty cartons and shoving aside heaps of rags and rubbish. Danda found it.

‘Hain! Hain!’ he said, revealing the glass with a flourish. It’s here! It’s here!

He handed it to the boy, who snatched it suspiciously and left the warehouse. Danda looked at Vishnu quickly, his eyes bright with grovelling: Did you see that, boss? Did you see it was me who found the glass?

When I was sure that I could move without trembling, I put my glass of chai on the ground beside me. It wasn’t all pride and anger: my lips were split and swollen. I knew I’d be drinking blood as well as chai.

‘Can you stand?’ Vishnu asked, setting his empty glass aside.

I stood. I started to fall.

The big man who’d slapped me around rushed to catch me, his strong arms encircling my shoulders with solicitous care. With help, I stood again.

‘You can go,’ Vishnu said.

He shifted his eyes toward Danda.

‘Give him the keys to his bike, yaar.’

Danda fished the keys from his pocket on impulse, but approached Vishnu, rather than me.

‘Please,’ he begged. ‘He knows something. I know it. Just… just give me a little more time.’

‘It’s okay,’ Vishnu replied, smiling indulgently. ‘I already know what I need to know.’

He took the keys from Danda and threw them to me. I caught them against my chest with both numbed hands. I met his gaze.

‘Besides,’ Vishnu said, looking at me, ‘you don’t even know about Pakistan, do you? You don’t have any damn idea what we’re talking about, isn’t it?’

I didn’t answer.

‘That’s it, my friend. Ja!’ Go!

I held his eyes for a moment, and then held out my hand, palm upwards.

‘My knives,’ I said.

Vishnu smiled, folding his arms again.

‘Let’s call that a fine, shall we? Your knives will go to Hanuman, as a fine for that shot you took at him. Take my advice. Go now, and keep this place a secret. Don’t tell Sanjay or anyone else about it.’

‘A secret?’

‘I let you know about this place, because you can use it to contact us. If you leave a message here, it will get back to me, very quickly.’

‘Why would I wanna do that?’

‘Unless I have misjudged you, and I’m really quite good at judging characters, you may decide, one day, that you have more in common with us than you think now. And you may want to talk to us. If you’re smart, you won’t tell anyone about this address. You’ll save it, for a rainy day. But for now, for today, as the Americans say, fuck off!’

I walked with Danda to the side door, stepping through as he opened it for me. He cleared his throat noisily, and spat on the leg of my trousers before slamming the door shut.

On the ground, beside my bike, I found a scrap of paper, and used it to wipe the mess of spit from my jeans. I put the key into the ignition of the bike. I was about to kick-start the engine, when I caught sight of my battered face in the rear-view mirror. My nose wasn’t broken, for once, but both eyes were pulpy and swollen.

I kicked the bike alive, but left her in neutral gear, resting on the side-stand with the engine turning over slowly. I twitched a control lever on a panel beneath one long edge of the seat. The panel dropped down, showing my Italian stiletto knife.

I hammered on the door of the warehouse with the butt of the knife. I heard an angry voice inside as someone approached the door, cursing whoever was disturbing the peace. It was Danda. I was glad.

The door opened. Danda was swearing angrily. I grabbed at the front of his shirt, slammed him against the doorjamb, and jabbed

the stiletto against his stomach. He tried to break free, but I pushed the point deeper into his stomach until the knife spit red onto his pink shirt.

‘Okay! Okay! Okay!’ he shouted. ‘Fuck! Arey, pagal hai tum?’ Have you gone mad?

Several men began to approach me. I pressed the knife a little harder.

‘No! No!’ Danda shouted. ‘Get the hell back, you guys! He’s cutting me here!’

The men stopped. Without taking my eyes off Danda’s face, I spoke to Vishnu.

‘My knives,’ I mumbled, my lips as numb as the heel of a bricklayer’s hand. ‘Bring them here. Give them to me.’

Vishnu hesitated. I saw the terror in Danda’s sweat. He was more afraid of his employer’s disregard than he was of my anger.

At last, Vishnu slouched toward us with the two knives. When he handed them to me, I shoved them into the belt at the back of my trousers, holding the stiletto at Danda’s belly.

Vishnu began to tug on Danda’s shirt, wanting to pull him away from me, and back into the warehouse. I resisted, pressing the knife just a little harder against Danda’s soft stomach. A half-centimetre of the blade was inside his body. One centimetre more would penetrate an organ.

‘Wait! Wait!’ Danda shrieked in panic. ‘I’m bleeding! He’s gonna kill me!’

‘What do you want?’ Vishnu asked.

‘Tell me about Pakistan,’ I said.

Vishnu laughed. It was a good laugh, clear and clean. It was the kind of laugh that would’ve endeared him to me on another day, when he hadn’t introduced me to his pool furniture.

‘I like you, and I feel like killing you, at the same time,’ he said, his dark-rimmed eyes gleaming. ‘That’s a peculiar talent you’ve got.’

‘Tell me about Pakistan,’ I said.

‘You really don’t know anything, do you?’ Vishnu sighed, as his smile died. ‘We saw that you went to a Council meeting, and with your Goa trip and all, we assumed, like, that you must be knowing what’s going on. Your guys are really keeping you in the dark, my friend. That’s dangerous, for you. Not to mention a little… insulting, na?’

‘Your man here will be in the dark any second now, if you don’t answer my question. I wanna know what this was all about. Tell me about Pakistan.’

‘If I tell you what I know, you’ll tell Sanjay,’ he replied, stifling a yawn.

There was a fine but deep scar over his right eye. He rubbed a fingertip along the cicatrice as he spoke.

‘That would give Sanjay an advantage. I can’t allow that. Let Danda go. Get on your motorcycle and go. If you kill Danda, I’ll have to kill you. He’s my cousin. And I don’t want to kill you. I don’t want to kill anyone. Not today. It’s my wife’s birthday, you know, and there’s a party.’

He shifted his gaze to stare at the sodden clouds overhead.

‘Go fast,’ he said, looking back at me. ‘We thought you knew something, but it’s obvious that you don’t. When you know more, and you want to talk, you know where to contact me. No hard feelings. These things happen. As the Americans say, I am owing one on you.’

‘Not as much as I’m owing one on you,’ I said, stepping away from Danda, and backing toward the bike.

He laughed again.

‘Let’s call this even, and start fresh and clean. Leave me a message here, when you want to get in touch. One way or another, I’ll come to know.’

Chapter Eleven

Every man takes a beating in his own way. My way, in those years, was to learn everything I could about the men who beat me, and then wait for Fate to meet me halfway.

When I escaped from prison, I punched a hole in the ceiling of an office, climbed through to the roof, and escaped over the front wall in broad daylight, with my friend. The ceiling we escaped through was in the office of the Chief Security Officer, the man responsible for having my friend, and me, and dozens of other men beaten, beyond reason or law.

I’d watched him for months. I’d studied his habits and moods. And I knew the seven-minute window, every day, when he’d be out of his office, leaving the door unlocked. We stood on his desk to punch the hole to freedom. He lost his job, when we escaped, and Fate took a holiday.

I don’t like being slapped around. I wanted to know about the men who’d done it. I wanted to know everything about them.

At the second gap in the road divider I turned the bike around, and rode back the way I’d come. I parked in the shade of some trees beside a little row of shops, on the opposite side of the street from the warehouse.

I turned off the engine. Passers-by and shopkeepers stared at my bloody face, but hurried away or averted their eyes when I stared back at them. After a time, a man selling cleaning cloths for cars and motorcycles approached me. I bought one of the longest cloths, but before giving the cloth-seller his money, I asked him to run some errands for me.

In five minutes he returned with a packet of codeine tablets, some adhesive bandages, a bottle of vodka, and two clean towels.

I paid the cloth-seller, found an open drain, and washed my face with a cloth soaked in vodka, cleaning off the running wounds with dabs from the clean towel.

A barber serving clients beneath a conversation-tree offered me his mirror. I fixed it to a ribbon on the tree, and dressed the two worst cuts on my face. Finally I took the cloth-seller’s black rag, and wound it around my forehead in an Afghan turban.

The clients and friends squatting around the barber’s chair in the shade nodded and wagged varying degrees of disapproval or consolation.

I took an empty glass, poured myself a shot of vodka and drank it. Holding bottle and glass in one hand, I ripped open a packet of codeine tablets with my teeth, shook four into the glass, and half-filled it with vodka. The level of approval rose among the shaving club. When I drank the glass down and offered the men the rest of the bottle, a little cheer went up.

I went back to sit on my bike, out of view, and stared through desert-dry leaves of sun-withered trees at the warehouse, where my blood was still wet on the floor.

They came out in a laughing, joking group, shoving and teasing the thin man with the moustache, Danda. They squeezed into two Ambassador cars, and drove out into the flow of traffic heading toward Tardeo.

Giving them half a minute, I followed the cars, careful to stay out of mirror range.

They passed through Tardeo, kept on through Opera House junction and into the main road. It was a long, leafy boulevard, running parallel to one of the city’s main train lines.

The cars stopped at the gate of a mansion complex, not far from the main station at Churchgate. The high, metal gates opened quickly, the cars drove inside, and the gates swung shut again.

I rode past, glancing up at the tall windows of the triple-fronted mansion. Wooden storm shutters covered all the windows. Dusty, blood-red geraniums spilled over the rail of the first-floor balcony. They dripped all the way to the rusted iron spears on top of a security wall, concealing the ground floor.

I slammed the bike into the heavy traffic, moving toward Churchgate station and beyond, past the thirsting, ochre playing fields of Azad Maidan.

I took my rage and fear out on the road, cutting between cars, fighting back against the city by challenging and beating every other bike that I passed.

I pulled up near KC College, close to Sanjay’s mansion. The school was one of Bombay’s finest. Well-dressed, fashion-conscious students crowded the street, their young minds glittering in the compass of their smiles. They were the hope of the city: the hope of the world, in fact, although not many knew it, at the time.

‘I swear,’ a voice from behind me said. ‘Fastest white man in Bombay. I’ve been trying to catch you for the last five -’

It was Farid the Fixer, the young gangster who blamed himself for not being with Khaderbhai at the end, in the killing snows of Afghanistan. He broke off suddenly as I removed the soft black cloth I’d used as a turban.

‘Oh, shit, man! What happened to you?’

‘Do you know if Sanjay’s at home?’

‘He is. Sure. Come on, let’s get inside.’

When I made my report to Sanjay, sitting at the glass and gilt table in his dining room, his expression was calm and almost dismissive. He asked me to repeat the names I’d heard them use, and the faces I’d seen.

‘I’ve been expecting this,’ he said.

‘Expecting it?’ I said.

‘Why didn’t you tell Lin?’ Farid demanded. ‘Or me, so I could ride with him.’

Sanjay ignored us and began to pace the long room.

His handsome face had begun to age beyond his years. The ridge-and-valley depressions below his eyes had deepened to dark, hard-edged troughs. Worry lines flared out from the corners of his bloodshot eyes, fading in the new grey that began at his temples, and streaked the gloss-black hair.

He drank too much, and he did too much of everything else he enjoyed. He was a young man in charge of an empire, burning youth into age.

‘What do you think they were really after?’ he asked me, after a long pause.

‘Why don’t you tell me? What’s the deal with Pakistan? What else didn’t you tell me, when you sent me to Goa?’

‘I tell you what you need to know!’ Sanjay snapped.

‘This was something that I needed to know before today,’ I said evenly. ‘You weren’t tied to that lounge chair, Sanjay. I was.’

‘Damn right!’ Farid said.

Sanjay let his eyes drift to his hands, resting on the glass table. His biggest fear, reasonably enough, was a bloody gang war that took most of the lives and power from one gang, and all the lives and power from another. Anything short of that, in his eyes, was a victory. It was the only thing we agreed on, in all the missions and battles of the last two years.

‘There are things in play here that you don’t know, and can’t understand,’ he said. ‘I’m running this Company. I tell you both what you need to know, and nothing more. So, fuck you, Lin. And fuck you, Farid.’

‘Fuck me, Sanjay?’ Farid spat at him. ‘That’s all the respect I get? How about I fuck your happiness right here and now?’

He took a step toward Sanjay but I stopped him, my hands on his chest.

‘Take it easy, Farid brother,’ I said. ‘This is just what they wanted, when they slapped me around today – us, falling out with each other.’

‘Fuck me?’ Farid snarled. ‘Say it again, boss. Say it again.’

Sanjay stared at the young fighter for a while, and then his cold eyes drifted to mine.

‘Tell me the truth, Lin. What did you tell them?’

It was my turn to anger. Rage drew in a breath. My lips widened, splitting cuts.

‘What are you trying to say, boss?’

He frowned, irritated.

‘Come on, Lin,’ he said. ‘This is the real world. People talk. What did you tell them?’

I was angry enough to beat him senseless; angrier at him, in fact, than the men who’d nearly beaten me senseless.

‘Of course he didn’t say anything!’ Farid said. ‘It’s not the first time he’s been kicked by the other side. Me, too. And you, too, Sanjay. Stop being so disrespectful. What’s the matter with you, boss?’

Sanjay flashed a look, exasperated to the point of being vicious, revealing how close he was to the edge. Farid held his gaze for a moment, but then looked away.

Sanjay turned back to me.

‘You can go, Lin,’ he said. ‘And whatever you did or didn’t say before, keep your mouth shut about this from now on.’

‘About what, Sanjay? About the act they put on today? One minute they’re gonna kill me, the next minute they’re letting me go. They wanted me to come back here, in this condition, and say the word Pakistan to you. It’s a message. I’m the message. This Scorpion guy, Vishnu, is big on messages.’

‘So am I,’ Sanjay smiled. ‘And I write messages in blood, like they do. In a time and manner of my own choosing.’

‘Whatever you do, don’t do it for me.’

‘Are you telling me what to do? Who the fuck do you think you are?’

There was a dragon inside me, all fire, but I didn’t want some other soldier to sit in a chair, as I’d done, until the ceiling turned red.

‘Don’t square up for me, boss. When the time comes, I’ll handle that myself.’

‘You’ll do what you’re told, and when you’re told.’

‘I’ll square this up myself, Sanjay,’ I repeated. ‘In a time and manner of my own choosing. Just so we’re clear that I told you, in advance.’

‘Get out,’ Sanjay said, his eyes narrowing. ‘Both of you. Don’t come near me, Lin, unless I send for you. Get out.’

On the street Farid stopped me, angrier than I was.

‘Lin,’ he said quietly, his eyes wider than rage. ‘I don’t give a shit what Sanjay says. He’s weak. He’s nothing. I have no respect for him any more. We’ll find Abdullah. We’ll go, just the three of us, without saying a thing. We’ll kill this Vishnu, the one in charge, and those other gandus, Danda and Hanuman.’

I smiled, bathing my wounded face in the warmth of his brave heart.

‘It’s okay. Leave it alone. Right place and right time, brother. One way or another, I’ll see those guys again, and if I need you, I’ll make sure to call you.’

‘Night and day, man,’ he replied, shaking hands.

He rode away, and I looked back at Sanjay’s mansion: another mansion, in a city of slums. The street windows were sealed, red metal shutters rusted into their slides. A withered hedge clung to a wrought-iron fence.

It was a lot like the house the Scorpions returned to, after they’d worked me over. It was too much like that house.

You can respect a man’s rights or opinions without knowing the man at all. But you can only respect the man himself when you find something in him that’s worthy of the word.

Farid didn’t look up to Sanjay, and it was clear that others on the Council felt the same way. I’d never looked up to Sanjay, but still I worked for him, under the protection of the Company that bore his name.

It was a matter of conscience for me, and perhaps for some of the others, but the erosion of authority was everything for Sanjay. Every gang is a totem of respect. Every leader is a portrait of faith.

Where was the rain? I felt dirty: beat up and dirty. I was falling. Everything was falling: everything but the rain. My heart was a hostage, somewhere, and I was writing the ransom note.

The world of weeks ago, when I’d left for Goa, was navigating by different stars. A weakened leader, propped up by Afghan guards, a fourteen-year-old boy, Tariq, dreaming of the power to command killers and thieves, the morning torture with the word Pakistan, Lisa, Karla, Ranjit: nothing was the same, and nowhere looked the same.

I was lost. And dirty. And beat up. I had to find my way. I had to stop falling. I turned my back on Sanjay’s mansion and rode away, pushing another raft of hope into that little ocean of minutes, my life.

Chapter Twelve

There was a note from Lisa on the kitchen table when I returned home. It said she’d missed me, and was going shopping with our friend, Vikram. She suggested that we should meet later, back at the apartment.

Relaxing for the first time since Vishnu’s men picked me up, I locked the door and leaned against the wall. It didn’t last long. I slid down the wall and sat on the floor.

It was still early. I’d forged three passports, been kidnapped, beaten, and debriefed, and it was still only two in the afternoon.

I’ve known friends who’ve gone through beatings, and don’t miss a step. I never learned to take the hits so easily. I could keep it inside and hold the line for as long as it took me to find a safe place, but as soon as I closed a sheltered door, the avalanche always began. And it took a while, that day, to get my heart under control, and stop my hands from shaking.

I had a shower, scrubbing at the cuts on my face and neck with a bristle brush and strong disinfectant. The wounds were clean, no small matter in a tropical city, but they began to bleed again. I drowned them in aftershave.

As the pain burned white dots in the space before my eyes, I filed it away for future reference: when the reckoning with Danda the moustache guy came, I had to remember to bring aftershave.

Bruises and welts were appearing in every place that Danda’s bamboo cane had struck. It was a forensic match for the marks I’d worn before, in prison: the marks I saw on other prisoners in the shower.

I looked away from the mirror, forcing myself to forget; another prison trick. In twenty minutes I was on my bike again, dressed in clean jeans and boots, a red T-shirt and my cut-off vest.

I rode along beside the fishermen’s coves to the Colaba Back Bay, to keep the appointment in the slum.

The land everywhere around me had been reclaimed from the sea, stone by stone. Tall, modern apartment buildings crowded together on the new stone ocean, and showered precious shade on wide, leafy streets.

It was an expensive, desirable area, with the President hotel as a figurehead on the prow of the suburb. The little shops that lined the three main boulevards were freshly painted. Flower boxes decorated many of the windows. The servants who moved back and forth from the residential towers to the shops were dressed in their best saris and bleached white shirts.

As the main road swung left and then right beside the World Trade Centre, the scene changed. The trees became more sparsely planted, and then stopped altogether. The shade began to fade as the last shadow cast by a tower surrendered to the sun.

And the heat from that sun, hovering, obscured by heavy clouds, beat down on the dust-grey ocean of the slum, where the ridges of low rooftops rolled away to the tattered horizon in ragged waves of worry and struggle.

I parked the bike, took the medicines and bandages from the saddlebags, and tossed a coin to one of the kids who offered to watch the bike for me. There wasn’t really a need. No one stole anything in that area.

As I entered the slum, making my way along a wide, sandy, uneven path, the smell of the open latrine that lined the road flattened the breath in my lungs. A fist of nausea twisted my stomach.

The beating in the warehouse came back hard and fast. The sun. The beating. The sun was too hot. I staggered to the side of the path. The surge of nausea erupted and I stooped, my hands on my knees, and threw up anything I still had inside onto the weeds beside the road.

The children of the slum chose that moment to rush out of the lanes to greet me. Crowding around me as I shuddered and shivered, they tugged at the sleeves of my shirt and shouted my name.

‘Linbaba! Linbaba! Linbaba!’

Pulling myself together I allowed the children to drag me with them into the slum. We worked our way through the narrow, stumble-foot lanes between huts made from plastic sheets, woven mats and bamboo poles. The huts, covered in dust accumulated through eight months of the dry season, looked like desert dunes.

Gleaming towers of pots and pans, garlanded images of gods, and smooth, highly polished earthen floors glimpsed their way through low doorways, attesting to the neat, ordered lives that persisted within.

The children led me directly to Johnny Cigar’s house, not far from the seashore boundary.

Johnny, who was the head man in the slum, was born on the streets of the city. His father, a Navy man on temporary assignment in Bombay, had abandoned Johnny’s mother when he learned that she was pregnant. He left the city on a warship, bound for the Port of Aden. She never heard from him again.

Cast out by her family, Johnny’s mother had moved into a pavement-dweller settlement made from sheets of plastic strung across a section of footpath near Crawford Market.

Johnny was born in the day-long shout, shove and shuffle heard from one of Asia’s largest covered markets. His ears rang from early morning until last light with shrill or braying cadenzas of street sellers and stallholders.

He’d lived the whole of his life in pavement communities and crowded slums, and only ever seemed truly at home in the surge and swirl of the crowd. The few times I’d seen him alone, walking the strip of sea coast beside the slum, or sitting in a lull of afternoon outside a chai shop, he’d seemed diminished by the solitude; withdrawn into a smaller sense of himself. But in any crowd, he was a jewel of his people.

‘Oh, my God!’ he cried, when he saw my face. ‘What the hell happened to you, man?’

‘It’s a long story. How you doin’, Johnny?’

‘Oh, shit, man. You got a solid pasting!’

I frowned at him. Johnny knew that frown. We’d lived together as neighbours in the slum for eighteen months, and had continued as good friends for years.

‘Okay, okay, thik hai, baba. Come, sit down. Have some chai. Sunil! Bring chai! Fatafat!’ Super quickly!

I sat on an empty grain drum, watching Johnny give instructions to a team of young men, who were making final preparations for the coming rain.

When the previous head man of the slum retired to his village, he nominated Johnny Cigar as his successor. A few voices grumbled that Johnny wasn’t the ideal choice, but the love and admiration everyone felt for the retiring head man silenced their objections.

It was an honorary position, with no authority beyond that contained within the character of the man who held it. After almost two years in the job, Johnny had proven himself to be wise in the settlement of disputes, and strong enough to inspire that ancient instinct: the urge to follow a positive direction.

For his part, Johnny enjoyed the leadership role, and when all else failed to resolve a dispute, he went with his heart, declared a holiday in the slum, and threw a party.

His system worked, and was popular. There were people who’d moved into that slum because there was a pretty good party every other week to settle a dispute peacefully. People brought disputes from other slums, to have them resolved by Johnny. And little by little, the boy born on the pavement was Solomon to his people.

‘Arun! Get down to the mangrove line with Deepak!’ he shouted. ‘That flood wall collapsed yesterday. Get it up again, fast! Raju! Take the boys to Bapu’s house. The old ladies in his lane have no plastic on the roof. Those fucking cats pulled it off. Bapu has the sheets. Help him get them up. The rest of you, keep clearing those drains! Jaldi!’ Fast!

The tea arrived, and Johnny sat down to drink with me.

‘Cats,’ he sighed. ‘Can you explain to me why there are cat people in this world?’

‘In a word? Mice. Cats are handy little devils.’

‘I guess so. You just missed Lisa and Vikram. Has she seen your face like this?’

‘No.’

‘Hell, man, she’s gonna have a fit, yaar. You look like somebody ran over you.’

‘Thanks, Johnny.’

‘Don’t mention,’ he replied. ‘Hey, that Vikram, he doesn’t look too good either. He’s not sleeping well, I think.’

I knew why Vikram didn’t look too good. I didn’t want to talk about it.

‘When do you think?’ I asked, looking at the black, heaving clouds.

The smell of rain that should-but-wouldn’t fall was everywhere in my eyes, in my sweat, in my hair: first rain, the perfect child of monsoon.

‘I thought it would be today,’ he replied, sipping at his tea. ‘I was sure.’

I sipped my tea. It was very sweet, laced with ginger to defeat the heat that pressed down on every heart in the last days of the summer. The ginger soothed the cuts on the inside of my mouth, and I sighed with pleasure.

‘Good chai, Johnny,’ I said.

‘Good chai,’ he replied.

‘Indian penicillin,’ I said.

‘There is… there is no penicillin in this chai, baba,’ Johnny said.

‘No, I mean -’

‘We never put penicillin in our tea,’ he declared.

He seemed offended.

‘No, no,’ I reassured him, knowing that I was heading down a dead-end street. ‘It’s a reference to an old joke, a joke about chicken soup, a joke about chicken soup being called Jewish penicillin.’

Johnny sniffed at his tea charily.

‘You… you smell chickens in the tea?’

‘No, no, it’s a joke. I grew up in the Jewish part of my town, Little Israel. And, you know, it’s a joke everybody tells, because Jewish people are supposed to offer you chicken soup, no matter what’s wrong with you. You’ve got an upset stomach, have a little chicken soup. You’ve got a headache, have a little chicken soup. You’ve just been shot, have a little chicken soup. And in India, tea is like chicken soup for Jewish people, see? No matter what’s wrong, a strong glass of chai will fix you up. Geddit?’

His puzzled frown cleared in a half-smile.

‘There’s a Jewish person not far from here,’ he said. ‘He stays in the Parsi colony at Cuffe Parade, even though he’s not a Parsi. His name is Isaac, I believe. Shall I bring him here?’

‘Yes!’ I replied excitedly. ‘Get the Jewish person, and bring him here!’

Johnny rose from his stool.

‘You’ll wait for me here?’ he asked, preparing to leave.

‘No!’ I said, exasperated. ‘I was joking, Johnny. It was a joke! Of course I don’t want you to bring the Jewish person here.’

‘It’s really no trouble,’ he said.

He stared at me, bewildered, trapped a half-step away, uncertain whether he should fetch Isaac-the-Jewish-person or not.

‘So… ’ I said at last, looking at the sky for an escape from the conversational cul-de-sac, ‘when do you think?’

He relaxed, and scanned the clouds churning in from the sea.

‘I thought it would be today,’ he replied. ‘I was sure.’

‘Well,’ I sighed, ‘if not today, tomorrow. Okay, can we do this now, Johnny?’

‘Jarur,’ he replied, moving toward the low doorway of his hut.

I joined him inside, closing the flimsy plywood door behind me. The hut, made of thin, tatami-style matting strung to bare bamboo poles, was paved on the bare earth with extravagantly detailed and coloured tiles. They formed a mosaic image of a peacock, with its tail fanned out against a background of trees and flowers.

The cupboards were filled with food. The large, metal, rat-proof wardrobe was an expensive and much-prized item of furniture in the slum. A battery-powered music system occupied a corner of a metal dresser. Pride of place went to a three-dimensional illustration of the flogged and crucified Christ. New floral-print mattresses were rolled up in a corner.

The traces of relative luxury attested to Johnny’s status and commercial success. I’d given him the money as a wedding present, to buy a small, legal apartment in the neighbouring Navy Nagar district. The gift was intended to allow him to escape the uncertainty and hardship of life in the illegal slum.

Aided by the enterprising spirit of his wife Sita, the daughter of a prosperous chai shop owner, Johnny used the apartment as collateral for a loan, and then rented it out at a premium. He used the loan to buy three slum huts, rented the three illegal huts at market rates, and was living in exactly the same slum lane where I’d first met him.

Moving a few things aside, Johnny made a place for me to sit. I stopped him.

‘Thanks, brother. Thanks. I don’t have time. I have to find Lisa. I’ve been one step behind her all day long.’

‘Lin brother, you’ll always be one step behind that girl.’

‘I think you’re right. Here, take this.’

I gave him the bag of medicines that Lisa had given me, and pulled a wad of money bound with tight elastic bands from my pocket. It was enough to pay two months’ wages for the two young men who worked as first aid attendants in the free clinic. There was also a surplus to cover the purchase of new bandages and medicines.

‘Is there anything special?’

‘Well… ’ he said, reluctantly.

‘Tell me.’

‘Anjali – Bhagat’s daughter – she went for the exams.’

‘How’d she do?’

‘She came top. And not just top of her class, mind you, but top of the whole Maharashtra State.’

‘Smart kid.’

I remembered the little girl she was, years ago, when she’d helped me from time to time in the free clinic. The twelve-year-old kept the names of all the patients in the slum in her head, hundreds of names, and became a friend to every one of them. In visits to the clinic in the years since, I’d watched her learn and grow.

‘But smart is not enough in this, our India,’ Johnny sighed. ‘The Registrar of the university, he is demanding a baksheesh of twenty thousand rupees.’

He said it flatly, without rancour. It was a fact of life, like the diminishing numbers of fish in fishermen’s nets, and the daily increase of cars, trucks and motorcycles on the roads of the once genteel Island City.

‘How much have you got?’

‘Fifteen thousand,’ he replied. ‘We collected the money from everyone here, from all castes and religions. I put in five thousand myself.’

It was a significant commitment. I knew Johnny wouldn’t see that money repaid in anything less than three years.

I pulled a roll of American dollars from my pocket. In those days of the rabid demand for black market money, I always carried at least five currencies with me at any one time: deutschmarks, pounds sterling, Swiss francs, dollars and riyals. I had about three hundred and fifty dollars in notes. At black market rates it was enough to cover the shortfall in Anjali’s education bribe.

‘Lin, don’t you think… ’ Johnny said, tapping the money against his palm.

‘No.’

‘I know, Linbaba, but it’s not a good thing that you give money without telling the people. They should know this thing. I understand that if we give without praise, anonymously, it is a ten-fold gift in the eyes of God. But God, if He’ll forgive me for speaking my humble mind, can be very slow in passing out praise.’

He was almost exactly my own height and weight, and he carried himself with the slightly pugnacious shoulder and elbow swing of a man who made fools suffer well, and fairly often.

His long face had aged a little faster than his thirty-five years, and the stubble that covered his chin was peppered with grey-white. The sand-coloured eyes were alert, wary, and thoughtful.

He was a reader, who consumed at least one new self-help book every week, and then unhelpfully nagged his friends and neighbours into reading them.

I admired him. He was the kind of man, the kind of friend, who made you feel like a better human being, just for knowing him. Strangely, stupidly, I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that. I wanted to do it. I started to do it a few times, but wouldn’t let myself speak the words.

My exile heart at that time was all doubt and reluctance and scepticism. I gave my heart to Khaderbhai, and he used me as a pawn. I gave my heart to Karla, the only woman I’ve ever been in love with, and she used me to serve the same man, the man we both called father, Khaderbhai. Since then I’d been on the streets for two years, and I’d seen the town come to the circus, the rich beg paupers, and the crime fit the punishment. I was older than I should’ve been, and too far from people who loved me. I let a few, not many, come close, but I never reached out to them as they did to me. I wouldn’t commit, as they did, because I knew that sooner or later I’d have to let go.

‘Let it go, Johnny,’ I said softly.

He sighed again, pocketed the money, and led the way outside the hut.

‘Why are Jewish people putting penicillin in their chickens?’ he asked me as we gazed at the lowering sky.

‘It was a joke, Johnny.’

‘No, but those Jewish people are pretty smart, yaar. If they’re putting penicillin in their chickens, they must have a damn good -’

‘Johnny,’ I interrupted, with a raised hand, ‘I love you.’

‘I love you, too, man,’ he grinned.

He wrapped his arms around me in a tight hug that woke every one of the wounds and bruises on my arms and shoulders.

I could still feel the strength of him; still smell the coconut oil in his hair as I walked away through the slum. The smothering clouds threw early evening shadows on the weary faces of fishermen and washerwomen, returning home from the busy shoreline. But the whites of their tired eyes glowed with auburn and rose-gold as they smiled at me. And they all smiled, every one of them, as they passed, crowns gleaming on their sweated brows.

Chapter Thirteen

When I stepped into the laughing broil of Leopold’s, I scanned the tables for Lisa and Vikram. I couldn’t see them, but my eyes met those of my friend Didier. He was sitting with Kavita Singh and Naveen Adair.

‘A jealous husband!’ Didier cried, admiring my battered face. ‘Lin! I’m so proud of you!’

‘Sorry to disappoint you,’ I shrugged, reaching out to shake hands with him and Naveen. ‘Slipped in the shower.’

‘Looks like the shower fought back,’ Naveen said.

‘What are you, a plumbing detective now?’

‘Whatever the cause, I am delighted to see sin on your face, Lin!’ Didier declared, waving to the waiter. ‘This calls for a celebration.’

‘I hereby call this meeting of Sinners Anonymous to order!’ Kavita announced.

‘Hi, my name’s Naveen,’ the young detective said, buying in, ‘and I’m a sinner.’

‘Hi, Naveen,’ we all replied.

‘Where to begin… ’ Naveen laughed.

‘Any sin will do,’ Didier prompted.

Naveen decided to think about it for a while.

‘It suits you, this new look,’ Kavita Singh said to me as we sat down.

‘I’ll bet you say that to all the bruises.’

‘Only the ones I put there myself.’

Kavita, a beautiful, intelligent journalist, had a preference for other girls, and was one of the few women in the city who was unafraid to declare it.

‘Kavita, Naveen will not reveal his sins!’ Didier pouted. ‘At least tell me some of yours.’

She laughed, and began reciting a list of her sins.

‘Those rocks in your shower,’ Naveen remarked quietly, leaning close to me, ‘did a professional job.’

I glanced at him quickly. I was ready to like him. I already did like him. But he was still a stranger, and I wasn’t sure that I could trust him. How did he know that I’d received a professional beating?

Reading my expression, he smiled.

‘All the hits, on both sides of your face, are bunched up in a tight pattern, left and right,’ he said quietly. ‘Your eyes are blacked, but they’re still open, and you can see okay. That’s not easy to do. Your wrists are marked, too. It’s not hard to figure that somebody who knew what he was doing smacked you around pretty good.’

‘I’m guessing there’s a point in there, somewhere.’

‘The point is, I’m hurt.’

‘You’re hurt?’

‘You didn’t invite me.’

‘I wasn’t the one sending out cards.’

‘Likely to be any more parties?’ he smiled.

‘I don’t know. You feeling lonely?’

‘Count me in, if you need a date, next time.’

‘I’m good,’ I said. ‘But thanks for the offer.’

‘Please!’ Didier insisted as a glowering waiter slammed the drinks down on the table. ‘Stop whispering, you two. If it’s not an illicit lover or jealous husband to boast about, you’ll have to offer another sin to discuss.’

‘I’ll drink to that,’ Kavita encouraged.

‘Do you know why sin is banned?’ Didier asked her, his blue eyes glittering.

‘Because it’s fun?’ Kavita offered.

‘Because it makes fun of people who ban sin,’ Didier said, raising his glass.

‘I’ll make the toast!’ Kavita announced, raising her glass to Didier’s. ‘To tying people up and giving them a good smack!’

‘Excellent!’ Didier cried.

‘I’m in,’ Naveen said, raising his glass.

‘No,’ I said.

It wasn’t the day to toast people being tied up; not for me.

‘Okay, Lin,’ Kavita snapped. ‘Why don’t you make the toast?’

‘To freedom, in all its forms,’ I said.

‘I’m in again,’ Naveen said.

‘Didier is always for freedom,’ Didier agreed, raising his glass.

‘Alright,’ Kavita said, banging her glass against ours. ‘To freedom, in all her forms.’

We’d just put our glasses back on the table when Concannon and Stuart Vinson joined us.

‘Hey, man,’ Vinson said, offering a handshake like a good-natured smile. ‘What the hell happened to you?’

‘Someone kicked his fuckin’ arse,’ Concannon laughed, his Northern Irish drawl prowling. ‘And it looks like they threw in his head, n’all. What ya been up to, boyo?’

‘He has shower issues,’ Kavita said.

‘Shower issues, does he, indeed?’ Concannon grinned, leaning close to Kavita. ‘And what issues do you have?’

‘You first,’ Kavita replied.

He grinned again, as if he’d won.

‘Me? I take issue with everything that isn’t already mine. And since I’ve let that cat out of the bag, I repeat, what issues do you have?’

‘I have loveliness issues. But I’m in treatment.’

‘Aversion therapy is said to be very effective,’ Naveen said, staring at Concannon.

Concannon looked from one to the other, laughed hard, seized two chairs from a neighbouring table without asking, dragged them to our table and pushed Vinson down into one of them.

He turned his own chair around backwards, and rested his solid forearms on the back of it.

‘What are we drinkin’?’ he asked.

I realised that Didier hadn’t called for drinks, his habit whenever anyone joined him in Leopold’s. I turned my head and saw him staring at Concannon. The last time I’d seen Didier look at someone that hard, he’d had a gun in his hand. Thirty seconds later he’d used it.

I raised my hand to call the waiter. When the drinks were ordered I moved the subject across Didier’s eye line.

‘You look good, Vinson.’

‘I’m damn happy,’ the young American replied. ‘We just made a killing. Fell right into my lap. Well, into our laps, Concannon’s and mine. So, hey, the drinks are on us.’

The drinks arrived. Vinson paid and we raised our glasses.

‘To sweet deals!’ Vinson said.

‘And to the suckers who sweeten them,’ Concannon added quickly.

Our glasses clashed, but Concannon had soured the toast.

‘Ten thousand American dollars each!’ Concannon said, slamming his glass down hard on the table. ‘No better feelin’! Just like comin’ in a rich girl’s mouth!’

‘Hey, Concannon!’ I said.

‘There’s no call for talk like that,’ Vinson added.

‘What?’ Concannon asked, his arms wide with wonder. ‘What?’

He turned his head and leaned the side of his chair toward Kavita.

‘Come on, darlin’,’ he said, his smile as wide as if he was asking her to dance, ‘you can’t be tellin’ me you’re a stranger to the experience. Not with a face and a figure like yours.’

‘Why don’t you talk to me about it?’ Naveen Adair muttered through clenched teeth.

‘Unless you’re a fuckin’ lesbian!’ Concannon continued, laughing so hard that his chair tilted sideways and almost fell.

Naveen began to stand. Kavita put a hand against his chest, holding him back.

‘For Chrissakes, Concannon!’ Vinson spluttered, surprised and confused. ‘Like, what the hell’s the matter with you? You brought me a solid-gold customer, we made a bundle of cash, and we’re supposed to be, like, happy and celebrating. Stop antagonising everybody already!’

‘It’s alright,’ Kavita said, staring evenly at Concannon. ‘I believe in free speech. If you put a hand on me, I’ll cut it off. But if you just sit there, talking like an idiot, hey, you can do that all night long for all I care.’

‘Oh, so, you are a fuckin’ cunt-licker,’ Concannon grinned back at her.

‘As a matter of fact -’ she began.

‘As a matter of fact,’ Didier interrupted her, ‘it’s none of your business.’

Concannon’s grin hardened at the edges. His eyes glittered, sunlight on the back of a cobra’s hood. He turned to face Didier. The menace in his expression was clear. The rudeness to Kavita had been a ruse to provoke Didier.

It worked. Didier’s eyes were indigo flames.

‘You should powder your nose and put on your dress, sweetheart,’ Concannon growled. ‘All you fuckin’ homos should wear dresses. As a warning, like, for the rest of us. If you get fucked like a woman, you should dress like one.’

‘You should have the courage, if not the honour,’ Didier replied evenly, ‘to discuss this privately. Outside.’

‘You’re a fuckin’ unnatural thing,’ Concannon hissed, through barely parted lips.

We were all on our feet. Naveen reached out to grab Concannon’s shirt. Vinson and I separated the two men, as waiters rushed at us from all corners of the bar.

The waiters at Leopold’s had a unique internship in those years: if they put on boxing gloves and lasted two minutes in the back lane with the very big, very tough Sikh head waiter, they got the job. Six of those waiters, directed by the very big, very tough Sikh head waiter, surrounded our table.

Concannon looked around quickly, his hard smile widening to show an uneven set of yellowing teeth. For a few seconds he listened to the voice within, urging him to fight and die. In some men, that’s the sweetest voice that ever speaks to them. Then the viciousness softened into cunning, and he began to back away through the circle of waiters.

‘You know what?’ he said, stepping backwards. ‘Fuck yez! Fuck yez all!’

‘What the hell was that all about?’ Vinson gasped as Concannon stomped out into the street, pushing shoppers aside.

‘It is obvious, Stuart,’ Didier said as we slowly sat down again.

He was the only one of us who hadn’t stood, and the only one who seemed calm.

‘Not to me, man.’

‘I have seen this phenomenon many times, Stuart, in many countries. The man is almost uncontrollably attracted to me.’

Vinson spluttered beer foam across the table. Kavita howled with laughter.

‘Are you saying he’s gay?’ Naveen asked.

‘Does a man have to be gay,’ Didier asked, giving him a look to tan leather, ‘to be attracted to Didier?’

‘Okay, okay,’ Naveen grinned.

‘I don’t think he’s gay,’ Vinson said. ‘He goes to prostitutes. I think he’s just crazy.’

‘You got that right,’ Kavita said, waving her glass in front of his bewildered frown.

Sweetie, who’d been standing well away from the confrontation, slapped a filthy rag on our table as a sign that he was ready to take our order. He picked his crooked nose with his middle finger, wiped it on his jacket, and let out a sigh.

‘Aur kuch?’ he menaced. Anything else?

Didier was about to make an order, but I stopped him.

‘Not for me,’ I said, standing and collecting my keys.

‘But, no!’ Didier protested. ‘One more, surely?’

‘I didn’t finish the last one. I’m riding.’

‘I’m with you, cowboy,’ Kavita said, joining me. ‘I told Lisa I’d call around tonight. I’ll come home with you, if you don’t mind?’

‘Happy to have you along.’

‘But… can a gay man go to prostitutes, like, a lot?’ Vinson asked, leaning toward Didier.

Didier lit a cigarette, examined the glow for a moment, and then addressed Vinson, his eyes narrowing.

‘Have you not heard them say, Stuart, that a gay man can do everything that a man wants?’

‘What?’ Vinson asked, adrift as an iceberg.

‘They also say that ignorance is bliss,’ I said, exchanging a smile with Didier. ‘And I’m gonna follow my bliss home.’

We left the bar and made our way through the crush of shoppers to the parking area, where I’d left my bike.

As I put the key into the ignition, a very strong hand reached out and seized my forearm. It was Concannon.

‘Fuck him, eh?’ he said, smiling widely.

‘What?’

‘Fuck him. The French mincer.’

‘You’re crazier than you know, Concannon.’

‘I can’t argue with that. And I don’t want to argue. I’ve got that money. Ten grand. Let’s go and get drunk.’

‘I’m going home,’ I said, pulling my arm free to put the key in the ignition.

‘Come on, it’ll be fun! Let’s go out, you and me. Let’s go pick a fight. Let’s find some really tough bastards, and hurt them. Let’s have fun, man!’

‘Attractive and all as that -’

‘I’ve got this new Irish music,’ he said quickly. ‘It’s fuckin’ grand. The thing about Irish music, you know, is that it’s so good to fight to.’

‘No.’

‘Ah, come on! At least listen to it, and get drunk with me.’

‘No.’

‘That Frenchman’s a fuckin’ faggot!’

‘Concannon -’

‘You and me,’ he said, softening his voice and forcing a smile almost exactly like a scowl of pain. ‘We’re the same, you and me. I know you. I fuckin’ know you.’

‘You don’t know me.’

He snarled, whirling his head around, and spitting on the ground.

‘I mean, that faggot, think about it. If the whole world was like him, the human race would die out.’

‘And if the whole world was like you, Concannon, we’d deserve to.’

It was hard; too hard. Who was I to throw stones? But I loved Didier, and I’d had all of Concannon I could take for one long day.

His eyes flashed with sudden murderous fury, and I stared back at him, thinking that I’d been tied up and beat up that day, and he could stare all he wanted.

I started the bike, kicked away the side-stand, and helped Kavita to climb up behind me. We rode away without looking back.

‘That guy,’ she shouted, leaning over my shoulder, her lips touching my ear, ‘is out of his bloody mind, yaar.’

‘I only met the guy once before,’ I shouted back. ‘He seemed kind of okay.’

‘Well, somebody emptied his okay basket,’ Kavita said.

‘You could say that about most of us,’ I replied.

‘Speak for yourself,’ Kavita laughed. ‘My basket is a horn of plenty, baby.’

I wasn’t laughing. The look in Concannon’s eyes stayed with me. Even as I brushed aside Lisa’s pain and concern, apologised to her, kissed her, and sat on a wobbly stool in the bathroom while she cleaned and dressed the cuts on my face, I saw Concannon’s eyes: omens in a cave.

‘It suits Lin, this look,’ Kavita said to Lisa, claiming a comfortable place on the couch after I’d been patched up. ‘I think he should pay someone to do it at least once every month. I’ve got a couple of girlfriends who’d do it for free.’

‘You’re not helping, Kavita. I mean, look at him. That’s what a car accident would look like, if cars were made out of people.’

‘Okay,’ Kavita said, ‘I’m really not wanting to get that image in my mind.’

Lisa frowned, and turned back to face me, her hand cradling the back of my head.

‘You’re not going to tell me what the hell happened, are you?’

‘Happened?’

‘You’re a sick man,’ she declared, pushing me away. ‘Did you at least eat something today?’

‘Well… I got kinda busy.’

‘Kavita, will you cook for us? I’m just too emotional to cook right now.’

Kavita cooked one of my favourites, yellow dhal and aloo ghobi, spiced cauliflower-potato mix. It was pretty good, too, and I didn’t know how much I needed it until I ate it. After we cleaned up quickly, we sat together to watch a movie.

It was Konchalovsky’s film of Kurosawa’s Runaway Train, with John Voight riding fearless into the white sky that every outlaw finds, sooner or later, on the horizon of violent desire.

Kavita, who condemned it as testosterone terrorism, insisted that we watch it a second time, but with the sound turned to zero, and with each of us speaking the parts of the characters. We ran the movie again, and laughed our way through the second viewing.

I played the game, making up lines for the characters Kavita gave me, desecrating the beloved movie, but as the light from that runaway train poured onto our laughing faces in the darkened room, other images and other faces from another dark place, earlier that long day, rained into me.

When Lisa put a new film in the player I stood, gathered my keys, and put my two knives into the scabbards.

‘Where are you going?’ Lisa asked from the couch, where she was snuggled in beside Kavita.

‘I’ve got something I have to do,’ I replied, leaning over to kiss her on the cheek.

‘You’re gonna what?’ she demanded. ‘We’re gonna watch another movie here! My choice, this time. It’s not fair that I have to see your testosterone terrorism, and you don’t have to see my oestrogen ecstasy.’

‘Let him go,’ Kavita said, cuddling close. ‘We’ll have a girls’ night in.’

At the door to the living room I turned to look at them again.

‘If I don’t come back tonight,’ I said, ‘don’t give my stuff away, because I always come back.’

‘Very funny,’ Lisa said. ‘Tell me, did you have a stamp collection, when you were a kid?’

‘Please, Lin,’ Kavita laughed. ‘Don’t answer that question.’

‘I tried,’ I said. ‘My father stamped it out. By the way, do you think I’m grouchy?’

‘What?’ they both asked.

‘Someone, a kid I know, he said I’m grouchy. I don’t get it. Do you think I’m grouchy?’

Lisa and Kavita laughed so hard they fell off the couch. When they saw the expression on my face they laughed harder and rolled together, their legs in the air.

‘Come on, it’s not that funny.’

They screamed for me to stop.

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Thanks a lot.’

They were still laughing when I started my bike, pulled out of the driveway, and headed along Marine Drive toward Tardeo.

It was late, and the streets were almost deserted. A scent of iron and salt, the blood of the sea, rose from the crests of waves, exhausting themselves on the walls of the wide bay. That scent rode the midnight breeze into every open window on the boulevard.

Massive black clouds boiled and swarmed overhead, so close that it seemed I could reach up and touch them as I rode. Lightning, silent but sky-wide, ripped the veil of night, shredding the darkness with theatres of cloud in every silver strike.

After eight dry months, the soul of the Island City was begging for rain. Every heart, sleeping or awake, stirred to the roil and rumble of the gathering storm. Every pulse, young or old, was drumming to the rhythm of the coming rain, every sighing breath a part of the waxing wind and the flooding clouds.

I parked the bike in the entrance to a deserted alley. The footpaths nearby were empty, and the few sleepers I saw were stretched out near a line of handcarts, three hundred metres away.

I smoked a cigarette, waiting and watching the quiet street. When I was sure that no-one was awake on the block, I put my cotton handkerchief under the downpipe of the petrol tank on my bike, pulled the feeder tube free, flooded the handkerchief with petrol, and then reconnected the tube.

At the door of the warehouse where they’d slapped me around that afternoon, I broke the padlock on the chain across the door, and slipped inside.

I used my cigarette lighter to find my way to the piece of pool furniture: that banana lounge in acid-green and yellow vinyl. There was an empty drum nearby. I dragged it toward the banana lounge, and sat down.

In a few minutes, my eyes adjusted to the darkness. I made out certain objects and pieces of furniture quite clearly. Among them was a large coil of coconut-fibre rope. The rope they’d used to tie me to the pool chair had been cut from that roll.

I stood up and uncoiled the rope until it tumbled into a large, loose pile. Packing the pile of rope under the banana lounge, I stuffed the petrol-soaked scarf within the fibre strands.

There were empty cardboard cartons, old telephone books, oily rags and other inflammables in the warehouse. I dragged them into a line leading from the pool chair to a row of cabinets and benches where the power tools were displayed, and doused them with everything I could find.

When I lit the scarf it flared up quickly. The flames fluttered and then rushed into a fierce fire that began to consume the pile of rope.

Thick, musty smoke quickly filled the open space. The vinyl banana lounge was putting up a fight. I waited until the fire had prowled along the line of combustible refuse, and then left the warehouse, dragging a heavy oxy-acetylene kit with me.

I let the gas bottles rest in the gutter, out of reach of the fire, and walked slowly to my bike.

The firelight in the windows of the warehouse rippled and throbbed for a time, as if a silent party was underway inside. Then there was a small explosion.

I guessed that a container of glue or paint thinner had exploded. Whatever it was, it brought the fire into the rafters of the warehouse, and sent the first flames and pieces of orange ash into the heavy, humid air.

People began emerging from surrounding shops and houses. They ran toward the fire, but there was nothing they could do. There was little water to spare. The warehouse was a stand-alone building. It was lost to the fire, and everyone knew it, but other buildings wouldn’t burn with it.

As the crowd swelled, the first chai and paan sellers arrived on bicycles to profit from the pool of spectators. Not long behind them were the firemen and the police.

The firemen trained hoses on the sides of the burning building, but the hoses only produced a thin stream of water. The police lashed out with bamboo canes at a few of the spectators, established a command post opposite the fire, and commandeered a chai seller for themselves.

I was getting worried. I wanted to burn down the torture shed. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. Vishnu wanted me to leave a message there, and I was sure that he’d get my message clearly. But I didn’t want the fire to spread.

The firemen in their brass Athenian helmets were helpless. It seemed, for a handful of heartbeats, that the fire might jump the open space to the next building.

Thunder boomed the drum of sky. Every window in the street shuddered. Every heart trembled. Thunder smashed the sky again and again, so fearsome that lovers, neighbours and even strangers reached out to one another instinctively.

Lightning lit lanterns of cloud everywhere at once, directly overhead. Dogs cowered and scampered. A cold wind gusted through the humid night, the blade of it piercing my thin shirt. The freezing wind fled, and a warm, plunging wave of air as damp as sea spray moved through the street like a hand rustling a silk curtain.

It rained. Liquid night, heavy as a cashmere cloak: it rained. And it rained.

The crowd shivered and shouted with delight. Forgetting the fire they jumped and whooped and danced together, laughing madly as their feet splashed on the sodden street.

The fire sizzled, defeated in the flood. Firemen joined the dancers. Someone turned on music somewhere. Cops swayed in a line beside their jeeps. The dancers laughed, soaked through, satin-skin clothes reflecting colours in the puddles at their feet.

I danced on a river of wet light. Storms rolled, while the sea came to the earth. Winds leapt at us like a pack of happy dogs. Lakes of lightning splashed the street. Heat sighed from every stone. Faith in life painted our faces. Hands were laughter. Shadows danced, drunk on rain, and I danced with them, the happy fool I was, as that first flood drowned the sins of the sun.