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.