Chapter Twelve

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

He seemed offended.

Johnny sniffed at his tea charily.

His puzzled frown cleared in a half-smile.

Johnny rose from his stool.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.