Chapter Thirty-Two
When the elevator doors opened, Scorpio George, Naveen Adair and Divya Devnani stepped out.
‘Lin!’ Naveen cried. ‘Where are you going, man? The party’s just getting started!’
‘I’m beat,’ I said, stepping into the elevator and holding the button to keep the doors open. ‘But can you give me a minute?’
‘Oh, please come with us!’ Scorpio pleaded. ‘I want you to tell me about that shooting incident at Leopold’s. Nobody’s talking, and I’m dying to know what happened.’
‘Another time, Scorp.’
‘Okay, then we’ll ride back down with you,’ Naveen said, pulling the others into the elevator with him.
The doors closed, leaving us with our reflected selves in the mirrored walls.
‘There was a very pretty American girl, all blonde hair and brown eyes, waiting upstairs,’ Divya said. ‘Did you meet her?’
‘There’s a very pretty girl waiting for me at home,’ I said.
‘But this girl –’
‘Forget it, Divya!’ I snapped, too harshly.
‘You should take a little time off from that Charm School, motherfucker,’ Divya said matter-of-factly. ‘You sweep a girl off her feet.’
‘I’m sorry, it’s been a rough –’
‘I’ll meet the American girl with brown eyes,’ Scorpio said brightly.
We turned to look at him.
‘I mean . . . if Lin’s, you know, not going to be there at the party, and . . . ’
‘You spruced up some, Scorpio,’ I remarked.
His longish hair was pulled into a ponytail. He wore a yellow shirt, new jeans, a silver-buckled belt and cowboy boots. A ring on his middle finger featured a Greek helmet, in gold, gleaming from the centre of an onyx square.
‘Is it too much?’ he asked, checking himself quickly in the wall mirror. ‘It was Diva’s idea. She said –’
‘It’s good,’ I said. ‘You look like a million dollars. Kudos, Divya.’
‘Thirty-five million dollars, actually,’ Divya replied. ‘And it’s Diva, remember? I swear, if you call me Divya again, I’ll punch you straight in the balls. And I’m short enough and mean enough to do it.’
‘That’s not hyperbole,’ Naveen averred.
‘Okay. You’re Diva, from now on.’
I looked down at her proud, pretty face. She was a short girl, who wore high-heeled shoes so often that it gave her a slightly forward-leaning stance, on the balls of her feet: a leopard-footed posture that made her look as if she was stalking prey. I liked it, and liked her, but just wanted to go home.
The doors opened on the lobby, and I stepped out quickly.
‘Sure we can’t tempt you?’ Naveen asked.
‘Not tonight.’
I pulled him close enough to whisper.
‘That thing at Leopold’s,’ I said quietly. ‘I’m glad you were there, Naveen.’
‘When there’s a reckoning,’ he said, just as quietly, ‘count me in.’
‘I will. Listen, if Didier asks you for any help, do me a good. He’s watching Lisa, while I’m away.’
‘Away?’
‘A week or so. I’ll check in with you, when I get back.’
‘Thik.’
‘And, hey, Scorpio,’ I said, in a louder voice, as Naveen rejoined Diva. ‘Be careful with the girl.’
‘The blonde, with brown eyes?’
‘Any girl,’ I said.
The doors closed, and the lift carried them back to the penthouse party.
I made my way to the bike, paid a tip to the security guards, and rode out into the coursing rain.
Soothing cleansing showers, cold so close to the sea, rolled with me as I rode the length of Marine Drive twice, before turning again and making my way home.
I didn’t know it then, but that fall of purging rain, drops as big as flowers, was the last heavy fall of the Bombay season. The torrents that had swamped the streets of the Island City, and left every patch of dusty earth lush with weeds, was drifting south toward Madras, before riding the sea lane up-drift to Sri Lanka, and the great oceans that had birthed them.
I took the steps two at a time, and rushed into the apartment, spilling water onto the silver-flecked marble of the hallway floor. Lisa wasn’t there.
I stripped off my sodden boots and clothes, scrubbed the cuts on my face clean with disinfectant, and stood in the shower, letting the cold water run on my back, the suburban penitent’s scourge.
I dressed, and was just about to make a pot of coffee, when Lisa walked in.
‘Lin! Where the hell have you been? Are you okay? Oh, God, let me look at your face.’
‘I’m fine. How are you? Has everything been quiet here?’
‘Are you proud of yourself?’
‘What?’
She shoved me, two hands on my chest, then picked up a metal vase, and threw it at me. I ducked, and it crashed into a wall unit, sending things clattering to the floor.
‘Coming home, all beat up like that!’
‘I –’
‘Gang wars in the street! Grow up, for God’s sake!’
‘It wasn’t –’
‘Shooting people at Leopold’s! Are you a complete asshole?’
‘I didn’t shoot any –’
‘Running off to the mountain with Karla.’
‘Okay, okay, so that’s what this is about.’
‘Of course it is!’ she shouted, throwing an ashtray at the wall unit.
She suddenly cried, then suddenly stopped crying and sat down on the couch, her hands folded in her lap.
‘I’m calm now,’ she said.
‘Okay . . . ’
‘I am.’
‘Okay.’
‘It’s not about you,’ she said.
‘Fair enough.’
‘No, really.’
‘Lisa, I didn’t even know she was there. But since you mention Karla, there’s something –’
‘Oh, Lin!’ she cried, pointing at the things that had fallen from the wall unit. ‘Look what happened to the sword! I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean that to happen.’
One of the things that had fallen from the cabinet was Khaderbhai’s sword: the sword that should’ve been willed to Tariq, the boy king, Khaderbhai’s nephew and heir. The sword was broken. The hilt had snapped completely free from the shaft of the sword. It lay in two pieces beside the scabbard.
I picked them up, wondering at the strange frailty of a weapon that had survived battles in the Afghan wars against the British.
‘Can you get it fixed?’ she asked anxiously.
‘I’ll do it when I get back,’ I said flatly, putting the pieces of the sword into the cabinet. ‘I’m going to Sri Lanka tomorrow, Lisa.’
‘Lin . . . no.’
I went to the bathroom, and showered again to cool down. Lisa showered, and joined me as I was drying off. I leaned into the mirror, and put a plaster on the ugly cut that Concannon’s lead sap had left on my cheek.
She talked, warning me about the dangers of going to Sri Lanka, telling me what she’d read in the newspaper, Ranjit’s newspaper, explaining to me that I had no obligation to go, and that I owed the Sanjay Council nothing, nothing, nothing.
When she finished, I pleaded with her to leave Bombay for a while, told her everything I knew about the Leopold’s incident, and warned her that things wouldn’t get better, until I reached some kind of an understanding with Concannon.
‘Enough horrible stuff,’ she said at last. ‘Is it my turn, now?’
I lay back against a stack of pillows on the bed. She was leaning against the doorjamb, her arms folded across her waist.
‘Okay, Lisa, your turn.’
‘If I can’t stop you leaving, it’s time to talk about other things.’
‘As a matter of fact –’
‘Women want to know,’ she said quickly. ‘You’re a writer. You’re supposed to know that.’
‘Women want to know . . . what?’
She joined me on the bed.
‘Everything,’ she said, a hand resting on my thigh. ‘All the stuff you never tell me, for example. The stuff you don’t tell any woman.’
I frowned.
‘Look, they say that women are emotional, and men are rational. Bullshit. If you saw the stuff you guys do, saw it from our point of view, the last thing you’d call it was rational.’
‘Okay.’
‘And women are actually pretty rational. They want clarity. They want an answer. Are you in this, or are you out? Women want to know. Anything less has no guts, and women like guts. That’s rational, in our book, if you’ll forgive the literary metaphor.’
‘Forgiven. What are you talking about?’
‘Karla, of course.’
‘I’ve been trying to talk to you about –’
‘You and Karla,’ she said. ‘Karla and you. On the mountain, and off it. I get it. And I’m cool with it.’
And suddenly it was done: we were two minds, two ways of being, two paradigms whirling apart, leaving phantom limbs where once they’d touched.
‘I can’t shake it, Lisa,’ I said. ‘It’s not Karla, it’s me, and I –’
‘Karla and I have an understanding about you,’ she said impatiently.
‘An . . . understanding?’
‘That’s what the lunch with her at Kayani’s was all about. Weren’t you paying attention?’
Feynman once said that if you understand quantum theory, you don’t. I had no idea what Lisa was talking about.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘It’s not about her, and it’s not about you. It’s about me.’
‘That’s what I was trying to talk about.’
‘No, you weren’t. You were talking about you and Karla. Fine. I get that. But this isn’t about that. This is about me.’
‘This . . . what?’
‘This conversation.’
‘Didn’t I start this conversation?’
‘No, I did,’ she frowned.
‘Was I there, when you did?’
‘Here it is. You can’t love two people, Lin. Not in the right way. Nobody can. She can’t do it, and neither can you. I get that. I really do. But sad and romantic and fucked up and thrilling and wonderful as all that is, it’s irrelevant. This isn’t about her, and it’s not about you. It’s my turn. It’s about me. It’s my shot at the mike, Lin.’
‘It’s what about you?’
‘It’s all about me.’
‘You think you could start this conversation again?’
She looked directly into my eyes, challenging me to stay with her.
‘See, women need to know, it’s that simple.’
‘I got that bit.’
‘And once they know, they can deal with anything.’
‘Deal with . . . what?’
‘Stop beating yourself up, Lin. You’re good at beating yourself up. You could get a prize, if they gave prizes for beating yourself up, and I kinda love that about you, but it’s not needed here. I’m breaking up with you, tonight, and I wanted to talk about it, because I thought you should know why.’
‘I . . . sure . . . of course. What?’
‘I really think you should know.’
‘Can I pretend to know?’
‘Stop kidding around, Lin.’
‘I’m not kidding, I’m just lost.’
‘Okay. It’s like this – I don’t want to explain you any more.’
‘Explain me to your friends, or my enemies?’
‘I don’t give a shit what anybody says about you,’ she said, burning blue into my eyes. ‘And I wouldn’t listen to it. You know that. What I don’t like about what you do is that you like it.’
‘Lisa –’
‘You like having two guns and six false passports and six currencies in the drawer. And you can’t say you do it to survive. You’re smarter than that. I’m smarter than that. The fact is, you like it. You like it a lot. And I don’t want to explain that to myself any more. I don’t like that you. I can’t like that you. I won’t like that you. I’m sorry.’
A man’s a prison. I should’ve told her that I’d quit the Sanjay Company, and the Sri Lanka run was my ticket home. I’d taken a step away from the me that she didn’t like. It wouldn’t have changed her mind, but it was something she had a right to hear. A man’s a prison. I didn’t speak.
‘Karla likes that you,’ she said casually. ‘I think she likes that you even more than you do.’
‘Where did you go, Lisa?’
She laughed, and pretty hard.
‘You really want to know?’
‘Enough with the wanting to know, Lisa.’
She sat up on the bed, her legs crossed. Her blonde hair was tied into a swallowtail, dipping and shaking as she spoke.
‘You know Rish, my partner in the gallery?’
‘How many partners have you got now?’
‘Six. Well –’
‘Six?’
‘So, anyway –’
‘Six?’
‘So, anyway, Rish has been doing a lot of meditation –’
‘Oh, no.’
‘And a lot of yoga studies –’
‘Okay, Lisa, stop. If you tell me there’s a guru behind all this, I’ll be obliged to slap him.’
‘He’s not my guru, he’s Rish’s guru, and that’s not the point. It wasn’t said by a guru, and Rish didn’t say it. A woman said it, I think. I don’t know who she is, actually. But Johnny Cigar gave me a self-help book, and Rish gave me exactly the same book, on the same day. And the quote was in that book – the thing she said.’
‘What thing?’
‘The thing that Rish heard from somewhere, and said to me.’
‘What thing?’
‘Resentment is unmet need or desire,’ she said. ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.’
I thought about it. A writer’s worst instinct, and too often the first, is to look for the flaw in any written or spoken thing that looks good. I didn’t find it.
‘That’s pretty good,’ I conceded.
‘Pretty good! She should get the Nobel Prize for Saying Cool Shit.’
‘Okay,’ I smiled.
‘It ripped my mind apart, Lin, I gotta tell ya. It made so much sense. I suddenly understood exactly why I was feeling so resentful, these last months. I was really out of it on resentment, you know? Like, when you get to the stage where you get irritated by things that used to be cute, only now they’re not cute any more?’
‘How much not cute are we talking about?’
‘A lot not cute.’
‘A lot?’
‘I was muttering,’ she confessed.
‘You were muttering?’
‘I was.’
‘Muttering?’
‘I thought you must’ve heard me, a couple times.’
‘About irritating things I did?’
‘Yes.’
‘Like what?’
‘Well, for starters –’
‘No, don’t tell me. I don’t wanna know.’
‘It might be helpful to your process,’ she suggested.
‘No, I’m good. I’ve already been processed. Go on. You were muttering.’
‘See,’ she said, smoothing out the bedcover in front of her folded legs, her feet asleep against her calves. ‘When I heard those words, resentment is unmet need or desire, I knew how to think about what I was feeling. Do you get that?’
‘Think-feeling. I . . . think I get it.’
‘I had a frame, you know, for the painting of me. I knew what my unmet need was. I knew what my unmet desire was. And when I knew that, I knew it all.’
‘Can you divulge the unmet need?’
‘I need to be free of you,’ she said flatly, her hands pressed into stars on the bed.
‘The new you gave up sugar.’
‘I don’t need it. Not any more,’ she said, tracing a circle on the bedcover with her finger. ‘I don’t have to sugar anything, especially not what I tell myself.’
‘And the unmet desire?’
‘I want to be one hundred per cent inside my own now. I want to be the moment, instead of just watching the moment pass. You know what I’m talking about, right? You get me?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Now. This now. My now. All my nows. That’s what I want. Do you get that?’
‘You’re in the now. I get it. I swear, Leese, if there’s a guru involved in this –’
‘This is all me. This is all mine.’
‘And it’s what you want?’
‘It’s the beginning of what I want, and I’m completely sure of it.’
She was tough. She was superb.
‘Then, if it’s really what you want, I love it, Lisa.’
‘You do?’
‘Of course. You can do anything you put your heart into.’
‘You really think so?’
‘It’s great, Lisa.’
‘I knew you’d get it,’ she said, her eyes blue pools of relief. ‘It’s just that I want a special now, one that’s mine, instead of a constant now, that I constantly share with someone else’s now.’
A constant now, that you constantly share with someone else’s now. It was a pretty good definition of prison.
‘I hear you.’
‘I want to know what it’s like to be me, when it’s just me.’
‘Go get ’em, Lisa.’
She smiled, and let out a weary sigh.
‘It sounds so selfish, but it wasn’t. It was generous, you know, not just to me, but to you and Karla, too. It let me see us all clearly, for the first time. It let me see how much you’re alike, you and her, and how different you both are than me. Do you understand that?’
In a damning way, in a kind and loving way, she was telling me that Karla and I were made for each other: Karla’s edges fitting my scars. True or not, strangely hurtful or not, it didn’t matter, because those minutes weren’t Karla’s or mine: they were hers.
The fall and summit within, what we do, and what we choose to become, are ours alone, as they should be, and must be. Lisa was deep in that serene, uncontradictable stillness born in resolution, and she was gloriously alone with it. She was clear, determined, brave and hopeful.
‘The new you is really something,’ I said quietly.
‘Thank you,’ she said softly. ‘And the new me, broken up with old you, and not sleeping in the same bed as the new you, needs to rent the guest bedroom to sleep in.’
‘Well,’ I laughed, ‘if your now isn’t too compromised by it, no problem.’
‘Oh, no,’ she said seriously, snuggling in beside me, her head on my chest. ‘But I do think, now that we’re separated under the same roof, we should have a few rules.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Like with sleepovers. We should have a sleepover rule.’
‘Sleepovers? Your now is getting more crowded by the minute.’
‘We could hang a sign on the front door.’
‘A sign?’
‘I mean, a sign that only we understand. Like a garden gnome, for example. If the garden gnome is on the left side of the door, one of us has a sleepover guest. If it’s on the right side of the door, no sleepovers.’
‘We don’t have a garden gnome. We don’t have a garden.’
‘We could use that cat statue you don’t like.’
‘I didn’t say I didn’t like it. I like it plenty. I said it didn’t seem to like me.’
‘And you’ll have to forgive the rent, for at least six months.’
‘Just to be clear on the sleepover cat signal,’ I asked. ‘Was it the left side of the door, or the right?’
‘The left. And you’ll have to forgive the rent.’
‘The rent’s already paid for a year, Lisa.’
‘No, I mean my rent, for the guest room. I’ll pay the market rate. I insist. But I put everything I have into the next show, and I’m skinned alive. I won’t be able to pay you for at least six months.’
‘Forget about it.’
‘No, really, I insist on paying,’ she said, punching me in the ribs.
‘Forget about it.’
She hit me again.
‘I give up. I’ll let you pay me back.’
‘And . . . I’ll need an advance,’ she added.
‘An advance?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You don’t work for me, Lisa.’
‘Yes, but I hate the word loan. It sounds like the noise a dog makes, when it’s in pain. I’ve decided, from now on, that when I need a loan I’ll ask for an advance. It’s a much more inspiring word.’
‘Advanced thinking.’
‘But I won’t be able to pay for food, electricity, phone or laundry bills for a while. Every penny of my advance will be tied up.’
‘Covered.’
‘I insist on paying it, when I have enough to spare from my next advance.’
‘Right.’
‘And I’ll need a car, but we can talk about that when you get back.’
‘Sure. Is that it, with the house rules?’
‘There is one other thing.’
‘Let’s have it.’
‘I don’t know. I mean –’
‘Let’s have it.’
‘I’m not cooking any more,’ she said, pressing her lips together until the bottom lip pouted free.
She’d cooked three times, in two years, and it wasn’t pleasant eating.
‘Okay.’
‘To be brutally honest, I absolutely hate cooking. I can’t stand it. I only did it to please you. It was a living hell for me every time, from beginning to end. I’m not doing it any more. I’m sorry, but that’s just how it is, even as a roommate.’
‘Okay.’
‘I don’t want to hurt you, but I don’t want you to get any expectations, either. I’m big into expectations at the moment, as part of my process, and I hose them down before they become –’
‘Resentments?’
‘Exactly! Oh, God, I feel so much better. Do you?’
‘I feel okay,’ I said.
‘You do? Really? It’s important to me. I don’t want to drag any guilt or shame into my now with me. It’s important to me that you care enough to let me do this, and that you feel good about it.’
Good is only half the truth, and truth is only half the story. A small part of me was aggrieved that she was demanding so much and taking so much from the little that we had left. But the bigger part of me had always supposed or expected, however silently and reluctantly, that we’d part from one another one day, and probably with little more than we could hold in our hands. And then there was Karla, always Karla. I had no right to shade a minute of Lisa’s happiness. Good is only half the truth, and truth is only half the story.
‘I’m good, Lisa. I just want you to be happy.’
‘I’m so glad,’ she said, smiling through her lashes. ‘I was dreading this, you know.’
‘Why? When have I ever not listened to you, or not supported you?’
‘It’s not that. It’s more complicated than that.’
‘How?’
‘There are other things and other people to consider.’
‘What things, Lisa? What people?’
‘I don’t want to go into it, now.’
Women want to know? I thought. Men want to know, too.
‘Come on, Lisa –’
‘Look, you’re leaving tomorrow, and I want us to keep feeling happy about how far we’ve come tonight, okay?’
‘If that’s the way you want it.’
‘I do. I’m happy, Lin, and don’t want to spoil it.’
‘I’ll be back soon, a week or so, and we’ll talk again. Whatever help you need, it’s yours. If you want a new place, I’ll set it up, and clear the rent for a year. Whatever you want. Don’t worry.’
‘You’ve really evolved, you know,’ she said wistfully.
‘From what?’
‘From what I met,’ she said.
She looked up at me with an expression I couldn’t recognise, at first, and then I did. It was endearment; the kind of endearment we reserve for very dear friends.
‘Do you remember our first kiss?’ she asked.
‘Afghan Church. They chased us out. We almost got arrested.’
‘Let’s find out,’ she said, moving to sit across me, ‘how we’ll remember our last kiss.’
She kissed me, but the kiss dissolved in whispers and we talked, lying side by side in the dark, until the storm softened and died. When she slept, I rose and packed a bag for the morning’s train ride.
I put my guns, ammunition, long knives, some passports and a few bundles of money in a compartment I’d had made in the back of a heavy chest of drawers. I left extra money for Lisa in the top drawer of the dresser, where she’d find it.
When everything was set, I went to the window and sat in the wicker chair I’d bought for her, high enough to give a view of the street below.
The last lonely chai seller walked past our window, gently ringing the bell on his bicycle to attract the attention of dozing nightwatchmen. Little by little the thring-thring of the bell faded, until the street was silent.
All life orbits that sun, Fate’s heart. Ranjit, Vikram, Dennis the Sleeping Baba, Naveen Adair, Abdullah, Sanjay, Diva Devnani, Didier, Johnny Cigar, Concannon, Vinson, Rannveig, Scorpio, Gemini, Sri Lanka, Lisa: my thoughts, a voyager, sailed from sea to sea, with one star in the black-ink sky, Karla.
Lisa was still asleep when I left, at dawn. I walked, contrition-brisk, to a taxi stand on the causeway. My shadow played like a laughing dog in the yellow morning. A sleepy taxi driver reluctantly accepted double the fare. The empty streets we drove were bright, cleaned by light.
The station, Bombay’s pagan cathedral, urged porters, passengers and burdens into passageways of crucial consequence, every seat precious; every seat important; every seat essential to someone’s destiny.
And when the Madras Express pulled out, at last, my window woke the streets for me, all the way through rain-stained suburbs to the tree line of green mountains and valleys, beyond the city’s grey hunger.
Again-and-again, again-and-again, the train’s rhythm chanted. I felt good: bad and good at the same time. My heart was a question; my head was a command.
Sri Lanka was risky. Lisa was right about that. But Abdullah had spoken to Sanjay, wresting my freedom from him in exchange for the mission I’d promised to do. And one job, like fifty others I’d done, was a small price to pay for a clean exit from the Company.
I was happy for Lisa, happy that she was free of me, if that was what she wanted. I was still feeling the same worried affection for her, but I had to start getting used to the fact that she was already gone: she was gone, and I was on a war train.
Lisa found her truth, and I found mine. I was still in love with Karla, and I couldn’t love anyone else.
It didn’t matter what intrigues Karla was plotting, with Ranjit or against him. It didn’t matter that she’d married someone else, or that I’d tried to love someone else. It didn’t matter if we couldn’t be more than friends. I loved her, and I always would.
I felt good, and bad: one bad mission away from good.
Again-and-again, the train wheels sang, again-and-again, again-and-again, as farms and fields and towns of dreams streamed past my window, and a shawl of sky misted distant mountains with the last of that year’s rain.