Chapter Sixty-Six
Ravi was fast, but I was only a few beats behind him. We rode easily along the dragon spine of Mohammed Ali Road at first, but finally hit a wall of cars, trucks and buses, all of them with their engines turned off.
We had to use the footpaths, filled with people who couldn’t walk on the blocked road. I was glad that Ravi was in front, as he nudged people out of the way with the wheel of his motorcycle. He negotiated the legs and arms and children’s bobbing heads with fluid respect, harming no-one, but maintaining a walking pace. And he repeated only one word, as he rode.
Khaderbhai!
He shouted it again and again, as an incantation. And people moved out of the way each time they heard it.
The Company that Khaderbhai created had become the chrysalis of the Sanjay Company and the calyptra of the Vishnu Company, but when blood was in the fire, only Khaderbhai’s name had the colour of instinct, and the power to part waves of hurrying people.
I was so afraid of losing contact with Ravi, and having my own wave of people to negotiate, that I rode too close to him and bumped his fender several times.
He sounded his horn calmly, to tell me to calm down, and then he went back to shouting that unforgotten name.
Khaderbhai!
We reached a corner close the mosque, but a high wall of motorcycles, handcarts and bicycles blocked the way forward on the footpath. The tide of people surged away, branching off through gaps in the cars on the road.
Through the arches of the pavement awnings we could see smoke, flames and fire trucks. The road beside us was a solid building made of cars and buses.
We shoved our bikes into a doorway, used my chain to lock them together, and climbed the accidental wall of bicycles, baskets and carts, dodging under signs strung outside shops.
We tumbled down the steep metal fall, landing behind a police line, where the jam ended. There was a piece of rope, suspended by the police between the fender of an Ambassador car and the handle of a handcart. It was all that had stopped the flood of people. We lifted the rope and slipped around the shops at the base of the mosque, heading to Khaderbhai’s mansion.
Fire trucks were training powerful hoses on the walls of the mosque, trying to stop the fire from spreading. The mosque seemed to be intact, but when we threaded our way through the black snakes of leaking fire hoses, we saw that Khaderbhai’s mansion was finished.
A lone unit of firemen was trying to slow the fire, but most of the resources had been diverted to stopping the fire from taking the mosque, and becoming a wider catastrophe in the street.
Men from several mafia Companies were already there, standing across the narrow street, staring at the flames painting rage on their faces. They were Hussein Company men, mostly, but there were a few Vishnu men and gangsters from other Companies. There were about twenty of them. Abdullah was in the centre, his eyes savage with fire.
Firemen were holding the gangsters back, pleading with them to withdraw and let them do their job. Abdullah broke ranks. He brushed three firemen aside and knocked out another, who’d tried to stop him entering the building. He disappeared in the flames.
Company men looked at the firemen, wondering if they were going to fight. Firemen wear uniforms. As far as the Company men were concerned, anyone who wears a uniform works for the other side.
The firemen backed away, taking their colleagues with them. They were paid to save people, not fight them. The men who were paid to fight people, the police, rushed toward the retreating firemen.
Fighting the cops is a tricky business. Lots of cops like to fight, but they’re sticklers for rules. No disfigurements, and no weapons: just fair, square, kick the shit out of each other. That pretty much covers it, except for two things. First, they have very long memories: longer than most criminals I’ve met, who are considerably more forgive-and-forget. And second, if things get out of hand, they can shoot you and get away with it.
The Company men put their weapons away, or threw them away, and stood in front of the burning building. The cops kicked in with everything they had, and the gangsters kicked back.
There’s a moment of choice, of course, every second that you live. I watched the fight begin, with fairly even numbers, the Company men holding their own. I saw a new gang of cops running to help their friends. Ravi stepped away from me with another gangster, Tricky, and they broke into a run, throwing their lives at the fight. I could’ve stayed there. I could’ve watched it happen. I didn’t. I dropped my knives behind a handcart, and ran into the mess of what none of us should be.
It was a short run. A cop hit me before I reached the line. He was good. He was quick. I heard the bell, and I didn’t know which round. I followed instinct: duck and cover, then lead with a combination. I came out swinging, but the cop was already at my feet. Tall Tony, tall, skinny Tony, had floored him.
We reinforced the Company line. Cops came to help cops. People were grappling and stumbling. Cops were hitting cops. Company men were hitting friends.
I had a cop by the shirt, and I was twisting it close to me. I figured that if he couldn’t hit me, he couldn’t hit anyone else.
I was wrong, on both counts. He swung a fist over my elbows and connected with some part of my head that shut things down: the part that plays the Clash, in a room somewhere, with a Russian writer, a long way away.
I fell backwards, my hands knotting instinct in his shirt, and he came with me. Other cops came with him, pulling gangsters down into the maul. The front of the mansion had burned, and was starting to collapse. We fell into cindered wood and ashes.
I don’t know how many people were on top of the cop who was on top of me: a tree of humanity had fallen. Incense burned my eyes, as if already lit for the dead, and filled the air around us as pieces of sandalwood smouldered.
Scorched pages from sacred texts burned in the rubble. I smelled hair burning, and too much sweat, from too many bodies, piled too high on top of me.
Bullets started firing from inside the mansion. I was suddenly glad to be covered by bodies.
‘Bullets are exploding in the heat!’ an officer said, in Marathi. ‘They’re going off at random. Hold your fire.’
The cops and Company men on top of me weren’t taking any chances. They hunkered down, pressing into the only hunkering they had, which was me. I was rabbit-breathing, in tiny gasps. The bullets stopped, as the ghost magazines ran their course. Then the arch above our heads gave way, at last. The fallen mob hunkered down a little further.
Fragments of scripture broke from the false arch, and fell on us. I couldn’t lift my arms. My hands were still locked in the cop’s shirt. I couldn’t see. I was breathing ash, in air, but glad to have any air at all.
And then it stopped. The cops and gangsters staggered and stumbled back, one by one. The cop on top of me was the last. He tried to crawl away, but I had his shirt. He kept lurching on his knees, not looking back at me, until I let go.
I got up, wiped my eyes, and looked at the burning house, the house, burning, where Khaderbhai had given me hours of instruction, hours of his life, to argue philosophy.
The arched courtyard was a shivering silhouette, drawn in red-yellow flames. The partitions of the mansion dropped away in sheets. The burning frame, just a star of wooden beams, was ablaze. And it was all gone. Gone.
I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t accept it. The place I’d thought of as eternal, somehow, was gone in flame and ash.
I turned, and saw Abdullah. He was on one knee in the open space, near the mosque. He had the boy king, Tariq, in his arms. People were standing back, awed by their own reverence. Abdullah cradled the boy, but Tariq’s head had already fallen toward the grave, and his strong young arms were seaweed in the ocean of time.
The fighting stopped. The cops established a new barricade a respectful distance away. People rushed through it to touch the dead boy’s cloak.
‘Nazeer?’ I asked Abdullah, when I could push through the thorn of mourners. ‘Did you see him, inside?’
‘I took his body from this boy’s,’ Abdullah said, still kneeling, still crying. ‘He is no more. I could not save his body. He was dead and burning, as I took Tariq.’
Abdullah was also a dying man, and we both knew it. He’d promised his life to Khaderbhai as a shield for the boy, and the boy was dead. The limp body was a tattered flag, draped on Abdullah’s knee. If it took his last breath, Abdullah would make the men who killed Tariq and Nazeer see the same flag in their eyes, before they died.
‘Are you sure he was dead?’
He looked at me, Iranian deserts drifting across his eyes.
‘Alright, alright,’ I said, too shocked to do anything but agree.
Nazeer was a pillar, a stone pillar: the man who tells you the story long after everyone else has died.
‘He was already dead, when you found him?’
‘Yes. His body was burned, on the back, but his sacrifice preserved the face and body of Tariq. They were shot, Lin. Both of them. And their guards are nowhere to be found.’
Mourners, mourning violently, shoved me aside to touch the fallen king. I scrambled through a quickly gathering crowd that no police rope could hold. People were coming from every stairway and narrow lane. I broke through to the main street and clambered over the collapsing wall of bicycles and handcarts to find Ravi, standing next to my bike.
‘Glad to see you, man,’ he said. ‘I need my bike. There’s gonna be hell tonight.’
If hell means fire and fury, he was right. Outrage breaks the dam of temper. The murder in the mansion, which also threatened a beloved mosque, would release waves of wolves, and we all knew it. The beautiful city, the tolerant Island City, wasn’t safe any more.
I wondered where Karla was, and if she was safe.
I unlocked my chain, set our bikes free, and we jammed our way back to Colaba. Ravi split away from me at Metro Junction to meet his brothers in arms. I ran up the stairs at the Amritsar hotel, checking to see if Karla was there.
‘You need a shower,’ Jaswant said. ‘And a change of clothes.’
My T-shirt was a mystery, ripped off in the fight. My vest was scorched and blackened. My bare arms and chest were covered in ash and scratches.
‘Have you seen her?’
‘She went to see the race.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Fuck you, baba,’ he said, as I took the steps four at a time.
I had to find the place where Karla would watch a legendary race. My guess was that she’d be drawn to the most dangerous turn on the course: the place where Fate and Death might watch together, with a picnic hamper.
It wasn’t easy to get there. The city was starting on lockdown, and I had to bribe cops at four checkpoints, just to keep my knives.
Inter-communal disharmony can cost lives in the thousands, anywhere in India, even in a tolerant city like Bombay. The cops locked the streets down tight, while a mosque was near to flames, and Hindus were thought to blame.
By the time I reached the vantage point the race was already run, and the traffic cops were responding to reports of a riot in Null Bazaar. A mob is coming from Dongri, I heard police radios saying, again and again in Marathi.
I rode down to the Haji Ali juice centre. I thought that Naveen might celebrate or commiserate the race there, because it was one of the few public places still publicly open.
There were people on the streets as I rode, running toward the Hindu temple, and the Muslim shrine. They’d heard that parts of the predominantly Muslim area of Dongri were in flames.
I had to weave between them, stopping now and then for panicked people who ran directly in front of me on the road. I slithered to a stop at Haji Ali, pulling my bike up some distance from a long line of foreign motorcycles, parked in front. I glanced inside the seated section of the juice bar, and saw Naveen, sitting with Kavita Singh.
I looked back to the biker boy group. There was a slim girl in niqab sunglasses, a red leather jacket, white jeans and red sneakers: Benicia. She was sitting on her bike, a matt black vintage 350cc with clip-on handlebars. The word Ishq, meaning Passionate Love, was painted on the petrol tank.
There were about a dozen people, all of them dressed in coloured leathers, despite the heat. I didn’t know any of them. A head turned toward me. It was Karla.
Karla smiled, but I didn’t know what her eyes said to me. It was either I’m so glad you’re here, or Don’t do anything stupid. I walked the distance between us, and took her arm.
‘I have to talk to you, Karla.’
The boy racers on Japanese motorcycles were looking me over. I was ashes, scratches, and burned-black marks.
‘What happened?’ she asked.
‘Khader’s house,’ I said. ‘It’s gone. Nazeer and Tariq, both gone.’
A psychic thing, but a thing real enough to make her shudder, forked through her body, jerking her head back in distress. She fell into me and slung her arm around my waist as we walked back to my bike. She sat on the bike, her back to the group outside the juice bar.
‘You look hurt,’ she said. ‘Are you okay?’
‘It’s nothing, I –’
‘Were you there, at the fire?’
‘Yeah, I –’
‘Lunatic!’ she snapped, simmering queens. ‘Things aren’t dangerous enough, without you have to go play with fire? Why am I taking all this trouble to keep you safe, when you take so much trouble to be unsafe?’
‘But I –’
‘Gimme a joint,’ she said.
We smoked. I was listening to the cops, in the police post nearby, talking about locking the whole city down as Plan B, if the rioting spread beyond Crawford market, which wasn’t far enough away from where we were.
I wanted to get her out of there. I wanted to take her home, dirty and all as I was. I wanted to take a shower and visit her in the Bedouin tent.
The biker boys were looking at us. They were hopped up on watermelon juice and someone else’s victory. Young men, with girls to impress: body language, looking for an offence no one committed.
Fire, I was thinking. It’s gone. All of it. Nazeer, Nazeer, Nazeer, they shot you, and burned you, my brother.
‘He’s dead, the boy?’ Karla asked, grabbing a rope of detail, and pulling me from the fire.
‘Yes. I saw him. He was dead, but untouched by the fire. Nazeer shielded his body. Abdullah brought Tariq’s body out of the building, but he had to leave Nazeer inside.’
‘May the universe comfort this young, returning soul,’ she said.
‘Comfort both their souls.’
‘Both their souls,’ she repeated.
‘They were shot, Karla, and their guards have disappeared.’
‘Are you sure?’
For a moment I looked at her as Abdullah had looked at me on the burning street, an extinct legacy in his arms.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Okay.’
A biker boy approached us. I moved around the bike.
‘Are you okay, Karla?’ the biker boy asked. ‘Is this guy bothering you?’
‘No, Jack,’ I said, unamiably. ‘You’re bothering me. Back off.’
He was a nice kid, probably, but it was the wrong moment on the wrong night. And besides, I was talking to my girl.
‘Who the fuck are you?’
‘I’m the guy who’s telling you to back off, Jack, while you can.’
‘Go and sit down, Abhay,’ Karla said, her back turned.
‘Anything for you, Karla,’ Abhay said, his shiny jacket creaking like stairs as he bowed. ‘If you need me, I’m just over here.’
He backed away, glaring at me until he rejoined his friends.
‘Nice kid,’ I said.
‘They’re all nice kids,’ she said. ‘And they’re all going to the party tonight.’
‘What party?’
‘The party that I uninvited you to.’
‘Uninvited me?’
‘You were invited, but I uninvited you.’
‘Who invited me, before you uninvited me?’
She turned her head a little to the side.
‘The hostess, if you must know.’
‘What party are we talking about, again?’
‘A special party, and believe it or not, I had to pull strings to cut you from the list. You should feel okay about that.’
‘I don’t feel okay about anything, right now.’
Another biker boy approached us behind Karla’s back, staring at me. The new biker boy was upset about something. I put my hand up, with a hard face behind it, and he stopped.
‘Don’t.’
He backed away again.
‘Take it easy, Lin,’ Karla said, close enough to kiss.
‘This is as easy as it gets, tonight.’
‘They’re friends. Not good friends, and not close friends, but useful friends.’
‘Come with me, Karla.’
‘I can’t –’ she began.
‘You can.’
‘I can’t.’
‘I won, Lin!’ Naveen said, running up to hug me. ‘What a race. That girl is phenomenal, but I won. Did you see it?’
‘Great, Naveen,’ I said. ‘Tell your biker boys to calm down.’
‘Oh, them?’ He laughed. ‘They’re hot-headed, but they just like to ride, man.’
‘Speaking of riding,’ Karla said, ‘I’m two-up with Benicia tonight.’
‘You’re . . . what?’
‘Naveen is bringing Kavita to the costume party, and I’m on Benicia’s back. I hope you’re good with that?’
I was so bad with it, I wanted to pick up motorcycles and throw them at God.
‘You know what,’ Naveen said, watching Karla and me. ‘I’ll just be over there, when we’re ready to roll.’
He backed away a few steps, and then jogged to meet his friends.
‘If I have to get burned or beat up to talk to you, Karla,’ I said, when we were alone, ‘we probably need counselling.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ she said, leaning away from me. ‘Counselling is for people too bored to tell the truth.’
‘That’s funny, coming from someone who won’t tell me the truth right now.’
‘I can’t tell you all of the truth. I thought you understood that?’
‘I don’t understand anything. Are you really going with those people tonight?’
She glanced over her shoulder, and turned back to me again.
‘This party is something different. Do you believe me, that I’m going to this party, and I uninvited you, because I love you?’
‘What I mean is, you’re going to a party, any party, no matter how important it is, after what happened tonight?’
She flared her lips for a second, showing her teeth, locked together. Her eyes opened wide. I knew the look. It wasn’t threatening: it was biting back something that would hurt me. I didn’t care.
‘You knew them, Karla. We’re talking about Nazeer. I don’t know about you, but all I want to do right now is be with you.’
‘It’s hard, what happened to the boy –’
‘And to Nazeer.’
‘And to Nazeer. Sweet Nazeer.’
She stopped, memories of the burly Afghan rubbing at the edges of her resolution. Karla and I both lit the same lamp when we saw Nazeer’s deeply lined face and his fierce, scowling smile, as he opened the door of the mansion.
She took a deep breath, smiled at me, and took my hand in hers.
‘This party really is important, Lin. It will open a lot of secret doors, and it’s gonna let me close a door that I probably shouldn’t have opened in the first place.’
‘What door?’
‘It’s too soon. Please, trust me. Please. Just trust me when I say that this party could give me a chance to walk away from all of this, and live with it, for a long time afterwards, without looking back.’
‘Why is the party so important?’
‘God! You won’t leave it alone, will you? And you won’t trust me.’
‘You give me so little, Karla. And this is a bad night. I’m sorry. I guess I’m a little faith-challenged.’
She looked at me, maybe a little disappointed, maybe simply looking at the disappointment on my face.
‘Alright,’ she said. ‘It’s a fetish party.’
‘And . . . so what?’
‘It’s the first of its kind in Bombay, and the veils will come down on a lot of the people there.’
‘How many veils?’
‘All of them, of course,’ she said softly, her hand on my cheek. ‘That’s why I uninvited you.’
‘What?’
‘I like you the way you are. I love you the way you are. That’s what this is all about, one way and another. I’m not about to compromise that by letting you loose in Babylon.’
‘But you’re going.’
‘I’m not you, baby,’ she said. ‘And you’re not me.’
‘Come with me, Karla.’
‘I have to go, Lin,’ she said. ‘I’ve got things I have to finish. Just trust me.’
‘Everything’s finished. Come with me.’
‘I have to go,’ she said, standing to leave, but I put fingers on her wrist where a bracelet might rest.
‘In case you didn’t hear it, the trumpet blew. The walls have fallen. It’s –’
‘A biblical reference,’ she smiled. ‘Tempting, Shantaram. More tempting than the damn party, but I gotta go.’
‘I’m not kidding. It’s not a time to party. It’s a time to fortify, and defend. It’s gonna get messy. Places are gonna burn. Streets will burn. We should get in some supplies, wait this out, and then find another town.’
She looked at me so lovingly that I was swimming in a river of honest affection, and had no idea how I’d left the shore.
‘It’s the things that make us one, that make us one worth having,’ she said.
I was all out. She was too close. The lights from the hectic drive-in juice bar lit neon fire in her eyes, and I was burning, again.
‘What does that mean?’
‘Don’t give up on me,’ she whispered.
‘But –’
‘Don’t you dare give up on me,’ she said.
She kissed me. She kissed me so truly that she was already gone when I opened my eyes.
She ran to join the biker boys. They were revving their engines. She climbed up behind Benicia.
The Spanish racer girl pulled on a full-face helmet and shut the visor: a black curve of lights where her eyes had been. She took her privacy seriously, and you can’t object to that. But Karla was on the back of her bike, and I wanted to object to that. Benicia leaned over to grip the low-slung handlebars, and Karla leaned in close to her.
Then she sat upright and look around, her eyes finding mine without searching. She smiled.
Don’t give up on me.
She folded herself against Benicia’s back.
Kavita got up behind Naveen. He made an artful loop in front of the juice bar, and pulled up beside me.
‘Why aren’t you coming, Lin?’ he asked, as the other biker boys revved their engines.
There was a fire, I was thinking. People died. Nazeer died. Parts of the city are locked down. But he was happy. He was a winner. I couldn’t take that away.
‘Have fun, Naveen. I’ll see you in a couple of days.’
‘Sure thing.’
He started revving his engine.
‘Behold, the Uninvited,’ Kavita said, as Naveen prepared to leave. ‘What thing, inside you, was too terrible to invite to a weekend party, Lin?’
Naveen thumped the gas and skidded off under clutch, and the biker boys followed him.
Karla threw her arms wide, as Benicia roared away.
Don’t give up on me.
I was burned, scratched, beat up, covered in ashes, and alone with the dead in a city going into lockdown.
Don’t you dare give up on me.