Chapter Eight
Outside on the street early evening glowed on every face, as if the whole world was blushing to think what the night would bring. Abdullah was waiting for me, his bike parked beside mine. He gave a few rupees to the kids who’d stood guard over our bikes. They shouted their delight, and ran to the sweet shops on the corner to buy cigarettes.
Abdullah swung out beside me into the traffic. At a red light, I spoke for the first time.
‘I’m picking up Lisa, at the Mahesh. Wanna come?’
‘I’ll ride with you that far,’ he replied solemnly, ‘but I will not join you. I have some work.’
We rode in silence along the shopping boulevard of Mohammed Ali Road. The allure of the perfume bazaars gave way to the sugared scents of firni, rabri, and falooda sweet shops. The glittering splendour of bangle and bracelet shops surrendered to the gorgeous fractals of Persian carpets, displayed side to side for a city block.
As the long road ended in a thatch-work confusion of handcarts, near the vast Crawford Market complex, we took a short cut, riding the wrong way into streams of traffic, threading through the wide eye of another junction.
Back in the right flow of traffic again, we paused for the long signal at Metro theatre junction. A movie poster covered the first floor of the cinema. Bad Guy and Good Guy faces, drenched in green, yellow and purple, told their story of love and anguish from behind a thorny hedge of guns and swords.
Families jammed into cars and taxis stared up at the movie poster. A young boy in a car near to me waved, pointed at the poster, and made his hand into a gun, to fire at me. He pulled the trigger. I pretended that a bullet had struck my arm, and the boy laughed. His family laughed. People in other cars laughed.
The boy’s kindly faced Mother urged the boy to shoot me again. The boy pointed his finger-gun, aimed with a squinting eye, and fired. I did the-Bad-Guy-coming-to-a-bad-end, and sprawled out on the tank of my bike.
When I sat up again everyone in the cars clapped or waved or laughed.
I took a bow, and turned to see Abdullah’s ashen mortification.
We are Company men, I heard him thinking. Respect and fear. One or the other, and nothing else. Respect and fear.
Only the sea on the coast ride to the Mahesh hotel finally softened his stern expression. He rode slowly, one hand on the throttle, one hand on his hip. I rode up close beside him, resting my left hand on his shoulder.
When we shook hands goodbye, I asked one of the questions that had been on my mind throughout the ride.
‘Did you know about the sword?’
‘Everyone knows about it, Lin, my brother.’
Our hands parted, but he held my eyes.
‘Some of them,’ he said carefully, ‘they are jealous that Khaderbhai left the sword to you.’
‘Andrew.’
‘He is one. But he is not the only one.’
I was silent, my lips tight on the curse that was staining the inside of my mouth. Sanjay’s words, Don’t mistake your usefulness for your value, had forked through my heart like summer lightning, and a voice was calling me to go, to run, anywhere else, before it ended in bad blood. And then there was Sri Lanka.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Inshallah,’ I said, standing to park my bike.
‘Tomorrow, Inshallah,’ he replied, stepping his bike into gear and pulling away from the kerb.
Without looking back, he called out to me. ‘Allah hafiz!’ May Allah be your guardian!
‘Allah hafiz,’ I replied, to myself.
The Sikh security guards at the door of the Mahesh hotel looked with some interest at the sword-shaped parcel strapped to my back, but let me pass with a nod and a smile. They knew me well.
Passports, abandoned by guests who skipped out of the hotel without paying their bills, found their way to me through the security teams or desk managers at most of the hotels in the city.
It was a steady stream of books, as illegal passports were known, running to fifteen or more a month in the skip season. And they were the best kind of books: the kind that people who lose them don’t report.
Every security office in every five-star hotel in the world has a wall of pictures of people who skipped out on a hotel bill, some of them leaving their passports behind. Most people looked at that wall to identify criminals. For me, it was shopping.
In the lobby of the hotel, I scanned the open-plan coffee lounge and saw Lisa, still at a meeting with friends beside the wide, tall windows that looked at the sea.
I decided to wash some of the street dirt off my face and hands before greeting her, and made my way toward the men’s room. As I reached the door I heard a voice, speaking from behind me.
‘Is that a sword on your back, or are you just furious to see me?’
I turned to see Ranjit, the budding media tycoon, the handsome athlete and political activist: the man that Karla, my Karla, had married. He was smiling.
‘I’m always furious to see you, Ranjit. Goodbye.’
He smiled again. It looked like an honest, earnest smile. I didn’t look close enough to find out, because the man smiling at me was married to Karla.
‘Goodbye, Ranjit.’
‘What? No, wait!’ he said quickly. ‘I’d like to talk to you.’
‘We just did. Goodbye, Ranjit.’
‘No, really!’ he said, dodging in front of me, his smile almost intact. ‘I’ve just finished a meeting, and I was on my way out, but I’m damn glad that I ran into you.’
‘Run into someone else, Ranjit.’
‘Please. Please. That’s . . . that’s not a word I use every day.’
‘What do you want?’
‘There’s . . . there’s something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about.’
I glanced around toward Lisa, sitting with her friends. She looked up and caught my eye. I nodded. She understood, and nodded back, before returning her attention back to her friends.
‘What’s on your mind?’ I asked.
A ripple of surprise scudded across the flawless landscape of his fine features.
‘If it’s a bad time –’
‘We don’t have a good time, Ranjit. Get to the point.’
‘Lin . . . I’m sure we could be friends, if we just –’
‘Don’t make this about you and me, Ranjit. There is no you and me. I’d know it, if there was.’
‘You speak as if you don’t like me,’ Ranjit said. ‘But you don’t know me at all.’
‘I don’t like you. And that’s just already. If I know you better, it’s sure to get worse.’
‘Why?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why don’t you like me?’
‘You know, if you stand in the lobby stopping everyone who doesn’t like you, and asking them why, you better get a room, because you’ll be here all night.’
‘But, wait . . . it’s . . . I don’t understand.’
‘Your ambition is putting Karla at risk,’ I said quietly. ‘I don’t like it. I don’t like you, for doing it. Is that clear enough?’
‘It’s Karla that I wanted to talk to you about,’ he said, studying my face.
‘What about Karla?’
‘I want to be sure she’s safe, that’s all.’
‘What do you mean, safe?’
His brow furrowed into a discomfited frown. He fatigue-sighed, allowing his head to fall forward for a moment.
‘I don’t even know how to start this . . . ’
I looked around, and then directed him to a space in the wide foyer, with two empty chairs. Pulling the sword from my shoulders, I sat facing him, the calico-wrapped weapon resting on my knees.
A waiter approached us immediately, but I smiled him away. Ranjit hung his head for a time, staring at the carpet, but then shrugged himself together.
‘You know, I’ve been pretty deep in the political stuff lately. Running some important campaigns. People have been getting at me, in any press that I don’t own. I suppose you’ve heard.’
‘I heard you’ve been buying vote banks,’ I said. ‘That’s making people nervous. Back to Karla.’
‘Have you . . . have you talked to Karla?’
‘Why do you ask that?’
‘Have you?’
‘We’re done, Ranjit.’
I began to stand, but he pressed me to stay.
‘Look, let me get this out. I’ve been running a strong press campaign against the Spear of Karma.’
‘A spear that’ll hit Karla, if you don’t stop provoking people into throwing it.’
‘That’s . . . that’s just what I wanted to talk to you about. You see . . . I know that you’re still in love with her.’
‘Goodbye,’ I said, standing to leave again, but he grasped at my wrist.
I looked at his hand.
‘That’s not advised.’
He pulled his hand away.
‘Please, wait. Please, just sit down, and hear what I’ve got to say.’
I sat down. My brow was all fault lines, and it was Ranjit’s fault.
‘I know you’re going to think I’m really out of line,’ he said quickly, ‘but I think you’d want to know, if Karla was in danger.’
‘You’re the threat to her, and you should back off. Soon.’
‘Are you threatening me?’
‘Yes. So glad we had this talk.’
We stared at one another, across the space that hovers between predator and prey: hot, imminent and driven.
Karla. My first sight of her, on my first day in Bombay, years before, had put my heart like a hunting bird on her wrist.
She’d used me. She’d loved me, until I loved her. She’d recruited me to work for Khaderbhai. When the blood was washed from floors of love, and hate, and vengeance, and the wounds had healed to a braille of scars, she’d married the handsome, smiling millionaire staring into my eyes. Karla.
I glanced around at Lisa, beautiful and bright, in the company of her artist friends. My mouth tasted sour, and my heartbeat was rising. I hadn’t spoken to Karla for two years, but I felt like a traitor to Lisa, sitting there while Ranjit talked about Karla. I looked back to Ranjit. I wasn’t happy.
‘I can see it in you,’ he said. ‘You still love her.’
‘Do you want me to slap you, Ranjit? Because if that’s it, you’re mostly there.’
‘No, of course not. I’m sure you still love her,’ he said honestly and earnestly, it seemed, ‘because, you know, if I was you, I’d still love her, even if she left me to marry another man. There’s only one Karla. There’s only one crazy way for any man to love her. We both know that.’
The best thing about a business suit is that there’s always plenty to hang on to, if need be. I grabbed at his suit, and shirt, and tie.
‘Stop talking about Karla,’ I said. ‘Quit while you’re behind.’
He opened his mouth to shout, I think, but thought better of it. He was a powerful man, peering through a political window at more power, and couldn’t make a scene.
‘Please, please, I’m not trying to upset you,’ he pleaded. ‘I want you to help Karla. If something happens to me, will you promise –’
I let him go, and he pulled away quickly, sitting back in his chair and adjusting his suit.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘There was an attempt on my life last week,’ he said sorrowfully.
‘You’re an attempt on your own life, Ranjit, every time you open your mouth.’
‘There was a bomb in my car.’
‘Tell me about the bomb.’
‘My driver was away from the car for only a few minutes, buying paan. Luckily, he noticed a trailing wire when he returned, and he found the bomb. We called the police, and they took it away. It wasn’t a real bomb, but the note said that the next one would be. I managed to keep it from the press. I have a certain amount of influence, as you know.’
‘Change your driver.’
He laughed weakly.
‘Change your driver,’ I said again.
‘My driver?’
‘He’s your weak link. Odds are, he found the bomb there, because he put it there. He was paid. It was done to scare you.’
‘I . . . you’re joking, of course. He’s been with me for three years . . . ’
‘Good. Give him a nice severance package. But get rid of him.’
‘He’s such a loyal man . . . ’
‘Does Karla know about this?’
‘No. And I don’t want her to know.’
It was my turn to laugh.
‘Karla’s a big girl. And she’s smart. You shouldn’t be keeping this from her.’
‘Still . . . ’
‘You’re wasting your best resource, if you don’t tell her. She’s smarter than you are. She’s smarter than anybody.’
‘But –’
‘Tell her.’
‘Maybe. Maybe you’re right. But I just want to try to get a handle on this thing, you know? I think it’ll be okay. I have good security. But I worry for her. That’s my only real worry.’
‘I told you before, back off,’ I said. ‘Lay off the politics, for a while. They say the fish starts to stink at the head. I say if it stinks anywhere, you’ve been there too long.’
‘I won’t stop, Lin. These guys, these fanatics, that’s how they win. They scare everybody into silence.’
‘You’re gonna teach me politics now?’
He smiled: the first smile of his that I almost liked, because it was sewn at the edges by something kinder than bright victory.
‘I . . . I think we’re on the edge of a truly big change in the way we think, and act, and maybe even the way we dream in this country. If better minds win, if India becomes a truly modern, secular democracy, with rights and freedoms for all, the next century will be the Indian century, and we’ll lead the world.’
He looked into my eyes and saw the scepticism. He was right about India’s future, everyone in Bombay knew it and felt it in those years, but what he’d given me was a speech, and one he’d delivered before.
‘You know,’ I said, ‘every guy on every side makes the same speech.’
He opened his mouth to protest, but I stopped him with a raised palm.
‘I don’t do politics, but I know hatred when I see it, and I know that poking hatred with a stick will get you bit.’
‘I’m glad you understand,’ he sighed, letting his shoulders sag.
‘I’m not the one who has to understand.’
His back straightened again.
‘I’m not afraid of them, you know?’
‘It was a bomb, Ranjit. Of course you’re afraid. I’m afraid just talking to you. I’ll prefer it when you’re far away.’
‘If I knew you’d be there for her, with your . . . your friends, I’d be able to face this situation with a quiet heart.’
I frowned at him, wondering if he understood all the ironies that were packed into his request. I decided to throw one back.
‘Couple weeks back, your afternoon newspaper carried a pretty rough article about the Bombay mafia. One of those friends of mine was mentioned by name. The article called for him to be arrested, or banned from the city. And he’s a man who hasn’t been charged with anything. What happened to innocent before guilty? What happened to journalism?’
‘I know.’
‘And as I recall, some other articles in your newspaper called for the death penalty to be applied, in a case involving another one of my friends.’
‘Yes –’
‘And now you’re asking me –’
‘For protection for Karla, you’re right, from the same men. I know it’s hypocritical. The fact is, I’ve got nowhere else to turn. These fanatics have got people everywhere. The cops, the army, teachers, the unions, government services. The only people in Bombay not contaminated by them are . . . ’
‘My people.’
‘That’s right.’
It was pretty funny, in its own way. I stood up, holding the sword in my left hand. He stood with me.
‘Tell Karla everything,’ I said. ‘Anything you’ve hidden from her about this, tell her. Let her make up her own mind about staying or leaving.’
‘I’ll . . . yes, of course. And about our arrangement? For Karla?’
‘We don’t have an arrangement. There’s no our. There’s no you and me, remember?’
He smiled, opened his mouth to speak, but then pulled me into a hug with surprising passion.
‘I know I can count on you to do the right thing,’ he said. ‘No matter what happens.’
My face was close to his neck. There was a powerful perfume: a woman’s perfume, that had settled on his shirt not long before. It was a cheap perfume. It wasn’t Karla’s perfume.
He’d been with a woman in a suite at the hotel, minutes before he asked me to watch over his wife, the woman I still loved.
And there it was: the truth, suspended on a thread of suspicion between our eyes as I shoved him from the hug. I still loved Karla. I still loved her. It had taken that, a different woman’s scent on Ranjit’s skin, to make me face a truth that had circled my life for two years, like a wolf circling a campfire.
I stared at Ranjit. I was thinking murder, and feeling shamed love for Lisa in equal measure: not a peaceful combination. He shifted his feet awkwardly, trying to read my eyes.
‘Well . . . okay,’ he said, taking a step away from me. ‘I’ll . . . I’ll get going.’
I watched as he walked to the doors of the hotel. When he climbed into the back seat of his Mercedes sedan, I saw him glance around nervously, a man who made enemies too easily, and too often.
I looked back to see Lisa, sitting at the table near the window, and reaching out to shake hands with a young man who’d stopped to say hello.
I knew she didn’t like him. She’d once described him as more slippery than a squid in the pocket of a plastic raincoat on a rainy night. He was the son of a successful diamond trader, and he was buying an upper berth in the movie industry, shredding careers along the way.
He was kissing her hand. She withdrew her hand quickly, but the smile she gave him was radiant.
She once told me that every woman has four smiles.
‘Only four?’
‘The First Smile,’ she’d said, ignoring me, ‘is the unconscious one that happens without thinking about it, like smiling at a kid in the street, or smiling back at someone who’s smiling at us from a TV screen.’
‘I don’t smile at the TV.’
‘Everybody smiles at the TV. That’s why we have them.’
‘I don’t smile at the TV.’
‘The Second Smile,’ she’d persisted, ‘is the polite one, the kind we use to invite friends into a house when they come to the door, or to greet them in a restaurant.’
‘Are they paying?’ I’d asked.
‘You wanna hear this, or not?’
‘If I say not, will you stop?’
‘The Third Smile is the one we use against other people.’
‘Smiling against people, huh?’
‘Sure. It’s a good one. With some girls, the best smile they’ve got is the one they use to keep people away.’
‘I’m gonna let that pass, and skip to the fourth.’
‘Aaah! The Fourth Smile is the one we only give to the one we love. It’s the one that says You’re the one. Nobody else ever gets that smile. No matter how happy you are with someone, and no matter how much you like someone, even if you like them so much that you love them really, really a lot, nobody ever gets the Fourth Smile except the one you’re truly in love with.’
‘What happens if you break up?’
‘The Fourth Smile goes with the girl,’ she’d said to me that day. ‘The Fourth Smile always goes with the girl. For ex-boyfriends it’s the Second Smile from then on, unless he’s a bad ex-boyfriend. Bad ex-boyfriends only ever get a Third Smile, no matter how charming they are.’
I watched Lisa give the young producer manqué her best Third Smile, and walked to the men’s room to wash off the new dirt I’d accumulated talking to Ranjit.
The black and cream tiled restroom was larger, more elegantly lit, better appointed, and more comfortable than eighty per cent of the homes in the city. I rolled up the sleeves of my shirt, ran some water over my short hair, and washed my face, hands and forearms.
The attendant handed me a fresh towel. He smiled at me, wagging his head in greeting.
One of the great mysteries of India, and the greatest of all its joys, is the tender warmth of the lowest paid. The man wasn’t angling for a tip: most of the men who used the washroom didn’t give one. He was simply a kind man, in a place of essential requirement, giving me a genuinely kind smile, one human being to another.
It’s that kindness, from the deepest well of the Indian heart, that’s the true flag of the nation, and the connection that brings you back to India again and again, or holds you there forever.
I reached into my pocket to give him a tip, and the silver envelope containing Khaderbhai’s letter came out in my hand with the money. Handing the man his tip, I put the envelope down on the wide counter beside the basin, and then supported myself with both arms, staring into my own eyes in the mirror.
I didn’t want to read the letter: I didn’t want to roll that stone away from the cave where I’d hidden so much of the past. But Tariq said that the letter mentioned Sri Lanka. I had to read it. Locking myself in a stall, I stood the sword against a corner of the door and sat down on the hard seat-cover to read Khaderbhai’s letter.
I held in my hand this day a small blue glass ball, of the kind that they call a marble in English, and I thought about Sri Lanka, and those who will journey to there in my name, as you have promised that you will do for me. For a long time I stared at that blue glass ball in the palm of my hand after I found it on the ground and picked it up. In such fragile things and subtle ways is the pattern of our lives revealed to us. We are collections of things that we find and experience and value and keep inside ourselves, sometimes knowingly, sometimes unknowingly, and that collection of things is what we finally become.
I collected you, Shantaram. You are one of the ornaments of my life. You are my dear son, like all my dear sons.
My hands began to shake: maybe angry, maybe sad, I couldn’t tell. I hadn’t let myself mourn him. I didn’t visit the gravestone monument, in the Marine Lines cemetery. I knew his body wasn’t buried there, because I’d helped to bury him myself.
A fever boiled up through my face, chilling my scalp. My dear son . . .
You will hate me, I think, when you come to know all of the truth about me. Forgive me, if you can. The night is heavy on me. It may be that all men would be hated if all of the truth were known about them. But with the honesty required of a letter such as this, written on the night before we go to war together, I cannot say that I do not deserve to be hated by some. And to them in this moment I say go to hell, the lot of you.
I was born to leave this legacy. I was born to do it no matter what the cost. Do I use people? Of course I do. Do I manipulate people? As many as I need. Do I kill people? I kill anyone who opposes me violently. And I am protected in this and I endure and I grow stronger, while all around me fall, because I am following my destiny. In my heart I have done no wrong, and my prayers are sincere. I think somehow you understand that.
I have always loved you, even from the first night that we met. Do you remember? When I took you to see the Blind Singers? That is as true as any bad thing you will come to know of me. The bad things are true and I freely admit it. But the good things are just as true even though they are truths of the heart and have no reality outside what we feel and remember. I chose you because I love you and I love you because I chose you. That is the whole of the truth, my son.
If Allah wills me to Him, and you are reading this after I have gone, that is no cause for sadness. I have many questions, and Allah, as you know, is the answer to all questions. And my spirit has mixed with yours, and with all of your brothers. You will never fear. I will always be near you. When you are lost and outnumbered and abandoned you will feel the touch of my father’s hand on your shoulder, and you will know that my heart is there next to you in battle, and all my sons.
Please find a way to let my soul kneel with yours in prayer even though you are not a man of prayer. Try to find a moment for at least a little prayer every day if you can. I will visit you there sometimes when you pray.
And remember this last advice from me. Love the truth that you find in the hearts of others. Always listen to the voice of love in your own heart.
I slid letter and envelope into my wallet. The words that blue glass appeared in the fold of letter still visible in the wallet, and my heart ran to the top of the hill.
I saw his hand. I saw afternoon light, glowing on his cinnamon-coloured skin. I saw the fine, long fingers moving as he spoke, as delicate as things born in the sea. I saw him smile. I saw the light of his thoughts, streaming from his amber eyes, reflecting off the blue glass ball, and I mourned him.
For a moment I found us, my adopted father and his abandoned son, in a different somewhere beyond judgement and fault: a place forgiven, a place redeemed.
Love unlived is a sin against life, and mourning is one of the ways we love. I felt it then, and I let it happen, the longing for him to return. The power in his eyes, and the pride when I did something he admired, and the love in his laugh. The longing: the longing for the lost.
A blood-filled drum was beating somewhere. I was hot, suddenly, and breathing too hard. I clutched at the sword. I had to leave. I had to get up and leave.
It was too late: sorrows hidden behind banners of rage for years fell as tears. It was messy, and noisy.
‘Sir?’ the washroom attendant called out after a while of my blubbering. ‘Are you urgently requiring more toilet paper?’
I laughed. Bombay saved me, as she did so many times.
‘I’m good,’ I called back. ‘Thanks for asking.’
I left the stall, put the sword on the towel stand, and washed my face with cold water. Mirror check: Terrible, but you’ve looked worse. I gave the very kind attendant another tip, and made my way back through the lobby toward Lisa’s table.
She was alone, staring out at the dark sea streaked with silver. Her reflection stared back at her, taking the chance to admire. Then she saw me approaching her in the glass.
A rough day. Cycle Killers, and the Sanjay Council, and Ranjit, and Karla, and the threat of Sri Lanka, sooner rather than later. A rough day.
She turned, running the eyes of her gentle intuition over the loss and wounded love still prowling on my face.
I started to speak, but she silenced me with a fingertip on my lips, and kissed me. And it was okay again, for a while. It was a crazy love we shared: she wasn’t in love with me, and I couldn’t be in love with her. But we made the night bright and the sunlight right a lot of the time, and never felt used or unloved.
We looked through the huge picture windows to the waves rolling into the bay. Waiters carrying trays behind us were reflected on the glass, moving back and forth as if they were walking on the waves. A black sky struck the sea, melting horizons.
If the hour comes, and there’s no-one to beg or blame but yourself, you learn that what we have in the end is just a handful more than what was born in us. That unique handful, what we add to what we are, is the only story of us that isn’t told by someone else.
Khaderbhai collected me, as his letter said. But the collector was dead, and I was still an exhibit in the museum of crime he created and left to the world. Sanjay had used me to test his new gun-running contact, and that made it clear: I had to leave the collection and find my freedom again, as soon as possible.
Lisa took my hand beside me. And we stood for a while, looking out, two pale reflections painted on the endless penance of the sea.