Chapter Eighty-One
The mountain made its own place in time, marked by rituals and sunsets, meals and meditations, fires, penance, prayers and laughter. One by one our crew of friends left the teacher’s mesa, and finally only Karla and I remained with Idriss, Silvano and a few students.
And she’d been right to ask for the time away from the city: simplified living, strangely enough, added new complexities to our relationship, and the splinters of city life were slowly blunted on the handle of understanding. We talked for hours every day and night, visiting the past while the present escaped us.
‘He saved me,’ Karla said one day, weeks into the stay, when the conversation drifted into the Khaderbhai years.
‘You met him on the plane, when you were on the run.’
‘I did. I was a mess. I’d killed a man, a rapist, my rapist, and even though I knew I’d do it again if I had to, I was a mess. I made it to the airport, and I bought a ticket, and got on the plane, but I fell apart in the air, five miles above the earth. Khaderbhai was sitting beside me. He had a return ticket to Bombay, and I had a one-way ticket. He talked to me, and when the plane landed he brought me here, to the mountain. And I went to work for him the next day.’
‘You loved him,’ I said, because I’d loved him.
‘Yes. I didn’t like him, and I told him that, and I didn’t agree with his way of doing things, but I loved him.’
‘For better or worse, he was a force in the city, and in all of our lives.’
‘He used me,’ she said. ‘And I let him. And I used people that he asked me to use. I used you, for him. But I don’t feel anything but . . . love . . . for him, when I think of him. Is it the same for you?’
‘It is.’
‘I still feel him sometimes, standing beside me, when things get bad.’
‘Me, too,’ I said. ‘Me, too.’
Karla and I enjoyed the time on the holy mountain, but we still liked to stay in touch with the unholy city. A newspaper made its way up the mountain once a week, and occasional visitors brought news of friends and foes, but our best updates came from the young Ronin, Jagat, who was running my bing for me while I was on the mountain.
Jagat met us in the car park beneath the caves, every two weeks. The news that he brought from the city always made us feel good about the steep climb back to the peak.
Politicians and other fanatics, Jagat reported, were doing their best to ensure that cooperation was impossible, especially among friends. In some areas, plastic barricades had begun to segregate neighbours and neighbourhoods, sometimes on nothing more than food preferences, breaking the shell of tolerance.
In streets and slums and working places across the city, people of every inclination got along well, and did good work. But in political party offices, those elected to represent the people put up fences between the people wherever friendship threatened political war. And people rallied blindly on both sides of the line, forgetting that barricades only ever separate armies of the poor.
Vishnu completed his purge, and the fully Hindu 307 Company was blessed by holy men, in Vishnu’s new mansion on Carmichael Road, not far from the art gallery that Karla had abandoned to Taj, but much deeper in the deep-pocket belt of Bombay’s elite.
A lavish housewarming party warmed the frosty noses of local snobs, Jagat said, and some of the movie star guests remained regular visitors to Vishnu’s excess.
‘Vishnu put up the money for a really big Hindi picture,’ Jagat said. ‘They’re shooting it in Bulgaria, or Australia. One of those foreign places. His photo was in all the papers, at the big shot party, when they announced the new movie.’
‘And nobody moved to arrest him for killing the Afghan guards, killing Nazeer and Tariq, and starting the fire that ate Khaderbhai’s house, and a portion of the city?’
‘No witnesses, baba-dude. Charges dropped. The Assistant Commissioner was at the party to announce the new movie. The hero of the movie is a rough and ready cop, based on the Assistant Commissioner dude himself, and how tough he was on crime and criminals, and how many of them he killed in encounters. And Vishnu is paying for it. I don’t get it, man. It’s like robbing your own bank, somehow.’
‘I hear you,’ I said.
‘Funny guys,’ Karla laughed. ‘How many bodyguards did Vishnu have with him?’
‘Four, I think,’ Jagat said. ‘About the same as the Assistant Commissioner.’
‘Why the bodyguard question?’ I asked her.
‘It’s the Inverse Fair Law. The more bodyguards, the less integrity.’
‘And the Cycle Killers have totally changed their image,’ Jagat replied, shaking his head. ‘They got a complete new look.’
‘Recycled Killers,’ Karla said. ‘How’s the new look?’
‘Well, I guess you can say it’s better than the old look. They wear white slacks, and peppermint-coloured shirts.’
‘All of them?’
‘Yeah. They’re heroes, now.’
‘Heroes?’ I doubted.
‘I’m not kidding. People love those guys. Even my girlfriend bought me a peppermint shirt.’
‘Cycle Killers in Jeeps, huh?’
‘In Jeeps, with chrome bicycles attached on the roll bars.’
‘And they don’t kill people any more?’
‘No. They’re called No Problem now.’
‘No Problem?’ Karla asked, intrigued.
‘Yeah.’
‘That’s like calling yourself Okay,’ I said. ‘Everybody says no problem every three minutes, in India. People say no problem even when there is a problem.’
‘Exactly,’ Jagat replied. ‘It’s brilliant. No problem too big, or too small. No Problem.’
‘You’re kidding me, Jagat.’
‘No way, baba-dude,’ he insisted. ‘I swear. And it’s working. People are asking them to negotiate for the release of kidnap victims, and such. They got a kidnapped millionaire free last week, and the only fingers he had left were on his left hand. Those fingers were on the line, too, until No Problem got on the case. People are asking them to fix building and construction problems that have tied up crores of rupees for years, man. They’re working shit out, for anyone who pays them.’
‘Nice,’ Karla said.
‘Uh-huh,’ I said, not easy with what I’d heard.
Back Street, Main Street and Wall Street are the three big streets in every city, and none of them play well together on the shallower edges of tangled banks.
The streets are apart, and false distinctions keep them apart, because whenever they intersect eyes find love, and minds see injustice, and the truth sets them free. Power, in any street, has a lot to lose from free minds and hearts, because power is the opposite of freedom. As one of the powerless, I prefer the Back Street guys to stay out of Main Street, the cops to fund their own movies, and the Wall Street guys to stay out of everything, until all the streets become One Street.
I had to pull my thoughts away: I knew that every hour Jagat spent with us added traffic to his ride back to the city. Karla, thinking with me perhaps, brought me back.
‘Have you been checking on Didier for us?’ Karla asked the young Ronin.
‘Jarur,’ the young street soldier said, spitting. ‘He still hangs out at Leopold’s, and he’s fine.
‘Hey, those Zodiac guys,’ he said, ‘the millionaires, they’re back in town.’
‘Where?’
‘The Mahesh, man,’ he said. ‘I can’t check on anyone inside that place. Not born with the right barcode to get past that scanner, you know.’
‘If you find anything out, let me know.’
‘Sure. Hey, you know why people looked after those two foreigners so much when they lived on the street?’ he asked thoughtfully.
‘They’re very nice guys?’ I suggested.
‘Apart from that,’ he said, his foot making a pattern of swirls in the dust at our feet.
‘Please, tell us,’ Karla urged, always drawn to the sun inside.
‘They were called the Zodiac Georges,’ he said. ‘That’s why. In India, I mean, it’s like a really big deal, you know? It’s like calling yourself Karma, or something. Everywhere they went, they carried the Zodiac with them, in their names. When you fed them, you fed the Zodiac. When you offered them a safe place, you offered safety to the Zodiac. When you protected them from bullies, you protected the Zodiac from negative energies. And making offerings to the planets that guide us and mess us up is, like, really important. There’s a lotta people out there, baba-dude, who miss the chance to offer something to the Zodiac guys, now that they’re so rich they don’t need it.’
India. Time measured in coincidence, and the logic of contradiction. Jagat pushed me off a perch of equilibrium I thought I’d claimed in India. But that shock happened almost every day, and shook the branch every time. The world I was living in, and not born into, rained strange flowers from every tree that gave me shelter.
‘That’s a lovely story, Jagat,’ Karla said.
‘It is?’ he asked, shyness hiding in a frown.
‘Yes. Thank you for sharing it.’
Jagat, whose name means The World, blushed and looked away, instinctively reaching for the handle of the knife in his belt.
‘Hey, listen, man,’ he said, turning back to me, his scarred young face telling the same stories every time someone looked at him. ‘I don’t feel right, taking all the money from your operation.’
‘You’re doing all the work,’ I said. ‘Why shouldn’t you take all the money? I’m the one who’s in your debt, for keeping it running. I owe you significant on this, Jagat-dude.’
‘Fuck you, man,’ he laughed. ‘I’m putting twenty-five per cent aside for you, every week, whether you like it or not, okay?’
‘Cool, jawan,’ I said, using the Hindi word for soldier. ‘I accept.’
‘When you get back from this spooky place full of tigers and holy men, there’ll be something there for you.’
‘When I get back to your spooky place full of businessmen and cops,’ I said. ‘I’ll be damn glad to get it.’
‘Let’s ride with Jagat to the highway and back,’ Karla suggested.
‘Good idea. Want some company, Jagat, or you wanna go fast?’
‘Let’s glide all the way down, baba-dude.’
‘Kruto!’ Karla said.
‘What’s this? Has Oleg been teaching you Russian?’ I asked, taking my bike off the stand.
‘Sprosite yego,’ she laughed.
‘Which means?’
‘Ask him.’
‘I will,’ I said, and she laughed harder.
A motorcycle is jealous metal. A motorcycle that loves you always knows when you even think about another motorcycle. And when she knows, she won’t start. And because I’d looked at Jagat’s bike, my bike didn’t start for me, even after three kicks.
Jagat thumped his bike into slow staccato motorcycle music, the 350cc single-piston engine like a drum that gets you from place to place, so long as you let it play its own tune.
I tried the kick-starter again, but all I got was a derisory cough.
Karla leaned over, hugging the tank of my bike, her arms around one of the handlebars.
‘A trip down the mountain and back again will be so good for you, baby,’ she said to the bike. ‘Let’s go for a ride.’
I kicked, and she started, jamming the throttle for a second, showing off.
We rode with Jagat, coasting downhill side by side on the deserted forest road, to the beginning of the fiercely determined highway. We waved him away, and turned back.
We rode through an evening forest, shifting from daytime daring to nighttime cunning. Birds were returning to roosts, insects were rising from slumber and bats as wide as eagles were waking for the feast.
We rode the long road to the caves as slowly as the bike would allow. We rode through soft wind in shadows, hiding and revealing the sky. The young night was clear. The first stars woke, rubbing their eyes. A leaf-fire somewhere sent earth perfumes into the air. And we were two happy fugitives, together and free.