The Mountain Shadow (108 page)

‘Just go back to what you were doing,’ I said, hatchet in hand. ‘Relax. I’ll go around picking up the weapons, because I don’t want anyone to get accidentally hurt. Okay?’

They blinked at me again. Didier was wearing a mask, and even he was blinking.

‘Wow,’ Charu and Pari said.

I put the jungle-street weapon on my wooden bed and went back to the room, gathering up knives, a gun, two clubs and a nifty knuckleduster. The last weapon was a set of Vikrant’s throwing knives, which I’d hidden behind a corner balcony support, near where Diva was sitting.

‘You’re either tragically paranoid,’ Diva said, ‘or tragically right.’

‘I don’t have time to be paranoid,’ I laughed. ‘There are too many people out to get me.’

I kept the handgun in my vest pocket. I couldn’t hide it in the apartment, because I couldn’t trust any of them if they found it.
It’s bad karma to let someone get killed with your gun
,
Farid, dead Farid the Fixer, once said to me.
Right up there under killing someone with it yourself
.

Didier and Oleg had their own guns, if guns were needed. And there was a chance, if things got worse, that they might. Riots burn city blocks in Bombay, and other Indian cities. And around the fire in rings of blades and clubs are some of the people who lit the fire, waiting for prey to run.

I’d made a deal with Dominic to make another tour, in two hours. He needed to go home, eat, take a nap, and report again for duty. With the city in lockdown, every cop worked every shift.

I’d planned to forget the food, and go straight to the nap, but with my place full of people and my mattress on the floor, the night had unplanned itself.

I went back into the main room and looted Jaswant’s supplies, heaped on the table beside the stove. I ate a banana off the bunch with one hand, and almonds with the other. I drank half a glass of honey from a pot. Then I cracked three eggs into a big glass, poured milk on it, threw in some turmeric powder, and drank it down.

The girls had been watching.

‘Eeeuw,’ Charu said.

She was a pretty girl. For a second, the vain part of me wanted to explain that I had to be on the road again, without any place to eat, and I didn’t have time to cook. But I was in love, and vanity, that little shadow of pride, couldn’t weaken me.

‘You want one?’ I asked, offering her the glass.

‘Eeeuw,’ Charu said.

‘Is that like a magic trick, or something?’ Pari asked.

‘If it’s tricks you like, Miss Pari,’ Didier said. ‘Look no further than Didier.’

‘Wow. I want to see every single trick, Didier,’ Charu said.

‘Make it thrilling, Didier,’ Pari added.

Things got back to unusual. Everybody said something essential, inessentially. I went back to my bedroom, racked my weapons into a roll, and stashed them on a window ledge, obscured by a dresser.

‘You know, if this was a horror movie,’ Oleg said, leaning in the doorway behind me, ‘the hidden weapons would be a tension point.’

‘Unless
you
knew,’ I said, tucking the roll out of sight. ‘Then
you’d
be the tension point.’

‘Damn!’ he said. ‘Have you ever played
Dragon Quest
? They’re mad for it in Moscow.’

‘I’m taking off, Oleg,’ I said, turning to face him.

‘Wait a minute,’ he said quickly, ‘you’re taking off? I thought nobody was taking off. Never split up. That’s the first rule of crazy-time survival tactics.’

‘Strange as these words are, I’m leaving you in charge.’

‘In charge of what?’

‘In charge of my room, while I’m gone.’

‘Okay,’ he said, considering. ‘What do you want me to do with it?’

‘Don’t let anything happen to my journals. Make sure the rations hold out for everybody. And if Karla comes back before me, guard her.’

‘Sure you want to take a risk on me?’ he asked. ‘I’m a tension point, now, because I know where the weapons are.’

‘Cut it out, Oleg.’

‘Sorry,’ he smiled. ‘But it’s so much fun. Randall said that there were these creepy experiments in a lab near here, and one of the subjects escaped recently. It was in the newspaper. The girls are scared to death. I might get lucky tonight. Is that allowed, if it’s on the couch?’

I looked at him, thinking about burning buildings, and burning friends.

‘Is that look a
yes
, or a
no
?’ he asked, smiling.

‘Are you writing this, Oleg, what’s happening tonight?’

‘Hell, yeah. Memorising it all like a time-camera. Aren’t you? It’s a pretty unusual situation, and a pretty unusual mix of people. I mean –’

‘Stay awake, Oleg. Buildings like this burn, when people burn things in Bombay. It’s not a joke. That’s why I haven’t been drinking. It’s why I haven’t had a smoke. This is the shit, and I need you to stay straight while I’m gone.’

‘Don’t worry about the lifeboat while you’re gone,’ he smiled. ‘They’ll all be here, when you swim back.’

‘You wrote that, just before, didn’t you?’

‘
Chert, da
. Thank you so much for this, Lin,’ he said. ‘I really appreciate it.’

‘If Karla comes back before me, keep her here.’

‘You’re insulting me,’ he said. ‘You told me that already.’

‘I mean, guard her above everything, and anyone. You get that, right?’

‘I get that,’ he grinned. ‘This just gets better and better.’

I walked back into the room dressed for battle. Didier was playing rock-paper-scissors with Diva. Charu and Pari were trying to explain the rules to Vinson, who saw too many hands to make sense of it. Randall was keeping score with polite cheating. Everyone was laughing. I walked through to the entrance hall.

‘Again, with the fucking barricade?’ Jaswant complained.

‘Open it, Jaswant.’

‘It’s a
bandobast
, idiot! It’ll be dawn in a couple of hours, and then you’ll be a sitting goose.’

‘A duck. A sitting duck. Open up.’

‘Don’t you realise,’ he asked patiently, ‘that every time you
open
the barricade, you
weaken
the barricade?’

‘Please, Jaswant.’

‘If my Parsi friend was here, he would’ve devised a
moveable
barricade for contingencies like this, but –’

‘Jaswant, open the barricade, and if you ask me for a code word when I come back, I’ll get a jeweller to write it on your
kara
.’

‘My fat Punjabi ass, you will,’ he said, shifting his considerable belly to his considerable chest. ‘And apology accepted.’

He eased the barricade away from the door, but as I was slipping through he stopped me.

‘If Miss Karla comes back,’ he said, ‘she’ll be safe, with me.’

‘You just became a friend, Jaswant.’

‘There’s a security fee,’ he said, as I squeezed through the gap in the door. ‘For my services as a bodyguard. I’ll just put it on your bill.’

I ran the steps in jumps, sliding along the wall, to find Dominic waiting impatiently for me in the alley underneath the hotel’s arch.

‘You took your time,’ he said, as we rode away. ‘You’re hard enough to explain as it is, Shantaram, without having to explain why I’m late on my rounds.’

‘Did you get any sleep?’ I called over his shoulder.

‘An hour. You?’

‘I had company. What’s the latest? How bad is it?’

‘Very bad,’ he said, images of the bike shooting forward and backward in streetlight windows as we passed. ‘There were fires in Dongri, Malad, and Andheri. Hundreds have lost their homes and shops. VT station is packed with refugees, finding shelter or leaving the city.’

‘Has there been any fighting?’

‘Youth leaders from Hindu and Muslim communities have rallied their people. When a fire starts in a Hindu area, Hindu students arrive in trucks. They make a cordon of witnesses, so that no violence can begin. It’s the same on the Muslim side. They don’t want it to be like the last riots in Bombay.’

‘How’s that working out?’

‘So far, the students are doing a pretty good job of keeping the peace. We should do a recruiting drive among them. We need kids like that in the police.’

‘Who’s starting the fires?’

‘When a fire takes a street in Bombay,’ he said, spitting on the road, ‘a shopping mall or apartment block takes its place.’

Profiteers sometimes used communal tension as an opportunity to burn down streets of small shops standing in the way of their profit schemes. They hired thugs, tied orange headbands on their heads when they were burning Muslim shops, and green headbands when they burned Hindu streets.

Dominic wasn’t being cynical about that truth: he was defeated by it. He was thirty years old, a father of three, two girls, ten and eight, and a four-year-old boy: he was an honest, hard-working man who risked his life day and night in the uniform that he wore, and he’d stopped believing in the system that dressed him in it, and gave him a gun to defend it.

He talked bitterly, as he rode, and I’d heard it before, many times, in slums, on the streets and in small shops. It was the voice of resentment at the double unfairness of a social inequity that preys upon the poor, while telling them that it’s their karma to be deprived.

Dominic’s family had been Hindus, in his grandfather’s time. They’d converted to Christianity in the wave of conversions summoned by the elegant, ethically indelible speeches of Dr Ambedkar, India’s first law minister and a champion of the Untouchables.

The family suffered after the conversion at first, but by the time that Dominic and his wife were making their own family, they were fully integrated into the Christian community, just as many others had become Buddhists or Muslims to slip the chain of caste.

They were the same people, the same neighbours, simply going to different places to connect with the Source. But each religion resented, and sometimes violently resisted, attrition from its own faith franchise, and conversions remained a fiercely contested issue.

We made his circuit of the city, from Navy Nagar to Worli Junction, through every route possible. Trucks of chanting Hindus and Muslims passed us, their banners rippling, orange for Hindus and green for Muslims.

Politicians and the rich defied the lockdown, riding in armed escorts on the empty roads, always passing at speed as if being chased. A few people dared to risk the streets, here and there. When we saw them, they saw us, and ran away. Apart from that, the city near dawn was empty.

There weren’t any zombies, but the dogs and rats were plentiful, and hungry, without humans leaving refuse for them to eat. They took over many deserted streets, howling and squeaking for scraps.

Dominic was very careful. Indian people like dogs and rats. Indian people like just about everything. He stopped once, when there was a swarm of rats in front of us, blocking the way like sheep on a country road.

He revved the engine, flashed the high-beam headlight, and sounded the horn. The rats didn’t move.

‘Any ideas?’ Dominic asked.

‘You could fire your gun in the air to disperse them. Cops do that with people, when they stand on the road.’

‘Not an option,’ Dominic said.

A thin pariah dog approached, jittering, its thin legs jerking as it walked. The Indian street dog has been around for thousands of years, and this dog knew its way around. It stopped, and began a complicated growling, barking message.

The rats scurried, scrambled and slithered away, a thick grey pelt looking somewhere else for trash. The dog barked at us.

Get outta here
, I think he said.

We rode on.

‘Nice dog,’ Dominic said over his shoulder.

‘Yeah, and I’m glad he didn’t have any friends. Thirty-five thousand people die of rabies every year in India.’

‘You really think on the dark side,’ he said, swinging the bike toward Worli Naka.

‘I think on the survival side, Dominic.’

‘You should let Jesus in your heart.’

‘Jesus is in every heart, brother.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Of course. I love that guy. Who doesn’t?’

‘A lot of people don’t,’ he laughed. ‘Some people hate Jesus.’

‘No. Brilliant mind, loving heart, significant penance: Jesus was the real deal. They might know
Christians
they don’t like, but nobody hates Jesus.’

‘Let’s hope that nobody hates Him tonight,’ he said, glancing in alleyways as we passed them.

We reached Worli Naka, a five-way junction under bright lights, with a football field of open space around a single cop, standing on the beat.