The Mountain Shadow

There wasn’t a lot to learn. The girl’s story was that she’d woken to find her boyfriend dead in the bed beside her. There was a syringe stuck in his arm. She’d called the manager for help, and he’d called the police and an ambulance.

Lightning Dilip was satisfied that it was a simple overdose. The kid had track marks on the veins in his arms, hands and feet, and the hotel manager testified that no-one had entered Rannveig’s room but the couple.

It cost me five thousand rupees to buy back the girl’s passport, and another ten thousand to have the name Rannveig Larsen removed from the account of the boy’s death.

In the revised version of the official record, it was the hotel manager who’d found the body, and Rannveig vanished from the narrative.

It was a lot of money in those days, and I planned to recover it from Vinson soon. As I was leaving Lightning Dilip’s office, slipping the Norwegian passport into my pocket, the duty sergeant stopped me.

‘Tell the Sanjay Company that this case raises the stakes.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘DaSilva,’ he said, almost spitting the word at me. ‘Andrew DaSilva. It was his heroin that killed this boy. It’s the third heroin death this week. The Sanjay Company is selling some very strong, very bad shit on the street. I’m getting trouble for it.’

‘How can you be sure of that?’

It wasn’t a polite question, and he didn’t have a polite answer.

‘Fuck you, and fuck dead junkies. I don’t give a shit. The two local kids are a minor problem. But when a foreigner dies in my zone, it leaves a big stain on my desk. I like a clean desk. I told DaSilva he would have to pay me double this month, for the two deaths. Now that it’s three deaths, the price is triple.’

‘Tell Sanjay yourself, Lightning. You see him more often than I do.’

I left the station house, moved through the traffic, and walked to the narrow cement-block and metal rail divider that separated the lanes moving south and north along the busy causeway.

Standing in a gap in the steel fence, I felt the traffic swirl around me: densely packed red commuter buses, scooters carrying five-member families, handcarts, motorcycles and bicycles, black-and-yellow taxis, fish-market trucks, private cars and military transports moving to and from the large naval base at the spear-tip of the Island City’s peninsula.

Words cut through the jungle of thoughts.

Our dope. Sanjay Company dope. The girl in the locket, Rannveig, like the thing at the airport. Her boyfriend. The girl in the locket. Our dope.

Horns, bicycle bells, music from radios, the cries of stallholders and beggars rose up everywhere, echoing from covered walkways and the elegantly sagging stones of buildings that supported them.

Our dope. Sanjay Company dope. The girl. The locket. Her boyfriend. Our dope.

The smells of the street punished me, making me dizzy: fresh catches of fish and prawns from Sassoon Dock, diesel and petrol fumes, and the heavy wet-linen smell of monsoon mould, creeping across the brow of every building in the city.

Our dope. Our dope.

I stood on the road divider. Traffic rivers ran in front of me, heading north, and behind me, heading south, along the arm of the peninsula.

Khaderbhai had refused to allow anyone in the Company to deal heroin in South Bombay, or to profit from prostitution. Since his death, more than half of the new Sanjay Company’s funds came from both sources, and Sanjay sanctioned more dealers and brothels every month.

It was a new world, not braver but much richer than the one I’d discovered, when Khaderbhai saved me from prison and recruited me. And it was no use telling myself that I didn’t sell the drugs or the girls: that I worked in counterfeiting and passports. I was up to the thin silver chain around my neck in it.

As a soldier with the Sanjay Company I’d fought other gangs, and could be called to protect Andrew, Amir, Faisal and their operations at any time, and with no explanation for the blood to be spilled, and no right to refuse.

Our dope.

I felt a touch in the centre of my back, and as I began to turn there was another touch, and another. Three of the Cycle Killers raced away into the flow of traffic on their chrome bicycles.

I looked back quickly to greet Pankaj, second in charge of the Cycle Killers, as he skidded his bicycle to a stop beside me. He rested against the metal rail of the road divider. Traffic eddied around him, and he looked mischief at me, his eyes bright.

‘That’s how easy it is, brother!’ he grinned, wagging his head energetically. ‘Not counting me, you are three times dead already, if my boys were using their knives, instead of their fingers.’

He jabbed two hard fingers into my chest, directly under my heart.

‘So glad we never fight, brother,’ I said.