The Mountain Shadow

‘Bilkul thik!’ he replied. Absolutely okay!

I left the office, forgetting the young MBA making false degrees, and pushed the bike to speed on Marine Drive, sweeping up onto the narrow cutting beside the Metro flyover.

At the Parsi Fire Temple corner I saw my friend Abdullah riding with two others across the intersection in front of me. They were headed for the narrow streets of the commerce district.

Waiting for a break in the almost constant flow of vehicles, and checking to see that the traffic cop on duty was busy accepting a bribe from someone else, I cut the red light and set off in pursuit of my friend.

As a member of the Sanjay Company, I’d pledged my life to defend others in the gang: the band of brothers in arms. Abdullah was more than that. The tall, long-haired Iranian was my first and closest friend in the Company. My commitment to him was beyond the duty of the pledge.

There’s a deep connection between gangsters, faith and death. All of the men in the Sanjay Company felt that their souls were in the hands of a personal God, and they were all devout enough to pray before and after a murder. Abdullah, no less than the others, was a man of faith, although he never showed mercy.

For my part, I still searched for something more than the verses, vows and veneration I’d found in the books of believers. And while I doubted everything in myself, Abdullah was always and ever certain: as confident in his invincibility as the strongest eagle, soaring above his head in the hovering Bombay sky.

We were different men, with different ways to love, and different instincts for the fight. But friendship is faith, too, especially for those of us who don’t believe in much else. And the simple truth was that my heart always rose, always soared in the little sky inside, whenever I saw him.

I followed him in the flow of traffic, waiting for the chance to pull in beside him. His straight back and relaxed command of the bike were characteristics I’d come to admire. Some men and women ride a horse as if they’re born to it, and something of the same instinct applies to riding a motorcycle.

The two men riding with Abdullah, Fardeen and Hussein, were good riders who’d been on bikes since they were infants, riding on the tanks of their fathers’ bikes, through the same traffic on the same streets, but they never achieved the same riverine facility as our Iranian friend, and never looked as cool.

Just as I sensed a gap opening beside his bike, and pulled forward to match his pace, he turned his head to look at me. A smile edged serious shadows from his face, and he pulled over to the kerb, followed by Fardeen and Hussein.

I stopped close to him, and we hugged, still sitting on our bikes.

‘Salaam aleikum,’ he greeted me warmly.

‘Wa aleikum salaam wa Rahmatullahi wa Barakatuh.’ And unto you be Peace, and Allah’s mercy, and His blessings.

Fardeen and Hussein reached out to shake hands.

‘You are going to the meeting, I heard,’ Abdullah said.

‘Yeah. I got the call from Nazeer. I thought you’d be there.’

‘I am indeed going there,’ he declared.

‘Well, you’re taking the long way,’ I laughed, because he was heading in the wrong direction.

‘I have a job to do first. It will not take long. Come with us. It is not far from here, and I believe that you do not know this place, and these people.’

‘Okay,’ I agreed. ‘Where are we going?’

‘To see the Cycle Killers,’ he said. ‘On a matter of Company business.’

I’d never visited the den of the Cycle Killers. I didn’t know much about them. But like every street guy in Bombay, I knew the names of their top two killers, and I knew that they outnumbered the four of us by six or seven to one.

Abdullah kicked his bike to life, waiting for us to kick-start our own bikes, and then led the way out into the brawl of traffic, his back straight, and his head high and proud.

Chapter Six

I’d seen some of the Cycle Killers, riding their polished chrome bicycles at suicidal speed through the market streets of the Thieves Bazaar. They were young, and always dressed in the same uniform of brightly coloured, tight-fitting undershirts, known as banyans, white stovepipe jeans, and the latest fashion brand of running shoes.

They all slicked their hair back with perfumed oil, wore ostentatious caste-mark tattoos on their faces to protect them against the evil eye, and covered their own eyes with identical mirror-finish aviator sunglasses, as polished as their silver bicycles.

They were, by general agreement among discriminating criminals, the most efficient knife-men money could buy, surpassed in skill by only one man in the city: Hathoda, the knife master for the Sanjay Company.