The Mountain Shadow

For his part, Didier applied himself to the Lost Love Bureau with surprising diligence. He rose early, something so shocking that I jumped with fright the first time I saw him bright and active at eight in the morning. Didier had always said that an hour of sunlight a day is enough for anyone, and the hour before sunset was the only sunlight worth having.

The morning version of the night person I knew was strange, at first. He was punctual. He worked. He even told jokes.

‘You know,’ Naveen said, a few weeks after the bureau had opened for business, ‘I’m so glad that you put Didier and me together. He’s a hard-working stiff, if you’ll pardon the expression.’

‘Maybe. I don’t know.’

‘You’re just nostalgic.’

‘It isn’t nostalgia, if the first version is better. I don’t want Didier to get corporate on me.’

The new Didier did get corporate, and detectived seriously, and business at the bureau was brisk. He put an advertisement for the Lost Love Bureau in the biggest daily newspaper, one of Ranjit’s newspapers, offering a reward for information on the whereabouts of Ranjit, the missing owner of Ranjit Media, a Lost Love.

The notice didn’t bring any new leads, but it got everyone in town talking about the Lost Love Bureau, and it brought more than a dozen clients, each one clutching a file of photographs and police reports on missing loved ones. And when two of the missing loves were found in as many weeks, due to Didier’s street connections and Naveen’s deductive skills, the bureau attracted more clients, all of them willing to pay cash in advance.

Karla was right, of course: a market is a need, serving itself. Lost loves, forgotten or abandoned by overstretched police departments, are a constant ache in the heart, no less for the cops themselves, and a need that demands to be served. The bureau did well: lost loves were found, and reunited with the hearts that couldn’t stop searching for them.

Vinson and Rannveig dropped in at Gemini George’s parties from time to time. Vinson was happy, but never left Rannveig’s side unless she sent him away, or told him to wait somewhere.

The girl with the ice-in-a-blue-glass eyes seemed to have accepted the death of her boyfriend. She never mentioned him to me again. But while that ghost might’ve slipped away on a river of acceptance, some shadow remained in the young face. It was as if every changing expression or movement of a hand was clouded by irresolution.

Nevertheless, she looked healthy and well. And she’d taken to dressing as Karla did, in a thin sheath of salwar kameez and tight cotton leggings. It suited her, with her hair pulled back into a high ponytail. And when she smiled happily and openly, as she did from time to time, leaves of doubt parted, and a bright sky of what she could become shone through.

In the mysterious absence of Ranjit, the proprietor, Kavita Singh was promoted from banner journalist to deputy editor of the flagship newspaper. The fact that Karla had a deciding proxy vote in Ranjit Media was influential. The fact that Kavita’s columns were the most popular in the city was decisive.

Within two weeks under Kavita’s creative hand, the newspaper took a new turn, not left or right, but straight up into something else. The mood was upbeat. Bombay was a great, exciting place to live. Enough of this comparing ourselves to other places shit, she wrote in her first editorial. Open your eyes, and see how wonderful this gigantic social experiment you’re living in is, and see how much real love keeps it going.

People loved it. Sometimes, people born in a place need to have someone wake its beauty for them, and Kavita’s editorial started a fire in every Mumbaikar’s heart; a fire of pride that none of them knew they’d prepared inside themselves, until Kavita lit it. The newspaper’s circulation increased by nine per cent. Kavita was a hit.

Karla laughed, long and happily, when the civic pride campaign became a trend that tumbled into a cascade of social activities across the city. I didn’t ask her why, and she didn’t tell me.

She moved into the rooms next to mine and transformed them, during a week of deletions and deliveries. Her three rooms, a living room, a bedroom and a wardrobe corridor like mine, became a Bedouin tent.

Waves of sky-blue and white muslin, fixed from the light fittings in the centre of each room, hid the ceilings. The lights were stripped away and replaced by old railway lanterns.

She took all the furniture out of the rooms, except for the bed, and a writing table in the living room. She bought the table from the music store downstairs and had the legs sawn off, so that she could sit at it cross-legged in the middle of the floor.