The Mountain Shadow

After that, it’s a matter of observation. This one chews paan, this one hates paan, this one listens to holy songs from a speaker in the shape of King Kong. This guy likes boys, this guy likes girls, this guy likes girls too much, this guy is confident when he’s alone, and this one cowers until his confederates arrive, this one drinks, thinks, smokes, chokes, peeps, talks, walks, and this one is the only one who’ll still be standing toe to toe with you, till the last thrust of the knife.

‘You hear what happened to Abhijeet?’ Francis, my Regal Circle money changer asked, when I pulled up beside him.

‘Yeah.’

Abhijeet was a street kid, hustling tourists on the strip. He’d tried to run a police roadblock too fast on a stolen scooter. He crashed into a stone bridge support, and the bridge didn’t give way.

‘Bloody little prick,’ Francis said, handing me the pick-up money. ‘He’s annoying my mind more, now that he’s dead, than he did when he was alive. And when he was alive, he was the most annoying prick in the world.’

‘He’s annoying you so much that you’re light, Francis,’ I said, checking the money he gave me.

‘What light, baba?’ he said, raising his voice loud enough for the other traders near him to hear.

I looked around at the faces on the street.

‘Don’t do this, Francis.’

‘I’m not doing anything, baba,’ he shouted. ‘You are accusing me, and –’

I grabbed him by the collar and dragged him toward an alley, a few steps away.

‘My shop!’

‘Fuck the shop.’

I shoved him into the alley.

‘Let’s do it,’ I said.

‘Let’s do what?’

‘You’re cheating me, in front of your friends. Now we can be honest, alone. Where’s the money?’

‘Baba, you –’

I slapped him.

‘I didn’t –’

I slapped him harder.

‘In my shirt,’ he said. ‘Your money is inside my shirt.’

There was a lot of money inside his shirt. I took the money he’d skimmed, and left the rest.

‘I don’t care where you get your money, Francis, so long as you don’t skim it from me. And you’ll never make a show in front of your friends again. You see that, right?’

It’s an ugly thing, raw power: ugly enough to scare away scavengers. And it’s an ugly job, sometimes, keeping street criminals in line. They need to know that reaction will always be fast and violent, and they need to fear it. If they don’t, they all turn on you, and then things get bloody.

I did the rounds until I had enough foreign money to knock on the door of the black market bank in Ballard Pier.

Black bankers aren’t criminals: they’re civilians who commit crimes. By staying on the safe side of the line, they don’t risk real prison time. They keep a low profile, when their wealth would bring them into the A-list, because the money’s more important. And they’re scrupulously apolitical: they hold black money for any party, whether in power or not.

The Sanjay Company used the black bank at Ballard Pier, and so did the Scorpions. But a lot of cops kept their loot there, and some heavy hitters in the armed services, and the politicians, of course. There was construction money, sugar baron money, oil money and slush fund money. In one way or another it was the best protected bank in town.

The bank cared for its customers in return. Whenever one of them messed up, the bank made the mess subside, for a fee. Each scandal was tagged and bagged and locked in the vault. There was more dirt in the black bank at Ballard Pier, it was said, than undeclared gold.

Everyone in town had something to gain from the bank’s invisible hand, and everyone had something to lose if the hand became a fist. The bank was so swollen with secrets and secret money that it was too crooked to fail.

For small hustlers like me, given access to a small sub-branch window, the black bank was a convenient way to hand in my US dollars and other currencies, take the equivalent in black rupees, and let the bank forward the foreign cash to the South Bombay buyers’ syndicate.

Nobody but partners with too much to lose knew who the buyers were. Some said that a wild bunch of movie producers and actors had set up the syndicate. One rumour insisted that it was a Bombay chapter of the Masonic Lodge.

Whoever they were, they were smart. They controlled eighty per cent of the black dollars in the south, made more profit than anyone in the chain, and never risked an hour behind bars.

After costs, in my small operation, I cleared twenty thousand rupees a month from the money changer operation. If I’d still been living in the slum, it would’ve made me a king. On the street, it was pin money.

Once crime starts to pay, you soon learn that the key to survival isn’t making money, it’s keeping it. Every black rupee you make has a hundred hands reaching out to take it away. And you can’t call the cops, because the cops are often the ones taking it away.

And when the cash you make comes in bundles, and you don’t have any burning desire to spend it, because you’re a rainy day kind of a guy, few decisions are more important than where you decide to keep it.