The Mountain Shadow

‘The girls are safe with me,’ he shouted back, his arms around Diva’s Divas. ‘But please, do not get yourselves killed!’

Chapter Fifty-Six

Naveen and I rode past crowds streaming from the big slum to the fire in the next cove. We stopped the bikes in the middle of the road, next to the concrete divider. From the road, we could see the long boats burning.

It was dark, on the beach, where the fishermen lived in their shamble of huts, but the cove faced a main road with an intersecting street, and the lights made cold pictures of the burning, only twenty metres away.

The boats were already blackened, shrivelled versions of the sturdy craft they’d been. Red-rimmed mouths of glowing coals still burned on their sides.

The boats were lost, but the fire hadn’t destroyed the houses, and people were working desperately to save them.

Naveen and I tied handkerchiefs around our faces, ran across the street, and joined the bucket brigades. I filled a space between two women, taking a bucket from one, and passing it to the other. They were fast, and it wasn’t easy to keep up with them.

We could hear women and children screaming from the beach, cut off by the fire. They’d saved themselves and the children in shallow waves.

Firemen ran through the flames and smoke to help them. Firemen ran into the burning huts to save children. Firemen caught fire, their sleeves and trousers bursting into quick flames from oil and kerosene spills among the crammed huts.

One rescuer emerged from the swirling smoke close to me with a child in his arms. His own hair was burning, but he ignored it. He passed beside me, but I couldn’t break the bucket-chain, and couldn’t help him.

The smell of burnt skin went into my mind while I was passing buckets of water and stayed there, like a dead horse found in a prairie of memory.

Is there a limit to the number of horrible things you can see, and experience, in any one life? Of course, there is: the limit is one, and none.

The buckets stopped. Everyone was kneeling, or looking at the sky. It was raining. I hadn’t noticed.

I was still smelling the burnt skin, and for some reason, I was remembering the severed head, on the side of the road, in Sri Lanka. I was still in yesterday’s prairie.

It poured. The fires sizzled. Firemen broke down the most dangerous structures, and contained the fire. People danced. If I’d been in a better mood, or if Karla had been there, I’d have danced with them.

I walked back along the beach and looked up, beyond the burnt boats, to the wall of trees at the far end of the beach. Grey figures began to walk out of the smoke and the shadows.

Greg figures, ghosts or demons, were coming toward us slowly.

The insides of the boats were saturated with a hundred years of fish oil, and the smoke all around us was blue-black as they burned and smouldered.

The men who stumbled through that black fog and rain toward us were stained with it, because they’d lit the fires. They were grey with ash and smoke and dust from the trees where they’d been hiding.

Rainwater striped their faces, making them grey tigers, moving slowly through a jungle of smoke. It took me a few seconds to realise that they were Scorpions.

Hanuman, as identifiable as a flagpole, and walking with a limp, was the last man out of the shadows.

Time really does slow down, sometimes, when love and fear combine with history, even if it’s only the history of a little place like the fishermen’s cove in Colaba. Heartbeats become hammers, and you can see everything at once. You’re somewhere else, already: somewhere dead, already. And you’re never sharper, never more aware of every swirl of smoke.

I saw the Scorpions coming toward us. I saw the people, still dancing behind me. I saw kids, dogs, and elderly people sitting on the sand. I saw firemen, standing amid the huts, steam coming off their burnt uniforms.

The Scorpions were still about sixty metres away. They were carrying knives and hatchets. They’d started the fire as Act One, and were coming to close the play.

I pulled my knives from their scabbards and started jogging toward them. I didn’t know what I was doing. The most important thing, it seemed to me at that moment, was to give the people behind me time to react, and run. I was shouting. I was screaming, I guess.

By the third or fourth step I stopped thinking, and something happened to the sound. I couldn’t hear anything. Wishes, wings without birds, passed through me like spears of light.

I had a knife in each hand and I was running through a tunnel, numbed of noise. I couldn’t even hear my own breathing. It seemed to take forever, but I knew that when I was close, it would be too fast.

There was somebody jogging with me. It was Naveen, but he wasn’t running with me, he was grabbing at my vest, he was pulling me to the ground. I hit the sand so hard that the world returned, and all the shouting and screaming and sirens came on at once. Naveen was half on top of me, where we fell.