The Mountain Shadow

I went back to my rooms, drank something, smoked the last tiny piece of Lisa’s heavenly dope, danced to music for a while, and then opened my journal to write.

Farid and Amir, gone. Hanuman and Danda, gone. Boats and huts on the beach burned. And Vikram, gone. Vikram, the love-train rider: Vikram, gone.

Change is the blood of time. The world was changing, out of time, and moving beneath me like a whale, soaring for air. The chess pieces were moving themselves. Nothing was the same, and I knew that nothing would be better, for a while.

The newly dead are ancestors, too. We respect the chain of life and love when we celebrate the life, not mourn the death. We all know that, and we all say it, when loved ones leave.

But even though we know that death is the truth, and we sing stories to ourselves, the pain of loss is something we can’t deny, except by wounding tenderness.

It’s a good thing, the crying. It isn’t rational, and it can’t be. It’s a purity beyond reason. It’s the essence of what we are, and the mirror of what we’ll become. Love.

I cried for Vikram. I knew that he wasn’t murdered, but released: a soul-prisoner, on the run forever. But still I filled the empty well with dancing, and tears.

And I ranted, and I raved, and I wrote strange things that should be true in my journal. My hand ran back and forth across the pages like an animal in a cage. When my eyes blurred, and the black words I’d written seemed like the black lace of Madame Zhou’s veil, I slept in a web of bad dreams: caught, and waiting for death to creep toward me.

Part Ten

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Sin is disconnection, and nothing disconnects us from one another more completely than the great sin, war. The struggle for control of southern crime caused friends to turn on one another, enemies to strike without warning and the cops to plead for peace, because the feud was ruining business for everyone.

The Scorpions regrouped under Vishnu’s leadership, bringing twenty more men to Bombay from the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. They were experienced street fighters, with a patriotic grudge, and within a week of their arrival they took Flora Fountain and the Fort area from the Sanjay Company.

The Sanjay Company, seeing their empire annexed piece by piece, reacted swiftly to the northern invasion: they killed their leader, not a hundred metres from his mansion.

Two-Hussein, the first soldier to fight for Khaderbhai decades before, stepped out in front of Sanjay’s car as the crime boss left his mansion. He fired his guns into the windows until Sanjay and his two Afghan guards were dead.

He renamed the Company after himself, as regicides often do, and raised the boy-king, Tariq, to a full place on the Council of the new Hussein Company. Tariq’s first act as a Council member was to call for death. Kill them all, the boy was widely reported to have said. Kill them all, and take everything they have.

It became the new motto of the Hussein Company – Take Everything They Have – where once it had been Truth and Courage.

Sin piled upon sin until the grave burden tore the last garment of tolerance, and frayed threads of honour and faith floated away on winter winds, leaving hatred naked, for all to see.

Karla started talking to me again, but she was much busier than before: too busy to share more than one meal with me, every other day. Vikram’s suicide struck her physically for a while, it seemed to me, but maybe she was just showing me what I wouldn’t face myself.

She stopped laughing and smiling. For a time, she was the Karla I’d first met: the Karla who didn’t smile. And there were no sleepovers.

It was an endurance test designed for released convicts, or musicians. I was walking through webs of testosterone and adrenaline and pheromones, disconnected from the woman I loved and couldn’t make love to, but spoke to, every other day.

And I was still testy. But testiness was the new normal in South Bombay, and nobody noticed.

The measure of a man is the distance between his human self, minute to minute, and his devoted self. I was devoted to Karla, but the distance between us left the devoted self all alone, guarding a candle in the wind, while the human self was outside, roaming the street.

As it happened, every street in town at that time was a carnival for roamers.

Fear is a poverty of Truth, and Greed is a poverty of Faith, Idriss said to me once. Fear and greed took turns to prowl the streets and slums of South Bombay for weeks: six long weeks of tension, pillage, profiteering, and blood in alleyways.