The Mountain Shadow

Kids ran from their parents’ hands to dance and jiggle next to the drummers. Parents stood behind them, clapping their hands and wagging their heads in time to the infallible rhythm. The children jumped like crickets, their thin arms and legs jerking and leaping. With an audience, the drummers pushed themselves to near-hysterical intensity, sending their heartbeat across the sea to the setting sun. I watched them as evening became night, spilling ink on the waves.

What are we doing, Karla? I thought. What are you doing?

I swung the bike around and headed back to Leopold’s. I was hoping to catch up with Kavita Singh, and tell her about Madame Zhou. In the weeks since Madame Zhou rose from her wave of shadows beneath the Amritsar hotel, I’d tried several times to contact Kavita, but without success. When the cold stares of reception staff at the newspaper office became a wall of unavailability, I realised that she was avoiding me. I didn’t know why Kavita would feel that way, or what I’d done to offend her, and decided to give Fate time to bring us together again. But Madame Zhou’s mention of her name worried me, and I couldn’t shake off the sense of duty to tell her about it. It was finally one of my street contacts who mentioned that Kavita had been hanging out with Didier, between three and four every afternoon at Leopold’s.

Didier had become something of a lost love at Leopold’s himself, and his frequent absences wounded the staff. They expressed their disapproval by being scrupulously polite whenever they served him, because nothing irritated him more.

He tried insulting them, to jolt them out of their insupportable civility. He gave it his best shot, calling up a few insults he’d always kept in reserve for emergencies. But they wouldn’t relent, and their cruel courtesy pushed a small thorn into his chest with every putrid please, and unforgivable thank you.

‘Lin,’ he said, sitting with Kavita Singh at his customary table. ‘What is your favourite crime?’

‘That again?’ I said.

I bent to kiss Kavita on the cheek but she raised her glass to her lips, so I waved hello instead. I shook Didier’s hand as I took a place beside him.

‘Yes, that again,’ Kavita said, drinking half her glass.

‘I already told you – mutiny.’

‘No, this is the second round,’ Didier said, smiling a secret. ‘Kavita and I have decided to play a game. We will ask everyone to nominate a second favourite crime, and then test our theories about them against both of their answers.’

‘You guys have theories about people?’

‘Come on, Lin,’ Kavita smiled. ‘You can’t tell me you don’t have a theory about me.’

‘Actually, I don’t. What’s your theory of me?’

‘Ah,’ Didier grinned. ‘That would spoil the game. First, you have to nominate a second favourite crime, and then we can confirm our theories.’

‘Okay, my second favourite crime? Resisting arrest. What’s your second favourite, Kavita?’

‘Heresy,’ she said.

‘Heresy isn’t a crime, in India,’ I objected, smiling for help from Didier. ‘Is that allowed in the rules of your game?’

‘I am afraid so, Lin. Whatever answer that people give to the question, is the answer they give.’

‘And you, Didier? Perjury was your first favourite, am I right?’

‘Indeed you are,’ he replied happily. ‘You should be playing this game with us.’

‘Thanks, and no thanks, but I’d like to know your second choice.’

‘Adultery,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘Well, because it involves love and sex, of course,’ he replied. ‘But, also, because it is the only crime that every adult human being fully understands. More than that, because we are not permitted to marry, it is one of the few crimes that a gay man cannot commit.’

‘That’s because adultery’s a sin, not a crime.’

‘You’re not going all religious on us are you, Lin, talking about sin?’ Kavita sneered.

‘No. I’m using the word in a less specific and more widely human sense.’

‘Can we know any sins, but our own?’ Kavita asked, her jaw set in a muscular challenge.

‘Heavy!’ Didier said. ‘I love it. Waiter! Another round!’

‘If people don’t think there’s any collective understanding, in anything at all, I wish them well. If you accept a common language, you can talk about sin in a meaningful, non-religious way. That’s all I mean.’

‘Then what is it?’ she demanded. ‘What is sin?’

‘Sin is anything that wounds love.’

‘Oh!’ Didier cried. ‘I love it, Lin! Come on, Kavita, let the panther prowl. Riposte, girl!’

Kavita sat back in her chair. She was dressed in a black skirt and a sleeveless black top, unzipped to new moon. Her short black hair, city-chic anywhere in the world, fell in a feathered fringe over a face bare of make-up, thirty-one years old, and pretty enough to sell anything.

‘And what if your whole life is a sin?’ She sneered. ‘What if every breath you draw wounds love?’

‘The grace of love,’ I said, ‘is that it washes away sins.’

‘Quoting Karla, are you?’ Kavita spat at me. ‘How fitting!’

She was angry, and I couldn’t understand it.