The Mountain Shadow

There’s a moment of choice, of course, every second that you live. I watched the fight begin, with fairly even numbers, the Company men holding their own. I saw a new gang of cops running to help their friends. Ravi stepped away from me with another gangster, Tricky, and they broke into a run, throwing their lives at the fight. I could’ve stayed there. I could’ve watched it happen. I didn’t. I dropped my knives behind a handcart, and ran into the mess of what none of us should be.

It was a short run. A cop hit me before I reached the line. He was good. He was quick. I heard the bell, and I didn’t know which round. I followed instinct: duck and cover, then lead with a combination. I came out swinging, but the cop was already at my feet. Tall Tony, tall, skinny Tony, had floored him.

We reinforced the Company line. Cops came to help cops. People were grappling and stumbling. Cops were hitting cops. Company men were hitting friends.

I had a cop by the shirt, and I was twisting it close to me. I figured that if he couldn’t hit me, he couldn’t hit anyone else.

I was wrong, on both counts. He swung a fist over my elbows and connected with some part of my head that shut things down: the part that plays the Clash, in a room somewhere, with a Russian writer, a long way away.

I fell backwards, my hands knotting instinct in his shirt, and he came with me. Other cops came with him, pulling gangsters down into the maul. The front of the mansion had burned, and was starting to collapse. We fell into cindered wood and ashes.

I don’t know how many people were on top of the cop who was on top of me: a tree of humanity had fallen. Incense burned my eyes, as if already lit for the dead, and filled the air around us as pieces of sandalwood smouldered.

Scorched pages from sacred texts burned in the rubble. I smelled hair burning, and too much sweat, from too many bodies, piled too high on top of me.

Bullets started firing from inside the mansion. I was suddenly glad to be covered by bodies.

‘Bullets are exploding in the heat!’ an officer said, in Marathi. ‘They’re going off at random. Hold your fire.’

The cops and Company men on top of me weren’t taking any chances. They hunkered down, pressing into the only hunkering they had, which was me. I was rabbit-breathing, in tiny gasps. The bullets stopped, as the ghost magazines ran their course. Then the arch above our heads gave way, at last. The fallen mob hunkered down a little further.

Fragments of scripture broke from the false arch, and fell on us. I couldn’t lift my arms. My hands were still locked in the cop’s shirt. I couldn’t see. I was breathing ash, in air, but glad to have any air at all.

And then it stopped. The cops and gangsters staggered and stumbled back, one by one. The cop on top of me was the last. He tried to crawl away, but I had his shirt. He kept lurching on his knees, not looking back at me, until I let go.

I got up, wiped my eyes, and looked at the burning house, the house, burning, where Khaderbhai had given me hours of instruction, hours of his life, to argue philosophy.

The arched courtyard was a shivering silhouette, drawn in red-yellow flames. The partitions of the mansion dropped away in sheets. The burning frame, just a star of wooden beams, was ablaze. And it was all gone. Gone.

I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t accept it. The place I’d thought of as eternal, somehow, was gone in flame and ash.

I turned, and saw Abdullah. He was on one knee in the open space, near the mosque. He had the boy king, Tariq, in his arms. People were standing back, awed by their own reverence. Abdullah cradled the boy, but Tariq’s head had already fallen toward the grave, and his strong young arms were seaweed in the ocean of time.

The fighting stopped. The cops established a new barricade a respectful distance away. People rushed through it to touch the dead boy’s cloak.

‘Nazeer?’ I asked Abdullah, when I could push through the thorn of mourners. ‘Did you see him, inside?’

‘I took his body from this boy’s,’ Abdullah said, still kneeling, still crying. ‘He is no more. I could not save his body. He was dead and burning, as I took Tariq.’

Abdullah was also a dying man, and we both knew it. He’d promised his life to Khaderbhai as a shield for the boy, and the boy was dead. The limp body was a tattered flag, draped on Abdullah’s knee. If it took his last breath, Abdullah would make the men who killed Tariq and Nazeer see the same flag in their eyes, before they died.

‘Are you sure he was dead?’

He looked at me, Iranian deserts drifting across his eyes.

‘Alright, alright,’ I said, too shocked to do anything but agree.

Nazeer was a pillar, a stone pillar: the man who tells you the story long after everyone else has died.

‘He was already dead, when you found him?’

‘Yes. His body was burned, on the back, but his sacrifice preserved the face and body of Tariq. They were shot, Lin. Both of them. And their guards are nowhere to be found.’