The Mountain Shadow

Clean and dried and naked, I closed the curtains, banning the day to come, locked all my locks, put weapons around the room wherever I thought I might need them, played music on my bad sound system, said a prayer of thanks for my bad sound system, and I paced.

When you do enough time in a cell, you learn to walk, because walking stills the voice inside, calling you to run.

Don’t you dare give up on me.

I walked. I drank some more. The music got louder, or maybe it just sounded louder. I was riding a Bob Marley wave to a brighter shore, and I wanted to look at Karla’s smile, and I realised that I didn’t have a photograph of Karla.

I searched everything I had without success, and decided that a joint might help. The joint found lots of interesting stuff I didn’t know I had, including a friendly cricket that didn’t sing, which I relocated to the balcony, but there was no picture of Karla.

I was getting a little high, and the first thing I wrote in my journal, after the fruitless search, was a question.

Is Karla real?

I wrote a lot of other things. I recited poetry. When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I began, and I got to like him with friends possessed, when someone seemingly possessed started banging on the door.

I went on with my war dance for the dead, and the banging stopped, and the drumming in the music thumped me around the room, and I could write again.

I wrote pages of notes on Nazeer. Departed loved ones never leave the heart, but the living picture of them fades, paled in memory’s river. I wanted to write Nazeer, before I couldn’t. I wanted to write those eyes, so often like the eyes of an animal, a hunting animal, unknowable and capable of anything: those mountain eyes, born in sight of the planet’s peak, that were so seldom lamps inside the cave of his tenderness.

I wrote the humour, hidden in ravines of his grimacing. I wrote the shadow that covered his face in any light, as if the ashen end was stamped on his face from the beginning.

I wrote his hands, those Komodo claws, the dark earth of early labour years branding them for life: Martian canals of lines and wrinkles on his knuckled fingers, some of them as deep as cuts from a knife.

I wrote Tariq. I wrote about the little beads of sweat that broke out on his lip whenever he was pretending to be someone else. I wrote the precision in his movements, as if his life was a tea ceremony that never ended.

And I wrote how handsome he was. There was a handsome man already growing in the awkward boy: a face that would make girls think about him at least twice, and a brave eye that would challenge every man he met.

I tried to write him, to keep him, to save him, and Nazeer, in words that might live.

I wrote until something ran out, or everything ran out, and I reached that place where words stop and thinking stops and there’s only emotion, feeling, a lonely heartbeat sounding through colder depths of the ocean inside, and I slept, dreaming of Karla, pulling me from a house on fire, her kisses burning love on my skin.

Part Twelve

Chapter Sixty-Eight

I woke to find that it wasn’t Karla’s kisses burning my skin: I’d fallen asleep with my face on a statue of Lord Shiva, and His trident had carved a mark on my cheek. I hit the shower and washed up again, determined to keep the door locked for a couple of days, and maybe continue my wake for the dead. But when I dried off and looked in the mirror, the trident mark was still there. It seemed as if it would last a few days before fading. And I knew, staring at that folly, that if I got so wasted that I branded my own face, when there were enemies who’d happily scar it for me, it was time to stop getting wasted.

And with that sobering thought, it occurred to me that Karla might’ve left her fetish party early, and could be stranded somewhere in the Island City, because of the rioting. I dressed in battle gear, did a pocket check, and walked into the entry hall. There was a barricade of furniture against the door leading to the stairs. It was common practice in hotels during a police lockdown of the city, in those years, to keep guests safe on one side of a barricade, and looters or rioters on the other.

‘The whole of South Bombay is locked down,’ Jaswant said, reading his newspaper. ‘I was lucky to get this newspaper. And no, you can’t have it until I’m finished.’

‘Where?’

‘You can’t have it anywhere. There’s a line before you, baba.’

‘I mean, where’s the lockdown?’

‘Everywhere.’

A lockdown meant that I couldn’t travel anywhere in the city during daylight: nobody could.

‘For how long?’

‘What the fuck do you care?’

‘Fuck it, Jaswant. What’s your hunch? One day, or four?’

‘Given all the fires and rioting last night, I’ve got the bookies on three days,’ he replied. ‘And I repeat, what the fuck do you care?’

‘Three days? I don’t think I’ve got enough inspiration for three days.’