The Mountain Shadow

‘In charge of my room, while I’m gone.’

‘Okay,’ he said, considering. ‘What do you want me to do with it?’

‘Don’t let anything happen to my journals. Make sure the rations hold out for everybody. And if Karla comes back before me, guard her.’

‘Sure you want to take a risk on me?’ he asked. ‘I’m a tension point, now, because I know where the weapons are.’

‘Cut it out, Oleg.’

‘Sorry,’ he smiled. ‘But it’s so much fun. Randall said that there were these creepy experiments in a lab near here, and one of the subjects escaped recently. It was in the newspaper. The girls are scared to death. I might get lucky tonight. Is that allowed, if it’s on the couch?’

I looked at him, thinking about burning buildings, and burning friends.

‘Is that look a yes, or a no?’ he asked, smiling.

‘Are you writing this, Oleg, what’s happening tonight?’

‘Hell, yeah. Memorising it all like a time-camera. Aren’t you? It’s a pretty unusual situation, and a pretty unusual mix of people. I mean –’

‘Stay awake, Oleg. Buildings like this burn, when people burn things in Bombay. It’s not a joke. That’s why I haven’t been drinking. It’s why I haven’t had a smoke. This is the shit, and I need you to stay straight while I’m gone.’

‘Don’t worry about the lifeboat while you’re gone,’ he smiled. ‘They’ll all be here, when you swim back.’

‘You wrote that, just before, didn’t you?’

‘Chert, da. Thank you so much for this, Lin,’ he said. ‘I really appreciate it.’

‘If Karla comes back before me, keep her here.’

‘You’re insulting me,’ he said. ‘You told me that already.’

‘I mean, guard her above everything, and anyone. You get that, right?’

‘I get that,’ he grinned. ‘This just gets better and better.’

I walked back into the room dressed for battle. Didier was playing rock-paper-scissors with Diva. Charu and Pari were trying to explain the rules to Vinson, who saw too many hands to make sense of it. Randall was keeping score with polite cheating. Everyone was laughing. I walked through to the entrance hall.

‘Again, with the fucking barricade?’ Jaswant complained.

‘Open it, Jaswant.’

‘It’s a bandobast, idiot! It’ll be dawn in a couple of hours, and then you’ll be a sitting goose.’

‘A duck. A sitting duck. Open up.’

‘Don’t you realise,’ he asked patiently, ‘that every time you open the barricade, you weaken the barricade?’

‘Please, Jaswant.’

‘If my Parsi friend was here, he would’ve devised a moveable barricade for contingencies like this, but –’

‘Jaswant, open the barricade, and if you ask me for a code word when I come back, I’ll get a jeweller to write it on your kara.’

‘My fat Punjabi ass, you will,’ he said, shifting his considerable belly to his considerable chest. ‘And apology accepted.’

He eased the barricade away from the door, but as I was slipping through he stopped me.

‘If Miss Karla comes back,’ he said, ‘she’ll be safe, with me.’

‘You just became a friend, Jaswant.’

‘There’s a security fee,’ he said, as I squeezed through the gap in the door. ‘For my services as a bodyguard. I’ll just put it on your bill.’

I ran the steps in jumps, sliding along the wall, to find Dominic waiting impatiently for me in the alley underneath the hotel’s arch.

‘You took your time,’ he said, as we rode away. ‘You’re hard enough to explain as it is, Shantaram, without having to explain why I’m late on my rounds.’

‘Did you get any sleep?’ I called over his shoulder.

‘An hour. You?’

‘I had company. What’s the latest? How bad is it?’

‘Very bad,’ he said, images of the bike shooting forward and backward in streetlight windows as we passed. ‘There were fires in Dongri, Malad, and Andheri. Hundreds have lost their homes and shops. VT station is packed with refugees, finding shelter or leaving the city.’

‘Has there been any fighting?’

‘Youth leaders from Hindu and Muslim communities have rallied their people. When a fire starts in a Hindu area, Hindu students arrive in trucks. They make a cordon of witnesses, so that no violence can begin. It’s the same on the Muslim side. They don’t want it to be like the last riots in Bombay.’

‘How’s that working out?’

‘So far, the students are doing a pretty good job of keeping the peace. We should do a recruiting drive among them. We need kids like that in the police.’

‘Who’s starting the fires?’

‘When a fire takes a street in Bombay,’ he said, spitting on the road, ‘a shopping mall or apartment block takes its place.’

Profiteers sometimes used communal tension as an opportunity to burn down streets of small shops standing in the way of their profit schemes. They hired thugs, tied orange headbands on their heads when they were burning Muslim shops, and green headbands when they burned Hindu streets.