The Mountain Shadow

Five hundred metres away, Vishnu, the head of the newly named 307 Company, after the number in the Indian penal code covering attempted murder, ruled the Underworld in a ruthless purge of Muslims from his gang. The only ones allowed to stay were the ones who told him about Pakistan, and everything else they knew about fallen Sanjay’s schemes.

Abdullah vanished, after the fire, and no-one knew where he was, or what he was planning. The other Muslims from the original Company broke away, gathered again in the heart of the Muslim bazaars in Dongri, and opened closer ties with gun suppliers from Pakistan.

The riots had scarred the city, as they always do: calls for calm from leaders high and low couldn’t still the rills of fear. Beyond the horror of communal violence itself, there was the cold realisation that such a thing can happen at all, even in a city as beautiful and loving as the Island City.

Karla clapped in time with the chanting. Randall and Naveen wagged their heads from side to side, going with the beat. And hundreds of the poor and the sick struggled and pressed through the thickening throng to touch the palanquin carrying Dennis, risen in glory.

Lights shone on the huge Gateway Monument, but from where we stood, the wide archway was just a slender thread: the eye of the needle that the camel of the British Raj couldn’t pass through.

The sea beyond was a black mirror, scattering lights from hundreds of small boats in jagged waves: fingerprints of light pressed on a pane of the sea.

And desperate prayers echoed from the Trojan tower that the British left in the Island City: sounds that moved away, like every sound, eternally.

Every sound we utter goes on forever, continuing through space and time until long after we’re gone. Our home, our Earth, transmits to the universe whatever we shout, or scream, or pray, or sing. The listening universe, that night, in that somehow sacred space, heard prayers and cries of pain, raised by hope.

‘Let’s ride,’ Karla said, swinging onto the back of my bike.

We swung away from the Gateway area slowly, giving Randall and Naveen time. And the crowd chanted louder, cleansing the conflicted signals in the Island City’s air, for a while, with the purity of their plea.

Chapter Seventy-Five

Happiness abhors a vacuum. Because I was so happy with Karla, the sadness in Naveen’s eyes reached deeper into the pool of empathy than it might’ve done, if sadness was still a vacuum in my own heart, as well. The brave love in his affection seemed to have retreated, and I wanted to know if it was recovering, or defeated.

When we returned to the Amritsar hotel, I got a moment to pull Naveen’s sleeve in the corridor behind Jaswant’s desk.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked him.

‘Going on?’

‘Randall is dating the woman you love, and you’re huggin’ him like a brother. I don’t get it.’

He bristled, in the way that dangerous young animals bristle, more from reflex than rage.

‘You know, Lin, there are things that are private, for a reason.’

‘Fuck that, you Irish-Indian. What’s going on?’

He relaxed, sure that I cared, and leaned against the wall.

‘I can’t do that world,’ he said. ‘I can’t even be in that world, unless I’m asking uncomfortable questions, or helping to arrest someone.’

‘What world?’

‘Her world,’ he said, as if they were his words for hell.

‘You don’t have to join her world, to be her boyfriend,’ I said. ‘Randall is dating her, and he lives in his car.’

‘Is that supposed to make me feel good?’

‘It’s supposed to make you realise that when you went on that more-than-a-date with Benicia, you messed it up. You gotta make it right. You earn the love you feel, man.’

He hung his head as if it was the third round of a six-round fight he couldn’t win. I felt bad. I didn’t want to depress him: I wanted him to know that he was Randall, and then some. And I wanted to remind him that Diva knew it, too.

‘Look, kid –’

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s okay. I hear what you say, but I’m not fighting this, and I never will.’

‘If you don’t get it out in the open now, it’ll come out with someone else, later on. And that’ll be on you, because you can fix this now.’

He smiled, and stood up straight, his eyes on mine.

‘You’re a good friend, Lin,’ he said. ‘But you’re shaking the wrong bush. I’m a free man, and Diva’s a free woman, and that’s the way it should be.’

‘I said my piece,’ I said, still saying my piece, ‘but I don’t see you quitting.’

‘Every peace is made by somebody quitting,’ he shrugged.

I looked at him, squinting the truth out of him.

‘You practised that for Karla, didn’t you?’

‘Yeah,’ he confessed, smiling. ‘But it’s true, in this case. I’m not going there, Lin, and I’d appreciate it if you don’t go there again either, after this. I really mean it. And I’ve got nothing against Randall. He’s a good guy. Better him than a bad guy.’

‘You got it,’ I said, sadder than he was, it seemed. ‘Let’s go see what Karla is doing.’

Karla was on the carpeted floor with Didier, doing a séance with a ouija board.