The Mountain Shadow

She was a river, not a stone, and every day was another curve in tomorrow’s plain. She was pulled from a family she loved, and that loved her, she thought, until they took the word of a man, a friend and neighbour, who raped her. Years later, when she killed the rapist and went on the run, she severed every connection to her own life.

She was runaway tough, a dancing cat, a green witch, and safe from everything but herself, like me.

She used the money she’d made on the stock market to hire people, new friends and not-quite strangers, giving them office space she’d rented in the Amritsar hotel. She was gathering a new family around her, as so many in the old family she’d found in Bombay left the Island City, or died, or were dying, like Gemini George.

I didn’t know how much of the gathering she did at the Amritsar hotel was considered, and how much was unconscious instinct. But when she worked with the three families in the treasure-hunters’ palace, she settled quickly and happily into their routine, and I saw the hunger for it, in both of us: the desire that had matured into need.

The word family is derived from the word famulus, meaning a servant, and in its early usage, familia, it literally meant the servants of a household. In its essence, the longing for family, and the ravenousness that the loss of family creates in us, isn’t just for belonging: it’s for the grace that abides in serving those we love.

Chapter Eighty-Seven

It was a season of change, and the Island City seemed to be sprucing itself up for a parade that hadn’t been called. Road dividers wore gleaming new coats, painted by men who risked their lives at every stroke. Shops redecorated, and shoppers redecorated with them. New signs announced old privilege on every corner. And beloved mould, nature’s comment on our plans, was scraped from buildings and painted over.

‘Why don’t you like the new makeover?’ a friend who owned a restaurant asked me, staring up at his freshly painted enterprise from the pavement.

‘I liked the old makeover. Your paint job is dandy, but I liked the one made by the last four monsoons.’

‘Why?’

‘I like things that don’t resist nature.’

‘You’ve gotta keep up with the times, man,’ he said, holding his breath as he entered his renovated restaurant, because it was impossible to breathe and stay conscious at the same time, so close to the drying paint.

Fashion is the business end of art, and even Ahmed’s House of Style finally succumbed to the tyranny of assimilation. His hand-painted sign was corporatised into the stigmata of avarice, a logo. Straight razors and angry bristle brushes were gone, replaced by a selection of hair-care chemicals that signs assured us hadn’t been tested on baby rabbits, and wouldn’t blind or kill the people who used them.

Even the aftershave, Ambrosia de Ahmed, had vanished, but I was lucky enough to arrive in time to save the mirror, starred with pictures of Ahmed’s free haircuts, each one like the death photo of an outlaw, murdered by justice.

‘Not the mirror!’ I said, stopping small men with big hammers from smashing it off the wall.

‘Salaam aleikum, Lin,’ Ahmed said. ‘The whole place is being renovated, for Ahmed’s New House of Style.’

‘Wa aleikum salaam. Not the mirror!’

I had my back to the mirror, my arms wide to stop the hammers. Karla was standing beside Ahmed, her arms folded, a cheeky smile playing in the garden of her eyes.

‘The mirror has to go, Lin,’ Ahmed said. ‘It doesn’t fit with the new look.’

‘This mirror goes with every look,’ I protested.

‘Not with this look,’ Ahmed said, sliding a brochure from a pile, and handing it to me.

I looked the picture over, and handed it back.

‘It looks like a place to eat sushi,’ I said. ‘People can’t argue politics and insult each other in a place like that, Ahmed, even with the mirror.’

‘New policy,’ he said. ‘No insults. No politics, religion or sex.’

‘Are you mad, Ahmed? Censorship, in a barber shop?’

I looked at Karla, and she was having a pretty good time.

‘Come on,’ I pleaded. ‘There has to be at least one place where nobody kisses anybody on the ass.’

Ahmed gave me a stern look.

It wasn’t his own stern look: it was the stern look on a handsome face beneath a pompadour haircut, in a catalogue of cuts and styles for the New House of Style.

I flipped through the pictures, knowing that Ahmed was probably proud of it, because he’d illegally included photos of movie stars and prominent businessmen to give the collection currency.

I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but for me the catalogue was the wrong set of victims.

‘You can’t break the mirror, Ahmed.’

‘Will you sell it to me, exactly as it is?’ Karla asked.

‘Are you serious?’

‘Yes, Ahmed. Is it for sale?’

‘It would take me some time, to clean off the pictures,’ he said thoughtfully.

‘I’d like it with the pictures, if you don’t mind, Ahmed. It’s perfect as it is.’

I love you, Karla, I thought.