The Mountain Shadow

When I refused to move, he folded his arms patiently and nodded to a tall, powerfully built man who’d been with us in the car. The man came for me.

Hit first, and hit hard, an old con used to tell me.

As the big man stepped in quickly, swinging out with an open-handed slap to the right side of my head, I rolled with the blow, and hit him with a short, sharp uppercut. It good-luck connected with the point of his chin.

The big man stumbled back a step. Two of the men drew guns. They were old-fashioned revolvers, military issue from a forgotten war.

The leader sighed again, and nodded his head.

Four men rushed forward, pushing me onto the green and yellow lounge chair. They tied my hands to the rear legs of the chair with coconut-fibre ropes. Slipping another length of rope under the front, they tied down my legs.

The leader finally unfolded his arms and approached me.

‘Do you know who I am?’

‘A critic?’ I suggested, trying not to show the scared that I was feeling.

He frowned, looking me up and down.

‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I know who you are. I know a Scorpion when I see one.’

The leader nodded.

‘They call me Vishnu,’ he said.

Vishnu, the man Sanjay spared after the war that cost so many, the man who came back with a gang called the Scorpions.

‘Why do so many gangsters name themselves after gods?’

‘How ’bout I name you dead, you bahinchudh!’ Danda spluttered.

‘Come to think of it,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘Danda’s not a god. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Danda’s just a demigod. Isn’t that right? A minor deity?’

‘Shut up!’

‘Stay cool, Danda,’ Vishnu soothed. ‘He’s just trying to keep the subject off the subject. Don’t let him bait you.’

‘A demigod,’ I mused. ‘Ever asked yourself how often you get the short stick around here, Danda?’

‘Shut up!’

‘You know what?’ Vishnu said, stifling a yawn. ‘Fuck him. Go ahead, Danda. Fuck his happiness, if you want.’

Danda rushed at me, swinging punches. As I moved my head quickly, left and right, he only connected with one in every three. Suddenly he stopped. When I held my head still long enough to glance up, I saw the big man, the man I’d hit on the point of the chin, pulling Danda away by the shoulder.

The big man punched at my face. He was wearing a brass ring on his middle finger. I felt it crunch along the curves of my cheek and jaw. The big man knew what he was doing. He didn’t break anything, he just made it unwell. Then he changed tactic, and smacked me hard on the sides of the head with open-handed slaps.

If you beat a man with your fists for long enough, your knuckles will shatter, or the man will die, or both. But if you break him up a little with your fists, to make sure that a good, hard slap is filled with pain, you can go on beating him all day long with an open hand.

Torture. It’s heavy and flat in that space. There’s a density to it, a centripetal pull so strong that there’s almost nothing you can take from it; so little you can learn that isn’t dark all the way through.

But one thing I came to know is that when the beating starts, you shut your mouth. You don’t speak. You keep your mouth shut, until it ends. And you don’t scream, if you can help it.

‘Okay,’ Vishnu said, when the month of two minutes ended.

The big man stepped back, accepted a towel from Danda and wiped his sweat-soaked face. Danda reached up to rub the big man’s shoulders.

‘Tell me about Pakistan,’ Vishnu demanded, holding a cigarette to my lips.

I drew in the smoke with dribbles of blood, and then puffed it out. I had no idea what he was talking about.

‘Tell me about Pakistan.’

I stared back at him.

‘We know you went to Goa,’ Vishnu said slowly. ‘We know you picked up some guns. So, I will ask you again. Tell me about Pakistan.’

Guns, Goa, Sanjay: it was all coming home with one turn of the karmic wheel. But there’s a voice inside my fear, and sooner or later it says, Let’s get it over with.

‘A lot of people think the capital of Pakistan is Karachi,’ I said, through swollen lips. ‘But it’s not.’

Vishnu laughed, and then stopped laughing.

‘Tell me about Pakistan.’

‘Great food, nice music,’ I said.

Vishnu glanced at the tip of his cigarette, and then raised his eyes to the big man.

And it started again. And I limped through thick mud as each new slap on the side of my head smacked me closer to the fog.

When the big man paused, resting his hands on his thighs, Danda seized the moment to flog me, with a thin bamboo rod. It left me soaking wet with suffered sweat, but woke me up.

‘How are your balls now, madachudh?’ Danda screamed at me, kneeling so close that I could smell mustard oil and bad-fear sweat in the armpits of his shirt.

I started laughing, as you do sometimes, when you’re being

tortured.

Vishnu waved his hand.

The sudden silence that followed the gesture was so complete that it seemed the whole world had stopped for a moment.