The Mountain Shadow

Somehow, that first glimpse of the street seemed strange and unfamiliar, as if the weird megacosm of catwalks and crawlspaces in the gigantic bell-chamber of Farzad’s house was the real world, and the gleaming, steaming street beyond was the illusion.

‘I . . . ah . . . I hope my mixed-up family didn’t freak you out,’ Farzad muttered.

‘Not at all.’

‘You don’t think, you know, it’s a bit . . . crazy, na? What we’re doing?’

‘Everybody’s searching for something. And from what I can see, you’re all happy.’

‘We are,’ he agreed quickly.

‘What kind of crazy person doesn’t like happy?’

Impulsively, the young Parsi reached out and hugged me stiffly.

‘You know, Lin,’ he said, as we parted from the hug, ‘there is actually something else I wanted to ask you.’

‘Something else, yet?’

‘Yes. You know, if you ever get the phone number of that girl, that beautiful girl with the loveliness in her eyes, that Divya, the one we met outside the police station this morning, I –’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘No.’

‘Really no?’

‘No.’

‘But –’

‘No,’ I said gently, smiling at his puzzled frown.

He shook his head, turned, and walked back inside the building, the hive, the home. I faced the sun and stood for a while on the rain-scented street.

Money’s a drug too, of course, but I wasn’t worried for Farzad’s extended family. They weren’t hooked. Not yet. They’d torn their homes apart, true enough, but they’d replaced them with a common space of sharing. They’d turned their lives upside down, but it was an adventure: a voyage within themselves. They made sense of the dream they lived. It was still fun, for them, and I liked them very much for it.

I was standing, with my face in the sunlight, looking calm, very calm, and crying, somewhere inside. Sometimes the sight of what you lost, reflected in another love, is too much: too much of what was, and isn’t any more.

Family, home: little words that rise like atolls in earthquakes of the heart. Loss, loneliness: little words that flood the valleys of alone.

In the island of the present, Lisa was slipping away, and a spell had been cast by the mention of a name: Karla. Karla.

It’s a foolish thing to try to love, when the one you really love, the one you’re born to love, is lost somewhere in the same square circle of a city. It’s a desperate, foolish thing to try to love someone at all. Love doesn’t try: love is immediate, and inescapable. The mention of Karla’s name was fire, inside, and my heart wouldn’t stop reminding me.

We were castaways, Karla and I, because we were cast out, both of us. Lisa and all the other bright people we loved, or tried to love, were volunteers, sailing to the Island City on dreams. Karla and I crawled onto the sand from ships we’d sunk ourselves.

I was a broken thing. I was a lonely, broken thing. Maybe Karla was, too, in her own way.

I looked at the domed house: separate entrances on the outside, joined lives on the inside. Whether they found the treasure or not, it was already that marvel, that miracle, an answered prayer.

I turned to the storm-faded sunlight again, and rejoined the world of exiles that was my home.

Chapter Sixteen

I swung the bike away from Farzad’s house and into the wide, divided boulevard that followed the Island City coast north. Densely packed, sodden rainclouds closed in overhead, darkening the street.

I began to pass a wide, sheltered inlet, and slowed down.

Long wooden fishing boats painted vivid blue, red and green had been dragged onto the shore for maintenance work. The fishermen’s simple huts leaned into one another, their plastic sheet coverings secured to the corrugated roofs against storm winds by bricks and pieces of broken concrete.

Nets were strung between wooden poles. Men worked on them, threading spools of nylon through holes and woven loops. Children played on the sand, defying the gathering rainstorm, and chased one another between the boats and webs of netting.

From dawn, the little bay was a small but important part of the local fishing community. After midnight it was a small but important part of the local smuggling community, who used fast boats to bring in cigarettes, whiskey, currencies and drugs.

Every time I passed the sandy beach I scanned it, looking for faces I knew, and signs of illicit trade. I had no personal interest: Farid the Fixer administered the bay, and the profits and opportunities were his. It was professional curiosity that drew my eye.

All of us in the black market knew every place in South Bombay where crime flourished, and all of us sent a discreet, searching eye into them, every time we passed. We began in caves and dark places, Didier once said, and we criminals still miss them terribly.

I let my eyes glance back to the wide divided road, and saw three motorcycles pass me on the other side. They were Scorpions. The man riding in the centre was Danda. I recognised one other as Hanuman, the big man who’d given me a professional beating in the warehouse.