The Mountain Shadow

‘Wait. I’m not finished. Compassion’s a very strange thing. It comes from deep inside. People know it when they see it, because you can’t fake it. I know. I’ve tried. I was terrible at it. I got sick, when I tried. I had to go back to being a genuine, uncaring cunt, just to get well again. It’s genuine, see, even being an uncaring cunt, and I’m drawn to genuine things, even if I don’t like them. Do you see what I mean?’

‘You don’t know me at all,’ I said, meeting his eye.

‘Well, that’s where you’re wrong,’ he smiled. ‘I’ve been in Bombay for a while, you know. A few days after I got here, I heard your name in a conversation of unsavoury types at an opium den. Then I heard it again, twice in quick succession. At first, I thought it was two foreign fellas they were talkin’ about, until I figured out that Lin and Shantaram were one and the same bad-mannered miscreant. You.’

‘So you were following me.’

‘I didn’t say that. What I said was that I got intrigued. I started asking about you. I made it my business to get to know people you know, and people you do business with. I even know your girlfriend.’

‘What?’

‘She didn’t tell ya that she met me?’

He grinned. I was beginning not to like that grin.

‘I wonder why she didn’t tell you? Maybe she likes me.’

‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

‘It’s no big deal,’ he said. ‘I met her at an art exhibition.’

My raised eyebrow provoked him.

‘Oh, what? Because I’m a big lump of a Northern Irish potato-muncher, I can’t be interested in art? Is that it?’

‘Get to the point.’

‘There is no point, boyo. I met Lisa – that’s her name, right? – at an exhibition. We talked, that’s all.’

‘Why?’

‘Look, I didn’t even know she was your girlfriend, until one of her friends mentioned your name, then I put two-and-you together, so to speak. I swear.’

‘Keep away from her, Concannon.’

‘Why? She seemed to like me. I think we hit it off, a little bit. I certainly liked her. You’ll have to let her go, one of these days, but I’m sure you already know that, don’t you?’

‘That’s it,’ I said, standing.

‘Wait a minute!’ he implored, standing with me and putting a hand gently on my arm. ‘Please. I don’t want to fight you, man. I didn’t . . . I mean . . . I’m not tryin’ to upset you. It’s just my way. I know it’s fucked up. I really do. But I don’t know any other way to be. It’s like I said before, about you. Even if you don’t like it, you have to see that it’s genuine. This is what me being genuine looks like. I truly don’t mean to hurt your feelings. And I truly would like to talk.’

I resisted, staring back at him and trying to read his eyes. The pupils were tiny: pinpoints vanishing in an ice-blue tide. I looked away.

On the road nearby, a traffic warden’s truck pulled up beside the Scorpion gang motorcycles. Leaping from the back, the team of lifters dragged the motorcycles to the side of the truck, then hoisted them onto the back, cramming them up against others that had been seized for parking illegally.

Concannon followed my gaze as I watched the operation.

‘If I hadn’t come along when I did,’ he said softly, ‘it might’ve been your dead body bein’ thrown onto the back of a truck.’

He was right. I didn’t like him, and I was pretty sure that he was crazy. But he’d stepped in at exactly the right time, and he’d saved me.

I sat down again. Concannon called for two more glasses of chai. Working quickly, his thick fingers made a small joint.

‘Will you smoke with me?’

I took it and puffed it alight as he held the match in the lantern of his cupped hands. After a time, I passed the joint back to him.

‘Seein’ as how you’re always gettin’ so offended, and jumpin’ up, and wantin’ to fight with me or run off somewhere, I’ll come straight to the point,’ he said, exhaling a stream of grey-blue smoke.

‘The point of what?’

‘I’m startin’ a new gang, and I want you to join me.’

It was my turn to laugh.

‘What’s so funny?’

‘How about . . . why?’

‘Why a gang?’ he asked, passing back the joint. ‘The usual. So we can buy guns, do a little menace and mayhem, scare people into giving us truckloads of money, spend the truckloads of money, and die in the effort.’

‘Dying in the effort? That’s your sales pitch?’

Just then a man named Jibril, a horse-breeder from the stables in the nearby slum, approached me. I stood to greet him.

He was a gentle man, shy and a little uncomfortable speaking with human beings, but talkative and loving when dealing with his horses.

His eldest daughter had developed a fever a few weeks before that day, and had become desperately ill. Jibril called me, and agreed to have the girl screened via wide-spectrum viral toxicity.

I’d paid for the testing at a private clinic, and the tests had revealed that the girl was suffering from leptospirosis, a sometimes fatal disease carried in the urine of rats. Because it had been detected early, the girl was responding well to treatment.