The Mountain Shadow

A drum began to beat: a heavy footstep in a hall of memory, my heart. We were breaking apart. In that instant it was clear: what we had was all we ever were, or could be.

Lightning painted the water around us on the roof. They turned above my head, Lisa and the storm and the wheel of Fate, and the whole world was red, blood red, even to that sea the sky, that sea the sky.

Part Four

Chapter Eighteen

Ruling a criminal enterprise requires an instinct for fear, a

flair for ruthless caprice, and a talent for herding your men into that lush minion-pasture between awe and envy. Running a criminal enterprise, on the other hand, is all hard work.

I woke early after the night of the red archer, feeling that an arrow had passed through me leaving a red emptiness inside. I was at my desk in the passport factory before nine.

Three hours of detailed work with Krishna and Villu brought my counterfeit passports up to date. After a call to my contact at the Bombay Municipal Corporation, asking him to deliver copies of

the permit documents for Farzad’s treasure-hunting family, I headed

to the Colaba Causeway for a working lunch.

Most of the five-, four- and three-star hotels in South Bombay were within a three-kilometre radius of the Gateway of India monument. Ninety per cent of Bombay’s tourists could be found within the same arc of the peninsula, along with ninety-five per cent of the illegal passport trade, and eighty-five per cent of the drug trafficking.

Most businesses in the south paid protection money, called hafta, meaning a week, to the Sanjay Company. The Company exempted the owners of seven restaurants and bars in the same area. The owners of those bars allowed touts, pimps, tourist guides, pickpockets, drug dealers and black market traders connected with the Sanjay Company to use their premises as convenient drop-off points for goods, documents and information.

My passport forgery and counterfeiting unit had to monitor those seven drop-off centres for usable documents. For the most part, that job fell to me. To keep enemies and potential rivals guessing, I changed the order of the bars and restaurants every day, rotating between them often enough to confuse any sense of routine.

I started, on that day, at the Trafalgar Restaurant, only a good knife’s throw from Lightning Dilip’s desk in the Colaba police station. At the door of the corner-facing restaurant, below the three steep steps leading inside, I paused to shake hands with a Memory Man named Hrishikesh.

Memory Men were a criminal sub-caste in those years: men who lacked the foolhardiness to risk prison time by actually committing crimes, but whose intelligence and prodigious memories allowed them to make a modest living, serving the fearless fools who did.

Taking up positions in high criminal traffic areas, such as the causeway, they made it their business to know the latest figures for the day’s gold prices, the current black and white market exchange rates for six major currencies, the carat price for white diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and sapphires, and half-hour fluctuations in the price of every illicit drug, from cannabis to cocaine.

‘What’s up, Kesh?’ I asked, shaking his hand.

‘No problem, baba,’ he grinned, raising his eyes to the sky for a moment. ‘Ooperwale.’

The word he’d used was a reference to God, and one of my favourites. More often used in the singular, Ooperwala, it could be roughly translated as The Person Upstairs. Used in the plural, the term meant The People Upstairs.

‘Ooperwale,’ I replied. ‘Let’s go.’

‘Okay,’ he said, becoming serious as he launched into his iterations of the latest prices and rates.

I only needed the gold and currency exchange rates, but I let Kesh run through the whole of his repertoire. I liked him, and admired the subtle genius that allowed him to hold hundreds of facts in his current memory, adjusting them as often as three times in a single day, without a decimal point of error.

Most gangsters held fringe dwellers like Kesh in contempt. I never understood it. The small-scale street outlaws were harmless people, surviving through cleverness and adapted skills in a hostile environment that sometimes didn’t treat them well. I also had a soft spot for independent outlaws: men and women who refused to join the ranks of law-abiding citizens, no less resolutely than they rejected the violence of hardcore criminals.

When his recitation ended, I paid him twice the going rate for a Memory Man’s mantra, and he gave me a smile like sunlight streaming off the sea.

Inside the restaurant I sat with my back to a wall. I had a clear view of the street. A waiter nudged my shoulder with his belly. I ordered a vegetable sandwich and a coffee.