The Mountain Shadow (5 page)

It stopped me. I felt, as I too often did, that I was abandoning him. It was foolish, I knew: Didier was arguably the most self-sufficient contrabandist in the city. He was one of the last independent gangsters, owing nothing, not even fear, to the mafia Companies, cops and street gangs that controlled his illegal world.

But there are some people, some loves, that worry every goodbye, and leaving them is like leaving the country of your birth.

Didier, my old friend, Naveen, my new friend, and Bombay, my Island City, for so long as she’d have me: each of us dangerous, in our different ways.

The man I was, when I arrived in Bombay years before, was a stranger in a new jungle. The man I became looked out at strangers, from the cover of the jungle street. I was at home. I knew my way around. And I was harder, maybe, because something inside me was missing: something that should’ve been there, next to my heart.

I escaped from prison, Didier escaped from persecution, Naveen escaped from the street, and the southern city escaped from the sea, hurled into its island existence by working men and women, one stone at a time.

I waved goodbye, and Didier smiled, touching the love letters to his forehead. I smiled back, and it was okay: okay to leave him.

No smile would work, no goodbye would pray, no kindness would save, if the truth inside us wasn’t beautiful. And the true heart of us, our human kind, is that we’re connected, at our best, by purities of love found in no other creature.

Chapter Three

I
T WAS A SHORT RIDE FROM
L
EOPOLD’S
to my apartment. I left the busy tourist causeway, crossed the road past the Colaba police station, and cruised on to the corner known to every taxi driver in Bombay as Electric House.

A right turn down the leafy street beside the police station gave me a view into a corner of the cellblock. I’d spent time in those cells.

My rebel eyes found the high, barred windows as I rode by slowly. A little cascade, memories, the stink of open latrines, the mass of men fighting for a slightly cleaner place near the gate bullied through my mind.

At the next corner I turned through the gate that gave access to the courtyard of the Beaumont Villa building, and parked my bike. Nodding to the watchman, I took the stairs three at a time to the third-floor apartment.

I entered, ringing the bell a few times. I walked through the living room to the kitchen, dropping my bag and keys on the table as I passed. Not finding her there or in the bedroom, I moved back into the living room.

‘Hi, honey,’ I called out, in an American accent. ‘I’m home.’

Her laugh rippled from behind the swirling curtains on the terrace. When I shoved the curtains aside I found her kneeling, with her hands in the earth of a garden about the size of an open suitcase. A little flock of pigeons crowded around her, pecking for crumbs, and pestering one another fussily.

‘You go to all the trouble of making a garden out here, girl,’ I said, ‘and then you let the birds walk all over it.’

‘You don’t get it,’ Lisa replied, turning aquamarine eyes on me. ‘I made the garden to bring the birds. It’s the birds I wanted in the first place.’

‘You’re my flock of birds,’ I said, when she stood to kiss me.

‘Oh, great,’ she mocked. ‘The writer’s home again.’

‘And so damn pleased to see you,’ I smiled, beginning to drag her with me toward the bedroom.

‘My hands are dirty!’ she protested.

‘I hope so.’

‘No, really,’ she laughed, breaking away. ‘We’ve gotta take a shower –’

‘I hope so.’

‘
You’ve
gotta take a shower,’ she persisted, circling away from me, ‘and change your clothes, right away.’

‘Clothes?’ I mocked back at her. ‘We don’t need no stinking clothes.’

‘Yes, we do. We’re going out.’

‘Lisa, I just got back. Two weeks.’

‘Nearly
three
weeks,’ she corrected me. ‘And there’ll be plenty of time to say hello, before we say goodnight. I promise.’

‘
Hello
is sounding a lot like
goodbye
.’

‘Hello is always the first part of goodbye. Go get wet.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘You’ll love it.’

‘That means I’m gonna hate it, aren’t I?’

‘An art gallery.’

‘Oh. Great.’

‘Fuck you,’ she laughed. ‘These guys are good. They’re on the edge, Lin. They’re real-deal artists. You’re gonna love them. And it’s a really important show. And if we don’t hurry, we’ll be late. And I’m so glad you got back in time.’

I frowned.

‘Come on, Lin,’ she laughed. ‘Without art, what is there?’

‘Sex,’ I replied. ‘And food. And more sex.’

‘There’ll be plenty of food at the gallery,’ she said, shoving me toward the shower. ‘And just think how grateful your
little flock of birds
will be when you come home from the art gallery that she
really
,
really
,
really
wants you to take her to, and that we’ll miss, if you don’t hit the shower
right now
!’

I was pulling my shirt off over my head in the stall. She turned on the shower behind me. Water crashed onto my back and my jeans.

‘Hey!’ I shouted. ‘These are my best jeans!’

‘And you’ve been in them for weeks,’ she called back from the kitchen. ‘Second-best jeans tonight, please.’

‘And I’ve still got your present,’ I shouted. ‘Right here, in the pocket of these jeans you just got soaking wet!’

She was at the door.

‘You got me a present?’ she asked.

‘Of course.’

‘Good. Very sweet. Let’s look at it later.’

She slipped out of sight again.

‘Yeah,’ I called back. ‘Let’s do that. After all that fun at the gallery.’

As I finished the shower, I heard her humming, a song from a Hindi movie. By chance, or by the synchronicities that curl within the spiral chambers of love, it was the same song that I’d been singing on the street, walking with Vikram and Naveen only hours before.

And later, as we gathered our things for the ride, we hummed and sang the song together.

Bombay traffic is a system designed by acrobats for small elephants. Twenty minutes of motorcycle fun got us to Cumballa Hill, a money belt district hitched to the hips of South Bombay’s most prestigious mountain.

I pulled my motorcycle into a parking area opposite the fashionably controversial Backbeat Gallery, at the commencement of fashionably orthodox Carmichael Road. Expensive imported cars and expensive local personalities drew up outside the gallery.

Lisa led us inside, working her way through the densely packed crowd. The long room held perhaps twice the safety limit of one hundred and fifty persons, a number that was conspicuously displayed on a fire-safety sign near the entrance.

If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the burning building.

She found one of her friends at last, and pulled me into an anatomically close introduction.

‘This is Rosanna,’ Lisa said, squeezed in beside a short girl who wore a large, ornate gold crucifix, with the nailed feet of the Saviour nestled between her breasts. ‘This is Lin. He just got back from Goa.’

‘We meet at last,’ Rosanna said, her chest pressing against mine as she raised a hand to run it through her short, spiked hair.

Her accent was American, but with Indian vowels.

‘What took you to Goa?’

‘Love letters and rubies,’ I said.

Rosanna glanced quickly at Lisa.

‘Don’t look at
me
,’ Lisa sighed, shrugging her shoulders.

‘You are
so
fucking
weird
, man!’ Rosanna cried out, in a voice like a parrot’s panic warning. ‘Come with
me
! You’ve got to meet Taj. Weird is his favourite thing, yaar.’

Wriggling her way through the crowd, Rosanna took us to meet a tall, handsome young man with shoulder-length hair that was sleek with perfumed oil. He was standing in front of a large stone sculpture, some three metres tall, of a wild man-creature.

The plaque beside the sculpture pronounced its name: ENKIDU. The artist greeted Lisa with a kiss on the cheek, and then offered his hand to me.

‘Taj,’ he said, giving me a smile of open curiosity. ‘You must be Lin. Lisa’s told me a lot about you.’

I shook his hand, allowed my eyes to search his for a moment, and then shifted my gaze to the huge sculpture behind him. He turned his head slightly, following my eyes.

‘What do you think?’

‘I like him,’ I said. ‘If the ceiling in my apartment was a little higher, and the floor a little stronger, I’d buy him.’

‘Thanks,’ he laughed.

He reached upwards to put a hand on the chest of the stone warrior.

‘I really don’t know what he is. I just had a compulsion to see him, standing in front of me. It’s not any more complicated than that. No metaphor or psychology or anything.’

‘Goethe said that all things are metaphors.’

‘That’s pretty good,’ he said, laughing again, the soft bark-brown eyes swimming with light. ‘Can I quote that? I might print it out, and put it beside my friend here. It might help me to sell him.’

‘Of course. Writers never really die, until people stop quoting them.’

‘That’s quite enough for this corner,’ Rosanna interrupted, seizing my arm. ‘Now, come see some of my work.’

She guided Lisa and me through the smoking, drinking, laughing, shouting crowd to the wall opposite the tall sculpture. Spanning half the long wall at eye level was a series of plaster reliefs. The panels had been painted to mimic a classical bronze finish, and told a story in consecutive panels.

‘It’s about the Sapna killings,’ Rosanna explained, shouting into my ear. ‘You remember? A couple of years ago? This crazy guy was telling servants to rise up against their rich masters, and kill them. You remember? It was in all the papers.’

I remembered the Sapna killings. And I knew the truth of the story better than Rosanna did, and better than most in the Island City of Bombay. I walked slowly from panel to panel, examining the long tableaux depicting figures from the public story of Sapna.

I felt light-headed and off balance. They were stories of men I’d known: men who’d killed, and died, and had finally become tiny figures fixed in an artist’s frieze.

Lisa pulled on my sleeve.

‘What is it, Lisa?’

‘Let’s go to the green room!’ she shouted.

‘Okay. Okay.’

We followed Rosanna through a leafy hedge of kisses and outstretched arms as she hooted and screeched her way to the back of the gallery. She tapped on the door with a little rhythmic signal.

When the door opened she pushed us through into a dark room illuminated by red motorcycle lights strung on heavy cables.

The room held about twenty people, sitting on chairs, couches and the floor. It was much quieter there. The girl who approached me, offering a joint, spoke in a throaty whisper that ran a hand through my short hair.

‘You wanna get fucked up?’ she asked rhetorically, offering the joint in her supernaturally long fingers.

‘You’re too late,’ Lisa cut in quickly, taking the joint. ‘Fate beat you to it, Anush.’

She puffed the joint and passed it back to the girl.

‘This is Anushka,’ Lisa said.

As we shook hands, Anushka’s long fingers closed all the way around my palm.

‘Anushka’s a performance artist,’ Lisa said.

‘You don’t say,’ I did say.

Anushka leaned in close to kiss me softly on the neck, the fingers of one hand cupping the back of my head.

‘Tell me when to stop,’ she whispered.

As she kissed my neck, I slowly turned my head until my eyes met Lisa’s.

‘You know, Lisa, you were right. I
do
like your friends. And I
am
having fun at the gallery, even though I thought I wouldn’t.’

‘Okay,’ Lisa said, pulling Anushka away. ‘Show’s over.’

‘Encore!’ I tried.

‘No encores,’ Lisa said, bringing me to sit on the floor beside a man in his thirties.

His head was shaved to a bright polish, and he wore a burnt-orange kurta pyjama set.

‘This is Rish. He mounted the exhibition, and he’s exhibiting work as well. Rish, this is Lin.’

‘Hey, man,’ Rish said, shaking hands. ‘How do you like the show?’

‘The performance art is outstanding,’ I replied, looking around to see Anushka leaning in to bite an unresisting victim.