‘In his last episode,’ Didier continued, ‘the good Vikram hired a horse from the handlers on Chowpatty Beach, and rode it to Letitia’s apartment on Marine Drive to serenade her outside her window.’
‘Did it work?’
‘Unfortunately, non. The horse left a package of merde on the front pathway—during an especially moving part of the song, no doubt—and the many other residents of the apartment building expressed their outrage by pelting the poor Vikram with rotting food. Letitia, it was noticed, threw more offensive missiles, and with a more deadly aim, than any of the neighbours.’
‘C’est l’amour,’ I sighed.
‘Exactly—merde and bad food, c’est l’amour,’ Didier agreed quickly. ‘I do think that I must involve myself in this romance, if it is to succeed. The poor Vikram—he is a fool for love, and Lettie despises a fool above all else. But things are much more successful for Maurizio in the last time. He had some business venture with Modena, Ulla’s paramour, and he is in the chips, as our dear Lettie would say. He is now a significant dealer, in Colaba.’
I forced my face to remain impassive while jealous thoughts of handsome Maurizio, flushed with success, spiked their way into my mind. The rain started again, and I glanced outside to see people running, hitching up their pants and their saris to avoid the many puddles.
‘Just yesterday’ Didier went on, carefully tipping his tea from the cup into the saucer, and sipping it from the saucer as most of the slum-dwellers did, ‘Modena arrived in a chauffeured car, at Leopold’s, and Maurizio is wearing a ten-thousand-dollar Rolex watch. But …’
‘But?’ I prompted, when he paused to drink.
‘Well, there is terrible risk in their business. Maurizio is not always … honourable … in his business dealings. If he should upset the wrong people, there will be great violence.’
‘And what about you?’ I asked, changing the subject because I didn’t want Didier to see the serpent of spite rising in me when he spoke of the trouble that might be finding its way to Maurizio. ‘Aren’t you flirting with danger yourself? Your new … interest … is one string short of the full marionette, or so I’m told. He’s got a very bad temper, Lettie says, and a hair-trigger controlling it.’
‘Oh, him?’ he sniffed dismissively, turning down the corners of his expressive mouth. ‘Not at all. He is not dangerous. Although he is annoying, and annoying is worse than dangerous, n’est-ce pas? It is easier to live with a dangerous man than an annoying one.’
Prabaker went to buy three beedie cigarettes from Kumar’s shop counter, and lit them with the same match, holding them in one hand and burning the ends with the other. He passed one each to Didier and me, and sat down again, smoking contentedly.
‘Ah, yes, there is another piece of news—Kavita has taken a new job at a newspaper, The Noonday. She is a features writer. It is a job with much prestige, I understand, and a fast track to a sub-editor’s position. She won it in a field of many talented candidates, and she is very happy.’
‘I like Kavita,’ I felt moved to say.
‘You know,’ Didier offered, staring at the glowing end of his beedie and then looking up at me, genuinely surprised, ‘so do I.’
We laughed again, and I deliberately included Prabaker in the joke. Parvati watched us from the corners of her smouldering eyes.
‘Listen,’ I asked, seizing the momentary pause in our conversation, ‘does the name Hassaan Obikwa mean anything to you?’
Didier’s mention of Maurizio’s new, ten-thousand-dollar Rolex had reminded me of the Nigerian. I fished the gold-and-white business card from my shirt pocket, and handed it over.
‘But, of course!’ Didier replied. ‘This is a famous Borsalino. They call him The Body Snatcher, in the African ghetto.’
‘Well, that’s a good start,’ I muttered, a wry smile twisting my lips. Prabaker slapped at his thigh, and doubled over with near-hysterical laughter. I put a hand on his shoulder to calm him down.
‘They say that when Hassaan Obikwa snatches a body away, not even the devil himself can find it. They are never again seen by living men. Jamais! How do you come to know him? How did you get his card?’
‘I sort of, bumped into him, earlier today’ I answered, retrieving the card and slipping it into my pocket.
‘Well, be careful, my dear friend,’ Didier sniffed, clearly hurt that I hadn’t provided the details of my encounter with Hassaan. ‘This Obikwa is like a king, a black king, in his own kingdom. And you know the old saying—a king is a bad enemy, a worse friend, and a fatal family relation.’
Just then a group of young men approached us. They were labourers from the construction site, and most of them lived on the legal side of the slum. They’d all passed through my small clinic during the last year, most of them wanting me to patch up wounds they’d received in work accidents. It was payday at the site, and they were flushed with the excited optimism that a full pay packet puts into young, hard-working hearts. They shook hands with me, each in turn, and paused long enough to see the new round of chai and sweet cakes they’d bought for us delivered to our table. When they left, I was grinning as widely as they were.
‘This social work seems to suit you,’ Didier commented through an arch smile. ‘You look so well and so fit—underneath the bruises and scratches, that is. I think you must be a very bad man, in your heart of hearts, Lin. Only a wicked man would derive such benefit from good works. A good man, on the other hand, would simply be worn out and bad tempered.’
‘I’m sure you’re right, Didier,’ I said, still grinning. ‘Karla said you’re usually right, about the wrong you find in people.’
‘Please, my friend!’ he protested, ‘You will turn my head!’
The sudden crash of many drums exploded, thumping music directly outside the chai shop. Flutes and trumpets joined the drums, and a wild, raucous music began. I knew the music and the musicians well. It was one of the jangling popular tunes that the slum musicians played whenever there was a festival or a celebration. We all went to the open front of the shop. Prabaker stood on a bench beside us to peer over the shoulders of the crowd.
‘What is it? A parade?’ Didier asked as we watched a large troupe slowly walk past the shop.
‘It’s Joseph!’ Prabaker cried, pointing along the lane. ‘Joseph and Maria! They’re coming!’
Some distance away, we could see Joseph and his wife, surrounded by relatives and friends, and approaching us with ceremonially slow steps. In front of them was a pack of capering children, dancing out their unself-conscious and near-hysterical enthusiasm. Some of them adopted poses from their favourite movie dance scenes, and copied the steps of the stars. Others leapt about like acrobats, or invented jerky, exuberant dances of their own.
Listening to the band, watching the children, and thinking of Tariq—missing the boy already—I remembered an incident from the prison. In that other world-within-a-world, back then, I moved into a new prison cell and discovered a tiny mouse there. The creature entered through a cracked air vent, and crept into the cell every night. Patience and obsessional focus are the gems we mine in the tunnels of prison solitude. Using them, and tiny morsels of food, I bribed the little mouse, over several weeks, and eventually trained it to eat from the edge of my hand. When the prison guards moved me from that cell, in a routine rotation, I told the new tenant—a prisoner I thought I knew well—about the trained mouse. On the morning after the move, he invited me to see the mouse. He’d captured the trusting creature, and crucified it, face down, on a cross made from a broken ruler. He laughed as he told me how the mouse had struggled when he’d tied it by its neck to the cross with cotton thread. He marvelled at how long it had taken to drive thumbtacks into its wriggling paws.
Are we ever justified in what we do? That question ruined my sleep for a long time after I saw the tortured little mouse. When we act, even with the best of intentions, when we interfere with the world, we always risk a new disaster that mightn’t be of our making, but that
wouldn’t occur without our action. Some of the worst wrongs, Karla once said, were caused by people who tried to change things.
I looked at the slum children dancing like a movie chorus and capering like temple monkeys. I was teaching some of those children to speak, read, and write English. Already, with just the little they’d learned in three months, a few of them were winning work from foreign tourists. Were those children, I wondered, the mice that fed from my hand? Would their trusting innocence be seized by a fate that wouldn’t and couldn’t have been theirs without me, without my intervention in their lives? What wounds and torments awaited Tariq simply because I’d befriended and taught him?
‘Joseph beat his wife,’ Prabaker explained as the couple drew near. ‘Now the people are a big celebration.’
‘If they parade like this when a man beats his wife, what parties they must throw when one is killed,’ Didier commented, his eyebrows arched in surprise.
‘He was drunk, and he beat her terribly’ I said, shouting above the din. ‘And a punishment was imposed on him by her family and the whole community.’
‘I gave to him a few good whacks with the stick my own self!’ Prabaker added, his face aglow with happy excitement.
‘Over the last few months, he worked hard, stayed sober, and did a lot of jobs in the community’ I continued. ‘It was part of his punishment, and a way of earning the respect of his neighbours again. His wife forgave him a couple of months ago. They’ve been working and saving money together. They’ve got enough, now, and they’re leaving today on a holiday.’
‘Well, there are worse things for people to celebrate,’ Didier decided, permitting himself a little shoulder and hip roll in time to the throbbing drums and snake-flutes. ‘Oh, I almost forgot. There is a superstition, a famous superstition attached to that Hassaan Obikwa. You should know about it.’
‘I’m not superstitious, Didier,’ I called back over the thump and wail of the music.
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ he scoffed. ‘Everyone in the whole world is superstitious.’
‘That’s one of Karla’s lines,’ I retorted.
He frowned, pursing his lips as he strained his memory to recall.
‘It is?’
‘Absolutely. It’s a Karla line, Didier.’
‘Incredible,’ he muttered. ‘I thought it was one of mine. Are you sure?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘Well, no matter. The superstition, about him, is that everyone who meets Hassaan Obikwa, and exchanges names with him in a greeting, will one day find himself a client of his—either a living client or a dead one. To avoid this fate, you don’t tell him your name when you meet him the first time. No-one ever does. You didn’t tell him your name, did you?’
A roar went up from the crowd surrounding us. Joseph and Maria were close. As they approached, I saw her radiant, hopeful, brave smile and his competing expressions of shame and determination. She was beautiful, with her thick hair trimmed short and styled to match the modern cut of her best dress. He’d lost weight, and looked fit, healthy, and handsome. He wore a blue shirt and new trousers. Husband and wife pressed against one another tightly, step for step, all four hands balled into a bouquet of clenched fingers. Family members followed them, holding a blue shawl to catch notes and coins thrown by the crowd.
Prabaker couldn’t resist the call to dance. He leapt off the bench and joined the thick tangle of jerking, writhing bodies that preceded Joseph and Maria on the track. Stumbling and tottering on his platform shoes, he skipped to the centre of the dancers. His arms were outstretched for balance as if he was crossing a shallow river on a path of stones. His yellow shirt flashed as he whirled and lurched and laughed in the dance. Didier, too, was drawn into the avalanche of revelry that ploughed through the long lane to the street. I watched him glide and sway gracefully into the party, swept along in the rhythmic dance until only his hands were visible above his dark, curly hair.
Girls threw showers of flower petals plucked from chrysanthemums. They burst in brilliant white clusters, and settled on all of us in the converging crowd. Just before the couple passed me, Joseph turned to look into my eyes. His face was fixed between a smile and a frown. His eyes were burning, glistening beneath the tight brows of his frown, while his lips held a happy smile. He nodded twice before looking away.
He couldn’t know it, of course; but with that simple nod of his head, Joseph had answered the question that had remained with me, as a dull ache of doubt, since the prison. Joseph was saved. That was the look simmering in his eyes as he nodded his head. It was the fever of salvation. That look, that frowning smile, combined shame and exultation because both are essential—shame gives exultation its purpose, and exultation gives shame its reward. We’d saved him as much by joining in his exultation as we had by witnessing his shame. And all of it depended upon our action, our interference in his life, because no man is saved without love.
What characterises the human race more, Karla once asked me, cruelty, or the capacity to feel shame for it? I thought the question acutely clever then, when I first heard it, but I’m lonelier and wiser now, and I know it isn’t cruelty or shame that characterises the human race. It’s forgiveness that makes us what we are. Without forgiveness, our species would’ve annihilated itself in endless retributions. Without forgiveness, there would be no history. Without that hope, there would be no art, for every work of art is in some way an act of forgiveness. Without that dream, there would be no love, for every act of love is in some way a promise to forgive. We live on because we can love, and we love because we can forgive.
The drums staggered toward the distant street. Moving away from us, the dancers romped and rolled on the rhythm, their swaying heads like a field of wildflowers weaving back and forth on waves of wind. As the music dwindled to an echo in our minds, the day-to-day and minute-to-minute of slum life slowly reclaimed the lanes. We gave ourselves to our routines, our needs, and our harmless, hopeful scheming. And for a while, a little while, ours was a better world because the hearts and smiles that ruled it were almost as pure and clean as the flower petals fluttering from our hair, and clinging to our faces like still, white tears.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE ROCKY CUSP OF COASTLINE bordering the slum began in mangrove swamp, at its left, and swept through deeper water around a long new-moon curve of white-crested wavelets to Nariman Point. The monsoon was at full strength, but just at that moment no rain fell from the grey-black ocean of the lightning-fractured sky. Wading birds swooped into the shallow swamp, and nestled among the slender, trembling reeds. Fishing boats plied their nets on the ragged waves of the bay. Children swam and played along the bouldered, pebble-strewn shoreline. On the golden crescent, across the small bay, apartment towers for the rich stood shoulder to shoulder to shoulder, all the way to the embassy district at the Point. In the large courtyards and recreation areas of those towers, the wealthy walked and took the air. Seen from the distant slum, the white shirts of the men and colourful saris of the women were like so many beads threaded by a meditating mind on the black strings of asphalt paths. The air, there, on that rocky fringe of the slum was clean and cool. The silences were large enough to swallow occasional sounds. The area was known as the Colaba Back Bay. There were few places in the city better suited to the spiritual and physical stocktaking that a wanted man worries himself with, when the omens are bad enough.
I sat alone, on a boulder that was larger and flatter than most, and I smoked a cigarette. I smoked in those days because, like everyone else in the world who smokes, I wanted to die at least as much as I wanted to live.
Sunlight suddenly pushed aside the sodden monsoon clouds, and for a few moments the windows of the apartment buildings across the bay were dazzling, brilliant mirrors of the golden sun. Then, horizon-wide, the rain clouds regrouped, and slowly sealed the splendent circle of sky, herding one against another until heaven matched the rolling sea with dark, watery waves of cloud.
I lit a new ci
garette with the butt of the last, and thought about love, and thought about sex. Under pressure from Didier, who permitted his friends to keep any secrets but those of the flesh, I’d admitted that I hadn’t made love to anyone since I’d arrived in India. That is a very long time between the drinks, my friend, he’d said, gasping in horror, and I propose that it would be a good idea to get very drunk, if you have my meaning, and very soon. And he was right, of course: the longer I went without it, the more important it seemed to become. I was surrounded, in the slum, by beautiful Indian girls and women who provoked small symphonies of inspiration. I never let my eyes or my thoughts wander too far in their direction—it would’ve compromised everything that I was, and did, as the slum doctor. But there were opportunities with foreign girls, tourists, in every other deal that I did with them, every other day. German, French, and Italian girls often invited me back to their hotel rooms for a smoke, once I’d helped them to buy hash or grass. I knew that something more than smoking was usually intended. And I was tempted. Sometimes I ached with it. But I couldn’t get Karla out of my mind. And deep within me—I still don’t know whether it’s love, or fear, or good judgement that spawns such a feeling—I sensed with all of my intuition that if I didn’t wait for her, it wouldn’t happen.
I couldn’t explain that love to Karla, or anyone else, including myself. I never believed in love at first sight until it happened to me. Then, when it did happen, it was as if every atom in my body had been changed, somehow: as if I’d become charged with light and heat. I was different, forever, just for the sight of her. And the love that opened in my heart seemed to drag the rest of my life behind it, from that moment onward. I heard her voice in every lovely sound the wind wrapped around me. I saw her face in brilliant mirrored flares of memory, every day. Sometimes, when I thought of her, the hunger to touch her and to kiss her and to breathe a cinnamon-scented minute of her black hair clawed at my chest and crushed the air in my lungs. Clouds, heavy with their burden of monsoon rain, massed above the city, above my head, and it seemed to me in those weeks that all grey heaven was my brooding love. The very mangroves trembled with my desire. And at night, too many nights, it was my restive sleep that rolled and turned the sea in lusted dreaming, until the sun each morning rose with love for her.