‘Yeah. I get the point. If everyone was stealing off everyone else we’d be so paranoid, and we’d waste so much time and money on it, that it would slow us down, and we’d never get —’
‘To the ultimate complexity’ he completed the thought for me. ‘This is why killing and stealing are wrong—not because a book tells us they are wrong, or a law tells us they are wrong, or a spiritual guide tells us they are wrong, but because if everyone did them we would not move toward the ultimate complexity that is God, with the rest of the universe. And the opposite of these is also true. Why is love good? Well, what would happen if everyone loved everyone else? Would that help us or would it hold us back?’
‘It would help,’ I agreed, laughing from within the trap he’d set for me.
‘Yes. In fact, such universal love would greatly accelerate the move-ment toward God. Love is good. Friendship is good. Loyalty is good. Freedom is good. Honesty is good. We knew that these things were good before—we have always known this in our hearts, and all the great teachers have always told us this—but now, with this definition of good and evil, we can see why they are good. Just as we can see why stealing and lying and killing are evil.’
‘But sometimes …’ I protested, ‘you know, what about self-defence? What about killing to defend yourself?’
‘Yes, a good point, Lin. I want you to imagine a scene for me. You are standing in a room with a desk in front of you. On the other side of the room is your mother. A vicious man holds a knife to the throat of your mother. The man will kill your mother. On the table in front of you there is a button. If you press it, the man will die. If you do not, he will kill your mother. These are the only possible outcomes. If you do nothing, your mother dies. If you press the button, the man dies and your mother is saved. What would you do?’
‘The guy’s history’ I answered without hesitation.
‘Just so,’ he sighed, perhaps wishing that I’d wrestled with the decision a little longer before pressing the button. ‘And if you did this, if you saved your mother from this vicious killer, would you be doing the wrong thing or the right thing?’
‘The right thing,’ I said just as swiftly.
‘No, Lin, I’m afraid not,’ he frowned. ‘We have just seen that in the terms of this new, objective definition of good and evil, killing is always wrong because, if everyone did it, we would not move toward God, the ultimate complexity, with the rest of the universe. So it is wrong to kill. But your reasons were good. So therefore, the truth of this decision is that you did the wrong thing, for the right reasons …’
As I rode the wind, a week after Khader’s little lecture on ethics, weaving the bike through ancient-modern traffic beneath a darkening, portentous tumble of clouds, those words echoed in my mind. The wrong thing, for the right reasons. I rode on and, even when I stopped thinking about Khader’s lesson, those words still murmured in the little grey daydream-space where memory meets inspiration. I know now that the words were like a mantra, and that my instinct—fate’s whisper in the dark—was trying to warn me of something by repeating them. The wrong thing … for the right reasons.
But on that day, an hour after Didier’s confession, I let the murmured warnings fade. Right or wrong, I didn’t want to think about the reasons—not my reasons for doing what I did, or Khader’s, or anyone’s. I enjoyed the discussions of good and evil, but only as a game, as an entertainment. I didn’t really want the truth. I was sick of truth, especially my own truth, and I couldn’t face it. So the thoughts and premonitions echoed and then whipped past me into the coils of humid wind. And by the time I swept into the last curve of coast near the Sea Rock Hotel, my mind was as clear as the broad horizon clamped upon the limit of a dark and tremulous sea.
The Sea Rock, which was as luxurious and opulently serviced as the other five-star hotels in Bombay, offered the special attraction that it was literally built upon the sea rocks at Juhu. From all its major restaurants, bars, and a hundred other windows, the Sea Rock scanned the endlessly shifting peaks and furrows of the Arabian Sea. The hotel also offered one of the best and most comprehensively eclectic smorgasbord lunches in the city. I was hungry, and glad to see that Lisa was waiting for me in the foyer. She wore a starched, sky-blue shirt with the collar turned up, and sky-blue culottes. Her blonde hair was wound into the praying-fingers of a French braid. She’d been clean, off heroin, for more than a year. She looked tanned and healthy and confident.
‘Hi, Lin,’ she smiled, greeting me with a kiss on the cheek. ‘You’re just in time.’
‘Great. I’m starving.’
‘No, I mean you’re just in time to meet Kalpana. Just a minute—here she comes now.’
A young woman with a fashionably western short haircut, hipster jeans, and a tight, red T-shirt approached us. She wore a stopwatch around her neck on a lanyard, and carried a clipboard. She was about twenty-six years old.
‘Hello,’ I said when Lisa introduced us. ‘Is that your rig outside? The broadcast vans, and all the cables? Are you shooting a movie?’
‘Supposed to be, yaar,’ she replied in the exaggerated vowels of the Bombay accent that I loved and found myself unconsciously imitating. ‘The director has gone off somewhere with one of our dancers. It’s meant to be a secret, yaar, but the whole damn set is talking about it. We’ve got a forty-five minute break. Although, mind you, that’s about ten times as long as our guy will need, from what all I’m told about his prowess.’
‘Okay’ I suggested, smacking my hands together. ‘That gives us time for lunch.’
‘Fuck lunch, let’s get stoned first, yaar,’ Kalpana demurred. ‘Have you got any hash?’
‘Yeah,’ I shrugged. ‘Sure.’
‘Did you bring a car?’
‘I’m on a Bullet.’
‘Okay let’s use my car. It’s in the car park.’
We left the hotel, and sat in her new Fiat to smoke. While I prepared the joint, she told me that she was an assistant to the producer of that and several other films. One of her duties was to oversee the casting of minor roles in the films. She’d subcontracted the task to a casting agent, but he was experiencing difficulty in finding foreigners to fill the small, non-speaking, decorative roles.
‘Kalpana got talking about this at dinner last week,’ Lisa summed up when Kalpana began to smoke. ‘She told me that her guys couldn’t find foreigners to play the parts in the movies—you know, the people at a disco or a party scene or, like, British people, in the time of the British Raj and like that. So … I thought of you.’
‘U-huh.’
‘It would be a great help if you could get the goras for me when we need them,’ Kalpana said, offering me what seemed to be a well-practised leer. Practised or not, it was damned effective. ‘We provide a cab to bring them to the shoot and take them home again. We give them a full lunch during the break. And we pay about two thousand rupees a day, per person. We pay that to you, plus a bonus commission per head. What you pay them, well, it’s up to you. Most of them are happy to do it for nothing, and are real surprised, you know, when they find out we actually pay them to be in the movies.’
‘Whaddaya say?’ Lisa asked me, her eyes gleaming through the rose filter of her stone.
‘I’m interested.’
My mind was trawling through the possible lateral benefits in the arrangement. Some of them were obvious. The moviemakers were a fairly affluent crowd of frequent flyers who might need black-market dol-lars and documents, from time to time. It was clear to me, as well, that the casting job was important to Lisa. On its own, that was reason enough for me to get involved. I liked her, and I was glad that she wanted to like me.
‘Good,’ Kalpana concluded, opening the door and stepping out to the car park. We walked back to the hotel foyer, each of us with sunglasses clamped to our eyes. We shook hands at the same spot where we’d met half an hour before.
‘Have your lunch,’ she said. ‘I’ll go back to the set. We’re in the ball-room. When you’re al
l done, follow the cables and you’ll find me. I’ll introduce you to the guys, and you can start right away. We need a few foreigners for tomorrow’s shoot, here. Two guys and two gals, yaar. Blonde, Sweden types, if you can find them. Hey—that was Kashmiri hash, na? We’ll get along just fine, Lin, you and me. Ciao#93; Ciao, baby.’
In the restaurant, Lisa and I heaped our plates high, and sat facing the sea to eat.
‘Kalpana’s okay’ she said between mouthfuls. ‘She’s sarcastic as all hell, sometimes, and she’s a real ambitious girl—don’t make any mistake about that—but she’s a straight talker and a real friend. When she told me about the casting job, I thought about you. I thought you might be able to … make something out of it …’
‘Thanks,’ I said, meeting her eye and trying to read her. ‘I appreciate the thought. Do you want to be partners in it with me?’
‘Yes,’ she answered quickly. ‘I was hoping … hoping you’d want to.’
‘We could work it out together,’ I suggested. ‘I don’t think I’ll have any trouble getting foreigners to work in the movies, but I don’t really want to do the rest of it. You could do that part, if you like. You could organise picking them up, looking after them on the set, and making the payments and all that. I’ll talk them into it, and you take it from there. I’d be glad to work with you, if you’re interested.’
She smiled. It was a good smile; the kind you like to keep.
‘I’d love to do it,’ she gushed, flushing pink with embarrassment under her tan. ‘I really need to do something, Lin, and I think I’m ready. When Kalpana ran this casting thing by me, I wanted to jump at it, but I was too nervous to take it on alone. Thanks.’
‘Don’t mention it. How’s it going with you and Abdullah?’
‘Mmmm,’ she mumbled, finishing a mouthful of food. ‘I’m not working, if you know what I mean, so that’s something. I’m not working at the Palace, and I’m not using. He gave me money. A lot of money. I don’t know where he got it. I don’t really care. It’s more money than I’ve ever seen in one bundle before in my whole life. It’s in this case, this metal case. He gave it to me, and asked me to look after it for him, and to spend it whenever I need it. It was real spooky, kinda like … I dunno … like his last will and testament, or something.’
I raised one eyebrow unconsciously in a quizzical expression. She caught the look, reflected a moment, and then responded.
‘I trust you, Lin. You’re the only guy in this city I do trust. Funny thing is, Abdullah’s the guy gave me the money and all, and I think I love him, in a kind of insane way, but I don’t trust him. Is that a horrible thing to say about the guy you live with?’
‘No.’
‘Do you trust him?’
‘With my life.’
‘Why?’
I hesitated, and then the words didn’t come. We finished our meal and sat back from the table, looking at the sea.
‘We’ve been through some things,’ I said after a while. ‘But it’s not just that. I trusted him before we did any of that. I don’t know what it is. A man trusts another man when he sees enough of himself in him, I guess. Or maybe when he sees the things he wishes he had in himself.’
We were silent for a time, each of us troubled, and stubbornly tempting fate in our own ways.
‘Are you ready?’ I asked her. She nodded in reply. ‘Let’s go to the movies.’
We followed the black vines of relay cables from the generator vans outside the hotel. They led us through a side entrance and past a procession of bustling assistants to the banquet room, which had been hired as a set. The room was filled with people, powerful lights, dazzling reflector panels, cameras, and equipment. Seconds after we entered, someone shouted Quiet, please] And then a riotous musical number began.
Hindi movies aren’t to everyone’s taste. Some foreigners I’d dealt with had told me that they loathed the kaleidoscopic turmoil of musical numbers, bursting stochastically between weeping mothers, sighing infatuates, and brawling villains. I understood what they meant, but I didn’t agree with them. A year before, Johnny Cigar had told me that in former lives I must’ve been at least six different Indian personalities. I’d taken it as a high compliment, but it wasn’t until I saw my first Bollywood movie shoot that I knew at last, and exactly, what he’d meant. I loved the singing, the dancing, and the music with the whole of my heart from the very first instant.
The producers had hired a two-thousand-watt amplifier. The music crashed through the banquet room and rattled into our bones. The colours were from a tropical sea. The million lights were as dazzling as a sun-struck lake. The faces were as beautiful as those carved on temple walls. The dancing was a frenzy of excited, exuberant lasciviousness and ancient classical skills. And the whole, improbably coherent expression of love and life, drama and comedy, was articulated in the delicate, unfurled elegance of a graceful hand, or the wink of a seductive eye.
For an hour we watched as the dance number was rehearsed and refined and finally recorded on film. During a break, after that, Kalpana introduced me to Cliff De Souza and Chandra Mehta, two of the four producers of the film. De Souza was a tall, curly-haired, thirty-year-old Goan with a disarming grin and a loping walk. Chandra Mehta was closer to forty. He was overweight, but comfortable with it: one of those big men who expand to fit a big idea of themselves. I liked both men and, although they were too busy to talk for long, that first meeting was cordial and communicative.
I offered Lisa a lift back to town, but she’d arranged to ride with Kalpana, and she chose to wait. I gave her the phone number at my new apartment, telling her to call if she needed me. On my way out through the foyer, I saw Kavita Singh also leaving the hotel. We’d both been so busy in recent months—she with writing about crimes, and me with committing them—that we hadn’t seen one another for many weeks.
‘Kavita!’ I called out, running forward to catch her. ‘Just the woman I wanted to see! The number-one reporter, on Bombay’s number-one newspaper. How are you? You … look … great]’
She was dressed in a silk pantsuit. It was the colour of bleached bone. She carried a linen handbag in the same colour. The single-breasted jacket descended to a deep decolletage, and it was obvious that she was wearing nothing under the jacket.
‘Oh, come off it!’ she snapped, grinning and embarrassed. ‘This is my dressed-to-kill outfit. I had to interview Vasant Lai. I just came out of there.’
‘You’re moving in powerful circles,’ I said, recalling photos of the populist politician. His incitements to communal violence had resulted in rioting, arson, and murder. Each time I saw him on television or read one of his bigoted speeches in the newspaper, he made me think of the brutal madman who called himself Sapna: a legal, political version of the psychopathic killer.
‘It was a snake-pit up there in his suite, I tell you, baba. But I got my interview. He has a weakness for big tits.’ She whipped a finger into my face. ‘Don’t say anything.’
‘Hey!’ I pacified her, raising both hands and wagging my head. ‘I’m … saying nothing at all, yaar. Absolutely nothing. I’m looking, mind you, and I wish I had three eyes, but I’m saying nothing at all!’
‘You bastard!’ she hissed, laughing through gritted teeth. ‘Ah, shit, what’s happening to the world, man, when one of the most important guys in the city won’t talk to you, but will give a two-hour interview to your tits! Men are such sick fuckers, don’t you think?’
‘You got me there, Kavita,’ I sighed.
‘Fuckin’ pigs, yaar.’
‘Can’t argue with that. When you’re right, you’re right.’ She eyed me suspiciously.
‘What are you being so damn agreeable about, Lin?’
‘Listen, where are you going?’
‘What?’
‘Where are you going? Right now, I mean.’
‘I was going to take a cab back to town. I’m living near Flora Fountain now.’
‘How about I give you a lift, on my bike? I want
to talk to you. I want you to help me with a problem.’
Kavita didn’t know me well. Her eyes were the colour of bark on a cinnamon tree, flecked with golden sparks. She looked me up and down with those eyes, and the forensic examination left her somewhere short of inspired reassurance.
‘What kind of a problem?’ she asked.
‘It involves a murder,’ I replied. ‘And I want you to make it a page-one story. I’ll tell you all about it at your place. And on the way you can tell me about Vasant Lai—you’ll have to shout on the back of the bike, so that’ll help you get it out of your system, na?’
Some forty minutes later, we sat together in her fourth-floor walk-up apartment on the edge of the Fort area, near Flora Fountain. It was a tiny apartment with a foldout bed, a rudimentary kitchen, and a hundred noisy neighbours. It boasted a superb bathroom, however, large enough to hold a washing machine and dryer without crowding. There was also a balcony enclosed in antique wrought iron that looked out on the wide, busy square around the fountain.
‘His name is Anand Rao,’ I told her, sipping the strong espresso coffee she’d prepared for me. ‘He shared a hut, in the slum, with a guy named Rasheed. They were my neighbours when I lived there. Then Rasheed’s wife and her sister came to stay, from the village in Rajasthan. Anand moved out of the hut to leave room for Rasheed and the sisters.’
‘Hang on,’ Kavita interrupted. ‘I better get this down.’
She stood up and walked to a wide, cluttered desk, where she gathered up a pad, pen, and cassette recorder. She’d changed out of her pantsuit, and wore loose harem pants and a singlet. Watching her walk, following her quick, purposeful, graceful movements, I realised for the first time just how beautiful she was. When she returned and set up the recorder, tucking her legs beneath her on the armchair as she prepared to write, she caught me staring at her.
‘What?’ she asked.
‘Nothing,’ I smiled. ‘Okay, so Anand Rao got to meet Rasheed’s wife and her sister. He got to like them. They were shy, but they were friendly, happy, and kind. I think, now, reading between the lines, that Anand got a little sweet on the sister. Anyway, one day Rasheed tells his wife that the only way they can set themselves up, in the little shop that they want, is if he sells his kidney—one of his kidneys—at this private hospital he knows about. She argues against this, but he finally convinces her that it’s their only chance.