If he knew he was losing the fight, his eyes didn’t show it. They gleamed like the scales of a fish in shallow water, aflame with cold light. He was smiling. He was happy.
He raised the lead sap slowly, until it was level with his shoulder, and spoke to me.
‘The devil’s got a crush on you, boy!’ he said, and then lashed out with the sap.
I ducked quickly to my right. The sap hit the back of my left shoulder. I felt the bone beneath the muscle shudder under the blow. Coming up fast, I swung out with an over-hand right. It hit him square on the side of the head, making solid contact. It had everything in it. It wasn’t enough.
Concannon shook his head and grinned. He raised the sap again and I grabbed at him, shoving him backwards onto the street.
In the movies, men fight for long minutes, taking turns to hit one another. In a real street fight, everything happens much faster. Everyone swings at anything they can, and if you’re knocked to the floor, most of the time you stay there.
Sometimes, of course, the floor is the safest place to be.
Bunching my fists against my forehead, waiting for an opportunity, I stared through my knuckles at Concannon. He was trying to hit me with the sap. I ducked, dodging and weaving, but taking blows as I parried.
As I stepped back, keeping my balance, I came up against Naveen. We glanced at one another quickly, and stood back to back.
We were alone, between Leopold’s and the row of street stalls. The waiters hesitated in the large doorway arch. They were holding the line. What happened on the street was none of their business. They were making sure that the fight didn’t spill back inside the restaurant.
The Scorpions moved in. Naveen faced four men alone, his back to mine. I couldn’t help him. I had Concannon.
I saw an opening, and snapped lefts and rights at the tall Irishman, but for every punch I landed, he replied with a hit from the sap. The deadly weight connected with my face, drawing fast blood. And no matter how hard or how well I connected with my punches, I couldn’t put him down.
Words came into my mind, shawls of snow in the wind.
So, this is it . . .
As suddenly as it had started, the brawl stopped. The Scorpions pulled away from us, circling around Concannon.
Naveen and I looked backwards for a second. We saw Didier. He had a gun in his hand. I was very glad to see him. He was smiling, just as Concannon had smiled. Standing beside him was Abdullah.
As we stepped away from the muzzle of Didier’s automatic pistol, Abdullah reached out with his left hand, placed it over Didier’s hand, and slowly lowered it until the handgun was at Didier’s side.
There was a moment of silence. The Scorpions stared hard, stranded on the wet-red footprint between fight and flight. Witnesses hiding behind stalls were breathing fast. Even the ceaseless traffic, it seemed, was softened.
Concannon spoke. It was a mistake.
‘You fuckin’ ugly, long-haired Iranian cunt,’ he said, showing all of his yellow teeth, and advancing on Abdullah. ‘You and I both know what you are. Why don’t you speak?’
Abdullah had a gun. He shot Concannon in the thigh. People screamed, shouted and scrambled out of the way.
The Irishman staggered, still fighting, wanting to hit Abdullah with the sap. Abdullah shot him again, in the same leg. Concannon fell.
Abdullah fired twice more, faster than my eye could follow. When Hanuman and Danda reeled backwards, I realised that the big Scorpion and his thin friend had been shot in the leg too.
The Scorpions who could still run, ran. Concannon, a born survivor, was crawling away, using his elbows to drag himself between the souvenir stalls toward the road.
Abdullah took two steps, and put his foot down hard on the Irishman’s back. Didier was at his side.
‘You . . . fuckin’ . . . coward . . . ’ Concannon spluttered. ‘Go on! Do it! You’re nothing!’
There was a lot of blood coming from the two wounds in his leg. Abdullah held the pistol over the back of Concannon’s head, and prepared to fire. The few people still close enough to see what was happening screamed.
‘Enough, brother!’ I shouted. ‘Stop!’
It was Didier’s turn to put a hand on Abdullah’s arm, gently pushing the handgun to Abdullah’s side.
‘Too many witnesses, my friend.’ He said. ‘Dommage. Go now. Go fast.’
Abdullah hesitated. There was an instinct working in him. I knew it. I’d heard the voice of that instinct, behind the wall. In that moment he wanted to kill Concannon more than he wanted to live. I stepped in beside him, as men had stepped in for me in prison, guarding my heart as much as my life.
‘The only reason the cops aren’t here,’ I said, ‘is because the Scorpions must’ve paid them to stay away while they attacked the place. That won’t last much longer. We’ve gotta go.’
He took his foot off Concannon’s back. The Irishman immediately began to drag himself toward the road.
Two cars pulled up. Scorpion men loaded Concannon and the wounded gangsters into the back. They sped away, knocking a taxi full of tourists out of the way.
Naveen Adair had his arm around Divya. Sunita, the cadet journalist, was with them.
‘Are you okay?’ I asked Divya.
‘Fucking men,’ she replied. ‘You’re all idiots.’
‘Are you okay?’ I asked Sunita.
She was clutching the red folder of my stories, hugging them to her chest. She was trembling.
‘I’m fine,’ she replied. ‘But, I have a request, and I don’t want to ask it, while you are bleeding. Your face is bleeding, do you know?’
‘O . . . kay. Can we make it quick?’
She handed me back my short stories, and held up the note I’d written to Ranjit.
‘Please let me deliver your note,’ she said.
‘Ah . . . ’
‘Please. You have no idea how much this man has harassed me, sexually, and I’m almost fainting with the pleasure of thinking about giving this note to him. I didn’t have lunch, also, so maybe I’m a little hypoglycaemic, but it feels like a really terrific holiday for me, so, sorry for your face, but please let me give him this note.’
Didier and Kavita joined me.
‘Didier, will you give Sunita your phone number, and escort her to Ranjit’s office?’
‘Certainly, but you must leave now, Lin.’
There was the sound of a gunshot, from not far away.
‘Listen,’ I said to Didier quickly. ‘Lisa’s staying at the gallery, on Carmichael Road. Can you go there?’
‘Of course.’
‘Make sure she’s alright. Stay with her, or keep her with you for a couple of days.’
‘Bien sûr,’ he replied. ‘What will you do?’
‘Stay out of sight. I don’t know yet. Take these stories, and keep them for me.’
I handed him the folder, and ran back to find Abdullah ready to ride, his bike beside mine.
‘Who’s doing the shooting?’
‘Our man,’ Abdullah replied, gunning the engine of his bike.
‘Where are the cops?’ I asked, starting my bike.
‘They were coming, but Ravi fired a shot in the air,’ he replied. ‘They have gone for body armour and machine guns. We must leave now.’
Heading into the afternoon traffic, Abdullah and I threaded our way through creeping vines of cars. From time to time we took short cuts on empty sidewalks, or through petrol station driveways. In minutes we descended the long hill at Pedder Road and were beside the juice centre, in sight of the island monument of Haji Ali’s tomb.
‘We should report to Sanjay,’ I said, when we stopped at the signal.
‘Agreed.’
We pulled into the parking bays at the juice centre. Leaving the bikes with the attendants, we called the mafia bo
ss. He sounded sleepy, as if we’d roused him from a siesta.
He woke up fast.
‘What the fuck? Where are you fucks now?’
‘At Haji Ali,’ Abdullah replied, holding the phone between us so that I could hear.
‘You can’t come back. The cops will be here in minutes, for sure, and I don’t want them asking questions you can’t answer. Stay away, and stay quiet for a couple of days for fuck’s sake, you motherfuckers. Tell me the truth, were any civilians shot?’
Abdullah bristled at the phrase Tell me the truth. Gritting his teeth in disgust, he handed me the phone.
‘No civilians, Sanjaybhai,’ I replied.
The term civilians referred to anyone who wasn’t involved in the criminal underworld: anyone other than judges, lawyers, gangsters, prison guards and the police.
‘Two Scorpions took it in the leg, and a freelancer named Concannon. He got it twice, in the same leg, but I wouldn’t count him out. There were a lot of witnesses. Most of them were street guys, or waiters at Leo’s.’
‘You made this fucking mess, Lin, and you’re telling me how to clean it up? Fuck you, motherfucker.’
‘If memory serves me right,’ I said calmly, ‘you shot someone outside Leo’s, once.’
Abdullah held up two fingers, waggling them at me.
‘Twice, in fact,’ I said. ‘And I didn’t start this mess, Sanjaybhai. The Scorpions started it, and that was a while ago. They’ve hit us nine times in the last month. They hit Leo’s, because it’s a place we all love, and it’s in the heart of Company land. The foreigner, Concannon, just wants Sanjay Company and the Scorpions to kill each other, because he’s starting his own gang. That’s as much as I know. I can’t tell you what to do, and I wouldn’t try. I can only tell you what I know. That’s for you, not against you.’
‘Madachudh! Bahinchudh!’ Sanjay shouted, and then calmed himself again. ‘This will cost a fortune to cover up. Who do you think set it up with the Colaba cops?’
‘Lightning Dilip was on duty. But I think this is too ambitious for him. He likes his enemies alive, and tied up.’
‘There’s a sub-inspector, Matre by name, who’s been on my back for a while,’ Sanjay mused. ‘Motherfucker! This has got his sweat all over it. Thik. I’ll handle everything at this end. You two stay out of sight for a couple of days. Check in with me again tomorrow. Put Abdullah back on the phone.’
I handed the phone back to Abdullah. He glared at me for a moment. I shrugged my shoulders. He listened.
‘Yes,’ he said twice, and hung up.
‘What’s the deal?’
‘Did he ask you if you were injured?’ Abdullah asked me.
‘He’s not the affectionate kind. He’s the disaffectionate kind.’
‘He did not ask,’ Abdullah snarled, frowning hard.
There was a small, brooding silence, and then he came back to the moment.
‘Your face. You are bleeding. We should see one of our doctors.’
‘I checked it in the mirror. It’s not that bad.’
I tied a handkerchief across the places on my forehead and eye socket where Concannon’s sap had drawn blood.
‘Right now,’ I said, ‘our problem is that Sanjay’s not going to war for us, and we’re on our own.’
‘I could force him to war.’
‘No, Abdullah. Sanjay let me dangle in the wind, and now he’s letting you swing with me. He’ll never go to war, until the war’s over.’
‘I repeat, I can make him go to war.’
‘Why is war even an option, Abdullah? I’m not complaining that Sanjay won’t go to war. I’m glad he won’t go to war. I’m glad that nobody else will get involved in this. We can handle payback on our own.’
‘And we will, Inshallah.’
‘But since we are alone, as we seem to be, we gotta work out a strategy, and the tactics to achieve it, because you just shot three people. One of them twice. What do you want to do?’
He looked away from me, checking the surrounding junction of major arterial avenues, cars streaming gleaming metal from one current or the other.
He looked at me again and half-opened his mouth, but there were no words for the experience: he was alone, and his comrades weren’t riding to his rescue. He was a soldier behind enemy lines, told that the escape route had just closed.
‘I think we should put as much distance as we can between us and them, for a while,’ I said, filling the dissonant gap. ‘Maybe Goa. We can ride there overnight. But don’t tell anyone. Every time I tell someone I’m going to Goa, they ask me to collect their dirty laundry.’
I’d tried to raise a smile, in the sierra of his doubt. It didn’t work.
Abdullah glanced back in the direction of South Bombay. He was wrestling with the desire to return, and kill every Scorpion that ever crawled out from under a rock. I waited for a few moments.
‘So, what’s the deal?’
He wrenched himself into the minute, and let out two long breaths, charging his will.
‘I came to Leopold’s to invite you to come with me to a special place. It is a lucky thing, perhaps, that I came when I did, but let us wait, until we see what the consequences of this day are, for each of us.’
‘What special place?’
He looked again to the horizon.
‘I was not expecting that we would be going there with such a dark shadow following us to the mountain, but, will you come with me, now?’
‘And, again, where might that be?’
‘To see the teacher of teachers, the master who taught his wisdom to Khaderbhai. Idriss is his name.’
I tasted the name of the fabled teacher.
‘Idriss.’
‘He is there,’ Abdullah said, pointing to a range of hills on the northern horizon. ‘He is in a cave, on that mountain. We will buy water, here, to carry with us. It is a long climb, to the summit of wisdom.’
Part Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Refreshed and prepared we rode the hot monsoon highway between lumbering trucks loaded with high, lopsided bundles, swaying at us at every curve. I was glad of the ride, and glad that Abdullah was racing for once. I needed the speed. Reaction times between speeding cars from lane to lane were so small that fierce concentration killed the pain. I knew pain would come. Pain can be deferred, but never denied. After the ride, let it come, I thought. Pain is just proof of life.
In two hours we reached the turnoff that led into the Sanjay Gandhi National Park. We paid the entrance fees and began the long, slow ride through the jungle-thick forest at the foot of the mountain.
The winding road leading to the tallest peak in the reserve was in surprisingly good condition. Recent storms had shaken branches loose from trees close to the road, but local forest dwellers, whose huts and hand-built compounds could be seen here and there through the lush undergrowth, quickly swept them up for firewood.
We passed groups of women dressed in flower-garden saris, walking single file and carrying bundles of sticks on their heads. Small children dragging their own sticks and bunches of twigs trailed behind the women.
The park was wild with rain-soaked life. Weeds rose to shoulder height, vines writhed and squirmed across the treillage of branches. Lichens, mosses and mushrooms flourished in every damp shadow.
Pink, mazarine blue and Van Gogh yellow wildflowers trailed across the leafy waterlogged carpet of the forest. Leaves burned red by rain covered the road like petals in a temple courtyard. Earth’s frayed-bark perfume saturated the air, drawn up into every sodden stem, stalk and trunk.
Councils of monkeys, meeting in assembly on the open road, scattered as we approached. They scampered to nearby rocky outcrops and boulders, their mouths pinched in simian outrage at our intrusion.
When one particularly large troop of animals scattered into the tree
s, making me start with fright, Abdullah caught my eye and allowed himself a rare smile.
He was the bravest and most loyal man I’d ever known. He was hard on others, but much harder on himself. And he had a confidence that all men admired or envied.
The great, square forehead loomed over the ceaselessly questioning arc of his eyebrows. A deep, black beard covered everything but his mouth. The deep-set eyes, the colour of honey in a terracotta dish, were sad: too sad and kind for the wide, proud nose, high cheekbones and lock-firm jaw that gave his face its fearsome set.
He’d grown his hair long again. It descended to his broad, thick shoulders, a mane that became the strength prowling in his long arms and legs.
Men followed his face, form and character into war. But something in him, humble reticence or cautious wisdom, pulled him back from the power that some men in the Sanjay Company urged him to take. They begged him, but he refused to lead. And that, of course, made them urge him all the more.
I rode the jungle road beside him, loving him, fearing for him, fearing for myself if ever I lost him, and not thinking about what had happened to me in that fight, and how it might be working on my body, if not my mind.
As we reached the cleared gravel parking space at the foot of the mountain, and turned off our bikes, I heard Concannon’s voice.
The devil’s got a crush on you, boy.
‘Are you alright, Lin brother?’
‘Yeah.’
The drift of my eyes found a phone, on the counter of a small shop.
‘Should we call Sanjay again?’
‘Yes. I will do it.’
He spoke to Sanjay for twenty minutes, answering the mafia don’s many questions.
It was quiet, at the foot of the mountain. A small shop, the only structure in the gravel parking lot, sold soft drinks, crisps and sweets. The attendant, a bored youth with a dreamy expression, lashed out now and then with a handkerchief tied to a small bamboo stick. The swarm of mites and flies scattered, for a second or two, but always returned to the sugar-stained counter of the shop.
No-one else approached the parking area, or descended from the mountain. I was glad. I was shaking so hard that it took me all of those twenty minutes to get myself together.