‘Look, Rosanna –’
‘Has it occurred to you that you’re the problem here? People like you, who come to India and bring trouble we don’t need?’
‘There was a lotta trouble here before I came, and there’ll be plenty left when I’m gone.’
‘We’re talking about you, not India.’
She was right: the two knives pressing against the small of my back made the point.
‘You’re right,’ I conceded.
‘I am?’
‘Yeah. I’m trouble, alright. And so are you, at the moment, if you don’t mind me saying it.’
‘Lisa doesn’t need trouble from you,’ she said, frowning hard.
‘No,’ I said evenly. ‘Nobody needs trouble.’
She studied my face a little longer, her brown eyes searching for something wide enough or deep enough to give the conversation a context. Finally she laughed, and looked away, running a ringed hand through her spiked hair.
‘How many days does the show run?’ I asked.
‘We’re supposed to have another week of this,’ she remarked, looking at the last guests leaving the exhibition. ‘If the crazies don’t close us down, that is.’
‘If I were you, I’d pay for some security. I’d put a couple of big, sharp guys on the door. Moonlight a few guys from one of the five-star hotels. They’re pretty good, some of those guys, and the ones who aren’t still look good enough.’
‘You know something about the show?’
‘Not really. I saw some men out here before. Seriously unhappy men. I think they’re seriously unhappy with your show.’
‘I hate those fucking fanatics!’ she hissed.
‘I think it’s mutual.’
I glanced toward the gallery to see Lisa kissing Rish and Taj goodbye.
‘Here’s Lisa.’
I swung a leg over the bike, and kick-started the engine. It growled to life, settling into a low, bubbling throb. Lisa came to hug Rosanna, and took her place on the back of my bike.
‘Phir milenge,’ I said. Until we meet again.
‘Not if I see you first.’
We rode down the long slope to the sea, but when we stopped at a traffic signal, a black van pulled up beside us, and I turned to see the men with the hateful stares. They were arguing among themselves.
I let them pull away when the signal changed. There were political stickers and religious symbols on the rear window of the van. I turned off the main road at the first corner.
We rode through back streets for a while, and I worried for the changes I was seeing. Rosanna’s faux-bronze panels told a brutal Bombay story, but less brutal than the truth, and less brutal than the politics of faith. The violence of the past was just sand in the swash of a new wave, breaking on the Island City’s shores. Political thugs travelled by the truckload, brandishing clubs, and mafia gangs of twenty or thirty men had grown to hundreds of fighters. We are what we fear, and many of us in the city feared reckless days of reckoning.
Chapter Four
Riding slowly, we made our way back to the sweeping curve
of Marine Drive, following the necklace of reflections on the gentle waters of the bay. That first glimmer of starry sea started us talking again, and we were still talking when I pulled the bike into the driveway of our apartment building, past the salute of the watchman, and into the covered parking bay.
‘You go up,’ I said to Lisa. ‘I’m gonna wipe down the bike.’
‘Now?’
‘Now. I’ll be right up.’
When I heard Lisa’s footsteps on the marble stairs I turned to the watchman, nodded to him, and pointed after her. Understanding that I wanted him to follow her, he set off quickly, taking the stairs two at a time.
I heard her open the apartment door, and say her goodnight to the watchman. I slipped quickly out through a side gate to the footpath. Moving quietly, I made my way along the line of the leafy hedge bordering the apartment building’s ground-floor car park.
As I’d turned to enter the parking area of the building, I’d seen a huddled figure draw backwards into the shadows of the tall hedge. Someone was hiding there.
I drew a knife and came up quietly to the spot near the gate where I’d seen the figure. A man stepped out in front of me, his back turned, and began to move toward the car park.
It was Scorpio George.
‘Lin!’ I heard him whisper. ‘Are you still there, Lin?’
‘What the hell are you doin’, Scorpio?’ I asked from behind him, and he jumped.
‘Oh, Lin! You scared the crap outta me!’
I frowned at him, wanting an explanation.
The peace pact that had held since the last big mafia gang war in South Bombay was failing. Young men who hadn’t fought the war, or negotiated the truce, were attacking one another in violation of rules that had been written in better men’s blood. There’d been attacks by rival gangs in our area. I was vigilant, on guard all the time, and angry at myself for coming so close to hurting a friend.
‘I’ve told you guys about creepin’ up on people,’ I said.
‘See . . . I’m sorry . . . ’ he began nervously, looking left and right. ‘It’s . . . it’s . . . ’
Distress had a hand on his chest, and he couldn’t lift it to speak. I looked for a place to talk with him.
I couldn’t step into the car park with Scorpio. He was a street guy, sleeping in a doorway, and his presence in the compound, if observed by a resident of the building, would lead to complaints. I had no fear of those complaints, but I knew that they’d cost the watchman his job.
Taking Scorpio by the arm, I led the tall, thin Canadian across the street to a collapsed wall of crumbled stones, deep in shadow. Sitting with him in the darkness, I lit a joint and passed it to him.
‘What’s up, Scorp?’
‘It’s this guy,’ he began, puffing deeply on the joint. ‘This guy with the dark suit. The CIA guy. It’s creeping me out, man! I can’t work the street. I can’t talk to tourists. It’s like I see him everywhere, in my mind, asking questions about me. Did your guy, that Naveen detective guy, did he find out anything?’
I shook my head.
‘One of the boys tailed him out to Bandra, but the kid ran out of taxi money, and lost him. I haven’t heard anything back from your guy, Naveen. I thought you might’ve heard something.’
‘No. Nothing yet.’
‘I’m scared, Lin,’ Scorpio George said, shuddering the fear along his spine. ‘All the street boys have tested him. Nothin’. He doesn’t buy drugs, doesn’t drink, not even beer. No girls.’
‘We’ll work it out, Scorp. Don’t worry.’
‘It’s weird,’ Scorpio frowned. ‘I’m really going outta my mind, y’know?’
I tugged a fold of hundred-rupee notes from my pocket, and gave it to him. Scorpio took it in a faltering hand, but then slipped it into a pocket concealed inside his shirt.
‘Thanks, Lin,’ he said, looking up quickly to meet my eyes. ‘I was waiting here to ask you to help me, because I haven’t been on the street. The watchman told me you were still out. But then I saw you were with Lisa, and I couldn’t let her see me. I didn’t want to ask for money in front of her. She has a high opinion of me.’
‘We all need money sometimes. And Lisa always has a high opinion of you, whether you need money or not.’
He had tears in his eyes. I didn’t want to see them.
‘Listen, you and Gemini,’ I said, leading him across the street again, ‘you guys lay up some supplies, buy some shit, and take a room at the Frantic. Stay there for a couple of days. We’ll find out who this guy is, and we’ll deal with it, okay?’
‘Okay,’ he said, shaking my hand with the tremble in his. ‘You think the Frantic’s pretty safe, yeah?’
‘The Frantic hotel is the only one tha
t’ll take you and your lifestyle, Scorp.’
‘Oh . . . yeah . . . ’
‘This mystery man won’t get past the desk there. Not in a suit. Keep your heads down, and you’ll be safe at the Frantic until we figure this out.’
‘Okay. Okay.’
He walked away, stooping his tall frame beneath the loose fronds of the hedge. I watched him do the street guy’s night walk: slowly, nonchalantly in the pools of street light – Honest Joe, nothing to hide – then scurrying faster in the shadowed sections of the street.
I slipped a twenty-rupee note to the watchman, standing beside me, and climbed the marble stairs to the apartment. Lisa stood in the bathroom doorway while I showered, and I told her about Scorpio George’s white-haired stalker.
‘But who is this guy?’ she asked as I stepped out of the shower. ‘What does he want with the Zodiacs?’
‘I dunno. Naveen Adair, the guy I told you about before? He smells lawyer. He might be right. He’s a smart kid. One way or another, we’ll find out who this guy is.’
Dried off again, I flopped down on the bed beside Lisa, my head resting on the satin breeze of her breast. From that position I looked down along the length of her naked body to her feet.
‘Rosanna likes you,’ she said, shifting the direction of the conversation with an elegant gesture to the left with both feet.
‘I doubt it.’
‘Why? What happened with her?’
‘Nothing . . . happened.’
‘Something happened when you were talking to her outside. What did you say?’
‘We just . . . talked about Goa.’
‘Oh, no,’ she sighed. ‘She’s nuts about Goa.’
‘So I discovered.’
‘But she does like you. No matter what you said about Goa.’
‘I . . . don’t think so.’
‘Oh, yeah. She certainly dislikes you, too, at the same time. But she definitely likes you.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘She was angry enough to hit you, when I came out.’
‘She was? I thought we reached a good place.’
‘She was ready to hit you, so she likes you a lot.’
‘Ah . . . how does that work?’
‘She was angry enough to hit you, and she doesn’t even know you, see?’
I didn’t, but that wasn’t unusual: Lisa had her own way of incommunicating.
‘It’s all so clear now.’
‘Was she doing her body language thing,’ she asked, ‘when she was talking to you?’
‘What body language thing?’
‘She fakes a sore back, and starts rolling her hips in a circle. Did she do that?’
‘No.’
‘That’s good.’
‘It is?’
‘Yeah, because it’s pretty sexy, and she did it for me, and not for you.’
‘There’s a logic rolling its hips in there somewhere, I’m sure, but I’m gonna let it roll past. I did manage to read Anushka’s body language, however.’
‘A bear could read her body language,’ Lisa cut in quickly, giving me a slap on the arm.
‘Where did you say she’s performing?’ I laughed.
‘I didn’t,’ she slapped.
A seashell bracelet jangled on her wrist. It was the present I’d brought for her from Goa. She played the music of the shells, twisting her wrist for a while, and then silenced them in the clutch of her free hand.
‘Did you have a shitty time tonight? Should I be sorry I made you go, when you just got back from your trip?’
‘Not at all. I really did like your friends, and it was about time I met them. I liked Rosanna, too. She has good fire.’
‘I’m so glad. She’s not just a partner. She’s become close. Do you find her attractive?’
‘What?’
‘It’s okay,’ she said, playing with the bedcover. ‘I find her attractive, too.’
‘What?’
‘She’s clever, dedicated, brave, creative, enthusiastic, and easy to get along with. She’s really great.’
I stared along the soft coastline of Lisa’s long, slender legs.
‘What are we talking about, again?’
‘You think she’s hot,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘It’s okay. I think she’s hot, too.’
She took my hand, and moved it between her legs.
‘How tired are you?’ she asked.
I looked down at her toes, bent backwards in a fan-shaped arch.
‘Nobody’s ever that tired.’
It was good. It was always good. We shared a loving kindness that was a kind of loving. And maybe because we both knew that it would end some day, some way, we let our bodies say things that our hearts couldn’t.
I went to the kitchen to fetch a cold drink of water, and brought a glass back for her, putting it on the table on her side of the bed.
For a while I looked at her, beautiful, healthy, strong, curled into herself like a sleeping cat. I tried to imagine what the vision of love she was clinging to might look like, and how different it was from my own.
I lay down beside her and gathered my body into the contours of her dream. Her toes closed reflexively over mine in her sleep. And more honest than my mind, my sleeping body bent at the knees, pressed against the closed door of her curved back, and beat on it with the fist of my heart, begging to be loved.
Chapter Five
Riding a motorcycle is velocity as poetry. The fine balance
between elegant agility and fatal fall is a kind of truth, and like all truth, it carries a heartbeat with it into the sky. Eternal moments in the saddle escape the stuttering flow of time, and space, and purpose. Coursing on those wheels, on that river of air, in that flight of freed spirit there’s no attachment, no fear, no joy, no hatred, no love, and no malice: the nearest thing, for some violent men, for this violent man, to a state of grace.
I arrived at the passport factory used by the Sanjay Company in a good mood. I’d taken the slow way to work that morning, and the ride had cleared my mind, leaving me with a placid smile I could feel in my whole body.
The factory was the main centre where we changed and created false passports. As the principal forger and counterfeiter of passports and other identification documents for the Sanjay Company, I spent at least some hours of most days at the factory.
I opened the door, and my motorcycle-smile froze. There was a young stranger in front of me. He put out his hand in greeting.
‘Lin!’ he said, shaking my hand as if he was pumping water from a village well. ‘My name’s Farzad. Come on in!’
I took off my sunglasses, accepted his invitation to my office, and found that a second desk had been lodged in a corner of the large room. The desk was piled high with papers and drawings.
‘They put me here . . . about two weeks ago,’ Farzad said, nodding toward his desk. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’
‘That depends.’
‘Depends on what?’
‘On who the hell you are, and what the hell you’re doin’ in my office.’
‘Oh,’ he laughed, relaxing enough to take a seat at the new desk. ‘That’s easy. I’m your new assistant. Count on it!’
‘I didn’t ask for a new assistant. I liked the old assistant.’
‘But I thought you didn’t have an assistant?’
‘Exactly.’
His hands flapped in his lap like fish flung on the shore. I stepped across the room to look through the long windows into the factory below. I noticed that changes had taken place there as well.
‘What the hell?’
I walked down the wooden steps leading to the factory floor, and headed toward the new desks and light boxes. Farzad followed me, speaking quickly.
‘They decided to expand the false document section to include education stuff. I thought you knew.’
‘What education stuff?’
‘Diplomas, degrees, certificates of competency and the like. That’s why they brought me in.’
He stopped suddenly, watching me as I picked up a document from one of the new desks. It was a Master’s Degree in Engineering, purporting to be issued by a prestigious university in Bengal.
It bore the name of a young man I knew: the son of a mafia enforcer from the fishing fleet area, who was as slow-witted as he was avaricious, and who was, by any reckoning, the greediest kid-gangster in Sassoon Dock.
‘They . . . brought me in . . . ’ Farzad concluded falteringly, ‘b-b-because I have an MBA. I mean, a real one. Count on it.’
‘There goes the neighbourhood. Doesn’t anybody study philosophy any more?’
‘My dad does,’ he said. ‘He’s a Steiner-Utilitarian.’
‘Please, whoever you are, I haven’t had a chai yet.’
Moving to a second table, I picked up another false qualification document. It was a Bachelor of Medicine in Dental Surgery. Reading my features, Farzad spoke again.
‘You know, it’s okay. None of these fake degrees will ever be used in India. They’re all for people who want jobs in foreign countries.’
‘Oh,’ I said, not smiling, ‘that makes it okay, then.’
‘Exactly!’ He grinned happily. ‘Shall I send for tea?’
When the chai arrived, in short, crack-veined glasses, we sipped and talked long enough for me to like him.
Farzad was from the small, brilliant and influential Parsi community. He was twenty-three years old, unmarried, and lived with his parents and extended family in a large house not far from the Bombay slum where I’d once lived.
After two postgraduate years in the United States, he started work at a futures trading firm in Boston. Within the first year, he’d become entangled in a complex Ponzi scheme, run by the head of his firm.
Although he’d played no direct part in his employer’s criminal intrigue, Farzad’s name appeared in transfers of funds to secret bank accounts. When it seemed that he might be arrested, he’d returned to India, using the fortuitous if unhappy excuse that he had to visit the sick bed of his dying uncle.