‘Did you find Madame Zhou?’ I asked.
‘She’s gone to ground,’ Karla replied, looking at the point where earth strains to kiss the sky.
‘Nothing at all?’
‘No-one’s seen her or heard from her since Didier and Naveen started asking around. She’s probably still here. She’s cunning. If she doesn’t want to be found, she’s invisible.’
‘Nobody’s invisible. If she’s still around, we’ll find her. Naveen gave me a message from Abdullah. He –’
‘Told you to wait here at least another week. Abdullah called, and told me. That’s why I pulled Naveen up here with me.’
‘And Diva?’
‘That’s something else. I wanted her to meet Idriss. I have plans for Diva, and something tells me that Idriss is a cosmic connection.’
‘Speaking of cosmic connections,’ I said, pulling her on top of me to kiss her.
Earth-smell through her hair. The sun touching us with warm light breaking through leaves, and winds rushing trees on the cliff with hot breath. Karla.
‘Can we sleep here tonight, Shantaram?’
‘We can sleep here now.’
‘Good. Then let’s go back to the kids, and play nice.’
‘Well . . . I . . . ’
We played nice with Naveen and the students. Idriss kept Diva in conversation for two hours, and then insisted that the poor little rich girl stay the night, in a poor little poor girl cave, with the other girls on the mountain.
Diva surprised me by agreeing immediately, and then unsurprised me by sending Naveen back to the car to fetch her essential supplies.
When we’d eaten dinner, and cleaned the dishes, some students left for the night, and others retired to the caves, to study or sleep. The night owls, my friends, sat around the fire, and sipped too-sweet black tea, laced with rum.
I stood to say goodnight to Idriss and Silvano, sitting with me, on the other side of the fire.
Naveen, Diva, and Karla talked and laughed together, firelight painting mysterious beauty.
‘That Diva is a remarkable young woman,’ Idriss said softly, as she laughed at something Karla said.
In her private conversation with Idriss, Diva had made the sage laugh so hard that he got the giggles, and couldn’t stop. Watching her laughing by the fire, the holy man chuckled again.
‘Don’t you think she’s remarkable?’
I looked at her, sitting next to Karla. I couldn’t see it.
‘I see a very spoilt girl,’ I said. ‘Smart, pretty, and spoilt.’
‘You might be right, now,’ Idriss laughed. ‘But think of what she will become, and what she could achieve.’
He retired for the night, Silvano at his side.
As I joined the others, Diva dragged Karla by the elbow, and they walked off together to sit in the canvas chairs that faced the eastern forest.
I could just see their profiles, dipping past the edges of the chairs as they talked. I sat down with Naveen.
‘Good to see you smiling, man,’ he observed.
‘Was I smiling?’
‘You were smiling. Well, before Karla left you were.’
He prodded at the fire with a stick, throwing up brittle sparks.
‘What’s on your mind, kid?’
‘It can wait till morning,’ he said, pestering the fire.
‘No time like the present. What’s up?’
‘I’m worried about her,’ he said, glancing up at the girls sitting in the canvas chairs, just out of hearing, except for their laughter.
‘Karla?’
‘No,’ he frowned. ‘Diva.’
‘What’s the problem?’
‘Her father got mixed up with some very bad guys. I’m talking supremely bad guys. It’s long money, and they’ve got short tempers.’
‘Wait a minute. Mukesh Devnani is one of the richest guys in Bombay.’
‘He took in a lot of black investment money from somewhere. He wanted to move from building convention centres to building whole towns and cities, straight off the plan. The only people with the real money to make that dream come true –’
‘– were the short-tempered guys. And now they want their money back, with interest.’
‘Right. It’s a weird thing that Ranjit is mixed up in this.’
‘Ranjit? How?’
‘He was running a campaign in his newspapers against one of the big new cities that Mukesh was set to build. The scare stories forced the government to change course, and cancel Mukesh’s permits. The whole thing started falling apart. It’s gotten so bad that when the cops come to his mansion, we never know if it’s to protect him or arrest him.’
‘He has to pay up, Naveen, even if it bankrupts him.’
‘That’s what I say. That’s what I told him, respectfully. But there’s some hitch. I don’t know what it is. I don’t get up to the mansion in Juhu very often now. I put this together in the few chances I got to rummage around in his office. I think Diva . . . I think she’s a kidnap, waiting to happen. Her Mother died six years ago. She’s his only child. His only heir. It’s a way for his enemies to hurt him. It’s just logic, in a twisted way. I’m worried, man.’
‘You really think it’s that bad?’
‘I do. I’m . . . a little freaked out. This is over my head, and I really care about this girl, even if I think her father is a prick.’
‘Take her out of the city.’
‘I’ve tried. She knows that something’s up with her dad. She won’t leave.’
‘You could hide her, for a while.’
‘How? Where? She’s famous, man. I spend more time dodging the press than I do dodging bad guys. And she loves it. I had to ban the phone. She was calling the paparazzi and telling them where she’d be. She knows them on a first name basis. She buys them rounds of drinks. She’s a godmother to one of their kids.’
I laughed, but then saw that he was still too serious for laughter.
‘She thinks discretion is anything that doesn’t involve skywriting, which she’s done, for her eighteenth birthday party. She told me. It’ll be the same wherever she goes.’
‘You could hide her in the slum,’ I suggested. ‘If she’s game for it. I hid there myself once, for eighteen months, and it’s one of the safest places I’ve ever been in my life.’
‘Would they take her in?’
‘The head man’s a friend. And he loves a party. He’s gonna love Diva. But it’s not for everybody, and Diva certainly isn’t everybody.’
‘Are you serious, about the slum?’
‘Unless you can think of a better place to hide a Bombay Diva from the madding crowd? But no promises. I have to run it by my friend, first.’
He looked again at the girls. Karla and Diva were honking with laughter, covering their mouths and noses to smother the noise.
They were drinking something. It looked good.
‘Listen, Naveen, if you still think it’s a good idea when I come down from the mountain, I’ll ask Johnny Cigar about it. Okay?’
‘I’m not sure how I’d to sell it to Diva, but okay. Yeah. Please do it, Lin. I want every choice I’ve got, if things go bad with her father’s friends.’
‘You got it, Naveen. Let’s find out what the girls are drinking.’
We talked together for a while, four friends bound in fear as much as in faith; in comradeship as much as companionship.
At the first break in laughing-talk, Karla and I said goodnight, gathered a batch of blankets, some water and a lunch box, and walked by torchlight to Silvano’s Point.
I set up a bower for us, using two blankets as lean-shelters, and padding the ground with the rest. We settled on hips and elbows. I opened the lunch box to show cold fried pakodas, pineapple, cashew and lentil cakes, a few handfuls of nuts, and Bengali custard in
small clay pots.
She closed it again, and emptied her purse, throwing two hip flasks, a cigarette case and a gold cigarette lighter with a small watch set into it onto the blanket. The hands on the watch were set at twenty-three minutes past midnight.
‘The watch on your lighter has stopped,’ I said, reaching for it.
‘Don’t wind it,’ she said quickly. ‘I like it that way.’
‘Karla, I’ll be back in a week, and I’ve been –’
‘Let me go first,’ she said.
‘Okay.’
‘I’m putting some money into a business venture with Didier and Naveen. They’re going to expand the detective business, and I think they’re on to something.’
‘Okay, but I was actually thinking of a black market money franchise. I’ve got the contacts, and I can buy their cash, if not their loyalty. I can make a good living for us.’
‘I’ve got money.’
‘And you should keep it.’
‘We don’t know how long we’ll be here in Bombay,’ she said, taking a sip from a flask and passing it to me. ‘Let’s enjoy this ride as much as we can, and as safely as we can.’
‘The detective business isn’t on the top ten list of safe occupations. I’m pretty sure it’s not on the top hundred.’
‘It’s still way above crime and punishment, Shantaram.’
Crime, and punishment. How many times had I heard or thought that phrase, that echo of Fate’s laugh, in the last few days? How many times does it take?
‘I don’t see a place for me in that set-up, Karla.’
‘You’re a silent partner,’ she said. ‘Like me.’
‘I am?’
‘The silenter the better.’
‘Silenter?’
‘You talk to people that Didier and Naveen can’t reach. If we have to talk to those guys, who’s gonna do that but you, or me? Why not you and me together?’
‘Karla,’ I smiled, wanting to take her clothes off, and my clothes off, and stop talking. ‘I can’t move from committing crimes to solving them. My skill-set is on the villain side.’
‘We’re specialising,’ Karla said, taking another sip from the flask, ‘in missing persons.’
‘Karla,’ I laughed. ‘You and me, we are missing persons.’
She laughed again.
‘Cases that the cops have given up on,’ she said.
‘If the cops gave up, there’s probably a good reason.’
She selected a joint from the brass case, and lit it.
‘Not necessarily. Sometimes they just want the case to go away, and a case that could get solved goes unsolved. And sometimes they’re paid to look the other way. Runaway husbands, missing brides, prodigal sons, we’re the office of last resort, for lost loves.’
‘I don’t see any money in it, Karla. I’d be living on your dollar, it seems to me.’
‘There probably won’t be any dollars. Not yet. It’ll cost more than it makes. But private security and private detection will boom, in this country. It’s a good bet. And fortunately, I’ve got enough chips to play the game, for a while. If it bugs you, keep a tab, and pay me back when the business takes off.’
‘Speaking of missing persons, any word of Ranjit?’
‘Not yet. There was a rumour he was seen on a yacht, in the Maldives. I’m trying to check it out. For the time being, his proxy vote makes me a serious player. Good thing he was a lousy boss, and I wasn’t. His entire news service is helping me track him down. Ironic, ain’t it?’
‘Are you still at the Taj?’
‘Yeah. It’s okay, for now. They’ve got good security downstairs, and I’ve got better security upstairs.’
‘Have you seen Didier?’
‘He’s been hanging with me. He’s pretty spooked about the acid throwers. You know how vain he is.’
‘He doesn’t call it vanity. He calls it good taste, and I think we both agree.’
‘One way or another,’ she said, ‘I’m gonna remove that woman from my harm’s way.’
She shoved all the things aside and lay back on the blankets, one hand behind her head.
‘So, Shantaram, now that you know my plans, are you in?’
Fate leads you to what you desire, and Time makes sure that it’s the wrong moment. Was I with her, in her lost love detective agency plan? No. I couldn’t work with the cops, and I couldn’t turn anyone in to the cops, which made me a lousy detective.
She knew it. She saw it in my eyes, and in my breathing: the heavy breath of worry that we weren’t on the same path away from the mountain.
‘Stop thinking,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow is just like you. It’s never on time.’
The wind in moonlight, painting leaf-shadow lace on her skin. Love in all the past lives, every time we’d loved each other and lost each other: starlight on her sleeping face. There was no star in my sky that night: no light to guide me on that sea of what we were, and what we weren’t. But I didn’t care. She was asleep, in my arms, and I was already sailing home.
Part Eight
Chapter Forty-Six
I didn’t throw in with Karla, Naveen and Didier in the Lost Love Bureau. Call me stubborn. Naveen did. Call me crazy. Didier did. Call me a free spirit. Karla didn’t. She didn’t speak to me at all. She didn’t even respond to my messages, but sent a message of her own, through Naveen, to stay away until she cooled off. I got hotter, instead, and bought Didier’s black market crime portfolio. He’d become a legitimate businessman, a partner in the Lost Love Bureau, two doors down from my own, and decided to turn his back on black business. I let his drug and callgirl rackets slide, and focused on his money changing operations. It took me a while to sort out the details. I was buying white money that had become black money, making it white again through a black bank, and figuring small weekly margins on a high daily turnover: make or break. It was like the stock market, without the lies and corruption.
When Karla finally responded, late in the second afternoon after coming down from the mountain, I raced to meet her at the sea wall in Juhu where we’d talked of Lisa, our own lost love, weeks before.
And as evening strollers passed us, smiling happily, and the sun began to fall, Karla wept and told me she wasn’t angry with me: she was troubled by Ranjit and Lisa.
‘What was Ranjit doing there with Lisa that night? What was she doing with him? Since I came back to Bombay, I can’t stop thinking about it.’
She cried into my chest, and then stopped crying, as I held her.
‘Why don’t I understand it, Shantaram?’
Karla was two beats ahead of every mind she met. The mystery tormented her, where it was just a slow burn in me; sand in the wind, for her, and sand in an hourglass with Ranjit’s name on it for me. I had to tell her to let it go, just as she’d once told me.
‘We’ll find him,’ I said. ‘And when we do, we’ll find out what happened. Until then we’ll have to stop thinking about it, or we’ll both go nuts. I mean, more nuts than we already are.’
She smiled.
‘There’s something not right,’ she said. ‘Something I should know, but don’t know. Something right there in front of me. But you’re right – if I don’t let it go, it’ll drive me crazy.’
Vermilion sunset, the last grace of the sun, washed flaws and faults from every face and form on the promenade: an ocean of evening light showing only the beautiful things we are inside.
Gentle breezes chased one another along the sea wall, playing through skirts and shirts of walkers on the way. The first few car headlights began to pass.
Pale shadows of palm leaves drifted across her face, tracing the exact curve of her neck to her lips, every time a car passed. Karla.
‘Is it your pride that won’t let you join Didier and Naveen and me?’ she asked, a harder eye turned toward me.
‘No.’
‘Pride is the only sin we can’t see in ourselves, you know.’
‘I’m not proud.’
‘The hell you’re not. But that’s okay. I like pride in a man. I like it in a woman, too. But don’t let it stop you now. We can make this work.’
‘How, Karla?’
‘We might be here a week, okay, but we might still be here three years from now. This can start to build in three months. Security is the big thing in India in the next fifty years. I’m telling you. I’ve had two years to study this, with Ranjit’s best advisors.’
‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’
‘I’m always serious, when it comes to love.’
‘Love?’ I grinned, like an idiot.
‘Pay attention,’ she jabbed at me. ‘I’m talking business.’
‘Okay, I’m attentive.’
‘Money isn’t gonna flow from the rich to the poor. It’s gonna flow from the poor to the rich, faster than ever, and it’s gonna stay there. That’s so outrageously unfair that personal security can’t lose as an investment. See?’
‘In a strange way. And the detective agency?’
‘We’re a bureau, not an agency. We only take on one kind of case. Lost loves. We don’t snoop or peep or shadow. We investigate missing loved ones. That’s our way into the wider security business. We’re gonna grow, and fast.’
‘How?’
‘If we want to grow, we need to know all the main players as friends. If we find missing loved ones for them along the way, they can’t roll on us later. Plus, we get to know where all the skeletons dance.’
‘You really thought this through.’
‘Will you stop stating the obvious?’
‘Look, I follow your logic, and I see the point –’
‘Do you? This is something clean, and right. I don’t see the right on your side of the playpen.’
‘Right? We’re talking about what’s right, now?’
‘You know, whatever else happens on the ride, interesting stuff like success and failure and fun, the bottom line for me, now, is that it’s gotta be right, and it’s gotta make a difference, or I’m an hour yesterday.’