I’d known the uncle, Keki, very well. He’d been a wise counsellor to Khaderbhai, the South Bombay don, and had a place on the mafia Council. In his last hours, the Parsi counsellor had asked the new head of the mafia Company, Sanjay Kumar, to protect young Farzad, his nephew, whom he regarded as a son.
Sanjay took Farzad in, telling him that he’d be safe from prosecution in the United States, if he remained in Bombay, and worked for the mafia Company. While I’d been in Goa, Sanjay had put him to work in my false passport factory.
‘There’s so many people moving out of India now,’ Farzad said, sipping his second chai. ‘And regulations will lighten up. You’ll see. Count on it.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Restrictions and laws, they’ll all change, they’ll all get looser and easier. People will be leaving India, people will be coming back to India, starting businesses here and in foreign countries, moving money around all over the place. And all of those people, one way or another, they’re all going to need or want some paperwork that gives them a better chance in America, or London, or Stockholm, or Sydney, you know?’
‘It’s a big market, huh?’
‘It’s a huge market. Huge. We only set this up two weeks ago, and we’re already working two full shifts to meet our commitments.’
‘Two shifts, huh?’
‘Flat out, baba.’
‘And . . . when one of our clients, who buys his engineering degree instead of studying for it, is called upon to build a bridge, say, that won’t fall down and kill a couple hundred people?’
‘No tension, baba,’ he replied. ‘In most countries, the fake degree only gets you in the door. After that, you have to do more study to meet the local standards, and get accreditation. And you know our Indian people. If you let them in the door, they’ll buy the house, and then the house next door, and then in no time they’ll own the street, and start renting houses to the people who used to own them. It’s the way we are. Count on it, yaar.’
Farzad was a gentle, open-faced young man. Relaxed with me at last and unafraid, his soft brown eyes stared from a place of unruffled serenity, deep within his sanguine opinion of the world.
His round, full lips parted slightly on the permanent quiver of a smile. His skin was very fair: fairer than my tanned face beneath my short blonde hair. His Western-chic jeans and silk designer shirt gave him the look of a visitor, a tourist, rather than someone whose family had lived in Bombay for three hundred years.
His face was unmarked, his skin showing no scar or scratch or faded bruise. It occurred to me, as I listened to his genial chatter, that it was likely he’d never been in a fight, or even closed his fist in anger.
I envied him. When I allowed myself to look into the half-collapsed tunnel of the past, it seemed that I’d been fighting all my life.
My kid brother and I were the only Catholic boys in our tough, working-class neighbourhood. Some of our tough, working-class neighbours waited patiently for the arrival of our school bus every evening, and fought us all the way home; day after day.
And it never stopped. A trip to the shopping centre was like crossing a Green Line into enemy territory. Local militias, or street gangs, attacked outsiders with the viciousness that the poor only ever visit on the poor. Learning karate and joining the local boxing club were the life-skills classes in my neighbourhood.
Every kid who had the heart to fight learned a martial art, and every week gave him several opportunities to practise what he learned. The accident and emergency department of the local hospital was filled, on Friday and Saturday nights, with young men who were having stitches put into cuts on their mouths and eyes, or having their broken noses repaired for the third time.
I was one of them. My medical file at the local hospital was heavier than a volume of Shakespeare’s tragedies. And that was before prison.
Listening to Farzad’s happy, dreaming talk of the car he was saving to buy, and the girl he wanted to ask out, I could feel the pressure of the two long knives I always carried at my back. In the secret drawer of a cabinet in my apartment there were two handguns and two hundred rounds of ammunition. If Farzad didn’t have a weapon, and the willingness to use it, he was in the wrong business. If he didn’t know how to fight, and what it feels like to lose a fight, he was in the wrong business.
‘You’re lining up with the Sanjay Company,’ I said. ‘Don’t plan too far ahead.’
‘Two years,’ Farzad said, cupping his hands in front of him as though he was holding the chunk of time and its promises. ‘Two years of this work, and then I’ll take all the money I’ve saved, and open a small business of my own. A consultancy, for people trying to get a Green Card in the US, and whatnot. It’s the coming thing! Count on it.’
‘Just keep your head down,’ I advised, hoping that Fate or the Company would give him the years he wanted.
‘Oh, sure, I always –’
The phone on my desk rang, cutting him off.
‘Aren’t you going to answer it?’ Farzad asked, after a few rings.
‘I don’t like telephones.’
The telephone was still ringing.
‘Well, why do you have one?’
‘I don’t. The office does. If it agitates you so much, you answer it.’
He lifted the receiver.
‘Good morning, Farzad speaking,’ he said, then held the phone away from his ear.
Gurgling sounds, like mud complaining or big dogs eating something, rumbled from the phone. Farzad stared at it in horror.
‘It’s for me,’ I said, and he let the phone fall into my hand.
‘Salaam aleikum, Nazeer.’
‘Linbaba?’
It was a voice I could feel through the floor.
‘Salaam aleikum, Nazeer.’
‘Wa aleikum salaam. You come!’ Nazeer commanded. ‘You come now!’
‘Whatever happened to How are you, Linbaba?’
‘You come!’ Nazeer insisted.
His voice was a growling thing dragging a body on a gravel driveway. I loved it.
‘Okay, okay. Keep your scowl on. I’m on my way.’
I put down the phone, collected my wallet and the keys to my bike, and walked to the door.
‘We’ll talk more, later on,’ I said, turning to look at my new assistant. ‘But for now, I think this is gonna work out okay, between you and me. Watch the store while I’m gone, thik?’
The word, pronounced teek, brought a wide smile to the young, unblemished face.
‘Bilkul thik!’ he replied. Absolutely okay!
I left the office, forgetting the young MBA making false degrees, and pushed the bike to speed on Marine Drive, sweeping up onto the narrow cutting beside the Metro flyover.
At the Parsi Fire Temple corner I saw my friend Abdullah riding with two others across the intersection in front of me. They were headed for the narrow streets of the commerce district.
Waiting for a break in the almost constant flow of vehicles, and checking to see that the traffic cop on duty was busy accepting a bribe from someone else, I cut the red light and set off in pursuit of my friend.
As a member of the Sanjay Company, I’d pledged my life to defend others in the gang: the band of brothers in arms. Abdullah was more than that. The tall, long-haired Iranian was my first and closest friend in the Company. My commitment to him was beyond the duty of the pledge.
There’s a deep connection between gangsters, faith and death. All of the men in the Sanjay Company felt that their souls were in the hands of a personal God, and they were all devout enough to pray before and after a murder. Abdullah, no less than the others, was a man of faith, although he never showed mercy.
For my part, I still searched for something more than the verses, vows and veneration I’d found in the books of believers. And while I doubted everything in myself, Abdullah was alw
ays and ever certain: as confident in his invincibility as the strongest eagle, soaring above his head in the hovering Bombay sky.
We were different men, with different ways to love, and different instincts for the fight. But friendship is faith, too, especially for those of us who don’t believe in much else. And the simple truth was that my heart always rose, always soared in the little sky inside, whenever I saw him.
I followed him in the flow of traffic, waiting for the chance to pull in beside him. His straight back and relaxed command of the bike were characteristics I’d come to admire. Some men and women ride a horse as if they’re born to it, and something of the same instinct applies to riding a motorcycle.
The two men riding with Abdullah, Fardeen and Hussein, were good riders who’d been on bikes since they were infants, riding on the tanks of their fathers’ bikes, through the same traffic on the same streets, but they never achieved the same riverine facility as our Iranian friend, and never looked as cool.
Just as I sensed a gap opening beside his bike, and pulled forward to match his pace, he turned his head to look at me. A smile edged serious shadows from his face, and he pulled over to the kerb, followed by Fardeen and Hussein.
I stopped close to him, and we hugged, still sitting on our bikes.
‘Salaam aleikum,’ he greeted me warmly.
‘Wa aleikum salaam wa Rahmatullahi wa Barakatuh.’ And unto you be Peace, and Allah’s mercy, and His blessings.
Fardeen and Hussein reached out to shake hands.
‘You are going to the meeting, I heard,’ Abdullah said.
‘Yeah. I got the call from Nazeer. I thought you’d be there.’
‘I am indeed going there,’ he declared.
‘Well, you’re taking the long way,’ I laughed, because he was heading in the wrong direction.
‘I have a job to do first. It will not take long. Come with us. It is not far from here, and I believe that you do not know this place, and these people.’
‘Okay,’ I agreed. ‘Where are we going?’
‘To see the Cycle Killers,’ he said. ‘On a matter of Company business.’
I’d never visited the den of the Cycle Killers. I didn’t know much about them. But like every street guy in Bombay, I knew the names of their top two killers, and I knew that they outnumbered the four of us by six or seven to one.
Abdullah kicked his bike to life, waiting for us to kick-start our own bikes, and then led the way out into the brawl of traffic, his back straight, and his head high and proud.
Chapter Six
I’d seen some of the Cycle Killers, riding their polished chrome bicycles at suicidal speed through the market streets of the Thieves Bazaar. They were young, and always dressed in the same uniform of brightly coloured, tight-fitting undershirts, known as banyans, white stovepipe jeans, and the latest fashion brand of running shoes.
They all slicked their hair back with perfumed oil, wore ostentatious caste-mark tattoos on their faces to protect them against the evil eye, and covered their own eyes with identical mirror-finish aviator sunglasses, as polished as their silver bicycles.
They were, by general agreement among discriminating criminals, the most efficient knife-men money could buy, surpassed in skill by only one man in the city: Hathoda, the knife master for the Sanjay Company.
Deep within the streets and narrower gullies, clogged with commerce and the clamour for cash, we parked our bikes outside a shop that sold Ayurvedic remedies and silk pouches filled with secret herbs, offering protection against love curses. I wanted to buy one, but Abdullah didn’t let me.
‘A man’s protection is in Allah, honour and duty,’ he growled, his arm around my shoulder. ‘Not in amulets and herbs.’
I made a mental note to go back to the shop, alone, and fell into step with my stern friend.
We entered a shoulder-wide lane, and as the lane darkened, further from the street, Abdullah led us beneath an almost invisible arch bearing the name Bella Vista Towers.
Beyond the arch we found a network of covered lanes that seemed, at one point, to pass through the middle of a private home. The owner of the home, an elderly man wearing a tattered banyan and sitting in an easy chair, was reading a newspaper through over-large optical sunglasses.
He didn’t look up or acknowledge us as we passed through what seemed to be his living room.
We walked on into an even darker lane, turned the last corner in the maze and emerged in a wide, open, sunlit courtyard.
I’d heard of it before: it was called Das Rasta, or Ten Ways. Residential buildings and the many lanes that serviced them surrounded the roughly circular courtyard, open to the sky. It was a private public square.
Residents leaned from windows, looking down into the action of Das Rasta. Some lowered or pulled up baskets of vegetables, cooked food, and other goods. Many more people entered and left the courtyard through wheel-spoke alleys leading to the wider world beyond.
In the centre of the courtyard, sacks of grain and pulses had been heaped together in a pile twice the height of a man. The sacks formed a small pyramid of thrones, and seated on them at various levels were the Cycle Killers.
In the topmost improvised throne was Ishmeet, the leader. His long hair had never been cut, according to Sikh religious tradition, but his observance of Sikhism stopped there.
His hair wasn’t held in a neat turban, but fell freely to his narrow waist. His thin, bare arms were covered in tattoos, depicting his many murders and gang war victories. There were two long, curved knives in decorated scabbards tucked into the belt of his tight jeans.
‘Salaam aleikum,’ he said lazily, greeting Abdullah as we approached his tower of thrones.
‘Wa aleikum salaam,’ Abdullah replied.
‘Who’s the dog-face you’ve got with you?’ a man sitting close to Ishmeet asked in Hindi, turning his head to spit noisily.
‘His name is Lin,’ Abdullah replied calmly. ‘They also call him Shantaram. He was with Khaderbhai, and he speaks Hindi.’
‘I don’t care if he speaks Hindi, Punjabi and Malayalam,’ the man responded in Hindi, glaring at me. ‘I don’t care if he can recite poetry, and if he has a dictionary shoved up his arse. I want to know what this dog-face is doing here.’
‘I’m guessing you have more experience with dogs than I do,’ I said in Hindi. ‘But I came here in the company of men, not dogs, who know how to show respect.’
The man flinched and twitched, shaking his head in disbelief. I wasn’t sure if it was because of the challenge I’d thrown, or the fact that a white foreigner had spoken it in the kind of Hindi used by street gangsters.
‘This man is also my brother,’ Abdullah said evenly, staring at Ishmeet. ‘And what your man says to him, he says to me.’
‘Then why don’t I say it to you, Iranian?’ the man said.
‘Why don’t you, by Allah?’ Abdullah replied.
There was a moment of exquisite calm. Men working to bring sacks of grain, pots of water, boxes of cold drinks, bags of spices and other goods still moved into and out of the courtyard. People still watched from their windows. Children still laughed and played in the shade.
But in the breathing space between the Cycle Killers and the four of us, a meditation stillness rippled outwards from our beating hearts. It was the deliberate stillness of not reaching for our weapons, the shadow before the flash of sunlight and blood.
The Cycle Killers were only a word away from war, but they respected and feared Abdullah. I looked into Ishmeet’s smiling eyes, schemed into slits. He was counting the corpses that would lie around his throne of sacks.
There was no doubt that Abdullah would kill at least three of Ishmeet’s men, and that the rest of us might account for as many again. And although there were twelve Cycle Killers in the courtyard, and several more in the rooms beyond, and although Ishmeet himself
might manage to live, the loss would be too great for his gang to survive a revenge attack by our gang.
Ishmeet’s eyes opened a little wider, crimson betel nut staining his smile.
‘Any brother of Abdullah,’ he said, staring directly at me, ‘is a brother of mine. Come. Sit up here, with me. We’ll drink bhang together.’
I glanced at Abdullah, who nodded to me without taking his eyes off the Cycle Killers. I climbed onto the wide throne of sacks and took a seat a little below Ishmeet, and level with the man who’d insulted me.
‘Raja!’ Ishmeet said, calling to a man who was polishing the rows of already gleaming bicycles. ‘Get some chairs!’
The man moved quickly to provide wooden stools for Abdullah, Fardeen, and Hussein. Others brought the pale green bhang in tall glasses, and also a large chillum.
I drank the glass of marijuana milk down in gulps, as did Ishmeet. Belching loudly, he winked at me.
‘Buffalo milk,’ he said. ‘Fresh pulled. Gives a little extra kick. You want to be a king in this world, man, keep your own milking buffalo.’
‘O . . . kay.’
He lit the chillum, took two long puffs, and passed it to me, smoke streaming from his nostrils like steam escaping from fissured stone.
I smoked and passed the chillum to the gang lieutenant sitting beside me. The animosity of moments before was gone from his smiling eyes. He smoked, passed the chillum along, and then tapped me on the knee.
‘Who’s your favourite heroine?’
‘From now, or before?’
‘From now.’
‘Karisma Kapoor.’
‘And from before?’
‘Smita Patil. What about you?’
‘Rekha,’ he sighed. ‘Before and now and always. She’s the queen of everything. Do you have a knife?’
‘Of course.’
‘Can I see it, please?’