He stopped, and looked at me, his eyes still roaming with the wild, and the dead.
‘It’s greed, you know,’ he said. ‘Greed is the key. Follow the greed to the sin. I was greedy for more power. I cursed a man, a foreigner, who challenged me on the street. I cursed him, told him that his riches would bring him ruin, and when I did that, every one of my powers drained from me like rain on a window.’
The hairs on my arms were standing up, and I looked at Karla, sitting on the other side of the holy-man-cleaner. She nodded.
‘Were there two foreigners that day?’ I asked.
‘Yes. One of them was very kind. An Englishman. The other was very rude, but I regret what I did. I regret any harm I may have caused him. I regret my betrayal of my own penance. I tried to find the man, but I couldn’t, although I searched everywhere, and I couldn’t lift my own curse.’
‘Dev,’ Karla said. ‘We know this man. We know the man you cursed. We can take you there, to meet him.’
The shaven sadhu crumpled, taking short breaths, and then slowly sat upright again.
‘Is it true?’
‘Yes, Dev,’ Karla said.
‘Are you okay, Dev?’ I asked, a hand on his thin shoulder.
‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘Maa! Maa!’
‘Do you want to lie down for a while?’ I asked.
‘No, I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m . . . I . . . lost my way, and I started drinking alcohol. I wasn’t used to it. I’d never had it in my life. I did bad things. Then a great saint stopped me, in the street, and took me to his Kali temple.’
He looked up quickly, as if breaking the surface for air.
‘Do you really know this man I cursed?’ he asked, his voice trembling.
‘We do,’ I said.
‘And will he see me? Will he allow me to lift the curse?’
‘I think he will,’ Karla said, smiling.
‘They say Maa Kali is terrifying,’ he said to me, his hand on my arm. ‘But only to hypocrites. If your heart is innocent, She cannot help but love you. She’s the Mother of the universe, and we are Her children. How could She not love us, if we make a place of innocence for Her inside ourselves?’
He was silent, breathing hard for a moment before he calmed himself, a hand on his heart.
‘Are you sure you’re quite well, Dev?’ Karla asked.
‘I am,’ he said. ‘Thanks to Maa, I’m well. It’s just a bit of a shock.’
‘How did you come to be here, Dev?’ I asked.
‘I shaved my head, and I came to this place, doing the most humble job I could find, serving the helpless and afraid. And now my question has been answered, because you found me here, to bring me to this man. Please, take this.’
He handed me a laminated card that was blank on one side, and had a design on the other. I slipped it into my vest pocket.
‘What is it, Dev?’ Karla asked.
‘It’s a yantra,’ he replied. ‘If you look at it with a truthful heart, it will clear the negative from your mind, so that you can make wise, caring choices.’
‘We’re waiting for news of our friend,’ I said. ‘Can we get anything for you, Dev?’
‘I’m very fine,’ he said, sitting back against the bench. ‘Am I really resigning from my job?’
‘It would seem so, Dev,’ Karla said.
Salar’s relatives arrived, escorted by two Company men, and the news came through that Salar was going to live.
We took Dev, the penitent holy man, to the penthouse floor of the Mahesh hotel. We watched Scorpio fall to his knees, and the sadhu fall with him, and we turned and went back to the elevator.
‘You know,’ she said, as we waited. ‘This might be just the thing to give Gemini’s immune system a jolt.’
‘It just might,’ I said, as the elevator pinged.
‘I know where we’re going,’ Karla said, passing the flask back to me on the way down.
‘You think you’re so smart,’ I said, pulling the lawyer’s black jacket around my blood-stained shirt.
‘We’re going to get your bike,’ she said. ‘She’s still on Mohammed Ali Road, and you care more about her than you do about getting cleaned up.’
She was so smart, and reminded me from time to time on the ride back to the Amritsar hotel. My happily rescued bike hummed machine mantras all the way home.
When we tumbled into her rooms, Karla freshened up, and left the bathroom for me.
I emptied my pockets onto the wide porcelain bench beneath the mirror. The money in my pockets was stained with blood. My keys were red, and the coins I spilled on the bench were discoloured, as if having been in a wishing fountain too long.
I put the knives and scabbards on the bench, dropped the lawyer’s suit jacket on the floor, and let the bloody shirt slide off my just as bloody T-shirt.
As I tossed it away, I noticed the card that Dev had given me. I picked it up, and placed it on the bench. I looked into the mirror for the first time, meeting myself like a stranger in a meadow.
I looked away from my own stare, and tried to forget what I couldn’t stop thinking.
The T-shirt was a gift from Karla. One of her artist protégées had made it, copying the knife-work of an artist known for biting the canvas that feeds him.
There were slashes, rips and tears all over the front. Karla liked it, I think, because she liked the artist who made it. I liked it, because it was incomplete, and unique.
I pulled it off carefully, hoping to soak the blood from it, but when I looked into the mirror, I let it fall into the sink.
The T-shirt had left a mark in blood on my chest. It was a triangle, upside down, with star-shapes around it. I looked at the card that Dev had given me. It was almost the same design.
India.
I let the card fall from my fingers, and stared into what I’d let myself become. I looked at the design on my chest. I asked the question we all ask sooner or later, if we stay in India long enough.
What do you want from me, India? What do you want from me, India? What do you want from me?
My heart was breaking on a wheel of coincidence, each foolish accident more significant than the next. If you look at it with a truthful heart, the sadhu said when he gave me the card. Wise, caring choices.
I escaped from a prison, where I had no choice, and cut my life down to a single choice, everywhere, with everyone but Karla: stay, or go.
What do you want from me, India?
What did the blood-design mean? If it was a message, written in another man’s blood, was it a warning? Or was it one of those affirmations that Idriss talked about? Was I going mad, asking the question, and searching for a significance that couldn’t exist?
I stumbled into the shower, watching red water run into the drain. The water ran clean at last, and I turned it off, but leaned against the wall, my palms flat against the tiles, my head down.
Was it a message? I heard myself asking without asking. A message in blood on my chest?
My knives clattered off the bench onto the tiled floor, startling me. I stepped out of the shower to pick up the knives, and slipped on the wet floor. Clutching at the knives as I steadied myself, I cut the inside of my hand.
I put the knives down, and cut myself again. I hadn’t cut myself with those knives in a year of practice. Blood ran into the basin, spilling onto the card I’d dropped. I scooped the card out of the basin, and dried it off.
I ran my hand under the cold tap, and used a towel to press the cuts closed. I cleaned my knives and put them away safely. And I stared at the card, and into the mirror, for quite a while.
I found Karla on the balcony, a thin blue robe over her shoulders. I wanted to see her like that every day, for the rest of my life, but I had to go out. I had something to do.
‘We gotta go out again,’ I said. ‘I’ve got
something I have to do.’
‘A mystery! Hey, speaking of, is that a bandage on your hand?’
‘It’s nothing,’ I said. ‘Are you up for another ride? The sun will be up soon.’
‘I’ll be ready before you are,’ she said, slipping off the robe. ‘I hope you haven’t got anything scary in mind.’
‘No.’
‘It’s just finding Dev for Scorpio and Gemini, by taking Salar to the hospital, by being in the perfume bazaar, I think we’ve used up our quota of karmic coincidence, Shantaram. We shouldn’t push our luck.’
‘Nothing scary, I promise,’ I said. ‘Unsettling, maybe. But not scary.’
By the time we reached the shrine at Haji Ali, pearl banners announced the Sun, the sky-king, waking devotion. Early pilgrims, pleaders and penitents were on the path to the shrine. Beggars with no arms or legs, arranged in a ring by their attendants, chanted the names of Allah, as passers-by put coins or notes in their circle of necessity.
Children visiting the shrine for the first time wore their best clothes: the boys in sweating suits, copied from movie stars, the girls with their hair pulled fiercely into decorated traps at the back of their heads.
I stopped us, halfway to the shrine, halfway to the sleeping saint.
‘This is it,’ I said.
‘You’re not going to pray today?’
‘Not . . . today,’ I said, looking left and right at the people passing by.
‘So, what are you going to do?’
There was a pause in the flow of people, and we were alone for a few seconds. I pulled my knives from their scabbards and threw them into the sea, one at a time.
Karla watched the knives whirl through the air. It was the best whirling I ever did, it seemed to me, before they whirled into vanishing sea.
We stood for a while, watching the waves.
‘What happened, Shantaram?’
‘I’m not sure.’
I handed her the card with the yantra design that Dev had given to me.
‘When I took my shirt off, that design was on my chest. It was almost exactly the same, painted on me in Salar’s blood.’
‘You think it’s a sign?’ she asked. ‘Is that it?’
‘I don’t know. I . . . I was asking myself that same question, and then I cut my hand on my knife. I just . . . I think I’m done with this. It’s weird. I’m not the religious type.’
‘But you are the spiritual type.’
‘I’m not. I’m really not, Karla.’
‘You are, and you just don’t know it. That’s one of the things I love most about you.’
We were silent again for a while, listening to the waves: the sound that wind makes, surfing through trees.
‘If you think I’m throwing my gun in there,’ she said, breaking the silence, ‘you’re crazy.’
‘Keep your gun,’ I laughed. ‘Me, I’m done. If I can’t fix it with my hands, from now on, then I probably deserve what’s coming. And anyway, you’ve got a gun, and we’re always together.’
She wanted the long way home, even though we were stamp-foot tired, and she got it.
When we’d ridden long enough with her new understanding of a slightly different me, we returned to the Amritsar, and showered off the last dust of doubt. I found her smoking a joint on the same balcony we’d left, an hour before, in the same blue robe.
‘You could’ve hit a fish on the head with one of those knives,’ she said. ‘When you threw them in the sea.’
‘Fish are like you, baby. They’re pretty quick.’
‘What you did before, with the knives. Did you mean it?’
‘I mean to try.’
‘Then I’m in it with you,’ she said, kissing my face. ‘All the way.’
‘Even if it takes us out of Bombay?’
‘Especially if it takes us out of Bombay.’
She drew the curtains to hide the day, and slipped off her robe to try out the mirror from Ahmed’s Old House of Style. They both looked good. She put some funk on her music system and funked at me, all mermaid arms and hips. I held her. She put her hands around my neck, and swayed in front of me.
‘Let’s go a little nuts,’ she said. ‘I think we deserve it.’
Chapter Ninety-One
Love and faith, like hope and justice, are constellations in the infinity of truth. And they always pull a crowd. So many excited coffee devotees crowded into the Love & Faith café on its opening night that Rannveig called and told us to come a little later, because love and faith alone couldn’t guarantee a place.
We found Didier at Leo’s, happily insulted by two waiters at the same time, and giving the service that he got. Leopold’s was sit-down jumping. People laughed at anything and shouted at nothing with happy determination. It looked like fun, but we had somewhere to go.
‘Just one drink,’ Didier pleaded. ‘Love & Faith has no alcohol. Have you ever heard of such a thing?’
‘One drink,’ Karla said, sitting beside him. ‘And not a mood-fluctuation more.’
‘Waiter!’ Didier called.
‘You think you’re the only customer who ever got thirsty in this place?’ Sweetie asked, flicking a rag at the table.
‘Bring alcohol, you fool!’ Didier snapped. ‘I have a curfew.’
‘And I have a life,’ Sweetie said, slouching away.
‘Gotta give you credit, Didier,’ I said. ‘You got things back to normal. I’ve never seen Sweetie surlier.’
‘What is credit,’ Didier preened, ‘but something you have to give back, with interest.’
‘Lin’s unarmed, Didier, and naked to the world,’ Karla said. ‘He threw his knives into the sea this morning.’
‘The sea will throw them back again,’ Didier said. ‘The sea can’t get over it that we crawled onto the land. Mark my words, Lin. The sea is a jealous woman, without the charming personality.’
A man approached our table carrying a parcel. It was Vikrant, the knife-maker, and for a second I felt a twinge of guilt that his superbly made instruments, my knives, were on the bottom of a shallow sea.
‘Hi, Karla,’ he said. ‘I’ve been looking for you, Lin. Your sword is finished.’
He unwrapped the calico parcel, revealing Khaderbhai’s sword. It had been repaired with gold rivets, and they’d been moulded into the eyes of two dragons, meeting at the tail.
It was beautiful work, but it was a painful thing to remember the sword. I’d forgotten it, in the year of mountains and burning mansions, and it shamed me to know that I had.
‘I rest my case,’ Didier said. ‘The sea is a jealous woman. Didier is never wrong.’
‘You can take the boy from the sword,’ Karla said, ‘but you can’t take the sword from the boy.’
‘It’s beautiful work,’ I said. ‘How much do I owe you, Vikrant?’
‘That was a true labour of love,’ he said, moving away. ‘It’s on me. Don’t kill anyone with it. Bye, Karla.’
‘Bye, Vikrant.’
The drinks arrived, and we were about to toast, but I stopped us with a raised hand.
‘Take a look at that girl over there,’ I said.
‘Lin, it is hardly gallant to remark on another woman, when a woman is in your –’
‘Just take a good look at her, Didier.’
‘Do you think it’s her?’ Karla asked.
‘Oh, yeah.’
‘Who?’ Didier demanded.
‘Karlesha,’ Karla said. ‘It’s Oleg’s Karlesha.’
‘Is it really!’
The girl was tall and looked a little like Karla, with black hair and pale green eyes. She was wearing skin-tight black jeans, a black motorcycle shirt and cowboy boots.
‘Karlesha,’ Karla muttered. ‘Not bad style.’
‘Sweetie,’ I called, and the waiter shuffled
over to me. ‘Have you still got that picture Oleg gave you?’
He scraped through his pockets petulantly, and produced a wrinkled photo. We held it up against the face of the girl, sitting five tables away.
‘Call Oleg, and get your reward,’ I said. ‘That’s the girl he’s been waiting for, over there.’
He goggled at the photograph for a while, looked at the girl, and scurried away to the phone.
‘Are we about done?’ I asked.
‘You don’t want to stay, and see Oleg and Karlesha reunited?’ Karla teased.
‘I’m tired of being Fate’s unwilling accomplice,’ I said.
‘I must see the reunion,’ Didier said. ‘And I will not move from this spot until I have witnessed it with my own eyes.’
‘Okay,’ I said, ready to leave.
A man approached our table. He was short, thin, dark-skinned and confident.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘are you the one they call Shantaram?’
‘Who wants to know?’ Didier snapped.
‘My name is Tateef, and I have something to discuss with Mr Shantaram.’
‘Discuss away,’ Karla said, waving a hand at me.
‘I hear you are a man who will do anything for money,’ Tateef said.
‘That’s a mighty offensive thing to say, Tateef,’ Karla said, smiling.
‘It certainly is,’ Didier agreed. ‘How much money?’
I held up my hand to stop the auction.
‘We’ve got an appointment, Tateef,’ I said. ‘Come back at three, tomorrow. We’ll talk.’
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Goodnight to all.’
He slipped between the tables, and out into the street.
‘You don’t even know what he has in mind, this, this, Tateef,’ Didier warned.
‘I liked the look of him. Didn’t you?’
‘I did,’ Karla said. ‘And I think we’re gonna see him again.’
‘Certainly not,’ Didier puffed. ‘Did you not see his shoes?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Military half-boot, white on the sides with salt, and on the edges of his jacket. My guess is that he’s spent a lot of time at sea, recently.’
‘I mean the style, Lin,’ Didier sighed. ‘They were hideous. I have seen taxidermy with more style.’