Gregory Roberts - The Mountain Shadow

‘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.

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.’