Gregory Roberts - The Mountain Shadow

Diva came out of the shadows suddenly.

‘I need to get very drunk,’ she said.

Didier stared his Told you so at me.

‘Will you… ’ Diva said, ‘my strange new friends, because none of you are my actual friends, and my actual friends aren’t here, and I may never see them again, like my father, will you help me to get very drunk, and clean me up when I get sick, and put me to bed safely, when I don’t know what’s going on any more?’

There was a pause.

‘Of course!’ Didier said. ‘Come here, sweet injured child. Come here to Didier, and we shall cry into everybody’s beer together, and spit into the eyes of Fate.’

She did cry, of course. She ranted, waved her arms, shouted, paced the little hut, tripped on the patchwork blankets, and called the girls in to dance with her.

When the ululating voices and handclap music reached a peak, she began to fall. Naveen caught her quickly and carried her to the bed of blankets, her arms falling at her sides like broken wings. She slowly curled her knees into her heart, and slept.

Sitting vigil in the next hut, Didier played poker with Naveen and the Zodiac Georges. It wasn’t a pretty game to watch: Scorpio never saw a crooked card, Didier and Gemini never played him a straight one, and Naveen couldn’t take his mind from the sleeping girl in the hut next door.

I looked in on Diva. Several of the neighbour girls were sleeping in the hut to keep Diva company. One girl of eighteen, named Anju, was cuddling the socialite’s shoulders in sleep. Another girl had her arm over Diva’s belly. Three girls snuggled in close to them. Somebody’s little brother was sleeping against their feet.

I trimmed the wick on the kerosene lantern to keep it alight, and lit a mosquito coil and a sandalwood incense stick from the flame. I set the coil and incense on a stand on top of the metal cabinet, and pulled the light plywood door shut on its rope hinges.

Through narrow lanes of sleeping trust I walked back to the rocks and the sea, as black as the sky. I stood watching and listening. In that spot Diva had heard, and realised, that she’d lost everything.

When I stood on the front wall of a prison, between the gun towers, I felt calm. All the terror drained from me, because I knew that if the guards shot me, I’d fall on the right side of the wall.

When I slid down my electric-cord rope to freedom and started running, the calm left me, and the realisation of what I’d lost hit me so hard that I couldn’t stop my hands from shaking for weeks.

But I’d chosen my exile, and Diva had hers forced on her. And it was too cruel: her father killed, and everyone else. It was the kind of too-cruel that makes a survivor fall. I hoped that the young socialite, hiding in the real world, had friends who wouldn’t let that happen, when she returned to the unreal world.

I heard a sound and turned to see Karla, standing on a rocky outcrop at the edge of the slum. She’d come to find me.

She waved to me, and a stray wave broke high against the rocks nearby. White rivulets of water streamed over black boulders to the shore. A second wave garlanded the rocks with surf as I climbed back toward the light, and love, one wet black stone at a time.

I paused with her at the top, and for a while we watched the sea spilling on the shore of Diva’s grief.

We walked back past huts humming and murmuring sleep: fathers sleeping outside to leave more room for the family inside, the silver moon bathing them in soft light.

And we talked softly with Didier, the Georges and Naveen in the hut beside Diva’s, all of us wanting to be close, in case she woke.

Diva’s Bombay would never be the same again: some of the people she’d known before the tragedy would become true friends, and some would become strangers in press paradise. Either way, when she returned to her destiny, everything would be changed. Naveen was a Bombay boy, and maybe he understood that in ways we couldn’t. But in our exile hearts, the Island City was home for all of us. And we waited together, that vigilant night, until the scarlet dawn helped a new exile wake, and struggle to the shore.

The lull that followed the storm of Lisa’s death and the massacre at the Devnani estate lasted for long, busy, peaceful weeks. I liked it. I’d seen enough storms for one year.

Diva settled into her role as a slum girl, and the slum settled into its role as host to a Diva. Neither of them had much choice: the girls in the slum were star-struck over Diva, so they formed a permanent honour guard; and the killers of Diva’s father hadn’t been identified, so Diva stayed in the safest place in the city.

The newspapers still carried the story of the massacre, and the missing heiress. A court-appointed CEO administered the group of companies owned by Diva’s father, working with the various boards of directors until the heiress could be found.

There were twenty-five thousand people in the slum, and most of them knew who Diva was. Nobody called a reporter, or tried to claim the reward. She was under the protection of the slum, and in that avalanche of huts and shoulder-width lanes she was Aanu, one

of their own. She was safe from thugs with guns or magazine deadlines.

The Georges ran a semi-permanent party and fully permanent poker game from the top floor of the Mahesh hotel. Celebrities who’d closed their windows at traffic signals, when they were poor fixtures of the city, spent more time in the penthouse parties than they did with their therapists.

When the deputy mayor broke the bank, he declared the game a municipal recreation, exempting it from prosecution under gambling laws. When the ward tax collector won a similar pot, the poker game was registered as a charity. And when the prettiest starlet in Bollywood won six hands in a row, cleaning out everyone except the bank, she made the game so hot that one Bollywood actor after another tried, and failed, to restore male pride by beating her record.

For his part, Didier applied himself to the Lost Love Bureau with surprising diligence. He rose early, something so shocking that I jumped with fright the first time I saw him bright and active at eight in the morning. Didier had always said that an hour of sunlight a day is enough for anyone, and the hour before sunset was the only sunlight worth having.

The morning version of the night person I knew was strange, at first. He was punctual. He worked. He even told jokes.

‘You know,’ Naveen said, a few weeks after the bureau had opened for business, ‘I’m so glad that you put Didier and me together. He’s a hard-working stiff, if you’ll pardon the expression.’

‘Maybe. I don’t know.’

‘You’re just nostalgic.’

‘It isn’t nostalgia, if the first version is better. I don’t want Didier to get corporate on me.’

The new Didier did get corporate, and detectived seriously, and business at the bureau was brisk. He put an advertisement for the Lost Love Bureau in the biggest daily newspaper, one of Ranjit’s newspapers, offering a reward for information on the whereabouts of Ranjit, the missing owner of Ranjit Media, a Lost Love.

The notice didn’t bring any new leads, but it got everyone in town talking about the Lost Love Bureau, and it brought more than a dozen clients, each one clutching a file of photographs and police reports on missing loved ones. And when two of the missing loves were found in as many weeks, due to Didier’s street connections and Naveen’s deductive skills, the bureau attracted more clients, all of them willing to pay cash in advance.

Karla was right, of course: a market is a need, serving itself. Lost loves, forgotten or abandoned by overstretched police departments, are a constant ache in the heart, no less for the cops themselves, and a need that demands to be served. The bureau did well: lost loves were found, and reunited with the hearts that couldn’t stop searching for them.