Gregory Roberts - The Mountain Shadow

Vinson and Rannveig dropped in at Gemini George’s parties from time to time. Vinson was happy, but never left Rannveig’s side unless she sent him away, or told him to wait somewhere.

The girl with the ice-in-a-blue-glass eyes seemed to have accepted the death of her boyfriend. She never mentioned him to me again. But while that ghost might’ve slipped away on a river of acceptance, some shadow remained in the young face. It was as if every changing expression or movement of a hand was clouded by irresolution.

Nevertheless, she looked healthy and well. And she’d taken to dressing as Karla did, in a thin sheath of salwar kameez and tight cotton leggings. It suited her, with her hair pulled back into a high ponytail. And when she smiled happily and openly, as she did from time to time, leaves of doubt parted, and a bright sky of what she could become shone through.

In the mysterious absence of Ranjit, the proprietor, Kavita Singh was promoted from banner journalist to deputy editor of the flagship newspaper. The fact that Karla had a deciding proxy vote in Ranjit Media was influential. The fact that Kavita’s columns were the most popular in the city was decisive.

Within two weeks under Kavita’s creative hand, the newspaper took a new turn, not left or right, but straight up into something else. The mood was upbeat. Bombay was a great, exciting place to live. Enough of this comparing ourselves to other places shit , she wrote in her first editorial. Open your eyes, and see how wonderful this gigantic social experiment you’re living in is, and see how much real love keeps it going.

People loved it. Sometimes, people born in a place need to have someone wake its beauty for them, and Kavita’s editorial started a fire in every Mumbaikar’s heart; a fire of pride that none of them knew they’d prepared inside themselves, until Kavita lit it. The newspaper’s circulation increased by nine per cent. Kavita was a hit.

Karla laughed, long and happily, when the civic pride campaign became a trend that tumbled into a cascade of social activities across the city. I didn’t ask her why, and she didn’t tell me.

She moved into the rooms next to mine and transformed them, during a week of deletions and deliveries. Her three rooms, a living room, a bedroom and a wardrobe corridor like mine, became a Bedouin tent.

Waves of sky-blue and white muslin, fixed from the light fittings in the centre of each room, hid the ceilings. The lights were stripped away and replaced by old railway lanterns.

She took all the furniture out of the rooms, except for the bed, and a writing table in the living room. She bought the table from the music store downstairs and had the legs sawn off, so that she could sit at it cross-legged in the middle of the floor.

She covered every linoleum inch of that floor, even the bathroom, with Turkish and Iranian carpets. They were lying on top of one another as if they’d exhausted themselves, wrestling for a place of prominence at her feet.

The balcony that looked out on Metro Junction, and connected with mine, was draped in red silk saris, softening the white heat of day to cooling troughs and stripes of crimson.

There weren’t any sleepovers, but it was okay. It was heaven, in fact: the happiest days I’d known since I’d thrown my life in a gutter of shame, nine years before.

Freedom and happiness and justice and even love are all parts of the same whole: peace, within. The first time I put fear into someone to get money for drugs, I crossed a line I’d drawn in the earth of my own life. But the shovel fell from my hand when Karla moved into the Amritsar hotel, and for a while I stopped digging graves of guilt. We ate breakfast, lunch and dinner together almost every day. We did the work we had to do separately, but got together every minute we could.

When we were free, we rode all the way around the Island City. When she felt like it, Karla drove her car, with Randall helping himself to a soda in the back. We saw a couple of movies, visited friends, and went to a few parties.

But any night together, every night together, she went back to the Bedouin tent alone, locking all those locks I’d put on her door.

She was driving me crazy, of course, but in the best possible way. People differ in things like this, I know, but for me it isn’t how long you wait for something that counts, it’s the quality of the wait. And hours alone with Karla every day was a quality wait.

Sometimes, in all that quality waiting, very occasionally, I found myself thinking about punching a new air vent in the wall of my room. And sometimes, being only a metre away from her behind a connecting wall every night, twisted the guitar string pretty tight. Mind you, there was always the black market, to wind the string tighter.

Crime is a demon , Didier once said, and adrenaline is his drug of choice . Every crime, even a little crime like black market money changing, comes with a measure of adrenaline. The people you’re doing business with are at least a little dangerous, the cops are more than a little dangerous, and every crime has its own species of predator and prey.

Black market money changing was all but legal in South Bombay in those years, operating openly in every second Colaba cigarette shop. South Bombay had two hundred and ten cigarette shops, all of them licensed by the Municipal Authority and the Sanjay Company. I ran fourteen of them, bought from Didier, and sanctioned by Sanjay. It was usually a safe trade, but criminals, by definition, are violently unpredictable.

I never took Karla on my rounds. I did one round between breakfast and lunch, another after lunch, and a late-night scout of the shops before sleep. It was important for the boss to be seen.

Running a crime franchise requires a sophisticated degree of cooperation, usually bought, and clearly defined roles and rules. I provided the finesse money. The Sanjay Company defined the roles, and enforced the rules.

But every trader changing black money at the street level has his own measure of pride. Rebellion, from frustration or fear, is a constant possibility. The defection of even one of my money changers would bring swift punishment from Sanjay, but it would also cost me the franchise. Making such uprisings impossible, by keeping the shopkeepers between fear and friendship, was my job.

Crime is feudal, and when you understand that, you actually understand quite a lot of it. The Sanjay Company was the castle on the hill, with a moat full of crocodile gangsters, and Sanjay was the feudal lord. If he wanted a girl, he took her. If he wanted a man dead, he killed him.

Because I’d purchased a franchise in the bazaar, that made me a kind of robber baron, and the shopkeepers were the serfs. They had no rights but those granted by the Company.

Crime is a medieval metropolis running parallel to the shining city, complete with absolute monarchy and public executions. And as a robber baron, riding from serf to serf on my steel pony, I had the right to assert my authority.

The first skill in running a crime franchise is projecting an air of unchallengeable entitlement. If you don’t believe it yourself, no-one else on the street will. They’re too smart. You have to own it, and own it in a way that stops people thinking about challenging you.

In Bombay that involves a lot of yelling and the occasional slap, usually over trivial things, until the air is clear and your voice is the last and the loudest.

After that, it’s a matter of observation. This one chews paan , this one hates paan , this one listens to holy songs from a speaker in the shape of King Kong. This guy likes boys, this guy likes girls, this guy likes girls too much, this guy is confident when he’s alone, and this one cowers until his confederates arrive, this one drinks, thinks, smokes, chokes, peeps, talks, walks, and this one is the only one who’ll still be standing toe to toe with you, till the last thrust of the knife.