Gregory Roberts - The Mountain Shadow

‘Not… yet.’

‘And you’re serious about the bet?’

‘Sure,’ he laughed, but then smartened up. ‘You’re not thinking of bribing the Diva girls into the slum, are you?’

‘No-one should go there,’ I said. ‘Diva’s there as a guest of Johnny and his family. Until the people who killed her father are caught, no-one should go to see her, in case they expose those people to harm.’

‘You’re… you’re right, of course,’ he said stiffly. ‘I wasn’t thinking of that. I’ll try to stop the Diva girls, but Didier might’ve already persuaded them. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s alright, Naveen. And if the Divas do visit the slum, and you get Benicia to race you, I’ll put a thousand dollars on you, kid, here and now.’

‘You mean it?’

I fished the money from my pocket, and handed it across.

‘Done,’ Naveen said, offering his hand.

‘Done,’ I said, shaking it.

‘How’s it going with Karla?’ Naveen asked.

‘Okay,’ I said, maybe convincingly. ‘How’s it going with Diva?’

‘I’m going nuts,’ he replied, very convincingly.

‘Does she know?’

‘Does she know I’m going nuts?’ he asked, professional concern darkening his face.

‘That you love her,’ I said, looking for the reaction.

The kid was good. He locked love in the cage of a clenched jaw, betraying nothing, and looked at the slum-girl Diva, clapping her hands in time to the music.

Some of the students wandered from group to group, laughing and talking. Others sat in whispered intimacy. There was some handholding, a little cuddling, and the occasional kiss. In Bombay, in those years, it was as wild as kids could get. It was also more innocent than you can reasonably expect sexually excited twenty-year-olds to be.

It was a sweet thing, the gentle love those kids shared, as their enervated minds recovered from the task of inheriting the city, while the music played, echoing softly from the tall apartment buildings nearby, where many of them lived.

They were sons and daughters of the future. They wore hip clothes, passed joints and bottles of cheap rum around, and played music near the sea. But they also got good grades, and didn’t give a damn that the group included every faith, and every caste.

They were already something that had never existed on the foreshore of the Island City, and when their turn came to run the companies and councils, they’d be navigating by different stars.

Diva’s two friends were leaning in toward Didier, clutching at him in helpless giggling. They weren’t listening to the music. Every sentence Didier whispered made them shriek into his shirt front, trying to stifle the sound.

He saw me, and excused himself from their pout.

‘What kept you?’ he asked, shaking my hand.

What kept me?

Arshan’s suicide attack on the Colaba police station, and a fabled treasure.

‘Tell you later. How you doing?’

Didier didn’t hear me. He was making a scandalous gesture to the girls.

‘How you doing, Didier?’

‘I have two very charming ladies over here, who would like to know you better than they should.’

He waved his hand as if presenting a magic trick. We looked at the girls, sitting a few metres away. They were doing something with their faces. It might’ve been smiling. I couldn’t be sure.

Whatever he’d told them about me sent them from fear to fascination, it seemed. They raised their hands, and moved them. It might’ve been waving, or they might’ve been warding me off.

They were scary-smiling again, and I couldn’t figure it out. Guys never understand what pretty girls do with their faces. They got up, quite athletically for sit-around girls, and began to slow-walk toward us, their bare toes prowling through the grass in step. They weren’t sit-around girls at all.

The Divas were dancers: dancers who danced together, and practised. They were good. That part, I understood. Guys always understand what pretty girls do with their hips.

‘If they ask you about the man you killed,’ Didier said, as the Diva girls slow-stepped across the moonlit grass, ‘I’ll take it from there.’

‘I haven’t killed anyone, Didier.’

‘You haven’t?’ he asked, dubious. ‘Why do I always think you have?’

‘Hi,’ one of the girls said.

‘Hi,’ the second girl said.

‘I’m so glad you girls are here,’ I said. ‘You’ve gotta hang around, until my wife gets back from church.’

‘Your wife?’ one girl said.

‘Church?’ the other peeped.

‘Yeah. She’s got the kids. Four under four. So glad you’re good babysitters. Those kids are demons, and we need a break.’

‘Eeeuw!’

‘Aren’t you the babysitters?’ I asked innocently. ‘Didier said you’d do Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, for twenty rupees an hour.’

‘Eeeuw!’ they said as they skipped away in step to sit with two pretty, well-dressed boys playing tabla drums with the band.

‘Now, look what you’ve done!’ Didier protested.

‘ The man I killed? ’ I countered. ‘ You’ll take it from there? ’

‘Well, Lin,’ he grumbled, ‘Didier is an artist of spin, everyone acknowledges that, but let’s face it, you don’t give me much to work with. I used a little poetic licence. If I tell people the truth, only Naveen and I will find you interesting, and I am not completely sure of Naveen.’

‘What is this? Shit on Shantaram Week? Back up, Didier. I’ve been crowded all I can take for one day.’

He couldn’t reply, because there was a sudden shout.

‘It is a fire, I believe!’

We turned to see flames, rising from a place on the coast, not far away.

‘It’s the fishermen’s colony,’ Naveen said.

‘The boats are on fire,’ I agreed.

‘Stay with Diva!’ Naveen shouted to Didier, as I ran for my bike.

‘The girls are safe with me,’ he shouted back, his arms around Diva’s Divas. ‘But please, do not get yourselves killed!’

Naveen and I rode past crowds streaming from the big slum to the fire in the next cove. We stopped the bikes in the middle of the road, next to the concrete divider. From the road, we could see the long boats burning.

It was dark, on the beach, where the fishermen lived in their shamble of huts, but the cove faced a main road with an intersecting street, and the lights made cold pictures of the burning, only twenty metres away.

The boats were already blackened, shrivelled versions of the sturdy craft they’d been. Red-rimmed mouths of glowing coals still burned on their sides.

The boats were lost, but the fire hadn’t destroyed the houses, and people were working desperately to save them.

Naveen and I tied handkerchiefs around our faces, ran across the street, and joined the bucket brigades. I filled a space between two women, taking a bucket from one, and passing it to the other. They were fast, and it wasn’t easy to keep up with them.

We could hear women and children screaming from the beach, cut off by the fire. They’d saved themselves and the children in shallow waves.

Firemen ran through the flames and smoke to help them. Firemen ran into the burning huts to save children. Firemen caught fire, their sleeves and trousers bursting into quick flames from oil and kerosene spills among the crammed huts.

One rescuer emerged from the swirling smoke close to me with a child in his arms. His own hair was burning, but he ignored it. He passed beside me, but I couldn’t break the bucket-chain, and couldn’t help him.

The smell of burnt skin went into my mind while I was passing buckets of water and stayed there, like a dead horse found in a prairie of memory.