Gregory Roberts - The Mountain Shadow

Is there a limit to the number of horrible things you can see, and experience, in any one life? Of course, there is: the limit is one, and none.

The buckets stopped. Everyone was kneeling, or looking at the sky. It was raining. I hadn’t noticed.

I was still smelling the burnt skin, and for some reason, I was remembering the severed head, on the side of the road, in Sri Lanka. I was still in yesterday’s prairie.

It poured. The fires sizzled. Firemen broke down the most dangerous structures, and contained the fire. People danced. If I’d been in a better mood, or if Karla had been there, I’d have danced with them.

I walked back along the beach and looked up, beyond the burnt boats, to the wall of trees at the far end of the beach. Grey figures began to walk out of the smoke and the shadows.

Greg figures, ghosts or demons, were coming toward us slowly.

The insides of the boats were saturated with a hundred years of fish oil, and the smoke all around us was blue-black as they burned and smouldered.

The men who stumbled through that black fog and rain toward us were stained with it, because they’d lit the fires. They were grey with ash and smoke and dust from the trees where they’d been hiding.

Rainwater striped their faces, making them grey tigers, moving slowly through a jungle of smoke. It took me a few seconds to realise that they were Scorpions.

Hanuman, as identifiable as a flagpole, and walking with a limp, was the last man out of the shadows.

Time really does slow down, sometimes, when love and fear combine with history, even if it’s only the history of a little place like the fishermen’s cove in Colaba. Heartbeats become hammers, and you can see everything at once. You’re somewhere else, already: somewhere dead, already. And you’re never sharper, never more aware of every swirl of smoke.

I saw the Scorpions coming toward us. I saw the people, still dancing behind me. I saw kids, dogs, and elderly people sitting on the sand. I saw firemen, standing amid the huts, steam coming off their burnt uniforms.

The Scorpions were still about sixty metres away. They were carrying knives and hatchets. They’d started the fire as Act One, and were coming to close the play.

I pulled my knives from their scabbards and started jogging toward them. I didn’t know what I was doing. The most important thing, it seemed to me at that moment, was to give the people behind me time to react, and run. I was shouting. I was screaming, I guess.

By the third or fourth step I stopped thinking, and something happened to the sound. I couldn’t hear anything. Wishes, wings without birds, passed through me like spears of light.

I had a knife in each hand and I was running through a tunnel, numbed of noise. I couldn’t even hear my own breathing. It seemed to take forever, but I knew that when I was close, it would be too fast.

There was somebody jogging with me. It was Naveen, but he wasn’t running with me, he was grabbing at my vest, he was pulling me to the ground. I hit the sand so hard that the world returned, and all the shouting and screaming and sirens came on at once. Naveen was half on top of me, where we fell.

He was pointing at something. I looked along his extended arm and saw cops, a lot of cops, running hard, and firing at will. Scorpions fell, or surrendered. Lightning Dilip was already kicking one of them.

Naveen and I were still lying on the ground. He was smiling and crying and laughing, all at the same time. He had his hand on my shoulder, the grip fierce.

He loved me after that night, that Indian-Irishman, and he never let me doubt it. Sometimes, the bravest thing we ever do is the thing we never get to do. And sometimes the spark that ignites a brother’s love, in men not born brothers, is nothing more than a pure intention.

We rode circles around the area of the cove until Abdullah, Ahmed and Tall Tony arrived. I gave Abdullah what I knew, and then we headed back to the jazz jam, on the Back Bay.

The band had left, and there were only a few kids still there. They told us that Didier, a favourite with the smokers, had left the message that he’d gone back to visit someone named Johnny Cigar.

Diva sat up quickly when we made our way through the slum to her hut.

‘What are you doing, you idiot?’ she demanded.

‘I’m fine,’ I said.

‘Not you!’ she snapped. ‘The other idiot. What do you think you’re doing, fighting bloody fires? Are you out of your tiny mind?’

‘You were safe, with Didier,’ Naveen protested. ‘I was only gone an hour.’

‘And who was keeping you safe?’ she asked, advancing to poke him in the chest.

Naveen grinned happily.

‘What are you so chirpy about?’

‘You care what happens to me,’ Naveen said, wagging his finger at her defiant nose. ‘You care about me.’

‘Of course I care about you. Some fucking detective, you are.’

‘Wow,’ Naveen said.

‘That’s all you’ve got to say?’

‘Wow.’

‘If you say that again, I’ll smack you with a pot,’ Diva said. ‘Shut your mouth, and kiss me with it.’

They almost did, but there was a fierce clatter of pots and pans, and a loud clamour of voices. Somebody was coming through the slum, and making a lot of noise about it.

Naveen put Diva in Sita’s hands, ready to make an escape through the back lanes on the sea coast. Johnny Cigar, Didier, Naveen and I faced the only path leading from the main part of the slum.

We heard a voice raised above all the others, shouting in English. It was Kavita Singh. When she came into the open space in front of Diva’s hut, we saw that she was smiling, and an honour guard of women was cheering her. Diva returned with Sita to greet her.

‘Just for you,’ Kavita said, handing Diva a newspaper. ‘Today’s front page. It’ll be on the stands in a few hours, but I thought you should be the first to see it.’

Diva read the lead article, looked at the photographs of her father, handed the paper to me, and fell into Naveen’s arms.

The gang responsible for the massacre at the Devnani mansion had been captured. They’d confessed to the crime, and were in prison. It was an African-Chinese crime syndicate, handling most of the pharmaceutical pleasures flowing illegally through Bombay to Lagos.

Smashing the gang and solving the murders was a triumph, the cops said, involving officers from several countries. The temporary CEO of Devnani Industries, Rajesh Jain, appealed once again for the missing heiress to come forward, and claim her inheritance.

For Diva, the threat was gone and she was free to leave the kerosene lamps, and live in the electric world again.

‘Lin,’ Didier said. ‘Can I offer you a flask?’

He’d been talking and joking with Kavita. Her expression said that I’d interrupted her, and it tested her patience.

‘How did you know Diva was here, Kavita?’

‘You and Karla are psychically connected,’ she snarled, taking a swig from Didier’s flask. ‘You tell me.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Why don’t you just go home, Lin,’ she said. ‘You do have a home, don’t you?’

I didn’t know what she was so angry about, and I didn’t care.

‘Bye, Kavita.’

I walked out to the street, and had just started my bike when a motorcycle pulled up beside me, and someone called my name. It was Ravi, the Company street soldier who’d ridden with me on the night of the contract.

‘Abdullah sent me to find you,’ he said, remaining on his bike, his hands on the high handlebars. ‘The Scorpions killed Amir. And Farid is dead.’

‘Peace be upon them,’ I said. ‘What happened?’

‘The Scorpions dragged Amir out of his house, and killed him in the street.’