Gregory Roberts - The Mountain Shadow

Vegetable biryani was served, along with coconut paste, Bengali spices, Kashmiri refinements, tandoori-fired vegetables, cucumber and tomato yoghurt, yellow dhal, and wok-fried cauliflower, okra and carrot, offered by an endless line of people, smiling as they served us.

‘Funny time for a party,’ I said to Karla.

‘If you knew anything about this,’ Kavita said, leaning over to catch my eyes, or my soul, or something, ‘you’d know that this is the time between shifts, and the only time that day workers and night workers can join in together.’

It was silly. I’d lived in that slum, and Kavita hadn’t, and there wasn’t much she could teach me about it.

‘You really won’t let this go, will you, Kavita?’

‘Why should I, cowboy?’

‘How about you pass me the pungent chutney, instead?’ Karla said, playing peacemaker.

I passed it across, my eyes catching Karla’s for a moment.

‘Ran away, when Lisa died,’ Kavita said. ‘And running away now.’

‘Okay, Kavita, just get it off your chest.’

‘Is that a threat?’ she asked, squinting spite at me.

‘How can the truth be a threat? I’m just sick of the guilt games. I came to this city with my own crosses. I don’t need you making new ones for me.’

‘You killed her,’ she said.

I didn’t see it coming.

‘Calm down, Kavita,’ Karla said.

‘I wasn’t even here. I wasn’t even in the same country. That was on your watch, Kavita.’

She flinched. She was hurt, and I didn’t want to hurt her: I only wanted her to stop hurting me. Her eyes brimmed, like snow domes of the world inside, made of tears.

‘I loved her,’ she said, the domes bursting. ‘You only used her, while you waited for Karla.’

‘This is the ideal moment, with foresight, to stop this, and focus on the occasion,’ Karla said at last. ‘Stop this bickering, both of you, and be gracious guests. We’re not here for us. We’re here for Diva, who suffered a lot as well.’

I pretended to eat, for a while, and Kavita pretended to stop. Neither one of us managed it.

‘It should be you who died on that bed, all alone,’ Kavita spat at me, losing control.

‘Stop this, Kavita,’ Karla said.

‘Nothing to say, Lin?’

‘Stop it, Kavita,’ I said.

‘That all you got?’

I started to get up, but she pulled at my sleeve.

‘You want to know what she said about you , while she was making love to me?’

I should’ve stopped. I didn’t.

‘You know, Kavita, you work at a newspaper that sells white-skin potions to a country full of brown-skinned people,’ I said. ‘You talk about the environment, and you take money from oil companies and coal companies for advertising. You lecture people who wear fur, and accept advertising from battery-fed chicken chains and hormone hamburgers. Your economists forgive bankers no matter what they do, your opinion pages shrink opinion, and your criticism is a flea on the elephant of intolerance. The women in your pages are dolls, while the men are sages. You cover up as many crimes as you report, and you’ve campaigned against innocent men just for ratings, and we both know it. Come down off your throne, Kavita, and leave me alone.’

She looked at me with a determination that revealed nothing, but maybe nothing was all she had, because she was silent.

I stood, excused myself, and walked back through the slum alone. Naveen caught up with me in a lane filled with small shops.

‘Lin,’ he said. ‘Wait up.’

‘How you doing with lost love?’ I asked.

I touched a nerve without knowing it. He let the anger-face out of the cage.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ he growled.

‘You know what, Naveen, I like you. But this really isn’t a good night to play sulky.’

I walked off alone, but when I reached my bike on the wide street outside, where children were still playing, someone came up behind me quickly and quietly.

I spun around, grabbed a throat in one hand and had my knife in the other before I knew it was Karla.

‘You got me there, Shantaram,’ she said, as I released her.

‘I always get you there.’

She didn’t pull away from me.

‘Sneaking up on people like that will buy you conniptions, girl,’ I said, my hands in the small of her back.

‘Conniptions? How American of you.’

‘You have no idea how American I could get tonight.’

‘Would that fix my conniptions?’

‘Maybe not. Maybe I should put a bell on your bracelet.’

‘Maybe you should,’ she purred.

I kissed her, leaning against the bike, praying that she’d never leave me.

‘Whoa,’ she said, easing away. ‘You’re ready to invade Troy, and the ships haven’t even landed.’

‘Whatever that means,’ I said, ‘can you explain it horizontally?’

‘ My current place, or your current place?’ She laughed.

‘Any current place,’ I said.

She laughed again.

‘That didn’t come out right,’ I said quickly. ‘We haven’t been together since the mountain. Does that seem like a long time, to you? It seems like a really long time, to me.’

I might’ve been telling jokes. She laughed harder with every word I said. She actually pleaded with me to stop, because she was choking.

‘You’re driving me crazy, Karla. That thing you feel, when something makes you feel completely right? I only feel that, with you.’

She stopped laughing, and looked me up and down. I don’t know what it is about me that makes people look me up and down, but I’ve had my share.

She kissed me. I kissed her. Rain, wave, and that place inside where we dance better than we dance: she kissed me.

She slapped me.

‘Damn! What was that for?’

‘Pull yourself together,’ she said. ‘I thought we had this talk. I told you. We’re in this game together, or I’m in it alone. They’re your options, not mine.’

‘Fair enough. Agreed. What game?’

‘I love you, Shantaram,’ she said, slipping away. ‘I need Kavita, at the moment. I’ve got a plan, and I can’t tell you about it, remember? I need her, and I need you to rise above, and be the better man.’

Dogs barked, as she trotted back to the slum.

I didn’t understand any of it except my part, and I wasn’t really sure about my part. But at least I knew that I was back in Karlaville. I could still feel her slap, and her kiss.

I didn’t see Oleg for two weeks after that night. He found a new couch, for a while, and the Diva girls found a new plaything. I took a taxi, the day after he vanished, and collected the banger bike he’d left by the side of the road. I talked to the bike for a while and assured her, even though my heart belonged to another machine, that I’d protect her in future, especially from Russian writers. She carried me home without incident, her engine humming a song the whole way: a brave motorcycle, not ready to die.

I did my rounds day to night, helped decent people out with loans and collected money from indecent defaulters, swapped funny jokes and funnier insults, smacked a cheeky money changer on the ear from time to time and knelt in prayer with others, bribed cops and Company soldiers for blessings from below, dropped donations into churches and temples for blessings from above, fed beggars outside mosques, chased a brutal pimp from my collection area, and came third in a knife-throwing competition, which I’d entered to find out who was better at a throwing a knife than I was: always a handy thing to know. In one way and another, golden days became silvered nights.

A couple of weeks after Oleg’s olfactory defection I was swinging back toward Leopold’s one day, thinking of their veg curry rice and hungry enough to eat it, when a man ran onto the causeway, stopping me in traffic.