Gregory Roberts - The Mountain Shadow

We shoved our bikes into a doorway, used my chain to lock them together, and climbed the accidental wall of bicycles, baskets and carts, dodging under signs strung outside shops.

We tumbled down the steep metal fall, landing behind a police line, where the jam ended. There was a piece of rope, suspended by the police between the fender of an Ambassador car and the handle of a handcart. It was all that had stopped the flood of people. We lifted the rope and slipped around the shops at the base of the mosque, heading to Khaderbhai’s mansion.

Fire trucks were training powerful hoses on the walls of the mosque, trying to stop the fire from spreading. The mosque seemed to be intact, but when we threaded our way through the black snakes of leaking fire hoses, we saw that Khaderbhai’s mansion was finished.

A lone unit of firemen was trying to slow the fire, but most of the resources had been diverted to stopping the fire from taking the mosque, and becoming a wider catastrophe in the street.

Men from several mafia Companies were already there, standing across the narrow street, staring at the flames painting rage on their faces. They were Hussein Company men, mostly, but there were a few Vishnu men and gangsters from other Companies. There were about twenty of them. Abdullah was in the centre, his eyes savage with fire.

Firemen were holding the gangsters back, pleading with them to withdraw and let them do their job. Abdullah broke ranks. He brushed three firemen aside and knocked out another, who’d tried to stop him entering the building. He disappeared in the flames.

Company men looked at the firemen, wondering if they were going to fight. Firemen wear uniforms. As far as the Company men were concerned, anyone who wears a uniform works for the other side.

The firemen backed away, taking their colleagues with them. They were paid to save people, not fight them. The men who were paid to fight people, the police, rushed toward the retreating firemen.

Fighting the cops is a tricky business. Lots of cops like to fight, but they’re sticklers for rules. No disfigurements, and no weapons: just fair, square, kick the shit out of each other. That pretty much covers it, except for two things. First, they have very long memories: longer than most criminals I’ve met, who are considerably more forgive-and-forget. And second, if things get out of hand, they can shoot you and get away with it.

The Company men put their weapons away, or threw them away, and stood in front of the burning building. The cops kicked in with everything they had, and the gangsters kicked back.

There’s a moment of choice, of course, every second that you live. I watched the fight begin, with fairly even numbers, the Company men holding their own. I saw a new gang of cops running to help their friends. Ravi stepped away from me with another gangster, Tricky, and they broke into a run, throwing their lives at the fight. I could’ve stayed there. I could’ve watched it happen. I didn’t. I dropped my knives behind a handcart, and ran into the mess of what none of us should be.

It was a short run. A cop hit me before I reached the line. He was good. He was quick. I heard the bell, and I didn’t know which round. I followed instinct: duck and cover, then lead with a combination. I came out swinging, but the cop was already at my feet. Tall Tony, tall, skinny Tony, had floored him.

We reinforced the Company line. Cops came to help cops. People were grappling and stumbling. Cops were hitting cops. Company men were hitting friends.

I had a cop by the shirt, and I was twisting it close to me. I figured that if he couldn’t hit me, he couldn’t hit anyone else.

I was wrong, on both counts. He swung a fist over my elbows and connected with some part of my head that shut things down: the part that plays the Clash, in a room somewhere, with a Russian writer, a long way away.

I fell backwards, my hands knotting instinct in his shirt, and he came with me. Other cops came with him, pulling gangsters down into the maul. The front of the mansion had burned, and was starting to collapse. We fell into cindered wood and ashes.

I don’t know how many people were on top of the cop who was on top of me: a tree of humanity had fallen. Incense burned my eyes, as if already lit for the dead, and filled the air around us as pieces of sandalwood smouldered.

Scorched pages from sacred texts burned in the rubble. I smelled hair burning, and too much sweat, from too many bodies, piled too high on top of me.

Bullets started firing from inside the mansion. I was suddenly glad to be covered by bodies.

‘Bullets are exploding in the heat!’ an officer said, in Marathi. ‘They’re going off at random. Hold your fire.’

The cops and Company men on top of me weren’t taking any chances. They hunkered down, pressing into the only hunkering they had, which was me. I was rabbit-breathing, in tiny gasps. The bullets stopped, as the ghost magazines ran their course. Then the arch above our heads gave way, at last. The fallen mob hunkered down a little further.

Fragments of scripture broke from the false arch, and fell on us. I couldn’t lift my arms. My hands were still locked in the cop’s shirt. I couldn’t see. I was breathing ash, in air, but glad to have any air at all.

And then it stopped. The cops and gangsters staggered and stumbled back, one by one. The cop on top of me was the last. He tried to crawl away, but I had his shirt. He kept lurching on his knees, not looking back at me, until I let go.

I got up, wiped my eyes, and looked at the burning house, the house, burning, where Khaderbhai had given me hours of instruction, hours of his life, to argue philosophy.

The arched courtyard was a shivering silhouette, drawn in red-yellow flames. The partitions of the mansion dropped away in sheets. The burning frame, just a star of wooden beams, was ablaze. And it was all gone. Gone.

I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t accept it. The place I’d thought of as eternal, somehow, was gone in flame and ash.

I turned, and saw Abdullah. He was on one knee in the open space, near the mosque. He had the boy king, Tariq, in his arms. People were standing back, awed by their own reverence. Abdullah cradled the boy, but Tariq’s head had already fallen toward the grave, and his strong young arms were seaweed in the ocean of time.

The fighting stopped. The cops established a new barricade a respectful distance away. People rushed through it to touch the dead boy’s cloak.

‘Nazeer?’ I asked Abdullah, when I could push through the thorn of mourners. ‘Did you see him, inside?’

‘I took his body from this boy’s,’ Abdullah said, still kneeling, still crying. ‘He is no more. I could not save his body. He was dead and burning, as I took Tariq.’

Abdullah was also a dying man, and we both knew it. He’d promised his life to Khaderbhai as a shield for the boy, and the boy was dead. The limp body was a tattered flag, draped on Abdullah’s knee. If it took his last breath, Abdullah would make the men who killed Tariq and Nazeer see the same flag in their eyes, before they died.

‘Are you sure he was dead?’

He looked at me, Iranian deserts drifting across his eyes.

‘Alright, alright,’ I said, too shocked to do anything but agree.

Nazeer was a pillar, a stone pillar: the man who tells you the story long after everyone else has died.

‘He was already dead, when you found him?’

‘Yes. His body was burned, on the back, but his sacrifice preserved the face and body of Tariq. They were shot, Lin. Both of them. And their guards are nowhere to be found.’

Mourners, mourning violently, shoved me aside to touch the fallen king. I scrambled through a quickly gathering crowd that no police rope could hold. People were coming from every stairway and narrow lane. I broke through to the main street and clambered over the collapsing wall of bicycles and handcarts to find Ravi, standing next to my bike.