Gregory Roberts - The Mountain Shadow

‘Again, with the fucking barricade?’ Jaswant complained.

‘Open it, Jaswant.’

‘It’s a bandobast , idiot! It’ll be dawn in a couple of hours, and then you’ll be a sitting goose.’

‘A duck. A sitting duck. Open up.’

‘Don’t you realise,’ he asked patiently, ‘that every time you open the barricade, you weaken the barricade?’

‘Please, Jaswant.’

‘If my Parsi friend was here, he would’ve devised a moveable barricade for contingencies like this, but -’

‘Jaswant, open the barricade, and if you ask me for a code word when I come back, I’ll get a jeweller to write it on your kara .’

‘My fat Punjabi ass, you will,’ he said, shifting his considerable belly to his considerable chest. ‘And apology accepted.’

He eased the barricade away from the door, but as I was slipping through he stopped me.

‘If Miss Karla comes back,’ he said, ‘she’ll be safe, with me.’

‘You just became a friend, Jaswant.’

‘There’s a security fee,’ he said, as I squeezed through the gap in the door. ‘For my services as a bodyguard. I’ll just put it on your bill.’

I ran the steps in jumps, sliding along the wall, to find Dominic waiting impatiently for me in the alley underneath the hotel’s arch.

‘You took your time,’ he said, as we rode away. ‘You’re hard enough to explain as it is, Shantaram, without having to explain why I’m late on my rounds.’

‘Did you get any sleep?’ I called over his shoulder.

‘An hour. You?’

‘I had company. What’s the latest? How bad is it?’

‘Very bad,’ he said, images of the bike shooting forward and backward in streetlight windows as we passed. ‘There were fires in Dongri, Malad, and Andheri. Hundreds have lost their homes and shops. VT station is packed with refugees, finding shelter or leaving the city.’

‘Has there been any fighting?’

‘Youth leaders from Hindu and Muslim communities have rallied their people. When a fire starts in a Hindu area, Hindu students arrive in trucks. They make a cordon of witnesses, so that no violence can begin. It’s the same on the Muslim side. They don’t want it to be like the last riots in Bombay.’

‘How’s that working out?’

‘So far, the students are doing a pretty good job of keeping the peace. We should do a recruiting drive among them. We need kids like that in the police.’

‘Who’s starting the fires?’

‘When a fire takes a street in Bombay,’ he said, spitting on the road, ‘a shopping mall or apartment block takes its place.’

Profiteers sometimes used communal tension as an opportunity to burn down streets of small shops standing in the way of their profit schemes. They hired thugs, tied orange headbands on their heads when they were burning Muslim shops, and green headbands when they burned Hindu streets.

Dominic wasn’t being cynical about that truth: he was defeated by it. He was thirty years old, a father of three, two girls, ten and eight, and a four-year-old boy: he was an honest, hard-working man who risked his life day and night in the uniform that he wore, and he’d stopped believing in the system that dressed him in it, and gave him a gun to defend it.

He talked bitterly, as he rode, and I’d heard it before, many times, in slums, on the streets and in small shops. It was the voice of resentment at the double unfairness of a social inequity that preys upon the poor, while telling them that it’s their karma to be deprived.

Dominic’s family had been Hindus, in his grandfather’s time. They’d converted to Christianity in the wave of conversions summoned by the elegant, ethically indelible speeches of Dr Ambedkar, India’s first law minister and a champion of the Untouchables.

The family suffered after the conversion at first, but by the time that Dominic and his wife were making their own family, they were fully integrated into the Christian community, just as many others had become Buddhists or Muslims to slip the chain of caste.

They were the same people, the same neighbours, simply going to different places to connect with the Source. But each religion resented, and sometimes violently resisted, attrition from its own faith franchise, and conversions remained a fiercely contested issue.

We made his circuit of the city, from Navy Nagar to Worli Junction, through every route possible. Trucks of chanting Hindus and Muslims passed us, their banners rippling, orange for Hindus and green for Muslims.

Politicians and the rich defied the lockdown, riding in armed escorts on the empty roads, always passing at speed as if being chased. A few people dared to risk the streets, here and there. When we saw them, they saw us, and ran away. Apart from that, the city near dawn was empty.

There weren’t any zombies, but the dogs and rats were plentiful, and hungry, without humans leaving refuse for them to eat. They took over many deserted streets, howling and squeaking for scraps.

Dominic was very careful. Indian people like dogs and rats. Indian people like just about everything. He stopped once, when there was a swarm of rats in front of us, blocking the way like sheep on a country road.

He revved the engine, flashed the high-beam headlight, and sounded the horn. The rats didn’t move.

‘Any ideas?’ Dominic asked.

‘You could fire your gun in the air to disperse them. Cops do that with people, when they stand on the road.’

‘Not an option,’ Dominic said.

A thin pariah dog approached, jittering, its thin legs jerking as it walked. The Indian street dog has been around for thousands of years, and this dog knew its way around. It stopped, and began a complicated growling, barking message.

The rats scurried, scrambled and slithered away, a thick grey pelt looking somewhere else for trash. The dog barked at us.

Get outta here , I think he said.

We rode on.

‘Nice dog,’ Dominic said over his shoulder.

‘Yeah, and I’m glad he didn’t have any friends. Thirty-five thousand people die of rabies every year in India.’

‘You really think on the dark side,’ he said, swinging the bike toward Worli Naka.

‘I think on the survival side, Dominic.’

‘You should let Jesus in your heart.’

‘Jesus is in every heart, brother.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Of course. I love that guy. Who doesn’t?’

‘A lot of people don’t,’ he laughed. ‘Some people hate Jesus.’

‘No. Brilliant mind, loving heart, significant penance: Jesus was the real deal. They might know Christians they don’t like, but nobody hates Jesus.’

‘Let’s hope that nobody hates Him tonight,’ he said, glancing in alleyways as we passed them.

We reached Worli Naka, a five-way junction under bright lights, with a football field of open space around a single cop, standing on the beat.

Dominic pulled up beside him, and turned off the engine.

‘All alone, Mahan?’ he asked in Marathi.

‘Yes, sir. But, not now, sir. Because you are here your good self, sir. Who’s the white guy?’

‘He’s a translator. A volunteer.’

‘A volunteer?’

Mahan gave me the once-over, watching me carefully in case I made any funny moves, because only a crazy person would volunteer to be on the street.

‘A volunteer? Is he mad?’

‘Give me a fucking report, Mahan,’ Dominic snapped.

‘Sir! All is quiet, sir, since my shift commenced, at -’

There was a heavy double-thump, as a fully loaded truck crested a speed breaker. We turned and saw it approaching from the right.

The huge truck had a wooden tray at the back, with sides that reached chest-height on the men who were crammed into it. Orange banners were flashes of sun-coloured light as the truck passed beneath streetlamps.