Gregory Roberts - The Mountain Shadow

She pulled away from me suddenly, and fetched around among her things until she found the letter she’d been holding for me.

‘This is the right time for a mountain shadow letter, if ever there was,’ she said, giving me the letter and cuddling in beside me again.

She yawned, gorgeously, closed her eyes, and slept. I opened the single-page letter. It was from Gemini George. I read it by the light of the torch.

Hey, mate, Gemini here, letting you know that me and Scorpio haven’t found the guru that cursed him yet, but we’re still on the trail. We was in Karnataka, on a mountain, then Bengal, and somewhere in between I got sick, mate, and I’m not feeling too good, but I can’t let Scorpio down, so we’ll keep on searching. I just wanted someone who cares about me to know that I don’t have no regrets, if I don’t come back, because I love my life, and I love my friend Scorpio.

Yours sincerely,

Gemini

I put the letter away, and held Karla close until she slept deeply in my arms, but it took me a while to find sleep.

I was thinking of the men sitting together by the fire, Ankit and Vinson, Didier and Randall, separated from love but finding it again in shared stories, thrown into the fire one wooden tribute at a time.

I thought of Abdullah, who never lost his faith in anything, but was almost always alone. I saw Vikram in a dark lane of memory, as alone in death as he was in the half-life of addiction.

I thought of Naveen, knowing that he was in love with Diva Devnani, but that he was staring at her through a wall of thorns called polite society.

I thought of Ahmed, of the House of Style, who told me once, during a very close shave, that he’d loved the same young woman passionately all his life, though both his family and hers had torn them apart, and he hadn’t seen her since he was nineteen years old.

I thought of Idriss, alone, and Khaderbhai alone, and Tariq alone, and Nazeer alone, and Kavita, alone without Lisa, and all the others who were living and dying alone, but always in love, or believing in love.

The wonder isn’t that love finds us, as strange and fated and mystical as that is. The wonder is that even when we never find it, even when love waits in the wings of dream too long, even when love doesn’t knock on the door, or leave messages, or put flowers in our hands, so many of us never stop believing in love.

Lovers, too happy loving, don’t need to believe. Lives unloved that never stop believing are saints of affection, keeping love itself alive in gardens of faith.

I looked at Karla, breathing into my chest. She flinched in the corner of a dream. I soothed her until her breathing was my personal music of peace again.

And I thanked whatever Fate or stars or mistakes or good deeds gave me that beautiful peace, when she was with me. And I slept, at last, and the half-moon, a silver chalice, showered stars on our dreams of the mountain shadow.

The mountain made its own place in time, marked by rituals and sunsets, meals and meditations, fires, penance, prayers and laughter. One by one our crew of friends left the teacher’s mesa, and finally only Karla and I remained with Idriss, Silvano and a few students.

And she’d been right to ask for the time away from the city: simplified living, strangely enough, added new complexities to our relationship, and the splinters of city life were slowly blunted on the handle of understanding. We talked for hours every day and night, visiting the past while the present escaped us.

‘He saved me,’ Karla said one day, weeks into the stay, when the conversation drifted into the Khaderbhai years.

‘You met him on the plane, when you were on the run.’

‘I did. I was a mess. I’d killed a man, a rapist, my rapist, and even though I knew I’d do it again if I had to, I was a mess. I made it to the airport, and I bought a ticket, and got on the plane, but I fell apart in the air, five miles above the earth. Khaderbhai was sitting beside me. He had a return ticket to Bombay, and I had a one-way ticket. He talked to me, and when the plane landed he brought me here, to the mountain. And I went to work for him the next day.’

‘You loved him,’ I said, because I’d loved him.

‘Yes. I didn’t like him, and I told him that, and I didn’t agree with his way of doing things, but I loved him.’

‘For better or worse, he was a force in the city, and in all of our lives.’

‘He used me,’ she said. ‘And I let him. And I used people that he asked me to use. I used you, for him. But I don’t feel anything but… love… for him, when I think of him. Is it the same for you?’

‘It is.’

‘I still feel him sometimes, standing beside me, when things get bad.’

‘Me, too,’ I said. ‘Me, too.’

Karla and I enjoyed the time on the holy mountain, but we still liked to stay in touch with the unholy city. A newspaper made its way up the mountain once a week, and occasional visitors brought news of friends and foes, but our best updates came from the young Ronin, Jagat, who was running my bing for me while I was on the mountain.

Jagat met us in the car park beneath the caves, every two weeks. The news that he brought from the city always made us feel good about the steep climb back to the peak.

Politicians and other fanatics, Jagat reported, were doing their best to ensure that cooperation was impossible, especially among friends. In some areas, plastic barricades had begun to segregate neighbours and neighbourhoods, sometimes on nothing more than food preferences, breaking the shell of tolerance.

In streets and slums and working places across the city, people of every inclination got along well, and did good work. But in political party offices, those elected to represent the people put up fences between the people wherever friendship threatened political war. And people rallied blindly on both sides of the line, forgetting that barricades only ever separate armies of the poor.

Vishnu completed his purge, and the fully Hindu 307 Company was blessed by holy men, in Vishnu’s new mansion on Carmichael Road, not far from the art gallery that Karla had abandoned to Taj, but much deeper in the deep-pocket belt of Bombay’s elite.

A lavish housewarming party warmed the frosty noses of local snobs, Jagat said, and some of the movie star guests remained regular visitors to Vishnu’s excess.

‘Vishnu put up the money for a really big Hindi picture,’ Jagat said. ‘They’re shooting it in Bulgaria, or Australia. One of those foreign places. His photo was in all the papers, at the big shot party, when they announced the new movie.’

‘And nobody moved to arrest him for killing the Afghan guards, killing Nazeer and Tariq, and starting the fire that ate Khaderbhai’s house, and a portion of the city?’

‘No witnesses, baba-dude. Charges dropped. The Assistant Commissioner was at the party to announce the new movie. The hero of the movie is a rough and ready cop, based on the Assistant Commissioner dude himself, and how tough he was on crime and criminals, and how many of them he killed in encounters. And Vishnu is paying for it. I don’t get it, man. It’s like robbing your own bank, somehow.’

‘I hear you,’ I said.

‘Funny guys,’ Karla laughed. ‘How many bodyguards did Vishnu have with him?’

‘Four, I think,’ Jagat said. ‘About the same as the Assistant Commissioner.’

‘Why the bodyguard question?’ I asked her.

‘It’s the Inverse Fair Law . The more bodyguards, the less integrity.’

‘And the Cycle Killers have totally changed their image,’ Jagat replied, shaking his head. ‘They got a complete new look.’

‘ Recycled Killers,’ Karla said. ‘How’s the new look?’