Gregory Roberts - The Mountain Shadow

If Allah wills me to Him, and you are reading this after I have gone, that is no cause for sadness. I have many questions, and Allah, as you know, is the answer to all questions. And my spirit has mixed with yours, and with all of your brothers. You will never fear. I will always be near you. When you are lost and outnumbered and abandoned you will feel the touch of my father’s hand on your shoulder, and you will know that my heart is there next to you in battle, and all my sons.

Please find a way to let my soul kneel with yours in prayer even though you are not a man of prayer. Try to find a moment for at least a little prayer every day if you can. I will visit you there sometimes when you pray.

And remember this last advice from me. Love the truth that you find in the hearts of others. Always listen to the voice of love in your own heart.

I slid letter and envelope into my wallet. The words that blue glass appeared in the fold of letter still visible in the wallet, and my heart ran to the top of the hill.

I saw his hand. I saw afternoon light, glowing on his cinnamon-coloured skin. I saw the fine, long fingers moving as he spoke, as delicate as things born in the sea. I saw him smile. I saw the light of his thoughts, streaming from his amber eyes, reflecting off the blue glass ball, and I mourned him.

For a moment I found us, my adopted father and his abandoned son, in a different somewhere beyond judgement and fault: a place forgiven, a place redeemed.

Love unlived is a sin against life, and mourning is one of the ways we love. I felt it then, and I let it happen, the longing for him to return. The power in his eyes, and the pride when I did something he admired, and the love in his laugh. The longing: the longing for the lost.

A blood-filled drum was beating somewhere. I was hot, suddenly, and breathing too hard. I clutched at the sword. I had to leave. I had to get up and leave.

It was too late: sorrows hidden behind banners of rage for years fell as tears. It was messy, and noisy.

‘Sir?’ the washroom attendant called out after a while of my blubbering. ‘Are you urgently requiring more toilet paper?’

I laughed. Bombay saved me, as she did so many times.

‘I’m good,’ I called back. ‘Thanks for asking.’

I left the stall, put the sword on the towel stand, and washed my face with cold water. Mirror check: Terrible, but you’ve looked worse . I gave the very kind attendant another tip, and made my way back through the lobby toward Lisa’s table.

She was alone, staring out at the dark sea streaked with silver. Her reflection stared back at her, taking the chance to admire. Then she saw me approaching her in the glass.

A rough day. Cycle Killers, and the Sanjay Council, and Ranjit, and Karla, and the threat of Sri Lanka, sooner rather than later. A rough day.

She turned, running the eyes of her gentle intuition over the loss and wounded love still prowling on my face.

I started to speak, but she silenced me with a fingertip on my lips, and kissed me. And it was okay again, for a while. It was a crazy love we shared: she wasn’t in love with me, and I couldn’t be in love with her. But we made the night bright and the sunlight right a lot of the time, and never felt used or unloved.

We looked through the huge picture windows to the waves rolling into the bay. Waiters carrying trays behind us were reflected on the glass, moving back and forth as if they were walking on the waves. A black sky struck the sea, melting horizons.

If the hour comes, and there’s no-one to beg or blame but yourself, you learn that what we have in the end is just a handful more than what was born in us. That unique handful, what we add to what we are, is the only story of us that isn’t told by someone else.

Khaderbhai collected me, as his letter said. But the collector was dead, and I was still an exhibit in the museum of crime he created and left to the world. Sanjay had used me to test his new gun-running contact, and that made it clear: I had to leave the collection and find my freedom again, as soon as possible.

Lisa took my hand beside me. And we stood for a while, looking out, two pale reflections painted on the endless penance of the sea.

Stories from the wounds of seven wars and power struggles gushed across the blotter on my desk in the passport-counterfeiting factory.

An Iranian professor, a scholar of pre-Islamic texts who’d escaped the Revolutionary Guard’s purges, required a full work-up: false birth certificate, false international motor vehicle licence, bank documents, and a false passport, complete with a travel history covering the last two years, supported by valid visa stamps.

The documents had to be good enough to pass close inspection, and get the customer on a plane. When he got wherever he was going, on my false documents, he planned to ditch them, and appeal for asylum.

The marks of torture on him were severe, but he had to take a chance with a false passport because no legal authority would give him a genuine one, except the legal authority that wanted him back in chains.

A Nigerian, an Ogoni activist who’d campaigned against government collusion with oil powers to exploit Ogoni resources, had become a target. He’d survived an assassination attempt, and had arrived in Bombay, in the cargo hold of a freighter, without papers, but with money from supporters in his community.

He bribed the cops at the port, who followed procedure and sent him to us. He needed a new identity, with a passport that changed his nationality and kept him safe.

A Tibetan nationalist had escaped from a Chinese work camp, and had walked across snow-covered peaks into India. He’d made his way to Bombay, where Tibetan exiles provided the money and the contact to the Sanjay Company for new documents.

And there were others: an Afghan, an Iraqi, a Kurdish activist, a Somali, and two men from Sri Lanka, all of them trying to avoid, escape, or survive the bloody dehiscence of wars they didn’t start, and couldn’t fight.

But wars are good for bad business, and we didn’t just work for good guys. The Sanjay Company was an equal opportunity exploiter. There were crooked businessmen wanting to hide their profits, and thugs who needed a new reputation to ruin, and runaway generals, and people who faked their own deaths, and they always bought their way to the front of the line.

And to one side, there was another passport. It was a Canadian book, bearing my photograph, and with a new visa stamp for Sri Lanka. It had a Reuters News Agency press card attached.

While I was preparing documents that enabled others to escape from wars and vicious regimes, I was making the document that would carry me into a conflict that had cost tens of thousands of lives.

‘Do you actually read all this?’ my new assistant asked, picking up the pages of biographical notes that had been prepared for us by the Ogoni activist.

‘Yeah.’

‘All of it?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Really? I mean… it’s pretty gruesome stuff, man.’

‘That it is, Farzad,’ I said, not looking up.

‘I mean, stuff like this, it’s worse than the newspapers.’

‘It’s all in the newspapers, if you look past the stock market reports and the sports pages,’ I said, still not looking at him.

‘I’m not surprised. This is some damn depressing shit, yaar.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘I mean, a guy could get himself well and truly into a state of depression with stuff like this, day after day, and really need a break. Count on it.’

‘Okay,’ I said, pushing away the file I’d been reading. ‘What’s the problem?’