Gregory Roberts - The Mountain Shadow

I stood from the bike. My hand began to move slowly toward the knives in the scabbards under the flap of my shirt. Cops didn’t just take bribes in Bombay in those years: they shot gangsters, from time to time.

A calm, deep voice spoke from very close behind me.

‘I wouldn’t be doing that, if I were you.’

I turned to see three men standing with me. A fourth man was at the wheel of a car, parked close behind them.

‘You know,’ I said, my hand on the knife, underneath my shirt, ‘if you were me, you probably would .’

The man who’d spoken looked away from me to nod his head at the policeman. The officer saluted, climbed back onto his bike, and rode away.

‘Nice trick,’ I said, turning back. ‘I must remember it, if I ever lose my balls.’

‘You can lose your motherfucking balls right here and now, gora ,’ a thin man with a pencil moustache said, showing the blade of a knife he hid in his sleeve.

I looked into his eyes. I read a very short story, told by fear and hatred. I didn’t want to read it again. The leader raised an exasperated hand. He was a heavy-set man in his late thirties, and a quiet talker.

‘If you don’t get in the car,’ he said quietly, ‘I’ll shoot you in the knee.’

‘Where will you shoot me if I do get in the car?’

‘That depends,’ he replied, regarding me evenly.

He was magazine dressed: hand-tailored silk shirt, loose-fitting grey serge trousers, a Dunhill belt, and Gucci loafers. There was a gold ring on his middle finger that was a copy of the Rolex on his wrist.

The other men looked around at the flow of traffic and pedestrians in the gutters of the road. It had been a fairly long silence. I decided to break it.

‘Depends on what ?’

‘On whether you do as you’re told or not.’

‘I don’t like being told what to do.’

‘Nobody does,’ he replied calmly. ‘That’s why there’s so much power attached to it.’

‘That’s pretty good,’ I said. ‘You should write a book.’

My heart was racing. I was scared. My stomach dropped like a body thrown in a river. They were the enemy, and I was in their hands. I was probably dead, whichever way you looked at it.

‘Get in the car,’ he said, allowing himself a little smile.

‘Get to the point.’

‘Get in the car.’

‘If we play it out here, you go with me. If I get in the car, I go out alone. Arithmetic says we should do it here.’

‘ Fuck it!’ the pencil moustache snapped. ‘Let’s kill this chudh , and get it over with.’

The heavy-set leader thought about it. It took a while. My hand was still on my knife.

‘You’re a logical man,’ he said. ‘They say you argued philosophy with Khaderbhai.’

‘Nobody argued with Khaderbhai.’

‘Even so, you can see that your position is irrational. I lose nothing by killing you. You gain everything by staying alive long enough to find out what I want.’

‘Except for the part about you being dead. I’d lose that. And so far, that’s the best part.’

‘Except for that,’ he said, smiling. ‘But you’ve seen how much trouble I went to, just to talk to you. If I wanted you dead, I’d have run over your motorcycle with one of my trucks.’

‘Leave my motorcycle out of this.’

‘Your bike will be safe, yaar,’ he laughed, nodding at the thin man with the moustache. ‘Danda will ride it for you. Get in the car.’

He was right. There was no other logical choice. I let my hand fall from my knife. The leader nodded. Danda stepped forward at once, started the bike, and kicked back the stand. He gunned the engine, impatient to leave.

‘You hurt that bike -’ I shouted at him, but before I could finish the threat he tapped the bike into first gear, and roared off into the stream of traffic, the motor screaming in protest.

‘Danda has no sense of humour, I’m afraid,’ the leader said as we watched Danda sway and skid through the traffic.

‘Good, because if he hurts my bike, he won’t find it funny.’

The leader laughed, and looked me hard in the eyes.

‘How could you exchange philosophies with a man like Khaderbhai?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that Khaderbhai was insane.’

‘Sane or not, he was never boring.’

‘What doesn’t bore us, in the long run?’ he asked, getting into the car.

‘A sense of humour?’ I suggested, getting in beside him.

They had me, and it was just like prison, because there was nothing I could do about it. He laughed again, and nodded to the driver, whose eyes filled the soft rectangle of the rear-view mirror.

‘Take us to the truth,’ he said to the driver in Hindi, watching me closely. ‘It’s always so refreshing, at this time of day.’

The driver bullied his way through tight, midday traffic, reaching a warehouse in an industrial area in minutes. The warehouse was freestanding, with a screaming space between it and the nearest buildings. Danda was already there. My bike was parked on the gravel driveway in front.

The driver parked the car. A roller door opened to a little over halfway. We got out, stooped under the door, and a chain clattered noisily as it rolled shut again.

There were two big worries. The first was that they hadn’t blindfolded me: they’d allowed me to see the location of the warehouse, and the faces of the eight men inside. The second worry was the supply of power tools, torches and heavy hammers arranged on benches along one wall of the warehouse.

It took an effort not to stare. Instead, I focused on the long low chair standing alone in the open space near the back wall of the small warehouse. It was a piece of pool furniture: a banana lounge, upholstered in strands of acid-green and lemon vinyl. There was a wide stain under the chair.

Danda, the skinny moustache with short-story eyes, gave me a thorough pat-down. He took my two knives and passed them on to the leader, who examined them for a moment, before putting them down carefully on the long bench.

‘Sit down,’ he said, turning to face me.

When I refused to move, he folded his arms patiently and nodded to a tall, powerfully built man who’d been with us in the car. The man came for me.

Hit first, and hit hard , an old con used to tell me.

As the big man stepped in quickly, swinging out with an open-handed slap to the right side of my head, I rolled with the blow, and hit him with a short, sharp uppercut. It good-luck connected with the point of his chin.

The big man stumbled back a step. Two of the men drew guns. They were old-fashioned revolvers, military issue from a forgotten war.

The leader sighed again, and nodded his head.

Four men rushed forward, pushing me onto the green and yellow lounge chair. They tied my hands to the rear legs of the chair with coconut-fibre ropes. Slipping another length of rope under the front, they tied down my legs.

The leader finally unfolded his arms and approached me.

‘Do you know who I am?’

‘A critic?’ I suggested, trying not to show the scared that I was feeling.

He frowned, looking me up and down.

‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I know who you are. I know a Scorpion when I see one.’

The leader nodded.

‘They call me Vishnu,’ he said.

Vishnu, the man Sanjay spared after the war that cost so many, the man who came back with a gang called the Scorpions.

‘Why do so many gangsters name themselves after gods?’

‘How ’bout I name you dead , you bahinchudh !’ Danda spluttered.

‘Come to think of it,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘Danda’s not a god. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Danda’s just a demigod. Isn’t that right? A minor deity?’