Gregory Roberts: The Mountain Shadow

‘Come on.’

‘Nobody, that is, until you did.’

‘We already covered Dennis,’ I said, pausing to let a four-man handcart pass. ‘Back to Concannon.’

‘Like I said, he boxes at my gym. He’s a street fighter. I don’t know much about him. He seems like a party guy. He loves a party.’

‘He’s got a mouth on him. You don’t keep a mouth like that to his age without having something to back it up.’

‘Are you saying I should watch him?’

‘Only the wrong side of him.’

‘And the third story?’ he asked.

I left the road where we’d been walking, and straddled the hand-width footpath for a few steps.

‘Where are we going?’ he asked, following me.

‘I’m going to get a juice.’

‘A juice?’

‘It’s a hot day. What’s the matter with you?’

‘Oh, nothing. Cool. I love juice.’

Thirty-nine degrees in Bombay, chilled watermelon juice, fans too close to your head turned up to three: bliss.

‘So… what’s with the private detective thing? Is that for real?’

‘Yeah. It started by accident, kind of, but I’ve been doing it for almost a year now.’

‘What kind of accident turns someone into a detective?’

‘I was doing a law degree,’ he smiled. ‘Got most of the way there. In my final year, I was researching a paper on private detectives, and how they impact the court system. Pretty soon, the only thing that interested me was the detective part of it, and I dropped out, to give it a shot.’

‘How’s it working out?’

He laughed.

‘Divorce is healthier than the stock exchange, and way more predictable. I did a few divorce cases, but I stopped. I was with another guy. He was teaching me the ropes. He’s been scoping divorce for thirty-five years, and still loves it. I didn’t. It was always unique for the married men, having the affairs. It was always the same sad movie for me.’

‘And since you left the lush pastures of divorce?’

‘I’ve found two missing pets, a missing husband, and a missing casserole dish so far,’ he said. ‘It seems that all of my clients, God bless them, are people too lazy or polite to do it for themselves.’

‘But you like it, the detective thing. You get a rush, right?’

‘You know, I think at this end of the story you get the truth. As a lawyer you’re only ever allowed a version of the truth. This is the real thing, even if it’s just a stolen heirloom casserole dish. It’s the real story, before everybody lies about it.’

‘Are you gonna stick with it?’

‘I don’t know,’ he smiled, looking away again. ‘Depends on how good I am, I guess.’

‘Or how bad you are.’

‘Or how bad I am.’

‘We’re already on story number three,’ I said. ‘Naveen Adair, Indian-Irish private detective.’

He laughed, white teeth foaming in the wake of it, but the wave faded quickly.

‘Not much to it, really.’

‘Naveen Adair,’ I pronounced. ‘Which part kicked you in the arse more, the Indian part, or the Irish part?’

‘Too Anglo for the Indians,’ he laughed, ‘and too Indian for the Anglos. My father… ’

Jagged peaks and lost valleys, for too many of us, are the lands called father. Climbing one of those peaks beside him, I waited until he crested the conversation again.

‘We lived on the footpath, after he abandoned my Mother. We were on the street, until I was five, but I don’t really remember it much.’

‘What happened?’

He raised his gaze to the street, eyes floating on the tide of colour and emotion, moving back and forth.

‘He had tuberculosis,’ the young detective said. ‘He made a will, naming my Mother, and it turned out that he’d made a lot of money, somehow, so we were suddenly rich, and… ’

‘Everything changed.’

He looked at me as if he’d told me too much.

The fan, only inches from my head, was giving me an ice-cream headache. I gestured to the waiter, and asked him to turn it down a notch.

‘You’re cold?’ he scoffed, his hand on the switch. ‘Let me show you cold.’

He turned the fan to blizzard five. I felt my cheeks beginning to freeze. We paid the bill and left, hearing his goodbye.

‘Table two, free again!’

‘I love that place,’ Naveen said as we left.

‘You do?’

‘Yeah. Great juice, nasty waiters. Perfect.’

‘You and I might get along, detective. We might just get along.’

The past, beloved enemy, has bad timing. Those Bombay days come back to me so vividly and suddenly that sometimes I’m shaken from the hour I’m in, and lost to the task. A smile, a song, and I’m back there, sleeping sunny mornings away, riding a motorcycle on a mountain road, or tied and beaten and begging Fate for an even break. And I love every minute of it, every minute of friend or foe, of flight and forgiveness: every minute of life. But the past has a way of taking you to the right place at the wrong time, and that can be a storm inside.

I should be bitter, I guess, after some of the things I’ve done, and had done to me. People tell me I should be bitter. A con once said, You’d be a top bloke, if you just had a little spite in you . But I was born without it, and I’ve never known spite or bitterness. I got angry and I got desperate and did bad things too often, until I stopped, but I never hated anyone, or consciously wished anyone harm, not even men who tortured me. And while a small measure of bitterness might’ve protected me from time to time, as it sometimes does, I’ve learned that sweet memories don’t walk through cynical doors. And I love my memories, even when they have bad timing: remembered minutes of sunlight staking out patches on tree-lined Bombay streets, of fearless girls flashing through traffic on scooters, of handcart pullers straining under the load but smiling, and those first memories of a young Indian-Irish detective named Naveen Adair.

We walked on the road silently for a while, passing between cars and streams of people, swaying back and forth between the bicycles and handcarts in the dance of the street.

In the wide doorway of the Fire Brigade building, a group of men in heavy navy-blue uniforms chatted and laughed. Inside the firehouse there were two large fire trucks, shimmering sunlight from every polished red or chrome surface.

An extravagantly decorated Hanuman shrine was fixed to one wall, and beside it a sign said:

IF YOU CAN’T STAND THE HEAT,

GET OUT OF THE BURNING BUILDING.

Further along, we entered the shopping district, spilling out from the Colaba market. Glass merchants, picture framers, timber and hardware stores, electrical goods, and plumbers’ supplies gradually gave way to clothing, jewellery and food stores.

At the wide entrance to the market itself we had to stop, as several heavy trucks made their way out into the maul of traffic on the main road.

‘Listen,’ he said as we waited. ‘You were right, about Vikram talking too much. But it ends with me. I’ll never talk about it to anyone else but you. Never. And if you ever need me, hey, man, I’m there. That’s all I’m trying to say. For Aslan, and what you did that night, if you don’t want it to be for you.’

It wasn’t the first time that I looked out from the red exile my life had become, into eyes alight with fires, burning on cliff-tops of the word escape . In my fugitive years, I sometimes found fast friendship in the song of rebellion: in the loyalty others pledged to my escape from the system, as much as to me.

They wanted me to stay free, in part, because they wanted someone to escape and stay free. I smiled at Naveen. It wasn’t the first or last time I went with the river inside.