Gregory Roberts - The Mountain Shadow

‘Why don’t I?’ I replied, facing him for the first time.

I could just make out the cold fire in his ice-blue eyes.

‘How about this?’ I suggested. ‘I’ll take my friend home to his parents, and then I’ll come back here, and we’ll meet outside. Sound okay?’

He stood up and approached me, standing close.

‘There’s two things that I hold sacred. A man’s right to crush his enemies, and a man’s right to destroy himself in any way he sees fit. We’re all goin’ down. All of us. We’re all on the same road. Vikram’s just a little way further down the road than you and me, that’s all. That’s his natural born right. And you’re not stoppin’ him.’

It was an angry speech, and every word became just a little angrier.

‘Rights have duties,’ I answered him, staring back into the fury. ‘A friend has a duty to help a friend.’

‘I don’t have any friends,’ he said evenly. ‘Nobody does. There’s no such thing. Friendship’s a fairy story, like Father fuckin’ Christmas. And what kind of a cunt did that fat bastard turn out to be? A fuckin’ lie, that’s what he is. There are no friends in this world. There’s allies and there’s enemies in this life, and any one of them can change their coat as soon as look at you. That’s the truth of it.’

‘I’m gonna take Vikram outta here.’

‘The fuck you are!’

He watched me for a moment, for five heartbeats, and slid his right foot backwards on the floor, shaping up for a fight. Not wanting to be caught flat-footed, I did the same. His hands slowly rose, stopping opposite his face, left fist forward. I raised my hands in response, my heart beating hard.

Stupid. Men. We were going to fight, for nothing. You can’t fight for anything, of course: you can only fight against something. If you’re fighting, the part of you that was for something has already been forgotten, replaced by a part that’s violently against something. And in that minute, I was violently against Concannon.

‘One Man Show!’ the One Man Show said suddenly.

‘Shut the fuck up,’ Concannon growled.

‘Guys!’ Dennis said from the bed, his eyes still closed. ‘My high! You’re killing my high !’

‘Go back to sleep, Dennis lad,’ Concannon said, watching my face. ‘This won’t take but a minute or two.’

‘ Please , guys,’ Dennis pleaded, in his soft, sonorous voice. ‘Concannon! Come over here, at once, my wild son. Come and smoke a legendary chillum with me. Help me get my high back, man. And Lin, take Vikram with you. He’s been here for a week. Unlike the rest of us in this happy little tomb, he actually has a family to go back to. Take him with you.’

Concannon slowly let his fists fall to his sides.

‘Whatever you say, Dennis, me old reprobate,’ he grinned. ‘It’s no skin off my nose.’

He went to sit beside Dennis on the huge bed.

‘Concannon,’ Dennis said, his eyes beginning to close again. ‘You’re the most alive human being I ever met. I can feel your energy, even when I’m dead. And that’s why I love you. But you’re killing my high.’

‘Settle down, Dennis me darlin’,’ Concannon said, his hand on Dennis’s shoulder. ‘There’ll be no more trouble.’

I roused Vikram quickly, and forced him to stand. As we reached the doors, Concannon spoke again.

‘I won’t forget this, Shantaram,’ he said, his teeth showing in a furious grin.

I took Vikram home in a taxi. He spoke only once.

‘She was a great chick,’ he said, as if to himself. ‘She really was. If she loved me, as much as I love her, she’d be perfect, you know what I mean?’

I helped his sister put him to bed, drank three cups of tea with his worried parents, and then took a taxi back to my parked bike.

I’d arranged to meet Lisa for lunch at Kayani’s, near the Metro Junction, and I rode there slowly, drifting at a walking pace on the long, leafy avenue of extravagantly coloured clothing stalls called Fashion Street. I was thinking about Concannon and Vikram and his parents, and my thoughts were wolves.

Vikram’s father was an older man, long retired, whose youngest son had been born into the autumn of his life. The self-defeating disarray of Vikram’s addiction bewildered him.

His handsome young son, who’d been something of a dandy, dressing himself in the black silk and silver buckles of his obsession with Sergio Leone’s movies, suddenly wore dirty clothes. His hair, which had once been coiffed to a millimetre’s perfection by his barber, hung in drifts, pressed flat where he’d slept. He didn’t wash himself or shave, sometimes for days at a time. He didn’t eat or speak to anyone at home. And the eyes that occasionally rose to meet his worried father’s were drained of light and life, as though the soul had already deserted the man, and was waiting for the body to fall.

Filled with the avalanchine power of love for his English rose, Vikram, the rich boy who never worked, had created a business on the edge of the movie industry. He supplied foreign tourists to play non-speaking parts in Bollywood movies.

It was a daring commercial venture. He had no experience in the industry, and was working with borrowed funds. But Vikram’s charm and belief in himself made it a success. Lisa, his first business partner, had begun to discover her talents in their work together.

When the English rose left Vikram without warning or explanation, the confidence that had seen him dance on the top of a moving train, to propose to her, drained from his life like blood from a whittled vein.

‘And he’s begun to take things,’ Vikram’s father had whispered, while Vikram slept. ‘Little things. His mother’s pearl brooch, and one of my pens, the good one, presented to me by the company, when I retired. When we asked him about it, he flew into a rage and blamed the servants. But it’s him. We know. He is selling the things he is stealing, to feed his habit for this drug.’

I nodded.

‘It’s a shame,’ the elderly man had sighed, his eyes filling with tears. ‘It’s a damn shame.’

It was sorrow and dread as well, because love had become a stranger in their home. I was that stranger, once. I was addicted to heroin: so addicted that I stole money to feed my habit. I stopped, twenty-five years ago, and I despise the drug more every year. I feel heart-crushing compassion every time I see or hear of someone still addicted: still shooting in a war against themselves. But I was that stranger in my parents’ house of love. I know how hard it is to find the line between helping someone out, and helping someone in. I know that all suffer and die inside, again and again, from the addiction of one. And I know that sometimes, if love doesn’t harden itself, love doesn’t survive at all.

And that day, in that runaway year before I knew what cards Fate would throw at me, I prayed for all of us: for Vikram and his family and all the slaves of oblivion.

I parked the bike opposite Kayani’s to meet Lisa. Watching the signal, I took two deep breaths and surfed my second-favourite pedestrian-killer Bombay traffic. Madness machines rushed at me, turning and weaving unpredictably. If you don’t dance in that, you die.

Across the suicide road I used the hanging rope in the doorway of the restaurant to assist me on the steep marble steps, and entered the café. Perhaps the most famous of Bombay’s deservedly famous Parsi tea and coffee houses, Kayani’s offered hot chilli omelettes, meat and vegetable pasties, toasted sandwiches, and the largest selection of home-baked cakes and biscuits in the area.

Lisa was waiting at the table she preferred, toward the back of the ground-floor space, with a view of the busy kitchen, seven steps away beyond a serving counter.