Gregory Roberts - The Mountain Shadow

‘Who painted it?’

‘I did,’ Rish said. ‘Why?’

‘What made you want to paint it in the first place?’

‘Are you saying that there are things I shouldn’t paint?’

‘I’m asking you why you chose to do it.’

‘For the freedom of art,’ Rish said.

‘Viva la revolution,’ Anushka purred, sitting down beside Rish and leaning into his lap.

‘Whose freedom?’ I asked. ‘Yours, or theirs?’

‘Spear of Karma?’ Rosanna sneered. ‘Crazy fascist fuckers, all of them. They’re nothing. Just a fringe group. Nobody listens to them.’

‘The fringe usually works its way to the centre that ignores or insults it.’

‘What?’ Rosanna spluttered.

‘That’s true, Lin,’ Rish agreed, ‘and they’ve done some violent stuff. No doubt. But they’re mainly in the regional centres and the villages. Beating up priests, and burning down a church here and there, that’s their thing. They’ll never get a big following in Bombay.’

‘Vicious fucking fanatics!’ a bearded young man wearing a pink shirt spat out viciously. ‘They’re the stupidest people in the world!’

‘I don’t think you can say that,’ I said softly.

‘I just did!’ the young man shot back. ‘So fuck you. I just said it. So I can say it.’

‘Okay. I meant that you can’t say it with any validity . Sure, you can say it. You can say that the moon is a Diwali decoration, but it wouldn’t have any validity. It’s simply not valid to say that all the people who oppose you are stupid.’

‘Then what are they?’ Rish asked.

‘I think you probably know them and their way of thinking better than I do.’

‘No, really, make your point, please.’

‘Okay, I think they’re devout. And not just devout, but fervently devout. I think they’re in love with God, infatuated with God, actually, and when their God is depicted without faith, it’s felt as an insult to the faith inside themselves.’

‘So, you’re saying I shouldn’t have been allowed to put on this show?’ Rish pressed.

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘Who the fuck is this guy?’ the bearded youth asked no-one.

‘Please,’ Rish continued. ‘Tell me what you did say.’

‘I stand for your right to create and present art, but I think that rights come with responsibilities, and that we, as artists, have a responsibility not to cause feelings of hurt and injury in the name of art. In the name of truth, maybe. In the name of justice and freedom. But not in the name of art.’

‘Why not?’

‘We stand on tall shoulders, when we express ourselves as artists, and we have to stay true to the best in the artists who came before us. It’s a duty.’

‘Who the fuck is this guy?’ the bearded youth asked the string of red motorcycle lights.

‘So, if those people are offended, it’s my fault?’ Rish asked softly and earnestly.

I was beginning to like him.

‘I repeat,’ the bearded youth demanded, ‘who the fuck is this guy?’

I already didn’t like the bearded youth.

‘I’m the guy who’s gonna rearrange your grammar,’ I said quietly, ‘if you address me in the third person again.’

‘He’s a writer ,’ Anushka yawned. ‘They argue, because -’

‘Because they can,’ Lisa interjected, tugging at my arm to lift me to my feet. ‘C’mon, Lin. Time to dance.’

Loud music thumped from heavy floor-mounted speakers.

‘I love this song!’ Anushka growled, jumping up and pulling Rish to his feet. ‘Dance with me, Rish!’

I held Lisa for a moment, and kissed her neck.

‘Go ahead,’ I smiled. ‘Dance your brains out. I’m gonna take another look at the exhibition. I’ll meet you outside.’

Lisa kissed me and joined the dancing crowd. I moved through the dancers, resisting the tidal roll of the music.

In the gallery room I stood before the bronze plaster reliefs that purported to tell the story of the Sapna killings. I tried to decide whether it was the artist’s nightmare, or mine.

I lost it all. I lost the custody of my daughter. I sleepwalked into heroin addiction and armed robbery. When I was caught, I was sentenced to serve ten years at hard labour, in a maximum-security prison.

I could tell you I was beaten during the first two and a half years of that sentence. I could give you half a dozen other sane reasons for escaping from an insane prison, but the truth of it’s simply that one day, freedom was more important to me than my life. And I refused, that day, to be caged. Not today. Not any more. I escaped, and became a wanted man.

The fugitive life took me from Australia, through New Zealand, to India. Six months in a remote village in Maharashtra gave me the language of farmers. Eighteen months in a city slum gave me the language of the street.

I went to prison again, in Bombay, as you do sometimes, when you’re on the run. The man who paid my freedom-ransom to the authorities was a mafia boss, Khaderbhai. He had a use for me. He had a use for everyone. And when I worked for him, no cop persecuted me in Bombay, and no prison offered hospitality.

Counterfeiting passports, smuggling, black market gold, illegal currency trading, protection rackets, gang wars, Afghanistan, vendettas: one way or another, the mafia life filled the months and years. And none of it mattered much to me, because the bridge to the past, to my family and friends, to my name and my nation and whatever I’d been before Bombay was gone, like the dead men prowling through Rosanna’s bronze-coloured frieze.

I left the gallery, made my way through the thinning crowd, and went outside to sit on my motorcycle. I was across the street from the entrance.

A crowd of people had gathered on the footpath, near my bike. Most of them were local people from servants’ quarters in the surrounding streets. They’d gathered in the cool nightfall to admire the fine cars and elegantly dressed guests entering and leaving the exhibition.

I heard people speaking in Marathi and Hindi. They commented on the cars and jewellery and dresses with genuine admiration and pleasure. No voice spoke with jealousy or resentment. They were poor people, living the hard, fear-streaked life crushed into the little word poor , but they admired the jewels and silks of the rich guests with joyful, unenvious innocence.

When a well-known industrialist and his movie-star wife emerged from the gallery, a little chorus of admiring sighs rose from the group. She wore a bejewelled yellow and white sari. I turned my head to look at the people, smiling and murmuring their appreciation, as if the woman were one of their own neighbours, and I noticed three men standing apart from the group.

Their stone-silent stares were grim. Malevolence rippled outward from their dark, staring eyes: waves so intense that it seemed I could feel them settle on my skin, like misted rain.

And then, as if they sensed my awareness of them, they turned as one and stared directly into my eyes, with clear, unreasoning hatred. We held the stare, while the happy crowd cooed and murmured their pleasure, while limousines drew up in front of us, and cameras flashed.

I thought of Lisa, still inside the gallery. The men stared, willing darkness at me. My hands moved slowly toward the two knives fixed in canvas scabbards in the small of my back.

‘Hey!’ Rosanna said, slapping me on the shoulder.

Reflex sent my hand whipping around to grab her wrist, while the other hand shoved her backwards a step.

‘Whoa! Take it easy!’ she said, her eyes wide with surprise.

‘I’m sorry.’ I frowned, releasing her wrist.

I turned quickly to search for the hate-filled eyes. The three men were gone.