Gregory Roberts: The Mountain Shadow

The Source of all things, the luminescence, has more forms than heaven’s stars, sure. And one good thought is all it takes to make it shine. But a single mistake can burn down a forest in your heart, hiding all the stars, in all the skies. And while a mistake’s still burning, ruined love or lost faith can make you think you’re done, and you can’t go on. But it’s not true. It’s never true. No matter what you do, no matter where you’re lost, the luminescence never leaves you. Any good thing that dies inside can rise again, if you want it hard enough. The heart doesn’t know how to quit, because it doesn’t know how to lie. You lift your eyes from the page, fall into the smile of a perfect stranger, and the searching starts all over again. It’s not what it was. It’s always different. It’s always something else. But the new forest that grows back in a scarred heart is sometimes wilder and stronger than it was before the fire. And if you stay there, in that shine within yourself, that new place for the light, forgiving everything and never giving up, sooner or later you’ll always find yourself right back there where love and beauty made the world: at the beginning. The beginning. The beginning.

‘Hey, Lin, what a beginning to my day!’ Vikram shouted from somewhere in the dark, humid room. ‘How did you find me? When did you get back?’

‘Just now,’ I answered, standing at the wide French doors that opened onto the street-front veranda of the room. ‘One of the boys told me you were here. Come out for a minute.’

‘No, no, come on in , man!’ Vikram laughed. ‘Meet the guys !’

I hesitated. My eyes, bright with sky, couldn’t see more than lumps of shadow in the dark room. All I could see clearly were two swords of sunlight, stabbing through closed shutters, piercing swirling clouds scented by aromatic hashish and the burnt vanilla of brown heroin.

Remembering that day, the drug-smell and the shadows and the burning light cutting across the room, I’ve asked myself if it was intuition that held me there at the threshold, and stopped me from going in. I’ve asked myself how different my life might’ve been if I’d turned and walked away.

The choices we make are branches in the tree of possibility. For three monsoons after that day, Vikram and the strangers in that room were new branches in a forest we shared for a while: an urban woodland of love, death and resurrection.

What I remember clearly, from that flinch of hesitation, that moment I didn’t think was important at all at the time, is that when Vikram stepped from the darkness and grabbed my arm, dragging me inside, I shivered at the touch of his sweating hand.

A huge bed, extending three metres from the left-hand wall, dominated the big rectangular room. There was a man, or a dead body, it seemed, dressed in silver pyjamas and stretched out on the bed, with both hands folded across his chest.

His chest, so far as I could tell, didn’t rise or fall. Two men, one on the left of the still figure, one on the right, sat on the bed and prepared chillum pipes.

On the wall above, directly over the head of the dead or deeply sleeping man, was a huge painting of Zoroaster, the prophet of the Parsi faith.

As my eyes adjusted to the darkness I saw three large chairs, separated by two heavy antique chests of drawers set against the far wall opposite the veranda, with a man sitting in each of them.

There was a very large, expensive Persian carpet on the floor, and various photographs of figures wearing traditional Parsi dress. To my right, opposite the bed, a hi-fi system rested on a marble-topped dresser. Two ceiling fans rotated just slowly enough not to irritate the clouds of smoke in the room.

Vikram led me past the bed to meet the man sitting in the first of the three chairs. He was a foreigner, like myself, but taller: his long body and even longer legs sprawled in the chair as if he was floating in a bath. I guessed him to be about thirty-five years old.

‘This is Concannon,’ Vikram said, urging me forward. ‘He’s in the IRA.’

The hand that shook mine was warm and dry and very strong.

‘ Fock the IRA!’ he said, pronouncing the first word in the accent of Northern Ireland. ‘I’m an Ulster man, UVF, but I can’t expect a heathen cunt like Vikram to understand that, can I?’

I liked the confident gleam in his eye. I didn’t like the confident words in his mouth. I withdrew my hand, nodding to him.

‘Don’t listen to him,’ Vikram said. ‘He talks a lot of weird shit, but he knows how to party like no foreigner I ever met, let me tell you.’

He pulled me toward the second man in the row of chairs. Just as I approached him, the young man puffed alight a hashish chillum, lit by the man from the third chair. As the flame from the matches was sucked into the pipe, a sudden burst of fire leaped from the bowl of the chillum and flared above the young man’s head.

‘ Bom shankar! ’ Vikram shouted, reaching out for the pipe. ‘Lin, this is Naveen Adair. He’s a private detective. Honest to God. And Naveen, this is Lin, the guy I’ve been telling you about. He’s a doctor, in the slum.’

The young man stood to shake my hand.

‘You know,’ he said with a wry smile, ‘I’m not much of a detective, yet.’

‘That’s okay,’ I smiled back at him. ‘I’m not much of a doctor, period.’

The third man, who’d lit the chillum, took a puff and offered me the pipe. I smiled it away, and he passed it instead to one of the men on the bed.

‘I’m Vinson,’ he said, with a handshake like a big, happy puppy. ‘Stuart Vinson. I’ve heard, like, a lot about you, man.’

‘ Every cunt has heard about Lin,’ Concannon said, accepting a pipe from one of the men on the bed. ‘Vikram goes on and on about you, like a fuckin’ groupie. Lin this, Lin that, and Lin the other fuckin’ thing. Tell me, have you sucked his cock yet, Vikram? Was he any good, or is it all talk?’

‘Jesus, Concannon!’ Vinson said.

‘What?’ Concannon asked, eyes wide. ‘ What? I’m only askin’ the man a question. India’s still a free country, isn’t it? At least, the parts where they speak English.’

‘Don’t mind him,’ Vinson said to me, shrugging an apology. ‘He can’t help it. He has, like, Asshole Tourette’s or something.’

Stuart Vinson, an American, had a strong physique, wide, clear features and a thick shock of wind-strewn blonde hair, which gave him the look of a sea adventurer, a solo yachtsman. In fact, he was a drug dealer, and a pretty successful one. I’d heard about him, just as he’d heard about me.

‘This is Jamal,’ Vikram said, ignoring Vinson and Concannon and introducing me to the man sitting on the left of the bed. ‘He imports it, rubs it, rolls it and smokes it. He’s a One Man Show.’

‘One Man Show,’ Jamal repeated.

He was thin, chameleon-eyed, and covered in religious amulets. I started counting them, hypnotised by holiness, and got to five major faiths before my eyes strayed into his smile.

‘One Man Show,’ I said.

‘One Man Show,’ he repeated.

‘One Man Show,’ I said.

‘One Man Show,’ he repeated.

I would’ve said it again, but Vikram stopped me.

‘This is Billy Bhasu,’ Vikram said, gesturing toward the small, very slight, cream-skinned man sitting on the other side of the still figure. Billy Bhasu put his palms together in a greeting, and continued to clean one of the chillums.