by Josh Lacey
I tried to get a moment alone with Uncle Harvey, but it was impossible. Tanya wouldn’t let go of him. He wouldn’t let go of her, either. The two of them walked arm in arm down the street, Uncle Harvey trying to persuade Tanya that he should be allowed to carry her rucksack, and her giggling, saying she was stronger than he was, she could carry her own bag and his too.
“We’ll arm-wrestle for it,” said Uncle Harvey.
“Here? Now? I’m ready.”
“We need a table. Let’s have a competition when we get to the hotel. Loser pays for dinner.”
“I will beat you both,” said Tanya. “You have to remember, Harvey, I’m an Israeli. I do my national service. I know how to fight.”
“So do I,” said Uncle Harvey.
That would have been my moment to say, Wait a minute, let’s go back up the hill, I want to help the priests put out the fire, and I wish I’d said exactly that, but I didn’t. I still had the tiger in my pants. I wanted to get him out, and even more important, I wanted to tell my uncle that I had it. I couldn’t say anything in front of Tanya. I glanced back at the temple and thought about Ram, and felt bad, then ran after my uncle.
Suresh had been waiting with his rickshaw. He was staring anxiously at the sky, watching the plume of smoke rising from the temple. As soon as he saw us, he hurried forward, unable to keep back his questions. “What is happening? How big is the fire?”
I told him as little as I’d told the others.
“What of the temple?” he asked.
“What about it?”
“It is hurt? It is OK?”
I could hear the panic in his voice and saw tears streaked through the dust on his face.
I wished I could convince him not to care so much about the imaginary god in its hole. It can’t possibly help your mom, I wanted to say, because it doesn’t even exist. Forget it. I’ve got some good news for you. There’s a tiger in my pants that is worth a couple of million dollars, and once we’ve sold it, I’m going to come back here and give you some money and you’ll be able to pay for your mom’s chemo yourself. But I kept those thoughts to myself and simply said that the fire had only been in one small part of the temple, far away from the inner sanctum.
“You are sure?” he asked, suddenly hopeful.
“I’m sure. Your god’s safe.”
He wiped away his tears and tried to smile.
There was just enough room for all three of us in the back of the rickshaw, Tanya in the middle with a Trelawney on either side, her rucksack and my uncle’s bag at our feet.
My uncle called out, “Home, James, and don’t spare the horses.”
“Excuse me, sir?” Suresh was puzzled.
“Don’t take any notice of him,” I said. “He’s just being an idiot.”
“No problem. But where to go?”
“That hotel in Srirangapatna,” said my uncle. “The one you recommended.”
“Ah, yes, sir. Right away.”
Suresh turned the key in the ignition. The engine coughed to life. Some startled birds flew out of a nearby tree. And we were off, bouncing down the road and chugging all the way to Srirangapatna.
Forget the hotel, I wanted to say. We’ve got much more important things to do. We’ve got to go to Bangalore and sell this tiger for two million dollars. But I kept quiet. I didn’t want Tanya to know what we were doing. I didn’t know her, and certainly didn’t trust her. I didn’t think she was a spy of Marko’s—although the thought had crossed my mind—but I didn’t want her knowing our business anyway. Much more important, I never wanted Suresh to discover what I’d done.
I leaned out of the rickshaw and looked behind us. No one was following us. On the top of the hill, a faint orange glow silhouetted the walls of the temple.
Sitting back down, I got a glimpse of Suresh’s face. He looked haunted, even frightened. Don’t worry about the temple, I thought. That temple never would have helped your mom. She needs chemo and a decent doctor. If all goes well, I’ll be back here tomorrow to get her exactly that.
Sixty bone-juddering minutes later, we chugged into the center of Srirangapatna and stopped outside the Hotel Krishna. Even there, I couldn’t talk to my uncle. He rushed inside and negotiated a price for two rooms, then arranged to meet Tanya in an hour to wander around town.
A porter had come out of the hotel to carry our baggage, but Uncle Harvey waved him away. “We can carry our own bags.” Disappointed, the porter slouched back inside.
Suresh was waiting patiently to be paid. He was a different person to the one who had picked us up earlier in the day. Then he’d been cheerful, optimistic, ready for anything. Now he was about to cry again.
I don’t know if my uncle took pity on him or was really impressed by his skills as a chauffeur, but he pulled out a bundle of notes from his wallet. “Here you go,” he said. “Thanks for everything.”
Suresh’s face lit up. He grabbed my uncle’s hand. “Thank you, Mister Harvey. You are a very good man.”
“Don’t mention it,” said Uncle Harvey.
Suresh grabbed my hand and thanked me, too, which raised my guilt levels.
He stuffed the cash into one of his pockets, then pulled something from another. “Please, you will take my card. If you need one more driver, you will call me.”
I took Suresh’s card, which was actually just a scrap of paper scribbled with his name and number. I stuffed it in my pocket, promising to call him if we ever came back to Srirangapatna. I didn’t tell him why I’d really be calling him; I didn’t want him to get too excited. But I was sure I’d be on the phone in a day or two, talking to Suresh, telling him that I wanted to know where to send enough money to make his mom well again.
He jumped in his rickshaw and drove away. I suppose he couldn’t wait to present Uncle Harvey’s cash to his mom. How much medicine would it buy? Enough to help her? Or just enough to stop the pain for a few days?
I remembered my mom’s friend Sandra, the one who died of cancer. I only met her a couple of times, but one of her kids was good friends with Grace, so we got constant updates. Mom talked about her a lot, always in the same hushed tone.
Her daughters set up a website in her memory. They organized a five-mile fun run and sent an email around, asking people to sponsor them. I gave Grace fifty cents a mile. On the site, there was a photo taken while Sandra was lying on her hospital bed. She looked like someone had stuck a tube down her throat and sucked the life out of her.
I followed my uncle into the hotel and up to our room, which was small and cold and smelled as if the last person staying here hadn’t flushed the toilet.
Uncle Harvey dumped his bag on the bed. “You need a shower,” he said. “Your face is covered in soot. Your clothes, too. We’re going to have to buy you some more.”
“And shoes.”
He looked at my bare feet. “Where are your shoes?”
“In the temple. You have to take them off when you go inside.”
“I’ll buy you some nice new sandals. You can borrow a shirt of mine. You’ll have to wear those same jeans and go barefoot for now. My shoes won’t fit you. Have a shower, put this on, and we’ll go out with Tanya to buy you a new wardrobe.” He offered me the shirt that he’d pulled from his bag. “You’re lucky she’s here. She’ll pick some nice stuff. Here, take this.” That was when he noticed what I was holding in the palm of my hand. “What’s that?”
“What does it look like?”
“I don’t know. What is it?”
“Guess.”
“A stone.”
“Guess again.”
“I don’t like these games. Just tell me what it is.”
“Can’t you guess?”
“I just said no.”
“Try.”
“Fine. Here. Let me have a look.” He took it out of my hand. “It is, um . . . Oh, I don’t know. A stone covered in gunk.” He scraped off some of the dirt with his fingernail. “That’s funny, it looks like . . .” His voice faded away.
He glanced at me. Then back at the shimmering jewel that his cleaning had just exposed. Now his voice was more serious. “What is this?”
“You still can’t guess?”
“Don’t mess about. What is this?”
“It’s a tiger, Uncle Harvey.”
“Where did you get it?”
“From a hole on the top of a hill.”
“This hole—was it in that temple?”
“Yes.”
“Did anyone see you?”
“No. That’s why I had to start the fire. To get everyone out of there.”
“You started that fire?”
“Yes.”
“You set fire to the temple?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t believe it,” said Uncle Harvey.
“I didn’t mean to,” I explained. “I just started a small fire to distract the guards. I didn’t think it would turn into that towering inferno. I just wanted to make a blaze that was big enough to make them panic. It worked, too. The guards came running. So did the priests. They left the inner sanctum unguarded. So I shot in there and grabbed the tiger and got out of there before anyone noticed anything.”
My uncle looked at me, his mouth twisted into a strange little smile. I couldn’t tell what it meant. What he said next was strange, too. “I hope you’re ready for who you’re going to be.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means exactly what I said.”
I repeated his words to myself. “I hope you’re ready for who you’re going to be.” Then I shook my head. “No, I don’t know what that means.”
“You’ll work it out soon enough.” He was grinning more straightforwardly now, his face breaking open with the happy smile of a man who can already see a million dollars in his bank account.
Then he rushed into the bathroom and washed two hundred years of dirt down the drain.
27
The guy who owned the hotel tried to make Uncle Harvey pay for the night, even though we’d only been in the room for a few minutes. Tanya came into the lobby when they were arguing and asked what was going on. Uncle Harvey started looking a bit hassled. “We have to go,” he said.
“Where?”
“Back to Bangalore. Just for the night.”
“Oh.”
“Give me a moment and I’ll explain everything.” Then he glanced at me, meeting my eyes for a moment as if to say: Don’t worry, I won’t tell her the truth, I’ll make something up.
He managed to get us out of the hotel without having to pay. As for Tanya—I don’t know what he said to her, but whatever it was, she wasn’t impressed. Uncle Harvey kissed her on both cheeks. He tried to kiss her on the lips, too, but she dodged out of the way.
“I’ll call you once we’ve finished our business in Bangalore,” he said. “We can meet up there. Stay in a nice hotel. Go out for dinner.”
“Maybe,” said Tanya. “Bye, Tom. Have fun.”
“Thanks,” I said. “And you.”
A rickshaw took us to the train station. I would have liked to get a ride with Suresh, but he’d gone.
The clerk in the ticket office told us that the Mysore–Bengaluru express would be passing through in forty minutes. We bought two tickets, then ducked outside and found a street lined with clothes shops. I said I only needed fresh underwear, a T-shirt, and some sneakers, but Uncle Harvey insisted on buying me a whole new wardrobe.
“We’re meeting a billionaire,” he said. “We don’t want to look like tramps.”
“I don’t get it. Why would J.J. care what I look like? We’ve got the tiger. He wants it. Isn’t that enough?”
“Not at all.” Uncle Harvey held up a shirt against me, then winced and put it back on the shelf. “If you look like you need to sell, your price goes down. When we meet J.J., we have to look like we don’t need the money. We’d like him to buy it, but if he doesn’t, we don’t care. That’s the only way we’re going to get a decent price. Appearance is everything. That’s the first rule of business. Ah, this one looks perfect. Here. Try it on.”
We hurried back to the station carrying our purchases and boarded our train. It was packed, but we managed to find ourselves a couple of seats by the window. Once the train left the station, I took my shopping bags to the bathroom. It wasn’t the perfect place to change your clothes—there was a big pool of what I hoped was water in the middle of the floor—but I managed to do it without getting my new pair of pants wet. When I returned to the carriage, my uncle looked me up and down, then told me to tuck my shirt in. Finally he nodded. “You’ll do.”
“You mean, I look cool?”
“No. But you’ll do.”
“Gee, thanks.”
He went to the bathroom and got changed too, and, I had to admit, he looked dapper. Gone were the dusty pants and the grubby shirt, replaced by black trousers, black shoes, a white shirt, and a dark brown jacket. These were the clothes that he’d worn to Grandpa’s funeral, but he didn’t look deathly. If you saw him striding briskly along the street, you would have thought he was a successful businessman on his way to do a deal. He sat down opposite me and pulled out his phone. He said he had to do some research. I asked what that meant. He wouldn’t tell me, but in a few minutes he said, “Come and look at this.”
“What is it?”
“Come here and I’ll show you.”
He’d connected to YouTube. When he pressed Play, the screen lit up with a bright orange logo, a capital J imposed over a roaring tiger.
“The Jaragami Corporation is one of India’s most remarkable success stories,” said a deep voice. “But this extraordinary company was originally nothing more than an idea, a vision in the imagination of one mathematical prodigy and business visionary, the company’s founder and owner, Jalata Jaragami.”
The screen now showed a slim man standing at a podium, addressing a conference.
The voiceover continued: “Jaragami started his company with only a few thousand rupees, borrowed from a family member, and traded from his own bedroom in a modest suburb of Bengaluru. Today, the Jaragami Corporation employs more than one hundred thousand people in India and abroad, and has an annual turnover of more than five billion U.S. dollars.”
More footage followed of Jalata Jaragami shaking hands with various famous people. I recognized only two of them, Bill Gates and Barack Obama, but Uncle Harvey told me the names of the others.
The screen showed a picture of a young Indian boy with glasses. The narrator said, “Jalata Jaragami learned to program a computer at the age of six. He started his first software company when he was eleven and earned his first million rupees only three days after his fourteenth birthday.”
“You’d better hurry,” said Uncle Harvey.
“I’m going to earn my first million today.”
“So you are.”
The carriage was full of people. Some of them were reading books or newspapers and others were staring at their own phones, but a couple of them now crowded around my uncle, staring at the film, and soon others joined them too. I could hear them whispering in their own language. One of them said, “Jaragami, yes?” When I agreed, he gave me a big smile. “Very rich man.”
The film was still playing. After a few minutes of boring information about J.J.’s company, its computers and their software, the narrator offered one little snippet of personal information about the founder, owner, and boss of the company.
“Jalata Jaragami is not just a wealthy businessman and a generous philanthropist,” said the deep-voiced narrator. “He is also a collector of valuable art and antiques, with a particular interest in India’s ancient heritage. Over the past decade, he has amassed the world’s finest collection of material related to Tipu Sultan, one of the foremost fighters in the battle against British rule of the subcontinent. After the battle of Seringapatam and the murder of Tipu Sultan by British forces, his treasures were stolen and scattered around the world. Jalata Jaragami is bringing these treasures back here to India, where they b
elong, creating a magnificent museum devoted to one of the foremost figures in the history of the subcontinent.”
Accompanying the last words, the screen had shown a series of images: a painting of a man in a turban; a sword with intricate carvings along the handle; a large white building surrounded by trees; a vast, airy room inside the museum, with pictures and objects hanging around the wall.
Uncle Harvey paused the video.
We stared at the image of J.J.’s museum.
In the center of the room, squatting like an immense frog, was a large, ornate throne, its seat covered with scarlet cushions, its back lined with eight spears. Seven of them were topped with little tiger statues. The eighth remained empty.
28
Night had fallen by the time we arrived in Bangalore, and in the darkness the streets seemed even fuller, packed with a billion cars, buses, and trucks, and a billion people, too, dodging between the lanes of traffic.
A taxi drove us from the station to the business district and dropped us at the foot of an enormous tower. I tipped back my head and stared at the thousands of windows above us, every one of them blazing bright light. It was the type of skyscraper that you might find in New York, filled with busy office workers making money, money, money.
Over the entrance stood a line of huge proud steel letters.
J A R A G A M I
Uncle Harvey and I strolled into the entrance lobby. The huge glass doors slid silently shut behind us. I wondered if Marko had been here. Was this where he came to get his orders? Did he come here to meet J.J.? Or was there no real connection between them? Did J.J. just order one of his ser-vants to get the tigers using any means necessary, not wanting to know what would actually happen? Would Marko be here now? I wasn’t sure if I dreaded the idea of seeing him or relished it. I wanted to confront him, yes, and take my revenge, but he scared me too—I don’t mind admitting that. And if we ran into him here, it wouldn’t even be a fair fight; he’d have all the advantages. This was his territory. We wouldn’t have a hope.
