‘Bad business, Lin,’ Anand said tersely. He stood with his back to the closed door, preventing anyone from entering.
Ignoring him, I began cardio-pulmonary resuscitation on the young man. I knew the drill too well. I’d pulled junkies out of overdoses, dozens of them, when I was a junkie myself. I’d done it fifty, eighty times in my own country, pressing and breathing life into the living dead. I pressed at the young man’s heart, willing it to beat, and breathed his lungs to their capacity for him. After ten minutes of the procedure he stuttered, deep in his chest, and coughed. I rested on my knees, watching to see if he was strong enough to breathe on his own. The breathing was slow, and then slower, and then it stopped in a hollow sigh. The sound was as flat and insentient as the air escaping from a fissure in layers of geyser stone. I began the CPR again. It was exhausting work, dragging his limp body back up the whole length of the well with my arms and my lungs.
The girl went under twice while I worked on her boyfriend. Anand slapped at her, and shook her awake. Three hours after I stepped into the hotel, Anand and I left the room. We were both soaked through with sweat, our shirts as wet as if we’d been standing in the rain that drummed and rattled beyond the windows. The couple was awake and sullen and angry with us, despite the girl’s earlier plea for help, because we’d disturbed the pleasure of their stone. I closed the door on them, knowing that some time soon, someone else in that city, or some other, would close a door on them forever. Every time junkies go down the well they sink a little deeper, and it’s just that little bit harder to drag them out again.
Anand owed me one. I showered and shaved, and accepted the gift of a freshly washed and ironed shirt. We sat in the foyer then, and shared a chai. Some men like you less the more they owe you. Some men only really begin to like you when they find themselves in your debt. Anand was comfortable with his obligation, and his handshake was the kind that good friends sometimes use in place of a whole conversation.
When I stepped down to the street, a taxi pulled in to the kerb beside me. Ulla was in the back seat.
‘Lin! Please, can you get in for some time?’
Worry, and what might’ve been dread, pushed her voice almost to a whine. Her lovely, pale face was trapped in a fearful frown.
I climbed in beside her, and the taxi pulled out slowly from the kerb. The cab smelled of her perfume and the beedie cigarettes that she constantly smoked.
‘Seedha jao!’ she told the driver. Go straight ahead! ‘I have a problem, Lin. I need some help.’
It was my night to be the white knight. I looked into her large blue eyes, and resisted the impulse to make a joke or a flirtatious remark. She was afraid. Whatever had scared her still possessed her eyes. She was looking at me, but she was still staring at the fear.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she sobbed, breaking down suddenly, and then pulling herself together just as swiftly. ‘I didn’t even say any hello to you. How are you? I haven’t seen you for a long time. Are you going good? You look very good.’
Her lilting German accent gave a fluttering music to her speech that pleased my ear. I smiled at her as the coloured lights streamed across her eyes.
‘I’m fine. What’s the problem?’
‘I need someone to go with me, to be with me, at one o’clock after midnight. At Leopold’s. I’ll be there and … and I need you to be there with me. Can you do it? Can you be there?’
‘Leopold’s is shut at midnight.’
‘Yes,’ she said, her voice breaking again on the edge of tears. ‘But I’ll be there, in a taxi, parked outside. I’m meeting someone, and I don’t want to be alone. Can you be there with me?’
‘Why me? What about Modena, or Maurizio?’
‘I trust you, Lin. It won’t take long—the meeting. And I’ll pay you. I’m not asking you to help me for nothing. I’ll pay you five hundred dollars, if you’ll just be there with me. Will you do it?’
I heard a warning, deep within—we usually do, when something worse than we can imagine is stalking us, and set to pounce. Fate’s way of beating us in a fair fight is to give us warnings that we hear, but never heed. Of course I would help her. Ulla was Karla’s friend, and I was in love with Karla. I would help her, for Karla’s sake, even if I didn’t like her. And I did like Ulla: she was beautiful, and she was just naive enough, just sanguine enough to stop sympathy slipping into pity. I smiled again, and asked the driver to stop.
‘Sure. Don’t worry. I’ll be there.’
She leaned across and gave me a kiss on the cheek. I got out of the cab. She put her hands on the window’s edge, and leaned out. Misty rain settled on her long eyelashes, forcing her to blink.
‘You’ll be there? Promise?’
‘One a.m.,’ I said firmly. ‘Leopold’s. I’ll be there.’
‘You promise?’
‘Yeah,’ I laughed. ‘I promise.’
The taxi pulled away, and she called out with a plaintive urgency that seemed harsh and almost hysterical in the stillness of the night.
‘Don’t let me down, Lin!’
I walked back toward the tourist beat, aimlessly, thinking about Ulla and the business, whatever it was, that her boyfriend, Modena, was involved in with Maurizio. Didier had told me they were successful, they were making money, but Ulla seemed afraid and unhappy. And there was something else that Didier had said—something about danger. I tried to remember the words he’d used. What were they? Terrible risk … great violence…
My mind was still shuffling through those thoughts when I realised that I was in Karla’s street. I passed her ground-floor apartment. The wide French doors, leading directly from the street, were open. A desultory breeze riffled the gauze curtains, and I saw a soft yellow light, a candle, glowing within.
The rain grew heavier, but a restlessness I couldn’t fight or understand kept me walking. Vinod’s love song, the song that rang bells in the dome of the Gateway Monument, was running on a loop in my mind. My thoughts floated back to the boat sailing on the surreal lake that the monsoon had made of the street. The look in Karla’s eyes—commanding, demanding—drove the restlessness to a kind of fury in my heart. I had to stop, sometimes, in the rain, to draw deep breaths. I was choking with love and desire. There was anger in me, and pain. My fists were clenched. The muscles of my arms and chest and back were tight and taut. I thought of the Italian couple, the junkies in Anand’s hotel, and I thought of death and dying. The black and brooding sky finally ruptured and cracked. Lightning ripped into the Arabian Sea, and thunder followed with deafening applause.
I began to run. The trees were dark, their leaves wet through. They looked like small black clouds themselves, those trees, each one shedding its shower of rain. The streets were empty. I ran through puddles of fast-flowing water, reflecting the lightning-fractured sky. All the loneliness and all the love I knew collected and combined in me, until my heart was as swollen with love for her as the clouds above were swollen with their mass of rain. And I ran. I ran. And, somehow, I was back in that street, back at the doorway to her house. And then I stood there, clawed by lightning, my chest heaving with a passion that was still running in me while my body stood still.
She came to the open doors to look at the sky. She was wearing a thin, white, sleeveless nightgown. She saw me standing in the storm. Our eyes met, and held. She came through the doors, down two steps, and walked toward me. Thunder shook the street, and lightning filled her eyes. She came into my arms.
We kissed. Our lips made thoughts, somehow, without words: the kind of thoughts that feelings have. Our tongues writhed, and slithered in their caves of pleasure. Tongues proclaiming what we were. Human. Lovers. Lips slid across the kiss, and I submerged her in love, surrendering and submerging in love myself.
I lifted her in my arms and carried her into the house, into the room that was perfumed with her. We shed our clothes on the tiled floor, and she led me to her bed. We lay close, but not touching. In the storm-lit darkness, the beaded sweat and raindrops on
her arm were like so many glittering stars, and her skin was like a span of night sky.
I pressed my lips against the sky, and licked the stars into my mouth. She took my body into hers, and every movement was an incantation. Our breathing was like the whole world chanting prayers. Sweat ran in rivulets to ravines of pleasure. Every movement was a satin skin cascade. Within the velvet cloaks of tenderness, our backs convulsed in quivering heat, pushing heat, pushing muscles to complete what minds begin and bodies always win. I was hers. She was mine. My body was her chariot, and she drove it into the sun. Her body was my river, and I became the sea. And the wailing moan that drove our lips together, at the end, was the world of hope and sorrow that ecstasy wrings from lovers as it floods their souls with bliss.
The still and softly breathing silence that suffused and submerged us, afterward, was emptied of need, and want, and hunger, and pain, and everything else except the pure, ineffable exquisiteness of love.
‘Oh, shit!’
‘What?’
‘Oh, Jesus! Look at the time!’
‘What? What is it?’
‘I’ve gotta go,’ I said, jumping out of the bed and reaching for my wet clothes. ‘I’ve got to meet someone, at Leopold’s, and I’ve got five minutes to get there.’
‘Now? You’re going now?’
‘I have to.’
‘Leopold’s will be shut,’ she frowned, sitting up in the bed and leaning against a little hill of pillows.
‘I know,’ I muttered, pulling on my boots and lacing them. My clothes and boots were soaking wet, but the night was still humid and warm. The storm was easing, and the breeze that had stirred the languid air was dying. I knelt beside the bed, and leaned across to kiss the soft skin of her thigh. ‘I’ve gotta go. I gave my word.’
‘Is it that important?’
A twitch of irritation creased my forehead with a frown. I was momentarily annoyed that she should press the point when I’d told her that I’d given my word: that should’ve been enough. But she was lovely in that moonless light, and she was right to be annoyed, while I wasn’t.
‘I’m sorry’ I answered softly, running my hand through her thick, black hair. How many times had I wanted to do that, to reach out and touch her, when we’d stood together?
‘Go on,’ she said quietly, watching me with a witch’s concentration. ‘Go.’
I ran to Arthur Bunder Road through the deserted market. White canvas covers on the market stalls gave them the appearance of shrouded cadavers in the cool-room of a morgue. My footsteps running made scattered echoes, as if ghosts were running with me. I crossed Arthur Bunder Road and entered Mereweather Road, running along that boulevard of trees and tall mansions, with no sight or sound of the million people who passed there during each busy day.
At the first crossroad I turned left to avoid the flooded streets, and I saw a cop riding a bicycle ahead. I ran on in the centre of the road, and a second bicycle cop pulled out of a dark driveway as I passed. When I was exactly half way into the side street, the first police jeep appeared at the end of the street. I heard the second jeep behind me and then the cyclists converged. The jeep pulled up beside me, and I stopped. Five men got out and surrounded me. There was silence for a few seconds. It was a silence of such delicious menace that the cops were almost drunk with it, and their eyes were lit with riot in the softly falling rain.
‘What’s happening?’ I asked, in Marathi. ‘What do you want?’
‘Get in the jeep,’ the commander grunted, in English.
‘Listen, I speak Marathi, so can’t we—’ I began, but the commander cut me off with a harsh laugh.
‘We know you speak Marathi, motherfucker,’ he answered, in Marathi. The other cops laughed. ‘We know everything. Now get in the fucking jeep, you sisterfucker, or we’ll beat you with the lathis, and then put you in.’
I stepped into the back of the covered jeep, and they sat me on the floor. There were six men in the back of the jeep, and they all had their hands on me.
We drove the two short blocks to the Colaba police station, across the road from Leopold’s. As we entered the police compound, I noticed that the street in front of Leopold’s was deserted. Ulla wasn’t there, where she’d said she would be. Did she set me up? I wondered, my heart thumping with dread. That made no sense, but still the thought became a worm that gnawed through all the walls I put up in my mind.
The night duty officer was a squat, overweight Maharashtrian who, like many of his colleagues in the police force, squeezed himself into a uniform that was at least two sizes too small for him. The thought occurred to me that the discomfort it must’ve caused might help to explain his evil disposition. There was certainly no humour in him or any of the ten cops who surrounded me, and I felt a perverse urge to laugh out loud as their scowling, heavy-breathing silence persisted. Then the duty officer addressed his men, and the laughter in me died.
‘Take this motherfucker and beat him,’ he said matter-of-factly. If he knew that I spoke Marathi, and could understand him, he gave no indication of it. He spoke to his men as if I wasn’t there. ‘Beat him hard. Give him a solid beating. Don’t break any bones, if you can help it, but beat him hard, and then throw him into the jail with the others.’
I ran. I pushed through the circle of cops, cleared the landing outside the duty room in a single leap, and hit the gravel yard of the compound, running. It was a stupid mistake, and not the last I was to make in the next few months. Mistakes are like bad loves, Karla once said, the more you learn from them, the more you wish they’d never happened. My mistake that night took me to the front gate of the compound, where I collided with a round-up party, and collapsed in a tangle of tied and helpless men.
The cops dragged me back to the duty room, punching and kicking me all the way. They tied my hands behind my back with coarse, hemp rope, and removed my boots before tying my feet together. The short, fat duty officer produced a thick coil of rope, and ordered his men to bind me with it from ankles to shoulders. Puffing and panting with his rage, he watched as I was trussed in so many coils of rope that I resembled an Egyptian mummy. The cops then dragged me to an adjoining room, and hoisted me up to hang me at chest height from a hook, face down, with the hook jammed through several coils of rope at my back.
‘Aeroplane …’ the duty officer growled, through clenched teeth.
The cops spun me around faster and faster. The hook held my bound hands in the bunched ropes, and my head hung down, level with my drooping feet. I whirled and spun until I lost my sense of up or down in the twirling room. Then the beatings began.
Five or six men hit my spinning body as hard and as often as they could, cracking their cane lathis against my skin. The stinging blows struck with piercing pain through the ropes, and on my face, arms, legs, and feet. I could sense that I was bleeding. The screaming rose up in me, but I clenched my jaws and gave the pain no sound of my own. I wouldn’t let them have it. I wouldn’t let them hear me scream. Silence is the tortured man’s revenge. Hands reached out, stopping my body, holding it still, while the room continued to whirl. Then they spun me in the opposite direction, and the beating began again.
When their sport was done, they dragged me up the metal steps to the lock-up—the same metal steps I’d climbed with Prabaker when I’d tried to help Kano’s bear-handlers. Will someone come to help me? I asked myself. No-one had seen my arrest on the deserted street, and no-one knew where I was. Ulla, if she came to Leopold’s at all, if she wasn’t actually involved in my arrest, wouldn’t know that I’d been arrested. And Karla—what could Karla think, but that I’d abandoned her after we’d made love? She wouldn’t find me. Prison systems are black holes for human bodies: no light escapes from them, and no news. With that mysterious arrest, I’d vanished into one of the city’s darkest black holes. I’d disappeared from the city as completely as if I’d caught a plane to Africa.
And why was I arrested? The questions buzzed and swarmed in my whirling mind. Did they know wh
o I really was? If they didn’t know—if it was something else, if it had nothing to do with who I really was—there would still be questions, identification procedures, maybe even fingerprint checks. My prints were on file all over the world, through the Interpol agency. It was only a question of time before my real identity emerged. I had to get a message out to … someone. Who could help me? Who was powerful enough to help me? Khaderbhai. Lord Abdel Khader Khan. With all of his contacts in the city, especially in the Colaba area, he would surely find out that I’d been arrested. In time, Khaderbhai would know. Until then, I had to sit tight, and try to get a message out to him.
Trussed up in the mummifying ropes, dragged up the hard metal stairs one bruising bump at a time, I forced my thoughts to settle on that mantra, and I repeated it to the thumping beat of my heart: Get a message to Khaderbhai … Get a message to Khaderbhai…
At the top landing of the stairs, they threw me into the long prison corridor. The duty officer ordered prisoners to remove the ropes from my body. He stood in the gateway of the lock-up, watching them with his fists on his hips. At one point, he kicked me two, three times to encourage them to work faster. When the last of the ropes was removed and passed through to the guards, he ordered them to lift me and stand me up, facing him at the open gate. I felt their hands numbly on my deadened skin, and I opened my eyes, through blood, to see his grimace of a smile.
He spoke to me in Marathi and then spat in my face. I tried to raise my arm to hit back at him, but the other prisoners held me fast. Their hands were gentle, but firm. They helped me into the archway of the first open cell-room, and eased me to the concrete floor. I looked up to see his face as he shut the gate. Loosely but accurately translated, he’d said to me, You’re fucked. Your life is over.
I saw the steel bars of the gate swing shut, and felt the creeping coldness numb my heart. Metal slammed against metal. The keys jangled and turned in the lock. I looked into the eyes of the men around me, the dead eyes and the frenzied, the resentful eyes and the fearing. Somewhere, deep inside me, a drum began to beat. It might’ve been my heart. I felt my body, my whole body, tense and clench as if it was a fist. There was a taste, thick and bitter, at the back of my mouth. I struggled to swallow it down and then I knew, I remembered. It was the taste of hatred—my hatred, theirs, the guards’, and the world’s. Prisons are the temples where devils learn to prey. Every time we turn the key we twist the knife of fate, because every time we cage a man we close him in with hate.
Shantaram: A Novel Page 49
