And it kept me busy, breaking laws for a living: so busy that I managed to hide most of what I felt from the heart that was feeling it. Everything moved quickly after that meeting at the Mocambo. Farid found new premises within a week. The two-story building, only a short walk from the floating mosque, Haji Ali, had been a records office for a branch of the Bombay Municipal Corporation. When the BMC had moved to larger, more modern offices, they’d left most of the old benches, desks, storage cupboards, and shelves behind as stock fittings. They were well suited to our needs, and I spent a week supervising a team of cleaners and labourers, who dusted and polished every surface while moving the furniture around to make way for the machinery and light-tables from Ghani’s basement.
Our men loaded that specialist equipment onto a large, covered truck and delivered it to the new premises late at night. The street was unusually quiet as the heavy truck backed up to the double folding doors of our new factory. But alarm bells and the heavier clang of fire-engine bells jangled in the distance. Standing beside our truck, I looked along the deserted street in the direction of the frantic sound.
‘It must be a big fire,’ I muttered to Sanjay, and he laughed out loud.
‘Farid started a fire,’ Salman said, answering for his friend. ‘We told him we didn’t want anyone watching us move this stuff into the new place, so he started the fire as a diversion. That’s why the street is so empty. Everybody who is awake has gone to the fire.’
‘He burned down a rival company,’ Sanjay laughed. ‘Now we are officially in the real estate business because our biggest rivals have just closed down, due to fire damage. We start our new real estate office not far from here tomorrow. And tonight, no curious fuckers are here to see us move our stuff into your new workshop. Farid killed two birds with one match, na?’
So, while fire and smoke singed the midnight sky, and bells and sirens railed about a kilometre away, we directed our men as they moved the heavy equipment into the new factory. And Krishna and Villu went to work almost at once.
In the months that I’d been away, Ghani had followed my suggestion to push the focus of the operation laterally into the production of permits, certificates, diplomas, licences, letters of credit, security passes, and other documents. It was a booming trade in the booming economy of Bombay, and we often worked through the dawn to satisfy the demand. And the business was generational: as licensing authorities and other bodies modified their documents in response to our forgeries, we dutifully copied and then counterfeited them again, at additional cost.
‘It’s a kind of Red Queen contest,’ I said to Salman Mustaan when the new passport factory had been running for six diligent months.
‘Lai ka Rani?’ he asked. A Red Queen?
‘Yeah. It’s a biology thing. It’s about hosts, like human bodies, and parasites, like viruses and such. I studied it when I was running my clinic in the zhopadpatti. The hosts—our bodies—and the viruses—any bug that makes us sick—are locked in a competition with each other. When the parasite attacks, the host develops a defence. Then the virus changes to beat that defence, so the host gets a new defence. And that keeps on going. They call it a Red Queen contest. It’s from the story, you know, Alice in Wonderland.’
‘I know it,’ Salman answered. ‘We did it at school. But I never understood it.’
‘That’s okay—nobody does. Anyway, the little girl, Alice, she meets this Red Queen, who runs incredibly fast but never seems to get anywhere. She tells Alice that, in her country, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. And that’s like us with the passport authorities, and the licensing boards, and the banks all over the world. They keep changing the passports and other documents to make it harder for us. And we keep finding new ways to fake them. And they keep changing the way they make them, and we keep finding new ways to fake them and forge them and adapt them for ourselves. It’s a Red Queen contest, and we all have to run real fast just to stand still.’
‘I think you’re doing better than standing still,’ he asserted. His tone was quiet but adamant. ‘You’ve done a damn fine job, Lin. The ID stuff is deadly—it’s a real big market. They can’t get enough. And it’s good work. So far, all our guys who’ve used your books have gone through without any problems, yaar. As a matter of fact, that’s why I’ve called you to have lunch with us today. I’ve got a surprise for you—kind of a present, like, and I’m sure you’re going to like it. It’s a way of saying thanks, yaar, for the great job you’ve been doing.’
I didn’t look at him. We were walking quickly, side by side, along Mahatma Gandhi Road toward the Regal Circle roundabout on a hot, cloudless afternoon. Where the footpath was clogged with shoppers halting at the tabletop street stalls, we walked on the road with a slow, unceasing stream of traffic behind and beside us. I didn’t look at Salman because I’d come to know him well enough during those six months to be sure he was embarrassed by the praise he’d felt moved to lavish on me. Salman was a natural leader but, like many men who have the gift of command and the instinct to rule, he was deeply troubled by every expression of the leadership art. He was, at heart, a humble man, and that humility made him an honourable man.
Lettie had once said that she found it strange and incongruous to hear me describe criminals, killers, and mafiosi as men of honour. The confusion, I think, was hers, not mine. She’d confused honour with virtue. Virtue is concerned with what we do, and honour is concerned with how we do it. You can fight a war in an honourable way—the Geneva Convention exists for that very reason—and you can enforce the peace without any honour at all. In its essence, honour is the art of being humble. And gangsters, just like cops, politicians, soldiers, and holy men, are only ever good at what they do if they stay humble.
‘You know,’ he remarked, as we moved to the wider footpath opposite the cloisters of the university buildings, ‘I’m glad it didn’t work out with your friends—the ones you wanted to help you with the passports, right at the start.’
I frowned, and remained silent, keeping pace with his rapid step. Johnny Cigar and Kishore had refused to join me in the passport factory, and it had shocked and disappointed me. I’d assumed that they would jump at the chance to make money—to make more money with me than either of them had ever dreamed of making alone. I’d never anticipated the saddened and offended expressions that closed their smiles when they understood, at last, that I was offering them nothing more than the golden opportunity to commit crimes with me. It had never occurred to me that they wouldn’t want to do it. It had never occurred to me that they would refuse to work with criminals, and for criminals.
I remembered turning away from their stony, closed, embarrassed smiles that day. I remembered the question that had knotted into a fist in my mind, right behind the eyes: Was I so far out of touch with the thoughts and feelings of decent men? The question still rankled six months later. The answer still stared back at me from the mirrored windows of the shops we passed as we walked.
‘If those guys of yours had worked out,’ Salman continued, ‘I wouldn’t have put Farid with you. And I’m damn glad that I did put him with you. He’s a much happier guy now. He’s a much more relaxed kind of guy. He likes you, Lin.’
‘I like him, too,’ I replied quickly, smiling through my frown. And it was true. I did like Farid, and I was glad that we’d become close friends.
Farid, the shy but capable youngster I’d met on my first visit to Khader’s mafia council more than three years before, had toughened up to a hard, fearless, angry man whose sense of loyalty assumed the full measure of his young life. When Johnny Cigar and Kishore rejected my offers of work, Salman had put Farid and the Goan, Andrew Ferreira, to work with me. Andrew had been genial and talkative, but he’d moved only reluctantly from the company of his young gangster friends, and we hadn’t become close. Farid, however, had spent most days and many nights with me, and we liked and understood one another.
‘He was right on the edge, I think, when Khader d
ied and we had to clean out Ghani’s guys’ Salman confided. ‘It got pretty rough—you remember—we all did some … unusual things. But Farid was wild. He was starting to worry me. You have to get heavy sometimes in our business. That’s just how it is. But you got a problem on your hands when you start to enjoy it, na? I had to talk to him. “Farid”, I said to him, “cutting people up should not be the first option. It should be a long way down the list. It shouldn’t even be on the same page as the first option.” But he went right on doing it. Then I put him with you. And now, after six months, he’s a much calmer guy. It worked out well, yaar. I think I’ll just have to put all the really bad and mad motherfuckers with you, Lin, to straighten them out.’
‘He blamed himself for not being there when Khader died,’ I said as we rounded the curve of the domed Jehangir Art Gallery. Seeing a small gap in the traffic, we jogged across the roundabout at Regal Circle junction, dodging and weaving between the cars.
‘We all did,’ Salman muttered softly when we took up a position outside the Regal Cinema.
It was a tiny phrase, three small words, and it said nothing new, nothing more than I already knew to be true. Yet that little phrase thundered in my heart, and an avalanche of grieving began to tremble, shift, and slide. For almost a year, and until that very moment, my anger at Khaderbhai had shielded me from the pain of grieving for him. Others had crumbled and withered and raged in their shock and sorrow at his death. I’d been so angry with him that my share of grief was still up there, beneath the smothering snow, in those mountains where he’d died. I’d felt a sense of loss. I’d suffered almost from the start. And I didn’t hate the Khan—I’d loved him, always, and still loved him in that instant as we stood outside the cinema, waiting for our friends. But I hadn’t really grieved for him—not in the way that I’d grieved for Prabaker or even Abdullah. Somehow, Salman’s casual remark that we all blamed ourselves for not being with Khader when he died had shaken my frozen sorrowing free, and the slow, inexorable snowslip of its heartache began, right there and then.
‘We must be a bit early,’ Salman observed cheerily, and I flinched as I forced myself into the moment with him.
‘Yeah.’
‘They’re coming by car, we’re walking, and still we beat them here.’
‘It’s a good walk. At night it’s even better. I do that walk a lot: the Causeway to V.T. and back. It’s one of my favourite walks in the whole city.’
Salman looked at me, a smile on his lips and a frown exaggerating the slightly crooked tilt of his almond-brown eyes.
‘You really love this place, don’t you?’ he asked.
‘Sure I do,’ I replied, a little defensively. ‘That doesn’t mean I like everything about it. There’s a lot that I don’t like. But I do love the place. I love Bombay, and I think I always will.’
He grinned and looked away down the street. I struggled to hold the set of my features, to keep my expression calm and even. But it was too late. The heartgrief had already begun.
I know now what was happening to me, what was overwhelming me, what was about to consume and almost destroy me. Didier had even given me a name for it—assassin grief, he’d once called it: the kind of grief that lies in wait and attacks from ambush, with no warning and no mercy. I know now that assassin grief can hide for years and then strike suddenly, on the happiest day, without discernible reason or exegesis. But on that day, six months after my work in the passport factory had begun, and almost a year after Khader’s death, I couldn’t understand the dark and trembling mood that was moving in me, swelling to the sorrow I’d too long denied. I couldn’t understand it, so I tried to fight it as a man fights pain or despair. But you can’t bite down on assassin grief, and will it away. The enemy stalks you, step for step, and knows your every move before you make it. The enemy is your own grieving heart and, when it strikes, it can’t miss.
Salman turned to me once more, his amber eyes gleaming in the cast of his thoughts.
‘That time, when we had the war to get rid of Ghani’s guys, Farid was trying to be a new Abdullah. He loved him, you know. He loved him like a brother. And I think he was trying to be Abdullah. I think he got the idea that we needed a new Abdullah to win the war for us. But it doesn’t work, does it? I tried to tell him that. I tell that to all the young guys—especially the ones who try to be like me. You can only ever be yourself. The more you try to be like someone else, the more you find yourself standing in the way. Hey, here’s the guys!’
A white Ambassador stopped in front of us. Farid, Sanjay, Andrew Ferreira, and a tough, forty-year-old Bombay Muslim named Amir got out of the car and joined us. We shook hands as the car drove off.
‘Let’s wait a minute, guys, while Faisal parks the car,’ Sanjay suggested.
It was true that Faisal, who ran the protection racket with Amir, was parking the car. It was also true, and more to the point, that Sanjay was enjoying himself, standing in our conspicuous group on a warm afternoon and sparking furtive but fervent looks from most of the girls passing us on the busy street. We were goondas, gangsters, and almost everyone knew it. Our clothes were new and expensive and cut to the edge of fashion. We were all fit. We were all confident. We were all armed and dangerous.
Faisal loped around the corner and wagged his head to signal that the car was safely parked. We joined him, and walked the three blocks to the Taj Mahal Hotel in a single, wide line. The route from Regal Circle to the Taj Hotel crossed spacious, open, crowded squares. We held our line easily as the crowds parted for us. Heads turned as we passed, and whispers whirled in our wake.
We climbed the white marble steps at the Taj, and walked through to the Shamiana Restaurant on the ground floor. Two waiters settled our group at a long, reserved table near a tall window with a courtyard view. I sat at one end of the table, nearest to the exit. The strange and overpoweringly dark mood that had stirred in me with Salman’s little phrase grew stronger by the minute. I wanted to be free to leave at any moment, without upsetting the balance of the group. The waiters greeted me with broad smiles, calling me gao-alay, or countryman, the Indian equivalent of the Italian paisano. They knew me well—the gora who spoke Marathi—and we chatted for a while in the village dialect I’d learned in Sunder more than four years before.
Food arrived, and the men ate with good appetite. I, too, was hungry, but I couldn’t eat, and I just pushed at the food to make a polite show. I drank two cups of black coffee and tried to bring my troubled, storming mind into the run of conversations. Amir was describing the movie he’d seen the night before—a Hindi gangster picture, in which the gangsters were vicious thugs and the hero conquered them all, unarmed and alone. He described every fight sequence in detail, and the men hooted with laughter. Amir was a scarred, blunt-headed man with thick, tangled eyebrows and a moustache that rode the cresting wave of his full upper lip like the wide prow of a Kashmiri houseboat. He loved to laugh and tell stories, and his self-assured, sonorous voice compelled attention.
Amir’s constant companion, Faisal, had been a champion boxer in the youth league. On his nineteenth birthday, after a year of tough professional bouts, he’d discovered that his manager had embezzled and squandered all the money he’d been entrusted to save from his boxers’ fights. Faisal had tracked the manager down. When he’d found him, he hit him and then kept on hitting him until the man was dead. He’d served eight years in prison for the crime, and was banned from boxing for life. In prison, the naive, hot-tempered teenager had become a calculating, cold-tempered young man. One of Khaderbhai’s talent scouts had recruited him in the prison, and he’d served his apprenticeship to the mafia through the last three years of his sentence. During the four years since his release, Faisal had worked as Amir’s principal strong-arm man in the burgeoning protection racket. He was quick, ruthless, and driven to succeed at whatever task was set for him. His flattened, broken nose, and a neat scar that dissected his left eyebrow gave him a fearsome appearance, and toughened what might otherwise
have been a too-regular and too-handsome face.
They were the new blood, the new mafia dons, the new lords of the city: Sanjay, the efficient killer with the movie-star looks; Andrew, the genial Goan who dreamed of taking his seat on the mafia council; Amir, the grizzled veteran with the story-teller’s gift; Faisal, the cold-hearted enforcer who only asked one question—Finger, arm, leg, or neck?—when he was given an assignment; Farid, known as the Fixer, who solved problems with fire and fear, and who’d raised six much younger brothers and sisters, alone, when his parents died in a cholera-infested slum; and Salman, the quiet one, the humble one, the natural leader, who controlled the lives of hundreds in the little empire that he’d inherited and held by force.
And they were my friends. More than friends, they were my brothers in their brotherhood of crime. We were bonded to one another in blood—not all of it other people’s—and boundless obligation. If I needed them, no matter what I’d done, no matter what I wanted them to do, they would come. If they needed me, I was there, without cavil or regret.
They knew they could count on me. They knew that when Khader had asked me to join him in his war I’d gone with him, and I’d put my life on the line. I knew I could count on them. When I’d needed him, Abdullah had been there to help me deal with Maurizio’s body. It’s a significant test, asking someone to help you dispose of a murdered man’s body. Not many pass it. Every man at the table had passed that test; some of them more than once. They were a solid crew, to use the Australian prison slang. They were the perfect crew for me, an outlaw with a price on my head. I’d never felt so safe—not even with Khaderbhai’s protection—and I never should’ve felt alone.
But I was alone, and for two reasons. The mafia was theirs, not mine. For them, the organisation always came first. But I was loyal to the men, not the mafia; to the brothers, not the brotherhood. I worked for the mafia, but I didn’t join it. I’m not a joiner. I never found a club or clan or idea that was more important to me than the men and women who believed in it.
Shantaram: A Novel Page 102
