‘What, ji, what?’
‘O Sweetness! God is in heaven today.’
‘God is in heaven daily, ji.’
‘But more today than yesterday. Reason I am still on His earth.’
‘O my mother!’ Sweetness knew what had happened. So did Veena. She wrapped herself around her father.
‘Came under fast, fast car. Raavi pulled me out of the jaws.’
‘Hare Krishna! Hare Krishna!’ Sweetness muttered in awe of Him who spares your life when you come under a fast, fast car. We went in the house in a procession led by Mr Swami. Everybody sat down wherever they could, on sofas, chairs or on the floor, Veena between her father and me. It made me rather self-conscious.
‘Had only put one foot outside the bank and whoosh. Lightning and thunder and your Gokul is under.’ My boss told the story of his ‘luckiest escape’. ‘Now you give us two teacups and one aspirin upisstair. I have work talk with Raavi.’
We had nothing to talk about. But I followed the boss upstairs. For the first time ever I did not want to leave his house. And I could do with a cup of tea. Veena brought two cups and sat in a chair in front of the sofa on which we were slumped - right in front of me, in fact. My boss finished his tea quickly and passed out like a light. What now?
Embarrassed, I stood up, ran down the stairs and walked out without caring if I found the hit men waiting. Nobody was. Thankful, I took the tube to Belsize Park. Tariq sat in his Volkswagen outside my house.
‘Both are mechanics,’ he told me: ‘The cunts who tried to run you over. I followed them. Reason I didn’t stop. Also I knew it was not serious – they were probably still trying to frighten you off.’
‘They frightened the shit out of us.’
‘You okay? Boss man too? Will find out this evening where one lives. The other tomorrow.’
Our Sherlock Holmes found out where one of the hit men lived half a mile from Number Two in a highrise block of council flats. It overlooked the busy Harrow Road on one side, on the other, the almost stagnant Grand Union Canal by Little Venice. In between there was an unkempt park, a primary school and an imposing church. Tariq had incredible luck. He saw an old Anglo-Indian woman come out of the block to feed the ducks. Our smart detective poured out his charm and got talking to her.
‘And believe it or not, she lives next door to the SOB, their balconies adjoin. “A nice man”, according to Mrs Sinclair.’
The nice man’s name was Dalton. Dalton did not go home after work. He went to the pub. He had a girlfriend, but he was messing around with other women too. He seldom brought any to his flat, but sometimes he stayed out all night. He had a little dog. He took it for walks along the canal early in the morning and before going to bed at night.
‘Our best bet is to catch him one night.’ I took part of the evening off work and went with Tariq and Walia to see. The canal was held by a long grass slope which gently reached out to a Victorian church and, a little further along, to a hideous bridge. It was a haunting place.
‘The place to catch a rat.’
But the rat failed to materialise. We came again very early next morning, me with a muffler around my mug, and in fact saw the man from a distance. But there were other people around, dog-walkers and fitness nutters. Mornings were out.
‘Has to be night,’ said my friends.
Not even during the most fantastic flights of fancy had I ever envisioned that one day I might be stalking someone with the express purpose of doing him bodily harm. The absurdity of it made me think of myself as less of a human than I generally thought I was. I did not hate anybody, not even Mr Muir. If anything, I was sorry for him. Jane’s father was a twisted man, hiring hoodlums to crush me as if I were vermin. I wished I had never set foot in the England I so adored, but had met Jane in some other land.
It was a crescent-moon night and supremely calm. What was I doing, lurking in the shadows of this silent church by this beautiful canal, waiting to do an ugly act on someone I did not hate?
Walia hadn’t come tonight. The elegant silver sliver up above us danced drunkenly on the ripples of the canal. Across the water was a row of newly built houses. How calm and serene it all was by contrast to the landscape of my heart.
We lay spread out under the young moon, cold, tense, hardly talking, counting the stars. There weren’t many, even though it was a clear night. Back home, where every night was clear, the sky became a dreamscape of a million glowing pinheads. It was a night for love, not revenge. I stood up. I wanted to go home.
‘Forget it, Tariq,’ I said, and just then saw a little dog silhouetted on the familiar pathway. I knew it was the dog. I began to throb with deep fear, like a soldier about to engage in mortal combat, for I knew the man could not be far behind. Tariq tried to pull me down so that we remained unseen. But I kept standing. Then I saw him, a moving shadow fifty or sixty yards behind the dog. The dog yelped and came running to me, sniffing and licking me. In the forlorn splendour of the ivory pale light, this was hauntingly surreal, this display of affection by the pet of a faceless enemy we were about to harm.
‘Daisy,’ shouted the shadow, and the dog ran back.
‘It’s him,’ Tariq hissed and pulled at me again.
‘No.’
‘What the fuck do you mean? If you won’t do it, I will do it on my own.’ Tariq was trembling with the adrenaline of a man about to commit murder.
‘No, you won’t,’ I hissed back. Crazed as I had become, I gripped Tariq’s hand with a strength of which I was hitherto unaware. For I had no doubt he would pounce on the moving shadow like a wild animal if I let go of his hand… Whistling, the man passed us, unaware how close he had been to GBH.
The morning mist merged with invisible rain. I knew it was raining because my hair was damp and there was a film of vapour on my face. Sometime later, the sun broke through and all became bright and beautiful. Not for long, though. For there followed what the BBC Weather Man would have called ‘thundery showers’. But it was all over within the hour. Looking through a back window, I saw a glory of a sight. A long white Rolls parked under a tree was completely covered with small pink leaves that had fallen off the branches. They looked like flower petals clinging sweetly to the bonnet, the roof, the windscreen; to every inch of the sleek and sexy-looking car. It was a car madly in love and about to get married. It was a car for Jane and me.
The autumn sun smiled again and the wet road glistened. Bustling Queensway looked happy. I too wanted to bustle and feel happy. But a pain pulsated in me. I longed to have her by my side, to hold her hand and feel her cheek against mine. I wished I could do something to make myself liked by her father, chant a mantra, wave a magic wand; something that would make him love me, not hate and haunt me. There was this desperate need in me, to be liked. But all he wanted was to see me removed from the face of the earth, have me eradicated.
Thinking about eradication brought an image to my mind which had not featured in my thinking for years. I was twelve and staying with an aunt in congested Old Delhi. One day I saw a bizarre sight – a number of men in white overalls wearing masks. They had long cylinders strapped to their back and they carried spray equipment – thin long pipes fitted with mouthpieces. A posse of them marched into my aunt’s street, men from Outer Space, and sprayed the street drains and pools of stagnant water and bushes with jets of some white stuff. I was told they were eradicating the malaria mosquitoes. Could the mosquitoes expect those men to love them?
The weather changed yet again. A dark cloud loomed over.
‘Coming from Naughty Hill,’ Lord Rameshwar said, pointing towards our neighbouring Notting Hill side. The cloud curled over half of the sky like the hood of a football stadium and just hung there menacingly. In the other half of the heavens the sun shone – a marvel. ‘English weather. Fifth or Sixth Wonder after Taj Mahal. What do you think?’ Lord Rameshwar is all smiles today, a Friday. Today, the country had a new Prime Minister, his lookalike Lord Alec Douglas Home, now Sir Alec Douglas Home be
cause he had to renounce his peerage to become Prime Minister.
‘What do I what, Sir Rameshwar.’
‘Think, you fool. Where is your brain?’
‘My brain? Where was it? It was in the Kilburn garage. It was in so many things. But mainly in her, my one-word mantra – Jane.
HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT
It was a red car this time. Two hefty fellows jumped out and shoved me in its front seat. Sitting one on my either side of me, they screeched up Haverstock Hill and turned right into Pond Street towards South End Green. I realised they were taking me to Hampstead Heath to do whatever they had to – cut me up or shoot me and dump my body in the bushes.
They stopped a few hundred yards up, at a secluded spot where I had once spent an hour with a girl called Pia, and dragged me out, leaving the car engine running. So it was going to be a quickie. They made me walk a hundred yards into the thick bushes. In the pitch dark, a blinding torchlight was flashed in my eyes.
‘Let’s see your pretty face, boyo,’ said dog-walker Dalton.
‘What do you want of me?’
‘You know what. Never to see the girl again. Never.’
‘How much is he paying you?’
‘Listen, mate. We have no quarrel with you. We’ll let you go if you give us your word that you’ll never see the girl again. Do we have your word?’
‘No, you don’t have my word.’
‘We can carve you up. Shoot you and dump you.’
‘Why don’t you?’
‘But before we do that, we want to do something to you to Show you we mean business.’ Dalton was doing all the talking.
‘Do what to me?’
‘Give you a new look. Empty this in your face.’ He pushed a six-inch clear-glass bottle under my nose. It was the sort I had seen in chemistry labs in schools. It had an unmistakable glass stopper. A label on it said Nitric Acid.
‘I would rather you shot me.’
‘Or maybe we’ll save it for the next time. So, make sure there ain’t no next time. It’s up to you, mate. But we’ll give you a parting gift anyway.’
The dog-walker brandished a rounders’ bat. The other thug relieved him of the bottle and grabbed and stretched out my arm. He then pulled up my jacket and shirt-sleeve like a nurse about to give me an injection.
‘You don’t mind if I borrow this.’ Dalton took the watch off my wrist and pocketed it. He raised the bat to break my arm.
‘You won’t get away with this, Dalton,’ I said. The bat stopped in mid-air in total surprise.
‘How the fuck does the black bastard know my name?’ Reflex action and my right foot went flying Bish-style, kicking the bat from Dalton’s hand. Then I ran. I ran downhill and as I did so, I alarmed someone hiding in the foliage. Pia’s ‘Peeping Tom’. He too ran downhill. Quick as a flash, I dived into a thick bush and saw my persecutors shoot past, chasing my saviour.
‘Get the cunt. We’ll teach him a lesson!’
The car engine was still running - what thoughtful crooks. I jumped in, reversed and zoomed off. In a street adjoining mine, I abandoned the car, wiping the steering wheel and the door handle carefully with a handkerchief. I then walked home to pick up a few things – I knew I wouldn’t be coming back here for some time. Having been made such utter fools of twice over in five minutes, what would the hoodlums do next? Would they tell their paymaster? And what about the paymaster himself? He would turn London upside down to catch me. Apart from the only refuge he wouldn’t think of – the Subcontinental.
Mr Muir was not a very intelligent man, or he wouldn’t have done what he did to me, or set these crooks upon me. I thought of him as basically thick, but dangerous also. It would never occur to him that I was hiding under his very nose, across the common party wall, the only thing we had in common besides his daughter whom we both loved in our vastly different ways and who was going to be all mine at last. We would be married as soon as she came back. Then.
I telephoned the Sub. Four individuals spoke to me one after the other. They all said the same thing – switch off the lights, stay put, pack a few things and wait. So I did. I then decided to take with me some of the books Jane had left, the very last time she came over. Among them, D.H. Lawrence’s Lady C’s Lover. As I tried to cram it in my shoulder-bag, out fell a slip of paper, a receipt – it was from a pawnbroker’s shop in Finchley Road for Jane’s gran’s gift of her earrings to her beloved granddaughter. A needle pierced my heart and for a moment I forgot the threat to my life.
I phoned Bish. I needed to see him. He said he would take a cab and be with me asap. I told him to go straight to the Sub. Then minutes Later, I heard Tariq blow his car horn three times in the side street by the narrow dustbin lane. Tariq had come with Walia. In no time at all we were outside the Sub, then inside it. Tariq took me in, as it were. Soon after, Bish turned up. He looked as if he had been hit for six. With the Melarams and some others, an Emergency Meeting took place about my future. Food appeared. But I couldn’t eat.
‘Eat, you fool. Tomorrow is another day,’ Tariq said. Tariq’s TV was on. It was all about the new Prime Minister. I thought of Lord Rameshwar and Jane and the little bird I had tried to save for her and then my Sub mates began to drift away.
‘Sleep, son, sleep. You’ve had some day,’ Tariq said. Oddly, he looked at Walia and Bish while saying that. ‘We are going for a drink at the Castle. Sorry, you can’t come because now you are to become invisible. Besides, you need sleep. So sleep and have sweet dreams. Of her,’ he added kindly, and then they left. I lay down on Tariq’s mattress which he had spread out on the floor for me for the night. I wanted to take stock of things, but I couldn’t. The late night news came on. I fell asleep half-way through with the TV and the light on.
I had to do this. I simply had to. I went to the Army surplus shop for a spot of shopping. I had hoped luck would be on my side for once. It was. Mr Muir sat alone at his desk, clearing it. He was finished for the day and was about to leave the office. ‘Not you again!’ He reached out for his briefcase. In a flash, I pulled out the imitation gun. ‘I wouldn’t if I were you. You see, Mr Muir, I am fully capable of shooting you in cold blood as you would, or have your hired assassins do. And to hell with the consequences.’
Mr Muir ground his jaws and stared at me hard with the obvious hope of overwhelming me with the threat in his eyes. But I was not to be overwhelmed. I stared back. I was playing the gamble of my life. I had to succeed - or I was finished.
‘Please stand up, Mr Muir.’ I noticed a sudden change in him - there was fear in the same steely eyes. He looked frightened and I experienced a twinge of perverse satisfaction.
Mr Muir stood up.
‘Don’t attempt anything which might make me pull the trigger. Now, move back and face the wall. Sir.’
Mr Muir obeyed. Hurriedly, I opened his briefcase with my left hand, opened it and drew out his gun. I took it in my right hand. It was loaded. I knew it would be. I emptied the magazine and threw away the bullets in the disused fireplace.
‘Kindly move,’ I said, picking up his key ring.
‘Where to?’
‘Out.’ I pressed the fake gun in his back.
‘Where are you taking me, damn you?’
‘Just move, Mr Muir.’
‘I’ll get you for this.’
‘I love your daughter. She loves me. We want to get married. But I have not come here to ask you for her hand. I have come here to make sure you do not get up to anything typical of you to spoil things. Move!’ I shoved the nozzle of the revolver hard in his spine. Mr Muir moved. I led him out and into his garage where he had given me hospitality for a night.
‘In there.’
‘You bastard.’
‘That’s what you think of me. What do you think of yourself?’
‘Shoot me, for God’s sake, and have done with it.’
‘No, sir. I want you to have a taste of your own medicine. If you were a normal human being, you would not have done to me what you
did. You are a sick man and you need a good dose of your own medicine.’ I pushed him into the second inner garage and closed the door on him.
As I moved back towards the main door I knew I couldn’t go through with it. I stopped, pulled his gun out and wiped it thoroughly with my handkerchief. I then went back and undid the bolt of the door. Throwing the gun on the cobbled floor, I hurried away to Tariq’s car, crying, ‘I can’t go through with it. I can’t, I can’t I can’t. Jane. Jane. Jane.’
I was sweating like a donkey. It was pitch dark. I tried to think where I was. There was light coming in from the window, but the window was not at the right place; nor did I know where the door was in relation to my head. Then there was light, blinding light. Bish, Tariq and Walia stood by the door and it all came back to me. I was staying in Tariq’s room at the Sun. He and the others were returning from the Castle. They didn’t look pissed, but wore wicked smiles.
‘We saw you were sleeping so I switched my light and the TV off. But you started shouting “Jane, Jane”.’
‘Was I? What time is it?’
‘Midnight.’
‘You been here since closing time?’
‘No, we went to get your watch back,’ Tariq said, dangling my wristwatch before me.
‘What?’
‘We done Dalton. Come to my room,’ Walia said.
‘Oh no, please no.’ They must have nabbed Dalton at the canal, beat him up and tied him up or something, then brought him here. But what for? I followed them to Walia’s room. Thank God it was empty. ‘Where is he then - Dalton?’
‘Doing breast-strokes,’ my friend said, emptying the contents of a plastic carrier bag – an imitation leather jacket, a striped shirt, a pair of jeans, underwear.
‘The personal effects of Mr Dalton,’ Bish said proudly.
Indian Magic Page 22
