‘What’s up, Kesh?’ I asked, shaking his hand.
‘No problem, baba,’ he grinned, raising his eyes to the sky for a moment. ‘Ooperwale.’
The word he’d used was a reference to God, and one of my favourites. More often used in the singular, Ooperwala, it could be roughly translated as The Person Upstairs. Used in the plural, the term meant The People Upstairs.
‘Ooperwale,’ I replied. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Okay,’ he said, becoming serious as he launched into his iterations of the latest prices and rates.
I only needed the gold and currency exchange rates, but I let Kesh run through the whole of his repertoire. I liked him, and admired the subtle genius that allowed him to hold hundreds of facts in his current memory, adjusting them as often as three times in a single day, without a decimal point of error.
Most gangsters held fringe dwellers like Kesh in contempt. I never understood it. The small-scale street outlaws were harmless people, surviving through cleverness and adapted skills in a hostile environment that sometimes didn’t treat them well. I also had a soft spot for independent outlaws: men and women who refused to join the ranks of law-abiding citizens, no less resolutely than they rejected the violence of hardcore criminals.
When his recitation ended, I paid him twice the going rate for a Memory Man’s mantra, and he gave me a smile like sunlight streaming off the sea.
Inside the restaurant I sat with my back to a wall. I had a clear view of the street. A waiter nudged my shoulder with his belly. I ordered a vegetable sandwich and a coffee.
I didn’t have to signal anyone: I only had to wait. I knew that the information network of the street was already at work. One or more of the endlessly drifting street guys roaming the tourist beat would’ve seen me park my motorcycle, talk with Kesh, and enter the restaurant. Word would already be spreading through neighbouring lanes and dens: Linbaba is sitting at Trafalgar.
Before I finished my sandwich, the first contact arrived. It was Billy Bhasu. Hesitating close to my table, he glanced around nervously, and spoke very softly.
‘Hello, Mr Lin. My name is Billy Bhasu. I am working with Dennis, the Sleeping Baba. You might be remembering me?’
‘Sit down. You’re making the boss nervous.’
He glanced at the restaurant boss, leaning on the counter, his hand playing in the trays of change as if they were pebbles in a stream. Billy Bhasu sat down.
A waiter appeared immediately, slapping a grimy vinyl menu booklet in front of Billy. The rules in all the drop-off bars and restaurants were simple: no fighting or disturbances that might upset the civilians, and everyone buys lunch, whether they eat it or not.
I ordered tea and a takeaway sandwich parcel for Billy. When the waiter left us, Billy came to the point quickly.
‘I have a chain,’ he said, reaching into his pocket. ‘Solid gold it is, with a picture locket attached.’
He put the gold locket and chain on the table. I picked it up, running my thumb over the links of the chain, and then prised open the locket. I found two photographs: a young man and a young woman, facing each other and smiling happily across the hinge of their little world: a world that had found its way into my hand.
‘I don’t take stolen goods, Billy.’
‘What stolen, baba?’ he demanded indignantly. ‘This was a trade, a fair trade, the locket for dope. And good quality. Almost fifty per cent pure. All square and fair!’
I looked at the photographs of the young couple again. They were northern Europeans, bright-eyed and healthy; from the kind of social background that put perfect teeth in untroubled smiles. They looked about twenty years old.
‘How much do you want?’
‘Oh, baba,’ he grinned, beginning the Indian bargaining ritual. ‘That is for you to say, not me.’
‘I’ll give you five dollars American.’
‘But,’ he spluttered, ‘it’s much too less, for such a piece!’
‘You said it was for me to say.’
‘Yes, baba, but it is for you to say a fair price!’
‘I’ll give you sixty per cent of the gram weight price. Do you agree it’s eighteen carat gold?
‘It’s . . . it’s maybe twenty-two carats, baba. No?’
‘It’s eighteen. Sixty per cent. Or try your luck with the Marwaris, at Zaveri Bazaar.’
‘Oh, no, baba!’ he said quickly. ‘If I deal with the Marwaris, I’ll end up owing them money. They’re too smart. I’d rather deal with you. No offence.’
‘None taken. Fifty per cent.’
‘Done at sixty.’
I called the waiter, passed him the locket and chain, and told him to ask the manager to weigh it on his jewellery scale. The waiter slouched over to a desk, and handed over the chain.
Using a fine scale that he kept under the counter, the manager weighed the locket and chain, wrote the gram weight on a piece of paper, and handed them back to the waiter.
The waiter passed the paper to me, hefted the chain and locket in the bowl of his hand for a moment as if checking the accuracy of the scale, and then dropped them into my upturned palm.
I glanced at the figure on the paper, and then showed it to Billy Bhasu. He nodded. Using Kesh’s figure for the current rate, I rounded the amount to the nearest ten rupees, and wrote the figure on the same sheet of paper, showing it to Billy. He nodded again.
‘You know, baba,’ he said, as he put away the money, ‘I saw that Naveen Adair before, that Anglo detective fellow. He gave me a message, if I see you in any place today.’
‘As it happens, I’m in any place right now.’
‘Yes,’ he replied earnestly. ‘So, I can give you his message.’
There was a pause.
‘Would you like another sandwich parcel, Billy?’
‘Actually, yes, Linbaba. Jamal is waiting outside.’
I waved for another parcel.
‘Are we good for the message, now?’
‘Oh, yes. Naveen said, let me be exactly sure, Tell Linbaba, if you see him, that I have nothing new about the man in the suit.’
‘That’s it? That’s the message?’
‘Yes, baba. It’s important, no?’
‘Critical. Let me ask you something, Billy.’
‘Yes, baba?’
‘If I didn’t buy your chain, were you gonna give me the message?’
‘Of course, baba,’ he grinned, ‘but for more than just two sandwiches.’
The sandwich parcels arrived. Billy Bhasu put his hand on them.
‘So . . . so now . . . I’ll take my leave?’
‘Sure.’
When he left the restaurant, I looked again at the photographs of the smiling young couple. I closed the locket, and dropped it into my shirt pocket.
For the next four hours, I worked my way through the other six drop-off restaurants and bars in my district, spending about forty minutes in each one.
It was an average day. I bought a passport, three pieces of jewellery, seven hundred and fifty US dollars in cash, an assortment of other currencies, and a fine watch.
That last item, in the last trade of the day, in the last of the bars, involved me in an angry dispute with two of the street guys.
The man who brought the watch to me, Deepak, settled the price quickly. It was a price far below the actual value of the watch, but far more than he could expect to receive from the professional buyers in the Fort area.
At the moment of the handover, a second man, Ishtiaq, entered the bar, shouting for a share of the money. Ishtiaq’s strategy was simple: make a big enough fuss to force a concession from Deepak, before the latter had the chance to slip away in the crowded street.
In other circumstances I’d have taken my money back, shoved both men out of the bar, and forgotten about them. My long-standing relationship with t
he bar’s owner was more important than any one transaction.
But when I’d put the watch to my ear, I’d heard the reassuring trip-click movement, twitching toward its rundown cycle: the mechanical heart beating its rhythm reward for the daily winding fidelity of its owner. It was, as it happened, my favourite watch.
Ignoring my instincts, I tried to placate Ishtiaq. The momentary weakness ignited impudence, and he shouted all the harder. Diners at other tables began to stare at us, and it wasn’t a big place.
Speaking quickly, I soothed Ishtiaq, pulled some money from my pocket and paid him off. He snatched at the notes, snarled at Deepak, and left the bar. Deepak gave me an apologetic shrug, and slipped out onto the street.
I slid the metal bracelet of the watch over my hand, onto my wrist. I snapped the catch shut. It was a perfect fit. Then I looked up to see the manager and his waiters staring at me. The short story written in their eyes was clear: I’d lost face. Men in my position didn’t placate street touts like Ishtiaq.
I glanced again at the watch on my wrist. My greed had weakened me. Greed is human Kryptonite, Karla once said to me, as she pocketed all of the commission we’d just made together on a deal.
I needed to work out, and swung the bike through traffic, heading for the mafia boxing gym at Ballard Pier.
The manager of the gym, Hussein, was a veteran gangster who’d lost an arm to a machete blow in a battle with another gang. His long, scarred face found its way into a biblical beard that rested on the prodigious mound of his chest. He was brave, kind, funny, tough, and a match for any of the young gangsters who trained at the gym. Every time I looked into his laughing, dangerous eyes I wondered what he and Khaderbhai must’ve been like: the young fighters who created a gang that became a mafia Company.
Let my enemy see the tiger, they used to say, before he dies.
There was no doubt that Hussein and Khaderbhai had shown the tiger many times, as they’d prowled the city, young and fearless, all those years before. And something of that striped menace lingered in the burnt-clay eyes of the gym master.
‘Wah, wah, Linbaba,’ he said, as I entered the gym. ‘Salaam aleikum.’
‘Wa aleikum salaam, One Hussein.’
Because another Hussein joined Khaderbhai in those early years, and went on to hold a position on the Council, they were sometimes known as One Hussein and Two Hussein, for the number of arms they possessed.
‘Kya hal hain?’ How are you going?
‘Busier than a one-armed man in a bar fight,’ I replied in Hindi.
It was an old joke between us, but he laughed every time.
‘How are you, One Husseinbhai?’
‘Still swinging the punches, Linbaba. If you keep punching, you stay hard. If you stop the windmill, there’s no flour.’
‘You got that right.’
‘Are you training full session, Lin?’
‘No, One Husseinbhai, just loading the guns.’
Loading the guns was gangster slang for a workout that pumped the biceps and triceps in the same session of supersets.
‘Damn good!’ he laughed. ‘Keep the guns loaded, yaar. You know the two rules of combat. Make sure they know they’ve been hit, and –’
‘Make sure they stay hit,’ I finished for him.
‘Jarur!’
He handed me a towel as I walked past into the main training room. The gym, which at first had been a small, dirty space where large, dirty gangsters learned the arts of street fighting, had proven so popular with the young men of the Sanjay Company that it had been expanded to include the whole of the neighbouring warehouse.
In the foreground there was an assortment of weight-training equipment: benches, lat and rowing machines, incline and decline presses, squat bars, chin-up and dip bars, and stacks of heavy plates and dumbbells. Beyond that area, lined with mirrors, was the blood-stained boxing ring.
Further into the newly created space was a wrestling and judo mat. Lining the far wall were heavy body bags and suspended speedballs. In the corner leading back toward the entrance was a corridor, two men wide, formed with vinyl-padded walls. The corridor was the training space for knife fighting.
It was hot in the gym. Grunts, moans and shouts of pain pierced humid air that was sweating adrenaline and that high, scrape-bone smell of testosterone.
I’ve spent a large part of my life in the company of men. Ten years of my life in prisons, seven years in gangs, twenty years in gyms, karate schools, boxing clubs, rugby teams, motorcycle groups, and all my growing years in a boys’ school: more than half of my life in exclusively male societies. And I’ve always felt comfortable there. It’s a simple world. You only need one key to every locked heart: confidence.
Nodding to the other young men in the weight-training area, I took the long knife-scabbards from their tucks in the back of my jeans, and folded them with my money, keys, the watch and my shirt on a wide wooden stool.
Strapping on a thick leather weight belt, I slapped the towel on an empty bench, and began my alternate sets of reclining tricep extensions and standing bicep curls. After thirty minutes, my arms were at the peak of their pump. I collected my things, and made my way to the knife-training corridor.
In those years before every handbag thief carried a gun, the techniques of knife fighting were a serious business. The masters who taught their knife skills were cult heroes for young gangsters, and treated with as much deference as members of the Sanjay Council themselves.
Hathoda, the man who’d taught me for two years, had also taught Ishmeet, the leader of the Cycle Killers, who’d passed on the skills to his own men. The knife master was just leaving the corridor with a young street fighter named Tricky as I approached.
They both greeted me with smiles and warm handshakes. The young gangster, exhausted but happy, excused himself quickly, and headed for the shower.
‘A good kid,’ Hathoda said in Hindi, as we watched him leave. ‘And a natural with the knife, may he never use it in shame.’
The last phrase was a kind of incantation that Hathoda taught his students. I repeated it instinctively, as we all did, in the plural.
‘May we never use it in shame.’
Hathoda was a Sikh, from the holy city of Amritsar. As a young man, he’d fallen in with a tough crowd. Eventually, he’d abandoned his studies, and spent almost all of his time with the local gang. When a violent robbery led to conflict with community leaders, Hathoda’s family disowned him. As part of the price of peace, his gang had been compelled to cast him out as well.
Alone and penniless, he made his way to Bombay, and was recruited by Khaderbhai. He apprenticed the young Sikh to Ganeshbhai, the last of the master knife fighters, who’d started with Khaderbhai in the early 1960s.
Hathoda never left the master’s side, and through years of study became a master himself. He was, in fact, the last knife teacher in South Bombay, but none of us knew that then, in those years before the glamour of the gun.
He was a tall man, something of a disadvantage for a knife fighter, with a thick mane of oiled hair coiled into a permanent topknot. His almond-shaped eyes, the same Punjabi eyes that with a single, smouldering stare, had seduced travellers to India for centuries, glowed with fearlessness and honour.
His name, the one that everyone in South Bombay knew him by, Hathoda, meant Hammer in Hindi.
‘So, Lin, you want to practise with me? I was just leaving, but I’m happy to stay for another session, if your reflexes are up to it?’
‘I don’t want to put you out, master-ji,’ I demurred.
‘It’s no trouble,’ he insisted. ‘I’ll just drink water, and we’ll begin.’
‘I’ll train with him,’ a voice from behind me said, speaking in Hindi. ‘The gora can work out with me.’
It was Andrew DaSilva, the young Goan member of the Sanjay Company Council. His use of the
term gora, meaning white man, though very common in Bombay, was insulting in the context. He knew it, of course, and leered at me, his mouth open and his lower jaw thrust out.
It was also a strange thing to say. Andrew was very fair-skinned, his part-Portuguese ancestry evident in his reddish-brown hair and honey-coloured eyes. Because I spent so much time riding my motorcycle in the sunlight, without a helmet, my face and arms were darker than his.
‘That is,’ Andrew added, when I didn’t respond, ‘if the gora isn’t afraid that I might embarrass him.’
It was the right moment, on the wrong day.
‘What level do you want?’ I asked, returning his stare.
‘Level four,’ Andrew said, his leer widening.
‘Four it is,’ I agreed.
All training in the knife-fighting arts was done with hammer handles: the reason for Hathoda’s enduring nickname. The wooden handles, without their hammerheads, approximated the hilt and heft of a knife, and could be used for practice, without causing the grievous injuries of real knives.
Level one used the blunt end of a basic hammer handle. Level four training used handles shaved to points, sharp enough to draw blood.
Training bouts were usually conducted in five one-minute rounds, with a thirty-second recovery period between them. Stripped down to jeans and bare chests, we entered the training corridor. Hathoda, standing in the entrance to referee the session, handed us one sharpened handle each.
The space was tight, with only a few centimetres of movement possible to left or right. The aim was to teach men how to fight in close quarters, surrounded by enemies. The end of the padded corridor was blocked off: the way in, was the only way out.
Andrew held his sharpened handle in the underhand grip, as if he was holding the hilt of a sword. I held mine with the blade downward, and adopted a boxer’s stance. Hathoda nodded to check that we were ready, glanced at the stopwatch hanging around his neck, and gave the signal.
‘Begin!’
Andrew rushed at me, trying for a surprise early strike. It was an easy sidestep. He stumbled past me, and I gave him a shove that sent him into Hathoda at the open end of the corridor.
The Mountain Shadow Page 22
