The Mountain Shadow

by Gregory David Roberts

  Karla clung to me. I put an arm around her waist, supporting her, and making her steps a little lighter.

  ‘Abdullah,’ she said softly, a few times.

  Abdullah.

  I remembered when she said it to make us laugh, on the steep climb. I remembered when Abdullah was a friend I could laugh with, and tease. We cried together as we walked.

  We reached the camp, and found students there, already bringing things back to function and faith.

  ‘Okay, this is too busy,’ Karla said, leaning against my shoulder. ‘Let’s hit the grassy knoll.’

  We headed for our makeshift tent on the knoll. I set her down there, unresisting, falling back onto a cushion as if into a dream, and within a minute she was asleep.

  We had a large water bottle in our kit of supplies. I soaked a towel, and cleaned the cuts and grazes that I’d already imagined, and then found, on her hands and feet.

  She moaned, from time to time, when cloth and water sent streaks into her sleeping mind, but didn’t wake.

  When the wounds on her hands and feet were clean, I rubbed them with turmeric oil. It was the medicine that everyone on the mountain used for cuts and scratches.

  When I finished massaging oil into her scraped and cut feet, she curled onto her side, and went deeper into that annihilating sleep.

  Abdullah. Abdullah.

  I took water into the forest, emptied myself, cleaned myself, scrubbed myself, and returned to find her sitting up, staring at our patch of sky.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m okay,’ she said. ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Cleaning up.’

  ‘After you cleaned the cuts on my hands and feet.’

  ‘I’m a sanitary guy.’

  I settled in beside her, and she settled in beside me.

  ‘He’s gone,’ she said, her face against my chest.

  ‘He’s gone,’ I echoed.

  Day raised the blue banner, and sounds of life shuddered from sleep: a shout, a laugh, bird cry brazen in the light, and doves trembling stories of love.

  She slept again, and I was calm with her, in the peace that only sleeping love creates, while thoughts of Abdullah, bullet wounds in the mind, kept bleeding.

  He was self-discipline, he was kindness unto blood for a friend, and he was ruthless enough to shame his own honour, which I was, too, in my own way.

  I slept, at last, riding a wave of consolation in words, words Idriss spoke, running through my mind again and again, sheep counting sheep.

  The mystery of love is what we will become, the phrase repeated. The mystery of love is what we will become. And the susurrus of syllables became the first gentle rain of the new monsoon, as we woke the next morning.

  Still wounded by the night we returned to the camp as heavy rain filled the sky with seas, purified in ascension and pouring from tree-shoulders, shaken in the wind.

  Rivulets played, making their own way through prior plans, and birds huddled on branches, not risking freedom’s flight. Plants that had been thin apostrophes became paragraphs, and vines that had slumbered like snakes in winter writhed insolent in vivid new green. Baptised by the sky, the world was born again, and hope washed a year’s dust and blood from the mountain.

  Part Fifteen

  Chapter Eighty-Five

  At the end of that first week of rain, after watching Silvano

  dance with students in a rare, sunny shower, and even Idriss shake a step or two, leaning on his long staff, Karla and I made our way down the mountain for the last time.

  We didn’t know that the steep path we took would vanish, in a year or so, erased by nature. We didn’t know that the mesa, and the caves, too, would be overgrown not long after Idriss and his students dismantled their camp and left for Varanasi.

  We didn’t know that it was the last time we’d ever see him. We were bubbling stories about him all the way down to the highway, unaware that he was already a ghost of philosophy, continuing in us through memories and ideas alone. We didn’t know that Idriss was already as lost to us in time as Abdullah.

  We raced a black cloud all the way back to the birth of the peninsula, at Metro, and parked the bike under the arch beneath the Amritsar hotel, just as a new storm hit.

  The tempest came at us from both sides of the archway, and we clung together, laughing as torrents scourged us. When the storm passed, we wiped the bike down together, Karla talking to her all the while like a psychic mechanic.

  We climbed the stairs to the lobby, and found it changed, after our weeks on the mountain. There was a glass refrigerator door, where Jaswant’s secret cabinet had been. He still had his swanky chair, but a swanky new glass and synthetic laminate counter replaced the wooden reception desk.

  Jaswant himself was in a swanky suit, complete with a tie.

  ‘What the hell, Jaswant?’ I said.

  ‘You’ve got to embrace change, man,’ Jaswant said. ‘Hello, Miss Karla. How lovely to see you again.’

  ‘Nice suit, Jaswant,’ she replied.

  ‘Thank you, Miss Karla. Do you think it fits okay?’

  ‘Very slimming. Come, say hi. But be careful, I’m dripping wet.’

  I was still frowning old doubt on the new desk.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

  ‘Your reception desk looks like an airline counter.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘An airline counter is something you go to because you have to, not because you want to.’

  ‘You can visit the old desk, any time you want. Oleg bought it. It’s in your rooms.’

  ‘Oleg! Damn, he’s good. He beat me to it.’

  ‘The new desk’s okay, Jaswant,’ Karla said. ‘Put a plant on the top shelf, and a nice big shell beside it, and maybe a blown-glass paperweight on the second shelf. It’ll soften things. I’ve got a shell you can borrow, if you like, and a paperweight that has a dandelion in it.’

  ‘Really? I’d love that.’

  ‘There’s no rum in here,’ I said, wiping condensation off the glass door of his new refrigerated cabinet. ‘And no cheese.’

  ‘There’s a new menu,’ Jaswant said, flipping a laminated card on the laminated airline counter.

  I didn’t look at it.

  ‘I liked the old menu.’

  ‘We didn’t have an old menu,’ Jaswant frowned.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘The Lost Love Bureau is bringing a lot of people through the door now, and I have to present the right corporate image. You’ve got to get with the times, Lin.’

  ‘I prefer it when the times get with me.’

  ‘Heads-up, Jaswant,’ Karla said. ‘I’ve been thinking of making some changes to my rooms.’

  ‘Changes?’ Jaswant asked, commerce tightening his new tie.

  Karla dismantled the Bedouin tent over the next few days, and we painted her rooms red, with black trim on the doors and doorways. Jaswant couldn’t complain, because he’d sold us the paint.

  She cut pictures from science magazines, and had them mounted in Bollywood-gold frames. She framed a feather, and a leaf, and a page from a book of poems that she found floating in the breeze in a quiet street:

  The Begging Rain

  Afterwards

  when I am not with you

  and you are alone enough

  to count the nails in your heart,

  studded like a treasure house door,

  when you arrange your silence

  in the vase of an hour,

  memories of our hands,

  and a spike of laughter

  colouring of my eyes,

  when you sit within the swell

  of heartbeat,

  the purple tide of daydream

  lapping at the shores of love,

  and your skin sings,
perfume-pierced,

  surrender to this thought of me:

  as mimosas long for monsoon,

  I long for you,

  as crimson cactus flowers long for Moon

  I long for you,

  and in my afterwards,

  when I am not with you,

  my head turns to the window of life

  and begs for rain.

  She put up large pictures of Petra Kelly and Ida Lupino, two of her heroes, in black baroque frames. She took her balcony plants inside, and filled every corner with them, leaving a few outside to rotate in sunlight.

  I think she tried to recreate the mountain forest in a hotel suite, and she did a good job. No matter where you sat in the main room you were looking at plants, or touched by them.

  And she installed a long, thin, stylised sculpture of a Trojan soldier, sculpted by Taj. I tried to put a plant in front of it, but she wouldn’t let me.

  ‘Really? It’s because of this guy that you left the gallery.’

  ‘He’s a good sculptor,’ Karla said, arranging the doomed soldier, ‘even if he’s not a terrific guy.’

  I used it as a hat stand. I had to buy a hat, but it was worth it. And little by little, things settled down to the semblance of peace that’s good enough, when you know enough about bad enough.

  Oleg’s green rooms, as my rooms became to match the couch, were popular. Karla and I went to a few of his parties, and had a good time. We laughed our way through several more parties, listening to the crazy conversations being shouted next door, transmitted through our wall in high infidelity.

  The young Russian had given up on Irina, the girl he called his Karlesha, and as the pictures he’d given to the waiters at Leopold’s faded and wrinkled, he stopped asking them if they’d seen her.

  ‘Why do you call Irina Karlesha,’ I asked him once.

  ‘I was in love with another girl named Irina,’ he replied, his perpetual smile fading in the half-light of reflection. ‘She was my first love. It was the first time I ever really fell down, inside, with love for a girl. We were both sixteen, and it was over within a year, but I still felt unfaithful to her, the first Irina, by using the name. Karlesha was a pet name that my father used for his sister, my aunt, and I always liked it.’

  ‘So . . . you didn’t feel unfaithful to Elena by going with Irina, but you felt unfaithful to your childhood sweetheart, by using the same name?’

  ‘You can only be unfaithful to someone you love,’ he said, frowning at my ignorance. ‘And I was never in love with Elena. I was in love with Irina, and I’m in love with Karlesha.’

  ‘And the girls who come and go in your green room?’

  ‘I’ve given up hope that I will see Karlesha again,’ he replied, looking away. ‘Didier’s T-shirt strategy didn’t work. Maybe it’s just not meant to be.’

  ‘Do you think love might spark with one of these girls?’

  ‘No,’ he answered quickly, brightening again. ‘I’m Russian. We R-people love very hard and very deeply. It’s why our writing and our music is so mad with passion.’

  He worked madly and passionately with Naveen, and they became an intuitive team. Didier worked with them on a case that drew publicity, when they reunited lost lovers and uncovered a slavery ring at the same time, leading to arrests and the break-up of the gang.

  The dangerous, debonair Frenchman devoted more time and seriousness to the Lost Love Bureau after that, and when he wasn’t holding court at Leopold’s, he was always with the young detectives, working on a shockingly urgent case.

  Vinson sold his drug racket to a competitor, and went back to the ashram with Rannveig. He sent a letter to Karla, after a few weeks of penitent floor scrubbing, saying that he didn’t really connect with the holy men at the ashram, but he got on well with the gardeners who grew their marijuana for them. He was happy, and he was working on a new business plan, with Rannveig.

  The Khaled Company didn’t fund any movies, and when a cop was killed in the south the truce between the police gang and the mafia gang was broken. Lightning Dilip worked triple shifts, as the prisoner count grew.

  A journalist was beaten on her doorstep for telling the truth, and a politician was beaten in his home for not telling a lie. Skirmishes between the police and the Khaled Company at court hearings were commonplace, and sometimes turned into riots. The Company blamed every prosecution on religious bias, and the cops blamed every punch on criminal intent.

  Khaled’s crown was slipping, and Abdullah wasn’t there to set it straight. The mystic-turned-mafia-don was losing control: his unnecessary violence was an insult to dishonest lawlessness, and everyone on Back Street wanted him to stop.

  We couldn’t stop Khaled, but we did stop Lightning Dilip. Karla said that she had a birthday present for me, and she wanted to give it to me early.

  ‘I don’t celebrate –’

  ‘Your birthday, I know. You wanna know what the present is, or not?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘The cop that we got on the fetish tapes,’ Karla said. ‘It’s Lightning Dilip.’

  Karma’s a hammer, not a feather, I remembered Karla saying.

  ‘Very interesting.’

  ‘Wanna know what his fetish was?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It involved a lot of sandwich wrap,’ Karla said.

  ‘Please, stop.’

  ‘Leaving only his insubordinates and his mouth exposed.’

  ‘Okay, enough.’

  ‘And in one part, the girl had to swat his privates with a flyswatter.’

  ‘Karla.’

  ‘A plastic one, of course, and then –’

  I put my fingers in my ears and said la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la until she stopped. It was childish, and beneath us both, and it worked.

  ‘Okay. Seeing as how it’s your birthday present, and we can make him do anything that we want,’ Karla asked, a wicked smile shining from insurgency, ‘what do you want to do with the Lightning Dilip film?’

  ‘I’m guessing you’ve already thought it through.’

  ‘I was thinking he should retire,’ Karla said. ‘Citing his remorse, for having mistreated prisoners. Demoted, disgraced, and without a pension.’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘Lightning Dilip has been digging his own grave for years, one kick at a time,’ Karla said. ‘I think he’s about ready to fall into it.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I’ll ask No Problem to deliver the message tomorrow, with a deadline for him to resign in twenty-four hours, or we go public. Sound right to you?’

  ‘No problem,’ I smiled, glad to be rid of him, and wondering who the next Lightning Dilip would be, and how much more we’d have to pay.

  ‘I was also thinking he should retire to a village somewhere, far away,’ Karla mused. ‘The one he came from might be nice. I’m pretty sure the people who watched him grow up will know what to do with him when he comes back.’

  ‘They’ll do it in an isolated spot, if they know him well.’

  Chapter Eighty-Six

  Gemini George was in a specially equipped room on the penthouse floor of the Mahesh hotel, watched over by Scorpio George and a prestige of doctors. The hotel had provided specialists through international contacts, and Scorpio hired medical expertise from the best hospitals in India.

  It seemed that it might be too late for Gemini, whose thin body failed and faded day by day, but he always greeted each new expert with a joke, and a smile.

  Scorpio made us suffer to see Gemini, because no-one else stayed still long enough to suffer listening to him.

  ‘I’ve been off my food,’ Scorpio said, as we stood outside the door to Gemini’s room. ‘And I’ve got a blister on my foot from pacing up and down, worrying about Gemini. And I deserve it, because it’s all my fault.’

  ‘It’
s okay,’ Karla said, taking his hand. ‘No-one blames you, Scorpio.’

  ‘But it is my fault. If I hadn’t been searching for that holy man, Gemini wouldn’t have got dengue fever, and we’d be okay, like before.’

  ‘No-one loves Gemini more than you do,’ Karla replied, as she opened the door. ‘He knows that.’

  Gemini was in a fully adjustable hospital bed, with tubes coming from too many places. A new plastic tent covered his bed. There were two nurses attending to him, checking data on machines arranged around the left side of the bed.

  He smiled at us as we approached. He looked bad. His thin body was the colour of a cut persimmon, and his face revealed the skull beneath the smile.

  ‘Hello, Karla,’ he said cheerily, although the sound of his voice was weak. ‘Hello, Lin, mate. So glad you’ve come.’

  ‘Damn good to see you again, man,’ I said, waving at him through the plastic tent.

  ‘How about a game?’ Karla purred. ‘Unless you think those meds you’re on stole your edge.’

  ‘Can’t play cards yet, although I’d love to. I’m in this plastic tent for a few weeks, you see, and they daren’t take it off. My immune system’s down, they say. I think the machines are just for show. They’re keeping me alive with rubber bands and kindness. Me organs are shuttin’ down, one by one, like people leaving a train, you know?’

  ‘Are you in pain, Gemini?’ Karla asked.

  He smiled, very slowly: sunlight burning shadows from a meadow.

  ‘I’m right as rain, love,’ he said. ‘They’ve got me on a drip. That’s when you know you’re dyin’, innit? When all the best drugs are suddenly legal, and you can have as much as you want. It’s the upside of the downside, so to speak.’

  ‘I’d still like to play a few hands,’ Karla smiled, ‘while we’re all on the upside.’

  ‘Like I said, it’s my immune system that’s up the spout. That’s why I got this tent. It’s actually you that could hurt me. Funny, innit?’

  ‘Gemini George, a quitter?’ Karla teased. ‘Of course you can play cards with us. We’ll deal you a hand, and I’ll hold the cards up for you without looking. You trust me, don’t you?’