The Mountain Shadow

When I returned, Ankit had refilled the drink, and there was a packet of sandwiches, some water, and two bottles of soft drink beside my backpack on the counter.

I gave him a small roll of money. It was about five hundred American.

‘No, I can’t take this,’ he said. ‘It’s too much.’

‘We may never see each other again, Ankit. Let’s not part fighting.’

He smiled, and put the money away.

‘The snacks will keep you going, and this might help, if things get . . . a little tense . . . with Blue Hijab.’

It was a dime of hashish, and a packet of cigarettes.

‘I should smoke hash, if things get tense with an armed, angry woman?’ I asked, accepting the gift.

‘No,’ he said. ‘She should.’

‘Blue Hijab smokes hash?’

‘Loves the stuff,’ Ankit said, packing the drinks and food into my backpack. ‘It’s like catnip. But save it, for as long as you can. She gets mean when it runs out.’

A car stopped hard outside. The horn sounded three times.

‘You should imagine that she’s Durga, the warrior goddess, mounted on a tiger, and behave accordingly.’

‘How’s that, exactly?’

‘Be respectful, devoted and afraid,’ Ankit said, wagging his head wickedly.

‘It’s been a pleasure, new-old friend. Goodbye.’

I turned at the door to see him smiling and waving. I looked back at the car to see Blue Hijab, jabbing a finger at me, the engine of the car revving.

We roared out of the driveway and onto the main road, heading south toward Colombo. She leaned forward in her seat, her arms taut and her knuckles white.

After ten minutes of listening to her teeth grinding the pepper of her temper, I decided to make conversation.

‘I met your husband, Mehmu.’

‘This is how you break a serene silence? With mention of my bloody husband?’

‘Serene? I’ve seen more serenity under interrogation.’

‘To hell with you,’ she said, but she relaxed against the seat, drained of rage. ‘I’ve been . . . tense. And I don’t want to get any tenser.’

I wanted to say something funny, but she had a gun.

She drove well. I studied her style for a while as she passed trucks, slowed for temporary barriers, and hit sharp corners. I love being driven by a driver I trust. It’s a rollercoaster, with fatal risk.

The windscreen was a bubble, moving through space and time. Tree shadows arched over the car as we passed, trying to comfort us as the forests ended and fenced houses became beads and baubles on another chain of civilisation.

‘I shot a man, yesterday,’ she said, after a while.

‘A friend or an enemy?’

‘Does it make a difference?’

‘Hell, yeah.’

‘He was an enemy.’

We drove in silence, for a while.

‘Did you kill him?’ I asked.

‘No.’

‘Could you have killed him?’

‘Yes.’

‘The mercy outweighs the shame,’ I said.

‘Fuck you,’ she said.

‘All that cursing isn’t exactly in line with Islam, is it?’

‘It’s in English, it doesn’t count, and I’m a Muslim communist,’ she said.

‘O . . . kay.’

She pulled the car into a roadside stop amid fields of flowers, sprung from sodden earth. She looked around, and turned the engine off.

‘Did Mehmu look well?’

‘He did.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, I like him. A lot, actually.’

She sobbed, suddenly, tears falling as freely as the raindrops that began to spatter the windows.

Just as quickly she recovered, dried her eyes, and began to open the bag of sandwiches.

She cried again, and couldn’t stop: something inside her was all of it, everything at once. I didn’t know what it was: I didn’t know her.

I saw the new-moon chips of nail polish near her cuticles, the bruise on her face, about the size of a man’s ring, the cuts on her own knuckles, the fragrance of fresh soap in her clothes, hand-washed in a hotel basin, the bag on the back seat, carrying essentials for a quick escape, and the quick escape she made every time her eyes detected that I might be looking into her, and not just at her.

But observation only took me to a tough, brave, devout girl on the run, who’s meticulous in her hygiene, but won’t clean the last coloured fragment of the girl she was from her fingernails. The why of her was still a mystery, because the why of anyone only comes with connection.

I felt helpless to console her. There were tissues in the bag. I handed them to her, one at a time, until the tears dried and the sobbing stopped, as the rain all around us stopped.

We got out and stood by the car. I tipped a stream of water from a bottle into her cupped hands, so that she could wash her face.

She stood there for a while, breathing air scented by white flowers, clinging to vines all around us.

We got back in the car, and I mixed a cigarette joint. She wouldn’t pass it back to me, so I mixed another. She wouldn’t give that back either, so I made a couple more cigarettes.

Minds floated free across fields of green velvet to memory’s greener pastures: that place, inside, where the soul is always a tourist. And I don’t know what memories danced for Blue Hijab, in those minutes, but for me it was Karla, turning and twirling, as she danced at the party. Karla.

‘I’m starving,’ Blue Hijab said. ‘And by the way –’