The Mountain Shadow

‘You think you’re so smart,’ I said, pulling the lawyer’s black jacket around my blood-stained shirt.

‘We’re going to get your bike,’ she said. ‘She’s still on Mohammed Ali Road, and you care more about her than you do about getting cleaned up.’

She was so smart, and reminded me from time to time on the ride back to the Amritsar hotel. My happily rescued bike hummed machine mantras all the way home.

When we tumbled into her rooms, Karla freshened up, and left the bathroom for me.

I emptied my pockets onto the wide porcelain bench beneath the mirror. The money in my pockets was stained with blood. My keys were red, and the coins I spilled on the bench were discoloured, as if having been in a wishing fountain too long.

I put the knives and scabbards on the bench, dropped the lawyer’s suit jacket on the floor, and let the bloody shirt slide off my just as bloody T-shirt.

As I tossed it away, I noticed the card that Dev had given me. I picked it up, and placed it on the bench. I looked into the mirror for the first time, meeting myself like a stranger in a meadow.

I looked away from my own stare, and tried to forget what I couldn’t stop thinking.

The T-shirt was a gift from Karla. One of her artist protégées had made it, copying the knife-work of an artist known for biting the canvas that feeds him.

There were slashes, rips and tears all over the front. Karla liked it, I think, because she liked the artist who made it. I liked it, because it was incomplete, and unique.

I pulled it off carefully, hoping to soak the blood from it, but when I looked into the mirror, I let it fall into the sink.

The T-shirt had left a mark in blood on my chest. It was a triangle, upside down, with star-shapes around it. I looked at the card that Dev had given me. It was almost the same design.

India.

I let the card fall from my fingers, and stared into what I’d let myself become. I looked at the design on my chest. I asked the question we all ask sooner or later, if we stay in India long enough.

What do you want from me, India? What do you want from me, India? What do you want from me?

My heart was breaking on a wheel of coincidence, each foolish accident more significant than the next. If you look at it with a truthful heart, the sadhu said when he gave me the card. Wise, caring choices.

I escaped from a prison, where I had no choice, and cut my life down to a single choice, everywhere, with everyone but Karla: stay, or go.

What do you want from me, India?

What did the blood-design mean? If it was a message, written in another man’s blood, was it a warning? Or was it one of those affirmations that Idriss talked about? Was I going mad, asking the question, and searching for a significance that couldn’t exist?

I stumbled into the shower, watching red water run into the drain. The water ran clean at last, and I turned it off, but leaned against the wall, my palms flat against the tiles, my head down.

Was it a message? I heard myself asking without asking. A message in blood on my chest?

My knives clattered off the bench onto the tiled floor, startling me. I stepped out of the shower to pick up the knives, and slipped on the wet floor. Clutching at the knives as I steadied myself, I cut the inside of my hand.

I put the knives down, and cut myself again. I hadn’t cut myself with those knives in a year of practice. Blood ran into the basin, spilling onto the card I’d dropped. I scooped the card out of the basin, and dried it off.

I ran my hand under the cold tap, and used a towel to press the cuts closed. I cleaned my knives and put them away safely. And I stared at the card, and into the mirror, for quite a while.

I found Karla on the balcony, a thin blue robe over her shoulders. I wanted to see her like that every day, for the rest of my life, but I had to go out. I had something to do.

‘We gotta go out again,’ I said. ‘I’ve got something I have to do.’

‘A mystery! Hey, speaking of, is that a bandage on your hand?’

‘It’s nothing,’ I said. ‘Are you up for another ride? The sun will be up soon.’

‘I’ll be ready before you are,’ she said, slipping off the robe. ‘I hope you haven’t got anything scary in mind.’

‘No.’

‘It’s just finding Dev for Scorpio and Gemini, by taking Salar to the hospital, by being in the perfume bazaar, I think we’ve used up our quota of karmic coincidence, Shantaram. We shouldn’t push our luck.’

‘Nothing scary, I promise,’ I said. ‘Unsettling, maybe. But not scary.’

By the time we reached the shrine at Haji Ali, pearl banners announced the Sun, the sky-king, waking devotion. Early pilgrims, pleaders and penitents were on the path to the shrine. Beggars with no arms or legs, arranged in a ring by their attendants, chanted the names of Allah, as passers-by put coins or notes in their circle of necessity.