The Mountain Shadow

Children visiting the shrine for the first time wore their best clothes: the boys in sweating suits, copied from movie stars, the girls with their hair pulled fiercely into decorated traps at the back of their heads.

I stopped us, halfway to the shrine, halfway to the sleeping saint.

‘This is it,’ I said.

‘You’re not going to pray today?’

‘Not . . . today,’ I said, looking left and right at the people passing by.

‘So, what are you going to do?’

There was a pause in the flow of people, and we were alone for a few seconds. I pulled my knives from their scabbards and threw them into the sea, one at a time.

Karla watched the knives whirl through the air. It was the best whirling I ever did, it seemed to me, before they whirled into vanishing sea.

We stood for a while, watching the waves.

‘What happened, Shantaram?’

‘I’m not sure.’

I handed her the card with the yantra design that Dev had given to me.

‘When I took my shirt off, that design was on my chest. It was almost exactly the same, painted on me in Salar’s blood.’

‘You think it’s a sign?’ she asked. ‘Is that it?’

‘I don’t know. I . . . I was asking myself that same question, and then I cut my hand on my knife. I just . . . I think I’m done with this. It’s weird. I’m not the religious type.’

‘But you are the spiritual type.’

‘I’m not. I’m really not, Karla.’

‘You are, and you just don’t know it. That’s one of the things I love most about you.’

We were silent again for a while, listening to the waves: the sound that wind makes, surfing through trees.

‘If you think I’m throwing my gun in there,’ she said, breaking the silence, ‘you’re crazy.’

‘Keep your gun,’ I laughed. ‘Me, I’m done. If I can’t fix it with my hands, from now on, then I probably deserve what’s coming. And anyway, you’ve got a gun, and we’re always together.’

She wanted the long way home, even though we were stamp-foot tired, and she got it.

When we’d ridden long enough with her new understanding of a slightly different me, we returned to the Amritsar, and showered off the last dust of doubt. I found her smoking a joint on the same balcony we’d left, an hour before, in the same blue robe.

‘You could’ve hit a fish on the head with one of those knives,’ she said. ‘When you threw them in the sea.’

‘Fish are like you, baby. They’re pretty quick.’

‘What you did before, with the knives. Did you mean it?’

‘I mean to try.’

‘Then I’m in it with you,’ she said, kissing my face. ‘All the way.’

‘Even if it takes us out of Bombay?’

‘Especially if it takes us out of Bombay.’

She drew the curtains to hide the day, and slipped off her robe to try out the mirror from Ahmed’s Old House of Style. They both looked good. She put some funk on her music system and funked at me, all mermaid arms and hips. I held her. She put her hands around my neck, and swayed in front of me.

‘Let’s go a little nuts,’ she said. ‘I think we deserve it.’

Chapter Ninety-One

Love and faith, like hope and justice, are constellations in the infinity of truth. And they always pull a crowd. So many excited coffee devotees crowded into the Love & Faith café on its opening night that Rannveig called and told us to come a little later, because love and faith alone couldn’t guarantee a place.

We found Didier at Leo’s, happily insulted by two waiters at the same time, and giving the service that he got. Leopold’s was sit-down jumping. People laughed at anything and shouted at nothing with happy determination. It looked like fun, but we had somewhere to go.

‘Just one drink,’ Didier pleaded. ‘Love & Faith has no alcohol. Have you ever heard of such a thing?’

‘One drink,’ Karla said, sitting beside him. ‘And not a mood-fluctuation more.’

‘Waiter!’ Didier called.

‘You think you’re the only customer who ever got thirsty in this place?’ Sweetie asked, flicking a rag at the table.

‘Bring alcohol, you fool!’ Didier snapped. ‘I have a curfew.’

‘And I have a life,’ Sweetie said, slouching away.

‘Gotta give you credit, Didier,’ I said. ‘You got things back to normal. I’ve never seen Sweetie surlier.’

‘What is credit,’ Didier preened, ‘but something you have to give back, with interest.’

‘Lin’s unarmed, Didier, and naked to the world,’ Karla said. ‘He threw his knives into the sea this morning.’

‘The sea will throw them back again,’ Didier said. ‘The sea can’t get over it that we crawled onto the land. Mark my words, Lin. The sea is a jealous woman, without the charming personality.’

A man approached our table carrying a parcel. It was Vikrant, the knife-maker, and for a second I felt a twinge of guilt that his superbly made instruments, my knives, were on the bottom of a shallow sea.

‘Hi, Karla,’ he said. ‘I’ve been looking for you, Lin. Your sword is finished.’

He unwrapped the calico parcel, revealing Khaderbhai’s sword. It had been repaired with gold rivets, and they’d been moulded into the eyes of two dragons, meeting at the tail.