The Mountain Shadow

‘Lisa, it’s cool. I’m fine. And I’m right here, with you.’

I kissed her face.

‘We better go,’ she said, as she frowned out of the kiss, ‘or we’ll miss him.’

‘Miss who?’

‘Miss whom, writer,’ she said. ‘You’ll find out, soon enough.’

She led me on the short walk from the seafront to the promenade that surrounded the nearby Air India building. The offices were closed, but the dim night-lights in the ground-floor reception area revealed the desks and doorways within.

When we reached a locked glass door, close to the back of the building, Lisa signalled me to wait. She glanced around nervously at the wedge of street we could see from the rear door, but there was no-one in sight.

‘So . . . what are we –’

‘We’re waiting,’ she interrupted me.

‘Waiting . . . for?’

‘For him.’

There was a flicker of light within the building. A security guard carrying a torch approached the door. He opened it with a key on a heavy chain, and held the door open for us. He urged us to enter quickly, and then locked the door again behind us.

‘This way,’ he said. ‘Follow me closely.’

Weaving his way along a series of corridors and between rows of silent desks, he brought us to a service elevator at the rear of the building.

‘Emergency lift,’ he said, smiling happily. ‘After stop at top, walk two floors to roof. My bonus, please.’

Lisa handed him a roll of notes. The guard saluted us, pressed the button to open the doors of the elevator, and waved us inside.

‘So, we’re gonna rob the Air India company,’ I said as we ascended in the lift. ‘And ten minutes ago, you were worried about a public kiss.’

‘I wasn’t worried,’ she laughed. ‘And we’re not here to rob the place. We’re here for a private party.’

The doors opened on a storage floor, with walls of filing cabinets and open shelves stacked with dusty folders.

‘Ah, the Kafka Room. Can’t wait to see the menu.’

‘Come on!’ Lisa said, rushing to the stairwell. ‘We have to hurry.’

Taking the steps two at a time, she led me up the stairs. At the top she hesitated, with her hand on the emergency release bar of the closed door.

‘I hope he remembered to leave this door unlocked,’ she said breathlessly, and then pushed on the bar.

We stepped through onto the roof of the building. It was a vast area, with several small metal huts on the periphery.

A huge structure towered ten metres over us, braced by heavy steel girders. It was the illuminated logo of the Air India company: a stylised archer, with a drawn bow, circled by a great disc.

The gigantic figure rose from a central support pylon, fixed to a rotating steel table, which was in turn supported by an array of girders and cables.

Like every other Mumbaikar, I’d seen the huge sign rotating above the Air India building hundreds of times, but standing so close to it, so high above the rolling sea, was a different truth.

‘Damn!’

‘We made it in time,’ Lisa grinned.

‘There’s a bad time for this? What a view!’

‘Wait,’ she said, staring up at the archer. ‘Wait.’

There was a whirring, grinding sound, as if a generator had started up nearby. The throb of an electric turbine began, building from a soft purr to a persistent whine. Then the click and stutter of a condenser, or several of them, chattered from somewhere very close, at the base of the immense sign.

Suddenly, in one burst of flickering crimson colour, the great circular logo lit up, bathing the whole space in blood-red light. Moments later, the crimson archer began to rotate on its pylon axis.

Lisa was dancing little excited steps, her arms wide.

‘Isn’t it great?’

She was laughing happily.

‘It’s brilliant. I love it.’

We watched the huge wheel of scarlet light turn for some time, and then shifted to face the open sea. The clouds had swollen together to fill the whole of heaven with black brooding. Distant lightning strikes forked through the darkness: ribs of cloud, rolling and shifting on the bed of night.

‘You like it?’ she asked, leaning in beside me as we watched the sky and sea.

‘I love it. How’d you come up with it?’

‘I was here a couple weeks ago with Rish, from the gallery. He was thinking about making a full-size copy of the Air India archer for a new Bombay exhibition, and he invited me to come take a look. When we got here, he changed his mind. But I liked it so much up here that I cultivated the guard, and bribed him to let us come up here, you and me.’

‘You cultivated the guard, huh?’

‘I’m a cultivated girl.’

For a time we gazed at the rejoicing sea, far below. It was a dangerous view, irresistible, but my thoughts slithered back to that afternoon, and Concannon.

‘Did you meet a tall Irishman named Concannon, a while back?’

She thought for a moment, one of my favourite frowns curling her upper lip.

‘Fergus? Is that his name?’

‘I only know him as Concannon,’ I said. ‘But you can’t miss this guy. Tall, heavyset, but athletic, kinda rangy, a boxer, with sandy hair and a hard eye. He said he met you, at an exhibition.’

‘Yeah, Fergus, that’s his name. I only spoke to him for a while. Why?’