Looking at her there, in the Village in the Sky, watching her laugh, it shocked me to think that I’d deliberately avoided her for so many months. I was no less surprised by how tactile the girls were with her, how easily they reached out to stroke her hair or to take her hands in their own. I’d perceived her to be aloof and almost cold. In less than a minute, those women were more familiar with her than I’d dared to be in more than a year of friendship. I remembered the quick, impulsive kiss she’d given me, in my hut. I remembered the smell of cinnamon and jasmine in her hair, and the press of her lips, like sweet grapes swollen with the summer sun.
Tea arrived, and I took my glass to stand near one of the huge window openings that looked out over the slum. Far below, the tattered cloak of the ghetto spread outward from the construction site to the very edge of the sea. The narrow lanes, obscured by ragged overhangs, were only partially visible and seemed more like tunnels than streets. Smoke rose in drifts from cooking fires, and stuttered on a sluggish seaward breeze to disperse over a scattering of canoes that fished the muddy shore.
Inland from the slum there were a large number of tall apartment buildings, the expensive homes of the middle-rich. From my perch, I looked down at the fabulous gardens of palms and creepers on the tops of some, and the miniature slums that servants of the rich had built for themselves on the tops of others. Mould and mildew scarred every building, even the newest. I’d come to think of it as beautiful, that decline and decay, creeping across the face of the grandest designs: that stain of the end, spreading across every bright beginning in Bombay.
‘You’re right, it is a good view,’ Karla said quietly as she joined me.
‘I come up here at night, sometimes, when everyone’s asleep,’ I said, just as quietly. ‘It’s one of my favourite places to be alone.’
We were silent, for a while, watching the crows hover and dip over the slum.
‘So, where’s your favourite place to be alone?’
‘I don’t like to be alone,’ she said flatly, and then turned in time to see my expression. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘I guess I’m surprised. I just, well, I thought of you as someone who’s good at being alone. I don’t mean that in a bad way. I just think of you as … sort of aloof, sort of above it all.’
‘Your aim is off.’ she smiled. ‘Below it all, would be more like it.’
‘Wow, twice in one day.’
‘What?’
‘That’s twice in one day that I’ve seen a big smile. You were smiling with the girls before, and I was thinking that it’s the first time I’ve ever seen you really smile.’
‘Well, of course I smile.’
‘Don’t get me wrong. I like it. Not-smiling can be very attractive. Gimme an honest frown over a false smile, any day. It looks right on you. You look, I don’t know, sort of satisfied not smiling, or maybe honest is the right word. It looks right on you, somehow. Or I thought it did, until I saw you smiling today.’
‘Of course I smile,’ she repeated, her brow creasing in a frown, while her tightly pressed lips wrestled with the smile.
We were silent again, staring at each other instead of the view. Her eyes were reef-green, flecked with gold, and they shone with the luminous intensity that’s usually a sign of suffering or intelligence, or both. A clean wind stirred her shoulder-length hair—very dark hair, the same black-brown as her eyebrows and long lashes. Her lips were a fine, unpainted pink, parted to reveal the tip of her tongue between even, white teeth. She leaned against the windowless frame with her arms folded. The tides of the breeze rippled through the loose silk of her blouse, revealing and concealing her figure.
‘What were you and the girls laughing about?’
She raised one eyebrow in the familiar, sardonic half-smile.
‘Are you making small talk with me?’
‘Maybe I am,’ I laughed. ‘I think you’re making me nervous. Sorry.’
‘Don’t worry about it. I take it as a compliment—to both of us. If you really want to know, it was mostly about you.’
‘Me?’
‘Yeah, they were talking about you hugging a bear.’
‘Oh, that. Well, it was pretty funny, I guess.’
‘One of the women was imitating the look you had on your face, just before you did it, and they cracked up over that. But the really funny thing to them was figuring out why you did it. Everyone took turns at guessing why. Radha—she said she’s your neighbour, right?’
‘Yeah, she’s Satish’s mother.’
‘Well, Radha said you hugged the bear because you felt sorry for it. That got a big laugh.’
‘I’ll bet,’ I mumbled dryly. ‘What did you say?’
‘I said you probably did it because you’re a guy who’s interested in everything, and wants to know everything.’
‘It’s funny you say that. A girlfriend of mine once told me, a long time ago, that she was attracted to me because I was interested in everything. She said she left me for the same reason.’
What I didn’t tell Karla was that the girlfriend had described me as interested in everything, and committed to nothing. It still rankled. It still hurt. It was still true.
‘Are you … are you interested in helping me with something?’ Karla asked. Her tone was suddenly serious, portentous.
So that’s it, I thought. That’s why she came to see me. She wants something. The spiteful cat of wounded pride arched behind my eyes. She didn’t miss me—she wanted something from me. But she had come, she was asking me, not someone else, and there was salvage in that. Looking into those serious green eyes, I sensed that it was rare for her to ask anyone for help. I also had the feeling that a great deal, maybe too much, was balanced in it.
‘Sure,’ I said, careful not to hesitate for too long. ‘What do you want me to do?’
She swallowed hard, pushing past an obvious reluctance, and spoke in a rush of words.
‘There’s this girl, a friend of mine. Her name’s Lisa. She’s got herself in a very bad situation. She started working at this place—a place for foreign call girls. Anyway, Lisa messed up. Now she owes money, a lot of it, and the Madame who runs the place where she works won’t let her go. I want to get her out of there.’
‘I don’t have much, but I think …’
‘It’s not the money. I’ve got the money. But the woman who runs the place has taken a liking to Lisa. Even if we pay, she won’t let her go. I know what she’s like. It’s personal now. The money’s just an excuse. What she really wants is to break Lisa, a little at a time, until there’s nothing left. She hates her, because Lisa’s beautiful and bright and she’s got guts. She won’t let her leave.’
‘You want us to break her out of there?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘I know some people,’ I said, thinking of Abdullah Taheri and his mafia friends. ‘They’re not afraid of a fight. We could ask them to help.’
‘No, I’ve got friends here, too. They could get her out of there easy enough, but that wouldn’t stop the heavies from finding her, and taking it out on her later. They don’t mess around. They use acid. Lisa wouldn’t be the first girl to get acid thrown in her face because she got on the wrong side of Madame Zhou. We can’t risk it. Whatever we do, it has to be in a way that convinces her to leave Lisa alone, forever.’
I was uneasy about it. I sensed that there was more to it than Karla was telling me.
‘Did you say Madame Zhou?’
‘Yes—have you heard of her?’
‘A bit,’ I nodded. ‘I don’t know how much of it to believe. People say some pretty wild and dirty things about her.’
‘The wild things … I don’t know … but the dirty things are all true, take it from me.’
I didn’t feel any better about it.
‘Why doesn’t she just run away, this friend of yours? Why doesn’t she get on a plane, and get the hell back to—where did you say she came from?’
‘She’s American. Look, if I could m
ake her go back to the States, there wouldn’t be a problem. But she won’t go back. She won’t leave Bombay. She’ll never leave Bombay. She’s a junkie. That’s a big part of it. But there’s more than that—stuff from her past, stuff she can’t face back there. So she won’t go. I’ve tried to talk her into it, but it’s no good. She … she just won’t. And I can’t say that I blame her. I’ve got issues of my own—things in my past I’d rather not go back to. Things I won’t go back to.’
‘And you’ve got a plan—to get this girl out, I mean?’
‘Yes. I want you to pretend that you’re someone from the American embassy, some kind of consulate officer. I’ve already set it up. You won’t have to do much. I’ll do most of the talking. We’ll tell them that Lisa’s father is some big honcho in America with ties to the government, and that you’ve had orders to get her out of there and keep an eye on her. I’ll have all that straight before you even walk in the door.’
‘It sounds pretty fuzzy to me, Karla. You think that’ll be enough?’
She took a bundle of beedies from her pocket and lit two of them with a cigarette lighter, holding the small cigarettes in one hand and playing the flame over them with the other. She passed one to me, and puffed deeply on her own before answering me.
‘I think so. It’s the best thing I’ve come up with. I talked it over with Lisa, and she says she thinks it’ll work. If Madame Zhou gets her money, and if she believes you’re from the embassy, and if she’s convinced that she’ll get into trouble with the embassy or the government if she hassles Lisa any more, I think she’ll leave her alone. There’s a lot of ifs in there, I know. A lot of it really depends on you.’
‘It depends on her, too, this … Madame. Do you think she’ll believe it—believe me?’
‘We’ll have to play it exactly right. She’s more cunning than clever, but she’s not stupid.’
‘Do you think I can do this?’
‘How’s your American accent?’ she asked with a little embarrassed laugh.
‘I was an actor once,’ I muttered, ‘in another life.’
‘That’s great!’ she said, reaching out to touch my forearm. Her long, slender fingers felt cool against my warm skin.
‘I don’t know,’ I frowned. ‘It’s a lot of responsibility if it doesn’t go down right. If something happens to the girl, or to you …’
‘She’s my friend. It’s my idea. The responsibility’s mine.’
‘I’d feel better about it, you know, just fighting my way in there, and fighting my way out again. This embassy thing—there’s so many ways it could go wrong.’
‘I wouldn’t ask you if I didn’t think it was the right way to go, and if I wasn’t sure you could do it, Lin.’
She fell silent, waiting. I let her wait, but I knew the answer already. She might’ve thought I was weighing it up, trying to make up my mind. In fact, I was only thinking about why I was going to do it. Is it for her? I asked myself. Am I committed, or just interested? Why did I hug the bear?
I smiled.
‘When do we do this?’
She smiled back.
‘In a couple of days. I’ve got to do a bit of stuff first, to set it all up.’
She threw the finished beedie away, and took a step towards me. I think she might’ve kissed me, but just then a frightened clamour of shouting and shrieks started up among the people, and they ran to join us at the windows. In the jam of bodies, Prabaker pushed his head through, under my arm and next to Karla.
‘Municipality!’ he shouted. ‘B.M.C. is coming! Bombay Municipal Corporation. Look there!’
‘What is it? What’s happening?’ Karla asked. Her voice was all but lost in the shouts and screams.
‘It’s the council. They’re going to tear down some houses,’ I called back, my lips close to her ear. ‘They do this every month or so. They’re trying to keep the slum under control, to stop it from spreading outside the edge, there, where it meets the street.’
We looked down near the main street to see four, five, six large, dark blue police trucks rolling into an open area that was a kind of no man’s land, enclosed by the crescent of the slum. The heavy trucks were covered with canvas tarpaulins. We couldn’t see inside them, but we knew they contained squads of cops, twenty or more men to each truck. An open tray-truck, loaded with council workers and their equipment, drove between the parked police vehicles and stopped near the huts. Several officers climbed down from the police trucks and deployed their men in two rows.
The council workers, themselves mostly slum-dwellers from other slums, leapt from their truck, and set about their task of demolition. Each man had a rope and grappling hook that he swung onto the roof of a hut until it caught fast. He then tugged on the rope, collapsing the fragile hut. The people had just enough time to gather the bare essentials—babies, money, papers. Everything else was tumbled and raked into the wreckage: kerosene stoves and cooking pots, bags and bedding, clothes and children’s toys. People scattered in panic. The police stopped some of them, and then marched a few young men away to the waiting trucks.
The people at our windows grew silent as they watched. From our vantage point, we could see the destruction far below, but we couldn’t hear even the loudest noise of it. Somehow, the soundlessness of that methodical, scouring obliteration struck at us all. I hadn’t noticed the wind until then. It was a moaning wail in that eerie quiet. I knew that all through the thirty-five floors of the building, above and below us, other people stared mute witness, just as we did.
Although the houses of construction workers in the legal slum were safe, all work on the site stopped in sympathy. The workers understood that when the building was finished it would be their own homes that would lie in ruins. They knew that the ritual they’d all seen so many times before would be played out for the last time: the ghetto would be gutted and burned, and a car park for limousines would take its place.
I looked at the faces around me; faces struck with compassion and dread. In the eyes of some, I saw smoulders of shame for what the council’s power had forced too many of us to think: Thank God … Thank God it’s not me …
‘Great luck, your house is safe, Linbaba! Yours and mine also!’ Prabaker said as we watched the cops and council workers climb back onto their trucks and drive away. They’d scythed and smashed a swath, one hundred metres long and ten metres wide, at the north-eastern corner of the illegal slum. About sixty houses had been obliterated, the homes of at least two hundred people. The entire operation had taken less than twenty minutes.
‘Where will they go?’ Karla asked quietly.
‘Most of it will be back again by this time tomorrow. Next month they’ll come and knock them down again, or another bunch of huts just like them in another part of the slum. Then that’ll be rebuilt. But it’s still a big loss. All their things have been smashed up. They have to buy new bamboo and mats and stuff, to make new houses. And people got arrested—we might not see them again for months.’
‘I don’t know what scares me more,’ she declared, ‘the madness that smashes people down, or their ability to endure it.’
Most of the people had left the window, but Karla and I remained as close together as we’d been in the push and shove of the crowd. My arm was around her shoulder. On the ground, twenty floors below, people began to pick through the rubble of their homes. Canvas and plastic shelters were already being erected for the elderly, the babies, and the smallest children. She turned to face me, and I kissed her.
The taut bow of her lips dissolved on mine in concessions of flesh to flesh. There was such sad tenderness in it that, for a second or two, I floated free, and was adrift in its inexpressible kindnesses. I’d thought of Karla as street-wise and tough and almost cold, but that kiss was pure, undisguised vulnerability. The gentle loveliness of it shocked me, and I was the first to pull away.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t …’ I faltered.
‘It’s okay,’ she smiled, leaning away from me with her hands
on my chest. ‘But we might be making one of those pretty girls at the feast jealous.’
‘Who?’
‘Are you saying you don’t have a girl here?’
‘No. Of course not.’ I frowned.
‘I’ve got to stop listening to Didier,’ she sighed. ‘It was his idea. He thinks you must have a girlfriend here. He thinks that’s the only reason you’d stay in the slum. He said that’s the only reason any foreigner would stay in the slum.’
‘I don’t have a girlfriend, Karla, not here or anywhere. I’m in love with you.’
‘No you’re not!’ she snapped, and it was like a slap.
‘I can’t help it. For a long time now I —’
‘Stop it!’ she interrupted me again. ‘You’re not! You’re not! Oh, God, how I hate love!’
‘You can’t hate love, Karla,’ I said, laughing gently, and trying to lighten her mood.
‘Maybe not, but you sure as hell can be sick of it. It’s such a huge arrogance, to love someone, and there’s too much of it around. There’s too much love in the world. Sometimes I think that’s what heaven is—a place where everybody’s happy because nobody loves anybody else, ever.’
The wind lashed her hair into her face, and she pushed it back with both hands, holding it there with her fingers fanned out across her forehead. She was staring down at her feet.
‘What the fuck ever happened to good, old, meaningless sex, without any strings attached?’ she rasped, her lips drawn tightly over her teeth.
It wasn’t a question, but I answered it anyway.
‘I’m not ruling that out—as a fall-back position, so to speak.’
‘Look, I don’t want to be in love,’ she stated, in a softer tone. She raised her eyes to stare into mine. ‘I don’t want anyone to be in love with me. It hasn’t been good to me, the romance thing.’
‘I don’t think it’s kind to anyone, Karla.’
‘My point, exactly.’
‘But when it happens, you haven’t got a choice. I don’t think it’s something any of us do by choice. And … I don’t want to put any pressure on you. I’m just in love with you, that’s all. I’ve been in love with you for a while, and I finally had to say it. It doesn’t mean you have to do anything about it—or me either, for that matter.’