He thumped the table for another drink, but when the small bottle arrived he grasped it for a while with both hands, staring at it with a brooding, pensive expression.
‘How long will you stay in Bombay?’ he asked, without looking at me.
‘I don’t know. It’s funny, everyone seems to ask me that in the last few days.’
‘You have already stayed longer than the usual. Most people cannot depart the city too quickly.’
‘There’s a guide, Prabaker’s his name, do you know him?’
‘Prabaker Kharre? The big smile?’
‘That’s him. He’s been showing me around for weeks now. I’ve seen all the temples and museums and art galleries, and a lot of the bazaars. From tomorrow morning he’s promised to show me something of the other side of the city—the really city, he called it. He made it sound interesting. I’ll stick around for that, and make my mind up then where I want to go next. I’m in no hurry.’
‘It’s a very sad thing, to be in no hurry, and I would not be so free in admitting it, if I were you,’ he said, still staring at the bottle. When he wasn’t smiling his face looked flabby, slack, and pallid grey. He was unwell, but it was the kind of unwell you have to work at. ‘We have a saying in Marseilles: a man in no hurry gets nowhere fast. I have been in no hurry for eight years.’
Suddenly his mood changed. He poured a splash from the bottle, looked at me with a smile, and raised his glass.
‘So, let’s drink! To Bombay, a fine place to be in no hurry! And to civilised policemen, who will accept a bribe, in the interests of the order, if not of the law. To baksheesh!’
‘I’ll drink to that,’ I said, clattering my glass against his in the toast. ‘So, tell me, Didier, what keeps you here in Bombay?’
‘I am French,’ he replied, admiring the dew on his half-raised glass, ‘I am gay, I am Jewish, and I am a criminal, more or less in that order. Bombay is the only city I have ever found that allows me to be all four of those things, at the same time.’
We laughed, and drank, and he turned his gaze on the wide room, his hungry eyes finally coming to rest on a group of Indian men who sat near one of the entrances. He studied them for a while, sipping slowly at his drink.
‘Well, if you decide to stay, you have picked a good time for it. This is a time of changes. Great changes. You see those men, eating foods with such strong appetite? They are Sainiks, workers for the Shiv Sena. Hatchet men, I think, is the charming English political phrase. Your guide, has he told you of the Sena?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘A conscious lapse, I would say. The Shiv Sena Party is the face of the future in Bombay. Perhaps their mode and their politique is the future everywhere.’
‘What kind of politics?’
‘Oh, regional, language-based, ethnic, us-against-them,’ he replied, sneering cynically as he ticked each characteristic off on the fingers of his left hand. They were very white, soft hands. His long fingernails were black with dirt under the edges. ‘The politics of fear. I hate politics, and politicians even more. They make a religion of being greedy. It’s unforgivable. A man’s relationship to his greed is a deeply personal thing, don’t you think? The Shiv Sena controls the police, because they are a Maharashtrian party, and most of the lower ranks of the police are Maharashtrians. They control a lot of the slums, too, and many of the unions, and some of the press. They have everything, in fact, except the money. Oh, they have the support of the sugar barons, and some of the merchants, but the real money—the industrial money and the black money—that is in the hands of the Parsees and the Hindus from other cities in India and, most hated of all, the Muslims. And here is the struggle, the guerre économique, the truth behind their talk of race and language and region. They are changing the city, a little less and a little more every day. Even the name has been changed, from Bombay to Mumbai. They haven’t managed to change the maps, yet, but they will do it. And they will do almost anything, join with almost anyone, in their quest. There are opportunities. Fortunes. Just in the last few months some Sainiks—oh, not the public ones, not the highly placed ones—made a deal with Rafiq and his Afghans and the police. In exchange for certain cash and concessions, the police closed down all but a few of the opium dens in the city. Dozens of the finest smoking parlours, places that have served the community for generations, were closed in a single week. Closed forever! Normally, I do not interest myself in the pigsty of politics, or in the slaughterhouse of big business, for that matter. The only force more ruthless and cynical than the business of big politics is the politics of big business. But this is big politics and big business together, in the destruction of the opium smoking, and I am incensed! I ask you, what is Bombay without its chandu—its opium—and its opium dens? What is the world coming to? It’s a disgrace!’
I watched the men he’d described, as they concentrated with energetic single-mindedness on their meal. The table was heaped with platters of rice, chicken, and vegetable dishes. None of the five men spoke, nor did they so much as look at one another as they ate, bending low to their plates and scooping the food into their mouths rapidly.
‘That’s a pretty good line,’ I commented, grinning widely. ‘The one about the business of big politics, and the politics of big business. I like it.’
‘Ah, my dear friend, I cannot claim it as my own. It was Karla who said it to me the first time, and I have used it ever since. I am guilty of many crimes—of most crimes, to say the truth—but I have never claimed a cleverness that was not my own.’
‘Admirable,’ I laughed.
‘Well,’ he puffed, ‘a man has to draw the line somewhere. Civilisation, after all, is defined by what we forbid, more than what we permit.’
He paused, drumming the fingers of his right hand on the cold marble tabletop. After a few moments, he glanced around at me.
‘That is one of mine,’ he said, apparently peeved that I hadn’t drawn attention to the phrase. When I didn’t react, he spoke again. ‘About the civilisation … it was one of mine.’
‘And damn clever,’ I responded quickly.
‘Nothing at all,’ he said modestly, then he caught my eye, and we both laughed out loud.
‘What was in it for Rafiq, if you don’t mind my asking. That stuff about closing all the opium dens. Why did he go along with it?’
‘Go along with it?’ Didier frowned, ‘Why, it was his idea. There is more money to be made from garad—brown sugar heroin—than there is from opium. And now everyone, all the poor who were chandu smokers, they have become garad smokers. Rafiq controls the garad, the brown sugar. Not all of it, of course. No one man controls all the thousands of kilos of brown sugar that come from Afghanistan, through Pakistan, into India. But a lot of it is his, a lot of the Bombay brown heroin. This is big money, my friend, big money.’
‘Why did the politicians go along with it?’
‘Ah, it is not only brown sugar and hashish that comes from Afghanistan into India,’ he confided, lowering his voice and speaking from the corner of his mouth once more. ‘There are guns, heavy weapons, explosives. The Sikhs are using these weapons now, in Punjab, and the Muslim separatists in Kashmir. There are weapons, you see. And there is power, the power to speak for many of the poor Muslims who are the enemies of the Shiv Sena. If you control one trade, the drugs, you can influence the other, the guns. And the Sena Party is desperate to control the flow of guns into their state, their Maharashtra. Money and power. Look there, at the table next to Rafiq and his men. You see the three Africans, two men and a woman?’
‘Yes. I noticed her before. She’s very beautiful.’
Her young face, with its prominent cheekbones, softly flared nose, and very full lips, looked as if it had been carved in volcanic stone by the rush of a river. Her hair was braided into a multitude of long, fine, beaded plaits. She laughed, sharing a joke with her friends, and her teeth gleamed large and perfectly white.
‘Beautiful? I think not. Among the Africans, th
e men are beautiful, in my opinion, whereas the women are merely very attractive. For Europeans, the opposite is true. Karla is beautiful, and I never knew a European man who is beautiful in that way. But that is another matter. I mean only to say that they are customers of Rafiq, Nigerians, and that their business between Bombay and Lagos is one of the concessions—a spin-off is the term, I think—of this deal with the Sainiks. The Sena has a man at Bombay Customs. So much money is moving from hand to hand. Rafiq’s little scheme is a tangle of countries, Afghanistan and India, Pakistan and Nigeria, and of powers—police and customs and politicians. All of it is a part of the struggle for control here in our cursed and beloved Bombay. And all of it, all this intrigue, grows from the closing down of my dear old opium dens. A tragedy.’
‘This Rafiq,’ I muttered, perhaps sounding more flippant than I’d intended, ‘is quite a guy.’
‘He is Afghan, and his country is at war, my friend. That gives him an edge, as the Americans say. And he works for the Walidlalla mafia council—one of the most powerful. His closest associate is Chuha, one of the most dangerous men in Bombay. But the real power here, in this part of the city, is the great don, lord Abdel Khader Khan. He is a poet, a philosopher, and a lord of crime. They call him Khaderbhai. Khader-Elder Brother. There are others, with more money and more guns than Khaderbhai—he is a man of rigid principles, you see, and there are many lucrative things that he will not do. But those same principles give him—I am not sure how to say it in English—the immoral high ground, perhaps, and there is no-one, in this part of Bombay, who has more real power than he does. Many people believe that he is a saint, with supernatural capabilities. I know him, and I can tell you that Khaderbhai is the most fascinating man I ever met. If you will allow me the small immodesty, this makes him a truly remarkable individual, for I have met a great many interesting men in my life.’
He left the words to swirl for a moment in the eye contact between us.
‘Come, you are not drinking! I hate it when people take so long to drink a single glass. It is like putting on a condom to masturbate.’
‘No really,’ I laughed. ‘I, er, I’m waiting for Karla to come back. She’s due any minute now.’
‘Ah, Karla …’ He said her name with a long, purring roll. And just what are your intentions with our inscrutable Karla?’
‘Come again?’
‘Perhaps it is more useful to wonder what intentions she has for you, no?’
He poured the last of the one-litre bottle into his glass and topped it up with the last of the soda. He’d been drinking steadily for more than an hour. His eyes were as veined and bloodshot as the back of a boxer’s fist, but the gaze that stared from them was unwavering, and his hands were precise in their movements.
‘I saw her on the street, just hours after I landed in Bombay,’ I found myself saying. ‘There was something about her that … I think she’s one of the reasons why I’ve stayed here this long. Her and Prabaker. I like them—I liked them both on sight. I’m a people person, if you know what I mean. If the people in it were interesting, I’d prefer a tin shed to the Taj Mahal—not that I’ve seen the Taj Mahal yet.’
‘It leaks,’ Didier sniffed, dismissing the architectural wonder with two words. ‘But did you say interesting? Karla is interesting?’
He laughed out loud again. It was a peculiarly high-pitched laugh, harsh and almost hysterical. He slapped me hard on the back, spilling a little of his drink.
‘Ha! You know, Lin, I approve of you, even if a commendation from me is a very fragile endorsement.’
He drained his glass, thumped it on the table, and wiped his closely trimmed moustache with the back of his hand. When he saw my puzzled expression, he leaned close until our faces were only a few centimetres apart.
‘Let me explain something to you. Look around here. How many people do you count?’
‘Well, maybe, sixty, eighty.’
‘Eighty people. Greeks, Germans, Italians, French, Americans. Tourists from everywhere. Eating, drinking, talking, laughing. And from Bombay—Indians and Iranians and Afghans and Arabs and Africans. But how many of these people have real power, real destiny, real dynamique for their place, and their time, and the lives of thousands of people? I will tell you—four. Four people in this room with power, and the rest are like the rest of the people everywhere: powerless, sleepers in the dream, anonyme. When Karla comes back, there will be five people in this room with power. That is Karla, the one you call interesting. I see by your expression, my young friend, you do not understand what I am saying. Let me put it this way: Karla is reasonably good at being a friend, but she is stupendously good at being an enemy. When you judge the power that is in a person, you must judge their capacities as both friend and as enemy. And there is no-one in this city that makes a worse or more dangerous enemy than Karla.’
He stared into my eyes, looking for something, moving from one eye to the other and back again.
‘You know the kind of power I’m talking about, don’t you? Real power. The power to make men shine like the stars, or crush them to dust. The power of secrets. Terrible, terrible secrets. The power to live without remorse or regret. Is there something in your life, Lin, that you regret? Is there anything you have done, that you regret it?’
‘Yes, I guess I —’
‘Of course you do! And so do I, regret … things I have done … and not done. But not Karla. And that is why she is like the others, the few others in this room, who have real power. She has a heart like theirs, and you and I do not. Ah, forgive me, I am almost drunk, and I see that my Italians are leaving. Ajay will not wait for much longer. I must go, now, and collect my little commission, before I can allow myself to be completely drunk.’
He sat back in his chair, and then pushed himself to his feet by leaning heavily on the table with both of his soft, white hands. Without another word or look he left, and I watched him walk toward the kitchen, threading his way through the tables with the rolling, spongy step of the practised drinker. His sports coat was creased and wrinkled at the back, where he’d been leaning against the chair, and the seat of his trousers hung in baggy folds. Before I knew him well enough, before I realised how much it meant that he’d lived by crime and passion for eight years in Bombay without making a single enemy and without borrowing a single dollar, I tended to dismiss Didier as little more than an amusing but hopeless drunkard. It was an easy mistake to make, and one that he himself encouraged.
The first rule of black business everywhere is: never let anyone know what you’re thinking. Didier’s corollary to the rule was: always know what the other thinks of you. The shabby clothes, the matted, curly hair, pressed flat in places where it had rested on the pillow the night before, even his fondness for alcohol, exaggerated into what seemed to be a debilitating addiction—they were all expressions of an image he cultivated, and were as carefully nuanced as a professional actor’s. He made people think that he was harmless and helpless, because that was the precise opposite of the truth.
I had little time to think about Didier and the puzzling remarks he’d made, however, because Karla soon returned, and we left the restaurant almost at once. We took the long way to her small house, walking beside the sea wall that runs from the Gateway of India to the Radio Club Hotel. The long, wide street was empty. On our right, behind a row of plane trees, were hotels and apartment buildings. A few lights, here and there, showed windowgraphs of the lives being lived in those rooms: a sculpture displayed on one wall, a shelf of books on another, a poster of some Indian deity, framed in wood, surrounded by flowers and smoky streamers of incense and, just visible in the corner of a street-level window, two slender hands pressed together in prayer.
On our left was a vast segment of the world’s largest harbour, the dark water starred by the moorage lights of a hundred ships at anchor. Beyond them, the horizon quivered with fires flung from the towers of offshore refineries. There was no moon. It was nearly midnight, but the air was still as wa
rm as it had been in the early afternoon. High tide on the Arabian Sea brought occasional sprays over the waist-high stone wall: mists that swirled, on the Simoom, all the way from the coast of Africa.
We walked slowly. I looked up often at the sky, so heavy with stars that the black net of night was bulging, overflowing with its glittering haul. Imprisonment meant years without a sunrise, a sunset, or a night sky, locked in a cell for sixteen hours each day, from early afternoon to late morning. Imprisonment meant that they took away the sun and the moon and the stars. Prison wasn’t hell, but there was no heaven in it, either. In its own way, that was just as bad.
‘You can take this good-listener business a little too far, you know.’
‘What? Oh, sorry. I was thinking.’ I apologised, and shook myself into the moment. ‘Hey, before I forget, here’s that money Ulla gave me.’
She accepted the roll of notes from me and shoved it into her handbag without looking at it.
‘It’s strange, you know. Ulla went with Modena to break away from someone else who was controlling her like a slave. Now she’s Modena’s slave, in a way. But she loves him, and that makes her ashamed that she has to lie to him, to keep a little money for herself.’
‘Some people need the master-slave thing.’
‘Not just some people,’ she responded, with sudden and disconcerting bitterness. ‘When you were talking to Didier about freedom, when he asked you the freedom to do what?—you said, the freedom to say no. It’s funny, but I was thinking it’s more important to have the freedom to say yes.’
‘Speaking of Didier,’ I said lightly, trying to change the subject and lift her spirits, ‘I had a long talk with him tonight, while I was waiting for you.’
‘I think Didier would’ve done most of the talking,’ she guessed.
‘Well, yes, he did, but it was interesting. I enjoyed it. It’s the first time we’ve ever talked like that.’