Shantaram (73 page)

"Good," Kalpana concluded, opening the door and stepping out to the car park. We walked back to the hotel foyer, each of us with sunglasses clamped to our eyes. We shook hands at the same spot where we'd met half an hour before.

"Have your lunch," she said. "I'll go back to the set. We're in the ballroom. When you're all done, follow the cables and you'll find me. I'll introduce you to the guys, and you can start right away. We need a few foreigners for tomorrow's shoot, here. Two guys and two gals, yaar. Blonde, Sweden types, if you can find them. Hey-that was Kashmiri hash, _na? We'll get along just fine, Lin, you and me. Ciao! Ciao, baby."

In the restaurant, Lisa and I heaped our plates high, and sat facing the sea to eat.

"Kalpana's okay," she said between mouthfuls. "She's sarcastic as all hell, sometimes, and she's a real ambitious girl-don't make any mistake about that-but she's a straight talker and a real friend. When she told me about the casting job, I thought about you. I thought you might be able to... make something out of it ..." "Thanks," I said, meeting her eye and trying to read her. "I appreciate the thought. Do you want to be partners in it with me?"

"Yes," she answered quickly. "I was hoping... hoping you'd want to."

"We could work it out together," I suggested. "I don't think I'll have any trouble getting foreigners to work in the movies, but I don't really want to do the rest of it. You could do that part, if you like. You could organise picking them up, looking after them on the set, and making the payments and all that. I'll talk them into it, and you take it from there. I'd be glad to work with you, if you're interested."

She smiled. It was a good smile; the kind you like to keep.

"I'd love to do it," she gushed, flushing pink with embarrassment under her tan. "I really need to do something, Lin, and I think I'm ready. When Kalpana ran this casting thing by me, I wanted to jump at it, but I was too nervous to take it on alone. Thanks."

"Don't mention it. How's it going with you and Abdullah?"

"Mmmm," she mumbled, finishing a mouthful of food. "I'm not working, if you know what I mean, so that's something. I'm not working at the Palace, and I'm not using. He gave me money. A lot of money. I don't know where he got it. I don't really care. It's more money than I've ever seen in one bundle before in my whole life. It's in this case, this metal case. He gave it to me, and asked me to look after it for him, and to spend it whenever I need it. It was real spooky, kinda like... I dunno... like his last will and testament, or something."

I raised one eyebrow unconsciously in a quizzical expression. She caught the look, reflected a moment, and then responded.

"I trust you, Lin. You're the only guy in this city I do trust.

Funny thing is, Abdullah's the guy gave me the money and all, and I think I love him, in a kind of insane way, but I don't trust him. Is that a horrible thing to say about the guy you live with?"

"No."

"Do you trust him?"

"With my life."

"Why?"

I hesitated, and then the words didn't come. We finished our meal and sat back from the table, looking at the sea.

"We've been through some things," I said after a while. "But it's not just that. I trusted him before we did any of that. I don't know what it is. A man trusts another man when he sees enough of himself in him, I guess. Or maybe when he sees the things he wishes he had in himself."

We were silent for a time, each of us troubled, and stubbornly tempting fate in our own ways.

"Are you ready?" I asked her. She nodded in reply. "Let's go to the movies."

We followed the black vines of relay cables from the generator vans outside the hotel. They led us through a side entrance and past a procession of bustling assistants to the banquet room, which had been hired as a set. The room was filled with people, powerful lights, dazzling reflector panels, cameras, and equipment. Seconds after we entered, someone shouted Quiet, please! And then a riotous musical number began.

Hindi movies aren't to everyone's taste. Some foreigners I'd dealt with had told me that they loathed the kaleidoscopic turmoil of musical numbers, bursting stochastically between weeping mothers, sighing infatuates, and brawling villains. I understood what they meant, but I didn't agree with them. A year before, Johnny Cigar had told me that in former lives I must've been at least six different Indian personalities. I'd taken it as a high compliment, but it wasn't until I saw my first Bollywood movie shoot that I knew at last, and exactly, what he'd meant. I loved the singing, the dancing, and the music with the whole of my heart from the very first instant.

The producers had hired a two-thousand-watt amplifier. The music crashed through the banquet room and rattled into our bones. The colours were from a tropical sea. The million lights were as dazzling as a sun-struck lake. The faces were as beautiful as those carved on temple walls. The dancing was a frenzy of excited, exuberant lasciviousness and ancient classical skills.

And the whole, improbably coherent expression of love and life, drama and comedy, was articulated in the delicate, unfurled elegance of a graceful hand, or the wink of a seductive eye.

For an hour we watched as the dance number was rehearsed and refined and finally recorded on film. During a break, after that, Kalpana introduced me to Cliff De Souza and Chandra Mehta, two of the four producers of the film. De Souza was a tall, curly haired, thirty-year-old Goan with a disarming grin and a loping walk. Chandra Mehta was closer to forty. He was overweight, but comfortable with it: one of those big men who expand to fit a big idea of themselves. I liked both men and, although they were too busy to talk for long, that first meeting was cordial and communicative.

I offered Lisa a lift back to town, but she'd arranged to ride with Kalpana, and she chose to wait. I gave her the phone number at my new apartment, telling her to call if she needed me. On my way out through the foyer, I saw Kavita Singh also leaving the hotel. We'd both been so busy in recent months-she with writing about crimes, and me with committing them-that we hadn't seen one another for many weeks.

"Kavita!" I called out, running forward to catch her. "Just the woman I wanted to see! The number-one reporter, on Bombay's number-one newspaper. How are you? You... look... great!"

She was dressed in a silk pantsuit. It was the colour of bleached bone. She carried a linen handbag in the same colour. The single breasted jacket descended to a deep d%ecolletage, and it was obvious that she was wearing nothing under the jacket.

"Oh, come off it!" she snapped, grinning and embarrassed. "This is my dressed-to-kill outfit. I had to interview Vasant Lai. I just came out of there."

"You're moving in powerful circles," I said, recalling photos of the populist politician. His incitements to communal violence had resulted in rioting, arson, and murder. Each time I saw him on television or read one of his bigoted speeches in the newspaper, he made me think of the brutal madman who called himself Sapna: a legal, political version of the psychopathic killer.

"It was a snake-pit up there in his suite, I tell you, baba. But I got my interview. He has a weakness for big tits." She whipped a finger into my face. "Don't say anything!"

"Hey!" I pacified her, raising both hands and wagging my head.

"I'm... saying nothing at all, yaar. Absolutely nothing. I'm looking, mind you, and I wish I had three eyes, but I'm saying nothing at all!"

"You bastard!" she hissed, laughing through gritted teeth. "Ah, shit, what's happening to the world, man, when one of the most important guys in the city won't talk to _you, but will give a two-hour interview to your tits? Men are such sick fuckers, don't you think?"

"You got me there, Kavita," I sighed.

"Fuckin' pigs, yaar."

"Can't argue with that. When you're right, you're right."

She eyed me suspiciously. "What are you being so damn agreeable about, Lin?"

"Listen, where are you going?"

"What?"

"Where are you going? Right now, I mean."

"I was going to take a cab back to town. I'm living near Flora Fountain now."

"How about I give you a lift, on my bike? I want to talk to you.

I want you to help me with a problem."

Kavita didn't know me well. Her eyes were the colour of bark on a cinnamon tree, flecked with golden sparks. She looked me up and down with those eyes, and the forensic examination left her somewhere short of inspired reassurance.

"What kind of a problem?" she asked.

"It involves a murder," I replied. "And I want you to make it a page-one story. I'll tell you all about it at your place. And on the way you can tell me about Vasant Lai-you'll have to shout on the back of the bike, so that'll help you get it out of your system, na?"

Some forty minutes later, we sat together in her fourth-floor walk-up apartment on the edge of the Fort area, near Flora Fountain. It was a tiny apartment with a foldout bed, a rudimentary kitchen, and a hundred noisy neighbours. It boasted a superb bathroom, however, large enough to hold a washing machine and dryer without crowding. There was also a balcony enclosed in antique wrought iron that looked out on the wide, busy square around the fountain.

"His name is Anand Rao," I told her, sipping the strong espresso coffee she'd prepared for me. "He shared a hut, in the slum, with a guy named Rasheed. They were my neighbours when I lived there.

Then Rasheed's wife and her sister came to stay, from the village in Rajasthan. Anand moved out of the hut to leave room for Rasheed and the sisters."

"Hang on," Kavita interrupted. "I better get this down."

She stood up and walked to a wide, cluttered desk, where she gathered up a pad, pen, and cassette recorder. She'd changed out of her pantsuit, and wore loose harem pants and a singlet.

Watching her walk, following her quick, purposeful, graceful movements, I realised for the first time just how beautiful she was. When she returned and set up the recorder, tucking her legs beneath her on the armchair as she prepared to write, she caught me staring at her. "What?" she asked.

"Nothing," I smiled. "Okay, so Anand Rao got to meet Rasheed's wife and her sister. He got to like them. They were shy, but they were friendly, happy, and kind. I think, now, reading between the lines, that Anand got a little sweet on the sister. Anyway, one day Rasheed tells his wife that the only way they can set themselves up, in the little shop that they want, is if he sells his kidney-one of his kidneys-at this private hospital he knows about. She argues against this, but he finally convinces her that it's their only chance.

"Well, he comes back from the hospital, and he tells her he's got good news and bad news. The good news is that they definitely want a kidney. The bad news is that they don't want a man's kidney-they want a woman's kidney."

"Okay," Kavita sighed, shaking her head.

"Yeah. The guy was a prince. Anyway, his wife balks at this, understandably, but Rasheed convinces her, and she goes off to have the operation."

"Do you know where this took place?" Kavita asked.

"Yeah. Anand Rao checked into it all, and told Qasim Ali, the head man in the slum. He's got the details. So, anyway, Anand Rao hears about this, when Rasheed's wife returns from the hospital, and he's furious. He knows Rasheed well-they shared the hut together for two years, remember-and he knows that Rasheed is a con man. He has it out with Rasheed, but it comes to nothing.

Rasheed gets all indignant. He spills kerosene on himself, and tells Anand Rao to light it, if he doesn't trust him, and if he thinks he's such a bad guy. Anand just warns him to look after the women, and leaves it at that."

"When did this happen?"

"The operation was six months ago. Well, the next thing is, Rasheed tells his wife that he's been down to the hospital twenty times to sell his own kidney, but they don't want it. He tells her the money they got for her kidney was only half as much as they need to buy their business. He tells her that they still want women's kidneys, and he starts working on her to sell her sister's kidney. The wife is against it, but Rasheed works on the young sister, telling her that if she doesn't sell her kidney, then the wife will have sold her kidney for nothing. Finally, the women give in. Rasheed packs the younger sister off to the hospital, and she returns, minus one of her kidneys." "This is some guy," Kavita muttered.

"Yeah. Well, I never liked him. He was one of those guys who smile as a tactic, you know, and not because they actually feel anything worth smiling about. Kind of like the way a chimpanzee smiles."

"And what happened? He took off with the money, I suppose?"

"Yeah. Rasheed took the money and ran. The two sisters were devastated. Their health deteriorated. They went downhill fast.

They ended up in hospital. First one, and then the other-they both fell into a coma. Lying together in their hospital beds, they were pronounced dead within minutes of each other. Anand was there, with a few others from the slum. He stayed long enough to see the sheets pulled over their faces. Then he ran out of the hospital. He went out of his mind with anger and... guilt, I suppose. He went looking for Rasheed. He knew every one of Rasheed's drinking dives. When he tracked him down, Rasheed was lying in a rubbish pit, sleeping off a binge. He'd paid some kids to keep the rats off his drunken body. Anand chased the kids off and sat down beside Rasheed, and listened to him snore. Then he cut his throat, and waited there until the blood stopped flowing."

"Pretty messy," Kavita muttered, not looking up from her pad.

"It was. It is. Anand gave himself up, and made a full confession. He's been charged with murder."

"And you want me to...?"

"I want you to make it a front-page story. I want you to build some kind of popular movement around him, so that if they do convict him-which they will, for sure-they'll have to go a little easy on him. I want him to have support while he's in prison, and I want to keep his prison time down to as little as possible."

"That's a lot of I want."

"I know."