‘I’m not kidding. Don’t underestimate her. When she moved from Delhi to Bombay, six years ago, there was a murder trial, and she was at the centre of it. Two very important guys ended up dead in her Delhi Palace, both of them with their throats cut. One of them happened to be a police inspector. The trial fell apart when one witness against her disappeared, and another was found hanging from the doorway of his house. She left Delhi to set up shop in Bombay, and within the first six months there was another murder, only a block away from the Palace, and a lot of people connected her with it. But she’s got so much stuff on so many people-stuff that goes all the way to the top. They can’t touch her. She can do pretty much what she likes, because she knows she’ll get away with it. If you want to get out of this, now’s your chance.’
We were in a Bumblebee, one of the ubiquitous black-and-yellow Fiat taxis, travelling south through the Steel Bazaar. Traffic was heavy. Hundreds of wooden handcarts, longer and taller and wider than a car when fully laden, trundled along between buses and trucks, pushed by barefoot porters, six men to each cart. The main streets of the Steel Bazaar were crammed with small and medium shops. They sold every kind of metal house-ware, from kerosene stoves to stainless steel sinks, and most of the cast-iron and sheet-metal products required by builders, shop-fitters, and decorators. The shops themselves were adorned with gleaming metal wares, strung in such brilliantly polished plenty and such artful array that they often attracted the camera lenses of tourists. Behind the glossy, commercial ramble of the streets, however, were the hidden lanes, where men who were paid in cents, rather than dollars, worked at black and gritty furnaces to produce those shining lures.
The windows of the cab were open, but no breeze stirred through them. It was hot and still in the sluggish churn of traffic. We’d stopped at Karla’s apartment on the way, where I’d swapped my T-shirt, jeans, and boots for a pair of dress shoes, conservatively cut black trousers, a starched white shirt, and a tie.
‘The only thing I’d like to get out of, at the moment, are these clothes,’ I grumbled.
‘What’s wrong with them?’ she asked, a mischievous gleam in her eye.
‘They’re itchy and horrible.’
‘They’ll be fine.’
‘I hope we don’t have an accident-I’d really hate to get killed in these clothes.’
‘Actually, they look pretty good on you.’
‘Oh, shit, make my day.’
‘Hey come on!’ she chided, curling her lip in an affable smirk. Her accent, the accent I’d come to love and consider the most interesting in the world, gave every word a rounded resonance that thrilled me. The music of that accent was Italian, its shape was German, its humour and its attitude were American, and its colour was Indian. ‘Being so fussy about dressing down, the way you do, is a kind of vanity, you know. It’s fairly conceited, too.’
‘I don’t dress down. I just hate clothes.’
‘No you don’t, you
‘What
‘That’s my point. You love clothes so much that you can’t bear to wear anything but the few things that feel just right.’
I fidgeted with the prickly collar of the shirt.
‘Well, Karla, these clothes are a long way from just right. How come you’ve got so many men’s clothes at your place, anyway? You’ve got more men’s clothes than I have.’
‘The last two guys who lived with me left in kind of a hurry.’
‘So much of a hurry that they left their clothes behind?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘One of them… got very busy’ she said quietly.
‘Busy doing what?’
‘He was breaking a mess of laws, so he probably wouldn’t want me to talk about it.’
‘Did you kick him out?’
‘No.’
She said it flatly, but with such a clear sense of regret that I let it go.
‘And… the other guy?’
‘You don’t want to know.’
I did want to know, but she turned her face away to stare out the window, and there was a finality in the gesture that warned and prohibited. I’d heard that Karla had once lived with someone named Ahmed, an Afghan. People didn’t talk about it much, and I’d assumed that they’d broken up years before. In the year that I knew her, she’d lived alone in the apartment, and I hadn’t realised until that moment how deeply that image of her had insinuated itself into my sense of who she was and how she lived. Despite her protest that she didn’t like to be alone, I’d thought of her as one of those people who never lived with others: someone who let people visit or even stay overnight, but never more than that.
