The radio at the counter gave us no other details, but the message wailed from the speaker that she'd been murdered. Only a few months after Bluestar, Indira's own Sikh bodyguards had killed her. The woman who'd been reviled as a despot by some, adored as the mother of the country by many others, and so closely identified with the nation as to be indistinguishable from its past, and from its destiny, was gone. She was dead.
I had to think. I had to calculate the danger. Security forces across the country would be on special alert. There would be ramifications-riots, killings, looting, and burning, as revenge exacted on the Sikh communities for her murder. I knew it.
Everyone in India knew it. On the radio, the announcer was talking about troop deployments in Delhi and in Punjab aimed at quelling anticipated disturbances. The tension would bring new dangers for me, a wanted man, working for the mafia, and living in the country with an expired visa. For a few moments, sitting there as Didier sipped his drink, as the men in the restaurant strained in silence to listen, and the early evening blushed our skin with rose-gold, my heart thumped with fear. Run, my thoughts whispered. Run now, while you can. This is your last chance...
But even then, as I formed the clear thought to flee the city, I felt myself relaxing into a dense, fatalistic calm. I wouldn't leave Bombay. I couldn't leave Bombay. I knew that, as surely as I'd ever known anything in my life. There was the issue of Khaderbhai: my financial debt to him had been repaid from the wages I'd made in his service with Khaled, but there was a moral debt that was harder to repay. I owed him my life, and we both knew it. He'd hugged me when I came out of the prison and, crying at my pitiful state, he'd promised me that for so long as I remained in Bombay, I would be under his personal protection.
Nothing like Arthur Road would ever happen to me again. He'd given me a gold medal featuring the Hindu aum symbol joined to a Muslim crescent and star, which I wore on a silver chain around my neck. Khaderbhai's name was inscribed on the back, in Urdu, Hindi, and English. In the event of trouble I was to show the medal, and ask that he be contacted at once. That security was imperfect, but it was better than anything I'd known since my exile had begun. His request for me to stay in his service, the unspoken debt that I owed him, and the safety that being Khader's man offered-all of those elements held me in the city.
And there was Karla. She'd disappeared from the city while I was in prison, and no-one knew where she'd gone. I had no idea where in all the wide world I might begin to look for her. But she loved Bombay. I knew that. It seemed reasonable to hope she might return. And I loved her. It grieved me-an emotion that was, in those months, even stronger than my love for her-that she must be thinking I'd abandoned her: that I got what I wanted, when we made love, and then dumped her. I couldn't move on without seeing her again, and explaining what had happened that night. So I stayed there, in the city, a minute's walk from the corner where we'd met, and I waited for her to return.
I glanced around the subdued, listening restaurant, and caught Vikram's eye. He smiled at me, and wagged his head. It was a heart-broken smile, and his eyes were inflamed with unshed tears.
Still, he smiled to comfort me, to reassure me, to include me in his bewildered grieving. And with that smile I suddenly knew that there was something else holding me there. In the end I realised that it was the heart, the Indian heart that Vikram had talked about-the land where heart is king-that held me when so many intuitions told me I should leave. And the heart, for me, was the city. Bombay. The city had seduced me. I was in love with her.
There was a part of me that she invented, and that only existed because I lived there, within her, as a Mumbaiker, a Bombayite.
"It's a fuckin' bad business, yaar," Vikram muttered as he rejoined us. "There's going to be a lot of blood spilled over this, yaar. On the radio, they're saying that Congress Party gangs are roaming in Delhi, going from house to house, and spoiling for a fight with the Sikhs."
We were silent, all three of us, lost in our own speculations and worry. Then Didier spoke.
"I think I have a lead for you," he said softly, wrenching us into the moment once more. "About the jail?"
"Oui."
"Go on."
"It is not much. It does not add much to what you already know- that it was a person of some power, as your patron, Abdel Khader, has told you."
"Whatever it is, Didier, it's more than I've got now."
