On the other hand, of course, I should've killed him. When I left him, bloody and broken, near the St. George Hospital, a warning voice told me it wasn't the end of the matter. And I did hesitate, looming over his body with murder in my eyes, but I couldn't take his life. Something he'd said, when he was begging me to stop beating him, stayed my hand. He said that he'd named me, that he'd thrown me to the Nigerian thugs when he had to invent someone else who was responsible for his theft, because he was jealous of me. He was jealous of my confidence, my strength, and my friendships. He was jealous of me. And in his jealousy, he hated me. And in that, we weren't so different, Maurizio and I.
It was still with me, all of it, the next day, when the Nigerians were gone and I went to Leopold's, looking for Didier to return his unused gun. It was still with me, clotting my mind with anger, confused in regret, when I found Johnny Cigar waiting for me outside. It was still there, as I struggled to focus, and understand his words.
"It's a very bad thing," he said. "Anand Rao has killed Rasheed this morning. He cut his throat. It's the first time, Lin."
I knew what he meant. It was the first murder in our slum. It was the first time that one slum-dweller had ever killed another in the Cuffe Parade slum. There were twenty-five thousand people in those little acres, and they fought and argued and bickered all the time, but none, not one of them, had ever killed another. And in the shocked moment, I suddenly remembered Madjid. He, too, had been murdered. I'd managed, somehow, to push the thought of his death away from my waking, working mind, but it had been gnawing through the screen of my composure slowly, steadily, all the while. And it broke through then, with the news of Rasheed's death. And that other murder-the slaughter, Ghani had said-of the old gold smuggler, the mafia don, became confused with the blood that was on Anand's hands. Anand, whose name meant happy.
Anand, who'd tried to talk to me and tell me about it, who'd come to me that day in the slum for help, and found none.
I pressed my hands to my face, and ran them through my hair. The street around us was as busy and colourful as ever. The crowd at Leopold's were laughing, talking, and drinking, as they usually did. But something had changed in the world that Johnny and I knew. The innocence was lost, and nothing would ever be the same.
I heard the words tumbling over and over in my mind. Nothing is ever gonna be the same... Nothing is ever gonna be the same...
And a vision, the kind of postcard that fate sends you, flashed before my eyes. There was death in that vision. There was madness. There was fear. But it was blurred. I couldn't see it clearly. I couldn't see the detail. I didn't know if the death and madness were happening to me, or happening around me. And in a sense, I didn't care. In too many ways of shame and angry regret, I didn't care. I blinked my eyes, and cleared my swollen throat, and stepped up off the street into the music, the laughter, and the light.
"The Indians are the Italians of Asia," Didier pronounced with a sage and mischievous grin. "It can be said, certainly, with equal justice, that the Italians are the Indians of Europe, but you do understand me, I think. There is so much Italian in the Indians, and so much Indian in the Italians. They are both people of the Madonna-they demand a goddess, even if the religion does not provide one. Every man in both countries is a singer when he is happy, and every woman is a dancer when she walks to the shop at the corner. For them, food is music inside the body, and music is food inside the heart. The language of India and the language of Italy, they make every man a poet, and make something beautiful from every banalite. These are nations where love-amore, pyaar- makes a cavalier of a Borsalino on a street corner, and makes a princess of a peasant girl, if only for the second that her eyes meet yours. It is the secret of my love for India, Lin, that my first great love was Italian."
"Where were you born, Didier?"
"Lin, my body was born in Marseilles, but my heart and my soul were born sixteen years later, in Genova."
He caught the eye of a waiter, and waved a hand lazily for another drink. He'd hardly taken a sip from the drink on the table in front of him, so I guessed that Didier was settling in for one of his longer discourses. It was two hours past noon on a cloudy Wednesday, three months after the Night of the Assassins.
The first rains of the monsoon were still a week away, but there was a sense of expectancy, a tension, that tightened every heartbeat in the city. It was as if a vast army was gathering outside the city for an irresistible assault. I liked the week before monsoon: the tension and excitement I saw in others was like the involuted, emotional disquiet that I felt almost all the time.
