"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."
