"I'll need a couple of runners-guys I can trust. I'd like to pick my own men."
"Who've you got in mind?" Sanjay asked.
"You don't know them. They're outside guys. But they're both good men. Johnny Cigar and Kishore. I trust them, and I know I can rely on them."
Sanjay and Salman exchanged a glance and looked to Nazeer. He nodded.
"No problem," Salman said. "Is that it?"
"One more thing," I added, turning to Nazeer. "I want Nazeer as my contact on the council. If there's any problem, for any reason, I want to deal with Nazeer first."
Nazeer nodded again, favouring me with a little smile deep in his eyes.
I shook hands with each man in turn to seal the deal. The exchange was a little more formal and solemn than I'd expected it to be, and I had to clench my jaw to stifle a laugh. And those attitudes, their gravitas and my recusant impulse to laugh, registered the difference between us. For all that I liked Salman, Sanjay, and the others-and the truth was that I loved Nazeer, and owed him my life-the mafia was, for me, a means to an end and not an end in itself. For them, the mafia was a family, an infrangible bond that held them from minute to minute and all the way to the dying breath. Their solemnity expressed that kin-sacred obligation from eye to eye and hand to hand, but I knew they never believed it was like that for me.
They took me in and worked with me-the white guy, the wild gora who went to the war with Abdel Khader Khan-but they expected me to leave them, sooner or later, and return to the other world of my memory and my blood.
I didn't think that, and I didn't expect it, because I'd burned all the bridges that might've led me home. And although I had to stop myself from laughing at the earnestness of the little ceremony, the handshake had, in fact, formally inducted me into the ranks of professional criminals. Until that moment, the crimes I'd committed had been in the service of Khader Khan. As difficult as it is for anyone outside that world to understand, there was a sense in which I'd been able to say, with sincerity, that I'd committed them for love of him: for my own safety, certainly; but, beyond every other reason, for the father's love I'd craved from him. With Khader gone, I could've made the break completely. I could've gone... almost anywhere. I could've done ... something else. But I didn't. I joined my fate to theirs and became a gangster for nothing more than the money, and the power, and the protection that their brotherhood promised.
And it kept me busy, breaking laws for a living: so busy that I managed to hide most of what I felt from the heart that was feeling it. Everything moved quickly after that meeting at the Mocambo. Farid found new premises within a week. The two-story building, only a short walk from the floating mosque, Haji Ali, had been a records office for a branch of the Bombay Municipal Corporation. When the BMC had moved to larger, more modern offices, they'd left most of the old benches, desks, storage cupboards, and shelves behind as stock fittings. They were well suited to our needs, and I spent a week supervising a team of cleaners and labourers, who dusted and polished every surface while moving the furniture around to make way for the machinery and light-tables from Ghani's basement.
Our men loaded that specialist equipment onto a large, covered truck and delivered it to the new premises late at night. The street was unusually quiet as the heavy truck backed up to the double folding doors of our new factory. But alarm bells and the heavier clang of fire-engine bells jangled in the distance. Standing beside our truck, I looked along the deserted street in the direction of the frantic sound.
"It must be a big fire," I muttered to Sanjay, and he laughed out loud.
"Farid started a fire," Salman said, answering for his friend.
"We told him we didn't want anyone watching us move this stuff into the new place, so he started the fire as a diversion. That's why the street is so empty. Everybody who is awake has gone to the fire."
"He burned down a rival company," Sanjay laughed. "Now we are officially in the real estate business because our biggest rivals have just closed down, due to fire damage. We start our new real estate office not far from here tomorrow. And tonight, no curious fuckers are here to see us move our stuff into your new workshop.
Farid killed two birds with one match, na?"
So, while fire and smoke singed the midnight sky, and bells and sirens railed about a kilometre away, we directed our men as they moved the heavy equipment into the new factory. And Krishna and Villu went to work almost at once.
