There was a little silence while Sanjay pursed his lips, twirled his hand palm upward, and looked from Salman to Farid. Then all three of them burst out laughing.
"You asked him!" Farid giggled.
"Okay, okay," Sanjay conceded. "I asked the wrong guy. Lin is a wild guy, yaar. He gets wild notions. He went to Afghanistan with Khader, man! Why did I ask a guy who's crazy enough to do that?
You ran that clinic in the zhopadpatti, and you never made a fuckin' paise out of it. Remind me of that, Lin brother, if I ever ask you for your business opinion again, na?"
"And another thing," I added, keeping a straight face.
"Eh, Baghwan!" Sanjay cried. "He's got another thing, yet!"
"If you think about the slogans, you'll understand where I'm coming from on this."
"The slogans?" Sanjay protested, provoking his friends to bigger laughter. "What fuckin' slogans, yaar?"
"You know what I mean. The slogan, or the motto, of the Walidlalla gang is Pahiley Shahad, Tab julm. I think I'm right in translating it as First Honey, Then Outrage, or even Atrocity.
Isn't that right? And isn't that what they say to each other as their slogan?"
"Yeah, yeah, that's their thing, man."
"And what's our slogan? Khader's slogan?"
They looked at one another, and smiled.
"Saatch aur Himmat." I spoke it aloud for them. "Truth and Courage. I know a lot of guys who'd like Chuha's slogan. They'd think it was clever and funny. And it sounds ruthless, so they'd think it was tough. But I don't like it. I like Khader's."
At the sound of an Enfield engine, I looked up to see Abdullah park his bike outside the chai shop and wave to me. It was time for me to go.
I'd spoken the truth, as I saw it, and I meant every word, but in my own heart of hearts I knew that Sanjay's argument, although not better, would turn out to be stronger than mine. The Walidlalla gang under Chuha was the future of all the mafia councils, in a sense, and we all knew it. Walid was still the head of the council that bore his name, but he was old and he was ill. He'd ceded so much power to Chuha that it was the younger don who ruled. Chuha was aggressive and successful, and he gained new ground by conquest or coercion every few months. Sooner or later, if Salman didn't agree to merge with Chuha, that expansion would come to open conflict, and there would be a war.
I hoped, of course, that Khader's council, under Salman, would win. But I knew that, if we did win, it would be impossible to claim Chuha's territory without also absorbing his trade in heroin, women, and porn. It was the future, and it was inevitable. There was simply too much money in it. And money, if the pile gets high enough, is something like a big political party: it does as much harm as it does good, it puts too much power in too few hands, and the closer you come to it the dirtier you get. In the long run, Salman could walk away from the fight with Chuha, or he could defeat him and become him. Fate always gives you two choices, Scorpio George once said: the one you should take, and the one you do.
"But hey," I said, standing to leave, "it's got nothing to do with me. And frankly, I don't really give a damn one way or the other. My ride is here. I'll see you guys later."
I walked out, with Sanjay's protests and his friends' laughter rattling above the clatter of cups and glasses.
"Bahinchudh! Gandu!" Sanjay shouted. "You can't fuck up my rave like that and then walk out, yaar! Come back here!"
As I approached him, Abdullah kick-started the bike and straightened it from the side stand, ready to ride.
"You're in a hurry for your workout," I said, settling myself onto the saddle of the bike behind him. "Relax. No matter how fast we get there, I'm still going to beat you, brother."
For nine months, we'd trained together at a small, dark, sweaty, and very serious gym near the Elephant Gate section of Ballard Pier. It was a goonda's gym set up by Hussein, the one-armed survivor of Khader's battle with the Sapna assassins. There were weights and benches, a judo mat, and a boxing ring. The smell of man-sweat, both fresh and fouled into the stitching of leather gloves and belts and turnbuckles, was so eye-wateringly rancid that the gym was the only building in the city block that rats and cockroaches spurned. There were bloodstains on the walls and the wooden floor, and the young gangsters who trained there accumulated more wounds and injuries in a workout week than the emergency ward of a city hospital on a hot Saturday night.
"Not today," Abdullah laughed over his shoulder, pulling the bike into a faster lane of traffic. "No fighting today, Lin. I am taking you for a surprise. A good surprise!" "Now I'm worried," I called back. "What kind of surprise?"
"You remember when I took you to see Doctor Hamid? You remember that surprise?"
"Yeah, I remember."
"Well, it is better than that. Much better."
"U-huh. Well, I'm still not very relaxed about it. Gimme another hint."
"You remember when I sent you the bear, for hugging?"
"Kano, sure, I remember."
