‘Always it is like this,’ Harshad said. ‘Navi Mumbai is only forty years old and it is still growing. They are building all these office towers, making a nice room for the computers to live. My building has no working elevator after many weeks now but the computers are very comfortable, this is all that matters. There. Let us see what I have done.’
He patted the wire down snug against the chassis, twisted the battery tight and turned the dial. The radio burst into life. A blare of strings and a woman’s shrill voice filled the air with sparks of lost love and deceit. Harshad gave a satisfied nod.
‘You fixed it,’ I said.
‘Of course. I am a bringer of life to all dead things.’ A look of sadness washed over him and he took a drink. He smoothed his mangled hand over his scalp and started screwing the cover back on the radio.
‘I like the hair,’ I told Amrita. My words startled her and she swayed as she turned to see me, groping out a hand to steady herself.
‘I have modelled the hair on Amitabh Bachchan in Deewaar,’ Amrita said, as if I knew who she was talking about. ‘My father loves this film a lot.’
‘I like it,’ I said. And with that I ran out of things to say. I tightened my fingers round the handle of my carrier bag, felt for the weight of the money in it. I swung the bag against my thigh to remind myself that I was holding a man’s life in my hands.
‘BB is pleased with you?’ Harshad asked. ‘He will let you help him?’
‘I think so.’
‘You told him about your dying wish?’
‘I left out the dying part. I didn’t need it in the end.’
‘It is lucky that I am a friend of BB, or maybe you would not have found him.’ Eyeing up the bag like a cat stalking a bird.
I thanked him and decided I’d leave him a little something when the time came. For cleaning up whatever mess I was bound to make.
The old man sat there surrounded by his little army of elephant gods. A plastic watering can rested at his side. I looked for the flowers it gave life to and saw none. He offered me another figurine. This one was playing a guitar. I refused it and he took the snub on the chin, turned away and carried on staring at the spot he’d been looking at before I’d disturbed him, somewhere past the streaking traffic, a patch of sky above the train tracks that meant something special to him. He waited with a tirelessness that made me envy him.
I had an urge to tickle the old man’s feet and I was seriously thinking about it when Bibhuti’s car pulled up.
Jolly Boy waved at me from the passenger seat. School was out for the big vacation and the boy had decided to make me the story of his summer. I was the first white man he’d known and I fascinated him. Sometimes I’d catch him peering intently at me as if I were a strange fish behind aquarium glass.
Sometimes I still do, but now his curiosity is a haunted thing, blunted by a sadness inappropriate to his age by the walk we took together on the trail of a tiger.
Bibhuti got out of the car to greet me. The sun bounced off him in his white T-shirt and stonewashed jeans. He looked like he could repel any danger that might come our way. He was the stuff they clad the space shuttle in to stop it burning up in re-entry. I felt safe with him and afraid of my deficiencies. He took a comb out of his pocket and ran it through his hair and then he smoothed his moustache just so.
He froze when he saw the old man. The confidence drained from him. He stared down in disbelief. The old man smiled up at him, toothless and defiant. He chuckled softly, his orange beard blazing in the sunlight.
Bibhuti swayed where he stood, a burning question on his lips. It was as if he’d seen the face of death.
The old man’s chuckle broke into gentle laughter. The light crashed back into Bibhuti’s eyes and he bent down to shake the old man’s hand. They spoke warmly, like friends reunited after a long time apart. Then Bibhuti said his farewells and led me to his car where it was idling at the kerb.
He gave the bonnet a gentle pat. ‘Only two months old,’ he murmured. ‘I wanted a mid-segment for a very long time and finally my wife consented. It is not so much a luxury, I need it for my work. I must be always moving around. We had a choice between a new car and moving to a larger apartment with two bedrooms. In the end I made the right decision.’
He ran his fingertip tenderly down the wing, scared up some dust. He bunched his T-shirt over his fist and wiped the dust away, cooing softly to himself.
‘It runs very well. I love to drive. In the summer we visit the hill stations that are close to here, and also to Goa. One day I will drive the whole span of my country from top to bottom. I will drive to my native place in Orissa and I will drive to Darjeeling, up in the mountains. You must come.’
‘I don’t know if I’ll still be here,’ I said.
‘You will stay. I am sure of this. My country will give you everything you need, there is no reason to go back.’
I think he was joking. He couldn’t have loved me then. We were still strangers.
He lowered himself carefully onto the plank of wood that had been placed on the driver’s seat. He told me it was a measure against a hamstring injury sustained in his previous record attempt. The injury had persisted for longer than he’d hoped, and he’d come to accept that it might never leave him. Such was the way of things for the dedicated sportsman, he said. To bear the scars of past achievements was to always carry a reminder of one’s destiny, to be read in times of doubt like a passage from a holy book.
I got in the passenger side. I opened my bag and let Bibhuti see the money. He gave a solemn nod, as if confirming the identity of ancestral bones. Jolly Boy leaned in from the back seat and wolf-whistled again. I stuffed the bag between my feet. On the dashboard a Ganesh unlike the old man’s bore witness to the deal. This one was made of smooth stone, like a chess piece. Peering out from inside its Perspex cube, its multiple arms wrapped round itself in meditation, it warned me against exploiting my new friend’s hospitality.
Bibhuti didn’t know the old man. Their conversation had taken the form of a mutual blessing.
‘He reminded me of someone I once knew, many years ago. He looks very much like him. He too had the orange beard and the smell of fire was on him. For a moment I thought he had returned to me but it was a mistake. Nevertheless this is a clear sign that I must accept your offer. I am very happy for your help.’
My heart skipped. Bibhuti turned the key and as the engine hacked into life I congratulated myself on having made it this far, under my own steam and with no recourse to prayer. The old man stood to watch us pull away, happily pissing in the watering can.
The sun struck its killer blows as we walked unprotected to the valley’s lowest point. I asked Jolly Boy if he knew what a robot was. He said he did. I told him about the game me and Ellen used to play when I was driving somewhere far. How we pretended the electricity pylons were robots that were shut down or sleeping on the grass banks that bordered the roads and, later, the motorways we hummed down on the way to seaside holidays.
‘You had to hold your breath as you went past so you didn’t wake them up. If you woke them up they’d go berserk and eat your car. Eat you as well.’
Ellen was always the first to break, her breath never big enough to contain the laughter that leaked from her in habitual swells, the tip of her tongue always sugared with an amusement that hinted at things known that couldn’t be captured by looking straight ahead with your eyes on the road. I pretended to go blue when the traffic slowed, and she reached across and poked my cheek to let the air out so I could take another breath. We’d stop by the side of the road to pick blackberries, plump and sweet, to be eaten in the shade of the flyover. The dying sun would chase us to the sea and Ellen would run to the beach to look for shells while I got the stove working, in a caravan small enough to go mad in if the weather closed in and our humour ran out. It didn’t run out for a long time. We had the hills to run down and grass to lie in when running got too hard. Even on a pebble beach there were heart-shaped stones to be harvested. Things would only fall apart when I stopped finding them.