‘Are you Russian?’ Farheen asked the man.
‘Yes, Russian,’ he replied.
‘I never met a Russian before,’ Farheen told him.
‘I’m Boris,’ said the man, ‘like Boris Yeltsin, except I don’t drink so much.’
Farheen said she didn’t know who Boris Yeltsin was.
Boris said, ‘When I was growing up I watched Indian movies, Awara, Mera Naam Joker. I like Raj Kapoor.’
Farheen didn’t know who Raj Kapoor was, and said so.
Jamal smiled and said, ‘She’s never heard of those movies, she’s too young.’
The Russian didn’t smile. He said, ‘Young or old, you should know Raj Kapoor. He is great Indian artist.’
‘We have great actors too, have you heard of Dilip Kumar? Great, great, better than Raj Kapoor. You know Dilip Kumar’s real name? Guess.’
The Russian got up and gathered his cigarettes and cellphone and heavy silver lighter. He hesitated for a minute before he left the table.
‘Yusuf,’ Jamal shouted as the man shouldered his way through the crowd. ‘Yusuf Khan!’
*
Farheen was wearing jeans, because he’d asked her to, and her shoes were so high she was almost as tall as he. She said she wanted a drink, because that’s what people did when they went to a club, wasn’t it? She spoke as if she expected an argument. Get me a nice one, she said, pointing to a black woman in a dress, who held a pink cocktail in a long-stemmed glass. When he came back with Farheen’s drink, she took a sip and smiled her thanks. She looked at the lights on the ceiling, which turned from gold to blue, and she looked at the crowd of people around them, dancing, or moving where they stood. She asked if he felt bad about giving drugs to people who had never learned how to say no, who were paying for their own destruction. Jamal fixed her with a look. He said, Look around, these are my customers. Do you see any Muslims? She said, How do you know there are none here? Look at us, we don’t look Muslim but we are. This wasn’t strictly true. Jamal had started to grow his beard, though he still shaved his cheeks and upper lip. And though she wasn’t wearing a burkha, she was covered up, she was decent, which was more than could be said for the women around her, women of many colours and ages, who came alone and danced alone. They danced and watched themselves in the mirrors. Men bought them drinks and told them jokes. They spoke very little Hindi and some English, but they were fluent in unidentifiable other tongues.
‘There are no Muslims here,’ Jamal told her, ‘which means there’s nothing wrong in selling them drugs.’
Farheen laughed.
‘In fact,’ she said, ‘it’s your duty.’
*
He didn’t like to dance: it made him feel foolish. Come on, soldier, Farheen said, I’ll show you how. If he refused, she would have danced alone. So he let her lead him to the floor. The dance was crazy and beautiful, people of all races and classes, all moving to one beat. Some swayed as if they were too high to stand, others hardly moved, or they moved only their hips. The metallic light fell around him in washes. It was like being on a stage with nobody looking. He felt a woman’s breasts against his back, and other bodies against his hips and thighs. Then Farheen kissed him. She put her tongue in his mouth and her lips were cold and wet from the cocktail. They stood absolutely still for a moment, but she pulled away to shout in his ear. Dance, she said, dance or we die.
Chapter Three The Enfolding
I went back the next day and found Rashid in his room, sitting in his chair by the window with the prayer beads in his hands. I asked if he was feeling better.
‘I’ll never be good or better, I’m past the age for it. Now there’s only bad and worse.’
I said I had come to pay my respects.
Rashid said, ‘I’m an old man. I don’t want to talk about the old days.’ But he brought it up himself.
‘Garad wrecked everything. If we’d stayed with opium my place would still be open. I’d be making money every day instead of sitting on a chair saying, if, if, if. So many people would be alive: Dimple, even your friend, the crazy one with the hammer. No, maybe not that sisterfucker.’
Instead of saying behenchodh like everyone else, Rashid’s variation was behen ko chodhu, and the way he said it made the words sound Arabic, a guttural clearing of the throat.
I said, ‘Rumi.’
‘Yes, him. Came here with a set of teeth, old dentures in a jam bottle. He said they were Mahatma Gandhi’s and tried to sell them to me for ten thousand rupees. I told him, chief, you’re a crazy man and this is a chandu khana not a pagal khana. He liked that. He said the dentures were Gandhi’s, totally genuine, money back guarantee. He said he got them from a man who got them from a man who stole them from Gandhi’s son, the drunk, who was neglected by the father. He said the government would give me a cash reward, saying all this loudly, and people laughing at him. I imagined the newspaper headlines: MUSLIM DRUG TRAFFICKER BUYS GHANDI’S TEETH. I told him to get them out of the khana before there was another riot. So this pagal smokes some garad and goes away. The jam bottle with the teeth, he leaves behind.’
The girl came in with a tray of tea and biscuits.
He said, ‘Years later I went for a talk at Bhavan’s College by one of Gandhi’s grandsons, a scholar of some kind. Afterwards I asked him if it was true, what Rumi said, that the old man had neglected his family. You know what he told me?’
‘I can’t even guess.’
‘He said the children may have suffered slightly from inattention, but the next generation made up for it. Of course he was bragging. He said the sins of the fathers may be visited on the children but the good is visited on the grandchildren. He was a tall corpse-like man with glasses that were too big for his face. He seemed annoyed. He told me I didn’t understand a thing about Gandhi, nobody did, no one understood that for him the most important thing in the world, more important than ideas and politics, were the simple facts of living. Life lived in quest of itself was the greatest art form. But the way he was saying these things, it was as if he didn’t believe his own words.’
‘How did Rumi die?’
‘Someone smashed his head with a piece of concrete pipe. They say it was the Pathar Maar, but I don’t think so. I think the Pathar Maar died a long time ago, or moved to some other city. Maybe Rumi met a copycat. Case is still unsolved.’
Rashid got up slowly. He took a set of keys from his pocket and gave them to the girl. He told her to take me to the flat on the half landing. He said, Zeenat’s old place. There’s a trunk under the bed. She’ll help you bring it up.
*
It was an old Bombay apartment with high ceilings and tiled floors. The front door opened into the living room, which had a marble-topped Irani table and some chairs. The rest of the space was crowded with computer equipment and obsolete or broken keyboards and terminals. The girl went through into the back and nodded at a tin trunk that lay wedged under the single bed. I pulled it out and between us we carried it up to Rashid. He unhooked a clasp and threw back the top and a handful of newspaper cuttings and documents fell on the floor. They were in Chinese and there was a photograph of a young officer in uniform. Rashid pulled out a striped shopping bag, the kind Bombay housewives stuff to the brim with coriander, onions and tomatoes. Inside was a pipe, the only one that had survived. He handed it to me. I sniffed the bowl for its long-gone scent and I thought I smelled it, like molasses and sleep and sickness.