JOHNNY GONE DOWN (14 page)

His arms. I suddenly felt sorry for myself. I would never be able to dance this way.

Someone handed me another drink and I took it happily as I continued to stare, as though hypnotized, at the Samba dancers. Maybe Lara was right, I thought. Love and passion, hope and longing, loss and redemption - these were what kept us alive. How could denial of the most basic human expressions be the greater truth? Lara, elusive and ethereal with her warm eyes, slight smile, long hair - our fleeting acquaintance probably meant nothing to her. The music picked up tempo and the couples grooved harder, hip to hip, fondling, even groping a little.

I was thirty and I had achieved nothing, I thought suddenly. I had never even been in love, unless I counted the puppy love for Lavanya in college and lusting after a model who was unfortunate enough to sit next to me on a flight. I couldn’t even claim that I had let go of love to pursue my career; I had nothing to show on that front either. I felt very sorry for myself indeed.

‘You dance with me, Buddha?’

A young woman with curly hair and smooth brown skin walked up to me. She was about a foot shorter than my six foot plus and looked stunning in her silky red dress.

Who was I kidding, I thought. Just about everyone looked stunning to me. Either this country had the
most gorgeous women in the world or I had lost the ability to discriminate because of my long dry spell.

‘Eu falar Portuguese,’ I said. ‘I speak Portuguese.’

‘Very sexy,’ she slurred. ‘Come dance with me.’

I pointed to my missing arm.

She shrugged and dragged me to the floor.

Alex hooted and handed me another glass of Caipirinha. Balancing the glass in my hand, I drank quickly and followed her lead. She pressed her hips tightly against mine, and I found myself shamefully aroused. Round and round we twirled as I tried to match move for move until I ended up tippling the glass over her in an effort to keep pace.

I watched the alcohol splash on her face and mingle with her sweat. It trickled down her neck and I turned away.

‘Lick me clean,’ she urged.

I hesitated. ‘I can’t do that,’ I said unconvincingly.

She pushed herself closer. ‘You made this mess. You need to clean it up.’

I leaned forward and licked her neck gently. She kissed me softly on my earlobes. I couldn’t hold back any longer. Someone, probably Alex, cheered. Another glass was handed to me, the music picked up a notch, and we began to spin.

‘Not bad. He has a decent one for such a tall guy.’

‘Do tall guys have little ones?’

‘Mostly. And I think he is Asian; Asians have the smallest.’

‘Does it work as well as it looks, Maria?’

I woke up with a start to find myself lying stark naked in an unfamiliar room, spooning an equally naked woman. I stared at her soft brown body in confusion, shrieks of laughter ringing in my ears. Marco, Alex and Maki were standing in front of us, fully dressed in sleeveless T-shirts and rugged jeans. I moved to cover myself and the woman, who had just stirred awake.

She stretched and swung her legs off the bed unselfconsciously.

‘Bastards,’ she said to Marco and the others. ‘Will you ever grow up?’

She didn’t make any attempt to cover herself, and I found myself aroused by her plump, curvaceous figure. Everyone howled, and she smiled.

‘You were not bad,’ she said. ‘You need help with Mr Johnson there any time, you know where to come.’

Only, I didn’t. I had no memory at all of last night, except thrusting for an eternity and her writhing, moaning body underneath.

The woman put on her red dress from yesterday.

Much to everyone’s amusement, she came and playfully stroked my penis.

‘Nice to meet you,’ she said. ‘My name is Maria.’

She left the room and I stared in embarrassment at Marco and his friends.

‘Can you show me the accounts please?’ I said in a rush.

They laughed well into the morning.

Chastened, showered, and with a fresh vow of Buddhist detachment, I knocked on the door of the room between mine and Marco’s - his office, as he called it. Alex opened the door. He had a big gun in his hand and a bigger frown on his face. He relaxed on seeing me and quickly pulled me inside.

Five or six children, barely ten or twelve years old, were on the floor with their hands in heaps of white powder that had been placed on a rubber mat. They were taking powder from one pile and mixing it in with an identical looking powder in another pile.

‘Friends, this is Buddha,’ said Marco, who was standing near the window, a rifle slung over each shoulder. The children looked up in acknowledgment and went back to mixing the powder.

‘Mixing cocaine with talcum powder,’ Marco said matter-of-factly. ‘Important for the accountant to know - we get it at five hundred dollars a kilo, we add another kilo of talcum powder and sell it for a thousand dollars a kilo. What is our net profit, men?’

‘Three hundred per cent, assuming the talcum powder costs nothing,’ I said automatically.

Marco looked at Alex triumphantly. ‘Didn’t I tell you? You would have taken a year to give me that answer. It took me a month to figure it out myself. We have a genius here, men.’

‘You deal in drugs?’ I asked quietly.

Why was I surprised? Did I expect a Brazilian slumlord to deal in mutual funds, treasury bonds and credit derivatives? But dealing in drugs and arms was the lowest of sins in Buddhist teaching, was I really going to fall so low? I didn’t say anything but my disapproval must have been obvious.

‘We use this money to fund everything in the favelas - water, electricity, schools, roads, community projects,’ said Alex defensively. ‘In Brazil, the government doesn’t care about slums. Poverty is a disease here; if you are infected by it, you are shunned like a leper. It’s only because of the work we do that people in the community can live like humans.’

Great, I thought, modern-day Robin Hoods. Marco, tattoos shining on his muscular arm, looked about as credible in the role of Mother Teresa helping the poor as I did as a Buddhist monk.

‘Don’t judge us before you know us, men,’ said Marco. ‘You don’t understand how things work around here.’

I was about to tell him I had seen worse in India when I stopped. He was right. Secluded in my army schools and cantonments, how much of
India’s poverty had I really experienced outside the voyeuristic school trips? The context mattered. Hadn’t I once almost willed Ishmael dead so I could eat his bowl of rice? From the little I had seen of Rio, the eruption of violence seemed as common as my frequent crises of faith in the monastery. Who was I to judge the impact of growing up in surroundings like these when I had spent eight years in meditation to get over two years of being locked up in a cell?

‘You don’t need to be involved in the business, men,’ said Marco. ‘You just look at the numbers. Make sure everything is fair and square.’

What could ever be fair in this business, I wondered. But then, which business was fair?

‘This is the account register,’ Marco said.

I took it in spite of myself. Numbers were scrawled uncertainly across every page. A few of the pages were torn in half and others blotted with water (or Caipirinha perhaps?) and casual bloodstains.

‘It’s a mess,’ he said, echoing my thoughts.

‘How do you keep track of the money?’ I asked.

‘Money comes, money goes,’ said Marco philosophically. ‘When it comes, we buy stuff; when it runs out, we don’t.’

‘What about your investments?’ I asked. ‘Is there a separate register for that?’

‘In our life, there are only two roads,’ he said. ‘Prison or death. What should we invest for?’

‘For the favela you take care of, perhaps? What
happens when you go to prison or die?’ I said a little testily.

‘Look at these runts,’ said Marco, gesturing at the young boys, who had finished mixing the coke and were now packing it into small plastic bags. They looked up dutifully. ‘After me, it’s them, and so it goes. No one is indispensable in this business, men.’

The realization of the impermanence of life, I thought; the Buddha would have been proud.

‘Let me study this,’ I said and picked up the register.

For the little time I was here, I would do my best to serve their needs, I decided. I began to walk out of the room.

‘Wait,’ he said. He opened a cupboard full of guns. ‘Choose your weapon.’

No, not this, I thought.

‘I don’t need to shoot,’ I said firmly.

‘Self-defence,’ he told me. ‘You can’t step out for a minute unless you have a gun. Remember what happened that day? That sort of thing happens every day.’

‘Who were they?’ I asked.

‘That was Baz, a small-time goon in this favela, who wants to become the Donos. We killed him last night after the funk. But it could have been anyone - the police, a gang from another favela, someone I once shot, even Alex here.’

‘Donos, please,’ Alex protested.

He raised his hand. ‘Don’t get me wrong. I trust everyone in the gang, but one day you may think I’ve become weak and senile; then I will need to be taken out. As I said before, in this life, it’s either prison or death.’

‘Not for you, though,’ he added as an afterthought. ‘No one kills the contador.’

I looked at the guns in the cupboard; they all looked the same.

‘Choose carefully,’ said Marco. ‘Everyone has a special relationship with their gun. Soon, using someone else’s gun will feel as uncomfortable as wearing someone else’s underwear.’

I moved towards the biggest one.

Marco and Alex laughed.

‘Not that one, idiot,’ said Marco. ‘How will you carry that monster? You should stick to the handguns - pistols, revolvers or derringers.’

‘But you guys carry them,’ I said.

He looked slightly abashed. I had forgotten I was a cripple.

‘Use one of these instead,’ he said. ‘The Anaconda, or the Python, the Beretta, the Glock… all are better for your purpose than the one you chose.’

I picked one up.

‘The Glock,’ he said approvingly. ‘Good choice. Here, just pull back the hammer with your mouth and pull the trigger - like this.’

‘Boom,’ he said as the bullet escaped, shattering
one in a long row of expensive-looking figurines standing in front of the window.

The runts cheered.

‘Now you try,’ he said. ‘Aim at the head of that statue. It will take some tries to get it right, men.’

‘Should we practise somewhere else?’ I asked.

He laughed. ‘It’s just stuff; here today, gone tomorrow.’

To emphasize the point, he shot at a few more figurines, not missing once.

He gave me the gun. It was smouldering hot and I almost dropped it.

‘Careful, Buddha.’ Marco laughed. ‘If it goes off, you may be left with just one leg as well.’

This was the first time anyone had joked about my arm and it felt curiously liberating. I concentrated on the statue he was pointing at. I took aim.

‘Easy, cowboy,’ said Marco. ‘Shooting a revolver isn’t half as easy as shooting your load into Maria.’

Alex and the runts burst into peals of laughter.

Suddenly, an image I had tried unsuccessfully to forget for years flashed through my mind - the Khmer soldier stabbing the pregnant woman again and again, her plain white dress gradually stained crimson with her unborn baby’s blood.

My hand shuddered as I shot the bastard.

I looked up, as if from a trance, and saw Marco and Alex staring at the headless figurine. My shot had been as clean as Marco’s.

I gave the smoking gun back to him. ‘Bond. James Bond,’ I said with a grin.

‘You were meant to be a bandido, not a contador,’ said Marco. ‘I don’t know anyone else who got their first shot right.’

‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ I said. ‘I am better at accounting than at shooting.’

‘Go do your accounts then,’ said Marco. ‘By the way, get ready for tonight. I have kept some shirts and jeans in your room.’

‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

‘A baile.’

‘What’s a baile?’

‘A baile is, well, a baile. Same kind of place we went last night, only bigger,’ he said. ‘Bigger speakers, bigger field, bigger music, more galinhas.’

‘Galinhas?’ I said.