JOHNNY GONE DOWN (2 page)

‘I’ve had to learn,’ I said.

‘Ufff… Can’t you close the door properly? I’m getting scalded. Aren’t you human?’ Another flash. Minnesota, homeless, sleeping under a bridge, shivering in my thin shirt and torn pants as the Arctic wind cut me in shreds. The body adapts, I had learnt.

‘You adapt,’ I told her.

She stared at me for a while. ‘I like you,’ she said
finally. ‘I’m sorry I reacted that way inside. Did you really go to school with Lavanya Varma at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston?’

MIT. Placid, innocent, the lull before the angry storms that hadn’t stopped raging since.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I replied.

She looked curiously at me. ‘How did you lose your arm?’

Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The most dismal time of my life. Not because I hadn’t seen worse after, but because I was young then. I was twenty-two. I was invincible. I wasn’t supposed to get hurt. Once again, I felt that hollow, empty feeling in the pit of my stomach when I recalled the gangrene that ate up my hand.

‘You ask too many questions,’ I told her.

She laughed, the open, honest laughter of someone who has never known loss.

‘What to do? I am the cliché ofa bored housewife.’ She smiled petulantly, no longer compelled to play the model parent now that her kid was tucked in for the night. ‘I let go my job after Raja was born. My husband travels all the time, but he still doesn’t make any money.’

Strangers on a train, I thought. She was desperate to reveal herself to any willing ear and drop every mask, secure in the knowledge that there would never be a next time.

She waited with an expectant look on her face, as
if wishing me to ask questions, to probe, or even to justify myself.

I didn’t say a word. Don’t ask, don’t judge, just accept - the first lesson I had learnt in the monastery. Eight years wasted; no monk could have walked farther away from the Buddha’s path than I had.

‘Sometimes I feel caged by my circumstances,’ she continued.

I shuddered as I recalled the small, dark cage where I had counted seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years, chained to the wall.

‘It’s getting late,’ I said.

She looked disappointed as I began to shuffle away from the train door.

‘Stay for a while. What’s early? What’s late? Do you have any work tomorrow in Delhi?’ She looked at me, half contemptuous, half teasing.
What work could someone like you have that can’t wait?

‘Tomorrow is important,’ I said with a mirthless smile as I limped my way back to the compartment. ‘A matter of life and death.’

Another sleepless night staring into the darkness. I felt the train rumble beneath me, its motion elegant and rhythmic, a mockery of my own irregular journey. I had been running for twenty-five years, yet I was behind where I started. I closed my eyes and waited.

‘Are you asleep?’

She was back in the compartment. A tall woman, the top of her head almost reached the upper berth where I lay, and her hair brushed lightly against my face. A sweet fragrance filled the air. A familiar fragrance, a whiff of patchouli and sandalwood.

Lara.

Her memory struck me with a crushing, almost physical force. A dull pain seemed to pass from my scrotum to the inside of my stomach.

‘You are awake,’ the woman whispered.

She bent down, possibly to check if her son was still asleep. Seemingly reassured, she looked up at me again.

‘You aren’t sleeping. Do you want to talk for a bit?’ she asked.

I wished for her sake that loneliness would be the most serious problem she ever faced in her life.

‘It’s late,’ I repeated.

‘Not that late,’ she answered.

‘It’s 2:20 a.m. Isn’t that late for you?’

She checked her watch quickly and looked at me, a surprised expression in her narrowed eyes. ‘2:21,’ she said. ‘How did you know the time? You don’t wear a watch, you don’t have a cellphone, you… you don’t even have a bag.’

I didn’t say anything. I had counted every second in the years spent in captivity; old habits die hard.

‘You don’t even have a bag,’ she repeated slowly.
‘How can anyone travel from Delhi to Bombay without a bag?’

‘Look,’ I said. ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but I really need to sleep.’

I turned on my side and stared unblinking into the darkness. Forgive me, I said silently to her, but every word you say seems to bury me in an avalanche of regret - and after all these years, I have lost the will to claw my way out again.

The train arrived on time at the New Delhi railway station the next day, and I searched for the handler among the hundreds of bewildered travellers, deformed beggars and smiling urchins. I had no idea what he looked like but I spotted him at once. He looked as I had expected him to look: short, squat, inconspicuous, of indeterminate ethnicity - as likely to be South American as Indian. He blended into the crowd easily; his eyes, intent and sharp, took in everything like a chameleon ready to pounce on his prey. He was trained by the best, and I knew that beneath his bulky, baggy shirt lay hard, taut muscles trained in advanced hand-to-hand combat and sharp shooting. He spotted me simultaneously and raised his left eyebrow. I responded to his gesture and walked up to him.

‘Good journey,’ he said, more an assertion than a question.

In our world, any journey you came back from alive was a good journey. Expertly, he guided me through the crowds. A cut here, a turn there and we were out of the station and into the waiting car. The car, nondescript from the outside, was fitted with all the equipment an operative needs to perform successfully. He rolled up the dividing screen between the driver and us, made a quick phone call in an unknown language from the phone affixed to the door, punched a few keys into his custom palm pilot, and we were on our way.

‘You’ve played before?’ he asked, his voice raspy, guttural and laboured.

I looked at his neck closely and spotted the wound. The bullet had probably punctured his lungs.

I shook my head.

‘It’s just like in the movies, except there is no need for drama,’ he said. ‘Don’t put on a performance. Just take the gun when it’s your turn, pull the trigger and pass it back.’

I nodded.

‘No drama,’ he repeated. ‘They’ve paid to see blood, they get blood. Nothing more, nothing less. This isn’t a circus.’

‘Okay,’ I said, glancing out the window to see roads and highways, large, cold buildings, faceless cars and the absence of shantytowns under the bridges. Twenty-five years, I reminded myself, things change.

‘Delhi has changed,’ I said.

He didn’t reply. Small talk wasn’t a part of his job description.

‘Two million rupees,’ he said after a while.

‘What?’

‘The stakes,’ he said. ‘You take half a million, those who bet on you double their money; we take the remaining.’

‘If I win, that is. If I lose, I get nothing except a bullet through my head.’

He shrugged. Life is tough, get over it.

They would pick up the money either way, I thought, though I suspected that the game was organized less for money and more for the entertainment of important clients - a morbid modern-day joust.

‘The Donos says you are the first man he has met who is genuinely unafraid to die,’ said the handler. ‘Two million rupees isn’t a joke in India. Do you know why the stakes are so high?’

I didn’t know, nor did I care.

‘Indians seem almost as afraid to die as Americans and Europeans. Elsewhere in south-east Asia - Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, even Hong Kong - it’s easy to organize. Here, we can’t find two people we can trust to play the game till the end. Every time, one or both of them chickens out after the first shot, or they shiver so much that they can’t even hold the revolver straight, or else they cry like
babies. It’s embarrassing. Why are Indians so afraid to die?’ he asked rhetorically.

‘Family ties, perhaps,’ I said disinterestedly.

I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I had no ties in India or, for that matter, anywhere else. I was better dead than alive, and would have done the honour myself except for my irrational belief that suicide was morally wrong, a direct violation of the laws that the Buddha had taught me. Or maybe I was just a yellow hypocrite. I neither knew nor trusted myself any more.

‘This time is going to be different, I know,’ he said, studying me closely. ‘Your eyes are steady.’

I didn’t say anything. Blowing your brains out for money was cowardice, not courage.

‘The other man is also a great find. He is dying of cancer but looks as healthy as an ox. It wouldn’t work if he looked as if he were about to die.’

I didn’t want to think about my opponent. It was best that he remained nameless and faceless.

‘How’s business?’ I asked instead.

The thick muscles in his neck tightened. ‘There are a lot of gang wars, especially with the big cartels from Colombia and Russia stepping in to get a piece of the action. I lost two men this month. You ran Marco’s operations in India?’

I shook my head. ‘I was with him in Brazil.’

‘How did you get there? I heard you went to MIT or Harvard or somewhere. You don’t meet too
many of them in our line of work,’ he said, his blank eyes showing a slight flicker of interest.

‘Long story,’ I said dismissively.

He shrugged. Whatever, your hell.

The car stopped in front of a furniture showroom on a busy street.

‘Here?’ I asked. It seemed an unlikely location for this diabolical duel. But where was I expecting him to take me anyway? India Gate or the Rashtrapati Bhavan, perhaps?

I followed him quietly as he scanned the road with a practised eye and made his way through the smoked glass doors to enter the main floor, which was filled with sparkling new cane furniture. The merchants in the showroom stood to attention. He ignored them and walked to the back of the shop. We went down a flight of stairs into a dark, stale basement where a small door opened into a surprisingly large, bare room with a wooden table in the centre and a chair on either side.

A man sat on one of the chairs, staring blankly at the light bulb above him, one of the two bulbs that lit the room.

‘This is Dayaram, your opponent,’ said the handler.

He looked about sixty, six foot plus, solidly built, with just a touch of grey in his thick black hair. The handler was right. God knows I had seen more dying men than anyone should see in a lifetime,
and he didn’t look like one. A little pale perhaps, but he might soon be blowing a hole through his temple, something that could make even the best of men lose colour. Dayaram got up from his chair and greeted me warmly.

‘Nikhil,’ I said, shaking his hand.

Or Jet. Or Monk Namche. Or Coke Buddha. Or Nick. Different aliases for each phase of my life. Take your pick, none had worked.

‘I was worried they wouldn’t be able to find an opponent,’ Daya said in chaste Hindi. ‘Thank you for doing this, sahib.’

I smiled slightly. He was thanking a man he was about to kill, or would be killed by in a few minutes. I liked him at once.

‘You have your choice of revolvers, but you both have to use the same one of course,’ said the handler, impatient to begin. ‘Should I toss a coin to choose who picks? We need to hurry before the audience starts coming in.’

An array of revolvers lay on the table - .17 Remington, .416 Barrett, .25 WSSM, .35 Remington, .357 Magnum, .30 Carbine. It had been a while but I recognized all of them, I realized with some measure of pride.

‘No need,’ I said. ‘He can pick.’

Dayaram looked bewildered at the range of options, just as I had been the first time Marco asked me to pick.

‘Just pick the one that feels most comfortable in your hand. All of them are equally effective,’ I said gently. ‘Aiming right is more important.’

The handler seemed to like the advice. He picked up the Smith.

‘You need to point here,’ he said, placing the gun against his temple. ‘Just move the barrel around a bit, like this, until you feel the slight bump, then press the trigger. Don’t point anywhere else on the head. It will be slow and painful for you - and for us. Too much blood, too messy, and you know of course that going to a hospital isn’t an option.’