The Mountain Shadow Read Online Free PDF

stealing my drink.
    Didier Levy was in his mid-forties. The first powder snow of winter wove spirals through his dark, curly hair. Soft, brilliantly blue irises hovered in the anemone patchwork of red veins filling the whites of his eyes, making him seem young and dissolute in the same smile: the mischievous boy still hiding inside the ruining man.
    He drank any kind of alcohol, at any time of the day or night, dressed like a dandy, long after other dandies melted in the heat, smoked tailor-made joints from a bespoke cigarette case, was a professional at most crimes, the master of a few, and was openly gay, in a city where that was still an oxymoron.
    I’d known him for five years, through struggles against enemies, within and without. He was brave: the kind of man who’ll face a gun with you and never run, no matter what the fall.
    He was authentic. He expressed the uniqueness when what we are, is what we’re free to become. I’d known him through lost loves, alarming lust, and kneeling epiphanies, his and mine. And I’d spent enough of those long, lonely wolf nights with him to love him.
    ‘ That look,’ I repeated. ‘The look that says you know something that everybody else should know. The look that says I told you so , before you tell me anything at all. So tell me, before you told me so.’
    Didier’s outraged expression crumbled in smiles, and fell into a laugh.
    ‘It is more of a told me so,’ he said. ‘I like that boy very much. More than I expected to. And more than I should, because this Naveen Adair, he has a reputation.’
    ‘If reputations were votes, we’d be presidents of somewhere.’
    ‘True,’ he replied. ‘But this boy’s reputation carries a warning. A word to the wise , isn’t that the expression?’
    ‘It is, but I’ve always wondered why the wise need a word.’
    ‘It is said that he is very, very good with his fists. He was a boxing champion at his university. He could have been the champion of India. His fists are deadly weapons. And as I have heard, he is very quick, too quick perhaps, to provoke into using them.’
    ‘You’re no slouch in the provoking department, Didier. And it doesn’t take a stick through the bars to get me going.’
    ‘Many men have already fallen to their knees before that young life. It is not a good thing, in a man so young, to see so much submission. There is a lot of blood behind that charming young smile.’
    ‘There’s a lot of blood behind your charming smile, my friend.’
    ‘Thank you,’ he nodded, accepting the compliment with a little toss of the greying curls. ‘I’m simply saying that from what I have heard, I would very much prefer to shoot that handsome young fellow than to fight him.’
    ‘Then it’s a lucky thing you carry a gun.’
    ‘I’m . . . if you’ll excuse the lapse . . . being serious , Lin, and you know how much contempt I have for serious things.’
    ‘I’ll keep it in mind. Promise. I’d better go.’
    ‘You’re leaving me here to drink alone, and you’re going home to her ?’ Didier mocked. ‘You think she’s waiting for you, after almost three weeks in Goa? What makes you think she hasn’t left you for some greener pastures , as the English say, with such charming provincialism.’
    ‘I love you, too, brother,’ I said, shaking his hand.
    I walked out into the breathing street, turning once to see him holding up the little bundle of love letters I’d retrieved for him, and waving goodbye.
    It stopped me. I felt, as I too often did, that I was abandoning him. It was foolish, I knew: Didier was arguably the most self-sufficient contrabandist in the city. He was one of the last independent gangsters, owing nothing, not even fear, to the mafia Companies, cops and street gangs that controlled his illegal world.
    But there are some people, some loves, that worry every goodbye, and leaving them is like leaving the country of your birth.
    Didier, my old friend, Naveen, my new friend, and Bombay, my