Another one walking beside me

I think Hope is a bitch.

Hope never left me or stayed with me.

My mother, Asha Mann, spent most of her adult life snorting coke and doing odd jobs to fund her addiction. One such odd job brought me into this world. During an unprotected exercise of flailing her legs, she discovered the implications of "the odds are against you."

I do not have much memory of my mother. But my neighbours in the slum where I live say that in her lucid moments, Ma used to call me Swayam. In Hindi, Swayam meant yourself. Maybe she hoped that, unlike her, I could live my life on my own terms. So here I am, Swayam Mann.

I've never seen my father. When Ma died, I bounced around for a few years, in the laps of the pavement, and some kind souls who wanted me to stop crying. In time, I became a runner for the local coke dealers in my slum. I was good, and soon I was supplying the packets from the rocky beaches of Anjuna to the crowded lanes of Baga.

Anjuna beach was my favourite in Goa. Most of the folks there who bought from me were "Goras" from London, Shondon, or Kansas. Looking at their big phones, I could make out that they had money, but they roamed around in tattered cotton clothes and had the same dirty hair as mine.

Once I had to deliver to a lady in a side alley of one of those fancy hotels. I remember her very well. Her name was Hope. She was standing next to a scooter near a panwala. She was already smoking when she took her packet. It was one of those scarlet, sunset evenings. An evening, when most do oohs and aahs while clicking their selfies and giggling a lot. Hope asked me about myself. I do not know what story I told her, but I hoped that Hope would give me some big tips, like some Goras sometimes do. And I was old enough to also think that if not tips, even tits would do.

She gave neither. But she did take me to one of those shacks. We ate a lot of stuff. I do not remember any of the names of those dishes, as they all tasted the same. I ate while Hope smoked into the sky. Suddenly, she stood up and asked if I wanted something special. I have had ganja before, but nothing very serious. After all, it is difficult to sell stuff if you do not know something about it. Hope showed me how to snort coke. She was very kind. As the orange orb lingeringly dipped into the horizon, I had my first coke. First time, not from a bottle, and it was uplifting. I never saw Hope again in Goa, but I do remember her fondly. Though now in a similar haze as my memory of my mother. That priest, who peddles religion in the slum centre, once told me that, people reincarnate. Was Hope my mother? I think so. She once told me that all of us are different, but to stand out from this tyranny of difference, we need to be more different than the others. She said that I need to speak and sound English, in order to sell my stuff to the Goras. She gave me my English name, reversing and literally translating my name from Hindi – Swayam Mann – to "Mind Yourself"

The name was good, and it was better at getting tips. As my buyers grinned at my name and snorted, I was getting good money. I would spend whatever money I could save from Tony, my dealer, on coke. My daily runs used to finish my mid-afternoon and I could laze in one section of the concave sandy stretch in Anjuna. Hope had triggered a love of all things English in me. I began attending night school to broaden my vocabulary beyond greetings, thank-yous, and four-letter words. The desperately sincere sister who ran the night school wanted me to study more. She said I am sharp and imaginative. But once I learned enough English to read books well, I stopped. All the partly read and well-thumbed books that my customers gave me were read in that Anjuna cove. Luckily, due to big rocks impeding access to my refuge, no shacks had staked their claim to the place. I could snort my coke, read my books, and listen to the wafting tunes of a song about some big-eyed girl wandering among tangerine trees and marmalade skies, from some nearby shack. I do not know much about tangerine or marmalade, but both seemed like something nice to me.

Earlier today, I wanted to start a book given to me by Stearns, a Portuguese customer of mine. He is leaving for the fair hills of Manala, a village up north in the Himalayas, and the book is his gift.

He said in his peculiar accent, "Minde, here, learn about your place. Learn about Alphonso." He always called me Minde. I do not know why. Perhaps he disliked the abrupt ending of the syllables in Mind, or perhaps he named me after a town in his home country called Minde.

I liked him. Sometime back, he had given me a book of poems about a dump yard. I did not understand it much, but a few lines stuck with me.

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

—But who is that one on the other side of you?

I liked it and asked Stearns about the lines. He told me it was about a foolish explorer. He had no other similar books about dump yards, but he gave him this book about Alphonso.

I curled myself up and snorted some coke. With a rock as my back support on the beach, I thought I would learn something about the mangos.

I love mangoes, and I have had Alphonso mangoes before. In season, I would buy those small, pockmarked, black, blue, and orangishly tricolored Appemedi mangoes that come across from neighbouring Karnataka. They are used mostly to make pickles, but I can afford them. If I am feeling rich, sometimes I haggle to buy some of those overripe, yellow, juicy Dusseri that come from faraway Lucknow. These mangoes are good, but Alphonso is like those flawless, fair-skinned, haughty princesses that one reads about in fairy tales. It is difficult and expensive to obtain, but once obtained, it is succulent beyond imagination. Hope had once given me some to taste. I hesitantly had one, but as the reddish and blemish less mango seduced me, I had a few more. I told Hope that these are gora mangoes, as against the desi mangoes. Hope smiled and said that the son of the oldest profession in the world has the oldest bias in the world. I did not understand her, but I did not accept mangoes from her again. I occasionally got a few as leftovers from tourists.

By the time I had snorted my second coke, I was almost halfway through the book. I was beginning to get a sneaking suspicion that the book was not about mangoes. It was about an ancient Portuguese guy, named Afonso de Albuquerque. Afonso was a bastard like me, but unlike me, he knew his father, who was a friend of the Portuguese king. This gave him the right propulsion in life, and he came to India, after the famous Vasco de Gama, to handle Portuguese matters. It was a swashbuckling time, with opposing local kings, high seas, pirates, and gold. It seemed much like that movie I had seen about some energetic characters in the Caribbean, except there were no ghosts. With the sea waves crashing into the black rocks, a salty breeze in the air, and the coke relaxing my synapses, I could see myself in the ship. I was Afonso. The mango is named after me, and it is wanted by everyone. Leading two dozen ships, I have won Goa for the Portuguese from the Sultan of Bijapur with the blood, sweat, and tears of my hundred dozen warriors. The Sultan somehow looked like Tony. I am at the crest of the main battleship, braving the wind and the spray, entering my patch of the crescent Anjuna beach, making my own destiny. I am Mind Yourself.

I was reading a section of the book about Afonso building a small church for the Jesuits on top of some hill in Goa. This church has never been found. This shook me out of my reverie. I knew where the church was. It had to be on top of the hill, past the Curlies shack in Anjuna, and overlooking the Arabian Sea. I got up, picked up the book, and started for the hill. As I reached Curlies, I could hear that song of the girl and her tangerine trees under the marmalade skies. I realised that the girl was called Lucy. Or maybe it was Laxmi. I wanted to sprint up the pebbled incline, past the shack. The sun had begun its descent to drown itself in the sea. There were many folks, mostly couples, who were on the ridge of the cliff before it broke into a peak. It is a moderately popular place. A small group of people called it the Sunset Point. Most climbed the thorny path to get a better view. Some, who wanted to snog in privacy, went down from the ridge to reach a small, rocky Land’s End, where they met the crashing waves. The rocks there gave them a false sense of privacy from prying eyes.

I reached the end of the ridge near the small hut of a temple, just before the incline gets more acute to get to the top of the hill. I paused for breath and scanned the scarlet horizon. Down below, a few couples were already cuddling up. I think I also saw a cop at the edge of the frayed beach. They sometimes came to extract petty bribes from the frolicking couples in the shadows of the rocks.

I could still see myself on the battleship. Now, I could see Hope, too, on the ship's bridge. She was dressed in a billowing white gown with blue iris sewn all over it and ornate fringes. She was saying something, but the wind was too fierce for me to hear her. I was feeling thirsty, but I did not want to go down to the shack for water. Afonso’s church was waiting for me. Waiting to be found by me. The last bit of the climb was tricky. Maybe that is why no one came here and the church lay undiscovered.

I again looked at the horizon. I still had some Coke left. I snorted the last of it and started climbing again.

I felt rejuvenated and less thirsty. Just around the bend, almost at the lonely top, there seemed to be rubble. That had to be the church, right at the edge of the cliff. I could not see any path leading to it, but the bushes and the gravel seemed to be thin at the rim of the top. I am Afonso. Nothing can stop me.

In perspective, I did get stopped.

A few paces before I reached the rubble, I slipped off the treacherous path and fell.

Those seven seconds of my fall from the hilltop did seem longer. As I was falling, I could sense I was still in the ship, but I could not see Hope. My ship managed to cross the crest of an insistently tall wave and fell sharply into the trough. I called out to Hope. I crashed into the ground, and my head turned into a splattered reddish Alphonso mango. 

Rakesh and Lucy were in the middle of a stolen moment of passion when they heard the thud of my fall on the other side of the rocks. First, they thought, it was the cop. Rakesh, who had been to this part of the beach before, though not always with Lucy, was familiar with Ganpati, the cop. As he hurriedly tried to get his composure back and searched his wallet for some money, he realised the thud was louder than the warning banging of Ganapati’s stick against the rocks. He stood up and saw Ganapati rushing towards the noise, with a small gaggle of couples following him. He helped a dishevelled Lucy up, and both of them ran towards the spot, where I had fallen.

By the time they reached me, Ganapati was already next to my broken and bloody body.

Lucy's blue iris on her white billowing dress with ornate fringe was reddened by the setting sun's evening glow. She had a strange expression on her face as she reached out to look at my fallen form.

Ganapati said, "A boy has fallen from the cliff. This a dead body here. Be careful. Mind yourself."