lean visitor entered a code into the hand unit he extracted from the pocket of his ragged shorts. An LED on the pack, which was woven of impenetrable carbon fiber composite camouflaged to look like cheap burlap, flashed green. Entry and broadcast of a second code brought forth another green light plus a soft click from somewhere within. Had anyone else tried to force their way into the pack without successfully entering both codes, the amount of C-4 explosive integrated into its inner lining was sufficient in quantity and purity to scatter the would-be intruder's body parts plus those of anyone in his immediate vicinity over a distance more expansive than the standard cricket field. As the pack's owner unsealed the top flap Sanjay leaned forward, the better to see what the man with the mongoose countenance had brought for him.
There were a dozen small packets, every one as neatly wrapped and bound as a Chinese New Year present. Each was hand-identified in English, that being as much the language of general commerce
throughout the subcontinent as it was in the rest of the wider world. One package said 'Acetaminophensyntase-Pandeswami Industries, Guwahati.' The two next to the first declared their contents to be 'Multivitamin with proprietary Ayurvedic herbs and supplements.' All three packages contained nothing of the kind, unless one counted as a similarity the fact that they were packed tight with synthesized Pharmaceuticals.
Illegal recreational pharmaceuticals.
Sanjay had always been a very fast learner. He had been the first in his village age group to master English verbs, the first to inquire about how to use a computer keyboard, the first to try voice recognition com mands. Once he obtained the small business loan that had enabled him to open his little shop, it had not taken him long to learn that even when dealing with ignorant tourists, the profit margin on T-shirts and silver anklets and carved wooden elephants was small. Much smaller than on other things that could be sold to travelers out of a shop such as his.
He prided himself on never selling such items to Indians. Well, not to Hindus, anyway. He was a strong BJP man, firmly believing them to be corrupt but less corrupt than the members of the Congress and other parties. When resigned to a life in hell always vote for the lesser devil, his father had once told him. Though considering himself to be completely unprejudiced, he was happy enough to sell drugs to Buddhists, and Muslims, and the occasional Sikh, as well as to eager tourists.
You are throwing away your lives as well as your money, he wanted to tell them when they came looking for his shop (he had already gained a modest reputation for availability of certain chemical combinants). You were born with all these advantages, and you are casting them to the winds for a few moments of false pleasure, he felt the urge to say.
But he did not. Because he had a wife, and two children, and had not the brutal ancestors of his fresh-faced customers raped and stolen from his own progenitors whatever had taken their fancy? Ghosh's Keepsakes was not exactly a front for a reprise of the Sepoy Rebellion, but neither did his misgivings over what he was doing cause him to lose much sleep. Especially not when some smart-mouthed French or Italian kid wearing fake Indian clothing and sporting long dreads ambled in off the street, acting as if he owned the place, and flashed a wallet stuffed with more rupees than Sanjay's long-suffering father was used to seeing in a year.
So he beamed at Bindar, who was forever looking over his shoulder as if Durga herself was on his tail with a knife in each of her eight arms, and selected one of the packets at random. His visitor simply nodded, knowing in advance what Sanjay intended to do with the package. Unless, of course, the shopkeeper had taken leave of his rural but care fully honed senses.
Using his remote, Sanjay unlocked the bottom drawer of his counter. It did not look like a drawer, but like a section of the counter base itself. Recognizing his thumbprint, the drawer slid out. It contained not trinkets and bangles, not even the good 22k gold jewelry he kept for knowledgeable customers, but several pieces of gleaming white electronics.
Carefully puncturing the packet he had selected he used a small spoon to tip a tiny bit of the beige powder it contained into an open receptacle atop one such device. Practiced fingers manipulated a set of buttons. Sanjay did not know how the instruments worked. It was not necessary that he did. While lights flickered and danced, Bindar struggled as he always did not to lean forward and peer over the counter.
As a matter of professional regard, Sanjay was not smiling now. He liked Bindar, who had come to Sagramanda from a village even poorer than Sanjay's and who had chosen a profession far more dangerous than that of shopkeeper. But it was hard to keep a straight face when his rest less visitor was twisting and squirming in the chair like a man whose previous night's meal of curried goat was threatening to come back on him.
It took only a couple of minutes for the precision instrument to render its verdict and end the courier's agony.
'Quite satisfactory,' Sanjay declared. The drawer shut down and locked automatically when he pushed it closed. A second touch on the remote would have opened a panel in a dirty section of floor behind him. Storing the merchandise could wait until Bindar's departure. After all, if the courier, good man though he was, saw the location of Sanjay's hiding place, then it would be a hiding place no longer.
Though even Sanjay's small shop accepted a wide range of cred-cards there were some transactions to be made in this world where cash was still preferred. Bindar's tension eased when Sanjay returned from a back room with a small box. Opening the box, the whippet-thin courier thumbed rapidly through the wad of bills it contained; a com forting masala of rupees, euros, yen, and dollars. He didn't count it all, just as Sanjay had not tested every packet. If the total was short, someone would accost the shopkeeper one day and have a word with him about the discrepancy. Perhaps break a bone or two. Or put out an eye. The same thing could happen to Bindar if one of the packets Sanjay had accepted turned out to be full of, say, turbinado sugar instead of fashionable hallucinogenics.
The transaction completed, the two men exchanged gossip, further sports talk, political conversation, and more tea. Bindar did not linger. He had other deliveries to make, other collections to pursue. Both men found themselves discussing the disappearance of a mutual acquaintance who had shorted a certain midlevel distributor in the district of High Hooghly. The acquaintance had been found just last week. In three different parts of the city. Simultaneously. It was an object lesson no one needed to dwell upon.
Bindar finished the last of his tea, rose, and moved toward the door. Fingering his remote, Sanjay unlocked it, at the same time reopening his shop for business and brightening the windows so passing customers could once more see inside as soon as he had safely locked away the delivery.
'Take care of yourself, my friend,' he told the departing courier. 'Watch out for evil spirits and loose women.'
'Every chance I get.' Bindar smirked. They were bound together by business and a common heritage. Neither of which would keep Bindar from having Sanjay's throat cut if he ever felt the shopkeeper had cheated him: a purely businesslike sentiment Sanjay silently reciprocated.
But-business was good, and there was no reason this day for such dark thoughts to trouble either man. Bidding Bindar good-bye, Sanjay returned to his chair behind the counter; the one that circulated a permanent cooling fluid throughout its seat and frame. There was no need to advertise that he had just restocked a certain singular portion of his inventory. His regular customers would know, and travelers would find out. Switching on the store box, he settled back and relaxed as a schedule of available entertainment materialized in the tunnel that opened in front of him.
He chose an old movie. He liked the old movies, even if they were in black and white. Three-dimensionalized, the figures appeared in front of him, one-quarter actual size, whirling and dancing and singing something about love and fate and the caprices of the Gods. Business was good, life was good, he told himself as he directed the brewer to make another cup of chai-iced, this time.
Next year, he told himself. Next year he would bring Chakra and the children to Sagramanda to live with him. Would get them out of the hot, stinking, poverty-stricken countryside forever.
One man's picturesque village is another man's slum.
*2*
Even dressed for protection from the appalling after noon heat, Depahli De turned heads in the mall. For most of her life it was a place she would never even have thought of entering, much less have felt comfortable in.
