Jinnah finally came to the lamp-lit shop where he hoped to find illumination of another sort, the dry goods store of his friend Puri. The door opened with a bright chiming of little bells.
“Ah, Jinnah. How nice to see you.” Mr. Puri’s smile beamed at Jinnah from behind the counter while the rest of him fussed with merchandise.
“You are stocking up for Diwali, perhaps? I have just the sweets for Manjit.”
“Actually, Mr. Puri, I wonder if you can assist me with my inquiries.”
Puri closed one dark eye, adding a few more wrinkles to his lined, round face. “Inquiries? Then you had better sit down and have some chai.”
Jinnah moved to the back of the store, where a small card table and a couple of battered folding chairs sat. This was a tradition. Puri preferred to sip and slurp his hot, fragrant tea while slipping Jinnah the information and advice he needed. Jinnah accepted a small, porcelain cup painted with a bright blue motif of Ganesha, the Hindu elephant god of wisdom. He breathed in the sweet, dark scent of cardamom and cloves mingling with cinnamon and anise.
“Now, how may I help you, Jinnah?”
The steam rising from his cup fogged the bottoms of Puri’s glasses, condensing like cataracts.
“You have a nephew, Mr. Puri,” Jinnah said, blowing gently into his cup. “Andy Gill.”
A shadow passed over Puri’s pleasant, clean-shaven face, as if the steam had turned to smoke. Here it comes, thought Jinnah.
“Yes, Andy,” Puri sighed. “A most troubled young man. He lives with his father, Sadhu. His mother, my sister, is still in India.”
Jinnah nodded. It was an all too common story. Andy was already starting to fit the profile of a street kid.
“They are close, Sadhu and Andy?”
“Is any young man of his age close to his father?” Puri smiled sadly. “That much I can understand. Andy is a difficult boy, but he has a good heart. He wants to do what is right. But his idea of what is proper is not his father’s. Sadhu is content to follow the Kirat Karna, earning an honest living like a good Sikh.”
Jinnah could not suppress a lopsided grin. He had a good idea what an eighteen-year-old boy let loose in the metropolis of Vancouver after growing up on the farm in the Punjab would think of his father’s devotion to hard work. He took a big slurp of chai, the sugary condensed milk leaving a coat on his tongue.
“How does Sadhu earn his living, Mr. Puri?”
“He has two jobs at the moment. I know that he is working on a house as we speak. Consequently, he has a difficult time trying to keep track of Andy’s activities. Mostly, they fight.”
“Fight?” said Jinnah, leaning forward slightly, instincts tingling. “Over what?”
Mr. Puri paused, cup halfway to his lips, and leaned his head sideways. “You have asked a great many questions about my nephew, Mr. Jinnah. What, may I ask, is your interest?”
Jinnah was ready for this one. He had his cover story courtesy of Saleem. There was no need to trouble Puri with tenuous links to headless bodies.
“My son has informed me that Andy goes to raves — you know, these warehouse concerts. He therefore thinks it is entirely appropriate for him to go, hmm?”
Mr. Puri shook his head and sighed. “Then you know, perhaps, the malady that affects Andy. He is not just rebelling against his father. He is searching for something else. He has a spiritual thirst, which he has tried to quench with materialism. The Western way. But he feels empty and seeks for something more. It’s a problem many children in the community face.”
Jinnah’s solution to the problem of rebellious sons involved a month in boot camp, not a weekend at a temple retreat, but he kept this thought to himself. “There may be something in what you say, Mr. Puri,” he muttered into his tea.
Puri looked especially grave as his put his empty cup down. “Then perhaps you could talk to Andy’s father, Sadhu? Give him the benefit of your experience, Jinnah. I’m sure he’ll appreciate it.”
If Jinnah had not already finished his tea, he would have choked on it. Puri wanted him to give parental advice? He must be mad! But unless Puri told him where Sadhu worked, it would be harder than hell to find him in the forest of Gills sprouting in the Vancouver phone book — if, indeed, Sadhu had a phone.
“Of course I will, Mr. Puri,” Jinnah promised. “You can depend on me.”
* * *
It was a long drive to Surrey, south of Vancouver. Jinnah took the Port Mann Bridge across the Fraser River, cursing as he crawled along the slowly curving span. What the hell was all this traffic doing here at this time of night, for God’s sake, when he needed to get to his destination ASAP? He also wondered what the hell a construction crew was doing working so late. Whenever he hired workers for a project they arrived at noon and left by three, with a two hour lunch in between. Jinnah was so lost in thought, wondering just how much money one could make in the housing business, that he almost missed the turnoff for Panorama Ridge. The directions Puri had given him were excellent, but finding anything in Surrey was difficult. New subdivisions and streets seem to spring up overnight, and roughly a third of them were not entered in the satellite-guided Love Machine’s database.
In the end it was not hard to find the place, a huge monster house that was alive with lights. Nor was it hard to figure out just why Sadhu was still hard at work, along with the rest of the crew visible through the curtainless windows. There were two cars parked bumper to bumper at the head of the driveway — a red Porsche and a black BMW. They were so close together that to Jinnah’s eyes they appeared to be trying to mate. He wondered what sort of bastard offspring such a union would create: a PMW? A Borsche? Two expensively dressed men with Bluetooths surgically attached to their ears were pacing beside their respective vehicles as Jinnah approached.
One, a tall man wearing designer glasses and sporting a greying ponytail, was shouting down his mouthpiece as if it was a long, hollow tube. “I said it’ll be ready for final inspection tomorrow! Yes, tomorrow!” he hollered. “Of course it’ll pass!”
Jinnah put him down as a Type A personality. The other fellow was quite a bit stouter and looked like he had had his suit sprayed onto him. By contrast, he was taking the quiet but deadly approach over his phone. “You told me the moldings would be here this afternoon,” he said, voice icy with menace. “I still have a crew waiting to put them on. I don’t care if you’re closed….”
Jinnah felt a tiny spark of sympathy for the fellow and put his plans to make a fortune in the residential housing market on hold. He was almost past them when the tall guy with the ponytail grabbed him by the shoulder.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” he barked. “The house is sold.”
Jinnah found the man crass, presumptuous, and his manners non-existent. He felt no compunction, therefore, to be courteous in return. “I have an urgent message for one of your employees,” he said bluntly. “About his son.”
The transformation was startling. Ponytail turned from a self-absorbed, driven yuppie into something resembling a human. The look on his face was very close to concern.
“Hey, sorry,” he said. “Hope it’s not serious.”
“That’s for his father to decide,” said Jinnah, and breezed past him and into the house.
The place was crawling with workers trying to put the finishing touches on the interior without enough time or materials. The foreman, a short, broad Sikh wearing a hairnet under his chin that barely contained his wild beard, hardly looked up when Jinnah asked where Sadhu Gill was. He jabbed an impatient thumb over his shoulder and cursed foully as he tried to get his air nailer unjammed.