Feeling the Vibes (13 page)

“You explain it to him,” I told him.

Brice didn’t pick up on my frosty tone. He squatted down so he and Obi were on the same level. “Obi, it makes you want to tear your hair out. I know that,” he said earnestly. “I used to be like you. I wanted to save the whole world, but if you try to help every single human you meet, you’ll go totally crazy.”

Obi nodded. “That’s what Miss Dove says. She says sometimes you just have to trust the Agency to take care of them for you.” He gave Brice a lopsided little smile. “But if you’ve been sent to help someone, then you REALLY have to, don’t you?”

Brice opened his mouth, but Obi said firmly, “We’ve been sent to help Ravi and Parvati. Then we’ll let the monks find me, and then I’ll go to be a
bodhisattva
, OK, Brice?”

“What if Obi isn’t
supposed
to leave until he’s helped Parvati and her kids?” The words just popped out of my mouth, surprising me.

“What if…” I took a breath. “What if Obi’s time-hopping wasn’t a mistake? What if us ending up here in…” I tried to remember what Parvati had called this settlement “…in Deva Katchi isn’t actually a mistake?”

Reuben smiled that sweet smile he does, like he’s picking up messages from, I don’t know, the stars.

“And what
if,
” he added, “Obi is supposed to start saving the world like, one family at a time, starting with this particular family?”

There was a sudden hush. Because no one immediately rushed to fill it, the silence just grew deeper and more intense. Parvati’s little house started to feel strangely shimmery and kind of
full
, I don’t know how else to put it. Nothing had happened yet absolutely everything had changed.

Parvati lifted Ravi’s chin with her finger. “We’ll be OK,
beta
. So long as we have breath in our bodies Krishna will take care of us.”

She hugged each of her children then said briskly, “Karisma, help me wash lentils for dhal. You older ones, do your homework.”

“OK,” Brice said abruptly.

“OK?” I blinked at him, confused.

“We’ll stay, but we’ll do this properly. We’ll hook up with the local angels and get a message back to the Agenc— Hey easy, tiger!”

Obi had launched himself at Brice, planting a four-year-old’s smacker on his face. “Thank you, Brice,” he said lovingly.

“No problem,” Brice finally managed and suddenly got super-busy with his phone, muttering about checking for cosmic info on Deva Katchi.

“I don’t need this magic string,” Obi announced suddenly. “I won’t get lost now.” He held out his wrist with its grubby knotted thread.

“Sure about that, sweetie?” I said doubtfully.

“VERY,
extremely
sure.”

I looked at him closely. The bewildered frown had gone. For the first time since Kashmir, he looked like my little buddha again.

“Your call,” Brice said. “You’re his angel big sister.”

“Take it off,” I decided. “It’s totally minging now anyway.”

Reubs carefully unknotted the cosmic thread. “You’re not to go wandering around by yourself, OK?”

“I won’t!” Obi promised happily.

Ravi was sitting by the open door, drumming on an upturned jar, looking like he was in his own little world.

Obi scooted over to join him. “Want to know a secret?” he told Ravi. He was hugging himself with excitement. “There are THREE angels in your house. They’re looking after me aksherly, and now they’ll be looking after you as well!”

I looked at Asha silently colouring in a picture. Then I looked at Karisma, importantly pushing up her bangles as she helped her mum with the lentils. She was about four years old, but she was like a tiny doll. All three children were so undernourished they seemed three or four years younger than they actually were.

I’d instinctively backed Obi, but it was HUGE what he was asking us to do, he literally expected us to work some angel miracle for Ravi and his family.

I wondered how I was going to live with myself if we let him down?

Chapter Sixteen

E
ither Mohit had come down off his drugs or he had got hold of some more, because I heard him singing his Mumbai song in the night.

“You can buy everything here!” he sang in his cracked voice, as he stumbled past.

Everything except sleep
, I thought gloomily.

It wasn’t only the noise: drunken fights, crying babies, TV soaps, conflicting radio stations, or Karisma’s constant coughing, or the busy scuttling of rats sounding a teensy bit too close for peace of mind. And it wasn’t just the muggy closeness of so many thousands of human beings, living like,
centimetres
apart from each other, so you could hear their most personal sounds and smell their most personal smells. It was the Deva Katchi vibe, the sheer intensity of life in an Indian slum, that made sleep next to impossible. This vibe even infiltrated the family’s dreams.

Parvati was dreaming she had lost Ravi. She ran through the slums calling his name, but no one could tell her where he’d gone.

Asha was dreaming about the day her daddy was carried into their house after the truck ploughed into his rickshaw. In the dream he didn’t look like her kind daddy any more. She screamed, “Abbu!”

Parvati shot awake from her own nightmare and went to comfort her.

Brice put up with this for a while then he silently morphed out into the night. We found him squinting at the tiny screen on his phone.

“Maybe it’s our vibes,” he said without looking up. “Four humans, three angels, a potential buddha. Pretty intense in a small space.”

“I think it’s always like this,” I said. “Plus Razak’s heavies stirred them up.”

“Maybe it’s just too intense for me then,” said Brice coolly. “I’m off to meet the locals. Someone should have a phone I could use.”

“I’ll come,” I offered. It wasn’t fair for Brice to have to face the music alone.

He shook his head. “You stay with Obi.”

“I’ll come then,” said Reubs.

“What - and deprive this gorgeous angel girl of your company?“Brice waggled his eyebrows at us both before melting into the steamy darkness of the slum.

Reuben and I found an upturned box each and sat outside Parvati’s house, you can’t say in silence, with competing Bollywood love songs soaring through the air, but
totally
not knowing what to say. I didn’t anyway. My face was burning.

Helplessly whirling in Time’s blender, not knowing if I’d ever get out, I’d forgotten that angels, even trainee angels, are able to read each other’s minds, even across Time and Space.

Brice could have heard me burbling about our souls being connected. Did that mean Reubs had heard…? He was very carefully not looking at me, though I’m not sure how I knew this because I was even more carefully not looking at him.

In the same way I also knew that his hand was just bare centimetres from mine. I was getting secret delicious tingles as if our auras were already touching. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Reuben REALLY liked me, but not knowing for sure reduced me to agonised silence.

The pale beams of a hurricane lamp came seeping from the house next door. I heard anxious voices. Hari’s parents were up with their poorly little boy.

Some people have real problems, I scolded myself. You’re an angel. Get busy!

“We should send vibes to Hari,” I said aloud, “and poor old Mohit.”

Instantly the tension dissolved. We were two angels with a job to do. Reuben didn’t know about Hari. I explained about the monsoon rains making the Deva Katchi kids sick every year.

“And Mohit?”

“Off his head on
nasha
mostly.”

Reuben raised his eyebrows.

“The local drugs,” I explained. “Probably he was a sweet guy once; now he’s totally out of his skull twenty-four seven. Perfect target for You Know Who.”

My buddy sighed. “That’s the problem with saving the world one family at a time. You want to keep adding people on. Hari, Mohit, everyone’s got a story.”

We sent vibes for a while, then Reuben gave me a sideways look. “Are you ever going to tell me what happened after you left the fort?”

Sending vibes puts you in a really peaceful place. Even so it wasn’t easy to talk about what I’d seen.

“Actually I kind of guessed,” Reuben said quietly when I’d finished. “When we were trying to find you, I felt it somehow.”

I had to swallow. “Amir was so full of life. It’s such a waste, Reubs!”

“Nothing’s wasted,” he said gently. “You know that. You died young and you seem to be doing OK.”

“But HOW he died, Reubs, you didn’t see.” I didn’t say I still saw it every time I closed my eyes.

“You’re positive Amir was on that train?”

I nodded miserably. “Obi was screaming his name before they opened the doors. He knew Amir was in there.”

“Our little buddha knows a lot, it seems to me,” he sighed.

“You think it’s a
bodhisattva
thing?”

“Or a Time thing. Without a time connection he’s just a blow-in. I guess that leaves him wide open to human emotions and whatever.”

Inside Parvati’s house Asha let out a harrowing scream.

I stood up. “Let’s go inside and sort this out once and for all. That little girl doesn’t need to be reliving her daddy’s death every night.”

“Here we go,” Reuben said half serious. “Taking away all the world’s bad dreams, one nightmare at a time.”

I felt my eyes stinging. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could? Take the world’s bad dreams away, I mean.”

Reuben lightly touched my cheek. “Let’s start with Asha’s and kind of take it from there. We’ve got eternity after all.”

Brice came back just as the house was waking up.

“Did you get through?” Reubs asked.

He shook his head. “Had to leave a message. At least now they’ve got Obi’s new co-ordinates.”

I was secretly glad of the reprieve. We had enough to cope with as it was it seemed to me.

Brice told us the Deva Katchi angels had insisted he brought us over to visit. Next afternoon we made our way there, past the school where kids were reciting a poem in Urdu, down a narrow lane past a cheapo-cheapo cafe, squeezing by pullcarts belonging to the slum’s snack
wallahs
. Nobody was buying or selling snacks though. It was the hottest part of the day and people were napping in any little patch of shade they could find.

The local angels had their base in what locals called a
chawl
, a derelict tenement due to be knocked down.

We were welcomed in by a bubbly angel girl in a stunning blue
salwar kamiz
.

“Most of the others are still out working so you’ll have to make do with the dregs!” she said laughing. “I’m Shusheela by the way, the noisy one, so everybody tells me!”

The angels occupied the whole top floor with dramatic views over the slum. It was very simply furnished, long divans covered with throws and a low carved table. Two angel girls and a boy were chatting quietly.

“This is Rhada,” said Shusheela. “This is our new girl, Anjum, and this lazy angel boy taking up the whole sofa is Samir!”

Shusheela and Anjum brought cool drinks and delicious nibbles, including, to Obi’s delight, a dish of Indian sweets!

Brice must have explained about Obi, or if they were surprised to see us with a shimmery little kid in tow, they were too polite to comment.

“Is this your first time in Mumbai?” Samir asked us.

‘First time in Mumbai, first time in Deva Katchi,” Reubs said.

“Still reeling I expect,” Samir said with a grin.

“A bit,” I said cautiously, not wanting to offend anyone.

“Slums like Deva Katchi are like India’s open secret,” Samir said. “Everyone knows they exist, but no one wants to think about it.”

“Sorry if this sounds dense,” I said, “but do slums just kind of
happen
?”

“People from the villages flock to Mumbai looking for a better life,” he explained. “Unfortunately millions of other people already had the same idea. Mumbai has totally run out of space; that’s why we have all these illegal settlements. Of course slumlords like Razak are very happy to take advantage.”

Rhada’s eyes flashed. “Don’t mention that leech! And you know the police daren’t touch him, Melanie? He has almost all the politicians in his pocket.”

Brice was looking out over the slum. “How do you stand this day after day?” he asked abruptly.

Rhada smiled. “This might sound weird, but after a while you just fall in love with it.”

“It’s true,” said Shusheela. “The people here are something else.”

“And good things are happening in Deva Katchi these days,” said Radha. “Paradisa Collective for one.”

“Is that like, an angel thing?” I asked confused.

“No, we can’t claim any credit at all!” Shusheela confessed. “These foreign women - are they Americans, Samir? - came to the slum. They saw people like Parvati scavenging to earn a pittance and they wanted to help, so they set up Paradisa Collective. Now Deva Katchi people supply Paradisa with waste plastic and other local women turn it into eco-friendly designer bags.”

“Designer bags. Wow,” I said queasily. “They clean the plastic, though, right?”