Sweetness and Light Read online

  About the Book

  India, monsoon season. Connor, an Australian expat with a brutal past, spends his time running low-stakes scams on tourists in a sleepy beach-side town. Sasha, an American in search of spiritual guidance, heads to an isolated ashram in the hope of mending a broken heart.

  When one of Connor’s grifts goes horribly wrong, it sets in motion a chain of events that brings the two lost souls together – and as they try to navigate a world of gangsters, gurus and secret agendas, they begin to realise that within the ashram’s utopian community, something is deeply, deeply wrong . . .

  Racing from the beaches of Goa to the streets of Delhi to the jungles of Tamil Nadu, Sweetness and Light is an intoxicating, unsettling story of the battle between light and dark, love and lust, morality and corruption. This is an explosive and unforgettable novel that confirms Liam Pieper’s place as one of Australia’s finest, sharpest writers.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Part 3

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Liam Pieper

  Imprint

  Read more at Penguin Books Australia

  For Mr Perumal

  Part 1

  India. Although it could just as easily be Thailand, or Cambodia, or Colombia. The town belongs to tourists now; the sultans are just a memory, so too the long-forgotten empires that rose and fell with indifferent tides. Once it belonged to Portugal, remembered only by the Catholic church that watches over the gentle curve of the bay. It had a different name then; now it’s called Shanti by the travellers who pass through it, named after the Shanti Bar that abuts the beach.

  That bar itself is staffed by Indians, and built of bamboo and straw in the Thai style, while its food – butter chicken, chips and vindaloo – belongs to the British palate. The stereo belongs to a solitary, decade-old Jack Johnson CD that starts again from the top after the final melancholy note of the closing track fades. The charming lamps that hang from the exposed beams of the roof and cast their shadows on revellers at night are from Kerala, while the playful afternoon zephyr that blows in from the sea to shake them is Arabian.

  The same breeze whips past the dozen crumbling colonial buildings that scatter the hillside, coaxing ripples out of the puddles in the muddy tracks that wend between them. The wind rises up to the whitewash facade of the church, where it stirs the heavy brass bell that hangs inside the tower into a single, booming ring, which echoes through the empty streets of the town. It’s the west coast of India, but could be anywhere, which is why Connor, waiting in the shade of the bell tower for the bus to come in, is here.

  For most of the Portuguese occupation, what is now Shanti Beach was a fishing village, one picturesque enough that some middle-class colonists built bleached-stone holiday homes here – they are all guesthouses now. The grand church was built centuries before by a retired slaver as an act of penitence and is maintained, more or less, by the one priest who lives there. Apart from these buildings, much of the town is composed of rickety plasterboard shacks built along dirt tracks – roads that were once pony trails but over the years evolved into thoroughfares, and one street paved in cobblestones. This runs alongside the foreshore and serves as the high street, lined with stalls selling street food and religious kitsch to the trickle of tourists who come through each summer.

  It isn’t easy to reach Shanti Beach. The only way in is by a rutted dirt road off the highway, littered with the rusting skeletons of hired scooters that caught a pothole and now lie mangled in the ditches alongside. Only a few tourist buses detour here, and they’re infrequent – delayed by a matter of hours or days. Their arrival time depends on a convergence of rain, natural disasters, traffic accidents, the level of floodwater on the road and the sobriety of the driver.

  Connor is alone on the hill. Most people in Shanti have the sense to stay indoors or nap under the shade of a tree in the noonday heat. The drivers stretch out in the back of their auto-rickshaws, the waiters put the chairs up and curl up under the tables, but Connor has never been able to nap. Especially in this heat. The clammy, choking fever heralds the monsoon; it embraces you like a drunk, arriving too soon, lingering long into the night.

  He waits out the worst at the top of the hill, where there’s a little respite from the baking humidity, reading his book and watching the waves, smoking, lighting the new cigarette off the last. Hours pass. He imagines his competition passing time; can see the men in their homes eating lunch with their families, fish curry mopped up with fluffy white pão, nothing wasted. The icons on the wall: Ganesha, Shiva, St Francis. A TV is on somewhere, and the noise of a mid-afternoon movie carries through the heat on otherwise deserted streets.

  In the late afternoon, as clouds gather over the ocean, he sees from the stirring town that the bus is due any minute. The owners of the guesthouses are the first to emerge sleepily from their lobbies, followed by the touts from the fancier hotels and resorts, up and down the coast, who come zipping in on shiny new motorcycles, their best rooms fallow in the off-season. They all trickle uphill, to where Connor is already waiting, tributaries running to the deluge; everyone with a stake in the ecosystem of the tourist money that comes in on the bus.

  It’s low season, and they need this one – a sleeper coach from Mumbai that should hold a couple dozen sleep-deprived, underfed, disoriented tourists. By the time it announces itself with the roar of an ancient gearbox fighting its way uphill in second gear, everyone is gathered to greet it.

  Almost nobody who works these beaches is from around here; blow-ins and entrepreneurs who headed west from poorer states to make hay on these tourist beaches. Most of the touts waiting for the bus ignore Connor as a rule. They aren’t hostile to him, the strange Australian working their patch, but neither do they ever welcome him.

  Except for Baba. Baba with his affection for foreigners, his affectations – linen suits, and Cuban boots with lifts in the heels that must be impossibly uncomfortable in this weather, and entirely unnecessary, since he already towers over everybody on the beach. Baba with his fingers in a million pies; Baba with his grip on commerce on these beaches. Baba, eternal pain in Connor’s arse.

  Many people have epiphanies while meditating on this beach, but none have the crystalline sharpness of Baba’s inspiration when he first saw Shanti, one winter afternoon with the sea mist coming in.

  Generations of travellers had loved Shanti as a sleepy, drug-addled backwater, but in the wild banks of windswept garbage, the broken-down and unloved villas, the murky water, Baba saw a glittering future.

  Far to the south are the wetlands of Kerala, and to the north, Russian tourists busting the seams of Morjim Beach get closer all the time. In a few years Russian money will start flooding through Shanti, needing to be washed, and Baba will be waiting.

  Not long after arriving in town he’d started investing in the village. A little at a time he’d bought up the bar and restaurant, the cafe, a couple of guesthouses, a yoga school. And the dive boat, which Connor works for him.

  Nearly everyone in town works for Baba in one way or another – the drug dealers, the rickshaw drivers who ferry guests to his fancier guesthouse up the coast, the fishermen who supply his restaurant. Even the group of bright-eyed, hunger-panged children who live on the streets. Most residents hate them, consider them vermin to be chased off with insults and rocks, but not Baba. He is forever sending them off on errands; to fetch him cigarettes, or paan, and then waving away the change, sometimes hundreds of rupees, for the child to keep. He has a soft spot for the feral kids – had been one himself, wild and vicious until he�
��d fought his way up in the world.

  A swarm races to meet the bus now, and Baba heads them off. He takes out his bankroll, hands out a little cash, shoos them away. Connor nods at Baba, who beams back, full blast.

  On the other side of the hill the bus gives up on second, shifts down to first, and then finally crests the rise and rolls down towards the waiting touts, an idol of Ganesha tied to the bull bar with a plastic garland. The bus rumbles to a halt, then shuts down with a whine from the hydraulics and a whoosh as the door opens and the climate-controlled interior opens up to the heat. A puff of condensation spills out of the footwell to die on the baking hilltop – a hopeful little mist that evaporates before the first sandal touches the ground.

  The travellers shuffle out, blinking into the haze and fumbling for sunglasses, making noises of meek disapproval as the driver climbs to the luggage rack on top of the coach and starts pitching the bags onto the dusty road. Connor can see them weighing whether or not to kick up a fuss before deciding against it and shrugging on their backpacks, bracing as the touts surround them, shouting offers of hotels, meals, beers, drugs – the gull cry of the rickshaw drivers rising above it all, ‘Taxi! Taxi!’

  Connor hangs back, waiting.

  It’s a disappointing bus. Less than half full, which isn’t bad for this backwater village, especially in the off-season, when there is little reason to visit, but this is an underwhelming crop of travellers. None of them is what he needs: women, alone, not too young.

  There are the usual half-dozen backpackers with tans, underarm hair peeking out from threadbare singlets, ratty dreadlocks and out-of-date Lonely Planet guides lifted from hostel shelves. They’ll stay for a week, maybe, and keep the bar busy, but that’s all. No good to him.

  Connor notes a Middle Eastern couple, unbearably attractive; tattooed and lean from long and shrewd travel. He stares after the girl forlornly. She would have been out of his reach, even if she were travelling alone.

  There’s a couple of hippy kids with boots, flared cargo pants and tiny backpacks. They will mope around town for a couple of days, then disappear north in a rickshaw in search of parties. Minutes after their arrival, an affable drug dealer is already leading them away to his home and a mini-fridge full of opium and MDMA. He has an adorable four-year-old son he deploys to get tourists to trust him. The child runs ahead, his teeth shining, as the hippies follow, flanking the dealer, who puts a proprietary arm around each of their shoulders. He controls an unspoken monopoly on the drug trade in Shanti Beach, mild as it is. Like everyone here, he works for Baba.

  One by one the tourists that emerge from the bus pair off with the touts who work for Baba and trudge after them into town, or climb onto the back of scooters or into the cheerful green-and-yellow auto rickshaws sent up the coast by the fancier hotels. Baba’s eyes fall on Connor and he feels it, behind Baba’s mirrored aviators, the pity. Baba comes over, fishes through his linen trousers for a pack of cigarettes, and offers one to Connor.

  ‘Any luck?’

  Connor puts the cigarette to his lips, articulates a frown around it, shakes his head.

  ‘What about that one? EPL at three o’clock.’ Baba nods at a tall, gaunt woman, early forties, with a severe silver bob and breezy resortwear, stepping off the bus and looking around warily. ‘She’s perfect.’

  EPL is a term Baba has coined, and is inordinately proud of. It is a catch-all term for the westerners, mainly women of a certain age, who have an epiphany after reading Eat Pray Love and decide to leave their grey lives in the hopes of finding a better one in India and catching a UTI from Javier Bardem. Across the entire ecosystem of Shanti Beach, they are the most coveted catch – they come pre-loaded with disposable income and the yen to spend it unwisely.

  Connor holds up a palm. ‘Give it a minute.’

  Sure enough, seconds later her friend – late forties, short and bossy-looking – alights and starts angrily haggling with an auto driver.

  Connor shrugs, and Baba pats his shoulder sympathetically.

  ‘Do not worry. Things will pick up. I will bet you a beer.’

  Connor is beginning to despair; little talent turns up at this time of year. These months between the perfect, bright days that ring in the new year and the arrival of the rains, Shanti is sweaty and vile, the surf murky and petulant. Lying on the beach is intolerable, and for visitors there’s little to do aside from lying on the beach.

  Connor’s mood is souring when he spots her, the second-to-last to get off the bus. She is thirty-five or thereabouts, fine-featured, breasts so high and delicate they would disappear in his palm; delightful and consequential as a dandelion on the breeze. He moves a little closer, takes in the ghost of a sunburn across her nose, her flowing ankle-length gown – the clothes all wrong, the wrong fabric, the wrong cut, chosen for panicked modesty rather than comfort. Connor’s eyes trail the length of the dress as the breeze fidgets with it, sketching a map of her body, then stills as his eyes come to her feet, wrapped, gloriously, in Birkenstocks.

  While she waits for the driver to retrieve her backpack from the rack on top of the bus, she rebuffs the touts. ‘No!’ she says loudly and firmly as they offer her meals, narcotics, taxis, hotels, taxis to hotels. ‘No thank you!’

  He is thrilled to hear it. Only the most greenhorn and rattled of travellers bothers being polite. Those who have found their bearings walk on as if wearing blinkers, brushing the men aside like ants at a picnic. The way this woman talks to them, half amused, half unnerved, tells him that she hasn’t been in India long, but long enough to suit him just fine. He reads all this in a heartbeat and Baba, watching Connor, reads it in his face.

  ‘You owe me a beer,’ says Baba. ‘I’ll be back to collect. Good luck.’

  People wash up on Shanti Beach after a sort of death. They come for all sorts of reasons: unhappy marriages, career crisis, loss of a parent, lack of a childhood. Whatever it is, there is always something that has shaken them up enough to get them on an aeroplane. There is always the hope, conscious or not, that they will find in this out-of-the-way half-mooned backwater the solution to whatever drove them from their homes.

  Connor had figured this out years ago, before he himself had come to Shanti, back when he was diving in the Andamans. If he waited at the edge of the scrum while the aggressive and local touts harangued the talent, he could sweep in like an afterthought, breezy and calm with a kindly ‘G’day’. People went wild for g’day, something he’d never actually heard that much in Australia, but which signalled that he was, himself, Australian, and therefore exotic – but in a safe sort of a way.

  As he approaches this one her eyes are wild, she looks beyond overwhelmed, has the composure of a drowning woman. Stepping in between her and one of Baba’s rickshaw drivers he meets her eye, extends a hand, smiles warmly, introduces himself. ‘G’day.’ He welcomes her to the town, recommends a place to stay, tells her that if she is interested in going out on the water, he would be happy to take her. He points out to sea, to where his boat bobs against the high tide, anchored to a sunken oil drum in the shallows. Her eyes follow his finger and he sees that there is something a little loose in her gaze, the way her eyes skate over the horizon.

  He picks up her suitcase, bats away her polite refusals, and offers to walk her to her guesthouse. He assures her it’s the best in town, that she’s made the right choice, helps her check in, translating the clerk’s spotty English. Once the woman has gone upstairs, Connor lingers in the lobby until she’s safely out of earshot, then presses the girl at the desk for any information on this new arrival. She will be staying at the beach an entire week, which makes Connor’s day. He will play it cool. In this one thing, perhaps, time is on his side.

  For the first day, he keeps his distance, shadows her from afar, knows that, in the manner of tourists who realise too late that solo vacations are profoundly lonely, she will be making an inventory of the other tourists on this beach. He takes care not to crowd her but to always be floating somewh
ere in her periphery – when she sunbakes, he lays down a towel twenty metres away. Close enough that she might notice him, but a respectful distance, with several other bathers between them. The idea is to work his way into her subconscious, for her to know that he is a fixture here, that he knows how things work.

  He does know how things work, he can follow the Talent’s whereabouts without leaving his home, keeps abreast of the gossip in town. Everyone else who lives and works here tolerates him, or at least the money he sprinkles around after a catch. The Talent has picked up a flyer for a yoga class – one of many in Shanti Beach, but easily the worst. The competition between rival yogis is intense, and visitors are often tribal about their practice.

  The yogi the Talent chooses is western; Italian, long ago she had been one of the original Goa freaks, the European flower-children who flourished on the beaches here in the seventies, followed by a stint in the Osho’s ashram, before finally retiring to Shanti Beach. Over the years her skin has taken on the colour and texture of a motorcycle jacket, and her mind has been eroded by the slow drip of time and a torrent of LSD.

  Her class is directed with airy confidence, encouraging an hour or so of vague flopping and bending on mats laid out on a flat part of the beach. She stands at the front of the class leading her students by waving her hands dreamily in front of her genitals, then announcing, apropos of who knows what, that they are finished.

  ‘We have reached our destination,’ she intones, in a calm voice accented with a half-century of deep self-satisfaction. ‘Now we go out into the world, my humble warriors of light.’

  When she says this line, the Talent snorts derisively, earning a hurt look from the yogi. Connor, who has been sure to be in the same class as her, on the next mat over, looks across and grins appreciatively. The Talent smiles back and works a cheerful shrug into her shavasana.