The Bombay Kid Comes To Town

He’d always wanted to be the Bombay Kid.

He tried telling this to his friends when they’d played cowboys and indians. They’d ask, where’s Bombay? And he’d have to answer, well, actually it was called Mumbai now. And it was in India. They’d heard of India, so they’d ask why he wanted to be the Bombay Kid? Well, he said, that’s where I was born. So, you’re an indian. Yeah, sure. Well, you can’t be the Bombay Kid. That’s a cowboy name. You’re an indian.

He’d been very young, and never thought to question it. It wasn’t like he knew anything about India, anything that your typical American teen would know. Of course he knew about Bollywood, and listened to the Indian pop music–it was all over the radio, so it wasn’t like he could avoid it even if he’d tried. He preferred the Hong Kong film industry, though. Both were better than any American films out of Hollywood, which turned out craptastic films for brain-dead religous zealots who wouldn’t let their children watch anything other than good family-centric films that reinforced ‘American’ values. American in the old sense, not the modern understanding of the word. What everyone called ‘North American’, though the Canadians hated being caught up in the term.

So it wasn’t really any surprise that he’d ended up running a tourist trap cowboy town for Pacific Rim tourists, and also trying to catch some of the Canadian tourist trade. Sometimes he even got some Euro-zone folks, who’d decided to see the ‘unspoiled wilderness’ of the Pacific Northwest. The wilderness in Eastern Siberia was unspoiled, but the government wasn’t the most tourist friendly you could find. Americans had a reputation for being backward assholes, but as a rule they wouldn’t through you into recycled gulags if they thought they could squeeze you for a few extra Euros. Americans did it the honest, old-fashioned way. They pestered the shit out of you until you bought their stupid cheap crap. And besides, it usually was a bargain.

He’d figured out, eventually, that he was a different sort of Indian. His father had been a mid-level executive for Arcelor Mittal, and had left a nice trust-fund for his son. His son grew up in America, in the city of Seattle, because it was a place where the money could go a little farther, but wasn’t a total backwater like most smaller American cities. New York, of course, was an exception–it was almost like Europe, and it had a cost of living to match. It was practically independant these days, like a lot of the U.S. It still sent it’s representatives to Washington, but more and more it held sway over its little region.

Seattle was a little like that, but much smaller. The eastern have of the state tended to complain about the way the people who lived around the Sound controlled their lives, and every few years would make noises about creating their own state (as they had even before the general decline and falling apart of the U.S.), but whenever someone did the math, they realized that even though they did indeed supply a lot of food to the Sound, and a lot of the energy, through dams and wind stations, they realized that they got a lot more money from the state government than they paid it in taxes. And then they just went back to grumbling.

Krishna had got the idea of a Western town from two places. One was Leavenworth, a ‘Bavarian’ town in Washington. It had jumped on the tourist bandwagon years ago, back when it was still mostly American tourists powering the industry. The second source had been a Western City he saw when he was travelling in Europe the year after he graduated from the University of Washington. It had been smack in the middle of the Czech countryside, a whole little town. The man who’d started it had been not unlike Krishna. When he was young, he’d loved cowboys and indians, watching the adventures of Karl Mays’ Apache Knight, Vinnetou. And he’d decided that was how he wanted to live his life, like those movies.

The more Krishna thought about it, the more confident he felt. He could find a small town willing to cater to tourism, with no industry or source of income (easily, because after all that was almost every town in America, except for a lucky few). The Bombay Kid would finally get his chance to ride.

He started in a small town that already had its foot in the tourism door, catering to the wilderness seekers, with rafting guides, and nature walks. Lots of bed and breakfast places, little hostels and hotels, craft stores. He decided to get himself established in town with an internet cafe. They were far enough out in the middle of the Cascades that they were effectively cut off from the ubiquitous wireless signals you could find in Seattle. So he bought some old computers, figuring that he’d catch enough wilderness seekers who’d idealistically set off without their notebooks, but would be suffering from social networking withdrawal. With a little kitchen in back, a little bookstore, and a couple of baristas working part-time, he soon had a solid little business to get himself introduced to the locals, to show that he wasn’t some crazed nut come to steal their money. No, he was a businessman, and he had a vision. The Bombay Kid had come to town, and he was going to clean the place up.