CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Despite the fact that only a handful of people could claim to have seen Madame Zhou with their own eyes, she was the main attraction, Karla assured me, for many of those who visited the Palace. Her clients were rich men: executive-level businessmen, politicians, and gangsters. The Palace offered them foreign girls - exclusively, for no Indian girls ever worked there-and elaborate facilities for the realisation of their wildest sexual fantasies. The strangest of those illicit pleasures, devised by Madame Zhou personally, were the subject of shocked, breathless whispers throughout the city, but influential contacts and substantial bribes meant that the Palace was immune from raids or even close scrutiny. And although there were other places in Bombay that provided equal indulgence and security, none of them were as popular as Madame Zhou's because none had the Madame herself. In the end, what kept men coming to the Palace wasn't the skill and loveliness of the women they could have there; it was the mystery of the woman they couldn't have-the invisible beauty of Madame Zhou.

People said she was Russian, but that detail, like all the others concerning her private life, seemed to be unverifiable. It was accepted, Karla said, simply because it was the most persistent rumour. One clear fact was that she'd arrived in New Delhi during the 1960s, a decade as wild for that city as it was for most western capitals. The new part of the city was celebrating its thirtieth year, then, and Old Delhi its three hundredth. Madame Zhou, most sources agreed, was twenty-nine. Legend had it that she'd been the mistress of a KGB officer who'd employed her unique beauty to suborn prominent Congress Party officials. The Congress Party governed India through those years with what seemed to be an unassailable lead in every national poll. Many of the party faithful-and even their enemies-believed that the Congress Party would continue to rule the Indian mother- land for a hundred years. Power over Congress men, therefore, was power over the nation.

The gossip about her years in Delhi prowled from scandals and suicides to political murder. Karla said that she'd heard so many different versions of the stories, from such a wide variety of people, she began to think that the truth, whatever it might've been, wasn't really important to them. Madame Zhou had become a kind of portmanteau figure: people packed the details of their own obsessions into her life. One said she possessed a fortune in precious gems that she kept in a hessian sack, another talked with authority about her addiction to various drugs, and a third whispered of satanic rites and cannibalism.

Karla said. "Devious, and dangerous."

We were in a Bumblebee, one of the ubiquitous black-and-yellow Fiat taxis, travelling south through the Steel Bazaar. Traffic was heavy. Hundreds of wooden handcarts, longer and taller and wider than a car when fully laden, trundled along between buses and trucks, pushed by barefoot porters, six men to each cart. The main streets of the Steel Bazaar were crammed with small and medium shops. They sold every kind of metal house-ware, from kerosene stoves to stainless steel sinks, and most of the cast iron and sheet-metal products required by builders, shop-fitters, and decorators. The shops themselves were adorned with gleaming metal wares, strung in such brilliantly polished plenty and such artful array that they often attracted the camera lenses of tourists. Behind the glossy, commercial ramble of the streets, however, were the hidden lanes, where men who were paid in cents, rather than dollars, worked at black and gritty furnaces to produce those shining lures.

The windows of the cab were open, but no breeze stirred through them. It was hot and still in the sluggish churn of traffic. We'd stopped at Karla's apartment on the way, where I'd swapped my T-shirt, jeans, and boots for a pair of dress shoes, conservatively cut black trousers, a starched white shirt, and a tie.

Her accent, the accent I'd come to love and consider the most interesting in the world, gave every word a rounded resonance that thrilled me. The music of that accent was Italian, its shape was German, its humour and its attitude were American, and its colour was Indian. "Being so fussy about dressing down, the way you do, is a kind of vanity, you know. It's fairly conceited, too."

I fidgeted with the prickly collar of the shirt.

You've got more men's clothes than I have."

She said it flatly, but with such a clear sense of regret that I let it go.

I did want to know, but she turned her face away to stare out the window, and there was a finality in the gesture that warned and prohibited. I'd heard that Karla had once lived with someone named Ahmed, an Afghan. People didn't talk about it much, and I'd assumed that they'd broken up years before. In the year that I knew her, she'd lived alone in the apartment, and I hadn't realised until that moment how deeply that image of her had insinuated itself into my sense of who she was and how she lived.

Despite her protest that she didn't like to be alone, I'd thought of her as one of those people who never lived with others: someone who let people visit or even stay overnight, but never more than that.

I looked at the back of her head, at the small part of her profile, at the barely perceptible bump of her breasts beneath the green shawl, and the long, thin fingers making prayer in her lap, and I couldn't imagine her living with someone. Breakfast and bare backs, bathroom noises and bad moods, domestic and demi married: it was impossible to see her in that. Perversely, I found it easier to imagine Ahmed, the Afghan roommate I'd never met, than it was to imagine her as anything but alone and... complete.

We sat in silence for five minutes, a silence calibrated by the slow metronome of the taxi's meter. An orange banner hanging from the dashboard of the car proclaimed that the driver, like many others in Bombay, was from Uttar Pradesh, a large and populous state in India's north-east. Our slow progress through the traffic jam gave him many chances to study us in the rear-vision mirror. He was intrigued. Karla had spoken to him in fluent Hindi, giving him precise, street-by-street directions to the Palace. We were foreigners who behaved like locals. He decided to test us.

We drove in silence for a few moments, and then I had to speak.

But if it ever comes to that, she'll find that you're long gone from the embassy."

The cards were made of pearl-white, textured, linen paper, and the words were embossed in liquid black italic. They declared that Gilbert Parker was a consular under-secretary at the embassy of the United States of America.

I'm not feeling any better about this, Karla, I have to say."

That's one of the reasons why I asked you to help me with this, you know? You've picked up a lot of Hindi, for someone who's only been here a year."

Karla replied, softly. A meditation of memories clouded her eyes for a moment, but then she concentrated again with obvious effort. "She lives on the top floor, and has everything she needs up there. She never goes out. She has two servants who bring food and clothes and stuff up to her. She can move around the building without being seen because there's a lot of hidden passageways and staircases. She can look in on most of the rooms through two way mirrors or metal air vents. She likes to watch. Sometimes she talks to people through a screen. You can't see her, but she can see you."

It was a simple question, and there was a simple answer-I love you, and I want to know everything-but there was a hard edge to her voice and a cold light in her eyes, and I faltered.

She sighed, exasperated.

They're high on it. But not me. She gives me the creeps, and she always has."

It was my turn to withdraw. I wrapped the silence around myself like a scarf, and stared past her softly sculptured profile to the haphazard beauty of the street. In truth, Madame Zhou's mystery didn't matter to me. I had no interest in her, then, beyond the mission Karla had given me. I was in love with the beautiful Swiss woman sitting beside me in the cab, and she was mysterious enough. I wanted to know about her. I wanted to know how she came to live in Bombay, and what her connection was to the weirdness of Madame Zhou, and why she never talked about herself. But no matter how badly I wanted to know... everything ... everything about her, I couldn't press it. I had no right to ask for more because I'd kept all of my secrets from her. I'd lied to her, saying that I came from New Zealand, and that I had no family. I hadn't even told her my real name. And because I was in love with her, I felt trapped by those fictions. She'd kissed me, and it was good; honest and good. But I didn't know if the truth in that kiss was the beginning for us or the end. My strongest hope was that the mission would bring us together. I hoped it would be enough to break through both our walls of secrets and lies.

I didn't underestimate the task she'd set for me. I knew it might go wrong, and I might have to fight to bring Lisa out of the Palace. I was ready. There was a knife in a leather scabbard tucked into the waistband of my trousers under my shirt. It had a long, heavy, sharp blade. I knew that with a good knife I could handle two men. I'd fought men in knife fights before, in prison.

A knife, in the hand of a man who knows how to use it and isn't afraid to drive it into other human bodies, is still, despite its ancient origin, the most effective close-order weapon after the gun. Sitting there in the cab, silent and still, I prepared myself for the fight. A little movie, a preview of the bloodshed to come, played itself out in my mind. I would have to keep my left hand free, to lead or drag Lisa and Karla out of the Palace. My right hand would have to force a path through any resistance. I wasn't afraid. I knew that if the fighting started, when the fighting started, I would slash and punch and stab without thinking.

The cab had bluffed its way through the strangle of traffic, and we picked up speed on the wider streets near a steep overpass. A blessing of fresh wind cooled us, and hair that had been lank and wet with sweat was dry in seconds. Karla fidgeted, tossed her beedie cigarette out of the open window, and rifled through the contents of her patent-leather shoulder bag. She took out a cigarette packet. It contained thick, ready-made joints with tapered, twisted ends. She lit one.

It was strong, Kashmiri hash. I felt the momentary loosening of stomach, neck, and shoulder muscles as the stone took hold. The driver sniffed loudly, theatrically, adjusting his mirror to see the back seat more clearly. I gave the joint back to Karla. She sucked at it a few more times, and then passed it to the driver.

He smoked it halfway down, and passed it back. "_Achaa _charras!

First number. I have it Am'rikan music, disco, very first number United States Am'rikan music disco. You like you hear."

He snapped a cassette into his dashboard player and threw the volume to maximum. Seconds later, the song We Are Family, by Sister Sledge, thumped out of the speakers behind our heads with numbing plangency. Karla whooped for joy. The driver switched the volume to zero, and asked if we liked it. Karla whooped again, and passed him the joint. He turned the music back to max. We smoked, and sang along, and drove past a thousand years of street, from barefoot peasant boys on bullock carts to businessmen buying computers.

Within sight of the Palace, the driver pulled over beside an open chai shop. He pointed to it, with a jerk of his thumb, and told Karla that he would wait for her there. I knew enough cab drivers, and had travelled enough in Bombay cabs, to know that the driver's offer to wait was a decent gesture of concern for her, and not just hunger for work or tips or something else. He liked her. I'd seen it before, that quirky and spontaneous infatuation. Karla was young and attractive, sure, but most of the driver's reaction was inspired by her fluency with his language, and the way she used it to deal with him. A German cab driver might be pleased that a foreigner had learned to speak German. He might even say that he was pleased. Or say nothing at all. The same might be true of a French cab driver, or an American, or an Australian.

But an Indian will be so pleased that if he likes something else about you-your eyes, or your smile, or the way you react to a beggar at the window of his cab-he'll feel bonded to you, instantly. He'll be prepared to do things for you, go out of his way, put himself at risk, and even do dangerous or illegal things. If you've given him an address he doesn't like, such as the Palace, he'll be prepared to wait for you, just to be sure that you're safe. You could come out an hour later, and ignore him completely, and he would smile and drive away, happy to know that no harm had come to you. It happened to me many times in Bombay, but never in any other city. It's one of the five hundred things I love about Indians: if they like you, they do it quickly, and not by half. Karla paid his fare and the promised tip, and told him not to wait. We both knew that he would.

The Palace was a huge building, triple-fronted and three stories tall. The street windows were barred with wrought-iron curlicues beaten into the shape of acanthus leaves. It was older than many other buildings on the street, and restored, not renovated.

Original detail had been carefully preserved. The heavy stone architraves over the door and windows had been chiselled into coronets of five-pointed stars. That meticulous craftsmanship, once common in the city, was all but a lost art. There was an alleyway on the right-hand side of the building, and the stonemasons had lavished their handiwork on the quoin-every second stone from the ground to below the eaves was faceted like a jewel. A glassed-in balcony ran the width of the third floor, the rooms within concealed by bamboo blinds. The walls of the building were grey, the door black. To my surprise, the door simply opened when Karla touched it, and we stepped inside. We entered a long, cool corridor, darker than the sunlit street but softly illuminated by lily-shaped lamps of fluted glass.

There was wallpaper-very unusual in humid Bombay-with the repetitive Compton pattern of William Morris in olive green and flesh pinks. A smell of incense and flowers permeated, and the eerie, padded silences of closed rooms surrounded us.

A man was standing in the hallway, facing us, with his hands loosely clasped in front of him. He was tall and thin. His fine, dark brown hair was pulled back severely and tied into a long plait that reached to his hips. He had no eyebrows, but very thick eyelashes, so thick that I thought they must be false. Some designs, in swirls and scrolls, were drawn on his pale face from his lips to his pointed chin. He was dressed in a black, silk kurta-pyjama and clear plastic sandals.

He stood to one side, and gestured towards the stairs at the end of the hall. The fingers of his outstretched hand were stained with henna stencils. They were the longest fingers I'd ever seen.

As we walked past him, I saw that the scrolled designs on his lower lip and chin were actually tattoos.

We climbed the wide stairs to the second floor, our footsteps swallowed by thick carpet and heavy teakwood newels and handrails. There were framed photographs and paintings on the walls, all of them portraits. As I passed those images, I had the sense that there were other living, breathing people in the closed rooms, all around us. But there was no sound. Nothing.

The half-light of late afternoon glowed through the cream coloured lace. The walls were bare and painted tan-brown, and there was a metal grille, about a metre square, set into one of them just above the skirting board. We knelt on the cushions in front of the grille as if we'd come to make our confession.

Madame Zhou laughed. It was a gurgling, bronchial laugh. It was the kind of laugh that hunted down funny things, and killed them stone dead.

She said the word as if it was a despicable insult. Her voice rasped the word across our skin. It had taken a lot of cigarettes, smoked in a particularly spiteful manner, to make that voice.

It was cold, naked, incomprehensible hatred. I was mesmerised by it, bewildered, and strangely ashamed.

It was a command. I took one of the cards from my pocket and handed it to Rajan. He held it at the edges, as if he was afraid of contamination, and backed out of the room, closing the door behind him.

Are you in love, Mr. Parker?"

I'd thought hard about what she might ask me, but I hadn't anticipated that question. And just at that moment, there was probably no other subject that could've unsettled me more. I looked at Karla, but she was staring down at her hands, and she gave me no clue. I didn't know what Madame Zhou meant by the question. She hadn't asked me if I was married or single, engaged or involved.

Parker. Are you in it?"

I don't know why I said it. The impression that I was making an act of confession, there, on my knees before the metal grate, was even more pronounced.

Don't think for a moment that she will ever love you in return, or keep any of her promises to you, or that anything but sorrow will come of the love you feel. She will never love you. I tell you this out of friendship, Mr. Parker. This is a little gift for you."

There was a lengthy pause. It was becoming an effort of concentration to listen and speak in Hindi. I felt lost, in over my head. It was going badly. She'd asked me three questions, and I'd stumbled badly on two of them. Karla was my guide in that strange world, but she seemed as confused and wrong-footed as I was. Madame Zhou had told her to shut up, and she'd swallowed it with a meekness I'd never seen or even imagined in her. I took a glass and drank some of the nimbu pani. The iced lime-juice was spiced with something hot to the taste like chilli powder. There was a shadowy movement and whisper in the darkness of the room behind the metal grate. I wondered if Rajan was in there with her. I couldn't make out the shape.

She spoke.

I would like to see you... relax. Perhaps, when Karla is finished with you, you will remember my invitation? In the meantime, remember-Lisa is mine if she returns to me. That matter is finished between us, today, here and now."

The relief was enormous. I felt sapped with it. We'd won. It was done, and Karla's friend was free to come with us.

Madame Zhou began to speak again, very quickly, and in another language. I guessed it to be German. It sounded harsh and threatening and angry, but I couldn't speak German then, and the words might've been kinder than they sounded to me. Karla responded from time to time with Ja or Nat%urlich nicht, but little else. She was rocking from side to side, sitting back on her folded legs. Her hands were in her lap. Her eyes were closed. And as I watched her, she began to cry. The tears, when they came, slipped from her closed eyelids like so many beads on a prayer chain. Some women cry easily. The tears fall as gently as fragrant raindrops in a sun-shower, and leave the face clear and clean and almost radiant. Other women cry hard, and all the loveliness in them collapses in the agony of it. Karla was such a woman. There was terrible anguish written in the rivulets of those tears and the torment that creased her face.

From behind the grate, the smoky voice full of spitting sibilants and crunching words continued. Karla swayed and sobbed in utter silence. Her mouth opened, and then closed soundlessly. A pearl of sweat trickled from her temple across the folded wing of her cheek. More sweat stippled her upper lip, dissolving in the tears. Then there was nothing from behind the metal grate: no sound or movement or even the sense of a human presence. And with an effort of will that clenched her jaws to white and set her body trembling, Karla swept her hands over her face, and her crying ceased.

She was very still. She reached out with one hand to touch me.

The hand rested on my thigh, and then pressed downward with regular, gentle pressures. It was the tender, reassuring gesture she might've used to calm a frightened animal. She was staring into my eyes, but I wasn't sure if she was asking me something or telling me something. She breathed deeply, quickly. Her green eyes were almost black in the shadowed room.

I didn't understand any of it. I couldn't understand the German chatter, and I had no idea what was going on between Karla and the voice behind the metal grille. I wanted to help her, but I didn't know why she'd cried, and I knew that we were probably being watched. I stood up, and then helped her to stand. For a moment, she rested her face against my chest. I put my hands on her shoulders, steadying her and easing her away from me. Then the door opened, and Rajan came into the room.

Karla brushed at the knees of her loose trousers, picked up her bag, and stepped past me toward the door.

I felt tired and angry and confused. I turned to see Karla and Rajan staring at me impatiently in the doorway. As I followed them along the corridors of the Palace, I grew more sullen and resentful with every step.

Rajan led us to a room at the very end of a corridor. The door was open. The room was decorated with large movie posters-Lauren Bacall in a still from To Have And Have Not, Pier Angeli from Somebody Up There Likes Me, and Sean Young from Blade Runner. A young and very beautiful woman sat on the large bed in the centre of the room. Her blonde hair was long and thick, ending in spirals of lush curls. Her sky-blue eyes were large and set unusually wide apart. Her skin was flawless pink, her lips painted a deep red. A suitcase and a cosmetic case were snapped shut and resting on the floor at her golden-slippered feet.

It was a deep voice. The accent was Californian.

There's a special anger we reserve for people who won't let us do them a good turn. My teeth began to grind with it.

The girl stood up quickly and grabbed at her bags. "Well, what're we waiting for? Let's get the fuck outta here before she changes her goddamn mind."

Rajan stopped me at the street door, and gave me a large, sealed envelope. He stared that perplexing malice into my eyes once more, and then closed the door. I caught up to Karla and pulled her round to face me.

She glanced at Lisa, who stood close by, impatient and shielding her eyes, even though the late-afternoon light wasn't bright. She looked at me again, her green eyes puzzled and tired.

Not now. Let's just go."

And who the hell are Ahmed and Christina? What happened to them?

What was she talking about? One minute you're indestructible, and then the next minute you're breaking down, while Madame Nutcase is babbling away in German or whatever."

A few more people stopped to join the idlers. One group of three young men stood very close, leaning on one another's shoulders and gawking with aggressive curiosity. The taxi driver who'd brought us there was standing beside his cab, five metres away.

He twirled his handkerchief to fan himself, watching us, smiling.

He was much taller than I'd thought him to be; tall and thin and dressed in a tightly fitting white shirt and trousers. Karla glanced over her shoulder at him. He wiped at his moustache with the red handkerchief, and then tied it as a scarf around his neck. He smiled at her. His strong, white teeth were gleaming.

She walked away.

The taxi driver greeted them, waggling his head happily. When they drove past me, there was music playing, Freeway of Love, and they were laughing. For one explosive moment of writhing fantasy I saw them all together, naked, the taxi driver and Lisa and Karla. It was improbable and ridiculous and I knew it, but the squirm was in my mind, and a white-hot thump of rage went pulsing along the thread of time and fate that connected me to Karla.

Then I remembered that I'd left my boots and clothes at her apartment.

There was a man standing beside me. His face was familiar, but I couldn't place it immediately. "What?"

The mention of Khader's name jolted my memory. It was Nazeer, Khaderbhai's driver. The white car was parked nearby.

The word please didn't sit well with him. It was clear that, in his view, lord Abdel Khader Khan gave orders that others quickly and gratefully obeyed. But he'd been told to request my company, rather than command it, and the English words he'd just spoken with such visible effort had been carefully memorised. I pictured him driving across the city and repeating the incantation of the foreign words to himself, as uncomfortable and unhappy with them as if they were fragments of prayer from another man's religion.

Alien to him or not, the words had their effect on me, and he looked relieved when I smiled a surrender.

He began to open the back door of the car, but I insisted on sitting in the front. As soon as we pulled away from the kerb, he switched on the radio and turned the volume to high, perhaps to prevent conversation. The envelope that Rajan had given me was still in my hands, and I turned it over to examine both sides. It was hand-made paper, pink, and about the size of a magazine cover. There was nothing written on the outside. I tore the corner and opened it to find a black-and-white photograph. It was an interior shot of a room, half-lit, and filled with expensive ornaments from a variety of ages and cultures. In the midst of that self-conscious clutter, a woman sat on a throne-like chair.

She was dressed in an evening gown of extravagant length that spilled to the floor and concealed her feet. One hand rested on an arm of the chair.

The other was poised in a regal wave or an elegant gesture of dismissal. The hair was dark and elaborately coifed, falling in ringlets that framed her round and somewhat plump face. The almond-shaped eyes stared straight into the camera. They wore a faintly neurotic look of startled indignation. The lips of her tiny mouth were pinched in a determined pout that pulled at her weak chin.

A beautiful woman? I didn't think so. And a range of less than lovely impressions stared from that face-haughty, spiteful, frightened, spoiled, self-obsessed. The photograph said she was all of those things, and more. And worse. But there was something else on the photograph, something more repugnant and chilling than the unlovely face. It was the message she'd chosen to stamp in red, block letters, across the bottom. It said: MADAME ZHOU IS

HAPPY NOW.

____________________

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

It was a room of diligently austere splendour. The only furniture was the low marble table and our nine cushions evenly arranged around the carpet. The only decoration was a framed black and gold-leaf depiction of the Kaaba at Mecca. The eight men who sat or reclined there seemed comfortable in that inornate simplicity, however, and certainly they were free to choose any style that they wanted, for there was the wealth and power of a small empire between them: an empire of crime.

When I'd arrived at the building beside the Nabila Mosque, in Dongri, Nazeer had shown me at once to a large, well-appointed bathroom, where I'd used the toilet and then washed my face and hands. Bombay, in those years, was the most voluptuously dirty city in the world. It wasn't only hot and cloyingly humid: in the eight rainless months of the year it was constantly aswirl with grimy dust clouds that settled on and smeared every exposed surface with a catholic variety of filths.

If I wiped my face with a handkerchief after only half an hour's walk along any street, the cloth was streaked with black.

And all of us, no matter what our level of learning, are enthusiastic about the study of English. It is a critical thing for us. One of the reasons why I asked you to come here, this evening, was so that we might enjoy the speaking of English with you, a native of the language. This is our monthly discussion night, you see, and our little group talks about-but wait, let me first introduce you."

He reached over to lay an affectionate hand on the bulky forearm of the heavy-set, elderly man who sat on his right. He was dressed in the green pantaloons and long tunic of Afghan traditional dress.

Sobhan wagged his grizzled, grey head at me in greeting, fixing me with a look of steely enquiry, perhaps to make sure that I understood the honour implied in the use of first names.

Rajubhai, a bald, thick-set man with a neat, grey moustache, smiled in response to Khaderbhai's introduction, and turned to me with his hands joined together in a silent greeting. His eyes, above the gentle steeple of his fingers, were hard and wary.

Dorabjee, a very tall, thin man in his middle fifties, turned his dark eyes on me. His expression seemed fixed in such distressing melancholy that I felt compelled to offer him a small, comforting smile in return.

A young servant entered with a tray of glasses and a silver pot of black tea. He served us, beginning with Khaderbhai and ending with me. He left the room, returned momentarily to place two bowls of ladoo and barfi sweets on the table, and then left us once more.

Immediately afterward, three men joined us in the room, making a place for themselves on another patch of carpet that was near, but a little apart from us. They were introduced to me-Andrew Ferreira, a Goan, and Salman Mustaan and Sanjay Kumar, both from Bombay-but from that moment they never spoke again. They were, it seemed, young gangsters on the next rung below council membership: invited to listen at the meetings, but not to speak.

And they did listen, very attentively, while watching us closely.

I turned, often, to find their eyes on me, staring out from the kind of grave appraisal I'd come to know too well in prison. They were deciding whether to trust me or not, and how hard it would be-as a purely professional speculation-to kill me, without a gun.

He reached across, pushing toward me a rolled poster that was lying on the table. I opened it out and read through the four paragraphs of large, bold typeface.

SAPNA

People of Bombay, listen to the voice of your King. Your dream is come to you and I am he, Sapna, King of Dreams, King of Blood. Your time is come, my children, and your chains of suffering will be lifted from you.

I am come. I am the law. My first commandment is to open your eyes. I want you to see your hunger while they waste food. I want you to see your rags while they wear silk. See that you live in the gutter while they live in palaces of marble and gold. My second commandment is to kill them all. Do this with cruel violence.

Do this in memory of me, Sapna. I am the law.

There was more, a lot more, all of it in the same vein. It struck me as absurd at first, and I started to smile. The silence in the room and the stares of tense concentration they turned on me stifled the smile to a grimace. They took it very seriously, I realised. Stalling for time, because I didn't know what Ghani wanted from me, I read through the ranting, insane tract again.

While I read the words, I remembered that someone had painted the name Sapna on the wall at the Village in the Sky, twenty-three floors off the ground. I remembered what Prabaker and Johnny Cigar had said about brutal murders done in Sapna's name. The continuing silence and expectant seriousness in the room filled me with a chill of menace. The hairs on my arms tingled with it, and a caterpillar of sweat inched down the groove of my spine.

The stillness was so complete that I could hear myself swallowing. They wanted me to give them something, and they expected it to be good.

Madjid grunted, and cleared his throat loudly. He drew his thick black eyebrows down over a thick black scowl.

Khaderbhai explained. "The government and the police have asked for co-operation from the newspapers. They have been reported as unrelated things, as deaths that happened during simple, unconnected robberies. But we know that Sapna's followers have committed them, because the blood of the victims was used to write the word Sapna on the walls and the floors. And despite the terrible violence of the attacks, not much of any real value was stolen from the victims. For now, this Sapna does not officially exist. But it is only a matter of time before everyone knows of him, and of what has been done in his name."

I sensed a vague hint of accusation in those last two words.

Although I had nothing whatsoever to do with Sapna and knew almost nothing about him, my face reddened with that special guilty blush of the completely innocent man.

Blessed are the killers, for they shall steal lives in my name- that's from the Sermon on the Mount. It's all been taken from the Bible, and there's probably more in here that I don't recognise.

But it's all been changed around, it's as though this guy, whoever wrote this stuff, has taken bits of the Bible, and written it upside down."

I might've said more, but Abdul Ghani ended the discussion abruptly.

But we really should move on now. If we don't get started on our theme for tonight, we'll miss out altogether. So, let's have a smoke, and talk of other things. It's our custom for the guest to start, so will you be so kind?"

Farid rose and placed a huge, ornate hookah, with six snaking lines, on the floor between us next to the table. He passed the smoking tubes out, and squatted next to the hookah with several matches held ready to strike. The others closed off their smoking tubes with their thumbs and, as Farid played a flame over the tulip-shaped bowl, I puffed it alight. It was the mix of hashish and marijuana known as ganga-jamuna, named after the two holy rivers, Ganges and Jamner. It was so potent, and came with such force from the water-pipe, that almost at once my bloodshot eyes failed in focus and I experienced a mild, hallucinatory effect: the blurring at the edges of other people's faces, and a minuscule time-delay in their movements. The Lewis Carrolls, Karla called it. I'm so stoned, she used to say, I'm getting the Lewis Carrolls. So much smoke passed from the tube that I swallowed it and belched it out again. I closed off the pipe, and watched in slow motion as the others smoked, one after another.

I'd just begun to master the sloppy grin that dumped itself on the plasticine muscles of my face when it was my turn to smoke again. It was a serious business. There was no laughing or smiling.

There was no conversation, and no man met another's eye. The men smoked with the same mirthless, earnest impassiveness I might've found on a long ride in an elevator full of strangers.

It was a good question. The false passport in my backpack in the slum said that I was a New Zealand citizen. The business card in my pocket said that I was an American named Gilbert Parker.

People in the village at Sunder had re-named me Shantaram. In the slum they knew me as Linbaba. A lot of people in my own country knew me as a face on a wanted poster. But is it my own country, I asked myself. Do I have a country?

It wasn't until I'd asked myself the question that I realised I already had the answer. If I did have a country, a nation of the heart, it was India. I knew that I was as much a refugee, a displaced and stateless person, as the thousands of Afghans, Iranians, and others who'd come to Bombay across the burning bridge; those exiles who'd taken shovels of hope, and set about burying the past in the earth of their own lives.

I trailed off a little lamely into the silence that greeted my suggestion, but moments later I was rewarded with a warmly approving smile from Khaderbhai.

Madjid cleared his throat and turned a gruff smile on his host.

He scratched at his bushy eyebrows with thumb and forefinger, and then plunged into the discussion with the confident air of a man much used to expressing his opinions.

And how much we suffer is a mark of how much we have been hurt by this realisation. Suffering, you see, is a kind of anger. We rage against the unfairness, the injustice of our sad and sorry lot.

And this boiling resentment, you see, this anger, is what we call suffering. It is also what leads us to the hero curse, I might add."

He snatched a chunk of sweet barfi from the plate on the table, bit a piece of it, and munched happily. He gestured to the man on his right, thrusting the sweet in his pudgy fingers.

He stared down at his strong hands, glowering at them as if at two despised and defeated enemies who were pleading for his mercy. A gloomy silence began to thicken in the air around us, and instinctively we looked to Khaderbhai. He sat cross-legged, stiff-backed, rocking slowly in his place and seeming to spool out a precise measure of respectful reflection. At last, he nodded to Farid, inviting him to speak. "I think that our brother Khaled is right, in a way," Farid began quietly, almost shyly. He turned his large, dark brown eyes on Khaderbhai. Encouraged by the older man's nod of interest, he continued. "I think that happiness is a really thing, a truly thing, but it is what makes us crazy people. Happiness is a so strange and power thing that it makes us to be sick, like a germ sort of thing. And suffering is what cures us of it, the too much happiness. The-how do you say it, bhari vazan?"

I felt a tiny twitch of jealousy. The sense of well-being bestowed by Khaderbhai's benignant smile was as intoxicating as the heady mixture we'd smoked in the hookah pipe. The urge to be a son to Abdel Khader Khan, to earn the blessing of his praise, was overwhelming. The hollow space in my heart where a father's love might've been, should've been, wrapped itself around the contours of his form, and took the features of his face. The high cheekbones and closely cropped silver beard, the sensual lips and deep-set amber eyes, became the perfect father's face.

I look back on that time now-at my readiness to serve him as a son might serve a father, at my willingness to love him, in fact, and at how quickly and unquestioningly it happened in my life- and I wonder how much of it came from the great power that he wielded in the city, his city. I'd never felt so safe, anywhere in the world, as I did in his company. And I did hope that in the river of his life I might wash away the scent, and shake off the hounds. I've asked myself a thousand times, through the years, if I would've loved him so swiftly and so well if he'd been powerless and poor.

Sitting there, then, in that domed room, feeling the twinge of jealousy when he smiled at Farid and praised him, I knew that although Khaderbhai had spoken of adopting me as his son, on our first meeting, it was really I who'd adopted him. And while the discussion continued around me, I spoke the words, quite clearly, in the secret voice of prayer and incantation... Father, father, my father...

Sobhan Mahmoud wagged his head in assent, his gleaming eyes nesting under a tufted ledge of grey eyebrows. He seemed amused by Khaderbhai's guess at his position on the theme.

No-one spoke or moved. There was a perceptible sharpening of focus and attention in the few silent moments as Khaderbhai gathered his thoughts. Each man had his own opinion and level of articulacy, yet I had the clear impression that Khaderbhai's contribution was usually the last word. I sensed that his response would set the tone, perhaps even becoming the answer those men would give, if the question about suffering were asked again. His expression was impassive, and his eyes were modestly cast down, but he was far too intelligent not to perceive the awe he inspired in others. I thought that he was far too human, as well, not to be flattered by it. When I came to know him better, I discovered that he was always avidly interested in what others thought of him, always acutely aware of his own charisma and its effect on those around him, and that every word he spoke, to everyone but God, was a performance. He was a man with the ambition to change the world forever. Nothing that he ever said or did-not even the quiet humility in his deep voice as he spoke to us then-was an accident, a chance, or anything but a calculated fragment of his plan. "In the first place, I would like to make a general comment, and then I would like to follow it with a more detailed answer. Do you all allow me this? Good. Then, to the general comment-I think that suffering is the way we test our love. Every act of suffering, no matter how small or agonisingly great, is a test of love in some way. Most of the time, suffering is also a test of our love for God. This is my first statement. Does anyone wish to discuss this point, before I proceed?"

I looked from one face to another. Some men smiled in appreciation of his point, some nodded their agreement, and some others frowned in concentration. All of them seemed eager for Khaderbhai to continue.

He scanned the attentive, expectant faces, and found approval.

The others wagged their heads at one another in agreement.

Can't a man have a healthy, scientific interest in pleasure?"

Each man was then given another turn to speak, and the discussion itself moved backwards and forwards, reversing on itself as arguments were embellished or abandoned for two long hours.

Hashish was smoked. Tea was served twice more, Abdul Ghani choosing to mix a small pellet of black opium in his, and drinking it down with a practised grimace.

Madjid modified his position by agreeing that suffering was not necessarily a sign of weakness, but insisting that we could toughen ourselves against it with a strong will; strength of will coming from strict self-discipline, a kind of self-imposed suffering. Farid added to his notion of suffering as an anti toxin to the poison of happiness by recalling specific incidents from the lives of his friends. Old Sobhan whispered a few sentences in Urdu, and Khaderbhai translated the new point for us: there are some things we human beings will never understand, the things only God can understand, and that suffering may well be one of them. Keki Dorabji made the point that the universe, as those of the Parsee faith see it, is a process of struggle between opposites-light and darkness, hot and cold, suffering and pleasure-and that nothing can exist without the existence of its opposite. Rajubhai added that suffering is a condition of the unenlightened soul, locked within the wheel of Karma. Khaled Fattah said nothing more, despite the artful urgings of Abdul Ghani, who teased and cajoled him several times before finally giving up the attempt, visibly piqued by the stubborn refusal.

For his part, Abdul Ghani emerged as the most vocal and likeable of the group. Khaled was an intriguing man, but there was anger- too much anger, perhaps-brooding in him. Madjid had been a professional soldier in Iran. He seemed brave and direct, yet given to a simplistic view of the world and its people. Sobhan Mahmoud was undoubtedly pious, but there was a vaguely antiseptic scent of inflexibility about him. Young Farid was openhearted, self-effacing and, I suspected, too easily led. Keki was dour and unresponsive, and Rajubhai seemed to be suspicious of me, almost to the point of rudeness. Of all of them, only Abdul Ghani displayed any sense of humour, and only he laughed aloud. He was as familiar with younger men as he was with those senior to him. He sprawled in his place, where others sat.

He interrupted or interjected when he pleased, and he ate more, drank more, and smoked more than any man in the room. He was especially, irreverently, affectionate with Khaderbhai, and it was certain that they were close friends.

Khaderbhai asked questions, probed, made comments upon what was said, but never added another word to his own position. I was silent; drifting, tired, and grateful that no-one pressured me to speak.

When Khaderbhai finally adjourned the meeting, he walked with me to the door that opened into the street beside the Nabila Mosque, and stopped me there with a gentle hand on my forearm. He said he was glad I'd come, and that he hoped I'd enjoyed myself. Then he asked me to return on the following day because there was a favour I could do for him, if I was willing. Surprised and flattered, I agreed at once, promising to meet him at the same place on the following morning. I stepped out into the night, and almost put it out of my mind.

On the long walk home, my thoughts browsed among the ideas I'd heard presented by that scholarly group of criminals. I recalled other, similar discussions I'd shared with men in prison. Despite their general lack of formal education, or perhaps because of it, many men I'd known in prison had a fervent interest in the world of ideas. They didn't call it philosophy, or even know it as such, but the stuff of their conversations was often just that- abstract questions of moral and ethic, meaning and purpose.

It had been a long day, and an even longer night. With Madame Zhou's photograph in my hip pocket, my feet pinched by shoes that had been bought to bury Karla's dead lover, and my head clogged with definitions of suffering, I walked the emptying streets and remembered a cell in an Australian prison where the murderers and thieves I'd called my friends often gathered to argue, passionately, about truth and love and virtue. I wondered if they thought of me from time to time. Am I a daydream for them now, I asked myself, a daydream of freedom and flight? How would they answer the question, what is suffering?

I knew. Khaderbhai had dazzled us with the wisdom of his un- common sense, and the cleverness of his talent for expressing it.

His definition was sharp, and barbed enough-suffering is happiness, backwards-to hook a fish of memory. But the truth of what human suffering really means, in the dry, frightened mouth of life, wasn't in Khaderbhai's cleverness that night. It belonged to Khaled Ansari, the Palestinian. His was the definition that stayed with me. His simple, unbeautiful words were the clearest expression of what all prisoners, and everyone else who lives long enough, know well-that suffering, of every kind, is always a matter of what we've lost. When we're young, we think that suffering is something that's done to us. When we get older-when the steel door slams shut, in one way or another-we know that real suffering is measured by what's taken away from us.

Feeling small and alone and lonely, I walked by memory and touch through the dark, lightless lanes of the slum. As I turned into the last gully where my own empty hut waited, I saw lamplight. A man was standing not far from my door with a lantern in his hand.

Beside him was a small child, a little girl, with knotted, teased hair. I drew near and saw that the man with the lantern was Joseph, the drunkard who'd beaten his wife, and that Prabaker was with him in the shadows.

Prabaker smiled, his round face floating in the yellow light. "I love it, your shoes-so clean and shining. Just in time you are.

Joseph is doing it good things. He has paid money, to have it the good luck sign put on everybody his doors. Since not being a badly drinking fellow any more, he has been working full overtimes, and with some of his extra money he paid for this, to help us all with good luck."

I saw it. Two fingers on the child's hands were joined, imperceptibly, to make just one thick finger between the index and middle fingers. Her palms were blue. Joseph held a flat dish of blue paint. The child had been dipping her hands into it, and making handprints on the door of every hut in our lane to bring protection against the many afflictions attributed to the Evil Eye. Superstitious slum-dwellers apparently deemed her to be especially blessed because she was born with the rare difference of only four fingers on each hand. As I watched, the child reached over to press her small hands against my flimsy door. With a brief, serious nod, Joseph led the girl away to the next hut.

He turned to leave, but I stopped him.

Prabaker glanced along the dark lane of ramshackle huts to the hovering glow-worm of Joseph's lamp. He looked back at me, only his eyes and his teeth visible, although we were standing quite close together.

But everybody knows that."

He walked away, singing, and he knew that none of the people sleeping in the wretched huts around him would mind. He knew that if they woke they would listen for a moment, and then drift back to sleep with a smile because he was singing about love.

____________________

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

One eye opened, and focused on a hovering, brown balloon that had Johnny Cigar's face painted on it. The eye closed again.

I was leaning out over the deep pool of sleep but that word, bleeding, pulled me back from the edge. I sat up, wincing at the numbed stiffness of one hip. My bed, like most of the beds in the slum, was a blanket, folded twice and placed on the hard-packed earth. Kapok mattresses were available, but they were impractical. They took up too much space in the small huts, they quickly became infested with lice, fleas, and other vermin, and rats found them irresistible. After long months of sleeping on the ground, I was as used to it as a man gets, but there wasn't much flesh on my hips, and I woke up sore every morning.

Johnny was holding a lamp quite close to my face. I blinked, pushing it aside to see another man squatting in the doorway with his arm held out in front of him. There was a large cut or gash on the arm, and blood seeped from it, drip, drip, drop, into a bucket. Only half awake, as I was, I stared stupidly at the yellow plastic bucket. The man had brought his own bucket with him to stop the blood from staining the floor of my hut, and that seemed more disturbing, somehow, than the wound itself.

Johnny slapped him on the ear.

He's a cheeky fellow, a goonda. He's afraid of police. Aren't you, hey, you stupid? Afraid of police, na?"

Ameer complained. Eve-teasing was the name given to the charge of sexual harassment, under Indian law, and it covered a range of offences from insulting language to physical molestation. "We warned them to stop it. Our ladies were not walking safely. For that reason only we did fight them."

Johnny raised his broad hand, silencing Ameer's protest. He wanted to strike the young man again, but my frown gave him reluctant pause.

But I'd never used them.

Someone in the other gang was hurt even more seriously than this stupid boy. Maybe he will die also, this other fellow. It is a police matter now, and they are asking questions. Ameer won't go to any doctor or hospital."

His eyes were huge with fright and horror-struck resolve. I looked at him full in the face for the first time, and I saw how young he was: sixteen or seventeen years old. He was wearing Puma sneakers, jeans, and a basketball singlet with the number printed on the front. The clothes were Indian copies of famous western brands, but they were considered fashionably hip by his peers in the slum, other young men with lean bellies and heads full of scrambled foreign dreams; young men who went without food to buy clothes that they imagined made them look like the cool foreigners in magazines and films.

I didn't know the kid. He was one of thousands I'd never seen, although I'd been there for almost six months, and no-one in the place lived more than five or six hundred metres from my hut.

Some men, such as Johnny Cigar and Prabaker, appeared to know everyone in the slum. It seemed extraordinary to me that they should know intimate details from the lives of so many thousands of people. It was even more remarkable that they cared-that they encouraged and scolded and worried about all of them. I wondered how that young man was connected to Johnny Cigar. Ameer shivered in the swirling chill of night, pressing his lips into a wide, noiseless whine as he contemplated taking needle and thread to his own flesh. I wondered how it was that Johnny, standing above him, knew him well enough to be sure he would do it; to nod at me with the message, Yes, if you give him the needle, he will do it himself.

I sat Ameer down on my bed, covering his shoulders with another blanket. Pulling the kerosene stove from my kitchen box, I pumped it up, primed it, and set a pot of water on it to boil. Johnny hurried off to ask someone to make hot, sweet tea. I washed my face and hands hurriedly, in the dark, at the open bathroom-space beside my hut. When the water boiled, I put a little into a dish, and threw two needles into the pot to sterilise them with further boiling. Using antiseptic and warm soapy water, I washed the wound and then dried it off with clean gauze. I bound the arm tightly with gauze, leaving it in place for ten minutes to press the wound together, in the hope that it would make the stitching easier.

Ameer drank two large mugs of sweet tea at my insistence, as a counter to the symptoms of shock that had begun to show. He was afraid, but he was calm. He trusted me. He couldn't know that I'd only done the procedure once before, and under ironically similar circumstances. A man had been stabbed during a prison fight. The problem between the two antagonists, whatever it was, had been resolved in the violent encounter, and the matter was finished so far as they were concerned. But if the stabbed man had reported to the prison infirmary for treatment, the authorities would've placed him in an isolation unit for prisoners on protection. For some men, child molesters and informers particularly, there was no alternative to being placed on protection because they wouldn't otherwise have survived. For others, men placed there against their will, the protection unit was a curse: the curse of suspicion, slanders, and the company of men they despised. The stabbed man had come to me. I'd stitched his wound closed with a leatherwork needle and embroidery thread. The wound healed, but it left an ugly, rippling scar. The memory of it never left me, and I wasn't confident about the attempt to stitch Ameer's arm.

The sheepish, trusting smile that the young man offered me was no help. People always hurt us with their trust, Karla said to me once. The surest way to hurt someone you like, is to put all your trust in him.

I drank tea, smoked a cigarette, and then set to work. Johnny stood in the doorway, ineffectually scolding several curious neighbours and their children away from the door. The suture needle was curved and very fine. I supposed that it should've been used with some kind of pliers. I had none in my kit. One of the boys had borrowed them to fix a sewing machine. I had to push the needle into the skin, and pull it through with my fingers. It was awkward and slippery, and the first few cross-shaped stitches were messy. Ameer winced and grimaced inventively, but he didn't cry out. By the fifth and sixth stitches I'd developed a technique, and the ugliness of the work, if not the pain involved, had diminished.

Human skin is tougher and more resilient than it looks. It's also relatively simple to stitch, and the thread can be pulled quite tightly without tearing the tissue. But the needle, no matter how fine or sharp, is still a foreign object and, for those of us who aren't inured to such work through frequent repetition, there's a psychological penalty that must be paid each time we drive that alien thing into another being's flesh. I began to sweat heavily despite the cool night. It was a measure of the distress involved that Ameer became brighter as the work progressed, while I grew more tense and fatigued.

I'm only half awake, for God's sake! Oh, what's the use? There, it's finished. You'll be okay, Ameer, I think. But you should have a tetanus injection."

I cleaned the wound once more and dusted it with antibiotic powder. Covering the twenty-six stitches with a loose bandage, I warned him not to get it wet, and instructed him to come back within two days to have it checked. He tried to pay me, but I refused the money. No-one paid for the treatment I dispensed.

Still, it wasn't principle that made me refuse. The truth was that I felt curiously, inexplicably angry-at Ameer, at Johnny, at myself-and I ordered him away curtly. He touched my feet, and backed out of the hut, collecting a parting slap on the head from Johnny Cigar.

I was about to clean up the mess in my hut when Prabaker rushed inside, grasped at my shirt, and tried to drag me out through the door.

We abandoned the hut and rushed out through the narrow, shadow clogged lanes of the sleeping slum. On the main street outside the President Hotel we caught a cab, and swept along the clean, silent streets past the Parsee Colony, Sassoon Dock, and the Colaba Market. The cab stopped outside the Colaba police station, directly across the road from Leopold's. The bar was closed, of course, with the wide metal shutters rolled down to the pavement.

It seemed preternaturally quiet: the haunted stillness of a popular bar, closed for business.

Prabaker and I passed the gates of the police station and entered the compound. My heart was beating fast, but I looked outwardly calm. All the cops in the station spoke Marathi-it was a requirement of their employment. I knew that if they had no special reason to suspect or challenge me, my proficiency with the Marathi language would please them as much as it surprised them. It would make me popular with them, and that small celebrity would protect me.

Still, it was a journey behind enemy lines, and in my mind I pushed the locked, heavy box of fear all the way to the back of the attic.

Prabaker spoke quietly to a havaldar, or police constable, at the foot of a long flight of metal stairs. The man nodded, and stepped to the side. Prabaker wagged his head, and I followed him up the steel steps to a landing, with a heavy door, on the first floor. A face appeared at the grille set into the door. Large brown eyes stared left and right, and then the door opened for us. We stepped into an antechamber that contained a desk, a small metal chair, and a bamboo cot. The guard who opened the door was the watchman on duty that night. He spoke briefly with Prabaker and then glared at me. He was a tall man with a prominent paunch and a large, expressively bristly moustache, tinged with grey.

There was a metal gate made from hinged, concertina-style lattices behind him. Beyond the gate, the faces of a dozen prisoners watched us with intense interest. The guard turned his broad back on them, and held out his hand.

I handed over a fifty-rupee note, and the watchman palmed it. He turned his back to me and approached the metal gate. We followed him. More men had gathered there, all wide awake and chattering, despite the late hour. The watchman stared at them, one by one, until all were silent. Then he called me forward. When I faced the bars of the steel gate, the crowd of men parted and two fantastic figures pushed their way to the front. They were the bear-handlers, the blue-skinned men who'd brought Kano the bear to my slum at Abdullah's request. They reached the gate and grasped at the bars, chattering at me so quickly and urgently that I only caught every fourth or fifth word.

Prabaker blinked at me, and then turned quickly to check the expressions on the faces of the watchman and the bear-handlers.

Do you... do you want to leave?"

Prabaker asked them to explain what they wanted, and the two blue-skinned men shouted their story, clutching at the lattices of the gate as if they were the boards of a raft on the open sea.

Prabaker explained, urging the men to be calm and to speak more slowly. "They say that these others were not treating their bear with respect. They were beating that bear with a whip, and that bear was crying, with pains all over him."

The bear-handlers spoke in a rush of words that kept Prabaker silent, listening and nodding, with his mouth open to speak.

Other prisoners approached the gate to listen. The corridor beyond the gate had long windows on one side covered by a metal grille. On the other side of the crowded prison corridor there were several rooms. Men streamed from those rooms, swelling the throng at the gate to a hundred or more prisoners, all of them listening with fascination to the bear-handler's story.

Prabaker translated. "And even when it cried, those fellows didn't stop beating it, that bear. And, you know, it was a girl bear!"

The men at the gate reacted with outraged, angry shouts and sympathetic cries.

He paused again, listening to the next instalment of the story. I turned to look at the watchman, and saw that he was as deeply engrossed in the unfolding saga as the prisoners were. He chewed paan as he listened, his thorn-bush of a moustache twitching up and down, and unconsciously emphasising his interest. A roar of approval for something in the story went up from the attentive prisoners, and the watchman was united with them in the appreciative shout.

Prabaker, the watchman, and I took two steps away from the gate and stood at the bare metal desk. Over my shoulder, I could see that the men at the gate were straining to hear our conversation.

The watchman smiled, and shook his head. A policeman was hurt in the scuffle, he explained, and the matter was out of his hands.

Shrugging my helplessness, I turned back to the gate and told the men that I couldn't bail or bribe them out of the jail. They rattled away at me in such a swift and garbled Hindi that I couldn't understand them.

I looked at Prabaker, and he shrugged.

We took the steel steps down to the ground-floor level, and were directed to a row of cells directly beneath the rooms we'd seen upstairs. A ground-level watchman opened one of the rooms, and we leaned inside to see Kano the bear sitting in the middle of a dark and empty cell. It was a large room, with a keyhole toilet in the floor in one corner. The huge muzzled bear was chained at his neck and on his paws, and the chains passed through a metal grille at one of the windows. He sat with his broad back against a wall, and his lower legs splayed out in front of him. His expression-and I have no other way of describing the set of his features, other than as an expression-was disconsolate and profoundly distressed. He let out a long, heart-wrenching sigh, even as we watched him.

Prabaker was standing a little behind me. I turned to ask him a question, and found that he was crying, his face contorted with miserable sobbing. Before I could speak, he moved past me toward the bear, evading the outstretched hand of the watchman. He reached Kano, with his arms before him in a wide embrace, and pressed himself to the creature, resting his head against Kano's and stroking the shaggy fur with murmurs of tenderness. I exchanged glances with the ground-level watchman. The man raised his eyebrows, and wagged his head from side to side energetically. He was clearly impressed.

The watchman wrinkled his lips in a pitying and contemptuous sneer.

He pulled himself away from the bear and approached me, wiping tears from his eyes with the backs of his hands as he walked. His wretchedness was so complete that I was moved to put my arm around him to comfort him.

Ten more minutes of discussion with the watchmen and the other guards resolved that it was impossible for us to bail out the handlers or their bear. There was nothing to be done. We returned to the metal gate and informed the bear-handlers that we were unable to help them. They broke into another animated dialogue with Prabaker.

Since a baby, he has never been sleeping alone, even one night.

For that only, they are a big worried. They say that Kano, he will be frightened. He will have a bad sleep, and have too many bad dreams. He will be crying, for his loneliness. And he will be ashamed, to be in the jail, because he is normally a very fine citizen, that bear. They want only to go down to that lock-up cell with Kano, and keep him some good companies."

One of the bear-handlers stared into my eyes when Prabaker finished his explanation. The man was distraught. His face was creased with worry. Anguish drew his lips back into something that resembled a snarl. He repeated one phrase again and again, hoping that with repetition and the force of his emotion he might make me understand. Suddenly, Prabaker burst into tears once more, sobbing like a child as he grasped the metal bars of the gate.

Negotiations with the watchmen and the other guards were spirited once we presented them with a request that they could grant without bending the rules to their breaking point. Prabaker thrived in the theatrically energetic barter, protesting and pleading with equal vigour. At last he arrived at an agreed sum- two hundred rupees, about twelve American dollars-and the moustachioed watchman unlocked the gate for the bear-handlers while I handed over the bundle of notes. In a strange procession of people and purposes, we filed down the steel stairs, and the ground-floor watchman unlocked the cell that housed Kano. At the sound of their voices, the great bear rose from his seated position, and then fell forward on all fours, dragged downward by the chains. The bear swayed its head from side to side in a joyful dance, and pawed at the ground. When the bear-handlers rushed to greet him, Kano drove his snout into their armpits, and nuzzled in their long, dread-locked hair, snuffling and sniffing at their scent. For their part, the blue men smothered him in affectionate caresses, and sought to ease the stress of the heavy chains. We left them in the enclosure of that embrace. When the steel cell door slammed shut on Kano and his handlers the sound rattled through the empty parade ground, gouging echoes from the stone. I felt that sound as a shiver in my spine as Prabaker and I walked out of the police compound.

Prabaker gushed. "A man must love his bear. That is what they said, those bear-handling fellows, and you have made it come true. It is a very, very, very fine thing that you have done."

We woke a sleeping cab driver outside the police station, on Colaba Causeway. Prabaker joined me in the back seat, enjoying the chance to play tourist in one of the cabs he frequently drove. As the taxi pulled out from the kerb, I turned to see that he was staring at me. I looked away. A moment later, I turned my head and found that he was still staring. I frowned at him, and he wagged his head. He smiled his world-embracing smile for me, and placed his hand over his heart.

At the entrance to the slum, Prabaker and I separated as he made his way to Kumar's chai shop for an early breakfast. He was excited. Our adventure with Kano the bear had given him a fascinating new story-with himself cast in an important role-to share with Parvati, one of Kumar's two pretty daughters. He hadn't said anything to me about Parvati, but I'd seen him talking to her, and I guessed that he was falling in love. In Prabaker's way of courtship, a young man didn't bring flowers or chocolates to the woman he loved: he brought her stories from the wider world, where men grappled with demons of desire, and monstrous injustice. He brought her gossip and scandals and intimate secrets. He brought her the truth of his brave heart, and the mischievous, awe-struck wonder that was the wellspring of his laughter, and of that sky-wide smile. And as I watched him scurry toward the chai shop, I saw that already his head was wagging and his hands were waving as he rehearsed the story that he brought to her as the new day's gift.

I walked on into the grey pre-morning as the slum murmured itself awake. Smoke swirling from a hundred small fires roved the lanes.

Figures wrapped in coloured shawls emerged, and vanished in the misty streams. The smells of rotis cooking on kerosene stoves, and chai boiling in fragrant pots joined the people-smells of coconut hair oil, sandalwood soap, and camphor-soaked clothing.

Sleepy faces greeted me at every turn in the winding lanes, smiling and offering the blessings of the morning in six languages and as many different faiths. I entered my hut and looked with new fondness at the humble, comfortable shabbiness of it. It was good to be home.

I cleaned up the mess in my hut and then joined the morning procession of men who filed out onto the concrete pier that we used as a latrine. When I returned, I discovered that my neighbours had prepared two full buckets of hot water for my bath. I rarely bothered with the laborious and time-consuming procedure of heating several pots of water on the kerosene stove, preferring the lazier, if less luxurious, option of a cold-water bath. Knowing that, my neighbours sometimes provided it for me.

It was no small service. Water, the most precious commodity in any slum, had to be carried from the communal well in the legal compound, some three hundred metres away beyond the barbed wire.

Because the well was only open twice a day, there were hundreds of people in the shove and wrestle for water, and each bucket was dragged into the light with bluff and scratch and shout. Carried back and hoisted through the wire, the water had to be boiled in saucepans on small kerosene stoves, at some cost of the relatively expensive fuel. Yet when they did that for me, none of my neighbours ever took credit for it or expected thanks. The water I used mightVe been boiled and brought there by Ameer's family as a sign of appreciation for the treatment I'd given him.

It might've come from my nearest neighbour, or it might've been provided by one of the half dozen people who stood around and watched me bathe. I would never know. It was one of the small, uncelebrated things people did for me every week.

In a sense, the ghetto existed on a foundation of those anonymous, unthankable deeds; insignificant and almost trivial in themselves, but collectively essential to the survival of the slum. We soothed our neighbours' children as if they were our own when they cried. We tightened a loose rope on someone else's hut when we noticed it sagging, and adjusted the lay of a plastic roof as we passed by. We helped one another, without being asked, as if we were all members of one huge tribe, or family, and the thousand huts were simply rooms in our mansion home.

At his invitation, I breakfasted with Qasim Ali Hussein. We drank sweet tea spiced with clove, and ate waffle-style rotis filled with ghee and sugar, and rolled into tubes. Ranjit's lepers had delivered a new batch of medicines and bandages on the previous day. Because I was away all afternoon, they'd left the bundles with Qasim Ali. We sorted through them together. Qasim Ali couldn't read or write English, and he insisted that I explain the contents and uses of the various capsules, tablets, and salves that I'd ordered. One of his sons, Ayub, sat with us, and wrote the name and description of each medicine in the Urdu script on tiny fragments of paper, and patiently attached a label to every container or tube of cream with adhesive tape. I didn't know it then, but Qasim Ali had chosen Ayub to be my assistant, to learn everything possible about medicines and their uses, so that he could replace me when the time came-as the head man was sure that it would-for me to leave the slum.

It was eleven o'clock when I finally found time to stop at Karla's small house near the Colaba Market. There was no answer to my knocking.

Her neighbours told me she'd gone out an hour earlier. They had no idea when she would return. I was annoyed. I'd left my boots and jeans inside, and I was anxious to retrieve them, to get out of those loose but uncomfortable clothes, those clothes that were hers. I hadn't exaggerated when I'd told her that the jeans, T-shirt, and boots were my only clothes. In my hut there were only two lungis, which I wore for sleeping, bathing, or for when I washed my jeans. I could've bought new clothes-a T-shirt, jeans, and track shoes would've cost me no more than four or five American dollars in the clothing bazaar at Fashion Street-but I wanted my own clothes, the clothes I felt right in. I left a grumble of words for her in a note, and set off to keep my appointment with Khaderbhai.

The great house on Mohammed Ali Road seemed to be empty when I arrived. The six panels of the street door were folded back, and the spacious marble entrance hall was exposed. Thousands of people walked past every hour, but the house was well known and no-one on the street seemed to pay any attention to me as I entered, knocking on the green panels to announce my arrival.

After a few moments, Nazeer came to greet me, his frown vaguely hostile. He directed me to swap my street shoes for a pair of house slippers, and then led me along a tall, narrow corridor in the opposite direction to that of the room I'd visited the night before. We passed a number of closed rooms as the corridor wound through two right turns, and eventually came out upon an inner courtyard.

The very large, oval space was open to the sky in the centre as if a great hole had been cut in the thick plasterwork of the ceiling. It was paved with heavy, square Maharashtrian stone, and surrounded by pillared arches that gave a cloister effect. There were many plants and flowering shrubs in the wide circle of the interior garden, and five tall, slender palms. The fountain that I'd heard from the meeting room, where we'd talked about suffering, was the centrepiece. It was a circle of marble about a metre in height and four metres in diameter with a single huge, uncut boulder in the centre. Water seemed to spout from the very core of the enormous stone. At its peak, the small fountain curved into a lily-shaped plume before splashing gently onto the smooth, rounded surfaces of the boulder and flowing with rhythmic, musical flourishes into the pond of the fountain.

Khaderbhai was sitting in a cane emperor chair, to one side of the fountain. He was reading a book, which he closed and placed on a glass-topped table when I arrived.

He stared at me, for a few moments as if measuring the exact width and depth of the lie, and then waved me to a small, backless stool that was the only other chair in the courtyard.

If you're working outside the law, on your own-if you want to go after him, and put him out of action personally, for whatever reason of your own-then I'll be glad to help. You can count me in, if you want to fight his gang, whoever they are."

Lin, so I will come directly to the point of the matter. The favour that I mentioned yesterday-I want you to teach one small boy, named Tariq, the English language. Not everything, of course, but enough that his English will be considerably improved, and that he will have some little advantage when he begins his formal studies."

He looked at me with benign, almost affectionate condescension.

It is my desire."

My mind was hot, my thoughts scattered and flapping like the birds that he'd startled with his voice. There had to be a way out. It was impossible.

My hut is really small, and there's nothing in it. He'll be uncomfortable. And it's... it's dirty and crowded and... where would he sleep and all that?"

I did think that, of course. It seemed to me that every child, beginning with the sons and daughters of the rich, would benefit from the experience of slum life.

Nazeer arrived with the tea and a prepared chillum.

We first smoked. Nazeer squatted on his haunches to smoke with us. As Khaderbhai puffed on the clay funnel, Nazeer gave me a complex series of nods, frowns, and winks that seemed to say, Look, see how the master smokes, see what a great lord he is, see how much he is, that you and I will never be, see how lucky we are to be here with him. Nazeer was a head shorter than I was, but I guessed that he was at least several kilos heavier. His neck was so thick that it seemed to draw his powerful shoulders up towards his ears. The bulky arms that stretched the seams of his loose shirt appeared to be only slightly more slender than his thighs. His broad, permanently scowling face was composed of three downward curves, something like the insignia of sergeant's stripes. The first of them consisted of his eyebrows, which began a little above and in the centre of his eyes, and descended with bristling unruliness along the slope of his frown to the level of the eyes themselves.

The second curve began in the deep grooves at the wings of his nose, and divided his face all the way to the jaw. The third was drawn by the desperate, pugnacious unhappiness of his mouth, the upside-down horseshoe of bad luck that fate had nailed to the doorpost of his life.

A ridge of purplish scar tissue was prominent on the brown skin of his forehead. His dark eyes moved in their deep hollows like hunted things, constantly seeking concealment. His ears looked as though they'd been chewed by some beast that had blunted its teeth on them, and given up the task. His most striking feature was his nose, an instrument so huge and magnificently pendulous that it seemed designed for some purpose altogether more grand than merely inhaling air and fragrances. I thought him ugly, then, when I first knew him, not so much for the unbeautiful set of his features as for their joylessness. It seemed to me that I'd never seen a human face in which the smile had been so utterly defeated.

The chillum returned to me for the third time, but the smoke was hot and tasted foul. I announced that it was finished. Nazeer seized it from me roughly and puffed with furious determination, managing to extract a dirty brown cloud of smoke. He tapped the gitak stone out onto his palm to reveal a tiny residue of white ash. Making sure that I was watching, he blew the ash from his hand to the ground at my feet, cleared his throat menacingly, and then left us.

Khaderbhai laughed. It was a sudden and very youthful laugh. I liked it, and I was moved to join him, though I didn't really understand why he was laughing.

He smiled, and reached out to rest his hand on my forearm.

Sitting there, on the low stool beside his chair, I had to look up at him, and I felt at some disadvantage. I also felt a sudden rush of affection for him, an affection that seemed to proceed from and depend upon the inequalities between us. It was vassal love, one of the strongest and most mysterious human emotions.

He will arrange for some families, including his own, to share your responsibility, and provide homes for the boy to sleep in, as well as your own. There will be many friends to help you look after Tariq. I want him to know the hardest life of the poorest people. But above all, I want him to have the experience of an English teacher. This last thing means a great deal to me. When I was a boy..."

He paused, allowing his gaze to shift and settle on the fountain and the wet surface of the great, round boulder. His eyes gleamed, reflecting the liquid light on the stone. Then a grave expression passed across them like a cloud-shadow slinking over smooth hills, on a sunny day.

Khaderbhai gestured toward the arches of the cloister, behind me, and I turned to see that the boy was already standing there. He was small for his age. Khaderbhai had said that he was eleven years old, but he seemed to be no more than eight. Dressed in clean, pressed kurta-pyjama and leather sandals, he clutched a tied calico bundle in his arms. He stared at me with such a forlorn and distrustful expression that I thought he might burst into tears. Khaderbhai called him forward, and the boy approached us, making a wide detour around me to the far side of his uncle's chair. The closer he came, the more miserable he seemed.

Khaderbhai spoke to him sternly and swiftly in Urdu, pointing at me several times. When he finished, the boy walked to my stool and extended his hand to me.

I shook hands with him, his small hand vanishing in mine. Nothing ever fits the palm so perfectly, or feels so right, or inspires so much protective instinct as the hand of a child.

His eyes flickered a tiny, hopeful smile in response, but doubt quickly smothered it. He looked back to his uncle. It was a look of desperate unhappiness, drawing his closed mouth wide and pulling his small nose in so tightly that it showed white at the corners.

Khaderbhai returned the look, staring strength into the boy, then stood up and called for Nazeer once more in that half-shout.

He turned without looking at the boy, and strode off into the shadowed arches. Tariq and I watched him leave, each of us feeling abandoned and betrayed. Nazeer walked with us to the door. As I changed into my street shoes, Nazeer knelt and pressed the boy to his chest with surprising and passionate tenderness.

Tariq clung to him, grabbing his hair, and had to be prised from the embrace with some force. When we stood once more, Nazeer gave me a look of eloquent, lingering menace-If anything happens to this boy, you will answer to me for it-and turned away from us.

A minute later we were outside, on the street beside the Nabila Mosque, boy and man joined tightly at the hand but in nothing else except our bewilderment at the power of the personality that had pushed us together against our wills. Tariq had simply been obedient, but there was something craven in my helplessness to resist Khaderbhai. I'd capitulated too readily, and I knew it.

Self-disgust quickly became self-righteousness. How could he do this to a child, I asked myself, his own nephew, give him up so easily to a stranger? Didn't he see how reluctant the boy was?

It's a callous disregard for the rights and well-being of a child. Only a man who thought of others as his playthings, would surrender a child to someone like... like me.

Furious at my feeble pliancy-How did I let him force me to do this?-and burning with spite and selfishness, I dragged Tariq along at a jogging trot as I marched through the swarming street.

Just as we passed the main entrance to the mosque, the muezzin began to recite the call to prayer from the minarets above our heads.

Allah hu Akbar Allah hu Akbar Allah hu Akbar Allah hu Akbar Ash-hadu an-la Ila ha-illallah Ash-hadu an-la Ila ha-illallah

God is great, God is great I bear witness that there is no god but _God...

Tariq tugged at my wrists with both hands, pulling me to a stop.

He pointed at the entrance to the mosque, and then to the tower above it, where loudspeakers amplified the voice of the muezzin.

I shook my head, and told him we had no time. He planted his feet and tugged harder at my wrist. I told him in Hindi and Marathi that I wasn't a Muslim, and I didn't want to enter the mosque. He was adamant, straining to drag me toward the doorway until the veins stood out at his temples. At last he broke free from my grip and scampered up the steps of the mosque. Kicking his sandals aside, he darted inside before I could stop him.

Frustrated and wavering, I hesitated at the large, open archway of the mosque. I knew that it was permitted for non-believers to enter.

People of any faith may enter any mosque and pray, or meditate, or simply admire and wonder. But I knew that the Muslims regarded themselves as a minority under siege in the predominantly Hindu city. Violent confrontations between religionists were common enough. Prabaker warned me, once, that clashes had occurred between militant Hindus and Muslims outside that very mosque.

I had no idea what to do. I was certain there were other exits, and if the boy decided to run off there would be little chance of finding him. A throbbing dread drummed in my heart at the thought that I might have to return to Khaderbhai and tell him I'd lost his nephew, not a hundred metres from where he'd entrusted the boy to me.

Just as I made up my mind to go inside and search the mosque, Tariq came into view, passing from right to left across the huge, ornately tiled vestibule. His hands, feet, and head were wet, and it seemed that he'd washed himself hurriedly. Leaning as far into the entrance as I dared, I saw the boy take up a position at the rear of a group of men, and begin his prayers.

I sat down on an empty push-cart, and smoked a cigarette. To my great relief, Tariq emerged after a few minutes, collected his sandals, and came over to join me. Standing very close to me, he looked up into my face and gave me a smile-frown; one of those splendidly contradictory expressions that only children seem to master, as if he were afraid and happy at the same time.

I knelt on one knee in front of him, and seized his arms. He winced, but I didn't relax the grip. My eyes were angry. I knew that my face looked hard and perhaps even cruel.

He frowned at me, defiant and afraid. Then his young face hardened into the mask we use to fight back tears. I saw his eyes fill, and one tear escaped to roll down his flushed cheek. I stood, and took a step away from him. Glancing around me, I saw that a few men and women had stopped on the street to stare at us. Their expressions were grave, although not yet alarmed. I reached out to offer the boy an open palm. He put his hand in mine, reluctantly, and I struck out along the street toward the nearest taxi stand.

I turned once to look over my shoulder, and saw that the people were following us with their eyes. My heart was beating fast. A viscid mix of emotions boiled in me, but I knew that most of it was rage, and most of the anger was at myself. I stopped, and the boy stopped with me. I breathed deeply for a few moments, fighting for reasonable control. When I looked down at him, Tariq was staring at me intently with his head cocked to one side.

The boy grinned at me. It was the first real smile he gave me. I was startled to see that it was very similar to Prabaker's lunar disk of a smile.

____________________

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I glanced at Tariq. He didn't look tired, but I knew he had to be getting sleepy. I decided that a rest was a good idea before the walk home. We kicked off our shoes and entered Karla's house, closing the street door behind us. I found some chilled water in the large, old-fashioned refrigerator. Tariq accepted a glass, and sat down on a pile of cushions to flip through a copy of India Today magazine.

Lisa was in Karla's bedroom, sitting on the bed with her knees drawn up. She was wearing a red silk pyjama jacket, and nothing else. A patch of her blonde pubic hair was visible, and I glimpsed reflexively over my shoulder to make sure that the boy couldn't see into the room. She cradled a bottle of Jack Daniels in her folded arms. Her long curly hair was tied up into a lopsided bun. She was staring at me with an expression of calculated appraisal, one eye almost closed. It reminded me of the look that marksmen concentrate on their targets in a firing range.

I sat on a straight-backed chair, straddling it, so that my forearms could rest on the back.

I don't know how I got talked into it in the first place, really."

She laughed out loud. It wasn't a pleasant sound. The state she was in gave it a forced and almost vicious edge. Still, the heart of it was rich and full, and I thought it might've been a nice laugh, once. She took a swig from the bottle, exposing one round breast with the movement.

We didn't like each other. We stared across the kind of bristling hostility that's sometimes as good as, or better than, mutual attraction.

She laughed again, and it was stronger, and more honest.

On my way to the small kitchen, I checked on Tariq. The boy had fallen asleep. His head was tipped back onto the cushions, and his mouth was open. One hand was curled up under his chin, and the other still grasped weakly at the magazine. I removed it, and covered him with a light woollen shawl that was hanging from a set of hooks. He didn't stir, and seemed to be deep in sleep. In the kitchen I took a bottle of chilled water from the refrigerator, snatched up two tumblers, and returned to the bedroom.

She watched me over the rim of her glass as I drank first one, then a second full glass of the iced water. "The water's good," she said, after a while. "Have you noticed that the water's good here? I mean, really good. You'd expect it to be fucking slime, I mean being Bombay and India and all.

People are so scared of the water, but it's really much better than the chemical-tasting horse-piss that comes outta the faucet back home."

She let her head fall onto one shoulder, and looked at me. I couldn't read her expression. Her eyes glittered in a radiant, almost inviting smile, but her mouth was twisted in a disdainful sneer.

Children might've turned her stomach, but it seemed to be immune to the searing effects of the sour mash whisky. She tipped the bottle back and drank off a good quarter of it in long, slow swallows. That's the one, I thought. If she wasn't drunk before, she is now. She wiped her lips with the back of her hand and smiled, but the expression was lopsided, and the focus was spilling from the bowls of her china blue eyes. Falling and fading as she was, the mask of her many abrasive attitudes began to slip, and she suddenly looked very young and vulnerable. The set of her jaw- angry, fearing, and dislikeable-relaxed into an expression that was surprisingly gentle and compassionate. Her cheeks were round and pink. The tip of her nose was turned-up slightly, and formed in soft contours. She was a twenty-four-year-old woman with the face of a girl, unmarked by the hollows of compromise or the deeply drawn lines of hard decisions. From the few things that Karla had told me about her, and what I'd seen at Madame Zhou's, her life had in fact been harder than most, but none of that showed in her face.

She offered me the bottle and I accepted it, taking a sip. I held on to it for a few moments, and when she wasn't looking I placed it on the floor beside the bed, discreetly out of her reach. She lit a cigarette and messed at her hair, spilling the loosely tied bun until the long curls fell over one shoulder. With her hand poised there, on top of her head, the wide sleeve of her silk jacket slipped past her elbow, and exposed the pale stubble of a shaved armpit.

There was no sign of other drugs in the room, but her pupils were contracted to pinpoints, suggesting that she'd taken heroin or some other opiate. Whatever the combination, it was sending her swiftly over the edge. She was slumped uncomfortably against the bedstead, and she was breathing noisily through her mouth. A little trickle of whisky and saliva dribbled from the corner of her slack lower lip.

Still, she was beautiful. The thought struck me that she would always look beautiful, even when she was being ugly. Hers was a big, lovely, empty face: the face of a pom-pom girl at a football match, the face advertisers use to help them sell preposterous and irrelevant things.

There was a lengthening silence. She stared at me blankly. It seemed that I could see the thoughts drifting downwards, through the blue of her eyes, like white flakes in the bubble of a snow dome.

The forgotten cigarette was burning down to her fingers. I placed the ashtray under it and prised it loose, letting it fall from her hand into the bowl. She didn't seem to notice. "Okay, so the Romans forced Hannibal's own people to kick him out," I pressed, actually curious about the fate of the Carthaginian warrior.

Lisa stirred her head from the pillows suddenly, her movements groggy, and glared at me with what seemed to be real malevolence.

She pulled the silk jacket open until she was quite naked, touching at her breasts clumsily. "Well? Aren't they?"

She snatched at my wrist with surprising speed, and dragged my hand onto her thigh, near the hip. The flesh was warm and smooth and supple. Nothing in the world is so soft and pleasing to the touch as the skin of a woman's thigh. No flower, feather, or fabric can match that velvet whisper of flesh. No matter how unequal they may be in other ways, all women, old and young, fat and thin, beautiful and ugly, have that perfection. It's a great part of the reason why men hunger to possess women, and so often convince themselves that they do possess them: the thigh, that touch.

Karla told you about those games, did she? Huh? Blind Man's Butt, did she tell you about that? The customers wear blindfolds and get a prize for guessing which one of us they push their cock into. No hands, ya see. That's the trick. Did she tell you any of this? Did she tell you about the Chair? That's a real popular number. One girl kneels down on her hands and knees, see, then another girl lies on top of her, back to back, and they tie them together. The customers go from one to another, kind of a multiple choice. Is this turnin' you on, Lin? Are you gettin' hot with this? It used to turn Karla's customers on, when she brought them to the Palace. Karla has a business head. Did you know that?

I worked at the Palace, but it was just a job, and all I ever made out of it was money. She's the one who made it dirty. She's the one who made it a... a sick thing. Karla's the one who'll do anything to get what she wants. Damn right, a business head, and a heart to match.."

She was rubbing my hand against herself with both of her own hands, grinding against it with rolling motions of her hips. She drew up her knees, and her legs parted. My hand was drawn to the lips of her vagina, heavy and swollen and wet. She pushed two of my fingers inside the dark heat.

That's training and practice, hours of it, months of it. Madame Zhou makes us squat, and squeeze down hard on a pencil, to build up a grip like a fist. I got so fuckin' good at it, I could write a letter with the goddamn thing. You feel how good that is?

You'll never find anything as tight as this, not anywhere. Karla isn't this good. I know she isn't. What's the matter with you?

Don't you wanna fuck me? What are you, some kinda faggot? I..."

She was still squeezing down on my fingers, still grasping at my wrist, but the straining smile faded, and her face slowly turned away.

I withdrew my fingers from her body, and my hand from her weakening grip, and backed away from the bed towards the bathroom. Hurriedly soaking a towel in cold water and grabbing up a large dish from the bathroom, I returned to find her sprawled out awkwardly, her hands on her belly. I straightened her into a more comfortable position, covering her with a light cotton blanket. I draped the cool towel over her forehead. She stirred a little, but she didn't resist. Her frown gradually dissolved into the earnest mask of the unwell.

I went to check on Tariq, and he too was sleeping soundly. I decided not to wake him. Being alone, in that stillness, was a piercing pleasure. Wealth and power, in a city where half the many millions were homeless, were measured by the privacy that only money could buy, and the solitude that only power could demand and enforce. The poor were almost never alone in Bombay, and I was poor.

There, in that breathing room, no sound reached me from the quieting street. I moved through the apartment freely, unwatched.

And the silence was sweeter, it seemed, the peace more profound, for the presence of the two sleepers, woman and child. A balm of fantasy soothed me. There was a time, once, when I'd known such a life: when a woman and a sleeping child were my own, and I was their man.

I stopped at Karla's cluttered writing desk, and caught sight of myself in a wide mirror on the wall above it. The momentary fantasy of belonging, that little dream of home and family, hardened and cracked in my eyes. The truth was that my own marriage had crumbled to ruin, and I'd lost my child, my daughter. The truth was that Lisa and Tariq meant nothing to me, and I meant nothing to them. The truth was that I belonged nowhere and to no-one. Surrounded by people and hungry for solitude, I was always and everywhere alone. Worse than that, I was hollow, empty, gouged out and scraped bare by the escape and flight. I'd lost my family, the friends of my youth, my country and its culture-all the things that had defined me, and given me identity. Like all the fugitive kind, the more successful I was, the longer and further I ran, the less I kept of my self.

But there were people, a few who could reach me, a few new friends for the new self I was learning to become. There was Prabaker, that tiny, life-adoring man. There was Johnny Cigar, and Qasim Ali, and Jeetendra and his wife, Radha: heroes of chaos who propped up the collapsible city with bamboo sticks, and insisted on loving their neighbours, no matter how far they'd fallen; no matter how broken or unlovely they were. There was Khaderbhai, there was Abdullah, there was Didier, and there was Karla. And as I looked into my own hard eyes in the green-edged mirror, I thought about them all, and asked myself why those people made a difference. Why them? What is it about them? Such a disparate group-the richest and the most wretched, educated and illiterate, virtuous and criminal, old and young-it seemed that the only thing they had in common was a power to make me feel... something.

On the desk in front of me was a thick, leather-bound book. I opened it and saw that it was Karla's journal, filled with entries in her own elegant handwriting. Knowing that I shouldn't, I turned through the pages and read her private thoughts. It wasn't a diary. There were no dates on any of the pages, and there were none of the day-to-day accounts of things done and people met. Instead, there were fragments. Some of them were culled from various novels and other texts, each one attributed to the respective author and annotated with her own comments and criticisms. There were many poems. Some had been copied out from selections and anthologies and even newspapers, with the source and the poet's name written beneath. Other poems were her own, written out several times with a word or a phrase changed and a line added. Certain words and their dictionary meanings were listed throughout the journal and marked with asterisks, forming a running vocabulary of unusual and obscure words. And there were random, stream-of-consciousness passages that described what she'd been thinking or feeling on a certain day. Other people were mentioned frequently, yet they were never identified except as he and she.

On one page there was a cryptic and disturbing reference to the name Sapna. It read:

THE QUESTION: What will Sapna do?

THE ANSWER: Sapna will kill us all.

My heart began to beat faster as I read the words through several times. I didn't doubt she was talking about the same man-the Sapna whose followers had committed the gruesome murders Abdul Ghani and Madjid had talked about, the Sapna who was hunted by the police and the underworld alike. And it seemed, from that strange couplet, that she knew something about him, perhaps even who he was. I wondered what it meant, and if she was in danger.

I examined the pages before and after the entry more carefully, but I found nothing more that might concern him, or Karla's connection to him. On the second-last page of the journal, however, there was one passage that clearly referred to me:

He wanted to tell me that he is in love with me. Why did I stop him? Am I so ashamed that it might be true? The view from that place was incredible, amazing. We were so high that we looked down on the kites that flew so high above the children's heads.

He said that I don't smile. I'm glad he said that, and I wonder why.

Beneath that entry she'd written the words:

I don't know what frightens me more, the power that crushes us or our endless ability to endure it.

I remembered the remark very well. I remembered her saying it after the slum huts had been smashed and dragged away. Like so many of the things she said, it had the kind of cleverness that insinuated itself into my memory. I was surprised and perhaps a little shocked to see that she, too, had remembered the phrase, and that she'd copied it down there-even improving it, with more aphoristic roundness than the impromptu remark had possessed. Is she planning to use those words again, I asked myself, with someone _else?

The last page carried a poem that she'd written-her most recent addition to the almost completed journal. Because it appeared on the page following her reference to me, and because I was so hungry for it, I read the poem and told myself that it was mine.

I let myself believe that it was meant for me, or that at least some part of it was born in feelings that were mine. I knew it wasn't true, but love seldom concerns itself with what we know or with what's true.

To make sure none followed where you led I used my hair to cover our tracks.

Sun set on the island of our bed night rose eating echoes and we were beached there, in tangles of flicker, candles whispering at our driftwood backs. Your eyes above me afraid of the promises I might keep regretting the truth we did say less than the lie we didn't, I went in deep, I went in deep, to fight the past for you.

Now we both know sorrows are the seeds of loving.

Now we both know I will live and I will die for this love.

Standing there, at the desk, I snatched up a pen and copied out the poem on a sheet of paper. With the stolen words folded secretly in my wallet, I closed the journal and replaced it exactly as I'd found it.

I walked to the bookshelf. I wanted to study the titles for clues to the woman who'd chosen them and read them. The small library of four shelves was surprisingly eclectic. There were texts on Greek history, on philosophy and cosmology, on poetry and drama.

Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma in an Italian translation. A copy of Madame Bovary in the original French. Thomas Mann and Schiller in German. Djuna Barnes and Virginia Woolf in English. I took down a copy of Maldoror, by Isidore Ducasse. The pages were dog-eared, and heavily annotated in Karla's own hand. I took out another book, a German translation of Gogol's Dead Souls, and it too bore Karla's hand-written notes on many pages. She consumed her books, I saw. She devoured her books, and was unafraid to mark them, even to scar them, with her own comments and system of references.

A row of journals, similar to the one I'd discovered on the desk, occupied half of one shelf, some twenty books in all. I took one of them down and flipped through it. The fact that it, like the others, was written in English, struck me for the first time. She was born in Switzerland and she was fluent in German and French, I knew; but when she wrote out her most intimate thoughts and feelings she used English. I seized on that, telling myself that there were good and hopeful signs in it. English was my language.

She spoke to herself, from her heart, in my language.

I moved around the apartment, studying the things she chose to surround herself with in her private living space. There was an oil painting of women carrying water from a river, with matkas balanced on their heads, and children following with smaller pots on their own heads. Prominently displayed on a dedicated shelf was a hand carved, rosewood figure of the goddess Durga. It was surrounded by incense holders. I noticed an arrangement of everlastings and other dried flowers. They were my own favourites, and very unusual in a city where fresh flowers were plentiful and inexpensive. There was a collection of found objects-a huge frond from a date palm that she'd picked up somewhere and fixed to one wall; shells and river stones that filled a large and waterless fish tank; a discarded spinning wheel on which she'd draped a collection of small, brass temple-bells.

The most colourful articles in the apartment, her clothes, hung from an open rack in one corner of her room rather than in a wardrobe. The clothes were divided into two distinct groups, left and right of the rack. On the left were her networking clothes- smart suits with long, narrow skirts, and the silver sheath of a backless evening dress, among other glamorous dresses. On the right were her private clothes, the loose silk trousers, flowing scarves, and long-sleeved cotton blouses that she wore by choice.

Under the rack of clothes was a row of shoes, two dozen pairs. At the end of the row were my boots, newly polished and laced up to their tops. I knelt to pick them up. Her shoes looked so small, next to my own, that I took one of them up instead, and held it in my hands for a moment. It was Italian, from Milano, in dark green leather, and with a decorative buckle stitched to the side and looped around the low heel. It was an elegant, expensive shoe, but the heel was worn down slightly on one side, and the leather was scuffed in a few places. I saw that she, or someone, had tried to disguise the pale scratches by drawing over them with a felt-tipped pen that was almost, but not quite, the right shade of green.

I found my clothes in a plastic bag behind the boots. They'd been laundered and folded neatly. I took them, and changed into them in the bathroom. I held my head under the cold-water tap for a full minute. Dressed in my old jeans and comfortable boots, and with my short hair pushed back into its familiar, messy disorder, I felt refreshed, and my spirits revived.

I returned to the bedroom to check on Lisa. She was sleeping contentedly. A diffident smile flickered on her lips. I tucked the sheet into the sides of the bed to prevent her from falling, and adjusted the overhead fan to a minimum speed. The windows were barred, and the front door snapped to the lock position when it was shut from outside. I knew that I could leave her there, and she would be safe. As I stood beside the bed, watching the rise and fall of her chest in its sleeping rhythm, I thought about leaving a note for Karla. I decided against it because I wanted her to wonder about me-to ask herself what I'd been thinking and what I'd done there, in her house. To give myself an excuse to see her, I folded the clothes she'd given me, the dead lover's burial clothes that I'd just discarded, and put them in a plastic bag. I planned to wash them, and return with them in a few days.

I turned to wake Tariq for our journey home, but the boy was standing in the doorway, clutching his small shoulder bag. His sleepy face wore a look of hurt and accusation.

He frowned, puzzled by the English words, and not at all reassured.

Thinking of the latrine, and the lack of water at the slum, I told him to use the bathroom before we went, and directed him to wash his face and hands well. After he'd used the toilet, I gave him a glass of milk and a sweet cake that I found in Karla's kitchen. We stepped out into the deserted street, and pulled the door locked behind us. He looked back at the house and at all the buildings around it, searching for landmarks that would fix the place in his mental map. Then he fell into step, beside but a little apart from me.

We walked on the road because the footpaths were occupied in many places by sleeping pavement dwellers. The only traffic was the occasional taxi or police jeep. Every shop and business was closed, and only a few houses or apartments showed light at their windows. The moon was almost full, but obscured from time to time by dense, brooding drifts of cloud. They were harbingers of the monsoon: the clouds that gathered and thickened every night, and would swell, within the following days, until every part of the sky was clogged with them, and it would rain, everywhere and forever. We made good time. Only half an hour after leaving Karla's apartment, we turned onto the wide track that skirted the eastern curve of the slum. Tariq had said nothing on the walk, and I, burdened by worry about how to cope with him and the responsibility for his welfare-burdened by the boy himself, it seemed to me then-kept a churlish silence. On our left, there was a large open area about the size of a soccer field that was set aside as a latrine zone, where women, young children, and elderly people went to relieve themselves. Nothing grew there, and the whole area was dusty and bare after eight months of continuous sunshine. On our right was the fringe of the construction site, marked here and there by low piles of timber, latticed steel, and other materials. Single bulbs, suspended from long extension wires, lit the mounds of supplies. There was no other light on the path, and the slum, still some five hundred metres away, showed only faint glimmers from a few kerosene lamps.

I told Tariq to follow my steps precisely, knowing that many people used the track as a latrine after dark because they were afraid of rats or snakes in the open field. By some mysterious, unspoken consensus, a narrow and erratic path was always left clean along the course of the track, so that latecomers might enter the slum without stepping in the filth that accumulated. I came home late at night so often that I'd learned how to negotiate the eccentric meander of that clean path without stumbling or tripping on the edges of the many large potholes that no-one ever seemed inclined to repair.

Tariq followed me closely, struggling dutifully to step exactly where I'd walked. The stench there at the edge of the slum was overpowering and sickening for a stranger, I knew. I'd grown accustomed to it, and had even come to think of it with a kind of affection, as the slum-dwellers did. That smell meant we were home, safe, protected by our collective wretchedness from the dangers that haunted poor people in the cleaner, grander city streets. Yet I never forgot the spasms of nausea I'd endured when I first entered the slum as a stranger. And I remembered the fear I'd felt, in that smear of air so foul it seemed to poison my lungs with every breath, and stain the very sweat on my skin.

I remembered, and I knew that Tariq was surely suffering and sickened and afraid. But I said nothing to comfort him, and I refused the impulse to take his hand. I didn't want the child with me,, and I was furious with myself for being too weak to tell Khaderbhai as much. I wanted the boy to be sickened. I wanted him to be afraid. I wanted him so sickened and afraid and unhappy that he would plead with his uncle to take him from me.

The crackling tension of that cruel silence was shattered by a burst of ferocious barking. The howls of that one dog soon stirred violent barking from several, and then many others. I stopped suddenly, and Tariq bumped into me from behind. The dogs were in the open field, and not far away. I peered into the blackness, but I couldn't see them. I sensed that it was a large pack, and spread out over a wide area. I looked to the mass of huts, calculating the distance to the slum and the safety of its buildings. Just then, the baying howls reached a crescendo of violence, and they came trotting at us out of the night.

Twenty, thirty, forty maddened dogs formed the pack that advanced on us in a wide crescent, cutting off our retreat to the slum.

The danger was extreme. Those dogs that were so cowed and obsequious in the daylight hours formed themselves into vicious, feral packs at night. Their aggression and ferocity was legendary in all the slums throughout the city, and inspired great fear.

Attacks upon human beings were common. I treated dog bites and rat bites almost every day in the little clinic at my hut. A drunken man had been savaged by a pack of dogs on the edge of the slum, and was still recovering in hospital. A young child had been killed in that very spot, only a month before. His small body had been torn to pieces, and the fragments were strewn across such a wide area that it had taken the whole of a long day to locate and retrieve them all.

We were stranded on the dark path. The dogs closed to within a few metres, swarming around us and barking furiously. The noise was deafening and terrifying. The bravest of the hounds inched closer and closer. I knew they were only seconds from making the first snapping rush at us. The slum was too far away to reach safely. I thought I could make it alone, suffering a few bites, but I knew the dogs would cut Tariq down in the first hundred metres. Much closer, there was a pile of timbers and other construction materials. It would give us weapons, and a well-lit area for the fight. I told Tariq to prepare himself to run on my command. When I was sure he understood, I threw the plastic bag containing the clothes Karla had loaned me into the midst of the pack. They fell on it at once, snapping and snarling at one another in their frenzy to rip and tear at it. "Now, Tariq! Now!" I shouted, shoving the boy in front of me and turning to cover his retreat. The dogs were so engrossed in the bundle that we were safe for a moment. I ran to the pile of scrap wood, and snatched up a length of stout bamboo just as the pack tired of the shredded bundle and advanced on us again.

Recognising the weapon, the enraged hounds hesitated a little further from us. They were many. Too many, I heard myself thinking. There's too many of them. It was the largest pack I'd ever seen. The wild howling goaded the most maddened of them to make a series of rushing feints from several directions. I raised the solid stick and told Tariq to climb onto my back. The boy did so at once, clambering up piggyback style, and wrapping his thin arms around my neck tightly. The pack crept closer. One black dog, larger than the rest, made a scrambling run with its jaws wide, and aimed at my legs. I brought the stick down with all my strength, missing the snout but smashing it into the animal's spine. It yelped in agony, and scuttled out of range. The battle began.

One after another, from left, right, and in front of us, they attacked. Each time, I lashed out with the stick to repulse them.

It occurred to me that if I managed to cripple or even kill one of the dogs, the others might be frightened off, but none of the blows I landed was serious enough to discourage them for very long. In fact, they seemed to sense that the stick could hurt them but not kill them, and they grew bolder.

The whole pack crept inexorably closer. The individual attacks came more often. Ten minutes into the struggle, I was sweating heavily and beginning to tire. I knew it wouldn't be long before my reflexes slowed, and one of the dogs slipped through to bite my leg or arm. And with the first smell of blood, their ravening fury would become rabid, berserk, and fearless. I hoped that someone in the slum would hear the ear-splitting clamour and come to our rescue. But I'd been woken by that same barking from the outskirts of the slum a hundred times late at night. And a hundred times I'd turned over and gone back to sleep without thinking about it.

The large black dog that seemed to be the pack leader made a cunning double feint. As I turned, too quickly, to meet its rush, my foot struck a projecting timber and I fell. I'd often heard people say that at the moment of some accident or sudden danger they had the sensation that time was delayed or sluggish, and everything seemed to happen in slow motion. That stumble sideways, as I fell to the ground, was my first experience of it. Between stumble and fall, there was a tunnel of lengthened time and narrowed perspectives. I saw the black dog hesitate in the rhythm of its instinctive retreats, and turn to face us once more. I saw its forepaws slip and slide beneath it with the energy of its scrambling turn, and then gouge out a purchase on the dusty track for the rush and spring. I saw the eyes of the beast, the almost human cruelty as it sensed my weakness and its nearness to the killing second. I saw the other dogs pause, almost as one, and then creep forward with little mincing steps. I had time to think how strange and inappropriate their stealth was, then, in the moments of my vulnerability. I had time to feel the rough stones scrape the skin back from my elbow as I struck the ground, and time to wonder at the ridiculous particle of worry, about the threat of infection, that strayed across the surface of the present and greater danger of the dogs, the dogs. They were everywhere.

And desperate, sickened with fear for him, I thought of Tariq, the poor child who'd been pressed into my care so reluctantly. I felt him slip from my neck, felt his fragile arms fall through my scrambling hands as I crashed into the slithering pile of timber.

I watched him fall and scramble forward with feline agility to stand, one foot on either side of my extended legs. Then, his body rigid with the vehemence of his rage and courage, the little boy shrieked, seized a lump of wood, and crashed it down on the snout of the black dog. The beast was sorely wounded. Its yelping screams rose above the din of barks and howls and the shrieking of the boy.

As I thrashed up to my feet, and time accelerated from its glue of fear and failure, some words repeated themselves in my mind, words from Karla's poem. I will die for this love, die for this love. Tariq had wounded the pack leader, and it hung back behind the others, dispiriting them for a few moments. The howling grew louder, however, and there was another quality to it then, a throbbing moan of frustration. It was as if they were sickening for the kill, and tormented by their failure. I hoped that in their agony of disappointment they might turn on one another if they didn't bring us down soon. Then, without warning, they sprang at us again.

They came in groups of two and three. They attacked from two sides at once. The boy and I stood side-to-side and back-to-back, fighting them off with desperate jabs and slashes. The dogs were insane with the blood lust. We hit them hard, but they cowered only seconds before leaping at us again. Everywhere around us was fang and snarl, snap and howl. I leaned over Tariq to help him drive back a determined rush from three or four of the beasts, and one dog managed to sprint in behind me and bite down hard on my ankle. My leather boot protected me, and I drove the dog away, but I knew we were losing the war. We'd retreated hard up against the mound of timbers, and there was nowhere else to go. The whole pack was snarling and lunging at us from only two metres away.

Then, from behind us, there was a sound of growling, and the crunching rattle of timbers slipping away under the weight of something that had jumped onto them. I thought that some of the dogs had somehow worked their way around onto the heap but, as I turned to meet the challenge, I saw the black-clad figure of Abdullah as he sprang, leaping over our heads into the midst of the thrashing jaws of the pack.

He whirled, striking out left and right. He jumped, drawing his knees up tight and landing with the supple tautness of a trained fighter. His movements were fluid, swift, and economical. It was the awful and beautiful frugality of snake and scorpion. Lethal.

Exact. Perfect. He'd armed himself with a metal rod, about three centimetres in diameter and more than a metre in length. He swung it two-handed as if it was a sword. But it wasn't the superior weapon or even his uncanny agility that terrified the dogs and drove them back. What routed them in panicked flight, leaving two of their number skull-crack dead, was the fact that he'd taken the fight to them; that he'd attacked, where we'd defended; that he was sure of winning, where we'd merely struggled to survive.

It was over quickly. There was silence, where so much sound had screamed. Abdullah turned to look at us with the metal rod held above his shoulder like a samurai sword. The smile shining from his brave young face was like moonlight gleaming on the minaret of Haji Ali's white mosque.

Later, while we drank hot and very sweet Suleimani chai in my hut, Abdullah explained that he'd been waiting for me in the hut, and heard the dogs. He told us he came to investigate it because he'd sensed that something was dreadfully wrong. When we'd talked the adventure through several times, I prepared three places for us on the bare earth floor, and we stretched out to rest.

Abdullah and Tariq slipped effortlessly into a sleep that eluded me. I lay back, in a darkness that smelt of incense and beedie cigarettes and cheap kerosene, and I sifted the events of the last few days through a sieve of doubt and suspicion. So much more had happened during those days, it seemed, than in the months before them. Madame Zhou, Karla, Khaderbhai's council, Sapna-I felt myself to be at the mercy of personalities that were stronger, or at least more mysterious, than my own. I felt the irresistible draw and drift of a tide that was carrying me to someone else's destination, someone else's destiny. There was a plan or purpose. I sensed it. There were clues, I was sure, but I couldn't separate them from the busy collage of hours and faces and words. The cloud-mottled night seemed full of signs and portents, as if fate itself was warning me to go or daring me to stay.

Tariq woke with a start, and sat up, staring about him. My eyes were adjusted to the darkness. I saw the moment of fear on his pale face clearly, a fear that tightened into sorrow and resolve even as I watched. He looked to the peacefully sleeping form of Abdullah, and then to me. Without a sound, he stood and dragged his sleeping mat over until it met mine. Snuggling down under the cover of his thin blanket once more, he cuddled in beside me. I stretched out my arm, and he rested his head on it. The smell of the sun was in his hair.

As exhaustion finally claimed me, submerging my doubts and confusions, the shrewd clarity of near-sleep suddenly showed me what it was that those new friends-Khaderbhai, Karla, Abdullah, Prabaker, and all the others-had in common. They were all, we were all, strangers to the city. None of us was born there. All of us were refugees, survivors, pitched up on the shores of the island city. If there was a bond between us, it was the bond of exiles, the kinship of the lost, the lonely, and the dispossessed. Realising that, understanding it, made me see the hard edges of the way I'd treated the boy, Tariq, himself a stranger in my raw and ragged fragment of the city. Ashamed of the cold selfishness that had stolen my pity, and pierced by the courage and loneliness of the little boy, I listened to his sleeping breath, and let him cling to the ache in my heart. Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears. In the end that's all there is: love and its duty, sorrow and its truth. In the end that's all we have-to hold on tight until the dawn.

____________________

PART THREE

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

He paused, looking toward the whispering fountain in Abdel Khader Khan's rain-splashed courtyard as if he was receiving inspiration from the wetness and the shimmering stone. He reached out with his right hand and took another honey cake, popping it whole into his mouth. The little beseeching smile he gave me as he chewed and swallowed seemed to say, I know I shouldn't, but I really can't help it.

The circular courtyard garden at the heart of Khaderbhai's house was open to the sky at its centre. Monsoon rain fell upon the fountain and surrounding tiles: rain so dense and constant that the sky was a river, and our part of the world was its waterfall.

Despite the rain, the fountain was still running, sending its frail plumes of water upward against the cascade from above. We sat under cover of the surrounding veranda roof, dry and warm in the humid air as we watched the downpour and sipped sweet tea.

He fell silent, staring into the mandala of veins on the back of his hand. A few moments later, he shook himself from his reverie and looked at me, his eyes gleaming in a gentle, affectionate smile.

The rest of us, all six billion of us, do pretty much what we are told!"

He laughed, and slapped at his thigh. It was a good laugh, the kind of laugh that won't rest until it shares the joke, and I found myself laughing with him.

It is not a question of classes, you see, because all the classes are in the hands of this tiny few. This set of numbers is the cause of empire and rebellion. This is the formula that has generated our civilisations for the last ten thousand years. This built the pyramids. This launched your Crusades. This put the world at war, and this formula has the power to impose the peace."

I frowned, and looked away from his penetrating gaze. It gave me a rush of intense pleasure to hear that Khaderbhai liked me and spoke of me. Still, I didn't want to admit, even to myself, how much his approval meant to me. The play of conflicting emotions- love and suspicion, admiration and resentment-confused me, as it usually did when I thought of Khader Khan, or spent time with him. The confusion emerged as irritation, in my eyes and in my voice.

Abdul ignored the question and leaned across the little table separating our two chairs.

We were sitting with our faces close enough for me to see the fine red veins in the whites of his eyes. The embroidery of those red fibres converged on the auburn iris of his eyes like so many fingers raised to support the golden, red-brown discs. Beneath the eyes were thick, heavy pouches, which gave his face its persistent expression of an inwardness filled with grieving and sorrow. Despite his many jokes and easy laughter, the pouches beneath his eyes were swollen, always, with a reservoir of unshed tears.

We'd been waiting half an hour for Khaderbhai to return. When I'd arrived with Tariq, Khader had greeted me warmly and then retired with the boy to pray, leaving me in the company of Abdul Ghani.

The house was utterly silent, save for the splash of falling rain in the courtyard and the bubble of the fountain's over-burdened pump. A pair of doves huddled together on the far side of the courtyard.

Abdul and I stared at one another in the silence, but I didn't speak, I didn't answer his question. Do you want to know why I love this man? Of course I wanted to know. I was a writer. I wanted to know everything. But I wasn't so happy to play Ghani's question-and answer game. I couldn't read him, and I couldn't guess where it was going.

Thousands of people find safety by tying their lives to his. I love him because he has the task, where other men do not even have the dream, of changing the whole world. I worry that he puts too much time and effort and money into that cause, and I have disagreed with him many times about it, but I love him for his devotion to it. And most of all, I love him because he is the only man I ever met-he is the only man you will ever meet-who can answer the three big questions."

Then I met Khaderbhai. He answered the questions for me. And I have loved him, as my brother, my soul's brother, ever since that day. I have served him from that day until the little minute that we share. He will tell you. The meaning of life! He will solve the mystery for you."

Ghani's voice was a new current in the wide, strong river that carried me: the river of the city and its fifteen million lives.

His thick, brown hair was streaked with grey, and smudged completely white at the temples. His moustache, more grey than brown, rested on finely sculptured, almost feminine lips. A heavy gold chain gleamed at his neck in the afternoon light, and matched the gold that flashed in his eyes. And as we stared at one another in that yearning silence, tears began to fill the red-rimmed cups of his eyes. I couldn't doubt the real depth of his feeling, but I couldn't fully understand it, either. Then a door opened behind us, and Ghani's round face dissolved into its usual mask of facetious affability. We both turned to see Khaderbhai enter with Tariq.

Three months. At first I'd thought it impossible to endure the boy's company for three days. Yet three months had passed too swiftly; and when the time came to bring him home, I'd returned him to his uncle against the wishes of my heart. I knew that I would miss him. He was a good boy. He would be a fine man-the kind of man I once had tried, and failed, to be.

There was a hint of reproach in my tone. It seemed to me a cruel arbitrariness that, without warning, had put the boy with me for months and had taken him away just as suddenly.

Khaderbhai's tone was gentle and patient. The affectionate and slightly amused smile in his eyes held me as firmly as his strong hands held the shoulders of the solemn, unsmiling boy standing in front of him.

I wasn't the only one who would miss him. He was a favourite with Qasim Ali Hussein. The head man had visited the boy often, and had taken him on his rounds of the slum. Jeetendra and Radha had spoiled him with their affection. Johnny Cigar and Prabaker had teased him good-naturedly, and they'd included him in their weekly cricket game. Even Abdullah had developed an emotional regard for the child. After the Night of the Wild Dogs, he'd visited Tariq twice every week to teach him the arts of fighting with sticks, scarves, and bare hands. I saw them often, during those months, their silhouettes carved on the horizon like figures from a shadow-play as they practised on the one small strip of sandy beach near the slum.

I shook hands with Tariq last, and looked into his earnest, truthful, black eyes. Memories from the last three months skipped across the fluid surface of the moment. I recalled his first fight with one of the slum boys. A much bigger boy had knocked him down, but Tariq drove him back with the power of his eyes alone, forcing shame into the boy with his stare. The other boy broke down and wept. Tariq embraced him in a solicitous hug, and their close friendship was sealed. I remembered Tariq's enthusiasm in the English classes that I'd set up for him, and how he soon became my assistant, helping the other children who joined in to learn. I saw him struggling against the first monsoon flood with us, digging a drainage channel out of the rocky earth with sticks and our bare hands. I remembered his face peeping around the flimsy door of my hut one afternoon when I was trying to write. Yes! What is it, Tariq! I'd asked him irritably.

Oh, I'm sorry, he'd replied. Do you want to be lonely?

I left Abdel Khader Khan's house, and began the long walk back to the slum, alone and diminished by the absence of the boy. I was less important, somehow, or suddenly less valuable in the different world that closed in on me without him. I kept my appointment with the German tourists, at their hotel, quite near Khaderbhai's mosque. They were a young couple, on their first trip to the sub-continent. They wanted to save money by changing their Deutschmarks on the black market, and then buy some hashish for their journey around India. They were a decent, happy couple - innocent, generous-hearted, and motivated by a spiritual notion of India. I changed their money for them, on a commission, and arranged the purchase of the charras. They were very grateful, and tried to pay me more than we'd agreed. I refused the extra money-a deal is a deal, after all-and then accepted their invitation to smoke with them. The chillum I prepared was average strength for those of us who lived and worked on the streets of Bombay, but much stronger than they were accustomed to smoking.

They were both stoned to sleep when I pulled the door of their hotel room closed, and walked on through dozy afternoon streets.

I made my way along Mohammed Ali Road to Mahatma Gandhi Road and the Colaba Causeway. I could've taken a bus, or one of the many prowling taxis, but I loved the walk. I loved those kilometres from Chor bazaar, past Crawford Market, V.T. Station, Flora Fountain, the Fort area, Regal Circle, and on through Colaba to Sassoon Dock, the World Trade Centre, and the Back Bay. I walked them a thousand times in those years, and they were always new, always exciting, and always inspiring. As I rounded Regal Circle and paused momentarily to check the Coming Attractions posters outside Regal Cinema, I heard a voice calling my name.

I turned to see Prabaker leaning from the passenger window of a black-and-yellow taxi. I walked over to shake his hand and greet the driver, Prabaker's cousin, Shantu.

I waved until his smile disappeared in the thicket of traffic, and then I jumped in fright as a car slammed to a screeching smash beside me. An Ambassador had tried to overtake a slower car and had crashed into a wooden hand-cart, forcing the heavy cart into the side of a taxi, only two metres away from me.

It was a bad accident. The hand-cart puller was seriously injured. I could see that the ropes attached to his neck and shoulders-the reins and harness-had trapped him in the yoke of the cart. His body, constrained by the ropes, had somersaulted, and he'd hit his head hard on the unyielding surface of the road.

One arm was twisted backward at a sickeningly unnatural angle. A piece of shinbone on one leg protruded below the knee. And those ropes, the very ropes he used every day to drag his cart through the city, were tangled about his neck and chest, and dragging him toward choking death.

I rushed forward with others, pulling my knife from its scabbard in the belt at the back of my trousers. Working fast, but as carefully as possible, I cut through the ropes and freed the man from the wreckage of his cart. He was an older man, perhaps sixty years old, but he was fit and lean and healthy. His fast heartbeat was regular and strong: a powerful current with which to charge his recovery. His airways were clear, and he was breathing easily. When I opened his eyes gently with my fingers, his pupils reacted to the light. He was dazed and shocked, rather than unconscious.

With three other men, I lifted him from the road to the footpath.

His left arm hung limply from its shoulder, and I eased it into a curve at the elbow. Onlookers donated their handkerchiefs when I called for them. Using four of the handkerchiefs, attached at the corners, I confined the arm to his chest in a makeshift sling. I was examining the break in his leg when a frenzy of screaming and shouts near the damaged cars forced me to my feet.

Ten or more men were trying to seize the driver of the Ambassador. He was a huge man, well over six feet, half again as heavy as I was, and twice as broad across the chest. He planted his thick legs against the floor of the vehicle, braced one arm against the roof, and gripped the steering wheel with the other.

The furious crowd gave up after a minute of fruitless, desperate struggle, and turned their attention to the man in the back seat.

He was a stocky man with strong shoulders, but he was much slighter and leaner. The mob dragged him from the back seat, and thrust him against the side of the car. He covered his face with his arms but the crowd began beating him with their fists and tearing at him with their fingers.

The two men were Africans. I guessed them to be Nigerians.

Watching from the footpath, I remembered the shock and shame I'd felt when I'd seen mob rage like that for the first time, almost eighteen months before, on the first day of Prabaker's dark tour of the city. I remembered how helpless and cowardly I'd felt when the crowd had carried the man's broken body away. I'd told myself then that it wasn't my culture, it wasn't my city, it wasn't my fight. Eighteen months later, the Indian culture was mine, and that part of the city was my own. It was a black-market beat. My beat. I worked there every day. I even knew some of the people in the murderous crowd. I couldn't let it happen again without trying to help.

Shouting louder than the rest, I ran into the screaming crowd and began dragging men away from the tight press of bodies.

It was a messy business. For the most part, they allowed me to drag them away from the mob. My arms were strong. The men felt the power that shoved them aside. But their killing rage soon hurled them back into the uproar, and I felt their fists and fingers pounding and gouging at me from everywhere at once. At last I succeeded in clearing a path to the passenger and then separating him from the leaders of the pack. With his back pressed defensively against the side of the car, the man raised his fists as if ready to fight on. His face was bloody. His shirt was torn and smeared with vivid, crimson blood. His eyes were wide and white with fear, and he breathed hard through clenched teeth. Yet there was determined courage in the set of his jaw and the scowl that bared his teeth. He was a fighter, and he would fight to the very end.

I took that in with a second's glance, and then turned my back to stand beside him and face the crowd. Holding my open hands in front of me, pleading and placating, I shouted for the violence to stop.

As I'd run forward and started the attempt to save the man I'd had a fantasy that the crowd would part and listen to my voice.

Stones would fall from the limp hands of mortified men. The mob, swayed by my eloquent courage, would wander away from the scene with shamed and downcast eyes. Even now, in my recollections of that moment and that danger, I sometimes surrender to a wish that my voice and my eyes had changed their hearts that day, and that the circle of hate, humiliated and disgraced, had widened and dispersed. Instead, the crowd hesitated for only an instant and then pressed in upon us again in a brawling, hissing, screaming, boiling rage, and we were forced to fight for our lives.

Ironically, the very numbers of the crowd attacking us worked to our advantage. We were trapped in an awkward L-shape made by the tangle of vehicles. The crowd surrounded us, and there was no escape. But the crush of their numbers inhibited their movements.

Fewer blows struck us than might've been the case had fewer men opposed us, and the thrashing crowd actually struck at themselves quite often in their fury.

And perhaps there really was some softening of their fury, some reluctance to _kill us, despite their urgent desire to cause us pain. I know that reluctance. I've seen it many times, in many violent worlds. I can't fully explain it. It's as if there's a collective conscience within the group-mind of a mob, and the right appeal, at exactly the right moment, can turn murderous hate aside from its intended victim. It's as if the mob, in just that critical moment, want to be stopped, want to be prevented from the worst of their own violence. And in that one doubting moment, a single voice or fist raised against the gathering evil can be enough to avert it. I've seen it in prison, where men bent on the pack-rape of another prisoner can be stopped by one voice that stirs their shame. I've seen it in war, where one strong voice can weaken and wither the hate-filled cruelty that torments a captured prisoner. And perhaps I saw it on that day, as the Nigerian and I struggled with the mob. Perhaps the strangeness of the situation-a white man, a gora, pleading in Hindi for the lives of two black men- held them back from murder.

The car behind us suddenly roared to life. The heavy-set driver had managed to start the car. He gunned the engine, and began to gently reverse away from the wreckage. The passenger and I slowly shuffled and slithered along beside the car as it backed up into the crowd. We struck out, shoving men away from us and wrenching their hands from our clothes. When the driver reached backward over his seat and opened the rear passenger door, we both jumped into the car. The press of the crowd slammed the door. Twenty, fifty hands drummed, beat, slapped, and pounded on the outside of the car. The driver pulled away, heading at a crawl along the Causeway Road. A collection of missiles-tea glasses, food containers, dozens of shoes-rained on the car. Then we were free, speeding along the busy road and watching through the rear window to make sure we weren't followed.

His eyes and his lips defined his face. The eyes were unusually wide-set and large, giving him a slightly reptilian stare, and the marvellous lips were so full and sumptuously shaped that they seemed to be designed for a much larger head. His teeth were white and even at the front, but all the teeth on either side were capped with gold. Rococo curves at the corners of his wide nose gave his nostrils a delicate flare, as if he was constantly inhaling a pleasantly intoxicating scent. A wide, gold earring, conspicuous beneath his short black hair and against the blue black skin of his thick neck, pierced his left ear.

I glanced at his torn, bloody shirt, and at the cuts and bruises that were swelling on his face and every exposed centimetre of flesh. When I met his eyes again they were glittering with excited good humour. He wasn't too shaken by the violence of the mob, and neither was I. We were both men who'd seen worse, and had been through worse, and we recognised that in each other immediately. In fact, neither of us ever mentioned the incident directly after that day of our meeting. I looked into his glittering eyes, and I felt my smile stretching to match his.

Do that, and we'll call it square."

Hassaan laughed, and slapped his hand on my knee. It was a good laugh-honest but wicked, and generous but shrewd.

Some of them are... acquaintances of mine. So... that's why it's important. If you're not going to do it, I need to know, so that I can take care of it myself. That's all."

The whole thing seemed to be getting very complicated. I wished I'd never raised the matter with him. I began to feel angry at him, without really understanding why. Then he offered me his open palm in a handshake.

We were silent again, and after a few moments I reached over to tap the driver on the shoulder.

The car pulled into the kerb, a few blocks from the slum. I opened the door to leave, but Hassaan gripped my wrist. It was a very strong grip. For a second, I calculated all the long way upward to the much greater strength I knew must be in Raheem's grip.

This is my telephone number. You can reach me, from here, at any time of the day or the night."

I took the card-it bore only his name and number-and shook his hand. Nodding to Raheem, I left the car.

The car drove off, and I turned toward the slum, staring at the gold-lettered business card for a full block before I put it in my pocket. A few minutes later, I passed the World Trade Centre and entered the compound of the slum, remembering, as I always did, the first time I entered those blest and tormented acres.

As I passed Kumar's chai shop, Prabaker came out to greet me. He was wearing a yellow silk shirt, black pants, and red-and-black patent leather high-heeled platform shoes. There was a crimson silk scarf tied at his throat.

Do you know who it is?"

We walked on for a few more seconds in silence. People greeted us on every side, calling out invitations to share chai, food, or a smoke.

He needn't have concerned himself with sparing me the shock. The closer I came to my hut, the more often I was informed that a foreigner was waiting to see me. Hello, Lin baba! There's a gora in your house, waiting for you!

We arrived at my hut to find Didier sitting in the shade of the doorway on a stool, and fanning himself with a magazine.

I stripped off my torn, bloody shirt, and poured a third of a bucket of clean water from the clay matka. Standing on the flattened pile of stones beside my hut, I washed my face, arms, and chest. Neighbours passed me as I washed, smiling when they caught my eye. There was an art to washing in that way, with no wasted drop of water and no excess of mess. I'd mastered that art, and it was one of the hundred little ways my life imitated theirs, and folded into the lotus of their loving, hoping struggle with fate.

He sat down with us in the rickety chai shop. Five huts had been cleared to make space for a single, large room. There was a counter made from an old bedroom dresser, a patchwork plastic roof, and benches for the customers made from planks resting precariously on piles of bricks. All the materials had been looted from the building site beside the slum. Kumar, the chai shop owner, fought a running guerrilla war with his customers, who tried to pilfer his bricks and planks for their own houses.

Kumar came to take our order himself. True to the general rule of slum life that the more money one made, the more poverty-stricken one had to look, Kumar's appearance was more dishevelled and ragged than the meanest of his customers. He dragged up a stained wooden crate for us to use as a table. Appraising it with a suspicious squint, he slapped at the crate with a filthy rag and then tucked the cloth into his singlet.

He grinned back at me, shaking his head of dark curls and raising the palms of his hands.

We both laughed, and Prabaker joined in, laughing so loudly that everyone in the chai shop turned to look at him.

She began by loathing him-"

We laughed again, and Prabaker slapped at his thigh, hooting with such hilarity that every head turned toward him. Didier and I inspected him with quizzical looks of our own. He responded with an impish smile, but I noticed that his eyes darted away quickly to his left. Following the glance, I saw his new love, Parvati, preparing food in Kumar's kitchen. Her thick, black plait of hair was the rope by which a man might climb to heaven. Her petite figure-she was tiny, shorter even than Prabaker-was the perfect shape of his desire. Her eyes, when she turned in profile to look at us, were black fire.

Looking over Parvati's shoulder, however, was her mother, Nandita. She was a formidable woman, three times the combined width and weight of her petite daughters, Parvati and Sita, and she glowered at us, her expression managing to combine greed for our custom with contempt for our male sex. I smiled at her, and wagged my head. Her smile, in return, was remarkably similar to the fierce grimace that Maori warriors affect to intimidate their enemies.

I forced my face to remain impassive while jealous thoughts of hand- some Maurizio, flushed with success, spiked their way into my mind. The rain started again, and I glanced outside to see people running, hitching up their pants and their saris to avoid the many puddles.

Prabaker went to buy three beedie cigarettes from Kumar's shop counter, and lit them with the same match, holding them in one hand and burning the ends with the other. He passed one each to Didier and me, and sat down again, smoking contentedly.

We laughed again, and I deliberately included Prabaker in the joke. Parvati watched us from the corners of her smouldering eyes.

Didier's mention of Maurizio's new, ten-thousand-dollar Rolex had reminded me of the Nigerian. I fished the gold-and-white business card from my shirt pocket, and handed it over.

They call him The Body Snatcher, in the African ghetto."

And you know the old saying-a king is a bad enemy, a worse friend, and a fatal family relation."

Just then a group of young men approached us. They were labourers from the construction site, and most of them lived on the legal side of the slum. They'd all passed through my small clinic during the last year, most of them wanting me to patch up wounds they'd received in work accidents. It was payday at the site, and they were flushed with the excited optimism that a full pay packet puts into young, hard-working hearts. They shook hands with me, each in turn, and paused long enough to see the new round of chai and sweet cakes they'd bought for us delivered to our table. When they left, I was grinning as widely as they were.

The sudden crash of many drums exploded, thumping music directly outside the chai shop. Flutes and trumpets joined the drums, and a wild, raucous music began. I knew the music and the musicians well. It was one of the jangling popular tunes that the slum musicians played whenever there was a festival or a celebration. We all went to the open front of the shop. Prabaker stood on a bench beside us to peer over the shoulders of the crowd.

Some distance away, we could see Joseph and his wife, surrounded by relatives and friends, and approaching us with ceremonially slow steps. In front of them was a pack of capering children, dancing out their unself-conscious and near-hysterical enthusiasm. Some of them adopted poses from their favourite movie dance scenes, and copied the steps of the stars. Others leapt about like acrobats, or invented jerky, exuberant dances of their own.

Listening to the band, watching the children, and thinking of Tariq-missing the boy already-I remembered an incident from the prison. In that other world-within-a-world, back then, I moved into a new prison cell and discovered a tiny mouse there. The creature entered through a cracked air vent, and crept into the cell every night. Patience and obsessional focus are the gems we mine in the tunnels of prison solitude. Using them, and tiny morsels of food, I bribed the little mouse, over several weeks, and eventually trained it to eat from the edge of my hand. When the prison guards moved me from that cell, in a routine rotation, I told the new tenant-a prisoner I thought I knew well-about the trained mouse. On the morning after the move, he invited me to see the mouse. He'd captured the trusting creature, and crucified it, face down, on a cross made from a broken ruler. He laughed as he told me how the mouse had struggled when he'd tied it by its neck to the cross with cotton thread. He marvelled at how long it had taken to drive thumbtacks into its wriggling paws.

Are we ever justified in what we do? That question ruined my sleep for a long time after I saw the tortured little mouse. When we act, even with the best of intentions, when we interfere with the world, we always risk a new disaster that mightn't be of our making, but that wouldn't occur without our action. Some of the worst wrongs, Karla once said, were caused by people who tried to change things. I looked at the slum children dancing like a movie chorus and capering like temple monkeys. I was teaching some of those children to speak, read, and write English. Already, with just the little they'd learned in three months, a few of them were winning work from foreign tourists. Were those children, I wondered, the mice that fed from my hand? Would their trusting innocence be seized by a fate that wouldn't and couldn't have been theirs without me, without my intervention in their lives?

What wounds and torments awaited Tariq simply because I'd befriended and taught him?

Prabaker added, his face aglow with happy excitement.

He frowned, pursing his lips as he strained his memory to recall.

You didn't tell him your name, did you?"

A roar went up from the crowd surrounding us. Joseph and Maria were close. As they approached, I saw her radiant, hopeful, brave smile and his competing expressions of shame and determination.

She was beautiful, with her thick hair trimmed short and styled to match the modern cut of her best dress. He'd lost weight, and looked fit, healthy, and handsome. He wore a blue shirt and new trousers. Husband and wife pressed against one another tightly, step for step, all four hands balled into a bouquet of clenched fingers. Family members followed them, holding a blue shawl to catch notes and coins thrown by the crowd.

Prabaker couldn't resist the call to dance. He leapt off the bench and joined the thick tangle of jerking, writhing bodies that preceded Joseph and Maria on the track. Stumbling and tottering on his platform shoes, he skipped to the centre of the dancers. His arms were outstretched for balance as if he was crossing a shallow river on a path of stones. His yellow shirt flashed as he whirled and lurched and laughed in the dance.

Didier, too, was drawn into the avalanche of revelry that ploughed through the long lane to the street. I watched him glide and sway gracefully into the party, swept along in the rhythmic dance until only his hands were visible above his dark, curly hair.

Girls threw showers of flower petals plucked from chrysanthemums.

They burst in brilliant white clusters, and settled on all of us in the converging crowd. Just before the couple passed me, Joseph turned to look into my eyes. His face was fixed between a smile and a frown. His eyes were burning, glistening beneath the tight brows of his frown, while his lips held a happy smile. He nodded twice before looking away.

He couldn't know it, of course; but with that simple nod of his head, Joseph had answered the question that had remained with me, as a dull ache of doubt, since the prison. Joseph was saved. That was the look simmering in his eyes as he nodded his head. It was the fever of salvation. That look, that frowning smile, combined shame and exultation because both are essential-shame gives exultation its purpose, and exultation gives shame its reward. We'd saved him as much by joining in his exultation as we had by witnessing his shame. And all of it depended upon our action, our interference in his life, because no man is saved without love.

What characterises the human race more, Karla once asked me, cruelty, or the capacity to feel shame for it? I thought the question acutely clever then, when I first heard it, but I'm lonelier and wiser now, and I know it isn't cruelty or shame that characterises the human race. It's forgiveness that makes us what we are. Without forgiveness, our species would've annihilated itself in endless retributions. Without forgiveness, there would be no history. Without that hope, there would be no art, for every work of art is in some way an act of forgiveness. Without that dream, there would be no love, for every act of love is in some way a promise to forgive. We live on because we can love, and we love because we can forgive.

The drums staggered toward the distant street. Moving away from us, the dancers romped and rolled on the rhythm, their swaying heads like a field of wildflowers weaving back and forth on waves of wind. As the music dwindled to an echo in our minds, the day to-day and minute-to-minute of slum life slowly reclaimed the lanes. We gave ourselves to our routines, our needs, and our harmless, hopeful scheming. And for a while, a little while, ours was a better world because the hearts and smiles that ruled it were almost as pure and clean as the flower petals fluttering from our hair, and clinging to our faces like still, white tears.

____________________

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The rocky cusp of coastline bordering the slum began in mangrove swamp, at its left, and swept through deeper water around a long new-moon curve of white-crested wavelets to Nariman Point. The monsoon was at full strength, but just at that moment no rain fell from the grey-black ocean of the lightning-fractured sky.

Wading birds swooped into the shallow swamp, and nestled among the slender, trembling reeds. Fishing boats plied their nets on the ragged waves of the bay. Children swam and played along the bouldered, pebble-strewn shoreline. On the golden crescent, across the small bay, apartment towers for the rich stood shoulder to shoulder to shoulder, all the way to the embassy district at the Point. In the large courtyards and recreation areas of those towers, the wealthy walked and took the air. Seen from the distant slum, the white shirts of the men and colourful saris of the women were like so many beads threaded by a meditating mind on the black strings of asphalt paths. The air, there, on that rocky fringe of the slum was clean and cool. The silences were large enough to swallow occasional sounds. The area was known as the Colaba Back Bay. There were few places in the city better suited to the spiritual and physical stocktaking that a wanted man worries himself with, when the omens are bad enough.

I sat alone, on a boulder that was larger and flatter than most, and I smoked a cigarette. I smoked in those days because, like everyone else in the world who smokes, I wanted to die at least as much as I wanted to live.

Sunlight suddenly pushed aside the sodden monsoon clouds, and for a few moments the windows of the apartment buildings across the bay were dazzling, brilliant mirrors of the golden sun. Then, horizon-wide, the rain clouds regrouped, and slowly sealed the splendent circle of sky, herding one against another until heaven matched the rolling sea with dark, watery waves of cloud. I lit a new cigarette with the butt of the last, and thought about love, and thought about sex. Under pressure from Didier, who permitted his friends to keep any secrets but those of the flesh, I'd admitted that I hadn't made love to anyone since I'd arrived in India. That is a very long time between the drinks, my friend, he'd said, gasping in horror, and I propose that it would be a good idea to get very drunk, if you have my meaning, and very soon. And he was right, of course: the longer I went without it, the more important it seemed to become. I was surrounded, in the slum, by beautiful Indian girls and women who provoked small symphonies of inspiration. I never let my eyes or my thoughts wander too far in their direction-it would've compromised everything that I was, and did, as the slum doctor. But there were opportunities with foreign girls, tourists, in every other deal that I did with them, every other day. German, French, and Italian girls often invited me back to their hotel rooms for a smoke, once I'd helped them to buy hash or grass. I knew that something more than smoking was usually intended. And I was tempted. Sometimes I ached with it. But I couldn't get Karla out of my mind. And deep within me-I still don't know whether it's love, or fear, or good judgement that spawns such a feeling-I sensed with all of my intuition that if I didn't wait for her, it wouldn't happen.

I couldn't explain that love to Karla, or anyone else, including myself. I never believed in love at first sight until it happened to me. Then, when it did happen, it was as if every atom in my body had been changed, somehow: as if I'd become charged with light and heat. I was different, forever, just for the sight of her. And the love that opened in my heart seemed to drag the rest of my life behind it, from that moment onward. I heard her voice in every lovely sound the wind wrapped around me. I saw her face in brilliant mirrored flares of memory, every day. Sometimes, when I thought of her, the hunger to touch her and to kiss her and to breathe a cinnamon-scented minute of her black hair clawed at my chest and crushed the air in my lungs. Clouds, heavy with their burden of monsoon rain, massed above the city, above my head, and it seemed to me in those weeks that all grey heaven was my brooding love. The very mangroves trembled with my desire. And at night, too many nights, it was my restive sleep that rolled and turned the sea in lusted dreaming, until the sun each morning rose with love for her. But she wasn't in love with me, she'd said, and she didn't want me to love her. Didier, trying to warn me, trying to help me or save me, perhaps, had said once that nothing grieves more deeply or pathetically than one half of a great love that isn't meant to be. And he was right, of course, up to a point. But I couldn't let it go, that hope of loving her, and I couldn't ignore the instinct that enjoined me to wait, and wait.

Then there was that other love, a father's love, and the son's love that I felt for Khaderbhai. Lord Abdel Khader Khan. His friend, Abdul Ghani, had called him a mooring post, with the lives of thousands tied to his life for safety. My own life seemed to be one of those harnessed to his. Yet I couldn't clearly see the means by which fate had bound me to him, nor was I completely free to leave. When Abdul had spoken of his search for wisdom, and the answers to his three big questions, he'd unwittingly described my own private search for something or someone to believe. I'd walked that same dusty, broken road toward a faith. But every time I'd heard the story of a belief, every time I'd seen some new guru, the result was the same: the story was unconvincing in some way, and the guru was flawed.

Every faith required me to accept some compromise. Every teacher required me to close my eyes to some fault. And then there was Abdel Khader Khan, smiling at my suspicions with his honey coloured eyes. Is he the real thing, I began to ask myself. Is he the one?

I turned to look at him.

I was frowning and smiling at the same time, surprised and bewildered. I held my breath, afraid that any sound might interrupt his musing.

He fell silent, and at last I spoke my amazement.

It was my turn to lapse into silence. I was furious with myself.

Despite my intimate knowledge of the slum-dwellers, and the debt I owed them-they'd taken me in, and given me all the support and friendship their hearts could hold-I still fell into the bigot's trap. Johnny shocked me with his knowledge because, somewhere in my deepest appraisal of the slum-dwellers, there was a prejudice that they had no right to such knowledge. In my secret heart I'd judged them as ignorant, even though I knew better, simply because they were poor.

We found Radha lying on a thin blanket in her hut. Her body was twisted into a knot of pain. Her hair was wet, saturated with sweat, as was the pink sari she wore. The smell in the hut was terrible. Chandrika, Jeetendra's mother, was trying to keep her clean, but Radha's fever rendered her incoherent and incontinent.

She vomited again violently as we watched, and that provoked a new dribble of diarrhoea.

I'm very worried, Linbaba."

I told him to throw out the water in his matka, wash it out thoroughly, and get fresh water. I instructed Chandrika to boil fresh water until it bubbled for ten minutes and then to use that water, when it cooled, as drinking water for Radha. Jeetendra and Johnny came with me to my hut, where I collected glucose tablets and a paracetamol-codeine mixture. I hoped to reduce her pain and fever with them. Jeetendra was just leaving with the medicine when Prabaker rushed in. There was anguish in his eyes and in the hands that grasped me.

The girl was writhing in the spasm of an agony that centred on her stomach. She clutched at her belly and curled up in a ball, only to fling her arms and legs outward in a back-arching convulsion. Her temperature was very high. She was slippery with sweat. The smells of diarrhoea and vomit were so strong in the deserted chai shop that the girl's parents and sister held cloths to their mouths and noses. Parvati's parents, Kumar and Nandita Patak, were trying to cope with the illness, but their expressions were equally helpless and defeated. It was a measure of their despondency and their fear that dread had banished modesty, and they allowed the girl to be examined in a flimsy undergarment that revealed her shoulders and most of one breast.

Terror filled the eyes of Parvati's sister, Sita. She hunched in a corner of the hut, her pretty face pinched and cramped by the horror she felt. It wasn't an ordinary sickness, and she knew it.

Johnny Cigar spoke to the girl in Hindi. His tone was harsh, almost brutal. He warned her that her sister's life was in her hands, and he admonished her for her cowardice. Moment by moment, his voice guided her out of the forest of her black fear. At last she looked up and into his eyes, as if seeing him for the first time. She shook herself, and then crawled across the floor to wipe her sister's mouth with a piece of wet towelling. With that call to arms from Johnny Cigar, and the simple, solicitous gesture from Sita, the battle began.

Cholera. By nightfall there were ten serious cases, and a dozen more possible. By dawn the next day there were sixty advanced cases, and as many as a hundred with some symptoms. By noon, on that day, the first of the victims died. It was Radha, my next door neighbour.

The official from the Bombay Municipal Corporation's Department of Health was a tired, astute, condolent man in his early forties named Sandeep Jyoti. His compassionate eyes were almost the same shade of dark tan as his glistening, sweat-oily skin. His hair was unkempt, and he pushed it back frequently with the long fingers of his right hand. Around his neck there was a mask, which he lifted to his mouth whenever he entered a hut or encountered one of the victims of the illness. He stood together with Doctor Hamid, Qasim Ali Hussein, Prabaker, and me near my hut after making his first examination of the slum.

There are twelve other cholera outbreaks, between here and Kandivli. They're small, mostly. But there's a bad one in Thane- more than a hundred new cases every day. All the local hospitals are overcrowded. But this is not bad, really, for the monsoon. We hope we can keep a cap on it at fifteen or twenty infection sites."

I waited for one of the others to speak, but they simply nodded their heads gravely.

But it's just not possible to take everyone. I'm not going to tell you any lies. It's the same in ten other hutments. I've been to them all, and the message is the same. You have to fight it out here, on your own. You have to get through it." "Are you out of your fucking mind?" I snarled at him, feeling the fear prowl in my gut. "We already lost my neighbour Radha this morning. There's thirty thousand people here. It's ridiculous to say we have to fight it out ourselves. You're the health department, for God's sake!"

Sandeep Jyoti watched his assistant close and secure the sample cases. When he turned back to me, I saw that his bloodshot eyes were angry. He resented the indignant tone, especially coming from a foreigner, and was embarrassed that his department couldn't do more for the slum-dwellers. If it hadn't been so obvious to him that I lived and worked in the slum, and that the people liked me as much as they relied on me, he would've told me to go to hell. I watched all those thoughts shift across his tired, handsome face and then I saw the patient, resigned, almost affectionate smile that replaced them as he ran a hand through his untidy hair.

It was an abrupt question, under the circumstances, and almost rude. I couldn't answer it.

He studied my eyes for a moment longer, and then his frown softened again in a gentle smile.

I wish I could do more. But I'm sure, you know, I'm sure that you all can handle it here-probably a lot better than you think, just at this moment. You've already made a good start. Where did you get the salts?"

Some of these people are too sick to hold them down."

ORT, or Oral Rehydration Therapy, had been devised by Jon Rohde, a scientist who worked with local and UNICEF doctors in Bangladesh during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The oral rehydration solution that he developed contained distilled water, sugar, common salt, and other minerals in carefully mixed proportions. Rohde knew that what kills people who are contaminated with the cholera bacterium is dehydration. The ugly fact is that they shit and vomit themselves to death. He discovered that a solution of water, salt, and sugar kept people alive long enough for the bacterium to pass through their systems. Ranjit's lepers, at Doctor Hamid's request, had given me boxes of the solution. I had no idea how much more of the stuff we could expect to receive, or how much we would need.

We watched in grim silence as he followed his assistant out of the slum. We were all afraid.

Qasim Ali Hussein took control. He declared his home to be a command centre. We called a meeting there, and some twenty men and women gathered to devise a plan. Cholera is largely a water borne disease. The vibrio cholerae bacterium spreads from contaminated water and lodges itself in the small intestine, producing the fever, diarrhoea, and vomiting that cause dehydration and death. We determined to purify the slum's water, beginning with the holding tanks and then moving on to the pots and buckets in each of the seven thousand huts. Qasim Ali produced a bundle of rupee notes as thick as a man's knee, and gave it to Johnny Cigar, deputing him to buy the water purification tablets and other medicines we would need.

Because so much rainwater had accumulated in puddles and rivulets throughout the slum, those too had provided breeding grounds for the bacteria. It was decided that a chain of shallow trenches would be established at strategic points in the lanes of the slum. They would be filled with disinfectant, and each person walking the lane would be required to pass through the ankle-deep antiseptic drench. Plastic bins for safe disposal of waste materials were to be placed at designated points, and antiseptic soap would be given to every household.

Soup kitchens would be established in the chai shops and restaurants to provide safe, boiled food and sterilised cups and bowls. A team was also assigned to the task of removing the bodies of the dead and taking them on a trundle-cart to the hospital. My task was to supervise the use of the oral rehydration solution and to prepare batches of a homemade mixture as required.

They were all huge undertakings and onerous responsibilities, but no man or woman at the gathering hesitated in accepting them.

It's a characteristic of human nature that the best qualities, called up quickly in a crisis, are very often the hardest to find in a prosperous calm. The contours of all our virtues are shaped by adversity. But there was another reason, far from virtue, for my own eagerness to accept the tasks-a reason found in shame. My neighbour Radha had been desperately ill for two days before she died, and I'd known nothing of it at the time. I was gripped by a feeling that my pride, my hubris, was responsible for the sickness in some way: that my clinic was founded in an arrogance - my arrogance-that had allowed the disease to breed in the smear of its conceits. I knew that nothing I'd done or neglected to do had caused the epidemic. And I knew that the disease wouldVe attacked the slum, sooner or later, with or without my presence. But I couldn't shake off the feeling that, somehow, my complacency had made me complicit.

Just a week before, I'd celebrated with dancing and drinking because, when I'd opened my little clinic, no-one had come. Not one man, woman, or child in all the thousands had needed my help.

The treatment queue that had begun with hundreds, nine months before, had finally dwindled to none. And I'd danced and drunk with Prabaker that day, as if I'd cured the whole slum of its ailments and illnesses. That celebration seemed vain and stupid as I hurried through the sodden lanes to the scores who were sick. And there was guilt in that shame as well. For the two days while my neighbour Radha lay dying, I'd been ingratiating myself with tourist customers in their five-star hotel. While she'd writhed and thrashed on a damp earth floor, I'd been calling down to room service to order more ice-cream and crepes.

I rushed back to the clinic. It was empty. Prabaker was looking after Parvati. Johnny Cigar had taken on the job of locating and removing the dead. Jeetendra, sitting on the ground outside our huts with his face in his hands, was sinking in the quicksand of his grief. I gave him the job of making several large purchases for me and checking on all the chemists in the area for ORTs. I was watching him shamble away down the lane toward the street, worrying about him, worrying about his young son, Satish, who was also ill, when I saw a woman in the distance walking toward me. Before I could actually know who it was, my heart was sure it was Karla.

She wore a salwar kameez-the most flattering garment in the world, after the sari-in two shades of sea green. The long tunic was a deeper green, and the pants beneath, tight at the ankle, were paler. There was also a long yellow scarf, worn backwards, Indian style, with the plumes of colour trailing out behind her.

Her black hair was pulled back tightly and fastened at the nape of her neck. The hairstyle threw attention at her large green eyes-the green of lagoons, where shallow water laps at golden sand-and at her black eyebrows and perfect mouth. Her lips were like the soft ridges of dunes in the desert at sunset; like the crests of waves meeting in the frothy rush to shore; like the folded wings of courting birds. The movements of her body, as she walked toward me on the broken lane, were like storm-wind stirring in a stand of young willow trees.

Now, tell me, calmly-what do you want me to do?"

I did need help, not just with the physical work of nursing the people, but also with the doubt and fear and shame that throbbed in my throat and chest. One of the ironies of courage, and the reason why we prize it so highly, is that we find it easier to be brave for someone else than we do for ourselves alone. And I loved her. The truth was that while my words warned her away to safety, my fanatic heart connived with my eyes to make her stay.

She reached out to place her long, slender hand in mine. The handshake was firm and confident.

We started with a tour of the slum, visiting the sick and dispensing packets of the solution. There were, by then, more than a hundred people presenting symptoms of cholera, and half of them were serious cases. Allowing just a few minutes with each of the victims, it still took us twenty hours. Constantly on the move, we drank soup or sugary chai from sterile cups as our only food. By evening of the following day, we sat down to eat our first full meal. We were exhausted, but hunger drove us to chew through the hot rotis and vegetables. Then, somewhat refreshed, we set off on a second round of the most serious cases.

It was filthy work. The word cholera comes from the Greek word kholera, meaning diarrhoea. The diarrhoea of the cholera sickness has a singularly vile smell, and you never get used to it. Every time we entered a hut to visit the sick, we fought the urge to vomit. Sometimes, we did vomit. And when we vomited once, the impulse to retch and gag was stronger than ever.

Karla was kind and gentle, especially with the children, and she filled the families with confidence. She kept her sense of humour through the smell, and the endless stooping to lift and clean and give comfort in dark, humid hovels; through the sickness and the dying; and through the fear, when the epidemic seemed to be getting worse, that we, too, would sicken and die. Through forty hours without sleep, she smiled every time I turned my hungry eyes on her. I was in love with her, and even if she'd been lazy or a coward or miserly or bad tempered I would've loved her still. But she was brave and compassionate and generous. She worked hard, and she was a good friend. And somehow, through those hours of fear and suffering and death, I found new ways and reasons to like the woman I already loved with all my heart.

At three after midnight on the second night, I insisted that she sleep, that we both sleep, before exhaustion crushed us. We began to walk back through the dark, deserted lanes. There was no moon, and the stars punctured the black dome of the sky with a dazzling intensity. In an unusually wide space, where three lanes converged, I stopped and raised a hand to silence Karla. There was a faint scratching sound, a whisper and scrape as of taffeta rustling, or cellophane being squeezed into a ball. In the blackness I couldn't tell where the sound began, but I knew it was close and getting closer. I reached around behind me to grab Karla, and held her pressed against my back, turning left and right as I tried to anticipate the sound. And then they came-the rats.

The rats came in hundreds and then thousands: black waves of running, squealing beasts that poured from the lanes and swept against our legs like the swirling tide of a river. They were huge, bigger than cats, fat and slimy and rushing through the lanes in a horde that was two or three animals deep. They swept past us at ankle-height and then shin-high, knee-high, running on one another's backs and slapping and smacking into my legs with brutal force. Beyond us, they plunged on into the night toward the sewer pipes of the rich apartment towers, just as they did every night on their migration from nearby markets and through the slum. Thousands. The black waves of snapping rats seemed to go on for ten minutes, although it couldn't have been so long. At last, they were gone. The lanes were picked clean of rubbish and scraps, and silence clogged the air.

Nobody minds, because they keep the place clean, and they don't worry you, if you're inside your hut, or asleep on the ground outside. But if you get in their way, and you panic, they just go right over the top of you, and pick you as clean as the lanes."

Limp with weariness and relief that we weren't badly hurt, we clung to one another and staggered back to the clinic-hut. I spread one blanket down on the bare earth. We stretched out on it, propped up against a stack of other blankets. I held her in my arms. A sprinkling shower of rain rappled on the canvas awning overhead. Somewhere, a sleeper cried out harshly, and the tense, meaningless sound swooped from dream to dream until it disturbed answering howls from a pack of wild dogs roaming the edge of the slum. Too exhausted to sleep just yet, and tingling with sexual tension in the press of our tired bodies we lay awake and, piece by painful piece, Karla told me her story.

She was born in Switzerland, in Basel, and she was an only child.

Her mother was Swiss-Italian, and her father was Swedish. They were artists. Her father was a painter, and her mother was a soprano coloratura. Karla Saaranen's memories of her early childhood years were the happiest of her life. The creative young couple was popular, and their house was a meeting place for poets, musicians, actors, and other artists in the cosmopolitan city. Karla grew up speaking four languages fluently, and spent many long hours learning her favourite arias with her mother. In her father's studio, she watched him magic the blank canvases with all the colours and shapes of his passion.

Then, one day, Ischa Saaranen failed to return from an exhibition of his paintings in Germany. At close to midnight, the local police told Anna and Karla that his car had left the road during a snowstorm. He was dead. Within a year, the misery that ruined Anna Saaranen's beauty, and killed her lovely voice, finally smothered her life as well. She took an overdose of sleeping tablets. Karla was alone.

Her mother's brother had settled in America, in San Francisco.

The orphaned girl was only ten when she stood next to that stranger at her mother's grave and then travelled with him to join his family. Mario Pacelli was a big, generous-hearted bear of a man. He treated Karla with affectionate kindness and sincere respect. He welcomed her into his family as an equal in every way to his own children. He told her often that he loved her and that he hoped she would grow to love him, and to give him a part of the love for her dead parents that he knew she kept locked within her.

There was no time for that love to grow. Karla's uncle Mario died in a climbing accident, three years after she arrived in America.

Mario's widow, Penelope, took control of her life. Aunt Penny was jealous of the girl's beauty and her combative, intimidating intelligence-qualities not discernible in her own three children. The more brightly Karla shined, in comparison to the other children, the more her aunt hated her. There's no meanness too spiteful or too cruel, Didier once said to me, when we hate someone for all the wrong reasons. Aunt Penny deprived Karla, punished her arbitrarily, chastised and belittled her constantly, and did everything but throw the girl into the street.

Forced to provide her own money for all her needs, Karla worked after school every night at a local restaurant, and as a baby sitter on weekends. One of the fathers she worked for returned, alone and too early, on a hot summer night. He'd been to a party, and had been drinking. He was a man she'd liked, a handsome man she'd found herself fantasising about from time to time. When he crossed the room to stand near her on that sultry summer night, his attention flattered her, despite the stink of stale wine on his breath and the glazed stare in his eyes. He touched her shoulder, and she smiled. It was her last smile for a very long time.

No-one but Karla called it rape. He said that Karla had led him on, and Karla's aunt took his part. The fifteen-year-old orphan from Switzerland left her aunt's home, and never contacted her again. She moved to Los Angeles, where she found a job, shared an apartment with another girl, and began to make her own way. But after the rape, Karla lost the part of loving that grows in trust. Other kinds of love remained in her-friendship, compassion, sexuality-but the love that believes and trusts in the constancy of another human heart, romantic love, was lost.

She worked, saved money, and went to night school. It was her dream to gain a place at a university-any university, anywhere- and study English and German literature. But too much in her young life had been broken, and too many loved ones had died. She couldn't complete any course of study. She couldn't remain in any job. She drifted, and she began to teach herself by reading everything that gave her hope or strength.

She let out a sighing gasp of air. I couldn't tell if it was despairing or simply exhausted.

She was frowning, and her tone was sharp.

She relaxed.

We were silent for a few moments. A baby was crying somewhere nearby, and I could hear its mother soothing it with a little spool of syllables that were tender and yet faintly annoyed at the same time.

She laughed with her mouth closed, breathing through her nose.

Her head rested on my arm. In the darkness her face was a set of soft curves, and her eyes gleamed like black pearls.

She was silent for so long, in response to the question, that I thought she must've fallen asleep. Then she spoke, quietly and steadily and evenly, as if she was giving testimony at a trial.

We used to talk about books and philosophy and music and art and food. He was a wonderful, gentle guy."

That's what happened to him. She was working for Madame Zhou. She was an Italian girl-very dark and beautiful. I even introduced him to her, one night, when she came into Leopold's with Ulla.

They were both working at the Palace."

Then she left the Palace. Maurizio had a contact at the German Consulate. He wanted to oil the wheels on some deal that he was working on with the German, and he discovered that the German was crazy about Ulla. With some heavy persuasion from the consulate officer, and all his own savings, Maurizio managed to buy Ulla free from the Palace. Maurizio got Ulla to twist the consulate guy until he did... whatever it was Maurizio wanted him to do.

Then he dumped him. The guy lost it, I heard. He put a bullet in his head. By then, Maurizio had put Ulla to work, to pay the debt she owed him."

I clamped my jaw shut, listening to the ruffle of air breathing in and out through my nose, until our two patterns of breath matched one another in rhythmic rise and fall.

I let the raining silence close her eyes for the last time. She slept. I knew we didn't have her story. Not the whole of it. I knew the small daubs of colour she'd excluded from her summary were at least as important as the broad strokes she'd included.

The devil, they say, is in the details, and I knew well the devils that lurked and skulked in the details of my own story.

But she had given me a hoard of new treasures. I'd learned more about her in that exhausted, murmuring hour than in all the many months before it. Lovers find their way by such insights and confidences: they're the stars we use to navigate the ocean of desire. And the brightest of those stars are the heartbreaks and sorrows. The most precious gift you can bring to your lover is your suffering. So I took each sadness she confessed to me, and pinned it to the sky.

Somewhere out there in the night, Jeetendra wept for his wife.

Prabaker mopped at Parvati's sweating face with his red scarf.

Heaped up on the blankets, our bodies bound by weariness and her deep slumber, surrounded by sickness and hope, death and defiance, I touched the soft surrendered curl of Karla's sleeping fingers to my lips, and I pledged my heart to her forever.

____________________

CHAPTER NINETEEN

We lost nine people in the cholera epidemic. Six of them were young children. Jeetendra's only son, Satish, survived, but two of the boy's closest friends died. Both of them had been enthusiastic students in my English class. The procession of children that ran with us behind the biers carrying those little bodies, garlanded with flowers, wailed their grief so piteously that many strangers on the busy streets paused in prayer, and felt the sudden burn and sting of tears. Parvati survived the sickness, and Prabaker nursed her for two weeks, sleeping outside her hut under a flap of plastic during the night. Sita took her sister Parvati's place at their father's chai shop; and, whenever Johnny Cigar entered or passed the shop, her eyes followed him as slowly and stealthily as a walking leopard's shadow.

Karla stayed for six days, the worst of it, and visited several times in the weeks that followed. When the infection rate dropped to zero, and the crisis had passed for the most serious cases, I took a three-bucket shower, changed into clean clothes, and headed for the tourist beat in search of business. I was almost broke. The rain had been heavy, and the flooding in many areas of the city was as hard on the touts, dealers, guides, acrobats, pimps, beggars, and black marketeers who made their living on the street as it was on the many businessmen whose shops were submerged.

Competition in Colaba for the tourist dollar was cordial, but creatively emphatic. Yemeni street vendors held up falcon-crested daggers and hand-embroidered passages from the Koran. Tall, handsome Somalis offered bracelets made from beaten silver coins.

Artists from Orissa displayed images of the Taj Mahal painted on dried, pressed papaya leaves. Nigerians sold carved, ebony canes with stiletto blades concealed within their spiral shafts.

Iranian refugees weighed polished turquoise stones by the ounce on brass scales hung from the branches of trees. Drum sellers from Uttar Pradesh, carrying six or seven drums each, burst into brief, impromptu concerts if a tourist showed the faintest interest.

Exiles from Afghanistan sold huge, ornamental silver rings engraved with the Pashto script and encircling amethysts the size of pigeons' eggs.

Threading through that commercial tangle were those who made their living servicing the businesses and the street traders themselves-incense wavers, bringing silken drifts of temple incense on silver trays, stove cleaners, mattress fluffers, ear cleaners, foot massagers, rat catchers, food and chai carriers, florists, laundry-men, water carriers, gas-bottle men, and many others. Weaving their way between them and the traders and the tourists were the dancers, singers, acrobats, musicians, fortune tellers, temple acolytes, fire-eaters, monkey men, snake men, bear-handlers, beggars, self-flagellators, and many more who lived from the crowded street, and returned to the slums at night.

Every one of them broke the law in some way, eventually, in the quest for a faster buck. But the swiftest to the source, the sharpest-eyed of all the street people, were those of us who broke the law professionally: the black marketeers. The street accepted me in that complex network of schemes and scammers for several reasons. First, I only worked the tourists who were too careful or too paranoid to deal with Indians; if I didn't take them, no-one did. Second, no matter what the tourists wanted, I always took them to the appropriate Indian businessman; I never did the deals myself. And, third, I wasn't greedy; my commissions always accorded with the standard set by decent, self-respecting crooks throughout the city. I made sure, as well, when my commissions were large enough, to put money back into the restaurants, hotels, and begging bowls of the area.

And there was something else, something far less tangible but even more important, perhaps, than commissions and turf-war sensitivities. The fact that a white foreigner-a man most of them took to be European-had settled so ably and comfortably in the mud, near the bottom of their world, was profoundly satisfying to the sensibility of the Indians on the street. In a curious mix of pride and shame, my presence legitimised their crimes. What they did, from day to day, couldn't be so bad if a gora joined them in doing it. And my fall raised them up because they were no worse, after all, than Linbaba, the educated foreigner who lived by crime and worked the street as they did.

Nor was I the only foreigner who lived from the black market.

There were European and American drug dealers, pimps, counterfeiters, con men, gem traders, and smugglers. Among them were two men who shared the name George. One was Canadian and the other was English. They were inseparable friends who'd lived on the streets for years. No-one seemed to know their surnames. To make the distinction, they were known by their star signs: Scorpio George and Gemini George. The Zodiac Georges were junkies who'd sold their passports, as the last valuable things they'd owned, and then worked the heroin travellers-tourists who came to India to binge-hit heroin, for a week or two, before returning to the safety of their own countries. There were surprisingly large numbers of those tourists, and the Zodiac Georges survived from their dealings with them.

The cops watched me and the Georges and the other foreigners who worked the streets, and they knew exactly what we were doing.

They reasoned, truly enough, that we caused no violent harm, and we were good for business in the black market that brought them bribes and other benefits. They took their cut from the drug and currency dealers. They left us alone. They left me alone.

On that first day after the cholera epidemic, I made about two hundred U.S. dollars in three hours. It wasn't a lot, but I decided it was enough. The rain had squalled through the morning, and by noon it seemed to have settled into the kind of sultry, dozing drizzle that sometimes lasts for days. I was sitting on a bar stool, and drinking a freshly squeezed cane juice under a striped awning near the President Hotel, not far from the slum, when Vikram ran in out of the rain.

We shook hands, and I ordered him a cane juice. He tipped his flat, black Flamenco hat onto his back, where it hung from a cord at his throat. His black shirt featured white embroidered figures down the button-strip at the front. The white figures were waving lassoes over their heads. His belt was made from American silver dollar coins linked one to the other and fastened with a domed concho as a belt buckle. The black flamenco pants were embroidered with fine white scrolls down the outside of the leg, and ended in a line of three small silver buttons. His Cuban heeled boots had crossover loops of leather that fastened with buckles at the outside.

Jesus, man! That was fuckin' weeks ago, yaar. I haven't seen you in too fuckin' long."

And you're more alike than people think. You both have a sense of humour, and you love to laugh. She can't stand hypocrites, and neither can you. And you're interested in life, I think, in pretty much the same way. I think you're a good couple, or at least you will be. And I think you'll get her in the end, Vikram.

I've seen the way she looks at you, even when she's putting shit on you. She likes you so much that she has to put you down. It's her way. Just stick with it, and you'll win her in the end."

He fell silent, staring out at the rain. His curly black hair had grown to his collar, at the back, and was trimmed at the front and sides. His moustache was fastidiously snipped and trimmed to little more than the thickness that a felt-tipped pen might've made. In profile, his face was imposing: the long forehead ended in a hawk-like nose and descended past a firm, solemn mouth to a prominent, confident jaw. When he turned to face me it was his eyes that dominated, however, and his eyes were young, curious, and shimmering with good humour.

He jumped off the stool and began to unbutton his shirt. "No! No! I was only joking!"

He wore a black singlet under the shirt, and the black hat was still hanging at his back. The cane juice crusher had a portable hi-fi at his stall. A new song from a hit Hindi movie started up.

The juice-wallah obligingly turned the volume up to the maximum, and Vikram began to dance and sing along with the words. Showing surprisingly elegant and graceful skill, he swung out from under the crowded awning and danced in the lightly falling rain. Within one minute of his twirling, swaying dance he'd lured other young men from the footpath, and there were six, seven, and then eight dancers laughing in the rain while the rest of us clapped, whooped, and hollered.

Turning his steps toward me once more, Vikram reached out to grasp my wrist with both of his hands, and then began to drag me into the dance. I protested and tried to fight him off, but many hands from the street assisted him, and I was pushed into the group of dancers. I surrendered to India, as I did every day, then, and as I still do, every day of my life, no matter where I am in the world. I danced, following Vikram's steps, and the street cheered us on.

The song finished after some minutes, and we turned to see Lettie standing under the awning and watching us with open amusement.

Vikram ran to greet her, and I joined them, shaking off the rain.

Hello, Lin. How are you, darlin'?"

They're stranded at the hotel, and our Karla's stranded there, and all."

Glancing around quickly, I saw that Prabaker's cousin Shantu was still sitting in his taxi, parked with several others outside the restaurants where I'd seen him earlier. I checked my watch. It was three-thirty. I knew that the local fishermen would all be back on shore with their catches. I turned to Vikram and Lettie once more.

I jumped into Shantu's taxi, twirling the meter to the on position through the passenger window. Lettie and Vikram waved as we sped past them. I explained my plan to Shantu on the way to the kholi settlement, adjacent to our slum. His dark, lined face creased in a weathered smile and he shook his head in wonder, but he pushed the battered taxi a little faster through the short ride on the rain-drenched road.

At the fishermen's settlement, I enlisted the support of Vinod, who was a patient at my clinic and one of Prabaker's close friends. He selected one of his shorter punts, and we lifted the light, flat boat onto the roof of the taxi and sped back to the Taj Hotel area, near the Radio Club Hotel.

Shantu worked in his taxi sixteen hours a day for six days every week. He was determined that his son and two daughters would know lives that were better than his own. He saved money for their education and for the substantial dowries he would be required to provide if the girls were to marry well. He was permanently exhausted, and beset by all the torments, terrible and trivial, that poverty endures. Vinod supported his parents, his wife, and five children from the fish that he hauled from the sea with his thin, strong arms. On his own initiative, he'd formed a co operative with twenty other poor fishermen. That pooling of resources had provided a measure of security, but his income seldom stretched to luxuries such as new sandals, or school books, or a third meal in any one day. Still, when they knew what I wanted to do, and why, neither Vinod nor Shantu would accept any money from me. I struggled to give it to them, even trying to force the money down the fronts of their shirts, but they refused to allow it. They were poor, tired, worried men, but they were Indian, and any Indian man will tell you that although love might not have been invented in India, it was certainly perfected there. We put the long, flat punt down in the shallow water of the flooded road near the Radio Club, close to Anand's India Guest House. Shantu gave me the oilskin cape he used to keep himself dry with whenever the taxi broke down, and the weathered black chauffeur's cap that was his good-luck charm. He waved us off as Vinod and I struck out for the Taj Mahal Hotel. We poled our way along the road that was usually busy with taxis, trucks, motorcycles, and private cars. The water grew deeper with every stroke of the poles until, at Best Street corner, where the Taj Mahal Hotel complex began, it was already waist deep.

The Taj had experienced such floods in the surrounding streets many times. The hotel was built upon a tall platform of bluestone and granite blocks, with ten marble steps leading up to each wide entrance. The floodwaters were deep that year-they reached to the second step from the top-and cars were floating, drifting helplessly, and bumping together near the wall surrounding the great arch of the Gateway of India monument. We steered the boat directly to the steps of the main entrance. The foyer and doorways were crowded with people: rich businessmen, watching their limousines bubble and drift into the rain; women in expensive local and foreign designer dresses; actors and politicians; and fashionable sons and daughters.

Karla stepped forward as if she'd been expecting me. She accepted my hand, and stepped into the punt. I threw the cape around her shoulders as she sat in the centre of the boat, and handed her the cap. She slipped it on with a raffish tilt of the cap's peak, and we set off. Vinod sent us in a loop toward the Gateway Monument. As we entered its magnificent, vaulted chamber, he began to sing. The monument produced a spectacular acoustic. His love song echoed, and rang the bell in every heart that heard him.

Vinod brought us to the taxi stand at the Radio Club Hotel. I reached out to help Karla from the boat, but she jumped to the footpath beside me, and we held on to one another for a moment.

Her eyes were a darker green beneath the peak of the cap. Her black hair glistened with raindrops. Her breath was sweet with cinnamon and caraway seed.

We pulled apart, and I opened the door of a taxi. She handed me the cap and the cape, and took a seat in the back of the cab. She hadn't spoken a single word since I'd arrived with the boat. Then she simply addressed the driver.

There was a command or a demand in her eyes. I couldn't decide what it was. I watched the cab speed away. Vinod and Shantu watched it with me, and clapped their hands on my shoulders. We lifted Vinod's boat back onto the roof of the taxi. As I took my seat beside Shantu, reaching out with my left arm to hold the long boat on the roof, I glanced up to see a face in the crowd.

It was Rajan, Madame Zhou's eunuch servant. He was staring at me.

His face was a gargoyle mask of malevolence and hatred.

That face remained with me all the way back to the kholi settlement, but when we unloaded the boat, and Shantu agreed to join Vinod and me for dinner, I let the image of Rajan's malice melt into my memory. I ordered food from a local restaurant and it was delivered to us there, on the beach, steaming hot in metal containers. We spread the containers out on an old piece of canvas sail, and sat beneath a wide plastic awning to eat.

Vinod's parents, wife, and five children took their places around the edge of the canvas sheet beside Shantu and me. Rain continued to fall, but the air was warm, and a faint breeze from the bay slowly stirred the humid evening. Our shelter on the sandy beach beside the many long boats looked out to the rolling sea. We ate chicken byriani, malai kofta, vegetable korma, rice, curried vegetables, deep fried pieces of pumpkin, potato, onion, and cauliflower, hot buttered naan bread, dhal, papadams, and green mango chutney. It was a feast, and the delight that spilled from the eyes of the children, while they ate their fill, put starlight in our smiles as we watched them.

When night fell, I rode back to Colaba's tourist beat in a cab. I wanted to take a room for a few hours at the India Guest House. I wasn't worried about the C-Form at the hotel. I knew that I wouldn't have to sign the register, and Anand wouldn't include me in his list of guests. The arrangement we'd agreed on months before-the same one that applied to most of the cheaper hotels in the city-allowed me to pay an hourly rent, directly to him, so that I could use the shower or conduct private business in one of the rooms from time to time. I wanted to shave. I wanted to spend a good half hour under a shower, using too much shampoo and soap. I wanted to sit in a white-tiled bathroom where I could forget the cholera, and scrape and scrub the last few weeks off my skin.

He led me to a room off the main corridor. A girl answered the door and spoke to us in Italian. She was distraught and dishevelled. Her hair was messed, and matted with lint and what looked like food. Her thin nightdress hung askew, revealing the hand-span of her ribs. She was a junkie, and she was stoned almost to sleep, but there was a numb, somnolent panic in her pleading.

On the bed there was a young man sprawled with one leg over the foot of the bed. He was naked to the waist, and his trousers were open at the front. One boot was discarded and the other was still on his left foot. He was about twenty-eight years old. He was dead.

No pulse. No heartbeat. No breathing. The overdose had thrown his body down the long black well, and his face was as blue as the sky at 5 p.m. on the darkest day of winter. I hauled his body up onto the bed, and put a roll of sheet behind his neck.

Ignoring him, I began cardio-pulmonary resuscitation on the young man. I knew the drill too well. I'd pulled junkies out of overdoses, dozens of them, when I was a junkie myself. I'd done it fifty, eighty times in my own country, pressing and breathing life into the living dead. I pressed at the young man's heart, willing it to beat, and breathed his lungs to their capacity for him. After ten minutes of the procedure he stuttered, deep in his chest, and coughed. I rested on my knees, watching to see if he was strong enough to breathe on his own. The breathing was slow, and then slower, and then it stopped in a hollow sigh. The sound was as flat and insentient as the air escaping from a fissure in layers of geyser stone. I began the CPR again. It was exhausting work, dragging his limp body back up the whole length of the well with my arms and my lungs.

The girl went under twice while I worked on her boyfriend. Anand slapped at her, and shook her awake. Three hours after I stepped into the hotel, Anand and I left the room. We were both soaked through with sweat, our shirts as wet as if we'd been standing in the rain that drummed and rattled beyond the windows. The couple was awake and sullen and angry with us, despite the girl's earlier plea for help, because we'd disturbed the pleasure of their stone. I closed the door on them, knowing that some time soon, someone else in that city, or some other, would close a door on them forever. Every time junkies go down the well they sink a little deeper, and it's just that little bit harder to drag them out again.

Anand owed me one. I showered and shaved, and accepted the gift of a freshly washed and ironed shirt. We sat in the foyer then, and shared a chai. Some men like you less the more they owe you.

Some men only really begin to like you when they find themselves in your debt. Anand was comfortable with his obligation, and his handshake was the kind that good friends sometimes use in place of a whole conversation.

When I stepped down to the street, a taxi pulled in to the kerb beside me. Ulla was in the back seat.

Worry, and what might've been dread, pushed her voice almost to a whine. Her lovely, pale face was trapped in a fearful frown.

I climbed in beside her, and the taxi pulled out slowly from the kerb. The cab smelled of her perfume and the beedie cigarettes that she constantly smoked.

It was my night to be the white knight. I looked into her large blue eyes, and resisted the impulse to make a joke or a flirtatious remark. She was afraid. Whatever had scared her still possessed her eyes. She was looking at me, but she was still staring at the fear.

Are you going good? You look very good."

Her lilting German accent gave a fluttering music to her speech that pleased my ear. I smiled at her as the coloured lights streamed across her eyes.

I heard a warning, deep within-we usually do, when something worse than we can imagine is stalking us, and set to pounce.

Fate's way of beating us in a fair fight is to give us warnings that we hear, but never heed. Of course I would help her. Ulla was Karla's friend, and I was in love with Karla. I would help her, for Karla's sake, even if I didn't like her. And I did like Ulla: she was beautiful, and she was just naive enough, just sanguine enough to stop sympathy slipping into pity. I smiled again, and asked the driver to stop.

She leaned across and gave me a kiss on the cheek. I got out of the cab. She put her hands on the window's edge, and leaned out.

Misty rain settled on her long eyelashes, forcing her to blink.

The taxi pulled away, and she called out with a plaintive urgency that seemed harsh and almost hysterical in the stillness of the night.

I walked back toward the tourist beat, aimlessly, thinking about Ulla and the business, whatever it was, that her boyfriend, Modena, was involved in with Maurizio. Didier had told me they were successful, they were making money, but Ulla seemed afraid and unhappy. And there was something else that Didier had said- something about danger. I tried to remember the words he'd used.

What were they? Terrible risk... great violence...

My mind was still shuffling through those thoughts when I realised that I was in Karla's street. I passed her ground-floor apartment. The wide French doors, leading directly from the street, were open. A desultory breeze riffled the gauze curtains, and I saw a soft yellow light, a candle, glowing within.

The rain grew heavier, but a restlessness I couldn't fight or understand kept me walking. Vinod's love song, the song that rang bells in the dome of the Gateway Monument, was running on a loop in my mind. My thoughts floated back to the boat sailing on the surreal lake that the monsoon had made of the street. The look in Karla's eyes-commanding, demanding-drove the restlessness to a kind of fury in my heart. I had to stop, sometimes, in the rain, to draw deep breaths. I was choking with love and desire. There was anger in me, and pain. My fists were clenched. The muscles of my arms and chest and back were tight and taut. I thought of the Italian couple, the junkies in Anand's hotel, and I thought of death and dying. The black and brooding sky finally ruptured and cracked.

Lightning ripped into the Arabian Sea, and thunder followed with deafening applause.

I began to run. The trees were dark, their leaves wet through.

They looked like small black clouds themselves, those trees, each one shedding its shower of rain. The streets were empty. I ran through puddles of fast-flowing water, reflecting the lightning fractured sky. All the loneliness and all the love I knew collected and combined in me, until my heart was as swollen with love for her as the clouds above were swollen with their mass of rain. And I ran. I ran. And, somehow, I was back in that street, back at the doorway to her house. And then I stood there, clawed by lightning, my chest heaving with a passion that was still running in me while my body stood still.

She came to the open doors to look at the sky. She was wearing a thin, white, sleeveless nightgown. She saw me standing in the storm. Our eyes met, and held. She came through the doors, down two steps, and walked toward me. Thunder shook the street, and lightning filled her eyes. She came into my arms.

We kissed. Our lips made thoughts, somehow, without words: the kind of thoughts that feelings have. Our tongues writhed, and slithered in their caves of pleasure. Tongues proclaiming what we were. Human. Lovers. Lips slid across the kiss, and I submerged her in love, surrendering and submerging in love myself.

I lifted her in my arms and carried her into the house, into the room that was perfumed with her. We shed our clothes on the tiled floor, and she led me to her bed. We lay close, but not touching.

In the storm-lit darkness, the beaded sweat and raindrops on her arm were like so many glittering stars, and her skin was like a span of night sky. I pressed my lips against the sky, and licked the stars into my mouth. She took my body into hers, and every movement was an incantation. Our breathing was like the whole world chanting prayers. Sweat ran in rivulets to ravines of pleasure. Every movement was a satin skin cascade. Within the velvet cloaks of tenderness, our backs convulsed in quivering heat, pushing heat, pushing muscles to complete what minds begin and bodies always win. I was hers. She was mine. My body was her chariot, and she drove it into the sun. Her body was my river, and I became the sea. And the wailing moan that drove our lips together, at the end, was the world of hope and sorrow that ecstasy wrings from lovers as it floods their souls with bliss.

The still and softly breathing silence that suffused and submerged us, afterward, was emptied of need, and want, and hunger, and pain, and everything else except the pure, ineffable exquisiteness of love.

A twitch of irritation creased my forehead with a frown. I was momentarily annoyed that she should press the point when I'd told her that I'd given my word: that should've been enough. But she was lovely in that moonless light, and she was right to be annoyed, while I wasn't.

I ran to Arthur Bunder Road through the deserted market. White canvas covers on the market stalls gave them the appearance of shrouded cadavers in the cool-room of a morgue. My footsteps running made scattered echoes, as if ghosts were running with me.

I crossed Arthur Bunder Road and entered Mereweather Road, running along that boulevard of trees and tall mansions, with no sight or sound of the million people who passed there during each busy day.

At the first crossroad I turned left to avoid the flooded streets, and I saw a cop riding a bicycle ahead. I ran on in the centre of the road, and a second bicycle cop pulled out of a dark driveway as I passed. When I was exactly half way into the side street, the first police jeep appeared at the end of the street.

I heard the second jeep behind me and then the cyclists converged. The jeep pulled up beside me, and I stopped. Five men got out and surrounded me. There was silence for a few seconds.

It was a silence of such delicious menace that the cops were almost drunk with it, and their eyes were lit with riot in the softly falling rain.

I stepped into the back of the covered jeep, and they sat me on the floor. There were six men in the back of the jeep, and they all had their hands on me.

We drove the two short blocks to the Colaba police station, across the road from Leopold's. As we entered the police compound, I noticed that the street in front of Leopold's was deserted. Ulla wasn't there, where she'd said she would be. Did she set me up? I wondered, my heart thumping with dread. That made no sense, but still the thought became a worm that gnawed through all the walls I put up in my mind.

The night duty officer was a squat, overweight Maharashtrian who, like many of his colleagues in the police force, squeezed himself into a uniform that was at least two sizes too small for him. The thought occurred to me that the discomfort it must've caused might help to explain his evil disposition. There was certainly no humour in him or any of the ten cops who surrounded me, and I felt a perverse urge to laugh out loud as their scowling, heavy breathing silence persisted. Then the duty officer addressed his men, and the laughter in me died.

If he knew that I spoke Marathi, and could understand him, he gave no indication of it. He spoke to his men as if I wasn't there. "Beat him hard. Give him a solid beating. Don't break any bones, if you can help it, but beat him hard, and then throw him into the jail with the others."

I ran. I pushed through the circle of cops, cleared the landing outside the duty room in a single leap, and hit the gravel yard of the compound, running. It was a stupid mistake, and not the last I was to make in the next few months. Mistakes are like bad loves, Karla once said, the more you learn from them, the more you wish they'd never happened. My mistake that night took me to the front gate of the compound, where I collided with a round-up party, and collapsed in a tangle of tied and helpless men.

The cops dragged me back to the duty room, punching and kicking me all the way. They tied my hands behind my back with coarse, hemp rope, and removed my boots before tying my feet together.

The short, fat duty officer produced a thick coil of rope, and ordered his men to bind me with it from ankles to shoulders.

Puffing and panting with his rage, he watched as I was trussed in so many coils of rope that I resembled an Egyptian mummy. The cops then dragged me to an adjoining room, and hoisted me up to hang me at chest height from a hook, face down, with the hook jammed through several coils of rope at my back.

The cops spun me around faster and faster. The hook held my bound hands in the bunched ropes, and my head hung down, level with my drooping feet. I whirled and spun until I lost my sense of up or down in the twirling room. Then the beatings began.

Five or six men hit my spinning body as hard and as often as they could, cracking their cane lathis against my skin. The stinging blows struck with piercing pain through the ropes, and on my face, arms, legs, and feet. I could sense that I was bleeding.

The screaming rose up in me, but I clenched my jaws and gave the pain no sound of my own. I wouldn't let them have it. I wouldn't let them hear me scream.

Silence is the tortured man's revenge. Hands reached out, stopping my body, holding it still, while the room continued to whirl. Then they spun me in the opposite direction, and the beating began again.

When their sport was done, they dragged me up the metal steps to the lock-up-the same metal steps I'd climbed with Prabaker when I'd tried to help Kano's bear-handlers. Will someone come to help _me? I asked myself. No-one had seen my arrest on the deserted street, and no-one knew where I was. Ulla, if she came to Leopold's at all, if she wasn't actually involved in my arrest, wouldn't know that I'd been arrested. And Karla-what could Karla think, but that I'd abandoned her after we'd made love? She wouldn't find me. Prison systems are black holes for human bodies: no light escapes from them, and no news. With that mysterious arrest, I'd vanished into one of the city's darkest black holes. I'd disappeared from the city as completely as if I'd caught a plane to Africa.

And why was I arrested? The questions buzzed and swarmed in my whirling mind. Did they know who I really was? If they didn't know-if it was something else, if it had nothing to do with who I really was-there would still be questions, identification procedures, maybe even fingerprint checks. My prints were on file all over the world, through the Interpol agency. It was only a question of time before my real identity emerged. I had to get a message out to... someone. Who could help me? Who was powerful enough to help me? Khaderbhai. Lord Abdel Khader Khan. With all of his contacts in the city, especially in the Colaba area, he would surely find out that I'd been arrested. In time, Khaderbhai would know. Until then, I had to sit tight, and try to get a message out to him.

Trussed up in the mummifying ropes, dragged up the hard metal stairs one bruising bump at a time, I forced my thoughts to settle on that mantra, and I repeated it to the thumping beat of my heart: Get a message to Khaderbhai... Get a message to Khaderbhai...

At the top landing of the stairs, they threw me into the long prison corridor. The duty officer ordered prisoners to remove the ropes from my body. He stood in the gateway of the lock-up, watching them with his fists on his hips. At one point, he kicked me two, three times to encourage them to work faster. When the last of the ropes was removed and passed through to the guards, he ordered them to lift me and stand me up, facing him at the open gate. I felt their hands numbly on my deadened skin, and I opened my eyes, through blood, to see his grimace of a smile.

He spoke to me in Marathi and then spat in my face. I tried to raise my arm to hit back at him, but the other prisoners held me fast. Their hands were gentle, but firm. They helped me into the archway of the first open cell-room, and eased me to the concrete floor. I looked up to see his face as he shut the gate. Loosely but accurately translated, he'd said to me, You're fucked. Your life is over.

I saw the steel bars of the gate swing shut, and felt the creeping coldness numb my heart. Metal slammed against metal. The keys jangled and turned in the lock. I looked into the eyes of the men around me, the dead eyes and the frenzied, the resentful eyes and the fearing. Somewhere, deep inside me, a drum began to beat. It mightVe been my heart. I felt my body, my whole body, tense and clench as if it was a fist. There was a taste, thick and bitter, at the back of my mouth. I struggled to swallow it down and then I knew, I remembered. It was the taste of hatred- my hatred, theirs, the guards', and the world's. Prisons are the temples where devils learn to prey. Every time we turn the key we twist the knife of fate, because every time we cage a man we close him in with hate.

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CHAPTER TWENTY