CHAPTER SIXTEEN

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.

____________________

CHAPTER TWENTY

The first floor of the lock-up at Colaba police station had four big cell rooms beyond the flexi-steel gate. A corridor connected the four rooms. On one side the corridor gave access to the rooms. On the other side it looked out, through steel mesh, onto the quadrangle of the police compound. There were more cells below. It was in one of those ground-floor cells that Kano the bear had been detained. Transients, who spent only one or two nights in custody, were held on the ground floor. Anyone likely to stay for a week or longer in the Colaba lock-up climbed the steps or was dragged up them, as I was, and passed through the sliding steel gate into one of hell's antechambers.

There were no doors beyond the steel gate. Each of the four rooms was accessed through a blank arch that was slightly wider than the average house doorway. The rooms were roughly three metres square. The corridor was just wide enough for two men to pass each other with their shoulders touching, and it was about sixteen metres long. At the end of the corridor there was a urinal and a keyhole-shaped squatting-toilet, both without doors.

A tap, providing water for washing and drinking, was fixed above the urinal.

The four rooms and corridor might've held forty men with an acceptable level of discomfort. When I woke up, on my first morning, I discovered that there were, in fact, two hundred and forty of us. The place was a hive, a termite's nest, a writhing mass of human beings, pressing against one another with every little movement of an arm or a leg. The toilet was ankle-deep in shit. The urinal overflowed. A stinking swamp oozed out of them into the far end of the corridor. The still, thickly humid monsoon air was clogged with moaning, murmurings, talking, complaining, shouting, and the screams, every few hours, of men going mad. I remained there for three weeks. The first of the four rooms, where I'd slept the first night, held only fifteen men. It was furthest from the sickening smell of the toilet. It was clean. There was space to lie down. The men who lived in that room were all rich-rich enough to pay the cops to beat up anyone who tried to squeeze in without an invitation.

The room was known as the Taj Mahal, and its residents were known as the pandrah kumar, the fifteen princes.

The second room held twenty-five men. I learned that they were all crooks: men who'd served hard time at least once before, and were prepared to fight, fast and dirty, to preserve a space for themselves. Their room was known as the chor mahal, the abode of thieves, and the men were known as the black hats, the kala topis - like Ranjit's lepers-because convicted thieves at the infamous Arthur Road Prison were forced to wear a black hat with their prison uniform.

The third room had forty men wedged into it, sitting shoulder to shoulder around the walls, and taking turns to stretch out in the little space left in the centre of the room. They weren't as hard as the men in the second room, but they were proud and willing.

They claimed the small squares of space they sat in, and then struggled to hold them against incursions by newcomers. They were constantly under pressure: every day, at least one of them lost a fight and lost his place to a new, tougher man. Still, the optimal number for the third room was forty men and, since it rarely rose above that limit, it was known as the chaaliss mahal, or the abode of the forty.

The fourth room was known in the lock-up slang as the dukh mahal, or the abode of suffering, but many men preferred to use the name that the Colaba police had given the last cell in the row: the detection room. When a new man entered the corridor for the first time, through the steel gate, he sometimes tried his luck in the first room. Every one of the fifteen men in that room, and not a few lackeys in the corridor, would rise up, shoving and threatening him away, shouting: Next room! Next room, bastard!

Driven along the corridor by the writhing, toiling press of bodies, the man might try to enter the second room. If no-one there knew him, whoever happened to be near the door would give him a clip, a smack in the mouth. Next room, motherfucker! If the man, badly rattled by then, tried to enter the third room as he was pushed further along the corridor, the two or three men who sat or stood in the doorway of that room would punch and kick at him. Next room! Next room, sisterfucker!

When the new man found himself shoved all the way to the fourth room, the detection room, he would be greeted as an old and very welcome friend. Come in, friend! Come in, brother!

Those foolish enough to enter were beaten and stripped naked by the fifty or sixty men who crushed into that black and foetid room. Their clothes were distributed according to a waiting list determined by a precise and perpetually adjusted pecking order.

Their body cavities were thoroughly searched for jewellery, drugs, or money. Any valuables went to the king of the detection room. During my weeks there, the king of the last room was a huge gorilla of a man with no neck, and a hairline that began little more than the thickness of a thumb above his single, thick eyebrow. The new men received filthy rags to wear-the rags that had been discarded by those who'd received their stolen clothes.

They then had two options: to leave the room and fend for themselves with the hundred men who lived in the impossibly crowded corridor, or to join the detection-room gang and wait for opportunities to prey on other hapless new men in the chain of muggings. From what I saw in those three weeks, about one man in every five who was brutalised and dispossessed in that last room took the second option.

Even the corridor had its pecking order, its struggles over a foothold of space, and its claim-jumpers who challenged the strength or bravery of rivals. Places near the front gate and relatively far from the toilet were prized. Yet even at the foul end of the corridor, where shit and piss flowed onto the floor in a repulsive, reeking sludge, men fought each other for an inch of space that was slightly shallower in the muck.

A few of those men who were forced to the end of the corridor, forced to stand ankle-deep in shit all day and all night, finally fell down and died. One man died in the lock-up while I was there, and several others were carried out in a state so close to death that I'd found it impossible to rouse them to consciousness. Others summoned the raging madness required to fight their way, minute by minute, hour by hour, metre by metre, day by day, and man by man, along the concrete anaconda's intestine to a place where they could stand and go on living, until the beast disgorged them through the same steel jaws that had swallowed their lives whole.

We received one meal a day, at four in the afternoon. It was dhal and roti, mostly, or rice with a thin curry sauce. There was also chai and a slice of bread in the early morning. The prisoners tried to organise themselves into two orderly lines, approaching and leaving the gate where the cops gave out food. But the crush of bodies, and the desperate hunger, and the greed of a few caused chaos at every meal. Many men missed out. Some went hungry for a day or longer.

We all received a flat aluminium plate when we entered the lock up. The plate was our only legal possession. There was no cutlery - we ate with our hands-and there were no cups: chai was ladled out onto the plates, and we sucked it off them with our mouths pressed into the thin pool of liquid. But the plates had other uses, first among which was in the manufacture of a makeshift stove. If two aluminium plates were bent into V shapes and used as stands, a third plate could rest on top of them. With a fuel source burning in the space between the bent, inverted plates and beneath the flat plate, a stove was created which could be used to reheat tea or food. The ideal fuel source was a flat rubber sandal. When one of those rubber shoes was lit at one end, it burned evenly and slowly all the way to the other end. The smoke given off was acrid and thick with a greasy soot that settled on everything it touched. The detection room, where two such stoves burned for some time every night, was blackened across its filthy floor and walls, as were the faces of all the men who lived there.

The stoves were a source of income for the kingpins in the detection room: they used them to re-heat chai and saved food, at a price, for the rich men in room one. The guards allowed deliveries of food and drink-for those who could afford it- during the day, but nothing passed through the gate at night. The fifteen princes, unstinting in the pursuit of their comforts, had bribed the cops to provide a small saucepan, and several plastic bottles and containers, in which to store chai and food. In that way, when deliveries had ceased every night, the princes still enjoyed hot chai and snacks.

Because the aluminium plates could only be used as stoves for so long before they became brittle and collapsed, new plates were always in demand. Because food and chai and even the rubber sandals used as fuel could all be turned into money, they too were always required. The weakest men lost their sandals, their plates, and their food. Those with the heart to help them, by sharing the use of their plates, had to eat in scrambled gulps, and then hand on the plates to be used again. As many as four men often ate off one plate, in that way, during the six or seven minutes that the cops allowed for food to be distributed at the steel gate.

Every day I looked into the eyes of starving men. I saw them watching other men shove hot food too quickly into their mouths with their fingers while cops ladled out the last of the meals. I saw them, every day, watching and waiting and fearing that they might miss out. The truth that filled their eyes was something we only ever know about ourselves in cruel and desperate hunger. I took it into myself, that truth, and the part of my heart that broke to see it has never healed.

And every night in room one, the Taj Mahal, the fifteen princes ate a hot meal and drank hot, sweet tea, heated up on the makeshift stoves in the detection room, before stretching out to sleep.

Even the princes, of course, had to use the toilet. The procedure was as vile and dehumanising for them as it was for the poorest prisoner; and in that, if in nothing else, we were all nearly equal. The long journey through the jungle of limbs and bodies in the corridor ended in the stinking swamp. There, the rich men, like the rest of us, packed their nostrils with strips of cloth torn from a shirt or singlet, and clamped a lit beedie cigarette between their teeth to fight the smell. With pants hitched to their knees, and sandals held in their hand, they then waded barefoot into the sewage to squat over the keyhole toilet. The toilet was unblocked, and functioned well enough; but with more than two hundred men using it, once or twice a day, every day, it was soon fouled by those who missed the keyhole in the floor.

Eventually, the piles of excrement slid down into the pools of urine that flowed from the shallow urinal. That was the filthy sludge through which we waded on our way to the toilet. Wading back to the urinal, the rich men then washed their hands and feet at the tap, without soap, and stepped on bundles of rags that were heaped like stepping-stones and formed a makeshift dam before the entrance to the detection room. For the price of a cigarette butt or a half-smoked beedie, men squatting in the muck would clean their feet once more with rags, and then they could begin the long struggle back along the corridor.

It was presumed that I had money, because I was a white foreigner, so the rich men in room one had invited me to join them when I'd woken in their room on my first morning. The idea appalled me. I'd been raised in a family of Fabian socialists, and I'd inherited their stubborn, impractical revulsion for social iniquity in all its forms. Imbued with their principles, and being a product, as a young man, of a revolutionary age, I'd become a revolutionary myself. Some of that commitment to _The _Cause, as my mother had called it, was still there in the core of my being. Moreover, I'd been living in a slum for many months with the city's poor. So I refused the offer-reluctantly I must admit-to enjoy the comforts of the rich. Instead, I muscled my way into the second room with the hard men who'd all served time in prison. There was a brief scuffle at the doorway but, when it was clear that I was prepared to fight for a place in the abode of thieves, they shuffled themselves around, and made room for me. Still, there was some resentment. The black hats, like self respecting crooks everywhere, were proud men. It wasn't long before they manufactured an opportunity to test me out.

On one of the long, squirming trips back from the toilet, three days after my arrest, a man in the crowd of prisoners tried to wrestle my plate away from me. I shouted a warning, in Hindi and Marathi, making the threat as anatomically impolite as my vocabulary would allow. It didn't stop him. The man was taller than I was, and bigger by some thirty kilos. His hands grasped the plate near my own, and we both pulled, but neither of us had the gross strength to wrest it away. All the men fell silent.

Their breathing was a tidal swirl of sound and warm air around us. It was a face off. Make or break: I made my way in that world, right there and then, or I broke down, and let myself be forced into the foetid swamp at the end of the corridor.

Using the man's grip on the plate as leverage, I smashed my head onto the bridge of his nose, five, six, seven times, and then again on the point of his chin as he tried to pull away. Alarm surged through the crowd. A dozen pairs of hands shoved at us, crushing our bodies and faces together. Packed into the press of frightened men, unable to move my hands, and unwilling to release the plate, I bit into his face. My teeth pierced his cheek until I tasted his blood in my mouth. He dropped the plate and screamed. Thrashing wildly, he scrambled through the bodies in the corridor to the steel gate. I followed him, with my hand reaching out for his back. Grasping the bars, he shook the gate and screeched for help. I caught him just as the watchman turned his keys in the lock. I grabbed at him as he escaped through the gate. His T-shirt stretched behind him, and for a second he was stuck there, his legs running but his body quite still. Then the T-shirt gave way, and I was left with a chunk of it in my hand as the man staggered through the opening. He cowered behind the watchman, his back pressed against the wall. His face was opened at the cheek where my teeth had cut him, and blood streamed from his nose down his throat to his chest. The gate slammed shut. The cop stared, smiling inscrutably, as I used the T-shirt to wipe the blood from my hands and the plate. Satisfied, I threw the shirt at the gate. I turned and squeezed my way through the silent crowd, taking my place in the thieves' room once more.

I didn't ask him what he was in for because the Australian prison protocol, followed by crooks of the old school-crooks who know there is a protocol, and who taught me about it, when I'd started my jail sentence with them-dictates that you don't ask a man about the crimes he might've committed until you like him enough to make him a friend, or dislike him enough to make him an enemy.

My name is Mahesh. What is your good name?"

I smiled for the first time since the police had picked me up. In prison, a man rations his smiles because predatory men see smiling as a weakness, weak men see it as an invitation, and prison guards see it as a provocation to some new torment.

Mahesh sighed, and his broad, dark face folded inward in a resigned frown. His wide-spaced brown eyes were so deep-set that they seemed to be hiding or seeking shelter beneath the ridge of his scarred brow. His wide nose, broken more than once, dominated his face and gave him a tougher look than his small mouth and rounded chin might've managed on their own.

Until then, we smoke, and pray to the God, and bite any sisterfuckers who try to take our plates, na?"

And for three weeks we did just that. We smoked too much, and we troubled deaf heaven with our prayers, and we fought with some men, and sometimes we comforted other men who were losing the will to smoke and pray and fight. And one day they came to take our fingerprints, pressing the black, traitorous loops and whorls onto a page that promised to tell a truth, a vile truth, and nothing but that truth. And then Mahesh and I were crushed with other men into an ancient blue prison truck-eighty men in the black womb of the truck, where thirty would've been too many-and driven toward Arthur Road Prison at reckless speeds through the streets of the city that we all loved too much.

Inside the gates of the prison, guards dragged us off the tailgate of the truck and told us to squat on the ground, while other guards processed us and signed us into the prison, one by one. It took four hours, shuffling forward and squatting on our haunches, and they left me till last. The guards had been told that I understood Marathi. Their watch commander tested the assertion, when I was alone with them, by ordering me to stand. I stood up on painfully stiff legs, and he ordered me to squat again. When I squatted down, he ordered me to stand again. That mightVe gone on indefinitely, judging by the hilarity it provoked in the gallery of surrounding guards, but I refused to play. He continued to give the commands, but I ignored him. When he stopped, we stared at one another across the kind of silence I've only ever known in prisons or on the battlefield. It's a silence you can feel on your skin. It's a silence you can smell, and taste, and even hear, somehow, in a dark space at the back of your head. Slowly, the commander's sinful smile retreated into the snarl of hate that had spawned it. He spat on the ground at my feet.

He pointed toward an archway that led into the prison's interior.

There was a hard right turn, just a little way into the arch, and I knew, the way all animals know, that harm waited for me there.

To encourage me, the guards rammed their batons into my back. I stumbled into the arch, and took the right turn. Some twenty men were waiting for me, lined up on either side of the long corridor and armed with bamboo sticks.

I knew the gauntlet well-better than any man should. There'd been another tunnel of pain, in another country: the punishment unit in the prison I'd escaped from in Australia. Those guards had made us run their gauntlet down a long narrow corridor, leading to the tiny exercise yards. And as we ran they'd swung their batons and kicked us, all the way to the steel door at the end of the line.

I stood in the harsh electric light of that new tunnel, in Bombay's Arthur Road Prison, and I wanted to laugh. Hey guys, I wanted to say, can't you be a little more original? But I couldn't speak. Fear dries a man's mouth, and hate strangles him.

That's why hate has no great literature: real fear and real hate have no words.

I walked slowly forward. The men were dressed in white shirts and shorts, with white caps on their heads, and wide black leather belts around their waists. The brass buckles on those belts carried numbers and a title. The title was Convict Overseer. They weren't prison guards, I soon discovered. In the Indian prison system, inherited from the days of the British Raj, the prison guards had very little to do with the day-to-day operation of the prison. Those everyday tasks of maintaining routines, order, and discipline were the preserve of convict overseers. Convicted murderers and other long-term serial offenders received sentences of fifteen years or more. During the first five of those years they were common prisoners. During the second five years they earned the privilege of a job in the kitchen, laundry, prison industries, or clean-up gangs. During the third and final five years they often accepted the hat, leather belt, and bamboo stick of a convict overseer. Then, the power of life and death was in their hands. Two lines of those convicted killers, who'd become guards themselves, awaited me in the tunnel. They raised their sticks and fixed their eyes on me, anticipating a charging run that might deprive them of the sporting chance to inflict some pain. I didn't run. I wish I could say, now, that I walked that night and didn't run because of something noble and brave that I found inside myself, but I can't. I've thought about it often. I've recalled and relived that walk a thousand times, and each time I remember it, there's less certainty about the why of it. Every virtuous act has some dark secret in its heart, Khaderbhai once told me, and every risk we take contains a mystery that can't be solved.

I walked toward them slowly, and I began to think of the long concrete path that leads from the shore to the shrine at Haji Ali: the mosque that floats like a great moored ship on the moonlit sea. That view of the monument to the revered saint, and the journey between the waves to the floating pavilions, was one of my beloved images of the city. Its beauty, for me, was like the angel that a man sees in the sleeping face of the woman he loves. And it might've been just that, beauty alone, that saved me. I was walking into the worst of the city, one of her cruellest and most iniquitous defiles, but some instinct flooded my mind with a loveliness I'd found in her-that path, across the sea, to the white minarets of the saint's tomb.

The bamboo sticks whipped and cracked, ripping and slashing at my arms and legs and back. Some blows hit my head, my neck, and my face. Swung with maximum force, by strong arms against bare skin, the blows from the bamboo sticks were a cross between a hot metal burn and an electric shock. The sticks were split at the ends.

They opened razor-thin cuts wherever they landed. Blood began to run from my face and the exposed skin on my arms.

I walked on as slowly and steadily as I could. I flinched often when the sticks smacked into my face or across my ear, but I never cringed or cowered or raised my hands. To keep my hands at my sides, I clutched at the legs of my jeans. And the attack, which had begun with frenzied violence, dwindled to fewer blows as I walked the gauntlet. It ceased altogether when I reached the last men in the lines. It was a kind of victory, seeing those men lower their sticks and their eyes as I passed them. The only victory that really counts in prison, an old-timer in the Australian jail once said to me, is survival. But survival means more than simply being alive. It's not just the body that must survive a jail term: the spirit and the will and the heart have to make it through as well. If any one of them is broken or destroyed, the man whose living body walks through the gate, at the end of his sentence, can't be said to have survived it. And it's for those small victories of the heart, and the spirit, and the will that we sometimes risk the body that cradles them.

The overseers and several guards brought me through the prison, in the darkening evening, to one of the many dormitory blocks.

The large, high-ceilinged room was twenty-five paces long and ten paces wide. There were barred windows that gave views of open areas around the building, and there were two tall steel gates, one at either end of the room. In a bathroom near one entrance, there were three clean keyhole toilets. When the guards locked us in for the night, there were one hundred and eighty prisoners in that room, and twenty convict overseers.

One quarter of the room was reserved for the overseers. They had their own stack of clean blankets. They arranged them with free space all around, and in piles eight or ten thick to provide soft beds. The rest of us were squeezed into two lines in the remaining three-quarters of the room, with a no-man's land of about four paces between our part of the room and the area claimed by the overseers.

Each of us had one blanket, taken from a neatly folded stack at the crowded end of the room. The blankets were folded down their length, and placed side to side on the stone floor against the long walls. We lay down on the narrow blankets, with our shoulders rubbing against one another. Our heads touched the side walls, and our feet pointed in toward the centre of the room. The bright lights remained on all night. The overseers on night watch took turns to walk the length of the room between the rows of feet. They all carried whistles on chains around their necks, which they used to summon the guards in the event of any trouble they couldn't handle themselves. I soon learned that they were reluctant to use the whistle, and there was very little trouble that was beyond their power.

The overseers gave me five minutes to wash the drying blood off my face and neck and arms, and to use the immaculately clean squat toilet. When I returned to the main room they offered me the opportunity to sleep at their end of the room. They assumed, no doubt, that my white skin was connected to a supply of money.

And they may have allowed themselves, in some small way, to be influenced by the fact that I'd walked their gauntlet without running. Whatever their reasons, I couldn't do it-they were the very men who'd beaten me only minutes before, the men who'd transformed themselves into prison guards-and I refused their offer. It was a huge mistake. As I walked to the far end of the room, took a blanket from the pile, and put it down next to Mahesh, they sneered and laughed. They were furious that I'd rejected the rare offer to join them, and they conspired, as cowards with power often will, to break my spirit.

In the night I woke from monstrous dreams with a piercing pain in my back. I sat up, scratching at my back to find an insect about the size of a small thumbtack attached to my skin. I wrenched it loose, and put it on the stone floor to examine it. The creature was dark grey, fat, swollen almost to round, with a multitude of legs. I squashed it with my hand. Blood spurted out. It was my own blood. The creature had feasted itself on me in my sleep. At once, a foul smell filled my nostrils. It was my first encounter with the parasite known as kadmal, the scourge of prisoners in the Arthur Road Prison. Nothing stopped them. They bit, and sucked blood, every night. The small, round wounds they made soon festered into poison-filled pustules. In any one night there were three to five bites; in a week, there were twenty; and, in a month, there were a hundred suppurating, infected sores on a man's body. And nothing stopped them.

I stared at the stupid mess that the squashed kadmal made, stunned to see how much blood the tiny creature had managed to drain from me. Suddenly there was a stabbing pain at my ear as the night watch overseer swung his bamboo lathi against my head.

I started up in anger, but Mahesh stopped me. His hands locked onto my arm, and he dragged me down with all his weight.

The overseer glared at me until I lay down again. He resumed his pacing of the brightly lit room, and Mahesh mouthed a warning to me. Our faces were only a hand's width apart. All along the two lines of sleepers, men were jammed together, arms and legs intertwined in sleep. The terror that spiked in Mahesh's eyes, and the whimper that he clamped with a hand to his mouth, were the last things that I saw and heard on that first night.

I closed my eyes, and closed my heart, and willed myself to sleep.

____________________

The overseers woke us a little after dawn, beating any man unfortunate enough to be asleep when they reached him. I was awake and ready, yet I too received a blow from a stick. I growled in anger and started up quickly, but Mahesh stopped me once again. We folded our blankets according to a precise pattern, and placed them in the pile at our end of the room. The guards opened the large steel gates from the outside, and we filed out of the room to assemble for the morning wash. The rectangular bathing area, something like an empty aboveground pool or a dry stone pond, had a huge cast-iron tank at one end.

As we approached, a prisoner opened a valve at the base of the tank, allowing a small jet of water to escape from a pipe that protruded at about shin-height. He scampered up a steel ladder and sat on top of the tank to watch. Men rushed for the pipe, and held their flat aluminium plates under the thin stream of water that issued from it. The crush of men at the tank was ten deep and ten wide: a huge knot of muscle and bone, straining and struggling to reach the pipe.

I waited until the crowd thinned out, watching the men wash themselves with the little water available. A few men, one in twenty, had pieces of soap, and attempted to lather themselves before returning to the pipe for more water. By the time I approached the pipe, the tank was almost empty. The trickle of water that I collected in my plate was wriggling with hundreds of maggot-like creatures. I thrust the plate away in disgust, and several men around me laughed.

You better grab some, if you want a wash before tomorrow morning.

This is it, brother. We can't be washing in the dormitory. That is a special for the overseers only. They let you wash there last night, because you had a lot of blood on you. But you'll never use that washing place again. We use the toilet inside, but we don't wash there. This is your only washing, brother."

I held the plate under the ever-diminishing trickle of water and then tipped the seething mass of worms over my chest and back, as Mahesh had done. Like all the Indian men I knew, I wore a pair of shorts-the over-underpants, Prabaker had called them in the village-under my jeans. I discarded the jeans, and the next plate full of wriggling beasts went down the front of my shorts.

By the time the overseers began hitting us with their sticks to herd us back into the dormitory, I was as clean as it was possible to be without soap, and using worm-infested water.

In the dormitory we squatted for an hour while we waited for the guards to make the morning head-count. After a time, the squatting caused us excruciating pain in our legs. Whenever anyone tried to stretch or straighten his legs, however, one of the patrolling overseers struck him a vicious blow. I didn't move in the line. I didn't want them to have the satisfaction of seeing me give in to the pain. But as I closed my eyes in sweating concentration, one of them struck me anyway, without cause or provocation. I began to stand, and once again I felt the restraining hands of Mahesh warning me to be still. When a second, third, and then a fourth blow ripped into my ear, over the space of fifteen minutes, I snapped.

Silence imploded in the room, swallowing every sound. No-one moved. Big Rahul stared. His broad expression, a parody of amused condescension, was infuriating. Slowly, the convict overseers began to converge in support of him. "Come here!" I shouted in Hindi. "Come on, hero! Let's go! I'm ready!"

Suddenly Mahesh and five or six other prisoners rose up all around me and clung to my body, trying to force me down to a squatting position.

There was a moment, while they pulled at my arms and shoulders, when Big Rahul and I made the kind of eye contact where each man knows everything about the violence in the other. His supercilious grin faded, and his eyes fluttered their signal of defeat. He knew it, and I knew it. He was afraid of me. I allowed the men to drag me down to a squatting position. He turned on his heel, and struck out reflexively at the nearest man crouching in the ranks. The tension in the room dissolved, and the head-count resumed.

Breakfast consisted of a single, large chapatti. We chewed them and sipped water during the five minutes allowed, and then the overseers marched us out of the room. We crossed several immaculately clean courtyards. In a broad avenue between fenced areas, the overseers forced us to squat in the morning sunlight while we waited to have our heads shaved. The barbers' wooden stools were in the shade of a tall tree. Every new prisoner had his hair clipped by one barber, and then a second barber shaved his head with a straight razor.

As we were waiting, we heard shouts coming from one of the fenced compounds near the barbers' courtyard. Mahesh nudged me, nodding his head for me to watch. Ten convict overseers dragged a man into the deserted compound beyond the wire fence. There were ropes attached to the man's wrists and waist. More ropes were attached to the buckles and rings of a thick leather collar fitted tightly around the man's neck. Teams of overseers were playing tug-of-war on the wrist ropes. The man was very tall and strong. His neck was as thick as the barrel of a cannon, and his powerful chest and back rippled with muscles. He was African. I recognised him. It was Hassaan Obikwa's driver, Raheem, the man I'd helped escape from the mob near Regal Circle.

We watched in a tight, fast-breathing silence. They manoeuvred Raheem to the centre of the compound, near a stone block about a metre high and a metre wide. He struggled and resisted them, but it was useless. More overseers joined in, with more ropes.

Raheem's legs went out from under him. Three men pulled on each wrist-rope with all their strength. His arms were drawn out so hard from his sides that I thought they might be torn from the sockets. His legs were splayed out at an excruciatingly unnatural angle. Other men, pulling on the ropes that passed through the leather collar, dragged his body toward the stone block. Using the ropes, the overseers stretched his left arm out, with the hand and forearm resting on the block.

Raheem lay beside the block, his other arm stretched out by another team of overseers. One of the overseers then climbed onto the block and jumped off onto Raheem's arm, with both feet, snapping the arm backwards in a sickening crunch of gristle and bone.

He couldn't scream, because the collar at his throat was too tight, but his mouth opened and closed on the scream that we made for him in our minds. His legs began to twitch and spasm. A violent shiver passed through his whole body, ending in a rapid shaking of his head that would've been funny if it wasn't so frightening. The overseers dragged him around until his right arm was resting on the block. The same man climbed the stone, talking all the while to one of his friends, pulling tension on a rope.

After a pause, he blew his nose with his fingers, scratched himself, and jumped onto the right arm, snapping it backwards.

Raheem lost consciousness. The convict overseers looped their ropes around his ankles and then dragged his body out of the compound. His arms flopped and flapped behind his body, as limp and lifeless as long black socks filled with sand.

Another man leaned close to us, speaking quickly.

Big Rahul walked toward us, resting the bamboo stick on his shoulder. He paused beside me, and brought the stick down with a lazy smack across my back. His laughter as he walked away down the line of waiting men was brutally loud, but it was also weak and false, and it didn't fool me. I'd heard that laugh before, in another prison across the world. I knew it well. Cruelty is a kind of cowardice. Cruel laughter is the way cowards cry when they're not alone, and causing pain is how they grieve. Squatting in the queue, I noticed with a revulsive flinch that tiny insects, lice, were crawling in the hair of the man in front of me. I'd been feeling itchy since I'd woken. Until that moment, I'd put it down to the bites of the kadmal, the rough blanket I'd slept on, and the many cuts I'd sustained in walking the gauntlet. I looked at the next man's hair. It, too, was crawling with writhing, white lice. I knew what that itchiness was, on my body and in my hair. I turned to look at Mahesh. His hair was alive with lice. I ruffled my own hair onto the palm of my hand, and there they were-white and crab-like, and too many to count at a glance.

Body lice. The blankets they'd forced us to use as sleeping mats were infested with them. Suddenly, the itchiness I felt was a crawling horror, and I knew that the filthy pests were all over my body. When my head was shaved, and we made our way back to the dormitory, Mahesh explained about the body lice, known as sheppesh.

He took off his T-shirt, and pulled it inside out. Holding the ribbed seam at the neck, he prised it apart and revealed the sheppesh crawling in the crease at the seam.

I watched him as he worked his way around the neck of his T-shirt, killing the body lice one by one. He moved on to the seams at the sleeves, then, and finally to the hem at the bottom of the shirt. There were scores of the lice, and he squashed each one expertly between his thumbnails.

When clean, put your pants with your shirt. Then your body-your arms underneath, your arse, your balls. And when your clothes they are clean, and your body it is clean, you get dressed again.

And you'll be okay, not so many sheppesh, until the night. And then you'll get too many new sheppesh on you from the blanket.

And no chance for sleeping without blanket, because the overseers will give you a solid pasting if you try. You can't avoid it. And then tomorrow, you start the whole business again. This is what we call sheppesh farming, and we are farmers every day at Arthur Road."

I looked around the open, rain-drenched courtyard beside the long dormitory, and a hundred men were busy farming, picking the lice from their clothes and killing them methodically. Some men didn't care. They scratched and shivered like dogs, and allowed the lice to breed on them. For me, the itchy, crawling violation of the body lice was a frenzy on the surface of my skin. I ripped my shirt off and examined the seam at the collar. The shirt was alive with them, squirming, burrowing, and breeding. I began to kill them, one by one, seam by seam. It was the work of several hours, and I practised it with fanatical assiduity, every morning that I spent in Arthur Road Prison, but I never felt clean there.

Even when I knew that I'd killed the lice, and rid myself of them temporarily, I still felt their wriggling, itching, crawling loathsomeness on my skin. And little by little, month by month, the horror of that creeping infestation pushed me to the edge.

For the whole of each day, between the early-morning head-count and the evening meal, we moved about within a large courtyard that was attached to our dormitory room. Some men played cards or other games. Some talked with friends, or tried to sleep on the stone paths. Not a few men, shuffling uncertainly on thin, tottering legs, talked a twitching madness to themselves, and stumbled into the walls until we turned them gently and set them on a new course.

Lunch, at Arthur Road, consisted of a watery soup ladled out onto our flat aluminium plates. The evening meal, served at four thirty with the addition of a single chapatti, was a repetition of that soup of the day. It was made with the peelings and discarded ends of various vegetables-peelings from beetroot on one day, from carrots the next, from pumpkins on the third day, and so on. The eyes and bruises, cut from potatoes, were used, as were the hard ends of courgettes, the papery outer skins of onions, and the muddy scrapings from turnips. We never saw pieces of the vegetables-those went to the guards and the convict overseers. In our soup, the scraps of peelings or stalky ends floated in a colourless, watery liquid. The large vat that the overseers wheeled into our compound for every meal brought one hundred and fifty ladled servings from the kitchens. There were one hundred and eighty men in the room. To remedy the deficiency, the overseers poured two buckets of cold water into the vat. They did that at every meal, with a ritual head-count and a pantomime display of inspiration as they solved the problem by adding the buckets of water. It never failed to rouse them to raucous laughter.

At six o'clock, after the evening meal, the guards counted us once more, and locked us in the long dormitory room. For two hours, then, we were permitted to talk, and to smoke charras, purchased from the overseers. Inmates at Arthur Road Prison received five ration tickets, called coupons, per month. Men with access to money could also purchase coupons. Some men held rolls with several hundred coupons in them. They used them to buy tea- two coupons bought a cup of hot tea-bread, sugar, jam, hot food, soap, shaving accessories, cigarettes, and the services of men who washed clothes or did other odd jobs. They were also the black-market currency in the prison. For six coupons, a man could buy a tiny goli, or a ball, of charras. For fifty he could buy a shot of penicillin. A few dealers also traded in heroin, for sixty coupons a fix, but the overseers were ruthless in their attempts to exterminate it. Heroin addiction was one of the few forces strong enough to overcome terror and challenge the torturers' authority. Most men, sane enough to fear the overseers' almost limitless power, satisfied themselves with the semi-legal charras, and the perfume of hashish often drifted through the room.

Every night the men gathered in groups to sing. Sitting in circles of twelve or more men, and tapping on their upturned aluminium plates as if they were tabla drums, the prisoners sang love songs from their favourite movies. They sang of heartbreak, and all the sorrows of loss. A particularly beloved song might start in one circle, be taken up by a second group for the next verses, and then move to a third group and a fourth before working its way back to the first. Around each circle of twelve or fifteen singers were twenty or thirty more men who provided the chorus of clapping hands and supporting voices. They cried openly as they sang, and they laughed together often. And with their music they helped one another to keep love alive in hearts that the city had forsaken, and forgotten.

At the end of the second week at Arthur Road, I met with two young men who were due for release within the hour. Mahesh assured me that they would carry a message for me. They were simple, illiterate village boys who'd visited Bombay and had found themselves caught in the round-up of unemployed youths. After three months in Arthur Road without any formal charge, they were finally being released. On a piece of paper I wrote the name and address of Abdel Khader Khan, and a short note informing him that I was in prison. I gave it to the men and promised to reward them when I was released. They joined their hands together in a blessing and then left me, their smiles bright and hopeful.

Later that day the overseers called our dormitory together with more than usual violence, and forced us to squat in close ranks.

As we watched, the two young men who'd tried to help me were dragged into the room and dumped against a wall. They were only semi-conscious. They'd been beaten viciously. Blood wept from wounds on their faces. Their mouths were swollen and their eyes were blackened. A snakeskin pattern of lathi bruises covered their bare arms and legs.

Help him, any of you, and you will get the same."

The overseers left the room to share a cigarette, and we rushed forward to help the men. I washed their wounds, and dressed the worst of them with strips of cloth. Mahesh helped me, and when we finished the job he took me outside to smoke a beedie.

Santosh is two years in this room, for no charge, and he doesn't know when he will go to court. I... I don't know how long you will be in this room. And, sorry, brother, nobody will help you now."

The weeks passed, and Mahesh was right-no-one risked the anger of the overseers to help me. Men were released from the room every week, and I approached as many of them as I could, and as carefully as possible, but none would help. My situation was becoming desperate. After two months at the prison, I guessed that I'd lost about twelve kilos. I looked thin. My body was covered in the small, suppurating sores caused by the bites of the nocturnal kadmal.

There were bruises caused by blows from overseers' canes on my arms, legs, back, face, and bald, shaved head. And all the time, every minute of every day and night, I worried that the report on my fingerprints would reveal who I really was. Almost every night the worry worked me into a sweating nightmare of the ten-year sentence I'd escaped from in Australia. That worry settled in my chest, squeezing my heart and often swelling to such a grotesque anguish that I felt myself choking, suffocating on it. Guilt is the hilt of the knife that we use on ourselves, and love is often the blade; but it's worry that keeps the knife sharp, and worry that gets most of us, in the end.

The frustration, dread, worry, and pain finally peaked when Big Rahul, the overseer who'd found in me a focus for the hatred and wretchedness he'd suffered in his twelve years at the prison, hit me one time too often. I was sitting near the entrance to the empty dormitory, and attempting to write down a short story that had emerged and developed in my mind over the last weeks. I'd been repeating the phrases of the story line by line and day after day as I'd created them. It was one of the meditations that kept me sane. When I managed, that morning, to scrounge a stub of pencil and a small sheaf of discarded sugar-ration wrappers, I felt ready at last to write down the lines of the first page. In a quiet moment, after farming for sheppesh, I began to write.

With all the stealth that malice manufactures, even in the gross and clumsy, Rahul crept up behind me and brought his lathi down on my left upper arm with bone-rattling force. His punishment stick was split at the end, and the blow ripped the skin of my arm open along the length of the muscle, almost from the shoulder to the elbow. Blood erupted from the deep cut and spilled over the fingers that I clamped on the wound.

Springing to my feet in red-vision rage, I reached out quickly and snatched the stick from Rahul's startled hand. Advancing towards him, I forced him backwards several paces into the empty room. There was a barred window beside me. I threw the stick through the bars. Rahul's eyes bulged with fear and astonishment.

It was the last thing he'd expected. He fumbled at his chest for his whistle. I kicked out in a twisting, flying front kick. He hadn't expected that, either. The ball of my foot struck him in the face between the nose and the mouth. He took several stumbling, backward steps. Rule number one of street fighting: stand your ground and never walk backwards, unless you're preparing a counter-strike. I followed him, pushing him on to the back foot and hitting him with a flurry of jabs and overhand rights. He put his head down, and covered up with his hands. Rule number two of street fighting: never put your head down. Aiming the punches for maximum damage, I punched him directly in the ear, on the temples, and at the throat. He was a bigger man than I was, and at least as strong, but he was no fighter. He buckled, and went to his knees, rolling over onto his side and pleading for mercy.

I looked up to see the other overseers running toward me from the yard outside. Backing up into a corner of the room, I took up a karate stance and waited for them. They ran at me. One of them was faster than the others. He rushed into striking range. I kicked out quickly. My foot struck him between the legs, with all the strength I had. I punched him three times before he hit the ground. His face was bloody. The blood smeared on the polished stone floor as he crawled away from me. The rest of them baulked.

They stood in a semi-circle around me, startled and confused, with their sticks raised in the air.

I punched my own face, hard, and punched it again, drawing blood from my lip. I swiped my right hand through the blood on my wounded arm and smeared it on my forehead. Lesson number three of street fighting: always get crazier than the other guy.

I'll rip someone's eye out with my fingers, and eat it! So come on! Let's get on with it! And hurry up, because God knows, I'm fuckin' hungry!"

They hesitated, and then drew back in a huddle to discuss the situation. I watched them, every muscle in my body as tight and taut as a leopard leaping to the kill. After half a minute of harsh whispering, the overseers reached a decision. They drew back further, and some of their number ran out of the room. I thought they must be running for the guards, but they returned in seconds with ten prisoners from my room. They ordered the men to sit on the ground, facing me, and then they began to beat them. The sticks rose and fell swiftly. The men shrieked and yowled. The beating ceased, after a minute, and they sent the ten men away. In a few seconds, they replaced them with ten more.

I looked at the men sitting on the ground, and then back at the overseer. I shook my head. The overseer gave the command, and the second group of ten men was beaten with the bamboo canes. Their cries rose up in piercing echoes, and wheeled about us in the stone room like a flock of frightened birds.

The next group of ten frightened men was assembled, facing me.

The overseers raised their sticks. Mahesh was in the third group.

One of the two men who'd been beaten and given an extra six-month sentence for trying to help me was also in the huddle of ten.

They looked at me. They were silent, but their eyes were pleading with me.

I put my hands down and took a step forward out of the corner.

The overseers rushed at me, and seized me with six pairs of hands. They shoved and dragged me to one of the barred steel gates, and forced me down on my back, with the top of my head resting against the steel bars. They kept several pairs of handcuffs in a locker at their end of the room. Using two sets of those antique iron devices, they chained my outstretched arms to the bars at the wrists, level with my head. They used coconut fibre rope to tie my legs together at the ankles.

Big Rahul knelt beside me, and brought his face close to mine.

The exertion of kneeling and bending and coping with his monstrous hatreds caused him to sweat and wheeze. His mouth was cut, and his nose was swollen. I knew that his head would ache for days from the punches I'd landed on his ear and his temple.

He smiled. You can never tell just how much badness there is in a man until you see him smile. I suddenly remembered a comment Lettie had made about Maurizio. If babies had wings, she said, he'd be the kind who'd pull them off. I started to laugh.

Helpless, with my arms stretched out and chained beside me, I laughed. Big Rahul frowned at me. His slack-lipped, cretinous puzzlement made me laugh the harder.

The beating began. Big Rahul exhausted himself in a furious assault that concentrated on my face and my genitals. When he could lift the stick no more, and was gasping for breath, the other overseers stepped in and continued the attack. They hammered at me with the bamboo lathis for twenty minutes or more.

Then they took a break to smoke cigarettes. I was wearing shorts and a singlet, nothing else. The canes had cut into me, flaying my skin, slicing and tearing it open from the soles of my feet to the top of my head.

After they'd smoked, the beating resumed. Some time later, I heard from the conversation around me that another group of overseers, from another room, had arrived. The new men, with fresh arms, lashed at my body. Their fury was merciless. When they were done, a third group of overseers launched a savage attack. Then there was a fourth group. Then the first group, from my own room, cracked and whipped their sticks at me with murderous brutality. It was ten thirty in the morning when the floggings began. They continued until eight o'clock that night.

I felt the neck of a glass bottle press against my mouth and teeth. Water flowed down my face. My arms were still stretched out beside me, and chained to the bars. My lips parted, and water flowed into my mouth. I swallowed quickly, gulping and spluttering. Hands held my head, and I felt two tablets enter my mouth, pushed by someone's fingers. The water bottle returned, and I drank, coughing water back through my nose.

Floating on my back, arms outstretched, my body was bruised and cut so extensively that no part of it escaped the pain. There was no way to measure or judge it because it was all pain, everywhere. My eyes were sealed shut. My mouth tasted blood and water. I drifted to sleep on a lake of sticky, numbing stone. The chorus of voices I heard was my own choir of screams and the shouts of pain I'd kept inside, and didn't give them, and wouldn't give them. They woke me, at dawn, by throwing a bucket of water on me. A thousand shrieking cuts woke with me. They permitted Mahesh to wash my eyes with a damp towel. When I could open them to see, they unlocked the handcuffs, lifted me by my stiff arms, and led me out of the room. We marched through empty courtyards and immaculately swept footpaths lined with geometrically perfect beds of flowers. At last we stopped before one of the senior prison officials. He was a man in his fifties. His grey hair and moustache were closely trimmed around his fine, almost feminine features. He was dressed in pyjamas and a silk brocade dressing gown. In the middle of a deserted courtyard, he was sitting in an elaborately carved, high-backed chair, something like a bishop's chair. Guards stood beside and behind him.

His English was the precise and rounded version of the language that was taught in good Indian schools. I knew, from those few sentences and the way he'd spoken them, that his education was a post-colonial parallel to my own. My mother, poor and worked into exhaustion every day of her life, had earned the money to send me to a school exactly such as his. Under other circumstances we might've discussed Shakespeare or Schiller or Bulfinch's Mythology. I knew that about him from those two sentences. What did he know about me?

I stared at him in silence. In the old school of Australian prisons you don't lag-or inform on-anyone. Not even the screws.

Not even convict overseers. You never tell on anyone, ever, for any reason.

The silence that followed his question was suddenly disturbed by the morning song of mynah birds. The sun was fully above the horizon, and golden light streamed through the misty air, scattering the dew. I felt the morning breeze on every one of the thousand cuts that stretched and cracked dried blood each time that I moved. With my mouth firmly shut, I breathed in the morning air of the city that I loved with all my heart.

The official examined his gold wristwatch for a moment, and then sighed his exasperation loudly.

I held my silence, and they led me back to the room. I knew the drill. I'd learned the hard way that it's wise to keep silent when prison authorities abuse their power: everything you do enrages them, and everything you say makes it worse. Despotism despises nothing so much as righteousness in its victims.

The chain-fitter was a cheerful, middle-aged man in the ninth year of a seventeen-year sentence for a double murder. He'd killed his wife and his best friend as they lay sleeping together, and then he'd turned himself in at the local police station.

With the ankle-chains fitted, he lifted the length of chain that would hobble my step. At its centre there was a wider link in the form of a ring. He gave me a long strip of coarse cloth, and showed me how to thread the strip through the ring, and fasten the cloth around my waist. In that way, the ring in the centre of the leg chain hung from the thread, at a little below the knees, and kept the leg chain from dragging on the ground.

The chain restricted my stride to tiny steps. Walking at any faster pace required a shuffling, hip-swinging gait. There were two other men in my room with leg-irons, and by studying their movements I gradually learned the technique. Within a few days, I walked that rolling, shambling dance as unselfconsciously as they did. In fact, by studying them and imitating them, I gradually discovered that there was something more than necessity in their shuffling dance.

They were trying to give some grace to their movements, put something beautiful in the sliding, weaving steps, to soften the indignity of the chain. Even in that, I discovered, human beings will find an art.

But it was a terrible humiliation. The worst things that people do to us always make us feel ashamed. The worst things that people do always strike at the part of us that wants to love the world. And a tiny part of the shame we feel, when we're violated, is shame at being human.

I learned to walk with the chains, but half rations took their toll, and I lost weight steadily: as much as fifteen kilos in a month, by my guess. I was living on a palm-sized piece of chapatti bread and one saucer of watery soup every day. My body was thin, and seemed to be weakening by the hour. Men tried to help me with smuggled food. They were beaten for it, but still they tried. I refused their offers of help, after a while, because the guilt I felt whenever they received a beating on my behalf was killing me just as surely as the malnutrition.

The many hundreds of small and large cuts that I'd sustained on the day and the night of the beating caused me agonising pain.

Most of them were infected, and some were swollen with yellow poison. I tried to wash them with the worm-infested water, but it didn't make them clean. The bites from the kadmal were accumulating every night. There were hundreds of bites, and many of them, too, became infected, weeping sores. Body lice swarmed on me. I followed the routine slaughter of the filthy, wriggling, crawling pests, every day, but they were drawn to the cuts and wounds on my body. I woke with them feeding on me and breeding in the warm, damp sores.

The beatings, however, had stopped after my meeting with the prison official on that Sunday morning. Big Rahul still whacked me occasionally, and some of the other overseers struck me from time to time, but they were habitual gestures, and not delivered with full force.

Then one day, as I lay on my side, conserving energy and watching the birds peck for crumbs in the courtyard next to our dormitory, I was attacked by a powerful man who jumped on me and seized my throat in both of his hands.

He mightVe been the man's twin. He was tall and heavyset. I recognised the face, and in the instant that I heard the words I remembered the man who'd tried to take my aluminium plate in the Colaba lock-up. I'd lost too much weight. I was too weakened by the hunger and the fever. The press of his body was crushing me, and his hands were closing my throat to air. He was killing me.

Lesson number four of street fighting: always keep something in reserve. The last of my energy exploded in a thrust, with one arm. I drove the arm downward, between our bodies, and grabbed his balls, squeezing and twisting with all the strength I had.

His eyes and mouth opened in a gurgling scream, and he tried to roll off me to his left. I rolled with him. He pressed his legs together and drew his knees up, but my right hand wouldn't surrender the crushing grip. I plunged the fingers of my other hand into the soft skin above his collarbone. Closing my fingers and thumb around the collarbone, I used it as a handle, for leverage, and began to hit him in the face with my forehead. I hit him six times, ten times. I felt his teeth open a cut in my forehead, felt his nose break, felt his strength oozing from him with his blood, felt the collar bone wrench and tear away in the socket. I kept hitting him with the head butt. We were both bloody, and he was weakening, but he wouldn't lie still. I kept hitting him.

I might've beaten him to death with the blunt instrument of my head, but the overseers dragged me off him and back to the gate.

The chains clamped around my wrists again, but they changed their tactics, and chained me to the gate face down on the stone floor.

Rough hands tore my thin shirt from my back. The bamboo sticks rose and fell with new fury. The overseers had arranged for the man to attack me-it was a setup, and they admitted it during one of the breaks while they rested their arms. They'd wanted the man to beat me senseless, maybe even kill me. He had the perfect motive, after all. They'd allowed him into the room, and they'd sanctioned his revenge attack. But it didn't work. I beat their man. And they were outraged that their plans had gone awry. So the beatings went on for hours, with breaks for cigarettes and chai and snacks, and private showings of my bloodied body for selected guests from other parts of the prison.

At the end of it, they released me from the gate. I listened, my ears filled with blood, as they argued about what to do with me. The beating that had followed the fight, the beating they'd just inflicted on me, was so savage and bloody that the overseers were worried. They'd gone too far, and they knew it. They couldn't report any part of it to the prison officials. They decided to keep the matter quiet, and they ordered one of their flunkies to wash my flayed and razored body with soap. Understandably, the man complained about the odious task. A flurry of blows encouraged him, and he applied himself to the job with some thoroughness. I owe my life to him and, in a strange way, to the man who'd tried to kill me. Without the attack, and their furious torture after it, the overseers wouldn't have allowed a soap and warm-water wash-it was the first and last I ever knew in the prison. And the soapy wash saved my life, I'm sure, because the many wounds and lesions on my body had become so badly infected that my temperature was constantly fevered, and the poison was killing me. I was too weak to move. The man who washed me-I never even knew his name-gave my cuts and wounds and abscessed sores such soothing solace, with the soapy water and soft wash cloth, that tears of relief streamed down my cheeks, mixing with my blood on the stone floor.

The fever fell to a simmering shiver, but I still starved, and I got thinner every day. And every day, at their end of the room, the overseers feasted themselves on three good meals. A dozen men worked as their flunkies. They washed clothes and blankets, scrubbed the floors, prepared the dining area, cleaned the mess after each meal and, whenever the whim possessed one of the overseers, gave foot, back, or neck massages. They were rewarded with fewer beatings than the rest of us, a few beedie cigarettes, and scraps of food from every meal. Sitting around a clean sheet on the stone floor, the overseers dipped into the many dishes that went into their meals: rice, dhals, chutneys, fresh roti, fish, meat stews, chicken, and sweet desserts. As they ate noisily, they threw scraps of chicken, bread, or fruit outwards to the surrounding flunkies sitting on their haunches in simian obsequiousness, and waiting with bulging eyes and salivating mouths.

The smell of that food was a monstrous torment. No food ever smelled so good to me, and as I slowly starved, the smell of their food came to represent the whole of the world I'd lost. Big Rahul took relentless delight in offering me food at every meal.

He would hold out a drum- stick of chicken, waving it in the air and feigning a dummy throw, enticing me with his eyes and raised eyebrows, and inviting me to become one of his dogs. Occasionally, he threw a drumstick or a sweet cake toward me, and warned the waiting flunkies to leave it for me, for the gora, urging me to crawl for it. When I didn't react, and wouldn't react, he gave the signal for the flunkies, and then laughed that weak, vicious laugh as the men scrambled and fought for it.

I couldn't bring myself to crawl across the floor and accept that food, although I was weaker by the day, by the hour. Eventually my temperature soared again until my eyes burned with the fever day and night. I visited the toilet, limping, or crawling on my knees when the fever crippled me, but the visits grew less frequent. My urine was a dark, orange colour. Malnutrition robbed my body of energy, and even the simplest movement-rolling over from one side to another, or sitting up-demanded so much of the precious, limited resource that I considered long and hard before undertaking it. I lay motionless for most of every day and night.

I still tried to remove the body lice, and I still tried to wash.

But those simple tasks left me wretched and panting. My heartbeat was unnaturally high, even while lying down, and my breath came in short puffs, often accompanied by soft, involuntary moans. I was dying of hunger, and I was learning that it's one of the cruellest ways to kill a man. I knew that Big Rahul's scraps would save me, but I couldn't crawl across that room to the edge of his feast. Still, I couldn't look away either, and every meal he gluttonised found its witness in my dying eyes.

I drifted, often, in fevered visions to my family, and the friends I'd known and had lost forever in Australia. I also thought of Khaderbhai, Abdullah, Qasim Ali, Johnny Cigar, Raju, Vikram, Lettie, Ulla, Kavita, and Didier. I thought of Prabakeri and I wished that I could tell him how much I loved his honest, optimistic, brave, and generous heart. And sooner or later, my thoughts always found their way to Karla, every day, every night, every hour that I counted out with my burning eyes.

And it seemed, to my dreaming mind, that Karla saved me. I was thinking of her when strong arms lifted me, and the chains fell from my wounded ankles, and guards marched me to the prison official's office. I was thinking of her.

The guards knocked. At an answering call, they opened the door.

They waited outside when I entered. In the small office, I saw three men-the prison official with the short grey hair, a plain-clothes cop, and Vikram Patel-sitting around a metal desk.

The official and the cop exchanged neutral glances, but didn't reply.

I sat, and stared at Vikram with tongue-locked amazement. The flat, black hat hanging on his back by the cord at his throat, and his black vest, shirt, and scrolled flamenco pants seemed wildly exotic, and yet the most reassuringly familiar costume I could imagine. My eyes began to lose focus in the elaborate whirls and scrolls on his embroidered vest, and I pulled my stare back to his face. That face wrinkled and winced as he stared at me. I hadn't looked into a mirror for four months. Vikram's grimaces gave me a fairly good idea of how near to death he believed me to be. He held out the black shirt with the lasso figures that he'd taken off his back to give to me in the rain four months before.

Taking that as his cue, the official coughed, and gestured toward the cop. The cop gave the lead back to him, and he addressed Vikram, a kind of smile pinching the soft skin around his eyes.

I stared at him evenly, my feverish eyes not wavering. I didn't reply.

I'll have the money in half an hour. Clean him up, and get him ready."

The cop gave an inquiring look at the prison official. He responded by waving his hand dismissively and wagging his head in agreement. The matter was a mere trifle. The men would be freed.

The two men raised their palms, and exchanged identical expressions of bewilderment. The fate of such a poor and insignificant man never intruded upon their material ambitions or their spiritual disenchantments. They turned to Vikram. The prison official thrust out his jaw as if to say, He's insane, but if that's what he wants...

Vikram stood to leave, but I raised my hand, and he sat down again quickly.

The cop laughed out loud.

The cop turned to the prison official, hunching his shoulders and raising the palm of his hand in a question.

There was a little silence, then, as the word impossible swirled in the room like smoke from a cheap cigar.

I stared back at him. The fever was stinging my eyes, and the effort it took to sit upright in the chair was causing me to sweat and shiver. He reached out, leaning over so that his hands were resting on my bare knees. I had the thought that some of the body lice might creep from my legs onto his hands, but I couldn't brush that reassuring touch aside.

Half an hour later, I rode with Raheem in the back of a black and-yellow Fiat taxi through the tectonic spectacle and pedestrian pageant of the city. Raheem had obviously received some treatment-his arms were encased in plaster casts-but he was thin and sick, and horror clogged his eyes. I felt nauseous just looking into those eyes. He never said a word, except to tell us where he wanted to go. He was crying, softly and silently, when we dropped him off at a restaurant that Hassaan Obikwa owned in Dongri.

As we drove on, the driver kept staring at my gaunt, starved, beaten face in his rear-vision mirror. Finally, I asked him in rough, colloquial Hindi if he had any Indian movie songs in his cab.

Stunned, he replied that he did. I nominated one of my favourites, and he found it, cranking it up to the max as we buzzed and beeped our way through the traffic. It was a song that the prisoners in the long room had passed from group to group.

They sang it almost every night. I sang it as the taxi took me back into the smell and colour and sound of my city. The driver joined in, looking often into the mirror. None of us lie or guard our secrets when we sing, and India is a nation of singers whose first love is the kind of song we turn to when crying just isn't enough.

The song was still soaring in me as I shed my clothes into a plastic bag for disposal, and stood under the strong warm jet of water in Vikram's shower. I tipped a whole bottle of Dettol disinfectant over my head, and scrubbed it into my skin with a hard nailbrush. A thousand cuts and bites and gashes cried out, but my thoughts were of Karla. Vikram told me she'd left the city two days before. No-one seemed to know where she'd gone. How will I find her? Where is she? Does she hate me now? Does she think I dumped her, after we made love? Could she think that about me? I have to stay in Bombay-she'll come back here, to the city. I have to stay and wait for her.

I spent two hours in that bathroom, thinking, scrubbing, and clenching my teeth against the pain. My wounds were raw when I emerged to wrap a towel round my waist and stand in Vikram's bedroom.

I looked into the full-length mirror on the front of his wardrobe. I'd used his bathroom scales to check my weight: I was forty-five kilos-half the ninety kilos I'd been when [ was arrested four months before. My body was so thin that it resembled those of men who'd survived concentration camps. The bones of my skeleton were all visible, even to the skull beneath my face. Cuts and sores covered my body, and beneath them was the tortoise-shell pattern of deep bruises, everywhere.

I tried to picture the men, to remember them, but I couldn't.

Afghans, Vikram had said. They must've been very good at keeping secrets because they'd never spoken to me in all those months in the locked room. Whoever they were, I owed them.

Vikram smiled and shook his head. He stood, and crossed the bedroom to pour two drinks at a small table that served as his private bar.

I'd think about it if I was you, Lin. You need to feed yourself up. You need to make some fast bucks. And you need a friend like him, yaar. All that stuff about Australia-it's a fuckin' wild story, man. I swear, being on the run and all, it's damn heroic.

At least with Khader on your side, you'll be safe here. With him behind you, nobody will ever do this shit to you again. You got a powerful friend there, Lin. Nobody fucks with Khader Khan in Bombay."

You got two choices-get the fuck out of town, or get some firepower on your side, like the guys at the OK Corral, you know?"

He laughed, but my expression didn't change, and he let the laughter quickly fade. He lit two cigarettes and passed one to me.

And that's what an Indian madachudh would do."

I looked in the mirror once more. The new clothes felt like salt on the raw wounds, but they covered the worst of it, and I looked less alarming, less confronting, less hideous. I smiled at the mirror. I was practising, trying to remember what it was like to be me. It almost worked. I almost had it. Then a new expression, not quite my own, swirled into the grey of my eyes. Never again.

That pain wouldn't happen to me again. That hunger wouldn't threaten me. That fear wouldn't pierce my exiled heart. Whatever it takes, my eyes said to me. Whatever it takes from now on.

____________________

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Working for Abdel Khader Khan was my first real instruction in organised crime-until then I'd been no more than a desperate man, doing stupid, cowardly things to feed a stupid, cowardly heroin habit, and then a desperate exile earning small commissions on random deals. Although they were crimes that I'd committed, and some of them were very serious, I was never really a criminal until I accepted Khaderbhai as my teacher. I'd been a man who committed crimes, up to then, rather than a criminal, and there's a difference between the two. The difference, as with most things in life, lay in the motive and the means. Being tortured in Arthur Road Prison had given me the motive to cross the line. Another man, a smarter man than I was, might've run away from Bombay as soon as he was freed from the prison. I didn't. I couldn't. I wanted to know who'd put me in there, and why. I wanted revenge. The safest and fastest way to that vengeance was to join Khaderbhai's branch of the mafia.

His instruction in the lawbreaker's arts-he sent me first to the Palestinian, Khaled Ansari, to learn the black-market money trade - gave me the means to become what I'd never tried or wanted to be: a professional criminal. And it felt good. It felt so good within the protective circle of that band of brothers. When I rode the train to Khaled's apartment every day, hanging out the door of a rattling carriage in the hot, dry wind with other young men, my heart swelled with the excitement of freedom's wild, reckless ride.

Khaled, my first teacher, was the kind of man who carried his past in the temple fires of his eyes, and fed the flames with pieces of his broken heart. I've known men like Khaled in prisons, on battlefields, and in the dens where smugglers, mercenaries, and other exiles meet. They all have certain characteristics in common. They're tough, because there's a kind of toughness that's found in the worst sorrow. They're honest, because the truth of what happened to them won't let them lie.

They're angry, because they can't forget the past or forgive it.

And they're lonely. Most of us pretend, with greater or lesser success, that the minute we live in is something we can share.

But the past for every one of us is a desert island; and those like Khaled, who find themselves marooned there, are always alone.

Khaderbhai had told me some of Khaled's history when he'd briefed me for my first lessons. I'd learned that Khaled, at only thirty four, was alone in the world. His parents, both renowned scholars, had been prominent in the Palestinian struggle for an independent nation-state. His father had died in prison, in Israel. His mother, his two sisters, his aunts and uncles, and his mother's parents had all been killed in the massacres at Shatila, in Lebanon. Khaled, who'd trained with Palestinian guerrilla units in Tunisia, Libya, and Syria, and had fought for nine years in dozens of operations across a score of conflict zones, broke down after the bloody deaths of his mother and all the others at the refugee camp. His Fattah Group commander, knowing the signs of that breakdown and the risks it posed, had released him from duty.

Although still devoted to the cause of Palestinian statehood in his words, he was in fact lost to any cause but the suffering he'd endured and the suffering he lived to inflict. He'd drifted to Bombay on the recommendation of a senior guerrilla fighter who knew Khaderbhai. The mafia don took him in. Impressed with his education, language skills, and obsessive dedication, the permanent members of Khaderbhai's council had rewarded the young Palestinian with successive promotions. Three years after Shatila, at the time that I met him, Khaled Ansari was in charge of Khaderbhai's black-market currency operation. The position carried with it a place on the council. And when I felt strong enough to put in a full day of study, not long after my release from Arthur Road Prison, the bitter, lonely, battle-scarred Palestinian began my instruction.

Khaled laughed. It was a short, sad laugh, and the only one that was left in him.

Men can be greedy for the profit made from, let's say, pastries, but if there isn't strict control on the baking of pastries, there won't be a black market for apple strudel. And the government has very strict controls on the disposal of sewage, but without greed for profit from sewage, there won't be a black market for shit. When greed meets control, you get a black market."

The Indian rupee, Khaled explained, was a restricted currency. It couldn't be taken out of India, and it couldn't legally be changed for dollars anywhere in the world but in India. With its vast population, India sent many thousands of businessmen, businesswomen, and travellers out of the country every day. Those people were permitted to take out only a limited amount of American currency with them. They could change a fixed amount of their rupees into American dollars, and the rest had to be converted in the form of travellers' cheques.

The regulation was enforced in various ways. When someone wanted to leave the country and change rupees into dollars to the legal limit, he or she had to present a passport and plane ticket at the bank. The bank teller confirmed the departure date on the ticket, and marked both the ticket and the passport to indicate that the holder had been granted the full limit of American dollars in exchange for rupees. The transaction couldn't be duplicated. There was no legal way for the traveller to buy more American dollars for that journey.

Almost everyone in India had at least some black money under the bed. From the few hundred rupees that a working man earned and didn't report to the Tax Office, all the way to the billions of rupees accumulated as profits from crime, the black economy was said to be almost half as large as the legal, white econoriy.

Anyone who had thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of undeclared rupees-as many Indian business travellers did-couldn't buy legal travellers' cheques with them: the bank or the Tax Office always wanted to know where the money came from. So the only real alternative was to buy dollars from the black-market currency dealers. And every day, in Bombay, millions of rupees worth of black American dollars, English pounds, Deutschmarks, Swiss francs, and other currencies were bought and sold in a trade that was a dark mirror of the legal money exchanges.

Khaled summarised. "He's happy, because he's three thousand rupees better off than he would've been at the bank. Then I sell the dollars, to an Indian businessman, for twenty-one thousand rupees. He's happy, because he bought the dollars with black money that he couldn't declare. Then I put three thousand rupees in the kitty, and I buy another thousand dollars, from another tourist, for eighteen thousand. That's the simple equation at the heart of the currency racket."

To find the tourists, and entice them to change their money, Khaderbhai's mafia council employed a small army of touts, guides, beggars, hotel managers, bellboys, restaurateurs, waiters, shopkeepers, airline officials, travel agents, nightclub owners, prostitutes, and cab drivers. Keeping tabs on them was one of Khaled's jobs. In the mornings he phoned all the businesses to establish exchange rates for all the important currencies. There were update calls every two hours throughout the day, advising of any fluctuations in the rates. A taxi was at his disposal around the clock, with two drivers operating in shifts. Every morning he visited the bagmen for each area, and handed over bundles of rupees for the street traders to use as their float. Touts and other street-level crooks dealt with the street traders, guiding tourists and businessmen to them. The traders changed money, and kept the foreign currencies in bundles to be collected. Bagmen did the rounds of traders throughout the day, supplying them with cash as they needed it. Collectors made several sweeps during each working day and night to pick up bundles of foreign currency.

Khaled supervised personal collections and exchanges at hotels, airline offices, travel agencies, and other businesses that required a greater degree of discretion. He made two major pick ups from his collectors in the key areas; one at noon, and one in the late evening. Relevant cops in every area were paid to look away from anything that might offend their sensibilities. In return, Khaderbhai promised that any violence he deemed necessary, in the event that someone tried to rob his men or hold out on them, would be swift and sure, and would never involve the police or threaten their interests in any way. The responsibility for maintaining discipline and enforcing Khader's control fell to Abdullah Taheri. His team of Indian goondas and Iranian veterans of the war with Iraq ensured that irregularities were rare, and ruthlessly punished.

The travel racket, he explained, was an especially lucrative part of the currency trade. It involved large numbers of people from the millions of Indians who worked in Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Muscat, Bahrain, Kuwait, and elsewhere throughout the Arab Gulf. The Indian workers, employed on contracts for three, six, or twelve months as domestics, cleaners, and labourers, were usually paid in foreign currency. Most of the workers tried to exchange their wages on the black market as soon as they got back to India, in order to gain a few extra rupees. Khader's mafia council offered the employers and the workers a shortcut. When they sold their foreign currencies in bulk to Khaderbhai, the Arab employers received a slightly more favourable rate, allowing them to pay their workers in rupees, at the black-market rate, in India. That left them with a surplus of rupees, and gave them a net profit from paying their workers.

For many Gulf State employers, the temptation to such currency crime was irresistible. They, too, had caches of undeclared, untaxed money under their opulent beds. Syndicates developed to organise the payment of Indian guest workers in rupees when they returned to India. The workers were happy because they got the black-market rate but didn't have to negotiate with hard-nosed black-market dealers personally. The bosses were happy because they made profits from the payment through their syndicates. The black marketeers were happy because a steady stream of dollars, Deutschmarks, riyals, and dirhams flowed into the river of demand created by Indian business travellers. Only the government missed out, and no-one in the thousands upon thousands of people involved in the trade shamed himself beyond endurance on that account.

His voice trailed off, and I couldn't be certain whether he was reminiscing or simply reluctant to talk further. I waited.

He fired a glance at me to reassure himself that I wasn't mocking him.

The bitterness in his voice was disconcerting. His jaw began to set in a grim and almost angry expression as he stared at his joined hands. I moved to steer the conversation away from the past.

He ran a hand over his face and up across the short, military haircut, prematurely streaked with grey and white. The gesture wiped his gloomy recollections away, and he gave me his full attention. "I heard that you met Ranjit-he's incredible, isn't he?"

We talked about Ranjitbhai, the king of his little group of lepers, and the black market they'd organised across the country.

Their mysterious trade fascinated us equally. As a historian-or a man who'd once dreamed of becoming a historian, like his scholarly mother-Khaled was intrigued by the long evolution and secret conduct of the lepers' organisation. As a writer, I was provoked by the story of their suffering and their unique response to it. After twenty minutes of excited, actuating discussion, we agreed to visit Ranjit together to find out more about the history of the black market in medicines.

And with that pledge between exiles, between scholar and writer, Khaled and I established a simple but enduring bond of intellectual respect. We became friends in the rapid, unquestioning way of criminals, soldiers, and other survivors of disaster. I visited him every day in his sparsely furnished, Spartan apartment near Andheri station. The sessions lasted five or six hours. They roved freely from ancient history to reserve bank interest-rate policies, from anthropology to fixed and floating currencies, and I learned more about that very common but complex crime in one month, with Khaled Ansari, than most street traders in dollars and Deutschmarks learned in a year of dealing.

And when the lessons were complete, I went to work with Khaled every morning and every evening, seven days a week. The pay was good. The wages I earned came in such quantities that I was often paid in thick blocks of rupees, direct from the bank and still bearing their steel staples all the way through the notes. Compared to the slum-dwellers I'd known as neighbours, friends, and patients for almost two years, I was already a rich man.

To ensure that the cuts and wounds of prison healed as quickly as possible, I'd taken a room at the India Guest House, at Khaderbhai's expense. The clean, tiled shower and soft mattress did help me to heal, but there was more to the move than physical convalescence. The truth was that the months in Arthur Road Prison had damaged my spirit more than my body. And the lingering shame I felt over the deaths of my neighbour Radha in the cholera epidemic, and the two boys from my English class, gave me no peace. The prison torment, and my failures in the cholera epidemic: I might've survived either one of them on its own, and gone back to those loving, wretched acres when I was well enough.

But both of them, together, were more than my frail self-respect could endure, and I couldn't live in the slum or even sleep the night there.

I visited Prabaker, Johnny, Qasim, and Jeetendra often, and I continued to help out at the clinic, attending to patients for two afternoons every week. But the strange mix of arrogance and insouciance that had permitted me to be the slum doctor was gone, and I didn't expect it to return. There's a little arrogance at the heart of every better self. That arrogance left me when I failed to save my neighbour's life-failed even to know that she was ill. And there's an innocence, essential and unblinking, in the heart of every determination to serve. That innocence faltered when I stumbled from the Indian prison: my smile, no less than my footsteps, hobbled by the memory of the leg-irons.

Moving out of the slum had as much or more to do with the state of my soul as it did with the wounds on my body.

For their part, my friends from the slum accepted my decision without question or comment. They greeted me warmly whenever I visited, and involved me in the daily routines and celebrations of the slum-weddings, festivals, community meetings, or cricket games-as if I still lived and worked with them. And despite their shock and sorrow when they saw my emaciated frame, and the scars that the overseers had branded on my skin, they never once mentioned the prison. A part of that, I think, was sensitivity to the shame they knew I must've been feeling; the shame that they would've felt had they been imprisoned. Another part, in the hearts of Prabaker, and Johnny Cigar, and perhaps even Qasim Ali, mightVe been found in guilt-that they hadn't been able to help me because they hadn't thought to search for me. None of them had realised that I'd been arrested. They'd assumed that I'd simply tired of life in the slum, and that I'd returned to my comfortable life in my comfortable country, like every other tourist or traveller they'd ever known.

And that, too, found its way into my reluctance to return to the slum. It astonished me, and it hurt me, after all I'd done there, and for all that they'd included me in the ragged skein of their too-many lives, that they still expected me to leave them, without a word of farewell, whenever the whim possessed me.

So, when my health improved and I began to earn real money, I didn't move back to the slum. Instead, with Khaderbhai's help, I rented an apartment in Colaba at the landward end of Best Street, not far from Leopold's. It was my first apartment in India, and my first indulgence of space and privacy and domestic luxuries such as a hot shower and a functioning kitchen. I ate well, cooking high-protein and high-carbohydrate meals, and forcing myself to finish off a bucket of ice cream every day. I put on body weight. I slept for ten hours at a stretch, night after night, healing my lacerated body with sleep's ravelling repair.

But I woke often, with my arms flailing, fighting, and the wet metal smell of blood still fresh from the nightmare.

I trained in karate and weightlifting with Abdullah at his favourite gym in the fashionable suburb of Breach Candy. Two other young gangsters-Salman Mustaan and his friend Sanjay, whom I'd met at my first visit to Khader's council-often joined us.

They were strong, healthy men in their late-twenties who liked to fight about as much as they liked sex, and they liked sex just fine. Sanjay, with his movie-star looks, was the joker. Salman was quieter and more serious. Although inseparable friends since childhood, they were as hard on one another in the ring as they were when they boxed Abdullah and me. We worked out five times each week, with two days off to allow our torn and swollen muscles to recover. And it was good. It helped. Pumping iron is Zen for violent men. Little by little, my body regained its strength, muscular shape, and fitness.

But no matter how fit I became, I knew that my mind wouldn't heal, couldn't heal, until I found out who'd arranged with the police to have me picked up and sent to Arthur Road Prison. I needed to know who did it. I needed to know the reason. Ulla was gone from the city-in hiding, some said, but no-one could guess from whom, or why. Karla was gone, and no-one could tell me where she was. Didier and several other friends were digging around for me, trying to find the truth, but they hadn't found anything that might tell me who'd set me up.

Someone had arranged with senior cops to have me arrested, without charge, and imprisoned at Arthur Road. The same person had arranged to have me beaten-severely and often-while I was in the prison. It was a punishment or an act of revenge.

Khaderbhai had confirmed that much, but he couldn't or wouldn't say more, except to tell me that whoever it was who'd set me up hadn't known that I was on the run. That information, about the escape from Australia, had emerged from the routine fingerprint check. The cops concerned had realised, at once, that there might be profit in keeping quiet about it, and they'd shelved my file until Vikram approached them on Khader's behalf.

A waiter brought my cup of coffee, and chatted with me for a while in Marathi. Vikram waited until we were alone again before he spoke.

Vikram stopped, and grinned at me until the grin became a playful laugh. He wore a black leather vest over his white silk shirt, despite the thirty-five-degree heat. In his heavy, black jeans and ornate black cowboy boots, he must've been very hot, but he seemed cool; almost as cool as he looked.

They said you never cheated anyone, never fucked anybody over, and you put a lot of money around with the poor street guys when you had it."

One of the moneychangers tells the cops, Hey, if you wanna know about Lin, go ask in the zhopadpatti, because he lives there.

Well, the cops are now real intrigued, like-a gora, living in the slum. So they go there, and they take a look. They don't tell anybody in the slum what happened to you, but they start asking about you, and the people say stuff like, You see that clinic?

Lin built it, and he's been working there for a long time, helping the people... And they say stuff like, Everybody here has been treated at Lin's clinic, free of charge, at one time or another, and he did a great job when the cholera came... And they told the cops about that little school you started, You see that little school for English? Lin started it... And the cops get an earful of this Lin, this Linbaba, this foreign guy who does all this good shit, and they go back to their boss, telling him what they heard."

Vikram's eyes widened in surprise, and then narrowed into a disapproving frown. He lifted the hat from his back and examined it, turning it in his hands and flicking specks of dust from the rim.

There's no heart like the Indian heart."

He was crying. Stunned, I watched him wipe the tears from his eyes, and I reached out to put a hand on his shoulder. He was right, of course. Even though I'd been tortured in an Indian prison, and almost killed there, I had been set free, and they had given me my old passport when I left the prison. Is there any other country in the world, I asked myself, that would've let me go, as India did? And even in India, if the cops had checked on me and discovered a different story- that I cheated Indians, say, or ran Indian prostitutes, or beat up defenceless people-they would've taken the money, and then sent me back to Australia anyway. It was the land where the heart is king. I knew that from Prabaker, from his mother, from Qasim Ali, from Joseph's redemption. I'd known it even in the prison, where men like Mahesh Malhotra had taken a beating in order to smuggle food to me when I was starving.

The second was Prabaker, whose weeping was so violent that it took me a full hour to console him. The third person, unexpectedly, was lord Abdel Khader, whose eyes filled with tears when I thanked him: tears that flowed on my neck and shoulder when he hugged me.

I'll go and listen, and come back."

He jogged to the crowded counter where fifteen or twenty men pressed together, arms around shoulders to listen, while an almost hysterical announcer gave details of the murder in Hindi.

Vikram could've listened to the broadcast from his seat at our table-the volume was switched up to the maximum, and we heard every word. It was something else that drew him to the crowded counter: a sense of solidarity and kinship; a huddled need to feel the astounding news, through contact with his countrymen, even as he listened to it.

I ordered for Didier, and let my thoughts wander while we listened to the plaintive screech of the radio announcer.

Selfishly, I wondered first what the assassination might mean for my security, and then what it might do to the exchange rates on the black money market. Some months before, Indira Gandhi had authorised an assault on the Sikh holy-of-holies, the Golden Temple, in Amritsar. Her goal was to drive out a large, well armed company of Sikh militants who'd entered the temple and fortified themselves there under the leadership of a handsome, charismatic separatist named Bhindranwale. Using the temple complex as a base, the militants had launched punitive attacks against Hindus, and those they described as recalcitrant Sikhs, for many weeks. Indira Gandhi, on the eve of a fiercely contested general election, had been deeply concerned that she would appear weak and indecisive if she failed to act. In what many judged to be the worst of her admittedly limited options, Indira had sent the army into battle with the Sikh rebels.

The army operation to dislodge the militants from the Golden Temple was known as Operation Bluestar. Bhindranwale's militants, believing themselves to be freedom fighters and martyrs for the Sikh cause, met the army force with reckless and desperate resistance. More than six hundred lives were lost, and many hundreds of people were injured. In the end, the Golden Temple complex was cleared, and Indira emerged as anything but indecisive or weak. Her goal of reassuring the Hindu heartland of voters had been achieved, but the Sikh struggle for a separate homeland, called Khalistan, was rich in new martyrs. And across the world, Sikh hearts clenched around their determination to avenge the profane and bloody invasion of their holiest shrine.

The radio at the counter gave us no other details, but the message wailed from the speaker that she'd been murdered. Only a few months after Bluestar, Indira's own Sikh bodyguards had killed her. The woman who'd been reviled as a despot by some, adored as the mother of the country by many others, and so closely identified with the nation as to be indistinguishable from its past, and from its destiny, was gone. She was dead.

I had to think. I had to calculate the danger. Security forces across the country would be on special alert. There would be ramifications-riots, killings, looting, and burning, as revenge exacted on the Sikh communities for her murder. I knew it.

Everyone in India knew it. On the radio, the announcer was talking about troop deployments in Delhi and in Punjab aimed at quelling anticipated disturbances. The tension would bring new dangers for me, a wanted man, working for the mafia, and living in the country with an expired visa. For a few moments, sitting there as Didier sipped his drink, as the men in the restaurant strained in silence to listen, and the early evening blushed our skin with rose-gold, my heart thumped with fear. Run, my thoughts whispered. Run now, while you can. This is your last chance...

But even then, as I formed the clear thought to flee the city, I felt myself relaxing into a dense, fatalistic calm. I wouldn't leave Bombay. I couldn't leave Bombay. I knew that, as surely as I'd ever known anything in my life. There was the issue of Khaderbhai: my financial debt to him had been repaid from the wages I'd made in his service with Khaled, but there was a moral debt that was harder to repay. I owed him my life, and we both knew it. He'd hugged me when I came out of the prison and, crying at my pitiful state, he'd promised me that for so long as I remained in Bombay, I would be under his personal protection.

Nothing like Arthur Road would ever happen to me again. He'd given me a gold medal featuring the Hindu aum symbol joined to a Muslim crescent and star, which I wore on a silver chain around my neck. Khaderbhai's name was inscribed on the back, in Urdu, Hindi, and English. In the event of trouble I was to show the medal, and ask that he be contacted at once. That security was imperfect, but it was better than anything I'd known since my exile had begun. His request for me to stay in his service, the unspoken debt that I owed him, and the safety that being Khader's man offered-all of those elements held me in the city.

And there was Karla. She'd disappeared from the city while I was in prison, and no-one knew where she'd gone. I had no idea where in all the wide world I might begin to look for her. But she loved Bombay. I knew that. It seemed reasonable to hope she might return. And I loved her. It grieved me-an emotion that was, in those months, even stronger than my love for her-that she must be thinking I'd abandoned her: that I got what I wanted, when we made love, and then dumped her. I couldn't move on without seeing her again, and explaining what had happened that night. So I stayed there, in the city, a minute's walk from the corner where we'd met, and I waited for her to return.

I glanced around the subdued, listening restaurant, and caught Vikram's eye. He smiled at me, and wagged his head. It was a heart-broken smile, and his eyes were inflamed with unshed tears.

Still, he smiled to comfort me, to reassure me, to include me in his bewildered grieving. And with that smile I suddenly knew that there was something else holding me there. In the end I realised that it was the heart, the Indian heart that Vikram had talked about-the land where heart is king-that held me when so many intuitions told me I should leave. And the heart, for me, was the city. Bombay. The city had seduced me. I was in love with her.

There was a part of me that she invented, and that only existed because I lived there, within her, as a Mumbaiker, a Bombayite.

We were silent, all three of us, lost in our own speculations and worry. Then Didier spoke.

Didier pursed his lips, and let out a puff of air.

Vikram put in. He finished his beer, and lit one of the long, thin, cheroots that he smoked as much for the complement they made to his costume as for the enjoyment of the smoke.

Didier observed. His frown was irritated and profoundly unsympathetic. "What is your problem?"

Let's hear it!"

I paid the bill and left, walking along the Causeway to Regal Cinema roundabout. It was early evening, one of the three best times of day in Bombay city. Early morning before the heat, and late night after the heat are special times of day, with special pleasures; but they're quiet times, with few people. Evening brings the people to their windows, balconies, and doorways.

Evening fills the streets with strolling crowds. Evening is an indigo tent for the circus of the city, and families bring children to the entertainments that inspire every corner and crossroad. And evening is a chaperone for young lovers: the last hour of light before the night comes to steal the innocence from their slow promenades. There's no time, in the day or night, when there are more people on the streets of Bombay than there are in the evening, and no light loves the human face quite so much as the evening light in my Mumbai.

I walked through the evening crowds, loving the faces, loving the perfumes of skin and hair, loving the colours of clothes and the cadences of words that surrounded me. Yet I was alone, too much alone with my love of evening in the city. And all the while a black shark slowly circled in the sea of my thoughts: a black shark of doubt and anger and suspicion. A woman betrayed me. A woman. A young and very beautiful woman...

The persistent blaring of a car horn drew my attention, and I saw Prabaker waving to me from his taxi. I got into the cab and asked him to drive me to my evening meeting with Khaled, near Chowpatty Beach. One of the first things I'd done with the first real money I'd made in Khaderbhai's service was pay for Prabaker's taxi licence. The cost of the licence had always been prohibitive for Prabaker, and it had eluded his sub-miniature talent for thrift.

He drove occasional shifts in his cousin Shantu's taxi without the required licence, but ran considerable risks in doing it.

With his own licence, he was free to approach any of the taxi lords who owned fleets of cabs and hired them out to licensed taxi drivers.

Prabaker was a hard worker and an honest man; but, more than that, he was the most likable man that most of those who knew him ever met. Even the hard-nosed taxi lords weren't immune to his sanguine charm. Within a month he had a semi-permanent lease' on a taxi, which he cared for as if it was his own. On the dashboard he'd installed a plastic shrine to Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth. The gold, pink, and green plastic figure of the goddess blazed an alarmingly fierce expression through the bulbs in her red eyes whenever he hit the brakes of the car. From time to time he reached over, with a showman's flourish, to squeeze a rubber tube at the base of the figure. That action sprayed, through what appeared to be a valve in the navel of the goddess, a potent and disquietingly industrial mix of chemical perfumes onto the shirt and trousers of his passenger. Every squeeze of the spray was followed by a reflexive, polishing rub of his brass taxi driver's identification badge, which he wore with swaggering pride. Only one thing, in the whole city, rivalled the affection he felt for the black-and-yellow Fiat taxi.

Too much love."

We are having such good luck that Mrs. Patak, she has a happy appetites, and she will eat, without stopping, for three hours in a movie. So there is a very constant passing of foods, and plenty of looking at the girls. And Mrs. Patak-thanks to the God, it is impossible to fill up that woman in one movie only."

A mob of people, hundreds, thousands, streamed around a corner and onto wide Marine Drive, some three hundred metres in front of us. They advanced toward us across the whole width of the street.

Their anguished faces stiffened on necks and shoulders made rigid with their rage. They chanted about Indira Gandhi, and about revenge, and about the punishments they wanted to visit upon the Sikhs. I tensed as they neared us, but the human torrent parted for the cab, and then swept around and beyond us without so much as the scrape of a sleeve against the side of the car.

Nevertheless, the eyes that looked in upon us were hate-stricken and cruel. I knew that if I were a Sikh, if I'd been wearing a Sikh turban or Sardarji scarf, the door would've been wrenched open.

As the crowd passed us and the road ahead became clear, I turned to see that Prabaker was wiping tears from his eyes. He fumbled in his pocket for a handkerchief, dragging a huge, red-checked sheet out at last, and dabbing at his eyes with it.

She was one of the most common names for Indira: journalists, peasants, politicians, and black marketers all referred to her as She.

He seemed so distraught that I sat with him in silence, for a while, staring out my window toward the darkening sea. When I turned to look at him once more, I saw that he was praying, with his head bowed forward and his hands pressed together at the base of the steering wheel. I watched his lips twitch and ripple in the whispered prayer, and then he opened his hands, turned his head, and smiled at me. His eyebrows rose and fell twice as he held the huge smile.

Too late. He crushed the bulb, and a swirling belch of the noxious chemical mixture spurted from the belly of the goddess and settled on my trousers and my shirt.

He parked beside a tall date pain, and I climbed out. We fought over payment for the cab ride. Prabaker refused the money, and I insisted that he take it. I suggested a compromise. He should take the money, and use it to buy some new perfume for his plastic goddess.

He swung the car away from the kerb and out into the stream of traffic. I heard the car horn blaring a musical good-bye until he was out of sight.

Khaled Ansari was waiting for me in our chartered cab, fifty metres away. He sat in the back, with both doors opened for the breeze. I wasn't late, and he couldn't have been waiting more than fifteen or twenty minutes, but still there were ten cigarette butts on the ground beside the open door of the cab.

Each one of them, I knew, was an enemy crushed under his heel, a violent wish, a brutal fantasy of the suffering he would one day inflict on those he hated.

And they were many, the ones he hated. Too many. The images of violence that filled his mind were so real, he'd told me, that sometimes he was nauseous with it. The anger was an ache in his bones. The hatred locked his jaws, and made him grind his teeth on the fury. The taste of it was bitter, always, all day and night, every waking minute, as bitter as the taste of the blackened knife he'd clamped between his teeth, as a Fattah guerrilla, when he'd crawled across broken ground toward his first kill.

It wasn't an offensive question, and it wasn't asked in an aggressive way, but there was too much hurt in it, too much of his pain for me to let it go.

I didn't reply. "She was... she was a beautiful girl, and smart, and maybe, I don't know, maybe the nicest human being I'm ever gonna meet. That was in New York. We were students together. Her parents, they were reform Jews-they supported Israel, but they were against the occupation of the territories. I was with that girl, making love to her, on the night my father died in an Israeli prison."

We were facing the sea, looking down on a section of Chowpatty Beach from a car park on the steep rise above Marine Drive.

Beneath us the first wave of families, and couples, and young men out for the night tried their luck at throwing darts or shooting balloons pinned to a target. The ice cream and sherbet-drink vendors called out from their flamboyantly decorated bowers like birds of paradise singing for mates.

The hatred that had coiled around Khaled's heart was the only thing we ever argued about. I'd been raised among Jewish friends.

Melbourne, the city where I grew up, had a huge Jewish community, many of them Holocaust survivors and their children. My mother had been prominent in Fabian socialist circles, and she'd attracted left-leaning intellectuals from the Greek, Chinese, German, and Jewish communities. Many of my friends had attended a Jewish school, Mt. Scopus College. I grew up with those kids, reading the same books, enjoying the same movies and music, marching together in support of the same causes. Some of those friends were among the few who'd stood by me when my life imploded in agony and shame. It was a Jewish friend, in fact, who'd helped me to escape from Australia after I broke out of prison. I respected, admired, and loved all of those friends. And Khaled hated every Israeli, and every Jew in the world.

The hate would've killed me."

My hate got stronger and harder. And then, I woke up one day, working for Khader, with money and power, and I could feel the hate creeping back into me. And it's here now, inside me, where it belongs. And I'm glad. I enjoy it. I need it, Lin. It's stronger than I am. It's braver than I am. My hate is my hero."

He held that fanatic stare for a moment, and then turned to the driver, who was dozing in the front seat of the car.

A minute later, he broke the silence to ask me a question.

She folded her hands together in a greeting, you know, for the two Sikh bodyguards at the gate. She knew those guys. They were only there, on duty, because she insisted on it. After the Golden Temple, after Bluestar, they advised her not to have Sikhs in her security detail. But she insisted because she couldn't believe that her loyal Sikh bodyguards would turn against her. She just didn't get it-how much hatred she put in them, when she ordered the army to attack the Golden Temple. Anyway, she put her hands together in a greeting, and she smiled at them, and said the word Namaste. One bodyguard, he pulled out his service revolver-it was a.38-and fired three shots. He got her right in the guts, in the abdomen. She crumpled to the pathway. The second bodyguard turned his Sten gun on her. He emptied the whole magazine. Thirty rounds. It's an old gun, the Sten, but it packs a hell of a punch at close range. At least seven bullets got her in the abdomen, three bullets went into her chest, and one went through her heart."

We rode in silence for a while. I was the first to speak.

He closed his eyes for a moment, and allowed his head to loll and roll with the movement of the car. Then he was suddenly awake, sitting upright, and sniffing the air around him.

Sooner or later, fate puts us together with all the people, one by one, who show us what we could, and shouldn't, let ourselves become. Sooner or later we meet the drunkard, the waster, the betrayer, the ruthless mind, and the hate-filled heart. But fate loads the dice, of course, because we usually find ourselves loving or pitying almost all of those people. And it's impossible to despise someone you honestly pity, and to shun someone you truly love. I sat beside Khaled in the darkness as the taxi took us to the business of crime. I sat beside him in the drift of coloured shadows, loving the honesty and toughness in him, and pitying the hatreds that weakened him and lied to him. And his face, reflected sometimes in the night that filled the window, was as drenched in destiny, and as radiant, as the faces found in paintings of doomed and haloed saints.

____________________

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

We were sitting in the busy, steamy, wondrously aromatic Restaurant Saurabh, in the Sassoon Dock area. The Saurabh served what many regarded as Bombay's best masala dhosas, in a city where five thousand restaurants vied for the honour. Despite that distinction, or because of it, the Saurabh was small and relatively unknown. Its name didn't appear in any of the guidebooks for tourists or the epicure columns in the daily newspapers. It was a worker's restaurant, and it was full, from morning until evening, with working men and women who cherished it and kept its secret to themselves. Accordingly, the meals were cheap and the decor was a functional minimum. Nevertheless, the restaurant was spotlessly clean, and the spectacular, baroque sails of the crispy dhosas, swept to the tables by waiters who worked at a run, housed the most delicious mixes of spices that could be found in any dish, anywhere in the city.

It was the first time he'd ever mentioned the escape. I was sure that he knew, of course, and I was sure he must've thought about it many times. But by broaching the subject with me he was raising the real nature of the rescue from Arthur Road Prison.

The fact was that he'd rescued me from two prisons-one in India and one in Australia-and I owed him a double debt.

Khaderbhai was the only person who'd ever asked me that question.

People in Australia and New Zealand had asked me about the escape. They'd wanted to know how I broke out of the prison, and how I stayed on the run. But only Khader asked me why I escaped.

They were insane with hate for the prisoners. I don't know why. I can't explain it. That's just how it was down there then. And they tortured us, nearly every night. And I fought back. I had to fight them. It's my nature, I guess. It's just how I am. I'm not the kind of man who could take it from them, without fighting back. Which made it all worse, of course. I got... well, they went to work on me, and it was... pretty bad. I was only down there, in that punishment unit, for a little while. But I had a long sentence, and I knew that sooner or later they'd find a reason to put me down there again, or I'd be stupid enough to give them one-it wasn't hard, believe me. I thought that when they did get me there again, when they got their hands on me, they'd torture me again, and I'd fight them again, and they'd probably kill me. So... I escaped."

He listened as I told him the story. We continued to eat while I talked. Khader never interrupted. He watched me throughout, and the smiling light in his eyes reflected the fire in mine. He seemed to enjoy the telling of the story as much as the tale itself.

They protected us and gave us shelter, for the first thirteen days and nights, while the cops tore the city up looking for us."

I paused, mopping up the last of my food with a corner of pea flour roti. Khaderbhai ate the last of the food on his own plate. We chewed vigorously, watching one another with thoughts and questions glittering in our eyes.

The feeling was so strong, I couldn't fight it it. So I went across the city, risking my life to see him. He said that he'd expected to see me, and that he was waiting for me to come to him. He told me that I had to give up my guns, first of all. He tried to convince me that I wouldn't need them, and that they'd bring me grief if I didn't get rid of them. He told me that I had to give up the crime of armed robbery, and never commit it again.

He said that I'd paid my dues for the crimes I'd committed, but that if I ever did that crime again I would be killed or captured straight away. Whatever else you have to do to stay free, he said, don't ever do that crime again. He told me to split from my friend, because he was sure to get caught, and if I was with him I'd be caught, too. And he told me to travel the world. Tell people as much as they need to know, he said. I remember that he was smiling when he said it, like there was nothing to it. And ask people for help, he said. You'll be all right... Don't worry ... It's a great adventure, your life, and it has only just begun ..."

There was a pause as I lapsed into silence once more. A waiter approached the table to clear away our empty plates, but Khader waved him away. The mafia don stared at me, his golden eyes unwavering, but it was a sympathetic and encouraging stare.

And I'd be in their power again. And they'd make a pretty good mess of me. I think... I think they'd kick me to death down there, in the punishment unit. Anyway, it's not an option. You don't lag people. You don't inform on people, not for any reason.

It's a principle. It's probably the only one we've got left when we get locked up in a cage."

The question was offensive, but his tone was entirely gentle and compassionate. I stared into his eyes, and was sure that he meant no offence or harm. It was Khader who'd rescued me from the Indian prison, after all and, indirectly, from the Australian prison that we were discussing. "You could say that," I answered calmly. "But that doesn't change the principle. You don't tell on people-not for any reason."

Influence was Khader's euphemism for the full range of interactions between his mafia group and the society in which it thrived. They began with bribery, in a schedule of venalities ranging from insider trading to the securing of profitable tenders. When bribes failed, Khader's influence extended to debt collection and protection rackets, aimed at businesses that operated in the areas he controlled. Not least in the spheres of his influence was intimidation, through force or blackmail, of political and bureaucratic recalcitrants.

Who judges the evil in it?"

He rose, and Nazeer, his constant companion, rose like his shadow and followed him to the sink, tap, and mirror housed in an alcove that was set into the back wall of the restaurant. They washed their hands and faces, hawking and spitting noisily into the sink, as did every other man in the restaurant at the conclusion of his meal. When my turn at washing, hawking, and spitting was complete, I found Khaderbhai talking with the owner of the Saurabh on the footpath outside the restaurant. When they separated, the owner embraced Khader and asked for his blessing.

The man was a Hindu, and his forehead bore the mark of blessing he'd received at a temple only hours before. Yet when Khaderbhai held the man's hands in his own, and softly mumbled a Muslim blessing, the devout Hindu responded with delight and gratitude.

Khader and I strolled back towards Colaba. Stocky, ape-like Nazeer walked a metre or so behind us, scowling at the street. At Sassoon Dock we crossed the road and passed beneath the arch at the main entrance to the old dockyard. The smell of prawns, drying in the sun in pink mountains, made my stomach flip, but when we caught sight of the sea the stench was lost in the strong breeze. Nearer to the docks we threaded our way through crowds of men pushing handcarts, and women carrying baskets on their heads, all bearing crushed ice and a burden of fish. Factories that produced the ice and processed the fish added their industrious clangour to the wailing of auctioneers and salesmen. At the edge of the dock itself, there were twenty large, wooden fishing boats, built to the same designs used for vessels that had sailed the Arabian Sea, on the Maharashtrian coast of India, five hundred years before. Here and there between them were larger, more expensive metal boats. The contrast between those rusted, graceless hulks and the elegant wooden boats beside them spoke a history, a modern saga, a world story that moved from life at sea, as a romantic calling, to the profiteer's cold, efficient lusting for the bottom line.

We sat on a wooden bench in a quiet, shaded corner of the dock where fishermen sometimes rested to share a meal. Khader stared at the vessels, which were shifting and genuflecting at their moorings on the lapping tide.

His short hair and beard were almost white. The tight, unblemished skin of his lean face was tanned to the colour of sun-ripened wheat. I looked at the face-the long, fine nose and wide brow and upward curving lips-and wondered, not for the first time, and not for the last, if my love for him would cost me my life. Nazeer, ever watchful, stood near us and scanned the dock with a glowering expression that approved of nothing in the world but the man who sat beside me.

Three fishermen dressed in lungis and singlets approached us shyly. One of them carried two wire baskets containing glasses of water and hot chai. Another grasped a plate bearing several sweet ladoo. The last man held a chillum and two golis of charras in his extended palms.

Khader smiled, and wagged his head. The men came forward quickly, handing glasses of chai to Khader, Nazeer, and me. They squatted on the ground in front of us and prepared their chillum. Khader received the honour of lighting the pipe, and I took the second dumm. The pipe went twice around the group and was tipped up clean by the last man, who exhaled the word _Kalaass...

_Finished... with his stream of blue smoke.

Khader continued talking to me in English. I was sure that the men couldn't understand him, but they remained with us, and watched his face intently.

Khader laughed. The fishermen laughed with him.

Whatever you call it, the whole universe is moving toward it."

And if our sun is dying-and one day it will-isn't that the opposite of complexity? How does that fit in with the movement to complexity, if all this complex planet is smashed to atoms, and our sun dies?"

Our bodies are the children of all the suns and other stars that died, before us, making the atoms that _we are made of. And if we were destroyed, by an asteroid, or by our own hand, well, somewhere else in the universe, our level of complexity, this level of complejxity, with a consciousness capable of understanding the process, would be duplicated. I do not mean people exactly like us. I mean that thinking beings, that are as complex as we are, would develop, somewhere else in the universe.

_We would cease to exist, but the process would go on. Perhaps this is happening in millions of worlds, even as we speak. In fact, it is very likely that it is happening, all over the universe, because that is what the universe does."

It was my turn to laugh.

Khaderbhai turned his full attention on me, with one eyebrow raised in amusement or disapproval, or both. It was an expression I'd seen on Karla's face more than once. He might've thought that my slightly mocking tone was rude. I didn't mean it to be. It was defensive, in fact, because I couldn't find a flaw in his logic, and I was profoundly impressed by his argument. Perhaps he was simply surprised. He told me once, much later, that one of the first things he liked about me was that I wasn't afraid of him; and my fearlessness often took him by surprise with its impudence and its folly. Whatever the cause for his little smile and arched eyebrow, it was some time before he continued.

It is not based on the revealed wisdom of any one faith or political movement. It is common to the best principles of all of them, but it is based on what we know rather than what we believe. In that sense, it is objective. Of course, what we know about the universe, and our place in it, is constantly changing as we add more information and gain new insights. We are never perfectly objective about anything, that is true, but we can be less objective, or we can be more objective. And when we define good and evil on the basis of what we know-to the best of our knowledge at the present time-we are being as objective as possible within the imperfect limits of our understanding. Do you accept that point?"

And all the holy texts, from all the great religions, tell us to do this. The Holy Koran, for example, is often telling us, instructing us, to study the planets and the stars to find truth and meaning."

He turned away from me to face the three fishermen, who'd stood with him and were waiting attentively. For a moment, I teased myself with the conceit that I'd stumped him with my question.

But that prideful hope dissolved as I watched him talk with the barefoot fishermen. There was such apodictic certitude in Khader's every pronouncement, such a decisive, incontrovertible assurance in the man, that it informed and composed even his stillnesses and silences. I knew that there was an answer to my question. I knew that he would give it to me when he judged the time to be right.

Standing near him, I eavesdropped on his conversation. He asked them if they had any complaints, if there was any bullying of the poor men on the dock. When they told him there was none, just at that time, he asked them about the available work, and if the jobs were fairly distributed among those with greatest need.

Reassured on that point as well, he asked them about their families and their children. The last of their conversation was about the work on Sassoon Dock's fishing fleet. They told him about the mountainous, stormy waves, the fragile boats, the friends made at sea, and the friends lost at sea. He told them about the one and only time he'd sailed the deep water, during a violent storm, in one of the long, wooden fishing boats. He told them how he'd tied himself to the boat, and how fervently he'd prayed until they'd sighted land. They laughed, and then tried to touch his feet in a respectful goodbye, but he lifted them by the shoulders and shook hands with them, one by one. When he parted from them, they walked away with their backs straight and their heads high.

I hesitated. Karla once said that men reveal what they think when they look away, and what they feel when they hesitate. With women, she said, it's the other way around.

It was true. Khaled was angry, and there was a part of his heart that was always hate-filled, but I liked him. Madjid was kind and patient and generous with me, yet I had no feeling for him at all beyond a vague, premonitory unease. After four months in the black-market currency business, Khaderbhai had decided that I should learn the gold-smuggling trade, and he'd sent me to Madjid Rhustem. In his house overlooking the sea, among the affluent elite at Juhu, I'd discovered the many ways in which gold was smuggled into India. Khaled's formula of greed and control applied to the trade in gold. Strictly enforced government controls on the import of gold crashed head-on with India's insatiable demand for the yellow metal.

Grey-haired Madjid controlled Khader's substantial gold imports, and had been running the business for almost ten years. With inexhaustible forbearance, he'd taught me everything that he thought I needed to know about gold and the smuggler's arts. His dark eyes had stared at me from beneath his bushy grey brows, hour after hour in the lessons. Although he commanded a large number of strong men, and could be ruthless with them when it was required, his rheumy eyes only ever showed me kindness. Still, I felt nothing for him but that bodeful uneasiness. When I left his house, after any lesson, a sense of relief flooded into me: a relief that washed the sound of his voice and the sight of his face from my mind, just as water might wash a stain from my hands.

My face flushed with emotion. It was as if my own father had said the last three words to me. And my own father never did. The power that those simple words had-the power that Khader had over me-made me realise how neatly and completely he'd come to fill the father's role in my life. In my innermost, secret heart, a small boy that I used to be was wishing that Khader was my father-my real father.

What do you really want here, in Bombay?"

We were approaching his parked car. Nazeer ran ahead on his short, thick legs to open the doors and start the engine. Khader and I stood close together, holding a stare.

You are safe here, Inshallah."

He held both my hands in his and murmured a blessing, just as he'd done with the owner of the Saurabh. I walked him to his car, watching as he stooped to sit. Someone had daubed the name Sapna on a grubby wall nearby. The paint was reasonably fresh, no more than a week old. If Khader had noticed, he gave no indication of it. Nazeer slammed the door, and ran around to the other side of the car.

He was smiling at me as Nazeer drove away, but it was Nazeer's scowl, behind him, that lingered longest in my mind. The man hated me, it seemed, and sooner or later I would have to settle the matter with him. It was a measure of just how lost and lonely I was, in my exile, that I looked forward to fighting him. He was shorter than I was, but every bit as strong, and perhaps a little heavier. I knew it would be a good fight.

I filed that future violence away under pending and impending, hailed a cab, and made my way to the Fort area. The commercial district of printers, stationers, warehouses, and light manufacturers, known simply as the Fort, served the office districts that surrounded it. The buildings and narrow streets of the Fort were some of the oldest in the city. The atmosphere of another age, an age of starched and formal courtesies, remained in those law firms, publishing houses, and other cerebral enterprises that had been fortunate enough to boast a Fort address for several decades.

One of the newer businesses in the Fort was the travel agency owned through proxies by Khaderbhai and managed by Madjid Rhustem. The agency handled the travel arrangements for thousands of men and women who worked on contracts in the Gulf States. On the legitimate side, the agency organised plane tickets, visas, work permits, and hostel accommodation in the Gulf. On the black market side, Madjid's agents arranged for most of the returning workers to wear from one to three hundred grams of our gold, per person, in chains, bracelets, rings, and brooches. The gold arrived in the Gulf ports from many sources. Some of it was obtained in legal bulk purchases. Much of it was stolen. Junkies and pickpockets and housebreakers from all over Europe and Africa stole gold jewellery and then sold it to their drug dealers and fences. A percentage of that gold, stolen in Frankfurt or Johannesburg or London, found its way through black marketeers to the Gulf ports. Khader's men in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, and every other Gulf capital melted the gold into thick bracelets and chains and brooches. For a small fee, the contract workers wore the gold jewellery on their return to India, and our men collected it from them at the international airport in Bombay.

Each year, the travel agency in the Fort area handled travel arrangements for at least five thousand contract workers. The gold they carried in was re-worked, when necessaiy, at a small workshop near the agency and then sold throughout the Zhaveri bazaar, or jewellery market. The profit from that one part of the gold operation was greater than four million American dollars a year, tax free, and Khader's senior managers were all wealthy, well-respected men.

I checked in with the staff at the Transact Travel Agency. Madjid was out, but the three managers were busy. When I'd learned how the gold-smuggling operation worked, I suggested that Khader's agency should computerise its files, and maintain a database on the contract workers who'd successfully completed one mission for us. Khader had approved the suggestion, and the men were busy transferring hard copy paper files onto the computers. I looked over their work, and was satisfied with their progress. We talked for a while, and when Madjid didn't return I went to look for him at the small gold workshop nearby.

Madjid looked up with a smile when I entered the factory, and then concentrated on the scales once more. Gold chains and bracelets, sorted into various grades, were weighed as individual pieces and weighed again in lots. The amounts were entered into a ledger and crossed-checked against a separate ledger kept for sales in the Zhaveri bazaar.

On that day, not two hours after Khaderbhai had talked to me of good and evil, I watched the heaps of gold chains and heavy home made bracelets being weighed and catalogued, and I felt myself plunging into a dark mood that I couldn't shake off. I was glad that Khaderbhai had directed me to leave Madjid and to begin work with Abdul Ghani. The golden-yellow metal that excited so many millions, in India, made me uneasy. I'd enjoyed working with Khaled Ansari and his currencies. I knew that I would enjoy working with Abdul Ghani in the passport business: passports were, after all, the main game for a man on the run. But working with gold in such huge quantities was unsettling. Gold fires the eyes with a different kind and colour of greed. Money's almost always just a means to an end; but, for many men, gold is an end in itself, and their love for it is the kind of thing that can give love a bad name.

I left Madjid for the last time, telling him that Khaderbhai had other work for me. I didn't volunteer the information that I was set to begin work with Abdul Ghani in the passport business.

Madjid and Ghani were both members of Khader's mafia council. I was sure they knew the substance of every decision affecting me before I knew it myself. We shook hands. He pulled me toward him in a clumsy, stiff-armed attempt at a hug. He smiled, and wished me luck. It was a false smile, but there wasn't any malice in it.

Madjid Rhustem was simply the kind of man who thought that smiling was an act of will. I thanked him for his patience, but I didn't return the smile.

When I made my last round of the jewellers at the Zhaveri bazaar, there was a quivering, agitated restlessness in me. It was the random anger that attaches itself to a sense of futility: the wide-eyed, fist-clenching anxiety that flares up often in a wasted life. I should've been happy, or at least happier. I had Khader's assurance of safety. I was making good money. I worked every day with hoards of gold a metre high. I was about to learn everything I needed to know about the passport business. I could buy whatever I wanted. I was fit and healthy and free. I should've been happier.

Happiness is a myth, Karla once said. It was invented to make us buy things. And as her words rippled on the stream of my dark feelings, as I remembered her face and her voice, I thought that maybe she was right, after all. Then I recalled those moments, earlier that day, when Khaderbhai had spoken to me as if he was speaking to his son. And there'd been happiness in that; I couldn't deny it. But it wasn't enough: true, and profound, and somehow pure as that feeling had been, it wasn't strong enough to lift my spirits.

My training session with Abdullah that day was intense. He accepted my taciturn mood, and we worked through the strenuous exercise-routine in silence. After a shower, he offered to give me a ride to my apartment on his motorcycle. We cruised along August Kranti Marg on our way inland from the coast at Breach Candy. We had no helmets, and the breeze of hot dry air streaming through our hair and loose silk shirts was a river of wind.

Abdullah's attention was suddenly taken by a group of men standing together outside a cafe. I guessed them to be Iranian, as he was. He wheeled the bike around, and pulled up about thirty metres from them.

He strolled along the footpath toward the men, pulling his long black hair into a ponytail and removing his watch as he walked. I snatched the keys from the ignition of the bike and set out after him. One of the men saw Abdullah and recognised him just as he approached. He gave a warning of some kind. The other men turned quickly. The fight started without a word. They swung wildly, flailing at him, and crashing into one another in their frenzy to land a punch on him. Abdullah stood his ground, covering his head with his fists held tightly to his temples. His elbows protected his body. When the fury of their initial attack abated, he struck out left and right, connecting with every punch. I ran up and joined him, dragging a man from his back. I tripped the man, forcing him against the straight edge of my leg until he fell. He tried to twist free of my grip, and dragged me down with him. I landed sideways to his body, with my knee on his chest, and punched him in the groin. He started to get up, and I swung round to hit him again, four or five times, on the cheek and the hinge of his jaw.

He rolled over onto his side, and curled his knees into his chest.

I looked up to see Abdullah drive off one of his attackers with a textbook right cross that splattered the man's nose in a sudden explosion of blood. I jumped up to put my back against Abdullah's, and shaped up in a karate stance. The three men who remained standing backed off, unsure of themselves. When Abdullah made a charge at them, shouting at the top of his voice, they turned and ran. I looked at Abdullah. He shook his head. We let them go.

The Indian crowd that had gathered to watch the fight followed us with their eyes while we walked back to the bike. I knew that if we'd fought Indians-from any part of India, and any ethnic, religious, or class divide-the whole street would've joined in against us. Since the fight was between foreigners, the people were curious and even excited, but they had no desire to get involved. As we rode past them, heading for Colaba, they began to disperse.

For his part, Abdullah never told me what the fight was about, and I never asked him. The one time we did talk of it, years later, he told me that he began to love me on that day. He loved me, he said, not because I joined the fight, but because I never once asked him what it was about. He admired that, he said, more than anything else he ever knew about me.

In the Colaba Causeway near my home, I asked Abdullah to slow down. I'd noticed a girl who was walking on the road, like a local, to avoid the crowds on the footpath. She looked different, changed somehow, but I recognised the blonde hair, the long, shapely legs, and hip-roll walk instantly. It was Lisa Carter. I told Abdullah to pull up just in front of her.

Her blonde hair was longer and thicker than when I'd last seen her. Her face was fuller and healthier, but her figure was trim and more athletic. She was wearing a white halter-neck top, a white mini-skirt, and Roman sandals. Her legs and slender arms were tanned to a golden chestnut. She looked beautiful. She _was beautiful.

She looked at me, and I raised my hands in a gesture that said, You're on your own, kid. I got off the bike and joined her on the road.

She hitched up her skirt and climbed onto the back of the bike.

The two or three men, out of several hundred on the street, who weren't already looking at her, joined in the chorus of stares.

Abdullah shook hands with me, grinning like a schoolboy. He kicked the bike into gear, and roared off into the meandering traffic.

They lived on the street, sleeping in doorways and foraging for commissions among the tourists who wanted to buy hard drugs. And it showed. They were unshaven, unwashed, and unkempt in appearance. They were also intelligent, honest, and unconditionally loyal to one another.

I was thinking of Prabaker, Vikram, and Johnny Cigar. And I knew the look I'd seen in Abdullah's eyes as he'd ridden off. He was a long way more than interested.

It's _meaning that makes us human beings."

A taxi pulled up beside us. The passenger in the back seat waited in a band of shadow for a moment, and then slowly leaned closer to the window. It was Ulla.

She was wearing black-framed sunglasses, and there was a scarf tied around her head, covering her ash-blonde hair. Her face was pale and drawn and thin.

I didn't move.

I turned and shook hands with the Georges. In the handshake with Scorpio, I passed over an American twenty-dollar bill. I'd taken it from my pocket when I first heard their voices, and I'd kept it ready to hand over when we parted. In their world, i knew, it was enough money-if their _nice _little _earner client fell through-to make them rich men for the night.

I opened the door and got into the cab. The driver pulled away into the traffic, checking me out often in his rear vision mirror.

I wasn't angry. For the first time in too long, I wasn't angry.

_Scorpio's _right, I thought: __it's meaning that makes us _human. There I was, with just the mention of a name, diving into the ocean of feeling again. I was looking for a woman, looking for Karla. I was involving myself in the world, taking risks. I had a reason. I had a quest.

And then I knew, in the excited moment, what it was that had caused my desolate mood at Madjid's, and put so much anger in me that day. I knew with perfect understanding that the momentary dream-the little boy's dream that Khader really _was my father- had plunged me into that restless, tide-rip of despair that fathers and sons too often let their love become. And seeing it, realising it, remembering it, I found the strength to lift the darkness from my heart. I looked at Ulla. I stared into the blue labyrinth of her eyes and I wondered, without anger or sorrow, if she'd played a part in betraying me, and having me put in prison.

She reached out to put a hand on my knee. The grip was strong, but her hand was shaking. I felt the scent-filled seconds expand around us. We were trapped, both of us, held fast, each in our different ways. And once again, we were about to set the web of our connection trembling.

____________________

At midnight's horizon the great milky wheel of stars rose wet and shivering from the waves, and the silver yellow light of a gibbous moon settled on the sea, glistening the tinsel-crested swell. It was a warm, still, and perfectly clear night. The deck of the Goa ferry was crowded, but I'd managed to stake out a clear space a little distance apart from a large group of young tourists. They were stoned, most of them, on grass, hash, and acid. Dance music thumped from the black, shouting mouths of a portable hi-fi. Sitting among their backpacks, they swayed and clapped in time, called out to one another over the music, and laughed, often. They were happy, on their way to Goa. The first time tourists were moving toward a dream. The old hands were returning to the one place in the world where they felt truly free.

Sailing toward Karla, looking out at the stars, listening to the kids who'd bought spaces on the deck of the ferry, I understood their hopeful, innocent excitement, and in a small and distant way I even shared it. But my face was hard. My eyes were hard.

And that hardness divided my feelings from theirs as cleanly and inviolably as the metre-wide space on the deck separated me from their tangled, high-spirited party. And as I sat there, on the swaying, gently plunging ferry, I thought about Ulla: I thought about the fear that had glittered in her sapphire-blue eyes when she'd talked to me in the back of the cab.

Ulla needed money that night, a thousand dollars, and I gave it to her. She needed me to accompany her to the hotel room where she'd left her clothes and personal belongings. We went there together and, despite her trembling fear, we collected her things and paid the bill without incident. She was in trouble, through some business deal involving Modena and Maurizio. The deal, like too many of Maurizio's quick scams, had soured. The men who'd lost their money weren't content, as others had been, to accept the loss and let the matter ride. They wanted their money, and they wanted someone to bleed, and not necessarily in that order.

She didn't tell me who they were. She didn't tell me why they considered her a target, or what they planned to do with her if they caught her. I didn't ask. I should've asked her, of course.

It would've saved me a lot of trouble. In the long run, it mightVe saved a life or two. But I wasn't really interested in Ulla. I wanted to know about Karla.

I relaxed a little. We loaded her belongings into the waiting cab, and I gave the driver directions to Abdullah's apartment in Breach Candy. I checked the streets around us carefully, and was fairly sure that we weren't being watched. When the cab moved off I sat back in silence for a while, watching the dark streets run in the window.

Ulla laughed.

My love for Karla cringed at the thought. My vanity preened itself in the flattery. I smothered the conflict in a harsher tone.

Ulla laughed again.

I turned, slowly, to stare at her, searching in the faint light for some hint of spite, some hidden meaning or allusion in the question.

Maurizio, he had a deal planned-well, actually, he had a rip-off planned-and I was the one in the middle. Maurizio was using me because the men he was planning to steal money from, they liked me, and they kind of trusted me, you know how it is."

I tried to find you the next day, to explain to you and make an apology, but... you were gone. I looked everywhere, I promise you I did. I was very sorry that I didn't go there to meet you at Leopold's, like I promised you that night."

I held the stare for a few seconds before replying.

Now, now! Stop!

The cab driver pulled over to the pavement beside a row of shuttered shops. The street was deserted. He switched off the cab, and watched us in his rear-vision mirror. Ulla tried to wrestle open the door. She was crying. In her agitation, she jammed the door handle, and the door wouldn't open.

I reached across to open the door. She stepped out, and leaned against the side of the car. I got out and joined her. She was trembling and sobbing. I held her in my arms until she cried it out.

She looked up into my face. Streetlights arced in her large, blue eyes. Her mouth was slack with exhaustion and fear, but her eyes were drawn to a distant, ineradicable hope.

She drifted in that reverie for a few moments and then snapped her head back to stare at me. Her hands gripped my arms as I held her.

And they remained with me, Ulla's tears, swarming with light, until they dissolved in the glittering, moonlit sea off the ferry. And her words, there is only love, passed like prayer-bead wishes on a thread of possibility as the music and laughter crashed around me.

When the light on that long night became the dawn, and the ferry docked at the Goan capital of Panjim, I was the first to board a bus to Mapusa. The fifteen-kilometre journey from Panjim to Mapusa, pronounced as Muppsa, wound through lush, leafy groves, past mansions built to the styles and tastes of four hundred years of Portuguese colonial rule. Mapusa was a transportation and communication centre for the northern region of Goa. I arrived on a Friday, market day, and the morning crowds were already busy with business and bargains. I made my way to the taxi and motorcycle stands. After a bout of bartering that invoked an august assembly of deities from at least three religions, and incorporated spirited, carnal references to the sisters of our respective friends and acquantainces, a dealer agreed to hire out an Enfield Bullet motorcycle for a reasonable rental. I paid a bond and a week's rent in advance, kick-started the bike, and set off through the market's maul toward the beaches.

The Enfield of India 350cc Bullet was a single-cylinder, four stroke motorcycle, constructed to the plans of the original 1950s' model of the British Royal Enfield. Renowned for its idiosyncratic handling as much as for its reliability and durability, the Bullet was a bike that demanded a relationship with its rider. That relationship involved tolerance, patience, and understanding on the part of the rider. In exchange, the Bullet provided the kind of soaring, celestial, wind-weaving pleasure that birds must know, punctuated by not infrequent near death experiences.

I spent the day cruising the beaches, from Calangute to Chapora.

I checked every hotel and guesthouse, sprinkling the arid ground with a shower of small but tempting bribes. I found local moneychangers, drug dealers, tour guides, thieves, and gigolos at each of the beaches. Most of them had seen foreign girls who answered her description, but none could be sure that he'd seen Karla. I stopped for tea or juice or a snack at the main beach restaurants, asking waiters and managers. They were all helpful, or tried to be helpful, because I spoke to them in Marathi and Hindi. None of them had seen her, however, and when the few leads I did get came to nothing, the first day of my search ended in disappointment.

The owner of the Seashore Restaurant in Anjuna, a heavy-set young Maharashtrian named Dashrant, was the last local I spoke to, as the sun began to set. He prepared a hearty meal of cabbage leaves stuffed with potatoes, green beans with ginger, aubergines with sour green chutney, and crisp-fried okra. When the meal was ready, he brought his own plate to my table, and sat with me to eat it. He insisted that we finish the meal with a long glass of the locally brewed coconut feni, and followed that with an equally long glass of cashew feni. Refusing to accept payment for the meal from a gora who spoke his native Marathi, Dashrant locked the restaurant and left with me, as my guide, on the back of my motorcycle. He saw my quest to find Karla as very romantic-very Indian, he said - and he wanted me to stay nearby, as his guest.

You sleep first, and search tomorrow-with a clean mind, isn't it?"

Paddling, with our legs outstretched from the bike, along a soft, sandy avenue between tall palms, I followed his directions to a small house. The square structure was made from bamboo, coconut poles, and palm leaves. It stood within sight of his restaurant, and with a wide view of the dark sea. I entered to find a single room, which he lit with candles and lamps. The floor was sand.

There was a table and two chairs, a bed with a bare rubber mattress, and a metal rack for hanging clothes. A large matka was filled with clean water. He announced, with pride, that the water had been drawn that day from a local well. There was a bottle of coconut feni on the table, with two glasses. Assuring me that the bike and I would be safe there, because it was known by all in the area to be his house, Dashrant handed me the key to the door's chain and padlock, and told me to stay until I found my girl. Winking a smile at me, he left. I heard him singing as he walked back between the slender palms to his restaurant.

I pulled the bike in against the hut, and tied a length of cord from it to the leg of the bed, covering it with sand. I hoped that if someone tried to steal the bike, the movement would wake me. Exhausted and disappointed, I fell onto the bed and was asleep in seconds. It was a nourishing, dreamless sleep, but I woke after four hours, and I was too alert, too restless, to find sleep again. I pulled my boots on, took a can of water, and visited the toilet at the back of the hut. Like many toilets in Goa, it was nothing more than a smooth, steep slope behind the squatting keyhole. Waste matter rolled down the slope to a narrow lane. Wild, hairy, black Goan pigs roamed the lanes, eating the waste. As I walked back to the house to wash my hands, I saw a herd of the black swine trotting along the lane. It was an efficient and environmentally benign method of waste disposal, but the sight of those pigs, feasting, was an eloquent argument in favor of vegetarianism.

I walked down to the beach, only fifty paces from Dashrant's hut, and sat on the dunes to smoke a cigarette. It was close to midnight, and the beach was deserted. The moon, almost full, was pinned like a medal to the chest of the sky. A medal for what? I thought. Wounded in action, maybe. A Purple Heart. Moonlight rushed with every rolling wave to the shore, as if the light itself was pulling the waves, as if the great net of silver light cast by the moon had gathered up the whole of the sea, and was hauling it to the shore, wave by wave.

A woman approached me, carrying a basket on her head. Her hips rolled and swayed in time to the running wavelets that lapped at her feet. She turned from the sea toward me and dropped the basket at my feet, squatting to look into my eyes. She was a watermelon seller, about thirty-five years old, and clearly familiar with tourists and their ways. Chewing forcefully on a mouthful of betel nut, she gestured with an open palm toward the half watermelon that remained in her large basket. It was very late for her to be on the beach. I guessed that she'd been baby sitting, or nursing a relative, and was returning home. When she saw me sitting alone, she'd hoped for one lucky-last sale for the night.

I told her, in Marathi, that I would be glad to buy a slice of melon. She reacted with happy surprise and, when the routine questions about where and how I'd learned Marathi were resolved, she cut me a generous slice. I ate the delicious sweet kalinga, spitting the seeds onto the sand. She watched me eat, and tried to resist when I forced a note rather than a coin into her basket. As she rose, lifting the basket to her head, I began to sing an old, sad, and much-loved song from a Hindi movie.

Ye doonia, ye mehfil Mere ham, ki nahi...

All the world, all its people Mean nothing to me...

She yelped in appreciation, and danced a few slick moves before walking away slowly along the beach.

She didn't reply. "So... why do you?"

She turned her head to watch a lone, distant figure on the beach.

It seemed to be a wandering holy man, carrying a long staff. I watched her watching the holy man, and I wanted to ask her again, to find out what had driven her from Bombay, but the set of her features was so tense that I decided to wait.

She flinched, or perhaps it was a shiver in response to the breeze from the sea. She was wearing a loose, yellow singlet top, and a green lungi. Her bare feet were buried in the sand, and she hugged her knees.

She paused, frowning pensively.

I couldn't understand what she'd said. I was sure it was important, and I wanted to ask her more, but the lone figure was only a few metres away, and he approached us with slow, dignified steps. The moment was lost.

He was indeed a holy man. Tall, lean, and tanned to a dark, earth-brown, he wore a loincloth and was adorned with dozens of necklaces, amulets, and decorative bracelets. His hair was matted in dreadlocks that reached to his waist. Balancing the long staff against his shoulder, he clasped his hands together in a greeting and a blessing. We greeted him in turn, and invited him to sit with us.

I fished a lump of charras from my pocket, and tossed it to him, with a filter cigarette.

He grinned, showing gaps in his teeth, and set to preparing a chillum. When the clay pipe was ready, he raised his palms to gain our attention.

He raised his arms above his head, and then bent over on his knees, touching his forehead to the sand, with his arms outstretched. Kneeling upright again and raising his hands, he repeated the gesture several times while mumbling indistinct words.

Eventually, he sat back on his feet, smiled the gap-toothed smile at us, and nodded for me to light the pipe. We smoked in silence.

When the pipe was finished, I refused to accept the return of the lump of charras. Acknowledging the gift with a solemn bow of his head, the holy man stood to leave. As we looked up at him, he slowly raised his staff to point it at the almost full moon. At once, we saw and understood what he meant-the pattern on the surface of the moon, that in some cultures is called the rabbit, suddenly looked to both of us like a kneeling figure raising his arms in prayer. Chuckling happily, the sadhu walked away along the gentle dunes.

And even though it's all true, all that, I don't really understand it, and I can't explain it-to you or to myself. I just love you. I just love you with all my heart. You do what God should do: you give me a reason to live. You give me a reason to love the world."

She kissed me, and our bodies settled together on the yielding sand. She clasped her hands in mine, and with our arms outstretched above our heads we made love while the praying moon seduced the sea, luring the waves to crash and crumble on the charmed, unfailing shore.

And for a week, then, we played at being tourists in Goa. We visited all the beaches on the coast of the Arabian Sea, from Chapora to Cape Rama. We slept for two nights on the white gold wonder of Colva Beach. We inspected all the churches in the Old Goa settlement. The Festival of St. Francis Xavier, held on the anniversary of the saint's death, every year, bound us in immense crowds of happy, hysterical pilgrims. The streets were thronged with people in their Sunday-best clothes. Merchants and street stall operators came from all over the territory. Processions of the blind, the lame, and the afflicted, hoping for a miracle, rambled toward the basilica of the saint. Xavier, a Spanish monk, was one of the seven original Jesuits in the order founded by his friend Ignatius Loyola. Xavier died in 1552. He was just forty six years old, but his spectacular proselytising missions to India, and what was then called the Far East, established his enduring legend. After numerous burials and disinterments, the much-exhumed body of St. Francis was finally installed in the Basilica of Bom Jesus, in Goa, in the early seventeenth century.

Still remarkably-some would say miraculously-well preserved, the body was exposed to public view once in every ten years.

While seemingly immune to decay, the saint's body had suffered various amputations and subtractions over the centuries. A Portuguese woman had bitten off one of the saint's toes, in the sixteenth century, in the hope of keeping it as a relic. Parts of the right hand had been sent to religious centres, as had chunks of the holy intestines. Karla and I offered outrageously extravagant bribes to the caretakers of the basilica, laughing all the while, but they steadfastly refused to allow us a peek at the venerable corpse.

It was a good question, and one that no-one in the justice system - cops, lawyers, judge, psychiatrist, or prison governors-had ever asked me.

She watched me in silence, almost matching her breathing to mine.

It was my turn to laugh.

It was a hard question to answer, because it forced me to compare the man I'd once been with the man I'd allowed myself to become.

Only the anarchists trust human beings enough to let them work it out for themselves. And I used to be that optimistic once. I used to believe and think like that. But I don't, any more. So, no-I guess I'm not an anarchist now."

Anyway, Ned and his guys were surrounded by this army of cops. His best friend was shot in the throat, and killed. His kid brother, and another kid named Steve Hart, shot each other with their last bullets rather than let themselves be captured. They were nineteen years old. Ned had this armour made from steel-a helmet and a chest plate. He came at them, the army of cops, with both guns blazing. He frightened the shit out of them, at first, and they ran away. But their officers drove them back to the fight.

They shot Ned's legs out from under him. After a phoney trial, with false statements from witnesses, Ned Kelly was sentenced to death."

She was watching the story in my face as I told it. I reached out for a handful of sand, and let it run through my fingers. Two large bats passed over our heads. They were close enough for us to hear the dry-leaf rustle of their wings.

She reached out to put an arm around my shoulders. With her free hand, she held my chin, and turned my head to face her smile.

I laughed, and she punched me in the ribs.

They hate bullshit. There's nothing like an Australian woman for taking the piss out of you."

She lay back on the sand, with her hands clasped behind her head.

And it should've been as happy, it should've been as easy, it should've been as good for ever as it was in those Goan days and nights of love. We should've built a life from the stars and the sea and the sand. And I should've listened to her-she told me almost nothing, but she did give me clues, and I know now that she put signs in her words and expressions that were as clear as the constellations over our heads. But i didn't listen. It's a fact of being in love that we often pay no attention whatsoever to the substance of what a lover says, while being intoxicated to ecstasy by the way it's said. I was in love with her eyes, but I didn't read them. I loved her voice, but I didn't really hear the fear and the anguish in it.

And when the last night came, and went, and I woke at dawn to prepare for the trip back to Bombay, I found her standing at the doorway, staring at the great shimmering pearl of the sea.

I laughed, because I thought it had to be a joke.

Her manner was so vehement, and the stand she was taking so inflexible and unexpected, that I was too surprised to be angry.

My smile curled into a frown.

We've talked about this. I'm getting into the passport business.

You know how important that is for me."

My stubbornness began to rouse itself.

Her fury dimmed into something worse, something I'd never seen in her: a resigned and defeated sorrow. I knew it was a sin to put such a feeling in such a woman, in any woman. And I knew, watching her little smile fade and die, that sooner or later I would pay for it.

I spoke to her softly, slowly, trying to win her agreement.

Stay with me now, here, or go back alone. The choice is yours.

But if you go back, it will finish us."

I stared at her, bewildered and angry and in love.

You've gotta tell me what's going on."

I sighed, and spoke evenly, but my teeth were clenched.

But the little bit that I've still got left-it's all I've got. A man has to respect himself, Karla, before he can respect anyone else. If I just give in, and do whatever you want me to do, without any kind of reason, I wouldn't respect myself. And if you tell the truth, you wouldn't respect me, either. So, I'm asking you again. What's this all about?"

I packed my bag and strapped it to the bike. When all was ready, I went down to the sea. She rose from the waves and walked toward me slowly, dragging her feet through the shifting sand. The singlet and lungi clung to her body. Her black hair gleamed sleek and wet under the soaring sun. The most beautiful woman I'd ever seen.

I looked into her eyes, and felt my own body harden, hollowed out by pride. My hands fell from her shoulders. I turned, and walked back to the bike. Riding to the last little cliff that gave a view of the beach, our beach, I stopped the bike and shielded my eyes to look for her. But she was gone. There was nothing but the waves breaking like the curved spines of playful porpoises, and the traceless, empty, tousled sheets of sand.

____________________

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

A smiling servant opened the door and ushered me into the room, gesturing for me to be silent. He needn't have bothered. The music was so loud in the room that I couldn't have been heard, even if I'd shouted. Cupping his hand as if it were a saucer, and pretending to sip from it, he mimed an offer of chai. I nodded.

He closed the door behind him quietly, leaving me alone with Abdul Ghani. The portly figure stood in the broad curve of a high bay window, looking out at a wide view of roof-garden plateaus, balconies ablaze with green and yellow saris hung out to dry, and rust-red herringbone rooftops.

The room was huge. Ornate ceiling rosettes surrounded thick, gold suspension chains for three elaborate chandeliers on the distant ceiling. At the end of the room near the main door, there was a long dining table with twelve high-backed teak chairs. A mahogany armoire ran the length of the table against one wall, and was topped by an immense, rose-glass mirror. Beside the armoire, there was a floor-to-ceiling bookcase running the further length of the wall. On the opposite long wall of the room, four tall windows looked upon the uppermost branches and cool, shading leaves of plane trees lining the street below. The centre of the room, between the wall of books and the tall windows, was set up as an office. A teak-and-leather captain's chair, facing the main door, served a broad, baroque desk. The far end of the room was decorated for entertaining, with leather chesterfields and deep armchairs. Two enormous bay windows in the end wall, behind the couches, dominated the room with arches of brilliant sunlight.

French doors set into the two bay windows opened onto a wide balcony, giving the view of Colaba's inner-city rooftop gardens, clotheslines, and neglected gargoyles.

Abdul Ghani stood there, listening to the music and singing that thundered from an expensive sound system built into the wall of books. The voices and the music were familiar, and a few moments of concentration brought them back to me. They were the Blind Singers, the same men I'd heard as Khaderbhai's guest, on the first night that I met him. The song wasn't one I recalled from that concert, but I was struck, at once, by its passion and power. As the thrilling, heart-wrenching chorus of voices finished, we stood in a throbbing silence that seemed to resist the noises of the households within the building and of the street below us.

Every time I hear them-and I play them every day, when I am at home here-I have the feeling that I am hearing the sound of my own requiem."

He still hadn't turned to face me, and I remained standing near the centre of the long room.

Tell me, Lin, do you think that one great act of genius can allow us to forgive the hundred flaws and failures that bring it into being?"

He turned to face me, and I saw that he was crying. Tears rolled quickly, easily, and continuously from his large eyes, and spilled across the plump cheeks to the belly of his long silk shirt. His voice, however, was calm and composed.

His body was torn to pieces, and the pieces were found in many different rooms of the house. The name Sapna was daubed on the walls with his own blood. Police are blaming fanatics who follow this Sapna. I'm sorry, Lin. Forgive my tears, please. I'm afraid that this bad business has taken its toll on me." "No, not at all. I'll... I'll come back at another time."

He walked to the hi-fi set, and extracted the cassette tape of the Blind Singers. Sliding it into a gold plastic case, he approached me and pressed it into my hand.

Do you know our young fighter, Andrew Ferreira? Yes? Then you know he is from Goa. He goes there, often, with Salman and Sanjay, when I have work for them. You must all go there together, some time-they will show you the special sights, if you get my meaning. So tell me, how was your trip?"

I answered him, trying to give my whole attention to the conversation, but my mind was thick with thoughts of Madjid; dead Madjid. I couldn't say that I'd liked him, or even that I'd trusted him. Yet his death, his murder, shook me, and filled me with a strange, excited agitation. He'd been killed-slaughtered, Abdul had said-in the house at Juhu where we'd studied together, and he'd taught me about gold and golden crimes. I thought of the house. I remembered its view of the sea, its purple-tiled swimming pool, its bare, pale-green prayer room where Madjid had bent his ancient knees, five times every day, and touched his bushy grey eyebrows to the floor. I remembered sitting outside that room, near the pool, waiting for him as he took time out to pray. I remembered staring at the purple water as the murmured syllables of the prayers buzzed past me into the swaying fronds of palms leaning in around the pool.

And once again I had the sense of a trap, of a destiny not shaped by my own deeds and desires. It was as if the constellations themselves were just the outlines of an immense cage that revolved and realigned itself, inscrutably, until the single moment that fate had reserved for me. There was too much that I didn't understand. There was too much that I wouldn't allow myself to ask. And I was excited, in that web of connections and concealments. The scent of danger, the smell of fear, filled my senses. The heart-squeezing, enlivening exhilaration of it was so powerful that it wasn't until an hour later, when we entered Abdul Ghani's passport workshop, that I could give my full attention to the man and the moment that we shared.

The men smiled widely, with perfect white teeth, in response to the compliment. They were handsome men, their faces formed from fine, almost delicate features, in a harmony of gentle contours and curves. They returned to their work as we strolled about the large room.

Strong lights shone from within its frame. "Krishna is our best light-box man. He examines the pages of genuine passports, looking for watermarks and concealed patterns. In this way, he can duplicate these effects where we need them."

I bent over Krishna's shoulder to watch him as he studied the information page of a British passport. A complex pattern of wavy lines descended from the top of the page, across a photograph, and on to the bottom of the page. On another passport beside it, Krishna was matching the pattern of wavy lines on the edge of a substituted photograph, creating the lines with a fine-tipped pen. Using the light-box, he placed one pattern over the other to check for irregularities.

Visa stamps, exit and entry, special permission stamps-whatever we need. He has three new profile-cutting machines, for reproducing the stamps. The machines cost me dearly-I had to import them, all the way from Germany-and I spent almost as much again, in baksheesh, getting them through customs controls and into our workshop without any unpleasant questions. But our Villu is an artist, and he often prefers to ignore my beautiful machines, and cut the new stamps by hand."

I watched as Villu created a new stamp on a blank rubber template. He copied a photographic enlargement of the original-a departure stamp from Athens airport-and cut the new stamp with scalpels and jeweller's files. Inkpad tests of the new stamp revealed minor flaws. When those were finally eradicated, Villu used a scrap of wet-and-dry sandpaper to wear away one corner of the stamp. That deliberate imperfection gave the inked image a genuine, natural appearance on the page. The completed stamp joined scores of others in the rack of stamps waiting to be used on newly altered passports.

Abdul Ghani completed his tour of the factory, demonstrating the computers, photocopy equipment, printing presses, profile cutters, and reserves of special parchment papers and inks. When I'd seen all there was to see on a first visit, he offered me a lift back to Colaba. I declined, asking him if I might stay and spend some time with the Sri Lankan forgers. He seemed pleased with my enthusiasm, or perhaps simply amused. When he left me, I heard his heavy sigh as the sadness of bereavement claimed him once more.

Krishna, Villu, and I drank chai and talked for three hours without a pause. Although they weren't brothers, they were both Tamil Sri Lankans who came from the same village on the Jaffna peninsula. Conflict between the Tamil Tigers-the Liberation Tigers for Tamil Eelam-and the Sri Lankan army had obliterated their village. Almost all the members of both families were dead.

The two young men escaped, with Villu's sister, a cousin, Krishna's grandparents, and his two young nieces, who were under five years old. A fishing boat brought them to India, on the people-smuggling route between Jaffna and the Coromandel coast.

They made their way to Bombay and then lived on a footpath, under a sheet of plastic, as pavement dwellers.

They'd survived that first year by taking ill-paid jobs as day labourers, and by committing a variety of petty crimes. Then, one day, a footpath-neighbour, who'd learned that they could read and write well in English, asked them to change a licence document.

Their work was good, and it brought a steadily increasing stream of visitors to their plastic awning on the Bombay footpath.

Hearing of their skill, Abdul Ghani had recommended to Khaderbhai that they be given a chance to prove themselves. Two years later, at the time that I met them, Krishna and Villu shared a large, comfortable apartment with the surviving members of their two families, saved money from their generous salaries, and were arguably the most successful forgers in Bombay, India's counterfeiting capital.

I wanted to learn everything. I wanted the mobility and security that their passport skills offered me. They spoke English well.

My enthusiasm fuelled their natural congeniality, and that first conversation flowed with good humour. It was a propitious start to the new friendship.

I visited Krishna and Villu every day for a week after that meeting. The young men worked long hours, and on some days I remained with them for ten hours at a stretch, watching them work, and asking my several hundred questions. The passports that they worked on fell into two main groups-those they obtained as genuine, used passports, and those that were blank and unused.

The used passports had been stolen by pickpockets, lost by tourists, or sold by desperate junkies from Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. The blank passports were rare. They'd been sold by corrupt officials at consulates and embassies and departments of immigration, from France to Turkey to China. Those that found their way into Khaderbhai's area of influence were bought immediately, at any price, and given to Krishna and Villu.

They showed me a blank, original, unused passport from Canada, as an example. It was housed in a fireproof safe with others from the United Kingdom, Germany, Portugal and Venezuela.

With sufficient patience, expertise, and resources, the two forgers could change almost anything in a passport to suit a new user's requirements. Photographs were substituted, and the ridge marks or indentations of a heavy stamp were imitated, using something as humble as a crochet hook. Sometimes the stitching that bound a passport was carefully removed, and whole groups of pages were replaced, using clean pages from a second passport.

Dates, details, and stamps were all altered or erased with chemical solvents. New data was inserted in an appropriate shade, selected from a comprehensive catalogue of printer's inks. Some of the changes defied the scrutiny of experts, and none of them was detectable in routine examinations.

During that first week of passport studies, I found a new, safe, comfortable apartment for Ulla in neighbouring Tardeo, not far from the Haji Ali Mosque. Lisa Carter, who'd visited Ulla almost every day at Abdullah's apartment-and visited, far more warmly, with Abdullah himself- agreed to share the new place. We moved them and their belongings in a small fleet of taxis. The two women liked one another, and got on well. They drank vodka, cheated at Scrabble and gin rummy, enjoyed the same kinds of movies on video, and swapped clothes.

They'd also discovered, in the weeks they'd spent in Abdullah's surprisingly well-stocked kitchen, that they liked one another's cooking. The new apartment was a new beginning for them and, despite Ulla's lingering fears about Maurizio and his crooked deals, she and Lisa were happy and optimistic.

I continued the weight training and karate with Abdullah, Salman, and Sanjay. We were fit and strong and fast. And as the days of training became weeks, Abdullah and I grew closer, as friends and brothers, just as Salman and Sanjay were with one another. It was the kind of closeness that didn't need conversation to sustain itself: quite often we would meet, travel to the gym, work out on the weights, box a few rounds, spend half an hour sparring at karate, and speak no more than ten words to one another.

Sometimes, with no more than a look in my eye or an unusual expression on his face, we would laugh, and keep on laughing so hard that we collapsed to the practice mats. And in that way, without words, I slowly opened my heart to Abdullah, and I began to love him.

I'd spoken to the head man of the slum, Qasim Ali Hussein, and to several others, including Johnny Cigar, when I'd first returned from Goa. I saw Prabaker in his taxi every other day. But there were so many new challenges and rewards in Ghani's passport workshop, and they kept me so busy and excited, that I stopped working, even occasionally, at the slum clinic I'd founded in the little hut that had been my home.

On my first visit to the slum in several weeks, I was surprised to find Prabaker in the wriggling convulsions of a dance while the slum musicians were rehearsing one of their popular songs.

The little guide was dressed in his taxi driver's khaki shirt and white trousers. He wore a purple scarf around his neck, and yellow plastic sandals. Approaching him unobserved, I watched him in silence for a while. His dance managed to combine obscenely lewd and suggestive thrusts of his hips with the facial expressions and hand-whirling gestures of a child-like innocence.

With clownish charm he held his open palms beside his smiling face one moment, and then pumped his groin back and forth with a determined little grimace the next. When he finally turned and saw me, his face exploded in that huge smile, that uniquely wide and heart-filled smile, and he rushed to greet me.

Can you believe it?"

I walked off, glancing back over my shoulder to see Prabaker encouraging the band with mechanical, piston-like thrusts of his narrow hips. At the edge of the slum, where black boulders tumbled to the sea, I found Johnny Cigar. He was dressed in a white singlet and a chequered green lungi. He braced himself with his arms, leaning back, and staring out to sea. It was almost exactly the same spot where he'd told me about seawater, sweat, and tears on the evening of the cholera outbreak, so many months before.

He paused, breathing through his nose, with his lips pressed tightly together. His eyes squinted against the glare from the glittering sea, and the fresh, persistent breeze. Behind us we could hear the noises of the slum-hawkers' cries, the slap of clothes on stone in the washing area, children playing, a bickering complaint, and the jangling music for Prabaker's piston-hips.

He turned to me, and the whites of his eyes were blazing with the tears he wouldn't let them shed.

He looked at me, his eyes talking to me in a language I could feel but couldn't understand. When I left him, he was staring at the ceaselessness of the sea, irritated to chequered, white rifts by the wind.

I walked back through the slum to the clinic. A conversation with Ayub and Siddhartha, the two young men I'd trained to run the clinic, reassured me that all was well. I gave them some money to keep, as an emergency float, and left money with Prabaker for his wedding preparations. I paid a courtesy visit to Qasim Ali Hussein, allowing him to force the hospitality of chai upon me.

Jeetendra and Anand Rao, two of my former neighbours, joined us, with several other men I knew well. Qasim Ali led the conversation, referring to his son Sadiq, who was working in the Gulf. In turn, we spoke of religious and communal conflict in the city, the construction of the twin towers; still at least two years from completion, and the weddings of Prabaker and Johnny Cigar.

It was a genial, sanguine meeting, and I rose to leave with the strength and confidence that those honest, simple, decent men always inspired in me. I'd only walked a few paces, however, when the young Sikh, Anand Rao, caught up, and fell into step beside me.

He fell silent, staring at his sandaled feet. I reached out to put a hand on his broad, proud, thin shoulder. Gradually his eyes lifted, and met mine in a mute appeal.

He recoiled as if I'd cursed him. He held the stare, for a moment, before turning and walking back into the slum.

I strode on through familiar streets, and told myself that it was okay. Anand Rao and Rasheed had shared a hut for more than two years. If they were falling out because Rasheed's wife and her sister had moved to the city, and Anand had been forced from the hut, it was probably to be expected. And it was no business of mine. I laughed, shaking my head as I walked, and trying to figure out why Anand Rao had reacted so badly to the offer of money. It wasn't an unreasonable thing for me to assume or to offer. On the thirty-minute walk from the slum to Leopold's, I gave money to five other people, including both of the Zodiac Georges. He'll get over it, whatever it is, I told myself. At any rate, it's got nothing to do with me. But the lies we tell ourselves are the ghosts that haunt the empty house of midnight.

And although I pushed Anand and the slum from my mind, I felt the breath of that ghosted lie on my face as I walked through the long, thronging Causeway on that hot afternoon.

I stepped up into Leopold's, and Didier seized me by the arm before I could speak or sit down, turning me about and leading me to a cab that was waiting outside.

You have no choice, Lin. You must help him. I know you. There is in you, as there is in me, a morbid belief in love, and a fascination for the madness that love puts in its victims."

I laughed, avoiding his eye, because it was true. The taxi pulled up at Marine Lines Station. Marine Lines was the first railway station after the central city terminus, at Churchgate Depot. We climbed the pedestrian ramp and found Vikram, with several of his friends, waiting for us on the station platform.

Just like I'm standing now." "U-huh."

The train from Churchgate Station came into view, approaching us at a steady pace. Vikram gave me the signal, opening his eyes as widely as the muscles would allow, and shaking his head. I put my hands on Lettie's shoulders, gently turning her until she stood as Vikram had requested, with her back to the tracks.

The train slowed behind her as it entered the station. Her eyes were gleaming. A smile flickered and faded on her open lips. She was intrigued and excited. Vikram and Didier were gesturing wildly, behind her back, for me to hurry. The train stopped with a wheezy creak of metal triumph.

She looked at me. She stared. She smiled into my eyes. She raised her eyebrows, and turned down the corners of her mouth as she considered it. Then she nodded.

Vikram leapt forward with the blindfold and tied it on, asking her if it was too tight. He guided her a step or two backwards, toward the train, and then told her to raise her arms over her head.

Some men appeared at the edge of the roofline on the train carriage. They'd been lying on the roof of the train. They leaned over, and seized Lettie's raised arms, lifting her slight frame effortlessly onto the roof with them. Lettie shrieked, but the piercing sound was lost in the shrill of the train guard's whistle. The train began to move.

I glanced at Didier.

I jogged along beside the train, and clambered up the outside of the carriage to the roof. There were a dozen men or more on the roof. Some of them were musicians. Sitting together, they cradled tablas, cymbals, flutes, and tambourines in their laps. Further along the dusty roof was a second group. Lettie sat in the middle of them. She still wore the blindfold. Men held her at the shoulders-one on each arm, and two from behind-to keep her safe. Vikram knelt in front of her.

I heard his pleading as I crept along the roof toward them at a crouch.

Vikram untied the blindfold, and watched her as she looked around, taking in the perspective from the roof of the fast moving train. Her mouth fell open, and her face slowly swelled into a wide smile.

There were words painted on it. As we neared the banner, the writing became clear enough to read. The words were painted in letters as tall as a man. They filled the whole width of the billowing sheet:

LETITIA I LOVE YOU