CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

I couldn't face the loss of Khaderbhai, my father-dream. I'd helped to bury him, for God's sake, with my own hands. But I didn't grieve, and I didn't mourn him. There wasn't enough truth in me for that kind of sorrowing because my heart wouldn't believe him dead. I'd loved him too much, it seemed to me in that winter of war, for him to simply be gone, to be dead. If so much love could vanish into the earth and speak no more, smile no more, then love was nothing. And I wouldn't believe that. I was sure there had to be a pay-off, somehow, and I kept waiting for it. I didn't know then, as I do now, that love's a one-way street. Love, like respect, isn't something you get; it's something you give. But not knowing that in those bitter weeks, not thinking that, I turned from the hole in my life where so much loving hope had been, and I refused to feel the longing or the loss. I cringed within the bleak, concealing camouflage of snow and shadowed stone. I chewed the leathered fragments of goat's meat left to us. And each minute crammed with heartbeats and hunger dragged me further from the grieving and the truth.

Eventually, of course, we exhausted the supply of meat, and a meeting was called to discuss our options. Jalalaad and the younger Afghans wanted to make a run for it: to fight our way through enemy lines, and strike out for the desert region of Zabul province, close to the Pakistan border. Suleiman and Khaled reluctantly agreed that there was no other option, but they wanted clear intelligence of the enemy disposition before choosing where to launch a breakout attack. To that end, Suleiman sent young Hanif on a scouting mission that would take him on a sweeping curve from the south-west to the north and south-east of our position. He ordered the young man to return within twenty four hours, and to travel only at night.

It was a long, cold, hungry wait for Hanif to return. We were drinking water, but that only staved off the torment for a few minutes, and left us even hungrier. Twenty-four hours stretched to two days, and then into a third, with no sign of him. On the morning of the third day, we accepted that Hanif was dead or captured.

Juma, a cameleer from the tiny Tajik enclave in the south-west of Afghanistan near Iran, volunteered to search for him. He was a dark, thin-faced man with a hawk-like nose and a thickly emotive mouth. He was close to Hanif and Jalalaad-the closeness that men in wars and prisons find, against their every expectation, and rarely express in words or gestures.

Juma's Tajik clans of cameleers were traditional rivals of the Mohmand Hazarbuz people of Hanif and Jalalaad in the nomadic transport of trade goods. The competition between the groups had become intense as Afghanistan rapidly modernised. In 1920, fully one in every three Afghans was a nomad. Just two generations later, by 1970, only 2 per cent of the people were nomads. Rivals though they were, the three young men had been thrown into close co-operation with one another by the war, and they'd become inseparable friends. Their friendship had developed in the insidiously dull months that troughed between the peaks of fighting, and was tested many times in combat. In their most successful battle, they'd used land mines and grenades to destroy a Russian tank. Each of them wore, on a leather thong around his neck, a small piece of metal taken from the tank as a souvenir.

When Juma declared that he would search for Hanif, we all knew that we couldn't prevent him from doing it. With a weary sigh, Suleiman agreed to let him go. Refusing to wait until nightfall, Juma shouldered his weapon and crept from the camp at once. He'd gone without food for three days, just as we had, but the smile that he sent back to Jalalaad, as he looked over his shoulder for the last time, was bright with strength and courage. We watched him leave, watched his thin, retreating shadow sweep the sundial of the snowy slopes beneath us.

Hunger exaggerated the cold. It was a long, hard winter, with snow falling on the mountains around us every other day. The temperature fluttered above zero during the daylight hours, but sank into icy, teeth-chattering sub-zero levels from dusk until well after dawn. My hands and feet were constantly cold; achingly cold. The skin on my face was wooden, and as riven with cracks as the feet of the farmers in Prabaker's village. We pissed on our hands, to fight off the aching sting of the cold, and it helped to bring feeling back to them momentarily. But we were so cold that taking a piss was a serious issue. First there was the dread inspired by having to open our clothes at all, and then there was the chill that followed the release of a bladder of warm fluid. Losing that warmth caused the body temperature to drop quickly, and we always put it off until the last moment.

Juma failed to return that night. At midnight, with hunger and fear prodding us awake, we all jumped at a little crickle of sound in the darkness. Seven guns aimed at the spot. Then we gasped as a face loomed from the shadows, much closer than we'd expected. It was Habib.

They will kill you all. There is only one way out of here now."

Habib didn't reply. Jalalaad asked the question again, more forcefully.

We listened in a silence thick with our fear and the poisonous smells of decayed flesh that clung to Habib. He seemed to be meditating, or perhaps listening to something no-one else could hear.

Habib said. His voice was still calm and composed, but his face was a gargoyle's leer, and the contrast unnerved us all. "Only a few of them stay here tomorrow. Only a few will stay, while the rest of them put the last mines on the north-west slopes, just after dawn. If you run at them, attack them, fight them tomorrow, in the south-east, there will only be a few of them. You can break through and escape. But only tomorrow."

You are a soldier. If you can get past them, we can do it."

True enough, the rotting pieces of the dead goat-the haram cuts from the animal-lay in a little heap in the slushy snow. Cold as it was, and even in the snow, the bits of raw meat had long begun to decay. We couldn't smell them from that distance, but it seemed that Habib could.

The madman's comment provoked a long discussion of the religious rights and wrongs of eating haram food. The men weren't rigid in the observation of their faith. They prayed every day, but not in strict adherence to the timetable of three sessions, ordained by Shia Islam, or the five sessions of the Sunni Muslims. They were good men of faith, rather than overtly religious men.

Nevertheless, in a time of war, and with the great dangers we faced, the last power they wanted ranged against them was God's.

They were holy warriors, mujaheddin: men who believed that they would become martyrs at the instant that they died in battle, and that they were assured a place in the heavens, where beautiful maidens would attend them. They didn't want to pollute themselves with forbidden foods when they were so close to the martyr's rush for paradise. It was a tribute to their faith, in fact, that the mere discussion of the haram meat hadn't occurred until we'd hungered for a month and then starved for five days.

For my part, I confessed to Mahmoud Melbaaf that I'd been thinking about the discarded meat almost constantly for the last few days. I wasn't a Muslim, and the meat wasn't forbidden to me.

But I'd lived so closely with the fighters, and for so many painful weeks, that I'd linked my fate to theirs. I would never have eaten anything while they hungered. I wanted to eat the meat, but only if they agreed and ate it with me.

Suleiman delivered the decisive opinion on the matter. He reminded the men that while it was indeed evil for a Muslim to eat haram food, it was an even greater evil for a Muslim to starve himself to death when haram food was available to be eaten. The men decided that we would cook the rotting meat in a soup, before the first light. Then, fortified by that meal, we would use Habib's information on the enemy positions to fight our way out of the mountains.

During the long weeks of hiding and waiting without heat or hot food, we'd entertained and supported one another with the stories we'd told. On that last night, after several others had spoken, it was my turn once more. For my first story, weeks before, I'd told them about my escape from prison. Although they'd been scandalised by my admissions about being a gunaa, or sinner, and being imprisoned as a criminal, they'd been thrilled by the account, and asked many questions afterwards. My second story had been about the Night of the Assassins: how Abdullah, Vikram, and I had tracked the Nigerian killers down; how we'd fought with them, defeated them, and then expelled them from the country; how I'd hunted Maurizio, the man who'd caused it all, and beat him with my fists; and how I'd wanted to kill him, but had spared his life, only to regret that pity when he'd attacked Lisa Carter and forced Ulla to kill him.

That story, too, had been very well received, and as Mahmoud Melbaaf took his place beside me to translate my third story, I wondered what might capture their enthusiasm anew. My mind scanned its list of heroes. There were many, so many men and women, beginning with my own mother, whose courage and sacrifice inspired the memory of them. But when I began to speak, I found myself telling Prabaker's story. The words, like some kind of desperate prayer, came unbidden from my heart.

I told them how Prabaker had left his village-Eden for the city when he was still a child; how he'd returned as a teenager, with the wild street boy Raju and other friends to confront the menace of the dacoits; how Rukhmabai, Prabaker's mother, had put courage into the men of the village; how young Raju had fired his revolver as he walked toward the boastful leader of the dacoits until the man fell dead; how Prabaker had loved feasting and dancing and music; how he'd saved the woman he loved from the cholera epidemic, and married her; and how he'd died, in a hospital bed, surrounded by our sorrowing love.

After Mahmoud finished translating the last of my words there was a lengthy silence while they considered the tale. I was just convincing myself that they were as moved by the life of my little friend as I was myself when the first questions began.

That information inspired a little gesticulating buzz of discussion that was more animated and partisan than any of the political or religious debates that had occasionally stirred among the men.

Suleiman asked.

In that way the session moved through all the themes that concerned them, until at last I excused myself and found a relatively sheltered spot where I could stare at the misty nothing of the frozen, shrouded sky. I was trying to fight down the fear that prowled in my empty belly, and leapt up with sharp claws at my heart in its cage of ribs.

Tomorrow. We were going to fight our way out. No-one had said it, but I knew that all the others were thinking we would die. They were too cheerful, too relaxed. All the tension and dread of the last weeks had drained from them once we'd made the decision to fight. It wasn't the joyful relief of men who know they're saved.

It was something else-something I'd seen in the mirror, in my cell, on the night before my desperate escape from prison, and something I'd seen in the eyes of the man who'd escaped with me. It was the exhilaration of men who were risking everything, risking life and death, on one throw of the dice. Some time on the next day we would be free, or we would be dead. The same resolution that had sent me over the front wall of a prison was sending us over the ridge, and into the enemy guns: it's better to die fighting than to die like a rat in a trap. I'd escaped from prison, and crossed the world, and crossed the years, to find myself in the company of men who felt exactly as I did about freedom and death.

And still I was afraid: afraid of being wounded, afraid of being shot in the spine and paralysed, afraid of being captured alive and tortured in another prison by yet another prison guard. It occurred to me that Karla and Khaderbhai would've had something clever to say to me about fear. And in thinking that, I realised how remote they were from the moment, and the mountain, and me. I realised that I didn't need their brilliance any more: it couldn't help me. All the cleverness in all the world couldn't stop my stomach from knotting around its prowling fear. When you know you're going to die, there's no comfort in cleverness.

Genius is vain, and cleverness is hollow, at the end. The comfort that does come, if it comes at all, is that strangely marbled mix of time and place and feeling that we usually call wisdom. For me, on that last night before the battle, it was the sound of my mother's voice, and it was the life and death of my friend Prabaker... God give you rest, Prabaker. I still love you, and the grieving, when I think of you, is pinned to my heart and my eyes with bright and burning stars... My comfort, on that freezing ridge, was the memory of Prabaker's smiling face, and the sound of my mother's voice: Whatever you do in life, do it with courage, and you won't go far wrong...

It's inside me, and I can't shake it tonight."

It was the first time that we'd spoken more than the essential word or two since the night that Khader had left. We'd worked and slept side by side, every day and night, but I almost never met his eye, and I'd avoided conversation with him so coldly that he, too, had been silent with me.

The New York accent, with its Arabic swell, rolled over me like a warm, frothy wave, and I almost reached out to hug him. I'd missed the assurances I'd always found in the sound of that voice, and the honest suffering I saw in the scarred face. I was so glad to have his friendship again that I confused what he'd said about Khaderbhai. I thought, without really thinking at all, that he was talking about Abdullah. He wasn't, and that, too, like a hundred other chances to know all the truth in the one conversation, was lost.

He told me so, a couple different times."

Shit, for a while there, I think you even had Karla believing, too. You gotta understand, Lin. If Khader had a choice, if there was a better way to do what he had to do, he would've taken it. It all played out the way it had to. Nobody wanted to fuck you over."

We were silent for a moment, both of us reeling back through the years. I remembered Abdullah, at the sea wall near the Haji Ali Mosque, on the night that I met him with Khaderbhai. I remembered him saying that a woman had taught him the clever phrase he'd used in English. It must've been Karla. Of course it was Karla.

And I remembered the stiffness that was in Khaled's manner when I first met him, and I realised, suddenly, that he must've been hurting then, and maybe blaming me for it. I saw clearly what it must've taken for him to be as friendly and kind to me as he was at the beginning.

She's hurt bad, in all the places that count. They really fucked her up when she was a kid. She's a bit crazy. She did something, in the States, before she came to India. And that fucked her up, too."

I hesitated, partly from reluctance to surrender the little advantage I might've had over him if he believed that she did say it, and partly from loyalty to Karla-because it was her business, after all. In the end, I answered him: I had to know why he'd asked me the question.

Khader made it worse, I think."

But then she met this guy, a politician, and he fell for her pretty hard. Khader needed the guy, so he got her to work for him, and I don't think she was cut out for it."

He fell silent again. We stared at the rocks and the frosty ground, avoiding one another's eyes. A few shivering minutes passed. At last he took a deep breath and stood up, slapping at the chill in his arms and legs. I stood as well, trembling with cold and stamping my numb feet. At the last possible moment, and with an impulsive rush as if he was breaking through a tangle of vines, Khaled flung his arms around me and hugged me. The strength in his arms was fierce, but his head slowly came to rest against mine as tenderly as the lolling head of a sleeping child.

When he pulled away from me, his face was averted and I couldn't see his eyes. He walked off, and I followed more slowly, hugging my hands under my arms to fight off the cold. It was only when I was alone that I recalled what he'd said to me: I got a bad feeling, Lin. A real bad feeling...

I resolved to talk to him about it, but just at that moment Habib stepped out of a shadow beside me, and I jumped in fright.

Habib garbled something at me, speaking so quickly that I couldn't make out a single clear syllable. His eyes were starting from his head. The effect was exaggerated by the dark, heavy pouches beneath his eyes, which dragged the lower lids with them and showed too much white below the fractured, scattered wheel of the iris.

He talks to every man, tonight. He comes to me. He asks me to make it English for you, what he says. You are the last, before Khaled. He wants to speak to Khaled last."

Mahmoud asked him to repeat what he'd said to me. Habib did speak again, in exactly the same too-rapid, hyper-energetic manner, staring into my eyes as if he expected an enemy or a monstrous beast to emerge from them. I was just as steadfast in returning the stare: I'd been locked up with violent, crazy men, and I knew better than to take my eyes off him.

Mahmoud asked Habib if there was anything else that he wanted to say. Holding the stare into my eyes, Habib rattled away in Pashto and Farsi.

Mahmoud spoke, and for a few moments Habib stared harder, searching in my eyes for a recognition or response that I couldn't give him. He turned and loped away with the stooped, crouching run that I found more chilling and alarming, somehow, than the more obvious, bulging madness in his eyes.

Mahmoud laughed. It was so rare to see him laugh out loud that I felt myself smiling in response. He'd lost weight on the mission - we'd all lost weight. His face was drawn tight to the high cheekbones and the pointed chin, covered with a thick, dark beard. His eyes, even in the cold moonlight, were the polished bronze of a temple vase.

It is Abdullah. He tells me that Khader Khan wants to see me. I go to Khader, in his car. We drive together, we talk, and after, I am his man."

Mahmoud frowned, and it seemed that he might be considering the question for the first time.

He choked off the words, and rubbed a tear from each eye with the sleeve of his rough jacket.

It was a long speech, and we were freezing cold, yet still I would've asked him more. I wanted to know it all-everything that filled the gaps between what Khaderbhai had told me and the secrets Khaled had shared. But at that moment we heard a piercingly piteous scream of terror. It died suddenly, as if the thread of sound had been cut with a pair of shears. We looked at one another, and reached for weapons in the same instinct.

We reached the origin of the sound at the same time as the other men. Nazeer and Suleiman rushed through our. group to see what we were staring at. They froze, silent and still, at the sight of Khaled Ansari kneeling over the body of Habib Abdur Rahman. The madman was on his back. He was dead. There was a knife in his throat where the words about luck had been only minutes before.

The knife had been pushed into his neck and twisted, just as Habib himself had done to our horses and to Siddiqi. But it wasn't Habib's knife that we stared at, jutting out of the muddy, sinewed throat like a branch from a riverbed. We all knew the knife well. We'd all seen its distinctive, carved, horn handle a hundred times. It was Khaled's knife.

Nazeer and Suleiman put their hands under Khaled's arms, and lifted him gently from the corpse. He accepted the help momentarily, but then he shrugged them off and knelt beside the body. Habib's pattu shawl was rucked up around his chest. Khaled pulled something from the front of the dead man's flak jacket. It was metal, two pieces of metal, hanging from Habib's neck on leather thongs. Jalalaad rushed forward and snatched them. They were the souvenir fragments of the tank that he and Hanif and Juma had destroyed; the pieces that his friends had worn around their necks.

Khaled stood and turned and walked slowly away from the killing.

I put my hand on his shoulder as he passed me, and walked with him. Behind me there was a howl of rage as Jalalaad attacked Habib's corpse with the butt of his Kalashnikov. I looked over my shoulder to see the mad eyes of the lunatic crushed beneath the rise and smashing fall of the weapon. And in one of those perversities of the pitying heart, I found myself feeling sorry for Habib. I'd wanted to kill him myself, more than once, and I knew that I was glad he was dead, but my heart was so sorry for him in that moment that I grieved as if he was a friend. He was a _teacher, I heard myself thinking. The most violent and dangerous man I'd ever known had been a kindergarten teacher. I couldn't shake that thought-as if it was the only truth, in that moment, that really mattered.

And when the men finally dragged Jalalaad away, there was nothing left: nothing but blood and snow and hair and shattered bone where the life and the tortured mind had been.

Khaled returned to our cave. He was muttering something in Arabic. His eyes were radiant, filled with a vision that illuminated him, and put an almost frightening resolve in the set of his scarred features.

At the cave, he removed the belt around his waist that held his canteen. He let it slip to the ground. He lifted the cartridge belt over his head from his shoulder and let that too fall. Next he rummaged through his pockets, emptying them of their contents one by one until there was nothing on him but the clothes he wore. At his feet were his false passports, his money, his letters, his wallet, his weapons, his jewellery, and even the bruised, wrinkle-eared photos of his long-dead family.

Khaled left the cave and walked to the edge of the compound. I ran to stop him, and pushed him back with both hands. He allowed the shove, and then came on toward me again. I threw my arms around him and dragged him back a few paces. He didn't resist me.

He stared directly ahead at that infuriating vision only he could see while he chanted the hypnotically poetic verses of the Koran.

And when I let him go, he continued his walk out of the camp.

Mahmoud, Nazeer, and Suleiman came forward but, instead of helping me to restrain Khaled, they grasped my arms and gently prised them away from him. Khaled immediately began to walk forward. I wrestled myself free, and rushed to stop him again. I shouted at him and slapped at his face to waken him to the danger. He didn't resist and he didn't. react. I felt the tears hot on my cold face, stinging in the cracks that split my frozen lips. I felt the sobbing in my chest like a river rappling and rolling against worn and rounded rocks, on and on and on. I held him tight, with one arm around his neck and the other around his waist, my hands locked together at his back.

Nazeer, even as thin and weakened as he'd become in those weeks, was too strong for me. His steel hands grabbed at my wrists and peeled them away from Khaled. Mahmoud and Suleiman helped him to hold me back as I struggled and reached out to grab Khaled's jacket. And then we watched him walk from the camp into the winter that one way or another had ruined or killed us all.

I lay there for hours unsleeping, filthy starving, angry, and broken-hearted. And I might've died there-some pain, sometimes, leaves you without legs or arms-but the smell of food brought me round. The men had decided that they couldn't wait to cook the last of the rotting meat. They'd boiled it in a pot during those hours, fanning the smoke away continuously and concealing the flame with blankets.

The soup was ready long before dawn, and every man took a bowl, glass, or mug of it. The stink of the rotting meat was more than our empty stomachs could bear, at first. We all vomited the foul, retching sips we took. But hunger has a will of its own, a will that's much older than the other will we praise and flatter in the palace of the mind. We were too hungry to refuse the food, and by the third try, or the fifth for some of us, we kept the repulsive, stinking brew down. Then the pain caused by the hot soup in our empty stomachs was as sharp as a belly full of fishhooks; yet that too passed, and every man forced himself to drink three helpings, and to chew the rubbery, rotting chunks of meat.

For two hours after that we took turns to dash into the rocks as the food worked through intestines and bowels that had seized in our starving bodies, and suddenly erupted.

At last, when we recovered, and when all the prayers were said, and when each man was ready, we gathered near the south-eastern edge of the compound at the place Habib had recommended for our attack. He'd assured us that the steep slope was our one chance to fight our way to freedom; and since he'd planned to fight in the attack with us, we had no reason to distrust the advice.

We were six men. The five others were Suleiman, Mahmoud Melbaaf, Nazeer, Jalalaad, and young Ala-ud-Din. He was a shy man of twenty with a boy's grin beneath an old man's faded green eyes.

He caught my eye, and nodded encouragingly. I returned the nod with a smile, and his face broke into a wider grin while his head nodded more vigorously. I looked away, ashamed that I'd spent so much time with him, months of hard time, without once trying to engage him in a conversation. We were going to die together, and I knew nothing about him. Nothing.

Dawn put fire in the sky. Wind-driven clouds streaming across the far plain were aflame, crimsoned with the first burning kisses of the morning sun. We shook hands, embraced, hugged one another, checked our weapons again and again, and stared down the steep slopes toward forever.

The end, when it comes, is always too soon. My skin was tight on my face, drawn back by the muscles of my neck and jaw, those muscles in turn pulled taut by the shoulders and arms and frostbitten hands, clutching the final agony of the gun.

Suleiman gave the order. My stomach dropped and locked, and froze as hard as the cold unfeeling earth beneath my boots. I stood up, and crossed the lip of the ridge. We started down the slope. It was a magnificent day, the best clear day for months. I remembered thinking, weeks before, that Afghanistan, like prison, had no dawns and no sunsets in the stone cages of its mountains.

Yet the dawn that morning was more lovely than any I'd ever known. When the steeper slopes eased into a more gradual decline, we picked up the pace, jogging over the last of the rose-pink snow and into the grey-green rough ground beyond.

The first explosions we heard were too far away from us to frighten me. Okay. Here it comes. This is it... The words chattered through my mind as if someone else spoke them: as if someone, like a coach, was preparing me for the end. Then the explosions were closer, as the enemy mortars found their range.

I looked along our line, and saw that the others were running harder than I was. Only Nazeer was still beside me. I tried to run faster. My legs seemed wooden and numb: I saw them moving, running, step after step, but I couldn't feel them. It took a gigantic effort of will to send the message to my legs, and command them to greater speed. At last I stumbled into a faster run.

Two mortars exploded quite close to me. I kept running, waiting for the pain, and waiting for the killing joke. My heart was churning in my chest, and my breathing came in gasping, grunting little puffs of cold air. I couldn't see the enemy positions. The mortar's range was well over a kilometre, but I knew they had to be closer than that. And then the first shots spattered, the tun-tun-tun-tun of the AK-74s-theirs and ours. I knew they were close. They were close enough to kill us, and close enough for us to kill them.

My eyes raced ahead on the rough ground, looking for holes or boulders, trying to find the safest path. A man went down, left of me, along the line. It was Jalalaad. He was running beside Nazeer, and less than a hundred metres from me. A mortar shell exploded directly in front of him and ripped his young body into pieces. Looking down again, I jumped over rocks and boulders, and I stumbled but didn't fall. I saw Suleiman, fifty metres in front of me, clutch at his throat and then fall forward, running a few more paces doubled-up as if he was searching for something on the ground in front of him. His body crumpled and collapsed over his face, tumbling to the side. His face and throat were bloodied and broken and torn open. I tried to run around him, but the ground was rough and strewn with rocks, and I had to jump over his body as I ran.

I saw the first flashes of fire from the enemy Kalashnikovs. They were far away, at least two hundred metres, much further than I'd guessed. A tracer bullet fizzed past me, only one step to my left. We wouldn't make it. We couldn't make it. There weren't many of them-there weren't many guns firing-but they had so much time to get a sight on us and shoot us down. They were going to kill us all. Then a wild flurry of explosions crunched into the enemy lines. The idiots! They blew up their own mortar shells, I thought, and gunfire like fireworks rattled the world from everywhere at once. And Nazeer raised his assault rifle, and fired as he ran, and I saw Mahmoud Melbaaf firing ahead of me, on my right, where Suleiman had been, and I raised my weapon, and pulled the trigger.

There was a horrible, blood-freezing scream somewhere very close.

I suddenly recognised it as my own, but I couldn't stop it. And I looked at the men, the brave and beautiful men beside me, running into the guns, and God help me for thinking it, and God forgive me for saying it, but it was glorious, it was glorious, if glory is a magnificent and raptured exaltation. It was what love would be like, if love was a sin. It was what music would be, if music could kill you. And I climbed a prison wall with every running step.

And then, in a world suddenly soundless as the deepest sea, my legs stopped still, and hot, gritty, filthy, exploding earth clogged my eyes and my mouth. Something had hit my legs.

Something hard and hot and viciously sharp had hit my legs. I fell forward as if I'd been running in the dark and I'd smashed into a fallen tree trunk. A mortar round. The metal fragments.

The shock-deafened silence. The burning skin. The blinding earth.

The choking struggle for breath. There was a smell that filled my head. It was the smell of my own death-it smells of blood, and seawater, and damp earth, and the ash of burned wood when you smell your own death before you die-and then I hit the ground so hard that I plunged through it into a deep, undreaming darkness.

And the fall was forever. And there was no light, no light.

____________________

PART FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

If you stare into its cold dead eye, the camera always mocks you with the truth. The black-and-white photograph showed almost all the men of Khader's mujaheddin unit assembled for the kind of formal portrait that makes the people of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India seem more stiff and gloweringly self-conscious than they really are. It was impossible to tell from that photo how much those men had loved to laugh, and how readily they'd smiled.

But none of them were looking directly into the lens of the camera. All the eyes but mine were a little above or below, a little to the left or the right. Only my own eyes stared back at me as I held the picture in my bandaged hands, and remembered the names of the men leaning together in the ragged lines.

Mazdur Gul, the stonemason, whose name means labourer, and whose hands were permanently grey-white from decades of work with granite... Daoud, who liked to be called by the English version of his name, David, and whose dream it was to visit the great city of New York and eat a meal in a fine restaurant...

Zamaanat, whose name means trust, and whose brave smile concealed the agony of shame he'd felt that his whole family lived in hungry squalor at Jalozai, a huge refugee camp near Peshawar...

Hajji Akbar, who'd been appointed as the doctor in the unit for no other reason than that he'd once spent two months as a patient in a Kabul hospital, and who'd greeted my acceptance of the doctor's job, when I arrived at the mountain camp, with prayers and a little Dervish dance of joy... Alef, the mischievously satirical Pashtun trader, who died crawling in the snow with his back torn open and his clothes on fire... Juma and Hanif, the two wild boys who were killed by the madman Habib... Jalalaad, their fearless young friend, who died in the last charge... Ala ud-Din, whose name in English is shortened to Aladdin, and who escaped unscathed... Suleiman Shahbadi, of the furrowed brow and sorrowing eyes, who died leading us into the guns.

And in the centre of the assembly there was a smaller, tighter group around Abdel Khader Khan: Ahmed Zadeh, the Algerian, who died with one hand clenched in the frozen earth and the other knotted into mine... Khaled Ansari, who murdered the madman Habib and then walked into the lost world of the smothering snow ... Mahmoud Melbaaf, who survived the last charge like Ala-ud Din, unwounded and unmarked... Nazeer, who ignored his own wounds to drag my unconscious body to safety... and me. Standing behind and a little to the left of Khaderbhai, my expression in the photograph was confident, resolute, and self-possessed. And the camera, they say, doesn't lie.

It was Nazeer who'd saved me. The mortar shell that had exploded so close to us, as we ran into the guns, ripped and ruptured the air. The shock wave burst my left eardrum. In the same deafened moment, pieces of the exploded shell passed us in a hot metal blizzard. None of the larger chunks of metal hit me, but eight small pieces of the shrapnel smashed into my legs below the knees - five in one leg, and three in the other. Two smaller pieces hit my body-one in the stomach, and one in the chest. They tore through the heavy layers of my clothing, and even pierced my thick money belt and the solid leather straps of my medic's bag, burning their way into my skin. Another chunk hit my forehead, high above the left eye.

They were tiny fragments, the largest of them about the size of Abe Lincoln's face on an American penny coin. Still, they were travelling at such a speed that they took my legs out from under me. Earth, thrown up by the explosion, peppered my face, blinding and choking me. I hit the ground hard, just managing to turn my face aside before the impact. Unfortunately, I turned the burst eardrum to the ground, and the violence of the blow rived the wound even further. I blacked out.

Nazeer, who was wounded in the legs and the arm, pulled my unconscious body into the shelter of a shallow, trench-like depression. He collapsed himself, then, covering my body with his own until the bombardment stopped. Lying there with his arms around my neck, he took a hit in the back of his right shoulder.

It was a piece of metal that would've hit me, and might've killed me, had Khader's man not protected me with his love. When all was quiet, he dragged me to safety.

The word swept us into remembrances of the shy, young Pashtun fighter. He'd seen Khaderbhai as the embodiment of all his warrior heroes, and he'd followed him everywhere, adoringly, with eyes he quickly cast down when the Khan looked his way. He'd survived smallpox as a child, and his face was severely pockmarked with dozens of small, brown, dish-like spots. His nickname, Kishmishi, used with great affection by the older fighters, meant Raisins. He'd been too shy to pose with us in the photograph, so he'd volunteered to operate the camera.

And he was not the only one."

They return the photos this morning. I thought you would like it to see them, before we leave."

I sat up on the cot bed and swung my legs over the side. When my feet hit the floor there was a pain so excruciating in my shins that I moaned aloud. Another fierce pain throbbed at my forehead.

I probed with my blunt, bandaged fingers at a wad of dressing beneath a bandage that wound round my head like a turban. A third pain in my left ear nagged for my attention. My hands were aching, and my feet, swaddled in three or more layers of socks, felt as if they were burning. There was a painful ache in my left hip, where the horse had kicked me when the jets had torn up the sky above us, months before. The wound had never properly healed, and I suspected that a bone was chipped beneath the tender flesh.

My forearm felt numb near the elbow, where my own horse had bitten me in its panic. That wound was also months old, and it too had never really healed. Doubled over, resting on my thighs, I could feel the tightness of my stomach and the leaner flesh of my legs. I was thin, after starving on the mountain. Too thin. All in all, it was a mess. I was in a bad way. Then my mind came back to the bandages on my hands, and a sensation close to panic rose like a spear in my spine.

He unwound the bulky bandages slowly, and I felt the sweat run from my eyebrows onto my cheeks. When both lots of bindings were removed, I stared at the disfigured claws that my hands had become, and I moved them, flexing the fingers. Frostbite had split my hands open at all the knuckle joints, and the bruise black wounds were hideous, but all the fingers and all the fingertips were there.

He produced the Stechkin, wrapped in a coil of cheesecloth. I tried to take it, but my hands couldn't hold the bundle.

I looked around me. We were in a large, sand-coloured tent with pallet floors and about fifteen folding cot-beds. Several men wearing Afghan clothing-loose pants, tunic shirts, and long, sleeveless vests in the same shades of pale green-moved among the beds. They were fanning the wounded men with straw fans, washing them with buckets of soapy water, or carrying away wastes through a narrow slit in the canvas door. Some of the wounded were moaning or speaking out their pain in languages I couldn't understand. The air in that Pakistani plain, after months in the snowy peaks of Afghanistan, was thick and hot and heavy. There were so many strong smells, one upon another, that my senses rejected them and concentrated on one particularly pungent aroma: the unmistakable smell of perfumed Indian basmati rice, cooking somewhere close to the tent.

I felt along the padded bandages that swathed my shins, from knees to ankles.

I laughed with him for the first time since I'd woken. The laugh sent my hands to my head in an effort to contain the throbbing pain it caused.

After the car, we moved you and Nazeer to a truck, for the road to Chaman. At Chaman, the Pakistanis, border guards, they want to take Nazeer's guns. He give them money-some of your money, from your money belt-and he keep his guns. We hide you in the blankets, with two dead men. We put them on top of you, and we show them to border guards, and tell that we want to give good Muslim burial for these men. Then we come into Quetta, to this hospital, and again they want to take Nazeer's guns. Again he give them money. They want to cut your fingers, because of the smell..."

I put my hands to my nose, and sniffed at them. There was a rotten, death-foetid smell to them still. It was faint, but clear enough to remind me of the rotting goat's feet we'd eaten as our last supper on the mountain. My stomach churned, arching like a fighting cat. Mahmoud quickly reached for a metal dish and thrust it under my face. I vomited, spitting black-green bile into the bowl, and fell forward helplessly onto my knees.

When the nausea attack passed, I sat back on the cot and snatched gratefully at the cigarette Mahmoud lit for me. "Go on." I stuttered.

The Afghans, they don't like the Pakistan police. They have big trouble with Pakistan police. Everybody has trouble with Pakistan police. So they give a permission to me, and I take Nazeer's guns when he sleep. And I look after him. And I look after you. Wait- I think our friends are here!"

The long flaps of the tent's doorway opened all the way back, stunning us with the yellow light of a warm day. Four men entered. They were Afghans, veteran fighters; hard men, with eyes that stared at me as if they were looking along the decorated barrel of a jezail rifle. Mahmoud rose to greet them, and whispered a few words. Two of the men woke Nazeer. He'd been in a deep sleep, and spun round at the first touch, grasping at the men and ready to fight. Reassured by their gentle expressions, he then turned his head to check on me. Seeing me awake and sitting up, he grinned so broadly that it was a little alarming in a face so seldom struck with a smile.

The two men helped him to his feet. There was a wad of bandage strapped to his right thigh. Supporting himself on their shoulders, he limped out into the sunlight. The other men helped me to my feet. I tried to walk, but my wounded shins refused to obey me, and the best I could manage was a tottering shuffle.

After a few seconds of that embarrassingly feeble scuffling, the men formed a chair with their arms and swept me up effortlessly between them.

For the next six weeks, that was the pattern of our recovery: a few days, perhaps as long as a week, in one location before an abrupt shift to a new tent or slum hut or hidden room. The Pakistan secret service, the ISI, had a malign interest in every foreigner who entered Afghanistan without their sanction during the war.

The problem for Mahmoud Melbaaf, who was our guardian in those vulnerable weeks, was the fascination our story held for the refugees and exiles who harboured us. I'd darkened my blonde hair, and I wore sunglasses almost all the time. But, no matter how careful and secretive we were in the slums and camps where we stayed, there was always someone who knew who I was. The temptation to talk about the American gunrunner who was wounded in battle, fighting with the mujaheddin, was irresistible. Talk like that would've been enough to pique the curiosity of any intelligence agent from any agency. And had the secret police found me, they would've discovered that the American was in fact an escaped convict from Australia. That would've meant promotions for some, and a special thrill for the torturers who would get to work on me before they handed me over to the Australian authorities. So we moved often and we moved quickly, and we spoke to none but the few we trusted with our wounded lives.

Little by little, the details emerged: the more complete story of the battle we'd run into, and our rescue after it. The Russian and Afghan soldiers who'd surrounded our mountain comprised the best part of a company and, as such, were probably led by a captain. Their sole purpose in operating among the Shar-i-Safa Mountains was to catch and kill Habib Abdur Rahman. A huge reward had been posted for his arrest, but the terror and the horror that his atrocities had forced into their minds made the hunt for him a much more personal operation for the searchers. So mesmerised were they by his savage hatred, and so obsessed were they with his capture, that they failed to detect the stealthy advance of Ahmed Shah Massoud's forces. When we made our break for freedom, acting on Habib's information that most of the Russians and the Afghans were busy laying mines and other traps on the far side of the mountain, the startled sentries in the deserted enemy camp had opened fire. They'd thought, perhaps, that Habib himself was coming for them, because their fire was wild and undisciplined. That action had precipitated the attack that was being planned by Massoud's mujaheddin, who must've seen the firing as a pre-emptive strike by the Russians. The explosions I'd seen and heard as I ran toward the enemy-they blew up their own mortar shells, the idiots- were actually direct hits on the Russian positions by Massoud's mortars. The wider mortar strikes that tore into our line were mere accidents: friendly fire, as they say.

And that was the elated moment I'd called glorious, in my mind, as I ran into the guns: that stupid waste of lives, that friendly fire. There wasn't any glory in it. There never is. There's only courage and fear and love. And war kills them all, one by one.

Glory belongs to God, of course; that's what the word really means. And you can't serve God with a gun.

When we fell, Massoud's men pursued the fleeing enemy all the way around the mountain and into the returning company of minelayers.

The battle that followed was a massacre. Not one man of the force sent to catch and kill Habib Abdur Rahman survived. He would've liked that, the madman, had he been alive to hear it. I know exactly how he would've grinned, with his wide mouth gaping soundless and his grief-crazed eyes bulging on swollen hatreds.

All that cold day, and into the sudden evening, Nazeer and I had remained on the battleground. As we shivered in the swiftly falling shadows of sunset, the mujaheddin and the survivors from our own unit returned from the fighting to find us. Mahmoud and Ala-ud-Din brought the dead-Suleiman and Jalalaad-from the barren mountain.

Massoud's men had combined with independent Achakzai fighters to claim the Chaman highway from the Pass all the way to the Russian defensive perimeter of besieged Kandahar, less than fifty kilometres from the city. The evacuation to Chaman, and through the Pass to Pakistan, was rapid and without incident. We rode in a truck, carrying our dead friends with us, and reached the checkpoint in hours-the journey that had taken us a month of mountains on Khader's horses.

Nazeer healed rapidly and began to regain weight. The wounds in his arm and the back of his shoulder closed over well, and gave him little trouble. But the larger and deeper wound to his right thigh seemed to have damaged the ligamentary relationship between muscle, bone, and tendons, from his hip to his knee. The upper leg was stiff, and he still walked with a limp as he swung his right step around the hip, instead of through it.

His spirits were relatively high, however, and he was anxious to return to Bombay-so anxious, in fact, that his fretting attention to my slower recovery became irritating. I snapped at him a couple of times when his solicitous urging-You better? You come now? We go now?-became unendurably annoying. I didn't know then that he had a mission, Khader's last mission, waiting for him in Bombay. The mission was all that held his grief and his shame at surviving Abdel Khader in check. And every day, as our health improved, the obligations of Khader's last command to him grew more suffocating; and his dereliction, as he saw it, more profane.

I had preoccupations of my own. The wounds on my legs were healing readily enough, and the skin on my forehead closed safely over a small, lumpy ridge of bone, but my ruptured eardrum became infected, and it was the source of a constant and almost unbearable pain. Every mouthful of food, every sip of water, every word I spoke, and every loud noise that I heard sent piercing little scorpion stings along the nerves of my face and throat, and deep into my fevered brain. Every movement of my body, or turn of the head, stabbed into that sweating excruciation. Every inward breath, and sneeze or cough, magnified the torment. Shifting accidentally in my sleep and bumping the damaged ear sent me starting up from the cot with a shout that woke every man for fifty metres around.

And then, after three weeks of that maddening, torturous pain and massive, self-medicated doses of penicillin and hot antibiotic washes, the wound healed and the pain receded from me just as memories do, like landmarks on a distant, foggy shore.

My hands healed around the deadened tissue on the knuckle joints.

Truly frozen tissue never really heals, of course, and the injury was one of many that settled in my flesh in those exile years. I took the suffering from Khader's mountain into my hands, and every cold day sends me back there with my hands aching, just as they did when I clutched at the gun before the battle.

Nevertheless, in the warmer air of Pakistan my fingers flexed and moved and obeyed me. My hands were ready for the work I had waiting; the little matter of revenge in Bombay. Although my body was thinner after the ordeal, it was harder and tougher than it had been all those plump months before, when we'd first set out for Khader's war.

Nazeer and Mahmoud organised our return trip by a series of connecting trains. They'd acquired a small arsenal of weapons in Pakistan, and were intent on smuggling them into Bombay. They concealed the guns in bales of fabric, and shipped them in the care of three Afghans who were fluent in Hindi. We rode in different carriages, and never acknowledged the men, but the illicit cargo was always on our minds. The irony of it-we'd set off to smuggle guns into Afghanistan, and we were returning to smuggle guns into Bombay- made me laugh, when it occurred to me, as I sat in my first-class carriage. But the laughter was bitter, and the expression it left on my face turned the eyes of my fellow passengers away.

It took us a little over two days to get back to Bombay. I was travelling on my false British book, the one I'd used to enter Pakistan. According to the entries in the book, I'd overstayed on my visa. Using the little smiling charm I could muster and the last of the money Khader had paid me, the last American dollars, I bribed the officials on both the Pakistani and Indian sides of the border without raising so much as the flicker of an eye. And an hour after dawn, eight months after we left her, we walked into the deep heat and frantic, toiling fervency of my beloved Bombay.

From a discreet distance, Nazeer and Mahmoud Melbaaf supervised the unloading and transport of their military cargo. Promising Nazeer that I would meet up with him that night at Leopold's, I left them at the station.

I took a cab. I felt drunk on the sound and colour and gorgeous flowing kinesis of the island city. But I had to concentrate. I was almost out of money. I directed the driver to the black market currency-collection centre in the Fort area. With the taxi waiting below, I ran up the three narrow wooden flights to the counting room. A memory of Khaled wrung out my heart-I used to run up these stairs with Khaled, with Khaled, with Khaled-and I clenched my jaw against it, just as I bit down on the pain in my wounded shins. The two big men, loitering with intent on the landing outside the room, recognised me. We shook hands, all of us smiling widely.

I looked into his tough young face. His name was Amir. I knew him to be brave and reliable and devoted to the Khan. For the blink of an eye it seemed, incredibly, that he was making a joke about Khader's death, and I felt a quick, angry impulse to stiffen him.

Then I realised that he simply didn't know. How is that possible?

Why don't they know! Instinct told me not to answer his question.

I held my eyes and my mouth in a hard, impassive little smile, and brushed past him to knock at the door. A short, fat, balding man in a white singlet and dhoti opened the door and thrust out his hands at once in a double handshake. It was Rajubhai, controller of the currency collections for Abdel Khader Khan's mafia council. He pulled me into the room, and closed the door. The counting room was the core of his personal and business universe, and he spent twenty out of every twenty four hours there. The thin, faded, pink-white cord across his shoulder, under his singlet, declared that he was a devout Hindu, one of many who worked within Abdel Khader's largely Muslim empire.

I struggled to keep the surprise from my face. Rajubhai was a senior man. He held a seat at the council meetings. If he didn't know that Khader was dead, then nobody in the city would know.

And if Khader's death was still a secret, then Mahmoud and Nazeer must've insisted on the suppression of the news. They hadn't said anything to me about it. I couldn't understand it. Whatever their reasons, I decided to support them and to keep my silence on the matter.

It wasn't an answer to his question, and his eyes narrowed on the word.

Three thousand rupees was a considerable sum to the street runners, or in the slums, but it was a trifling amount in the context of the black-market currency trade. Rajubhai's office collected a hundred times that much and more every day, and he'd often paid me sixty thousand rupees at a time as my wage and my share of commissions.

Rajubhai turned his head and gestured, with a twitch of his eyebrows, to one of his clerks. The man handed over three thousand rupees in used but clean hundred-rupee notes. Riffling the small bundle first, from habit, as a double check, Rajubhai handed the notes across. I peeled off two notes to put in my shirt pocket, and pushed the rest inside a deeper pocket in my long vest.

I took the steps two at a time on the way down to the cab, feeling the shock of each jump shudder into my shins. The driver swung out into the traffic at once, and I directed him to a clothing shop that I knew on the Colaba Causeway. One of the sybaritic splendours of Bombay is the limitless variety of relatively inexpensive, well-made clothes constantly changing to reflect the newest Indian and foreign trends. In the refugee camp, Mahmoud Melbaaf had given me a long, blue-serge vest, a white shirt, and coarse brown trousers. The clothes had served for the trip from Quetta, but in Bombay they were too hot and too strange: they drew curious attention to me when I needed the camouflage of current fashion. I chose a pair of black jeans with strong, deep pockets, a new pair of joggers to replace my ruined boots, and a loose, white silk shirt to wear over the jeans. I changed in the dressing room, sliding my knife in its scabbard under the belt of my jeans and concealing it with the shirt.

While waiting at the cashier's desk, I caught sight of myself unexpectedly in an angled mirror that showed my face in three quarter profile. It was a face so hard and unfamiliar that it startled me to recognise it as my own. I remembered the photograph taken by shy Kishmishi, and looked again into the mirror. There was a cold impassiveness in my face-and a determination, perhaps-which hadn't even begun to gleam in the eyes that had stared so confidently into the lens of Khaled's camera. I snatched up my sunglasses and put them on. Have I changed so much? I hoped that a hot shower, and shaving off my thick beard, would soften some of the hard edges. But the real hardness was inside me, and I wasn't sure if it was simply tough and tenacious or if it was something much more cruel.

The cab driver followed my instructions and pulled up near the entrance to Leopold's. I paid him, and stood on the busy Causeway for a minute, staring at the wide doorway of the restaurant where my fated connection to Karla and Khaderbhai had really begun. Every door is a portal leading through time as well as space. The same doorway that leads us into and out of a room also leads us into the past of the room and its ceaselessly unfolding future. People knew that once, deep within the ur-mind, the ur-imagination. You can still find those who decorate doorways, and reverently salute them, in every culture, from Ireland to Japan. I stepped up one, two steps, and reached out with my right hand to touch the doorjamb and then touch my chest, over the heart, in a salaam to fate and a homage to the dead friends and enemies who entered with me.

Didier Levy was sitting in his usual chair, commanding a view of the patrons and of the busy street beyond. He was talking to Kavita Singh. Her eyes were averted, but he looked up and saw me as I approached the table. Our eyes met and held for a second, each of us reading the other's shifting expressions like diviners finding meanings in the magic of scattered bones.

There was a little more grey, I thought, in the mop of dark curls that brushed the collar of his jacket. The pale blue eyes were a little more tired, a little more bloodshot. Yet the wicked, leering mischief still arched his eyebrow, and the playful sneer I knew so well, and loved, was still there, curling his upper lip. He was the same man, in the same city, and it was good to be home.

She was beautiful. Her thick, dark brown hair was tousled and awry. Her back was straight. Her eyes were clear. And, as she held me, the casual, friendly touch of her fingers on my neck seemed like such a tender ravishment-after the blood and snow of Afghanistan-that I can still feel it, through all the years since.

The disappointment in his eyes moderated my tone, if not my mood.

She walked out with my eyes on her, and when the drinks arrived Didier insisted that I sit down with him at last.

So we sat, and he raised his glass immediately to toast with mine.

I raised my glass in turn, clinked it against his, and threw back the double.

I stared back at him in silence, secretly delighted to be back in the company of someone who knew me well enough to read between the frown lines.

I helped them bury him. He's dead. They're all dead. We're the only ones left from here-Nazeer, Mahmoud, and me."

Didier was ashen-faced, and the grey seemed to move even into his eyes. Stricken by the news-he looked as though someone had struck him hard on the face-he slumped in his chair and his jaw fell open. He began to slip sideways in the chair, and I was afraid that he would fall to the floor or even suffer a stroke.

His weary eyes drifted up to meet mine.

He dropped his gaze again, and lapsed into a reverie so rich in thought and feeling that his head twitched and his lower lip trembled in the turbulence of it. I was worried. I'd seen men go under before. In prison, I'd watched men succumb, fragmented by fear and shame, and then slaughtered by solitude. But that was a process: it took weeks, months, or years. Didier's collapse was the work of seconds, and I was watching him crumple and fade from one heartbeat to the next.

I moved around the table and sat beside him, pulling him close to me with an arm around his shoulder.

I left my bike, my Enfield, with you. I left my passports and my money and some other stuff. Do you remember? It's very important.

I need that stuff, Didier. Do you remember?"

He blinked, and turned his head to look at me, his upper lip curling in the familiar sneer.

At Didier's apartment I shaved, showered, and changed into the new clothes. Didier insisted that I eat something. He cooked an omelette while I went through the two boxes of my belongings to find my stash of money-about nine thousand American dollars-the keys to my bike, and my best false passport. It was a Canadian book, with my photo and details inserted in it. The false tourist visa had expired. I had to renew it quickly. If anything went wrong in what I planned to do, I would need plenty of money and a good, clean book.

She is finished, Lin."

I moved to the door of his apartment, and he ran to join me. It was the fastest I'd ever seen him move, and I smiled at the strangeness of it.

But there's too much that's-I don't know-tied up in it, I guess."

I couldn't explain it to him. It was more than just revenge-I knew that-but the web of connections between Zhou, Khaderbhai, Karla, and me was so sticky with shame and secrets and betrayals that I couldn't bring myself to face it clearly or talk about it to my friend. "Bien," he sighed, reading the determination in my face. "If you must go to her, then I will come with you."

____________________

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Didier Levy was the worst pillion passenger I've ever known. He held on to me so tightly, and with such rigid tensity, that it was difficult to steer the bike. He howled as we approached cars, and shrieked when we sped up to pass them. On critical, sweeping turns he wriggled in terror, trying to straighten the bike from its necessary lean into the curve. Every time I stopped the bike at a traffic signal, he put both feet down to the ground to stretch his legs and moan about the cramps in his hips. Every time I accelerated away, he dragged his feet on the road and fidgeted for several seconds until he found the footrests. And when taxis or other cars ventured too close to us, he kicked out at them or waved his fist in frantic outrage. By the time we reached our destination, I calculated that the danger faced during a thirty-minute ride in fast traffic with Didier was roughly equivalent to a month under fire in Afghanistan.

I pulled up outside the factory run by my Sri Lankan friends Villu and Krishna. Something was wrong. The signs outside had changed, and the double front doors were wide open. I went up the steps and leaned inside to see that the passport workshop was gone, replaced by an assembly line producing garlands of flowers.

Minutes later I left him with the bike near the entrance to Abdul Ghani's mansion. The watchman at the street door recognised me, and snapped his hand up in a theatrical salute. I put a twenty rupee note in his other hand as he opened the door, and I stepped into the cool, shadowed foyer to be greeted by two servants. They knew me well, and led me upstairs with wide, friendly smiles and a little mime-show of comments on the length of my hair and the weight I'd lost. One of the men knocked on the door of Abdul Ghani's large study, and waited with his ear to the door.

The servant entered, closing the door behind him, and returned a few moments later. He wagged his head at me and opened the door wide. I walked inside, and the door closed. Brilliant sunshine blazed at the high, arched windows. Shadows reached in spikes and claws across the polished floor. Abdul was sitting in a wing chair that faced the window, and only his plump hands were visible, steepled together like sausages in a butcher's window.

I was shocked to see how the months, the nine months since I'd seen him, had aged Khader's old friend. The thick hair was grey to white, and his eyebrows were frosted with silver. The fine nose was pinched by deep lines that swept past the curve of his mouth to a sagging jaw. His lips, once the most sumptuously sensual I'd seen in Bombay, were as split and cracked as Nazeer's had been in the snow mountains. The pouches beneath his eyes drooped past the peak of his cheekbones and reminded me, with a shiver, of those that had dragged down the eyes of the madman Habib. And the eyes-the laughing, golden, amber eyes-were dull, and drained of the soaring joys and vain deceits that once had shone in his passionate life.

Abdul clutched at his chest and sobbed like a child, mewling and moaning incoherently as the tears rolled fat and freely from his large eyes. After a few moments he recovered, and looked up at me.

The sobbing spilled over again, and he plunged his face into his fleshy hands. I watched him uncomfortably, not knowing what to do or say. Since the moment that I'd cradled Khader's body in my arms on the snowy slope of the mountain, I'd refused to face the fact of his death. And I was still angry with Khader Khan. So long as I held that anger before me like a shield, loving Khader and grieving for him were deep and distant wonders of my heart.

So long as I was angry, I could fight off the tears and miserable longing that made Ghani so wretched. So long as I was angry, I could concentrate on the job at hand-information about Krishna, Villu, and the passport workshop. I was on the point of asking him about them when he spoke again.

You might think we could afford it. The sum is not so great, after all. But you're wrong. There is no organisation that can support such an insane hero curse as Khader's. And I couldn't change his mind. I couldn't save him. The money didn't mean anything to him, don't you see? You can't reason with a man who has no sense of money and its... its value. It's the one thing all civilised men have in common, don't you agree? If money doesn't mean anything, there is no civilisation. There is nothing."

He trailed off into indecipherable mumbles. Tears rolled into the little rivers they found on his cheeks, and dropped through the yellow light into his lap.

We rebuilt the cellar, and fitted it out. There is a trapdoor in the kitchen floor. Iqbal will show you the way. The boys are working there now."

I went down through the house to the kitchen and lifted the heavy trapdoor. A dozen steps led into the floodlit cellar. Krishna and Villu greeted me happily, and went to work on my passport immediately. Few things excited them more than a counterfeiting challenge, and they chattered in a spirited little argument before agreeing on the best approach.

While they worked, I examined Ghani's new workshop. It was a large space-much larger than the basement of Abdul Ghani's mansion alone. I walked some thirty to fifty metres past light tables, printing machines, photocopiers, and storage cupboards. I guessed that the basement extended beneath the next large house in the street beside Ghani's. It seemed likely that they'd bought the house next door, and connected the two cellars. If that were so, I assumed, there would be another exit, leading into the neighbouring house. I was searching for it when Krishna called to tell me that my rush-jobs visa was ready. Intrigued by the new set-up beneath the houses, I promised myself that as soon as possible I would return and inspect the workshop thoroughly.

We found a narrow lane that gave access to the rear of the buildings in the street. In contrast to the proud, clean, main street, the access lane was filthy. We stepped carefully between rank, scum-covered pools of black liquid, and skirted piles of oily, unidentifiable debris. I glanced at Didier, knowing from his wretched grimace that he was calculating how many drinks it would take to rid himself of the stench that filled his nostrils.

The walls and fences on either side of the lane were made of stone, brick, and cement, patched together over many decades, and swarming with a wormy writhe of plants, mosses, and creepers.

Counting back from the corner, building by building, we found the rear of the Palace and pressed on a short wooden gate, set into a high stone wall. The gate opened at the touch, and we stepped into a spacious rear courtyard that must've been a luxurious and beautiful retreat before the mob had attacked it. Heavy clay pots had been toppled and shattered, their burdens of earth and flowers spilled in muddy confusion. Garden furniture had been smashed to kindling. Even the paving tiles were cracked in many places, as if they'd been struck with hammers.

We found a blackened door that led into the house. It was unlocked, and swung inward with a rusty creak of complaint.

I stepped inside. The door swung shut behind me, and I wished that I'd thought to bring a torch. It was dark, and the floor was treacherously cluttered with broken dishes, pots, pans, and other vessels strewn amid the black lumps of furniture and fallen beams. I picked my way slowly through the ground-floor kitchen and on into a long corridor that led toward the front of the big house. I passed several rooms that were burned. In one of them, the fire had been so fierce that the floor was missing, and the charred bearers showed through the gaps like the ribs of some great animal's remains.

Near the front of the house I found the stairway that I'd taken, years before, when I'd come there with Karla to save Lisa Carter.

The Compton wallpaper, once so rich in colour and texture, was scorched and peeling from the blistered walls. The stairway itself was carbonised, its carpet scorched to stringy clumps of ash. I climbed up slowly, testing each step before pressing down with my full weight. One step collapsed beneath me when I was halfway to the top, and I scrambled upward more quickly to the landing on the first floor.

On the upper level I had to pause while my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few moments I could make out the gaps in the floor, and I began to inch my way around them. The fire had incinerated some parts of the house, leaving holes and blackened stumps, while sparing other parts of the house altogether. Those pristine sections were so clean, and so precisely as I remembered them, that they heightened the eerie strangeness of the place. I felt as if I was moving between the past, before the fire, and the ruined present: as if my own memories were creating those grandiose, unconsumed zones in the house.

Some way along that wide passage on the upper level my foot plunged through a papery section of floor, and in my hard reaction I drove backward into the wall behind me. The wall itself collapsed and I found myself falling, in a clumsy stumble, flaying out with my hands to find something solid to cling to amid the crumbling rubble. I landed with a thump, much more quickly than I expected, and realised at once that I was inside one of Madame Zhou's secret corridors. The wall I'd fallen through appeared to be as solid as all the others, but it was merely a plywood screen papered over with her ubiquitous Compton pattern.

I stood up and brushed myself off in a very narrow, low corridor that snaked ahead, following the shapes and corners of the rooms it circumscribed. Metal grates were set into the walls of the rooms that the secret corridor passed. Some of them were low, near the floor, and others were higher. Beneath the higher metal grates were boxed steps. From the lowest of those steps I looked into a room through the heart-shaped gaps in the metal grille. I could see the whole room beyond: the cracked mirror on the wall, the burned and collapsed bed, and the rusted metal nightstand beside it.

There were several steps above the one on which I stood, and I imagined her, Madame Zhou, crouched there on the topmost step and breathing silently while she watched, and watched.

The corridor wound through several turns, and I lost my bearings, unsure in the enshrouding darkness if I faced the front of the house or the rear. At one point the secret corridor inclined sharply. I climbed upward until the higher metal grilles disappeared, and I stumbled in the dark upon a flight of steps.

Feeling my way upward, I encountered a door. It was a small, paneled wooden door-so small and perfectly proportioned that it mightVe been furnished for a child's playhouse. I tried the doorknob. It turned easily in my hand. I pushed it open, and shrank back immediately at the inward rush of light from beyond.

I stepped into an attic room lit by a row of four stained-glass dormer windows that peaked like little chapels and reached out over the external roof of the house. The fire had reached the room, but it had failed to destroy it. The walls were darkened, splashed with streaky burn-shadows, and the floor was holed in places to reveal a deep sandwich layer between it and the ceiling of the room below. Parts of the long room, however, were quite solid and untouched by the flames. In those islands of exotically carpeted floor and unblemished wall-space, furniture still stood intact and unmarked. And in the stiff, enwrapping arms of a throne-like chair, her face twisted in a manic stare, was Madame Zhou.

As I approached her I realised that the malevolent stare wasn't directed at me. She was staring with hatred and spite at some point in the past, some place or person or event that held her mind as firmly as a chain holds a dancing bear. Her face was made up with a thick smear and powdering of cosmetics. It was a mask- more tragic, for all its deluded exaggerations, than grotesque.

The painted mouth was bigger than her own lips. The scrawled eyebrows were larger than the real ones. The daubed cheeks were higher than the bones beneath them. When I stood near enough, I saw that there was a trickle of drool dripping, dripping, from the corner of her mouth into her lap. The smell of alcohol, undiluted gin, wreathed her and coiled into other smells, more foul and sickening. Her hair was almost concealed by a wig. The thick coils of the black, pompadour wig hung slightly askew, revealing the short, sparse grey hair beneath. She was dressed in a green silk cheongsam. The neck of the dress covered her throat almost to her chin. Her legs were folded, with her feet resting on the seat of the chair beside her. They were tiny feet-the size of a small child's feet-enclosed in soft, silk slippers.

Her hands, as limp and expressionless as her slack mouth, lay in her lap like things washed up on a deserted shore.

It was impossible for me to tell her age or her nationality. She might've been Spanish. She might've been Russian. She might've been Indian, in part, or Chinese, or even Greek. And Karla was right-she had been beautiful once. It was the kind of beauty that grows from the sum of its parts rather than from any one outstanding feature: a beauty that strikes the eye rather than the heart, and a beauty that sours if it isn't nourished by some goodness from within. And she wasn't beautiful then, in that moment. She was ugly. And Didier was right, too: she was beaten and broken and finished. She was floating on the black lake, and soon the dark water would drag her under. There was a deep silence where her mind used to be, and a blank, uncraving emptiness where once her cruel and scheming life had ruled.

Standing there, invisible to her, I was astonished and bewildered to realise that I felt not angry or vengeful, but ashamed. I felt ashamed that I'd filled my heart with revenge. The part of me that had wanted to-What? Had I really wanted to kill her?-was the very part that was like her. I looked at her, and I knew that I was looking at myself, my own future, my destiny, if I couldn't rid my heart of its vindictiveness.

And I knew, as well, that the revenge I'd fed myself with and planned through the weeks of my recuperation in Pakistan was not merely hers, not only hers. I was striking out at myself, and at a guilt I could only face in that moment of shame as I looked at her. It was the guilt I felt for Khader's death. I was his American-his guarantee against the warlords and pirates. If I'd been with him, as I was supposed to be, when he'd tried to take the horses to his village, the enemy might not have fired on him.

It was foolish and, like most guilt, it only told one half of the story. There were Russian uniforms and weapons on some of the dead around Khader's body: Nazeer had told me that. My being there probably wouldn't have changed a thing. They would've captured me or killed me, and the result for Khader would've been the same. But reason didn't play a big part in the guilt I'd felt, deep in my heart, since the moment I'd seen his dead face beneath its shroud of snow. Once I'd faced it, I couldn't shake the shame. And somehow, the blame and repining sorrow changed me. I felt the vengeful stone fall from the hating hand that had wanted to throw it. I felt light, as if light itself filled me and lifted me up.

And I felt free-free enough to pity Madame Zhou, and even to forgive her. And then I heard the scream.

A heart-piercing shriek, as shrill as a wild pig's, pulled me round just in time to see Rajan, Madame Zhou's eunuch servant, running at me at full speed. Caught off balance by the charge, I stumbled backward with his arms wrapped around my chest, and we crashed into and then through one of the attic windows. I was leaning out backwards, looking up under blue sky at the crazed servant and the eaves of the house behind his head. I felt the unmistakable cold trickle of blood on the top and the back of my head where the broken glass had made deep cuts. More glass fell in jagged shards as we wrestled in the smashed window, and I shook my head from side to side to save my eyes. Rajan clung to me and drove forward with his feet in a weird, running shuffle that gained him no space at all. It took me a moment to understand that he was trying to push me out through the window- to push us both out, into the big fall. And it was working. I felt my feet beginning to lift off the floor under the pressure of his effort, and I slipped further out through the little steeple of the dormer window.

Growling with fury and desperation, I clutched at the window frame and dragged us back into the attic with all my strength.

Rajan fell backward, and scrambled to his feet with astonishing speed to run shrieking at me again. There was no way to step around his quick charge, so we closed again in a murderous grapple. His hands locked on my throat. My left hand clawed at his face, looking for the eye. His long, curved fingernails were sharp, and they pierced the skin of my neck. Shouting from the pain, I found his ear with the fingers of my left hand, and used it to pull his head close enough to punch with my right. I hammered my fist into his face, six, seven, eight times until he wrenched free from me, tearing the ear half away from his head.

He fell back a step and stood there, panting heavily and glaring at me with a hatred that was beyond reason or fear. His face was bloody. His lips were split into a broken tooth, and the skin over one eye, where the eyebrow had been shaved off, had opened up in an ugly cut. His bald head was cut and bleeding where he'd crashed through the glass. The blood was in one eye, and I guessed that his nose was broken. He should've quit. He had to quit. He didn't.

Shrieking, shrill and weird, he ran at me. I sidestepped and slammed a hard, short right hand into the side of his head, but he reached out with his clawed hand as he fell, and clutched at my trousers. His momentum pulled us both down and then he scrambled, crab-like, to cover me, reaching out for my neck. Once more the claws bit into my shoulder and my throat.

He was lean, but he was strong and tall. I'd lost so much weight in Khader's war that we were evenly matched for strength. I rolled once, twice, but couldn't shake him. His head was tucked in close to mine, and I couldn't punch at him. I felt his mouth and his teeth against my neck. He was straining forward, butting heads with me and biting. His long, sharp claws punctured my throat to the stubs of his fingers.

I reached down and found my knife. I pulled it out and around, and rammed it into his body. The blade went into his thigh, high up near the hip. He raised his head in a howl of pain, and I stabbed him in the neck, close to the shoulder. The knife went in through the front and deep into the shoulder, crunching an edge of bone and gristle on the way. He scrabbled at his throat, and rolled away from me until his body met the wall. He was beaten.

There was no fight left in him. It was over. And then I heard the scream.

I jerked my head around to see Rajan creeping out of the gap between the broken floor and the ceiling of the room below. It was the same man, or so it seemed, but whole and unharmed: the same bald head, shaved eyebrows, decorated eyes, and clawed fingernails painted as green as a grass snake. I swung round quickly to see that Rajan was still there, curled in a moaning heap against the wall. It's a twin, I thought stupidly. There's two of them. Why didn't anyone tell me? And I turned again, just as the screeching twin rushed at me. The second one had a knife in his hand.

He held the thin, curved blade like a sword, sweeping it in a vicious arc as he ran. I allowed his frenzied sweep to pass and then stepped in close, jabbing downward with my own knife. It cut his arm and shoulder, but he was still free to move. His knife slashed backward toward me. He was fast-fast enough to cut my forearm. Blood ran quickly from the wound, and rage pulled me into him with my right fist punching and jabbing with the knife. Then a sudden black, blood tasting pain crashed into the back of my head, and I knew I'd been hit from behind. I scrambled past the twin, and twisted round to see wounded Rajan, his shirt painted on his skin with his own blood. There was a lump of wood in his hand. My head was ringing with the force of the blow he'd struck. Blood was running from wounds on my head, my neck, my shoulder, and the soft inside of my forearm. The twins began wailing again, and I knew they were about to make a new charge. A tiny seed of doubt ripened and burst open in my mind for the first time since the bizarre contest had begun: I might not win this...

I grinned at them, shaping up for their charge with my fists high and my left foot forward. Okay, I thought. Let's go. Let's finish it. They ran at me, keening that high-pitched scream again. The one with the lump of wood, Rajan, swung it at me. I raised my left arm to block the blow. It came down hard on my shoulder, but I rammed my right fist into his face and he fell backward, his knees folding before he hit the floor. His brother slashed at my face with the knife. I ducked and weaved, but the knife cut my head at the back, above the neck. I came up under his guard and jammed my knife into his shoulder, all the way to the crank. I'd aimed for his chest, but it was still a useful wound because his arm below the knife went as limp as seaweed, and he screeched away from me in panic.

Years of anger broke through: all the prison-anger I'd buried in the shallow grave of my resentful self-control. The blood running down my face from the cuts and gashes on my head was liquid anger, thick and red and spilling from my mind. A furious strength ripped the muscles of my arms, shoulders, and back. I looked from Rajan and his twin to the imbecile in the chair. Kill them all, I thought, dragging the air in through clenched teeth, and growling it out again. I'll kill them all.

I heard someone calling me, calling me, calling me back from the edge of the abyss into which Habib, and all those like him, had plunged.

I heard the sound of his footsteps, and I heard him curse as he stumbled in the dark. He pushed open the little door and stooped to enter the room. There was a gun in his hand, and I was glad to see him. I watched his face as he quickly took in the scene-the blood on my face and arms, the blood on the bodies of the twins, the drooling figure in the chair. I saw his shocked surprise harden and settle into the grim, angry line of his mouth. Then he heard the scream.

Rajan's brother, the one with the knife, let out that blood numbing waul and ran at Didier, who swung his pistol round without hesitation and shot the man in the groin, near the hip.

He crumpled and flung himself sideways, yowling sobs of pain as he rolled on the floor, doubled over his bleeding wound. Rajan limped to the throne-like chair and draped his body in front of Madame Zhou, shielding her with his bare chest. He stared his hatred into Didier's eyes, and we knew that he was willing to take a bullet to protect her. Didier took a step towards him, and levelled the pistol at Rajan's heart. The Frenchman's face was set in a severe frown, but his pale eyes were calm, and gleaming with his cool and absolute dominion. That was the real man, the steel blade within the shabby, rusting scabbard. Didier Levy: one of the most capable and dangerous men in Bombay.

I reached out to cover the gun in Didier's hand. Rajan flinched and flexed. His twin, crying out in pain, began to drag himself away from us along the edge of the wall. Then I slowly pushed Didier's hand downward until the gun was at his side. Rajan met my eyes. I saw the surprise and fear in his black eyes soften into relief. He held the stare a moment longer and then limped to his brother's side.

With Didier close behind me, I made my way along the secret corridor and back to the blackened stairs.

Spluttering and coughing in the cloud of charcoal dust and floating fibres, I wriggled against my fallen friend to sit upright. My neck was stiff and sore, and I'd landed on my wrist and shoulder, spraining them both, but I seemed to be intact and otherwise unbroken. Didier had landed on me, and I heard him moaning grumpily.

We laughed as we hobbled out of the ruined Palace together, and the laughter stayed with us in the hours that followed while we bathed our wounds and dressed them. Didier gave me a clean shirt and trousers to wear. His wardrobe was surprisingly stylish and colourful for a man who dressed in such a drab uniform at Leopold's. He explained that most of those bright new clothes had been left with him by lovers who'd never returned for them, and I thought of Karla, giving me clothes that had once belonged to her lovers. And the laughter bubbled up anew as we ate a meal together at Leopold's while Didier talked of his most recent romantic disasters. We were laughing still when Vikram Patel ran up the steps with his arms wide in an excited greeting.

I stood just in time to receive his flying hug. Holding my shoulders with his arms straight, he looked me over, frowning at the cuts on my head and face.

I turned my head to look at Didier, who shrugged non-committally and then glared at Vikram with his teeth bared in fury.

I caught the eye of our waiter and nodded to him, gesturing for a new round of drinks. We were silent until they arrived and the drinks were poured, and then, with the glasses in the air, I proposed a toast.

It is not safe. Stay away from the dundah places."

The word dundah, or business, was the slang term we used for all of Khader's black-market operations in Bombay. They'd become targets, somehow.

Of course he was the traitor. Of course he was the one who'd tried to have us arrested and killed in Karachi. That's who Khaled had been talking about on the night before the battle: not Abdullah, but Ghani. Abdul Ghani...

I sat down again, avoiding the eyes of my friends until I could disguise the dread that I knew they would read in them.

But somehow, in some way, for some reason, the love had died in me, and I suddenly realised it, and was suddenly sure. It wasn't completely over, my feeling for Karla. It never is completely over. But there was nothing of the jealousy I once would've felt for the stranger Ranjit. There was no rage against him, and no feeling of hurt inspired by her. I felt numbed and empty sitting there, as if the war, and the loss of Khaderbhai and Khaled, and the face-off with Madame Zhou and her twins had poured anaesthetic into my heart.

And there was, instead of pain, a sense of wonder-I could think of no other way to describe what I was feeling-at Abdul Ghani's treachery. And behind that almost spiritual awe there was a dull, throbbing, fatalistic dread. For even then the bloody future his betrayal had forced on us was unfolding and spilling into our lives, like the sudden blossom of a drought-forced rose in a red, falling rush to dry, unyielding earth.

____________________

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

One hour after I'd left Abdul Ghani's mansion to confront Madame Zhou, Nazeer and three of his most trusted men forced the door of the house next to Ghani's and made their way through the long basement workshop that connected the two houses. At about the time that I picked my way through the rubble of Madame Zhou's ruined Palace, Nazeer and his men, wearing black knitted masks, pushed up the trapdoor in Ghani's kitchen and entered the house.

They seized the cook, the yardman, Abdul's two servants, and the Sri Lankan counterfeiters, Villu and Krishna, and locked them in a small room in the basement. As I climbed the blackened stairs of the Palace to the attic and found Madame Zhou, Nazeer crept upstairs to Abdul's grand study and found him sitting in the wing chair, weeping and still. Then, at about the time that I uncurled the knotted fist of my revenge to pity my broken enemy, the drooling Madame, Nazeer avenged himself and Khader Khan by killing the traitor who'd betrayed us all in Pakistan.

Two men held Abdul's arms against the chair. A third man forced his head back and his eyes open. Nazeer removed his mask. Staring into Abdul's eyes, Nazeer stabbed him in the heart. Abdul must've known he had to die. He was sitting there, alone, waiting for his killers. But his scream, they say, came all the way from hell to claim him.

They rolled his body off the chair and onto the polished floor.

Then, as I struggled with Rajan and his twin in the attic across the city, Nazeer and his men used heavy cleavers to hack off Abdul's hands, his feet, and his head. They scattered the pieces of his corpse around the great house, just as Abdul Ghani had ordered the Sapna killers to do with the butchered pieces of loyal old Madjid's body. And as I left the ruined Palace, my heart free and almost at peace for the first time in too many vengeful months, Nazeer and his men released Krishna, Villu, and the servants-all deemed to have had no part in Ghani's treachery-and then left the mansion to hunt down the members of Ghani's faction, and kill them all.

Ghani freaks out. He can see all that shit he's been doing coming right home to his doorstep. So he decides that he's got to have a sacrifice. Someone from the Khader Khan council itself, you know, right in the fuckin' heart of it all, that the Sapna guys can chop up to throw the cops off. They figured, if the cops saw one of our own guys get all chopped up, they'd have to think that Sapna was our enemy."

Patil was the cop in charge of the case, and he was there when they were putting the pieces of Madjid's body into carry bags. He knew how close Madjid was to Khaderbhai. Patil's dad-now there's a tough cop, yaar-had some history with Khaderbhai. He put him in jail once."

Sanjay, in agreement, clapped Nazeer on the back with a hard, good-natured slap. It was almost exactly the place where Nazeer had been wounded, and I knew the slap must've hurt, but he showed no sign of pain. Instead, he studied my face. It was my first formal debriefing after Abdul Ghani's death and the end of the two-week gangster war that had cost six lives and put the power of the mafia council back in the hands of Nazeer and the Khader faction. I met his gaze, and nodded slowly.

His stern, unsmiling face softened for an instant and then quickly set in its customary severity.

There was a small hesitation as all three men looked at me. Their features were set in grim and almost resentful stillness, as if I'd asked them an impolite or embarrassing question. But their eyes, lit with secrets and lies, seemed regretful and saddened.

We were in the Mocambo, a restaurant and coffee bar in the Fort Area. It was clean, well serviced, and fashionably bohemian. Rich businessmen from the Fort mixed with gangsters, lawyers, and celebrities from the movies and the rapidly developing television industries. I liked the place, and I'd been glad that Sanjay had chosen it for our meeting. We'd worked our way through a big but healthy lunch and kulfi dessert, and had moved on to our second coffee. Nazeer sat at my left, with his back in a corner space, and facing the main street door. Next to him was Sanjay Kumar, the tough, young Hindu gangster from the suburb of Bandra who'd once been my training partner. He'd worked his way into a permanent position on what remained of Khader's mafia council. He was thirty years old, fit and heavy-set, with thick, dark-brown hair that he blow-dried to match the bouffant of the movie heroes. His face was handsome. Wide-apart brown eyes, set deep into the shelter of a high brow, looked out with humour and confidence over a wide nose, a smiler's mouth, and a softly rounded chin. He laughed easily, and it was always a good, warm laugh, no matter how often he provoked himself to it.

And he was generous: it was almost impossible to pay a bill in his company-not, as some thought, because he aggrandised himself with the gesture, but rather because it was his instinct to give and to share. He was also brave, and as dependable in a violent crisis as he was from day to mundane day. He was an easy man to like, and I did like him, and I had to remind myself with a little nudge of will, now and then, that he was one of the men who'd hacked off Abdul Ghani's hands and feet and head with a butcher's cleaver.

The fourth man at our table, sitting next to Sanjay, as always, was Salman, his best friend. Salman Mustaan was born in the same year as Sanjay, and had grown up with him in the bustling, crowded suburb of Bandra. He'd been a precocious child, I'd been told, who'd surprised his impoverished parents by topping every subject in every class at his junior school. His success was the more remarkable for the fact that, from the day of his fifth birthday, the boy had worked twenty hours a week with his father, plucking chickens and sweeping out at the local poultry yard.

I knew his history well, piecing it together from stories and confidences he'd shared when we'd worked out together at Abdullah's gym. When Salman had announced that he had to leave school to work longer hours in support of his family, a teacher who knew Abdel Khader Khan asked the don to intercede on his behalf. Salman became one of Khaderbhai's scholarship children- like my adviser, in the slum clinic, Doctor Hamid-and it was decided that he should be groomed toward a career as a lawyer.

Khader enrolled Salman in a Catholic college run by Jesuit priests, and every day the boy from the slum dressed in a clean, white uniform and took his place among the sons of the rich elite. It was a good education-Salman's spoken English was eloquent, and his general knowledge roved through history and geography to literature, science, and art. But there was a wildness in the boy and a restless hunger for excitement that even the strong arms and the hard canes of the Jesuits couldn't tame.

While Salman struggled with the Jesuits, Sanjay had found a job in Khaderbhai's gang. He worked as a runner, carrying messages and contraband between mafia offices throughout the city. In the first weeks of that service, Sanjay was stabbed during a fight with men from a rival gang who'd tried to rob him. The boy fought back and evaded his attackers, delivering his contraband parcel to Khader's collection centre, but his wound was serious and he took two months to recover from it. Salman, his lifelong friend, blamed himself for not being with Sanjay, and he left school immediately. He begged the Khan for permission to join his friend and work with him as a runner. Khader agreed, and from that day the boys worked together at every crime in the council's catalogue.

They were just sixteen then, at the beginning. They both turned thirty in the weeks before our meeting in the Mocambo. The wild boys had become hard men who lavished gifts on their families, and lived with a certain gaudy, aggressive cool. Although they'd supported their sisters into prestigious marriages, both men were unmarried, in a country where that was unpatriotic at the least, and sacrilegious at worst. They'd refused to marry, Salman told me, because of a shared belief or presentiment that they would die violently and they would die young. The prospect didn't frighten or worry them. They saw it as a reasonable tradeoff: excitement and power and wealth enough to provide for their families, balanced against short lives that rushed into the dead end of a knife or a gun. And when Nazeer's group won the gangster war against Ghani's group, the two friends found themselves on the new council; young mafia dons in their own right.

Salman said thoughtfully, his voice clear and his English rounded to the nearest decibel point. "He talked about that hero curse thing for a good year or so before he decided to create Sapna."

The two younger men turned to face Nazeer. Sanjay asked him a few questions in Urdu. It was an act of respect toward the older man: they knew the facts as well as Nazeer did, but they deferred to his recollection of them and included him in the discussion. I understood most of Nazeer's reply, but I waited for Sanjay to translate.

Complaining about Khader spending money on the mujaheddin and the war and all, and meanwhile he was keeping these psycho fuckers in five-star hotels for two fuckin years!"

And he started shooting his mouth off, telling anyone who would listen that he was the real Sapna. They were in a bar in the President Hotel. Then he starts shouting that he was ready to tell it all-who was behind the Sapna killings, you know, and who planned it all and paid for it all."

But I was on a job, in Goa. Anyway, Khader fixed them up."

Jeetudada and his guys put up a fight. There was a big shoot-out.

Two of our guys got hit. One of them was Hussein-you know, he runs the numbers in Ballard Pier now. That's how he lost his arm-he took a shotgun blast, both barrels of a crowd-pleaser, a sawn-off, and it tore his arm right off his body. If Ahmed Zadeh hadn't wrapped him up and dragged him out of there, and off to hospital, he would've bled to death, right there in the car park. All four of them who were there-Jeetudada and his three guys-got wasted.

Khaderbhai put the last bullets into their heads himself. But one of those Sapna guys wasn't in the car park, and he got away. We never tracked him down. He went back to Delhi, and he disappeared from there. We haven't heard anything since."

Nazeer spoke again, grunting the words at us in his wrathful style as if they were threats.

Sanjay translated, "it was obvious that it had to be Abdul Ghani behind it."

I nodded my agreement. It was obvious. Abdul Ghani was from Pakistan. His connections there went deep, and high. He'd told me about it more than once when I'd worked for him. I wondered why I hadn't seen it at the time, when the cops raided our hotel in Pakistan. My first thought was that I'd simply liked him too much to suspect him, and that was true. More to the point, perhaps, was how flattered I'd been by his attention: Ghani had been my patron on the council, after Khader himself, and he'd invested time, energy, and affection in our friendship. And there was something else that might have distracted me in Karachi: my mind had been filled with shame and revenge-I remembered that much from the visit to the mosque when I'd sat beside Khaderbhai and Khaled to hear the Blind Singers. I remembered reading Didier's letter and deciding, in that shifting, yellow lamplight, that I would kill Madame Zhou. I remembered thinking that and then turning my head to see the love in Khader's golden eyes. Could that love and that anger have smothered something so important, something so obvious, as Ghani's treachery? And if I'd missed that, what else had I missed? "Khader wasn't supposed to make it out of Pakistan," Salman added. "Khaderbhai, Nazeer, Khaled-even you. Abdul Ghani thought it was his chance to take out the whole council in one shot-all the guys on the council who weren't with him. But Khaderbhai had his own friends in Pakistan, and they warned him, and you made it out of the trap. I think Abdul must've known he was finished from that day on. But he held his peace, and he didn't make any moves here. He was hoping, I guess, that Khader, and the whole lot of you, might be killed in the war-"

Nazeer interrupted him, impatient with the English that he despised. I thought I understood what he'd said, and I translated his words, looking to Sanjay for confirmation that my guess was correct.

He said that if anything happened to him in the war, Nazeer was to return to Bombay and avenge him. Was that it?"

I looked at each of them in turn, and settled my eyes on Nazeer.

If my understanding was correct, it was a tempting offer. The victorious Khader faction had reformed the local mafia council under old Sobhan Mahmoud. Nazeer had become a full member of the council, as had Mahmoud Melbaaf. The others included Sanjay and Salman, Farid, and three other Bombay-born dons. All of the last six spoke Marathi every bit as well as they spoke Hindi or English. That gave me a unique and very significant point of contact with them because I was the only gora any of them knew who could speak Marathi. I was the only gora any of them knew who'd been leg ironed at Arthur Road Prison. And I was one of the very few men, brown or white, who'd survived Khader's war. They liked me. They trusted me. They saw me as a valuable asset. The gangster war was over. In the new Pax Mafia that ruled their part of the city, fortunes could be made. And I needed the money. I'd been living on my savings, and I was almost broke.

So, angry as he is, he takes the brother-in-law's own house as well-makes him sign over his own house, just for being such a big madachudh about Ghani's houses. So now he's got nothing, that guy, and we got three houses on the market instead of one."

Salman concluded with a wry smile. "I'm moving us into it as soon as I can. We're taking over one of the big agencies. I've got Farid working on it. Okay, Lin, if you don't want to work at Ghani's place, where would you like us to set it up for you?"

Sanjay and Salman exchanged a glance and looked to Nazeer. He nodded.

Nazeer nodded again, favouring me with a little smile deep in his eyes.

I shook hands with each man in turn to seal the deal. The exchange was a little more formal and solemn than I'd expected it to be, and I had to clench my jaw to stifle a laugh. And those attitudes, their gravitas and my recusant impulse to laugh, registered the difference between us. For all that I liked Salman, Sanjay, and the others-and the truth was that I loved Nazeer, and owed him my life-the mafia was, for me, a means to an end and not an end in itself. For them, the mafia was a family, an infrangible bond that held them from minute to minute and all the way to the dying breath. Their solemnity expressed that kin-sacred obligation from eye to eye and hand to hand, but I knew they never believed it was like that for me.

They took me in and worked with me-the white guy, the wild gora who went to the war with Abdel Khader Khan-but they expected me to leave them, sooner or later, and return to the other world of my memory and my blood.

I didn't think that, and I didn't expect it, because I'd burned all the bridges that might've led me home. And although I had to stop myself from laughing at the earnestness of the little ceremony, the handshake had, in fact, formally inducted me into the ranks of professional criminals. Until that moment, the crimes I'd committed had been in the service of Khader Khan. As difficult as it is for anyone outside that world to understand, there was a sense in which I'd been able to say, with sincerity, that I'd committed them for love of him: for my own safety, certainly; but, beyond every other reason, for the father's love I'd craved from him. With Khader gone, I could've made the break completely. I could've gone... almost anywhere. I could've done ... something else. But I didn't. I joined my fate to theirs and became a gangster for nothing more than the money, and the power, and the protection that their brotherhood promised.

And it kept me busy, breaking laws for a living: so busy that I managed to hide most of what I felt from the heart that was feeling it. Everything moved quickly after that meeting at the Mocambo. Farid found new premises within a week. The two-story building, only a short walk from the floating mosque, Haji Ali, had been a records office for a branch of the Bombay Municipal Corporation. When the BMC had moved to larger, more modern offices, they'd left most of the old benches, desks, storage cupboards, and shelves behind as stock fittings. They were well suited to our needs, and I spent a week supervising a team of cleaners and labourers, who dusted and polished every surface while moving the furniture around to make way for the machinery and light-tables from Ghani's basement.

Our men loaded that specialist equipment onto a large, covered truck and delivered it to the new premises late at night. The street was unusually quiet as the heavy truck backed up to the double folding doors of our new factory. But alarm bells and the heavier clang of fire-engine bells jangled in the distance. Standing beside our truck, I looked along the deserted street in the direction of the frantic sound.

Farid killed two birds with one match, na?"

So, while fire and smoke singed the midnight sky, and bells and sirens railed about a kilometre away, we directed our men as they moved the heavy equipment into the new factory. And Krishna and Villu went to work almost at once.

In the months that I'd been away, Ghani had followed my suggestion to push the focus of the operation laterally into the production of permits, certificates, diplomas, licences, letters of credit, security passes, and other documents. It was a booming trade in the booming economy of Bombay, and we often worked through the dawn to satisfy the demand. And the business was generational: as licensing authorities and other bodies modified their documents in response to our forgeries, we dutifully copied and then counterfeited them again, at additional cost.

His tone was quiet but adamant. "You've done a damn fine job, Lin. The ID stuff is deadly-it's a real big market. They can't get enough. And it's good work. So far, all our guys who've used your books have gone through without any problems, yaar. As a matter of fact, that's why I've called you to have lunch with us today. I've got a surprise for you-kind of a present, like, and I'm sure you're going to like it. It's a way of saying thanks, yaar, for the great job you've been doing."

I didn't look at him. We were walking quickly, side by side, along Mahatma Gandhi Road toward the Regal Circle roundabout on a hot, cloudless afternoon. Where the footpath was dogged with shoppers halting at the tabletop street stalls, we walked on the road with a slow, unceasing stream of traffic behind and beside us. I didn't look at Salman because I'd come to know him well enough during those six months to be sure he was embarrassed by the praise he'd felt moved to lavish on me. Salman was a natural leader but, like many men who have the gift of command and the instinct to rule, he was deeply troubled by every expression of the leadership art. He was, at heart, a humble man, and that humility made him an honourable man.

Lettie had once said that she found it strange and incongruous to hear me describe criminals, killers, and mafiosi as men of honour. The confusion, I think, was hers, not mine. She'd confused honour with virtue. Virtue is concerned with what we do, and honour is concerned with how we do it. You can fight a war in an honourable way-the Geneva Convention exists for that very reason-and you can enforce the peace without any honour at all. In its essence, honour is the art of being humble. And gangsters, just like cops, politicians, soldiers, and holy men, are only ever good at what they do if they stay humble.

I frowned, and remained silent, keeping pace with his rapid step.

Johnny Cigar and Kishore had refused to join me in the passport factory, and it had shocked and disappointed me. I'd assumed that they would jump at the chance to make money-to make more money with me than either of them had ever dreamed of making alone. I'd never anticipated the saddened and offended expressions that closed their smiles when they understood, at last, that I was offering them nothing more than the golden opportunity to commit crimes with me. It had never occurred to me that they wouldn't want to do it. It had never occurred to me that they would refuse to work with criminals, and for criminals.

I remembered turning away from their stony, closed, embarrassed smiles that day. I remembered the question that had knotted into a fist in my mind, right behind the eyes: Was I so far out of touch with the thoughts and feelings of decent men? The question still rankled six months later. The answer still stared back at me from the mirrored windows of the shops we passed as we walked.

And it was true. I did like Farid, and I was glad that we'd become close friends.

Farid, the shy but capable youngster I'd met on my first visit to Khader's mafia council more than three years before, had toughened up to a hard, fearless, angry man whose sense of loyalty assumed the full measure of his young life. When Johnny Cigar and Kishore rejected my offers of work, Salman had put Farid and the Goan, Andrew Ferreira, to work with me. Andrew had been genial and talkative, but he'd moved only reluctantly from the company of his young gangster friends, and we hadn't become close. Farid, however, had spent most days and many nights with me, and we liked and understood one another.

It shouldn't even be on the same page as the first option.` But he went right on doing it. Then I put him with you. And now, after six months, he's a much calmer guy. It worked out well, yaar. I think I'll just have to put all the really bad and mad motherfuckers with you, Lin, to straighten them out."

It was a tiny phrase, three small words, and it said nothing new, nothing more than I already knew to be true. Yet that little phrase thundered in my heart, and an avalanche of grieving began to tremble, shift, and slide. For almost a year, and until that very moment, my anger at Khaderbhai had shielded me from the pain of grieving for him. Others had crumbled and withered and raged in their shock and sorrow at his death. I'd been so angry with him that my share of grief was still up there, beneath the smothering snow, in those mountains where he'd died. I'd felt a sense of loss. I'd suffered almost from the start. And I didn't hate the Khan-I'd loved him, always, and still loved him in that instant as we stood outside the cinema, waiting for our friends.

But I hadn't really grieved for him-not in the way that I'd grieved for Prabaker or even Abdullah. Somehow, Salman's casual remark that we all blamed ourselves for not being with Khader when he died had shaken my frozen sorrowing free, and the slow, inexorable snowslip of its heartache began, right there and then.

Salman looked at me, a smile on his lips and a frown exaggerating the slightly crooked tilt of his almond-brown eyes.

He grinned and looked away down the street. I struggled to hold the set of my features, to keep my expression calm and even. But it was too late. The heartgrief had already begun.

I know now what was happening to me, what was overwhelming me, what was about to consume and almost destroy me. Didier had even given me a name for it-assassin grief, he'd once called it: the kind of grief that lies in wait and attacks from ambush, with no warning and no mercy. I know now that assassin grief can hide for years and then strike suddenly, on the happiest day, without discernible reason or exegesis. But on that day, six months after my work in the passport factory had begun, and almost a year after Khader's death, I couldn't understand the dark and trembling mood that was moving in me, swelling to the sorrow I'd too long denied. I couldn't understand it, so I tried to fight it as a man fights pain or despair. But you can't bite down on assassin grief, and will it away. The enemy stalks you, step for step, and knows your every move before you make it. The enemy is your own grieving heart and, when it strikes, it can't miss.

Salman turned to me once more, his amber eyes gleaming in the cast of his thoughts.

A white Ambassador stopped in front of us. Farid, Sanjay, Andrew Ferreira, and a tough, forty-year-old Bombay Muslim named Amir got out of the car and joined us. We shook hands as the car drove off.

It was true that Faisal, who ran the protection racket with Amir, was parking the car. It was also true, and more to the point, that Sanjay was enjoying himself, standing in our conspicuous group on a warm afternoon and sparking furtive but fervent looks from most of the girls passing us on the busy street. We were goondas, gangsters, and almost everyone knew it. Our clothes were new and expensive and cut to the edge of fashion. We were all fit. We were all confident. We were all armed and dangerous.

Faisal loped around the corner and wagged his head to signal that the car was safely parked. We joined him, and walked the three blocks to the Taj Mahal Hotel in a single, wide line. The route from Regal Circle to the Taj Hotel crossed spacious, open, crowded squares. We held our line easily as the crowds parted for us. Heads turned as we passed, and whispers whirled in our wake.

We climbed the white marble steps at the Taj, and walked through to the Shamiana Restaurant on the ground floor. Two waiters settled our group at a long, reserved table near a tall window with a courtyard view. I sat at one end of the table, nearest to the exit. The strange and overpoweringly dark mood that had stirred in me with Salman's little phrase grew stronger by the minute. I wanted to be free to leave at any moment, without upsetting the balance of the group. The waiters greeted me with broad smiles, calling me gao-alay, or countryman, the Indian equivalent of the Italian paisano. They knew me well-the gora who spoke Marathi-and we chatted for a while in the village dialect I'd learned in Sunder more than four years before.

Food arrived, and the men ate with good appetite. I, too, was hungry, but I couldn't eat, and I just pushed at the food to make a polite show. I drank two cups of black coffee and tried to bring my troubled, storming mind into the run of conversations.

Amir was describing the movie he'd seen the night before-a Hindi gangster picture, in which the gangsters were vicious thugs and the hero conquered them all, unarmed and alone. He described every fight sequence in detail, and the men hooted with laughter. Amir was a scarred, blunt-headed man with thick, tangled eyebrows and a moustache that rode the cresting wave of his full upper lip like the wide prow of a Kashmiri houseboat. He loved to laugh and tell stories, and his self-assured, sonorous voice compelled attention.

Amir's constant companion, Faisal, had been a champion boxer in the youth league. On his nineteenth birthday, after a year of tough professional bouts, he'd discovered that his manager had embezzled and squandered all the money he'd been entrusted to save from his boxers' fights. Faisal had tracked the manager down. When he'd found him, he hit him and then kept on hitting him until the man was dead. He'd served eight years in prison for the crime, and was banned from boxing for life. In prison, the naive, hot-tempered teenager had become a calculating, cold tempered young man. One of Khaderbhai's talent scouts had recruited him in the prison, and he'd served his apprenticeship to the mafia through the last three years of his sentence. During the four years since his release, Faisal had worked as Amir's principal strong-arm man in the burgeoning protection racket. He was quick, ruthless, and driven to succeed at whatever task was set for him. His flattened, broken nose, and a neat scar that dissected his left eyebrow gave him a fearsome appearance, and toughened what might otherwise have been a too-regular and too handsome face.

They were the new blood, the new mafia dons, the new lords of the city: Sanjay, the efficient killer with the movie-star looks;

Andrew, the genial Goan who dreamed of taking his seat on the mafia council; Amir, the grizzled veteran with the story-teller's gift; Faisal, the cold-hearted enforcer who only asked one question-Finger, arm, leg, or neck?-when he was given an assignment; Farid, known as the Fixer, who solved problems with fire and fear, and who'd raised six much younger brothers and sisters, alone, when his parents died in a cholera-infested slum; and Salman, the quiet one, the humble one, the natural leader, who controlled the lives of hundreds in the little empire that he'd inherited and held by force.

And they were my friends. More than friends, they were my brothers in their brotherhood of crime. We were bonded to one another in blood-not all of it other people's-and boundless obligation. If I needed them, no matter what I'd done, no matter what I wanted them to do, they would come. If they needed me, I was there, without cavil or regret. They knew they could count on me. They knew that when Khader had asked me to join him in his war I'd gone with him, and I'd put my life on the line. I knew I could count on them. When I'd needed him, Abdullah had been there to help me deal with Maurizio's body. It's a significant test, asking someone to help you dispose of a murdered man's body. Not many pass it. Every man at the table had passed that test; some of them more than once. They were a solid crew, to use the Australian prison slang. They were the perfect crew for me, an outlaw with a price on my head. I'd never felt so safe-not even with Khaderbhai's protection-and I never should've felt alone.

But I was alone, and for two reasons. The mafia was theirs, not mine. For them, the organisation always came first. But I was loyal to the men, not the mafia; to the brothers, not the brotherhood. I worked for the mafia, but I didn't join it. I'm not a joiner. I never found a club or clan or idea that was more important to me than the men and women who believed in it.

And there was another difference between the men in that group and me-a difference so profound that friendship, on its own, couldn't surmount it. I was the only man at that table who hadn't killed a human being, in hot blood or cold. Even Andrew, amiable and garrulous young Andrew, had fired his Beretta at a cornered enemy-one of the Sapna killers-and emptied all seven rounds of the magazine into the man's chest until he was, as Sanjay would've said, two or three times dead.

Just at that moment the differences suddenly seemed immense and unconquerable to me-far greater and more significant than the hundred talents, desires, and tendencies that we had in common. I was slipping away from them, right there and then, at the long table in the Taj. While Amir told his stories and I tried to nod and smile and laugh with the others, grief came to claim me. The day that had started well, and should've been like any other, had spun askew with Salman's little words. The room was warm, but I was cold. My belly hungered, but I couldn't eat. I was surrounded by friends, in a vast, crowded restaurant, but I was lonelier than a mujaheddin sentry on the night before battle.

And then I looked up to see Lisa Carter walk into the restaurant.

Her long, blonde hair had been cut. The new short style suited her open, honest, pretty face. She was dressed in pale blue-her favourite colour-a loose shirt and pants, with matching blue sunglasses propped in her thick hair. She looked like a creature of light, a creature made out of sky and clean, white light.

Without considering what I was doing, I stood and excused myself, and left my friends. She saw me as I approached her. A smile as big as a gambler's promise unveiled her face as she opened her arms to hug me. And then she knew. One hand reached up to touch my face, her fingertips reading the braille of scars, while the other hand took my arm to lead me out of the restaurant and into the foyer.

And she worried a lot. So she made him give it up."

I stared back at her, saying nothing. "Karla," she explained. "She wants to see you, I think."

I held the silence. I was enjoying it, a little, that so many emotions were chasing one another across the soft, unblemished landscape of her face.

And she was right: it was a spectacular view. Tourist ferries bound for the caves on Elephanta Island, or returning to shore, rose up the wavelets and rolled over them in proud, practised glissades. Hundreds of smaller craft dipped and nodded like preening birds in the shallow water while huge cargo vessels, anchored to the horizon, lay motionless on that cusp of calm where the ocean became the bay. On the street below us, parading tourists wove coloured garlands with their movements through and around the tall, stony gallery of the Gateway Monument.

She kicked off her shoes and sat cross-legged on the bed. I sat near her on the edge of the bed. I stared at the floor near the door. We were quiet for a while, listening to the noises that pushed their way into the room with a breeze that caused the curtains to riffle, swell, and fall.

And we got a lot in common. We both beat the dope. That's a fuckin' hard thing to do, and you know it. And not many people do it. But we did-we both did-and I think that's because we're alike, you and me. We'd be good, Lin. We'd be... we'd be real good."

I didn't answer because I didn't want her to know the truth. I didn't want to know the truth myself. And the silence thickened and swelled until I could feel the tingling pressure of it on my skin.

He's got a big studio out near Juhu Beach. I go there sometimes."

She was silent again. We sat there, feeling the breeze alternately warm and cool as the air from the street and the bay swirled into the room. I could feel her eyes on me like a blush of shame. I stared at our two hands joined and resting on the bed.

He uses them like a mould, and he makes a sculpture out of them.

He had a hundred things there-shapes made out of egg cartons, and the blister-pack that a new toothbrush came in, and the empty package that had a set of headphones in it."

I turned to look at her. The sky in her eyes held tiny storms.

Her lips, embossed with secret thoughts, were swollen to the truth she was trying to tell me.

When I kissed her, the storm from her blue eyes came into our mouths, and the tears that slid across her lemon-scented skin were sweeter than honey from the sacred bees in Mombadevi's Jasmine Temple garden. I let her cry for us. I let her live and die for us in the long, slow stories our bodies told. Then, when the tears stopped, she surrounded us with poised and fluent beauty-a beauty that was hers alone: born in her brave heart, and substantialised in the truth of her love and her flesh. And it almost worked.

We kissed again as I prepared to leave her room-good friends, lovers, gathered into one another then and forever by the clash and caress of our bodies, but not quite healed by it, not quite cured by it. Not yet.

Something happened, when I came back from Afghanistan. Or maybe it happened in Afghanistan. It just... stopped."

She made sense, after that. So... I guess you have to know.

Anyway, if there's anything gonna happen for us, I want it to be clear-the past, I mean."

She sat on the bed once more, drawing her knees up under her chin in the tight wrap of the towel. There were changes in her, and I couldn't help noticing them-a kind of honesty, maybe, in the way her body moved, and a new, almost languorous release that softened her eyes. They were love-changes, and beautiful for that, and I wondered if she saw any of them in me, sitting still and quiet near the door.

But she wouldn't. It's funny how it goes, isn't it? I wanted her to tell you, then, because I thought it might put you off her.

Now, I'm telling you, so that you can give her one more chance- if you want to. Anyway, here it is. Karla left the States because she had to. She was running away... because she killed a guy."

I laughed. It was a small chuckle, at first, but it rolled and rumbled helplessly into a belly laugh. I doubled over, leaning on my thighs for support.

She stared at me, rocking slightly as she hugged her knees. She wasn't laughing.

And it messed her up pretty bad. And then, one day, she got herself a gun, and she went to his house when he was alone, and she shot him. Six times. Two in the chest, she said, and four in the crotch."

She's never been back, so she doesn't know if there's a sheet on her or not."

I sat back in the chair and let out a long, slow breath. Lisa watched me closely, her blue eyes narrowing slightly and reminding me of the way she'd looked at me on that night, years before, in Karla's apartment.

I rode the elevator down to the foyer alone with the crowd of my mirror selves: beside and behind me, still and silent, not one of them was able to meet my eye. Once through the glass doors, I walked down the marble steps and across the wide forecourt of the Gateway Monument to the sea. Beneath the arched shadow I leaned on the sea wall and looked out at the boats carrying tourists back to the marina. How many of those lives, I wondered, watching the travellers pose for one another's cameras, are happy and carefree and... simply free? How many of them are sorrowing? How many are...

And then the full darkness of that long-resisted grieving closed around me. I realised that for some time I'd been gritting my teeth and that my jaw was cramped and stiff, but I couldn't unlock the muscles. I turned my head to see one of the street boys, someone I knew well, doing business with a young tourist.

The boy, Mukul, sent his eyes left and right, lizard quick, and passed a small, white packet to the tourist. The man was about twenty years old: tall and fit and handsome. I guessed him to be a German student, and I had a good eye. He hadn't been in the city long. I knew the signs. He was new blood, with money to burn and the whole world of experience open to him. And there was a spring in his step as he walked away to join his friends. But there was poison in the packet in his hand. If it didn't kill him outright, in a hotel room somewhere, it would deepen in his life, maybe, as it did once in mine, until it poisoned every breathing second.

I didn't care-not about him or me or anyone. I wanted it. I wanted the drug, just then, more than anything in the world. My skin remembered the satin-flush of ecstasy and the lichen stippled creep of fever and fear. The smell-taste was so strong that I felt myself retching it. The hunger for oblivion, painless, guiltless, and unsorrowing, swirled in me, shivering from my spine to the thick, healthy veins in my arms. And I wanted it: the golden minute in heroin's long leaden night.

Mukul caught my eye and smiled from habit, but the smile twitched and crumbled into uncertainty. And then he knew. He had a good eye, too. He lived on the street, and he knew the look. So the smile returned, but it was different. There was seduction in it- It's right here... I've got it right here... It's good stuff ... Come and get it-and the dealer's tiny, vicious, little sneer of triumph. You're no better than me... You're not much at all ... And sooner or later, you'll beg me for it...

The day was dying. Each jewelled shimmer, dazzling from the waves in the bay, turned from glittering white to pink, and weak, blood red. Sweat ran into my eyes as I stared back at Mukul. My jaws ached, and my lips quivered with the strain of it: the strain of not responding, not speaking, not nodding my head. I heard a voice or remembered it: All you have to do is nod your head, that's all you have to do, and it'll all be _over... And grieving tears boiled up in me, relentless as the gathering tide that slapped against the sea wall. But I couldn't cry them, those tears, and I felt that I was drowning in a sorrow that was bigger than the heart that tried to hold it. I pressed my hands down on the little mountain range of the faceted bluestones on the top of the sea wall, as if I could drive my fingers into the city and save myself by clinging to her.

But Mukul... Mukul smiled, promising peace. And I knew there were so many ways to find that peace-I could smoke it in a cigarette, or chase it on a piece of foil, or snort it, or puff it in a chillum, or spike it into my vein, or just eat it, just swallow it and wait for the creeping numbness to smother every pain on the planet. And Mukul, reading the sweating agony like a dirty page in a dirty book, inched his way closer to me, sliding along the wet stone wall. And he knew it. He knew everything.

A hand touched my shoulder. Mukul flinched as if he'd been kicked, and backed away from me, his dead eyes dwindling to nothing in the burning splendour of the setting sun. And I turned my head to stare into the face of a ghost. It was Abdullah, my Abdullah, my dead friend, killed in a police ambush too many suffering months before. His long hair was cut short and thick like a movie star's. His black clothes were gone. He wore a white shirt and grey trousers with a fashionable cut. And they seemed strange, those different clothes-almost as strange as seeing him standing there. But it was Abdullah Taheri, his ghost, as handsome as Omar Sharif on his thirtieth birthday, as lethal as a big cat prowling, a black panther, and with those eyes the colour of sand in the palm of your hand a half-hour before sunset. Abdullah.

That was it. Just that.

It was a surprise."

Now the surprise is really a shocks."

The tone of the conversation was matter-of-fact. The fading sky behind his head, and the passers-by on the street, were unremarkable. Nothing matched the blur and streak of a dream. Yet it had to be a dream. Then the ghost lifted his white shirt to reveal his many wounds, healed and healing into dark-skinned rings, whirls, and thumb-thick gashes.

Then they took me to Delhi. I was in hospital for one year. It was a private hospital, not far from Delhi. It was a year of many operations. Not a good year, Lin brother. Then it was almost another year to become well, Nushkur'allah."

Warm. Alive. I held him tightly, clamping my hand to my wrist behind his back. I felt the press of his ear against my face, and smelt the soap on his skin. I heard his voice passing from his chest to mine like ocean sonancies, sounding and resounding, wave on wave through shores of tight-wet sand at night. Eyes closed, and clinging to him, I floated on the dark water of the sorrowing I'd done for him, for both of us. Heart-crippled with fear that I was mad, that it really was a dream, a nightmare, I held him until I felt the strong hands push me gently to the length of his extended arms.

I flipped open the box to offer him one.

Mostly drugs business, but sometimes guns business and sometimes passports. And they were spies against us, reporting about any of us from Iran who ran away from the Iraq war. I was one man who ran away from the Iraq war. Many thousands ran away to here, India, and many thousands who hate Ayatollah Khomeini. The spies from Iran, they made reports about us to the new Savak in Iran.

And they hate Khader because he want to help the mujaheddin in Afghanistan and because he did help so many of us from Iran. You understand this business, Lin brother?"

I understood it. The Iranian expatriate community in Bombay was huge, and I had many friends who'd lost their homeland and their families, and were struggling to survive. Some of them worked in existing mafia gangs like Khader's council. Others had formed their own gangs, hiring themselves out to do the wet work, in a business that got a little bloodier every working day. I knew that the Iranian secret police had spies circulating among the exiles, reporting on them and sometimes getting their own hands a little damp.

I nodded, listening to him, and thinking about something Abdul Ghani had said to me once: All the secret police of the world work together, Lin, and that is their biggest secret.

Six good traitors gone. Nobody ever can find the bodies of those traitors. Only three were left. The three men from Iran, so then they work with Abdul Ghani. He told them how to make a trap for me. At that time, do you remember, we did not know it, that Sapna, he was working for Ghani and planning to move against us.

Khader did not know. I did not know. If I knew that, I would put the pieces of those Sapna men into Hassaan Obikwa's hole in the ground myself. But I did not know. When I came into the trap, near to Crawford Market, the men from Iran fire the first time from a place near me. The police, they think that I am firing my gun. They fire at me. I am dying, I know, so I take my guns and I shoot at the police. The rest, you know."

They make a riot and then they fight step and step into the police station, and they take my body out of there and away to the hospital. Khader had a truck near there, and he had a doctor - you know him, Doctor Hamid, do you remember him?-and they saved me."

After Nazeer, Farid is the best of them. Never forget that."

He hesitated a moment more but then smiled, nodded his head, and walked back through the domed arch toward the Taj Hotel.

Evening dimmed the afternoon's bright halo. A haze of dusty smoke and vapour misted the horizon, sizzling soundlessly, as if the sky at the distant wall of the world was dissolving into the waters of the bay. Most of the boats and ferries were safely tied to their mooring posts at the dock beneath me. Others rose and fell and rose again, swaying on the secure tethers of their sea anchors. High tide pushed the swollen waves against the long stone wall where I stood. Here and there along the boulevard, frothy plumes, like gasps of effort, slapped up, over, and onto the white footpaths. Strollers walked around the intermittent fountains, or ran laughing through the sudden boom and spray. In the little seas of my eyes, those tiny blue-grey oceans, waves of tears pushed hard against the wall of my will.

Did you send him? I whispered to the dead Khan, my father.

Assassin grief had pushed me to that wall where the street boys sold heroin. And then, when it was almost too late, Abdullah had appeared. Did you send him to save me?

The setting sun, that funeral fire in the sky, seared my eyes, and I looked away to follow the last flares of cerise and magenta streaming out and fading in the ocean-mirrored sapphire of the evening. And staring out across the rile and ruffle of the bay, I tried to fit my feelings within a frame of thought and fact.

Strangely, weirdly, I'd re-found Abdullah and re-lost Khaderbhai on the same day, in the same hour. And the experience of it, the fact of it, the inescapably fated imperative of it, helped me to understand. The sorrowing I'd shunned had taken so long to find me because I couldn't let him go. In my heart, I still held him as tightly as I'd hugged Abdullah only minutes before. In my heart, I was still there on the mountain, kneeling in the snow and cradling the handsome head in my arms.

As the stars slowly reappeared in the silent endlessness of sky, I cut the last mooring rope of grief, and surrendered to the all sustaining tide of destiny. I let him go. I said the words, the sacred words: I forgive you...

And it was good. And it was right. I let the tears fall. I let my heart break on my father's love, like the tall waves beside me that hurled their chests against the wall, and bled onto the wide, white path.

____________________

CHAPTER FORTY

The word mafia comes from the Sicilian word for bragging. And if you ask any serious man who commits serious crimes for a living, he'll tell you it's just that-the boasting, the pride-that gets most of us in the end. But we never learn. Maybe it's not possible to break laws without boasting about it to someone.

Maybe it's not possible to be an outlaw without being proud in some way. Certainly, in those last months of the old mafia, the brotherhood that Khaderbhai had designed, steered, and ruled, there was plenty of boasting and no less pride. But it was the last time that any of us in that corner of Bombay's underworlds of crime could've said, with complete honesty, that we were proud to be gangsters.

Khader Khan had been dead for almost two years, but his precepts and principles still dominated the day-to-day operations of the mafia council he'd founded. Khader had hated heroin, and he'd refused to deal in the drug or permit anyone else but desperately addicted street junkies to trade in it within the areas he'd controlled. Prostitution had also appalled him. He'd seen it as a business that injured women, degraded men, and blighted the community where it occurred. The hemisphere of his influence had extended to all the streets, parks, and buildings across several square kilometres. Within that little kingdom, any man or woman who hadn't kept their involvement with prostitution and pornography to very low, very discreet, levels of activity had risked his condign punishment. And that situation prevailed under the new council headed by Salman Mustaan.

Old Sobhan Mahmoud, still the nominal head of the council, was gravely ill. In the years since Khader died, he'd suffered two strokes that had left his speech and much of his movement severely impaired. The council moved him into Khader's beach house in Versova-the same house where I'd gone through cold turkey with Nazeer. They ensured that the aged don had access to the best medical treatments, and arranged for his family and his servants to attend him.

Nazeer slowly groomed Khader's nephew, young Tariq, for what most on the council assumed would be a leading role. Despite the boy's pedigree, his maturity, and his unusually solemn demeanour-there was no-one, man or boy, whose dour, fervent intensity reminded me so much of Khaled-Tariq was deemed to be too young to claim a council position or even to attend the council meetings. Instead, Nazeer gave him duties and responsibilities that more gradually acquainted him with the world he might one day command. In all practical senses, Salman Mustaan was the don, the new Khan, the leader of the council and the ruler of Khaderbhai's mafia. And Salman, as everyone who knew him testified, was Khaderbhai's man, body and soul. He governed the actions of the clan as if the grey-haired lord was still there, still alive, advising and cautioning him in private sessions every night.

Most of the men supported Salman unquestioningly. They understood the principles involved, and agreed that they were worth upholding. In our area of the city, the words goonda and gangster weren't an insult. Local people knew that our branch of the mafia did a better job than the police at keeping heroin and salacious crimes from their streets. The police, after all, were susceptible to bribes. Indeed, Salman's mafia clan found itself in the unique position of bribing the police-the same cops who'd just been paid off by pimps and pushers-to look away whenever they had to run a recalcitrant heroin dealer into a brick wall, or take a mash hammer to a pornographer's hands.

Old men in the district nodded to one another, and compared the relative calm on their streets with the chaos that tumbled and trawled through the streets of other districts. Children looked up to the young gangsters, sometimes adopting one as a local hero. Restaurants, bars, and other businesses welcomed Salman's men as preservers of peace and comparatively high moral standards. And the informing rate in the areas of his control, the amount of unsolicited information supplied to the police-a sure indicator of public popularity or displeasure-was lower than in any other area across the whole seething sprawl of Bombay. We had pride, and we had principle, and we were almost the men of honour that we believed ourselves to be. Still, there were a few grumbles of complaint within the clan, and some council meetings hosted fierce, unresolved arguments about the future of the group. The heroin trade was making other mafia councils rich. New smack millionaires flaunted their imported cars, designer clothes, and state-of-the-art electronic gadgets at the most exclusive and expensive venues in the city.

More significantly, they used their inexhaustible, opiate-based income streams to hire new men: mercenaries who were paid well to fight dirty and to fight hard. Little by little, those gangs expanded their territories in turf wars that left a few of the toughest men dead, many more wounded, and cops all over the city lighting incense sticks to give thanks for their luck.

With similarly high profits derived from the new and insatiable market for imported, hard-core pornographic videos, some of the rival councils had accumulated enough money to acquire that ultimate status symbol for any criminal gang: a hoard of guns.

Envious of the wealth amassed by such gangs, infuriated by their territorial gains, and wary of their growing power, some of Salman Mustaan's men urged him to change his policy. First among those critical voices was that of Sanjay, Salman's oldest and closest friend.

Every time our guys get in a fight with his guys, and give them a solid pasting, I meet with Chuha. Every time he makes an offer to join our council to his, I meet with him. I know the fucker too well. That's the problem."

The Walidlalla council held a contiguous border with our own.

Relations between the gangs were generally respectful but not cordial. Walid, the leader of the rival council, had been a close friend of Khaderbhai and, with him, was one of the original founders of the council system. Although Walid had led his council into the heroin and pornography trade that he, like Khaderbhai, had once despised, he'd also insisted that no conflict with Salman's council should occur. Chuha, his second in command, had ambitions that strained at the leash of Walid's control. Those ambitions led to disputes and even battles between the gangs, and all too often forced Salman to meet with the Rat at stiffly formal dinners held on neutral ground in a suite at a five-star hotel.

Sanjay looked around the table for support, and finally appealed to me.

He liked me, and he knew that I liked him. "Tell me the truth.

What do you think of him?"

I glanced around at Salman and he nodded, just as Khader might've done.

I glanced again at Salman. He grinned back at me, raising his eyebrows and the palms of his hands in a Don't look at me gesture.

Sanjay looked at Farid and Salman with a blank expression of confused innocence.

The word bucks was Bombay slang for rupees. Fifty rupees was the same amount, I knew, that Sanjay customarily tipped waiters and better-than-average cab drivers.

There was a little silence while Sanjay pursed his lips, twirled his hand palm upward, and looked from Salman to Farid. Then all three of them burst out laughing.

You ran that clinic in the zhopadpatti, and you never made a fuckin' paise out of it. Remind me of that, Lin brother, if I ever ask you for your business opinion again, na?"

Isn't that right? And isn't that what they say to each other as their slogan?"

They looked at one another, and smiled.

At the sound of an Enfield engine, I looked up to see Abdullah park his bike outside the chai shop and wave to me. It was time for me to go.

I'd spoken the truth, as I saw it, and I meant every word, but in my own heart of hearts I knew that Sanjay's argument, although not better, would turn out to be stronger than mine. The Walidlalla gang under Chuha was the future of all the mafia councils, in a sense, and we all knew it. Walid was still the head of the council that bore his name, but he was old and he was ill. He'd ceded so much power to Chuha that it was the younger don who ruled. Chuha was aggressive and successful, and he gained new ground by conquest or coercion every few months. Sooner or later, if Salman didn't agree to merge with Chuha, that expansion would come to open conflict, and there would be a war.

I hoped, of course, that Khader's council, under Salman, would win. But I knew that, if we did win, it would be impossible to claim Chuha's territory without also absorbing his trade in heroin, women, and porn. It was the future, and it was inevitable. There was simply too much money in it. And money, if the pile gets high enough, is something like a big political party: it does as much harm as it does good, it puts too much power in too few hands, and the closer you come to it the dirtier you get. In the long run, Salman could walk away from the fight with Chuha, or he could defeat him and become him. Fate always gives you two choices, Scorpio George once said: the one you should take, and the one you do.

I walked out, with Sanjay's protests and his friends' laughter rattling above the clatter of cups and glasses.

As I approached him, Abdullah kick-started the bike and straightened it from the side stand, ready to ride.

For nine months, we'd trained together at a small, dark, sweaty, and very serious gym near the Elephant Gate section of Ballard Pier. It was a goonda's gym set up by Hussein, the one-armed survivor of Khader's battle with the Sapna assassins. There were weights and benches, a judo mat, and a boxing ring. The smell of man-sweat, both fresh and fouled into the stitching of leather gloves and belts and turnbuckles, was so eye-wateringly rancid that the gym was the only building in the city block that rats and cockroaches spurned. There were bloodstains on the walls and the wooden floor, and the young gangsters who trained there accumulated more wounds and injuries in a workout week than the emergency ward of a city hospital on a hot Saturday night.

It wasn't true: I never hit him as hard as he hit me. Although he was healing well, and he was very fit, he'd never fully recovered the uncanny strength and charismatic vitality he'd known before the police shooting. And when he removed his shirt to box with me, the sight of his scarred body-it was as if he'd been savaged by the claws of wild animals and burned with hot iron brands- always made me pull my punches. Still, I never admitted that to _him.

We were silent for a while, breathing the warm wind and watching the black business unfold on the streets we'd both roamed so often. There were a hundred large and small scams and deals going down around us every minute, and we knew them all.

When we found ourselves twisted into a knot of traffic behind a stalled bus, I looked along the footpath and noticed Taj Raj, a pickpocket who usually worked the Gateway area near the Taj Mahal Hotel. He'd survived a machete attack years before that had all but severed his neck. The wound caused him to speak in a rattling whisper, and his head was set at such an ill-balanced angle that when he wagged it to agree with someone he almost fell over. He was working the stumble-fall-pilfer game with his friend Indra serving as the stumbler. Indra, known as the Poet, spoke almost all of his sentences in rhyming couplets. They were deeply moving in their beauty, for the first few stanzas, but always found their way into sexual descriptions and allusions so perverse and abhorrent that strong, wicked men winced to hear them. Legend had it that Indra had once recited his poetry through a microphone during a street festival, and had cleared the entire Colaba Market of shoppers and traders alike. Even the police, it was said, had shrunk back in horror until exhaustion overcame the Poet, and then they'd rushed him as he paused for breath. I knew both men, and liked them, though I never let them get closer than an arm's stretch from my pockets. And sure enough, as the bus finally grumbled to life and the traffic began to ease forward, I watched Indra pretending to be blind-not his best performance, but good enough-and stumbling into a foreigner. And Taj Raj, the helpful passer-by, assisted both of them to their feet, and relieved the foreigner of his burdensome wallet.

He laughed, and turned his head to show me the white teeth of his smile.

He coasted the bike to a stop and parked it outside the Strand Coffee House, one of my favourite breakfast dives, near the Colaba Market.

We came upon Vikram Patel and the Zodiac Georges, Scorpio and Gemini, sitting comfortably on bulging sacks of lentils beside a pulses stall, and drinking chai from glasses.

Abdullah and I shook hands all round and, as we sat down on the row of sacks, Scorpio George signalled a chai-runner to bring two more glasses. The passport work was often keeping me busy at night because Krishna and Villu-both of them with young children in their growing families-had taken to staggering their shifts, giving themselves valuable hours at home during the day. That work with the books, and other commitments to the Salman council, prevented me from going to Leopold's as often as I once had.

Whenever I could, I'd met with Vikram and the Georges near Vikram's apartment on the edge of the Colaba Market. Vikram was there most days, after his lunch with Lettie. He kept me up to date with the news from Leopold's-Didier had fallen in love, again, and Ranjit, Karla's new boyfriend, was becoming popular- and the Georges filled me in on what was going down on the streets.

We glanced at one another, our eyes widening with alarm. There was no escape. We were too comfortable to move, and Scorpio knew it. We were trapped.

Anyway, Gemini and me, we sure could use the commission on that deal, and it would be kinda nice not to get ripped off, or beaten up, or maimed, or killed-unless, of course, that's in your plan.

So, please light the way, and fill our hearts with love. Signing off now, but keeping the line open, as always, I'll say Amen."

At that moment Abdullah leaned forward to whisper into my left ear.

And then, still smiling, my eyes were drawn to a stooped figure watching us from the shadows beneath an awning.

With my attention upon him, the figure drew back into the shadows and then turned and loped away, limping, as if the whole left side of his body was damaged.

He was fast, and he knew the streets well. It occurred to me, as he ducked into hidden doorways and all but invisible gaps between buildings, that I was probably the only foreigner in the city who knew those streets as well as he did. For that matter, there were few Indians-only touts and thieves and junkies-who could've kept up with him. He scrambled into a hole that someone had knocked through a high stone wall to create an access hatch from one street to another. He stepped around a partition that seemed as solid as brick, but was made from stretched and painted canvas. He took short cuts through improvised shops in sheltering archways, and weaved his way along the labyrinth lines of washed, brightly coloured saris hung out to dry.

And then he made a mistake. He ran into a narrow lane that had been commandeered by homeless pavement dwellers and extended families that were crowded out of local apartments. I knew it well. About a hundred men, women, and children were living in the converted lane. They slept in shifts, in a loft space they'd built above the cobbled lane and between the walls of adjacent buildings. They did everything else in the long, dark, narrow room that the lane had become. Modena dodged between the seated and standing groups; between cooking stoves and bathing stalls and a blanket of card players. Then, at the end of the lane-room, he turned left instead of right. It was a cul-de-sac surrounded by high sheer walls. It was completely dark, and it ended in a little dogleg where the space curved around the blind corner of another building. We'd used it, sometimes, to make buys with drug dealers we didn't completely trust, because there was only one way in or out. I rounded the corner, only a few steps behind him, and stood there, panting and straining my eyes to pierce the darkness. I couldn't see him, but I knew he had to be in there.

I'll just put my bag down, and light us up a beedie, okay? One for you. One for me."

I put the bag down slowly, expecting him to make a rush past me.

I took a bundle of beedies from my shirt pocket, and extracted two from the pack. Holding them between my third and fourth fingers, thick ends inwards, as every poor man in the city did, I worked open a box of matches and struck one. With the flame playing over the ends of the cigarettes, I allowed myself a glimpse upward and I saw him, cringing away from the little arc of light thrown by the match. Just as the match died, I extended my arm to offer him one of the glowing beedie cigarettes. In the new dark, after the match failed, I waited for a second, two seconds, three seconds, and then I felt his fingers, softer and more delicate in their grasp than I would've believed, close around my own and accept the cigarette.

When he puffed at the beedie I saw his face clearly for the first time. It was grotesque. Maurizio had sliced and slashed so much suffering into the soft skin that it was almost frightening simply to look at it. In the faint orange light, I saw the sneering smile that gleamed in Modena's eyes as he recognised the horror in my own.

How many times, I wondered, had he seen that horror in the eyes of others-that wide, white dread as they imagined his scars on their own faces and his torment in their souls? How many times had he seen others flinch, as I'd flinched, and shrink away from his wounds as if from the open sores of a disease? How many times had he seen men ask themselves: What did he do? What did he do to deserve this?

Maurizio's knife had opened both cheeks beneath the dark brown eyes. The cuts had healed into long Y-shaped scars that dragged down the lower lids of his eyes and ran like the trails of hideous, mocking tears. The lower lids, permanently red and raw, gaped open in little trenches of agony that revealed the whole globe of each eye. The wings and septum of his nose had been cut through to the bone. The skin, when it closed together, had fused in jagged whorls at the sides but not at all in the centre, where the laceration was too deep. The wide hole where his nostrils had been resembled the snout of a pig, and flared with every inward breath. There were many more cuts beside the eyes, around the jaw, and along the full width of his brow below the hairline.

It looked as though Maurizio had tried to peel off the whole layer of Modena's face, and the hundred scars that encircled his features were puckered, here and there, into little mounds of flesh that might've matched the outstretched fingers of a man's hands. I knew that there had to be other scars and injuries beneath his clothes: the movements of his arm and leg on the left side of his body were awkward, as if the hinges at elbow, shoulder, and knee had stiffened around wounds that had never really healed.

It was a monstrous mutilation; a disfigurement so calculated in its cruelty that I felt numbed by it and unable to respond. I noticed that there were no marks on or near his mouth. I wondered at the fortune that had left his sensuous and finely sculpted lips so perfect, so flawlessly unscarred. Then I remembered that Maurizio had gagged him when he'd tied him to the bed, only lifting the twisted cloth from time to time as he'd commanded him to speak. And it seemed to me, as I watched Modena puff at the cigarette, that his smooth, unblemished mouth was the worst and most terrible wound of them all. We smoked the beedies down to stubs in silence, and my eyes adjusted to the darkness. I became aware, gradually, of how small he was; how much smaller he'd become with the shrivelling effect of the wounds on his left side. I felt that I was towering over him. I stepped back a pace into the light, picked up my bag, and wagged my head encouragingly.

I led the way back through the converted lane and into a chai shop where workers from a local flourmill and bakery were resting between shifts. The men, several of them, shuffled along the wooden bench to make room for us. They were powdered with white flour in their hair and over the whole of their bodies. They looked like phantoms or so many stone statues come to life. Their eyes, no doubt irritated by the dusty flour, were as red as coals from the fiery pit beneath their ovens. Their wet lips, where they sipped the tea, were black leeches against the ghostly white of their skin. They stared at us with the usual frank, Indian curiosity, but looked away quickly when Modena raised his gaping eyes to them.

I waited for him to say something more, but he locked his mouth in a tight little grimace and breathed loudly, evenly, through his wide, flaring nose.

I thought he was being facetious, and I didn't hide the irritation in my frown.

He made the little speech so calmly, and then sipped at his tea with such contented abstraction, that it exaggerated the weirdness of his delusion. How could he think that Ulla, who'd left him on the bloody bed to die, would return from Germany to be with him? And even if she were to return, how could she react to his face, deformed into that mourner's mask, with anything but horror?

She'll come back for me."

The dire emphasis he'd put on the last word, and the fractured little smile that accompanied it, sent a creeping unease along the skin of my arms. Some of that disquiet croaked into my voice as I repeated the word.

I stared at him, fascinated no less by the fact of his speech than its meaning. Modena had been one of the most taciturn men I'd ever known. When we'd both been regulars at Leopold's he'd gone for weeks at a time, and sometimes as long as a month, without uttering a word in my presence. But the new Modena, the scarred survivor, was a talker. I'd been forced to run him down in a blind alley to get him to talk at all, it was true; but once he started, he became disconcertingly chatty. As I listened to him, as I reoriented myself to the disfigured, voluble version of the man, I became aware of the melodies that his Spanish accent made as it moved fluently between Hindi and English, mixing the two seamlessly, and incorporating words from each into a hybrid language that was his own. Adrift on the softness in his voice, I asked myself if that was the key to the mysterious bond that had existed between them, Ulla and Modena: if they'd talked to one another, for hours, when they were alone, and if that tender euphony, that voice music, had held them together.

And then, with a suddenness that caught me off-guard, the meeting with Modena was over. He stood to pay the bill and walked out into the lane, waiting for me just beyond the doorway.

He began to walk away from me, but I stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.

He turned to leave, but I stopped him again, drawing him closer to me so that I could whisper into his ear.

Not even Ramesh knows that I have money with me. He does not know that I save my money. He does not even know about my apartment.

He thinks that I spend my share of the money that we earn together on drugs. And I do not take any drugs, Lin. You know that. I never did any drugs. I just let him think that I do. But you are different, Lin. You are my friend. I can tell you the truth. I can trust you. Why should I not trust the man who killed the devil himself?"

His perfect mouth widened into an accomplice's leer. The expression dragged harder on the Y-shaped scars that once were the lower lids of his eyes. The gape of those eyes was so unnerving in the flame-lit lane that I had to steel myself not to flinch or draw back when he reached out to put his palm on my chest.

He hesitated, swallowing hard, the full, unmarked lips trembling on the words. I wanted to stop him, to spare him the memory of it and maybe save myself from it as well. But as I began to speak he put a little more pressure in the palm that he held against my chest, silencing me, and looking up into my eyes once more.

A clear voice within me said that I should tell him what had really happened. He had a right to know the truth. And I wanted to tell him. An emotion that I couldn't fully understand-the last vestige of anger at Ulla, perhaps, or a jealous contempt for his faith in her-made me want to shake him, and shout the truth at him, and hurt him with it. But I couldn't speak. I couldn't move. And as his eyes reddened and simmered into tears that ran, exactly, in the channelling scars that pierced his cheeks I held the stare, and nodded my head, and said nothing at all. He nodded his head, slowly, in reply. He misread me, I think, or I misread him. I'll never know.

Silences can wound as surely as the twisting lash, the poet Sadiq Khan once wrote. But sometimes, being silent is the only way to tell the truth. I watched Modena turn and limp away, and I knew that the wordless minute we'd shared, with his hand on my chest and his breached and weeping eyes close to mine, would always be more precious and even more honest for both of us, no matter how errable or misunderstood, than the cold, unloving truth of his world alone, or of mine.

And maybe he's right, I thought. Maybe his way of remembering Maurizio and Ulla was right. Certainly, he'd dealt with the pain they'd caused him a lot better than I'd dealt with that kind of pain when it had happened to me. When my marriage fell apart in betrayal and bitterness, I became a junkie. I couldn't bear it that love was broken, and that happiness had cindered so suddenly into sorrow. So I ruined my life, and hurt a lot of people on the long way down. Modena, instead, had worked and saved and waited for love to return. And thinking about that-how he'd lived with what had been done to him-and wondering at it on the long walk back to Abdullah and the others, I discovered something that I should've known, as Modena did, right from the start. It was something simple: so simple that it took a pain as great as Modena's to shake me into seeing it. He'd been able to deal with that pain because he'd accepted his own part in causing it. I'd never accepted my share of responsibility-right up to that moment-for the way my marriage had failed or for the heartache that had followed it. That was why I'd never dealt with it.

And then, as I entered the bright, bartering bustle of the market, I did: I did accept that blame, and I felt my heart expand and unfold as it released its burdens of fear, resentment, and self-doubt. I walked back between the busy stalls and, by the time I joined Abdullah, Vikram, and the Georges, I was smiling. I answered their questions about Modena, and I thanked Abdullah for his surprise. He was right-I did forgive him everything, after that. And although I couldn't find the words to tell him of the change that had happened to me, he sensed, I think, that the difference in the smile I shared with him came from a new peace that was born in me that day, and slowly began to grow.

The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling, and sewn with rebus threads. Most of the time, the best we can do is wrap it around ourselves for comfort or drag it behind us as we struggle to go on. But everything has its cause and its meaning.

Every life, every love, every action and feeling and thought has its reason and significance: its beginning, and the part it plays in the end. Sometimes, we do see. Sometimes, we see the past so clearly, and read the legend of its parts with such acuity, that every stitch of time reveals its purpose, and a kind of message is enfolded in it. Nothing in any life, no matter how well or poorly lived, is wiser than failure or clearer than sorrow. And in the tiny, precious wisdom that they give to us, even those dread and hated enemies, suffering and failure, have their reason and their right to be.

____________________

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Money stinks. A stack of new money smells of ink and acid and bleach like the fingerprinting room in a city police station. Old money, vexed with hope and coveting, smells stale like dead flowers kept too long between the pages of a cheap novel. When you put a lot of money, new and old, into one room-millions of rupees counted twice and snapped into bundles with rubber bands- it stinks. _I love money, Didier once said to me, but I hate the smell of it. The more happiness I get from it, the more thoroughly I have to wash my hands afterwards. I knew exactly what he meant. In the counting-room for the mafia money-change racket, an airless cavern in the Fort area where the hot lights were bright enough to search through the best counterfeit, and the overhead fans never turned fast enough to lift a stray note from the counting tables, the smell of money was like the sweat and the dirt on a gravedigger's boots.

Some weeks after the meeting with Modena, I pushed my way out through the door of Rajubhai's counting room, shoving the goondas aside with the kind of childish rough play we all enjoyed, and gasped at the fresher air in the stairway. A voice called my name, and I stopped on the third step, my hand on the wooden rail. I looked up to see Rajubhai leaning out of the doorway. The short, fat, bald currency-controller for Khader's-no, Salman's- mafia council was dressed, as always, in a dhoti and a white singlet. He leaned out of the doorway, I knew, because he never actually left the room until he sealed it, at close to midnight, every night. When he needed to relieve himself, he used a private facility that was fitted with a one-way mirror so that he could watch the room. He was a dedicated accountant-the mafia's best- but it wasn't just the duty of his profession that held Rajubhai to the activity on his counting tables. Away from the busy room he was a grumpy, suspicious, and strangely wizened man. In the counting room he was plumper, somehow, and expansively self-assured. It was as if the physical attachment linked him to a psychic force: so long as a part of his body was still in the room, he was still connected to the energy, the power, the money.

I did the quick walk-fall down three flights of the stairway, teasing and shoving the goondas on duty at every level, and bumped past the men at the street door. At the end of the street I acknowledged the smiles of two more men watching the door.

There were some exceptions, but for the most part the young mafia gangsters liked me. I wasn't the only foreigner working with the Bombay mafia-there was an Irish gangster in the Bandra council, an American freelancer making a name in major drug deals, a Dutchman working with a gang in Khar, and there were other men across the city-but I was the only gora in the Salman council. I was their foreigner. And those years, as Indian pride was rising like new green, white, and orange vines from the scorched post colonial earth, were the last years when being foreign, being British, or looking and sounding British was enough to win hearts and intrigue minds.

Rajubhai's invitation to his daughter's wedding was significant: it meant that I was accepted as one of them. For months I'd worked side by side with Salman, Sanjay, Farid, Rajubhai, and others on the council. My work in the passport section was bringing in almost as much money as the entire currency operation. My own contacts on the streets threw large sums into the gold, goods, and money-change pots. I worked out in the boxing gym with Salman Mustaan and Abdullah Taheri every other day. Using my friendship with Hassaan Obikwa, I'd forged a new alliance with his men in the black ghetto. It was a useful connection which had brought us new men, money, and markets. At Nazeer's request, I'd joined the delegation that had struck an arms agreement with Afghan exiles in the city-a deal that had ensured a steady supply of weapons to the Salman council from the semi-autonomous tribal regions on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. I had friendship and respect and more money than I cared to spend, but it wasn't until Rajubhai invited me to his daughter's wedding that I knew I was truly accepted. He was a senior man on the Salman council. His invitation was the endorsement that welcomed me into the inner circle of trust and affection. You can work with the mafia, and for the mafia, and do the kind of job that earns high esteem, but you're not really one of them until they invite you home to kiss the babies.

I walked out through the invisible boundaries of the Fort area and approached Flora Fountain. A roving taxi slowed beside me, the driver gesturing aggressively for my fare. I waved him away.

Not realising that I could speak Hindi, he drove up beside me at a crawling pace and leaned from the window to talk.

This is our Bombay, and Bombay is ours. If you can't speak Marathi, what are you doing in Bombay? Have you got a goat's brain inside your sisterfucking head?"

Why don't you look for some real tourists, and leave poor Indian fuckers like me alone, na?"

He laughed aloud and passed his hand across the window of his cab to shake mine gently, and then sped away.

I walked on, avoiding the crowded footpaths to join the swifter lines on the road beside the passing cars. Deep breaths of the city finally drove the smell of the currency-room from my nostrils. I was heading back toward Colaba, to Leopold's, to meet Didier. I wanted to walk because I was glad to be back in the part of the city I loved most. Work for Salman's mafia council took me to every distant suburb of the great city, and there were many favoured places: from Mahalaxmi to Malad; from Cotton Green to Thana; from Santa Cruz and Andheri to the Lakes District on the Film City Road. But the real seat of his council's power was in the long peninsula that began in the sweeping curve of Marine Drive and followed the scimitar shore all the way to the World Trade Centre. And it was there in those thriving streets, never more than a few bus stops from the sea, that I'd lost my heart to the city and learned to love her.

It was hot on the street, hot enough to burn all but the deepest thoughts from troubled minds. Like every other Bombayite, every other Mumbaiker, I'd made that walk from Flora Fountain to the Causeway a thousand times, and like them I knew where to find the cool breezes and refreshing shades on the way. My scalp, my face, and my shirt were wet with sweat in any few seconds of bare sunlight-the baptism in every daylight walk-and then cooled all the way to dry again in a minute of shaded wind.

My thoughts, as I moved between the traffic and the browsing shoppers, were on the future. Paradoxically, even perversely, just as I was being accepted into the secret heart of Bombay, I also felt the strongest urge to leave. I understood the two forces, contradictory as they seemed. So much of what I'd loved about Bombay had been in the hearts and minds and words of human beings-Karla, Prabaker, Khaderbhai, and Khaled Ansari. They were all gone, in one way or another, yet there was a constant, melancholy sense of them in every street, shrine, and strip of sea-coast that I loved in the city. Still, there were new sources of love and inspiration-new beginnings rising from the fallow fields of loss and disillusion. My position with Salman's mafia council was secure. Business opportunities were opening up in the Bollywood film industry and the newer fields of television and multi-media: I received offers of work every other week. I had a good apartment, with a view of the Haji Ali Mosque, and plenty of money. And night by night I grew a little closer in loving affection for Lisa Carter.

A sadness that lingered in all my favourite places was pressing me to leave the city, just as new love and acceptance pulled me closer to her heart. And I couldn't decide, as I walked that long, baptismal stretch from Flora to the Causeway, which way to jump. No matter how often or deeply I thought about the struggled past or the sorrow and promise of the present, I couldn't make that leap of confidence or trust or faith into the future. There was something missing: some calculation, some piece of evidence or parallax view of my life that would make it all clear to me, I was sure, but I didn't know what it was. So I moved between the frantic flow of cars, bikes, buses, trucks, and push-carts, and the meandering progress of tourists and shoppers, and let my thoughts drift into the heat and the street.

Arturo, a young Italian hiding in Bombay from an undisclosed problem with the police in Naples, was Didier's new infatuation.

He was a short, slight man with a doll-like face that many a girl might've envied. He spoke very little English and reacted to every approach, no matter how friendly, with the same petulantly surly shudder of irritation. Consequently, Didier's many friends ignored him and set the alarms in their mental clocks to give the relationship from a few months, at most, to a few weeks, before it collapsed.

The drinks arrived, and Didier clattered his glass against mine.

I took a sip from it and put it down on the table next to him.

Several people from the movie crowd that worked with Lisa Carter were at the long table, joining in a party with some of Kavita Singh's press group. Sitting next to Didier were Vikram and Lettie. They were both happier and healthier than I'd ever known them to be. They'd bought the new apartment in the heart of Colaba near the market only months before. While the commitment had exhausted their savings and forced them to borrow from Vikram's parents, it was proof of their faith in one another and the future of their burgeoning movie business, and they were still excited with the change.

Vikram greeted me warmly, rising from his chair to give me a hug.

His gunslinger's clothes had disappeared, item by item, under Lettie's persuasion and his own maturing taste. All that remained of the Clint Eastwood costume were the silver belt and the black cowboy boots. His beloved hat, surrendered with no little reluctance when he'd found himself more frequently in the boardrooms of major companies than in the stuntmen's corral, was hanging from a hook in my apartment.

It was one of my most treasured possessions.

When I leaned over to kiss Lettie, she seized the shoulder of my shirt and pulled me closer to whisper in my ear.

Sitting next to Lettie were the movie producers Cliff De Souza and Chandra Mehta. As sometimes happens with close friends, Cliff and Chandra seemed to exchange the substance of their bodies between them over time, so that Cliff had become slightly thinner and more angular, while Chandra had gained weight in almost perfect proportion. The more they differed physically, however, the more they resembled one another in other ways. In fact, the close colleagues, who often worked and played together for forty hours at a stretch, used so many of the same gestures, facial expressions, and phrases that they were known on the sets of the movies they produced as Fat Uncle and Skinny Uncle.

They raised their arms in identically enthusiastic greeting when I approached them, although each was pleased to see me for his own reasons. Cliff De Souza had developed a passionate affection for Kavita Singh since I'd introduced them, and he'd hoped I might influence her in his favour. Having a far longer acquaintance with her, I knew that no power could influence Kavita toward anything not fully consonant with her will and her wish. Still, she seemed to like him well enough, and they had much in common. They were both almost thirty and unmarried-a status so unusual in the Indian upper middle class, in those years, that their families anguished over it at every feast and festival in the crowded calendar. They were both media professionals who prided themselves on their independence and artistic flair. They were also driven by the same instinctive tolerance to seek out, and fairly examine, each point of view in any apparent conflict of interests. And they were attractive people. Kavita's shapely figure and perilously seductive eye seemed the perfect complement to Cliff's rangy angularity and the boyishness of his artless, lopsided grin.

For my part, liking them both, I saw no reason to resist the matchmaker's urge to meddle. In public I made it clear that I liked Cliff De Souza, and in private I praised him discreetly to her whenever the natural opportunity arose. They had a chance-a good chance, it seemed to me-and my heart put a wishing star in my eyes for them.

Chandra Mehta, on the other hand, was pleased to see me because I was his closest link to the black money in Salman's mafia council, and the only link he could describe as amicable. Like Khader before him, Salman Mustaan saw great advantage in the access to Bombay's film world that Chandra Mehta provided. New regulations at federal and state levels had tightened restrictions on the flow of capital, making it ever more difficult to launder black money. For many reasons-not least because of the irresistible glamour attached to the industry- politicians had exempted the movie business from many of those monetary and investment controls. They were boom economy years, and Bollywood films were going through a renaissance in style and confidence. The films got bigger and better, and had begun to reach out to a wider world market. As the budgets for successful films soared, however, producers exhausted the traditional sources of revenue. That convergence of interests drove more than a few producers and production houses into strange syzygies with gangsters: films about mafia goondas were financed by the mafia, and the profits from hit movies about hit men went into new crimes and real hits on real people, which in turn became the subjects for screenplays and new films financed by more mafia money.

And I played my part, so to speak, by working as the connection between Chandra Mehta and Salman Mustaan. The relationship was a lucrative one. The Salman council had put crores, each crore being ten million rupees, through Mehta-De Souza Productions, and drew clean, untraceable profits from the bottom line. That first contact with Chandra Mehta, when he'd asked me to find a few thousand American dollars on the black market, had fattened into a nexus that the portly producer couldn't resist or refuse. He was rich, and getting richer. But the men who poured their wealth into his company frightened him, and every contact with them was menaced with the scent of their distrust. So Chandra Mehta smiled at me, and was glad to see me, and tried to pull me tighter into the tremulous clutch of his friendship whenever our paths crossed.

I didn't mind. I liked Chandra Mehta, and I liked Bollywood movies. I allowed him to drag me into the worried, wealthy world of his friendship.

Next to him at the table was Lisa Carter. Her thick, blonde hair had grown long enough, after the short cut, to fall beside the oval cameo of her face. Her blue eyes were clear and glittering with passionate intent. She was tanned and very healthy. She'd even gained a little extra weight-something she decried, but that I and every other man within her sight-horizon was bound to admire. And there was something new and very different in her manner: a warm, unhurried softness in her smile; a willing laugh that won the laughter of others; and a lightness of spirit that looked for and often found the best in those she met. For weeks, months, I'd watched those changes shift and settle in her, and at first I'd thought they'd grown from my affection. Although no formal relationship had been declared-she continued to live in her apartment, and I lived in mine-we were lovers, and we were far more than friends. After a time, I realised that the changes were not mine, but hers alone.

After a time, I began to see how deep the well of her loving was, and how much her happiness and confidence depended on drawing that love into the light, and sharing it. And love was beautiful in her. It was a clear sky she gave us with those eyes, and a summer morning with her smile.

She kissed my cheek when I greeted her. I returned the kiss, wondering, as I stepped back, why a small concerned frown rippled from her brow to her cornflower-blue eyes.

Sitting next around the long table were the print journalists Dilip and Anwar. They were young, only a few years out of college, and still learning their trade in the anonymous vaults of The Noonday, a Bombay daily. At night, with Didier and his little court, they discussed the big breaking stories of the day as if they'd played key parts in the scoops or had followed their own instincts to the investigation's end. Their excitement, enthusiasm, ambition, and limitless hope for the future so delighted everyone in the Leopold's crowd that Kavita and Didier felt obliged to respond, occasionally, with sardonic sniping.

Dilip and Anwar reacted well, laughing and often giving as good as they got until the whole group was shouting and pounding the table in delight.

Dilip was a tall, fair, almond-eyed Punjabi. Anwar, a third generation native of Bombay, was shorter, darker, and the more serious of the two. New blood, Lettie had said to me with a smile, a few days before that afternoon. It was a phrase she'd once used about me, soon after I'd arrived in Bombay. And as I made my way around the table and looked at the two young men talking with such passion and purpose, it occurred to me that once, before heroin and crime, my life had been like theirs. Once I'd been just as happy and healthy and hopeful as they were. And I was glad to know them, and to know they were a part of the pleasure and promise of the Leopold's crowd. It was right that they were there, just as it was right that Maurizio was gone, and Ulla and Modena were gone, and that I, too, would one day be gone.

Returning their warm handshakes, I moved past the young men to Kavita Singh sitting beside them. Kavita stood to give me a hug.

It was the tender, close hug that a woman gives a man when she knows she can trust him, or when she's sure his heart belongs to someone else. It was a rare enough embrace between foreigners.

Coming from an Indian woman, it was uniquely intimate in my experience. And it was important. I'd been in the city for years;

I could make myself understood in Marathi, Hindi, and Urdu; I could sit with gangsters, slum-dwellers, or Bollywood actors, claiming their goodwill and sometimes their respect; but few things made me feel as accepted, in all the Indian worlds of Bombay, as Kavita Singh's fond embrace.

I never told her that-what her affectionate and unconditional acceptance meant to me. So much, too much, of the good that I felt in those years of exile was locked in the prison cell of my heart: those tall walls of fear; that small, barred window of hope; that hard bed of shame. I do speak out now. I know now that when the loving, honest moment comes it should be seized, and spoken, because it may never come again. And unvoiced, unmoving, unlived in the things we declare from heart to heart, those true and real feelings wither and crumble in the remembering hand that tries too late to reach for them.

On that day, as the grey-pink veil of evening slowly enclosed the afternoon, I said nothing to Kavita. I let my smile, like a thing made of broken stones, fall and slide from the peak of her affection to the ground beneath her feet. She took my arm and steered me into an introduction to the man who sat beside her.

I suddenly knew what Lettie had meant with her cryptic comment, Keep your cool, lad, and why Lisa couldn't shift the frown that creased her brow.

He tipped his head back and roared with laughter, his mouth open wide enough to reveal a perfect set of perfect Indian teeth.

Still laughing, he met my eye and wagged his head in wonder.

So that's part of it, I thought. He gets her jokes. He likes her play with words. He understands her love of them and her cleverness. That's one of the reasons why she likes him. Okay.

The rest of it was more obvious. He had a lithe build, and was average tall, my height, with an open, handsome face. More than just the sum of good features-high cheekbones, a high, wide forehead, expressive topaz-coloured eyes, a strong nose, smiling mouth, and firm chin-it was the kind of face that once would've been called dashing: the lone yachtsman, the mountaineer, the jungle adventurer. He wore his hair short. The hairline was receding, but even that seemed to suit him, as if it was the preferred option for healthy, athletic men. And the clothes-I knew them well from the shopping expeditions that Sanjay, Andrew, Faisal, and the other mafiosi made to the most expensive stores in the city. There wasn't a self-respecting gangster in Bombay who wouldn't have pursed his lips and wagged his head in approval of Ranjit's clothes.

I turned to flinch a frown at Kavita Singh, who hunched her shoulders and raised the palms of her hands as she looked away.

There are few things more discomfiting than a spontaneous outburst of genuine decency from someone you're determined to dislike for no good reason. I felt a little blush of shame beginning to spread across my cheeks.

It's not the right forum. But The Noonday, well, it would be the perfect forum for them. And I know they'd buy them for a very fair price. The editor of The Noonday, Anil, is a friend of mine.

I know what he likes, and I know he'll like your stories. I didn't show him your work, of course. Not without your permission. But I did tell him that I read them, and that I think they're good. He wants to meet you. If you take your stories to him, I'm sure you'll get on well with him. Anyway, I'll leave it at that. He's hoping to see you. But it's up to you. Whatever you decide, I wish you all the best."

He sat down, and I moved past him to greet Kalpana and then take my place beside Didier. I was so distracted by the exchange with Ranjit-Jeet-Choudry that I only half-listened to Didier's announcement of his planned trip to Italy with Arturo. Three months, I heard him say, and I remember thinking that three months in Italy could become three years, and that I might lose him. The thought was so strange that I wouldn't let myself consider it. Bombay without Didier was like... Bombay without Leopold's, or the Haji Ali Mosque, or the Gateway Monument. It was unthinkable.

Pushing the thought away, I looked around the laughing, drinking, talking table of friends, and filled the empty glass within me, pouring their successes and their hopes into my eyes. Then I returned my attention to Ranjit, Karla's boyfriend. I'd done my homework on him in recent months. I knew that he was the second eldest-some said the favourite-of four sons born to Ramprakash Choudry, a truck driver who'd made his fortune resupplying coastal towns in Bangladesh that had been hit by cyclones. The first government tenders had grown into major contracts, requiring fleets of trucks and, eventually, chartered aircraft and ships. Along the way, Choudry had acquired a small-circulation Bombay newspaper as part of a merger with a more diversified transport and communications firm.

He'd handed the paper to his son Ranjit, who'd just graduated with a business degree and was the first, on both sides of his family, to complete high school and to attend any kind of further-education college. Ranjit had been running the paper, re badged as The Daily Post, for eight years. His success with The Post, as it was known, had allowed Ranjit to segue into the incipient field of independent television production.

He was wealthy, influential, popular, and possessed of an entrepreneurial elan in print, movies, and television: a media baron in the making. There were rumours of resentments stirring in the heart of Ranjit's older brother Rahul, who'd joined his father in the transport business in his early teenage years, and had never enjoyed the private-school education lavished upon Ranjit and the younger siblings. There was gossip, also, about the two younger brothers, the wild parties they sometimes threw, and the large bribes required to keep them out of trouble. There was no criticism of Ranjit, however, in any connection; and apart from those few simmering concerns, his life seemed almost charmed.

He was, as Lettie had once said, quite a fat and shiny catch. And as I watched him with friends-listening more than he talked, smiling more than he frowned, self-deprecating and considerate, tactful and attentive-I had to admit to myself that he was a very likeable man. And, strangely, I felt sorry for him. A few years or even months before, I would've been jealous that he was such a likeable man-such a very nice guy, as more than a few people said to me when I'd asked them about him. I would've hated him. But I felt nothing like that for Ranjit Choudry. Instead, as I watched him, remembering too much of what I'd felt for Karla, and thinking about her clearly for the first time in... a long time, I felt sorry for the rich, handsome media baron, and I wished him luck.

For half an hour I talked across the table with Lisa and the others and then I looked up to see Johnny Cigar, standing in the wide doorway and gesturing to catch my eye. Delighted to have an excuse to leave, I turned to Didier and drew him around to face me. "Listen, if you're really serious about going to Italy for three months-"

Didier was appalled.

The George from Canada, the Scorpio, he does speak some French.

That is true. Yes. Yes. Tell them I think it is a good idea. Tell them to see me, and I will speak to them-with very careful instructions."

Laughing as I said goodbye, I joined Johnny Cigar at the doorway of the restaurant. He pulled me close to him.

We pushed our way through the breaking waves of walkers to the road and found a taxi. I was smiling as we waved the taxi down and climbed inside. For months, I'd been trying to find a way to help Gemini and Scorpio George that was more meaningful than the money I gave them from time to time. Didier's holiday with Arturo provided the perfect opportunity. I knew that three months in Didier's apartment would add years to their lives: three months without the stress of street living and with the secure good health that only a home and home cooking can provide. And I also knew that, with the Zodiac Georges in his apartment while he was gone, Didier would worry just enough to make his return to Bombay a little more likely, and a little sooner.

And Prabaker's baby, from the sister of my Sita, Parvati, that baby is also very beautiful. He is very much like Prabaker... in his face and his smiling."

I didn't want to think about my dead, beloved friend.

There was a little silence and then Johnny turned to me with an expression of worry, almost of torment.

I put my hand on his shoulder, but he wouldn't meet my eye.

I smiled, trying to put him at ease.

Has he got himself put in jail again?"

They don't know that Kano's bear-wallahs, they love him so much, like a big brother, and he loves them also, and they would never hurt him. But the policy is the policy. So, the Wildlife-wallahs, they captured Kano, and they took him to the animal jail. And he was crying and crying for his blue bear-wallahs. And the bear wallahs, they were outside the animal jail, and they were also crying and crying. And two of those Wildlife-wallahs, two watchmen on duty, they got very upset about all the crying, so they went outside, and they started beating Kano's blue men with lathis. They gave them a solid pasting. And Kano, he saw his two blue men getting that beating, and he just lost his control. He broke down that cage and made an escape. The two bear-wallahs got a big feeling of courage, and they beat up the Wildlife fellows and ran away with Kano. Now they are hiding in our zhopadpatti, in the same hut that you used to have as your house. And we have to try to get them out of the city without getting captured. Our problem is how to get that Kano from the zhopadpatti to Nariman Point. There is a truck waiting there, and the driver has agreed to take Kano away with his bear-wallahs."

The taxi pulled up outside the slum as the evening, emptied of its sunset and pale enough to unveil the first few stars, drew squealing, playing faronades of children back to their huts, where plumes of smoke from cooking fires fluttered into the cooling air.

We came upon a group of a dozen men and a similar number of women and children gathered near the hut where I'd lived and worked for almost two years. And although I'd left the zhopadpatti, convinced that I could never live there again, it always gave me a thrill of pleasure to see the humble little hut, and stand near it. The few foreigners I'd taken to the slum-and even the Indians, such as Kavita Singh and Vikram, who'd visited me there - had been horrified by the place and aghast to think that I'd chosen to stay there so long. They couldn't understand that every time I entered the slum I felt the urge to let go and surrender to a simpler, poorer life that was yet richer in respect, and love, and a vicinal connectedness to the surrounding sea of human hearts. They couldn't understand what I meant when I talked about the purity of the slum: they'd been there, and seen the wretchedness and filth for themselves. They saw no purity. But they hadn't lived in those miraculous acres, and they hadn't learned that to survive in such a writhe of hope and sorrow the people had to be scrupulously and heartbreakingly honest. That was the source of their purity: above all things, they were true to themselves.

So, with my dishonest heart thrilling at the nearness of my once and favourite home, I joined the group and then gasped as a huge, shrouded figure emerged from beside the hut and stood among us.

As we watched, the shapeless form took a few lumbering steps, knocking over a stool and water pot as it swayed and lurched forward.

The bear suddenly stooped and then fell forward onto its four paws. We followed it with our eyes. The blue-grey, burkha-clad figure trundled forward, all the while emitting a low, grumbling moan.

They'd washed themselves clean of the brilliant blue dye that usually covered their bodies, and they'd stripped away all of their silver ornaments. Their long dreadlocks and decorated plaits were concealed beneath turbans, and they wore plain white shirts and trousers. Unadorned and decolourised, the blue men seemed spiritless, and much smaller and slighter than the fantastic beings I'd first encountered in the slum.

There was some discussion while I tried to explain what kind of platform or table I had in mind: one mounted on wheels for carrying fruit, vegetables, and other goods around the slum and displaying them for sale. When it was clear, and such a hawker's cart was found and wheeled into the clearing, the bear-handlers waggled their heads excitedly that yes, yes, yes, Kano would sit on such a moving table. They added that it was possible to steady him on the table by using ropes, and that he wouldn't find that secure fastening objectionable if they first explained its necessity to him. But what, they wanted to know, did I have in mind?

Ganesh, the elephant-headed God, was arguably the most popular in all the Hindu pantheon, and I was sure no-one would think to stop and search a little procession featuring a large sculpture of his form on a moving trolley.

The elephant-headed god was known as the Lord of Obstacles and the Great Solver of Problems. People in trouble appealed to him with prayers in much the same way that some Christians appealed to their patron saints. He was also the divine ministrant of writers. "It will be not a problem to push a Ganesha to Nariman Point,"

Joseph's wife, Maria, pointed out. "But how to put that Kano bear into the disguise-that is a problem. Just putting him in the dress was a very difficult job."

We were speaking in Hindi, and the last exchange was too swift for me to follow.

I looked around me at the press of expectant faces. For a moment I felt a thrill of wonder and envy that the little community of neighbours and friends worried so much about the problems of two itinerant bear-handlers-and the bear, of course. That unequivocal involvement, one with another, and its unquestioning support-stronger and more urgent than even the co-operation I'd seen in Prabaker's village-was something I'd lost when I'd left the slum to live in the comfortable, richer world. I'd never really found it anywhere else, except within the high-sierra of my mother's love. And because I knew it with them, once, in the sublime and wretched acres of those ragged huts, I never stopped wanting it and searching for it.

What do you think, Johnny?"

The elderly sculptor raised his grizzled brows when we entered his hut, but affected to ignore us and continued with the work of sanding and polishing a newly moulded section of a fibreglass religious frieze almost two metres in length. He worked at a long table made from thick builder's planks, lashed together and resting on two carpenter's trestles. Wood and fibreglass shavings covered the table and lay in chips and whorls, along with rinds of papier-mache, at his bare feet. Sections of the sculpted and moulded forms-heads and limbs and bodies with gorgeously rounded bellies-rested on the floor of the hut amid a venerable profusion of plaques, reliefs, statues, and other pieces.

He took some convincing. The artist was notoriously cantankerous and he assumed, at first, that we were trying to mock the gods, and him, with a prank or a hoax. In the end, three elements persuaded him to help us. First was the bear-handlers' impassioned appeal to the problem-solving genius of Ganesha, the Lord of Obstacles. The elephant-headed one was, as it turned out, old Rakeshbaba's personal favourite from the abundant plane of the divine. Second, Johnny's subtle suggestion that perhaps the task was beyond the creative skill of the old sculptor proved a telling blow. Rakeshbaba shouted that he could disguise the Taj Mahal itself in a Ganesha sculpture, if he so desired, and the camouflage of a bear was a mere trifle to such a gifted artist, as the whole world knew and proclaimed him to be. Third, and perhaps most influential, was Kano himself. Apparently growing impatient in the lane outside, the burly creature forced its way into the hut and then lay down on its back beside Rakeshbaba, with all four paws in the air. The grouchy sculptor was transformed immediately into a giggling, cackling child as he bent to scratch the creature's belly and play with its gently whirling paws.

He stood at last to shove all of us but the bear-handlers and the bear from his workshop. The wooden cart was wheeled inside, and the wiry, grey-haired artist drew his reed curtains across the entrance.

Worried but excited, we waited outside, swapping stories and popping bubbles of news. The slum had survived the last monsoon with little real damage, Siddhartha told me, and no serious outbreaks of illness. Qasim Ali Hussein, celebrating the birth of his fourth grandson, had taken his extended family to his birth village in Karnataka State. He was well, and in good spirits, all of the voices confirmed. Jeetendra seemed to have recovered, inasmuch as such a thing is possible, from the death of his wife in the cholera epidemic. Although he'd vowed never to remarry, he worked and prayed and laughed enough to keep the soul bright within his eyes. His son Satish, who'd been sullen and quarrelsome for a time after his mother's death, had at last overcome the aloofness of grieving, and was engaged to a girl he'd known since his earliest memory in the slum. The promised pair was still too young to marry, but their betrothal gave them both joy, and was a commitment to the future that gladdened Jeetendra's heart. And one by one, each in his own way, everyone in the group that night praised Joseph, the redeemed one, the new leader who lowered his gaze shyly and only raised his eyes to share his embarrassed smile with Maria, standing at his side.

At last, Rakeshbaba pulled aside the reed curtains and beckoned us to enter his workshop. We crowded together and stepped into the golden lamplight. A gasp, some of us breathing in and some puffing out, rustled through our group as we looked at the completed sculpture. Kano was not simply disguised-he was transfigured into the form of the elephant-headed god. A huge head had been fitted over the bear's head, and rested on a pink, round-bellied body, with arms attached. Swathes of light blue silk surrounded the base of the figure where it rested on the trolley. Garlands of flowers were heaped on the flat table and around the neck of the god, concealing the join for the head.

At the sound of his voice, the bear turned his head. What we saw was the living god, Ganesha, turn his elephant head to stare at us from his painted eyes. It was the movement of an animal, of course, and utterly unlike a human gesture. The whole group, myself included, flinched in surprise and fright. The children with us squealed, and pushed themselves backwards into the protective vines of adult legs and arms.

We rolled out of the slum with a knot of supporters. Once past the World Trade Centre and into the residential boulevard leading to the Back Bay area, we began a tentative chant. Those nearest to the cart put their hands on it and helped to push or pull it along. Those like Johnny and me, on the fringe, clung to the others and added our voices to the chant. As we gathered speed to a fast walk, the chanting grew more vigorous. In a while, many of the helpers seemed to forget that we were bear-smugglers, and hurled their voices into devoutly passionate chants and responses, no less inspired, I was sure, than they'd been a week before on the real pilgrimage.

As we walked, it occurred to me that the slum had been strangely devoid of pariah dogs. I noticed that there were none visible anywhere on the streets. Remembering how violently the dogs had reacted to Kano's first visit to the slum, I felt moved to mention it to Johnny.

Johnny, Narayan, Ali, and the few other men who'd heard the comment turned their faces to me quickly and stared, wide-eyed with amazement and worry. Sure enough, seconds later a shrill, whining howl broke out from the footpath to our left. A dog rushed out from its cover and launched itself at us, barking furiously. It was a small, wizened, mangy cur of a thing, not much bigger than a fair-sized Bombay rat, yet the barking was loud enough to pierce the screen of sound in our chanting.

It took only seconds, of course, for more pariah dogs to join in the howling affray. They came from left and right, single animals and groups of them, yelping and yowling and growling hideously.

In an attempt to drown them out, we raised our chants to greater volume, all the while keeping our wary eyes on the snapping jaws of the dogs.

As we approached the Back Bay area we passed an open maidan, or field, where a party of wedding musicians dressed in bright red and-yellow uniforms, complete with tall, plumed hats, was rehearsing its songs. Seeing our little procession as an opportunity to practise their music on the march, they swung in behind us and struck up a rousing, if not particularly canorous, version of a popular devotional song. Incited by the spectacle that our smuggling mission had become, happy children and pious adults left the footpaths and streamed toward us, joining in the thunderous chants and swelling our numbers to more than a hundred souls.

Agitated, no doubt, by the wild throng and frenzied barking, Kano the bear swayed from side to side on the cart, turning his head to follow the peaks of sound. At one point we passed a group of strolling policemen, and I risked a glance to see them standing completely still, their mouths open and their heads turning as one, like a row of mouth-clown dummies at a carnival sideshow, as we passed.

After too many long minutes of that brawling and roistering, we were near enough to Nariman Point to see the tower of the Oberoi Hotel. Worried that we'd never rid ourselves of the wedding band, I ran back to press a bundle of notes into the hand of their bandmaster, with instructions that he should turn right, away from us, and march along Marine Drive. As we neared the sea, he led his men right when we moved left. Emboldened, perhaps, by their successful tour with our little parade, the musicians launched into a medley of dance hits as they marched away toward the brighter lights of the ocean drive. Most of the crowd jigged and danced away with them. Even the dogs, lured too far beyond their prowling domain, turned away from us and crept back into the mean shadows that had spawned them.

We pushed the cart further along the sea road toward the deserted spot where the truck was parked. Just then I heard a car horn sounding, close by. My heart sinking at the thought that it was the police, I slowly turned to look. Instead, I saw Abdullah, Salman, Sanjay, and Farid standing beside Salman's car. They'd stopped in a wide parking bay, surfaced with gravel stones, that was empty but for them.

I crossed the road to join Salman, Abdullah, and the others.

They'd been eating take-away food bought at one of the Nariman caravans parked near the sea wall. As I greeted them, Farid swept the rubble of containers and paper towels from the roof of the car onto the gravel park space. I felt the wince of guilt that litter-conscious westerners invariably experience, and reminded myself that the mess on the road would be collected by rag pickers who depended on the litter for their livelihood.

I saw that another man got out of Faisal's car and waited there, watching the approach road. I recognised the fine features of my friend Mahmoud Melbaaf. One more man, a heavy-set gangster named Raj, waited with the boy Tariq in the second car.

The rest of the gang is at a wedding in Thana. It's like a sign from heaven or something. It's the best chance we'll ever have.

But we've got to be damn quick!"

My stomach dropped and then set hard. I knew exactly what they were talking about, and what it meant for us. There'd been reports and rumours for days that Chuha and his gang within the Walidlalla council had made contact with the Sapna survivor and two of his family members, a brother and a brother-in-law. They were planning a strike against our group. The border war for new gang territory had flared, pitting Chuha's mafia council against ours, and Chuha was hungry.

The Sapna-Iran connection, all survivors from Abdul Ghani's treacherous attempted coup, had learned of the hostility between the councils, and had appeared at just the right moment to capitalise on Chuha's greed and ambition. They'd promised to bring weapons-new guns-and lucrative contacts in the Pakistani heroin trade. They were renegades: the Sapna killers were working without Abdul Ghani, and the Iranians had no official support from the Savak. It was hatred that had brought them together.

They wanted revenge for the deaths of their friends, and their hate had combined with Chuha's to put murder in their minds.

The situation had been so tense, for so long, that Salman had infiltrated the Chuha gang with his own man, Little Tony, a gangster from Goa who was unknown in Bombay. He'd provided information from the inside. They were his reports that had alerted Salman to the Sapna-Iran connection and the imminent attack. With Faisal's confirmation of their arrival at Chuha's house, we all knew there was only one option Salman would consider. Fight. Make war. Put an end to the Sapna killers and the Iranian spies, once and for all. Finish Chuha.

Absorb his territory. Seize his operations.

The Sapna fucks, you know, they've been there all day. They came in the morning. Little Tony, he told us as soon as he could.

We've been watching them for two hours at Chuha's place. The last time he talked to me, Little Tony said they were all getting together-Chuha and his closest guys, the Sapnas, and the guys from Iran. They were waiting for the Iran guys to get here and then they want to hit us. Soon. Maybe tomorrow night. The day after tomorrow, at the latest. Chuha sent word for a lot more guys. They're coming from Delhi and Calcutta. They're working out some kind of a plan where they hit us at about ten places at once, like, to stop us from coming back at them. I told Tony to go back and to let us know when the Iran guys got there. We were watching the place, like usual. Then we saw them walk in, a day early like, but we were pretty sure. Not long after, Little Tony came out and lit a cigarette. That was the signal. They're the ones-the ones who are after Abdullah. Now they're all in there together, and we're only two minutes away. I know it's early, but we have to go. We have to do it now, Salman, in the next five minutes."

Chuha might have more guys coming, as well, so we need at least two on the outside. I don't mind fighting my way in there, but I don't want to fight my way out again if I don't have to. Hussein is already there. Faisal, you're the number two on the street outside, okay? Nobody goes in, or out, but us."

Salman continued.

Why do I have to miss all the action?"

Salman held the stare, frowning pensively. It occurred to me, stupidly, that his slightly crooked face-one eye a little lower than the other, his nose bent from a bad break, his mouth scarred in the corner-found a handsome symmetry only then, when the burden of his thoughts creased his features into a determined frown.

It would've been messy. I wasn't a good fighter, but I knew the moves. I could hit hard. And if I got into real trouble in those years, I wasn't afraid to put the wet end of a knife into another man's body. Andrew was capa- ble. With a gun in his hand, he was deadly. As Amir moved around to support him, directly behind his right shoulder, Abdullah took up a similar position beside me. A fight would become a brawl. We all knew it. But the young Goan didn't raise his hands, and as one second became five, and ten, and fifteen, it seemed that he wasn't as willing with his fists as he was with his mouth.

Nazeer broke the stand-off. Pushing between us, he seized Andrew by the wrist and a scruff of shirtsleeve. I knew that grip well.

I knew that Andrew had to kill the burly Afghan if he wanted to break it. Nazeer paused only long enough to give me a bewilderingly cryptic look, part censure and part pride, part anger and part red-eyed affection, before he shoved the young Goan backwards through the circle of men. At the car, he pushed Andrew into the driver's seat and then climbed into the back with Tariq. Andrew started the car and sped away, spitting gravel and dust as he wheeled around and headed back toward Marine Drive. As the car swept past me I saw Tariq's face at the window. It was pale, with only the eyes, like wild paw prints in snow, betraying any hint of the mind or the mood within.

Everyone laughed. I wasn't sure if it was at the vehemence of my tone or the blunt simplicity of the Hindi phrase.

There's a lane behind Chuha's house-Abdullah, you know it. It has two feeds from other lanes, one into the main street, and one around the corner to other houses in the block. At the back of Chuha's house there's a yard. I've seen it. There are two windows, both with heavy bars, and only one door to the house.

It's down two steps. You two hold that place. Nobody goes in when we start. If we do right, some of them will try to make a run for it out there. Don't let them get past you. Stop them right there, in the yard. The rest of us will go in through the front. What about the guns, Faisal?"

The men nodded, and wagged their heads in agreement.

One by one the men spoke, quickly, most of them using the one word, Abi, meaning now. Salman nodded, then closed his eyes and muttered a prayer in Arabic. When he looked up again, he was committed, fully committed for the first time. His eyes were blazing with hatred and the fearsome killing rage he'd kept at bay.

_Truth... _and _courage.

Without another word, the men claimed their guns, climbed into the two cars, and drove the few short minutes to Chuha's home on fashionable Sardar Patel Road. Before I could order my thoughts and even consider, clearly, what I was doing, I found myself creeping along a narrow lane with Abdullah in a darkness deep enough for me to feel the widening of my straining eyes. Then we climbed over a sheer wooden fence and dropped down into the backyard of the enemy's house.

We stood together in the dark for a few moments, checking the luminous dials on our watches, and listening hard as we let our eyes adjust. Abdullah whispered beside me, and I almost jumped at the sound.

Remember?"

In my clumsier way, looking more like a cat waking stiffly from a long sleep, I crept after him. As I reached the two wide steps leading down to the blue door, I saw him open it and slip inside the house like a shadow thrown by a swooping bird. He pushed the door shut soundlessly behind him.

Alone, in the dark, I took my knife from the sheath in the small of my back, and enclosed the hilt in my right fist, dagger-point down. Staring out into the darkness, I put all of my focus on the beating of my heart, trying by force of will to slow its too rapid pace. It worked, after a time. I felt the count reducing, calming me further in turn as the meditative loop closed around a single, still thought. That thought was of Khaderbhai, and the formula he'd made me repeat so often: The wrong thing, for the right reasons. And I knew, as I repeated the words in the fearing dark, that the fight with Chuha, the war, the struggle for power, was always the same, everywhere, and it was always wrong.

Salman and the others, no less than Chuha and the Sapna killers and all the rest of them, were pretending that their little kingdoms made them kings; that their power struggles made them powerful. And they didn't. They couldn't. I saw that then so clearly that it was like understanding a mathematical theorem for the first time. The only kingdom that makes any man a king is the kingdom of his own soul. The only power that has any real meaning is the power to better the world. And only men like Qasim Ali Hussein and Johnny Cigar were such kings and had such power.

Unnerved and afraid, I pressed my ear to the door and strained to hear anything of Abdullah or the others within. The fear that twisted in me wasn't the fear of death. I wasn't afraid to die. I was afraid of being so injured or wounded that I couldn't walk, or couldn't see or, for some other reason, couldn't run from capture. Above all things I was afraid of that-of being captured and caged again. As I pressed my ear to the door, I prayed that no wound would weaken me. Let it happen here, I prayed. Let me get through this, or let me die here...

I don't know where they came from. I felt the hands on me before I heard a single sound. Two men slammed me round and hard up against the door. Instinctively, I struck out with my right hand.

I couldn't swing the knife up quickly enough to stop them. One man pinned me to the door by the throat. He was a big man, and very strong. The other man used two hands, trying to force me to drop the knife. He wasn't quite so strong, and he couldn't make me drop the weapon. Then a third man hopped down the steps from the darkness, and with those extra hands they twisted my grip and forced me to drop the knife.

He stared at me, obviously bewildered to have stumbled on a foreigner who was listening at the door and armed with a knife.

I didn't reply. All I could think was that I had to warn Abdullah somehow. I couldn't understand how they'd reached that spot without making a sound. The back gate must've swung silently on its hinges. Their shoes or chappals must've been soled with soft rubber. Whatever. I'd let them sneak up on me, and I had to warn Abdullah.

I suddenly struggled as if I was trying to break free. The feint had its effect. The men all shouted at me, and three pairs of hands slammed me against the blue door. One of the smaller men scrambled to my left side, pinning my left arm to the door. The other short man held my right arm. In the wrestle, I managed to kick my boots hard against the door three times. Abdullah must've heard it, I thought. It's okay... I've warned him... He must know something's wrong...

Again I refused to answer, staring at him. Their hands, as hard as shackles, held me to the door.

He slammed his fist into my face. I managed to move my head, just slightly, but I felt the blow on my jaw and cheek. He had rings on his fingers, or he was using a knuckleduster. I couldn't see it, but I could feel the hard metal chipping bone.

I kept silent, and he struck me again, the fist ramming into my face three times. _I know this... I thought. _I know this... I was back in prison, in Australia, in the punishment unit-the fists and boots and batons... I know this...

He paused, waiting for me to speak. The two smaller men grinned at him, then at me. Aur, one of them said. More. Hit him again.

The big man drew back and punched at my body. They were slow, deliberate, professional punches. I felt the wind empty from my body, and it was as if my life itself was draining from me. He moved up the body to my chest and throat and face. I felt myself wading into that black water where beaten boxers stagger and fall. I was done. I was finished.

I wasn't angry with them. I'd fucked up. I'd let them sneak up on me-walk up on me, probably. I'd gone there to fight, and I should've been on guard. It was my fault. Somehow, I'd missed them, and messed up, and it was my own fault. All I wanted to do was warn Abdullah. I kicked back feebly at the door, hoping he would hear it and get away, get away, get away...

I fell through perfect darkness, and the weight of all the world fell with me. When I hit the floor I heard shouts, and I realised that Abdullah had wrenched open the door, letting us fall into him. In the dark, bloody-eyed and swollen, I heard a gun firing twice, and saw the flashes. Then light filled the world, and I blinked into the glare as another door opened somewhere, and I saw men rushing in on us. The gun fired again twice, three times, and I rolled out from under the big man to see my knife, close to my eyes, shining on the ground near the open blue door.

I grabbed for the knife just as one of the smaller men tried to crawl over me and out the door. Without thinking, I swept it backwards and into his hip. He screamed, and I scrambled up to him, slashing the knife across his face near the eyes.

It's amazing how a little of the other guy's blood, or a lot of it, if you can manage it, puts power in your arms and pain killing adrenaline in your aching wounds. Wild with rage, I swung round to see Abdullah locked in a struggle with two men. There were bodies on the floor of the room. I couldn't tell how many.

Gunshots cracked and drummed from all around and above us in the other rooms of the building. They seemed to come from several places in the house at the same time. There were shouts and screams. I could smell shit and piss and blood in the room.

Someone had a gut wound. I hoped that it wasn't me. My left hand slapped at my belly and searched, frisking myself for wounds.

Abdullah was punching it out with the two men. They were wrestling, gouging, biting. I began to crawl toward them, but I felt a hand on my leg pulling me backward. It was a strong hand.

A very strong hand. It was the big guy.

He'd been shot, I was sure, but I couldn't see any blood on his shirt or his pants. He dragged me in as if I was a turtle caught in a net. When I reached him, I raised the knife to stab him, but he beat me to it. He slammed his fist into the right side of my groin. He'd missed the killing blow, a direct hit, but it was still enough to make me curl and roll over in agonising pain. I felt him lurch past me, actually using my body for leverage as he pushed himself to his feet. I rolled back, retching bile, to see him stand and take a step toward Abdullah.

I couldn't let it happen. Too many times, my heart had withered on the thought of Abdullah's death: alone, in a circle of guns. I thrashed against the pain, and in a scrabble of bloody, slipping movements I sprang up and plunged my knife into the big guy's back. It was high, just under the scapula. I felt the bone shiver under the blade, diverting the point sideways toward the shoulder. He was strong. He took two more steps, dragging my body with him on the hook of the knife, before he crumpled and fell. I fell on top of him, looking up to see Abdullah. He had his fingers in a man's eyes. The man's head was bent backwards against Abdullah's knee. The man's jaw gave way, and his neck cracked like a piece of kindling.

Hands pulled at me, dragging me toward the back door. I struck out, but strong, gentle hands twisted the knife from my fingers.

Then I heard the voice, Mahmoud Melbaaf's voice, and I knew we were safe.

As we reached the back gate, a column of our men rushed past us.

Faisal and Hussein carried one man between them. Farid and Little Tony carried another. Sanjay had a man's body on his right shoulder. He was sobbing as he clutched the body to his chest and shoulder.

Salman. The last voice of reason in the Khader council. The last Khader man. I hurried down the lane to the waiting cars and I felt the life draining from me, just as it had when the big man was hitting me at the blue door. It was over. The old mafia council was gone with Salman. Everything had changed. I looked at the others in my car: Mahmoud, Farid, and the wounded Amir.

They'd won their war. The Sapna killers were gone at last. A chapter, a book of life and death that had opened with Sapna's name, was closed forever. Khader was avenged. Abdul Ghani's mutinous betrayal was finally defeated. And the Iranians, Abdullah's enemies, were no more: as silent as that bloody, unscreaming house where Abdullah was... working. And Chuha's gang was crushed. The border war was over. It was over. The wheel had turned through one full revolution, and nothing would ever be the same. They'd won, but they were all crying. All of them.

Crying.

I let my head fall back on the seat of the car. Night, that tunnel of lights joining promise to prayer, flew with us at the windows. Slowly, desolately, the fist of what we'd done unclenched the clawed palm of what we'd become. Anger softened into sorrow, as it always does, as it always must. And no part of what we'd wanted, just an hour's life before, was as rich in hope or meaning as a single teardrop's fall.

____________________

Sunlight shattered on the water, shedding streaks in crystal brilliant slivers across waves rolling swollen on the broad meniscus of the bay. Birds of fire in the approaching sunset wheeled and turned as one in their flocks, like banners of waving silk. From a low-walled courtyard on the white marble island of Haji Ali Mosque, I watched pilgrims and pious local residents wend and weave, leaving the shrine for the shore along the flat stone path. The incoming tide would submerge the path, they knew, and then only boats could bring them home. Those who'd sorrowed or repented, like others on previous days, had cast garlands of flowers upon the shallower, receding sea. Riding the returning tide, those orange-red and faded grey-white flowers floated back, garlanding the path itself with the love, loss, and longing that was prayed upon the water by a thousand broken hearts each wave determined day.

And we, that band of brothers, had come to the shrine to pay our last respects, as they say, and pray for the soul of our friend Salman Mustaan. It was the first time since the night he'd been killed that we'd gathered as a group. For weeks after the battle with Chuha and his gang we'd separated, to hide and to heal our wounds. There'd been an outcry in the press, of course. The words carnage and massacre were spread across the pages of the Bombay dailies like butter on a prison guard's sugared bun. Calls had rung out for justice, undefined, and punishment, unremitting. And there was no doubt that the Bombay police could've made arrests.

They certainly knew which gang was responsible for the little heaps of bodies they'd found in Chuha's house. But there were four good reasons not to act: reasons that were more compelling, for the city's cops, than the unrighteous indignation of the press.

First, there was no-one from inside the house, on the streets outside, or anywhere else in Bombay who was willing to testify against us, even off the record. Second, the battle had put an end to the Sapna killers, which was something the cops would've been very glad to take care of personally. Third, the Walidlalla gang under Chuha's leadership had killed a policeman, months before, when he'd stumbled into one of their major drug deals near Flora Fountain.

The case had remained unsolved, officially, because the cops had nothing they could take into court. But they'd known, almost from the day it had happened, that Chuha's men had spilled the blood.

The bloodshed in Chuha's house was very close to what the cops themselves had wanted to do to the Rat and his men-and would've accomplished, sooner or later, if Salman hadn't beaten them to it. And fourth, the payment of a crore of rupees, appropriated from Chuha's operations and applied in liberal smears to a small multitude of forensic palms, had put a helpless shrug in all the right constabulary shoulders.

Privately, the cops told Sanjay, who was the new leader of the Khader Khan council, that the clock was ticking on him, and he'd used up all his chances on that one throw of the dice. They wanted peace-and continued prosperity, of course-and, if he didn't pull his men into line, they would do it for him. And by the way, they told him after accepting his ten-million-rupee bribe, and just before they threw him back onto the street, that guy Abdullah, in your outfit, we don't want to see him again.

Ever. He was dead once, in Bombay. He'll be dead again, for good this time, if we see him...

One by one, after weeks of lying low, we'd made our way back into the city and back to the jobs we'd done in the Sanjay gang, as it had become known. I returned from hiding in Goa and took up my position in the passport operation with Villu and Krishna. When the call finally went out for us to gather at Haji Ali, I rode to the shrine on my Enfield bike, and walked with Abdullah and Mahmoud Melbaaf across the rippling wavelets of the bay.

Mahmoud led the prayers, kneeling at the front of our group. The little balcony, one of many surrounding the island mosque, was ours alone. Facing toward Mecca, and with the breeze filling and then falling from his white shirt, Mahmoud spoke for all the men who knelt or stood behind him:

Praise be to God, Lord of the Universe, The Compassionate, the Merciful, Sovereign of the Day of Judgement! You alone we worship, and to You alone we turn for help.

Guide us to the straight path...

Farid, Abdullah, Amir, Faisal, and Nazeer-the Muslim core of the council-knelt behind Mahmoud. Sanjay was a Hindu. Andrew was a Christian. They knelt beside me and behind the praying group. I stood with my head bowed and my hands clasped in front of me. I knew the words of the prayers and I knew the simple standing, kneeling, and bowing observations. I could've joined in. I knew that Mahmoud and the others would've been delighted if I had. But I couldn't bring myself to kneel with them. The separation that they found so easy and instinctual-this is my criminal life, over here, and that's my religious life, over there-was impossible for me. I did speak to Salman, whispering my hope that he'd found peace, wherever he was. Yet I was too self-consciously aware of the darkness in my heart to offer more than that tiny prayer. So I stood in silence, feeling like an impostor, a spy on that island of devotions, as the amethyst evening blessed the balcony of praying men with gold-and-lilac light. And the words of Mahmoud's prayer seemed a perfect fit for my withered honour and my thinning pride: those who have incurred your wrath... those who have gone astray...

At the end of prayers we hugged one another, according to custom, and made our way back along the path toward the shore. Mahmoud was leading the way. We'd all prayed, in our own ways, and we'd all cried for Salman, but we didn't look the part of devout visitors to the holy shrine. We all wore sunglasses. We all wore new clothes. Everyone, except me, carried a year or more of smuggler's wages in gold chains, first-tier watches, rings, and bracelets. And we swaggered. We walked the walk: the little dance-step that fighting-fit gangsters do when they're armed and dangerous. It was a bizarre procession, and one so menacing that we had to work hard to make the professional beggars on the island pathway take the sheaves of rupee notes we'd brought as alms.

The men had three cars parked near the sea wall. It was almost exactly where I'd stood with Abdullah on the night I met Khaderbhai. My bike was parked beyond them, and at the cars I paused to say goodbye.

I knew the meal would be fun, after the melancholy observations at the shrine, and that it would include a choice of drugs and a choice of happy, silly, pretty girls. I was grateful for the offer, but I refused.

Abdullah and Nazeer wanted to walk me to my bike. We'd only taken a few steps when Andrew ran up behind us and called me to stop.

I've been wanting to make-well-an apology, you know?"

He pulled at my arm, near the elbow, leading me away from Nazeer and just out of his hearing. Leaning in close to me, he spoke softly and quickly.

I looked back into Andrew's camel-brown eyes, and let out a deep breath. Dislike had been simmering since the night in the car park. I hadn't forgotten what he'd said, and how close we'd come to fighting it out. His little speech had made me angrier still.

If we hadn't just been to a funeral service for a friend we'd both liked, I probably would've hit him already.

Mothers are sacred, yaar, and I'm sure your mother is a very fine lady. So, please, I'm asking you, like-please accept my apology."

Abdullah, Nazeer, and I turned away and walked to the bike.

Abdullah was unusually quiet. The silence he carried with him was ominous and unsettling.

He spoke to Nazeer quickly, in Urdu. The older man nodded several times and then said something about names, or not mentioning names. Nazeer turned his head to face me, and favoured me with a wide, warm smile.

Sinhalese, they are Buddhist. But in the middle of them, there are the others-Tamil Muslims-with no guns and no army.

Everybody kill them, and nobody fight for them. They need passports and money-gold money. We go to help them."

Abdullah, and me, and one gora-you. Three men. We go."

I owed him. Nazeer would never mention that fact, I knew, and he wouldn't hold it against me if I didn't go with him. We'd been through too much together. But I did owe him my life. It would be very hard to refuse him. And there was something else-something wise, perhaps, and fervently generous-in that rare, wide smile he'd given me. It seemed that he was offering me more than just the chance to work with him, and work off my debt. He blamed himself for Khader's death, but he knew that I still felt guilty and ashamed that I hadn't been there with him, pretending to be his American, when Khader had died. He's giving me a chance, I thought, as I let my eyes move from his to Abdullah's and back again. He's giving me a way to close the book on it.

I heard a voice in my head-or not a voice, really, but just words in whispered echoes like stones hissing across the still surface of a lake-Killer... He's a killer... Don't do it...

Get away... Get away now... And the voice was right, of course.

Dead right. And I wish I could say that it took me more than those few heartbeats to make up my mind to join him.

Nazeer's jaw locked tight, bunching the muscles of his cheeks and exaggerating the downward curve of his mouth. He frowned at his sandaled feet as if they were disobedient puppies. Then he suddenly hurled himself at me, and locked his hands behind me in a punishing hug. It was the violent, wrestler's hug of a man whose body had never learned to speak the language of his heart-except when he was dancing-and it ended as abruptly and furiously as it had begun. He whipped his thick arms away and shoved me backward with his chest, shaking his head and shuddering as if a shark had passed him in shallow water. He looked up quickly, and the warmth that reddened his eyes vied with a grim warning clamped in the bad-luck horseshoe of his mouth. I knew that if I ever raised that moment of affection with him, or referred to it in any way, I would lose his friendship forever.

I kicked the bike to life and straddled it, pushing away from the kerb with my legs and pointing it in the direction of Nana Chowk and Colaba.

I waved, and nodded, but I couldn't give the answering call to the slogan. I didn't know how much truth or courage was in my decision to join them on their mission to Sri Lanka. Not much, it seemed to me, as I rode away from them, from all of them, and surrendered to the warm night, and the press and pause of traffic.

A blood-red moon was rising from the sea as I reached the Back Bay road leading to Nariman Point. I parked the bike beside a cold-drink stall, locked it, and threw the keys to the manager, who was a friend from the slum. With the moon behind me, I set out along the footpath beside a long curve of sandy beach where fishermen often repaired their nets and battered boats. There was a festival on that night in the Sassoon Dock area. The celebrations had drawn most of the local people from the huts and shelters on the beach. The road where I walked was almost deserted.

And then I saw her. She was sitting on the edge of an old fishing boat that was half-buried on the beach. Only the prow and a few metres of the long boat's gunnels protruded from the surrounding waves of sand. She was wearing a long, salwar top over loose pants. Her knees were drawn up, and she was resting her chin on her arms as she stared out at the dark water.

It was just lucky that I ran into Didier on his way to the airport, and he told me."

Her eyes moved across my features for a moment, as if she was searching a map for a familiar reference point. Her smile slowly faded.

She didn't answer, but her stare tightened in the intensity of her concentration.

She looked away, towards the sea, and breathed a long, slow sigh.

I don't even know how I got on it. And I broke down-just, kind of, cracked up. And Khader, he was on the same plane. And he put his arm around me. I told him everything... absolutely... everything. And next thing, I'm in this cave with a giant Buddha statue and this teacher named Idriss-Khader's teacher."

There was a pause while she let those memories pull her into the past, but then she shook herself free, and back into the moment.

I looked up sharply, but I didn't respond. "Did you know Ulla's in town?" she asked after a while.

You know the Pieta? Michelangelo? It looked exactly like that. It was so strange. It really shook me up. Some things are so weird they make you angry, you know?"

I raised an eyebrow, returning her stare, but said nothing.

I laughed, but she didn't laugh with me.

She clamped her lips tightly around an angry response, but I held my hands up in surrender, and spoke quickly.

She relaxed, smiling again.

She laughed and then turned to me, suddenly serious again. Her eyes, pale with moonlight; her eyes, the green of water lilies after the rain; her long hair, black as forest river stones; her hair that was like holding the night itself in the wrap of my fingers; her lips, starred with incandescent light; lips of camellia-petal softness warmed with secret whispers. Beautiful.

And I loved her. I loved her still so much, so hard, but with no heat or heart at all. That falling love, that helpless, dreaming, soaring love, was gone. And I suddenly knew in those seconds of ... cold adoration, I suppose... that the power she'd once held over me was also gone. Or, more than that, her power had moved into me, and had become mine. I held all the cards. And then I wanted to know. It wasn't good enough to just accept what had happened between us. I wanted to know everything.

She gave an anguished little sigh, and stretched her legs out to bury her bare feet in the sand. Watching the small cascades of soft sand spill over her moving feet, she spoke in a dull, flat tone, as if she was composing a letter-or recalling a letter, perhaps, that she'd written once and never sent to me. "I knew you were going to ask me, and I think that's why I've waited so long to get in touch with you. I let people know that I was around, and I asked after you, but I didn't do anything, until today, because... I knew you'd ask me."

She broke off, staring at her feet in the sand, and clamped her jaw shut. Reflected lights gleamed in her eyes. For a moment I let myself imagine how those green eyes must've blazed with firelight as she'd watched the Palace burn.

She looked at me quickly, reading my eyes.

My expression didn't change, and her smile faded as she looked down at the sand once more.

She was silent again for a while. From somewhere beyond the deserted beach we heard the sounds of the festival: happy, roaring laughter rising over the blare of a brass band. Much closer, ocean music gushed onto the soft assenting shore, and the palms above us trembled in the cooling breeze.

Maybe there was later. And I don't remember the rest, until I was in the plane with Khader's arm around me."

She was quiet. I leaned over to pick up a conical shell descending in spirals to a sharp, eroded point. I pressed it into my palm until it pierced the skin, and then threw it away across the rippled sand. When I looked at her again, I found that she was staring at me and frowning hard.

You know that."

Her eyes narrowed as she read the angry disappointment in my face.

And then I just... quit. I'd had enough."

She was frowning, and seemed irritated by the question.

My jaw was locked tight, and I turned my head away from her. She waited for a few moments and then spoke again.

She'd been watching me closely. I knew she was clever enough to see that I was striking back at her with the questions, but her eyes told me that she saw more than that. Although I'd tried to hide it, I knew she'd picked up the scepticism barbed with righteous censure in my tone. When I finished she took a breath, and seemed about to speak, but then she paused as if reconsidering her reply.

And I tried to talk Khaderbhai out of it. I tried to get them to stop. But I didn't feel anything about it, even when they killed Madjid. And I... I used to like him, you know? I liked old Madjid. He was the best of them, in a way. But I didn't feel anything when he died. And I didn't feel it, not even a bit, when Khader told me he had to leave you in jail and let you get beaten up. I liked you-more than I liked anyone else-but I didn't feel bad or sorry. I kind of understood it-that it had to happen, and it was just bad luck that it was happening to _you. I felt nothing. And that's when it hit me-that's when I knew I had to get away."

And there it was. I had it all-all the truth and detail that I'd needed to know since that day on the mountain, in the withering snow, when Khader had told me about her. I think I'd expected to feel... nourished, perhaps, and vindicated, by forcing her to tell me what she'd done and why she'd done it. I think I'd hoped to be released by it, and solaced, just by hearing her tell me.

But it wasn't like that. I felt empty: the kind of emptiness that's sad but not distressed, pitying but not broken-hearted, and damaged, somehow, but clearer and cleaner for it. And then I knew what it was, that emptiness: there's a name for it, a word we use often, without realising the universe of peace that's enfolded in it.

The word is free.

Our lips met like waves that crest and merge the whirl of storming seas. I felt that I was falling: free and falling at last from the love that had opened, lotus-layered, within me. And together we did fall the length of her black hair to the still warm sand in the hollow of the sunken boat.

When our lips parted, stars rushed through that kiss into her sea-green eyes. An age of longing passed from those eyes into mine. An age of passion passed from my grey eyes into hers. All the hunger, all the fleshed and hope-starved craving, streamed from eye to eye: the moment we met; the laughing wit of Leopold's; the Standing Babas; the Village in the Sky; the cholera; the swarm of rats; the secrets that she'd whispered near exhausted sleep; the singing boat on the flood beneath the Gateway; the storm when we made love the first time; the joy and loneliness in Goa; and our love reflecting shadows into glass, on the last night before the war.

And there were no more words. There was no more cleverness as I walked her to a taxi parked nearby. I kissed her again. A long kiss, goodbye. She smiled at me. It was a good smile, a beautiful smile, and almost her best. I watched the red lights of the taxi fuzz and blur and then vanish in the furtherness of night.

Alone on the strangely quiet street, I began to walk back to Prabaker's slum-I always thought of it as Prabaker's slum, and I still do-to retrieve my bike. My shadows twirled with every street light, dragging loath behind me and then rushing on ahead.

Ocean songs receded. The road moved beyond the span of coast and into the wide, tree-lined streets of the new peninsula reclaimed from the sea, stone on mortared stone, by the ever-expanding island city.

Sounds of celebration streamed into the road from streets around me. The festival had ended, and the people were beginning to return. Daring boys on bicycles flashed between the walkers much too fast, but never touching so much as a flap of sleeve.

Impossibly beautiful girls in bright new saris glided between the glances of young men who'd scented their shirts, as well as their skin, with sandalwood soap. Children slept on shoulders, their unwilled arms and legs hanging limp as wet washing on a line. Someone sang a love song, and a dozen voices joined the choruses for each verse. Every man and woman, walking home to slum hut or fine apartment, smiled, listening to the romantic, foolish words.

Three young men singing near me saw my smile, and raised the palms of their hands in question. I lifted my arms and sang the chorus, joining my voice to theirs, and shocking and delighting them with what I knew. They threw their strangers' arms around me and swept our song-connected souls toward the unvanquishable ruin of the slum. Everyone in the whole world, Karla once said, was Indian in at least one past life. And I laughed to think of her.

I didn't know what I would do. The first part of it was clear enough-"! was the debt to the burly Afghan, Nazeer. He'd said to me once, when I'd talked to him of the guilt I continued to feel for Khader's death: Good gun, good horse, good friend, good battle-you know better way that Great Khan, he can die? And a tiny fragment of that thought or feeling applied to me, too. It was right, somehow-although I couldn't have explained it, even to myself-and fitting for me to risk my life in the company of good friends, and in the course of an important mission.

And there was so much more that I had to learn, so much that Khaderbhai had wanted to teach me. I knew that his physics teacher, the man he'd told me about in Afghanistan, was in Bombay. And the other teacher, Idriss, was in Varanasi. If I made it back to Bombay from Nazeer's mission to Sri Lanka, there was a world of learning to discover and enjoy.

In the meanwhile, in the city, my place with Sanjay's council was assured. There was work there, and money, and a little power. For a while there was safety, in the brotherhood, from the long reach of Australian law. There were friends on the council, and at Leopold's, and in the slum. And, yes, maybe there was even a chance for love.

When I reached the bike I kept walking on into the slum. I wasn't sure why. I was following an instinct, and drawn, perhaps, by the swollen moon. The narrow lanes, those writhing alleys of struggle and dream, were so familiar to me and so comfortingly safe that I marvelled at the fear I'd once felt there. I wandered without purpose or plan, and moved from smile to smile as men and women and children who'd been my patients and neighbours looked up to see me pass. I moved in mists of cooking scent and shower soap, of animal stalls and kerosene lamps, of frankincense and sandalwood streaming upward from a thousand tiny temples in a thousand tiny homes.

At a corner of one lane I bumped into a man, and as our faces rose to their apologies we recognised one another in the same instant. It was Mukesh, the young thief who'd helped me in the Colaba lock-up and the Arthur Road jail: the man whose freedom I'd demanded when Vikram had paid me out of prison.

He leaned in close to whisper.

He ran off through the lanes. I turned away, to walk unsmiling into a sudden mood that was anxious and angry and forlorn. And then, as it always did, the city, Bombay, my Mumbai, held me up on the broad back of a nourishing constancy. I found myself at the edge of a devoted crowd gathered before the new, large hut belonging to the Blue Sisters. Men and women stood at the rear of the crowd, while others sat or knelt in a semi-circle of soft light at the threshold of the hut. And there in the doorway, framed by haloes of lamplight and wreathed about with streamers of blue incense smoke, were the Blue Sisters themselves. Radiant.

Serene. Beings of such lambent compassion, such sublime equanimity, that in my broken, exiled heart I pledged to love them, as every man and woman who saw them did.

At that moment I felt a tug at my shirtsleeve and I turned my head to see what seemed to be the ghost of a gigantic smile with a very small man attached to it. The ghost shook me, grinning happily, and I reached out to enclose it in a hug and then bent forward quickly to touch its feet, in the traditional greeting to a father or mother. It was Kishan, Prabaker's father. He explained that he was in the city for a holiday with Rukhmabai, Prabaker's mother, and Parvati, his widow.

We arrived at the little group of huts, including my own, that clustered around Kumar's chai shop near the crescent of the sea.

Johnny Cigar was there, with Jeetendra, Qasim Ali Hussein, and Joseph's wife, Maria.

It was a big one, na?"

I swung round to see Rukhmabai standing close to us. I bent to touch her feet, but she restrained me, and joined her hands together in a greeting. She looked sadder and older within the soft endearments of her smile, and grieving had put a swipe of grey in the black pelt of her hair. But the hair was growing back. The long hair I'd seen falling like a shadow dying was growing back, and there was living hope in the thick, upward sweep of it.

Then she directed my gaze to the woman in widow's white standing beside her. It was Parvati, and a child, a son, was standing with her. He was clinging to her sari skirt for support. I greeted Parvati, and when I gave my attention to the boy and looked into his face I was so shocked that my jaw dropped open. I turned to the adults and they all smiled, waggling their heads in the same wonder, for the child was the image of Prabaker. More than merely resembling him, the boy was the exact duplicate of the man we'd all loved more than any other we knew. And when he smiled at me it was his smile, Prabaker's vast, world-encompassing smile, that I saw in that small, perfectly round face.

Parvati nodded. I held my arms out to him, and he came to me without protest.

The boy kissed me on the cheek, quickly, and then wrapped his tiny arms around my neck with impetuous strength, and squeezed me. I hugged him in return, and held him to my heart.

I gave the boy back into Parvati's arms, and wiped a hand across my face and into my hair. Looking at the people, listening to the breathing, heaving, laughing, struggling music of the slum, all around me, I remembered one of Khaderbhai's favourite phrases.

Every human heartbeat, he'd said many times, is a universe of possibilities. And it seemed to me that I finally understood exactly what he'd meant. He'd been trying to tell me that every human will has the power to transform its fate. I'd always thought that fate was something unchangeable: fixed for every one of us at birth, and as constant as the circuit of the stars. But I suddenly realised that life is stranger and more beautiful than that. The truth is that, no matter what kind of game you find yourself in, no matter how good or bad the luck, you can change your life completely with a single thought or a single act of love.

For this is what we do. Put one foot forward and then the other.

Lift our eyes to the snarl and smile of the world once more.

Think. Act. Feel. Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world. Drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another night. Push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day. With love: the passionate search for a truth other than our own. With longing: the pure, ineffable yearning to be saved. For so long as fate keeps waiting, we live on. God help us. God forgive us. We live on.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wrote the first lines of Shantaram thirteen years before I wrote the last. Many people have been involved with the project during those years, and have helped me in ways great or small. In making this grateful acknowledgement I am sure that, unintentionally, some names will be omitted. I ask those friends and colleagues to forgive me.

I want to thank my publishers at Scribe and, in particular, Henry Rosenbloom, who saw the love in this book, and who held his nerve when the chips were down-you can't ask more than that in any context; my editor, Margot Rosenbloom, for providing me with a loving edit that was always a brave but regardful combination of head and heart; the agent for the project, Jenny Darling, whose insightful suggestions helped me to make Shantaram a better book than it ever could have been without her; the book's designer, Miriam Rosenbloom, for the imaginative elegance with which she graced the project; the inspiring team at Pan Macmillan, for their enthusiastic and enduring encouragement; Debbie McInnes, the book's full-hearted and tireless local publicist; Aysha Rowe and Jenny Nagle, who championed the book in Aotearoa New Zealand;

Jessika and Nick, for their being and their courage and their joy; Nick, Mary, Paris, and Blaise, for keeping the faith in their absent friend; my mother and my stepfather, whose unflagging moral, spiritual, and financial support-beyond what I have ever deserved or could repay-has sustained me, and uplifted this work; and my partner, Shula, who has been the first positive word and the last loving line of defence.

And, reaching back through those thirteen years, I also want to thank the following colleagues and loved ones: Allan and Maria Almeida, Trish Anderson, Chloris and Chris Bath, Christine Boyle, Kerry Boxall, Buckley Bullock, Grant Carey, William Carey, Sarah Carroll, Tracy Carroll, Alfredo Cerda, Paul Chamberlain, Narayan Chandrashekar, Julia Chennels, Glen and Bindi Choyce, Sue Coley, Celia Conor, Tom Cooper, Graeme Corcoran, Daniella Cripa, Malcolm Crook, Alison Davidson, Mark Davis, Danny Derse, James Dorabjee, Paul Dornbusch, Cameron Drake, Suzannah Espie, Lindsay Forbes, Kate Galloway, Con Gantinas, Richard Gelemanovic, Claudia Glenewinkel, Linnet Good, Nicholas Goodwin, Sherridan Green, Ingrid Grobel, Lutz Grossman, Anna Hampson, Justine Hampson, Jason and Victoria Hartcup, Wendy Hatfield, Robbie Heazlewood, Chris, Lee, and Ian Hunter, Pietro The Colonel Iodice, Bashka Jacobs, Su Jamison, Sandy Jarrett, Jenny and Stuart, Julie Jordanou, Yusuf Mohammed Khan, Daniel Keays, Val Keogh, Ranyana Khotari, Glen King, Andy Kirkland, Dr.

Sue Knight, Clay Lafferty, Dr. John Lattanzio, Marc Lawrence, Kevin Leighton, Lisette, Myriam Leo, Paul Linacre, Gnter Lck, Dr. Mohammed al Mahdi, Amad Malkoun, Big Mick Mantzaris, Pat Martin, Nick and Christine Matheou, Maximillian, Elaine May, John McAuslan, Joan McQueen, Martin and Claudia Meurer, Marjorie Michael, Mark Mitchell, Myriam, Kim Albert Ng, Blaise Oarsman, Donna Palma, Kylie Parish, Lindon Parker, Vikram Patel, Jan Paull, Sally Paxton, Joyce Petrie, Susan Rokich, Max Rosenbloom, Fabian Salamon, Kristina Schelldorfer, Sven Schmidt, David and Michelle Shipworth, Kathy Simota, Dave Stevens, Barry and Steven Stockley, Anand Subramaniam, Sue and Phyl, Gregory and Mary Szczepaniak, Gillian Upton, Chandrakant Vishwanath, Void, Werner and Linda Weber, Cheryle Weinstein, Chris Wilson, John Wooller, and Lee Xiaoshin.

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Table of Contents

PART PART PART PART PART ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Chapter One

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

PART TWO

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

PART THREE

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

PART FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

PART FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE