CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

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