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.

"You should meet with Chuha," Sanjay said earnestly as he, Farid, Salman, and I drank chai at a little shop on Maulana Azad Road near the brilliant, green mirages of the Mahalaxmi Racecourse. He was talking about Ashok Chandrashekar, an influential strong-arm man in the Walidlalla gang. He'd used Ashok's nickname, Chuha, meaning the Rat.

"I've met with the fucker, yaar," Salman sighed. "I meet him all the time. Every time one of his guys tries to squeeze out a corner of our territory, I meet with Chuha to set it straight.

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.

"No, but you haven't really talked to him, one on one like, about the money we can make. If you did, Salman brother, I know you'd find out he talks a lot of sense. He's making crores out of the fuckin' garad, man. The junkies can't get enough of the shit. He has to bring it in by fuckin' train. And the blue movies thing, man-it's going crazy. I swear! It's a fuckin' deadly business, yaar. He's making five hundred copies of every movie, and selling them for five hundred each. That's two-and-a-half lakhs, Salman, for every fuckin' blue movie! If you could make money like that by killing people, India's population problem would be solved in a month! You should just talk to him, Salman brother."

"I don't like him," Salman declared. "And I don't trust him, either. One of these days, I think I'll have to finish the madachudh once and for all. That's not a very promising way to start up a business, na?"

"If it comes to that, I'll kill the gandu for you, brother, and it will be my pleasure. But up to then, like, before we actually have to _kill him, we can still make a lot of money with him."

"I don't think so."

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

"Come on, Lin. What do you think?"

"It's council business, Sanju," I replied, smiling at his earnestness. "It's got nothing to do with me."

"But that's why I'm asking you, Linbaba. You can give us an independent point of view, like. You know Chuha. And you know how much money there is in the heroin. He's got some good money ideas, don't you think so?"

"Arrey, don't ask him!" Farid cut in. "Not unless you want the truth."

"No, go on," Sanjay persisted, the gleam in his eyes brightening.

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 think Chuha's the kind of guy who gives violent crime a bad name," I said. Salman and Farid spluttered their tea, laughing, and then mopped at themselves with their handkerchiefs.

"Okay," Sanjay frowned, his eyes still gleaming. "So, what... exactly... don't you like about him?"

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.

"Chuha's a stand-over man," I replied. "And I don't like stand over men."

"He's a what?"

"A stand-over man, Sanjay. He beats up on men he knows can't fight back, and takes whatever he wants from them. In my country, we call those guys stand-over men because they really do stand over little guys and steal from them."

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

"I don't see the problem," he said.

"No, I know you don't have a problem with it. And that's okay. I don't expect everyone to think like me. Fact is, most people don't. And I understand that. I get it. I know that's how a lot of guys make their way. But just because I understand it, that doesn't mean I like it. I met some of them in jail. A couple of them tried to stand over me. I stabbed them. None of the others ever tried it again. The word got around. Try to stand over this guy, and he'll put a hole in you. So they left me alone. And that's just the thing. I would've had more respect for them if they'd kept on trying to stand over me. I wouldn't have stopped fighting them-I still would've cut them up, you know, but I would've respected them more while I did it. Ask the waiter here, Santosh, what he thinks of Chuha. They came in here last week, Chuha and his guys, and slapped him around for fifty bucks."

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.

"The guy's a fuckin' millionaire, if you believe his bullshit," I said, "and he stands over a decent working guy like Santosh for fifty bucks. I don't respect that. And in your heart of hearts, Sanjay, I don't think you do, either. I'm not going to do anything about it. That's not my job. Chuha makes his graft by slapping people. I understand that. But if he ever tries to stand over me, I'll cut him. And I tell you, man, I'll enjoy doing it."

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 asked him!" Farid giggled.

"Okay, okay," Sanjay conceded. "I asked the wrong guy. Lin is a wild guy, yaar. He gets wild notions. He went to Afghanistan with Khader, man! Why did I ask a guy who's crazy enough to do that?

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?"

"And another thing," I added, keeping a straight face.

"Eh, Baghwan!" Sanjay cried. "He's got another thing, yet!"

"If you think about the slogans, you'll understand where I'm coming from on this."

"The slogans?" Sanjay protested, provoking his friends to bigger laughter. "What fuckin' slogans, yaar?"

"You know what I mean. The slogan, or the motto, of the Walidlalla gang is Pahiley Shahad, Tab julm. I think I'm right in translating it as First Honey, Then Outrage, or even Atrocity.

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

"Yeah, yeah, that's their thing, man."

"And what's our slogan? Khader's slogan?"

They looked at one another, and smiled.

"Saatch aur Himmat." I spoke it aloud for them. "Truth and Courage. I know a lot of guys who'd like Chuha's slogan. They'd think it was clever and funny. And it sounds ruthless, so they'd think it was tough. But I don't like it. I like Khader's."

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.

"But hey," I said, standing to leave, "it's got nothing to do with me. And frankly, I don't really give a damn one way or the other. My ride is here. I'll see you guys later."

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

"Bahinchudh! Gandu!" Sanjay shouted. "You can't fuck up my rave like that and then walk out, yaar! Come back here!"

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

"You're in a hurry for your workout," I said, settling myself onto the saddle of the bike behind him. "Relax. No matter how fast we get there, I'm still going to beat you, brother."

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.

"Not today," Abdullah laughed over his shoulder, pulling the bike into a faster lane of traffic. "No fighting today, Lin. I am taking you for a surprise. A good surprise!" "Now I'm worried," I called back. "What kind of surprise?"

"You remember when I took you to see Doctor Hamid? You remember that surprise?"

"Yeah, I remember."

"Well, it is better than that. Much better."

"U-huh. Well, I'm still not very relaxed about it. Gimme another hint."

"You remember when I sent you the bear, for hugging?"

"Kano, sure, I remember."

"Well, it is much better than that!"

"A doctor and a bear," I called out above the growl of the engine. "There's a lot of space between them, brother. One more hint."

"Ha!" he laughed, coming to a stop at a set of traffic lights. "I will say to you this-the surprise is so good that you will forgive me for all that you suffered when you thought I was dead."

"I do forgive you, Abdullah."

"No, Lin brother. I know you do not forgive me. I have too many bruises, and I am too much sore from our boxing and karate."

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.

"Okay," I laughed. "If that's the way you're gonna play it, I don't forgive you!"

"But when you see this surprise," he called out, laughing with me, "you will forgive me completely, with a full heart. Now, come on! Stop asking me about it, and tell me, what did Salman say to Sanjay about that pig-that Chuha?"

"How did you know that's what we were talking about?"

"I can see the look in Salman's face," he shouted back. "And Sanjay, he told me, this morning, that he wants to ask Salman- again-to make business with Chuha. So, what did Salman say?"

"You know the answer to that one," I replied a little more quietly as we stopped in traffic.

"Good! Nushkur'Allah." Thanks be to God. "You really hate Chuha, don't you?"

"I don't hate him," he clarified, moving off with the flow of cars. "I just want to kill 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.

"Why?" I asked, when we were moving through free space again.

"Why what?"

"Why do you want to kill Chuha?"

"I know he had a meeting... with the men from Iran," Abdullah shouted over his shoulder. "People say it was just business- Sanjay, he says it was just business. But I think more than business. I think he work with them, against Khader Khan. Against us. For that reason, Lin."

"Okay," I called back, pleased to have my own instincts about Chuha confirmed, but worried for my wild, Iranian friend. "But don't do anything without me, okay?"

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

"I'm serious, Abdullah. Promise me!"

"Thik hain, Lin brother!" he shouted in reply. "I will call you, when the time is right!"

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.

"What the hell's going on?" I demanded as we walked toward the market. "Some surprise-I come here nearly every day."

"I know," he answered, grinning enigmatically. "And I am not the only one who knows it."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"You will find out, Lin brother. Here are your friends."

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.

"Hey, man!" Vikram greeted me. "Pull up a sack and make yourself at home."

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 thought you weren't coming today, man," Vikram said as the chai arrived.

"Abdullah gave me a lift," I replied, frowning at my friend's mysterious smile, "and we got stuck in traffic. It was worth it, though. I had a front row seat for Taj Raj and Indra doing their stumble routine on MG Road. It was quite a show."

"He's not what he used to be, our Taj Raj," Gemini commented, hurling South London at us in the vowels of the last two words.

"Not as nimble, like. Since the accident, y'know, his timing's a bit off. I mean, it's only reasonable, innit? His whole bleedin' head was damn near off, an' all, so it's no wonder his timing's got a kink in it."

"At this point," Scorpio George interrupted, lowering his head and assuming the solemn piety we all knew well and dreaded more, "I think we should all bow our heads in prayer."

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.

"Oh, Lord," Scorpio began.

"Oh, Gawd," Gemini grumbled.

"And Lady," Scorpio continued, "infinite yin-yang spirit in the sky, we humbly ask you to hear the prayers, today, of five souls that you put into the world, and left in the temporary care of Scorpio, Gemini, Abdullah, Vikram, and Lin."

"What does he mean, temporary?" Vikram whispered to me, and I shrugged in reply.

"Please help us, Lord," Scorpio intoned, his eyes shut and his face raised to heaven, which seemed, roughly, to be in the middle of the balcony on the third floor of the Veejay Premnaath Academy of Hair Colouring and Ear Boring. "Please guide us to know what's right, and to do the right thing. And you can start, God, if you're of a mind, by helping out with the little business deal we're doing with the Belgian couple tonight. I don't have to tell you, Lord and Lady, how tricky it is to supply customers with good-quality cocaine in Bombay. But, thanks to your providence, we managed to find ten grams of A-grade snow-and, given the real bad drought on the streets, that was a mighty slick piece of work on your part, God, if you'll accept my professional admiration.

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."

"Amen!" Gemini responded, clearly relieved that the prayer was far shorter than Scorpio's more usual efforts.

"Amen," Vikram sobbed, nudging a tear from his eye with the knuckles of a balled fist.

"Astagfirullah," Abdullah muttered. Forgive me, Allah.

"So how about a bite to eat then?" Gemini suggested cheerily.

"There's nothing like a bit of religion to put you in the frame of mind to make a pig of yourself, is there?"

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

"Look slowly-no, slowly! Look over there, behind the peanuts shop, near the corner. Do you see him? Your surprise, brother Lin. Do you see him?"

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

"He is here every day," Abdullah whispered. "And not only here- in some other places that you go, also. He watches you. He waits, and he watches you."

"Vikram!" I mumbled, wanting some other testament to what I was seeing. "Look! There, on the corner!"

"Look at what, man?"

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.

"Didn't you see him?"

"No, man. See who?" Vikram complained, standing with me to squint in the direction of my frantic stare.

"It's Modena!" I shouted, running after the limping Spaniard. I didn't look back at Vikram, Abdullah, and the Zodiacs. I didn't answer Vikram's call. I didn't think about what I was doing or why I was pursuing him. My mind was only one thought, one image, and one word. Modena...

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.

"Modena," I said softly into the black echoes. "It's Lin. I just want to talk to you. I'm not trying to... I know you're in here.

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.

"Garam chai pio?" I asked. Shall we drink hot tea?

"Thik hain," he replied. Okay.

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'm sorry for running away," he said quietly, his eyes fixed on his hands as they fidgeted in his lap.

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.

"Are you... are you okay?" I asked, when the tea arrived.

"Jarur," he answered, with a little smile. Certainly. "Are you okay?"

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

"I do not mean to offend you," he said, smiling again. It was a strange smile, so perfect in the curve of the mouth, and so deformed in the stiffened cheeks that dragged the lower lids of his eyes down into little wells of misery. "I am only offering my help, if you need it. I have money. I always carry ten thousand rupees with me."

"What?"

"I always carry-"

"Yes, yes, I heard you." He was speaking softly, but still I glanced up at the bakery men to see if they'd heard him as well.

"Why were you watching me today in the market?" "I watch you very often. Almost every day. I watch you and Karla and Lisa and Vikram."

"Why?"

"I must watch you. It is one of the ways I will know how to find her."

"To find who?"

"Ulla. When she returns. She won't know where I am. I don't go... I don't go to Leopold's any more or any of the other places we used to be together. When she looks for me, she will come to you or to one of the others. And I will see her. And we will be together."

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?

"Ulla... went to Germany, Modena."

"I know," he smiled. "I am glad for her."

"She won't be coming back."

"Oh, yes," he said flatly. "She'll come back. She loves me.

She'll come back for me."

"Why-" I began, and then abandoned the thought. "How do you live?"

"I have a job. A good job. It pays good money. I work with a friend, Ramesh. I met him when... after I was hurt. He looked after me. At the houses of the rich, when a son is born, we go there, and I put on my special clothes. I put on my costume."

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.

"Costume?"

"Yes. It has a long tail and sharp ears, and a chain of little skulls around the neck. I make it that I am a demon, an evil spirit. And Ramesh, he makes that he is a holy sadhu, looking like a holy man, and he beats me away from the house. And I come back, and I make it that I am trying to steal the baby. And the women scream when I come near the baby. And Ramesh, he beats me away again. Again I come back, and again he beats me until, at the very last, he beats me so badly that I make like I am dying, and I run away. The people pay us good money for the show." "I never heard of it before."

"No. It is our own idea, Ramesh and me. But after the first rich family paid us, all the others wanted to be sure to beat the evil spirit away from their new baby son. And they pay us good money, all of them. I have an apartment. I don't own it, of course, but I have paid more than a year of rent in advance already. It is small, but it is comfortable. It will be a good place for Ulla and me to live together. You can see the waves of the sea from the main window. My Ulla, she loves the sea. She always wanted a house near to the sea..."

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.

"I must go," he said, looking nervously to his left and right before raising his wounded eyes to mine. "Ramesh is there by now, outside the President Hotel. When she comes back, Ulla will be there, she will stay there. She loves that hotel. It is her favourite. She loves the Back Bay area. And there was a plane this morning from Germany. A Lufthansa plane. She might be there."

"You check... after every flight?"

"Yes. I do not go in," he murmured, lifting his hand as if to touch his face, but running it through his short, greying hair instead. "Ramesh goes in the hotel for me. He checks her name- Ulla Volkenberg-to see if she is there. One day she will be there. She will be there."

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

"Listen, Modena, don't run away from me next time, okay? If you need anything, if there's anything I can do, just ask me. Is it a deal?"

"I will not run away again," he said solemnly. "It is just my habit to run. And it was just my habit that was running away from you. It was not me running, just my habit. I am not afraid of you. You are my friend."

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

"Modena, don't tell anyone else that you keep so much money on you. Promise me."

"Nobody else knows that, Lin," he assured me, smiling that deep eyed grimace at me. "Only you. I would not say that to anyone.

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?"

"What do you mean?"

"I'm talking about Maurizio, the enemy of my blood."

"I didn't kill Maurizio," I said, frowning down into the red walled caves of his eyes.

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.

"Do not worry, Lin. The secret is safe with me. I am glad that you killed him. Not just for me. I knew him. I was his best friend-his only friend. If he lived, after he did this to me, there was no limit to his evil. That is how a man destroys his own soul-he loses the last limit to his evil. And I watched him, when he cut me with his knife, and when he walked away the last time, and I knew that he lost his soul. It cost him his soul, what he did... the things he did to me." "You don't have to talk about it."

"No, it is okay, now, to talk about him. Maurizio was afraid. He was always afraid. He lived all his life in fear of... everything. And he was cruel. That is what gave him his power. I have known a lot of powerful men in my life, and this much I know - all the powerful men I knew were afraid, and cruel. That is the... mix... that gave them power over other men. I was not afraid. I was not cruel. I had no power. I was... you know, it was like the feeling for my Ulla-I was in love with Maurizio's power. And then, after he left me there, on the bed, and Ulla came into the room, I saw the fear in her eyes. He put his fear into her. He made her so afraid, when she saw what he did to me, that she ran away and left me there. And when I watched her leave, and shut the door..."

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.

"I hated Maurizio for the first time, then. My people, the people of my blood, we do not want to hate, because when we do hate, it is with the whole of the soul, and it can never forgive the hated one. But I hated Maurizio, and I wished him dead, and I cursed him with that wish. Not for what he did to _me, but for what he did to my Ulla, and for what he would do in the future as a man without a soul. So, do not worry, Lin. I do not speak of it to anyone, what you did. And I am glad, I am truly grateful that you killed him."

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.

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Дата добавления: 2015-10-26