Chapter twelve. One week became three weeks, and one month became five

One week became three weeks, and one month became five. From time to time, as I worked the streets of Colaba with my tourist clients, I ran into Didier, or Vikram, or some of the others from Leopold's. Sometimes I saw Karla, but I never spoke to her. I didn't want to meet her eyes while I was poor, and living in the slum. Poverty and pride are devoted blood brothers until one, always and inevitably, kills the other.

I didn't see Abdullah at all during that fifth month, but a succession of strange and occasionally bizarre messengers came to the slum with news of him. I was sitting alone at the table in my hut one morning, writing, when the ghetto dogs roused me from my work with a fury of barking more frenzied than anything I'd ever heard. There was rage and terror in it. I put down my pen, but didn't open my door or even move from my chair. The dogs were often vicious at night, but that was the first time I'd ever heard such ferocity in the daylight hours. The sound was fascinating and alarming. As I perceived that the pack was coming nearer and slowly nearer to my hut, my heart began to thump.

Shafts of golden morning stabbed through rents and gaps in the fragile reed walls of my hut. Those mote-filled rays stuttered and strobed as people rushed past in the lane outside. Shouts and screams joined the howling. I looked around me. The only weapon of any kind in my small house was a thick bamboo stick. I picked it up. The riot of barking and voices concentrated outside my hut, and seemed to be centred on my door.

I pulled open the thin piece of plywood I used as a door, and dropped the stick at once. There, half a metre away, was a huge, brown bear. The animal towered over me, filling the doorway with awesome, muscled fur. It stood easily on its hind legs, with its enormous paws raised to the height of my shoulders. The presence of the beast provoked the ghetto dogs to madness.

Not daring to come within reach, they turned on one another in their fierce rage. Ignoring them and the excited crowd of people, the bear stooped and leaned in toward the doorway to stare into my eyes. Its eyes were large, sentient, and topaz-coloured. It growled. Far from threatening, the bear's growl was a rumbling, tumbling, oddly soothing roll of sound, more eloquent than the prayer that muttered through my mind. My fear slipped away as I listened to it. Across that half-metre of air, I felt the reverberations of the feral noise throb against my chest. It leaned closer until its face and mine were centimetres apart.

Froth dissolved to liquid, and dripped from its wet, black jaws.

The bear meant me no harm. Somehow, I was sure of it. The eyes of the beast were speaking of something else. It was seconds only, but in that thudding stillness the communication of an animal sadness, undiluted by reason and complete in its passion, was so intense and pure, from eye to eye, that it seemed much longer, and I wanted it to go on.

The dogs slashed at one another, whining and howling an agony of hate and fear, wanting to rip at the bear, but more afraid than enraged. Children screamed, and people scrambled to avoid the thrashing dogs. The bear turned, ponderously slow, but then lashed out swiftly and swept a massive paw at the dogs. The dogs scattered, and a number of young men seized the opportunity to drive them further away with stones and sticks.

The bear swayed from side to side, scanning the crowd with those large, dolorous eyes. With a clear view of the animal, I noticed that it wore a leather collar studded with short spikes. Two chains were fastened to the collar, and they trailed away into the hands of two men. I hadn't seen them until then. They were bear-handlers, dressed in vests, turbans, and trousers, all of which were a startling electric blue colour. Even their chests and faces were painted blue, as were the metal chains and collar of the bear. The bear turned and stood to face me again.

Impossibly, one of the men who held its chains spoke my name.

"Mr. Lin? You are Mr. Lin, I am thinking so?" he asked.

The bear tilted its head as if it, too, was asking the question.

"Yes!" a few voices in the crowd called out. "Yes! This is Mr.

Lin! This is Linbaba!"

I was still standing in the doorway of my hut, too surprised to speak or move. People were laughing and cheering. A few of the more courageous children crept almost close enough to touch the bear with darting fingers. Their mothers shrieked and laughed and gathered them back into their arms.

"We are your friends," one of the blue-faced men said, in Hindi.

His teeth were dazzling white, against the blue. "We have come with a message for you."

The second man took a crumpled, yellow envelope from the pocket of his vest and held it up for me to see.

"A message?" I managed to ask.

"Yes, an important message for you, sir," the first man said.

"But first, you must do something. There is a promise for giving the message. A big promise. You will like it very much."

They were speaking in Hindi, and I was unfamiliar with the word vachan, meaning promise. I stepped from the hut, edging around the bear. There were more people than I'd imagined, and they crowded together, just out of range of the bear's paws. Several people were repeating the Hindi word vachan. A babble of other voices, in several languages, added to the shouts and stone throwing and barking dogs to produce the sound effects for a minor riot.

The dust on the stony paths rose up in puffs and swirls, and although we were in the centre of a modern city, that place of bamboo huts and gaping crowds might've been a village in a forgotten valley. The bear-handlers, when I saw them clearly, seemed fantastic beings. Their bare arms and chests were well muscled beneath the blue paint, and their trousers were decorated with silver bells and discs and tassels of red and yellow silk.

Both men had long hair, worn in dreadlocks as thick as two fingers, and tipped with coils of silver wire.

I felt a hand on my arm, and almost jumped. It was Prabaker. His usual smile was preternaturally wide and his dark eyes were happy.

"We are so lucky to have you live with us, Lin. You are always bringing it so many adventures of a fully not-boring kind!"

"I didn't bring this, Prabu. What the hell are they saying? What do they want?"

"They have it a message for you, Lin. But there is a vachan, a promise, before they will give it the message. There is a... you know... a catches."

"A catches?" "Yes, sure. This is English word, yes? Catches. It means like a little revenge for being nice," Prabaker grinned happily, seizing the opportunity to share one of his English definitions with me.

It was his habit or fortuity, always, to find the most irritating moments to offer them.

"Yes, I know what a catch is, Prabu. What I don't know is, who are these guys? Who's this message from?"

Prabaker rattled away in rapid Hindi, delighted to be the focus of attention in the exchange. The bear-handlers answered him in some detail, speaking just as swiftly. I couldn't understand much of what was said, but those in the crowd who were close enough to hear broke out in an explosion of laughter. The bear dropped down on all fours and sniffed at my feet.

"What did they say?"

"Lin, they won't tell who is sending it the messages," Prabaker said, suppressing his own laughter with some difficulty. "This is a big secret, and they are not telling it. They have some instructions, to give this message to you, with nothing explanations, and with the one catches for you, like a promise."

"What catch?"

"Well, you have to hug it the bear."

"I have to what?"

"Hug it the bear. You have to give him a big cuddles, like this."

He reached out and grabbed me in a tight hug, his head pressed against my chest. The crowd applauded wildly, the bear-handlers shrieked in a high-pitched keening, and even the bear was moved to stand and dance a thudding, stomp-footed jig. The bewilderment and obvious reluctance on my face drove the people to more and bigger laughter.

"No way," I said, shaking my head.

"Oh, yes," Prabaker laughed.

"Are you kidding? No way, man."

"Takleef nahin!" one of the bear-handlers called out. No problem!

"It is safe. Kano is very friendly. Kano is the friendliest bear in all India. Kano loves the people."

He moved closer to the bear, shouting commands in Hindi. When Kano the bear stood to his full height, the handler stepped in and embraced him. The bear closed its paws around him, and rocked backwards and forwards. After a few seconds, it released the man, and he turned to the tumultuous applause of the crowd with a beaming smile and a showman's bow.

"No way," I said again.

"Oh, come on, Lin. Hug it the bear," Prabaker pleaded, laughing harder.

"I'm not hugging it any bear, Prabu."

"Come on, Lin. Don't you want to know what is it, the messages?"

"No."

"It might be important."

"I don't care."

"You might like that hugging bear, Lin, isn't it?"

"No."

"You might."

"I won't."

"Well, maybe, would you like me to give you another big hugs, for practice?"

"No. Thanks, all the same."

"Then, just hug it the bear, Lin."

"Sorry."

"Oh, pleeeeeeese," Prabaker wheedled.

"No."

"Yes, Lin, please hug it the bear," Prabaker encouraged, asking for support from the crowd. There were hundreds of people crammed into the lanes near my house. Children had found precarious vantage points on top of some of the sturdier huts.

"Do it, do it, do _it!" they wailed and shouted.

Looking around me, from face to laughing face, I realised that I didn't have any choice. I took the two steps, reached out tremulously, and slowly pressed myself against the shaggy fur of Kano the bear. He was surprisingly soft under the fur-almost pudgy. The thick forelegs were all muscle, however, and they closed around me at shoulder height with a massive power, a non human strength. I knew what it was to feel utterly helpless.

One fright-driven thought spun through my mind-Kano could snap my back as easily as I could snap a pencil. The bear's voice grumbled in his chest against my ear. A smell like wet moss filled my nostrils. Mixed with it was a smell like new leather shoes, and the smell of a child's woollen blanket. Beyond that, there was a piercing ammoniac smell, like bone being cut with a saw. The noise of the crowd faded. Kano was warm. Kano moved from side to side. The fur, in the grasp of my fingers, was soft, and attached to rolls of skin like that on the back of a dog's neck. I clung to the fur, and rocked with him. In its brawny grip, it seemed to me that I was floating, or perhaps falling, from some exalted place of inexpressible peace and promise.

Hands shook my shoulders, and I opened my eyes to see that I'd fallen to my knees. Kano the bear had released me from the hug, and was already at the end of the short lane, lumbering away with his slow, thumping tread in the company of his handlers and the retinue of people and maddened dogs.

"Linbaba, are you all right?"

"I'm fine, fine. Must have... I got dizzy, or something."

"Kano was giving you the pretty good squeezes, yes? Here, this is your message."

I went back to my hut and sat at the small table made from packing crates. Inside the crumpled envelope was a typed note on matching yellow paper. It was typed in English, and I suspected that it had been typed by one of the professional letter-writers on the Street of the Writers. It was from Abdullah.

My Dear Brother, Salaam aleikum. You told me that you are giving the bear hugs to the people. I think this is a custom in your country and even if I think it is very strange and even if I do not understand, I think you must be lonely for it here because in Bombay we have a shortage of bears. So I send you a bear for some hugging. Please enjoy. I hope he is like the hugging bears in your country. I am busy with business and I am healthy, thanks be to God. After my business I will return to Bombay soon, Inshallah. God bless you and your brother.

Abdullah Taheri Prabaker was standing at my left shoulder, reading the note out aloud, slowly.

"Aha, this is the Abdullah, who I am not supposed to be telling you that he is doing all the bad things, but really he is, even at the same time that I am not telling you... that he is."

"It's rude to read other people's mail, Prabu."

"Is rude, yes. Rude means that we like to do it, even when people tell us not to, yes?"

"Who are those bear guys?" I asked him. "Where are they staying?"

"They are making money with the dancing bear. They are original from UP., Uttar Pradesh, in the north of this, our Mother India, but travelling everywhere. Now they are staying at the zhopadpatti in Navy Nagar area. Do you want me to take you there?"

"No," I muttered, reading the note over again. "No, not now.

Maybe later."

Prabaker went to the open door of the hut and paused there, staring at me reflectively with his small, round head cocked to one side. I put the note in my pocket, and looked up at him. I thought he wanted to say something-there was a little struggle of concentration in his brow-but then he seemed to change his mind. He shrugged. He smiled.

"Some sick peoples are coming today?"

"A few. I think. Later."

"Well, I will be seeing you at the lunch party, yes?"

"Sure."

"Do you... do you want me, for to do anything?"

"No. Thanks."

"Do you want my neighbour, his wife, to wash it your shirt?"

"Wash my shirt?"

"Yes. It is smelling like bears. You are smelling like bears, Linbaba."

"It's okay," I laughed. "I kinda like it."

"Well, I'm going now. I'm going to drive my cousin Shantu's taxi."

"Okay then."

"All right. I'm going now."

He walked out, and when I was alone again the sounds of the slum swarmed around me: hawkers selling, children playing, women laughing, and love songs blaring from radios running on maximum distortion. There were also animal sounds, hundreds of them. With only days to go before the big rain, many itinerants and entertainers, like the two bear-handlers, had sought shelter in slums throughout the city. Ours was host to three groups of snake charmers, a team of monkey men, and numerous breeders of parrots and singing birds. The men who usually tethered horses in open ground near the Navy barracks brought their mounts to our makeshift stables. Goats and sheep and pigs, chickens and bullocks and water buffalo, even a camel and an elephant-the acres of the slum had become a kind of sprawling ark, providing sanctuary from the coming floods.

The animals were welcome, and no'-one questioned their right to shelter, but their presence did pose new problems. On the first night of their stay, the monkey men allowed one of their animals to escape while everyone was asleep. The mischievous creature scampered over the tops of several huts and lowered itself into the hut used by one group of snake charmers. The snake men housed their cobras in covered wicker baskets which were secured with a bamboo slip-catch and a stone placed on top of each cover. The monkey removed one of the stones, and opened a basket containing three cobras. From a safe vantage point at the top of the hut, the monkey shrieked the snake men awake, and they sounded the alarm.

"Saap alla! Saap alla! Saap!" Snakes are coming! Snakes!

There was pandemonium, then, as sleepy slum-dwellers rushed about with kerosene lanterns and flaming torches, striking at every shadow, and beating each other on the feet and shins with sticks and poles. A few of the flimsier huts were knocked over in the stampede. Qasim Ali finally restored order, and organised the snake men into two search parties that combed the slum systematically until they found the cobras and returned them to their basket.

Among their many other skills, the monkeys had also been trained to be excellent thieves. Like most of the slums throughout the city, ours was a stealing-free zone. With no locks on any of the doors, and no secret places for any of us to hide things, the monkeys were in a pilferer's paradise. Each day, the embarrassed monkey men were forced to set up a table outside their hut where all the items their monkeys had stolen could be displayed, and reclaimed by the rightful owners. The monkeys showed a marked preference for the glass bangles and brass anklets or bracelets worn by most of the little girls. Even after the monkey men bought them their own supply of the baubles, and festooned their hairy arms and legs with them, the monkeys still found the theft of such jewellery irresistible.

Qasim Ali decided at last to have noisy bells put on all the monkeys while they were within the slum. The creatures displayed an inventive resourcefulness in divesting themselves of the bells or in smothering them. I once saw two monkeys stalking along the deserted lane outside my hut, at dusk, their eyes huge with simian guilt and mischief. One of them had succeeded in removing the bells from around its neck. It walked on its hind legs, in tandem with the other ape, muffling the noise of the other's bells by holding on to them with both tiny hands. Despite their ingenuity, the bell music did make their usually noiseless capering more detectable, reducing their small felonies and the shame of their handlers.

Along with those itinerants, many of the people who lived on the streets near our slum were drawn to the relative security of our huts. Known as pavement dwellers, they were people who made homes for themselves on every available strip of unused land and any footpath wide enough to support their flimsy shelters, while still permitting pedestrian traffic. Their houses were the most primitive, and the conditions under which they lived the most harsh and brutalising, of all the millions of homeless people in Bombay. When the monsoon struck, their position was always dangerous and sometimes untenable, and many of them sought refuge in the slums.

They were from every part of India: Assamese and Tamils, Karnatakans and Gujaratis, people from Trivandrum, Bikaner, and Konarak. During the monsoon, five thousand of those extra souls squeezed themselves into the already over-crowded slum. With subtractions for the space taken up by animal pens, shops, storage areas, streets, lanes, and latrines, that allowed some two square metres for each man, woman, and child among us.

The greater-than-usual crowding caused some tensions and additional difficulties, but in the main the newcomers were treated tolerantly. I never heard anyone suggest that they shouldn't have been helped or made welcome. The only serious problems, in fact, came from outside the slum. Those five thousand extra people, and the many thousands who'd flocked to other slums as the monsoon approached, had been living on the streets. They'd all done their shopping, such as it was, in shops throughout the area. Their purchases were individually small- eggs, milk, tea, bread, cigarettes, vegetables, kerosene, children's clothes, and so on. Collectively, they accounted for large amounts of money and a considerable portion of the trade for local shops. When they moved to the slums, however, the newcomers tended to spend their money at the dozens of tiny shops within the slums. The small, illegal businesses supplied almost everything that could be bought in the legal shops of the well-established shopping districts. There were shops that supplied food, clothing, oils, pulses, kerosene, alcohol, hashish, and even electrical appliances. The slum was largely self-contained, and Johnny Cigar-a money and tax adviser to the slum businesses-estimated that the slum-dwellers spent twenty rupees within the slum for every one rupee they spent outside it.

Shopkeepers and small businessmen everywhere resented that attrition of their sales and the success of the thriving slum shops. When the threat of rain pulled even the pavement dwellers into the slums, their resentment turned to rage. They joined forces with local landlords, property developers, and others who feared and opposed the expansion of the slums. Pooling their resources, they recruited two gangs of thugs from areas outside Colaba, and paid them to attack the supply lines to slum shops.

Those returning from the large markets with cartloads of vegetables or fish or dry goods for shops in the slum were harassed, had their goods spoiled, and were sometimes even assaulted.

"I'd treated several children and young men who'd been attacked by those gangs. There'd been threats that acid would be thrown.

Unable to appeal to the police for help-the cops had been paid to maintain a discreet myopia-the slum-dwellers banded together to defend themselves. Qasim Ali formed brigades of children who patrolled the perimeter of the slum as lookouts, and several platoons of strong, young men to escort those who visited the markets.

Clashes had already occurred between our young men and the hired thugs. We all knew that, when the monsoon came, there would be more and greater violence. Tensions ran high. Still, the war of the shopkeepers didn't dispirit the slum-dwellers. On the contrary, the shopkeepers within the slum experienced a surge of popularity. They became demi-heroes, and were moved to respond with special sales, reduced prices, and a carnival atmosphere.

The ghetto was a living organism: to counter external threats, it responded with the antibodies of courage, solidarity, and that desperate, magnificent love we usually call the survival instinct. If the slum failed, there was nowhere and nothing else.

One of the young men who'd been injured in an attack on our supply lines was a laborer on the construction site beside the slum. His name was Naresh. He was nineteen years old. It was his voice, and a confident rapping on the open door of my hut, which scattered the brief, still solitude that I'd found when my friends and neighbours had followed Kano and his bear-handlers from the slum.

Without waiting for me to reply, Naresh stepped into the hut and greeted me.

"Hello, Linbaba," he greeted me, in English. "You have been hugging it bears, everyone says."

"Hello, Naresh. How's your arm? You want me to take a look at it?"

"If you have time, yes," he answered, switching to Marathi, his native tongue. "I took a break from work, and I have to return in fifteen or twenty minutes. I can come back another time if you are busy."

"No, now is okay. Come and sit down, and we'll have a look."

Naresh had been slashed on the upper arm with a barber's straight razor. The cut wasn't deep, and it should've healed quickly with no more than a wrap of bandage. The unclean humidity of his working conditions, however, accelerated the risk of infection.

The bandage I'd placed on his arm just two days before was filthy and soaked with sweat. I removed it, and stored the soiled dressing in a plastic bag for disposal later in one of the communal fires.

The wound was beginning to knit well enough, but it was an angry red, with some flares of yellowish-white. Khaderbhai's lepers had supplied me with a ten-litre container of surgical disinfectant.

I used it to wash my hands and then cleansed the wound, roughly scraping at it until there was no trace of the white infection.

It must've been tender, but Naresh endured the pain expressionlessly. When it was dry, I squeezed antibiotic powder into the crease of the cut and applied a fresh gauze dressing and bandage.

"Prabaker tells me you had a narrow escape from the police the other night, Naresh," I said as I worked, stumbling along in my broken Marathi.

"Prabaker has a disappointing habit of telling everybody the truth," Naresh frowned.

"You're telling me," I answered quickly, and we both laughed.

Like most of the Maharashtrians, Naresh was happy that I tried to learn his language, and like most of them he spoke slowly and very precisely, encouraging me to understand. There were no parallels between Marathi and English, it seemed to me: none of the similarities and famil- iar words that were shared by English and German, for example, or English and Italian. Yet Marathi was an easy language to learn because the people of Maharashtra were thrilled that I wanted to learn it, and they were very eager to teach.

"If you keep stealing with Aseef and his gang," I said, more seriously, "you're going to get caught."

"I know that, but I hope not. I hope the Enlightened One is on my side. It's for my sister. I pray that no harm will come to me, you see, because I am not stealing for myself, but for my sister.

She will be married soon, and there is not enough to pay the promised dowry. It is my responsibility. I am the oldest son."

Naresh was brave, intelligent, hard working, and kind with the young children. His hut wasn't much bigger than my own, but he shared it with his parents, and six brothers and sisters. He slept outside on the rough ground to leave more space for the younger ones inside. I'd visited his hut several times, and I knew that everything he owned in the world was contained in one plastic shopping bag: a change of rough clothes, one pair of good trousers and a shirt for formal occasions and for visiting the temple, a book of Buddhist verses, several photographs, and a few toiletries. He owned nothing else. He gave every rupee that he earned from his job or made from petty thefts to his mother, asking her for small change in return as he required it. He didn't drink or smoke or gamble. As a poor man with no immediate prospects, he had no girlfriend and only a slender chance of winning one. The one entertainment he allowed himself was a trip to the cheapest cinema, with his workmates, once a week. Yet he was a cheerful, optimistic young man. Sometimes, when I came home through the slum late at night, I saw him curled up on the path, outside the family hut, his thin young face slackened in sleep's exhausted smile.

"And you, Naresh?" I asked, fastening the bandage with a safety pin. "When will you get married?"

He stood, flexing his slender arm to loosen the tight bandage.

"After Poonam is married, there are two other sisters who must be married," he explained, smiling and wagging his head from side to side. "They must be first. In this, our Bombay, the poor man must look for husbands before he looks for a wife. Crazy, isn't it?

Amchi Mumbai, Mumbai amchi!" It's our Bombay, and Bombay is _ours!

He went out without thanking me, as was usual with the people I treated at my hut. I knew that he would invite me to dinner at his house one day soon, or bring me a gift of fruit or special incense. The people showed thanks, rather than saying it, and I'd come to accept that.

When Naresh emerged from my hut with a clean bandage, several people who saw him approached me for treatment. I attended to them one by one-rat bites, fever, infected rashes, ringworm- chatting with each, and catching up on the gossip that constantly swirled through the lanes and gullies like the ubiquitous dust devils.

The last of those patients was an elderly woman accompanied by her niece. She complained of pains in her chest, on the left side, but the extremes of Indian modesty made examination a complex procedure. I asked the girl to summon others to help. Two of the niece's young friends joined her in my hut. The friends held a sheet of thick cloth up between the elderly woman and myself, completely obscuring her from my view. The girl was standing beside her aunt in a position where she could look over the blanket and see me sitting on the other side. Then, as I touched my own chest here and there, the young niece imitated me by touching her aunt's breast.

"Does it hurt here?" I asked, probing my own chest above the nipple.

Behind the screen, the niece probed at her aunt's breast, asking my question.

"No."

"How about here?"

"No, not there."

"What about here?"

"Yes. There it is hurting," she answered.

"And here? Or here?"

"No, not there. A little bit here."

With that pantomime, and through the invisible hands of her niece, I finally established that the elderly woman had two painful lumps in her breast. I also learned that she experienced some pain with deep breaths, and when lifting heavy objects. I wrote a note for Doctor Hamid, detailing my second-hand observations and my conclusions. I'd just finished explaining to the girl that she should take her aunt to Doctor Hamid's surgery at once, and give him my note, when a voice spoke behind me.

"You know, poverty looks good on you. If you ever got really down and out, you might be irresistible." I turned in surprise to see Karla leaning in the doorway with her arms folded. An ironic half-smile turned up the corners of her mouth. She was dressed in green-loose silk trousers and a long sleeved top, with a shawl of darker green. Her black hair was free, and burnished with copper tints by the sun. The green of warm, shallow water in a dreamed lagoon blazed in her eyes. She was almost too beautiful: as beautiful as a blush of summer sunset on a sky-wide stream of cloud.

"How long have you been there?" I asked, laughing.

"Long enough to see this weird faith-healing system of yours in operation. Are you curing people by telepathy now?"

"Indian women are very obstinate when it comes to having their breasts handled by strangers," I replied when the patient and her relatives had filed past Karla, and left the hut.

"Nobody's perfect, as Didier would say," she drawled, with a smirk that fluttered just short of a smile. "He misses you, by the way. He asked me to say hello to you. In fact, they all miss you. We haven't seen much of you at Leopold's, since you started this Red Cross routine."

I was glad that Didier and the others hadn't forgotten me, but I didn't look her in the eye. When I was alone, I felt safe and satisfyingly busy in the slum. Whenever I saw friends from beyond those sprawling acres, a part of me shrivelled in shame. Fear and guilt are the dark angels that haunt rich men, Khader said to me once. I wasn't sure if that was true, or if he simply wanted it to be true, but I did know from experience that despair and humiliation haunt the poor.

"Come in, come in. This is a real surprise. Sit... sit here, while I just... clean up a bit."

She came over and sat on the wooden stool as I gathered a plastic bag containing used swabs and bandages, and swept the last of the litter into it. I washed my hands with spirit once more, and packed the medicines into the little rack of shelves.

She looked around the small hut, examining everything with a critical eye. As my gaze followed hers, I saw my little house for the shabby, threadbare hovel that it really was. Because I lived alone in the hut, I'd come to think of it as luxuriously spacious, in contrast to the crowding that was everywhere around me. With her beside me, it seemed mean and cramped.

The bare earth floor was cracked, and formed in lumpy undulations. Holes as big as my fist punctured every wall, exposing my life to the brawl and business of the bustling lane outside. Children peeped in through the holes at Karla and me, emphasising how unprivate my life there was. The reed matting of the roof sagged, and had even given way in a few places. My kitchen consisted of a single-burner kerosene stove, two cups, two metal plates, a knife, a fork, a spoon, and a few containers of spices. The whole of it fitted into a cardboard box, and was stored in one corner.

I was in the habit of buying only enough for a single meal at a time, so there was no food. The water was stored in an earthenware matka. It was slum water. I couldn't offer it to her because I knew Karla couldn't drink it. My only furniture was a cupboard for medicines, a small table, a chair, and a wooden stool. I remembered how delighted I'd been when those sticks of furniture were given to me; how rare they were in the slum. With her eyes, I saw the cracks in the wood, the stains of mildew, the repairs made with wire and string.

I looked back to where she sat on the stool, lighting a cigarette and blowing the smoke out through the side of her mouth. A rush of irrational resentment seized me. I was almost angry that she'd made me see the unlovely truth of my house.

"It's... it's not much. I..."

"It's fine," she said, reading my heart. "I lived in a little hut like this in Goa for a year once. And I was happy. There isn't a day goes by when I don't feel like going back there. I sometimes think that the size of our happiness is inversely proportional to the size of our house."

She raised her left eyebrow in a high arch as she said it, challenging me to respond and meet her on her level, and with that gesture it was all right between us. I wasn't resentful any more. I knew, I was certain somehow, that wanting my little house to be bigger or brighter or grander than it was had been in my mind, not hers. She wasn't judging. She was only looking, seeing everything, even what I felt.

My neighbour's twelve-year-old son, Satish, came into the hut, carrying his tiny, two-year-old cousin on his hip. He stood close to Karla, staring unselfconsciously. She stared back at him just as intently, and I was struck by how similar they were in that instant, the Indian boy and the European woman. Both had full lipped, expressive mouths, and hair that was night-sky black; and although Karla's eyes were sea-green and the boy's were dark bronze, each pair wore the same grave expression full of interest and humour.

"Satish, chai bono," I said to him. Make some tea.

He gave me a quick smile, and hurried out. Karla was the first foreign miss he'd ever seen in the slum, so far as I knew. He was excited to have the task of serving her. I knew he would talk about it to the other kids for weeks afterwards.

"So, tell me, how did you find me? How did you even get in here?"

I asked her when we were alone.

"Get in?" she frowned. "It's not illegal to visit you, is it?"

"No," I laughed, "but it's not common either. I don't get many visitors here."

"Actually, it was easy. I just stepped off the street and asked people to take me to you."

"And they brought you here?"

"Not exactly. They're very protective of you, you know. They took me to your friend, Prabaker, first, and he brought me to you."

"Prabaker?"

"Yes, Lin, you want me?" Prabaker said, popping through the doorway from his eavesdropping post outside.

"I thought you were going to drive your taxi," I muttered, adopting the stern expression that I knew amused him the most.

"My cousin Shantu's taxi," he said, grinning. "Was driving, yes, but now my other cousin, Prakash, he is driving, while I am taking it my two hours of lunch breaks. I was at Johnny Cigar, his house, when some people came there with Miss Karla. She wants to see you, and I came here. It is very good, yes?"

"It's good, Prabu," I sighed.

Satish returned, carrying a tray with three cups of hot, sweet tea. He handed them to us, and tore open a small packet containing four Parle Gluco biscuits, which he presented to us with a solemn sense of ceremony. I expected him to eat the fourth biscuit himself, but he placed it on his palm instead, marked it off into even sections with his grubby thumb nail, and then broke it into two pieces. Measuring the fragments against one another, he picked the one that was minutely larger and handed it to Karla. The other went to his baby cousin, who sat in the doorway of the hut and nibbled at the biscuit happily.

I was sitting on the straight-backed chair, and Satish came over to squat on the floor beside my feet. He rested his shoulder against my knee. I was big enough to know that the rare show of affection was a breakthrough with Satish. At the same time I was small enough to hope that Karla had noticed it, and was impressed by it.

We finished the tea, and Satish gathered the empty cups, leaving the hut without a word. At the door, he gave Karla a long-lashed, lingering smile as he took his cousin's hand to lead her away.

"He's a nice kid," she remarked.

"He is. My next-door neighbour's son. You really sparked something in him today. He's normally very shy. So, what brings you to my humble home, anyway?"

"Oh, I just happened to be in the area," she said nonchalantly, looking at the gaps in my wall, where a dozen little faces stared in at us. The voices of other children could be heard, questioning Satish about her. Who is she? Is she Linbaba's wife?

"Passing by, huh? It couldn't be, maybe, that you missed me, just a little bit?"

"Hey don't push your luck," she mocked.

"I can't help it. It's a genetic thing. I come from a long line of luck-pushers. Don't take it personally."

"I take everything personally-that's what being a person is all about. And I'll take you to lunch, if you're finished with your patients."

"Well, I have a lunch date, actually-"

"Oh. Okay, then-"

"No, no. You're welcome to come, if you like. It's kind of an open invitation. We're having a celebration lunch today, right here. I'd be very happy if you'd... be our guest. I think you'll like it. Tell her she'll like it, Prabu."

"We will have it a very nice lunches!" Prabaker said. "My good self, I have kept it a complete empty stomach for filling up to fat. So good is the food. You will enjoy so much, the people will think you are having a baby inside your dress."

"Okay," she said slowly, and then looked at me. "He's a persuasive guy, your Prabaker."

"You should meet his father," I replied, shaking my head in a resigned shrug.

Prabaker's chest swelled with pride, and he wagged his head happily. "So, where are we going?"

"It's at the Village in the Sky," I told her.

"I don't think I've heard of it," she said, frowning.

Prabaker and I laughed, and the vaguely suspicious furrows in her brow deepened.

"No, you won't have heard of it, but I think you'll like it.

Listen, you go on ahead with Prabaker. I'll wash up, and change my shirt. I'll just be a couple of minutes, okay?"

"Fine," she said.

Our eyes met, and held. For some reason, she lingered, watching me expectantly. I couldn't understand the expression, and I was still trying to read it when she stepped close to me and quickly kissed my lips. It was a friendly kiss, impulsive and generous and light-hearted, but I let myself believe that it was more. She walked out with Prabaker, and I spun around on one foot, whispering a shout of joy while I did an excited little dance. I looked up to see the children peering through the holes in the hut and giggling at me. I made a scary face at them, and they laughed harder, breaking into little whirling parodies of my dance. Two minutes later, I loped through the slum lanes after Prabaker and Karla, tucking my clean shirt into my pants as I ran, and shaking the water from my hair.

Our slum, like many others in Bombay, came into being to serve the needs of a construction site-two thirty-five-floor buildings, the World Trade Centre towers, being built on the shore of the Colaba Back Bay. The tradesmen, artisans, and labourers who built the towers were housed in hutments, tiny slum-dwellings, on land adjacent to the site. The companies that planned and constructed large buildings, in those years, were forced to provide such land for housing. Many of the tradesmen were itinerant workers who followed where their skills were needed, and whose real homes were hundreds of kilometres away in other states. Most of the workers who were native to Bombay simply had no homes, other than those they found with their jobs.

In fact, many men accepted the risks of that hard and dangerous work for no other reason than to gain the security of one of those shelters.

The companies were happy enough to comply with the laws that made land and huts available because the arrangement was eminently suitable to them in other ways. The kinship fostered in workers' slums guaranteed a sense of unity, familial solidarity, and loyalty to the company, which served employers well. Travelling time to and from work was eliminated when men lived on the site. The wives, children, and other dependants of employed workers provided a ready source of additional labourers. They were hired from that pool and put to work, from day to day, at a moment's notice. And the entire work force of several thousand people were much more easily influenced, and to some extent even controlled, when they lived in a single community.

When the World Trade Centre towers were first planned, a large area was set aside and marked off into more than three hundred hut-sized plots. As workers signed on, they received one of the plots and a sum of money with which to buy bamboo poles, reed matting, hemp rope, and scrap timber. Each man then built his own house, assisted by family and friends. The sprawl of fragile huts spread outward like a shallow, tender root-system for the huge towers that were to come. Vast underground wells were sunk to provide water for the community. Rudimentary lanes and pathways were scraped flat. Finally, a tall, barbed wire fence was erected around the perimeter to keep out squatters. The legal slum was born.

Drawn by the regular wages that those workers had to spend, and no less by the plentiful supply of fresh water, squatters soon arrived and settled outside the fence-line. Entrepreneurs establishing chai shops and small grocery stores were the first, attaching their tiny shops to the fence. Workers from the legal compound stooped to crouch through gaps in the wire, and spend their money. Vegetable shops and tailor shops and little restaurants were next. Gambling dens and other dens for the sale of alcohol or charras soon followed. Each new business clung to the fence of the compound until at last there was no space left on the fence-line. The illegal slum then began to grow outward into the surrounding acres of open land leading to the sea.

Homeless people joined in ever-larger numbers, picking out squares for their huts. New holes were stretched in the fence.

Squatters used them to enter the legal slum to collect water, and workers used them to make purchases in the illegal slum, or visit new friends.

The squatters' slum grew rapidly, but with a haphazard, needs driven planlessness that was a disorderly contrast to the neater lanes of the workers' slum. In time there were eight squatters for every person in the workers' compound, more than twenty-five thousand people in all, and the division between legal and illegal slums became blurred, camouflaged by the crowding. Although the Bombay Municipal Corporation condemned the illegal slum, and construction company officers discouraged contact between workers and squatters, the people thought of themselves as one group; their days and dreams and drives were entangled in the ravel of ghetto life. To workers and squatters alike, the company fence was like all fences: arbitrary and irrelevant. Some of the workers who weren't permitted to bring more than immediate family into the legal slum invited their relatives to squat near them, beyond the wire. Friendships flourished among the children of both sides, and marriages of love or arrangement were common.

Celebrations on one side of the wire were well attended by residents from both sides. And because fires, floods, and epidemics didn't recognise barbed-wire boundaries, emergencies in one part of the slum required the close co-operation of all.

Karla, Prabaker, and I bent low to step through an opening in a section of fence, and we passed into the legal slum. A covey of children trooped along beside us, dressed in freshly washed T-shirts and dresses. They all knew Prabaker and me well. I'd treated many of the young children, cleaning and bandaging cuts, abrasions, and rat bites. And more than a few of the workers, afraid that they might be stood down from work when they received minor injuries on the construction site, had visited my free clinic rather than the company's first-aid officer.

"You know everybody here," Karla remarked as we were stopped for the fifth time by a group of neighbours. "Are you running for mayor of this place, or what?"

"Hell, no. I can't stand politicians. A politician is someone who promises you a bridge, even when there's no river."

"That's not bad," she murmured. Her eyes were laughing.

"I wish I could say it was mine," I grinned. "An actor named Amitabh said it."

"Amitabh Bachchan?" she asked. "The Big B himself?"

"Yeah-do you like Bollywood movies?"

"Sure, why not?"

"I don't know," I answered, shaking my head. "I just didn't... think you would."

There was a pause, then, that became an awkward silence. She was first to speak.

"But you do know a lot of people here, and they like you a lot."

I frowned, genuinely surprised by the suggestion. It never occurred to me that the people in the slum might like me. I knew that some men-Prabaker, Johnny Cigar, even Qasim Ali Hussein- regarded me as a friend. I knew that some others treated me with a respect that seemed honest and unfeigned. But I didn't consider the friendship or the respect as any part of being liked.

"This is a special day," I said, smiling and trying to shift ground. "The people have been trying for years to get their own primary school. They've got about eight hundred school-age kids, but the schools for miles around are full, and can't take them.

The people got their own teachers organised, and found a good spot for a school, but the authorities still put up a hell of a fight."

"Because it's a slum..."

"Yeah. They're afraid that a school would give the place a kind of legitimacy. In theory, the slum doesn't exist, because it's not legal and not recognised."

"We are the not-people," Prabaker said happily, "And these are the not-houses, where we are not-living."

"And now we have a not-school to go with it," I concluded for him. "The municipality finally agreed to a kind of compromise.

They allowed them to set up a temporary school near here, and there'll be another one organised soon. But they'll have to tear them down when the construction is finished."

"When will that be?"

"Well, they've been building these towers for five years already, and there's probably about three more years' work in it, maybe more. No-one's really sure what'll happen when the buildings are finished. In theory, at least, the slum will be cleared."

"Then all this will be gone?" Karla asked, turning to sweep the hutment city with her gaze.

"All will be gone," Prabaker sighed.

"But today's a big day. The campaign for the school was a long one, and it got pretty violent sometimes. Now the people have won, and they'll have their school, so there'll be a big celebration tonight. Meanwhile, one of the men who works here has finally got a son, after having five daughters in a row, so he's having a special pre-celebration lunch, and everyone's invited."

"The Village in the Sky!" Prabaker laughed.

"Just where is this place? Where are you taking me?"

"Right here," I replied, pointing upwards. "Right up there."

We'd reached the perimeter of the legal slum, and the megalithic immensity of the twin skyscrapers loomed before us. Concreting had been completed to three-quarters of their height, but there were no windows, doors, or fittings on the unfinished buildings.

With no flash or reflection or trim to relieve the grey massiveness of the structures, they swallowed light into themselves, extinguished it, and became silos for storing shadows. The hundreds of cave-like holes that would eventually be windows allowed a kind of cross-sectional view into the construction-an ant-farm picture of men and women and children, on every floor, walking to and fro, upward and down, about their tasks. At ground level, the noise was a percussive and exciting music of towering ambition: the nervous irritation of generators, the merciless metal-to-metal zing of hammers, and the whining insistence of drills and grinders.

Snaking lines of sari-clad women carrying dishes of gravel on their heads wove through all the workplaces, from man-made dunes of small stones to the yawning mouths of ceaselessly revolving cement-mixing machines. To my western eyes, those fluid, feminine figures in soft red, blue, green, and yellow silk were incongruous in the physical turmoil of the construction site. Yet I knew, from watching them through the months, that they were indispensable to the work. They carried the great bulk of stone and steel and cement on their slender backs, one round dish-full at a time. The uppermost floors hadn't been concreted, but the framework of upright, transom, and truss girders was already in place and even there, thirty-five storeys into the sky, women worked beside the men. They were simple people from simple villages, most of them, but their view of the great city was unparalleled, for they were building the tallest structures in Bombay.

"Tallest buildings in all India," Prabaker said with a gesture of expansive, proprietal pride. He lived in the illegal slum, and had nothing whatsoever to do with the construction, but he boasted about the buildings as if they were his own design.

"Well, the tallest buildings in Bombay, anyway," I corrected.

"You'll get a good view from up there. We're having lunch on the twenty-third floor."

"Up... there?" Karla said through an expression of exquisite dread. "No problem, Miss Karla. We are not walking up it, this building.

We are travelling first class, in that very fine lifts."

Prabaker pointed to the freight elevator attached to the outside of the building in a yellow, steel framework. She watched as the platform jerked and rattled upwards on heavy cables with loads of men and equipment.

"Oh, swell," Karla said. "Now I feel great about it."

"I feel great, too, Miss Karla!" Prabaker agreed, his smile huge as he tugged at her sleeve and pulled her toward the elevator.

"Come, we will catch the lifts on the next run. They are a beautiful buildings, yes?"

"I don't know. They look like monuments to something that died," she muttered to me as we followed him. "Something very unpopular... like... the human spirit, for example."

The workmen who ran the freight elevator shouted safety instructions at us, gruff in their self-importance. We climbed onto the wobbling platform with several other men and women, and a wheelbarrow containing work tools and barrels of rivets. The driver blew two shrill blasts on his metal whistle and threw the lever that activated the powerful generators, controlling our ascent. The motor roared, the platform shuddered, throwing us at the panic-handles attached to the uprights, and the elevator groaned slowly upwards. There was no cage surrounding the platform, only a yellow pipe at waist height around the three open sides. In a few seconds, we were fifty, eighty, a hundred metres off the ground.

"How do you like it?" I shouted.

"I'm scared out of my brain!" she shouted back, her dark eyes shining. "It's great!"

"Are you afraid of heights?"

"Only when I'm on them! I hope you got a reservation, at this goddamn restaurant of yours! What are we doing eating lunch here, anyway? Don't you think they should finish the building first?"

"They're working on the top floors now. This elevator is constantly in use. It's not usually available for the workers to use. It's reserved for wheelbarrows and building materials and stuff. It's a long climb, up thirty flights of steps every day, and it gets fairly tricky in places. A lot of the people who work these upper floors stay up here most of the time. They live up here. Eat, work, and sleep. They've got farm animals and kitchens and everything. Goats for milk, and chickens for eggs, everything they need is sent up to them. It's sort of like a base camp that mountaineers use when they climb Everest."

"The Village in the Sky!" she shouted back.

"You got it."

The elevator stopped at the twenty-third floor, and we stumbled out onto a concrete surface that sprouted clumps of steel rods and wires like metal weeds. It was a vast, cavernous space, divided by equidistant columns and canopied by a flat, concrete ceiling adorned with a creepery of cables. Every flat plane was an unrelieved grey, which gave a startling vividness to the human and animal figures grouped on the far side of the floor. An area around one of the pillars was fenced off with wicker and bamboo for use as an animal pen. Straw and hessian was strewn about to serve as bedding for the goats, chickens, cats, and dogs that foraged amid discarded food scraps and rubbish in the pen. Rolled blankets and mattresses, for the people who slept there, were heaped around another pillar. Yet another pillar had been designated as a play area for children, with a few games and toys and small mats scattered for their use.

As we approached the crowd of people, we saw that a great feast was being laid out on clean reed mats. Huge banana leaves served as plates. A team of women scooped out servings of saffron rice, alu palak, kheema, bhajee, and other foods. A battery of kerosene stoves stood nearby, and more food was cooking there. We washed our hands in a drum of water and joined the others, sitting on the floor between Johnny Cigar and Prabaker's friend Kishore. The food was much more piquantly spiced with chillies and curries than any available in restaurants in the city, and much more delicious. As was customary, the women had their own banquet, laid out some five metres away. Karla was the only female in our group of twenty men.

"How are you liking the party?" Johnny asked Karla as the first course of foods was being replaced by the second.

"It's great," she replied. "Damn nice food. Damn nice place to eat it."

"Ah! Here is the new daddy!" Johnny called out. "Come here, Dilip. Meet Miss Karla, a friend of Lin's who has come to eat with us."

Dilip bowed low with his hands pressed together in greeting, and then moved away, smiling shyly, to supervise the preparation of tea at two large stoves. He worked as a rigger on the site. The site manager had given him the day off to organise the feast for his family and friends. His hut was on the legal side of the slum, but close to my own across the wire. Beside the women's banquet area, just beyond Dilip's tea stoves, two men were attempting to clean something from the wall. A word that someone had painted there was still legible beneath their scrubbing. It was the word SAPNA, written in large English capitals.

"What is that?" I asked Johnny Cigar. "I've seen it everywhere lately."

"It's bad, Linbaba," he spat out, crossing himself superstitiously. "It's the name of a thief, a goonda. He's a bad fellow. He's been doing evil things all over the city. He's been breaking into houses, and stealing, and even killing."

"Did you say killing?" Karla asked. The skin on her lips was tight, and her jaw was set in a hard, grim line.

"Yes!" Johnny insisted. "First it was just words, in posters and such, and writing on the walls. Now, it has come to murder-cold blood murder. Two people were killed in their own houses just last night."

"He is so crazy, this Sapna, he uses a _girl's name," Jeetendra sneered.

It was a good point. The word sapna, meaning dream, was feminine, and a fairly common girl's name.

"Not so crazy," Prabaker disagreed, his eyes gleaming but his expression grave. "He tells that he is the king of thieves. He talks about making it war, to help the poor people, and killing the rich peoples. This is crazy, yes, but it is the kind of a crazy that many people will agree with, inside the quiet of their own heads."

"Who is he?" I asked.

"Nobody knows who he is, Lin," Kishore said, his American accented English, learned from tourists, flowing in a liquid drawl. "A lot of people are talking about him, but nobody I spoke to has ever seen him. People say he's the son of a rich man. They say he's from Delhi, and that he got cut out of his inheritance.

But some people also say he's a devil. Some people think that it's not a man at all, but a kind of organisation, like. There are posters stuck up around the place, posters telling the thieves and the poor buggers in the zhopadpattis to do crazy things. And like Johnny said, now two people have been murdered.

The name Sapna is getting painted on walls and streets all over Bombay. The cops are asking a lot of questions. I think they're scared."

"The rich peoples are scared, too," Prabaker added. "They were rich people, those unlucky fellows, killed in their homes. This Sapna fellow is writing his name in English letters, not the Hindi writing. This is an edu- cated fellow. And who painted that name here, in this place? The peoples are always here, always work or sleep, but nobody has seen who painted his name. An educated ghost! Rich peoples are also scared. Not so crazy, this Sapna fellow."

"Madachudh! Pagal!" Johnny spat again. _Motherfucker! _Madman!

"He's trouble, this Sapna, and the trouble will be ours, you know, because trouble is the only property that poor fellows like us are allowed to own."

"I think we might change the subject, guys," I interjected, looking at Karla. Her face was pale, and her eyes were wide with what seemed to be fright. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," she answered quickly. "Maybe that elevator ride was scarier than I thought."

"Sorry for problem, Miss Karla," Prabaker apologised, his face pinched in a solicitous frown. "From now, only happy talking. No more talking about killing and murders and blood all over the houses, and all that."

"That should cover it, Prabu," I muttered through clenched teeth, glaring at him.

Several young women came to clear the used banana leaves away, and lay out small dishes of sweet rabdi dessert for us. They stared at Karla with frank fascination.

"Her legs are too thin," one of them said, in Hindi. "You can see them, through the pants."

"And her feet are too big," said another.

"But her hair is very soft, and a good, black Indian colour," said a third.

"Her eyes are the colour of stink-weed," said the first with a contemptuous sniff.

"Be careful, sisters," I laughed, speaking in Hindi. "My friend speaks perfect Hindi, and she understands everything you're saying."

The women reacted with shocked scepticism, chattering amongst themselves. One of them stooped to stare into Karla's face, and asked her loudly if she spoke Hindi.

"My legs may be too thin, and my feet may be too big," Karla replied in fluent Hindi, "but there's nothing wrong with my hearing."

The women shrieked in delight and crowded around her, laughing happily. They pleaded with her to join them, sweeping her away to the women's banquet. I watched her for some time, surprised to see her smile and even laugh out loud in the company of the women and the young girls. She was the most beautiful woman I'd ever known. It was the beauty of a desert at dawn: a loveliness that filled my eyes, and crushed me into silent, unbreathing awe.

Looking at her there, in the Village in the Sky, watching her laugh, it shocked me to think that I'd deliberately avoided her for so many months. I was no less surprised by how tactile the girls were with her, how easily they reached out to stroke her hair or to take her hands in their own. I'd perceived her to be aloof and almost cold. In less than a minute, those women were more familiar with her than I'd dared to be in more than a year of friendship. I remembered the quick, impulsive kiss she'd given me, in my hut. I remembered the smell of cinnamon and jasmine in her hair, and the press of her lips, like sweet grapes swollen with the summer sun.

Tea arrived, and I took my glass to stand near one of the huge window openings that looked out over the slum. Far below, the tattered cloak of the ghetto spread outward from the construction site to the very edge of the sea. The narrow lanes, obscured by ragged overhangs, were only partially visible and seemed more like tunnels than streets. Smoke rose in drifts from cooking fires, and stuttered on a sluggish seaward breeze to disperse over a scattering of canoes that fished the muddy shore.

Inland from the slum there were a large number of tall apartment buildings, the expensive homes of the middle-rich. From my perch, I looked down at the fabulous gardens of palms and creepers on the tops of some, and the miniature slums that servants of the rich had built for themselves on the tops of others. Mould and mildew scarred every building, even the newest. I'd come to think of it as beautiful, that decline and decay, creeping across the face of the grandest designs: that stain of the end, spreading across every bright beginning in Bombay.

"You're right, it is a good view," Karla said quietly as she joined me.

"I come up here at night, sometimes, when everyone's asleep," I said, just as quietly. "It's one of my favourite places to be alone."

Дата добавления: 2015-10-26