Chapter fifteen

"Wake up, Lin! Hey, Linbaba, you must awake up now!"

One eye opened, and focused on a hovering, brown balloon that had Johnny Cigar's face painted on it. The eye closed again.

"Go away, Johnny."

"Hello to you, too, Lin," he chuckled, infuriatingly happy. "You have to get up."

"You're an evil man, Johnny. You're a cruel and evil man. Go away."

"One fellow has an injury, Lin. We need your medicine box, and your good medical self also."

"It's still dark, man." I groaned. "It's two o'clock in the morning. Tell him to come back in the daylight, when I'm alive."

"Oh, certainly, I will tell him, and he will go, but I think you should know that he is bleeding very swiftly. Still, if you must have more sleep, I will beat him away from your door, this very instant, with three-four good shots from my slipper."

I was leaning out over the deep pool of sleep but that word, bleeding, pulled me back from the edge. I sat up, wincing at the numbed stiffness of one hip. My bed, like most of the beds in the slum, was a blanket, folded twice and placed on the hard-packed earth. Kapok mattresses were available, but they were impractical. They took up too much space in the small huts, they quickly became infested with lice, fleas, and other vermin, and rats found them irresistible. After long months of sleeping on the ground, I was as used to it as a man gets, but there wasn't much flesh on my hips, and I woke up sore every morning.

Johnny was holding a lamp quite close to my face. I blinked, pushing it aside to see another man squatting in the doorway with his arm held out in front of him. There was a large cut or gash on the arm, and blood seeped from it, drip, drip, drop, into a bucket. Only half awake, as I was, I stared stupidly at the yellow plastic bucket. The man had brought his own bucket with him to stop the blood from staining the floor of my hut, and that seemed more disturbing, somehow, than the wound itself.

"Sorry for trouble, Mr. Lin," the young man said.

"This is Ameer," Johnny Cigar grunted, whacking the injured man on the back of the head with a resounding slap. "Such a stupid fellow he is, Lin. Now he's sorry for trouble. I should take my slipper and beat your black, and beat some of your blue also."

"God, what a mess. This is a bad cut, Johnny." It was a long, deep slash from the shoulder almost to the tip of the elbow. A large, triangular flap of skin, shaped like the lapel of an overcoat, was beginning to curl away from the wound. "He needs a doctor. This has to be stitched up. You should've taken him to the hospital."

"Hospital naya!" Ameer whined. "Nahin, baba!"

Johnny slapped him on the ear.

"Shut up, you stupid! He won't go to a hospital or a doctor, Lin.

He's a cheeky fellow, a goonda. He's afraid of police. Aren't you, hey, you stupid? Afraid of police, na?"

"Stop hitting him, Johnny. It's really not helping. How did this happen?"

"Fighting. His gang, with the other gang. They fight, with swords and choppers, these street gangsters, and this is the result."

"The other fellows started it. They were doing the Eve-teasing!"

Ameer complained. Eve-teasing was the name given to the charge of sexual harassment, under Indian law, and it covered a range of offences from insulting language to physical molestation. "We warned them to stop it. Our ladies were not walking safely. For that reason only we did fight them."

Johnny raised his broad hand, silencing Ameer's protest. He wanted to strike the young man again, but my frown gave him reluctant pause.

"You think this is a reason to fight with swords and choppers, you stupid? Your mummy will be very happy that you stop the Eve teasing, and get yourself hacked up into teeny pieces, na? Very happy she'll be! And now you want Linbaba to sew you up, and make nice repairs to your arm. Shameful, you are!"

"Wait a minute, Johnny. I can't do this. It's too big, too messy... it's too much."

"You have the needles and cotton in your medical boxes, Lin." He was right. The kit contained suture needles and silk thread.

But I'd never used them.

"I've never used them, Johnny. I can't do it. He needs a professional-a doctor or a nurse."

"I told you, Lin. He won't go to a doctor. I tried to force him.

Someone in the other gang was hurt even more seriously than this stupid boy. Maybe he will die also, this other fellow. It is a police matter now, and they are asking questions. Ameer won't go to any doctor or hospital."

"If you give me, I will do myself," Ameer said, swallowing hard.

His eyes were huge with fright and horror-struck resolve. I looked at him full in the face for the first time, and I saw how young he was: sixteen or seventeen years old. He was wearing Puma sneakers, jeans, and a basketball singlet with the number printed on the front. The clothes were Indian copies of famous western brands, but they were considered fashionably hip by his peers in the slum, other young men with lean bellies and heads full of scrambled foreign dreams; young men who went without food to buy clothes that they imagined made them look like the cool foreigners in magazines and films.

I didn't know the kid. He was one of thousands I'd never seen, although I'd been there for almost six months, and no-one in the place lived more than five or six hundred metres from my hut.

Some men, such as Johnny Cigar and Prabaker, appeared to know everyone in the slum. It seemed extraordinary to me that they should know intimate details from the lives of so many thousands of people. It was even more remarkable that they cared-that they encouraged and scolded and worried about all of them. I wondered how that young man was connected to Johnny Cigar. Ameer shivered in the swirling chill of night, pressing his lips into a wide, noiseless whine as he contemplated taking needle and thread to his own flesh. I wondered how it was that Johnny, standing above him, knew him well enough to be sure he would do it; to nod at me with the message, Yes, if you give him the needle, he will do it himself.

"Okay, okay, I'll do it," I surrendered. "It's going to hurt. I haven't got any anaesthetic."

"Hurt!" Johnny boomed happily. "Pain is no problem, Lin. Good you have pains, Ameer, you chutia. Pains in your brains, you should be having."

I sat Ameer down on my bed, covering his shoulders with another blanket. Pulling the kerosene stove from my kitchen box, I pumped it up, primed it, and set a pot of water on it to boil. Johnny hurried off to ask someone to make hot, sweet tea. I washed my face and hands hurriedly, in the dark, at the open bathroom-space beside my hut. When the water boiled, I put a little into a dish, and threw two needles into the pot to sterilise them with further boiling. Using antiseptic and warm soapy water, I washed the wound and then dried it off with clean gauze. I bound the arm tightly with gauze, leaving it in place for ten minutes to press the wound together, in the hope that it would make the stitching easier.

Ameer drank two large mugs of sweet tea at my insistence, as a counter to the symptoms of shock that had begun to show. He was afraid, but he was calm. He trusted me. He couldn't know that I'd only done the procedure once before, and under ironically similar circumstances. A man had been stabbed during a prison fight. The problem between the two antagonists, whatever it was, had been resolved in the violent encounter, and the matter was finished so far as they were concerned. But if the stabbed man had reported to the prison infirmary for treatment, the authorities would've placed him in an isolation unit for prisoners on protection. For some men, child molesters and informers particularly, there was no alternative to being placed on protection because they wouldn't otherwise have survived. For others, men placed there against their will, the protection unit was a curse: the curse of suspicion, slanders, and the company of men they despised. The stabbed man had come to me. I'd stitched his wound closed with a leatherwork needle and embroidery thread. The wound healed, but it left an ugly, rippling scar. The memory of it never left me, and I wasn't confident about the attempt to stitch Ameer's arm.

The sheepish, trusting smile that the young man offered me was no help. People always hurt us with their trust, Karla said to me once. The surest way to hurt someone you like, is to put all your trust in him.

I drank tea, smoked a cigarette, and then set to work. Johnny stood in the doorway, ineffectually scolding several curious neighbours and their children away from the door. The suture needle was curved and very fine. I supposed that it should've been used with some kind of pliers. I had none in my kit. One of the boys had borrowed them to fix a sewing machine. I had to push the needle into the skin, and pull it through with my fingers. It was awkward and slippery, and the first few cross-shaped stitches were messy. Ameer winced and grimaced inventively, but he didn't cry out. By the fifth and sixth stitches I'd developed a technique, and the ugliness of the work, if not the pain involved, had diminished.

Human skin is tougher and more resilient than it looks. It's also relatively simple to stitch, and the thread can be pulled quite tightly without tearing the tissue. But the needle, no matter how fine or sharp, is still a foreign object and, for those of us who aren't inured to such work through frequent repetition, there's a psychological penalty that must be paid each time we drive that alien thing into another being's flesh. I began to sweat heavily despite the cool night. It was a measure of the distress involved that Ameer became brighter as the work progressed, while I grew more tense and fatigued.

"You should've insisted that he go to a hospital!" I snapped at Johnny Cigar. "This is ridiculous!"

"You're doing very excellent sewing, Lin," he countered. "You could make up a very fine shirt, with stitches like that."

"It's not as good as it should be. He'll have a big scar. I don't know what the fuck I'm doing here."

"Are you having trouble with toilet, Lin?"

"What?"

"Are you not going to toilet? Are you having it hard motions?"

"For Chrissakes, Johnny! What are you babbling about?"

"Your bad temper, Lin. This is not your usual behaviour. Maybe it is a problem with hard motions, I think so?"

"No," I groaned.

"Ah, then it is loose motions you're having, I think."

"He had it loose motions for three days last month," one of my neighbours chipped in from the open doorway. "My husband told me that Linbaba was going three-three-four times to toilet every day then, and again three-three-four times every night. The whole street was talking."

"Oh yes, I remember," another neighbour recalled. "Such pain he had! What faces he pulled when he was at toilet, yaar. Like he was making a baby. And it was a very runny, loose motion. Like water, it was, and it came out so fast, like when they explode the cannons on Independence Day. Da-dung! Like that, it was! I recommended the drinking of chandu-chai that time, and his motions became harder, and a very good colour again."

"A good idea," Johnny muttered appreciatively. "Go and get it some chandu-chai for Linbaba's loose motions." "No!" I moaned. "I don't have loose motions. I don't have hard motions. I haven't had a chance to have any motions at all yet.

I'm only half awake, for God's sake! Oh, what's the use? There, it's finished. You'll be okay, Ameer, I think. But you should have a tetanus injection."

"No need, Linbaba. I had it injections before three months, after the last fighting."

I cleaned the wound once more and dusted it with antibiotic powder. Covering the twenty-six stitches with a loose bandage, I warned him not to get it wet, and instructed him to come back within two days to have it checked. He tried to pay me, but I refused the money. No-one paid for the treatment I dispensed.

Still, it wasn't principle that made me refuse. The truth was that I felt curiously, inexplicably angry-at Ameer, at Johnny, at myself-and I ordered him away curtly. He touched my feet, and backed out of the hut, collecting a parting slap on the head from Johnny Cigar.

I was about to clean up the mess in my hut when Prabaker rushed inside, grasped at my shirt, and tried to drag me out through the door.

"So good that you are not sleeping, Linbaba," he gasped breathlessly. "We can save the time of waking you up. You must come now with me! Hurry, please!"

"For God's sake, what is it now?" I grumbled. "Let go of me, Prabu. I've got to clean up this mess."

"No time for mess, baba. You come now, please. No problem!"

"Yes problem!" I contradicted him. "I'm not going anywhere until you tell me what the hell is going on. That's it, Prabu. That's final. No problem."

"You absolutely must come, Lin," he insisted, dragging at my shirt. "Your friend is in the jail. You must help!"

We abandoned the hut and rushed out through the narrow, shadow clogged lanes of the sleeping slum. On the main street outside the President Hotel we caught a cab, and swept along the clean, silent streets past the Parsee Colony, Sassoon Dock, and the Colaba Market. The cab stopped outside the Colaba police station, directly across the road from Leopold's. The bar was closed, of course, with the wide metal shutters rolled down to the pavement.

It seemed preternaturally quiet: the haunted stillness of a popular bar, closed for business.

Prabaker and I passed the gates of the police station and entered the compound. My heart was beating fast, but I looked outwardly calm. All the cops in the station spoke Marathi-it was a requirement of their employment. I knew that if they had no special reason to suspect or challenge me, my proficiency with the Marathi language would please them as much as it surprised them. It would make me popular with them, and that small celebrity would protect me.

Still, it was a journey behind enemy lines, and in my mind I pushed the locked, heavy box of fear all the way to the back of the attic.

Prabaker spoke quietly to a havaldar, or police constable, at the foot of a long flight of metal stairs. The man nodded, and stepped to the side. Prabaker wagged his head, and I followed him up the steel steps to a landing, with a heavy door, on the first floor. A face appeared at the grille set into the door. Large brown eyes stared left and right, and then the door opened for us. We stepped into an antechamber that contained a desk, a small metal chair, and a bamboo cot. The guard who opened the door was the watchman on duty that night. He spoke briefly with Prabaker and then glared at me. He was a tall man with a prominent paunch and a large, expressively bristly moustache, tinged with grey.

There was a metal gate made from hinged, concertina-style lattices behind him. Beyond the gate, the faces of a dozen prisoners watched us with intense interest. The guard turned his broad back on them, and held out his hand.

"He wants you to-" Prabaker began.

"I know," I stopped him, fishing into the pocket of my jeans. "He wants baksheesh. How much?"

"Fifty rupees," Prabaker grinned, looking up with his biggest smile into the face of the tall officer.

I handed over a fifty-rupee note, and the watchman palmed it. He turned his back to me and approached the metal gate. We followed him. More men had gathered there, all wide awake and chattering, despite the late hour. The watchman stared at them, one by one, until all were silent. Then he called me forward. When I faced the bars of the steel gate, the crowd of men parted and two fantastic figures pushed their way to the front. They were the bear-handlers, the blue-skinned men who'd brought Kano the bear to my slum at Abdullah's request. They reached the gate and grasped at the bars, chattering at me so quickly and urgently that I only caught every fourth or fifth word.

"What's going on, Prabu?" I asked, completely mystified. When Prabaker told me that my friend was in jail, I'd assumed that he'd meant Abdullah. I was expecting to find Abdullah behind the bars, and I moved left and right, trying to see beyond the bear-handlers and the other men crowding at the gate.

"These are your friends, isn't it?" Prabaker asked. "Don't you remember, Lin? They came with Kano to have your bear hugs."

"Yes, sure, I remember them. Did you bring me to see them?"

Prabaker blinked at me, and then turned quickly to check the expressions on the faces of the watchman and the bear-handlers.

"Yes, Lin," he said quietly. "These men were asking you to come.

Do you... do you want to leave?"

"No, no. I just... never mind. What do they want? I can't make out what they're saying."

Prabaker asked them to explain what they wanted, and the two blue-skinned men shouted their story, clutching at the lattices of the gate as if they were the boards of a raft on the open sea.

"They say, they tell it, that they are staying near to the Navy Nagar, and they found there some other fellows, who also are bear handling fellows, and having it one very sad and skinny bear,"

Prabaker explained, urging the men to be calm and to speak more slowly. "They say that these others were not treating their bear with respect. They were beating that bear with a whip, and that bear was crying, with pains all over him."

The bear-handlers spoke in a rush of words that kept Prabaker silent, listening and nodding, with his mouth open to speak.

Other prisoners approached the gate to listen. The corridor beyond the gate had long windows on one side covered by a metal grille. On the other side of the crowded prison corridor there were several rooms. Men streamed from those rooms, swelling the throng at the gate to a hundred or more prisoners, all of them listening with fascination to the bear-handler's story.

"So hard, those bad fellows were beating their poor bear,"

Prabaker translated. "And even when it cried, those fellows didn't stop beating it, that bear. And, you know, it was a girl bear!"

The men at the gate reacted with outraged, angry shouts and sympathetic cries.

"Our fellows here, they were very upset about the others, beating that other bear. So, they went up to those others, and they told them they must not be beating any bear. But they were very bad and angry, those fellows. There was a lot of shouting, and pushing, and bad language. One of those fellows, he called our fellows the sisterfuckers. Our fellows, they called the other ones the arse-holes. The bad ones, they called our fellows motherfucking bastards. Our fellows, they called them brotherfuckers. The other ones, they said a lot more about something-and-anything-fucking. Our fellows, they said back a lot about-"

"Get to the point, Prabu."

"Yes, Lin," he said, listening intently. There was a lengthy pause.

"Well?" I demanded.

"Still a lot of bad language, Lin," he replied, shrugging helplessly. "But some of it, I have to say, is very, very fine, if you want to hear it?"

"No!"

"Okay," he said, at last, "at the end, somebody called it the police to come. Then there was a big fight."

He paused again, listening to the next instalment of the story. I turned to look at the watchman, and saw that he was as deeply engrossed in the unfolding saga as the prisoners were. He chewed paan as he listened, his thorn-bush of a moustache twitching up and down, and unconsciously emphasising his interest. A roar of approval for something in the story went up from the attentive prisoners, and the watchman was united with them in the appreciative shout.

"At first, the other fellows were winning that big fight. So much fighting there was, Lin, like in Mahabharata. Those bad fellows had a few friends, who all made a contribution of punches and kicking and slapping with slippers. Then, Kano the bear, he got upset. Just before the police arrived, Kano the bear got into that fight, to help his bear-handling fellows. He stopped that fight too fast. He was knocking those other fellows right, and left also. That Kano is a very good fighting bear. He beat those bad fellows, and all their friends, and gave them a solid pasting!"

"And then the blue guys got arrested," I concluded for him.

"Sad to say it, yes. Arrested, they were, for the charge of Breaking the Peaces."

"Okay. Let's talk."

Prabaker, the watchman, and I took two steps away from the gate and stood at the bare metal desk. Over my shoulder, I could see that the men at the gate were straining to hear our conversation.

"What's the Hindi word for bail, Prabu? Find out if we can bail the guys out of jail." Prabaker asked, but the watchman shook his head, and told us that it was out of the question.

"Is it possible for me to pay the fine?" I asked in Marathi, using the commonly accepted euphemism for a police bribe.

The watchman smiled, and shook his head. A policeman was hurt in the scuffle, he explained, and the matter was out of his hands.

Shrugging my helplessness, I turned back to the gate and told the men that I couldn't bail or bribe them out of the jail. They rattled away at me in such a swift and garbled Hindi that I couldn't understand them.

"No, Lin!" Prabaker announced, beaming a smile at me. "They don't worry for themselves. They worry for Kano! He is arrested also, that bear. They are very worried for their bear. That is what they want you to help them for!"

"The bear is arrested?" I asked the watchman, in Marathi.

"Ji, ha!" he replied, a flourish of pride rippling in his wild moustache. Sir, yes! "The bear is in custody downstairs!"

I looked at Prabaker, and he shrugged.

"Maybe we should see it that bear?" he suggested.

"I think we should see it that bear!" I replied.

We took the steel steps down to the ground-floor level, and were directed to a row of cells directly beneath the rooms we'd seen upstairs. A ground-level watchman opened one of the rooms, and we leaned inside to see Kano the bear sitting in the middle of a dark and empty cell. It was a large room, with a keyhole toilet in the floor in one corner. The huge muzzled bear was chained at his neck and on his paws, and the chains passed through a metal grille at one of the windows. He sat with his broad back against a wall, and his lower legs splayed out in front of him. His expression-and I have no other way of describing the set of his features, other than as an expression-was disconsolate and profoundly distressed. He let out a long, heart-wrenching sigh, even as we watched him.

Prabaker was standing a little behind me. I turned to ask him a question, and found that he was crying, his face contorted with miserable sobbing. Before I could speak, he moved past me toward the bear, evading the outstretched hand of the watchman. He reached Kano, with his arms before him in a wide embrace, and pressed himself to the creature, resting his head against Kano's and stroking the shaggy fur with murmurs of tenderness. I exchanged glances with the ground-level watchman. The man raised his eyebrows, and wagged his head from side to side energetically. He was clearly impressed.

"I did that first, you know," I found myself saying, in Marathi.

"A few weeks ago. I hugged that bear first."

The watchman wrinkled his lips in a pitying and contemptuous sneer.

"Of course you did," he mocked. "Absolutely, you did."

"Prabaker!" I called out. "Can we get on with this?"

He pulled himself away from the bear and approached me, wiping tears from his eyes with the backs of his hands as he walked. His wretchedness was so complete that I was moved to put my arm around him to comfort him.

"I hope you are not minding, Lin," he cautioned. "I smell quite much like bears."

"It's okay," I answered him softly. "It's okay. Let's see what we can do."

Ten more minutes of discussion with the watchmen and the other guards resolved that it was impossible for us to bail out the handlers or their bear. There was nothing to be done. We returned to the metal gate and informed the bear-handlers that we were unable to help them. They broke into another animated dialogue with Prabaker.

"They know all that we cannot be helping," Prabaker clarified for me, after a few minutes. "What they want is to be in that lock-up cell with Kano. They are worried for Kano because he is lonely.

Since a baby, he has never been sleeping alone, even one night.

For that only, they are a big worried. They say that Kano, he will be frightened. He will have a bad sleep, and have too many bad dreams. He will be crying, for his loneliness. And he will be ashamed, to be in the jail, because he is normally a very fine citizen, that bear. They want only to go down to that lock-up cell with Kano, and keep him some good companies."

One of the bear-handlers stared into my eyes when Prabaker finished his explanation. The man was distraught. His face was creased with worry. Anguish drew his lips back into something that resembled a snarl. He repeated one phrase again and again, hoping that with repetition and the force of his emotion he might make me understand. Suddenly, Prabaker burst into tears once more, sobbing like a child as he grasped the metal bars of the gate.

"What's he saying, Prabu?"

"He says a man must love his bear, Lin," Prabaker translated for me. "He says like that. A man must love his bear."

Negotiations with the watchmen and the other guards were spirited once we presented them with a request that they could grant without bending the rules to their breaking point. Prabaker thrived in the theatrically energetic barter, protesting and pleading with equal vigour. At last he arrived at an agreed sum- two hundred rupees, about twelve American dollars-and the moustachioed watchman unlocked the gate for the bear-handlers while I handed over the bundle of notes. In a strange procession of people and purposes, we filed down the steel stairs, and the ground-floor watchman unlocked the cell that housed Kano. At the sound of their voices, the great bear rose from his seated position, and then fell forward on all fours, dragged downward by the chains. The bear swayed its head from side to side in a joyful dance, and pawed at the ground. When the bear-handlers rushed to greet him, Kano drove his snout into their armpits, and nuzzled in their long, dread-locked hair, snuffling and sniffing at their scent. For their part, the blue men smothered him in affectionate caresses, and sought to ease the stress of the heavy chains. We left them in the enclosure of that embrace. When the steel cell door slammed shut on Kano and his handlers the sound rattled through the empty parade ground, gouging echoes from the stone. I felt that sound as a shiver in my spine as Prabaker and I walked out of the police compound.

"It is a very fine thing that you have done tonight, Linbaba,"

Prabaker gushed. "A man must love his bear. That is what they said, those bear-handling fellows, and you have made it come true. It is a very, very, very fine thing that you have done."

We woke a sleeping cab driver outside the police station, on Colaba Causeway. Prabaker joined me in the back seat, enjoying the chance to play tourist in one of the cabs he frequently drove. As the taxi pulled out from the kerb, I turned to see that he was staring at me. I looked away. A moment later, I turned my head and found that he was still staring. I frowned at him, and he wagged his head. He smiled his world-embracing smile for me, and placed his hand over his heart.

"What?" I asked irritably, although his smile was irresistible, and he knew it, and I was already smiling with him in my heart.

"A man..." he began, intoning the words with sacramental solemnity.

"Not again, Prabu." "... must love his bear," he concluded, patting at his chest and wagging his head frantically.

"Oh, God help me," I moaned, turning again to look at the awkward stir and stretch of the waking street.

At the entrance to the slum, Prabaker and I separated as he made his way to Kumar's chai shop for an early breakfast. He was excited. Our adventure with Kano the bear had given him a fascinating new story-with himself cast in an important role-to share with Parvati, one of Kumar's two pretty daughters. He hadn't said anything to me about Parvati, but I'd seen him talking to her, and I guessed that he was falling in love. In Prabaker's way of courtship, a young man didn't bring flowers or chocolates to the woman he loved: he brought her stories from the wider world, where men grappled with demons of desire, and monstrous injustice. He brought her gossip and scandals and intimate secrets. He brought her the truth of his brave heart, and the mischievous, awe-struck wonder that was the wellspring of his laughter, and of that sky-wide smile. And as I watched him scurry toward the chai shop, I saw that already his head was wagging and his hands were waving as he rehearsed the story that he brought to her as the new day's gift.

I walked on into the grey pre-morning as the slum murmured itself awake. Smoke swirling from a hundred small fires roved the lanes.

Figures wrapped in coloured shawls emerged, and vanished in the misty streams. The smells of rotis cooking on kerosene stoves, and chai boiling in fragrant pots joined the people-smells of coconut hair oil, sandalwood soap, and camphor-soaked clothing.

Sleepy faces greeted me at every turn in the winding lanes, smiling and offering the blessings of the morning in six languages and as many different faiths. I entered my hut and looked with new fondness at the humble, comfortable shabbiness of it. It was good to be home.

I cleaned up the mess in my hut and then joined the morning procession of men who filed out onto the concrete pier that we used as a latrine. When I returned, I discovered that my neighbours had prepared two full buckets of hot water for my bath. I rarely bothered with the laborious and time-consuming procedure of heating several pots of water on the kerosene stove, preferring the lazier, if less luxurious, option of a cold-water bath. Knowing that, my neighbours sometimes provided it for me.

It was no small service. Water, the most precious commodity in any slum, had to be carried from the communal well in the legal compound, some three hundred metres away beyond the barbed wire.

Because the well was only open twice a day, there were hundreds of people in the shove and wrestle for water, and each bucket was dragged into the light with bluff and scratch and shout. Carried back and hoisted through the wire, the water had to be boiled in saucepans on small kerosene stoves, at some cost of the relatively expensive fuel. Yet when they did that for me, none of my neighbours ever took credit for it or expected thanks. The water I used mightVe been boiled and brought there by Ameer's family as a sign of appreciation for the treatment I'd given him.

It might've come from my nearest neighbour, or it might've been provided by one of the half dozen people who stood around and watched me bathe. I would never know. It was one of the small, uncelebrated things people did for me every week.

In a sense, the ghetto existed on a foundation of those anonymous, unthankable deeds; insignificant and almost trivial in themselves, but collectively essential to the survival of the slum. We soothed our neighbours' children as if they were our own when they cried. We tightened a loose rope on someone else's hut when we noticed it sagging, and adjusted the lay of a plastic roof as we passed by. We helped one another, without being asked, as if we were all members of one huge tribe, or family, and the thousand huts were simply rooms in our mansion home.

At his invitation, I breakfasted with Qasim Ali Hussein. We drank sweet tea spiced with clove, and ate waffle-style rotis filled with ghee and sugar, and rolled into tubes. Ranjit's lepers had delivered a new batch of medicines and bandages on the previous day. Because I was away all afternoon, they'd left the bundles with Qasim Ali. We sorted through them together. Qasim Ali couldn't read or write English, and he insisted that I explain the contents and uses of the various capsules, tablets, and salves that I'd ordered. One of his sons, Ayub, sat with us, and wrote the name and description of each medicine in the Urdu script on tiny fragments of paper, and patiently attached a label to every container or tube of cream with adhesive tape. I didn't know it then, but Qasim Ali had chosen Ayub to be my assistant, to learn everything possible about medicines and their uses, so that he could replace me when the time came-as the head man was sure that it would-for me to leave the slum.

It was eleven o'clock when I finally found time to stop at Karla's small house near the Colaba Market. There was no answer to my knocking.

Her neighbours told me she'd gone out an hour earlier. They had no idea when she would return. I was annoyed. I'd left my boots and jeans inside, and I was anxious to retrieve them, to get out of those loose but uncomfortable clothes, those clothes that were hers. I hadn't exaggerated when I'd told her that the jeans, T-shirt, and boots were my only clothes. In my hut there were only two lungis, which I wore for sleeping, bathing, or for when I washed my jeans. I could've bought new clothes-a T-shirt, jeans, and track shoes would've cost me no more than four or five American dollars in the clothing bazaar at Fashion Street-but I wanted my own clothes, the clothes I felt right in. I left a grumble of words for her in a note, and set off to keep my appointment with Khaderbhai.

The great house on Mohammed Ali Road seemed to be empty when I arrived. The six panels of the street door were folded back, and the spacious marble entrance hall was exposed. Thousands of people walked past every hour, but the house was well known and no-one on the street seemed to pay any attention to me as I entered, knocking on the green panels to announce my arrival.

After a few moments, Nazeer came to greet me, his frown vaguely hostile. He directed me to swap my street shoes for a pair of house slippers, and then led me along a tall, narrow corridor in the opposite direction to that of the room I'd visited the night before. We passed a number of closed rooms as the corridor wound through two right turns, and eventually came out upon an inner courtyard.

The very large, oval space was open to the sky in the centre as if a great hole had been cut in the thick plasterwork of the ceiling. It was paved with heavy, square Maharashtrian stone, and surrounded by pillared arches that gave a cloister effect. There were many plants and flowering shrubs in the wide circle of the interior garden, and five tall, slender palms. The fountain that I'd heard from the meeting room, where we'd talked about suffering, was the centrepiece. It was a circle of marble about a metre in height and four metres in diameter with a single huge, uncut boulder in the centre. Water seemed to spout from the very core of the enormous stone. At its peak, the small fountain curved into a lily-shaped plume before splashing gently onto the smooth, rounded surfaces of the boulder and flowing with rhythmic, musical flourishes into the pond of the fountain.

Khaderbhai was sitting in a cane emperor chair, to one side of the fountain. He was reading a book, which he closed and placed on a glass-topped table when I arrived.

"Salaam aleikum, Mr. Lin," he smiled. Peace be with you.

"Wa aleikum salaam. Aap kaise hain?" And with you be peace. How are you, sir?

"I am well, thank you. Mad dogs and Englishmen may very well be out and about in the midday sun, but I prefer to sit here, in the shade of my humble garden."

"Not so humble, Khaderbhai," I remarked.

"Do you think it altogether too grand?"

"No, no. I didn't mean that," I said hurriedly, because that's precisely what I'd been thinking. I couldn't help but recall that he owned the slum where I lived; the dusty, barren slum of twenty-five thousand people, where nothing green existed after eight rainless months, and the only water was rationed from wells that were padlocked shut, most of the time. "This is the most beautiful place I've ever seen in Bombay. I couldn't have imagined this from the street outside."

He stared at me, for a few moments as if measuring the exact width and depth of the lie, and then waved me to a small, backless stool that was the only other chair in the courtyard.

"Please sit down, Mr. Lin. Have you eaten?"

"Yes, thank you. I had a late breakfast."

"Allow me to serve you tea, at least. Nazeer! Idhar-ao!" he shouted, his voice startling a pair of doves that had been pecking for crumbs at his feet. The birds flew up and flapped around Nazeer's chest as he entered. They seemed to be unafraid of him, even to recognise him, and they settled on the flagstones once more, following him like tame puppies.

"Chai bono, Nazeer," Khaderbhai commanded. His tone with the driver was imperious, but not severe, and I guessed that it was the only tone Nazeer felt comfortable with and respected. The burly Afghan withdrew silently, the birds hop-running behind him into the very house.

"Khaderbhai, there's something I want to say before we... talk about anything else," I began quietly. My next words drew his head up swiftly, and I knew that I had his full attention. "It's about Sapna."

"Yes, go on," he murmured.

"Well, I thought about it a lot last night, what we were talking about, and what you asked me to do at the meeting, to sort of help you and so on, and I've got a problem with it." He smiled, and raised one eyebrow quizzically, but he said nothing more, and I was forced to explain myself further.

"I know I'm not saying this very well, but I just don't feel right about it. No matter what this guy did, I don't want to be put in a position of being... well, a kind of cop. I wouldn't feel right about working with them, even indirectly. In my country, the phrase helping the police with their enquiries is a euphemism for informing on someone. I'm sorry. I understand that this guy killed people. If you want to go after him, that's your business, and I'm happy to help you out in any way I can. But I don't want to be involved with the cops, or to help them do it.

If you're working outside the law, on your own-if you want to go after him, and put him out of action personally, for whatever reason of your own-then I'll be glad to help. You can count me in, if you want to fight his gang, whoever they are."

"Is there anything more?"

"No. That's... that's... pretty much it."

"Very well, Mr. Lin," he replied. His face was impassive as he studied me, but there was a puzzling laughter in his eyes. "I may put your mind at rest, I think, in assuring you that while I do assist a large number of policemen financially, so to say, I do not ever work with them. I can tell you, however, that the matter of Sapna is a deeply personal one, and I would ask that if you should wish to confide anything at all about this terrible fellow, you will speak of it only to me. You will not speak to any of the gentlemen you met here, last night, about this Sapna or... or to anyone else. Is that agreed?"

"Yes. Yes, that's agreed."

"Was there anything else?"

"Well, no."

"Excellent. Then, to business: I have very little time today, Mr.

Lin, so I will come directly to the point of the matter. The favour that I mentioned yesterday-I want you to teach one small boy, named Tariq, the English language. Not everything, of course, but enough that his English will be considerably improved, and that he will have some little advantage when he begins his formal studies."

"Well, I'll be happy to try," I stammered, bewildered by the request, but not daunted by it. I felt competent to teach the fundamentals of the language that I wrote in every day of my life. "I don't know how _good I'll be at it. I think there must be a lot of people who'd be better than I would, but I'm happy to take a shot at it. Where do you want me to do it? Would I come here to teach him?"

He looked at me with benign, almost affectionate condescension.

"Why, he will stay with you, naturally. I want you to have him with you, constantly, for the next ten or twelve weeks. He will live with you, eat with you, sleep at your house, go where you go. I do not simply want that he learns the English _phrases. I want that he learns the English way. Your way. I want that he learns this, with your constant company."

"But... but I'm not English," I objected stupidly.

"This is no matter. You are English enough, don't you think? You are a foreigner, and you will teach him the ways of a foreigner.

It is my desire."

My mind was hot, my thoughts scattered and flapping like the birds that he'd startled with his voice. There had to be a way out. It was impossible.

"But I live at the zhopadpatti. You know that. It's very rough.

My hut is really small, and there's nothing in it. He'll be uncomfortable. And it's... it's dirty and crowded and... where would he sleep and all that?"

"I am aware of your situation, Mr. Lin," he replied, a little sharply. "It is precisely this, your life in the zhopadpatti, that I want him to know. Tell me your honest opinion, do you think that there are lessons to be learned in the slum? Do you think he will benefit from spending some time with the city's poorest people?"

I did think that, of course. It seemed to me that every child, beginning with the sons and daughters of the rich, would benefit from the experience of slum life.

"Yes, I suppose I do. I do think it's important to see how people live there. But you have to understand, it's a huge responsibility for me. I'm not doing a spectacular job of looking after myself. I don't know how I could look after a kid."

Nazeer arrived with the tea and a prepared chillum.

"Ah, here is our tea. We shall first smoke, yes?"

We first smoked. Nazeer squatted on his haunches to smoke with us. As Khaderbhai puffed on the clay funnel, Nazeer gave me a complex series of nods, frowns, and winks that seemed to say, Look, see how the master smokes, see what a great lord he is, see how much he is, that you and I will never be, see how lucky we are to be here with him. Nazeer was a head shorter than I was, but I guessed that he was at least several kilos heavier. His neck was so thick that it seemed to draw his powerful shoulders up towards his ears. The bulky arms that stretched the seams of his loose shirt appeared to be only slightly more slender than his thighs. His broad, permanently scowling face was composed of three downward curves, something like the insignia of sergeant's stripes. The first of them consisted of his eyebrows, which began a little above and in the centre of his eyes, and descended with bristling unruliness along the slope of his frown to the level of the eyes themselves.

The second curve began in the deep grooves at the wings of his nose, and divided his face all the way to the jaw. The third was drawn by the desperate, pugnacious unhappiness of his mouth, the upside-down horseshoe of bad luck that fate had nailed to the doorpost of his life.

A ridge of purplish scar tissue was prominent on the brown skin of his forehead. His dark eyes moved in their deep hollows like hunted things, constantly seeking concealment. His ears looked as though they'd been chewed by some beast that had blunted its teeth on them, and given up the task. His most striking feature was his nose, an instrument so huge and magnificently pendulous that it seemed designed for some purpose altogether more grand than merely inhaling air and fragrances. I thought him ugly, then, when I first knew him, not so much for the unbeautiful set of his features as for their joylessness. It seemed to me that I'd never seen a human face in which the smile had been so utterly defeated.

The chillum returned to me for the third time, but the smoke was hot and tasted foul. I announced that it was finished. Nazeer seized it from me roughly and puffed with furious determination, managing to extract a dirty brown cloud of smoke. He tapped the gitak stone out onto his palm to reveal a tiny residue of white ash. Making sure that I was watching, he blew the ash from his hand to the ground at my feet, cleared his throat menacingly, and then left us.

"Nazeer doesn't like me very much."

Khaderbhai laughed. It was a sudden and very youthful laugh. I liked it, and I was moved to join him, though I didn't really understand why he was laughing.

"Do you like Nazeer?" he asked, still laughing.

"No, I guess I don't," I answered, and we laughed all the harder.

"You do not want to teach Tariq English, because you do not want the responsibility," he said, when the laughter had subsided.

"It's not just that... well, yes, it is just that. It's..." I looked into those golden eyes, pleading with them. "I'm not very good with responsibility. And this... this is a lot of responsibility. It's too much. I can't do it."

He smiled, and reached out to rest his hand on my forearm.

"I understand. You are worried. It is natural. You are worried that something might happen to Tariq. You are worried that you will lose your freedom to go where you want, and to do what you want. This is only natural."

"Yes," I murmured, relieved. He did understand. He knew that I couldn't do what he asked. He was going to let me off the hook.

Sitting there, on the low stool beside his chair, I had to look up at him, and I felt at some disadvantage. I also felt a sudden rush of affection for him, an affection that seemed to proceed from and depend upon the inequalities between us. It was vassal love, one of the strongest and most mysterious human emotions.

"Very well. My decision is this, Lin-you will take Tariq with you, and have him remain with you for two days. If, after this forty-eight hours, you think it is impossible for the situation to continue, you will bring him back here, and I will ask no more of you. But I am sure that he will be no problem to you. My nephew is a fine boy."

"Your... nephew?"

"Yes, the fourth son of my youngest sister, Farishta. He is eleven years old. He has learned some English words, and he speaks Hindi, Pashto, Urdu, and Marathi fluently. He is not so tall for his age, but he is most sturdy in his health."

"Your nephew-," I began again, but he cut me off quickly.

"If you find that you can do this thing for me, you will see that my dear friend in the zhopadpatti, Qasim Ali Hussein-you know him, of course, as the head man-he will help you in every way.

He will arrange for some families, including his own, to share your responsibility, and provide homes for the boy to sleep in, as well as your own. There will be many friends to help you look after Tariq. I want him to know the hardest life of the poorest people. But above all, I want him to have the experience of an English teacher. This last thing means a great deal to me. When I was a boy..."

He paused, allowing his gaze to shift and settle on the fountain and the wet surface of the great, round boulder. His eyes gleamed, reflecting the liquid light on the stone. Then a grave expression passed across them like a cloud-shadow slinking over smooth hills, on a sunny day.

"So, forty-eight hours," he sighed, bringing himself to the moment. "After that, if you bring him back to me, I will not think the worse of you. Now it is time for you to meet the boy."

Khaderbhai gestured toward the arches of the cloister, behind me, and I turned to see that the boy was already standing there. He was small for his age. Khaderbhai had said that he was eleven years old, but he seemed to be no more than eight. Dressed in clean, pressed kurta-pyjama and leather sandals, he clutched a tied calico bundle in his arms. He stared at me with such a forlorn and distrustful expression that I thought he might burst into tears. Khaderbhai called him forward, and the boy approached us, making a wide detour around me to the far side of his uncle's chair. The closer he came, the more miserable he seemed.

Khaderbhai spoke to him sternly and swiftly in Urdu, pointing at me several times. When he finished, the boy walked to my stool and extended his hand to me.

"Hello very much," he said, his eyes huge with reluctance and fear.

I shook hands with him, his small hand vanishing in mine. Nothing ever fits the palm so perfectly, or feels so right, or inspires so much protective instinct as the hand of a child.

"Hello to you, too, Tariq," I said, smiling in spite of myself.

His eyes flickered a tiny, hopeful smile in response, but doubt quickly smothered it. He looked back to his uncle. It was a look of desperate unhappiness, drawing his closed mouth wide and pulling his small nose in so tightly that it showed white at the corners.

Khaderbhai returned the look, staring strength into the boy, then stood up and called for Nazeer once more in that half-shout.

"You will forgive me, Mr. Lin. There are a number of matters that require my urgent attentions. I will expect you in two days, if you are not happy, na? Nazeer will show you out."

He turned without looking at the boy, and strode off into the shadowed arches. Tariq and I watched him leave, each of us feeling abandoned and betrayed. Nazeer walked with us to the door. As I changed into my street shoes, Nazeer knelt and pressed the boy to his chest with surprising and passionate tenderness.

Tariq clung to him, grabbing his hair, and had to be prised from the embrace with some force. When we stood once more, Nazeer gave me a look of eloquent, lingering menace-If anything happens to this boy, you will answer to me for it-and turned away from us.

A minute later we were outside, on the street beside the Nabila Mosque, boy and man joined tightly at the hand but in nothing else except our bewilderment at the power of the personality that had pushed us together against our wills. Tariq had simply been obedient, but there was something craven in my helplessness to resist Khaderbhai. I'd capitulated too readily, and I knew it.

Self-disgust quickly became self-righteousness. How could he do this to a child, I asked myself, his own nephew, give him up so easily to a stranger? Didn't he see how reluctant the boy was?

It's a callous disregard for the rights and well-being of a child. Only a man who thought of others as his playthings, would surrender a child to someone like... like me.

Furious at my feeble pliancy-How did I let him force me to do this?-and burning with spite and selfishness, I dragged Tariq along at a jogging trot as I marched through the swarming street.

Just as we passed the main entrance to the mosque, the muezzin began to recite the call to prayer from the minarets above our heads.

Allah hu Akbar Allah hu Akbar Allah hu Akbar Allah hu Akbar Ash-hadu an-la Ila ha-illallah Ash-hadu an-la Ila ha-illallah

God is great, God is great I bear witness that there is no god but _God...

Tariq tugged at my wrists with both hands, pulling me to a stop.

He pointed at the entrance to the mosque, and then to the tower above it, where loudspeakers amplified the voice of the muezzin.

I shook my head, and told him we had no time. He planted his feet and tugged harder at my wrist. I told him in Hindi and Marathi that I wasn't a Muslim, and I didn't want to enter the mosque. He was adamant, straining to drag me toward the doorway until the veins stood out at his temples. At last he broke free from my grip and scampered up the steps of the mosque. Kicking his sandals aside, he darted inside before I could stop him.

Frustrated and wavering, I hesitated at the large, open archway of the mosque. I knew that it was permitted for non-believers to enter.

People of any faith may enter any mosque and pray, or meditate, or simply admire and wonder. But I knew that the Muslims regarded themselves as a minority under siege in the predominantly Hindu city. Violent confrontations between religionists were common enough. Prabaker warned me, once, that clashes had occurred between militant Hindus and Muslims outside that very mosque.

I had no idea what to do. I was certain there were other exits, and if the boy decided to run off there would be little chance of finding him. A throbbing dread drummed in my heart at the thought that I might have to return to Khaderbhai and tell him I'd lost his nephew, not a hundred metres from where he'd entrusted the boy to me.

Just as I made up my mind to go inside and search the mosque, Tariq came into view, passing from right to left across the huge, ornately tiled vestibule. His hands, feet, and head were wet, and it seemed that he'd washed himself hurriedly. Leaning as far into the entrance as I dared, I saw the boy take up a position at the rear of a group of men, and begin his prayers.

I sat down on an empty push-cart, and smoked a cigarette. To my great relief, Tariq emerged after a few minutes, collected his sandals, and came over to join me. Standing very close to me, he looked up into my face and gave me a smile-frown; one of those splendidly contradictory expressions that only children seem to master, as if he were afraid and happy at the same time.

"Zuhr! Zuhr!" he said, indicating that it was the time of the noon prayer. His voice was remarkably firm for such a small child. "I am thank you for God. Are you thank you for God, Linbaba?"

I knelt on one knee in front of him, and seized his arms. He winced, but I didn't relax the grip. My eyes were angry. I knew that my face looked hard and perhaps even cruel.

"Don't you ever do that again!" I snapped at him, in Hindi.

"Don't you ever run away from me again!"

He frowned at me, defiant and afraid. Then his young face hardened into the mask we use to fight back tears. I saw his eyes fill, and one tear escaped to roll down his flushed cheek. I stood, and took a step away from him. Glancing around me, I saw that a few men and women had stopped on the street to stare at us. Their expressions were grave, although not yet alarmed. I reached out to offer the boy an open palm. He put his hand in mine, reluctantly, and I struck out along the street toward the nearest taxi stand.

I turned once to look over my shoulder, and saw that the people were following us with their eyes. My heart was beating fast. A viscid mix of emotions boiled in me, but I knew that most of it was rage, and most of the anger was at myself. I stopped, and the boy stopped with me. I breathed deeply for a few moments, fighting for reasonable control. When I looked down at him, Tariq was staring at me intently with his head cocked to one side.

"I'm sorry I got angry with you, Tariq," I said calmly, repeating the words in Hindi. "I won't do it again. But please, please don't run away from me like that. It makes me very scared and worried."

The boy grinned at me. It was the first real smile he gave me. I was startled to see that it was very similar to Prabaker's lunar disk of a smile.

"Oh, God help me," I said, sighing all the way from the core of my bones. "Not another one."

"Yes, okay very much!" Tariq agreed, shaking my hand with gymnastic enthusiasm. "God help you, and me, all day, please!"

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Дата добавления: 2015-10-26