Chapter sixteen

"When will she be back?"

"How should I know? Not long, maybe. She said to wait."

"I don't know. It's getting late. I gotta get this kid home to bed."

"Whatever. It's all the same to me, Jack. She said to wait, that's all."

I glanced at Tariq. He didn't look tired, but I knew he had to be getting sleepy. I decided that a rest was a good idea before the walk home. We kicked off our shoes and entered Karla's house, closing the street door behind us. I found some chilled water in the large, old-fashioned refrigerator. Tariq accepted a glass, and sat down on a pile of cushions to flip through a copy of India Today magazine.

Lisa was in Karla's bedroom, sitting on the bed with her knees drawn up. She was wearing a red silk pyjama jacket, and nothing else. A patch of her blonde pubic hair was visible, and I glimpsed reflexively over my shoulder to make sure that the boy couldn't see into the room. She cradled a bottle of Jack Daniels in her folded arms. Her long curly hair was tied up into a lopsided bun. She was staring at me with an expression of calculated appraisal, one eye almost closed. It reminded me of the look that marksmen concentrate on their targets in a firing range.

"So where'd ya get the kid?"

I sat on a straight-backed chair, straddling it, so that my forearms could rest on the back.

"I sort of inherited him. I'm doing someone a favour."

"A favour?" she asked, as if the word was a euphemism for some kind of infection.

"Yeah. A friend of mine asked me to teach the kid a little English."

"So, what's he doing here? Why isn't he at home?"

"I'm supposed to keep him with me. That's how he's supposed to learn."

"You mean keep him with you all the time? Everywhere you go?" "That's the deal. But I'm hoping to give him back after two days.

I don't know how I got talked into it in the first place, really."

She laughed out loud. It wasn't a pleasant sound. The state she was in gave it a forced and almost vicious edge. Still, the heart of it was rich and full, and I thought it might've been a nice laugh, once. She took a swig from the bottle, exposing one round breast with the movement.

"I don't like kids," she said proudly, as if she was announcing that she'd just received some distinguished award. She took another long drink. The bottle was half full. I realised that she was early drunk, in that squall of coherence before slurred speech and clumsiness and collapse.

"Look, I just want to get my clothes," I muttered, looking around the bedroom for them. "I'll pick them up, and come back and see Karla another time."

"I'll make you a deal, Gilbert."

"The name's Lin," I insisted, although that, too, was a false name.

"I'll make you a deal, Lin. I'll tell you where your clothes are, if you agree to put them on here, in front of me."

We didn't like each other. We stared across the kind of bristling hostility that's sometimes as good as, or better than, mutual attraction.

"Assuming you can handle it," I drawled, grinning in spite of myself, "what's in it for me?"

She laughed again, and it was stronger, and more honest.

"You're all right, Lin. Get me some water, will ya? The more of this stuff I drink, the goddamn thirstier I get."

On my way to the small kitchen, I checked on Tariq. The boy had fallen asleep. His head was tipped back onto the cushions, and his mouth was open. One hand was curled up under his chin, and the other still grasped weakly at the magazine. I removed it, and covered him with a light woollen shawl that was hanging from a set of hooks. He didn't stir, and seemed to be deep in sleep. In the kitchen I took a bottle of chilled water from the refrigerator, snatched up two tumblers, and returned to the bedroom.

"The kid's asleep," I said, handing her a glass. "I'll let him crash for a while. If he doesn't wake up by himself, I'll get him up later."

"Sit here," she commanded, patting at the bed beside her. I sat.

She watched me over the rim of her glass as I drank first one, then a second full glass of the iced water. "The water's good," she said, after a while. "Have you noticed that the water's good here? I mean, really good. You'd expect it to be fucking slime, I mean being Bombay and India and all.

People are so scared of the water, but it's really much better than the chemical-tasting horse-piss that comes outta the faucet back home."

"Where is home?"

"What the fuck difference does it make?" She watched me frown impatiently, and added quickly, "Don't get mad, keep your goddamn shirt on. I'm not tryin' to be a smart-ass. I really mean it- what difference does it make? I'll never go back there, and you'll never go there in the first place."

"I guess not."

"God it's hot! I hate this time of the year. It's always worst just before the monsoon. It makes me crazy. Doesn't this weather make you crazy? This is my fourth monsoon. You start to count in monsoons after you've been here a while. Didier is a nine-monsoon guy. Can you believe that? Nine fucking monsoons in Bombay. How about you?"

"This is my second. I'm looking forward to it. I love the rain, even if it does turn the slum into a swamp."

"Karla told me you live in one of the slums. I don't know how you can stand it-that stink, all those people living on top of each other. You'd never get me inside one of those places."

"Like most things, and most people, it's not as bad as it looks from the outside."

She let her head fall onto one shoulder, and looked at me. I couldn't read her expression. Her eyes glittered in a radiant, almost inviting smile, but her mouth was twisted in a disdainful sneer.

"You're a real funny guy, Lin. How did you really get hooked up with that kid?"

"I told you."

"So what's he like?"

"I thought you didn't like kids."

"I don't. They're so... innocent. Except that they're not. They know exactly what they want, and they don't stop till they get it. It's disgusting. All the worst people I know are just like big, grown-up children. It's so creepy it makes me sick to my stomach."

Children might've turned her stomach, but it seemed to be immune to the searing effects of the sour mash whisky. She tipped the bottle back and drank off a good quarter of it in long, slow swallows. That's the one, I thought. If she wasn't drunk before, she is now. She wiped her lips with the back of her hand and smiled, but the expression was lopsided, and the focus was spilling from the bowls of her china blue eyes. Falling and fading as she was, the mask of her many abrasive attitudes began to slip, and she suddenly looked very young and vulnerable. The set of her jaw- angry, fearing, and dislikeable-relaxed into an expression that was surprisingly gentle and compassionate. Her cheeks were round and pink. The tip of her nose was turned-up slightly, and formed in soft contours. She was a twenty-four-year-old woman with the face of a girl, unmarked by the hollows of compromise or the deeply drawn lines of hard decisions. From the few things that Karla had told me about her, and what I'd seen at Madame Zhou's, her life had in fact been harder than most, but none of that showed in her face.

She offered me the bottle and I accepted it, taking a sip. I held on to it for a few moments, and when she wasn't looking I placed it on the floor beside the bed, discreetly out of her reach. She lit a cigarette and messed at her hair, spilling the loosely tied bun until the long curls fell over one shoulder. With her hand poised there, on top of her head, the wide sleeve of her silk jacket slipped past her elbow, and exposed the pale stubble of a shaved armpit.

There was no sign of other drugs in the room, but her pupils were contracted to pinpoints, suggesting that she'd taken heroin or some other opiate. Whatever the combination, it was sending her swiftly over the edge. She was slumped uncomfortably against the bedstead, and she was breathing noisily through her mouth. A little trickle of whisky and saliva dribbled from the corner of her slack lower lip.

Still, she was beautiful. The thought struck me that she would always look beautiful, even when she was being ugly. Hers was a big, lovely, empty face: the face of a pom-pom girl at a football match, the face advertisers use to help them sell preposterous and irrelevant things.

"So go on, tell me. What's he like, that little kid?"

"Well, I think he's some kind of religious fanatic," I confided, smiling, as I looked over my shoulder at the sleeping boy. "He made me stop three times today, and this evening, so he could say his prayers. I don't know if it's doing his soul any good, but his stomach seems to be working fine. He can eat like they're giving prizes for it. He kept me in the restaurant for more than two hours tonight, eating everything from noodles and grilled fish to ice cream and jelly. That's why we're late. I would've been home ages ago, but I couldn't get him out of the restaurant. It's going to cost me an arm and a leg to keep him for the next couple of days. He eats more than I do."

"Do you know how Hannibal died?" she asked.

"Come again?"

"Hannibal, that guy with the elephants. Don't you know your history? He crossed the Alps, with his elephants, to attack the Romans."

"Yeah, I know who you're talking about," I said testily, irritated by the conversational non sequitur.

"Well, how did he die?" she demanded. Her expressions were becoming exaggerated, the gross burlesque of the drunk.

"I don't know."

"Ha!" she scoffed. "You don't know everything."

"No. I don't know everything."

There was a lengthening silence. She stared at me blankly. It seemed that I could see the thoughts drifting downwards, through the blue of her eyes, like white flakes in the bubble of a snow dome.

"So, are you going to tell me?" I probed after a while. "How did he die?"

"Who die?" she asked, mystified.

"Hannibal. You were going to tell me how he died."

"Oh, him. Well, he kinda led this army of thirty thousand guys over the Alps into Italy, and fought the Romans for like, sixteen years. Six-teen goddamn years! And he never got beaten, even one time. Then, after a lot of other shit, he went back to his own country, where he became a big honcho, what with being a big hero and all. But the Romans, those guys never forgot that he embarrassed the fuck outta them, so they used politics, and they got his own people to turn on him, and kick him out. Are you getting any of this?"

"Sure."

"I mean really, am I wastin' my goddamn time here with this? I don't have to do this, you know. I can spend my time with a lot better people than you. I can be with anyone I like. Anyone!"

The forgotten cigarette was burning down to her fingers. I placed the ashtray under it and prised it loose, letting it fall from her hand into the bowl. She didn't seem to notice. "Okay, so the Romans forced Hannibal's own people to kick him out," I pressed, actually curious about the fate of the Carthaginian warrior.

"They exiled him," she corrected grumpily.

"Exiled him. Then what happened? How did he die?"

Lisa stirred her head from the pillows suddenly, her movements groggy, and glared at me with what seemed to be real malevolence.

"What's so special about Karla, huh?" she demanded furiously.

"I'm more beautiful than she is! Take a good look-my tits are better than hers."

She pulled the silk jacket open until she was quite naked, touching at her breasts clumsily. "Well? Aren't they?"

"They're... very nice," I muttered.

"Nice? They're goddamn beautiful is what they are. They're perfect! You want to touch them, don't you? Here!"

She snatched at my wrist with surprising speed, and dragged my hand onto her thigh, near the hip. The flesh was warm and smooth and supple. Nothing in the world is so soft and pleasing to the touch as the skin of a woman's thigh. No flower, feather, or fabric can match that velvet whisper of flesh. No matter how unequal they may be in other ways, all women, old and young, fat and thin, beautiful and ugly, have that perfection. It's a great part of the reason why men hunger to possess women, and so often convince themselves that they do possess them: the thigh, that touch.

"Has Karla told you what I did at the Palace, huh? What I used to do there?" she said with puzzling hostility, moving my hand onto the hard little mound of blonde hair between her legs. "Madame Zhou has us play games there. They're big on games at the Palace.

Karla told you about those games, did she? Huh? Blind Man's Butt, did she tell you about that? The customers wear blindfolds and get a prize for guessing which one of us they push their cock into. No hands, ya see. That's the trick. Did she tell you any of this? Did she tell you about the Chair? That's a real popular number. One girl kneels down on her hands and knees, see, then another girl lies on top of her, back to back, and they tie them together. The customers go from one to another, kind of a multiple choice. Is this turnin' you on, Lin? Are you gettin' hot with this? It used to turn Karla's customers on, when she brought them to the Palace. Karla has a business head. Did you know that?

I worked at the Palace, but it was just a job, and all I ever made out of it was money. She's the one who made it dirty. She's the one who made it a... a sick thing. Karla's the one who'll do anything to get what she wants. Damn right, a business head, and a heart to match.."

She was rubbing my hand against herself with both of her own hands, grinding against it with rolling motions of her hips. She drew up her knees, and her legs parted. My hand was drawn to the lips of her vagina, heavy and swollen and wet. She pushed two of my fingers inside the dark heat.

"You feel that?" she mumbled, her teeth clenched and exposed in a grim smile. "That's muscle power, boy. That's what that is.

That's training and practice, hours of it, months of it. Madame Zhou makes us squat, and squeeze down hard on a pencil, to build up a grip like a fist. I got so fuckin' good at it, I could write a letter with the goddamn thing. You feel how good that is?

You'll never find anything as tight as this, not anywhere. Karla isn't this good. I know she isn't. What's the matter with you?

Don't you wanna fuck me? What are you, some kinda faggot? I..."

She was still squeezing down on my fingers, still grasping at my wrist, but the straining smile faded, and her face slowly turned away.

"I... I... I think I'm gonna throw up."

I withdrew my fingers from her body, and my hand from her weakening grip, and backed away from the bed towards the bathroom. Hurriedly soaking a towel in cold water and grabbing up a large dish from the bathroom, I returned to find her sprawled out awkwardly, her hands on her belly. I straightened her into a more comfortable position, covering her with a light cotton blanket. I draped the cool towel over her forehead. She stirred a little, but she didn't resist. Her frown gradually dissolved into the earnest mask of the unwell.

"He committed suicide," she said softly, her eyes closed. "That Hannibal. They were going to extradite him back to Rome, make him face charges at a trial, so he killed himself. How do ya like that? After all that fighting, all those elephants, all those big battles, he killed himself. It's true. Karla told me. Karla always tells the truth... even when she's lying... she said that to me once... I always tell the truth, even when I'm lying... Fuck, I love that girl. I love that girl. You know, she saved me from that place-and you did, too-and she's helping me to get clean... to dry out... gotta dry out, Lin... Gilbert... gotta get off the shit... I love that girl..." She slept. I watched her for a while, waiting to see if she was sick, if she would wake, but she was wrapped in unworried sleep.

I went to check on Tariq, and he too was sleeping soundly. I decided not to wake him. Being alone, in that stillness, was a piercing pleasure. Wealth and power, in a city where half the many millions were homeless, were measured by the privacy that only money could buy, and the solitude that only power could demand and enforce. The poor were almost never alone in Bombay, and I was poor.

There, in that breathing room, no sound reached me from the quieting street. I moved through the apartment freely, unwatched.

And the silence was sweeter, it seemed, the peace more profound, for the presence of the two sleepers, woman and child. A balm of fantasy soothed me. There was a time, once, when I'd known such a life: when a woman and a sleeping child were my own, and I was their man.

I stopped at Karla's cluttered writing desk, and caught sight of myself in a wide mirror on the wall above it. The momentary fantasy of belonging, that little dream of home and family, hardened and cracked in my eyes. The truth was that my own marriage had crumbled to ruin, and I'd lost my child, my daughter. The truth was that Lisa and Tariq meant nothing to me, and I meant nothing to them. The truth was that I belonged nowhere and to no-one. Surrounded by people and hungry for solitude, I was always and everywhere alone. Worse than that, I was hollow, empty, gouged out and scraped bare by the escape and flight. I'd lost my family, the friends of my youth, my country and its culture-all the things that had defined me, and given me identity. Like all the fugitive kind, the more successful I was, the longer and further I ran, the less I kept of my self.

But there were people, a few who could reach me, a few new friends for the new self I was learning to become. There was Prabaker, that tiny, life-adoring man. There was Johnny Cigar, and Qasim Ali, and Jeetendra and his wife, Radha: heroes of chaos who propped up the collapsible city with bamboo sticks, and insisted on loving their neighbours, no matter how far they'd fallen; no matter how broken or unlovely they were. There was Khaderbhai, there was Abdullah, there was Didier, and there was Karla. And as I looked into my own hard eyes in the green-edged mirror, I thought about them all, and asked myself why those people made a difference. Why them? What is it about them? Such a disparate group-the richest and the most wretched, educated and illiterate, virtuous and criminal, old and young-it seemed that the only thing they had in common was a power to make me feel... something.

On the desk in front of me was a thick, leather-bound book. I opened it and saw that it was Karla's journal, filled with entries in her own elegant handwriting. Knowing that I shouldn't, I turned through the pages and read her private thoughts. It wasn't a diary. There were no dates on any of the pages, and there were none of the day-to-day accounts of things done and people met. Instead, there were fragments. Some of them were culled from various novels and other texts, each one attributed to the respective author and annotated with her own comments and criticisms. There were many poems. Some had been copied out from selections and anthologies and even newspapers, with the source and the poet's name written beneath. Other poems were her own, written out several times with a word or a phrase changed and a line added. Certain words and their dictionary meanings were listed throughout the journal and marked with asterisks, forming a running vocabulary of unusual and obscure words. And there were random, stream-of-consciousness passages that described what she'd been thinking or feeling on a certain day. Other people were mentioned frequently, yet they were never identified except as he and she.

On one page there was a cryptic and disturbing reference to the name Sapna. It read:

THE QUESTION: What will Sapna do?

THE ANSWER: Sapna will kill us all.

My heart began to beat faster as I read the words through several times. I didn't doubt she was talking about the same man-the Sapna whose followers had committed the gruesome murders Abdul Ghani and Madjid had talked about, the Sapna who was hunted by the police and the underworld alike. And it seemed, from that strange couplet, that she knew something about him, perhaps even who he was. I wondered what it meant, and if she was in danger.

I examined the pages before and after the entry more carefully, but I found nothing more that might concern him, or Karla's connection to him. On the second-last page of the journal, however, there was one passage that clearly referred to me:

He wanted to tell me that he is in love with me. Why did I stop him? Am I so ashamed that it might be true? The view from that place was incredible, amazing. We were so high that we looked down on the kites that flew so high above the children's heads.

He said that I don't smile. I'm glad he said that, and I wonder why.

Beneath that entry she'd written the words:

I don't know what frightens me more, the power that crushes us or our endless ability to endure it.

I remembered the remark very well. I remembered her saying it after the slum huts had been smashed and dragged away. Like so many of the things she said, it had the kind of cleverness that insinuated itself into my memory. I was surprised and perhaps a little shocked to see that she, too, had remembered the phrase, and that she'd copied it down there-even improving it, with more aphoristic roundness than the impromptu remark had possessed. Is she planning to use those words again, I asked myself, with someone _else?

The last page carried a poem that she'd written-her most recent addition to the almost completed journal. Because it appeared on the page following her reference to me, and because I was so hungry for it, I read the poem and told myself that it was mine.

I let myself believe that it was meant for me, or that at least some part of it was born in feelings that were mine. I knew it wasn't true, but love seldom concerns itself with what we know or with what's true.

To make sure none followed where you led I used my hair to cover our tracks.

Sun set on the island of our bed night rose eating echoes and we were beached there, in tangles of flicker, candles whispering at our driftwood backs. Your eyes above me afraid of the promises I might keep regretting the truth we did say less than the lie we didn't, I went in deep, I went in deep, to fight the past for you.

Now we both know sorrows are the seeds of loving.

Now we both know I will live and I will die for this love.

Standing there, at the desk, I snatched up a pen and copied out the poem on a sheet of paper. With the stolen words folded secretly in my wallet, I closed the journal and replaced it exactly as I'd found it.

I walked to the bookshelf. I wanted to study the titles for clues to the woman who'd chosen them and read them. The small library of four shelves was surprisingly eclectic. There were texts on Greek history, on philosophy and cosmology, on poetry and drama.

Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma in an Italian translation. A copy of Madame Bovary in the original French. Thomas Mann and Schiller in German. Djuna Barnes and Virginia Woolf in English. I took down a copy of Maldoror, by Isidore Ducasse. The pages were dog-eared, and heavily annotated in Karla's own hand. I took out another book, a German translation of Gogol's Dead Souls, and it too bore Karla's hand-written notes on many pages. She consumed her books, I saw. She devoured her books, and was unafraid to mark them, even to scar them, with her own comments and system of references.

A row of journals, similar to the one I'd discovered on the desk, occupied half of one shelf, some twenty books in all. I took one of them down and flipped through it. The fact that it, like the others, was written in English, struck me for the first time. She was born in Switzerland and she was fluent in German and French, I knew; but when she wrote out her most intimate thoughts and feelings she used English. I seized on that, telling myself that there were good and hopeful signs in it. English was my language.

She spoke to herself, from her heart, in my language.

I moved around the apartment, studying the things she chose to surround herself with in her private living space. There was an oil painting of women carrying water from a river, with matkas balanced on their heads, and children following with smaller pots on their own heads. Prominently displayed on a dedicated shelf was a hand carved, rosewood figure of the goddess Durga. It was surrounded by incense holders. I noticed an arrangement of everlastings and other dried flowers. They were my own favourites, and very unusual in a city where fresh flowers were plentiful and inexpensive. There was a collection of found objects-a huge frond from a date palm that she'd picked up somewhere and fixed to one wall; shells and river stones that filled a large and waterless fish tank; a discarded spinning wheel on which she'd draped a collection of small, brass temple-bells.

The most colourful articles in the apartment, her clothes, hung from an open rack in one corner of her room rather than in a wardrobe. The clothes were divided into two distinct groups, left and right of the rack. On the left were her networking clothes- smart suits with long, narrow skirts, and the silver sheath of a backless evening dress, among other glamorous dresses. On the right were her private clothes, the loose silk trousers, flowing scarves, and long-sleeved cotton blouses that she wore by choice.

Under the rack of clothes was a row of shoes, two dozen pairs. At the end of the row were my boots, newly polished and laced up to their tops. I knelt to pick them up. Her shoes looked so small, next to my own, that I took one of them up instead, and held it in my hands for a moment. It was Italian, from Milano, in dark green leather, and with a decorative buckle stitched to the side and looped around the low heel. It was an elegant, expensive shoe, but the heel was worn down slightly on one side, and the leather was scuffed in a few places. I saw that she, or someone, had tried to disguise the pale scratches by drawing over them with a felt-tipped pen that was almost, but not quite, the right shade of green.

I found my clothes in a plastic bag behind the boots. They'd been laundered and folded neatly. I took them, and changed into them in the bathroom. I held my head under the cold-water tap for a full minute. Dressed in my old jeans and comfortable boots, and with my short hair pushed back into its familiar, messy disorder, I felt refreshed, and my spirits revived.

I returned to the bedroom to check on Lisa. She was sleeping contentedly. A diffident smile flickered on her lips. I tucked the sheet into the sides of the bed to prevent her from falling, and adjusted the overhead fan to a minimum speed. The windows were barred, and the front door snapped to the lock position when it was shut from outside. I knew that I could leave her there, and she would be safe. As I stood beside the bed, watching the rise and fall of her chest in its sleeping rhythm, I thought about leaving a note for Karla. I decided against it because I wanted her to wonder about me-to ask herself what I'd been thinking and what I'd done there, in her house. To give myself an excuse to see her, I folded the clothes she'd given me, the dead lover's burial clothes that I'd just discarded, and put them in a plastic bag. I planned to wash them, and return with them in a few days.

I turned to wake Tariq for our journey home, but the boy was standing in the doorway, clutching his small shoulder bag. His sleepy face wore a look of hurt and accusation.

"You want leave me?" he asked.

"No," I laughed, "but you'd be a lot better off if I did. More comfortable, anyway. My place isn't as nice as this."

He frowned, puzzled by the English words, and not at all reassured.

"Are you ready?"

"Yes, ready," he mumbled, wagging his head from side to side.

Thinking of the latrine, and the lack of water at the slum, I told him to use the bathroom before we went, and directed him to wash his face and hands well. After he'd used the toilet, I gave him a glass of milk and a sweet cake that I found in Karla's kitchen. We stepped out into the deserted street, and pulled the door locked behind us. He looked back at the house and at all the buildings around it, searching for landmarks that would fix the place in his mental map. Then he fell into step, beside but a little apart from me.

We walked on the road because the footpaths were occupied in many places by sleeping pavement dwellers. The only traffic was the occasional taxi or police jeep. Every shop and business was closed, and only a few houses or apartments showed light at their windows. The moon was almost full, but obscured from time to time by dense, brooding drifts of cloud. They were harbingers of the monsoon: the clouds that gathered and thickened every night, and would swell, within the following days, until every part of the sky was clogged with them, and it would rain, everywhere and forever. We made good time. Only half an hour after leaving Karla's apartment, we turned onto the wide track that skirted the eastern curve of the slum. Tariq had said nothing on the walk, and I, burdened by worry about how to cope with him and the responsibility for his welfare-burdened by the boy himself, it seemed to me then-kept a churlish silence. On our left, there was a large open area about the size of a soccer field that was set aside as a latrine zone, where women, young children, and elderly people went to relieve themselves. Nothing grew there, and the whole area was dusty and bare after eight months of continuous sunshine. On our right was the fringe of the construction site, marked here and there by low piles of timber, latticed steel, and other materials. Single bulbs, suspended from long extension wires, lit the mounds of supplies. There was no other light on the path, and the slum, still some five hundred metres away, showed only faint glimmers from a few kerosene lamps.

I told Tariq to follow my steps precisely, knowing that many people used the track as a latrine after dark because they were afraid of rats or snakes in the open field. By some mysterious, unspoken consensus, a narrow and erratic path was always left clean along the course of the track, so that latecomers might enter the slum without stepping in the filth that accumulated. I came home late at night so often that I'd learned how to negotiate the eccentric meander of that clean path without stumbling or tripping on the edges of the many large potholes that no-one ever seemed inclined to repair.

Tariq followed me closely, struggling dutifully to step exactly where I'd walked. The stench there at the edge of the slum was overpowering and sickening for a stranger, I knew. I'd grown accustomed to it, and had even come to think of it with a kind of affection, as the slum-dwellers did. That smell meant we were home, safe, protected by our collective wretchedness from the dangers that haunted poor people in the cleaner, grander city streets. Yet I never forgot the spasms of nausea I'd endured when I first entered the slum as a stranger. And I remembered the fear I'd felt, in that smear of air so foul it seemed to poison my lungs with every breath, and stain the very sweat on my skin.

I remembered, and I knew that Tariq was surely suffering and sickened and afraid. But I said nothing to comfort him, and I refused the impulse to take his hand. I didn't want the child with me,, and I was furious with myself for being too weak to tell Khaderbhai as much. I wanted the boy to be sickened. I wanted him to be afraid. I wanted him so sickened and afraid and unhappy that he would plead with his uncle to take him from me.

The crackling tension of that cruel silence was shattered by a burst of ferocious barking. The howls of that one dog soon stirred violent barking from several, and then many others. I stopped suddenly, and Tariq bumped into me from behind. The dogs were in the open field, and not far away. I peered into the blackness, but I couldn't see them. I sensed that it was a large pack, and spread out over a wide area. I looked to the mass of huts, calculating the distance to the slum and the safety of its buildings. Just then, the baying howls reached a crescendo of violence, and they came trotting at us out of the night.

Twenty, thirty, forty maddened dogs formed the pack that advanced on us in a wide crescent, cutting off our retreat to the slum.

The danger was extreme. Those dogs that were so cowed and obsequious in the daylight hours formed themselves into vicious, feral packs at night. Their aggression and ferocity was legendary in all the slums throughout the city, and inspired great fear.

Attacks upon human beings were common. I treated dog bites and rat bites almost every day in the little clinic at my hut. A drunken man had been savaged by a pack of dogs on the edge of the slum, and was still recovering in hospital. A young child had been killed in that very spot, only a month before. His small body had been torn to pieces, and the fragments were strewn across such a wide area that it had taken the whole of a long day to locate and retrieve them all.

We were stranded on the dark path. The dogs closed to within a few metres, swarming around us and barking furiously. The noise was deafening and terrifying. The bravest of the hounds inched closer and closer. I knew they were only seconds from making the first snapping rush at us. The slum was too far away to reach safely. I thought I could make it alone, suffering a few bites, but I knew the dogs would cut Tariq down in the first hundred metres. Much closer, there was a pile of timbers and other construction materials. It would give us weapons, and a well-lit area for the fight. I told Tariq to prepare himself to run on my command. When I was sure he understood, I threw the plastic bag containing the clothes Karla had loaned me into the midst of the pack. They fell on it at once, snapping and snarling at one another in their frenzy to rip and tear at it. "Now, Tariq! Now!" I shouted, shoving the boy in front of me and turning to cover his retreat. The dogs were so engrossed in the bundle that we were safe for a moment. I ran to the pile of scrap wood, and snatched up a length of stout bamboo just as the pack tired of the shredded bundle and advanced on us again.

Recognising the weapon, the enraged hounds hesitated a little further from us. They were many. Too many, I heard myself thinking. There's too many of them. It was the largest pack I'd ever seen. The wild howling goaded the most maddened of them to make a series of rushing feints from several directions. I raised the solid stick and told Tariq to climb onto my back. The boy did so at once, clambering up piggyback style, and wrapping his thin arms around my neck tightly. The pack crept closer. One black dog, larger than the rest, made a scrambling run with its jaws wide, and aimed at my legs. I brought the stick down with all my strength, missing the snout but smashing it into the animal's spine. It yelped in agony, and scuttled out of range. The battle began.

One after another, from left, right, and in front of us, they attacked. Each time, I lashed out with the stick to repulse them.

It occurred to me that if I managed to cripple or even kill one of the dogs, the others might be frightened off, but none of the blows I landed was serious enough to discourage them for very long. In fact, they seemed to sense that the stick could hurt them but not kill them, and they grew bolder.

The whole pack crept inexorably closer. The individual attacks came more often. Ten minutes into the struggle, I was sweating heavily and beginning to tire. I knew it wouldn't be long before my reflexes slowed, and one of the dogs slipped through to bite my leg or arm. And with the first smell of blood, their ravening fury would become rabid, berserk, and fearless. I hoped that someone in the slum would hear the ear-splitting clamour and come to our rescue. But I'd been woken by that same barking from the outskirts of the slum a hundred times late at night. And a hundred times I'd turned over and gone back to sleep without thinking about it.

The large black dog that seemed to be the pack leader made a cunning double feint. As I turned, too quickly, to meet its rush, my foot struck a projecting timber and I fell. I'd often heard people say that at the moment of some accident or sudden danger they had the sensation that time was delayed or sluggish, and everything seemed to happen in slow motion. That stumble sideways, as I fell to the ground, was my first experience of it. Between stumble and fall, there was a tunnel of lengthened time and narrowed perspectives. I saw the black dog hesitate in the rhythm of its instinctive retreats, and turn to face us once more. I saw its forepaws slip and slide beneath it with the energy of its scrambling turn, and then gouge out a purchase on the dusty track for the rush and spring. I saw the eyes of the beast, the almost human cruelty as it sensed my weakness and its nearness to the killing second. I saw the other dogs pause, almost as one, and then creep forward with little mincing steps. I had time to think how strange and inappropriate their stealth was, then, in the moments of my vulnerability. I had time to feel the rough stones scrape the skin back from my elbow as I struck the ground, and time to wonder at the ridiculous particle of worry, about the threat of infection, that strayed across the surface of the present and greater danger of the dogs, the dogs. They were everywhere.

And desperate, sickened with fear for him, I thought of Tariq, the poor child who'd been pressed into my care so reluctantly. I felt him slip from my neck, felt his fragile arms fall through my scrambling hands as I crashed into the slithering pile of timber.

I watched him fall and scramble forward with feline agility to stand, one foot on either side of my extended legs. Then, his body rigid with the vehemence of his rage and courage, the little boy shrieked, seized a lump of wood, and crashed it down on the snout of the black dog. The beast was sorely wounded. Its yelping screams rose above the din of barks and howls and the shrieking of the boy.

"Allah hu Akbar! Allah hu Akbar!" Tariq shouted. He crouched, and swung at the empty air, his own face wild as any beast, and his posture as feral. In the last of those impossibly long seconds of my heightened sense, I had time to feel the hot sting of tears as I watched him crouch and swing and fight to defend us. I could see the knuckles of his spine thrust out against his shirt, and the bones of his thin, little knees outlined against his trousers. There was so much bravery in that small package. The emotion that burned my eyes was love, the pure, pride-filled love of father for son. I loved him with all my heart in that second.

As I thrashed up to my feet, and time accelerated from its glue of fear and failure, some words repeated themselves in my mind, words from Karla's poem. I will die for this love, die for this love. Tariq had wounded the pack leader, and it hung back behind the others, dispiriting them for a few moments. The howling grew louder, however, and there was another quality to it then, a throbbing moan of frustration. It was as if they were sickening for the kill, and tormented by their failure. I hoped that in their agony of disappointment they might turn on one another if they didn't bring us down soon. Then, without warning, they sprang at us again.

They came in groups of two and three. They attacked from two sides at once. The boy and I stood side-to-side and back-to-back, fighting them off with desperate jabs and slashes. The dogs were insane with the blood lust. We hit them hard, but they cowered only seconds before leaping at us again. Everywhere around us was fang and snarl, snap and howl. I leaned over Tariq to help him drive back a determined rush from three or four of the beasts, and one dog managed to sprint in behind me and bite down hard on my ankle. My leather boot protected me, and I drove the dog away, but I knew we were losing the war. We'd retreated hard up against the mound of timbers, and there was nowhere else to go. The whole pack was snarling and lunging at us from only two metres away.

Then, from behind us, there was a sound of growling, and the crunching rattle of timbers slipping away under the weight of something that had jumped onto them. I thought that some of the dogs had somehow worked their way around onto the heap but, as I turned to meet the challenge, I saw the black-clad figure of Abdullah as he sprang, leaping over our heads into the midst of the thrashing jaws of the pack.

He whirled, striking out left and right. He jumped, drawing his knees up tight and landing with the supple tautness of a trained fighter. His movements were fluid, swift, and economical. It was the awful and beautiful frugality of snake and scorpion. Lethal.

Exact. Perfect. He'd armed himself with a metal rod, about three centimetres in diameter and more than a metre in length. He swung it two-handed as if it was a sword. But it wasn't the superior weapon or even his uncanny agility that terrified the dogs and drove them back. What routed them in panicked flight, leaving two of their number skull-crack dead, was the fact that he'd taken the fight to them; that he'd attacked, where we'd defended; that he was sure of winning, where we'd merely struggled to survive.

It was over quickly. There was silence, where so much sound had screamed. Abdullah turned to look at us with the metal rod held above his shoulder like a samurai sword. The smile shining from his brave young face was like moonlight gleaming on the minaret of Haji Ali's white mosque.

Later, while we drank hot and very sweet Suleimani chai in my hut, Abdullah explained that he'd been waiting for me in the hut, and heard the dogs. He told us he came to investigate it because he'd sensed that something was dreadfully wrong. When we'd talked the adventure through several times, I prepared three places for us on the bare earth floor, and we stretched out to rest.

Abdullah and Tariq slipped effortlessly into a sleep that eluded me. I lay back, in a darkness that smelt of incense and beedie cigarettes and cheap kerosene, and I sifted the events of the last few days through a sieve of doubt and suspicion. So much more had happened during those days, it seemed, than in the months before them. Madame Zhou, Karla, Khaderbhai's council, Sapna-I felt myself to be at the mercy of personalities that were stronger, or at least more mysterious, than my own. I felt the irresistible draw and drift of a tide that was carrying me to someone else's destination, someone else's destiny. There was a plan or purpose. I sensed it. There were clues, I was sure, but I couldn't separate them from the busy collage of hours and faces and words. The cloud-mottled night seemed full of signs and portents, as if fate itself was warning me to go or daring me to stay.

Tariq woke with a start, and sat up, staring about him. My eyes were adjusted to the darkness. I saw the moment of fear on his pale face clearly, a fear that tightened into sorrow and resolve even as I watched. He looked to the peacefully sleeping form of Abdullah, and then to me. Without a sound, he stood and dragged his sleeping mat over until it met mine. Snuggling down under the cover of his thin blanket once more, he cuddled in beside me. I stretched out my arm, and he rested his head on it. The smell of the sun was in his hair.

As exhaustion finally claimed me, submerging my doubts and confusions, the shrewd clarity of near-sleep suddenly showed me what it was that those new friends-Khaderbhai, Karla, Abdullah, Prabaker, and all the others-had in common. They were all, we were all, strangers to the city. None of us was born there. All of us were refugees, survivors, pitched up on the shores of the island city. If there was a bond between us, it was the bond of exiles, the kinship of the lost, the lonely, and the dispossessed. Realising that, understanding it, made me see the hard edges of the way I'd treated the boy, Tariq, himself a stranger in my raw and ragged fragment of the city. Ashamed of the cold selfishness that had stolen my pity, and pierced by the courage and loneliness of the little boy, I listened to his sleeping breath, and let him cling to the ache in my heart. Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears. In the end that's all there is: love and its duty, sorrow and its truth. In the end that's all we have-to hold on tight until the dawn.

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PART THREE

Дата добавления: 2015-10-26