Chapter eighteen

The rocky cusp of coastline bordering the slum began in mangrove swamp, at its left, and swept through deeper water around a long new-moon curve of white-crested wavelets to Nariman Point. The monsoon was at full strength, but just at that moment no rain fell from the grey-black ocean of the lightning-fractured sky.

Wading birds swooped into the shallow swamp, and nestled among the slender, trembling reeds. Fishing boats plied their nets on the ragged waves of the bay. Children swam and played along the bouldered, pebble-strewn shoreline. On the golden crescent, across the small bay, apartment towers for the rich stood shoulder to shoulder to shoulder, all the way to the embassy district at the Point. In the large courtyards and recreation areas of those towers, the wealthy walked and took the air. Seen from the distant slum, the white shirts of the men and colourful saris of the women were like so many beads threaded by a meditating mind on the black strings of asphalt paths. The air, there, on that rocky fringe of the slum was clean and cool. The silences were large enough to swallow occasional sounds. The area was known as the Colaba Back Bay. There were few places in the city better suited to the spiritual and physical stocktaking that a wanted man worries himself with, when the omens are bad enough.

I sat alone, on a boulder that was larger and flatter than most, and I smoked a cigarette. I smoked in those days because, like everyone else in the world who smokes, I wanted to die at least as much as I wanted to live.

Sunlight suddenly pushed aside the sodden monsoon clouds, and for a few moments the windows of the apartment buildings across the bay were dazzling, brilliant mirrors of the golden sun. Then, horizon-wide, the rain clouds regrouped, and slowly sealed the splendent circle of sky, herding one against another until heaven matched the rolling sea with dark, watery waves of cloud. I lit a new cigarette with the butt of the last, and thought about love, and thought about sex. Under pressure from Didier, who permitted his friends to keep any secrets but those of the flesh, I'd admitted that I hadn't made love to anyone since I'd arrived in India. That is a very long time between the drinks, my friend, he'd said, gasping in horror, and I propose that it would be a good idea to get very drunk, if you have my meaning, and very soon. And he was right, of course: the longer I went without it, the more important it seemed to become. I was surrounded, in the slum, by beautiful Indian girls and women who provoked small symphonies of inspiration. I never let my eyes or my thoughts wander too far in their direction-it would've compromised everything that I was, and did, as the slum doctor. But there were opportunities with foreign girls, tourists, in every other deal that I did with them, every other day. German, French, and Italian girls often invited me back to their hotel rooms for a smoke, once I'd helped them to buy hash or grass. I knew that something more than smoking was usually intended. And I was tempted. Sometimes I ached with it. But I couldn't get Karla out of my mind. And deep within me-I still don't know whether it's love, or fear, or good judgement that spawns such a feeling-I sensed with all of my intuition that if I didn't wait for her, it wouldn't happen.

I couldn't explain that love to Karla, or anyone else, including myself. I never believed in love at first sight until it happened to me. Then, when it did happen, it was as if every atom in my body had been changed, somehow: as if I'd become charged with light and heat. I was different, forever, just for the sight of her. And the love that opened in my heart seemed to drag the rest of my life behind it, from that moment onward. I heard her voice in every lovely sound the wind wrapped around me. I saw her face in brilliant mirrored flares of memory, every day. Sometimes, when I thought of her, the hunger to touch her and to kiss her and to breathe a cinnamon-scented minute of her black hair clawed at my chest and crushed the air in my lungs. Clouds, heavy with their burden of monsoon rain, massed above the city, above my head, and it seemed to me in those weeks that all grey heaven was my brooding love. The very mangroves trembled with my desire. And at night, too many nights, it was my restive sleep that rolled and turned the sea in lusted dreaming, until the sun each morning rose with love for her. But she wasn't in love with me, she'd said, and she didn't want me to love her. Didier, trying to warn me, trying to help me or save me, perhaps, had said once that nothing grieves more deeply or pathetically than one half of a great love that isn't meant to be. And he was right, of course, up to a point. But I couldn't let it go, that hope of loving her, and I couldn't ignore the instinct that enjoined me to wait, and wait.

Then there was that other love, a father's love, and the son's love that I felt for Khaderbhai. Lord Abdel Khader Khan. His friend, Abdul Ghani, had called him a mooring post, with the lives of thousands tied to his life for safety. My own life seemed to be one of those harnessed to his. Yet I couldn't clearly see the means by which fate had bound me to him, nor was I completely free to leave. When Abdul had spoken of his search for wisdom, and the answers to his three big questions, he'd unwittingly described my own private search for something or someone to believe. I'd walked that same dusty, broken road toward a faith. But every time I'd heard the story of a belief, every time I'd seen some new guru, the result was the same: the story was unconvincing in some way, and the guru was flawed.

Every faith required me to accept some compromise. Every teacher required me to close my eyes to some fault. And then there was Abdel Khader Khan, smiling at my suspicions with his honey coloured eyes. Is he the real thing, I began to ask myself. Is he the one?

"It is very beautiful, isn't it?" Johnny Cigar asked, sitting beside me and staring out at the dark, impatient restlessness of the waves.

"Yeah," I answered, passing him a cigarette.

"Our life, it probably began inside of the ocean," Johnny said quietly. "About four thousand million years before now. Probably near hot places, like volcanoes, under the sea."

I turned to look at him.

"And for almost all of that long time, all the living things were water things, living inside the sea. Then, a few hundred million years ago, maybe a little more-just a little while, really, in the big history of the Earth-the living things began to be living on the land, as well."

I was frowning and smiling at the same time, surprised and bewildered. I held my breath, afraid that any sound might interrupt his musing.

"But in a way you can say that after leaving the sea, after all those millions of years of living inside of the sea, we took the ocean with us. When a woman makes a baby, she gives it water, inside her body, to grow in. That water inside her body is almost exactly the same as the water of the sea. It is salty, by just the same amount. She makes a little ocean, in her body. And not only this. Our blood and our sweating, they are both salty, almost exactly like the water from the sea is salty. We carry oceans inside of us, in our blood and our sweat. And we are crying the oceans, in our tears."

He fell silent, and at last I spoke my amazement.

"Where the hell did you learn that?" I snapped, perhaps a little harshly.

"I read it in a book," he replied, turning to me with shy concern in his brave, brown eyes. "Why? Is it wrong? Have I said it wrongly? I have the book, in my house. Shall I get it for you?"

"No, no, it's right. It's... perfectly right."

It was my turn to lapse into silence. I was furious with myself.

Despite my intimate knowledge of the slum-dwellers, and the debt I owed them-they'd taken me in, and given me all the support and friendship their hearts could hold-I still fell into the bigot's trap. Johnny shocked me with his knowledge because, somewhere in my deepest appraisal of the slum-dwellers, there was a prejudice that they had no right to such knowledge. In my secret heart I'd judged them as ignorant, even though I knew better, simply because they were poor.

"Lin! Lin!" my neighbour Jeetendra called out in a frightened shriek, and we turned to see him clambering over the rocks toward us. "Lin! My wife! My Radha! She is very sick!"

"What is it? What's the matter?"

"She has bad loose motions. She is very hot with fever. And she is vomiting," Jeetendra puffed. "She's looking bad. She's looking very bad."

"Let's go," I grunted, jumping up and leaping from stone to stone until I reached the broken path leading back to the slum.

We found Radha lying on a thin blanket in her hut. Her body was twisted into a knot of pain. Her hair was wet, saturated with sweat, as was the pink sari she wore. The smell in the hut was terrible. Chandrika, Jeetendra's mother, was trying to keep her clean, but Radha's fever rendered her incoherent and incontinent.

She vomited again violently as we watched, and that provoked a new dribble of diarrhoea.

"When did it start?"

"Two days ago," Jeetendra answered, desperation drawing down the corners of his mouth in a grimace. "Two days ago?"

"You were out some place, with tourists, very late. Then you were at Qasim Ali, his house, until late last night. Then you were also gone today, from very early. You were not here. At the first I thought it was just a loose motions. But she is very sick, Linbaba. I tried three times to get her in the hospital, but they will not take her."

"She has to go back to hospital," I said flatly. "She's in trouble, Jeetu."

"What to do? What to do, Linbaba?" he whined, tears filling his eyes and spilling on his cheeks. "They will not take her. There are too many people at the hospital. Too many people. I waited for six hours today altogether-six hours! In the open, with all other sick peoples. In the end, she was begging me to come back to here, to her house. So ashamed, she was. So, I came back, just now. That's why I went searching for you, and called you only.

I'm very worried, Linbaba."

I told him to throw out the water in his matka, wash it out thoroughly, and get fresh water. I instructed Chandrika to boil fresh water until it bubbled for ten minutes and then to use that water, when it cooled, as drinking water for Radha. Jeetendra and Johnny came with me to my hut, where I collected glucose tablets and a paracetamol-codeine mixture. I hoped to reduce her pain and fever with them. Jeetendra was just leaving with the medicine when Prabaker rushed in. There was anguish in his eyes and in the hands that grasped me.

"Lin! Lin! Parvati is sick! Very sick! Please come too fast!"

The girl was writhing in the spasm of an agony that centred on her stomach. She clutched at her belly and curled up in a ball, only to fling her arms and legs outward in a back-arching convulsion. Her temperature was very high. She was slippery with sweat. The smells of diarrhoea and vomit were so strong in the deserted chai shop that the girl's parents and sister held cloths to their mouths and noses. Parvati's parents, Kumar and Nandita Patak, were trying to cope with the illness, but their expressions were equally helpless and defeated. It was a measure of their despondency and their fear that dread had banished modesty, and they allowed the girl to be examined in a flimsy undergarment that revealed her shoulders and most of one breast.

Terror filled the eyes of Parvati's sister, Sita. She hunched in a corner of the hut, her pretty face pinched and cramped by the horror she felt. It wasn't an ordinary sickness, and she knew it.

Johnny Cigar spoke to the girl in Hindi. His tone was harsh, almost brutal. He warned her that her sister's life was in her hands, and he admonished her for her cowardice. Moment by moment, his voice guided her out of the forest of her black fear. At last she looked up and into his eyes, as if seeing him for the first time. She shook herself, and then crawled across the floor to wipe her sister's mouth with a piece of wet towelling. With that call to arms from Johnny Cigar, and the simple, solicitous gesture from Sita, the battle began.

Cholera. By nightfall there were ten serious cases, and a dozen more possible. By dawn the next day there were sixty advanced cases, and as many as a hundred with some symptoms. By noon, on that day, the first of the victims died. It was Radha, my next door neighbour.

The official from the Bombay Municipal Corporation's Department of Health was a tired, astute, condolent man in his early forties named Sandeep Jyoti. His compassionate eyes were almost the same shade of dark tan as his glistening, sweat-oily skin. His hair was unkempt, and he pushed it back frequently with the long fingers of his right hand. Around his neck there was a mask, which he lifted to his mouth whenever he entered a hut or encountered one of the victims of the illness. He stood together with Doctor Hamid, Qasim Ali Hussein, Prabaker, and me near my hut after making his first examination of the slum.

"We'll take these samples and have them analysed," he said, nodding to an assistant who filed blood, sputum, and stool samples in a metal carry case. "But I'm sure you're right, Hamid.

There are twelve other cholera outbreaks, between here and Kandivli. They're small, mostly. But there's a bad one in Thane- more than a hundred new cases every day. All the local hospitals are overcrowded. But this is not bad, really, for the monsoon. We hope we can keep a cap on it at fifteen or twenty infection sites."

I waited for one of the others to speak, but they simply nodded their heads gravely.

"We've got to get these people to hospital," I said at last.

"Look," he replied, glancing around him and drawing a deep breath, "we can take some of the critical cases. I'll arrange it.

But it's just not possible to take everyone. I'm not going to tell you any lies. It's the same in ten other hutments. I've been to them all, and the message is the same. You have to fight it out here, on your own. You have to get through it." "Are you out of your fucking mind?" I snarled at him, feeling the fear prowl in my gut. "We already lost my neighbour Radha this morning. There's thirty thousand people here. It's ridiculous to say we have to fight it out ourselves. You're the health department, for God's sake!"

Sandeep Jyoti watched his assistant close and secure the sample cases. When he turned back to me, I saw that his bloodshot eyes were angry. He resented the indignant tone, especially coming from a foreigner, and was embarrassed that his department couldn't do more for the slum-dwellers. If it hadn't been so obvious to him that I lived and worked in the slum, and that the people liked me as much as they relied on me, he would've told me to go to hell. I watched all those thoughts shift across his tired, handsome face and then I saw the patient, resigned, almost affectionate smile that replaced them as he ran a hand through his untidy hair.

"Look, I really don't need a lecture from a foreigner, from a rich country, about how badly we look after our own people, or the value of a human life. I know you're upset, and Hamid tells me you do a good job here, but I deal with this situation every day, all over the state. There are a hundred million people in Maharashtra, and we value them all. We do our best."

"Sure you do," I sighed in return, reaching out to touch his arm.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to take it out on you. I'm just... I'm way out of my depth here and... I guess I'm scared."

"Why do you stay here, when you can leave?"

It was an abrupt question, under the circumstances, and almost rude. I couldn't answer it.

"I don't know. I don't know. I love... I love this city. Why do you stay?"

He studied my eyes for a moment longer, and then his frown softened again in a gentle smile.

"What help can you give us?" Doctor Hamid asked.

"Not much, I'm sorry to say." He looked at the dread in my eyes, and heaved a sigh from the hill of exhaustion in his heart. "I'll arrange for some trained volunteers to come and give you a hand.

I wish I could do more. But I'm sure, you know, I'm sure that you all can handle it here-probably a lot better than you think, just at this moment. You've already made a good start. Where did you get the salts?"

"I brought them," Hamid answered quickly, because the ORT salts had been supplied illegally by Khaderbhai's lepers. "When I told him I thought we had cholera here, he brought the ORTs, and told me how to use them," I added. "But it's not easy.

Some of these people are too sick to hold them down."

ORT, or Oral Rehydration Therapy, had been devised by Jon Rohde, a scientist who worked with local and UNICEF doctors in Bangladesh during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The oral rehydration solution that he developed contained distilled water, sugar, common salt, and other minerals in carefully mixed proportions. Rohde knew that what kills people who are contaminated with the cholera bacterium is dehydration. The ugly fact is that they shit and vomit themselves to death. He discovered that a solution of water, salt, and sugar kept people alive long enough for the bacterium to pass through their systems. Ranjit's lepers, at Doctor Hamid's request, had given me boxes of the solution. I had no idea how much more of the stuff we could expect to receive, or how much we would need.

"We can get you a delivery of salts," Sandeep Jyoti said. "We'll get them to you as soon as possible. The city is stretched to its limits, but I'll make sure you get a team of volunteers here as soon as we can send them. I'll put a priority on it. Good luck."

We watched in grim silence as he followed his assistant out of the slum. We were all afraid.

Qasim Ali Hussein took control. He declared his home to be a command centre. We called a meeting there, and some twenty men and women gathered to devise a plan. Cholera is largely a water borne disease. The vibrio cholerae bacterium spreads from contaminated water and lodges itself in the small intestine, producing the fever, diarrhoea, and vomiting that cause dehydration and death. We determined to purify the slum's water, beginning with the holding tanks and then moving on to the pots and buckets in each of the seven thousand huts. Qasim Ali produced a bundle of rupee notes as thick as a man's knee, and gave it to Johnny Cigar, deputing him to buy the water purification tablets and other medicines we would need.

Because so much rainwater had accumulated in puddles and rivulets throughout the slum, those too had provided breeding grounds for the bacteria. It was decided that a chain of shallow trenches would be established at strategic points in the lanes of the slum. They would be filled with disinfectant, and each person walking the lane would be required to pass through the ankle-deep antiseptic drench. Plastic bins for safe disposal of waste materials were to be placed at designated points, and antiseptic soap would be given to every household.

Soup kitchens would be established in the chai shops and restaurants to provide safe, boiled food and sterilised cups and bowls. A team was also assigned to the task of removing the bodies of the dead and taking them on a trundle-cart to the hospital. My task was to supervise the use of the oral rehydration solution and to prepare batches of a homemade mixture as required.

They were all huge undertakings and onerous responsibilities, but no man or woman at the gathering hesitated in accepting them.

It's a characteristic of human nature that the best qualities, called up quickly in a crisis, are very often the hardest to find in a prosperous calm. The contours of all our virtues are shaped by adversity. But there was another reason, far from virtue, for my own eagerness to accept the tasks-a reason found in shame. My neighbour Radha had been desperately ill for two days before she died, and I'd known nothing of it at the time. I was gripped by a feeling that my pride, my hubris, was responsible for the sickness in some way: that my clinic was founded in an arrogance - my arrogance-that had allowed the disease to breed in the smear of its conceits. I knew that nothing I'd done or neglected to do had caused the epidemic. And I knew that the disease wouldVe attacked the slum, sooner or later, with or without my presence. But I couldn't shake off the feeling that, somehow, my complacency had made me complicit.

Just a week before, I'd celebrated with dancing and drinking because, when I'd opened my little clinic, no-one had come. Not one man, woman, or child in all the thousands had needed my help.

The treatment queue that had begun with hundreds, nine months before, had finally dwindled to none. And I'd danced and drunk with Prabaker that day, as if I'd cured the whole slum of its ailments and illnesses. That celebration seemed vain and stupid as I hurried through the sodden lanes to the scores who were sick. And there was guilt in that shame as well. For the two days while my neighbour Radha lay dying, I'd been ingratiating myself with tourist customers in their five-star hotel. While she'd writhed and thrashed on a damp earth floor, I'd been calling down to room service to order more ice-cream and crepes.

I rushed back to the clinic. It was empty. Prabaker was looking after Parvati. Johnny Cigar had taken on the job of locating and removing the dead. Jeetendra, sitting on the ground outside our huts with his face in his hands, was sinking in the quicksand of his grief. I gave him the job of making several large purchases for me and checking on all the chemists in the area for ORTs. I was watching him shamble away down the lane toward the street, worrying about him, worrying about his young son, Satish, who was also ill, when I saw a woman in the distance walking toward me. Before I could actually know who it was, my heart was sure it was Karla.

She wore a salwar kameez-the most flattering garment in the world, after the sari-in two shades of sea green. The long tunic was a deeper green, and the pants beneath, tight at the ankle, were paler. There was also a long yellow scarf, worn backwards, Indian style, with the plumes of colour trailing out behind her.

Her black hair was pulled back tightly and fastened at the nape of her neck. The hairstyle threw attention at her large green eyes-the green of lagoons, where shallow water laps at golden sand-and at her black eyebrows and perfect mouth. Her lips were like the soft ridges of dunes in the desert at sunset; like the crests of waves meeting in the frothy rush to shore; like the folded wings of courting birds. The movements of her body, as she walked toward me on the broken lane, were like storm-wind stirring in a stand of young willow trees.

"What are you doing here?"

"Those charm school lessons are paying off, I see," she drawled, sounding very American. She arched one eyebrow, and pursed her lips in a sarcastic smile.

"It's not safe here," I scowled.

"I know. Didier ran into one of your friends from here. He told me about it."

"So, what are you doing here?"

"I came to help you."

"Help me what?" I demanded, exasperated by my worry for her.

"Help you... do whatever you do here. Help other people. Isn't that what you do?"

"You have to go. You can't stay. It's too dangerous. People are dropping down everywhere. I don't know how bad it'll get."

"I'm not going," she said calmly, staring her determination into me. The large, green eyes blazed, indomitable, and she was never more beautiful. "I care about you, and I'm staying with you. What do you want me to do?" "It's ridiculous!" I sighed, rubbing the frustration through my hair. "It's bloody stupid."

"Listen," she said, surprising me with a wide smile, "do you think you're the only one who needs to go on this salvation ride?

Now, tell me, calmly-what do you want me to do?"

I did need help, not just with the physical work of nursing the people, but also with the doubt and fear and shame that throbbed in my throat and chest. One of the ironies of courage, and the reason why we prize it so highly, is that we find it easier to be brave for someone else than we do for ourselves alone. And I loved her. The truth was that while my words warned her away to safety, my fanatic heart connived with my eyes to make her stay.

"Well, there's plenty to do. But be careful! And the first sign that... that you're not okay, you grab a taxi to my friend Hamid's. He's a doctor. Is that a deal?"

She reached out to place her long, slender hand in mine. The handshake was firm and confident.

"It's a deal," she said. "Where do we start?"

We started with a tour of the slum, visiting the sick and dispensing packets of the solution. There were, by then, more than a hundred people presenting symptoms of cholera, and half of them were serious cases. Allowing just a few minutes with each of the victims, it still took us twenty hours. Constantly on the move, we drank soup or sugary chai from sterile cups as our only food. By evening of the following day, we sat down to eat our first full meal. We were exhausted, but hunger drove us to chew through the hot rotis and vegetables. Then, somewhat refreshed, we set off on a second round of the most serious cases.

It was filthy work. The word cholera comes from the Greek word kholera, meaning diarrhoea. The diarrhoea of the cholera sickness has a singularly vile smell, and you never get used to it. Every time we entered a hut to visit the sick, we fought the urge to vomit. Sometimes, we did vomit. And when we vomited once, the impulse to retch and gag was stronger than ever.

Karla was kind and gentle, especially with the children, and she filled the families with confidence. She kept her sense of humour through the smell, and the endless stooping to lift and clean and give comfort in dark, humid hovels; through the sickness and the dying; and through the fear, when the epidemic seemed to be getting worse, that we, too, would sicken and die. Through forty hours without sleep, she smiled every time I turned my hungry eyes on her. I was in love with her, and even if she'd been lazy or a coward or miserly or bad tempered I would've loved her still. But she was brave and compassionate and generous. She worked hard, and she was a good friend. And somehow, through those hours of fear and suffering and death, I found new ways and reasons to like the woman I already loved with all my heart.

At three after midnight on the second night, I insisted that she sleep, that we both sleep, before exhaustion crushed us. We began to walk back through the dark, deserted lanes. There was no moon, and the stars punctured the black dome of the sky with a dazzling intensity. In an unusually wide space, where three lanes converged, I stopped and raised a hand to silence Karla. There was a faint scratching sound, a whisper and scrape as of taffeta rustling, or cellophane being squeezed into a ball. In the blackness I couldn't tell where the sound began, but I knew it was close and getting closer. I reached around behind me to grab Karla, and held her pressed against my back, turning left and right as I tried to anticipate the sound. And then they came-the rats.

"Don't move!" I cautioned in a hoarse whisper, pulling her to my back as tightly as I could. "Keep perfectly still! If you don't move, they'll think you're part of the furniture. If you move, they'll bite!"

The rats came in hundreds and then thousands: black waves of running, squealing beasts that poured from the lanes and swept against our legs like the swirling tide of a river. They were huge, bigger than cats, fat and slimy and rushing through the lanes in a horde that was two or three animals deep. They swept past us at ankle-height and then shin-high, knee-high, running on one another's backs and slapping and smacking into my legs with brutal force. Beyond us, they plunged on into the night toward the sewer pipes of the rich apartment towers, just as they did every night on their migration from nearby markets and through the slum. Thousands. The black waves of snapping rats seemed to go on for ten minutes, although it couldn't have been so long. At last, they were gone. The lanes were picked clean of rubbish and scraps, and silence clogged the air.

"What... the fuck... was that?" she asked, her mouth gaping open.

"The damn things come through here every night about this time.

Nobody minds, because they keep the place clean, and they don't worry you, if you're inside your hut, or asleep on the ground outside. But if you get in their way, and you panic, they just go right over the top of you, and pick you as clean as the lanes."

"I gotta hand it to you, Lin," she said, and her voice was steady, but fear was still wide in her eyes. "You sure know how to show a girl a good time."

Limp with weariness and relief that we weren't badly hurt, we clung to one another and staggered back to the clinic-hut. I spread one blanket down on the bare earth. We stretched out on it, propped up against a stack of other blankets. I held her in my arms. A sprinkling shower of rain rappled on the canvas awning overhead. Somewhere, a sleeper cried out harshly, and the tense, meaningless sound swooped from dream to dream until it disturbed answering howls from a pack of wild dogs roaming the edge of the slum. Too exhausted to sleep just yet, and tingling with sexual tension in the press of our tired bodies we lay awake and, piece by painful piece, Karla told me her story.

She was born in Switzerland, in Basel, and she was an only child.

Her mother was Swiss-Italian, and her father was Swedish. They were artists. Her father was a painter, and her mother was a soprano coloratura. Karla Saaranen's memories of her early childhood years were the happiest of her life. The creative young couple was popular, and their house was a meeting place for poets, musicians, actors, and other artists in the cosmopolitan city. Karla grew up speaking four languages fluently, and spent many long hours learning her favourite arias with her mother. In her father's studio, she watched him magic the blank canvases with all the colours and shapes of his passion.

Then, one day, Ischa Saaranen failed to return from an exhibition of his paintings in Germany. At close to midnight, the local police told Anna and Karla that his car had left the road during a snowstorm. He was dead. Within a year, the misery that ruined Anna Saaranen's beauty, and killed her lovely voice, finally smothered her life as well. She took an overdose of sleeping tablets. Karla was alone.

Her mother's brother had settled in America, in San Francisco.

The orphaned girl was only ten when she stood next to that stranger at her mother's grave and then travelled with him to join his family. Mario Pacelli was a big, generous-hearted bear of a man. He treated Karla with affectionate kindness and sincere respect. He welcomed her into his family as an equal in every way to his own children. He told her often that he loved her and that he hoped she would grow to love him, and to give him a part of the love for her dead parents that he knew she kept locked within her.

There was no time for that love to grow. Karla's uncle Mario died in a climbing accident, three years after she arrived in America.

Mario's widow, Penelope, took control of her life. Aunt Penny was jealous of the girl's beauty and her combative, intimidating intelligence-qualities not discernible in her own three children. The more brightly Karla shined, in comparison to the other children, the more her aunt hated her. There's no meanness too spiteful or too cruel, Didier once said to me, when we hate someone for all the wrong reasons. Aunt Penny deprived Karla, punished her arbitrarily, chastised and belittled her constantly, and did everything but throw the girl into the street.

Forced to provide her own money for all her needs, Karla worked after school every night at a local restaurant, and as a baby sitter on weekends. One of the fathers she worked for returned, alone and too early, on a hot summer night. He'd been to a party, and had been drinking. He was a man she'd liked, a handsome man she'd found herself fantasising about from time to time. When he crossed the room to stand near her on that sultry summer night, his attention flattered her, despite the stink of stale wine on his breath and the glazed stare in his eyes. He touched her shoulder, and she smiled. It was her last smile for a very long time.

No-one but Karla called it rape. He said that Karla had led him on, and Karla's aunt took his part. The fifteen-year-old orphan from Switzerland left her aunt's home, and never contacted her again. She moved to Los Angeles, where she found a job, shared an apartment with another girl, and began to make her own way. But after the rape, Karla lost the part of loving that grows in trust. Other kinds of love remained in her-friendship, compassion, sexuality-but the love that believes and trusts in the constancy of another human heart, romantic love, was lost.

She worked, saved money, and went to night school. It was her dream to gain a place at a university-any university, anywhere- and study English and German literature. But too much in her young life had been broken, and too many loved ones had died. She couldn't complete any course of study. She couldn't remain in any job. She drifted, and she began to teach herself by reading everything that gave her hope or strength.

"And then?"

"And then," she said slowly, "one day, I found myself on a plane, going to Singapore, and I met a businessman, an Indian businessman, and my life... just... changed, forever."

She let out a sighing gasp of air. I couldn't tell if it was despairing or simply exhausted.

"I'm glad you told me."

"Told you what?"

She was frowning, and her tone was sharp.

"About... your life," I answered.

She relaxed.

"Don't mention it," she said, allowing herself a little smile.

"No, I mean it. I'm glad, and I'm grateful, that you trusted me enough to... talk about yourself."

"And I meant it, too," she insisted, still smiling. "Don't mention it-any of it-to anyone. Okay?"

"Okay."

We were silent for a few moments. A baby was crying somewhere nearby, and I could hear its mother soothing it with a little spool of syllables that were tender and yet faintly annoyed at the same time.

"Why do you hang out at Leopold's?"

"What do you mean?" she asked sleepily.

"I don't know. I just wonder."

She laughed with her mouth closed, breathing through her nose.

Her head rested on my arm. In the darkness her face was a set of soft curves, and her eyes gleamed like black pearls.

"I mean, Didier and Modena and Ulla, even Lettie and Vikram, they all fit in there, somehow. But not you. You don't fit."

"I think... they fit in with me, even if I don't fit in with them," she sighed.

"Tell me about Ahmed," I asked. "Ahmed and Christina."

She was silent for so long, in response to the question, that I thought she must've fallen asleep. Then she spoke, quietly and steadily and evenly, as if she was giving testimony at a trial.

"Ahmed was a friend. He was my best friend, for a while, and kind of like the brother I never had. He came from Afghanistan, and was wounded in the war there. He came to Bombay to recover-in a way, we both did. His wounds were so bad that he never really did get his health back completely. Anyway, we kind of nursed each other, I guess, and we became very close friends. He was a science graduate, from Kabul University, and he spoke excellent English.

We used to talk about books and philosophy and music and art and food. He was a wonderful, gentle guy."

"And something happened to him," I prompted.

"Yeah," she replied, with a little laugh. "He met Christina.

That's what happened to him. She was working for Madame Zhou. She was an Italian girl-very dark and beautiful. I even introduced him to her, one night, when she came into Leopold's with Ulla.

They were both working at the Palace."

"Ulla worked at the Palace?"

"Ulla was one of the most popular girls Madame Zhou ever had.

Then she left the Palace. Maurizio had a contact at the German Consulate. He wanted to oil the wheels on some deal that he was working on with the German, and he discovered that the German was crazy about Ulla. With some heavy persuasion from the consulate officer, and all his own savings, Maurizio managed to buy Ulla free from the Palace. Maurizio got Ulla to twist the consulate guy until he did... whatever it was Maurizio wanted him to do.

Then he dumped him. The guy lost it, I heard. He put a bullet in his head. By then, Maurizio had put Ulla to work, to pay the debt she owed him."

"You know, I've been working up a healthy dislike for Maurizio."

"It was a shitty deal, true enough. But at least she was free from Madame Zhou and the Palace. I have to give Maurizio his due there-he proved it could be done. Before that, nobody ever got away-not without getting acid thrown in her face. When Ulla broke away from Madame Zhou, Christina wanted to break out as well. Madame Zhou was forced to let Ulla go, but she was damned if she was going to part with Christina as well. Ahmed was crazy in love with her, and he went to the Palace, late one night, to have it out with Madame Zhou. I was supposed to go with him. I did business with Madame Zhou-I brought businessmen there for my boss, and they spent a lot of money-you know that. I thought she'd listen to me. But then I got called away. I had a job... a job... it was... an important contact... I couldn't refuse. Ahmed went to the Palace alone. They found his body, and Christina's, the next day, in a car, a few blocks from the Palace. The cops... said that they both took poison, like Romeo and Juliet."

"You think she did it to them, Madame Zhou, and you blame yourself, is that it?"

"Something like that."

"Is that what she was talking about, that day, through the metal grille, when we got Lisa Carter out of there? Is that why you were crying?"

"If you must know," she said softly, her voice emptied of all its music and emotion, "she was telling me what she did to them, before she had them killed. She was telling me how she played with them, before they died."

I clamped my jaw shut, listening to the ruffle of air breathing in and out through my nose, until our two patterns of breath matched one another in rhythmic rise and fall.

"And what about you?" she asked, at last, her eyes closing more slowly and opening less often. "We've got my story. When are you going to tell me your story?"

I let the raining silence close her eyes for the last time. She slept. I knew we didn't have her story. Not the whole of it. I knew the small daubs of colour she'd excluded from her summary were at least as important as the broad strokes she'd included.

The devil, they say, is in the details, and I knew well the devils that lurked and skulked in the details of my own story.

But she had given me a hoard of new treasures. I'd learned more about her in that exhausted, murmuring hour than in all the many months before it. Lovers find their way by such insights and confidences: they're the stars we use to navigate the ocean of desire. And the brightest of those stars are the heartbreaks and sorrows. The most precious gift you can bring to your lover is your suffering. So I took each sadness she confessed to me, and pinned it to the sky.

Somewhere out there in the night, Jeetendra wept for his wife.

Prabaker mopped at Parvati's sweating face with his red scarf.

Heaped up on the blankets, our bodies bound by weariness and her deep slumber, surrounded by sickness and hope, death and defiance, I touched the soft surrendered curl of Karla's sleeping fingers to my lips, and I pledged my heart to her forever.

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Дата добавления: 2015-10-26