Chapter twenty-two

Working for Abdel Khader Khan was my first real instruction in organised crime-until then I'd been no more than a desperate man, doing stupid, cowardly things to feed a stupid, cowardly heroin habit, and then a desperate exile earning small commissions on random deals. Although they were crimes that I'd committed, and some of them were very serious, I was never really a criminal until I accepted Khaderbhai as my teacher. I'd been a man who committed crimes, up to then, rather than a criminal, and there's a difference between the two. The difference, as with most things in life, lay in the motive and the means. Being tortured in Arthur Road Prison had given me the motive to cross the line. Another man, a smarter man than I was, might've run away from Bombay as soon as he was freed from the prison. I didn't. I couldn't. I wanted to know who'd put me in there, and why. I wanted revenge. The safest and fastest way to that vengeance was to join Khaderbhai's branch of the mafia.

His instruction in the lawbreaker's arts-he sent me first to the Palestinian, Khaled Ansari, to learn the black-market money trade - gave me the means to become what I'd never tried or wanted to be: a professional criminal. And it felt good. It felt so good within the protective circle of that band of brothers. When I rode the train to Khaled's apartment every day, hanging out the door of a rattling carriage in the hot, dry wind with other young men, my heart swelled with the excitement of freedom's wild, reckless ride.

Khaled, my first teacher, was the kind of man who carried his past in the temple fires of his eyes, and fed the flames with pieces of his broken heart. I've known men like Khaled in prisons, on battlefields, and in the dens where smugglers, mercenaries, and other exiles meet. They all have certain characteristics in common. They're tough, because there's a kind of toughness that's found in the worst sorrow. They're honest, because the truth of what happened to them won't let them lie.

They're angry, because they can't forget the past or forgive it.

And they're lonely. Most of us pretend, with greater or lesser success, that the minute we live in is something we can share.

But the past for every one of us is a desert island; and those like Khaled, who find themselves marooned there, are always alone.

Khaderbhai had told me some of Khaled's history when he'd briefed me for my first lessons. I'd learned that Khaled, at only thirty four, was alone in the world. His parents, both renowned scholars, had been prominent in the Palestinian struggle for an independent nation-state. His father had died in prison, in Israel. His mother, his two sisters, his aunts and uncles, and his mother's parents had all been killed in the massacres at Shatila, in Lebanon. Khaled, who'd trained with Palestinian guerrilla units in Tunisia, Libya, and Syria, and had fought for nine years in dozens of operations across a score of conflict zones, broke down after the bloody deaths of his mother and all the others at the refugee camp. His Fattah Group commander, knowing the signs of that breakdown and the risks it posed, had released him from duty.

Although still devoted to the cause of Palestinian statehood in his words, he was in fact lost to any cause but the suffering he'd endured and the suffering he lived to inflict. He'd drifted to Bombay on the recommendation of a senior guerrilla fighter who knew Khaderbhai. The mafia don took him in. Impressed with his education, language skills, and obsessive dedication, the permanent members of Khaderbhai's council had rewarded the young Palestinian with successive promotions. Three years after Shatila, at the time that I met him, Khaled Ansari was in charge of Khaderbhai's black-market currency operation. The position carried with it a place on the council. And when I felt strong enough to put in a full day of study, not long after my release from Arthur Road Prison, the bitter, lonely, battle-scarred Palestinian began my instruction.

"People say that money is the root of all evil," Khaled told me when we met in his apartment. His English was rich with accents of New York and Arabic and the Hindi that he spoke reasonably well. "But it's not true. It's the other way round. Money isn't the root of all evil. Evil is the root of all money. There's no such thing as clean money. All the money in the world is dirty, in some way, because there's no clean way to make it. If you get paid in money, somebody, somewhere, is suffering for it. That's one of the reasons, I think, why just about everybody-even people who'd never break the law in any other way-is happy to add an extra buck or two to their money on the black market."

"You make your living from it," I said, curious to know how he would respond.

"So?"

"So, how do you feel about it?"

"I don't feel anything about it, one way or the other. Suffering is the truth. Not suffering is the lie. I told you that, once before. That's just the way the world is."

"But surely some money has more suffering attached to it," I persisted, "and some money has less."

"Money only comes in two kinds, Lin-yours, and mine."

"Or, in this case, Khader's money."

Khaled laughed. It was a short, sad laugh, and the only one that was left in him.

"We make money for Abdel Khader, true, but a part of everything we make is ours. And it's the little part of everything that belongs to _us that keeps us in the game, na? Okay, let's get started. Why do black markets for money exist?"

"I'm not sure what you mean."

"I'll ask it in a different way," Khuled smiled. The thick scar that started at his throat, below the left ear, and cut a groove in his face all the way to the corner of his mouth, gave the smile a lopsided and unsettling twist. The scarred half of his face didn't smile at all, which meant that the other half seemed menacing, or pained, when he was trying hardest to be kind. "How is it that we can buy one American dollar from a tourist for, say, eighteen rupees, when the banks are only offering fifteen or sixteen?"

"Because we can sell them for more than eighteen?" I offered.

"Good. Good. Now, how can we do that?"

"Because... someone wants to buy them at that price, I guess."

"Exactly. But who are we selling them to?"

"Look, the most I ever did was put tourists together with black market guys, and take my cut. I don't really know what happens to the dollars after that. I never went that far into it."

"Black markets for things exist," he said slowly, as if confiding a personal secret rather than a commercial fact, "because the white markets are too strict. In this case, in the case of currencies, the government and the Reserve Bank of India control the white markets, and they're too strict. It's all about greed, and control. These are the two elements that make for commercial crime. Any one of them, on its own, is not enough. Greed without control, or control without greed won't give you a black market.

Men can be greedy for the profit made from, let's say, pastries, but if there isn't strict control on the baking of pastries, there won't be a black market for apple strudel. And the government has very strict controls on the disposal of sewage, but without greed for profit from sewage, there won't be a black market for shit. When greed meets control, you get a black market."

"You've put a lot of thought into this," I commented, laughing, but impressed and genuinely glad that he wanted to give me the ontology of currency crime, and not just the ways I could go about committing it.

"Not really," he answered self-deprecatingly.

"No, I'm serious. When Khaderbhai sent me here, I thought you were going to give me a few tables of figures-you know, today's currency exchange rates and all that-and then send me on my way."

"Oh, we'll get to the rates and stuff soon enough," he smiled again, sounding very American in the light-hearted aside. I knew he'd studied in New York when he was much younger. Khaderbhai had told me that he'd been happy there, for a time. A little of that happiness seemed to have survived in the long, rounded vowels and other Americanisms of his speech. "But first you need the theory, before you can make a profit from the practice."

The Indian rupee, Khaled explained, was a restricted currency. It couldn't be taken out of India, and it couldn't legally be changed for dollars anywhere in the world but in India. With its vast population, India sent many thousands of businessmen, businesswomen, and travellers out of the country every day. Those people were permitted to take out only a limited amount of American currency with them. They could change a fixed amount of their rupees into American dollars, and the rest had to be converted in the form of travellers' cheques.

The regulation was enforced in various ways. When someone wanted to leave the country and change rupees into dollars to the legal limit, he or she had to present a passport and plane ticket at the bank. The bank teller confirmed the departure date on the ticket, and marked both the ticket and the passport to indicate that the holder had been granted the full limit of American dollars in exchange for rupees. The transaction couldn't be duplicated. There was no legal way for the traveller to buy more American dollars for that journey.

Almost everyone in India had at least some black money under the bed. From the few hundred rupees that a working man earned and didn't report to the Tax Office, all the way to the billions of rupees accumulated as profits from crime, the black economy was said to be almost half as large as the legal, white econoriy.

Anyone who had thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of undeclared rupees-as many Indian business travellers did-couldn't buy legal travellers' cheques with them: the bank or the Tax Office always wanted to know where the money came from. So the only real alternative was to buy dollars from the black-market currency dealers. And every day, in Bombay, millions of rupees worth of black American dollars, English pounds, Deutschmarks, Swiss francs, and other currencies were bought and sold in a trade that was a dark mirror of the legal money exchanges.

"I buy a thousand American dollars, from a tourist, for eighteen thousand rupees, when the bank exchange rate is set at fifteen,"

Khaled summarised. "He's happy, because he's three thousand rupees better off than he would've been at the bank. Then I sell the dollars, to an Indian businessman, for twenty-one thousand rupees. He's happy, because he bought the dollars with black money that he couldn't declare. Then I put three thousand rupees in the kitty, and I buy another thousand dollars, from another tourist, for eighteen thousand. That's the simple equation at the heart of the currency racket."

To find the tourists, and entice them to change their money, Khaderbhai's mafia council employed a small army of touts, guides, beggars, hotel managers, bellboys, restaurateurs, waiters, shopkeepers, airline officials, travel agents, nightclub owners, prostitutes, and cab drivers. Keeping tabs on them was one of Khaled's jobs. In the mornings he phoned all the businesses to establish exchange rates for all the important currencies. There were update calls every two hours throughout the day, advising of any fluctuations in the rates. A taxi was at his disposal around the clock, with two drivers operating in shifts. Every morning he visited the bagmen for each area, and handed over bundles of rupees for the street traders to use as their float. Touts and other street-level crooks dealt with the street traders, guiding tourists and businessmen to them. The traders changed money, and kept the foreign currencies in bundles to be collected. Bagmen did the rounds of traders throughout the day, supplying them with cash as they needed it. Collectors made several sweeps during each working day and night to pick up bundles of foreign currency.

Khaled supervised personal collections and exchanges at hotels, airline offices, travel agencies, and other businesses that required a greater degree of discretion. He made two major pick ups from his collectors in the key areas; one at noon, and one in the late evening. Relevant cops in every area were paid to look away from anything that might offend their sensibilities. In return, Khaderbhai promised that any violence he deemed necessary, in the event that someone tried to rob his men or hold out on them, would be swift and sure, and would never involve the police or threaten their interests in any way. The responsibility for maintaining discipline and enforcing Khader's control fell to Abdullah Taheri. His team of Indian goondas and Iranian veterans of the war with Iraq ensured that irregularities were rare, and ruthlessly punished.

"You'll work with me, on the collections," Khaled announced.

"You'll learn it all, in time, but I really want you to concentrate on the tricky ones-the five-star hotels, and the airline offices. The shirt and tie jobs. I'll go with you, especially at the start, but I think it'll be good if a gora, a well-dressed, white foreigner, does the hand-overs in those places. You'll be invisible. They won't look at you twice. And our contacts will be a lot less edgy, dealing with you. After that, I want you to get into the travel business. I can use a gora there, too."

"The travel business?"

"Oh, you're gonna love it," he said, meeting my eyes with that same sad smile. "It'll make that stint you did in Arthur Road seem worth it, because it's first class all the way."

The travel racket, he explained, was an especially lucrative part of the currency trade. It involved large numbers of people from the millions of Indians who worked in Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Muscat, Bahrain, Kuwait, and elsewhere throughout the Arab Gulf. The Indian workers, employed on contracts for three, six, or twelve months as domestics, cleaners, and labourers, were usually paid in foreign currency. Most of the workers tried to exchange their wages on the black market as soon as they got back to India, in order to gain a few extra rupees. Khader's mafia council offered the employers and the workers a shortcut. When they sold their foreign currencies in bulk to Khaderbhai, the Arab employers received a slightly more favourable rate, allowing them to pay their workers in rupees, at the black-market rate, in India. That left them with a surplus of rupees, and gave them a net profit from paying their workers.

For many Gulf State employers, the temptation to such currency crime was irresistible. They, too, had caches of undeclared, untaxed money under their opulent beds. Syndicates developed to organise the payment of Indian guest workers in rupees when they returned to India. The workers were happy because they got the black-market rate but didn't have to negotiate with hard-nosed black-market dealers personally. The bosses were happy because they made profits from the payment through their syndicates. The black marketeers were happy because a steady stream of dollars, Deutschmarks, riyals, and dirhams flowed into the river of demand created by Indian business travellers. Only the government missed out, and no-one in the thousands upon thousands of people involved in the trade shamed himself beyond endurance on that account.

"I... this whole business was once something of a specialty with me...," Khaled said, when that long first lesson finally ended.

His voice trailed off, and I couldn't be certain whether he was reminiscing or simply reluctant to talk further. I waited.

"When I was studying, in New York," he went on at last, "I was working on a thesis... well, I wrote a thesis, on _un-organised trade in the ancient world. It's an area that my mother was researching, before the '67 war. When I was a kid, she got me interested in the black markets of Assyria, Akkad, and Sumer, and how they related to trade routes, and taxes, and the empires that built up around them. When I started to write it myself, I called it Black Babylon."

"It's a catchy title."

He fired a glance at me to reassure himself that I wasn't mocking him.

"I mean it," I said quickly, wanting to put him at ease because I was beginning to like him. "I think it's a good topic for a thesis, and it's a very catchy title. I think you should go ahead and finish it." He smiled again.

"Well, Lin, life has a lot of surprises, and, as my uncle in New York used to say, most of them ain't happy ones for a working stiff. Now I'm working _for a black market, instead of working on one. Now, it's Black Bombay."

The bitterness in his voice was disconcerting. His jaw began to set in a grim and almost angry expression as he stared at his joined hands. I moved to steer the conversation away from the past.

"You know, I've been involved with a part of the black market that might interest you. Have you heard of the lepers' medicine market?"

"Sure," he replied, interest glittering in his dark brown eyes.

He ran a hand over his face and up across the short, military haircut, prematurely streaked with grey and white. The gesture wiped his gloomy recollections away, and he gave me his full attention. "I heard that you met Ranjit-he's incredible, isn't he?"

We talked about Ranjitbhai, the king of his little group of lepers, and the black market they'd organised across the country.

Their mysterious trade fascinated us equally. As a historian-or a man who'd once dreamed of becoming a historian, like his scholarly mother-Khaled was intrigued by the long evolution and secret conduct of the lepers' organisation. As a writer, I was provoked by the story of their suffering and their unique response to it. After twenty minutes of excited, actuating discussion, we agreed to visit Ranjit together to find out more about the history of the black market in medicines.

And with that pledge between exiles, between scholar and writer, Khaled and I established a simple but enduring bond of intellectual respect. We became friends in the rapid, unquestioning way of criminals, soldiers, and other survivors of disaster. I visited him every day in his sparsely furnished, Spartan apartment near Andheri station. The sessions lasted five or six hours. They roved freely from ancient history to reserve bank interest-rate policies, from anthropology to fixed and floating currencies, and I learned more about that very common but complex crime in one month, with Khaled Ansari, than most street traders in dollars and Deutschmarks learned in a year of dealing.

And when the lessons were complete, I went to work with Khaled every morning and every evening, seven days a week. The pay was good. The wages I earned came in such quantities that I was often paid in thick blocks of rupees, direct from the bank and still bearing their steel staples all the way through the notes. Compared to the slum-dwellers I'd known as neighbours, friends, and patients for almost two years, I was already a rich man.

To ensure that the cuts and wounds of prison healed as quickly as possible, I'd taken a room at the India Guest House, at Khaderbhai's expense. The clean, tiled shower and soft mattress did help me to heal, but there was more to the move than physical convalescence. The truth was that the months in Arthur Road Prison had damaged my spirit more than my body. And the lingering shame I felt over the deaths of my neighbour Radha in the cholera epidemic, and the two boys from my English class, gave me no peace. The prison torment, and my failures in the cholera epidemic: I might've survived either one of them on its own, and gone back to those loving, wretched acres when I was well enough.

But both of them, together, were more than my frail self-respect could endure, and I couldn't live in the slum or even sleep the night there.

I visited Prabaker, Johnny, Qasim, and Jeetendra often, and I continued to help out at the clinic, attending to patients for two afternoons every week. But the strange mix of arrogance and insouciance that had permitted me to be the slum doctor was gone, and I didn't expect it to return. There's a little arrogance at the heart of every better self. That arrogance left me when I failed to save my neighbour's life-failed even to know that she was ill. And there's an innocence, essential and unblinking, in the heart of every determination to serve. That innocence faltered when I stumbled from the Indian prison: my smile, no less than my footsteps, hobbled by the memory of the leg-irons.

Moving out of the slum had as much or more to do with the state of my soul as it did with the wounds on my body.

For their part, my friends from the slum accepted my decision without question or comment. They greeted me warmly whenever I visited, and involved me in the daily routines and celebrations of the slum-weddings, festivals, community meetings, or cricket games-as if I still lived and worked with them. And despite their shock and sorrow when they saw my emaciated frame, and the scars that the overseers had branded on my skin, they never once mentioned the prison. A part of that, I think, was sensitivity to the shame they knew I must've been feeling; the shame that they would've felt had they been imprisoned. Another part, in the hearts of Prabaker, and Johnny Cigar, and perhaps even Qasim Ali, mightVe been found in guilt-that they hadn't been able to help me because they hadn't thought to search for me. None of them had realised that I'd been arrested. They'd assumed that I'd simply tired of life in the slum, and that I'd returned to my comfortable life in my comfortable country, like every other tourist or traveller they'd ever known.

And that, too, found its way into my reluctance to return to the slum. It astonished me, and it hurt me, after all I'd done there, and for all that they'd included me in the ragged skein of their too-many lives, that they still expected me to leave them, without a word of farewell, whenever the whim possessed me.

So, when my health improved and I began to earn real money, I didn't move back to the slum. Instead, with Khaderbhai's help, I rented an apartment in Colaba at the landward end of Best Street, not far from Leopold's. It was my first apartment in India, and my first indulgence of space and privacy and domestic luxuries such as a hot shower and a functioning kitchen. I ate well, cooking high-protein and high-carbohydrate meals, and forcing myself to finish off a bucket of ice cream every day. I put on body weight. I slept for ten hours at a stretch, night after night, healing my lacerated body with sleep's ravelling repair.

But I woke often, with my arms flailing, fighting, and the wet metal smell of blood still fresh from the nightmare.

I trained in karate and weightlifting with Abdullah at his favourite gym in the fashionable suburb of Breach Candy. Two other young gangsters-Salman Mustaan and his friend Sanjay, whom I'd met at my first visit to Khader's council-often joined us.

They were strong, healthy men in their late-twenties who liked to fight about as much as they liked sex, and they liked sex just fine. Sanjay, with his movie-star looks, was the joker. Salman was quieter and more serious. Although inseparable friends since childhood, they were as hard on one another in the ring as they were when they boxed Abdullah and me. We worked out five times each week, with two days off to allow our torn and swollen muscles to recover. And it was good. It helped. Pumping iron is Zen for violent men. Little by little, my body regained its strength, muscular shape, and fitness.

But no matter how fit I became, I knew that my mind wouldn't heal, couldn't heal, until I found out who'd arranged with the police to have me picked up and sent to Arthur Road Prison. I needed to know who did it. I needed to know the reason. Ulla was gone from the city-in hiding, some said, but no-one could guess from whom, or why. Karla was gone, and no-one could tell me where she was. Didier and several other friends were digging around for me, trying to find the truth, but they hadn't found anything that might tell me who'd set me up.

Someone had arranged with senior cops to have me arrested, without charge, and imprisoned at Arthur Road. The same person had arranged to have me beaten-severely and often-while I was in the prison. It was a punishment or an act of revenge.

Khaderbhai had confirmed that much, but he couldn't or wouldn't say more, except to tell me that whoever it was who'd set me up hadn't known that I was on the run. That information, about the escape from Australia, had emerged from the routine fingerprint check. The cops concerned had realised, at once, that there might be profit in keeping quiet about it, and they'd shelved my file until Vikram approached them on Khader's behalf.

"Those fuckin' cops liked you, man," Vikram told me as we sat together in Leopold's one afternoon, a few months after I'd started work with Khaled as a currency collector.

"U-huh."

"No, really, they did. That's why they let you go."

"I never saw that cop before in my life, Vikram. He didn't know me at all."

"You don't get it," he replied patiently. He poured another glass of cold Kingfisher beer, and sipped it appreciatively. "I talked to that guy, the cop, when I got you out of there. He told me the whole story. See, when the first guy in the fingerprint section found out who the fuck you really were-when your fingerprint check came back with the news that you were this wanted guy, from Australia-he freaked out on it. He freaked out on how much money he might get, you know, to keep the shit quiet. A chance like that doesn't come along every day, na? So, without saying anything to anyone else, he goes to a senior cop he knows, and shows him the file report on your prints. That cop freaks out, too. He goes to another cop-the one we saw at the jail-and shows him the file. That cop tells the others to keep quiet about it, and leave it to him to find out how much money there is in it."

A waiter brought my cup of coffee, and chatted with me for a while in Marathi. Vikram waited until we were alone again before he spoke.

"They love it, you know, all these waiters and cab drivers and post office guys-and the cops, too-they love it, all these guys, that you speak Marathi to them. Fuck, man, I'm born here, and you speak Marathi better than I do. I never learned to speak it properly. I never had to. That's why so many Marathis are so pissed off, man. Most of us don't give a shit about the Marathi language, or who all comes to live in Bombay, or wherever the fuck they come from, yaar. Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, so the cop has this file on you, and he's keeping it quiet. But he wants to know more about this Australian fucker, who escaped from jail, before he does anything, yaar."

Vikram stopped, and grinned at me until the grin became a playful laugh. He wore a black leather vest over his white silk shirt, despite the thirty-five-degree heat. In his heavy, black jeans and ornate black cowboy boots, he must've been very hot, but he seemed cool; almost as cool as he looked.

"It's fuckin' great, man!" he laughed. "You busted out of a maximum-security jail! Fuckin' deadly! It's the greatest thing I ever heard, Lin. It's tearing my heart out that I can't tell anyone about it."

"Do you remember what Karla said about secrets, when we were sitting here one night?"

"No, man. What was it?"

"It isn't a secret, unless keeping it hurts."

"That's pretty fuckin' good," Vikram mused, grinning "So where was I? I'm losing it today, man. It's this Lettie thing. It's driving me insane, Lin. Oh yeah, the cop in charge, the cop with your file, he wants to do some checking on you. So, he sends two of his guys around, asking questions about you. All the street guys you used to work with, they gave you solid support, man.

They said you never cheated anyone, never fucked anybody over, and you put a lot of money around with the poor street guys when you had it."

"But the cops didn't tell anyone I was in Arthur Road?"

"No, man, they were checking up on you to find out if they wanted to fuck you over, and send you back to the Australian cops, or not-depending on how you checked out. And there's more to it.

One of the moneychangers tells the cops, Hey, if you wanna know about Lin, go ask in the zhopadpatti, because he lives there.

Well, the cops are now real intrigued, like-a gora, living in the slum. So they go there, and they take a look. They don't tell anybody in the slum what happened to you, but they start asking about you, and the people say stuff like, You see that clinic?

Lin built it, and he's been working there for a long time, helping the people... And they say stuff like, Everybody here has been treated at Lin's clinic, free of charge, at one time or another, and he did a great job when the cholera came... And they told the cops about that little school you started, You see that little school for English? Lin started it... And the cops get an earful of this Lin, this Linbaba, this foreign guy who does all this good shit, and they go back to their boss, telling him what they heard."

"Oh, come on, Vikram! You really think that made a difference? It was about money, that's all, and I'm just glad you were there to pay it."

Vikram's eyes widened in surprise, and then narrowed into a disapproving frown. He lifted the hat from his back and examined it, turning it in his hands and flicking specks of dust from the rim.

"You know, Lin, you've been here for a while now, and you've learned some language, and been to the village, and lived in the slum, and even been the fuck to jail and all, but you still don't get it, do you?"

"Maybe not," I conceded. "Probably not."

"Damn right you don't, man. This is not England, or New Zealand, or Australia, or wherever the fuck else. This is India, man. This is India. This is the land of the heart. This is where the heart is king, man. The fuckin' heart. That's why you're free. That's why that cop gave you back your phoney passport. That's why you can walk around, and not get picked up, even though they know who you are. They could've fucked you, Lin. They could've taken your money, Khader's money, and let you go, and then get some other cops to bust you, and send you the fuck home. But they didn't do it, and they won't do it, because you got them in their heart, man, in their Indian fuckin' heart. They looked at all what you did here, and how the people in that slum love you, and they thought, Well, he fucked up in Australia, but he's done some good shit here. If he pays up, we'll let the fucker go. Because they're Indians, man. That's how we keep this crazy place together-with the heart. Two hundred fuckin' languages, and a billion people. India is the heart. It's the heart that keeps us together. There's no place with people like my people, Lin.

There's no heart like the Indian heart."

He was crying. Stunned, I watched him wipe the tears from his eyes, and I reached out to put a hand on his shoulder. He was right, of course. Even though I'd been tortured in an Indian prison, and almost killed there, I had been set free, and they had given me my old passport when I left the prison. Is there any other country in the world, I asked myself, that would've let me go, as India did? And even in India, if the cops had checked on me and discovered a different story- that I cheated Indians, say, or ran Indian prostitutes, or beat up defenceless people-they would've taken the money, and then sent me back to Australia anyway. It was the land where the heart is king. I knew that from Prabaker, from his mother, from Qasim Ali, from Joseph's redemption. I'd known it even in the prison, where men like Mahesh Malhotra had taken a beating in order to smuggle food to me when I was starving.

"What's this? A lover's quarrel, perhaps?" Didier asked, inviting himself to sit down.

"Oh, fuck you, Didier!" Vikram laughed, pulling himself together.

"Ah, well, it's a touching thought, Vikram. But, perhaps when you are feeling a little better. And how are you today, Lin?"

"I'm fine," I smiled. Didier was one of three people who'd burst into tears when they saw me, flesh-withered and still ripped with cuts and wounds, soon after my release from Arthur Road Prison.

The second was Prabaker, whose weeping was so violent that it took me a full hour to console him. The third person, unexpectedly, was lord Abdel Khader, whose eyes filled with tears when I thanked him: tears that flowed on my neck and shoulder when he hugged me.

"What'll you have?" I asked him.

"Oh, very kind," he murmured, purring with pleasure. "I believe that I will begin with a flask of whisky, and a fresh lime, and a cold soda. Yes. That will be a good commencement, no? It is very strange, and a very unhappy business, don't you think, this news about Indira Gandhi?"

"What news?" Vikram asked.

"They are saying on the news, just now, that Indira Gandhi is dead."

"Is it true?" I asked.

"I fear that it is," he sighed, suddenly and uncharacteristically solemn. "The reports are not confirmed, but I think there is no doubt."

"Was it the Sikhs? Was it because of Bluestar?"

"Yes, Lin. How did you know?"

"When she stormed the Golden Temple, to get Bhindranwale, I had a feeling it was going to catch up with her."

"What happened? Did the KLF do it?" Vikram asked. "Was it a bomb?"

"No," Didier answered, gravely. "They say it was her bodyguards- her Sikh bodyguards."

"Her own bodyguard, for fuck's sake!" Vikram gasped. His mouth gaped open, and his gaze drifted on the tide of his thoughts.

"Guys-I'll be back in a minute. Do you hear that? They're talking about the story, right now, on the radio, at the counter.

I'll go and listen, and come back."

He jogged to the crowded counter where fifteen or twenty men pressed together, arms around shoulders to listen, while an almost hysterical announcer gave details of the murder in Hindi.

Vikram could've listened to the broadcast from his seat at our table-the volume was switched up to the maximum, and we heard every word. It was something else that drew him to the crowded counter: a sense of solidarity and kinship; a huddled need to feel the astounding news, through contact with his countrymen, even as he listened to it.

"Let's have that drink," I suggested.

"Yes, Lin," Didier answered, pouting with his lower lip, and offering a flourish of his hand to dismiss the distressing subject. The gesture failed. His head lolled forward, and he stared vacantly at the table in front of him. "I can't believe it. It is simply not believable. Indira Gandhi, dead... It is almost unthinkable. It is almost impossible to force myself to think of it, Lin. It is... you know... impossible."

I ordered for Didier, and let my thoughts wander while we listened to the plaintive screech of the radio announcer.

Selfishly, I wondered first what the assassination might mean for my security, and then what it might do to the exchange rates on the black money market. Some months before, Indira Gandhi had authorised an assault on the Sikh holy-of-holies, the Golden Temple, in Amritsar. Her goal was to drive out a large, well armed company of Sikh militants who'd entered the temple and fortified themselves there under the leadership of a handsome, charismatic separatist named Bhindranwale. Using the temple complex as a base, the militants had launched punitive attacks against Hindus, and those they described as recalcitrant Sikhs, for many weeks. Indira Gandhi, on the eve of a fiercely contested general election, had been deeply concerned that she would appear weak and indecisive if she failed to act. In what many judged to be the worst of her admittedly limited options, Indira had sent the army into battle with the Sikh rebels.

The army operation to dislodge the militants from the Golden Temple was known as Operation Bluestar. Bhindranwale's militants, believing themselves to be freedom fighters and martyrs for the Sikh cause, met the army force with reckless and desperate resistance. More than six hundred lives were lost, and many hundreds of people were injured. In the end, the Golden Temple complex was cleared, and Indira emerged as anything but indecisive or weak. Her goal of reassuring the Hindu heartland of voters had been achieved, but the Sikh struggle for a separate homeland, called Khalistan, was rich in new martyrs. And across the world, Sikh hearts clenched around their determination to avenge the profane and bloody invasion of their holiest shrine.

The radio at the counter gave us no other details, but the message wailed from the speaker that she'd been murdered. Only a few months after Bluestar, Indira's own Sikh bodyguards had killed her. The woman who'd been reviled as a despot by some, adored as the mother of the country by many others, and so closely identified with the nation as to be indistinguishable from its past, and from its destiny, was gone. She was dead.

I had to think. I had to calculate the danger. Security forces across the country would be on special alert. There would be ramifications-riots, killings, looting, and burning, as revenge exacted on the Sikh communities for her murder. I knew it.

Everyone in India knew it. On the radio, the announcer was talking about troop deployments in Delhi and in Punjab aimed at quelling anticipated disturbances. The tension would bring new dangers for me, a wanted man, working for the mafia, and living in the country with an expired visa. For a few moments, sitting there as Didier sipped his drink, as the men in the restaurant strained in silence to listen, and the early evening blushed our skin with rose-gold, my heart thumped with fear. Run, my thoughts whispered. Run now, while you can. This is your last chance...

But even then, as I formed the clear thought to flee the city, I felt myself relaxing into a dense, fatalistic calm. I wouldn't leave Bombay. I couldn't leave Bombay. I knew that, as surely as I'd ever known anything in my life. There was the issue of Khaderbhai: my financial debt to him had been repaid from the wages I'd made in his service with Khaled, but there was a moral debt that was harder to repay. I owed him my life, and we both knew it. He'd hugged me when I came out of the prison and, crying at my pitiful state, he'd promised me that for so long as I remained in Bombay, I would be under his personal protection.

Nothing like Arthur Road would ever happen to me again. He'd given me a gold medal featuring the Hindu aum symbol joined to a Muslim crescent and star, which I wore on a silver chain around my neck. Khaderbhai's name was inscribed on the back, in Urdu, Hindi, and English. In the event of trouble I was to show the medal, and ask that he be contacted at once. That security was imperfect, but it was better than anything I'd known since my exile had begun. His request for me to stay in his service, the unspoken debt that I owed him, and the safety that being Khader's man offered-all of those elements held me in the city.

And there was Karla. She'd disappeared from the city while I was in prison, and no-one knew where she'd gone. I had no idea where in all the wide world I might begin to look for her. But she loved Bombay. I knew that. It seemed reasonable to hope she might return. And I loved her. It grieved me-an emotion that was, in those months, even stronger than my love for her-that she must be thinking I'd abandoned her: that I got what I wanted, when we made love, and then dumped her. I couldn't move on without seeing her again, and explaining what had happened that night. So I stayed there, in the city, a minute's walk from the corner where we'd met, and I waited for her to return.

I glanced around the subdued, listening restaurant, and caught Vikram's eye. He smiled at me, and wagged his head. It was a heart-broken smile, and his eyes were inflamed with unshed tears.

Still, he smiled to comfort me, to reassure me, to include me in his bewildered grieving. And with that smile I suddenly knew that there was something else holding me there. In the end I realised that it was the heart, the Indian heart that Vikram had talked about-the land where heart is king-that held me when so many intuitions told me I should leave. And the heart, for me, was the city. Bombay. The city had seduced me. I was in love with her.

There was a part of me that she invented, and that only existed because I lived there, within her, as a Mumbaiker, a Bombayite.

"It's a fuckin' bad business, yaar," Vikram muttered as he rejoined us. "There's going to be a lot of blood spilled over this, yaar. On the radio, they're saying that Congress Party gangs are roaming in Delhi, going from house to house, and spoiling for a fight with the Sikhs."

We were silent, all three of us, lost in our own speculations and worry. Then Didier spoke.

"I think I have a lead for you," he said softly, wrenching us into the moment once more. "About the jail?"

"Oui."

"Go on."

"It is not much. It does not add much to what you already know- that it was a person of some power, as your patron, Abdel Khader, has told you."

"Whatever it is, Didier, it's more than I've got now."

"As you wish. There is a... man of my acquaintance... who must visit the Colaba police station on a daily basis. We were talking, earlier today, and he mentioned the foreigner who was in the lock-up there some months ago. The name he used was the Bite of the Tiger. I cannot imagine how you came to win such a name for yourself, Lin, but I make a wild guess that it is not entirely flattering, the story, non? Alors, he told me that the Bite of the Tiger-you-was betrayed by a woman."

"Did he give you a name?"

"No. I asked him, and he said that he did not know who she is. He did say that she is young, and very beautiful, but he may have invented those last details."

"How reliable is this man of your acquaintance?"

Didier pursed his lips, and let out a puff of air.

"He can be relied upon to lie, and cheat, and steal. That is the extent of his reliability, I am afraid, but in these things he does show a marvellous predictability. However, in this case I think he has no reason to lie. I think you were the victim of a woman, Lin."

"Well, that makes two of us, yaar. You and me both, brother,"

Vikram put in. He finished his beer, and lit one of the long, thin, cheroots that he smoked as much for the complement they made to his costume as for the enjoyment of the smoke.

"You have been going out with Letitia for three months now,"

Didier observed. His frown was irritated and profoundly unsympathetic. "What is your problem?"

"You tell me! I'm going out with her all over the place, and I still can't get to first base. I'm not even in the ballpark. Fuck the ballpark, yaar-I'm not even in the fuckin' zip code. This chick is killin' me. This love is killin' me. She's playing hard to get. And brother, I'm hard but not getting any. I swear, I'm about to fuckin' explode!"

"You know, Vikram," Didier said, his eyes shining once more with shrewdness and good humour, "I have a strategy that just might work for you."

"Didier, man, I'll try anything. The way things are, with this Indira thing and all, I gotta grab any chance while I can. Who knows where we'll all be tomorrow, na?"

"Yes, well, attention! This plan, it involves great daring, and careful planning, and a precise timing. If you are careless, it might cost you your life."

"My... my life?"

"Yes. Make no mistake. But if you succeed, I think you will win her heart forever. Are you, how do they say it, are you game, to try it?"

"I'm the game-iest motherfucker in the whole damn saloon, yaar.

Let's hear it!"

"I might take this as my cue to leave, before you guys get too deep into this," I interrupted, standing and shaking hands with both men. "Thanks for the tip, Didier. I appreciate it. And a tip for you, Vikram-whatever you plan to try with Lettie, you can start by losing the phrase hot-titty English _chick. Every time you call her that, she winces like you just strangled a baby rabbit."

"You really think so?" he asked, frowning his puzzlement.

"Yes."

"But it's one of my best lines, yaar. In Denmark-"

"You're not in Denmark any more, Toto."

"Okay, Lin," he conceded, laughing. "Listen, when you find out what went down with the jail thing... I mean, who the motherfucker was who put you in there, and all... well, if you need a hand, count me in. Okay?"

"Sure," I said, enjoying the good eye contact. "Take it easy."

I paid the bill and left, walking along the Causeway to Regal Cinema roundabout. It was early evening, one of the three best times of day in Bombay city. Early morning before the heat, and late night after the heat are special times of day, with special pleasures; but they're quiet times, with few people. Evening brings the people to their windows, balconies, and doorways.

Evening fills the streets with strolling crowds. Evening is an indigo tent for the circus of the city, and families bring children to the entertainments that inspire every corner and crossroad. And evening is a chaperone for young lovers: the last hour of light before the night comes to steal the innocence from their slow promenades. There's no time, in the day or night, when there are more people on the streets of Bombay than there are in the evening, and no light loves the human face quite so much as the evening light in my Mumbai.

I walked through the evening crowds, loving the faces, loving the perfumes of skin and hair, loving the colours of clothes and the cadences of words that surrounded me. Yet I was alone, too much alone with my love of evening in the city. And all the while a black shark slowly circled in the sea of my thoughts: a black shark of doubt and anger and suspicion. A woman betrayed me. A woman. A young and very beautiful woman...

The persistent blaring of a car horn drew my attention, and I saw Prabaker waving to me from his taxi. I got into the cab and asked him to drive me to my evening meeting with Khaled, near Chowpatty Beach. One of the first things I'd done with the first real money I'd made in Khaderbhai's service was pay for Prabaker's taxi licence. The cost of the licence had always been prohibitive for Prabaker, and it had eluded his sub-miniature talent for thrift.

He drove occasional shifts in his cousin Shantu's taxi without the required licence, but ran considerable risks in doing it.

With his own licence, he was free to approach any of the taxi lords who owned fleets of cabs and hired them out to licensed taxi drivers.

Prabaker was a hard worker and an honest man; but, more than that, he was the most likable man that most of those who knew him ever met. Even the hard-nosed taxi lords weren't immune to his sanguine charm. Within a month he had a semi-permanent lease' on a taxi, which he cared for as if it was his own. On the dashboard he'd installed a plastic shrine to Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth. The gold, pink, and green plastic figure of the goddess blazed an alarmingly fierce expression through the bulbs in her red eyes whenever he hit the brakes of the car. From time to time he reached over, with a showman's flourish, to squeeze a rubber tube at the base of the figure. That action sprayed, through what appeared to be a valve in the navel of the goddess, a potent and disquietingly industrial mix of chemical perfumes onto the shirt and trousers of his passenger. Every squeeze of the spray was followed by a reflexive, polishing rub of his brass taxi driver's identification badge, which he wore with swaggering pride. Only one thing, in the whole city, rivalled the affection he felt for the black-and-yellow Fiat taxi.

"Parvati. Parvati. Parvati..." he said, as we sped past Churchgate Station towards Marine Drive. He was drunk on the music of her name. "I love her too much, Lin! Is love, yes, when a terrible feeling makes you happy? When you worry about a girl, more even than you worry about your taxi? That's a love, isn't it? A great love, isn't it? My God! Parvati. Parvati. Parvati..."

"It's love, Prabu."

"And Johnny has it too much love for Sita, my Parvati her sister.

Too much love."

"I'm happy for you. And for Johnny. He's a good man. You're both good men."

"Oh, yes!" Prabaker agreed, slapping his hand on the horn a few times for emphasis. "We are fine fellows! And tonight we are going out for a triple dates, with the sisters. It will be too much fun."

"There's another sister?"

"Another?"

"Yeah-you said a triple date. Are there three sisters? I thought there were only two."

"Yes, Lin, absolutely only two sisters."

"Well, don't you mean a double date?"

"No, Lin. Parvati and Sita, they always bring their mummy, the wife of Kumar, Mrs. Patak. The girls, they are sitting on one side only, and Mrs. Nandita Patak, she is sitting in middle, and Johnny Cigar is with me, sitting on the other side. It is a triple date."

"It sounds... like... a lotta fun."

"Yes, fun! Of course fun! So much of fun! And when we offer it some foods and some drinks to Mrs. Patak, we can look at the girls, and they can look at us also. This is our system. This is how we smile at the girls and give them big winks with our eyes.

We are having such good luck that Mrs. Patak, she has a happy appetites, and she will eat, without stopping, for three hours in a movie. So there is a very constant passing of foods, and plenty of looking at the girls. And Mrs. Patak-thanks to the God, it is impossible to fill up that woman in one movie only."

"Hey, slow down... that looks like a... a riot."

A mob of people, hundreds, thousands, streamed around a corner and onto wide Marine Drive, some three hundred metres in front of us. They advanced toward us across the whole width of the street.

"Not a riots, Linbaba," Prabaker replied, slowing the cab to a stop. "Riot nahin, morcha hain." It's not a riot, it's a demonstration. It was clear that the people were passionately angry. The men and the women shook their fists in time with their furious chanting.

Their anguished faces stiffened on necks and shoulders made rigid with their rage. They chanted about Indira Gandhi, and about revenge, and about the punishments they wanted to visit upon the Sikhs. I tensed as they neared us, but the human torrent parted for the cab, and then swept around and beyond us without so much as the scrape of a sleeve against the side of the car.

Nevertheless, the eyes that looked in upon us were hate-stricken and cruel. I knew that if I were a Sikh, if I'd been wearing a Sikh turban or Sardarji scarf, the door would've been wrenched open.

As the crowd passed us and the road ahead became clear, I turned to see that Prabaker was wiping tears from his eyes. He fumbled in his pocket for a handkerchief, dragging a huge, red-checked sheet out at last, and dabbing at his eyes with it.

"It is a too much very sad situations, Linbaba," he sniffed.

"That is the end of She. What is to become of our India now, without She? I am asking myself, and not having much of answers."

She was one of the most common names for Indira: journalists, peasants, politicians, and black marketers all referred to her as She.

"Yeah. It's a mess, Prabu."

He seemed so distraught that I sat with him in silence, for a while, staring out my window toward the darkening sea. When I turned to look at him once more, I saw that he was praying, with his head bowed forward and his hands pressed together at the base of the steering wheel. I watched his lips twitch and ripple in the whispered prayer, and then he opened his hands, turned his head, and smiled at me. His eyebrows rose and fell twice as he held the huge smile.

"So, Lin, how is about some sexy perfumes, on your good self?" he asked, reaching across to press the bulb beneath the plastic Lakshmi goddess on the dashboard of his cab.

"No!" I shrieked, trying to stop him.

Too late. He crushed the bulb, and a swirling belch of the noxious chemical mixture spurted from the belly of the goddess and settled on my trousers and my shirt.

"Now," he grinned, starting the engine and pulling out onto Marine Drive again, "we are ready for the life again! We are the lucky fellows, isn't it?" "Sure it is," I grumbled, gasping for a clean breath of air at the open window. A few minutes later we neared the car park, where I'd arranged to meet Khaled. "You can let me out just here, Prabu. This is my stop, near that big tree."

He parked beside a tall date pain, and I climbed out. We fought over payment for the cab ride. Prabaker refused the money, and I insisted that he take it. I suggested a compromise. He should take the money, and use it to buy some new perfume for his plastic goddess.

"Oh, yes, Linbaba!" he cried, accepting the money at last. "What a good ideas you're having! I was just thinking that I have almost finished my perfumes bottle, and it is so much expensive that I didn't want to buy it another gallon any more. Now I can buy a big bottle, a new big bottle, and for weeks I can fill up my Lakshmi like new! Thank you, too much!"

"Don't mention it," I answered him, laughing in spite of myself.

"Good luck on your triple date."

He swung the car away from the kerb and out into the stream of traffic. I heard the car horn blaring a musical good-bye until he was out of sight.

Khaled Ansari was waiting for me in our chartered cab, fifty metres away. He sat in the back, with both doors opened for the breeze. I wasn't late, and he couldn't have been waiting more than fifteen or twenty minutes, but still there were ten cigarette butts on the ground beside the open door of the cab.

Each one of them, I knew, was an enemy crushed under his heel, a violent wish, a brutal fantasy of the suffering he would one day inflict on those he hated.

And they were many, the ones he hated. Too many. The images of violence that filled his mind were so real, he'd told me, that sometimes he was nauseous with it. The anger was an ache in his bones. The hatred locked his jaws, and made him grind his teeth on the fury. The taste of it was bitter, always, all day and night, every waking minute, as bitter as the taste of the blackened knife he'd clamped between his teeth, as a Fattah guerrilla, when he'd crawled across broken ground toward his first kill.

"It's gonna kill you, Khaled, you know."

"So I smoke too much. So what the fuck. Who wants to live forever?"

"I'm not talking about the cigarettes. I'm talking about what's inside you, making you chain-smoke them. I'm talking about what you're doing to yourself by hating the world. Someone told me once that if you make your heart into a weapon, you always end up using it on yourself."

"You're a fine one to come on with a lecture, brother," he said, and he laughed. The small laugh. The sad laugh. "You're not exactly Father Fucking Christmas, Lin."

"You know, Khader told me... about Shatila."

"What did he tell you?"

"That... you lost your family there. It must've been incredibly hard for you."

"What do you know about it?" he demanded.

It wasn't an offensive question, and it wasn't asked in an aggressive way, but there was too much hurt in it, too much of his pain for me to let it go.

"I know about Sabra and Shatila, Khaled. I've been into politics all my life. I was on the run, at the time, when it happened, but I followed the news every day, for months. It was... it was a heartbreaking story."

"I was in love with a Jewish girl once, you know?" Khaled asked.

I didn't reply. "She was... she was a beautiful girl, and smart, and maybe, I don't know, maybe the nicest human being I'm ever gonna meet. That was in New York. We were students together. Her parents, they were reform Jews-they supported Israel, but they were against the occupation of the territories. I was with that girl, making love to her, on the night my father died in an Israeli prison."

"You can't blame yourself for being in love, Khaled. And you can't blame yourself for what other people did to your father."

"Oh, sure I can," he said, offering me that small, sad smile.

"Anyway, I went back home, and I was just in time for the October War-the one the Israelis call the Yom Kippur War. We got smashed. I made it to Tunis, and got some training. I started fighting, and I kept on fighting, all the way to Beirut. When the Israelis invaded, we made a stand at Shatila. My whole family was there, and a lot of my neighbours from the old days. All of them, all of us, we were all refugees, with nowhere else to go."

"Were you evacuated, with the other fighters?"

"Yeah. They couldn't beat us, so they worked out a truce. We left the camps-with our weapons, you know, to show that we weren't defeated. We marched, like soldiers, and there was a lot of firing in the air. Some people got killed just watching us. It was weird, like a parade or some kind of bizarre celebration, you know? And then, when we were gone, they broke all their promises, and they sent the Phalange into the camps, and they killed all the old men, and the women, and the children. And they all died. All my family. All the ones I left behind. I don't even know where their bodies are. They hid them, because they knew it was a war crime. And you think... you think I should _let it go, Lin?"

We were facing the sea, looking down on a section of Chowpatty Beach from a car park on the steep rise above Marine Drive.

Beneath us the first wave of families, and couples, and young men out for the night tried their luck at throwing darts or shooting balloons pinned to a target. The ice cream and sherbet-drink vendors called out from their flamboyantly decorated bowers like birds of paradise singing for mates.

The hatred that had coiled around Khaled's heart was the only thing we ever argued about. I'd been raised among Jewish friends.

Melbourne, the city where I grew up, had a huge Jewish community, many of them Holocaust survivors and their children. My mother had been prominent in Fabian socialist circles, and she'd attracted left-leaning intellectuals from the Greek, Chinese, German, and Jewish communities. Many of my friends had attended a Jewish school, Mt. Scopus College. I grew up with those kids, reading the same books, enjoying the same movies and music, marching together in support of the same causes. Some of those friends were among the few who'd stood by me when my life imploded in agony and shame. It was a Jewish friend, in fact, who'd helped me to escape from Australia after I broke out of prison. I respected, admired, and loved all of those friends. And Khaled hated every Israeli, and every Jew in the world.

"It would be like me hating all Indians, just because some Indians tortured me in an Indian prison." I said softly.

"It's not the same."

"I'm not saying it's the same. I'm trying to... look, when they had me chained to the wall there, at Arthur Road, and they went to work on me, it went on for hours. After a while, all I could smell and taste was my own blood. All I could hear was the lathis ripping into me."

"I know, Lin-"

"No, let me finish. There was a minute, right in the middle of it, that was... so weird... it was like I was floating, outside myself, looking down at my own body, and at them, and watching everything that was going on. And... I got this weird feeling... this really strange kind of understanding... of everything that was happening. I knew who they were, and what they were, and why they were doing it. I knew it all really clearly, and then I knew that I had two choices-to hate them or to forgive them. And... I don't know why, or how, but it was absolutely clear to me that I had to forgive them. I had to, if I wanted to survive. I know it sounds crazy-"

"It doesn't sound crazy," he said flatly, almost regretfully.

"It still seems crazy to me. I haven't really... figured it out, yet. But that's exactly what happened. And I did forgive them. I really did. And I'm sure, somehow, that that's what got me through it. I don't mean that I stopped being angry-shit, if I'd gotten free and gotten a gun, I probably would've killed them all. Or maybe not. I don't know. But the point is, I did forgive them, right there and then, in the middle of it. And I'm sure that if I didn't do that-if I'd just hated them-I wouldn't have made it through till Khader got me out. I would've gone under.

The hate would've killed me."

"It's still not the same, Lin. I understand what you're saying, but the Israelis did more to me than that. And anyway, if I was in an Indian prison, and they did that to _me, what they did to _you, I would hate Indians forever. I'd hate them all."

"But I don't hate them. I love them. I love this country. I love this city."

"You can't say you don't want revenge, Lin."

"I do want revenge. You're right. I wish I didn't. I wish I was better than that. But I only want it on one person-the one who set me up-not the whole nation that she comes from."

"Well, we're different people," he said flatly, staring out at the distant fires of the offshore oil refinery. "You don't understand. You can't understand it."

"I understand that hate kills you, Khaled, if you can't let it go."

"No, Lin," he answered, turning to look at me in the faint light of the cab. His eyes were gleaming, and there was a broken smile fixed to his scarred face. It was something like the expression Vikram wore when he talked about Lettie, or like Prabaker's face when he talked about Parvati. It was the kind of expression some men assume when they talk about their experience of God.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-26