Chapter twenty-five

A smiling servant opened the door and ushered me into the room, gesturing for me to be silent. He needn't have bothered. The music was so loud in the room that I couldn't have been heard, even if I'd shouted. Cupping his hand as if it were a saucer, and pretending to sip from it, he mimed an offer of chai. I nodded.

He closed the door behind him quietly, leaving me alone with Abdul Ghani. The portly figure stood in the broad curve of a high bay window, looking out at a wide view of roof-garden plateaus, balconies ablaze with green and yellow saris hung out to dry, and rust-red herringbone rooftops.

The room was huge. Ornate ceiling rosettes surrounded thick, gold suspension chains for three elaborate chandeliers on the distant ceiling. At the end of the room near the main door, there was a long dining table with twelve high-backed teak chairs. A mahogany armoire ran the length of the table against one wall, and was topped by an immense, rose-glass mirror. Beside the armoire, there was a floor-to-ceiling bookcase running the further length of the wall. On the opposite long wall of the room, four tall windows looked upon the uppermost branches and cool, shading leaves of plane trees lining the street below. The centre of the room, between the wall of books and the tall windows, was set up as an office. A teak-and-leather captain's chair, facing the main door, served a broad, baroque desk. The far end of the room was decorated for entertaining, with leather chesterfields and deep armchairs. Two enormous bay windows in the end wall, behind the couches, dominated the room with arches of brilliant sunlight.

French doors set into the two bay windows opened onto a wide balcony, giving the view of Colaba's inner-city rooftop gardens, clotheslines, and neglected gargoyles.

Abdul Ghani stood there, listening to the music and singing that thundered from an expensive sound system built into the wall of books. The voices and the music were familiar, and a few moments of concentration brought them back to me. They were the Blind Singers, the same men I'd heard as Khaderbhai's guest, on the first night that I met him. The song wasn't one I recalled from that concert, but I was struck, at once, by its passion and power. As the thrilling, heart-wrenching chorus of voices finished, we stood in a throbbing silence that seemed to resist the noises of the households within the building and of the street below us.

"Do you know them?" he asked, without turning around.

"Yes. They're the Blind Singers, I think."

"Indeed, they are," he said in the mix of Indian lilt and BBC newsreader's tone that I'd come to enjoy. "I love their music, Lin, more than anything I have ever heard, from any culture. But in the heart of my love for it, I have to say that I am afraid.

Every time I hear them-and I play them every day, when I am at home here-I have the feeling that I am hearing the sound of my own requiem."

He still hadn't turned to face me, and I remained standing near the centre of the long room.

"That... that must be unsettling."

"Unsettling..." he said softly. "Yes. Yes, it is unsettling.

Tell me, Lin, do you think that one great act of genius can allow us to forgive the hundred flaws and failures that bring it into being?"

"It's... hard to say. I'm not exactly sure what you mean, but I guess it depends on how many people benefit by it, and how many people get hurt."

He turned to face me, and I saw that he was crying. Tears rolled quickly, easily, and continuously from his large eyes, and spilled across the plump cheeks to the belly of his long silk shirt. His voice, however, was calm and composed.

"Did you know that our Madjid was killed last night?"

"No," I frowned, shocked by the news. "Killed?"

"Yes. Murdered. Slaughtered like some beast, in his own house.

His body was torn to pieces, and the pieces were found in many different rooms of the house. The name Sapna was daubed on the walls with his own blood. Police are blaming fanatics who follow this Sapna. I'm sorry, Lin. Forgive my tears, please. I'm afraid that this bad business has taken its toll on me." "No, not at all. I'll... I'll come back at another time."

"Of course not. You're here now, and Khader is anxious for you to begin. We'll drink tea, and I will pull myself together, and then we'll examine the passport business, you and I."

He walked to the hi-fi set, and extracted the cassette tape of the Blind Singers. Sliding it into a gold plastic case, he approached me and pressed it into my hand.

"I want you to have this, as a present from me," he said, his eyes and cheeks still wet with tears. "It's time I stopped listening to it, and I feel sure that you will enjoy it."

"Thank you," I muttered, almost as confused by the gift as I was by the news of Madjid's death.

"Not at all, Lin. Come, sit with me. You were in Goa, I believe?

Do you know our young fighter, Andrew Ferreira? Yes? Then you know he is from Goa. He goes there, often, with Salman and Sanjay, when I have work for them. You must all go there together, some time-they will show you the special sights, if you get my meaning. So tell me, how was your trip?"

I answered him, trying to give my whole attention to the conversation, but my mind was thick with thoughts of Madjid; dead Madjid. I couldn't say that I'd liked him, or even that I'd trusted him. Yet his death, his murder, shook me, and filled me with a strange, excited agitation. He'd been killed-slaughtered, Abdul had said-in the house at Juhu where we'd studied together, and he'd taught me about gold and golden crimes. I thought of the house. I remembered its view of the sea, its purple-tiled swimming pool, its bare, pale-green prayer room where Madjid had bent his ancient knees, five times every day, and touched his bushy grey eyebrows to the floor. I remembered sitting outside that room, near the pool, waiting for him as he took time out to pray. I remembered staring at the purple water as the murmured syllables of the prayers buzzed past me into the swaying fronds of palms leaning in around the pool.

And once again I had the sense of a trap, of a destiny not shaped by my own deeds and desires. It was as if the constellations themselves were just the outlines of an immense cage that revolved and realigned itself, inscrutably, until the single moment that fate had reserved for me. There was too much that I didn't understand. There was too much that I wouldn't allow myself to ask. And I was excited, in that web of connections and concealments. The scent of danger, the smell of fear, filled my senses. The heart-squeezing, enlivening exhilaration of it was so powerful that it wasn't until an hour later, when we entered Abdul Ghani's passport workshop, that I could give my full attention to the man and the moment that we shared.

"This is Krishna, and this is Villu," Ghani said, introducing me to two short, slender, dark-skinned men who resembled one another so closely that I thought they might be brothers. "There are many experts in this business, many men and women with a detective's eye for detail, and a surgeon's confident steadiness of hand. But my experience of ten years in the counterfeiting arts tells me that the Sri Lankans, such as our Krishna and Villu, are the best forgers in the world."

The men smiled widely, with perfect white teeth, in response to the compliment. They were handsome men, their faces formed from fine, almost delicate features, in a harmony of gentle contours and curves. They returned to their work as we strolled about the large room.

"This is the light-box," Abdul Ghani explained, waving his plump hand at a long table. It was topped with white opaque glass.

Strong lights shone from within its frame. "Krishna is our best light-box man. He examines the pages of genuine passports, looking for watermarks and concealed patterns. In this way, he can duplicate these effects where we need them."

I bent over Krishna's shoulder to watch him as he studied the information page of a British passport. A complex pattern of wavy lines descended from the top of the page, across a photograph, and on to the bottom of the page. On another passport beside it, Krishna was matching the pattern of wavy lines on the edge of a substituted photograph, creating the lines with a fine-tipped pen. Using the light-box, he placed one pattern over the other to check for irregularities.

"Villu is our best stamp man," Abdul Ghani said, guiding me to another long table. On a rack at the back of the table, there were rows of many more rubber stamps.

"Villu can make any stamp, no matter how intricate its design.

Visa stamps, exit and entry, special permission stamps-whatever we need. He has three new profile-cutting machines, for reproducing the stamps. The machines cost me dearly-I had to import them, all the way from Germany-and I spent almost as much again, in baksheesh, getting them through customs controls and into our workshop without any unpleasant questions. But our Villu is an artist, and he often prefers to ignore my beautiful machines, and cut the new stamps by hand."

I watched as Villu created a new stamp on a blank rubber template. He copied a photographic enlargement of the original-a departure stamp from Athens airport-and cut the new stamp with scalpels and jeweller's files. Inkpad tests of the new stamp revealed minor flaws. When those were finally eradicated, Villu used a scrap of wet-and-dry sandpaper to wear away one corner of the stamp. That deliberate imperfection gave the inked image a genuine, natural appearance on the page. The completed stamp joined scores of others in the rack of stamps waiting to be used on newly altered passports.

Abdul Ghani completed his tour of the factory, demonstrating the computers, photocopy equipment, printing presses, profile cutters, and reserves of special parchment papers and inks. When I'd seen all there was to see on a first visit, he offered me a lift back to Colaba. I declined, asking him if I might stay and spend some time with the Sri Lankan forgers. He seemed pleased with my enthusiasm, or perhaps simply amused. When he left me, I heard his heavy sigh as the sadness of bereavement claimed him once more.

Krishna, Villu, and I drank chai and talked for three hours without a pause. Although they weren't brothers, they were both Tamil Sri Lankans who came from the same village on the Jaffna peninsula. Conflict between the Tamil Tigers-the Liberation Tigers for Tamil Eelam-and the Sri Lankan army had obliterated their village. Almost all the members of both families were dead.

The two young men escaped, with Villu's sister, a cousin, Krishna's grandparents, and his two young nieces, who were under five years old. A fishing boat brought them to India, on the people-smuggling route between Jaffna and the Coromandel coast.

They made their way to Bombay and then lived on a footpath, under a sheet of plastic, as pavement dwellers.

They'd survived that first year by taking ill-paid jobs as day labourers, and by committing a variety of petty crimes. Then, one day, a footpath-neighbour, who'd learned that they could read and write well in English, asked them to change a licence document.

Their work was good, and it brought a steadily increasing stream of visitors to their plastic awning on the Bombay footpath.

Hearing of their skill, Abdul Ghani had recommended to Khaderbhai that they be given a chance to prove themselves. Two years later, at the time that I met them, Krishna and Villu shared a large, comfortable apartment with the surviving members of their two families, saved money from their generous salaries, and were arguably the most successful forgers in Bombay, India's counterfeiting capital.

I wanted to learn everything. I wanted the mobility and security that their passport skills offered me. They spoke English well.

My enthusiasm fuelled their natural congeniality, and that first conversation flowed with good humour. It was a propitious start to the new friendship.

I visited Krishna and Villu every day for a week after that meeting. The young men worked long hours, and on some days I remained with them for ten hours at a stretch, watching them work, and asking my several hundred questions. The passports that they worked on fell into two main groups-those they obtained as genuine, used passports, and those that were blank and unused.

The used passports had been stolen by pickpockets, lost by tourists, or sold by desperate junkies from Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. The blank passports were rare. They'd been sold by corrupt officials at consulates and embassies and departments of immigration, from France to Turkey to China. Those that found their way into Khaderbhai's area of influence were bought immediately, at any price, and given to Krishna and Villu.

They showed me a blank, original, unused passport from Canada, as an example. It was housed in a fireproof safe with others from the United Kingdom, Germany, Portugal and Venezuela.

With sufficient patience, expertise, and resources, the two forgers could change almost anything in a passport to suit a new user's requirements. Photographs were substituted, and the ridge marks or indentations of a heavy stamp were imitated, using something as humble as a crochet hook. Sometimes the stitching that bound a passport was carefully removed, and whole groups of pages were replaced, using clean pages from a second passport.

Dates, details, and stamps were all altered or erased with chemical solvents. New data was inserted in an appropriate shade, selected from a comprehensive catalogue of printer's inks. Some of the changes defied the scrutiny of experts, and none of them was detectable in routine examinations.

During that first week of passport studies, I found a new, safe, comfortable apartment for Ulla in neighbouring Tardeo, not far from the Haji Ali Mosque. Lisa Carter, who'd visited Ulla almost every day at Abdullah's apartment-and visited, far more warmly, with Abdullah himself- agreed to share the new place. We moved them and their belongings in a small fleet of taxis. The two women liked one another, and got on well. They drank vodka, cheated at Scrabble and gin rummy, enjoyed the same kinds of movies on video, and swapped clothes.

They'd also discovered, in the weeks they'd spent in Abdullah's surprisingly well-stocked kitchen, that they liked one another's cooking. The new apartment was a new beginning for them and, despite Ulla's lingering fears about Maurizio and his crooked deals, she and Lisa were happy and optimistic.

I continued the weight training and karate with Abdullah, Salman, and Sanjay. We were fit and strong and fast. And as the days of training became weeks, Abdullah and I grew closer, as friends and brothers, just as Salman and Sanjay were with one another. It was the kind of closeness that didn't need conversation to sustain itself: quite often we would meet, travel to the gym, work out on the weights, box a few rounds, spend half an hour sparring at karate, and speak no more than ten words to one another.

Sometimes, with no more than a look in my eye or an unusual expression on his face, we would laugh, and keep on laughing so hard that we collapsed to the practice mats. And in that way, without words, I slowly opened my heart to Abdullah, and I began to love him.

I'd spoken to the head man of the slum, Qasim Ali Hussein, and to several others, including Johnny Cigar, when I'd first returned from Goa. I saw Prabaker in his taxi every other day. But there were so many new challenges and rewards in Ghani's passport workshop, and they kept me so busy and excited, that I stopped working, even occasionally, at the slum clinic I'd founded in the little hut that had been my home.

On my first visit to the slum in several weeks, I was surprised to find Prabaker in the wriggling convulsions of a dance while the slum musicians were rehearsing one of their popular songs.

The little guide was dressed in his taxi driver's khaki shirt and white trousers. He wore a purple scarf around his neck, and yellow plastic sandals. Approaching him unobserved, I watched him in silence for a while. His dance managed to combine obscenely lewd and suggestive thrusts of his hips with the facial expressions and hand-whirling gestures of a child-like innocence.

With clownish charm he held his open palms beside his smiling face one moment, and then pumped his groin back and forth with a determined little grimace the next. When he finally turned and saw me, his face exploded in that huge smile, that uniquely wide and heart-filled smile, and he rushed to greet me.

"Oh, Lin!" he cried, squeezing his head into my chest in an affectionate hug. "I have a news for you! I have it such a fantastic news! I was looking for you in every place, every hotel with naked ladies, every drinking bar with black-market peoples, every dirty slum, every-"

"I get the picture, Prabu. So, what's your news?"

"I am to be getting married! I am making a marriage on Parvati!

Can you believe it?"

"Sure, I can believe it. Congratulations. I take it you were practising, just now, for the wedding party."

"Oh, yes!" he agreed, lunging at me with his hips a few times. "I want a very sexy dancing for everybody at the party. It's a pretty good sexy, isn't it?"

"It's... sexy... sure. How are things here?"

"Very fine. No problem. Oh, Lin! I forgot! Johnny, he is making a marriage also. He will be married with Sita, the sister of my own beautiful Parvati."

"Where is he? I want to say hello."

"He is down at the seashore, you know, at the place where he sits on the rocks, for being lonely-the same place where you also enjoy a good lonely. You'll find him there."

I walked off, glancing back over my shoulder to see Prabaker encouraging the band with mechanical, piston-like thrusts of his narrow hips. At the edge of the slum, where black boulders tumbled to the sea, I found Johnny Cigar. He was dressed in a white singlet and a chequered green lungi. He braced himself with his arms, leaning back, and staring out to sea. It was almost exactly the same spot where he'd told me about seawater, sweat, and tears on the evening of the cholera outbreak, so many months before.

"Congratulations," I said, sitting beside him and offering him a beedie cigarette.

"Thanks, Lin," he smiled, shaking his head. I put the packet away, and for a while we both watched the small petulant waves smack at the rocky shore.

"You know, I was brought into this life-conceived, I mean, not born-just over there, in the Navy Nagar," he said, nodding his head toward the compound of the Indian Navy. A curve of coastline separated us from the Nagar, but a direct line of sight across the small bay gave us a clear view of the houses, huts, and barracks.

"My mother was from Delhi-side originally. Her family, they were all Christians. They made good money in the service of the British, but they lost their position, and their privileges, after the Independence. They moved to Bombay when my mother was fifteen years old. Her father took employment with the navy, working as a clerk. They lived in a zhopadpatti near here. My mother fell in love with a sailor. He was a tall, young fellow from Amritsar, with the best moustache in the whole Nagar. When she became pregnant with me, her family threw her out. She tried to get some help from the sailor who was my father, but he left the Nagar, and she never saw him or heard about him again."

He paused, breathing through his nose, with his lips pressed tightly together. His eyes squinted against the glare from the glittering sea, and the fresh, persistent breeze. Behind us we could hear the noises of the slum-hawkers' cries, the slap of clothes on stone in the washing area, children playing, a bickering complaint, and the jangling music for Prabaker's piston-hips.

"She had a tough time of it, Lin. She was heavily pregnant with me when they threw her out. She moved to a pavement-dweller settlement, across in Crawford Market area, and wore the widow's white sari, pretending that she'd had a husband, and pretending that he was dead. She had to do that-she had to become a widow, for life, before she was even married. That's why I never got married. I'm thirty-eight years old. I can read and write very well-my mother made sure I was educated-and I do the bookwork for all the shops and businesses in the slum. I do the taxes for every man who pays them. I make a good living here, and I have respect. I should've been married fifteen or even twenty years ago. But she was a widow, all her life, for me. And I couldn't do it. I just couldn't allow myself to get married. I kept hoping I would see him, the sailor with the best moustache. My mother had one very old, faded photograph of the two of them, looking very serious and stern. That's why I lived in this area. I always hoped I would see him. And I never married. And she died last week, Lin. My mother died last week."

He turned to me, and the whites of his eyes were blazing with the tears he wouldn't let them shed.

"She died last week. And now, I'm getting married." "I'm sorry to hear about your mother, Johnny. But I'm sure she'd want you to get married. I think you'll make a good father. In fact, I know you'll make a good father. I'm sure of it."

He looked at me, his eyes talking to me in a language I could feel but couldn't understand. When I left him, he was staring at the ceaselessness of the sea, irritated to chequered, white rifts by the wind.

I walked back through the slum to the clinic. A conversation with Ayub and Siddhartha, the two young men I'd trained to run the clinic, reassured me that all was well. I gave them some money to keep, as an emergency float, and left money with Prabaker for his wedding preparations. I paid a courtesy visit to Qasim Ali Hussein, allowing him to force the hospitality of chai upon me.

Jeetendra and Anand Rao, two of my former neighbours, joined us, with several other men I knew well. Qasim Ali led the conversation, referring to his son Sadiq, who was working in the Gulf. In turn, we spoke of religious and communal conflict in the city, the construction of the twin towers; still at least two years from completion, and the weddings of Prabaker and Johnny Cigar.

It was a genial, sanguine meeting, and I rose to leave with the strength and confidence that those honest, simple, decent men always inspired in me. I'd only walked a few paces, however, when the young Sikh, Anand Rao, caught up, and fell into step beside me.

"Linbaba, there is a problem here," he said quietly. He was an unusually solemn man at the best of times, but at that moment his expression was unambiguously grim. "That Rasheed, that fellow I used to be sharing with. Do you remember?"

"Yes. Rasheed. I remember him," I replied, recalling the thin, bearded face and restless, guilty eyes of the man who'd been my neighbour, with Anand, for more than a year.

"He is making a bad business," Anand Rao declared bluntly. "His wife and her sister came from their native place. I went from that hut when they came. He has been living with them alone now, for some time."

"And... what?" I asked, as we walked out on to the road together. I had no idea what Anand Rao was driving at, and I had no patience for it. It was the kind of vague, insinuated complaint that had come to me almost every day when I'd lived in the slum. Most of the time, such complaints came to nothing. Most of the time, it was in my best interests to have nothing to do with them. "Well," Anand Rao hesitated, perhaps sensing my impatience, "it is... he is... something is very bad, and I am... there must be..."

He fell silent, staring at his sandaled feet. I reached out to put a hand on his broad, proud, thin shoulder. Gradually his eyes lifted, and met mine in a mute appeal.

"Is it money?" I asked, reaching into my pocket. "Do you need some money?"

He recoiled as if I'd cursed him. He held the stare, for a moment, before turning and walking back into the slum.

I strode on through familiar streets, and told myself that it was okay. Anand Rao and Rasheed had shared a hut for more than two years. If they were falling out because Rasheed's wife and her sister had moved to the city, and Anand had been forced from the hut, it was probably to be expected. And it was no business of mine. I laughed, shaking my head as I walked, and trying to figure out why Anand Rao had reacted so badly to the offer of money. It wasn't an unreasonable thing for me to assume or to offer. On the thirty-minute walk from the slum to Leopold's, I gave money to five other people, including both of the Zodiac Georges. He'll get over it, whatever it is, I told myself. At any rate, it's got nothing to do with me. But the lies we tell ourselves are the ghosts that haunt the empty house of midnight.

And although I pushed Anand and the slum from my mind, I felt the breath of that ghosted lie on my face as I walked through the long, thronging Causeway on that hot afternoon.

I stepped up into Leopold's, and Didier seized me by the arm before I could speak or sit down, turning me about and leading me to a cab that was waiting outside.

"I have searched for you everywhere," Didier puffed as the cab pulled out from the kerb. "I have been to the most unspeakably foul places, looking for you."

"People keep telling me that."

"Well, Lin, you really must try to spend more time in places where they serve a decent alcohol. It may not make the finding of you easier, but it will make it far more pleasant."

"Where are we going, Didier?"

"Vikram's great strategy-my own superb strategy, if you please- for the capture of Letitia's cold and stony little English heart unfolds, now, even as we speak." "Yeah, well, I wish him all the best," I frowned, "but I'm hungry. I was about to make very loud noises in a plate of Leopold's pulao. You can let me off here."

"But, no! It is not possible!" Didier objected. "Letitia, she is a very stubborn woman. She would refuse gold and diamonds if someone insisted that she should take them. She will not participate in the strategy unless someone convinces her. Someone like you, my friend. And this must be achieved in the next half hour. At exactly six minutes after three o'clock."

"What makes you think Lettie will listen to me?"

"You are the only one of us she does not now hate, or has not hated at some time in the past. For Letitia, the statement I do not hate you is a poem of passionate love. She will listen to you. I am sure of it. And without you, the plan will fail. And the good Vikram-as if loving such a woman as our Letitia was not sufficient to prove his mental derangement-he has already risked his life, several times, to make the plan possible. You cannot imagine how much preparation we have made, Vikram and I, for just this moment."

"Well, nobody told me anything about it," I complained, still thinking of the delicious pulao at Leopold's.

"But that is exactly why I have searched for you all over Colaba!

You have no choice, Lin. You must help him. I know you. There is in you, as there is in me, a morbid belief in love, and a fascination for the madness that love puts in its victims."

"I wouldn't put quite that spin on it, Didier."

"You can spin it how you will," he replied, laughing for the first time, "But you have the love disease, Lin, and you know, in your heart, that you must help Vikram, just as I must help him."

"Oh God," I relented, lighting a beedie to stave off the hunger.

"I'll do what I can to help. What's the plan?"

"Ah, it is quite complicated-"

"Just a minute," I said, raising my hand to interrupt him quickly. "Is this scheme of yours dangerous?"

"Well..."

"And does it involve breaking the law?"

"Well..."

"I thought so. Then, don't tell me until we get there. I've got enough to worry about." "D'accord. I knew that we could count on you. Alors, speaking of worry, I have a little news that may be of some help to you."

"Let's have it."

"The woman who made the complaint about you, the woman who put you in the prison, she is not Indian. I have learned it, beyond any doubt. She is a foreigner who lives here, in Bombay."

"There's nothing else?"

"No. I regret, there is nothing more. Not at this time. But I will not rest until I know all."

"Thanks, Didier."

"It's nothing. You are looking well, by the way. Perhaps even better than before you went to the prison."

"Thanks. I'm a little heavier, and a little fitter."

"And a little... crazier... perhaps?"

I laughed, avoiding his eye, because it was true. The taxi pulled up at Marine Lines Station. Marine Lines was the first railway station after the central city terminus, at Churchgate Depot. We climbed the pedestrian ramp and found Vikram, with several of his friends, waiting for us on the station platform.

"Oh, fuck! Thank God you're here, man!" he said, pumping my hand in a frantic, two-handed shake. "I thought you weren't coming."

"Where is Letitia?" Didier asked.

"She's down the platform, yaar. She's buying a cold drink. See her there, just past the chai shop?"

"Ah, yes. And she knows nothing of the plan?"

"Not a fuckin' thing, man. I'm so nervous that it's not going to work, yaar. And what if she gets killed, Didier? It won't be a good look for us, man, if my proposal kills her!"

"Killing her would definitely be a bad start," I mused.

"Don't worry. It will be okay," Didier soothed, although he mopped his brow with a scented handkerchief as his eyes searched the empty tracks for an approaching train. "It will work. You must have faith."

"That's what they said at Jonesville, yaar."

"What do you want me to do, Vikram?" I asked, hoping to calm him down.

"Okay," he replied, puffing as if he'd just run up a flight of steps. "Okay. First, Lettie has to stand just here, facing you.

Just like I'm standing now." "U-huh."

"It has to be right here. Exactly here. We've checked it out a hundred fuckin' times, man, and it has to be just here. Have you got that?"

"I... think so. You're saying that she has to stand just-"

"Here!"

"Here?" I teased him.

"Fuck, man, this is serious!"

"Okay! Take it easy. You want me to make Lettie stand here."

"Yeah. Here. And your job is to get her to put the blindfold on."

"The... blindfold?"

"Yeah. She's got to wear a blindfold, Lin. It won't work without it. And she has to leave it on, even when it gets very scary."

"Scary..."

"Yeah. That's your job. Just convince her to put the blindfold on, when we give you the signal, and then convince her to keep it on, yaar, even if she's screaming a bit."

"Screaming..."

"Yeah. We thought about a gag, but we decided, you know, a gag might be a bit counter-fuckin'-productive, yaar, because she might freak out a bit, with a gag. And she's going to freak out enough as it is, without using a fuckin' gag on her."

"A... gag..."

"Yeah. Okay, here she comes! Get ready for the signal."

"Hello, Lin, you fat bastard," Lettie said, giving me a kiss on the cheek. "You're really beefing out, aren't you, son?"

"You look good, too," I replied, smiling at the pleasure of seeing her.

"So, what's this all about then?" she asked. "It looks like the gang's all here."

"You don't know?" I shrugged.

"No, of course I don't. Vikram just told me we were meeting you and Didier-hullo, Didier-and here we all are. What's up?"

The train from Churchgate Station came into view, approaching us at a steady pace. Vikram gave me the signal, opening his eyes as widely as the muscles would allow, and shaking his head. I put my hands on Lettie's shoulders, gently turning her until she stood as Vikram had requested, with her back to the tracks.

"Do you trust me, Lettie?" I asked. She smiled up at me.

"A bit," she replied.

"Okay," I nodded. "Well, I want you to do something. It's gonna sound strange, I know, but if you don't do it, you'll never know how much Vikram loves you-how much we _all love you. It's a surprise that we figured out for you. It's about love..."

The train slowed behind her as it entered the station. Her eyes were gleaming. A smile flickered and faded on her open lips. She was intrigued and excited. Vikram and Didier were gesturing wildly, behind her back, for me to hurry. The train stopped with a wheezy creak of metal triumph.

"So, here it is-you have to put a blindfold on, and you have to promise us not to look until we tell you."

"Is that it?"

"Well, yeah," I shrugged.

She looked at me. She stared. She smiled into my eyes. She raised her eyebrows, and turned down the corners of her mouth as she considered it. Then she nodded.

"Okay," she laughed. "Let's do it."

Vikram leapt forward with the blindfold and tied it on, asking her if it was too tight. He guided her a step or two backwards, toward the train, and then told her to raise her arms over her head.

"Raise my arms? What, like this? If you tickle me, Vikram, you'll pay!"

Some men appeared at the edge of the roofline on the train carriage. They'd been lying on the roof of the train. They leaned over, and seized Lettie's raised arms, lifting her slight frame effortlessly onto the roof with them. Lettie shrieked, but the piercing sound was lost in the shrill of the train guard's whistle. The train began to move.

"Come on!" Vikram shouted to me, climbing up the outside of the carriage to join her.

I glanced at Didier.

"No, my friend!" he shouted. "This is not for me. You go! Hurry!"

I jogged along beside the train, and clambered up the outside of the carriage to the roof. There were a dozen men or more on the roof. Some of them were musicians. Sitting together, they cradled tablas, cymbals, flutes, and tambourines in their laps. Further along the dusty roof was a second group. Lettie sat in the middle of them. She still wore the blindfold. Men held her at the shoulders-one on each arm, and two from behind-to keep her safe. Vikram knelt in front of her.

I heard his pleading as I crept along the roof toward them at a crouch.

"I promise you, Lettie. It really is a great surprise."

"Oh, it's a friggin' surprise all right," she shouted. "And not half as big as the surprise you're gonna get, when we get down from here, Vikram bloody Patel!"

"Hi, Lettie!" I called to her. "Great view, eh? Oh, sorry. Forgot about the blindfold. Well, it _will be a great view, when you can see it."

"This is fuckin' madness, Lin!" she shouted at me. "Tell these bastards to let go of me!"

"That wouldn't be wise, Lettie," Vikram answered. "They're hanging on to you so you don't fall, yaar, or stand up, and snag yourself on an overhead wire, or something. It's really only another half a minute, I promise you, and then you'll understand what all is happening."

"I understand, don't you worry. I understand that you're a dead man, Vikram, when I get down from here. You might as well throw me off the bloody roof now, I'm tellin' ya! If you think I-"

Vikram untied the blindfold, and watched her as she looked around, taking in the perspective from the roof of the fast moving train. Her mouth fell open, and her face slowly swelled into a wide smile.

"Wow! It's... Wow! It really is a great view!"

"Look!" Vikram commanded, turning to point along the roofs of the train carriages. There was something stretched across the tracks, much higher than the roofline of the train. It was strung between the pylon supports for the overhead electric wires. It was a huge banner, puffed like the sail of a ship in the steady breeze.

There were words painted on it. As we neared the banner, the writing became clear enough to read. The words were painted in letters as tall as a man. They filled the whole width of the billowing sheet:

Дата добавления: 2015-10-26