Chapter twenty-six

"The Indians are the Italians of Asia," Didier pronounced with a sage and mischievous grin. "It can be said, certainly, with equal justice, that the Italians are the Indians of Europe, but you do understand me, I think. There is so much Italian in the Indians, and so much Indian in the Italians. They are both people of the Madonna-they demand a goddess, even if the religion does not provide one. Every man in both countries is a singer when he is happy, and every woman is a dancer when she walks to the shop at the corner. For them, food is music inside the body, and music is food inside the heart. The language of India and the language of Italy, they make every man a poet, and make something beautiful from every banalite. These are nations where love-amore, pyaar- makes a cavalier of a Borsalino on a street corner, and makes a princess of a peasant girl, if only for the second that her eyes meet yours. It is the secret of my love for India, Lin, that my first great love was Italian."

"Where were you born, Didier?"

"Lin, my body was born in Marseilles, but my heart and my soul were born sixteen years later, in Genova."

He caught the eye of a waiter, and waved a hand lazily for another drink. He'd hardly taken a sip from the drink on the table in front of him, so I guessed that Didier was settling in for one of his longer discourses. It was two hours past noon on a cloudy Wednesday, three months after the Night of the Assassins.

The first rains of the monsoon were still a week away, but there was a sense of expectancy, a tension, that tightened every heartbeat in the city. It was as if a vast army was gathering outside the city for an irresistible assault. I liked the week before monsoon: the tension and excitement I saw in others was like the involuted, emotional disquiet that I felt almost all the time.

"My mother was a delicate and beautiful woman, the photographs of her reveal," Didier continued. "She was only eighteen years old, when I was born, and not yet twenty when she died. The influenza claimed her. But there were whispers-cruel whispers, and I heard them many times-that my father had neglected her, and was too, how do they say it, tight with his money to pay doctors when she fell ill. Whatever the case, she died before I was two years old, and I have no memory of her.

"My father was a teacher of chemistry and mathematics. He was much older than my mother when he married her. By the time I started at school, my father was the headmaster. He was a brilliant man, I was told, for only a brilliant Jew could rise to the position of headmaster in a French school. The racisme, the anti-Semitism, in and around Marseilles at that time, so soon after the war, was like a sickness. It was a guilt that pinched at them, I think. My father was a stubborn man-it is a kind of stubbornness that permits one to become a mathematician, isn't it? Perhaps mathematics is itself a kind of stubbornness, do you think?"

"Maybe," I replied, smiling. "I never thought about it that way, but maybe you're right."

"Alors, my father returned to Marseilles, after the war, and returned to the very house that he had been forced to leave when the Jew-haters took control of the town. He had fought with the Resistance, and he was wounded, in hand-to-hand fighting with the Germans. Because of that, no-one dared to challenge him. Not openly. But I am sure that his Jewish face and his Jewish pride and his beautiful young Jewish bride reminded the good citizens of Marseilles of the thousands of French Jews who were betrayed and sent to their deaths. And it was a cold triumph for him, returning to that house he had been forced out of, and to that community that had betrayed him. And that coldness claimed his heart, I believe, when my mother died. Even his touch, when I think of it now, was cold. Even his hand, when he touched me."

He paused and took a sip from his glass, replacing it slowly and carefully in the precise circle of moisture it had left on the table in front of him.

"Well then, he was a brilliant man," he continued, raising his eyes to mine with a hastily gathered smile. "And, with one exception, he was a brilliant teacher. The exception was me. I was his only failure. I had no head for science and mathematics.

They were languages I could never decipher or understand. My father responded to my stupidity with a brutal temper. His cold hand, it seemed to me when I was a child, was so large that when he struck me my whole body was shocked and bruised by the giant's hard palm and the whips of his fingers. I was afraid of him, and ashamed of my failures at school, so I played the truant very often, and fell into what the English call a bad company. I was many times in the courts, and served two years in the prisons for children before my thirteenth birthday.

At sixteen, I left my father's house, my father's city, and my father's country forever.

"By chance I came to Genova. Have you seen it? I tell you, it is the jewel in the tiara of the Ligurian coast. And one day, on the beach at Genova, I met a man who opened my life to every good and beautiful thing that there is in the world. His name was Rinaldo.

He was forty-eight years old then, when I was sixteen. His family held some ancient title, a noble line that reached to the time of Columbus. But he lived in his magnificent house on the cliffs without the pretensions of his rank. He was a scholar, the only true Renaissance man I ever met. He taught me the secrets of antiquity, the history of art, the music of poetry, and the poetry of music. He was also a beautiful man. His hair was silver and white, like the full moon, and his very sad eyes were grey.

In contrast to the brutish hands of my father, with their chilling touch, Rinaldo's hands were long, slender, warm, expressive, and he made tenderness in everything that he touched.

I learned what it is to love, with all of the mind and all of the body, and I was born in his arms."

He began to cough, and attempted to clear his throat, but the cough became a fit that wracked his body in painful spasms.

"You've got to stop smoking and drinking so much, Didier. And you've gotta do a little exercise now and then."

"Oh, please," he shuddered, stubbing out a cigarette and fishing another from the pack in front of him as the coughs subsided.

"There is nothing so depressing as good advice, and I will be pleased if you do not inflict it upon me. Frankly, I am shocked at you. You must know this, surely? Some years ago I suffered such an offensively gratuitous piece of good advice that I was depressed for six months afterward. It was a very close call-I almost never recovered."

"Sorry," I smiled. "I don't know what came over me."

"You are forgiven," he sniffed, downing one glass of whisky as the waiter brought the next. "You know," I admonished him, "Karla says that depression only happens to people who don't know how to be sad."

"Well she is wrong!" he declared. "I am an expert in the tristesse. It is the perfect, definitive human performance. There are many animals that can express their happiness, but only the human animal has the genius to express a magnificent sadness. And for me it is something special; a daily meditation. Sadness is my one and my only art."

He pouted for a few moments, too peeved to proceed, but then raised his eyes to meet mine and laughed out loud.

"Have you heard from her?" he asked.

"No."

"But you know where she is?"

"No."

"She has left Goa?"

"I asked a guy I know down there, Dashrant-he owns a restaurant on the beach where she was staying-I asked him to keep an eye on her, and make sure she was okay. I called him last week, and he told me she left. He tried to talk her into staying, but she... well, you know."

Didier pursed his lips in a reflective frown. We both watched the shuffling, idling, bustling, scurrying street only two metres away, beyond the wide entrance to Leopold's.

"Et bien, don't worry yourself about Karla," Didier said at last.

"At the least, she is well protected."

I assumed that Didier meant she could take care of herself and, perhaps, that she lived under a good and lucky sign. I was wrong.

There was more to the remark than that. I should've asked him what he meant, of course. In the long years since that conversation I've asked myself a thousand times how different my life might've been if only I'd asked him what he meant by that remark. Instead, my head full of assumptions and my heart full of pride, I changed the subject.

"So... what happened?"

"Happened?" he asked, bewildered.

"What happened to you and Rinaldo in Genova?"

"Ah, yes. He loved me, and I loved him, it was true, but he made an error of the judgment. He gave my love a test. He allowed me to discover the secret place where he kept a large sum of cash. I could not resist the temptation that he offered to me. I took the money and ran away. I loved him, but I took his money, and I ran away. For all his wisdom, he did not know that love cannot be tested. Honesty can be tested, and loyalty. But there is no test for love. Love goes on forever, once it begins, even if we come to hate the one we love. Love goes on forever because love is born in the part of us that does not die."

"Did you ever see him again?"

"Yes. Yes, I did. Another loop of fortune brought me back to Genova, almost fifteen years later. I walked on the same boulevard of sand where he had taught me to read Rimbaud and Verlaine. And then I saw him. He was sitting with a group of men of his own age-he was more than sixty then-and they were watching two elderly men play chess. He wore a grey cardigan and a black velvet scarf, although the day was not cold. His hair was almost gone. That silver crown of hair, it was... gone. His face was all hollow spaces, and his skin was a bad mix of bad colours, as if he was recovering from a serious illness. Perhaps he was succumbing to it. I do not know. I walked on past him, averting my gaze, so that he should not recognise me. I even pretended a strange, stooping walk to disguise myself. At the last moment I glanced back at him, watching as he coughed violently into a white handkerchief. There was blood, I think, staining that white handkerchief. I walked faster and faster until I ran with the haste of a man in terror."

Once again we sat in silence and allowed our eyes to rove the passing crowds, following a man in a blue turban in one instant, and a woman in a black mask, veil, and chador the next.

"You know, Lin, I have lived what many-or most-would call a wicked life. I have done things that could put me in prison, and things that, in some nations, could see me executed. There are many things I have done that I can say, I am not proud. But there is only one act in my whole life that I can say, I am truly ashamed of it. I hurried past that great man, and I had money enough and time enough and good health enough to help him. I hurried past him, not because I felt guilty about the theft of his money. And not because I was afraid of his sickness, or the commitment it might cost me. I hurried past that good and brilliant man who loved me, and taught me how to love, simply because he was old-because he was not beautiful any more."

He drained his glass, examined its emptiness for a moment, and then placed it on the table as gently and attentively as if it was about to explode. "Merde! Let's drink, my friend!" he cried at last, but my hand stayed his, preventing him from summoning the waiter.

"I can't, Didier. I have to meet Lisa at the Sea Rock. She asked me to ride out there and meet her. I'll have to leave now, if I'm going to make it."

He clenched his jaws on something-a request, perhaps, or another confession. My hand still rested on his.

"Look, you can come, if you like. It's not a private meeting, and it's a nice ride out to Juhu."

He smiled slowly, and slid his hand out from under mine. Still staring into my eyes, he raised his hand, pointing with one finger. A waiter came to the table. Without looking at him, Didier ordered another whisky. When I paid my bill and walked out to the street, he was coughing again, hunched over one hand and clutching his glass with the other.

I'd bought a bike, an Enfield Bullet, a month before. The taste of two-wheeled adrenaline that I'd experienced in Goa had nagged at me until I finally surrendered to it, and went with Abdullah to the mechanic who serviced his bike. The mechanic, a Tamil named Hussein, loved bikes, and loved Abdullah almost as much.

The Enfield he sold to me was in perfect condition, and it never once let me down. Vikram was so impressed with it that he bought one from Hussein within a week. Sometimes we rode together, Abdullah, Vikram, and I, our three bikes side by side, and the sun in our laughing mouths.

On that afternoon when I left Didier at Leopold's I rode slowly, and gave myself time and space to think. Karla was gone from the little house on Anjuna beach. I had no idea where she might be.

Ulla told me that Karla had stopped writing to her, and I had no reason to think she was lying. So Karla was gone, and there was no way to find her. And every day I woke with a dream or a thought of her. Every night I slept with the knife of regret in my chest.

My thoughts drifted to Khaderbhai as I rode. He seemed well pleased with the niche role that I was playing in his mafia network. I supervised certain movements of smuggled gold through the domestic and international airports, exchanged sums of cash with agents at the five-star hotels and airline offices, and arranged to buy passports from foreigners. They were all jobs that a gora could perform more successfully and less obtrusively than an Indian. My conspicuousness was a strange and ironic form of camouflage. Foreigners were stared at in India. Somewhere in the five or more millennia of its history, the culture had decided to dispense with the casual, nonchalant glance. By the time I came to Bombay, the eye contact ranged from an ogling gaze to a gawping, goggle-eyed glare. There was nothing malicious in it. The staring eyes that found and followed me everywhere I went were innocent, curious, and almost always friendly. And that intense scrutiny had its benefits: for the most part, people stared at what I was, not what I did. Foreigners were stared into invisibility. So I wandered in and out of travel agencies or grand hotels, airline or business offices, followed in every step by eyes that saw me, but not the crimes I committed in the service of the great Khan.

I rode on past the Haji Ali Mosque, accelerating into the wide avenue of afternoon traffic, and as I rode I asked myself why Abdel Khader Khan never referred to the murder of his friend and colleague Madjid. It still nagged at me and I wanted to ask him about it, but the one time that I'd mentioned his name, soon after the murder, Khader had looked so stricken with grief that I'd let the subject lapse. And as the days had passed into weeks, and the weeks had drifted into silent months, I'd found it impossible to drag the subject into our conversations. It was as if _I was the one who was keeping secrets; and no matter how thick my mind became with thoughts of the murder, I never admitted them to him. Instead, we talked business or we spoke of philosophy. And during the course of our long discussions he finally answered my big question. I remembered the excitement that had refracted in his eyes, and the pride, perhaps, when I'd proved that I understood his teaching. And as I rode from Leopold's to my meeting with Lisa on that day of Didier's confession, I remembered word-by-word and smile-by-smile the great Khan's explanation.

"And so, you understand the principle of the argument to this point?"

"Yes," I answered him. I'd come to his Dongri mansion that night, a week before, to give him a report on the changes I'd recommended and initiated in the passport factory run by Abdel Ghani. With Ghani's approval and support, we'd expanded the operation to include a full package of identity documents- driver's licences, bank accounts, credit cards, even memberships of sports clubs. Khader was delighted with the progress of those innovations, but he soon changed the subject to talk of his favourite themes: good and evil, and the purpose of life. "Perhaps you can tell it back to me," he nodded, looking into the playful fling and splash of the fountain's plumes of water. His elbows rested on the arms of the white cane armchair, and the temple of his fingertips peaked at his lips and the neat, silver grey moustache.

"Ah... sure. You were saying that the whole universe is moving toward some ultimate complexity. This has been going on since the universe began, and physicists call it the tendency toward complexity. And... anything that kicks this along and helps it is good, and anything that hinders it is evil."

"Very good," Khader said, raising one eyebrow in the smile he offered me. As was so often the case, I wasn't sure if he was expressing approval or mockery or both. It seemed, with Khader, that he never felt or expressed any one emotion without feeling something of its opposite. That might be true for all of us, to some extent. But with him, with lord Abdel Khader Khan, it wasn't possible to know what he really thought or felt about you. The one and only time that I saw the whole of the truth in his eyes- on a snow-covered mountain called Sorrow's Reward-it was already too late, and I never saw it again.

"And this final complexity," he added, "it can be called God, or the Universal Spirit, or the Ultimate Complexity, as you please.

For myself, there is no problem in calling it God. The whole universe is moving toward God, in a tendency toward the ultimate complexity that God is."

"That still leaves me with the question I asked you last time.

How do you decide how any one thing is good or evil?"

"That is true. I promised you an answer to this very good question then, young Mr. Lin, and you will have it. But, first, you must answer a question for me. Why is killing wrong?"

"Well, I don't think it is always wrong."

"Ah," he mused, his amber eyes glittering in the same wry smile.

"Well, I must tell you that it _is always wrong. This will become clear, later in our discussion. For now, concentrate on the type of killing that you do think is wrong, and tell me why it is wrong."

"Yeah, well, it's the unlawful taking of a life."

"By whose law?"

"Society's law. The law of the land," I offered, sensing that the philosophical ground was slipping away beneath me.

"Who makes this law?" he asked gently. "Politicians pass laws. Criminal laws are inherited from... from civilisation. The laws against unlawful killing go all the way back-maybe all the way back to the cave."

"And why was killing wrong for them?"

"You mean... well, I'd say, because there's only one life. You only get one shot at it, and to take it away is a terrible thing."

"A lightning storm is a terrible thing. Does that make it wrong, or evil?"

"No, of course not," I replied more irritably. "Look, I don't know why we need to know what's behind the laws against killing.

We have one life, and if you take a life without a good reason you do something wrong."

"Yes," he said patiently. "But why is it wrong?"

"It just _is, that's all."

"This is the point we all reach," Khader concluded, more serious in his tone. He put his hand on my wrist as it rested on the arm of my chair beside him, and he tapped out the important points with his fingers. "If you ask people why killing, or any other crime, is wrong, they will tell you that it is against the law, or that the Bible, or the Upanishads, or the Koran, or the Buddha's eight-fold path, or their parents, or some other authority tells them it is wrong. But they don't know why it is wrong. It may be true, what they say, but they don't know why it is true.

"In order to know about any act or intention or consequence, we must first ask two questions. One, what would happen if everyone did this thing? Two, would this help or hinder the movement toward complexity?"

He paused as a servant entered with Nazeer. The servant brought sweet, black suleimani chai, in long glasses, and a variety of irresistible sweets on a silver tray. Nazeer brought a questioning glance for Khaderbhai and a scowl of unmitigated contempt for me. Khader thanked him and the servant, and they left us alone once more.

"In the case of killing," Khader continued, after he'd sipped the tea through a cube of white sugar. "What would happen if everyone killed people? Would that help or hinder? Tell me."

"Obviously, if everyone killed people, we would wipe each other out. So... that wouldn't help."

"Yes. We human beings are the most complex arrangement of matter that we know of, but we are not the last achievement of the universe. We, too, will develop and change with the rest of the universe. But if we kill indiscriminately, we will not get there.

We will wipe out our species, and all the development that led to us across millions of years- billions of years-will be lost. The same can be said for stealing. What would happen if everyone stole things? Would that help us, or would it hinder us?"

"Yeah. I get the point. If everyone was stealing off everyone else we'd be so paranoid, and we'd waste so much time and money on it, that it would slow us down, and we'd never get-"

"To the ultimate complexity," he completed the thought for me.

"This is why killing and stealing are wrong-not because a book tells us they are wrong, or a law tells us they are wrong, or a spiritual guide tells us they are wrong, but because if everyone did them we would not move toward the ultimate complexity that is God, with the rest of the universe. And the opposite of these is also true. Why is love good? Well, what would happen if everyone loved everyone else? Would that help us or would it hold us back?"

"It would help," I agreed, laughing from within the trap he'd set for me.

"Yes. In fact, such universal love would greatly accelerate the movement toward God. Love is good. Friendship is good. Loyalty is good. Freedom is good. Honesty is good. We knew that these things were good before-we have always known this in our hearts, and all the great teachers have always told us this-but now, with this definition of good and evil, we can see why they are good.

Just as we can see why stealing and lying and killing are evil."

"But sometimes..." I protested, "you know, what about self defence? What about killing to defend yourself?"

"Yes, a good point, Lin. I want you to imagine a scene for me.

You are standing in a room with a desk in front of you. On the other side of the room is your mother. A vicious man holds a knife to the throat of your mother. The man will kill your mother. On the table in front of you there is a button. If you press it, the man will die. If you do not, he will kill your mother. These are the only possible outcomes. If you do nothing, your mother dies. If you press the button, the man dies and your mother is saved. What would you do?"

"The guy's history," I answered without hesitation.

"Just so," he sighed, perhaps wishing that I'd wrestled with the decision a little longer before pressing the button. "And if you did this, if you saved your mother from this vicious killer, would you be doing the wrong thing or the right thing?" "The right thing," I said just as swiftly.

"No, Lin, I'm afraid not," he frowned. "We have just seen that in the terms of this new, objective definition of good and evil, killing is always wrong because, if everyone did it, we would not move toward God, the ultimate complexity, with the rest of the universe. So it is wrong to kill. But your reasons were good. So therefore, the truth of this decision is that you did the wrong thing, for the right reasons..."

As I rode the wind, a week after Khader's little lecture on ethics, weaving the bike through ancient-modern traffic beneath a darkening, portentous tumble of clouds, those words echoed in my mind. The wrong thing, for the right reasons. I rode on and, even when I stopped thinking about Khader's lesson, those words still murmured in the little grey daydream-space where memory meets inspiration. I know now that the words were like a mantra, and that my instinct-fate's whisper in the dark-was trying to warn me of something by repeating them. The wrong thing... for the right reasons.

But on that day, an hour after Didier's confession, I let the murmured warnings fade. Right or wrong, I didn't want to think about the reasons-not my reasons for doing what I did, or Khader's, or anyone's. I enjoyed the discussions of good and evil, but only as a game, as an entertainment. I didn't really want the truth. I was sick of truth, especially my own truth, and I couldn't face it. So the thoughts and premonitions echoed and then whipped past me into the coils of humid wind. And by the time I swept into the last curve of coast near the Sea Rock Hotel, my mind was as clear as the broad horizon clamped upon the limit of a dark and tremulous sea.

The Sea Rock, which was as luxurious and opulently serviced as the other five-star hotels in Bombay, offered the special attraction that it was literally built upon the sea rocks at Juhu. From all its major restaurants, bars, and a hundred other windows, the Sea Rock scanned the endlessly shifting peaks and furrows of the Arabian Sea. The hotel also offered one of the best and most comprehensively eclectic smorgasbord lunches in the city. I was hungry, and glad to see that Lisa was waiting for me in the foyer. She wore a starched, sky-blue shirt with the collar turned up, and sky-blue culottes. Her blonde hair was wound into the praying-fingers of a French braid. She'd been clean, off heroin, for more than a year. She looked tanned and healthy and confident. "Hi, Lin," she smiled, greeting me with a kiss on the cheek.

"You're just in time."

"Great. I'm starving."

"No, I mean you're just in time to meet Kalpana. Just a minute- here she comes now."

A young woman with a fashionably western short haircut, hipster jeans, and a tight, red T-shirt approached us. She wore a stopwatch around her neck on a lanyard, and carried a clipboard.

She was about twenty-six years old.

"Hello," I said when Lisa introduced us. "Is that your rig outside? The broadcast vans, and all the cables? Are you shooting a movie?"

"Supposed to be, yaar," she replied in the exaggerated vowels of the Bombay accent that I loved and found myself unconsciously imitating. "The director has gone off somewhere with one of our dancers. It's meant to be a secret, yaar, but the whole damn set is talking about it. We've got a forty-five minute break.

Although, mind you, that's about ten times as long as our guy will need, from what all I'm told about his prowess."

"Okay," I suggested, smacking my hands together. "That gives us time for lunch."

"Fuck lunch, let's get stoned first, yaar," Kalpana demurred.

"Have you got any hash?"

"Yeah," I shrugged. "Sure."

"Did you bring a car?"

"I'm on a Bullet."

"Okay, let's use my car. It's in the car park."

We left the hotel, and sat in her new Fiat to smoke. While I prepared the joint, she told me that she was an assistant to the producer of that and several other films. One of her duties was to oversee the casting of minor roles in the films. She'd subcontracted the task to a casting agent, but he was experiencing difficulty in finding foreigners to fill the small, non-speaking, decorative roles.

"Kalpana got talking about this at dinner last week," Lisa summed up when Kalpana began to smoke. "She told me that her guys couldn't find foreigners to play the parts in the movies-you know, the people at a disco or a party scene or, like, British people, in the time of the British Raj and like that. So... I thought of you." "U-huh."

"It would be a great help if you could get the goras for me when we need them," Kalpana said, offering me what seemed to be a well-practised leer. Practised or not, it was damned effective.

"We provide a cab to bring them to the shoot and take them home again. We give them a full lunch during the break. And we pay about two thousand rupees a day, per person. We pay that to _you, plus a bonus commission per head. What you pay them, well, it's up to you. Most of them are happy to do it for nothing, and are real surprised, you know, when they find out we actually pay them to be in the movies."

"Whaddaya say?" Lisa asked me, her eyes gleaming through the rose filter of her stone.

"I'm interested."

My mind was trawling through the possible lateral benefits in the arrangement. Some of them were obvious. The moviemakers were a fairly affluent crowd of frequent flyers who might need black market dollars and documents, from time to time. It was clear to me, as well, that the casting job was important to Lisa. On its own, that was reason enough for me to get involved. I liked her, and I was glad that she wanted to like me.

"Good," Kalpana concluded, opening the door and stepping out to the car park. We walked back to the hotel foyer, each of us with sunglasses clamped to our eyes. We shook hands at the same spot where we'd met half an hour before.

"Have your lunch," she said. "I'll go back to the set. We're in the ballroom. When you're all done, follow the cables and you'll find me. I'll introduce you to the guys, and you can start right away. We need a few foreigners for tomorrow's shoot, here. Two guys and two gals, yaar. Blonde, Sweden types, if you can find them. Hey-that was Kashmiri hash, _na? We'll get along just fine, Lin, you and me. Ciao! Ciao, baby."

In the restaurant, Lisa and I heaped our plates high, and sat facing the sea to eat.

"Kalpana's okay," she said between mouthfuls. "She's sarcastic as all hell, sometimes, and she's a real ambitious girl-don't make any mistake about that-but she's a straight talker and a real friend. When she told me about the casting job, I thought about you. I thought you might be able to... make something out of it..." "Thanks," I said, meeting her eye and trying to read her. "I appreciate the thought. Do you want to be partners in it with me?"

"Yes," she answered quickly. "I was hoping... hoping you'd want to."

"We could work it out together," I suggested. "I don't think I'll have any trouble getting foreigners to work in the movies, but I don't really want to do the rest of it. You could do that part, if you like. You could organise picking them up, looking after them on the set, and making the payments and all that. I'll talk them into it, and you take it from there. I'd be glad to work with you, if you're interested."

She smiled. It was a good smile; the kind you like to keep.

"I'd love to do it," she gushed, flushing pink with embarrassment under her tan. "I really need to do something, Lin, and I think I'm ready. When Kalpana ran this casting thing by me, I wanted to jump at it, but I was too nervous to take it on alone. Thanks."

"Don't mention it. How's it going with you and Abdullah?"

"Mmmm," she mumbled, finishing a mouthful of food. "I'm not working, if you know what I mean, so that's something. I'm not working at the Palace, and I'm not using. He gave me money. A lot of money. I don't know where he got it. I don't really care. It's more money than I've ever seen in one bundle before in my whole life. It's in this case, this metal case. He gave it to me, and asked me to look after it for him, and to spend it whenever I need it. It was real spooky, kinda like... I dunno... like his last will and testament, or something."

I raised one eyebrow unconsciously in a quizzical expression. She caught the look, reflected a moment, and then responded.

"I trust you, Lin. You're the only guy in this city I do trust.

Funny thing is, Abdullah's the guy gave me the money and all, and I think I love him, in a kind of insane way, but I don't trust him. Is that a horrible thing to say about the guy you live with?"

"No."

"Do you trust him?"

"With my life."

"Why?"

I hesitated, and then the words didn't come. We finished our meal and sat back from the table, looking at the sea.

"We've been through some things," I said after a while. "But it's not just that. I trusted him before we did any of that. I don't know what it is. A man trusts another man when he sees enough of himself in him, I guess. Or maybe when he sees the things he wishes he had in himself."

We were silent for a time, each of us troubled, and stubbornly tempting fate in our own ways.

"Are you ready?" I asked her. She nodded in reply. "Let's go to the movies."

We followed the black vines of relay cables from the generator vans outside the hotel. They led us through a side entrance and past a procession of bustling assistants to the banquet room, which had been hired as a set. The room was filled with people, powerful lights, dazzling reflector panels, cameras, and equipment. Seconds after we entered, someone shouted Quiet, please! And then a riotous musical number began.

Hindi movies aren't to everyone's taste. Some foreigners I'd dealt with had told me that they loathed the kaleidoscopic turmoil of musical numbers, bursting stochastically between weeping mothers, sighing infatuates, and brawling villains. I understood what they meant, but I didn't agree with them. A year before, Johnny Cigar had told me that in former lives I must've been at least six different Indian personalities. I'd taken it as a high compliment, but it wasn't until I saw my first Bollywood movie shoot that I knew at last, and exactly, what he'd meant. I loved the singing, the dancing, and the music with the whole of my heart from the very first instant.

The producers had hired a two-thousand-watt amplifier. The music crashed through the banquet room and rattled into our bones. The colours were from a tropical sea. The million lights were as dazzling as a sun-struck lake. The faces were as beautiful as those carved on temple walls. The dancing was a frenzy of excited, exuberant lasciviousness and ancient classical skills.

And the whole, improbably coherent expression of love and life, drama and comedy, was articulated in the delicate, unfurled elegance of a graceful hand, or the wink of a seductive eye.

For an hour we watched as the dance number was rehearsed and refined and finally recorded on film. During a break, after that, Kalpana introduced me to Cliff De Souza and Chandra Mehta, two of the four producers of the film. De Souza was a tall, curly haired, thirty-year-old Goan with a disarming grin and a loping walk. Chandra Mehta was closer to forty. He was overweight, but comfortable with it: one of those big men who expand to fit a big idea of themselves. I liked both men and, although they were too busy to talk for long, that first meeting was cordial and communicative.

I offered Lisa a lift back to town, but she'd arranged to ride with Kalpana, and she chose to wait. I gave her the phone number at my new apartment, telling her to call if she needed me. On my way out through the foyer, I saw Kavita Singh also leaving the hotel. We'd both been so busy in recent months-she with writing about crimes, and me with committing them-that we hadn't seen one another for many weeks.

"Kavita!" I called out, running forward to catch her. "Just the woman I wanted to see! The number-one reporter, on Bombay's number-one newspaper. How are you? You... look... great!"

She was dressed in a silk pantsuit. It was the colour of bleached bone. She carried a linen handbag in the same colour. The single breasted jacket descended to a deep d%ecolletage, and it was obvious that she was wearing nothing under the jacket.

"Oh, come off it!" she snapped, grinning and embarrassed. "This is my dressed-to-kill outfit. I had to interview Vasant Lai. I just came out of there."

"You're moving in powerful circles," I said, recalling photos of the populist politician. His incitements to communal violence had resulted in rioting, arson, and murder. Each time I saw him on television or read one of his bigoted speeches in the newspaper, he made me think of the brutal madman who called himself Sapna: a legal, political version of the psychopathic killer.

"It was a snake-pit up there in his suite, I tell you, baba. But I got my interview. He has a weakness for big tits." She whipped a finger into my face. "Don't say anything!"

"Hey!" I pacified her, raising both hands and wagging my head.

"I'm... saying nothing at all, yaar. Absolutely nothing. I'm looking, mind you, and I wish I had three eyes, but I'm saying nothing at all!"

"You bastard!" she hissed, laughing through gritted teeth. "Ah, shit, what's happening to the world, man, when one of the most important guys in the city won't talk to _you, but will give a two-hour interview to your tits? Men are such sick fuckers, don't you think?"

"You got me there, Kavita," I sighed.

"Fuckin' pigs, yaar."

"Can't argue with that. When you're right, you're right."

She eyed me suspiciously. "What are you being so damn agreeable about, Lin?"

"Listen, where are you going?"

"What?"

"Where are you going? Right now, I mean."

"I was going to take a cab back to town. I'm living near Flora Fountain now."

"How about I give you a lift, on my bike? I want to talk to you.

I want you to help me with a problem."

Kavita didn't know me well. Her eyes were the colour of bark on a cinnamon tree, flecked with golden sparks. She looked me up and down with those eyes, and the forensic examination left her somewhere short of inspired reassurance.

"What kind of a problem?" she asked.

"It involves a murder," I replied. "And I want you to make it a page-one story. I'll tell you all about it at your place. And on the way you can tell me about Vasant Lai-you'll have to shout on the back of the bike, so that'll help you get it out of your system, na?"

Some forty minutes later, we sat together in her fourth-floor walk-up apartment on the edge of the Fort area, near Flora Fountain. It was a tiny apartment with a foldout bed, a rudimentary kitchen, and a hundred noisy neighbours. It boasted a superb bathroom, however, large enough to hold a washing machine and dryer without crowding. There was also a balcony enclosed in antique wrought iron that looked out on the wide, busy square around the fountain.

"His name is Anand Rao," I told her, sipping the strong espresso coffee she'd prepared for me. "He shared a hut, in the slum, with a guy named Rasheed. They were my neighbours when I lived there.

Then Rasheed's wife and her sister came to stay, from the village in Rajasthan. Anand moved out of the hut to leave room for Rasheed and the sisters."

"Hang on," Kavita interrupted. "I better get this down."

She stood up and walked to a wide, cluttered desk, where she gathered up a pad, pen, and cassette recorder. She'd changed out of her pantsuit, and wore loose harem pants and a singlet.

Watching her walk, following her quick, purposeful, graceful movements, I realised for the first time just how beautiful she was. When she returned and set up the recorder, tucking her legs beneath her on the armchair as she prepared to write, she caught me staring at her. "What?" she asked.

"Nothing," I smiled. "Okay, so Anand Rao got to meet Rasheed's wife and her sister. He got to like them. They were shy, but they were friendly, happy, and kind. I think, now, reading between the lines, that Anand got a little sweet on the sister. Anyway, one day Rasheed tells his wife that the only way they can set themselves up, in the little shop that they want, is if he sells his kidney-one of his kidneys-at this private hospital he knows about. She argues against this, but he finally convinces her that it's their only chance.

"Well, he comes back from the hospital, and he tells her he's got good news and bad news. The good news is that they definitely want a kidney. The bad news is that they don't want a man's kidney-they want a woman's kidney."

"Okay," Kavita sighed, shaking her head.

"Yeah. The guy was a prince. Anyway, his wife balks at this, understandably, but Rasheed convinces her, and she goes off to have the operation."

"Do you know where this took place?" Kavita asked.

"Yeah. Anand Rao checked into it all, and told Qasim Ali, the head man in the slum. He's got the details. So, anyway, Anand Rao hears about this, when Rasheed's wife returns from the hospital, and he's furious. He knows Rasheed well-they shared the hut together for two years, remember-and he knows that Rasheed is a con man. He has it out with Rasheed, but it comes to nothing.

Rasheed gets all indignant. He spills kerosene on himself, and tells Anand Rao to light it, if he doesn't trust him, and if he thinks he's such a bad guy. Anand just warns him to look after the women, and leaves it at that."

"When did this happen?"

"The operation was six months ago. Well, the next thing is, Rasheed tells his wife that he's been down to the hospital twenty times to sell his own kidney, but they don't want it. He tells her the money they got for her kidney was only half as much as they need to buy their business. He tells her that they still want women's kidneys, and he starts working on her to sell her sister's kidney. The wife is against it, but Rasheed works on the young sister, telling her that if she doesn't sell her kidney, then the wife will have sold her kidney for nothing. Finally, the women give in. Rasheed packs the younger sister off to the hospital, and she returns, minus one of her kidneys." "This is some guy," Kavita muttered.

"Yeah. Well, I never liked him. He was one of those guys who smile as a tactic, you know, and not because they actually feel anything worth smiling about. Kind of like the way a chimpanzee smiles."

"And what happened? He took off with the money, I suppose?"

"Yeah. Rasheed took the money and ran. The two sisters were devastated. Their health deteriorated. They went downhill fast.

They ended up in hospital. First one, and then the other-they both fell into a coma. Lying together in their hospital beds, they were pronounced dead within minutes of each other. Anand was there, with a few others from the slum. He stayed long enough to see the sheets pulled over their faces. Then he ran out of the hospital. He went out of his mind with anger and... guilt, I suppose. He went looking for Rasheed. He knew every one of Rasheed's drinking dives. When he tracked him down, Rasheed was lying in a rubbish pit, sleeping off a binge. He'd paid some kids to keep the rats off his drunken body. Anand chased the kids off and sat down beside Rasheed, and listened to him snore. Then he cut his throat, and waited there until the blood stopped flowing."

"Pretty messy," Kavita muttered, not looking up from her pad.

"It was. It is. Anand gave himself up, and made a full confession. He's been charged with murder."

"And you want me to...?"

"I want you to make it a front-page story. I want you to build some kind of popular movement around him, so that if they do convict him-which they will, for sure-they'll have to go a little easy on him. I want him to have support while he's in prison, and I want to keep his prison time down to as little as possible."

"That's a lot of I want."

"I know."

"Well," she frowned, "it's an interesting story, but I've got to tell you, Lin, we get too many stories like this every day. Wife burning, dowry murders, child prostitution, slavery, female infanticide-it's a war against women in India, Lin. It's a fight to the death, and mostly it's the women dying. I want to help your guy, but I don't see this as page one, yaar. And anyway, I don't have any pull with page one. I'm new there myself, don't forget."

"There's more," I pressed her. "The kicker in the story is that the sisters didn't die. Half an hour after they were pronounced dead, Rasheed's wife stirred beneath the sheet. A few minutes later, her sister moved and groaned. They're alive and well today. Their hut, in the slum, has become a kind of shrine. People come from all over the city to see the miracle sisters who returned from the dead. It's the best thing that's ever happened to the businesses in the slum. They're doing a roaring trade with the pilgrims. And the sisters are richer than they could ever have dreamed. People are throwing money at them, a rupee or two at a time, and it's really adding up. The sisters have set up a charity for abandoned wives.

And I think their story-back from the dead, you know-is enough to jump this to page one."

"Arrey yaar, baba!" Kavita yelped. "Okay, first you have to get me together with the women. They're the key to this. Then I have to interview Anand Rao in prison."

"I'll take you there."

"No," she insisted. "I have to speak to him alone. I don't want him prompted by you, or responding to you. I have to see how he'll hold up on his own. If we're going to build a campaign around him, he'll have to stand alone, yaar. But you can speak to him first and prepare the way before my interview. I'll try to get to see him in the next two or three weeks. We've got a lot to do."

For two hours we discussed the campaign, and I answered her many questions. I left her in a happy, enthusiastic whirl of pressure and purpose. I rode straight out to Nariman Point, and bought a sizzling meal from one of the fast-food vans parked on the beach.

But my appetite wasn't as good as I'd thought, and I ate less than half. I went down to the rocks to rinse my hands in the seawater, within sight of the spot where Abdullah had introduced himself to me three years before.

Khader's words floated on the swift, shallow stream of my thoughts once again: the wrong thing, for the right reasons... I thought of Anand Rao, in Arthur Road Prison, in the big dormitory room with the overseers and the body lice. I shivered the thought off into the breeze. Kavita had asked me why the Anand Rao case was so important to me. I didn't tell her that he'd come to me before he committed the murder, only a week before he cut Rasheed's throat. I didn't tell her that I'd brushed him off, and insulted him, demeaning his dilemma with an offer of money. I smudged an answer to her question, and let her think that I was just trying to help a friend, just trying to do the right thing.

Khaderbhai once said that every virtuous act is inspired by a dark secret. It mightn't be true of everyone, but it was true enough about me. The little good that I've done in the world has always dragged behind it a shadow of dark inspiration. What I do know now, and didn't know then is that, in the long run, motive matters more with good deeds than it does with bad. When all the guilt and shame for the bad we've done have run their course, it's the good we did that can save us. But then, when salvation speaks, the secrets we kept, and the motives we concealed, creep from their shadows. They cling to us, those dark motives for our good deeds. Redemption's climb is steepest if the good we did is soiled with secret shame.

But I didn't know that then. I washed my hands in the cold,uncaring sea, and my conscience was as silent and remote as the mute, unreachable stars.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-26