Chapter thirty

Heroin is a sensory deprivation tank for the soul. Floating on the Dead Sea of the drug stone, there's no sense of pain, no regret or shame, no feelings of guilt or grief, no depression, and no desire. The sleeping universe enters and envelops every atom of existence. Insensible stillness and peace disperse fear and suffering. Thoughts drift like ocean weeds and vanish in the distant, grey somnolency, unperceived and indeterminable. The body succumbs to cryogenic slumber: the listless heart beats faintly, and breathing slowly fades to random whispers. Thick nirvanic numbness clogs the limbs, and downward, deeper, the sleeper slides and glides toward oblivion, the perfect and eternal stone.

That chemical absolution is paid for, like everything else in the universe, with light. The first light that junkies lose is the light in their eyes. A junkie's eyes are as lightless as the eyes of Greek statues, as lightless as hammered lead, as lightless as a bullet hole in a dead man's back. The next light lost is the light of desire. Junkies kill desire with the same weapon they use on hope and dream and honour: the club made from their craving. And when all the other lights of life are gone, the last light lost is the light of love. Sooner or later, when it's down to the last hit, the junkie will give up the woman he loves, rather than go without; sooner or later, every hard junkie becomes a devil in exile.

I levitated. I floated, upraised on the supernatant liquid of the smack in the spoon, and the spoon was as big as a room. The raft of opiate paralysis drifted across the little lake in the spoon, and the rafters intersecting over my head seemed to hold an answer, some kind of answer, in their symmetry. I stared at the rafters, knowing that the answer was there and that it might save me. And then I closed my eyes of hammered lead again, and lost it. And sometimes I woke. Sometimes I was wide-awake enough to want more of the deadening drug. Sometimes I was awake enough to remember it all.

There'd been no funeral for Abdullah because there was no body for them, for us, to bury. His body had disappeared during the brawling riot just as Maurizio's body had disappeared-as completely as a flared, exhausted star. I joined the others to carry Prabaker's body to the ghat, the burning place. I ran with them through the streets. I ran with them beneath the garlanded burden of his little body, chanting names of God, and then I watched his body burn. Grief roamed the lanes of the slum afterward, and I couldn't remain there with the gathering of friends and family who mourned him. They stood near the spot where Prabaker had been married only weeks before. Tattered streamers from the wedding still dangled from the roofs of some of the huts. I spoke to Qasim Ali, Johnny, Jeetendra, and Kishan Mango, but then I left them and rode to Dongri. I had questions for lord Abdel Khader Khan: questions that crawled inside me like the things in Hassaan Obikwa's pit.

The house near the Nabila Mosque was closed, locked up with heavy padlocks and utterly silent. No-one in the forecourt of the mosque or the street of shops could tell me when he'd left, or when he might return. Frustrated and angry, I rode to see Abdul Ghani. His house was open but his servants told me that he was out of the city on a holiday, and wasn't expected home again for weeks. I visited the passport factory, and found Krishna and Villu hard at work. They confirmed that Ghani had left them instructions and sufficient funds for several weeks of work, and had told them that he was taking a holiday. When I rode to Khaled Ansari's apartment, I met a watchman on duty who told me that Khaled was in Pakistan. He had no idea when the dour Palestinian would return.

The other members of Khader's mafia council were just as suddenly and conveniently absent. Farid was in Dubai. General Sobhan Mahmoud was in Kashmir. No-one answered my knock at Keki Dorabjee's house, and every window was darkened with a drawn shade. Rajubhai, who'd never been known to miss a day at his counting house in the Fort, was visiting a sick relative in Delhi. Even the second-level bosses and lieutenants were out of town or simply unavailable.

Those who remained, the gold agents and currency couriers and passport contacts all over the city, were polite and friendly.

Work for them seemed to continue at the same pace and with the same routines. My own work was just as secure. I was anticipated at every depot, exchange centre, jewellery store, and other point of contact with Khader's empire. Instructions had been left for me with gold dealers, currency men, and the touts who bought and stole passports. I wasn't sure if it was a compliment to me-that I could be relied upon to function in the absence of the council-or that they saw me as so inconsequential in their scheme of things that I didn't merit an explanation.

Whatever the reason, I felt dishearteningly alone in the city.

I'd lost Prabaker and Abdullah, my closest friends, in the same week, and with them I'd lost the mark on the psychic map that says You Are Here. Personality and personal identity are in some ways like co-ordinates on the street map drawn by our intersecting relationships. We know who we are and we define what we are by references to the people we love and our reasons for loving them. I was that point in space and time where Abdullah's wild violence intersected with Prabaker's happy gentleness.

Adrift, then, and somehow un-defined by their deaths, I realised with unease and surprise how much I'd also come to depend upon Khader and his council of bosses. My interactions with most of them had been cursory, it seemed to me, and yet I missed the reassurance of their presence in the city almost as much as I missed the company of my dead friends.

And I was angry. It took me a while to understand that anger, and to realise that Khaderbhai was its instigator and its target. I blamed him for Abdullah's death: for not protecting him and for not saving him. I couldn't bring myself to believe that Abdullah, the friend I'd loved, was the brutal madman Sapna. But I was ready to believe that Abdel Khader Khan had some connection to Sapna and to the killings. Moreover, I felt betrayed by his desertion of the city. It was as if he'd abandoned me to face... everything... alone. It was a ridiculous notion, of course, and quite self-aggrandising. The truth was that hundreds of Khader's men were still working in Bombay, and I dealt with many of them every day. But still I felt it-betrayed and forsaken. A coldness, formed from doubt and angry fear, began to spread inward toward the core of my feeling for the Khan. I still loved him, and I was still bonded to him as a son to his father, but he was no longer my revered and flawless hero.

A mujaheddin fighter once told me that fate gives all of us three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives. But these twelve are always disguised, and we can never know which one is which until we've loved them, left them, or fought them. Khader was one of my twelve, but his disguise was always the best. In those abandoned, angry days, as my grieving heart limped into numbing despair, I began to think of him as my enemy; my beloved enemy.

And deal by deal, crime by crime, day by day my will and purpose and hope staggered toward the pit. Lisa Carter pursued and won her contract with Chandra Mehta and Cliff De Souza. For her sake I sat in at the meeting that clinched the deal, and I signed on as her partner. The producers saw my involvement as important. I was their safe conduit to the black money of the Khader Khan mafia-an untapped and virtually inexhaustible resource. They didn't mention that connection, not then, but it was a key factor in their decision to sign on with Lisa. The contract specified that Lisa and I would supply foreign junior artists, as bit players were known, for three major studios. The terms of payment and commissions were set for two years.

After the meeting, Lisa walked me to my bike parked at the sea wall on Marine Drive. We sat together at the precise spot where Abdullah had put his hand on my shoulder, years before, when my mind was filled with the drowning sea. We were lonely, Lisa and I, and at first we talked to one another as lonely people do-in fragments of complaint, and corners clipped from conversations that we'd already had with ourselves, alone.

"He knew it would happen," she said after a long, silent pause.

"That's why he gave me that money in the case. We talked about it. He talked about it. He talked about being killed. You know about the war in Iran? The war with Iraq? He almost got killed there a few times. It got into his head, I'm sure of it. I think he wanted to die, for running away from the war and leaving his friends and family behind. And when it came down to it, if it ever did come down to it, he wanted to go out like that."

"Maybe," I answered her, looking at the sublime, indifferent sea.

"Karla once said we all attempt suicide several times in our lives, and sooner or later we all succeed."

Lisa laughed, because I'd surprised her with the quote, but the laugh ended in a long sigh. She tilted her head to let the wind play with her hair.

"The thing with Ulla," she said quietly, "It's been killing me, Lin. I can't get Modena out of my mind. I'm reading all the papers, every day, looking for something about him-about maybe they found him or something. It's weird... the thing with Maurizio, you know, I was sick with it for weeks after. I used to cry all the time, just walking on the street or reading a book or trying to sleep, and I couldn't eat a meal without feeling sick to my stomach. I couldn't stop thinking about his dead body... and the knife... what it must've felt like, when Ulla pushed the knife into him... But now, all that's kind of faded. It's still there, you know, in the bottom of my gut, but it doesn't freak me out any more. And even Abdullah-I don't know if I'm in shock or denial or whatever, but I don't... let myself think about him. It's like... like I accept it, or something. But Modena-that keeps getting worse. I can't stop thinking about him."

"I see him, too," I muttered. "I see his face, and I wasn't even there in that hotel room. It's not good."

"I should've hit her."

"Ulla?"

"Yes, Ulla!"

"Why?"

"That... callous... bitch! She left him there, tied up in that room. She brought you trouble, and me trouble and... Maurizio... But when she told us about Modena, I just put my arm around her, and took her to the shower, and looked after her like she'd just told me she hadn't fed her pet goldfish. I should've slapped her or socked her one on the jaw or kicked her ass or something.

Now she's gone, and I'm still freaking out about Modena."

"Some people do that," I said, smiling at the anger in her because I felt it myself. "Some people always manage to make us feel sorry for them, no matter how stupid and angry we feel about it after. They're the canaries, kind of, in the coalmines of our hearts. If we stop feeling sorry for them, when they let us down, we're in deep trouble. And anyway, I didn't get involved to help her. I did it to help you."

"Oh, I know, I know," she sighed. "It's not Ulla's fault. Not really. The Palace messed her up. It messed with her head completely. Everyone who worked for Madame Zhou got messed up in some way. You should've seen Ulla, back then, when she started work there. She was gorgeous, I gotta tell ya. And kind of... innocent... in a way that the rest of us weren't, if you know what I mean. I went there already crazy when I first started work there. But it fucked me up, too. We all... we had to... we did some weird shit there..."

"You told me about it," I said gently.

"I told you?" "Yeah."

"I told you what?"

"You told me... a lot of it. The night I came around to get my clothes from Karla's. I went there with the kid, Tariq. You were very drunk, and very stoned."

"And I told you about that?"

"Yeah."

"Jesus! I don't remember that. I was starting to turkey. That was the first night, when I tried to get off the stuff-when I did get off the stuff. I remember the kid, though... and I remember you didn't want to have sex with me."

"Oh, I wanted it, alright."

She turned her head quickly and met my eye. Her expression smiled at the lips, but a tiny frown creased her forehead. She was wearing a red salwar kameez. The long, loose silk shirt clung to her breasts and the outline of her figure in the strong sea breeze. Her blue eyes glittered with courage and other mysteries.

She was brave and fragile and tough in the same instant. She'd dragged herself from the life that was drowning her at Madame Zhou's Palace, and she'd beaten heroin. In defence of her friend's life, and her own, she'd helped to kill a man. She'd lost her lover, Abdullah, my friend, his body torn and mutilated by bullets. And it was all there, in her eyes and her thin face, thinner than it should've been. It was all there, if you knew what to look for, and if you knew where to look.

"So, how did you end up at the Palace?" I asked, and she flinched a little as I changed the subject.

"I don't know," she sighed. "I ran away from home when I was a kid. I couldn't stand it at home. I got outta there as soon as I could. In a couple years I was a teenage junkie, working the beat in L.A. and getting beat up by that month's pimp. Then a guy came along, a nice, quiet, lonely, gentle guy, named Matt. I fell for him, hard. He was my first real love. He was a musician, and he'd been to India a couple times. He was sure we could make enough money for a new start, if we smuggled some shit from Bombay back home. He said that he'd pay for the tickets, if I agreed to carry the stuff. When we got here, he just took off with everything- all our money, and my passport, and everything. I don't know what happened. I don't know if he got cold feet or found someone else to do the job or just decided to do it himself. I don't know. The end of it was... that I got stuck in Bombay with a big, raging heroin habit, and no money, and no passport. I started working from a hotel room, turning tricks to keep going. After a couple months of that, a cop came into my room one day and told me I was busted. I was going to an Indian jail-unless I agreed to work for this friend of his."

"Madame Zhou."

"Yeah."

"Tell me, did you ever see her? Did you ever talk to her in person?"

"Nah. Almost no-one ever talks to her or sees her, except for Rajan and his brother. Karla met her in person. Karla hates her.

Karla hates her more than... I've never seen anything like it in my life. Karla hates her so much that she's a bit crazy with it, if you know what I mean. She thinks about Madame Zhou almost all the time, and she'll get her, sooner or later."

"The thing with her friend Ahmed, and Christine," I murmured.

"She thinks Madame Zhou had them killed, and she blames herself for it. She can't let it go."

"That's right!" she answered wonderingly, her face frowning and smiling in puzzlement. "Did she tell you about that?"

"Yeah."

"That's..." she laughed, "that's amazing! Karla never talks to anyone about that. I mean, anyone. But I guess it's not really so amazing. You really got under her skin. You know that time when the cholera was in the slum and all? She talked about that for weeks after. She talked about it like it was some kind of holy experience, some kind of transcendental high. And she talked about you a lot. I've never seen her so... inspired, I guess."

"When Karla got me to rescue you from the Palace," I asked, not looking at her, "was that for you, or was it just a way to score points against Madame Zhou?"

"You mean, were we just pawns in Karla's game, you and me? Is that what you're asking?"

"Something like that."

"I think I'd have to say yes, we were." She pulled her long scarf from her neck and drew it across an open palm, staring at it intently. "Oh, you know, Karla likes me and all, I'm sure about that. She's told me things that nobody knows-not even you. And I like her. And she lived in the States, you know. She grew up there, and she felt something about that. I think I was the only American girl who ever worked at the Palace. But the heart of it, deep down, was this war with Madame Zhou. I think we got used up, you and me. But it doesn't matter, you know? She got me out of there-you got me out of there, with her, and I'm damn glad. Whatever her reasons were, I don't hold it against her, and I don't think you should either."

"I don't," I sighed.

"But?"

"But... nothing. We didn't work out, Karla and me, but I..."

"You still love her?"

I turned my head to look at her, but when her blue eyes met mine I changed the subject.

"Have you heard anything from Madame Zhou?"

"Not a thing."

"Has she been asking questions about you? Anything at all?"

"Nothing, thank God. It's weird-I don't hate Madame Zhou. I don't feel anything for her, one way or the other, except that I never want to go anywhere near her again. But I do hate her servant, Rajan. If you worked at the Palace, he's the one you had to deal with and answer to. His brother takes care of the kitchen, but Rajan looks after the girls. And that's one spooky motherfucker, that Rajan. He gets around like a ghost. It's like he's got eyes in the back of his head. He's the scariest thing in the whole world, let me tell ya. Madame Zhou, I never even saw.

She talks to you through a metal grille. There's at least one in every room, so she can watch what's going on, and talk to the girls or the customers. It's a fuckin' creepy place, Lin. I'd rather die than go back to that."

There was another silence. Waves pushed at the shoreline of rocks and pebbles at the base of the wall. Seagulls hovered, prowling the wind for signs of things that slithered and scuttled among the rocks.

"How much money did he leave you?"

"I'm not sure," she said. "I never counted it. It's a lot.

Seventy, eighty grand-a lot more, you know, than Maurizio carved up Modena for, and got himself killed for. It's crazy, isn't it?"

"You should take it, and get the fuck out of here."

"That's funny-I thought we just signed a two-year contract with Mehta and his production company. You know, the let's-get-on with-our-_lives contract."

"Fuck the contract."

"Come on, Lin."

"Fuck the contract. You've gotta get out of this. We don't know what the fuck's going on. We don't know why Abdullah's dead. We don't know what he did do, or what he didn't do. If he wasn't Sapna, then things are bad. If he was Sapna, things are much worse. You should take the money and just... go."

"And go where?"

"Anywhere."

"Are you going?"

"No. I've got unfinished business here. And I'm... I'm finished myself, in a way. But you should go."

"You don't get it, do you?" she demanded. "It's not about the money. If I go back now, I'll put the lot of it in my arm. I've gotta have something more than money. I'm trying to _build something here with this business. And I can do it here. I'm something here. I'm somebody. The people look at me, when I just walk down the street, because I'm different."

"You'd be something, wherever you are," I said, grinning at her.

"Don't make fun of me, Lin."

"I'm not, Lisa. You're a beautiful girl, and you've got heart- that's why people stare at you."

"This can work," she insisted. "I can feel it in my bones. I don't have any education, Lin, and I'm not smart like you. I'm not trained to do anything. But this... this could be big. I could, I don't know... I could start producing movies, maybe, one day. I could... do something good."

"You are good. You'll do good wherever you go."

"No. This is my chance. I'm not going back-I'm not going anywhere-until I've made it. If I don't do that, if I don't try, then the whole thing will be for nothing. Maurizio... and everything else that's happened will be for nothing. If I leave here, I want to do it with my head on straight, and a pocket full of money that I earned myself."

I looked into the wind, feeling the day alternately warm and cool and warm again on my face and arms as the breeze turned and returned across the bay. A small fleet of fishing canoes drifted past us on their way back to the fishermen's sandy refuge near the slum. I suddenly remembered the day in the rain, sailing in a canoe across the flooded forecourt of the Taj Mahal Hotel and beneath the booming, resonant dome of the Gateway Monument. I remembered Vinod's love song, and the rain that night as Karla came into my arms.

And staring, then, at the ceaseless, eternal waves, I remembered all that had been lost since that storming night: prison, torture, Karla gone, Ulla gone, Khaderbhai and his council gone, Anand gone, Maurizio dead, Modena probably dead, Rasheed dead, Abdullah dead, and Prabaker-it was impossible-Prabaker, also dead. And I was one of them: walking and talking and staring at the wilding waves, but as dead in my heart as all the rest.

"And what about you?" she asked. I could feel her eyes on me, and I could hear the emotions in her voice: sympathy, tenderness, maybe even love. "If I stay-and I'm definitely going to stay- what are you going to do?"

I looked at her for a while, reading the runes in her sky-blue eyes. Then I stood from the wall, held her in my arms, and kissed her. It was a long kiss. We lived out a life together in that kiss: we lived and loved and grew old together, and we died. Then our lips parted, and that life we might've had retreated, shrinking to a spark of light we would always recognise in one another's eyes.

I could've loved her. Maybe I already did love her a little. But sometimes the worst thing you can do to a woman is to love her.

And I still loved Karla. I loved Karla.

"What am _I going to do?" I said, repeating her question. I held her shoulders in my hands, keeping her at the distance of my arms. I smiled. "I am going to get stoned."

I rode away, and never looked back. I paid three months' rent on my apartment, and paid substantial baksheesh to the watchman in the car park and the watchman in the building. I kept one good, forged passport in my pocket, put all my spare passports and a bundle of cash into a satchel, and left it with my Enfield Bullet bike in Didier's care. Then I took a cab to Gupta-ji's opium den near the Street of Ten Thousand Whores, Shoklaji Street. I climbed the worn wooden steps to the third floor and walked into the cage that junkies build for themselves, one shiny, sharp, steel bar at a time.

Gupta-ji provided a large room with twenty sleeping mats and wooden pillows for his opium smokers. For those with special needs he reserved other rooms behind that open den. Through a very small doorway, I entered the discreet corridor that led to those back rooms. It was so low that I had to stoop, almost to crawling. The room I chose had a cot with a kapok mattress, a weathered carpet, a small cabinet with wickerwork doors, a lamp with a silk lampshade, and a large clay matka filled with water. The walls on three sides were made from reed matting stretched upon wooden frames. The last wall, at the head of the bed, looked out over a busy street of Arab and local Muslim traders, but its windows were shuttered so that only a few bright stars of sunlight gleamed in the chinks and gaps. There was no ceiling. Instead, the view overhead was of heavy rafters crossing and joining one another in support of the clay tile roof. I got to know that view very well.

Gupta-ji took money and instructions, and left me alone. The room, so close to the roof, was very hot. I took my shirt off, and switched off the lamp. The dark little room was like a cell; a prison cell at night. I sat on the bed and, almost at once, the tears came. I'd cried before, in Bombay. I'd shed tears after I met Ranjit's lepers, and when the stranger had washed my tortured body in Arthur Road Prison, and with Prabaker's father at the hospital. But that sorrow and suffering had always been stifled: somehow, I'd managed to choke back the worst of it, the flood of it. Then, alone in that little opium cell with my ruined love for those dead friends, Abdullah and Prabaker, I let it go.

The tears, when they come to some men, are worse than beatings.

They're wounded worse by sobbing, men like that, than they are by boots and batons. Tears begin in the heart, but some of us deny the heart so often, and for so long, that when it speaks we hear not one but a hundred sorrows in the heartbreak. We know that crying is a good and natural thing. We know that crying isn't a weakness, but a kind of strength. Still, the weeping rips us root by tangled root from the earth, and we crash like fallen trees when we cry.

Gupta-ji gave me time. When at last I heard the sliding, scuffing sound of his chappals as he approached the door I smeared the sorrow from my face, and switched on the lamp. He'd brought what I'd asked for-a steel spoon, distilled water, disposable syringes, heroin, and a carton of cigarettes-and he set the items out on the little dresser. There was a girl with him. He told me that her name was Shilpa, and that he'd assigned her to me as a servant. She was young, years less than twenty, but already scarred with the glum expression of the working professional.

Hope, ready to snarl or grovel like a beaten cur, cowered in her eyes. I sent her and Gupta-ji away, and cooked up a taste of heroin.

The dose sat in the syringe for almost an hour. I picked it up and put the needle against a fat, strong, healthy vein in my arm five times, only to put it down again unused. And for the whole of that sweating hour I stared at the liquid in the syringe. That was it. The damnation drug. That was the big one, the drug that had driven me to commit stupid, violent crimes; that had put me in prison; that had cost me my family, and lost my loved ones.

The everything-and-nothing drug: it takes everything, and gives you nothing in return. But the nothing that it gives you, the unfeeling emptiness it gives you, is sometimes all and everything you want.

I pushed the needle into the vein, pulled back the rose of blood that confirmed the clean puncture of the vein, and pressed the plunger all the way to the stop. Before I could pull the needle from my arm, the drug made my mind Sahara. Warm, dry, shining, and featureless, the dunes of the drug smothered all thought, and buried the forgotten civilisation of my mind. The warmth filled my body as well, killing off the thousand little aches, twinges, and discomforts that we endure and ignore in every sober day.

There was no pain. There was nothing.

And then, with the desert still in my mind, I felt my body drowning, and I broke the surface of a suffocating lake. Was it a week after that first taste? Was it a month? I crawled onto the raft and floated there on the lethal lake in the spoon, carrying the Sahara in my blood. And those rafters overhead: there was a kind of message in them, a message about how and why we all intersected, Khader and Karla and Abdullah and I. Our lives, all of us, in the link to Abdullah's death, intersected in some uniquely profound way. It was there, in the rafters, a key to the code.

But I closed my eyes. I remembered Prabaker. I remembered that he was working so hard and so late on the night he died because he owned the taxi, and was working for himself. I'd bought the taxi for him. He'd be alive if I hadn't bought that taxi for him. He was the little mouse that I'd trained and fed with crumbs in my prison cell; the mouse that was crucified. And sometimes the breeze of a clear, unstoned hour gave me an image of Abdullah in the minute before he died, alone in the killing circle. Alone. I should've been there. I was with him every day. I should've been with him then. Friends don't let friends die like that-alone with death and fate. And where was his body? And what if he was Sapna?

Could my friend, my friend I loved, really have been that ruthless, insane mutilator? What did Ghani say? Pieces of Madjid's slaughtered body were found all over his house... Could I have loved the man who did that? What did it mean, that some small, insistent part of me feared that he was Sapna, and loved him anyway?

And I fired the silver bullet into my arm again, and fell back on the floating raft. And I saw the answer in the rafters overhead.

And I was sure I would understand it with a little more dope, and a little more, and a little more.

I woke to see a face glaring at me and speaking fiercely in a language I couldn't understand. It was an ugly face, a scowling face, defined by deep lines that descended in curved chines from his eyes and nose and mouth. Then the face had hands, strong hands, and I found myself lifted from the raft of my bed and propped unsteadily on my feet.

"You come!" Nazeer growled in English. "You come, now!"

"Fuck..." I said slowly, pausing for maximum effect, "... off."

"You come!" he repeated. The anger in him was so close to the surface that he trembled with it, and opened his mouth unconsciously to bare his teeth in an underbite.

"No," I said, turning to the bed once more. "You... go!"

He pulled me around to face him again. There was enormous power in his arms. He clamped the metal grapples of his hands on my arms.

"Now! You come!"

I'd been three months in the room at Gupta-ji's. They were three months of heroin every day, and food every other day, and the only exercise a short walk to the toilet and back. I didn't know it then, but I'd lost twelve kilos-the best thirty pounds of muscle on my body. I was thin and weak and still stupid on drugs.

"Okay," I said, feigning a smile. "Okay, let me go, will ya. I have to get my stuff."

He relaxed his grip as I nodded toward the little table where my wallet, watch, and passport rested. Gupta-ji and Shilpa waited in the corridor beyond. I gathered up the possessions and put them into my pockets, pretending to co-operate with Nazeer. When I judged the moment to be right, I swung round at him with an overhand right. It should've hit him. It would've hit him when I was healthy and sober. I missed him completely, and threw myself off balance. Nazeer drove a fist into my solar plexus, just under the heart. I doubled over, winded and helpless, but my knees locked stiffly and my legs wouldn't fold. He raised my head, with his left hand locked into a patch of my hair, pulled his right fist back at shoulder height, hesitated in the precision of his aim, and then rammed his fist into my jaw. The full force of his neck, shoulders, and back were in the blow. I saw Gupta-ji's lips pout and his eyes squint in a wince, and then his face exploded in a shower of sparks that left the world darker than a cave full of sleeping bats.

It was the only time in my life I was ever knocked out cold. It seemed that I was falling forever, and the ground was impossibly far away. After a time I was dimly aware of movement, floating through space, and I thought, It's okay, this is all a dream, a drug dream, and I'm going to wake up any minute now, and take more drugs.

Then I came down with a rumpled crash on the raft once more. But the raft-bed that I'd floated on for three long months had changed. It was different, somehow-soft and smooth. And there was a new and wonderful smell, a gorgeous perfume. It was Coco. I knew it well. It was Karla. It was the perfume on Karla's skin.

Nazeer had carried me over his shoulder all the way down the flights of stairs and out into the street, where he'd dumped me into the back seat of a taxi. Karla was there. My head rested in her lap. And I opened my eyes to look into her lovely face. And her green eyes looked back at me with compassion and concern and something else. I closed my eyes, and in the moving darkness I knew what it was, that something else in her eyes. It was disgust. She was disgusted by my weakness, my heroin habit, my stink of neglect and self-indulgence. Then I felt her hands on my face, and it was like crying, and her fingers moving the caress across my cheek were the tears.

When the taxi finally stopped, Nazeer carried me up two flights of steps as easily as he might've lugged a sack of flour. I came to consciousness again draped over his shoulder, looking down at Karla as she climbed the steps behind us. I tried to smile at her. We entered a big house through a back door that led to a kitchen. Beyond the large, modern kitchen, we came into an enormous, open-plan living room, with one wall of glass that looked out upon a golden beach and the dark sapphire sea.

Flipping me over his shoulder, Nazeer lowered me with more gentleness than I'd expected to a pile of cushions near the glass feature wall. The last hit I'd injected, just before he'd kidnapped me from Gupta-ji's, was a big dose. Too big. I was groggy and lapsing. The urge to close my eyes and surrender to the stone swept over me in almost irresistible, immersible waves.

"Don't try to get up," Karla said, kneeling beside me and washing my face with a wet towel.

I laughed, because standing was the last thing on my mind. In the laugh I felt the soreness, dimly, through the stone, on the point of my chin and the hinge of my jaw.

"What's going on, Karla?" I asked, hearing my voice crack and warble as I spoke. Three months of utter silence and soul-fog had distorted my speech with dysphasic lapses and creaking fumbles.

"What are you doing here? What am I doing here?"

"Did you think I would leave you there?"

"How did you know? How did you find me?"

"Your friend Khaderbhai found you. He asked me to bring you here."

"He asked you!"

"Yes," she said, staring into my eyes with such intensity that it cut through the stone like sunrise piercing the morning's hazy mist.

"Where is he?"

She smiled, and the smile was sad because it was the wrong question. I know that now. I'm not stoned now. That was my chance to know the whole of the truth, or as much of the truth as she knew. If I'd asked her the right question, she would've told me the truth. That was the power behind her intense stare. She was ready to tell me everything. She might've even loved me, or begun to love me. But I hadn't asked the right question. I hadn't asked about her. I'd asked about him.

"I don't know," she answered, raising herself with her hands to stand beside me. "He was supposed to be here. I think he'll be here soon. I can't wait, though. I have to go."

"_What?" I sat up, and tried to push the stone curtains aside in order to see her, to speak to her, to keep her with me.

"I have to go," she repeated, walking briskly to the door. Nazeer waited for her there, his thick arms jutting out from the swollen trunk of his body. "I can't help it. I've got a lot of things to do before I leave."

"Leave? What do you mean, leave?"

"I'm leaving Bombay again. I've got some work. It's important, and I... well, I have to do it. I'll be back in about six or eight weeks.

I'll see you then, maybe."

"But this is crazy. I don't get it. You should've left me there, if you're only going to leave me now."

"Look," she said, smiling patiently, "I just got back yesterday, and I'm trying not to stay. I'm not even going back to Leopold's.

I saw Didier this morning-he says hello, by the way-but that's it. I'm not sticking around. I agreed to help get you out of that little suicide pact you had going with yourself at Gupta-ji's.

Now you're here, you're safe, and I have to go."

She turned and spoke to Nazeer. They were speaking Urdu, and I understood only every third or fourth word of their conversation.

He laughed, listening to her, and turned to look at me with his customary contempt.

"What did he say?" I asked her when they fell silent.

"You don't want to know."

"Yes I do."

"He doesn't think you'll make it," she replied. "I told him that you'll do cold turkey here, and be waiting for me when I come back in a couple of months. He doesn't think so. He says you'll run out of here to get a fix the first minute the turkey begins.

I made a bet with him that you'd make it."

"How much did you bet?"

"A thousand bucks."

"A thousand bucks," I mused. It was an impressive stake, against the odds.

"Yes. It's all the cash he has-a kind of nest egg. He's betting it all that you'll break down. He says you're a weak man. That's why you take drugs."

"What do you say?"

She laughed, and it was so rare to see and hear her laugh that I took those bright, round syllables of happiness into me like food, like drink, like the drug. Despite the stone and the sickness, I knew with perfect understanding that the greatest treasure and pleasure I would ever know was in that laugh; to make that woman laugh, and feel the laughter bubbling from her lips against my face, my skin.

"I told him," she said, "that a good man is as strong as the right woman needs him to be." Then she was gone, and I closed my eyes, and an hour or a day later I opened them to find Khaderbhai sitting beside me.

"Utna hain," I heard Nazeer's voice say. He's awake.

I woke unwell. I woke alert and cold and needing heroin. My mouth was filthy and my body ached everywhere at once.

"Hmmm," Khader murmured. "You have the pain already."

I pulled myself up on the pillows and looked around the room. It was the beginning of evening, and night's long shadow was creeping across the sandy beach beyond the window. Nazeer sat on a piece of carpet near the entrance to the kitchen. Khader was dressed in the loose pantaloons, shirt, and tunic-vest of the Pathans. The clothes were green, the favourite colour of the Prophet. He looked older, somehow, after just those few months.

He also looked fitter, and more calm and determined than I'd ever seen him.

"Do you need food?" he asked when I stared at him without speaking. "Do you want to take your bath? There is everything here. You can bath as often as you like. You can eat food-there is plenty. You can put on new clothes. I have them for you."

"What happened to Abdullah?" I demanded.

"You must get well."

"What the fuck happened to Abdullah?" I shouted, my voice breaking.

Nazeer watched me. He was outwardly calm, but I knew that he was ready to spring.

"What do you want to know?" Khader asked gently, avoiding my eyes, and nodding his head slowly as he stared at the carpet between his crossed knees.

"Was he Sapna?"

"No," he replied, turning to meet my hard stare. "I know the people say this, but I give you my word that he was not Sapna."

I exhaled a full breath in an exhausted sigh of relief. I felt tears stinging my eyes, and I bit the inside of my cheek to kill them.

"Why did they say he was Sapna?"

"Abdullah's enemies made the police believe that he was."

"What enemies? Who are they?"

"Men from Iran. Enemies from his country."

I remembered the fight; the mysterious fight. Abdullah and I- we'd fought with a group of Iranian men on the street. I tried to remember other details from that day, but I couldn't think past the sharp, guilty twist of regret that I'd never asked Abdullah who the men were or why we'd fought them.

"Where's the real Sapna?"

"He is dead. I found the man-the real Sapna. Now he is dead.

That much is done, for Abdullah."

I relaxed against the cushions, and closed my eyes for a moment.

My nose was beginning to run, and my throat was clogged and sore.

I'd built up a big habit in those three months-three grams of pure Thai-white heroin every day. The turkey was coming on fast, and I knew that it would be two weeks in Hell's punishment unit.

"Why?" I asked him, after a time.

"What do you mean?"

"Why did you find me? Why did you have him-Nazeer-bring me here?"

"You work for me," he answered, smiling. "And now, I have a job of work for you to do."

"Well, I'm afraid I'm not up to it, just at the minute."

The cramps were creeping into my stomach. I groaned, and looked away.

"Oh, yes," he agreed. "You must be well first. But then, in three or four months, you will be the right man to do this job for me."

"What... what kind of a job?"

"It is a mission. A kind of holy mission, you might call it. Do you know how to ride a horse?"

"A horse? I don't know anything about horses. If I can do the job on a motorcycle-when I get well, _if I get well-I'm your man."

"Nazeer will teach you to ride. He is, or he was, the best horseman in a village of men who are the best horsemen in Nangarhar province. There are horses stabled near here, and you can learn to ride on the beach."

"Learn to ride..." I muttered, wondering how I was going to survive the next hour, and the hour after that, and the worse that would come.

"Oh, yes, Linbaba," he said, reaching out with the smile and touching my shoulder with his palm. I flinched at the touch, and shivered, but the warmth of his hand seemed to enter me, and I was still. "You cannot reach Kandahar in any other way but by horse, at this time, because the roads are all mined and bombed.

So you see, when you go with my men to the war in Afghanistan, you must know how to ride a horse."

"Afghanistan?"

"Yes."

"What... what the hell makes you think I'm going to Afghanistan?"

"I don't know if you will do it or not," he replied with what seemed to be genuine sadness. "I am going on this mission myself.

To Afghanistan-my home, that I have not seen for more than fifty years. And I am inviting you-I am asking you-to go with me. The choice, of course, is yours to make. It is a dangerous job. That much is certain. I will not think less about you, if you decide not to go with me."

"Why me?"

"I need a gora, a foreigner, who is not afraid to break a large number of international laws, and who can pass for an American.

Where we will go there are many rival clans, and they have fought with one another for hundreds of years. They have long traditions of raiding one another and taking whatever they can as plunder on their raids. Only two things unite them, just at this time-love for Allah, and hatred for the Russian invaders. At the moment, their chief allies against the Russians are the Americans. They are fighting with American money and American weapons. If I have an American with me, they will leave us alone, and let us pass, without molesting us or stealing more than a reasonable amount from us."

"Why don't you get an American-a real one, I mean?"

"I tried. I could not find one crazy enough to take the risk.

That is why I need you."

"What are we smuggling on this mission to Afghanistan?"

"The usual things that one smuggles into a war-guns, explosives, passports, money, gold, machine parts, and medicines. It will be an interesting journey. If we pass through the heavily armed clans who would like to take what we have, we will deliver our goods to a unit of mujahed-din fighters who are putting siege to Kandahar city. They have been fighting the Russians in the same place for two years, and they need the supplies."

Questions writhed in my shivering mind, hundreds of them, but the cold turkey was crippling me. Cold, greasy sweat from the struggle smothered my skin. The words, when they came at last, were rushed and faltering. "Why are you doing this? Why Kandahar? Why there?"

"The mujaheddin-the men at the siege of Kandahar-they are my people, from my village. They are from Nazeer's village also.

They are fighting a jihad, a holy war, to drive the Russian invaders out of the homeland. We have helped them in many ways, up to this time. Now it is time to help them with guns, and with my blood, if it is necessary."

He looked at the sickness trembling across my face, and cutting facets from my eyes. He smiled again, pressing his fingers into my shoulder until that pain, that touch, his touch, was all I felt for a moment.

"First you must be well," he said, releasing the pressure of his fingers and touching his palm to my face. "Allah be with you, my son. Allah ya fazak!"

When he left me, I went to the bathroom. Stomach cramp stabbed me with eagle's claws, and then twisted my insides with talons of agony. Diarrhoea shook me with convulsive spasms. I washed myself, shivering so violently that my teeth clattered together.

I looked in the mirror and saw my eyes, the pupils so large that the whole iris was black. When the light comes back, when the heroin stops and the turkey starts and the light returns, it rushes in through the black funnels of the eyes.

Wearing a towel around my waist, I walked back to the big main room. I looked thin. I was stooped, and shivering, and moaning involuntarily. Nazeer looked me up and down, with a sneer curling his thick upper lip. He handed me a pile of clean clothes. They were exact copies of Khader's green Afghan costume. I dressed, shaking and trembling and losing my balance a few times. Nazeer watched me, his knotty fists balled at his hips. The sneer rippled his lip like the opening ridges of a clamshell. His every gesture was so loud and broad that it had the exaggeration of pantomime, but his dark eyes were fierce with menace. I suddenly realised that he reminded me of the Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune. He was an ugly, troll-like caricature of Mifune.

"Do you know Toshiro Mifune?" I asked him through a desperate, pain-smeared laugh. "You know Mifune? Huh?"

His answer was to walk to the front door of the house and throw it open. He pulled some fifty-rupee notes from his pocket, and hurled them onto the floor.

"Jaa, bahinchudh!" he snarled, pointing out the open door. Go, sister-fucker! I staggered to the pile of cushions heaped against the great window and collapsed there. I pulled a blanket over myself, cringing in the flaying wrench and cramp of the craving. Nazeer closed the door of the house and took up his position on the patch of carpet, sitting cross-legged and straight-backed as he watched me.

We all cope with anxiety and stress, to one degree or another, with the help of a cocktail of chemicals produced in the body and released in the brain. Chief among them is the endorphin group.

The endorphins are peptide neurotransmitters that have pain relieving properties. Anxiety and stress and pain bring on the endorphin response as a natural coping mechanism. When we take any of the opiates-morphine or opium or heroin, in particular- the body stops producing endorphins. When we stop taking opiates, there's a lag of between five and fourteen days before the body begins a new endorphin production cycle. In the meanwhile, in that black, tortured crawlspace of one to two weeks without heroin and without endorphins, we learn what anxiety and stress and pain really are.

What's it like, Karla asked me once, cold turkey off heroin? I tried to explain it. Think about every time in your life that you've ever been afraid, really afraid. Someone sneaks up behind you when you think you're alone, and shouts to frighten you. The gang of thugs closes in around you. You fall from a great height in a dream, or you stand on the very edge of a steep cliff.

Someone holds you under water and you feel the breath gone, and you scramble, fight, and claw your way to the surface. You lose control of the car and see the wall rushing into your soundless shout. Then add them all up, all those chest-tightening terrors, and feel them all at once, all at the same time, hour after hour, and day after day. And think of every pain you've ever known-the burn with hot oil, the sharp sliver of glass, the broken bone, the gravel rash when you fell on the rough road in winter, the headache and the earache and the toothache. Then add them all up, all those groin-squeezing, stomach-tensing shrieks of pain, and feel them all at once, hour after hour, and day after day. Then think of every anguish you've ever known. Remember the death of a loved one. Remember a lover's rejection. Recall your feelings of failure and shame and unspeakably bitter remorse. And add them all up, all the heart-stabbing griefs and miseries, and feel them all at once, hour after hour, and day after day. That's cold turkey. Cold turkey off heroin is life with the skin torn away.

The assault of anxiety on the unprotected mind, the brain without natural endorphins, makes men and women mad. Every junkie going through turkey is mad. The madness is so fierce and cruel that some die of it. And in the temporary insanity of that skinned, excruciated world, we commit crimes. And if we survive, years later, and become well, our healthy recollection of those crimes leaves us wretched, bewildered, and as self-disgusted as men and women who betray their comrades and country under torture.

Two full days and nights into the torment, I knew I wasn't going to make it. Most of the vomiting and the diarrhoea had passed, but the pain and anxieties were worse, much worse, every minute.

Beneath the screaming in my blood there was a calm, insistent voice: You can stop this... you can fix this... you can stop this... take the money...get a fix... you can stop this pain...

Nazeer's bamboo and coconut-fibre cot was in the far corner of the room. I lurched toward it, watched closely by the burly Afghan, who was still sitting on his mat near the door. Trembling and moaning with pain, I dragged the cot closer to the great window that looked out on the sea. I took up a cotton sheet and began to tear at it with my teeth. It gave way in a few places, and I ripped it along the length, tearing off strips of cloth.

Frantic in my movements and close to panic, I hurled two thick, embroidered quilts onto the rope bed for a mattress, and lay down on it. Using two of the strips, I tied my ankles to the bed. With a third strip, I secured my left wrist. Then I lay down, and turned my head to look at Nazeer. I held out the remaining strip, and asked him with my eyes to bind my arm to the bed. It was the first time that we'd ever met one another's eyes in an equally honest stare.

He rose from his square of carpet and walked toward me, holding the stare. He took the strip of cloth from my hand and bound my right wrist to the frame of the bed. A shout of trapped, panic fear escaped from my open mouth, and another. I bit down on my tongue, biting through the flesh at the sides until blood ran past my lips. Nazeer nodded slowly. He tore another thick strip from the sheet and twirled it into a corkscrew tube. Sliding it between my teeth, he tied the gag behind my head. And I bit down on the devil's tail. And I screamed. And I turned my head to see my own reflection tied to the night in the window. And for a while I was Modena, waiting and watching and screaming with my eyes. Two days and nights I was tied to the bed. Nazeer nursed me with tenderness and constancy. He was always there. Every time I opened my eyes, I felt his rough hand on my brow, wiping the sweat and the tears into my hair. Every time the lightning strike of cramp twisted a leg or arm or my stomach, he was there, massaging warmth into the knot of pain. Every time I whimpered or screamed into the gag, he held my eyes with his, willing me to endure and succeed. He removed the gag when I choked on a trickle of vomit or my blocked nose let no air pass, but he was a strong man and he knew that I didn't want my screams to be heard. When I nodded my head, he replaced the gag and tied it fast.

And then, when I knew that I was either strong enough to stay or too weak to leave, I nodded to Nazeer, blinking my eyes, and he removed the gag for the last time. One by one he untied the bonds at my wrists and ankles. He brought me a broth made from chicken and barley and tomatoes, unspiced, except for salt. It was the richest and most delicious thing I ever tasted in my life. He fed it to me, spoon by spoon. After an hour, when I finished the little bowl, he smiled at me for the first time, and that smile was like sunlight on sea rocks after summer rain.

Cold turkey goes on for about two weeks, but the first five days are the worst. If you can get through the first five days, if you can crawl and drag yourself into that sixth morning without drugs, you know you're clean, and you know you'll make it. Every hour, for the next eight to ten days, you feel a little better and a little stronger. The cramps fade, the nausea passes, the fever and chills subside. After a while, the worst of it is simply that you can't sleep. You lie on the bed at night, twisting and writhing in discomfort, and sleep never comes. In those last days and very long nights of the turkey, I became a Standing Baba: I never sat or lay down, all day and all night, until exhaustion collapsed my legs at last and I sank into sleep.

And it passes, the turkey passes, and you emerge from the cobra bite of heroin addiction like any survivor from any disaster: dazed, wounded forever, and glad to be alive.

Nazeer took my first sarcastic jokes, twelve days after the turkey began, as the cue for my training to commence. From the sixth day I'd been walking with him as light exercise, and for the fresh air. The first of those walks had been slow and halting, and I'd returned to the house after fifteen minutes. By the twelfth day I was walking the length of the beach with him, hoping to tire myself so much that I could sleep.

Finally, he took me to the stable where Khader's horses were kept. The stable was a converted boathouse, one street away from the beach. The horses were trained for beginning riders, and carried tourists up and down the beach in the high season. The white gelding and grey mare were large, docile animals. We took them from Khader's stable-master and led them down to the flat, hard-packed sand of the beach.

There's no animal in the world with a deeper sense of parody than a horse. A cat can make you look clumsy, and a dog can make you look stupid, but only a horse can make you look both at the same time. And then, with nothing more than the flick of a tail or a casual stomp on your foot, it lets you know that it did it on purpose. Some people know from the first contact with the animal that they'll ride well, and bond with the beast. I'm not one of those people. A friend of mine has a strange, antimagnetic effect on machines: watches stop on her wrist, radio receivers crackle, and photocopy machines glitch whenever she's near. My relationship with horses is something like that.

The thickset Afghan cupped his hands to boost me onto the gelding's back, nodding his head for me to climb up, and winking encouragingly. I put my foot into his hands and sprang up onto the white horse, but in the instant that I sat on its back the previously meek, well-trained creature hurled me off with a prodigious, arching kick. I soared over Nazeer's shoulder and landed with a thump on the sand. The gelding galloped away down the beach without me. Nazeer stared after it, gape-mouthed. The animal was only calmed and returned to my presence when he fetched a blinding bag, and placed it over its head.

That was the beginning of Nazeer's slow, reluctant acceptance of the fact that I would never be anything other than the worst horseman he knew. The disappointment should've plunged me deeper into the well of his contempt, but in fact it provoked an opposite reaction. In the weeks that followed he became solicitous and even tender-hearted toward me. For Nazeer, that stumbling ineptitude with horses was a terrible affliction, as pitiable in a man as a painfully debilitating illness. And even at my best, when I managed to remain on the horse for minutes at a time, and work the beast in a circle by flapping my legs at its sides and yanking with both hands at the bridle, my gracelessness moved him close to tears.

Nevertheless, I persevered with the lessons, and I exercised every day. I worked my way up to twenty sets of thirty push-ups, with a minute rest between each set. I followed the push-ups every day with five hundred sit-ups, a five-kilometre run, and a forty-minute swim in the sea. After almost three months of the routine, I was fit and strong.

Nazeer wanted me to gain some experience at riding over rough terrain, so I arranged with Chandra Mehta for us to visit the riding range at the Film City movie studio ranch. Many of the feature films had horse-and-rider sequences. The teams of horses were cared for by squads of men who lived on the vast tracts of hilly land, and were on call for stunt and action scenes. The animals were superbly well trained but, barely two minutes after Nazeer and I had mounted the brown mares assigned to us, my horse threw me into a stack of clay pots. Nazeer took up the reins of my horse and sat in his saddle, shaking his head pityingly.

"Hey, great stunt, yaar!" one of the stunt men called out. There were five of them riding with us, and they all laughed. Two men jumped down to help me up.

Two falls later, as I climbed wearily into the saddle, I heard a familiar voice. I looked around to see a group of riders. At their head was a cowboy looking like Emiliano Zapata, with a black hat hanging on his back from a leather thong.

"I fuckin' knew it was you!" Vikram shouted. He drew his horse up close to mine and shook my hand warmly. His companions joined Nazeer and our stunt riders, and they trotted away, leaving us alone.

"What are you doing here?"

"I own the fuckin' place, man!" He spread his arms wide. "Well, not exactly. Lettie bought a share, as a partner, with Lisa."

"My Lisa?"

He raised one eyebrow quizzically.

"Your Lisa?"

"You know what I mean."

"Sure," he said, grinning widely. "Her and Lettie, you know, they're running that casting agency together-the one you guys started up. And they're doin' all right, man. They're good together. I decided to get in on it as well. Your friend, Chandra Mehta, told me there was a share going in the stunt stable. Hey, it's a natural for me, wouldn't you say?"

"Oh, no doubt about that, Vikram."

"So, I put some damn money in it, and now I come out here every week. I'm an extra in a fuckin' movie tomorrow! Come and watch me get shot, brother!"

"It's a tempting offer," I said, laughing with him. "But I'm leaving town for a while tomorrow."

"You're leaving? For how long?"

"I don't know, exactly. A month, maybe longer."

"Then you'll be back?"

"Sure. Keep a video of the stunt. When I get back, we'll get stoned, and watch you get killed in slow motion."

"Ha! You got a deal! Come on! Let's ride together, man!"

"No, no!" I shouted. "I'll never get this horse to ride with you, Vikram. I'm the worst rider you ever saw. I've already fallen off this one three times. If I can get it to _walk in a straight line I'll be happy."

"Come on, brother Lin! I tell you what, I'll lend you my hat. It never fails, man. It's a lucky hat. You're having trouble because you got no hat."

"I... I don't think the hat's gonna cover it, man."

"It's a fuckin' magic hat, man, I'm telling you!"

"You haven't seen me ride."

"And you haven't worn the hat. The hat can fix anything. Plus, you're a gora. No offence to your whiteness, yaar, but these are Indian horses, man. They just need to get a little Indian style from you, that's all. You speak in Hindi to them, and dance a little, then you'll see."

"I don't think so."

"Sure, man. Come on, get down and dance with me."

"What?"

"Come on and dance with me."

"I'm not dancing for the horses, Vikram," I declared, with as much dignity and sincerity as I could pack into the bizarre string of words.

"Sure you will! You get down with me now, and dance a little Indian magic. The horses have to _see that cool, Indian motherfucker you got inside your tight, white exterior, man. I swear, the horses will love you, and you'll ride like Clint fuckin' Eastwood!"

"I don't want to ride like Clint fuckin' Eastwood."

"Yes, you do!" he laughed. "Everybody does."

"No, I'm not doing it."

"Come on."

"No way." He climbed down, and began to prise my boots from the stirrups.

Exasperated, I climbed down and stood next to him, facing the two horses.

"Like this!" Vikram said, shaking his hips and stepping out in a movie dance routine. He began to sing, clapping his hands in time. "Come on, yaar! Put some India into it, man. Don't go all fuckin' European on me."

There are three things that no Indian man can resist: a beautiful face, a beautiful song, and an invitation to dance. I was Indian enough, in my crazy white way, to dance with Vikram, even if it was simply that I couldn't bear to see him dance alone. Shaking my head, and laughing despite myself, I joined in his routine. He guided me through the dance, adding new steps until we had the turns and walks and gestures in perfect time together.

The horses watched us with that peculiarly equine mix of white eyed timorousness and snorting condescension. Still, we danced and sang to them in that grassy wilderness of rolling hills, under a blue sky as dry as the smoke from a campfire in the desert.

And when the dance was over, Vikram spoke to my horse in Hindi, letting it snuffle at his black hat. He passed the hat to me then, and told me to wear it. I slipped it over my head and we climbed into the saddles.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-26