The Standing Babas were men who'd taken a vow never to sit down, or lie down, ever again, for the rest of their lives. They stood, day and night, forever. They ate their meals standing up, and made their toilet standing up. They prayed and worked and sang standing up. They even slept while they were standing, suspended in harnesses that kept the weight of their bodies on their legs, but prevented them from falling when they were unconscious.
For the first five to ten years of that constant standing, their legs began to swell. Blood moved sluggishly in exhausted veins, and muscles thickened. Their legs became huge, bloated out of recognisable shape, and covered with purple varicose boils. Their toes squeezed out from thick, fleshy feet, like the toes of elephants. During the following years, their legs gradually became thinner, and thinner. Eventually, only bones remained, with a paint-thin veneer of skin and the termite trails of withered veins.
The pain was unending and terrible. Spikes and spears of agony stabbed up through their feet with every downward pressure.
Tormented, tortured, the Standing Babas were never still. They shifted constantly from foot to foot in a gentle, swaying dance that was as mesmerising, for everyone who saw it, as the sound- weaving hands of a flute player for his cobras.
Some of the Babas had made the vow when they were sixteen or seventeen years old. They were compelled by something like the vocation that calls others, in other cultures, to become priests, rabbis, or imams. A larger number of much older men had renounced the world as a preparation for death and the next level of incarnation. Not a few of the Standing Babas were businessmen who'd given themselves to ruthless pursuits of pleasure, power, and profit during their working lives. There were holy men who'd journeyed through many other devotions, mastering their punishing sacrifices before undertaking the ultimate vow of the Standing Baba. And there were criminals-thieves, murderers, major mafia figures, and even former warlords-who sought expiation, or propitiation, in the endless agonies of the vow.
The den was really a corridor between two brick buildings at the rear of their temple. Hidden from view forever, within the temple compound, were the secret gardens, cloisters, and dormitories that only those who made and kept the vow ever saw. An iron roof covered the den. The floor was paved with flat stones. The Standing Babas entered through a door at the rear of the corridor. Everyone else entered and left through an iron gate at the street end.
The customers, men from every part of the country and every level of society, stood along the walls of the corridor. They stood, of course: no-one ever sat in the presence of the Standing Babas.
There was a tap fixed over an open drain near the entrance gate, where men drank water or leaned over to spit. The Babas moved from man to man and group to group, preparing hashish in funnel- shaped clay chillums for the customers, and smoking with them.
The faces of the Babas were radiant with their excruciation.
Sooner or later, in the torment of endlessly ascending pain, every man of them assumed a luminous, transcendent beatitude.
Light, made from the agonies they suffered, streamed from their eyes, and I've never known a human source more brilliant than their tortured smiles.
The Babas were also comprehensively, celestially, and magnificently stoned. They smoked nothing but Kashmiri-the best hashish in the world-grown and produced at the foothills of the Himalayas in Kashmir. And they smoked it all day, and all night, all their lives.
I stood with Karla and Prabaker at the back wall of the narrow den. Behind us was the sealed door through which the Standing Babas had entered. In front of us were two lines of men standing along the walls all the way to the iron gate at the street end of the passage. Some of the men were dressed in suits. Some wore designer jeans. Workmen, wearing faded lungis, stood beside men in traditional dress from various regions of India. They were young and old, rich and poor. Their eyes were often drawn to Karla and me, pale-skinned foreigners, standing with our backs against the wall. It was clear that some of them were shocked to see a woman in the den. Despite their open curiosity, no-one approached us or acknowledged us directly, and for the most part they gave their attention to the Standing Babas and the hashish.
Conversations, buzzing softly, blended with music and devotional chanting, coming from somewhere inside the compound.
"So, what do you think?"
"It's incredible!" she replied, her eyes gleaming in the soft light of the shaded lamps. She was exhilarated, and perhaps a little unnerved. Smoking the charras had relaxed the muscles of her face and shoulders, but there were tigers moving quickly in the eyes of her soft smile. "It's amazing. It's horrible and holy at the same time. I can't make up my mind which is the holy part, and which is the horrible part. Horrible-that's not the right word, but it's something like that."
"I know what you mean," I agreed, thrilled that I'd succeeded in impressing her. She'd been in the city for five years, and she'd heard about the Babas many times, but that visit with me was her first. My tone implied that I knew the place well, but I couldn't fairly claim credit for the experience. Without Prabaker, who'd knocked on the gate for us and gained access with his golden smile, we wouldn't have been permitted to enter.
One of the Standing Babas approached us slowly with an acolyte who held a silver tray containing chillums, charras, and the paraphernalia of smoking. Other monks rocked and swayed along the length of the corridor, smoking and chanting prayers. The Baba standing before us was tall and lean, but his legs were so thickly swollen that dreadful ropes of distended veins throbbed on their surfaces. His face was thin. The bones of his skull, near the temples, were sharply defined. His cheekbones, majestic, presided over deep valleys that ran to a hard and hungry jaw. His eyes were huge, within the caverns ridged by his brows, and there was such madness and longing and love in them that he was at once fearsome and immensely pitiable.
He prepared the chillum, rocking from side to side and smiling absently. He never looked at us, but still it seemed to be the smile of a very close friend: indulgent, knowing, forgiving. He was standing and swaying so close to me that I could see each wiry strand in the forest of his brows. I heard the little gasps of his breathing. The rapid outward rushes of air sounded like wavelets on a steep shore. He finished preparing the chillum, and looked up at me. For a moment I was lost in the vision that swarmed and screeched in his eyes. For a tiny moment in the infinitude of his suffering I almost felt it, what the human will can drive the human body to endure and achieve. I almost understood it, that smile of his, driven insane by the will that forced it to shine. I was sure that he was communicating it to me - that he wanted me to know. And I tried to tell him, with my eyes alone, that I could almost sense it, almost feel it. Then he held the chillum to his mouth, in the funnel of his hand, puffed it alight, and offered it to me. That terrible intimacy with his unending pain shrivelled, the vision shimmered, and the moment drifted away with the fading white shadows of the smoke. He turned, and tottered slowly back toward the street gate, muttering prayers in a soft drone.
A scream pierced the air. Everyone turned to the street-entrance gate. A man dressed in the red turban, vest, and silk trousers of a northern tribesman stood there, near the iron gate, shrieking at the very top of a strong voice. Before we could discern his message or react in any way, the man drew a long, thick-bladed sword from his belted sash and raised it over his head. Still screaming, he began to stalk along the corridor. He was staring directly at me as he walked, with a stomping, marching tread. I couldn't understand the words he was screeching, but I knew what he had in mind. He wanted to attack me. He wanted to kill me.
The men standing at the sides flattened their backs against the walls instinctively. The Standing Babas rocked themselves out of the madman's path. The door behind us was locked shut. There was no escape. We were unarmed. The man walked on towards us, waving the sword in circles over his head with both hands. There was nowhere to go, and nothing to do, but to fight him. I took one step back with the right foot, and raised my fists. It was a karate stance. Seven years of martial arts' training pulsed and flickered in my arms and legs. I felt good about it. Like every other tough, angry man I knew, I avoided fighting until it came to me, and then I enjoyed it.
At the last possible moment, a man stepped out from the wall at the side, tripped the goose-stepping tribesman, and sent him crashing to the stone floor. The sword fell from his hand and clattered to a stop at Karla's feet. I snatched it up, and watched as the man who'd tripped our assailant held him in a firm but merciful submission hold. He gripped the fallen man's arm in a hammerlock, behind his back. At the same time he twisted the collar of the man's shirt to choke off a little air.
The anger or madness that had possessed the swordsman subsided, and he surrendered passively. Men who knew him stepped forward and escorted him out to the alley, beyond the iron gate. Seconds later, one of the men returned and approached me. Looking into my eyes, he held out his hands, palms upward, for the sword. I hesitated, but then handed it over. The man gave us a polite and apologetic bow, and left the den.
In the bubble and chatter that followed his departure, I checked on Karla. Her eyes were wide and she pursed her lips in a wondering smile, but she wasn't distressed. Reassured, I went to thank the man who'd stepped in to help us. He was tall, taller than I am by a few centimetres, and had a strong, athletic build.
His thick, black hair was unusually long for Bombay in those years, and he wore it in a high ponytail. His silk shirt and loose trousers were black, and he wore black leather sandals.
"Abdullah," he replied, when I'd told him my name, "Abdullah Taheri."
"I owe you one, Abdullah," I said, giving him a smile that was as cautious as it was grateful. He'd moved with such lethal grace that he made the trick of disarming the swordsman seem effortless. But it wasn't as easy as it looked. I knew how much skill and courage it had taken, and how big a role instinct had played in his timing. The man was a natural; a born fighter.
"That was damn close."
"No problem," he smiled. "He was drunk, I think, that fellow, or not right in his head."
"Whatever his problem was, I still owe you one," I insisted.
"No, really," he laughed.
It was an easy laugh, revealing white teeth. The sound of it came from deep within his chest: a laugh from the heart. His eyes were the colour of sand, in the palm of your hand, a few minutes before the sun sinks below the sea.
"All the same, I want to thank you."
"Okay," he conceded, clapping a hand to my shoulder.
I returned to Karla and Prabaker. When we turned to leave the den, Abdullah was already gone. The alley outside was deserted, and within a few minutes we caught a taxi back to Colaba. Karla was silent during the ride, and I too said nothing, miserable that my attempt to impress her had ended in such confusion and near disaster. Only Prabaker felt free to speak.
"What a lucky escapes!" he said, from the front seat, grinning at us in turn as we sat together but apart in the back of the taxi. "I thought a sure thing that fellow would chop us up in teeny pieces. Some of the people should not be smoking the charras, isn't it? Some of the people get very angry when they relax their brains."
At Leopold's I got out of the taxi and stood with Karla while Prabaker waited. A late-afternoon crowd surged around the island of our silent stare.
"You're not coming in?"
"No," I answered, wishing that the moment was more like the strong, confident scene I'd imagined through most of that day.
"I'm going to collect my stuff from the India Guest House, and move to the slum. In fact, I won't be coming to Leopold's for a while, or anywhere else for that matter. I'm going to... you know... get on my feet... or... I don't know... find my feet ... or... I'm going to... what was I saying?"
"Something about your feet."
"Yeah," I laughed. "Well, you gotta start somewhere."
"This is kind of goodbye, isn't it?"
"Not really," I muttered. "Well, yes. Yes, it is."
"And you only just got back from the village."
"Yeah," I laughed again. "From the village, to the slum. It's quite a jump."
"Just make sure you land on your-"
"-feet. Okay. I got it."
"Listen, if it's a question of money, I could-"
"No," I said quickly. "No. I want to do this. It's not just money. I..."
For three seconds I balanced on the edge of telling her about my visa problems. Her friend, Lettie, knew someone at the Foreigner Registration Branch. She'd helped Maurizio, I knew, and there was a chance that she could help me. But then I drew back from the edge, and covered the truth with a smile. Telling Karla about the visa would lead to other questions that I couldn't answer. I was in love with her, but I wasn't sure that I could trust her. It's a fact of life on the run that you often love more people than you trust. For people in the safe world, of course, exactly the opposite is true.
"I... think this will be quite an adventure. I'm... actually looking forward to it."
"Okay," she said, nodding her head slowly in acceptance. "Okay.
But you know where I live. Come by and see me, when you get the chance."
"Sure," I answered, and we both smiled, and we both knew that I wouldn't visit her. "Sure. And you know where I am, with Prabaker. You do the same."
She reached out to take my hand in hers, and then leaned over to kiss me on the cheek. She turned to leave, but I held her hand.
"Don't you have any advice for me?" I asked, trying to find another laugh.
"No," she said impassively. "I'd only give you advice if I didn't care what happens to you."
It was something. It wasn't much, but it was something to hold on to and shape my love around, and keep me wishing. She walked away. I watched her step into the brittle brightness and banter of Leopold's, and I knew that a door to her world had closed, for a time. For as long as I lived in the slum, I would be exiled from that little kingdom of light. Living in the slum would consume me, and conceal me, as effectively as if the mad swordsman had struck me with his blade.
I slammed the door of the taxi and looked at Prabaker, whose wide and beaming smile across the seat in front of me became the world.
"Thik hain. Challo!" I said. Okay. Let's go!
We pulled up, forty minutes later, outside the slum in Cuffe Parade, beside the World Trade Centre. The contrast between the adjacent and roughly equal plots of land was stark. To the right, looking from the road, the World Trade Centre was a huge, modern, air-conditioned building. It was filled to three levels with shops, and displays of jewels, silks, carpets, and intricate craftworks. To the left was the slum, a sprawling ten acres of wretched poverty with seven thousand tiny huts, housing twenty- five thousand of the city's poorest people. To the right there were neon lights and floodlit fountains. To the left there was no electricity, no running water, no toilets, and no certainty that the whole shamble and bustle of it wouldn't be swept away, from one day to the next, by the same authorities that reluctantly tolerated it.
I turned my eyes from the glamorous limousines, drawn up outside the Trade Centre, and began the long walk into the slum. There was an open latrine near the entrance, concealed by tall weeds, and screens made from reed mats. The smell was appalling and almost overpowering. It was like a physical element permeating the air, and it seemed that I could feel it settle on my skin in a thickening, slimy ooze. Gagging and swallowing back the impulse to vomit, I glanced at Prabaker.
His smile had dimmed, and for the first time I saw something like cynicism in it.
"See, Lin," he said with that uncharacteristically hard little smile drawing down the corners of his mouth, "See how the people live."
Once past the latrines and within the first lane of huts, however, there were fitful gusts of wind from a wide arc of seacoast that formed the furthermost edge of the slum. The air was hot and steamy, but the breeze dispersed the noisome stink from the latrine. Smells of spices, cooking, and incense predominated. Seen up close, the huts were pitiful structures made from scraps of plastic and cardboard, thin bamboo poles, and flat reed mats for walls. They were erected over bare earth.
Patches of concrete and stonework showed in some places where the old floors and foundations of the original buildings, cleared from the site years before, remained intact.
As I walked along the narrow rag-and-plastic lanes of the slum, word spread that the foreigner was on his way. A large crowd of children gathered and pooled around Prabaker and me, close to us but never touching. Their eyes were wide with surprise and excitement. They burst into fierce gusts of nervous laughter, shouted to one another, and leapt into jerky, spontaneous dances as we approached.
People came out of their huts to stand in every doorway. Dozens, and eventually hundreds, of people crowded into the side-lanes and the occasional gaps between the houses. They were all staring at me with such gravity, such a fixity of frowning intensity, that I felt sure they must bear me enormous ill-will. I was wrong, of course. I couldn't know then, on my first day, that the people were simply staring at my fear. They were trying to understand what demons haunted my mind, causing me to dread so terribly the place they knew to be a sanctuary from fates far worse than slum life.
And the fact was that for all my fear of its swarm and squalor, I did know a fate far worse than slum life. It was a fate so bad that I'd climbed a prison wall and given up everything that I knew, everything I was, everything I loved, to escape it.
"This is now your house, Lin," Prabaker proudly announced over the giggling and chatter of the children when we reached the hut.
"Go inside. See all for yourself." The hut was identical to the others around it. The roof was a sheet of black plastic. The frame was made from thin bamboo poles bound together with coconut-fibre twine. The walls were made from hand-woven reed matting. The floor was bare earth, pressed flat and smooth by the feet of the hut's previous tenants. The door was a thin piece of plywood dangling on rope hinges. The plastic ceiling was so low that I had to stoop, and the whole room was about four paces long by two paces wide. It was almost exactly the same size as a prison cell.
I put my guitar in one corner, and then dragged the first-aid kit from the pack, setting it up in another corner. I had a couple of wire coat-hangers, and I was hanging my few clothes in the upper corners of the hut when Prabaker called me from outside.
I stepped out to find Johnny Cigar, Raju, Prabaker, and several other men standing together in the lane. I greeted those I knew, and was introduced to the others.
"This is Anand, your neighbour on the one side-on left side,"
Prabaker said, bringing me to shake hands with a tall, handsome, young Sikh who wore his long hair in a tight yellow scarf.
"Hello," I said, smiling in response to the warmth of his strong handshake. "I know another Anand-the manager of the India Guest House."
"Is he a good man?" Anand asked through a puzzled frown.
"He's a nice guy. I like him."
"Good," Anand replied, giving me a boyish smile that undermined the serious tone in his deep voice. "Then we are half the way to being friends, na?"
"Anand, he shares his house with another of bachelors, with name Rafiq," Prabaker continued.
Rafiq was about thirty years old. A straggly beard dangled from his pointed chin. His very prominent front teeth gaped from an impoverished grin. His eyes narrowed unfortunately in the expression, and gave him a sly, almost malevolent appearance.
"On the other side is our very good neighbour, Jeetendra. His wife has the name Radha."
Jeetendra was short and plump. He smiled happily and shook my hand, rubbing vigorously at his prominent paunch all the while.
His wife, Radha, acknowledged my smile and nod of greeting by drawing her red cotton shawl over her head and holding it across her face with her teeth. "Do you know," Anand said in a gentle, conversational tone that caught me by surprise, "it is a _fire, I believe."
He was standing on his stretched toes, and shading his eyes from the afternoon sun with his hand as he looked away across the black dunes of the huts. Everyone followed his gaze. There was a humid, ominous silence. Then, several hundred metres away, a gorgeous plume of orange flames erupted skyward. An explosion followed, sounding like a shotgun blast into a metal shed. Every man ran at top pace in the direction of the yellow spears of flame that rose in the distance.
I stood still, fascinated, bewildered, staring at the flames and spirals of smoke. As I watched, the jets of fire expanded to become a sheet and then a wall of searing flames. The red, yellow, and orange wall began to advance with the breeze from the sea, engulfing new huts every few seconds. It was heading directly toward me, at a slow walking pace, incinerating everything that stood in its path.
Explosions thundered in the blaze-one, two, another. I realised, at last, that they were kerosene stoves. Every one of the seven thousand huts had a stove. Those that were pumped up and under pressure were exploding when the flames reached them. The last monsoon rain had fallen weeks before. The slum was a huge pile of tinder-dry kindling, and a strengthening sea breeze fanned the flames through a whole acre of fuel and human lives.
Stunned, afraid, but not in panic, I watched the inexorable advance of the inferno, and decided that the cause was lost. I rushed into the hut, seized my pack and belongings, and scrambled for the door. At the threshold I dropped the pack, and stooped to retrieve the clothes and other items that had spilled to the ground. In the act, I looked up to see some twenty or more women and children, standing in a group and watching me. For an instant of perfect, wordless communication, I knew exactly what they were thinking. We stared across the open ground, and I heard their speaking minds.
Look at the big, strong foreigner, saving himself, and running away from the fire, while our men run towards it...
Ashamed, I stuffed my belongings into the pack, and placed it at the feet of the woman, Radha, who'd been introduced as my neighbour. Then I turned and ran toward the fire.
Slums are planless, organic dispersements. There's purpose in the nar- row, twisting lanes, but no order. Within three or four turns, I was lost. I ran in a line of men who were moving toward the smoke and flames. Beside us, running, staggering, and bumping along the lane in the opposite direction, was a constant file of other people moving away from the fire. They were helping the elderly and herding the children. Some carried possessions-clothes, cooking pots, stoves, and cardboard boxes of documents. Many of them were injured, showing cuts, bloody wounds, and serious burns. The smell of burning plastic, fuel, clothes, hair, and flesh was acrid and unnerving.
I turned a blind corner, and another, and another, until I was near enough to hear the roaring flames above the shouts and screams. Then a dazzlingly brilliant fireball burst through the gap between two huts. It was screaming. It was a woman, engulfed in flames. She ran straight at me, and we collided.
My first impulse was to spring away as I felt my hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes burn off in the contact with her. She stumbled, and fell over backwards, still screaming and thrashing. I ripped the shirt from my back. Using it to protect my hands and face, I threw myself on her, smothering the flames with my skin and clothes. Others rushed forward and tended to her. I ran on toward the fire again. She was still alive when I left her, but a voice in my mind was declaring her dead. She's dead... she's gone ... she won't make _it...
The maw of the fire, when I did reach it, was terrifying. The flames roared to two or three times the height of the tallest hut, and ranged across a semi-circular front, arched away from us, that was fifty or more huts wide. Wilful gusts of wind drove the arc forward in probing feints, flaring up suddenly on one side, and then blazing toward us from a different direction.
Behind it was the inferno, a cauldron of burning huts, explosions, and poisonous smoke.
A man stood in the centre of the large arc of open space before the wall of flames, directing those who were fighting the fire as if he was a general ordering troops into battle. He was tall and lean, with silver-grey hair, and a short, pointed, silver-grey beard. He was dressed in a white shirt, white trousers, and sandals. There was a green scarf tied at his neck, and he held a short, brass-tipped wooden stick in his hand. His name was Qasim Ali Hussein, and that was my first glimpse of the head man in the slum. Qasim Ali's double tactic was to send beaters against the fire to slow it down while other teams demolished the huts that stood in the fire's path, and dragged away their contents to deprive the fire of fuel. That involved a staggered retreat, ceding land to the flames all the while, and then launching counter-attacks wherever the fire seemed to weaken. Slowly turning his head and sweeping his gaze back and forth across the front of the fire, Qasim pointed with the brass-tipped stick, and shouted commands.
The head man turned his gaze in my direction. A sliver of surprise gleamed in the polished bronze of his eyes. His scrutiny took in the blackened shirt in my hand. Without a word, he lifted his stick to point toward the flames. It was a relief and an honour to obey him. I trotted forward and joined a team of beaters. I was very glad to find Johnny Cigar in the same team.
"Okay?" he shouted. It was both encouragement and enquiry.
"Okay!" I shouted back. "We need more water!"
"There is no more water!" he called back, gasping as the smoke eddied around us. "The tank is empty. Trucks will fill it up tomorrow. The water that people are using here is their ration."
I discovered later that every household, my own included, was rationed to two or three buckets of water per day for all cooking, drinking, and washing needs. The slum-dwellers were trying to put the fire out with their drinking water. Every bucket thrown, and there were many, forced one more household to spend a thirsty night, waiting for the morning delivery of water in city council trucks.
"I hate these fucking fires!" Johnny cursed, slamming downward with a wet sack to emphasise his words. "Come on, you fuck! You want to _kill me? Come on! We will beat you! We will beat you!"
A sudden quirk of the fire sent a burst of orange flame toward us. The man beside me fell backward, screaming and clutching at his burned face. Qasim Ali directed a rescue team to help him away. I seized his discarded sack and fell into line beside Johnny, slamming at the flames with one hand and shielding my face with the other.
We glanced over our shoulders, often, to receive directions from Qasim Ali Hussein. We couldn't hope to put the fire out with our wet rags. Our role was to gain time for the demolition teams scrambling to remove endangered huts. It was heartbreaking work.
They were saving the slum by destroying their own houses. And to gain time for those wrecking teams, Qasim sent us left and right in desperate chess moves, starving the fire, and slowly winning ground.
When one squalling downdraft of wind swept black and brown smoke into our clearing, we lost sight of Qasim Ali Hussein completely.
I wasn't the only man who thought to pull back in retreat. Then, through the smoke and dust, we saw his green scarf, held aloft and fluttering in the breeze. He stood his ground, and I glimpsed his calm face, summing up the status of the struggle and calculating his next move. The green scarf rippled above his head like a banner. The wind changed again, and we hurled ourselves to the task once more, inspired with new courage. The heart of the man with the green scarf was in me, and in all of us.
In the end, when we'd made our last sweep through the scorched lanes and charred lumps of houses, looking for survivors and counting the dead, we stood together in a mournful assembly to hear the tally. It was known that twelve persons were dead, six of them elderly men and women, and four of them children. More than one hundred were injured, with burns and cuts. Many of them were serious wounds. About six hundred houses were lost-one- tenth of the slum.
Johnny Cigar was translating the figures for me. I was listening to him with my head close to his, but watching Qasim Ali's face as he read from his hastily prepared list of the dead and injured. When I turned to look at Johnny, I found that he was crying. Prabaker pushed through the crowd to join us, just as Johnny told me that Raju was one of those who'd died in the fire.
Raju, with the sad, honest, friendly face; the man who'd invited me to live in the slum. Dead.
"Damn lucky!" Prabaker summed up cheerfully, when Qasim Ali had called the tally. His round face was so blackened with soot that his eyes and teeth seemed almost supernaturally bright. "Last year, in the last big fire, a full one-third of the zhopadpatti was burning up. One house from every three houses! More than two thousand houses gone! Kalaass! More than forty people dying also.
Forty. It's too many, Lin, let me tell you. This year is a very lucky fire. And our houses are safe also! Bhagwan have blessings on our brother, Raju."
Shouts from the edge of the sombre crowd drew our attention, and we turned to see one of the search teams pushing their way through to Qasim Ali. A woman from the team was carrying a baby they'd rescued from the smouldering rubble. Prabaker translated the excited shout and chatter for me. Three adjoining huts had collapsed in the blaze, falling on a family. In one of those inexplicable quirks of the fire's action, the parents of the child had suffocated and died, but the child, a baby girl, had survived.
Her face and body were untouched, but her legs were severely burned. Something had fallen across them at mid-thigh, and they were black, split, and cracked. She was screaming in pain and terror.
"Tell them to come with us!" I shouted to Prabaker. "Lead me back to my hut, and tell them to follow us. I've got medicine and bandages!"
Prabaker had seen the large and impressive first-aid kit many times. He knew it included bandages, salves, and creams, disinfectant solutions, swabs, probes, and an array of surgical instruments. Grasping my meaning at once, he shouted a message to Qasim Ali and the others. I heard the words medicine and doctor repeated several times. Then he grasped my sleeve and dragged me with him, jogging back to the hut.
With the kit open on the ground in front of my hut, I applied local anaesthetic cream to the baby's legs in a thick smear. It began to work almost at once. The baby settled down to a quiet whimper, and cuddled within her rescuer's arms.
"Doctor... doctor... doctor..." people said, all around me.
Qasim Ali called for lamps to be brought as the sun set on the Arabian Sea, and the long Bombay evening finally succumbed to warm, star-filled night. By the yellow flickering lamplight we tended to the wounded slum-dwellers, using my first-aid kit as the basis of our little open-air clinic. Johnny Cigar and Prabaker worked with me as translators and nurses. The most common injuries were burns, cuts, and deep gashes, but a great many people were also affected by smoke inhalation.
Qasim Ali Hussein watched us for a short while, and then left to supervise the erection of emergency shelters, the rationing of remaining water supplies, the preparation of food, and the dozen other tasks that would fill the night to morning and beyond. A cup of tea appeared beside me. My neighbour Radha had made it and brought it to me. It was the first thing I ate or drank in the slum, and it was the best chai I ever tasted in my life. An hour later, she forced her husband and two other young men to drag me from the injured people to eat a meal of roti bread, rice, and bhajee. The curried vegetables were deliciously spiced, and I cleaned the plate with the last bite of roti. And again, hours later, after midnight, it was Radha's husband, Jeetendra, who pulled at my arm and drew me into my hut, where a hand-crocheted blanket had been spread out on the bare earth.
Unresisting, I collapsed on the blanket for my first night of sleep in the slum.
Seven hours later-hours that passed as if they were minutes-I woke to see Prabaker's face hovering in the air. I blinked, and squinted, and realised that he was squatting on his haunches, with his elbows on his knees, and his face cupped in his hands.
Johnny Cigar was squatting beside him, on his left, and Jeetendra was on his right.
"Good morning, Linbaba!" he said, cheerfully, when my eyes settled on his. "Your snorings is a fabulous thing. So loud! Like having a bullock in this hut, Johnny said so."
Johnny nodded his agreement, and Jeetendra wagged his head from side to side.
"Old Sarabai is having a first-class cure for snorings," Prabaker informed me. "She can take one very sharp pieces of bamboo, about same as long as my finger, and push it up inside of your nose.
After that, no more snoring. Bas! Kalaass!"
I sat up on the blanket, and stretched the stiffness from my back and shoulders. My face and eyes were still gritty from the fire, and I could feel that the smoke had stiffened in my hair. Lances of morning light stabbed through holes in the walls of the hut.
"What are you doing, Prabu?" I asked irritably. "How long have you been watching me sleeping?"
"No so very long, Lin. Only for the half hours or so."
"It's not polite, you know," I grumbled. "It's not nice to watch people when they're sleeping."
"I'm sorry, Lin," he said quietly. "In this India we can see everybody sleeping, at some times. And we say that the face, when it is in sleeping, is the friend of the world."
"Your face is so kind when you are sleeping, Lin," Johnny Cigar added. "I was very surprised."
"I can't begin to tell you what this means to me, guys. Can I expect to find you in the hut, every morning, when I wake up?"
"Well, if you really, really want, Lin," Prabaker offered, jumping to his feet. "But this morning we only came to tell you that your patients are ready." "My... patients?"
"Yes. Come and see."
They stood, and opened the door of the hut. Sunlight splintered into my burning eyes. I blinked, and stepped through, following the men into the brilliant, bayside morning to see a line of people squatting on the ground outside my hut. There were thirty or more of them forming a queue along the length of the lane to the first turn.
"Doctor... doctor..." people murmured and whispered when I emerged from the hut.
"Come on!" Prabaker urged, tugging at my arm.
"Come on where?"
"First to toilet," he replied, happily. "You must make a motions, isn't it? I will show you how we make a motions, into the sea, on the long cement jetty. That is where the young men and boys make their motions, every morning, into the oceans-motions into the oceans, isn't it? You just be squatting down, with your buttocks pointing on the oceans. Then you wash your good self with a shower, and you have it a happy breakfast. Then you can easily fix up all your patients. No problem."
We walked along the length of the queue. They were young and old, men and women. Their faces were cut, bruised, and swollen. Their hands were blackened, blistered, and bloody. There were arms in slings, and legs in splints. And at the first turn, I saw to my horror that the queue extended into the next lane, and was longer, much longer.
"We've got to... do something..." I mumbled. "They're all... waiting."
"No problem, waiting, Lin," Prabaker replied, airily. "The people are waiting more than one hour already. If you are not with us, they would still be waiting, but waiting for nothing only.
Waiting for nothing, that is what kills the heart of a man, isn't it? Now the people are waiting for something. Waiting for you, they are. And you are a really something, Lin-Shantaram, if you don't mind I'm saying it to your smoky face and sticking-up hairs. But first, you must make it motions, and then washing, and then breakfast. And we have to get going--some young fellows are waiting down there on the jetty, and wanting to see you make your motions."
"They what?"
"Oh yes! They are a fascinating for you. You are like a movie hero for them. They are dying to see how you will make your motions. And then, after all these things, you will return, and fix the patients, like a really hero, isn't it so?"
And in that way was my role in the slum created. If fate doesn't make you laugh, Karla said, in one of my first conversations with her, then you just don't get the joke. As a teenager I'd trained in first-aid treatment. The formal course of study had covered cuts, burns, sprains, breaks, and a wide range of diagnostic and emergency procedures. Later, I'd earned my nickname, Doc, by using my training in CPR to pull junkies out of overdoses, and save their lives. There were hundreds of people who only knew me as Doc. Many months before that morning in the slum, my friends in New Zealand had given me the first-aid kit as a going-away present. I was sure those threads-the training, the nickname, the first-aid kit, the work as unofficial doctor in the slum- were all connected in some way that was more than accident or coincidence.
And it had to be me. Another man, with my first-aid training or better trained, wouldn't have been forced by crime and a prison- break to live in the slum. Another criminal, ready to live there with the poor, wouldn't have had my training. I couldn't make sense of the connection on that first morning. I didn't get the joke, and fate didn't make me laugh. But I knew there was something-some meaning, some purpose, leading me to that place, and that job, at exactly that time. And the force of it was strong enough to bind me to the work, when every intuition tried to warn me away.
So, I worked into the day. One by one, the people gave me their names and their smiles and, one by one, I did my best to treat their wounds. At some point during the morning, someone put a new kerosene stove in my hut. Someone else provided a metal box for rat-proof storage of food. A stool found its way into my hut, and a water pot-the ubiquitous matka-and a set of saucepans, and a few pieces of cutlery.
As evening throbbed in a scarlet arch of sky, we sat in a group, near my hut, to eat and talk. Sadness lingered in the busy lanes, and memories of those who'd died receded and returned like waves moving on the great ocean of the heart. Yet carried on that sadness, a part of sorrowing itself, was the determination of those who'd endured. The scorched earth had been cleared and cleaned, and many of the huts were already rebuilt. Hopes rose with every humble home that was restored.
I looked at Prabaker, laughing and joking as he ate, and I thought of our visit with Karla to the Standing Babas. One moment from that evening, one heartbeat's length of time as the crazed man had charged at us with a sword, was stretched in my memory. At the precise instant when I took that step backwards and raised my hands in a boxing stance to fight, Prabaker took a step to the side, and stood in front of Karla. He wasn't in love with her, and he wasn't a fighter. Yet his first instinct was to step sideways and protect Karla by shielding her with his body, while my first thought was to step back and fight.
If the mad swordsman hadn't been tripped, if he'd reached us, I would've been the one to fight him. And, probably, I would've saved us: I'd fought men with fists, knives, and clubs before, and I'd won. But even then, even if it had gone that far, Prabaker would've been the real hero, for the bravery of that little, instinctive, sideways step.
I'd grown to like Prabaker. I'd learned to admire his unshakeable optimism. I'd come to depend on the comforting warmth his great smile provided. And I'd enjoyed his company, day and night, through the months in the city and the village. But in that minute, on my second night in the slum, as I watched him laughing with Jeetendra, Johnny Cigar, and his other friends, I began to love him.
The food was good, and there was enough for all. Music played on a radio somewhere. It was the fine, almost unbearably sweet soprano and happy, boasting tenor of a duet from an Indian movie.
The people talked, nourishing one another with their smiles and conversation. And some time during the course of that love-song, somewhere in the landscape of the slum-dwellers' reassurances, somehow through the fact of our survival, their world enfolded my life within its dreams, as gently and completely as a swollen tide doses over a stone that stands upon its shore.