I escaped from prison in broad daylight, as they say, at one o'clock in the afternoon, over the front wall and between two gun-towers. The plan was intricate and meticulously executed, up to a point, but the escape really succeeded because it was daring and desperate. The bottom line for us, once we started, was that the plan had to succeed. If it failed, the guards in the punishment unit were quite capable of kicking us to death.
There were two of us. My friend was a wild, big-hearted twenty- five year old serving a life sentence for murder. We tried to convince other men to escape with us. We asked eight of the toughest men we knew, all of them serving ten straight years or more for crimes of violence. One by one, they found an excuse not to join in the attempt. I didn't blame them. My friend and I were young first-offenders with no criminal history. We were serving big years, but we had no reputation in the prison system. And the escape we'd planned was the kind that people call heroic if it succeeds, and insane if it fails. In the end, we were alone.
We took advantage of extensive renovations that were being carried out on the internal security-force building-a two-storey office and interrogation block near the main entrance gate at the front wall. We were working as maintenance gardeners. The guards who pulled shifts in the area saw us every day. When we went to work there, on the day of the escape, they watched us for a while, as usual, and then looked away. The security-force building was empty. The renovation workers were at lunch. In the few long seconds of the little eclipse created by the guards' boredom and their familiarity with us, we were invisible, and we made our move.
Cutting our way through the chain-link fence that closed off the renovation site, we broke open a door to the deserted building and made our way upstairs. The interior was hollowed out by the renovation. Unplastered walls showed the skeleton structure of uprights and load-bearing beams. The bare, wooden steps on the stairway were white with dust, and littered with fragments of brick and plaster. There was a manhole in the ceiling on the top floor.
Standing on my friend's strong shoulders, I punched out the wooden trapdoor in the manhole and climbed through. I had an extension cord with me, wrapped around my body under my coveralls. I uncoiled it and pulled it free, fixed one end to a roof beam, and passed the other down to my friend. He used it to climb up into the roof-space with me.
The roof stretched out in zigzag waves. We scrambled toward the narrowing pinch of space where the roof met the front wall of the prison. I chose a spot on one of the troughs to cut our way through, hoping that the peaks on either side would conceal the hole from the gun-towers. It was dark everywhere in the roof- space, but in that narrow wedge near the wall it was blacker than a guard's baton.
With a cigarette lighter for a lantern, we worked to cut our way through the double-thickness of hardwood that separated us from the tin on the outside of the roof. A long screwdriver, a chisel, and a pair of tin snips were our only tools. After fifteen minutes of hacking, scraping, and stabbing at the wood, we'd cleared a little space about the size of a man's eye. Waving the flame of the hot cigarette lighter back and forth, we could see the glint of the metal roof beyond the small hole. But the wood was too hard and too thick. With the tools we had, it would take us hours to make a man-sized hole.
We didn't have hours. We had thirty minutes, we guessed, or maybe a little more, before the guards did a routine check of the area.
In that time we had to get through the wood, cut a hole in the tin, climb out on the roof, use our power extension cord as a rope, and climb down to freedom. The clock was ticking on us. We were trapped in the roof of the security building. And any minute, we knew, the guards might notice the cut fence, see the broken door, and find the smashed manhole. Any minute they could come up through the manhole into that black, sweating cave, and find us.
"We've gotta go back," my friend whispered. "We'll never get through the wood. We've gotta go back, and pretend it never happened."
"We can't go back," I said flatly, although the thought had screamed through my mind as well. "They'll find all the broken stuff, the fence we cut, and they'll know it was us. We're the only ones allowed in the area. If we go back, we're in the Slot for a year."
The Slot was prison slang for the punishment unit. In those years, that unit, in that prison, was one of the most inhumane in the country. It was a place of random, brutal beatings. A failed attempt to escape through the roof of the security-force building - their building, the head office for the punishment unit guards - would ensure that the beatings were less random and more brutal.
"Well what the fuck are we gonna do?" my friend demanded, shouting with everything but his voice. Sweat dripped from his face, and his hands were so wet with fear that he couldn't hold the cigarette lighter.
"I think there's two possibilities," I declared.
"What are they?"
"First, we could use that ladder-the one that's chained to the wall downstairs. We could go down again, break the chain off the ladder, tie the extension cord to the top of it, slam it up against the wall, climb up, and throw down the cord on the other side. Then we can slide down to the street."
"That's it?"
"That's the first plan."
"But... they'll see us," my friend protested.
"Yeah."
"And they'll start shooting at us."
"Yeah."
"They'll shoot us."
"You said that."
"Well, fuck me," he hissed. "I think it bears repeating. It's a fuckin' salient point, don't you think?"
"I figure that one of us will get through, maybe, and one of us will get shot. It's fifty-fifty."
We considered the odds in silence for a while.
"I hate that plan," my friend shuddered.
"So do I."
"What's the second plan?"
"Did you notice that buzz saw, on the ground floor, as we came up here?"
"Yeah..." "If we bring it up here, we could use the buzz saw to cut through the wood. Then we can use the tin snips to cut through the tin.
After that, it's back to the original plan."
"But they'll hear the thing," my friend whispered fiercely. "I can hear them talking on the fuckin' telephone. We're that close.
If we drag the saw up here, and fire it up, it'll sound like a fuckin' helicopter."
"I know. But I think they'll just figure it's the workers, doing more work."
"But the workers aren't here."
"No, but the shift at the gate is changing. There's new guards coming on duty. It's a big chance to take, but I think if we do it they'll just hear the noise, as usual, and think it's the workers. They've been listening to drills and hammers and buzz saws for weeks. And there's no way they could imagine that it's us doing it. They'd never figure that crims would be crazy enough to use a power saw, right next to the main gate. I think it's our best shot."
"I hate to be Mister-fuckin'-Negative here," he objected, "but there's no electricity in this building. They shut it off for the renovating. The only power point is outside. The extension cord is long enough to reach down there, I think, but the power is outside the building."
"I know, I know. One of us will have to go down, creep out the door we busted open, and plug the extension cord into the outside power outlet. It's the only way."
"Who goes down there?"
"I'll do it," I said. I tried to sound confident and strong, but there are some lies that the body just won't believe, and the words came out as a squeak.
I scrambled over to the manhole. My legs were stiff with dread and tension-cramp. I slid down the extension cord and crept down the stairway to the ground floor, playing the cord out all the way. It reached to the door, with plenty to spare. The buzz saw was resting near the door. I tied the extension cord around the handle of the saw, and ran back up the stairs. My friend pulled the saw up into the manhole and then passed the cord back to me.
Once more I crept down to the door. With my body pressed flat against a wall, I breathed hard, and tried to find the courage to open the door. At last, with a heart-wrenching rush of adrenaline, I pushed the door aside and stepped out into the open to plug the cord into the socket. The guards, armed with pistols, were talking among themselves, not twenty metres from the door. If one of them had been facing my way, it wouldVe been over. I glanced up to see that they were looking in every direction but mine. They were talking and walking about in the gate area, and laughing at a joke someone had just cracked. No-one saw me. I slipped back inside the building, crawled like a wolf on all fours up the stairs, and dragged myself up the cord to the manhole.
In the dark corner near the trough in the zigzag roof space, my friend lit the cigarette lighter. I saw that he'd connected the power saw to the cord. He was ready to make the cut. I took the lighter, and held it for him. Without a second of hesitation, he hoisted the heavy saw and clicked it to life. The machine screamed like the whine of a jet engine on a runway. My friend looked at me, and a huge grin tore his mouth open. His teeth were clenched in the smile, and his eyes were glittering with the reflected fire. Then he drove the saw into the thick wood. With four swift, ear-splitting cuts, he made a perfect hole that revealed a square of gleaming tin.
We waited in the silence that followed, our ears ringing with diminishing echoes, and our hearts thumping at our chests. After a moment we heard a telephone ring close by, at the main gate, and we thought we were finished. Then someone answered the phone.
It was one of the gate guards. We heard him laugh and talk on in a relaxed, conversational tone. It was okay. We were safe. They'd heard the power saw, of course; but, just as I'd hoped, they'd dismissed it as noise made by the workmen.
Heartened, I punched a hole in the tin with the screwdriver.
Sunlight from the free sky above shot in on us. I widened the hole, and then used the tin snips to cut a panel of tin around three sides. Pushing with two sets of hands, we shoved the flap of tin outwards, and I poked my head through the hole. I saw that we had indeed cut our way into one of the troughs of the roof.
The deepest part of that V-shaped trench was a blind spot. If we lay down in that narrow defile we couldn't see the tower guards, and they couldn't see us.
We had one job left to do. The power cord was still plugged into the outlet, downstairs and outside the building. We needed the cord. It was our rope. We needed it to climb down the outside of the prison wall to the street. One of us had to go down the stairs, push out through the door in full view of the guards in the adjacent gate area, unplug the power cord, and then climb back up into the roof again. I looked at my friend, his sweating face clear in the bright light bathing us from the hole we'd cut in the roof, and I knew it had to be me.
Downstairs, with my back against the inside wall, next to the door, I paused again, and tried to will the strength into my arms and legs for the move out into the open. I was breathing so hard that I felt dizzy and nauseous. My heart, like a trapped bird, hurled itself against the cage of my chest. After a few long moments, I knew I couldn't do it. Everything, from judicious caution to superstitious terror, screamed at me not to go out there again. And I couldn't.
I had to cut the cord. There was no other way. I took the chisel from the side-pocket of my coveralls. It was very sharp, even after the work we'd done with it in trying to penetrate the wooden barrier in the roof. I placed it against the trailing power cord, where it entered under the door. I raised my hand to strike. The thought occurred to me that if I blew out the power by cutting through the cord it could sound an alarm, and perhaps send a guard into the building to investigate. It didn't matter.
I didn't have any choice. I knew I couldn't go out into the open again. I slammed my hand down hard onto the chisel. It cut through the cord, and embedded itself in the wooden floor. I swept the snipped ends of the cord away from the metal chisel, and waited for the sound of an alarm or the tumble of voices to approach from the gate area. There was nothing. Nothing. I was safe.
I grabbed the loose end of the power cord, and rushed back upstairs and into the roof space. At the new manhole we'd cut in the roof, we secured the cord to a heavy, wooden bearer beam.
Then my friend started out through the hole. When he was halfway onto the tin roof, he got stuck. For a few moments, he couldn't move upward and he couldn't move back. He began to thrash wildly, straining with all his strength, but it was hopeless. He was stuck fast.
It was dark again in the roof space, with his body blocking the hole we'd made. I scrabbled around with my hands in the dust, between the roof joists, and found the cigarette lighter. When I struck it, I saw at once what had trapped him. It was his tobacco pouch-a thick, leather wallet that he'd made for himself in one of the hobby groups. Telling him to hold still, I used the chisel to tear a flap in the pocket at the back of his coveralls. When I ripped the pocket away, the tobacco pouch fell free into my hands, and my friend went up through the hole and onto the roof.
I followed him up to the tin roof. Wriggling like worms in the gutter of the trough, we moved forward to the castellated front wall of the prison. We knelt to look over the wall. We were visible then, for a few seconds, but the tower guards weren't looking our way. That part of the prison was a psychological blind spot. The tower guards ignored it because they didn't believe that anyone would be crazy enough to attempt a daylight escape over the front wall.
Risking a quick, frantic glimpse at the street below, we saw that there was a queue of vehicles outside the prison. They were deliverymen, waiting to enter through the main gate. Because each vehicle was searched throughout, and checked with mirrors beneath, the queue made slow progress. My friend and I hunkered down in the trough to consider our options.
"That's a mess down there."
"I say we go now," he said.
"We have to wait," I countered.
"Fuck it, just throw the cord over and let's go."
"No," I whispered. "There's too many people down there."
"So what?"
"One of them'll play hero, for sure."
"Fuck him. Let him play hero. We'll just go over the top of him."
"There's too many of them."
"Fuck them all. We'll go straight through 'em. They won't know what hit 'em. It's us or them, mate."
"No," I said finally. "We have to wait. We have to go over when there's no-one down there. We have to wait."
And we did wait, for a twenty-minute eternity, and I wriggled forward again and again to look over the wall, risking exposure every time. Then, at last, I looked down to the street and saw that it was completely empty in both directions. I gave my friend the signal. He scrambled forward over the wall, and down out of sight. I crept forward to look, expecting to see him climbing down the cord, but he was already on the street. I saw him disappear into a narrow lane, across the street from the prison.
And I was still inside, on the roof.
I clambered over the bluestone parapet, and took hold of the cord. Standing with my legs against the wall, and the cord in both hands, my back to the street, I looked at the gun-tower on my left. The guard was talking into a telephone and gesturing with his free hand. He had an automatic rifle slung over his shoulder. I looked to the other tower. The guard there, also armed with a rifle, was calling down to another guard inside the prison in the gate area. He was smiling and relaxed. I was invisible. I was standing on the front wall of the toughest maximum-security prison in the state, and I was invisible.
I pushed off with my legs and started the descent, but my hands slipped-the fear, the sweat-and I lost the cord. I fell. It was a very high wall. I knew it was a killing fall to the ground below. In an agony of terror and desperation, I grabbed at the cord and seized it. My hands were the brakes that slowed my fall.
I felt the skin tear away from my palms and fingers. I felt it singe and burn. And slower, but still hard enough to hurt, I slammed into the ground, stood, and staggered across the road. I was free.
I looked back at the prison once. The cord was still dangling over the wall. The guards were still talking in their towers. A car drifted past on the street, the driver drumming his fingers on the steering wheel in time to a song. I turned my back. I walked on through the lane into a hunted life that cost me everything I'd ever loved.
When I committed the armed robberies, I put fear into people.
From that time-even as I did the crimes-and on through prison and life on the run, fate put fear into me. The nights were steeped in it, and sometimes I felt as if the blood and the breath in my body were clotted with fright. The fear I'd put into others became ten terrors, fifty, a thousand, filling the loneliest hours of every night with dread.
By day, in those early Bombay months, when the world worked and worried around me, I wedged my life into a busy thickness of duties, needs, and small pleasures. But at night, when the sleeping slum dreamed, the horror crept across my skin. My heart backed away into a black cave of memory. And I walked most nights, while the city slept. I walked, and I forced myself not to look over my shoulder at the gun-towers and the dangling power cord on the high wall that wasn't there.
The nights, at least, were quiet. At midnight, every night in those years, the cops imposed a curfew on Bombay. Half an hour before twelve, police jeeps gathered in the main streets of the central city, and began the enforced closure of restaurants, bars, stores, and even the tiny pavement shops that sold cigarettes and paan. The beggars, junkies, and hookers who weren't already at home or hiding were chased from the footpaths.
Steel shutters came down over the shop windows. White calico cloths were thrown over the tables in all the markets and bazaars. Quiet and emptiness descended. In the whirl and crush of people and purposes in Bombay's daylight scramble, it was impossible to imagine those deserted silences. But each and every night was the same: soundless, beautiful, and threatening. Bombay became a haunted house.
For two to three hours after midnight, in an operation known as the round-up, squads of plain-clothes cops patrolled the vacant streets in search of criminals, junkies, suspects, and homeless, unemployed men. More than half the people in the city were homeless, of course, and many of them lived, ate, and slept on the streets. The sleepers were everywhere, stretched out on the footpaths with only a thin blanket and a cotton sheet to keep out the damp of night. Single people, families, and whole communities who'd escaped some drought, flood, or famine slept on the stone paths and in doorways, huddled together in bundled necessity.
It was technically illegal to sleep on the streets in Bombay. The cops enforced that regulation, but they were as pragmatic about it as they were about enforcing the laws against prostitution on the Street of Ten Thousand Whores. A certain discrimination was required, and in fact the list of those they wouldn't arrest for the crime of homelessness was quite long. Sadhus and all other religious devotees, for example, were exempted. Elderly people, amputees, the sick, or the injured didn't find much sympathy, and were sometimes forced to move on to another street, but they weren't arrested. Lunatics, eccentrics, and itinerant entertainers such as musicians, acrobats, jugglers, actors, and snake charmers were occasionally roughed up, but they were invariably excluded from the round-up. Families, particularly those with young children, usually received no more than a stern warning not to remain longer than a few nights in a given area.
Any man who could prove he had a job, however menial, by displaying the business card or written address of his employer, was spared. Single men who were clean and respectful and could demonstrate some level of education could usually talk their way out of an arrest, even if they weren't employed anywhere. And, of course, anyone who could pay baksheesh was safe.
That left the very poor, homeless, unemployed, uneducated, single young men as the high-risk group in the midnight round-up. With no money to pay their way out of the police net, and not enough education to talk their way out, scores of those young men were arrested throughout the city, every night. Some of them were arrested because they fitted descriptions of wanted men. Some were found to have drugs or stolen goods in their possession.
Some were well known, and the cops arrested them routinely, on suspicion. Many, however, were simply dirty and poor and stricken with a sullen helplessness.
The city didn't have the funds to provide thousands of pairs of metal handcuffs; and even if the money were found, the cops probably wouldn't have burdened themselves with heavy chains.
Instead, they carried lengths of rough twine made from hemp and coconut fibres, and used it to tie the arrested men one to the other by the right hand. The thin rope was enough to hold the men because the victims of nightly round-ups were mostly too weak, under-nourished, and spiritually defeated to run. They submitted meekly, silently. When between a dozen and twenty men had been arrested and tied into the human chain, the six or eight cops in the round-up squad marched them back to holding cells.
For their part, the cops were fairer than I'd expected them to be, and undeniably brave. They were armed only with the thin bamboo cane known as the lathi. They carried no clubs, gas, or guns. They had no walkie-talkies, so they couldn't call for back- up if they ran into trouble on the patrols. There were no vehicles to spare for the round-up, so the squads walked the many kilometres of their beat. And although they struck out often with the lathi, savage or even serious beatings were rare-much less frequent than police beatings in the modern, western city where I'd grown up.
Nevertheless, the round-up did mean days, weeks, or even months of confinement for the young men in prisons that were as bad as any in Asia, and the caravans of roped, arrested men that shambled throughout the city, after midnight, were more melancholy and forlorn than most funeral processions.
In my late-night walks around the city, I was invariably alone when the round-up was done. My rich friends feared the poor. My poor friends feared the cops. Most foreigners feared everybody, and kept to their hotels. The streets were mine as I searched their cool silences.
On one of those night walks, about three months after the fire, I found myself on the sea wall at Marine Drive. The broad footpath beside the sea wall was bare and clean. A six-lane road separated the seaside path from a horizon-wide, incurving crescent of affluence: fine homes, expensive apartments, consular offices, first-class restaurants, and hotels that looked out over the black and heaving sea.
There were very few cars on the Drive, that night, only one every fifteen or twenty minutes, travelling slowly. Few lights shone in any of the rooms across the street behind me. A cool wind carried the clean, salt air in irascible gusts. It was quiet. The sea was louder than the city.
Some of my friends from the slum worried about me walking alone on the streets at night. Don't walk at night, they said. The night is no safety in Bombay. But it wasn't the city that I feared. I felt safe on the streets. Strange and troubled as my life was, the city enfolded it within the millions of others as if... as if it belonged there, no less than any other.
And the work I was doing enhanced that sense of belonging. I gave myself assiduously to the role of slum doctor. I found books on diagnostic medicine, and studied them by lamplight in my hut. I accumulated a modest cache of medicines, salves, and bandages, buying them from local chemists with money I earned in black- market deals with tourists. And I stayed on there, in those squalid acres, even after I'd made enough money to leave. I stayed on in the cramped little hut when I could've moved to a comfortable apartment. I allowed my life to be swept up in the broiling, dancing struggle of their twenty-five thousand lives. I bound myself to Prabaker and Johnny Cigar and Qasim Ali Hussein.
And although I tried not to think of Karla, my love put claws in the sky. I kissed the wind. I spoke her name, when I was alone.
On the sea wall, I felt the cool breeze wash across the skin of my face and chest like water poured from a clay matka. There was no sound but my own breath in the wind and the crash of deep water on the rocks, three metres below the wall. The waves, reaching up in splash and spindrift, pulled at me. Let go. Let go. Get it over with. Just fall down and die. So easy. It wasn't the loudest voice in my mind, but it came from one of the deepest sources-the shame that smothered my self-esteem. The shamed know that voice: You let everyone down. You don't deserve to live. The world would be better off without you... And for all that I tried to belong, to heal myself with the work in the clinic, to save myself with the fool notion of being in love with Karla, the truth was that I was alone in that shame, and lost. The sea surged and shoved at the rocks below. One push, and it would all be over. I could feel the fall, the crash as my body struck the rocks; the cold slipperiness of drowning death. So easy.
A hand touched my shoulder. The grip was soft and gentle, but firm enough to hold me there. I turned quickly in shocked surprise. There was a tall, young man standing behind me. His hand remained on my shoulder as if to brace me there; as if he'd read my thoughts a few moments before.
"Your name is Mr. Lin, I believe," he said quietly. "I don't know if you can remember me-my name is Abdullah. We met at the den of the Standing Babas."
"Yes, yes," I stammered. "You helped us, helped me. I remember you well. You left-you disappeared-before I got to thank you properly."
He smiled easily, and took away his hand to run it through his thick, black hair.
"No need for thanks. You would be doing the same for me, in your country, isn't it? Come, there is someone who wants to meet you."
He gestured to a car that was parked at the kerb ten metres away.
It had drawn up behind me, and the motor was still running, but somehow I'd failed to hear it. It was an Ambassador, India's modest version of a luxury car. There were two men inside-a driver, and one passenger in the back.
Abdullah opened the rear door and I stooped to look inside. A man in his middle to late sixties sat there, his face half illuminated by the streetlights. It was a lean, strong, intelligent face with a long, thin nose and high cheekbones. I was struck and held at once by the eyes, an amber brilliance of amusement and compassion and something else-ruthlessness, perhaps, or love. His hair and beard were close-cropped and white-grey.
"You are Mr. Lin?" he said. His voice was deep, resonant, and supremely confident. "I am pleased to meet you. Yes, very pleased. I have heard something good about you. It is always a delight to hear good things-and even more pleasurable, when it concerns foreigners, here in our Bombay. Perhaps you have heard of me also. My name is Abdel Khader Khan."
Sure, I'd heard of him. Everyone in Bombay had heard of him. His name appeared in the newspapers every other week. People spoke about him in the bazaars and nightclubs and slums. He was admired and feared by the rich. He was respected and mythologised by the poor. His discourses on theology and ethics, held in the courtyard of the Nabila Mosque in Dongri, were famous throughout the city, and drew many scholars and students from every faith. No less famous were his friendships with artists, businessmen, and politicians.
He was also one of the lords of Bombay's mafia-one of the founders of the council system that had divided Bombay into fiefdoms ruled by separate councils of mafia dons. The system was a good one, people said, and popular, because it had brought order and relative peace to the city's underworld after a decade of bloody power struggles. He was a powerful, dangerous, brilliant man.
"Yes, sir," I answered, shocked that I'd inadvertently used the word sir. I loathed the word. In the punishment unit we were beaten whenever we failed to address the guards as _sir. "I know your name, of course. The people call you Khaderbhai."
The word bhai, at the end of his name, meant elder brother. It was a term of respectful endearment. He smiled and nodded his head slowly when I said it: Khaderbhai.
The driver adjusted his mirror and fixed me in it, staring expressionlessly. There were fresh jasmine flowers hanging in garlands from the mirror, and the perfume was intoxicating, almost dizzying after the fresh wind from the sea. As I leaned into the doorway of the car, I became acutely conscious of myself and my situation: my stooping posture; the wrinkles in my frown as I lifted my face to see his eyes; the rim of guttering at the edge of the car's roof under my fingertips; and a sticker, pasted to the dashboard, that read GOD BLESS I AM DRIVING THIS CAR.
There was no-one else on the street. No cars passed. It was silent, but for the idling engine of the car and the muffled churning of the shuffling waves.
"You are the doctor in the Colaba hutments, Mr. Lin. I heard of it at once, when you went to live there. It is unusual, a foreigner, living in the hutments. This belongs to me, you understand. The land where those huts stand-it belongs to me.
You have pleased me by working there."
I was stunned into silence. The slum where I lived, known as the zhopadpatti, or the hutments, half a square kilometre, with twenty-five thousand men, women, and children, belonged to him?
I'd lived there for months, and I'd heard Khaderbhai's name mentioned many times, but no-one had ever said that he owned the place. It can't be, I heard myself thinking. How can any one man own such a place, and all its lives?
"I, er, I'm not a doctor, Khaderbhai," I managed to tell him.
"Perhaps that is why you are having such success in treating the sick, Mr. Lin. Doctors will not go into the hutments willingly.
We can compel men not to be bad, but we cannot compel them to be good, don't you find? My young friend, Abdullah, recognised you just now, as we passed you, sitting on the wall. I turned the car to come back here for you. Come-sit inside the car with me. I will take you somewhere."
I hesitated.
"Please, don't trouble yourself. I..."
"No trouble, Mr. Lin. Come and sit. Our driver is my very good friend, Nazeer."
I stepped into the car. Abdullah closed the door behind me, and then sat in the front next to the driver, who adjusted the mirror to find and fix me in it again. The car didn't move off.
"Chillum bono," Khaderbhai said to Abdullah. Make a chillum.
Abdullah produced one of the funnel-shaped pipes from his jacket pocket, placed it on the seat beside him, and set about mulling together a mix of hashish and tobacco. He pressed a ball, known as a goli, of hashish onto the end of a matchstick, and burned it with another match. The smell of the charras coiled into the perfume of the jasmine flowers. The engine of the car was still idling slowly and quietly. No-one spoke.
In three minutes the chillum was prepared, and offered to Khaderbhai for the first dumm, or puff. He smoked, and passed the pipe to me. Abdullah and the driver smoked then, passing the chillum for one more round. Abdullah cleaned the pipe quickly and efficiently, and returned it to his pocket.
"Challo," Khader said. Let's go.
The car moved away from the kerb slowly. Streetlights began to stream into the sloping windshield. The driver snapped a cassette into the dashboard player. The soul-wrenching strains of a romantic gazal slammed out at maximum volume from speakers behind our heads. I was so stoned that I could feel my brain trembling within my skull, but when I looked at the other three men they appeared to be perfectly controlled and composed.
The ride was eerily similar to a hundred stoned drives with friends in Australia and New Zealand when we'd smoked hash or grass, put loud music on the dashboard player, and cruised together in a car. Within my own culture, however, it was mainly the young who smoked and cruised with the music on max. There, I was in the company of a very powerful and influential senior man who was much older than Abdullah, the driver, and me. And while the songs followed regular rhythms, they were in a language that I couldn't understand. The experience was familiar and disturbing at the same time-something like returning, as an adult, to the schoolyard of childhood-and despite the soporific slump of the drug, I couldn't entirely relax.
I had no idea where we were going. I had no idea how or when we would return. We were travelling toward Tardeo, which was the opposite direction to my home in the Colaba slum. As the minutes passed, I reflected on that particularly Indian custom of amiable abduction. For months, in the slum, I'd succumbed to the vague and mysterious invitations of friends to accompany them to unspecified places, for unknown purposes. You come, people said with smiling urgency, never feeling the need to tell me where we were going, or why. You come now! I'd resisted it a few times, at first, but I soon learned that those obscure, unplanned journeys were invariably worthwhile, frequently interesting and enjoyable, and quite often important. Little by little, I learned to relax, and submit, and trust my instincts, just as I was doing with Khaderbhai. I never regretted it, and I was never once hurt or disappointed by the friends who abducted me.
As the car crested the long, slow hill, leading down to the Haji Ali Mosque, Abdullah turned off the cassette and asked Khaderbhai if he wanted to make his regular stop at the restaurant there.
Khader stared at me reflectively for a moment, and then smiled and nodded to the driver. He tapped me on the hand twice with the knuckles of his left hand, and touched his thumb to his lips. Be silent now, the gesture said. Look, but don't speak.
We pulled into a parking bay, beside and a little apart from a row of twenty other cars outside the Haji Ali Restaurant.
Although most of Bombay slept after midnight, or at least pretended to sleep, there were centres of sound and colour and activity in the city. The trick lay in knowing where to find them. The restaurant near the Haji Ali shrine was one of those places. Hundreds of people gathered there every night to eat, and meet, and buy drinks or cigarettes or sweets. They came in taxis and private cars and on motorcycles, hour after hour, until dawn. The restaurant itself was small and always full. Most of the patrons preferred to stand on the footpath, and sit in or on their cars, to eat. Music blasted from many of the cars. People shouted in Urdu, Hindi, Marathi, and English. Waiters scurried from the counter to the cars and back, carrying drinks, parcels, and trays with stylish skill.
The restaurant broke the business curfew, and should've been closed down by the officers of the Haji Ali police post, which was only twenty metres away. But Indian pragmatism recognised that civilised people in large, modern cities needed places to gather and hunt. The owners of certain oases of noise and fun were permitted to bribe various officials and cops in order to stay open, virtually all night. That wasn't, however, the same thing as having a licence. Such restaurants and bars were operating illegally, and sometimes the appearance of compliance had to be displayed. Regular phone calls alerted the police post at Haji Ali when a commissioner or a minister or some other VIP intended to drive past. With a co-operative bustle, the lights were turned out, the cars dispersed, and the restaurant was forced to a temporary close. Far from discouraging people, that small inconvenience added a touch of glamour and adventure to the commonplace act of buying snacks. Everyone knew that the restaurant at Haji Ali, like every other illegal nightspot in town that faked a close, would reopen in less than half an hour.
Everyone knew about the bribes that were paid and taken. Everyone knew about the warning phone calls. Everyone profited, and everyone was well pleased. The worst thing about corruption as a system of governance, Didier once said, is that it works so well.
The headwaiter, a young Maharashtrian, hurried up to the car and nodded energetically as our driver ordered for us. Abdullah got out of the car, and walked to the long, crowded take-away counter. I watched him. He walked with an athlete's touchy grace.
He was taller than most of the other young men around him, and there was a striking, heads-up confidence in his bearing. His black hair was long at the back, reaching almost to his shoulders. He wore simple, inexpensive clothes-soft black shoes, black trousers, and a white silk shirt-but they suited him well, and he carried them with a certain martial elegance. His body was well muscled, and he looked to be about twenty-eight years old.
He turned toward the car, and I caught sight of his face. It was a handsome face, calm and composed. I knew the source of that composure. I'd seen the swift and lethal way he'd moved to disarm the swordsman at the den of the Standing Babas.
A few customers and all of the counter staff recognised Abdullah, and talked, smiled, or joked as he ordered cigarettes and paan.
Their gestures were exaggerated. Their laughter was louder than it had been moments before. They crowded against one another, and reached out to touch him often. It seemed that they were almost desperate to be liked by him, even just to be noticed by him. But there was hesitancy as well-a kind of reluctance-as if, despite everything in their talk and smiles, they didn't really like or trust him. It was also very clear that they were afraid of him.
The waiter returned, and passed our food and drinks to the driver. He lingered at the open window beside Khaderbhai, his eyes pleading to speak.
"Your father, Ramesh, he is well?" Khader asked him.
"Yes, bhai, he is well. But... but... I have a problem," the young waiter answered, in Hindi. He tugged nervously at the edge of his moustache.
Khaderbhai frowned, and stared hard into the worried face.
"What kind of problem are you having, Ramesh?"
"It's... it's my landlord, bhai. There is... there will be an eviction. I, we, my family, we are paying double rent already.
But the landlord... the landlord is greedy, and he wants to evict us."
Khader nodded thoughtfully. Drawing encouragement from his silence, Ramesh plunged on in rapid Hindi.
"It's not just my family, bhai. All the families in the building are to be evicted. We have tried everything, made very good offers, but the landlord will not listen to us. He has goondas, and those gangsters have made threats, and even done some beatings. My own father was beaten. I am ashamed that I have not killed that landlord, bhai, but I know that this would only bring more trouble on my family and the other families in the building.
I told my very honoured father that we should tell you, and that you would protect us. But my father is too proud. You know him.
And he loves you, bhai. He will not disturb your peace to ask for help. He will be very angry if he knows that I spoke of our trouble in this way. But when I saw you tonight, my lord Khaderbhai, I thought that... that the Bhagwan had brought you here to me. I... I am very sorry to disturb you..." He fell silent, swallowing hard. His fingers were white in their grip on his metal tray.
"We will see what can be done about your problems, Ramu,"
Khaderbhai said slowly. The affectionate diminutive of the name Ramesh, Ramu, provoked a wide, child's smile on the young face.
"You will come and see me tomorrow, at two o'clock sharp. We will talk further. We will help you, Inshallah. Oh, and Ramu-there will be no need to speak to your father about this, until the problem, Inshallah, has been solved."
Ramesh looked as though he wanted to seize Khader's hand and kiss it, but he simply bowed and backed away, muttering his thanks.
Abdullah and the driver had ordered plates of fruit salad and coconut yoghurt, and they ate with noisy appreciation when the four of us were alone. Khaderbhai and I had ordered only mango- flavoured lassi. As we sipped the iced drinks, another visitor came to the window of the car. It was the chief officer of the Haji Ali police post.
"A great honour to see you again, Khaderji," he said, his face writhing into a grimace that was either a reaction to stomach cramp, or an oily smile. He spoke Hindi with the strong accent of some dialect, and I found it difficult to understand. He asked after Khaderbhai's family, and then made some reference to business interests.
Abdullah put his empty plate down on the front seat, and drew a packet, wrapped in newspapers, from under the seat. He passed it across to Khader, who opened a corner of the packet to reveal a thick bundle of hundred-rupee notes, and then passed it casually through the window to the cop. It was done so openly, and even ostentatiously, that I felt sure it was important to Khader that everyone within a hundred metres would see the bribe made and taken.
The cop scrunched the parcel into the front of his shirt, and leaned aside to spit twice noisily, for luck. He came close to the window once more, and began to speak in a quick, urgent murmur. I caught the words body and bargain, and something about the Thief Bazaar, but I couldn't make sense of it. Khader silenced him with a raised hand. Abdullah looked from Khader to me, and then broke into a boyish grin.
"Come with me, Mr. Lin," he said quietly. "We will see the mosque, isn't it?"
As we got out of the car I heard the cop say loudly, The gora speaks Hindi? Bhagwan save us from foreigners! We walked to a deserted spot on the sea wall. The mosque, at Haji Ali, was built upon a small, flat island that was connected to the mainland by a stone path, three hundred and thirty-three steps long. From dawn to dusk, the tide permitting, that broad pathway was thronged with pilgrims and tourists. At high tide, the path was completely submerged, and deep waters isolated the island. Seen from the retaining wall on the road beside the sea, the mosque at night seemed like a great moored ship. Brass lanterns, throwing green and yellow light, swung from brackets on the marble walls. In the moonlight, the teardrop arches and rounded contours glowed white and became the sails of that mystic ship, and the minarets were so many towering spars.
On that night, the swollen, flattened, yellow moon-known in the slum as a grieving moon-hovered hypnotic-full, above the mosque.
There was a breeze from the sea, but the air was warm and humid.
Swarms of bats flying overhead, along the lines of electrical wires, thousands of them, were like musical notes on a strip of sheet music. A very small girl, awake past her bedtime and still selling ribbons of jasmine flowers, came up to us and gave Abdullah a garland. He reached into his pocket to give her some money, but she refused, laughing, and walked away singing the chorus of a song from a popular Hindi movie.
"There is no act of faith more beautiful than the generosity of the very poor," Abdullah said, in his quiet tone. I had the impression that he never raised his voice above that softness.
"You speak English very well," I commented, genuinely impressed by the sophisticated thought and the way he'd expressed it.
"No, I don't speak well. I knew a woman, and she taught me those words," he replied. I waited for more, and he hesitated, looking out over the sea, but when he spoke again it was to change the subject. "Tell me, Mr. Lin, that time at the den of the Standing Babas, when that man was coming for you with a sword-what would you have done if I was not there?"
"I would've fought him."
"I think..." He turned to stare into my eyes, and I felt my scalp tightening with an unaccountable dread. "I think you would have died. You would have been murdered, and you would now be dead."
"No. He had a sword, but he was old, and he was crazy. I would've beaten him."
"Yes," he said, not smiling. "Yes, I think you are right-you would have beaten him. But the others, the girl and your Indian friend, one of them would have been hurt, or even killed, if you had survived. When the sword came down, if it did not strike you, it would have hit one of them, I think it is so. One of you would have died. You or your friends-one of you would be dead."
It was my turn to be silent. The sense of dread I'd felt a moment before was suddenly a full-blown alarm. My heart was thumping a loudness of blood. He was talking about having saved my life, and yet I sensed a threat in his words. I didn't like it. Anger began to rise in me. I tensed, ready to fight him, and stared hard into his eyes.
He smiled, and put a hand on my shoulder, just as he'd done less than an hour before at another sea wall, on Marine Drive. As quickly as the tingling, intuitive sense of alarm arose, it also passed; as powerful as it had been, it was suppressed and gone.
It was months before I thought of it again.
I turned to see the cop saluting and moving away from Khader's car.
"Khaderbhai was very conspicuous about giving that cop a bribe."
Abdullah laughed, and I remembered the first time I'd heard him laugh out loud, in the den of the Standing Babas. It was a good laugh, guileless and completely unselfconscious, and I suddenly liked him because of it.
"We have a saying in Persian-Sometimes the lion must roar, just to remind the horse of his fear. This policeman has been making problems here at Haji Ali. The people do not respect him. For that, he is unhappy. His unhappiness is causing him to make problems. The more problems he makes, the less respect he gets from the people. Now they see such big baksheesh, more than a policeman like him is getting, and they will respect him a little. They will be impressed that the great Khaderbhai pays him so well. With this little respect, he will make less problems for all of us. But still, the message is very clear. He is a horse, but Khader is a lion. And the lion, it has roared."
"Are you Khaderbhai's bodyguard?"
"No, no!" he laughed again. "Lord Abdel Khader needs no protection. But..." He paused, and we both looked at the grey- haired man in the back of the modest limousine. "But I would die for him, if that is what you mean. That, and a lot more would I do for him."
"There's not a lot more you can do for someone than die for them," I replied, grinning at his earnestness as much as the strangeness of his idea.
"Oh yes," he said, putting an arm around my shoulder and leading us back towards the car. "There is a lot more."
"You are making a friendship with our Abdullah, Mr. Lin?"
Khaderbhai said as we climbed back into the car. "This is a good thing. You should be close friends. You look like brothers."
Abdullah and I looked at one another, and laughed gently at the words. My hair was blond, and his was ink black. My eyes were grey, and his were brown. He was Persian, and I was Australian.
At first glance, we couldn't be more dissimilar. But Khaderbhai stared from one to the other of us with such a puzzled frown, and was so genuinely bewildered by our amusement, that we swallowed our laughter in smiles. And as the car headed out along the Bandra road, I thought about what Khader had said. I found myself thinking that, for all the differences between us, there just might be some perceptive truth in the older man's observation.
The car drove on for almost an hour. It slowed, at last, on the outskirts of Bandra, in a street of shops and warehouses, and then bumped into the entrance to a narrow lane. The street was dark and deserted, as was the lane. When the car doors opened, I could hear music and singing.
"Come, Mr. Lin. We go," Khaderbhai said, feeling no compulsion to tell me where we were going or why.
The driver, Nazeer, remained with the car, leaning against the bonnet and finally allowing himself the luxury of unwrapping the paan that Abdullah had bought for him at Haji Ali. As I passed him to walk down the lane, I realised that Nazeer hadn't spoken a single word, and I wondered at the long silences so many Indian people practised in that crowded, noisy city.
We passed through a wide stone arch, along a corridor and, after climbing two flights of stairs, we entered a vast room filled with people, smoke, and clamorous music. It was a rectangular room, hung with green silks and carpets. At the far end there was a small, raised stage where four musicians sat on silk cushions.
Around the walls there were low tables surrounded by comfortable cushions. Pale green, bell-shaped lanterns, suspended from the wooden ceiling, cast trembling hoops of yellow-gold light.
Waiters moved from group to group, serving black tea in long glasses. At some of the tables there were hookah pipes, pearling the air with blue smoke, and the perfume of charras. Several men rose immediately to greet Khaderbhai. Abdullah was also well known there. A number of people acknowledged him with a nod, wave, or spoken greeting. I noticed that the men in that room, unlike those at Haji Ali, embraced him warmly, and lingered as they held his hand between their own. I recognised one man in the crowd. It was Shafiq Gussa, or Shafiq The Angry, the controller of prostitution in the navy barracks area near the slum where I lived. I knew a few other faces-a well-known poet, a famous Sufi holy man, and a minor movie star-from photographs in newspapers.
One of the men near Khaderbhai was the manager of the private club. He was a short man, plumply buttoned into a long Kashmiri vest. The white lace cap of a hajji, one who'd made the pilgrimage to Mecca, covered his bald head. His forehead was discoloured by the dark, circular bruise some Muslims acquire through touching their foreheads to a stone in their devotions.
He shouted instructions, and at once waiters brought a new table and several cushions, setting them up in a corner of the room with a clear view to the stage.
We sat cross-legged, with Khader in the centre, Abdullah at his right hand, and me at his left. A boy, wearing a hajji cap and Afghan pants and vest, brought us a bowl of popped rice, sharply spiced with chilli powders, and a platter of mixed nuts with dried fruits. The chai waiter poured hot, black tea from a narrow-spouted kettle through a metre of air without spilling a drop. He placed the tea before each of us and then offered sugar cubes. I was about to drink the tea without sugar, but Abdullah stopped me.
"Come, Mr. Lin," he smiled, "We are drinking Persian tea, in the real Iranian style, isn't it?"
He took a sugar cube and placed it in his mouth, holding it firmly between his front teeth. He lifted the glass then, and sipped the tea through the cube. I followed suit, imitating the steps. The sugar cube slowly crumbled and melted away and, although the taste was sweeter than I preferred, I enjoyed what was for me the strangeness of a new custom.
Khaderbhai also took a sugar cube and sipped his tea through it, endowing the little custom with a peculiar dignity and solemnity, as in fact he did with every expression and even the most casual gesture. He was the most imperial human being I'd ever met.
Looking at him, then, as he inclined his head to listen to Abdullah's light-hearted conversation, the thought came to me that in any life, and in any world, he would command men, and inspire their obedience.
Three singers joined the musicians, and sat a little in front of them. A gradual silence settled in the room, and then all of a sudden the three men began to sing in powerful, thrilling voices.
It was a luscious sound-a layered and gorgeous music of passionate intensity. The men weren't just singing, they were crying and wailing in song. Real tears ran from their closed eyes and dripped onto their chests. I was elated, listening to it; and yet, somehow, I felt ashamed. It was as if the singers had taken me into their deepest and most intimate love and sorrow.
They sang three songs then quietly left the stage, disappearing through a curtain into another room. No-one had spoken or moved during the performance, but then everyone spoke at once as we forced ourselves to break the spell that had enveloped us.
Abdullah stood up and crossed the room to talk with a group of Afghans at another table.
"How do you like the singing, Mr. Lin?" Khaderbhai asked me.
"I like it very much. It's incredible, amazing. I've never heard anything like it. There was so much sadness in it, but so much power as well. What language was it? Urdu?"
"Yes. Do you understand Urdu?"
"No, I'm afraid I don't. I only speak a little Marathi and Hindi.
I recognised it as Urdu because some of the people speak it around me, where I live."
"Urdu is the language of gazals, and these are the best gazal singers in all Bombay," he replied.
"Are they singing love songs?"
He smiled, and leaned across to rest his hand on my forearm.
Throughout the city, people touched one another often during their conversations, emphasising the points they made with a gentle squeeze of pressure. I knew the gesture well from daily contact with my friends in the slum, and I'd come to like it.
"They are love songs, yes, but the best and most true of all love songs. They are love songs to God. These men are singing about loving God."
I nodded, saying nothing, but my silence prompted him to speak again.
"You are a Christian fellow?" he asked.
"No. I don't believe in God." "There is no believing in God," he declared, smiling again. "We either know God, or we do not."
"Well," I laughed, "I certainly don't know God, and frankly I'm inclined to think that God is impossible to believe in, at least most of the notions of God that I've come across."
"Oh, of course, naturally, God is impossible. That is the first proof that He exists."
He was staring at me intently, his hand still resting warm on my arm. Be careful, I thought. You're getting into a philosophical discussion with a man who's famous for them. He's testing you.
It's a test, and the water's deep.
"Let me get this straight-you're saying that because something is impossible, it exists?" I asked, pushing a canoe of thought out into the uncharted water of his ideas.
"That is correct."
"Well, wouldn't that mean that all the possible things don't exist?"
"Precisely!" he said, smiling more widely. "I am delighted that you understand."
"I can say those words," I answered, laughing to match his smile, "but that doesn't mean I understand them."
"I will explain. Nothing exists as we see it. Nothing we see is really there, as we think we are seeing it. Our eyes are liars.
Everything that seems real, is merely part of the illusion.
Nothing exists, as we think it does. Not you. Not me. Not this room. Nothing."
"I still don't get it. I don't see how possible things don't exist."
"Let me put it another way. The agents of creation, the energy that actually animates the matter and the life that we think we see around us, cannot be measured or weighed or even put into time, as we know it. In one form, that energy is photons of light. The smallest object is a universe of open space to them, and the entire universe is but a speck of dust. What we call the world is just an idea-and not a very good one, yet. From the point of view of the light, the photon of light that animates it, the universe that we know is not real. Nothing is. Do you understand now?"
"Not really. It seems to me that if everything we think we know is wrong, or is an illusion, then none of us can know what to do, or how to live, or how to stay sane."
"We lie," he said with a flash of real humour in the gold-flecked amber of his eyes. "The sane man is simply a better liar than the insane man. You and Abdullah are brothers. I know this. Your eyes lie, and tell you that this is not so. And you believe the lie, because it is easier."
"And that's how we stay sane?"
"Yes. Let me tell you that I can see you as my son. I was not married, and I have no son, but there was a moment of time, yes, when it was possible for me to be married, and to have a son. And that moment of time was-how old are you?"
"I'm thirty."
"Exactly! I knew it. That moment of time, when I could have been a father, was exactly thirty years ago. But if I tell you that I see it clearly, that you are my son, and I am your father, you will think that it is impossible. You will resist it. You will not see the truth, that I see now, and that I saw in the first moments when we met, a few hours ago. You will prefer to make a convenient lie, and to believe it-the lie that we are strangers, and that there is no connection between us. But fate-you know fate? Kismet is the word, in the Urdu language-fate has every power over us, but two. Fate cannot control our free will, and fate cannot lie. Men lie, to themselves more than to others, and to others more often than they tell the truth. But fate does not lie. Do you see?"
I did see. My heart knew what he was saying, even as my rebellious mind rejected the words and the man who spoke them.
Somehow, he'd found that sorrow in me. The hole in my life that a father should've filled was a prairie of longing. In the loneliest hours of those hunted years, I wandered there, as hungry for a father's love as a cellblock full of sentenced men in the last hour of New Year's Eve.
"No," I lied. "I'm sorry, but I just don't agree. I don't think you can make things true, just by believing them."
"I have not said that," he replied, patiently. "What I am saying is that reality-as you see it, and as most people see it-is nothing more than an illusion. There is another reality, beyond what we see with our eyes. You have to _feel your way into that reality with your heart. There is no other way."
"It's just... pretty confusing, your way of looking at things.
Chaotic, in fact. Don't you find it chaotic, yourself?"
He smiled again.
"It is strange, at first, to think in the right way. But there are a few things we can know, a few things to be sure of, and it is relatively easy. Let me show you. To know the truth, all you have to do is close your eyes."
"It's that easy?" I laughed.
"Yes. All you have to do is close your eyes. We can know God, for example, and we can know sadness. We can know dreams, and we can know love. But none of these are real, in our usual sense of things that exist in the world and seem real. We cannot weigh them, or measure their length, or find their basic parts in an atom smasher. Which is why they are possible."
My canoe of thought was taking water, and I decided to bail out, fast.
"I've never heard of this place before. Are there many places like this?"
"Perhaps five," he replied, accepting the change of topic with tolerant equanimity. "Is that many, do you think?"
"I guess it's enough. There aren't any women. Are women not allowed to come here?"
"Not forbidden," he frowned, casting about for the right words.
"Women are permitted here, but they do not want to come. There are other places where women gather, to do their own things and to hear music and singers, and no man would want to disturb them there, either."
A very elderly man approached us and sat at Khaderbhai's feet. He wore the simple cotton shirt and thin baggy pants known as a kurta-pyjama. His face was deeply lined, and his white hair was cropped into a short, punk cut. He was thin and stooped and obviously poor. With a curt but respectful nod to Khader, he began to mull tobacco and hashish in his gnarled hands. In a few minutes he passed a huge chillum to Khader, and waited with matches ready to light it.
"This man is Omar," Khaderbhai said, pausing with the chillum almost to his lips. "He is the best maker of the chillum in all Bombay."
Omar lit the chillum for Khaderbhai, breaking into a toothless grin and basking in the praise. He passed it to me, studied my technique and lung-power with a critical eye, and grunted a sort of approval. After Khader and I had smoked twice, Omar took the chillum and finished it with gigantic puffs that swelled his thin chest to bursting. When he was finished, he tapped out a small residue of white ash. He'd sucked the chillum dry, and proudly accepted a nod of acknowledgement from Khaderbhai. Despite his great age, he rose easily from the seated position without touching his hands to the floor. He hobbled away as the singers returned to the stage. Abdullah rejoined us, bringing a cut-glass bowl filled with slices of mango, papaya, and watermelon. The scents of the fruits surrounded us as their tastes dissolved in our mouths. The singers began their next performance, singing just one song that continued for almost half an hour. It was a lush, tripartite harmony built upon a simple melody and improvised cadenzas. The musicians accompanying the singers on the harmonium and the tablas were animated, but the singers themselves were expressionless, motionless, with their eyes closed and their hands limp.
As before, the silent crowd in the club broke out in rowdy chatter when the singers left the small stage. Abdullah leaned across to speak to me.
"While we were driving here in the car, I was thinking about being brothers, Mr. Lin. I was thinking about what Khaderbhai said."
"That's funny, so was I."
"My two brothers-we were three brothers in my family in Iran, and now my two brothers, they are dead. They were killed in the war against Iraq. I have a sister, in Iran, but I have no brother. I am just one brother now. One brother is a sadness, isn't it?"
I couldn't answer him directly. My own brother was lost to me. My whole family was lost, and I was sure I would never see them again.
"I was thinking that perhaps Khaderbhai saw something true.
Perhaps we really are looking like brothers."
"Maybe we are."
He smiled.
"I have decided to like you, Mr. Lin."
He said it with such solemnity, despite the smile, that I had to laugh.
"Well, I guess in that case you'd better stop calling me Mr. Lin.
It gives me the heebie-jeebies, anyway."
"Jeebies?" he asked, earnestly. "It is an Arabic word?"
"Don't worry about it. Just call me Lin."
"Okay. I will call you Lin. I will call you Lin brother. And you will call me Abdullah, isn't it so?"
"I guess it is."
"Then we will remember this night, at the concert of the blind singers, because it is the night we begin brothering for each other."
"Did you say, the blind singers?"
"Yes. You don't know them? These are the Blind Singers of Nagpur.
They are famous in Bombay."
"Are they from an institution?"
"Institution?"
"Yeah, a school for the blind, maybe. Something like that."
"No, Lin brother. At one time they could see, just as we are seeing. But in a small village, near Nagpur, there was a blinding, and these men became blind."
The noise around me was dizzying, and the once pleasant smell of the fruits and the charras was beginning to cloy and stifle.
"What do you mean, there was a blinding?"
"Well, there were rebels and bandits, hiding in the mountains, near that village," he explained in his slow, deliberate way.
"The villagers had to give them food, and other help. They had no choice. But when the police and soldiers came to the village, they made twenty people blind, as a lesson, as a warning to other people, in other villages. This happens sometimes. The singers were not from that village. They were visiting there, to sing at a festival. It was just bad luck. They were made blind, with the rest. All of them, those men and women, twenty people, were tied on the ground, and their eyes were put out, with sharp pieces of bamboo. Now they sing here, everywhere, and are very famous. And rich also..."
He talked on. I listened, but I couldn't respond or react.
Khaderbhai sat next to me, conversing with a young, turbaned Afghan. The young man bent low to kiss Khader's hand, and the butt of a gun appeared within the folds of his robe. Omar returned and began to prepare another chillum. He grinned up at me with his stained gums, and nodded.
"Yes, yes," he lisped, staring into my eyes. "Yes, yes, yes."
The singers came back to sing again, and smoke spiralled up into the slash of slowly revolving fans, and that green silk room of music and conspiracies became a beginning for me. I know now that there are beginnings, turning points, many of them, in every life; questions of luck and will and fate. The naming day, the day of the flood sticks in Prabaker's village, when the women gave me the name Shantaram, was a beginning. I know that now. And I know that everything else I'd been and done in India up to that night and the concert of the blind singers, perhaps even the whole of my life, was a preparation for that beginning with Abdel Khader Khan. Abdullah became my brother. Khaderbhai became my father. By the time I realised that fully, and knew the reasons for it, my new life as brother and son had taken me to war, and involved me in murder, and everything had changed forever.
Khaderbhai leaned across after the singing stopped. His lips were moving, and I knew he was speaking to me, but for a moment I couldn't hear him.
"I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you."
"I said that the truth is found more often in music," he repeated, "than it is in books of philosophy."
"What is the truth?" I asked him. I didn't really want to know. I was trying to hold up my end of the conversation. I was trying to be clever.
"The truth is that there are no good men, or bad men," he said.
"It is the deeds that have goodness or badness in them. There are good deeds, and bad deeds. Men are just men-it is what they do, or refuse to do, that links them to good and evil. The truth is that an instant of real love, in the heart of anyone-the noblest man alive or the most wicked-has the whole purpose and process and meaning of life within the lotus-folds of its passion. The truth is that we are all, every one of us, every atom, every galaxy, and every particle of matter in the universe, moving toward God."
Those words of his are mine forever now. I can hear them. The blind singers are forever. I can see them. The night, and the men that were the beginning, father and brother, are forever. I can remember them. It's easy. All I have to do is close my eyes.