Abdullah took his brothering seriously. A week after the Night of the Blind Singers, he arrived at my hut in the Cuffe Parade slum carrying a satchel filled with medicines, salves, and bandages.
He also brought a small metal case containing a few surgical instruments. We went through the bag together. He asked me about the medicines, wanting to know how useful they were and what quantities I might need in the future. When he'd satisfied himself, he dusted off the wooden stool and sat down. He was silent for a few minutes, watching me pack the supplies he'd brought into a rack of bamboo shelves. The crowded slum chattered, brawled, sang, and laughed around us.
"Well, Lin, where are they?" he finally asked.
"Where's who?"
"The patients. Where are they? I want to see my brother healing them. There can't be healing, without sick people, isn't it?"
"I, er, I don't have any patients just now."
"Oh," he sighed. He frowned, drumming his fingers on his knees.
"Well, do you think I should go and get you some?"
He half rose from his seat, and I had a vision of him dragging sick and injured people to my hut by force.
"No, no, take it easy. I don't see people every day. But if I do see people, if I'm here, they usually start coming around two o'clock. They don't come this early in the morning. Nearly everyone works until at least noon. I'm usually working myself. I have to earn money too, you know."
"But not this morning?"
"No, not today. I made some money last week. Enough to last me for a while."
"How did you make this money?"
He stared at me ingenuously, unaware that the question might embarrass me or be taken as rude.
"It's not polite to ask foreigners how they make their money, Abdullah," I informed him, laughing.
"Oh, I see," he said, smiling. "You made it by the illegal means."
"Well, that's not exactly the point. But yes, now that you mention it. There was this French girl who wanted to buy half a kilo of charras. I found it for her. And I helped a German guy get a fair price for his Canon camera. They were both commission jobs."
"How much did you make with this business?" he asked, his eyes not wavering. They were a very pale brown, those eyes, almost a golden colour. They were the colour of sand dunes in the Thar Desert, on the last day before it rains.
"I made about a thousand rupees."
"Each business, one thousand?"
"No, both jobs together made a thousand."
"This is very little money, Lin brother," he said, his nose wrinkling and his mouth puckering with contempt. "This is tiny, tiny, very small money."
"Well, it might be tiny to you," I mumbled defensively, "but it's enough to keep me going for a couple of weeks or so."
"And now you are free, isn't it?"
"Free?"
"You have no patients?"
"No."
"And you have no little commission business to do?"
"No."
"Good. Then we go together, now."
"Oh, yeah? Where are we going?"
"Come, I will tell you when we get there."
We stepped out of the hut and were greeted by Johnny Cigar, who'd obviously been eavesdropping. He smiled at me, and scowled at Abdullah, then smiled at me again with traces of the scowl in the shadows of his smile.
"Hi, Johnny. I'm going out for a while. Make sure the kids don't get into the medicines, okay? I put some new stuff into the shelves today, and some of it's dangerous."
Johnny thrust his jaw out to defend his wounded pride.
"Nobody will touch anything in your hut, Linbaba! What are you saying? You could put millions of rupees in there, and nobody would touch anything. Gold also you could put in there. The Bank of India is not as safe as this, Linbaba's hut."
"I only meant that..."
"And diamonds, also, you can leave in there. And emeralds. And pearls."
"I get the picture, Johnny."
"No need to worry about all that," Abdullah interjected. "He makes such tiny money that nobody would have the interest to be taking it. Do you know how much money he made last week?"
Johnny Cigar seemed suspicious of Abdullah. The hostile scowl pinched his face a little tighter, but he was intrigued by the question, and his curiosity got the better of him.
"How much?"
"I don't think we need to go into this right now, guys," I grumbled, struggling to head off what I knew could become a one- hour discussion of my tiny money.
"One thousand rupees," Abdullah said, spitting for emphasis.
I seized him by the arm and gave him a shove along the path between the huts.
"Okay, Abdullah. We were going somewhere, weren't we? Let's get on with it, brother."
We took a few steps, but Johnny Cigar came after us and tugged at my shirtsleeve, pulling me a pace or two behind Abdullah.
"For God's sake, Johnny! I don't want to talk about how much money I made, right now. I promise, you can nag me about it later but..."
"No, Linbaba, not about that," he rasped, in a scratchy whisper.
"That man, that Abdullah-you shouldn't trust him! Don't do any business with him!"
"What is this? What's the matter, Johnny?"
"Just don't!" he said, and might've said more, but Abdullah turned and called to me, and Johnny sulked off, vanishing in a twist of lane.
"What is the problem?" Abdullah asked as I drew level with him, and we set off between the snaking lines of huts.
"Oh, no problem," I muttered, knowing that there was. "No problem at all."
Abdullah's motorcycle was parked on the roadway, outside the slum, where several kids were watching over it. The tallest of them snapped up the ten-rupee tip Abdullah gave them, and then led his ragged urchin band away at a whooping run. Abdullah kicked the engine over, and I climbed up onto the pillion seat behind him. Wearing no helmets, and only thin shirts, we swung out into the friendly chaos of traffic, heading parallel to the sea towards Nariman Point.
If you know bikes at all, you can tell a lot about a man by how he rides. Abdullah rode from reflex rather than concentration.
His control of the bike in motion was as natural as his control of his legs in walking. He read the traffic with a mix of skill and intuition. Several times, he slowed before there was an obvious need, and avoided the hard braking that other, less instinctive riders were forced to make. Sometimes he accelerated into an invisible gap that opened magically for us, just when a collision seemed imminent. Although unnerving at first, the technique did soon inspire a kind of grudging confidence in me, and I relaxed in the ride.
At Chowpatty Beach, we turned away from the sea, and the cool breeze from the bay was stilled and then choked off by streets of tall terraces. We joined shoals of traffic in a steamy drift towards Nana Chowk. The architecture there was from the middle period of Bombay's development as a great port city. Some of the buildings, constructed in the sturdy geometries of the British Raj, were two hundred years old. The detailed intricacies of balconies, window surrounds, and stepped facades reflected a luxurious elegance that the modern city, for all its chrome and glamour, rarely afforded itself.
The section from Nana Chowk to Tardeo was known as a Parsee area.
It had surprised me, at first, that a city so polymorphous as Bombay, with its unceasing variety of peoples, languages, and pursuits, tended to such narrow concentrations. The jewellers had their own bazaar, as did the mechanics, plumbers, carpenters, and other trades. The Muslims had their own quarter, as did the Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs, Parsees, and Jains. If you wanted to buy or sell gold, you visited the Zhaveri bazaar, where hundreds of goldsmiths competed for your custom. If you wanted to visit a mosque, you found several of them within walking distance of one another.
But after a while I realised that the demarcations, like so many other long and short lines of division in the complex, culturally polyglot city, were not as rigid as they'd seemed. The Muslim quarter had its Hindu temples, the Zhaveri bazaar had its vegetable sellers among the glittering jewels, and almost every tower of luxury apartments had its adjacent slum.
Abdullah parked the bike outside the Bhatia Hospital, one of several modern hospitals and clinics which were endowed by charitable Parsee trusts. The large building housed expensive wards for the rich, and free treatment centres for the poor. We climbed the steps and entered a spotlessly clean marble foyer pleasantly cooled by large fans. Abdullah spoke to the receptionist and then led me down a corridor to the busy casualty and admissions section. After more questions to a porter and a nurse, he finally located the man he sought-a short and very thin doctor who sat at a cluttered desk.
"Doctor Hamid?" Abdullah asked.
The doctor was writing, and didn't look up.
"Yes, yes," he answered testily.
"I have come from Sheik Abdel Khader. My name is Abdullah."
The pen stopped at once, and Doctor Hamid slowly lifted his head.
He stared at us with a look of apprehensive curiosity. It was a look you see sometimes on the faces of bystanders witnessing a fight.
"He telephoned to you yesterday, and told you to expect me?"
Abdullah prompted quietly.
"Yes, yes of course," Hamid said, regaining his composure in an easy smile. He stood up to shake hands across the desk.
"This is Mr. Lin," Abdullah introduced me, as the doctor and I shook hands. It was a very dry and fragile hand. "He is the doctor in the Colaba hutments."
"No, no," I protested. "I'm not a doctor. I've just been sort of co-opted into helping out there. And I'm... I'm not trained for it, and... not really very good at it."
"Khaderbhai tells me that when you spoke to him, you complained about the referrals you're making to the St. George and other hospitals," Hamid said, getting down to business, and ignoring my protest with the air of a man who was too busy to indulge another's modesty. His eyes were dark brown, almost black, and glistening behind the polished lenses of his gold-framed glasses.
"Well, yes," I replied, surprised that Khaderbhai had remembered my conversation with him, and that he'd found it important enough to tell the doctor. "The problem is that I'm flying blind, if you know what I mean. I don't know enough to cope with all the problems people come to me with. When I come across illnesses that I can't identify, or what I think are probably illnesses, I send them to the diagnostic clinic at St. George Hospital. I don't know what else to do with them. But a lot of the time they come back to me without having seen anyone-no doctors, no nurses, no-one."
"These people are not feigning illness, you think?"
"No. I'm sure." I was a little offended for myself, and even more indignant for the slum-dwellers. "They've got nothing to gain by pretending to be sick. And they're proud people. They don't ask for help lightly."
"Of course," he murmured, removing his glasses to rub at the deep ridges they'd imposed on his nose. "And have you been to the St.
George yourself? Have you seen anyone there to ask them about this?"
"Yes. I went there twice. They told me they're swamped with patients, and they do the best they can. They suggested that if I could get referrals from licensed medical practitioners, then the slum-dwellers could jump the queue, so to speak. I'm not complaining about them, at the St. George. They've got their own problems. They're under-staffed and overcrowded. In my little clinic, I look at about fifty patients a day. They get six hundred patients every day. Sometimes as many as a thousand. I'm sure you know how it is. I think they're doing the best they can, and they're pushed to the limit just trying to treat the emergency cases. The real problem is that my people can't afford to see a real doctor, to get the referral that would help them jump the queue at the hospital. They're too poor. That's why they come to _me."
Doctor Hamid raised his eyebrows, and offered me that easy smile.
"You said my people. Are you becoming such an Indian, Mr. Lin?"
I laughed, and answered him in Hindi for the first time, using a line from the theme song to a popular movie that was showing, then, in many cinemas.
"In this life, we do what we can to improve ourselves."
Hamid also laughed, clapping his hands together once in pleased surprise.
"Well, Mr. Lin, I think I may be able to help you. I am on duty here two days a week, but the rest of the time I can be found at my surgery, in Fourth Pasta Lane." "I know Fourth Pasta Lane. That's very close to us."
"Precisely, and, after speaking to Khaderbhai, I have agreed that you should begin referring your patients to me, when you need it, and I will arrange treatment at St. George Hospital when I think it is required. We can begin from tomorrow, if you wish."
"Yes, I do," I said quickly. "I mean, it's great, thank you, thank you very much. I don't know how we're going to go about paying you but..."
"No need for thanks, and no need to worry about payment," he replied, glancing at Abdullah. "My services will be free for your people. Perhaps you would like to join me for tea? I take a break here soon. There is a restaurant across the road from the hospital. If you can wait for me there, I will come across and join you. We have, I think, much to discuss."
Abdullah and I left him, and waited for twenty minutes in the restaurant, watching through a large window as poor patients hobbled to the entrance of the hospital, and rich patients were delivered in taxis and private cars. Doctor Hamid joined us, and outlined the procedures I was to follow in referring the slum- dwellers to his practice in Fourth Pasta Lane.
Good doctors have at least three things in common: they know how to observe, they know how to listen, and they're very tired.
Hamid was a good doctor, and when, after an hour of discussion, I looked into his prematurely lined face, the eyes burned and reddened by lack of sleep, I felt shamed by his honest exhaustion. He could accumulate wealth, I knew, and surround himself with luxury, in private practice in Germany or Canada or America, yet he chose to be there, with his own people, for a fraction of the reward. He was one of thousands of health professionals working in the city, with careers as distinguished in what they denied themselves as in what they achieved every working day. And what they achieved was no less than the survival of the city.
When Abdullah took us into the plaited traffic once more, his bike weaving a haphazard progress through the threads of buses, cars, trucks, bicycles, bullock wagons, and pedestrians, he called over his shoulder to tell me that Doctor Hamid had once lived in a slum himself. He said that Khaderbhai had taken especially gifted slum children from several slums throughout the city, and paid for their enrolment in private colleges. Through secondary and then tertiary studies, the children were provided for and encouraged. They graduated to become physicians, surgeons, nurses, teachers, lawyers, and engineers. Hamid was one of those gifted children who'd been selected more than twenty years before. In response to the needs of my small clinic, Khaderbhai was calling in some dues.
"Khaderbhai is a man who makes the future," Abdullah concluded, as we stopped for a traffic signal. "Most of us-me and you, my brother-we wait for the future to come to us. But Abdel Khader Khan dreams the future, and then he plans it, and then he makes it happen. That is the difference between him and the rest of us."
"What about you, Abdullah?" I asked him in a shout as we roared off with the traffic once more. "Did Khaderbhai plan you!"
He laughed out loud, his chest heaving with the pleasure and the force of the laugh.
"I think he did!" he replied.
"Hey! This isn't the way back to the slum. Where are we going now?"
"We are going to visit the place where you will be getting your medicines."
"My what?"
"Khaderbhai has arranged for you to get medicines, every week.
The things I brought you today-those are the first. We are going to the medicine black market."
"A black market for medicine? Where is it?"
"In the slum of the lepers," Abdullah answered, matter-of-factly.
Then he laughed again as he pushed the bike to greater speed through a gap in the traffic that opened for him, even as he reached it. "Just leave it to me, Lin brother. Now you are part of the plan, isn't it so?"
Those words-now you are part of the plan-should've woken some fear in me. I should've sensed... something... even then, right at the start. But I wasn't afraid. I was almost happy. The words seemed exciting. They rushed my blood. When my fugitive life began, I was exiled from my family, homeland, and culture. I thought that was the whole of it. Years into the banishment, I realised that I was exiled _to something, as well. What I escaped to was the lonely, reckless freedom of the outcast. Like outcasts everywhere, I courted danger because danger was one of the few things strong enough to help me forget what I'd lost. And staring into the warmth of the afternoon wind, riding with Abdullah into the web of streets, I fell as fearlessly into my fate, that afternoon, as a man falls into love with a shy woman's best smile.
The journey to the lepers' camp took us to the outskirts of the city. There were several treatment colonies for Bombay's lepers, but the men and women we went to see refused to live in them. Funded by state and private contributions, the colonies provided medical attention, caring support, and clean environments. The rules and regulations that governed them were strict, however, and not all the lepers could bring themselves to conform. As a result, some chose to leave, and some were forced out. At any one time, a few dozen men, women, and children lived outside the colonies, in the wider community of the city.
The elastic tolerance of slum-dwellers-who accommodated every caste and race and condition of person within their sprawl of huts-rarely extended to lepers. Local councils and street committees didn't endure their presence for long. Feared and shunned, the lepers formed themselves into mobile slums that settled, within an hour, in any open space they could find, and made a traceless departure in even less time. Sometimes they established themselves for several weeks beside a rubbish dump, fending off the permanent rag-pickers, who resisted their incursion. At other times they set up their camp on a swampy patch of vacant land or some outfall for industrial waste. When I first visited them with Abdullah, that day, I found that they'd built their ragged shelters on the rusty stones of a railway siding near the suburb of Khar.
We were forced to park Abdullah's bike, and enter the railway land as the lepers did, through gaps in fences and across ditches. The rusty plateau was a staging area for most trains on the urban route and many of the goods wagons carrying produce and manufactured articles out of the city. Beyond the sub-station itself were office outbuildings, storage warehouses, and maintenance sheds. Further on was a vast shunting area-an open space marked by dozens of railway lines and their confluences. At the outer edges, high wire fences enclosed the space.
Outside was the commerce and cosiness of suburban Khar: traffic and gardens, balconies and bazaars. Within was the aridity of function and systems. There were no plants, no animals, and no people. Even the rolling stock were ghost trains, trundling from shunting stop to shunting stop without staff or passengers. Then there was the lepers' slum.
They'd seized a diamond of clear space between the tracks for themselves, and patched their shelters together in it. None of the huts was taller than my chest. From a distance, they looked like the pup tents of an army bivouac wreathed in the smoke of cooking fires. As we neared them, however, we saw that their appalling raggedness made the slum huts where I lived seem like solid, comfortable structures.
They were made from scraps of cardboard and plastic held aloft with crooked branches, and braced with thin string. I could've knocked the whole camp to rubble with an open hand, and it would've taken me less than a minute, yet thirty men, women, and children made their lives there.
We entered the slum unchallenged, and made our way to one of the huts near the center. People stopped and stared at us, but no-one spoke. It was hard not to look at them, and then hard not to stare when I did look. Some of the people had no noses, most of them had no fingers, the feet of many were bound in bloody bandages, and some were so advanced into the deteriorations that their lips and ears were missing.
I don't know why-the price, perhaps, that women pay for their loveliness--but the disfigurements seemed more ghastly for the women than they were for the men. Many of the men had a defiant and even a jaunty air about them-a kind of pugnacious ugliness that was fascinating in itself. But shyness just looked cowed in the women, and hunger looked predatory. The disease was indiscernible in the many children I saw. They looked fit, if uniformly thin, and quite well. And they worked hard, all of those children. Their small fingers did the grasping for the whole of their tribe.
They'd seen us coming, and must've passed the word because, as we approached the hut, a man crawled out and stood to greet us. Two children came at once and supported him. He was tiny, reaching to just above my waist, and severely stricken with the disease. His lips and the lower part of his face were eaten away to a hard, knobby ridge of dark flesh that extended downwards from the cheeks to the hinges of his jaw. The jaw itself was exposed, as were the teeth and gums, and the gaping holes where his nose had been.
"Abdullah, my son," he said, in Hindi. "How are you? Have you eaten?"
"I am well, Ranjitbhai." Abdullah replied in respectful tones. "I have brought the gora to meet you. We have just now eaten, but we will drink tea, thank you."
Children brought stools to us, and we sat there in the open space in front of Ranjit's hut. A small crowd gathered and sat on the ground, or stood around us.
"This is Ranjitbhai," Abdullah told me, in Hindi, speaking loudly enough for all to hear. "He is the boss here, the senior fellow, in the slum of the lepers. He is the king here, in this club for kala topis."
Kala topi means black hat in Hindi, and it's a phrase used, sometimes, to describe a thief, referring to the black-banded hats that convicted thieves were forced to wear in Bombay's Arthur Road Prison. I wasn't sure exactly what Abdullah had meant by the remark, but Ranjit and the other lepers took it well enough, smiling and repeating the phrase several times.
"Greetings, Ranjitbhai," I said, in Hindi. "My name is Lin."
"Aap doctor hain?" he asked. You are a doctor?
"No!" I almost shouted in panic, disconcerted by the disease and my ignorance of it, and afraid he would ask me to help them. I turned to Abdullah, and switched to English. "Tell him I'm not a doctor, Abdullah. Tell him I just do a little first aid, and treat rat bites and scratches caused by the barbed wire, and things like that. Explain to him. Tell him that I haven't had any real training, and I don't know the first thing about leprosy."
Abdullah nodded, and then faced Ranjitbhai.
"Yes," he said. "He is a doctor."
"Thank you very much, Abdullah," I gnashed out through clenched teeth.
Children brought full glasses of water for us, and tea in chipped cups. Abdullah drank his water in quick gulps. Ranjit tilted his head back, and one of the children tipped the water in a gurgle down his throat. I hesitated, fearful of the grotesque sickness around me. One of the slum words in Hindi for lepers can be translated as the undead, and I felt that I was holding the nightmares of the undead in my hands. All the world of suffering disease was concentrated in that glass of water, it seemed to me.
But Abdullah had drunk his glass. I was sure he'd calculated the risks, and decided it was safe. And every day of my life was a risk. Every hour had its hazards, after the big gamble of escape from prison. The voluptuous recklessness of a fugitive moved my arm to my mouth, and I drank the water down. Forty pairs of eyes watched me drink.
Ranjit's own eyes were honey-coloured, and clouded by what I judged to be incipient cataracts. He examined me closely, those eyes roving from my feet to my hair and back, several times, with unshy curiosity.
"Khaderbhai has told me that you need medicines," he said slowly, in English. His teeth clicked together as he spoke, and with no lips to help him form the words, his speech was difficult to understand. The letters B, F, P, and V were impossible, for example, with M and W coming out as other sounds altogether. The mouth forms more than just words, of course: it forms attitudes and moods and nuances of meaning, and those expressive hints were also missing. And he had no fingers, so even that aid to communication was denied him.
Instead, there was a child, perhaps his son, who stood at his shoulder and repeated his words in a quiet but steady voice, one beat behind the rhythm of his speech, just as a translator might.
"We are always happy to help lord Abdel Khader," the two voices said. "I have the honour to serve him. We can give you much medicine, every week, no problem. First-class stuff, as you see."
He shouted a name, then, and a tall boy in his early teens pushed through the crowd to lay a canvas bundle at my feet. He knelt to roll out the canvas, and revealed a collection of ampoules and plastic bottles. There was morphine hydrochloride, penicillin, and antibiotics for staph and strep infections. The containers were labelled and new.
"Where do they get this stuff?" I asked Abdullah as I examined the medicines.
"They steal it," he answered me, in Hindi.
"Steal it? How do they steal it?"
"Bahut hoshiyaar," he replied. Very cleverly.
"Yes, yes."
A chorus of voices surrounded us. There was no humour in that concord. They accepted Abdullah's praise solemnly, as if he was admiring some work of art they'd collectively produced. Good thieves, clever thieves, I heard people mutter around me.
"What do they do with it?"
"They sell it on the black market," he told me, still speaking in Hindi, so that all those present could follow our conversation.
"They survive nicely from this, and other very good stealing."
"I don't get it. Why would anyone buy medicine from them? You can buy this stuff from just about any chemist."
"You want to know everything, brother Lin, isn't it? Well then, we must have another cup of tea, because this is a two-cups-of- tea story."
The crowd laughed at that, and pressed a little closer, picking out places to sit near us for the story. A large, empty, unattended goods wagon rumbled past slowly on an adjacent track, perilously close to the huts. No-one gave it more than a cursory glance. A railway worker, dressed in khaki shirt and shorts, strolled between the lines, inspecting the rails. He looked up at the lepers' camp from time to time, but his mild curiosity faded as he passed us, and he never looked back. Our tea arrived, and we sipped it as Abdullah began his story. Several of the children were sitting against our legs, their arms wrapped around one another compan- ionably. One little girl slipped her arm around my right leg, and hugged me with artless affection.
Abdullah spoke in very simple Hindi, repeating some passages in English, when he perceived that I hadn't understood. He began by talking of the British Raj, the time when Europeans controlled all of India from the Khyber Pass to the Bay of Bengal. The firengi, the foreigners, he said, gave lepers the lowest priority on their scale of privileges and entitlements. As the last in line, lepers often missed out on the limited supply of medicines, bandages, and medical treatment. When famine or flood struck, even the traditional medicines and herbal remedies were in short supply. The lepers became skilled at stealing what they couldn't obtain by other means-so skilled, in fact, that they accumulated surpluses, and began to sell medicines in their own black market.
In India's vastness, Abdullah went on, there were always conflicts-brigandage, rebellions, wars. Men fought, and blood was spilled. But many more men died through the festering of wounds and the ravages of disease than were killed in battles.
One of the best sources of intelligence available to police forces and governments lay in the control of medicines, bandages, and expertise. All sales from chemists, hospital pharmacies, and pharmaceutical wholesalers were registered. Any purchase or string of purchases significantly greater than the established norm attracted attention that sometimes led to captures or killings. A telltale trail of medicines, particularly of antibiotics, had led to the downfall of many dacoits and revolutionaries. In their black market, however, the lepers asked no questions, and sold to anyone who could pay. Their networks and secret markets existed in every great city in India. Their customers were terrorists, infiltrators, separatists, or just more than usually ambitious outlaws.
"These people are dying," Abdullah concluded, with the colourful turn of phrase that I was learning to expect from him, "and they steal life for themselves, and then they sell life to others who are dying."
When Abdullah finished speaking, there was a dense and ponderous silence. Everyone looked at me. They seemed to want some response, some reaction, to the story of their sadness and skill, their cruel isolation and violent indispensability. Whistling hisses of breath came through the clenched teeth of lipless mouths. Patient, serious eyes fixed me with expectant concentration.
"Can I... can I have another glass of water, please?" I asked, in Hindi, and it must've been the right thing to say because the whole crowd started laughing. Several children rushed off to fetch the water, and a number of hands patted me on the back and shoulder.
Ranjitbhai explained, then, how Sunil, the boy who'd showed us the canvas bundle of medicines, would make deliveries to my hut in the slum as and when I required them. Before we could leave, he asked that I remain seated for a while longer. Then he directed every man, woman, and child in his group to come forward and touch my feet. It was mortifying, a torment, and I entreated him not to do it. He insisted. A stern, almost severe expression burned in his eyes, while the lepers hobbled forward, one by one, and tapped their leathery stumps or the blackened, curled claws of their fingernails to my feet.
An hour later, Abdullah parked his bike near the World Trade Centre. We stood together for a moment, and then he reached out impulsively and enclosed me in a warm, bearish hug. I laughed as we came apart, and he frowned at me, clearly puzzled.
"Is it funny?" he asked.
"No," I reassured him. "I just wasn't expecting a bear hug, that's all."
"Bare? Do you mean it is naked?"
"No, no, we call that a bear hug," I explained, gesturing with my hands, as if they were claws. "Bears, you know, the furry animals that eat honey and sleep in caves. When you hold someone like that, we say you're giving them a bear hug."
"Caves? Sleeping in caves?"
"It's okay. Don't worry about it. I liked it. It was... good friendship. It was what friends do, in my country, giving a bear hug like that."
"My brother," he said, with an easy smile, "I will see you tomorrow, with Sunil, from the lepers, with new medicine."
He rode off, and I walked alone into the slum. I looked around me, and that place I'd once regarded as grievously forlorn seemed sturdy, vital, a miniature city of boundless hope and possibility. The people, as I passed them, were robust and invigorated. I sat down in my hut, with the thin plywood door closed, and I cried.
Suffering, Khaderbhai once told me, is the way we test our love, especially our love for God. I didn't know God, as he'd put it, but even as a disbeliever I failed the test that day. I couldn't love God-anyone's God-and I couldn't forgive God. The tears stopped after a few minutes, but it was the first time I'd cried for too long, and I was still deep in the mud of it when Prabaker came into my hut and squatted down beside me.
"He is a danger man, Lin," he said without preamble.
"What?"
"This Abdullah fellow, who came here today. He is a very danger man. You are better not for any knowing of him. And doings with him are even worsely dangerous, also."
"What are you talking about?"
"He is..." Prabaker paused, and the struggle was explicit in his gentle, open face. "He is a killing man, Lin. A murdering fellow.
He is killing the people for money. He is a goonda-a gangster fellow-for Khaderbhai. Everybody knows this. Everybody, except of you."
I knew it was true without asking any more, without a shred of proof beyond Prabaker's word. It's true, I said in my mind. In saying it, I realised that I'd always known, or suspected it. It was in the way other people treated him, the whispers he inspired, and the fear I'd seen in so many of the eyes that looked into his. It was in the ways that Abdullah was like the best and most dangerous men I'd known in prison. That, or something like that, had to be true.
I tried to think clearly about what he was, and what he did, and what my relationship to him should or shouldn't be. Khaderbhai was right, of course. Abdullah and I were very much alike. We were men of violence, when violence was required, and we weren't afraid to break the law. We were both outlaws. We were both alone in the world. And Abdullah, like me, was ready to die for any reason that seemed good enough on the day. But I'd never killed anyone. In that, we were different men.
Still, I liked him. I thought of that afternoon at the lepers' slum, and I recalled how self-assured I'd been there with Abdullah. I knew that a part of whatever equanimity I'd managed to display, perhaps most of it, had really been his. With him I'd been strong and able to cope. He was the first man I'd met, since the escape from prison, who'd had that effect on me. He was the kind of man that tough criminals call a hundred-percenter: the kind of man who'll put his life on the line if he calls you his friend; the kind who'll put his shoulder beside yours, without question or complaint, and stand with you against any odds.
Because men like that are so often the heroes in films and books, we forget how rare they are in the real world. But I knew. It was one of the things that prison taught me. Prison pulls the masks away from men. You can't hide what you are, in prison. You can't pretend to be tough. You are, or you're not, and everyone knows it. And when the knives came out against me, as they did more than once, and it was kill or be killed, I learned that only one man in hundreds will stand with you, to the end, in friendship's name.
Prison also taught me how to recognise those rare men when I met them. I knew that Abdullah was such a man. In my hunted exile, biting back the fear, ready to fight and die every haunted day, the strength and wildness and will that I found in him were more, and better, than all the truth and goodness in the world. And sitting there in my hut, striped with hot white light and cooling shadows, I pledged myself to him as brother and friend, no matter what he'd done, and no matter what he was.
I looked up into Prabaker's worried face, and smiled. He smiled back at me, reflexively, and in an instant of unusual clarity I saw that, for him, I was the one who inspired something of that confidence: as Abdullah was to me, so was I to Prabaker.
Friendship is also a kind of medicine, and the markets for it, too, are sometimes black.
"Don't worry," I said, reaching out to put a hand on his shoulder. "It'll be all right. It'll be fine. Nothing's going to happen to me."