She walked into Leopold's at the usual time, and when she stopped at a table near me to talk with friends, I tried once more to find the words for the foliant blaze of her green eyes. I thought of leaves and opals and the warm shallows of island seas. But the living emerald in Karla's eyes, made luminous by the sunflowers of gold light that surrounded the pupils, was softer, far softer.
I did eventually find that colour, the green in nature that was a perfect match for the green in her lovely eyes, but it wasn't until long months after that night in Leopold's. And strangely, inexplicably, I didn't tell her about it. I wish now with all my heart that I did. The past reflects eternally between two mirrors - the bright mirror of words and deeds, and the dark one, full of things we didn't do or say. I wish now that from the beginning, even then in the first weeks that I knew her, even on that night, the words had come to tell her... to tell her that I liked her.
And I did-I liked everything about her. I liked the Helvetian music of her Swiss-American English, and the way she pushed her hair back slowly with a thumb and forefinger when she was irritated by something. I liked the hard-edged cleverness of her conversation, and the easy, gentle way she touched the people she liked when she walked past them or sat beside them. I liked the way she held my eyes until the precise moment when it stopped being comfortable, and then smiled, softening the assail, but never looked away.
She looked the world in the eye and stared it down, and I liked that about her because I didn't love the world then. The world wanted to kill me or catch me. The world wanted to put me back in the same cage I'd escaped from, where the good guys, the guys in prison-guard uniforms who got paid to do the right thing, had chained me to a wall and kicked me until they broke my bones. And maybe the world was right to want that. Maybe it was no worse than I deserved. But repression, they say, breeds resistance in some men, and I was resisting the world with every minute of my life.
The world and I are not on speaking terms, Karla said to me once in those early months. The world keeps trying to win me back, she said, but it doesn't work. I guess I'm just not the forgiving type. And I saw that in her, too, right from the start. I knew from the first minute how much like me she was. I knew the determination in her that was almost brutal, and the courage that was almost cruel, and the lonely, angry longing to be loved. I knew all that, but I didn't say a word. I didn't tell her how much I liked her. I was numb, in those first years after the escape: shell-shocked by the disasters that warred in my life. My heart moved through deep and silent water. No-one, and nothing, could really hurt me. No-one, and nothing, could make me very happy. I was tough, which is probably the saddest thing you can say about a man.
"You're becoming a regular here," she teased, ruffling my hair with one hand as she sat down at my table.
I loved it when she did that: it meant that she'd read me accurately, that she was sure I wouldn't take offence. I was thirty then-ugly, taller than average, with wide shoulders, a deep chest, and thick arms. People didn't often ruffle my hair.
"Yeah. I guess I am."
"So, you went around on tour with Prabaker again? How was it today?"
"He took me to the island, Elephanta, to see the caves."
"A beautiful place," she remarked quietly, looking at me, but dreaming of something else. "If you get the chance, you should visit the Ajanta and Ellora caves, in the north of the state. I spent the night there, once, at Ajanta, in one of the caves. My boss took me there."
"Your boss?"
"Yes, my boss."
"Is he European, your boss, or Indian?"
"Neither one, actually."
"Tell me about him."
"Why?" she asked with a direct, frowning stare.
I was simply making conversation, trying to keep her near me, talking to me, and the sudden wariness that bristled in the single word of her question surprised me. "It's no big deal," I replied, smiling. "I'm just curious about how people get work here, how they make a living, that's all."
"Well, I met him five years ago, on a long-distance flight," she said, looking down at her hands and seeming to relax once more.
"We both got on the plane at Zurich. I was on my way to Singapore, but by the time we got to Bombay he'd convinced me to get off the plane and work for him. The trip to the caves was... something special. He arranged it, somehow, with the authorities, and I went up there with him, and spent the night in a big cave, full of stone sculptures of the Buddha, and a thousand chattering bats. I was safe. He had a bodyguard posted outside. But it was incredible. A fantastic experience. And it really helped me to ... to put things in focus. Sometimes you break your heart in the right way, if you know what I mean."
I wasn't sure what she meant; but when she paused, expecting a reply, I nodded as if I did understand.
"You learn something or you _feel something completely new, when you break your heart that way," she said. "Something that only you can know or feel in that way. And I knew, after that night, I would never have that feeling anywhere but India. I knew-I can't explain it, I just knew somehow-that I was home, and warm, and safe. And, well, I'm still here..."
"What kind of business is he in?"
"What?"
"Your boss-what does he do?"
"Imports," she said. "And exports."
She lapsed into silence, turning her head to scan the other tables.
"Do you miss your home?"
"My home?"
"Yeah, I mean your other home. Don't you ever get homesick for Switzerland?"
"In a way, yes I do. I come from Basel-have you ever been there?"
"No, I've never been to Europe."
"Well, you must go, and when you go there you must visit Basel.
It's really a very European city, you know? It's divided by the river Rhine into Great Basel and Small Basel, and the two halves of the city have really different styles and attitudes, so it's like living in two cities at the same time. That used to suit me once. And it's right on the meeting place of three countries, so you can just walk across the border into Germany and France. You can have breakfast in France, you know, with coffee and baguettes, and lunch in Switzerland, and dinner in Germany, without leaving the city by more than a few kilometres. I miss Basel, more than I miss Switzerland."
She stopped, catching her breath, and looked up at me through soft, unpainted lashes.
"Sorry, I'm giving you a geography lesson here."
"No, no, please go on. It's interesting."
"You know," she said slowly, "I like you, Lin."
She stared that green fire into me. I felt myself reddening slightly, not from embarrassment, but from shame, that she'd said so easily the very words, I like you, that I wouldn't let myself say to her.
"You do?" I asked, trying to make the question sound more casual than it was. I watched her lips close in a thin smile.
"Yes. You're a good listener. That's dangerous, because it's so hard to resist. Being listened to-really listened to-is the second-best thing in the world."
"What's the first best thing?"
"Everybody knows that. The best thing in the world is power."
"Oh, is it?" I asked, laughing. "What about sex?"
"No. Apart from the biology, sex is all about power. That's why it's such a rush."
I laughed again.
"And what about love? A lot of people say that love is the best thing in the world, not power."
"They're wrong," she said with terse finality. "Love is the opposite of power. That's why we fear it so much."
"Karla, dear one, the things you say!" Didier Levy said, joining us and taking a seat beside Karla. "I must make the conclusion that you have wicked intentions for our Lin."
"You didn't hear a word we said," she chided.
"I don't have to _hear you. I can see by the look on his face.
You've been talking your riddles to him, and turning his head around. You forget, Karla, that I know you too well. Here, Lin, we'll cure you at once!"
He shouted to one of the red-jacketed waiters, calling the man by the number "4" emblazoned on the breast pocket on his uniform.
"Hey! Char number! Do battlee beer! What will you have, Karla?
Coffee? Oh, char number! Ek coffee aur. Jaldi karo!"
Didier Levy was only thirty-five years old, but those years were stitched to him in lumpy wads of flesh and deep lines that gave him the plump and careworn look of a much older man. In defiance of the humid climate, he always wore baggy canvas trousers, a denim shirt, and a rumpled, grey woollen sports coat. His thick, curly black hair never seemed to be shorter or longer than the line of his collar, just as the stubble on his tired face never seemed to be less than three days from its last shave. He spoke a lavishly accented English, using the language to provoke and criticise friend and stranger alike with an indolent malignity.
There were people who resented his rudeness and rebukes, but they tolerated them because he was frequently useful and occasionally indispensable. He knew where everything-from a pistol, to a precious gem, to a kilo of the finest Thai-white heroin-might be bought or sold in the city. And, as he sometimes boasted, there was very little he wouldn't do for the right amount of money, provided there was no significant risk to his comfort and personal safety.
"We were talking of the different ideas people have about the best thing in the world," Karla said, "But I don't have to ask what you think."
"You would say that _I think money is the best thing in the world," he suggested lazily, "and we'd both be right. Every sane and rational person one day realises that money is almost everything. The great principles and the noble virtues are all very well, in the long run of history, but from one day to the next, it's money that keeps us going-and the lack of it that drives us under the great wheel. And what about you, Lin? What did you say?"
"He didn't say anything yet, and now that you're here, he won't get a chance."
"Now be fair, Karla. Tell us, Lin. I would like to know."
"Well, if you press me, I'd have to say freedom."
"The freedom to do what?" he asked, putting a little laugh in the last word.
"I don't know. Maybe just the freedom to say no. If you've got that much freedom, you really don't need any more."
The beer and coffee arrived. The waiter slammed the drinks onto the table with reckless discourtesy. The service in the shops, hotels, and restaurants of Bombay, in those days, moved from a politeness that was charming or fawning to a rudeness that was either abrupt or hostile. The churlishness of Leopold's waiters was legendary. It's my favourite place in the whole world, Karla once said, to be treated like _dirt.
"A toast!" Didier declared, raising his glass to touch mine. "To the freedom... to drink! _Salut!"
He drank half the long glass, let out a loud, wide-mouthed sigh of pleasure, and then drank the rest. He was pouring himself a second glass when two others, a man and a woman, joined our group, sitting between Karla and me. The dark, brooding, undernourished young man was Modena, a dour and taciturn Spaniard who did black-market business with French, Italian, and African tourists. His companion, a slim and pretty German prostitute named Ulla, had for some time allowed him to call himself her lover.
"Ah, Modena, you are just in time to buy the next round," Didier shouted, reaching past Karla to slap him on the shoulder. "I will have a whisky and soda, if you please."
The shorter man flinched under the blow and scowled unhappily, but he called the waiter to his side, and ordered drinks. Ulla was speaking with Karla in a mixture of German and English that, by accident or intent, obscured the most interesting parts of her conversation.
"How could I know it, _na? How was it possible for me to know that he was a Spinner? Total verruckt, I tell you. At the start, he looked totally straight to me. Or, maybe, do you think that was a sign? Maybe he was a little bit too straight looking. _Na _ja, ten minutes in the room and er wollte auf der Klamotten kommen. On my best dress! I had to fight with him to save my clothes, der Sprintficker! Spritzen wollte er, all over my clothes! Gibt's ja nicht. And later, when I went to the bathroom for a little sniff of cokes, I came back to see dass er seinen Schwanz ganz tief in einer meiner Schuhe hat! Can you believe it!
In my shoe! _Nicht _zu _fassen."
"Let's face it," Karla said gently, "The crazy ones always know how to find you, Ulla."
"Ja, leider. What can I say? Crazy people love me."
"Don't listen to her, Ulla my love," Didier consoled her.
"Craziness is the basis of many a fine relationship. In fact, craziness is the basis of every fine relationship!"
"Didier," Ulla sighed, mouthing his name with a smile of exquisite sweetness, "have I told you to get fucked yet?"
"No!" he laughed, "But I forgive you for the lapse. Between us, my darling, such things are always implied, and understood."
The whisky arrived, in four small flasks, and the waiter prised the tops off two soda bottles with a brass bottle opener that hung from a chain at his belt. He let the tops bounce on the table and fall to the floor, then swished a grimy rag over the wet surface of the table, forcing us to duck and weave as the moisture spilled in all directions.
Two men approached our table from different parts of the restaurant, one to speak to Didier and the other with Modena.
Ulla used the moment to lean close to me. Under the table she pressed something into my hand-it felt like a small roll of bank notes-and her eyes pleaded with me not to draw attention to it.
As she talked to me, I slipped the notes into my pocket without looking at them.
"So have you decided how long you're going to stay?" she asked.
"I don't really know. I'm in no hurry."
"Don't you have someone waiting for you somewhere, or someone you should go to?" she asked, smiling with adroit but passionless coquetry. Seduction was a habit with her. She turned that same smile on her customers, her friends, the waiters, even on Didier, whom she openly disliked-on everyone, in fact, including her lover, Modena. In the months and years that followed, I heard a lot of people criticise Ulla, some of them cruelly, for her flirtations. I didn't agree with them. It seemed to me, as I got to know her well, that she flirted with the world because flirting was the only real kindness she ever knew or shared: it was her way of being nice, and of making sure that people-men- were nice to her. She believed that there wasn't enough niceness in the world, and she said so, in exactly those words, more than once. It wasn't deep feeling, and it wasn't deep thinking, but it was right, as far as it went, and there was no real harm in it.
And what the hell, she was a beautiful girl, and it was a very good smile.
"No," I lied. "There's no-one waiting, and no-one I should go to."
"And don't you have any, wie soll ich das sagen, any program? Any plan?"
"Not really. I'm working on a book."
During the time since the escape, I'd learned that telling people a small part of the truth-that I was a writer-provided me with a useful and flexible cover story. It was vague enough to explain extended stays or sudden departures, and the word research was comprehensive enough to account for inquiries about certain subjects, such as transport and travel and the availability of false documents, that I was sometimes forced to make. Moreover, the cover story guaranteed me a measure of privacy: the simple threat to tell people, at length, of my work in progress usually discouraged all but the most persistently curious.
And I was a writer. In Australia I'd written since my early twenties. I'd just begun to establish myself through my first published work when my marriage collapsed, I lost the custody of my daughter, and I lost my life in drugs, crime, imprisonment, and escape. But even as a fugitive, writing was still a daily custom and part of my instinctual routine. Even there, in Leopold's, my pockets were full of notes, scribbled onto napkins, receipts, and scraps of paper. I never stopped writing. It was what I did, no matter where I was or how my circumstances changed. One of the reasons I remember those early Bombay months so well is that, whenever I was alone, I wrote about those new friends and the conversations we shared. And writing was one of the things that saved me: the discipline and abstraction of putting my life into words, every day, helped me to cope with shame and its first cousin, despair.
"Well, Scheisse, I don't see what's to write about in Bombay.
It's no good place, ja. My friend Lisa says this is the place they were thinking about, when they invented the word pits. And I think it is a good place for calling a pits. Better you should go somewhere else to write about, like Rajasthan maybe. I did hear that it's not a pits there, in Rajasthan."
"She's right, Lin," Karla added. "This is not India. There are people here from every part of India, but Bombay isn't India.
Bombay is an Own-world, a world in itself. The real India is out there."
"Out there?"
"Out there, where the light stops."
"I'm sure you're right," I answered, smiling in appreciation of the phrase. "But I like it here, so far. I like big cities, and this is the third-biggest city in the world."
"You're beginning to sound like your tour guide," Karla joked. "I think, maybe, Prabaker has been teaching you too well."
"I guess he has. He's been filling my head with facts and figures every day for two weeks-quite amazing really, for a guy who left school when he was seven, and taught himself to read and write here on the streets."
"What facts and figures?" Ulla asked.
"Well, for instance, the official population of Bombay is eleven million, but Prabu says the guys who run the illegal numbers racket have a better idea of the real population, and they put it at anything from thirteen to fifteen million. And there are two hundred dialects and languages spoken in the city every day. Two hundred, for God's sake! It's like being in the centre of the world."
As if in response to that talk of languages, Ulla spoke to Karla quickly and intently in German. At a sign from Modena she stood, and gathered her purse and cigarettes. The quiet Spaniard left the table without a word, and walked toward the open archway that led to the street.
"I have a job," Ulla announced, pouting winsomely. "See you tomorrow, Karla. About eleven o'clock, ja? Maybe we'll have dinner together tomorrow night, Lin, if you're here? I would like that. Bye! _Tschus!"
She walked out after Modena, followed by leers and admiring stares from many of the men in the bar. Didier chose that moment to visit several acquaintances at another table. Karla and I were alone.
"She won't, you know."
"Won't what?"
"She won't have dinner with you tomorrow night. It's just her way."
"I know," I grinned.
"You like her, don't you?"
"Yeah, I do. What-does that strike you as funny?"
"In a way, yes. She likes you, too."
She paused, and I thought she was about to explain her remark, but when she spoke again it was to change the subject.
"She gave you some money. American dollars. She told me about it, in German, so Modena wouldn't understand. You're supposed to give it to me, and she'll collect it from my place at eleven tomorrow."
"Okay. Do you want it now?"
"No, don't give it to me here. I have to go now. I have an appointment. I'll be back in about an hour. Can you wait till then? Or come back, and meet me then? You can walk me home, if you like."
"Sure, I'll be here."
She stood to leave, and I stood also, drawing back her chair. She gave me a little smile, with one eyebrow raised in irony or mockery or both.
"I wasn't joking before. You really should leave Bombay."
I watched her walk out to the street, and step into the back of a private taxi that had obviously been waiting for her. As the cream-coloured car eased into the slow stream of night traffic, a man's hand emerged from the passenger window, thick fingers clutching a string of green prayer beads, and warning away pedestrians with a wave.
Alone again, I sat down, set my chair against the wall, and let the activity of Leopold's and its clamorous patrons close over me. Leopold's was the largest bar and restaurant in Colaba, and one of the largest in the city. The rectangular ground-floor room occupied a frontage equal to any four other restaurants, and was served by two metal doors that rolled up into wooden arches to give an expansive view of the Causeway, Colaba's busiest and most colourful street. There was a smaller, more discreet, air- conditioned bar on the first floor, supported by sturdy columns that divided the ground floor into roughly equal sections, and around which many of the tables were grouped. Mirrors on those pillars, and on much of the free wall space, provided the patrons with one of the bar's major attractions: the chance to inspect, admire, and ogle others in a circumspect if not entirely anonymous fashion. For many, the duplication of their own images in two or more mirrors at the same time was not least among the pleasures of the pastime. Leopold's was a place for people to see, to be seen, and to see themselves in the act of being seen.
There were some thirty tables, all of them topped with pearl- smoked Indian marble. Each table had four or more cedar chairs-
sixty-minute _chairs, Karla used to call them, because they were just uncomfortable enough to discourage customers from staying for more than an hour. A swarm of broad fans buzzed in the high ceiling, stirring the white-glass pendulum lights to a slow, majestic sway. Mahogany trim lined the painted walls, surrounded the windows and doors, and framed the many mirrors.
Rich fruits used in desserts and juices-paw paw, papaya, custard apples, mosambi, grapes, watermelon, banana, santra, and, in the season, four varieties of mango-were displayed across the whole surface of one wall in gorgeous abundance. A vast, solid-teak manager's counter presided, like the bridge of a sailing ship, over the busy deck of the restaurant. Behind that, along a narrow corridor, one corner of the frantic kitchen was occasionally visible beyond the scurry of waiters and the sweating clouds of steam.
A faded but still sumptuous elegance struck and held the eyes of all who walked through those wide arches into Leopold's little world of light, colour, and richly panelled wood. Its chief splendour was truly admired by none but its humblest workers, however, for it was only when the bar was closed, and the cleaners removed all the furniture each morning, that the beauty of the floor was exposed.
Its intricate tile-work replicated the pattern used in a north Indian palace, with hexagons in black, cream, and brown radiating from a central sunburst. And thus a paving designed for princes, all but invisible to the tourists with their eyes on their own reflections in the dazzling mirrors, revealed its luxurious perfections only in secret to the naked feet of cleaners, the city's poorest and meekest working men.
For one cool, precious hour each morning after it opened, and the floors had been cleaned, Leopold's was an oasis of quiet in the struggling city. From then, until it closed at midnight, it was constantly crowded with visitors from a hundred countries, and the many locals, both foreign and Indian, who came there from every part of the city to conduct their business. The business ranged from traffic in drugs, currencies, passports, gold, and sex, to the intangible but no less lucrative trade in influence- the unofficial system of bribes and favours by which many appointments, promotions, and contracts were facilitated in India.
Leopold's was an unofficial free zone, scrupulously ignored by the otherwise efficient officers of the Colaba police station, directly across the busy street. Yet a peculiar dialectic applied to the relationships between upstairs and down, inside and outside the restaurant, and governed all of the business transacted there. Indian prostitutes, garlanded with ropes of jasmine flowers and plumply wrapped in bejewelled saris, were prohibited downstairs, and only accompanied customers to the upstairs bar. European prostitutes were only permitted to sit downstairs, attracting the interest of men who sat at other tables, or simply paused on the street outside. Deals for drugs and other contraband were openly transacted at the tables, but the goods could only be exchanged outside the bar. It was common enough to see buyer and seller reach agreement on price, walk outside to hand over money and goods, then walk back inside to resume their places at a table. Even the bureaucrats and influence peddlers were bound by those unwritten rules: agreements reached in the dark booths of the upstairs bar could only be sealed, with handshakes and cash, on the pavement outside, so that no man could say he'd paid or received bribes within the walls of Leopold's.
While the fine lines that divided and connected the legal and illegal were nowhere more elegantly drawn, they weren't unique to the diverse society of Leopold's. The traders in the street stalls outside sold counterfeits of Lacoste, Cardin, and Cartier with a certain impudent panache, the taxi drivers parked along the street accepted tips to tilt their mirrors away from the unlawful or forbidden acts that took place on the seats behind them, and a number of the cops who attended to their duties with diligence, at the station across the road, had paid hefty bribes for the privilege of that lucrative posting in the city centre.
Sitting at Leopold's, night after night, and listening to the conversations at the tables around me, I heard many foreigners and not a few Indians complain about the corruption that adhered to every aspect of public and commercial life in Bombay. My few weeks in the city had already shown me that those complaints were often fair, and often true. But there's no nation uncorrupted.
There's no system that's immune to the misuse of money.
Privileged and powerful elites grease the wheels of their progress with kickbacks and campaign contributions in the noblest assemblies. And the rich, all over the world, live longer and healthier lives than the poor. There is a difference between the dishonest bribe and the honest bribe, Didier Levy once said to me. The dishonest bribe is the same in every country, but the honest bribe is India's alone. I smiled when he said that, because I knew what he meant. India was open. India was honest.
And I liked that from the first day. My instinct wasn't to criticise. My instinct, in the city I was learning to love, was to observe, and become involved, and enjoy. I couldn't know then that, in the months and years to come, my freedom and even my life would depend on the Indian willingness to tilt the mirror.
"What, alone?" Didier gasped, returning to the table. "C'est trop! Don't you know, my dear friend, it is faintly disgusting to be alone here? And, I must tell you that being disgusting is a privilege I reserve, exclusively, for myself. Come, we will drink."
He flopped into a chair beside me, calling his waiter to order more drinks. I'd spoken to him at Leopold's almost every night for weeks, but we'd never been alone. It surprised me that he'd decided to join me before Ulla, Karla, or another of his friends returned. In a small way, it was a kind of acceptance, and I felt grateful for it.
He drummed his fingers on the table until the whisky arrived, drank half his glass in a greedy gulp and then relaxed at last, turning to me with a narrow-eyed smile.
"You are heavy in thoughts."
"I was thinking about Leopold's-looking around, and taking it all in."
"A terrible place," he sighed, shaking his head of thick curls.
"I hate myself for enjoying it so much here."
Two men, wearing loose trousers gathered tightly at the ankles and dark green vests over their long-sleeved, thigh-length shirts, approached us, and drew Didier's keen attention. They nodded to him, provoking a broad smile and a wave, and then joined a group of friends at a table not far from our own.
"Dangerous men," Didier muttered, the smile still creasing his face as he stared at their backs. "Afghans. Rafiq, the small one, he used to run the black market in books."
"Books?"
"Passports. He was the boss. A very big fellow, previously. Now he runs brown sugar through Pakistan. He makes a lot more money from the brown sugar, but he is very bitter about this losing of the book business. Men were killed in that struggle-most of them his men."
It wasn't possible that they could've heard the remark, but just then the two Afghans turned in their seats and stared at us with dark, serious expressions, as if responding to his words. One of their companions at the table leaned close, and spoke to them. He pointed at Didier, then at me, and they shifted their gaze to look directly into my eyes.
"Killed..." Didier repeated softly, smiling even more broadly until the two men turned their backs to us once more. "I would refuse to do business with them, if only they did not do such good business."
He was speaking out of the corner of his mouth, like a prisoner under the eyes of the warders. It struck me as funny. In Australian prisons, that whispering technique is known as _side-
_valving. The expression spoke itself clearly in my mind and, together with Didier's mannerism, the words put me back in a prison cell. I could smell the cheap disinfectant, hear the metal hiss of the keys, and feel the sweating stone under my fingertips. Flashbacks are common to ex-prisoners, cops, soldiers, ambulance drivers, fire fighters, and others who see and experience trauma. Sometimes the flashback is so sudden, and so inappropriate to the surrounding circumstance, that the only sane reaction is foolish, uncontrollable laughter.
"You think I'm joking?" Didier puffed indignantly. "No, no, not at all."
"This is the truth, I assure you. There was a small war over this business. See, here, even now as we speak, the victors arrive.
That is Bairam, and his men. He is Iranian. He is an enforcer, and one of those who works for Abdul Ghani, who, in his turn, works for one of the great crime lords of the city, Abdel Khader Khan. They won this little war, and now it is they who control the business in passport books."
He gestured with a slight nod of his head to point out a group of young men, dressed in stylish western jeans and jackets, who'd just entered through one of the arches. They walked to the manager's desk and greeted the owners of Leopold's warmly before taking a table on the far side of the room. The leader of their group was a tall, heavy-set man in his early thirties. He lifted his plump, jovial face above the heads of his friends and swept the room from right to left, acknowledging deferential nods and friendly smiles from a number of acquaintances at other tables.
As his eyes found us, Didier waved a greeting.
"Blood," he said softly, through his bright smile. "For a time yet, these passports will be stamped in blood. For me it is nothing. In matters of food I am French, in matters of love I am Italian, and in matters of business I am Swiss. Very Swiss.
Strictly neutral. But there will be more blood on these books, of that I am sure."
He turned to me and blinked once, twice, as if severing the thread of daydream with his thick lashes.
"I must be drunk," he said with pleasurable surprise. "Let's have another drink."
"You go ahead. I'll sit on this one. How much do these passports cost?"
"Anything from one hundred to one thousand-dollars, of course.
Do you want to buy one?"
"No..."
"Ah. This is a Bombay gold dealer's no. It is a no that means maybe, and the more passionate the no, the more definite the maybe. When you want one, come to me. I will arrange it for you- for a small commission, of course."
"You make a lot of... commissions here?"
"Mmm, it goes. I cannot complain," he grinned, his blue eyes gleaming through lenses of pink, alcoholic wetness. "I make ends meet, as they say, and when they meet I get a payment from both of the ends. Just now, tonight, I made the arrangements for a sale-two kilos of Manali hashish. You see those Italian tourists, over there, by the fruits, the fellow with the long, blonde hair, and the girl in red? They wanted to buy. Someone-you see him, out there on the street, the one with a dirty shirt and no shoes, waiting for his commission-he put them to me, and then I in my turn put them to Ajay. He makes hashish business, and he is an excellent criminal.
See now, he sits with them, and all are smiling. The deal is done. My work for this night is finished. I am a free man!"
He thumped the table for another drink, but when the small bottle arrived he grasped it for a while with both hands, staring at it with a brooding, pensive expression.
"How long will you stay in Bombay?" he asked, without looking at me.
"I don't know. It's funny, everyone seems to ask me that in the last few days."
"You have already stayed longer than the usual. Most people cannot depart the city too quickly."
"There's a guide, Prabaker's his name, do you know him?"
"Prabaker Kharre? The big smile?"
"That's him. He's been showing me around for weeks now. I've seen all the temples and museums and art galleries, and a lot of the bazaars. From tomorrow morning he's promised to show me something of the other side of the city-the really city, he called it. He made it sound interesting. I'll stick around for that, and make my mind up then where I want to go next. I'm in no hurry."
"It's a very sad thing, to be in no hurry, and I would not be so free in admitting it, if I were you," he said, still staring at the bottle. When he wasn't smiling his face looked flabby, slack, and pallid grey. He was unwell, but it was the kind of unwell you have to work at. "We have a saying in Marseilles: a man in no hurry gets nowhere fast. I have been in no hurry for eight years."
Suddenly his mood changed. He poured a splash from the bottle, looked at me with a smile, and raised his glass.
"So, let's drink! To Bombay, a fine place to be in no hurry! And to civilised policemen, who will accept a bribe, in the interests of the order, if not of the law. To _baksheesh!"
"I'll drink to that," I said, clattering my glass against his in the toast. "So, tell me, Didier, what keeps you here in Bombay?"
"I am French," he replied, admiring the dew on his half-raised glass, "I am gay, I am Jewish, and I am a criminal, more or less in that order. Bombay is the only city I have ever found that allows me to be all four of those things, at the same time."
We laughed, and drank, and he turned his gaze on the wide room, his hungry eyes finally coming to rest on a group of Indian men who sat near one of the entrances. He studied them for a while, sipping slowly at his drink.
"Well, if you decide to stay, you have picked a good time for it.
This is a time of changes. Great changes. You see those men, eating foods with such strong appetite? They are Sainiks, workers for the Shiv Sena. Hatchet men, I think, is the charming English political phrase. Your guide, has he told you of the Sena?"
"No, I don't think so."
"A conscious lapse, I would say. The Shiv Sena Party is the face of the future in Bombay. Perhaps their mode and their politique is the future everywhere."
"What kind of politics?"
"Oh, regional, language-based, ethnic, us-against-them," he replied, sneering cynically as he ticked each characteristic off on the fingers of his left hand. They were very white, soft hands. His long fingernails were black with dirt under the edges.
"The politics of fear. I hate politics, and politicians even more. They make a religion of being greedy. It's unforgivable. A man's relationship to his greed is a deeply personal thing, don't you think? The Shiv Sena controls the police, because they are a Maharashtrian party, and most of the lower ranks of the police are Maharashtrians. They control a lot of the slums, too, and many of the unions, and some of the press. They have everything, in fact, except the money. Oh, they have the support of the sugar barons, and some of the merchants, but the real money-the industrial money and the black money-that is in the hands of the Parsees and the Hindus from other cities in India and, most hated of all, the Muslims. And here is the struggle, the guerre economique, the truth behind their talk of race and language and region. They are changing the city, a little less and a little more every day. Even the name has been changed, from Bombay to Mumbai. They haven't managed to change the maps, yet, but they will do it. And they will do almost anything, join with almost anyone, in their quest. There are opportunities. Fortunes. Just in the last few months some Sainiks-oh, not the public ones, not the highly placed ones- made a deal with Rafiq and his Afghans and the police. In exchange for certain cash and concessions, the police closed down all but a few of the opium dens in the city. Dozens of the finest smoking parlours, places that have served the community for generations, were closed in a single week. Closed forever!
Normally, I do not interest myself in the pigsty of politics, or in the slaughterhouse of big business, for that matter. The only force more ruthless and cynical than the business of big politics is the politics of big business. But this is big politics and big business together, in the destruction of the opium smoking, and I am incensed! I ask you, what is Bombay without its chandu-its opium-and its opium dens? What is the world coming to? It's a disgrace!"
I watched the men he'd described, as they concentrated with energetic single-mindedness on their meal. The table was heaped with platters of rice, chicken, and vegetable dishes. None of the five men spoke, nor did they so much as look at one another as they ate, bending low to their plates and scooping the food into their mouths rapidly.
"That's a pretty good line," I commented, grinning widely. "The one about the business of big politics, and the politics of big business. I like it."
"Ah, my dear friend, I cannot claim it as my own. It was Karla who said it to me the first time, and I have used it ever since.
I am guilty of many crimes-of most crimes, to say the truth-but I have never claimed a cleverness that was not my own."
"Admirable," I laughed.
"Well," he puffed, "a man has to draw the line somewhere.
Civilisation, after all, is defined by what we forbid, more than what we permit."
He paused, drumming the fingers of his right hand on the cold marble table top. After a few moments, he glanced around at me.
"That is one of mine," he said, apparently peeved that I hadn't drawn attention to the phrase. When I didn't react, he spoke again. "About the civilisation... it was one of mine."
"And damn clever," I responded quickly.
"Nothing at all," he said modestly, then he caught my eye, and we both laughed out loud.
"What was in it for Rafiq, if you don't mind my asking. That stuff about closing all the opium dens. Why did he go along with it?" "Go along with it?" Didier frowned, "Why, it was his idea. There is more money to be made from garad-brown sugar heroin-than there is from opium. And now everyone, all the poor who were chandu smokers, they have become garad smokers. Rafiq controls the garad, the brown sugar. Not all of it, of course. No one man controls all the thousands of kilos of brown sugar that come from Afghanistan, through Pakistan, into India. But a lot of it is his, a lot of the Bombay brown heroin. This is big money, my friend, big money."
"Why did the politicians go along with it?"
"Ah, it is not only brown sugar and hashish that comes from Afghanistan into India," he confided, lowering his voice and speaking from the corner of his mouth once more. "There are guns, heavy weapons, explosives. The Sikhs are using these weapons now, in Punjab, and the Muslim separatists in Kashmir. There are weapons, you see. And there is power, the power to speak for many of the poor Muslims who are the enemies of the Shiv Sena. If you control one trade, the drugs, you can influence the other, the guns. And the Sena Party is desperate to control the flow of guns into their state, their Maharashtra. Money and power. Look there, at the table next to Rafiq and his men. You see the three Africans, two men and a woman?"
"Yes. I noticed her before. She's very beautiful."
Her young face, with its prominent cheekbones, softly flared nose, and very full lips, looked as if it had been carved in volcanic stone by the rush of a river. Her hair was braided into a multitude of long, fine, beaded plaits. She laughed, sharing a joke with her friends, and her teeth gleamed large and perfectly white.
"Beautiful? I think not. Among the Africans, the men are beautiful, in my opinion, whereas the women are merely very attractive. For Europeans, the opposite is true. Karla is beautiful, and I never knew a European man who is beautiful in that way. But that is another matter. I mean only to say that they are customers of Rafiq, Nigerians, and that their business between Bombay and Lagos is one of the concessions-a spin-off is the term, I think-of this deal with the Sainiks. The Sena has a man at Bombay Customs. So much money is moving from hand to hand. Rafiq's little scheme is a tangle of countries, Afghanistan and India, Pakistan and Nigeria, and of powers-police and customs and politicians. All of it is a part of the struggle for control here in our cursed and beloved Bombay. And all of it, all this intrigue, grows from the closing down of my dear old opium dens. A tragedy."
"This Rafiq," I muttered, perhaps sounding more flippant than I'd intended, "is quite a guy."
"He is Afghan, and his country is at war, my friend. That gives him an edge, as the Americans say. And he works for the Walidlalla mafia council-one of the most powerful. His closest associate is Chuha, one of the most dangerous men in Bombay. But the real power here, in this part of the city, is the great don, lord Abdel Khader Khan. He is a poet, a philosopher, and a lord of crime. They call him Khaderbhai. Khader-_Elder-_Brother. There are others, with more money and more guns than Khaderbhai-he is a man of rigid principles, you see, and there are many lucrative things that he will not do. But those same principles give him-I am not sure how to say it in English-the immoral high ground, perhaps, and there is no-one, in this part of Bombay, who has more real power than he does. Many people believe that he is a saint, with supernatural capabilities. I know him, and I can tell you that Khaderbhai is the most fascinating man I ever met. If you will allow me the small immodesty, this makes him a truly remarkable individual, for I have met a great many interesting men in my life."
He left the words to swirl for a moment in the eye contact between us.
"Come, you are not drinking! I hate it when people take so long to drink a single glass. It is like putting on a condom to masturbate."
"No really," I laughed. "I, er, I'm waiting for Karla to come back. She's due any minute now."
"Ah, Karla..." He said her name with a long, purring roll. "And just what are your intentions with our inscrutable Karla?"
"Come again?"
"Perhaps it is more useful to wonder what intentions she has for _you, no?"
He poured the last of the one-litre bottle into his glass and topped it up with the last of the soda. He'd been drinking steadily for more than an hour. His eyes were as veined and bloodshot as the back of a boxer's fist, but the gaze that stared from them was unwavering, and his hands were precise in their movements.
"I saw her on the street, just hours after I landed in Bombay," I found myself saying. "There was something about her that... I think she's one of the reasons why I've stayed here this long.
Her and Prabaker. I like them-I liked them both on sight. I'm a people person, if you know what I mean. If the people in it were interesting, I'd prefer a tin shed to the Taj Mahal-not that I've seen the Taj Mahal yet."
"It leaks," Didier sniffed, dismissing the architectural wonder with two words. "But did you say interesting! Karla is interesting?"
He laughed out loud again. It was a peculiarly high-pitched laugh, harsh and almost hysterical. He slapped me hard on the back, spilling a little of his drink.
"Ha! You know, Lin, I approve of you, even if a commendation from me is a very fragile endorsement."
He drained his glass, thumped it on the table, and wiped his closely trimmed moustache with the back of his hand. When he saw my puzzled expression, he leaned close until our faces were only a few centimetres apart.
"Let me explain something to you. Look around here. How many people do you count?"
"Well, maybe, sixty, eighty."
"Eighty people. Greeks, Germans, Italians, French, Americans.
Tourists from everywhere. Eating, drinking, talking, laughing.
And from Bombay-Indians and Iranians and Afghans and Arabs and Africans. But how many of these people have real power, real destiny, real dynamique for their place, and their time, and the lives of thousands of people? I will tell you-four. Four people in this room with power, and the rest are like the rest of the people everywhere: powerless, sleepers in the dream, anonyme.
When Karla comes back, there will be five people in this room with power. That is Karla, the one you call interesting. I see by your expression, my young friend, you do not understand what I am saying. Let me put it this way: Karla is reasonably good at being a friend, but she is stupendously good at being an enemy. When you judge the power that is in a person, you must judge their capacities as both friend and as enemy. And there is no-one in this city that makes a worse or more dangerous enemy than Karla."
He stared into my eyes, looking for something, moving from one eye to the other and back again.
"You know the kind of power I'm talking about, don't you? Real power. The power to make men shine like the stars, or crush them to dust. The power of secrets. Terrible, terrible secrets. The power to live without remorse or regret. Is there something in your life, Lin, that you regret? Is there anything you have done, that you regret it?"
"Yes, I guess I-"
"Of course you do! And so do I, regret... things I have done... and not done. But not Karla. And that is why she is like the others, the few others in this room, who have real power. She has a heart like theirs, and you and I do not. Ah, forgive me, I am almost drunk, and I see that my Italians are leaving. Ajay will not wait for much longer. I must go, now, and collect my little commission, before I can allow myself to be completely drunk."
He sat back in his chair, and then pushed himself to his feet by leaning heavily on the table with both of his soft, white hands.
Without another word or look he left, and I watched him walk toward the kitchen, threading his way through the tables with the rolling, spongy step of the practised drinker. His sports coat was creased and wrinkled at the back, where he'd been leaning against the chair, and the seat of his trousers hung in baggy folds. Before I knew him well enough, before I realised how much it meant that he'd lived by crime and passion for eight years in Bombay without making a single enemy and without borrowing a single dollar, I tended to dismiss Didier as little more than an amusing but hopeless drunkard. It was an easy mistake to make, and one that he himself encouraged.
The first rule of black business everywhere is: never let anyone know what you're thinking. Didier's corollary to the rule was: always know what the other thinks of you. The shabby clothes, the matted, curly hair, pressed flat in places where it had rested on the pillow the night before, even his fondness for alcohol, exaggerated into what seemed to be a debilitating addiction-they were all expressions of an image he cultivated, and were as carefully nuanced as a professional actor's. He made people think that he was harmless and helpless, because that was the precise opposite of the truth.
I had little time to think about Didier and the puzzling remarks he'd made, however, because Karla soon returned, and we left the restaurant almost at once. We took the long way to her small house, walking beside the sea wall that runs from the Gateway of India to the Radio Club Hotel. The long, wide street was empty.
On our right, behind a row of plane trees, were hotels and apartment buildings. A few lights, here and there, showed windowgraphs of the lives being lived in those rooms: a sculpture displayed on one wall, a shelf of books on another, a poster of some Indian deity, framed in wood, surrounded by flowers and smoky streamers of incense and, just visible in the corner of a street-level window, two slender hands pressed together in prayer.
On our left was a vast segment of the world's largest harbour, the dark water starred by the moorage lights of a hundred ships at anchor. Beyond them, the horizon quivered with fires flung from the towers of offshore refineries. There was no moon. It was nearly midnight, but the air was still as warm as it had been in the early afternoon. High tide on the Arabian Sea brought occasional sprays over the waist-high stone wall: mists that swirled, on the Simoom, all the way from the coast of Africa.
We walked slowly. I looked up often at the sky, so heavy with stars that the black net of night was bulging, overflowing with its glittering haul. Imprisonment meant years without a sunrise, a sunset, or a night sky, locked in a cell for sixteen hours each day, from early afternoon to late morning. Imprisonment meant that they took away the sun and the moon and the stars. Prison wasn't hell, but there was no heaven in it, either. In its own way, that was just as bad.
"You can take this good-listener business a little too far, you know."
"What? Oh, sorry. I was thinking." I apologised, and shook myself into the moment. "Hey, before I forget, here's that money Ulla gave me."
She accepted the roll of notes from me and shoved it into her handbag without looking at it.
"It's strange, you know. Ulla went with Modena to break away from someone else who was controlling her like a slave. Now she's Modena's slave, in a way. But she loves him, and that makes her ashamed that she has to lie to him, to keep a little money for herself."
"Some people need the master-slave thing."
"Not just some people," she responded, with sudden and disconcerting bitterness. "When you were talking to Didier about freedom, when he asked you the freedom to do what?-you said, the freedom to say no. It's funny, but I was thinking it's more important to have the freedom to say yes."
"Speaking of Didier," I said lightly, trying to change the subject and lift her spirits, "I had a long talk with him tonight, while I was waiting for you." "I think Didier would've done most of the talking," she guessed.
"Well, yes, he did, but it was interesting. I enjoyed it. It's the first time we've ever talked like that."
"What did he tell you?"
"Tell me?" The phrase struck me as peculiar; it carried the hint that there were things he shouldn't tell. "He was giving me some background on some of the people at Leopold's. The Afghans, and the Iranians, and the Shiv Sainiks-or whatever they're called- and the local mafia dons."
She gave a wry little smile.
"I wouldn't take too much notice of what Didier says. He can be very superficial, especially when he's being serious. He's the kind of guy who gets right down to the skin of things, if you know what I mean. I told him once he's so shallow that the best he can manage is a single entendre. The funny thing is, he liked it. I'll say this for Didier, you can't insult him."
"I thought you two were friends," I remarked, deciding not to repeat what Didier had said about her.
"Friends... well, sometimes, I'm not really sure what friendship is. We've known each other for years. We used to live together once-did he tell you?"
"No, he didn't."
"Yeah. For a year, when I first came to Bombay. We shared a crazy, fractured little apartment in the Fort area. The building was crumbling around us. Every morning we used to wake with plaster on our faces from the pregnant ceiling, and there were always new chunks of stone and wood and other stuff in the hallway. The whole building collapsed in the monsoon a couple of years ago, and a few people were killed. I walk that way sometimes, and look up at the hole in the sky where my bedroom used to be. I suppose you could say that we're close, Didier and I. But friends? Friendship is something that gets harder to understand, every damn year of my life. Friendship is like a kind of algebra test that nobody passes. In my worst moods, I think the best you can say is that a friend is anyone you don't despise."
Her tone was serious, but I allowed myself a gentle laugh.
"That's a bit strong, I think."
She looked at me, frowning hard, but then she, too, laughed.
"Maybe it is. I'm tired. I haven't had enough sleep for the last few nights. I don't mean to be hard on Didier. It's just that he can be very annoying sometimes, you know? Did he say anything about me?"
"He... he said that he thinks you're beautiful."
"He said that?"
"Yes. He was talking about beauty in white people and black people, and he said Karla is beautiful."
She raised her eyebrows, in mild and pleased surprise.
"Well, I'll take that as a significant compliment, even if he is an outrageous liar."
"I like Didier."
"Why?" she asked quickly.
"Oh, I don't know. It's his professionalism, I think. I like people who are expert at what they do. And there's a sadness in him that... kind of makes sense to me. He reminds me of a few guys I know. Friends."
"At least he makes no secret of his decadence," she declared, and I was suddenly reminded of something Didier had told me about Karla, and the power of secrets. "Perhaps that's what we really have in common, Didier and I-we both hate hypocrites. Hypocrisy is just another kind of cruelty. And Didier's not cruel. He's wild, but he's not cruel. He's been quiet, in the last while, but there were times when his passionate affairs were the scandal of the city, or at least of the foreigners who live here. A jealous lover, a young Moroccan boy, chased him down the Causeway with a sword one night. They were both stark naked-quite a shocking event in Bombay, and in the case of Didier, something of a spectacle, I can report. He ran into the Colaba police station, and they rescued him. They are very conservative about such things in India, but Didier has one rule-he never has any sex- involvement with Indians-and I think they respect that. A lot of foreigners come here just for the sex with very young Indian boys. Didier despises them, and he restricts himself to affairs with foreigners. I wouldn't be surprised if that's why he told you so much of other people's business tonight. He was trying to seduce you, perhaps, by impressing you with his knowledge of dark business and dark people. Oh, hello! Katzeli! Hey, where did _you come from?"
We'd come upon a cat that was squatting on the sea wall to eat from a parcel someone had discarded there. The thin, grey animal hunkered down and scowled, growling and whining at the same time, but it allowed Karla to stroke its back as it lowered its head to the food once more. It was a wizened and scabrous specimen with one ear chewed to the shape of a rosebud, and bare patches on its sides and back where unhealed sores were exposed. I found it amazing that such a feral, emaciated creature should permit itself to be petted by a stranger, and that Karla would want to do such a thing. Even more astounding, it seemed to me then, was that the cat had such a keen appetite for vegetables and rice, cooked in a sauce of whole, very hot chillies.
"Oh, look at him," she cooed. "Isn't he beautiful?"
"Well..."
"Don't you admire his courage, his determination to survive?"
"I'm afraid I don't like cats very much. I don't mind dogs, but cats..."
"But you must love cats! In a perfect world, all the people would be like cats are, at two o'clock in the afternoon."
I laughed.
"Did anyone ever tell you you've got a very peculiar way of putting things?"
"What do you mean?" she asked, turning to me quickly.
Even in the streetlight I could see that her face was flushed, almost angry. I didn't know then that the English language was a gentle obsession with her: that she studied and wrote and worked hard to compose those clever fragments of her conversation.
"Just that you have a unique way of expressing yourself. Don't get me wrong, I like it. I like it very much. It's like... well ... take yesterday, for instance, when we were all talking about truth. Capital T Truth. Absolute truth. Ultimate truth. And _is _there any truth, is anything true? Everybody had something to say about it-Didier, Ulla, Maurizio, even Modena. Then you said, The truth is a bully we all pretend to like. I was knocked out by it. Did you read that in a book, or hear it in a play, or a movie?"
"No. I made it up myself."
"Well, that's what I mean. I don't think I could repeat anything that the others said, and be sure of getting it exactly right.
But that line of yours-I'll never forget it."
"Do you agree with it?"
"What-that the truth is a bully we all pretend to like?"
"Yes."
"No, I don't, not at all. But I love the idea, and the way you put it."
Her half-smile held my stare. We were silent for a few moments, and just as she began to look away I spoke again to hold her attention. "Why do you like Biarritz?"
"What?"
"The other day, the day before yesterday, you said that Biarritz is one of your favourite places. I've never been there, so I don't know, one way or the other. But I'd like to know why you like it so much."
She smiled, wrinkling her nose in a quizzical expression that might've been scornful or pleased.
"You remember that? Then, I guess I better tell you. Biarritz... how to explain it... I think it's the ocean. The Atlantic. I love Biarritz in the wintertime, when the tourists are gone, and the sea is so frightening that it turns people to stone. You see them standing on the deserted beaches, and staring at the sea- statues, scattered along the beach between the cliffs, frozen stiff by the terror they feel when they look at the ocean. It's not like other oceans-not like the warm Pacific or the Indian.
The Atlantic there, in winter, is really unforgiving, and ruthlessly cruel. You can feel it calling to you. You know it wants to drag you out and pull you under. It's so beautiful, I just burst into tears the first time I really looked at it. And I wanted to go to it. I wanted to let myself go out and under the big, angry waves. It's the scariest thing. But the people in Biarritz, they're the most tolerant and easy-going people in Europe, I think. Nothing freaks them out. Nothing is too over- the-top. It's kind of weird-in most holiday places, the people are angry and the sea is calm. In Biarritz, it's the other way around."
"Do you think you'll go back there one day-to stay, I mean?"
"No," she said quickly. "If I ever leave here, for good, it'll mean going back to the States. I grew up there, after my parents died. And I'd like to go back, some day. I think I love it there, most of all. There's something so confident and open-hearted and ... and brave about America, and the American people. I don't feel American-at least, I don't think I do-but I'm comfortable with them, if you know what I mean, more than I am with any other people, anywhere."
"Tell me about the others," I asked, wanting to keep her talking.
"The others?" she asked, frowning suddenly.
"The crew at Leopold's. Didier and the others. Tell me about Letitia, to start with. How do you know her?"
She relaxed, and let her eyes roam the shadows on the far side of the street. Still thinking, still considering, she lifted her gaze to the night sky. The blue-white light from a street lamp melted to liquid on her lips and in the spheres of her large eyes.
"Lettie lived in Goa for a while," she began, affection playing in her voice. "She came to India for the usual mix-parties and spiritual highs. She found the parties, and she enjoyed them, I think. Lettie loves a party. But she never had much luck with the spiritual side of things. She went back to London-twice in the same year-but then she came back to India for one last try at the soul thing. She's on a soul mission. She talks tough, but she's a very spiritual girl. I think she's the most spiritual of all of us, really."
"How does she live? I don't mean to pry-it's what I was saying before, I just want to learn how people make a living here. How foreigners get by, I mean."
"She's an expert with gems-gemstones and jewels. She works on a commission basis for some of the foreign buyers. It was Didier who got her the job. He has contacts everywhere in Bombay."
"Didier?" I smiled, genuinely surprised. "I thought that they hated each other-well, not hate exactly. I thought they couldn't stand each other."
"Oh, they annoy one another, sure. But there's a real friendship there. If anything bad happened to one of them, the other would be devastated."
"How about Maurizio?" I asked, trying to keep my tone even. The tall Italian was too handsome, too confident, and I envied him for what I saw as his deeper knowledge of Karla, and his friendship with her. "What's his story?"
"His story? I don't know what his story is," she replied, frowning again. "His parents died, leaving him a lot of money. He spent it, and I think he developed something of a talent for spending money."
"Other people's money?" I asked. I might've seemed too eager for that to be true, because she answered me with a question.
"Do you know the story of the scorpion and the frog? You know, the frog agrees to carry the scorpion across the river, because the scorpion promises not to sting him?"
"Yeah. And then the scorpion stings the frog, half way across the river. The drowning frog asks him why he did it, when they'll both drown, and the scorpion says that he's a scorpion, and it's his nature to sting."
"Yes," she sighed, nodding slowly until the frown left her brow.
"That's Maurizio. And if you know that, he's not a problem, because you just don't offer to carry him across the river. Do you know what I mean?"
I'd been in prison. I knew exactly what she meant. I nodded, and asked her about Ulla and Modena.
"I like Ulla," she answered quickly, turning that half-smile on me again. "She's crazy and unreliable, but I have a feeling for her. She was a rich girl, in Germany, and she played with heroin until she got a habit. Her family cut her off, so she came to India-she was with a bad guy, a German guy, a junkie like her, who put her to work in a very tough place. A horrible place. She loved the guy. She did it for him. She would've done anything for him. Some women are like that. Some loves are like that. Most loves are like that, from what I can see. Your heart starts to feel like an overcrowded lifeboat. You throw your pride out to keep it afloat, and your self-respect and your independence.
After a while you start throwing people out-your friends, everyone you used to know. And it's still not enough. The lifeboat is still sinking, and you know it's going to take you down with it. I've seen that happen to a lot of girls here. I think that's why I'm sick of love."
I couldn't tell if she was talking about herself, or pointing the words at me. Either way, they were sharp, and I didn't want to hear them.
"And how about Kavita? Where does she fit in?"
"Kavita's great! She's a freelancer-you know that-a freelance writer. She wants to be a journalist, and I think she'll get there. I hope she gets there. She's bright and honest and gutsy.
She's beautiful, too. Don't you think she's a gorgeous girl?"
"Sure," I agreed, recalling the honey-coloured eyes, the full and shapely lips, and the long, expressive fingers. "She's a pretty girl. But they're all good-looking people, I think. Even Didier, in his crumpled-up way, has got a touch of the Lord Byron about him. Lettie's a lovely girl. Her eyes are always laughing- they're a real _ice-blue, her eyes, aren't they? Ulla looks like a doll, with those big eyes and big lips on such a round face.
But it's a pretty doll's face. Maurizio's handsome, like a magazine model, and Modena's handsome in a different way, like a bullfighter or something. And you're... you're the most beautiful woman I've ever seen with my own eyes."
There, I'd said it. And even in the shock of speaking the thought out loud, I wondered if she'd understood, if she'd pierced my words about their beauty, and hers, to find the misery that inspired them: the misery that an ugly man feels in every conscious minute of love.
She laughed-a good, deep, wide-mouthed laugh-and seized my arm impulsively, pulling me along the footpath. Just then, as if drawn from the shadows by her laughter, there was a clattering rattle of noise as a beggar, riding on a small wooden platform with metal ball-bearing wheels, rolled off the footpath on the opposite side of the street. He pushed himself forward with his hands until he reached the centre of the deserted road, wheeling to a stop with a dramatic pirouette. His piteously thin mantis- legs were folded and tucked beneath him on the platform, which was a piece of wood no bigger than a folded newspaper. He wore a boy's school uniform of khaki shorts and a powder-blue shirt.
Although he was a man in his twenties, the clothes were too big for him.
Karla called out, greeting him by name, and we stopped opposite him. They spoke for some time in Hindi. I stared across the ten metres that separated us, fascinated by the man's hands. They were huge hands, as wide across the back, from knuckle to knuckle, as his face. In the streetlight I could see that they were thickly padded on the fingers and palms like the paws of a bear.
"Good night!" he called out in English, after a minute. He lifted one hand, first to his forehead and then to his heart, in a delicate gesture of consummate gallantry. With another swift, show-off's pirouette, he propelled himself forward along the road, gaining speed as he rolled down the gentle slope to the Gateway Monument.
We watched him out of sight, and then Karla pulled at my arm, leading me along the path once more. I allowed myself to be led.
I allowed myself to be drawn by the soft pleading of the waves, and the roulade of her voice; by the black sky, and the darker night of her hair; by the sea-tree-stone smell of the sleeping street, and the perfume sublime on her warm skin. I allowed myself to be drawn into her life, and the life of the city. I walked her home. I said good night. And I was singing quietly to myself as I went back along the silent brood of streets to my hotel.