And from the pink and purple palette of the perished evening, a blue-black night rose up around us as we rode. We plunged with the sea-wind into tunnels of light. The robe of sunset slipped from the shoulders of the city. Lisa’s hands moved on my hard skin like the sea; like the surging, swarming caress of the sea. And for a moment, as we rode together, we were one: one desire, one promise dissolving into compromise, one mouth tasting the trickle of danger and delight. And something—it might’ve been love, or fear—goaded me to the choice, putting whispers in the warming wind: This is as young, and as free, as you’ll ever be.

In my room, I lay down to sleep. The move to the slum would give me time: it was a hard solution to the visa problem, but a practical one. I felt relieved and optimistic about it, and I was very tired. I should’ve slept well. But my dreams that night were violent and troubled. Didier once told me, in a rambling, midnight dissertation, that a dream is the place where a wish and a fear meet. When the wish and the fear are exactly the same, he said, we call the dream a nightmare.

‘Well,’ I laughed, ‘I certainly don’t know God, and frankly I’m inclined to think that God is impossible to believe in, at least most of the notions of God that I’ve come across.’ ‘Oh, of course, naturally, God is impossible. That is the first proof that He exists.’ He was staring at me intently, his hand still resting warm on my arm. Be careful, I thought. You’re getting into a philosophical discussion with a man who’s famous for them. He’s testingyou. It’s a test, and the water’s deep. ‘Let me get this straight—you’re saying that because something is impossible, it exists?’ I asked, pushing a canoe of thought out into the uncharted water of his ideas. ‘That is correct.’ ‘Well, wouldn’t that mean that all the possible things don’t exist?’ ‘Precisely!’ he said, smiling more widely. ‘I am delighted that you understand.’ ‘I can say those words,’ I answered, laughing to match his smile, ‘but that doesn’t mean I understand them.’ ‘I will explain. Nothing exists as we see it. Nothing we see is really there, as we think we are seeing it. Our eyes are liars. Everything that seems real, is merely part of the illusion. Nothing exists, as we think it does. Not you. Not me. Not this room. Nothing.’ ‘I still don’t get it. I don’t see how possible things don’t exist.’ ‘Let me put it another way. The agents of creation, the energy that actually animates the matter and the life that we think we see around us, cannot be measured or weighed or even put into time, as we know it. In one form, that energy is photons of light. The smallest object is a universe of open space to them, and the entire universe is but a speck of dust. What we call the world is just an idea—and not a very good one, yet. From the point of view of the light, the photon of light that animates it, the universe that we know is not real. Nothing is. Do you understand now?’ ‘Not really. It seems to me that if everything we think we know is wrong, or is an illusion, then none of us can know what to do, or how to live, or how to stay sane.’ ‘We lie,’ he said with a flash of real humour in the gold-flecked amber of his eyes. ‘The sane man is simply a better liar than the insane man. You and Abdullah are brothers. I know this. Your eyes lie, and tell you that this is not so. And you believe the lie, because it is easier.’ ‘And that’s how we stay sane?’ ‘Yes.

The whole hanging-the-cunt-up-over-the-acid thing, it was all a bit—what did you call it, Salman? What was the word?’ ‘Tawdry,’ Salman suggested. ‘Yeah. Taw-fuckin-dry the whole thing. Farid, he likes to get respect, or cut to the chase and gun the motherfucker down, like. So,

Didier is here. I have all the latest news and gossip for you. You know the difference between news and gossip, don’t you? News tells you what people did. Gossip tells you how much they enjoyed it.’

‘Khaled! Yeah! Are you okay?’ ‘Sure. Jet fighters! Fuck me! Two of them. Not far overhead. A hundred feet, man, no more than that. Fuck! They were really smashing up the sound barrier! What a noise!’ ‘Were they Russians?’ ‘No, I don’t think so. Not this close to the border. More likely they were Pakistani fighters, American planes with Pak pilots, crossing a little into Afghan space to keep the Russians on their toes.

He went out without thanking me, as was usual with the people I treated at my hut. I knew that he would invite me to dinner at his house one day soon, or bring me a gift of fruit or special incense. The people showed thanks, rather than saying it, and I’d come to accept that.

No discovery pleased me more, on that first excursion from the city, than the full translation of the famous Indian head-wiggle. The weeks I’d spent in Bombay with Prabaker had taught me that the shaking or wiggling of the head from side to side—that most characteristic of Indian expressive gestures—was the equivalent of a forward nod of the head, meaning Yes. I’d also discerned the subtler senses of I agree with you, and Yes, I would like that. What I learned, on the train, was that a universal message attached to the gesture, when it was used as a greeting, which made it uniquely useful. Most of those who entered the open carriage greeted the other seated or standing men with a little wiggle of the head. The gesture always drew a reciprocal wag of the head from at least one, and sometimes several of the passengers. I watched it happen at station after station, knowing that the newcomers couldn’t be indicating Yes, or I agree with you with the head-wiggle because nothing had been said, and there was no exchange other than the gesture itself. Gradually, I realised that the wiggle of the head was a signal to others that carried an amiable and disarming message: I’m a peaceful man. I don’t mean any harm. Moved by admiration and no small envy for the marvellous gesture, I resolved to try it myself. The train stopped at a small rural station. A stranger joined our group in the carriage. When our eyes met for the first time, I gave the little wiggle of my head, and a smile. The result was astounding. The man beamed a smile at me so huge that it was half the brilliance of Prabaker’s own, and set to such energetic head waggling in return that I was, at first, a little alarmed. By journey’s end, however, I’d had enough practice to perform the movement as casually as others in the carriage did, and to convey the gentle message of the gesture. It was the first truly Indian expression my body learned, and it was the beginning of a transformation that has ruled my life, in all the long years since that journey of crowded hearts.

It was a genial, sanguine meeting, and I rose to leave with the strength and confidence that those honest, simple, decent men always inspired in me.

Whatever the reason, I felt dishearteningly alone in the city. I’d lost Prabaker and Abdullah, my closest friends, in the same week, and with them I’d lost the mark on the psychic map that says You Are Here. Personality and personal identity are in some ways like co-ordinates on the street map drawn by our intersecting relationships. We know who we are and we define what we are by references to the people we love and our reasons for loving them. I was that point in space and time where Abdullah’s wild violence intersected with Prabaker’s happy gentleness. Adrift, then, and somehow un-defined by their deaths, I realised with unease and surprise how much I’d also come to depend upon Khader and his council of bosses. My interactions with most of them had been cursory, it seemed to me, and yet I missed the reassurance of their presence in the city almost as much as I missed the company of my dead friends.

Despite that distinction, or because of it, the Saurabh was small and relatively unknown. Its name didn’t appear in any of the guidebooks for tourists or the epicure columns in the daily newspapers.

‘I didn’t think so. She told me she wasn’t going to tell you about it. I said she was crazy. I said she had to level with you. But she wouldn’t. It’s funny how it goes, isn’t it?

ONE WEEK became three weeks, and one month became five. From time to time, as I worked the streets of Colaba with my tourist clients, I ran into Didier, or Vikram, or some of the others from Leopold’s. Sometimes I saw Karla, but I never spoke to her. I didn’t want to meet her eyes while I was poor, and living in the slum. Poverty and pride are devoted blood brothers until one, always and inevitably, kills the other.

At first, on that first journey out of the city into India, I found such sudden politeness infuriating after the violent scramble to board the train. It seemed hypocritical for them to show such deferential concern over a nudge with a foot when, minutes before, they’d all but pushed one another out of the windows. Now, long years and many journeys after that first ride on a crowded rural train, I know that the scrambled fighting and courteous deference were both expressions of the one philosophy: the doctrine of necessity. The amount of force and violence necessary to board the train, for example, was no less and no more than the amount of politeness and consideration necessary to ensure that the cramped journey was as pleasant as possible afterwards. What is necessary? That was the unspoken but implied and unavoidable question everywhere in India. When I understood that, a great many of the characteristically perplexing aspects of public life became comprehensible: from the acceptance of sprawling slums by city authorities, to the freedom that cows had to roam at random in the midst of traffic; from the toleration of beggars on the streets, to the concatenate complexity of the bureaucracies; and from the gorgeous, unashamed escapism of Bollywood movies, to the accommodation of hundreds of thousands of refugees from Tibet, Iran, Afghanistan, Africa, and Bangladesh, in a country that was already too crowded with sorrows and needs of its own.

‘But sometimes …’ I protested, ‘you know, what about self-defence? What about killing to defend yourself?’ ‘Yes, a good point, Lin. I want you to imagine a scene for me. You are standing in a room with a desk in front of you. On the other side of the room is your mother. A vicious man holds a knife to the throat of your mother. The man will kill your mother. On the table in front of you there is a button. If you press it, the man will die. If you do not, he will kill your mother. These are the only possible outcomes. If you do nothing, your mother dies. If you press the button, the man dies and your mother is saved. What would you do?’ ‘The guy’s history’ I answered without hesitation. ‘Just so,’ he sighed, perhaps wishing that I’d wrestled with the decision a little longer before pressing the button. ‘And if you did this, if you saved your mother from this vicious killer, would you be doing the wrong thing or the right thing?’ ‘The right thing,’ I said just as swiftly. ‘No, Lin, I’m afraid not,’ he frowned. ‘We have just seen that in the terms of this new, objective definition of good and evil, killing is always wrong because, if everyone did it, we would not move toward God, the ultimate complexity, with the rest of the universe. So it is wrong to kill. But your reasons were good. So therefore, the truth of this decision is that you did the wrong thing, for the right reasons …’

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

Sooner or later, fate puts us together with all the people, one by one, who show us what we could, and shouldn’t, let ourselves become. Sooner or later we meet the drunkard, the waster, the betrayer, the ruthless mind, and the hate-filled heart. But fate loads the dice, of course, because we usually find ourselves loving or pitying almost all of those people. And it’s impossible to despise someone you honestly pity, and to shun someone you truly love. I sat beside Khaled in the darkness as the taxi took us to the business of crime. I sat beside him in the drift of coloured shadows, loving the honesty and toughness in him, and pitying the hatreds that weakened him and lied to him. And his face, reflected sometimes in the night that filled the window, was as drenched in destiny, and as radiant, as the faces found in paintings of doomed and haloed saints.

That convergence of interests drove more than a few producers and production houses into strange syzygies with gangsters: films about mafia goondas were financed by the mafia, and the profits from hit movies about hit men went into new crimes and real hits on real people, which in turn became the subjects for screenplays and new films financed by more mafia money.

Riding the night, cutting into crowded streets, winding the bike into the web of lights, I felt nothing: no fear, no dread, no shiver of excitement. Red-lining a motorcycle means opening the throttle so hard, with every change of gears, that the needle on the rev-counter is twisted all the way round to the red zone of maximum revolutions. And that’s what we were doing, all of us, in our different ways, Karla and Didier and Abdullah and I: we were red-lining our lives. And Lisa. And Maurizio. Twisting the needle to the red zone. A Dutch mercenary in Kinshasa once told me that the only time he ever stopped hating himself was when the risk he faced became so great that he acted without thinking or feeling anything at all. I wished he hadn’t said it to me because I knew exactly what he meant. And I rode that night, I soared that night, and the stillness in my heart was almost like being at peace.

At one point, Prabaker’s father reached out from his place at my left side to rest his hand on my shoulder. It was a simple gesture of kindness and comfort, but its effect on me was profound. A moment before, I’d been drifting toward sleep. Suddenly I was hard awake. I plunged into memories and thoughts of my daughter, my parents, my brother; of the crimes I’d committed, and the loves I’d betrayed and lost forever. It may seem strange, and it may in fact be impossible for anyone else to understand, but until that very moment I’d had no real comprehension of the wrong I’d done, and the life I’d lost. While I’d committed the armed robberies, I was on drugs, addicted to heroin. An opiate fog had settled over everything that I thought and did and even remembered about that time. Afterwards, during the trial and the three years in prison, I was sober and clear-headed, and I should’ve known then what the crimes and punishments meant, for myself and my family and the people I’d robbed at the point of a gun. But I didn’t know or feel anything of it then. I was too busy being punished, and feeling punished, to put my heart around it. Even with the escape from prison, and the flight, running and hiding as a wanted man, a hunted man with a price on my head—even then, there was no final, clear, encompassing grasp of the acts and the consequences that made up the new, bitter story of my life. It was only there, in the village in India, on that first night, adrift on the raft of murmuring voices, and my eyes filled with stars; only then, when another man’s father reached out to comfort me, and placed a poor farmer’s rough and calloused hand on my shoulder; only there and then did I see and feel the torment of what I’d done, and what I’d become—the pain and the fear and the waste; the stupid, unforgivable waste of it all. My heart broke on its shame and sorrow. I suddenly knew how much crying there was in me, and how little love. I knew, at last, how lonely I was. But I couldn’t respond. My culture had taught me all the wrong things well. So I lay completely still, and gave no reaction at all. But the soul has no culture. The soul has no nations. The soul has no colour or accent or way of life. The soul is forever. The soul is one. And when the heart has its moment of truth and sorrow, the soul can’t be stilled. I clenched my teeth against the stars. I closed my eyes. I surrendered to sleep. One of the reasons why we crave love, and seek it so desperately, is that love is the only cure for loneliness, and shame, and sorrow. But some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths about yourself are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. And some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you.

‘There is no act of faith more beautiful than the generosity of the very poor,’ Abdullah said, in his quiet tone. I had the impression that he never raised his voice above that softness.

I shook hands with each man in turn to seal the deal. The exchange was a little more formal and solemn than I’d expected it to be, and I had to clench my jaw to stifle a laugh. And those attitudes, their gravitas and my recusant impulse to laugh, registered the difference between us. For all that I liked Salman, Sanjay, and the others—and the truth was that I loved Nazeer, and owed him my life—the mafia was, for me, a means to an end and not an end in itself. For them, the mafia was a family, an infrangible bond that held them from minute to minute and all the way to the dying breath. Their solemnity expressed that kin-sacred obligation from eye to eye and hand to hand, but I knew they never believed it was like that for me. They took me in and worked with me—the white guy, the wild gora who went to the war with Abdel Khader Khan—but they expected me to leave them, sooner or later, and return to the other world of my memory and my blood.

Abdullah and Tariq slipped effortlessly into a sleep that eluded me. I lay back, in a darkness that smelt of incense and beedie cigarettes and cheap kerosene, and I sifted the events of the last few days through a sieve of doubt and suspicion. So much more had happened during those days, it seemed, than in the months before them. Madame Zhou, Karla, Khaderbhai’s council, Sapna—I felt myself to be at the mercy of personalities that were stronger, or at least more mysterious, than my own. I felt the irresistible draw and drift of a tide that was carrying me to someone else’s destination, someone else’s destiny. There was a plan or purpose. I sensed it. There were clues, I was sure, but I couldn’t separate them from the busy collage of hours and faces and words. The cloud-mottled night seemed full of signs and portents, as if fate itself was warning me to go or daring me to stay.

‘What I have just told you is the relationship between consciousness and matter,’ Khader proclaimed, pausing again until he had my eye. ‘This is a kind of test, and now you know it. This is a test that you should apply to every man who tells you that he knows the meaning of life. Every guru you meet and every teacher, every prophet and every philosopher, should answer these two questions for you: What is an objective, universally acceptable definition of good and evil? And, What is the relationship between consciousness and matter? If he cannot answer these two questions, as I have done, you know that he has not passed the test.’

We’d reached the perimeter of the legal slum, and the megalithic immensity of the twin skyscrapers loomed before us. Concreting had been completed to three-quarters of their height, but there were no windows, doors, or fittings on the unfinished buildings. With no flash or reflection or trim to relieve the grey massiveness of the structures, they swallowed light into themselves, extinguished it, and became silos for storing shadows. The hundreds of cave-like holes that would eventually be windows allowed a kind of cross-sectional view into the construction—an ant-farm picture of men and women and children, on every floor, walking to and fro, upward and down, about their tasks. At ground level, the noise was a percussive and exciting music of towering ambition: the nervous irritation of generators, the merciless metal-to-metal zing of hammers, and the whining insistence of drills and grinders.

Returning their warm handshakes, I moved past the young men to Kavita Singh sitting beside them. Kavita stood to give me a hug. It was the tender, close hug that a woman gives a man when she knows she can trust him, or when she’s sure his heart belongs to someone else. It was a rare enough embrace between foreigners. Coming from an Indian woman, it was uniquely intimate in my experience. And it was important. I’d been in the city for years; I could make myself understood in Marathi, Hindi, and Urdu; I could sit with gangsters, slum-dwellers, or Bollywood actors, claiming their goodwill and sometimes their respect; but few things made me feel as accepted, in all the Indian worlds of Bombay, as Kavita Singh’s fond embrace. I never told her that—what her affectionate and unconditional acceptance meant to me. So much, too much, of the good that I felt in those years of exile was locked in the prison cell of my heart: those tall walls of fear; that small, barred window of hope; that hard bed of shame. I do speak out now. I know now that when the loving, honest moment comes it should be seized, and spoken, because it may never come again. And unvoiced, unmoving, unlived in the things we declare from heart to heart, those true and real feelings wither and crumble in the remembering hand that tries too late to reach for them.

‘Very well. I think that you can see my point here—we avoid chaos, in building houses and dividing land and so forth, by having an agreed standard for the measure of a unit of length. We call it a metre and, after many attempts, we decide upon a way to establish the length of that basic unit. In the same way, we can only avoid chaos in the world of human affairs by having an agreed standard for the measure of a unit of morality.’ ‘I’m with you.’ ‘At the moment, most of our ways of defining the unit of morality are similar in their intentions, but they differ in their details. So the priests of one nation bless their soldiers as they march to war, and the imams of another country bless their soldiers as they march out to meet them. And everybody who is involved in the killing, says that he has God on his side. There is no objective and universally acceptable definition of good and evil. And until we have one, we will go on justifying our own actions, while condemning the actions of the others.’ ‘And you’re putting the physics of the universe up as a kind of platinum-iridium bar?’ ‘Well, I do think that our definition is closer, in its precision, to the photon-second measure than it is to the platinum-iridium bar, but the point is essentially correct. I think that when we look for an objective way to measure good and evil, a way that all people can accept as reasonable, we can do no better than to study the way that the universe works, and its nature—the quality that defines the entire history of it—the fact that it is constantly moving towards greater complexity. We can do no better than to use the nature of the universe itself. And all the holy texts, from all the great religions, tell us to do this. The Holy Koran, for example, is often telling us, instructing us, to study the planets and the stars to find truth and meaning.’

The contrast between the familiar and the exceptional was everywhere around me. A bullock cart was drawn up beside a modern sports car at a traffic signal. A man squatted to relieve himself behind the discreet shelter of a satellite dish. An electric forklift truck was being used to unload goods from an ancient wooden cart with wooden wheels. The impression was of a plodding, indefatigable, and distant past that had crashed intact, through barriers of time, into its own future. I liked it.

And in that way was my role in the slum created. If fate doesn’t make you laugh, Karla said, in one of my first conversations with her, then you just don’t get the joke. As a teenager I’d trained in first-aid treatment. The formal course of study had covered cuts, burns, sprains, breaks, and a wide range of diagnostic and emergency procedures. Later, I’d earned my nickname, Doc, by using my training in CPR to pull junkies out of overdoses, and save their lives. There were hundreds of people who only knew me as Doc. Many months before that morning in the slum, my friends in New Zealand had given me the first-aid kit as a going-away present. I was sure those threads—the training, the nickname, the firstaid kit, the work as unofficial doctor in the slum—were all connected in some way that was more than accident or coincidence. And it had to be me. Another man, with my first-aid training or better trained, wouldn’t have been forced by crime and a prison-break to live in the slum. Another criminal, ready to live there with the poor, wouldn’t have had my training. I couldn’t make sense of the connection on that first morning. I didn’t get the joke, and fate didn’t make me laugh. But I knew there was something—some meaning, some purpose, leading me to that place, and that job, at exactly that time. And the force of it was strong enough to bind me to the work, when every intuition tried to warn me away.

IN MY FIRST KNIFE FIGHT I learned that there are two kinds of people who enter a deadly conflict: those who kill to live, and those who live to kill. The ones who like killing might come into a fight with most of the fire and fury, but the man or woman who fights just to live, who kills just to survive, will usually come out of it on top. If the killer-type begins to lose the fight, his reason for fighting it fades. If the survivor-type begins to lose, his reason for fighting it flares up fiercer than ever. And killing contests with deadly weapons, unlike common fistfights, are lost and won in the reasons that remain when the blood begins to run. The simple fact is that fighting to save a life is a better and more enduring reason than fighting to end one.

We wouldn’t make it. We couldn’t make it. There weren’t many of them—there weren’t many guns firing—but they had so much time to get a sight on us and shoot us down. They were going to kill us all. Then a wild flurry of explosions crunched into the enemy lines. The idiots! They blew up their own mortar shells, I thought, and gunfire like fireworks rattled the world from everywhere at once. And Nazeer raised his assault rifle, and fired as he ran, and I saw Mahmoud Melbaaf firing ahead of me, on my right, where Suleiman had been, and I raised my weapon, and pulled the trigger. There was a horrible, blood-freezing scream somewhere very close. I suddenly recognised it as my own, but I couldn’t stop it. And I looked at the men, the brave and beautiful men beside me, running into the guns, and God help me for thinking it, and God forgive me for saying it, but it was glorious, it was glorious, if glory is a magnificent and raptured exaltation. It was what love would be like, if love was a sin. It was what music would be, if music could kill you. And I climbed a prison wall with every running step.

Khaderbhai once said that every virtuous act is inspired by a dark secret. It mightn’t be true of everyone, but it was true enough about me. The little good that I’ve done in the world has always dragged behind it a shadow of dark inspiration. What I do know now, and didn’t know then is that, in the long run, motive matters more with good deeds than it does with bad. When all the guilt and shame for the bad we’ve done have run their course, it’s the good we did that can save us. But then, when salvation speaks, the secrets we kept, and the motives we concealed, creep from their shadows. They cling to us, those dark motives for our good deeds. Redemption’s climb is steepest if the good we did is soiled with secret shame.

THE STANDING BABAS were men who’d taken a vow never to sit down, or lie down, ever again, for the rest of their lives. They stood, day and night, forever. They ate their meals standing up, and made their toilet standing up. They prayed and worked and sang standing up. They even slept while they were standing, suspended in harnesses that kept the weight of their bodies on their legs, but prevented them from falling when they were unconscious. For the first five to ten years of that constant standing, their legs began to swell. Blood moved sluggishly in exhausted veins, and muscles thickened. Their legs became huge, bloated out of recognisable shape, and covered with purple varicose boils. Their toes squeezed out from thick, fleshy feet, like the toes of elephants. During the following years, their legs gradually became thinner, and thinner. Eventually, only bones remained, with a paint-thin veneer of skin and the termite trails of withered veins. The pain was unending and terrible. Spikes and spears of agony stabbed up through their feet with every downward pressure. Tormented, tortured, the Standing Babas were never still. They shifted constantly from foot to foot in a gentle, swaying dance that was as mesmerising, for everyone who saw it, as the sound-weaving hands of a flute player for his cobras.

Dead and naked he looked thinner, feebler somehow. I should’ve pitied him. Even if we never pity them at any other time, and in any other way, we should pity the dead when we look at them, and touch them. Pity is the one part of love that asks for nothing in return and, because of that, every act of pity is a kind of prayer. And dead men demand prayers. The silent heart, the tumbled nave of the chest unbreathing, and the guttered candles of the eyes—they summon our prayers. Each dead man is a temple in ruins, and when our eyes walk there we should pity, we should pray. But I didn’t pity him. You got what you deserve, I thought, as we rolled his body in the plastic sheet. I felt despicable and mean-souled for thinking it, but the words wormed their way through my brain like a murderous whisper working its way through an angry mob. You got what you deserve.

I had preoccupations of my own. The wounds on my legs were healing readily enough, and the skin on my forehead closed safely over a small, lumpy ridge of bone, but my ruptured eardrum became infected, and it was the source of a constant and almost unbearable pain. Every mouthful of food, every sip of water, every word I spoke, and every loud noise that I heard sent piercing little scorpion stings along the nerves of my face and throat, and deep into my fevered brain. Every movement of my body, or turn of the head, stabbed into that sweating excruciation. Every inward breath, and sneeze or cough, magnified the torment. Shifting accidentally in my sleep and bumping the damaged ear sent me starting up from the cot with a shout that woke every man for fifty metres around. And then, after three weeks of that maddening, torturous pain and massive, self-medicated doses of penicillin and hot antibiotic washes, the wound healed and the pain receded from me just as memories do, like landmarks on a distant, foggy shore.

‘Hell, no. I can’t stand politicians. A politician is someone who promises you a bridge, even when there’s no river.’

We came upon a group of a dozen men and a similar number of women and children gathered near the hut where I’d lived and worked for almost two years. And although I’d left the zhopadpatti, convinced that I could never live there again, it always gave me a thrill of pleasure to see the humble little hut, and stand near it. The few foreigners I’d taken to the slum—and even the Indians, such as Kavita Singh and Vikram, who’d visited me there—had been horrified by the place and aghast to think that I’d chosen to stay there so long. They couldn’t understand that every time I entered the slum I felt the urge to let go and surrender to a simpler, poorer life that was yet richer in respect, and love, and a vicinal connectedness to the surrounding sea of human hearts. They couldn’t understand what I meant when I talked about the purity of the slum: they’d been there, and seen the wretchedness and filth for themselves. They saw no purity. But they hadn’t lived in those miraculous acres, and they hadn’t learned that to survive in such a writhe of hope and sorrow the people had to be scrupulously and heartbreakingly honest. That was the source of their purity: above all things, they were true to themselves.

For me, the most important thing is the amount of sin that is in the crime. You asked me, just now, why we do not make money from prostitution and drugs, as the other councils do, and I tell you it is because of the sin that is in those crimes. It is for this reason that I will not sell children, or women, or pornography, or drugs. It is for this reason that I will not permit those businesses in any of my areas. In all of these things, the sin in the crime is so great that a man must give up his soul for the profit he makes. And if a man gives his soul, if he becomes a soul-less man, it takes nothing less than a miracle for him to regain it.’

The bus stopped in a stutter of traffic, and a man emerged from one of the huts near my window. He was a foreigner, as pale-skinned as any of the new arrivals on the bus, and dressed only in a wrap-around sheet of hibiscus-patterned cotton. He stretched, yawned, and scratched unselfconsciously at his naked belly. There was a definitive, bovine placidity in his face and posture. I found myself envying that contentment, and the smiles of greeting he drew from a group of people who walked past him to the road.

‘So do I,’ she said, laughing. ‘I love it. They put it all together from painted canvas and skinny pieces of wood and it’s … it’s like they’re making dreams or something. I know that sounds corny, but I mean it. I love this world, Lin, and I don’t want to go back to the other one.’

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.

The simple and astonishing truth about India and Indian people is that when you go there, and deal with them, your heart always guides you more wisely than your head. There’s nowhere else in the world where that’s quite so true. I didn’t know that then, as I closed my eyes in the dark and breathing silence on that first night in Bombay. I was running on instinct, and pushing my luck. I didn’t know that I’d already given my heart to the woman, and the city. And knowing none of it, I fell, before the smile faded from my lips, into a dreamless, gentle sleep.

Abdul’s agents in South America, Asia, and Africa established contact with embezzlers, torturers, mandarins, and martinets who’d supported fallen tyrannies.

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.

‘Are you still an anarchist?’ It was a hard question to answer, because it forced me to compare the man I’d once been with the man I’d allowed myself to become. ‘Anarchists …’ I began and then faltered. ‘No political philosophy I ever heard of loves the human race as much as anarchism. Every other way of looking at the world says that people have to be controlled, and ordered around, and governed. Only the anarchists trust human beings enough to let them work it out for themselves. And I used to be that optimistic once. I used to believe and think like that. But I don’t, any more. So, no—I guess I’m not an anarchist now.’

Long years after that day, the Afghan guerrillas I came to know as friends, on a mountain near the siege of Kandahar, talked for hours about Indian films and their favourite Bollywood movie stars. Indian actors are the greatest in the world, one of them said once, because Indian people know how to shout with their eyes. That back-street fried-foods cook stared at me, with shouting eyes, and stopped me as surely as if he’d pushed a hand into my chest. I couldn’t move. In my own eyes, there were words—I’m sorry, I’m sorry that you have to do this work, I’m sorry that your world, your life, is so hot and dark and unremembered, I’m sorry that I’m intruding

The weeks of the city I’d thought I was beginning to know—the Bombay of temples, bazaars, restaurants, and new friends—had cindered in the fires of that public rage.

‘Fanaticism is the opposite of love,’ I said, recalling one of Khaderbhai’s lectures. A wise man once told me—he’s a Muslim, by the way—that he has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded Jew than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. He has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded Christian or Buddhist or Hindu than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. In fact, he has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded atheist than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. I agree with him, and I feel the same way. I also agree with Winston Churchill, who once defined a fanatic as someone who won’t change his mind and can’t change the subject.’

‘Lai ka Rani?’ he asked. A Red Queen? ‘Yeah. It’s a biology thing. It’s about hosts, like human bodies, and parasites, like viruses and such. I studied it when I was running my clinic in the zhopadpatti. The hosts—our bodies—and the viruses—any bug that makes us sick—are locked in a competition with each other. When the parasite attacks, the host develops a defence. Then the virus changes to beat that defence, so the host gets a new defence. And that keeps on going. They call it a Red Queen contest. It’s from the story, you know, Alice in Wonderland.’ ‘I know it,’ Salman answered. ‘We did it at school. But I never understood it.’ ‘That’s okay—nobody does. Anyway, the little girl, Alice, she meets this Red Queen, who runs incredibly fast but never seems to get anywhere. She tells Alice that, in her country, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. And that’s like us with the passport authorities, and the licensing boards, and the banks all over the world. They keep changing the passports and other documents to make it harder for us. And we keep finding new ways to fake them. And they keep changing the way they make them, and we keep finding new ways to fake them and forge them and adapt them for ourselves. It’s a Red Queen contest, and we all have to run real fast just to stand still.’

Shantu worked in his taxi sixteen hours a day for six days every week. He was determined that his son and two daughters would know lives that were better than his own. He saved money for their education and for the substantial dowries he would be required to provide if the girls were to marry well. He was permanently exhausted, and beset by all the torments, terrible and trivial, that poverty endures. Vinod supported his parents, his wife, and five children from the fish that he hauled from the sea with his thin, strong arms. On his own initiative, he’d formed a co-operative with twenty other poor fishermen. That pooling of resources had provided a measure of security, but his income seldom stretched to luxuries such as new sandals, or school books, or a third meal in any one day. Still, when they knew what I wanted to do, and why, neither Vinod nor Shantu would accept any money from me. I struggled to give it to them, even trying to force the money down the fronts of their shirts, but they refused to allow it. They were poor, tired, worried men, but they were Indian, and any Indian man will tell you that although love might not have been invented in India, it was certainly perfected there.

To ensure the unflagging progress of the ox, Kishan beat the animal fiercely and often. The stick rose and fell with a resounding smack at regular intervals of minutes. The rhythm of those heavy blows was punctuated by sharp jabs at the animal’s flanks with the nail attached to the end of the stick. Each thrust penetrated the thick hide, and raised a little tuft of cream brown fur. The ox didn’t react to those assaults, other than to continue its lumbering, drag-footed advance along the path. Nevertheless, I suffered for the beast. Each blow and jab accumulated within my sympathy until it was more than I could bear. ‘Prabu, do me a favour, please ask your father to stop hitting the animal.’ ‘Stop … stop hitting?’ ‘Yeah. Ask him to stop hitting the ox, please.’ ‘No, it is not possible, Lin,’ he replied, laughing. The stick slammed into the broad back of the ox, and was followed by two quick jabs of the nail. ‘I mean it, Prabu. Please ask him to stop.’ ‘But, Lin …’ I flinched, as the stick came down again, and my expression pleaded with him to intervene. Reluctantly, Prabaker passed on my request to his father. Kishan listened intently, and then laughed helplessly in a fit of giggles. After a time, he perceived his son’s distress, however, and the laughter subsided, and finally died, in a flurry of questions. Prabaker did his best to answer them, but at last he turned his increasingly forlorn expression to me once more. ‘My father, Lin, he wants to know why you want him to stop using the stick.’ ‘I don’t want him to hurt the ox.’ This time Prabaker laughed, and when he was able to translate my words for his father, they both laughed. They talked for a while, still laughing, and then Prabaker addressed me again. ‘My father is asking, is it true that in your country people are eating cows?’ ‘Well, yes, it’s true. But …’ ‘How many of the cows do you eat there?’ ‘We … well … we export them from my country. We don’t eat them all ourselves.’ ‘How many?’ ‘Oh, hundreds of thousands of them. Maybe millions, if you count the sheep. But we use humane methods, and we don’t believe in unnecessarily hurting them.’ ‘My father is saying, he thinks it is very hard to eat one of these big animals, without hurting it.’ He then sought to explain my nature to his father by recounting for him the story of how I’d given up my seat, on the train journey, to allow an elderly man to sit, how I shared my fruit and other food with my fellow passengers, and how I often gave to beggars on the streets of Bombay. Kishan pulled the cart to a sudden stop, and jumped down from the wooden yoke. He fired a stream of commands at Prabaker, who finally turned to me to translate. ‘My father wants to know if we have it any presents with us, from Bombay, for him and the family. I told him we did. Now he wants us to give it those presents to him here, and in this place, before we go any more along the road.’ ‘He wants us to go through our bags, here, on this track?’ ‘Yes. He is afraid that when we get to Sunder village, you will have a good hearts, and give it away all those presents to other people, and he will not get his presents. He wants it all his presents now.’ So we did. Under the indigo banner of early-evening sky, on the scratch of track between fields of undulant maize and millet, we spread out the colours of India, the yellows and reds and peacock blues of shirts and lungi wraps and saris. Then we repacked them, with fragrant soaps and sewing needles, incense and safety pins, perfume and shampoo and massage oils, so that one full bag contained only those things we’d brought for Prabaker’s family. With that bag safely tucked behind him on the rails of the ox-cart harness, Kishan Mango Kharre launched us on the last leg of our journey by striking the dumbly patient ox more often, and with a good deal more vigour, than he’d done before I tried to intercede on its behalf.

A make-up assistant held up a mirror while Chunkey combed and fretted at his hair. The intensity of the gaze that he focused on the mirror was as steadfast as a surgeon’s might be in the midst of a complex and critical procedure.

The restaurant broke the business curfew, and should’ve been closed down by the officers of the Haji Ali police post, which was only twenty metres away. But Indian pragmatism recognised that civilised people in large, modern cities needed places to gather and hunt. The owners of certain oases of noise and fun were permitted to bribe various officials and cops in order to stay open, virtually all night. That wasn’t, however, the same thing as having a licence. Such restaurants and bars were operating illegally, and sometimes the appearance of compliance had to be displayed. Regular phone calls alerted the police post at Haji Ali when a commissioner or a minister or some other VIP intended to drive past. With a co-operative bustle, the lights were turned out, the cars dispersed, and the restaurant was forced to a temporary close. Far from discouraging people, that small inconvenience added a touch of glamour and adventure to the commonplace act of buying snacks. Everyone knew that the restaurant at Haji Ali, like every other illegal nightspot in town that faked a close, would reopen in less than half an hour. Everyone knew about the bribes that were paid and taken. Everyone knew about the warning phone calls. Everyone profited, and everyone was well pleased. The worst thing about corruption as a system of governance, Didier once said, is that it works so well.

Knowing that I shouldn’t, I turned through the pages and read her private thoughts. It wasn’t a diary. There were no dates on any of the pages, and there were none of the day-to-day accounts of things done and people met. Instead, there were fragments. Some of them were culled from various novels and other texts, each one attributed to the respective author and annotated with her own comments and criticisms. There were many poems. Some had been copied out from selections and anthologies and even newspapers, with the source and the poet’s name written beneath. Other poems were her own, written out several times with a word or a phrase changed and a line added. Certain words and their dictionary meanings were listed throughout the journal and marked with asterisks, forming a running vocabulary of unusual and obscure words. And there were random, stream-of-consciousness passages that described what she’d been thinking or feeling on a certain day.

DIDIER LEVY was the worst pillion passenger I’ve ever known. He held on to me so tightly, and with such rigid tensity, that it was difficult to steer the bike. He howled as we approached cars, and shrieked when we sped up to pass them. On critical, sweeping turns he wriggled in terror, trying to straighten the bike from its necessary lean into the curve.

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

‘My father is a very success man,’ Prabaker beamed, proudly, his arm around the older man’s shoulders. I spoke very little Marathi, and Kishan spoke no English, so Prabaker repeated everything in both languages. Hearing the phrase in his own language, Kishan lifted his shirt with a graceful, artless flourish, and patted at his hairy pot-belly. His eyes glittered as he spoke to me, waggling his head all the while in what seemed to be an unnervingly seductive leer. ‘What did he say?’ ‘He wants you to pat his tummies,’ Prabaker explained, grinning. Kishan grinned as widely. ‘I don’t think so.’ ‘Oh, yes, Lin. He wants you to pat his tummies.’ ‘No.’ ‘He really wants you to give it a pat,’ he persisted. ‘Tell him I’m flattered, and I think it’s a fine tummies. But tell him I think I’ll pass, Prabu.’ ‘Just give it a little pat, Lin.’ ‘No,’ I said, more firmly. Kishan’s grin widened, and he raised his eyebrows several times, in encouragement. He still held the shirt up to his chest, exposing the round, hairy paunch. ‘Go on, Lin. A few pats only. It won’t bite you, my father’s tummies.’ Sometimes you have to surrender, Karla said, before you win. And she was right. Surrender is at the heart of the Indian experience. I gave in. Glancing around me, on the deserted track, I reached out and patted the warm and fuzzy belly. Just then, of course, the tall green stalks of millet beside us on the path separated to reveal four dark brown faces. They were young men. They stared at us, their eyes wide with the kind of amazement that’s afraid, appalled, and delighted at the same time.

The signal changed and I kicked the bike into gear, twisting the throttle to send us into the intersection on the staccato throbbing of the engine’s growl.

I had no idea where we were going. I had no idea how or when we would return. We were travelling toward Tardeo, which was the opposite direction to my home in the Colaba slum. As the minutes passed, I reflected on that particularly Indian custom of amiable abduction. For months, in the slum, I’d succumbed to the vague and mysterious invitations of friends to accompany them to unspecified places, for unknown purposes. You come, people said with smiling urgency, never feeling the need to tell me where we were going, or why. You come now! I’d resisted it a few times, at first, but I soon learned that those obscure, unplanned journeys were invariably worthwhile, frequently interesting and enjoyable, and quite often important. Little by little, I learned to relax, and submit, and trust my instincts, just as I was doing with Khaderbhai. I never regretted it, and I was never once hurt or disappointed by the friends who abducted me.

‘So go on, tell me. What’s he like, that little kid?’ ‘Well, I think he’s some kind of religious fanatic,’ I confided, smiling, as I looked over my shoulder at the sleeping boy. ‘He made me stop three times today, and this evening, so he could say his prayers. I don’t know if it’s doing his soul any good, but his stomach seems to be working fine.

It was impossible for me to tell her age or her nationality. She might’ve been Spanish. She might’ve been Russian. She might’ve been Indian, in part, or Chinese, or even Greek. And Karla was right—she had been beautiful once. It was the kind of beauty that grows from the sum of its parts rather than from any one outstanding feature: a beauty that strikes the eye rather than the heart, and a beauty that sours if it isn’t nourished by some goodness from within. And she wasn’t beautiful then, in that moment.

The horse was making me look good. It’s gonna be okay, I whispered to myself, knowing, as the words trotted through the thick fog of vain hope in my mind, that I’d uttered the certain jinx formula.

‘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.’

And I should’ve listened to her—she told me almost nothing, but she did give me clues, and I know now that she put signs in her words and expressions that were as clear as the constellations over our heads. But I didn’t listen. It’s a fact of being in love that we often pay no attention whatsoever to the substance of what a lover says, while being intoxicated to ecstasy by the way it’s said. I was in love with her eyes, but I didn’t read them. I loved her voice, but I didn’t really hear the fear and the anguish in it.

Glimpses inside the houses showed unpainted walls and sagging staircases. Many ground-floor windows were held open to reveal makeshift shops for the sale of sweets, cigarettes, groceries, vegetables, and utensils.

It happened in seconds. I told myself, as I watched the beating, that it was all too fast, that I was dazed, and there was no time to react. What we call cowardice is often just another name for being taken by surprise, and courage is seldom any better than simply being well prepared. And I might’ve done more, I might’ve done something, anything, if it had happened in Australia. It’s not your country, I told myself, as I watched the beating. It’s not your culture …

Encouraged by that febrile curiosity, Cliff De Souza spun out yarns about the Bollywood stars, and Chandra Mehta added titillating ruffles of gossip throughout.

But I was alone, and for two reasons. The mafia was theirs, not mine. For them, the organisation always came first. But I was loyal to the men, not the mafia; to the brothers, not the brotherhood. I worked for the mafia, but I didn’t join it. I’m not a joiner. I never found a club or clan or idea that was more important to me than the men and women who believed in it. And there was another difference between the men in that group and me—a difference so profound that friendship, on its own, couldn’t surmount it. I was the only man at that table who hadn’t killed a human being, in hot blood or cold. Even Andrew, amiable and garrulous young Andrew, had fired his Beretta at a cornered enemy—one of the Sapna killers—and emptied all seven rounds of the magazine into the man’s chest until he was, as Sanjay would’ve said, two or three times dead.

‘This social work seems to suit you,’ Didier commented through an arch smile. ‘You look so well and so fit—underneath the bruises and scratches, that is. I think you must be a very bad man, in your heart of hearts, Lin. Only a wicked man would derive such benefit from good works. A good man, on the other hand, would simply be worn out and bad tempered.’ ‘I’m sure you’re right, Didier,’ I said, still grinning. ‘Karla said you’re usually right, about the wrong you find in people.’