He looked at Johnny, his eyes and his mouth wide open, and his hands raised in expectation. Johnny glowered at him, but the frown quickly softened into a broad smile, and he turned his attention to me.
‘We made a decision for you,’ Johnny Cigar declared. ‘You will live with us. You are Prabaker’s good friend. There is a place for you.’
‘Yes, Lin!’ Prabaker added quickly. ‘One family is leaving tomorrow. And then, the day after tomorrow, that house will be yours.’
‘But … but …’ I stammered, flattered by the generous gesture, and yet horrified at the thought of life in the slum. I remembered my one visit to Prabaker’s slum only too well. The smell of the open latrines, the heartbreaking poverty, the cramp and mill of people, thousands upon thousands of people—it was a kind of hell, in my memory, a new metaphor that stood for the worst, or almost the worst, that could happen.
‘No problem, Lin,’ Prabaker laughed. ‘You will be too happy with us, you will see. And you know, you’re looking like a different fellow now, it is true, but after a few months with us you will look exactly the same as everyone else there. People will think you are already living in the slum for years and years and years. You will see.’
‘It is a place for you,’ Raju said, reaching out slowly to touch my arm. ‘A safe place, until you can save your money. Our hotel is free.’
The others laughed at that, and I joined them, inspired by their optimism and enthusiasm. The slum was filthy and crowded beyond imagining, but it was free, and there were no C-Forms for the residents. It would give me time to think, I knew, and time to plan.
‘I … well … thanks, Prabu. Thanks, Johnny. Thanks, Raju. I accept your offer. I’m very grateful. Thank you.’
‘No problem,’ Johnny Cigar replied, shaking my hand, and meeting my eye with a determined, penetrating stare.
I didn’t know then that Johnny and Raju had been sent by the head man of the slum, Qasim Ali Hussein, to look me over. In my ignorance and self-centeredness, I’d recoiled at the thought of the terrible conditions of the slum, and accepted their offer reluctantly. I didn’t know that the huts were in much demand, and that there was a long list of families waiting for a place. I couldn’t know, then, that offering a place to me meant that a family in need had missed out on a home. As the last step in making that decision, Qasim Ali Hussein had sent Raju and Johnny to my hotel. Raju’s task was to determine whether I could live with them. Johnny’s task was to make sure that they could live with me. All I knew, on the first night of our meeting, was that Johnny’s handshake was honest enough to build a friendship on, and Raju’s sad smile had more acceptance and trust in it than I deserved.
‘Okay, Lin,’ Prabaker grinned. ‘Day after tomorrow, we come to pick up your many things, and your good self also, in the late of afternoon.’
‘Thanks, Prabu. Okay. But wait! Day after tomorrow—won’t that … won’t that mess up our appointment?’
‘Appointment? What for an appointment, Linbaba?’
‘The … the … Standing Babas,’ I replied lamely.
The Standing Babas, a legendary cloister of mad, inspired monks, ran a hashish den in suburban Byculla. Prabaker had taken me there as part of his dark tour of the city, months before. On the way back to Bombay from the village, I’d made him promise to take me there again, with Karla. I knew she’d never been to the den, and I knew she was fascinated by the stories she’d heard of it. Raising the matter then, in the face of their hospitable offer, was ungrateful, but I didn’t want to miss the chance to impress her with the visit.
‘Oh yes, Lin, no problem. We can still make a visit to those Standing Babas, with the Miss Karla, and after that we will collect up all your things. I will see you here, day after tomorrow at three o’clock afternoon. I am so happy you are going to be a slum-living fellow with us, Lin! So happy!’
He walked out of the foyer and descended the stairwell. I watched him join the lights and traffic stirring on the noisy street, three floors below. Worries waned and receded. I had a way to make a little money. I had a safe place to stay. And then, as if that safety allowed them to, my thoughts wound and spiralled along the streets and alleys to Karla. I found myself thinking of her apartment, of her ground-floor windows, those tall French doors that looked out on the cobbled lane, not five minutes away from my hotel. But the doors I pictured in my mind stayed shut. And as I tried, and failed, to form an image of her face, her eyes, I suddenly realised that if I became a slum-dweller, if I lived in those squalid, squirming acres, I might lose her; I probably would lose her. I knew that if I fell that far, as I saw it then, my shame would keep me from her as completely and mercilessly as a prison wall.
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.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE STANDING BABAS were men who’d taken a vow never to sit down, or lie down, ever again, for the rest of their lives. They stood, day and night, forever. They ate their meals standing up, and made their toilet standing up. They prayed and worked and sang standing up. They even slept while they were standing, suspended in harnesses that kept the weight of their bodies on their legs, but prevented them from falling when they were unconscious.
For the first five to ten years of that constant standing, their legs began to swell. Blood moved sluggishly in exhausted veins, and muscles thickened. Their legs became huge, bloated out of recognisable shape, and covered with purple varicose boils. Their toes squeezed out from thick, fleshy feet, like the toes of elephants. During the following years, their legs gradually became thinner, and thinner. Eventually, only bones remained, with a paint-thin veneer of skin and the termite trails of withered veins.
The pain was unending and terrible. Spikes and spears of agony stabbed up through their feet with every downward pressure. Tormented, tortured, the Standing Babas were never still. They shifted constantly from foot to foot in a gentle, swaying dance that was as mesmerising, for everyone who saw it, as the sound-weaving hands of a flute player for his cobras.
Some of the Babas had made the vow when they were sixteen or seventeen years old. They were compelled by something like the vocation that calls others, in other cultures, to become priests, rabbis, or imams. A larger number of much older men had renounced the world as a preparation for death and the next level of incarnation. Not a few of the Standing Babas were businessmen who’d given themselves to ruthless pursuits of pleasure, power, and profit during their working lives. There were holy men who’d journeyed through many other devotions, mastering their punishing sacrifices before undertaking the ultimate vow of the Standing Baba. And there were criminals—thieves, murderers, major mafia figures, and even former warlords—who sought expiation, or propitiation, in the endless agonies of the vow.
The den was really a corridor between two brick buildings at the rear of their temple. Hidden from view forever, within the temple compound, were the secret gardens, cloisters, and dormitories that only those who made and kept the vow ever saw. An iron roof covered the den. The floor was paved with flat stones. The Standing Babas entered through a door at the rear of the corridor. Everyone else entered and left through an iron gate at the street end.
The customers, men from every part of the country and every level of society, stood along the walls of the corridor. They stood, of course: no-one ever sat in the presence of the Standing Babas. There was a tap fixed over an open drain near the entrance gate, where men drank water or leaned over to spit. The Babas moved from man to man and group to group, preparing hashish in funnel-shaped clay chillums for the customers, and smoking with them.
The faces of the Bab
as were radiant with their excruciation. Sooner or later, in the torment of endlessly ascending pain, every man of them assumed a luminous, transcendent beatitude. Light, made from the agonies they suffered, streamed from their eyes, and I’ve never known a human source more brilliant than their tortured smiles.
The Babas were also comprehensively, celestially, and magnificently stoned. They smoked nothing but Kashmiri—the best hashish in the world—grown and produced at the foothills of the Himalayas in Kashmir. And they smoked it all day, and all night, all their lives.
I stood with Karla and Prabaker at the back wall of the narrow den. Behind us was the sealed door through which the Standing Babas had entered. In front of us were two lines of men standing along the walls all the way to the iron gate at the street end of the passage. Some of the men were dressed in suits. Some wore designer jeans. Workmen, wearing faded lungis, stood beside men in traditional dress from various regions of India. They were young and old, rich and poor. Their eyes were often drawn to Karla and me, pale-skinned foreigners, standing with our backs against the wall. It was clear that some of them were shocked to see a woman in the den. Despite their open curiosity, no-one approached us or acknowledged us directly, and for the most part they gave their attention to the Standing Babas and the hashish. Conversations, buzzing softly, blended with music and devotional chanting, coming from somewhere inside the compound.
‘So, what do you think?’
‘It’s incredible!’ she replied, her eyes gleaming in the soft light of the shaded lamps. She was exhilarated, and perhaps a little unnerved. Smoking the charras had relaxed the muscles of her face and shoulders, but there were tigers moving quickly in the eyes of her soft smile. ‘It’s amazing. It’s horrible and holy at the same time. I can’t make up my mind which is the holy part, and which is the horrible part. Horrible—that’s not the right word, but it’s something like that.’
‘I know what you mean,’ I agreed, thrilled that I’d succeeded in impressing her. She’d been in the city for five years, and she’d heard about the Babas many times, but that visit with me was her first. My tone implied that I knew the place well, but I couldn’t fairly claim credit for the experience. Without Prabaker, who’d knocked on the gate for us and gained access with his golden smile, we wouldn’t have been permitted to enter.
One of the Standing Babas approached us slowly with an acolyte who held a silver tray containing chillums, charras, and the paraphernalia of smoking. Other monks rocked and swayed along the length of the corridor, smoking and chanting prayers. The Baba standing before us was tall and lean, but his legs were so thickly swollen that dreadful ropes of distended veins throbbed on their surfaces. His face was thin. The bones of his skull, near the temples, were sharply defined. His cheekbones, majestic, presided over deep valleys that ran to a hard and hungry jaw. His eyes were huge, within the caverns ridged by his brows, and there was such madness and longing and love in them that he was at once fearsome and immensely pitiable.
He prepared the chillum, rocking from side to side and smiling absently. He never looked at us, but still it seemed to be the smile of a very close friend: indulgent, knowing, forgiving. He was standing and swaying so close to me that I could see each wiry strand in the forest of his brows. I heard the little gasps of his breathing. The rapid outward rushes of air sounded like wavelets on a steep shore. He finished preparing the chillum, and looked up at me. For a moment I was lost in the vision that swarmed and screeched in his eyes. For a tiny moment in the infinitude of his suffering I almost felt it, what the human will can drive the human body to endure and achieve. I almost understood it, that smile of his, driven insane by the will that forced it to shine. I was sure that he was communicating it to me—that he wanted me to know. And I tried to tell him, with my eyes alone, that I could almost sense it, almost feel it. Then he held the chillum to his mouth, in the funnel of his hand, puffed it alight, and offered it to me. That terrible intimacy with his unending pain shrivelled, the vision shimmered, and the moment drifted away with the fading white shadows of the smoke. He turned, and tottered slowly back toward the street gate, muttering prayers in a soft drone.
A scream pierced the air. Everyone turned to the street-entrance gate. A man dressed in the red turban, vest, and silk trousers of a northern tribesman stood there, near the iron gate, shrieking at the very top of a strong voice. Before we could discern his message or react in any way, the man drew a long, thick-bladed sword from his belted sash and raised it over his head. Still screaming, he began to stalk along the corridor. He was staring directly at me as he walked, with a stomping, marching tread. I couldn’t understand the words he was screeching, but I knew what he had in mind. He wanted to attack me. He wanted to kill me.
The men standing at the sides flattened their backs against the walls instinctively. The Standing Babas rocked themselves out of the madman’s path. The door behind us was locked shut. There was no escape. We were unarmed. The man walked on towards us, waving the sword in circles over his head with both hands. There was nowhere to go, and nothing to do, but to fight him. I took one step back with the right foot, and raised my fists. It was a karate stance. Seven years of martial arts’ training pulsed and flickered in my arms and legs. I felt good about it. Like every other tough, angry man I knew, I avoided fighting until it came to me, and then I enjoyed it.
At the last possible moment, a man stepped out from the wall at the side, tripped the goose-stepping tribesman, and sent him crashing to the stone floor. The sword fell from his hand and clattered to a stop at Karla’s feet. I snatched it up, and watched as the man who’d tripped our assailant held him in a firm but merciful submission hold. He gripped the fallen man’s arm in a hammerlock, behind his back. At the same time he twisted the collar of the man’s shirt to choke off a little air. The anger or madness that had possessed the swordsman subsided, and he surrendered passively. Men who knew him stepped forward and escorted him out to the alley, beyond the iron gate. Seconds later, one of the men returned and approached me. Looking into my eyes, he held out his hands, palms upward, for the sword. I hesitated, but then handed it over. The man gave us a polite and apologetic bow, and left the den.
In the bubble and chatter that followed his departure, I checked on Karla. Her eyes were wide and she pursed her lips in a wondering smile, but she wasn’t distressed. Reassured, I went to thank the man who’d stepped in to help us. He was tall, taller than I am by a few centimetres, and had a strong, athletic build. His thick, black hair was unusually long for Bombay in those years, and he wore it in a high ponytail. His silk shirt and loose trousers were black, and he wore black leather sandals.
‘Abdullah,’ he replied, when I’d told him my name, ‘Abdullah Taheri.’
‘I owe you one, Abdullah,’ I said, giving him a smile that was as cautious as it was grateful. He’d moved with such lethal grace that he made the trick of disarming the swordsman seem effortless. But it wasn’t as easy as it looked. I knew how much skill and courage it had taken, and how big a role instinct had played in his timing. The man was a natural; a born fighter. ‘That was damn close.’
‘No problem,’ he smiled. ‘He was drunk, I think, that fellow, or not right in his head.’
‘Whatever his problem was, I still owe you one,’ I insisted.
‘No, really,’ he laughed.
It was an easy laugh, revealing white teeth. The sound of it came from deep within his chest: a laugh from the heart. His eyes were the colour of sand, in the palm of your hand, a few minutes before the sun sinks below the sea.
‘All the same, I want to thank you.’
‘Okay,’ he conceded, clapping a hand to my shoulder.
I returned to Karla and Prabaker. When we turned to leave the den, Abdullah was already gone. The alley outside was deserted, and within a few minutes we caught a taxi back to Colaba. Karla was silent during the ride, and I too said nothing, miserable that my attempt to impress her had ended in such confusion and near disaster. Only Prabake
r felt free to speak.
‘What a lucky escapes!’ he said, from the front seat, grinning at us in turn as we sat together but apart in the back of the taxi. ‘I thought a sure thing that fellow would chop us up in teeny pieces. Some of the people should not be smoking the charras, isn’t it? Some of the people get very angry when they relax their brains.’
At Leopold’s I got out of the taxi and stood with Karla while Prabaker waited. A late-afternoon crowd surged around the island of our silent stare.
‘You’re not coming in?’
‘No,’ I answered, wishing that the moment was more like the strong, confident scene I’d imagined through most of that day. ‘I’m going to collect my stuff from the India Guest House, and move to the slum. In fact, I won’t be coming to Leopold’s for a while, or anywhere else for that matter. I’m going to … you know … get on my feet … or … I don’t know … find my feet … or … I’m going to … what was I saying?’
‘Something about your feet.’
‘Yeah,’ I laughed. ‘Well, you gotta start somewhere.’
‘This is kind of goodbye, isn’t it?’
‘Not really’ I muttered. ‘Well, yes. Yes, it is.’
‘And you only just got back from the village.’
‘Yeah,’ I laughed again. ‘From the village, to the slum. It’s quite a jump.’
‘Just make sure you land on your —’
‘—feet. Okay. I got it.’
‘Listen, if it’s a question of money, I could —’
‘No,’ I said quickly. ‘No. I want to do this. It’s not just money. I …’
For three seconds I balanced on the edge of telling her about my visa problems. Her friend, Lettie, knew someone at the Foreigner Registration Branch. She’d helped Maurizio, I knew, and there was a chance that she could help me. But then I drew back from the edge, and covered the truth with a smile. Telling Karla about the visa would lead to other questions that I couldn’t answer. I was in love with her, but I wasn’t sure that I could trust her. It’s a fact of life on the run that you often love more people than you trust. For people in the safe world, of course, exactly the opposite is true.