And once again I had the sense of a trap, of a destiny not shaped by my own deeds and desires. It was as if the constellations themselves were just the outlines of an immense cage that revolved and realigned itself, inscrutably, until the single moment that fate had reserved for me. There was too much that I didn’t understand. There was too much that I wouldn’t allow myself to ask. And I was excited, in that web of connections and concealments. The scent of danger, the smell of fear, filled my senses. The heart-squeezing, enlivening exhilaration of it was so powerful that it wasn’t until an hour later, when we entered Abdul Ghani’s passport workshop, that I could give my full attention to the man and the moment that we shared.
‘This is Krishna, and this is Villu,’ Ghani said, introducing me to two short, slender, dark-skinned men who resembled one another so closely that I thought they might be brothers. ‘There are many experts in this business, many men and women with a detective’s eye for detail, and a surgeon’s confident steadiness of hand. But my experience of ten years in the counterfeiting arts tells me that the Sri Lankans, such as our Krishna and Villu, are the best forgers in the world.’
The men smiled widely, with perfect white teeth, in response to the compliment. They were handsome men, their faces formed from fine, almost delicate features, in a harmony of gentle contours and curves. They returned to their work as we strolled about the large room.
‘This is the light-box,’ Abdul Ghani explained, waving his plump hand at a long table. It was topped with white opaque glass. Strong lights shone from within its frame. ‘Krishna is our best light-box man. He examines the pages of genuine passports, looking for watermarks and concealed patterns. In this way, he can duplicate these effects where we need them.’
I bent over Krishna’s shoulder to watch him as he studied the information page of a British passport. A complex pattern of wavy lines descended from the top of the page, across a photograph, and on to the bottom of the page. On another passport beside it, Krishna was matching the pattern of wavy lines on the edge of a substituted photograph, creating the lines with a fine-tipped pen. Using the light-box, he placed one pattern over the other to check for irregularities.
‘Villu is our best stamp man,’ Abdul Ghani said, guiding me to another long table. On a rack at the back of the table, there were rows of many more rubber stamps.
‘Villu can make any stamp, no matter how intricate its design. Visa stamps, exit and entry, special permission stamps—whatever we need. He has three new profile-cutting machines, for reproducing the stamps. The machines cost me dearly—I had to import them, all the way from Germany—and I spent almost as much again, in baksheesh, getting them through customs controls and into our workshop without any unpleasant questions. But our Villu is an artist, and he often prefers to ignore my beautiful machines, and cut the new stamps by hand.’
I watched as Villu created a new stamp on a blank rubber template. He copied a photographic enlargement of the original—a departure stamp from Athens airport—and cut the new stamp with scalpels and jeweller’s files. Inkpad tests of the new stamp revealed minor flaws. When those were finally eradicated, Villu used a scrap of wet-and-dry sandpaper to wear away one corner of the stamp. That deliberate imperfection gave the inked image a genuine, natural appearance on the page. The completed stamp joined scores of others in the rack of stamps waiting to be used on newly altered passports.
Abdul Ghani completed his tour of the factory demonstrating the computers, photocopy equipment, printing presses, profile cutters, and reserves of special parchment papers and inks. When I’d seen all there was to see on a first visit, he offered me a lift back to Colaba. I declined, asking him if I might stay and spend some time with the Sri Lankan forgers. He seemed pleased with my enthusiasm, or perhaps simply amused. When he left me, I heard his heavy sigh as the sadness of bereavement claimed him once more.
Krishna, Villu, and I drank chai and talked for three hours without a pause. Although they weren’t brothers, they were both Tamil Sri Lankans who came from the same village on the Jaffna peninsula. Conflict between the Tamil Tigers—the Liberation Tigers for Tamil Eelam—and the Sri Lankan army had obliterated their village. Almost all the members of both families were dead. The two young men escaped, with Villu’s sister, a cousin, Krishna’s grandparents, and his two young nieces, who were under five years old. A fishing boat brought them to India, on the people-smuggling route between Jaffna and the Coromandel coast. They made their way to Bombay and then lived on a footpath, under a sheet of plastic, as pavement dwellers.
They’d survived that first year by taking ill-paid jobs as day labourers, and by committing a variety of petty crimes. Then, one day, a footpath-neighbour, who’d learned that they could read and write well in English, asked them to change a licence document. Their work was good, and it brought a steadily increasing stream of visitors to their plastic awning on the Bombay footpath. Hearing of their skill, Abdul Ghani had recommended to Khaderbhai that they be given a chance to prove themselves. Two years later, at the time that I met them, Krishna and Villu shared a large, comfortable apartment with the surviving members of their two families, saved money from their generous salaries, and were arguably the most successful forgers in Bombay, India’s counterfeiting capital.
I wanted to learn everything. I wanted the mobility and security that their passport skills offered me. They spoke English well. My enthusiasm fuelled their natural congeniality, and that first conversation flowed with good humour. It was a propitious start to the new friendship.
I visited Krishna and Villu every day for a week after that meeting. The young men worked long hours, and on some days I remained with them for ten hours at a stretch, watching them work, and asking my several hundred questions. The passports that they worked on fell into two main groups—those they obtained as genuine, used passports, and those that were blank and unused. The used passports had been stolen by pickpockets, lost by tourists, or sold by desperate junkies from Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. The blank passports were rare. They’d been sold by corrupt officials at consulates and embassies and departments of immigration, from France to Turkey to China. Those that found their way into Khaderbhai’s area of influence were bought immediately at any price, and given to Krishna and Villu. They showed me a blank, original, unused passport from Canada, as an example. It was housed in a fireproof safe with others from the United Kingdom, Germany, Portugal and Venezuela.
With sufficient patience, expertise, and resources, the two forgers could change almost anything in a passport to suit a new user’s requirements. Photographs were substituted, and the ridge-marks or indentations of a heavy stamp were imitated, using something as humble as a crochet hook. Sometimes the stitching that bound a passport was carefully removed, and whole groups of pages were replaced, using clean pages from a second passport. Dates, details, and stamps were all altered or erased with chemical solvents. New data was inserted in an appropriate shade, selected from a comprehensive catalogue of printer’s inks. Some of the changes defied the scrutiny of experts, and none of them was detectable in routine examinations.
During that first week of passport studies, I found a new, safe, comfortable apartment for Ulla in neighbouring Tardeo, not far from the Haji Ali Mosque. Lisa Carter, who’d visited Ulla almost every day at Abdullah’s apartment—and visited, far more warmly, with Abdullah himself—agreed to share the new place. We moved them and their belongings in a small fleet of taxis. The two women liked one another, and got on well. They drank vodka, cheated at Scrabble and gin rummy, enjoyed the same kinds of movies on video, and swapped clothes. They’d also discovered, in the weeks they’d spent in Abdullah’s surprisingly well-stocked kitchen, that they liked one another’s cooking. The new apartment was a new beginning for them and, despite Ulla’s lingering fears about Maurizio and his crooked deals, she and Lisa were happy and optimistic.
I continued the weight training and karate with Abdullah, Salman, and Sanjay. We were fit and strong and
fast. And as the days of training became weeks, Abdullah and I grew closer, as friends and brothers, just as Salman and Sanjay were with one another. It was the kind of closeness that didn’t need conversation to sustain itself: quite often we would meet, travel to the gym, work out on the weights, box a few rounds, spend half an hour sparring at karate, and speak no more than ten words to one another. Sometimes, with no more than a look in my eye or an unusual expression on his face, we would laugh, and keep on laughing so hard that we collapsed to the practice mats. And in that way, without words, I slowly opened my heart to Abdullah, and I began to love him.
I’d spoken to the head man of the slum, Qasim Ali Hussein, and to several others, including Johnny Cigar, when I’d first returned from Goa. I saw Prabaker in his taxi every other day. But there were so many new challenges and rewards in Ghani’s passport -workshop, and they kept me so busy and excited, that I stopped working, even occasionally, at the slum clinic I’d founded in the little hut that had been my home.
On my first visit to the slum in several weeks, I was surprised to find Prabaker in the wriggling convulsions of a dance while the slum musicians were rehearsing one of their popular songs. The little guide was dressed in his taxi driver’s khaki shirt and white trousers. He wore a purple scarf around his neck, and yellow plastic sandals. Approaching him unobserved, I watched him in silence for a while. His dance managed to combine obscenely lewd and suggestive thrusts of his hips with the facial expressions and hand-whirling gestures of a child-like innocence. With clownish charm he held his open palms beside his smiling face one moment, and then pumped his groin back and forth with a determined little grimace the next. When he finally turned and saw me, his face exploded in that huge smile, that uniquely wide and heart-filled smile, and he rushed to greet me.
‘Oh, Lin!’ he cried, squeezing his head into my chest in an affectionate hug. ‘I have a news for you! I have it such a fantastic news! I was looking for you in every place, every hotel with naked ladies, every drinking bar with black-market peoples, every dirty slum, every —’
‘I get the picture, Prabu. So, what’s your news?’
‘I am to be getting married! I am making a marriage on Parvati! Can you believe it?’
‘Sure, I can believe it. Congratulations. I take it you were practising, just now, for the wedding party.’
‘Oh, yes!’ he agreed, lunging at me with his hips a few times. ‘I want a very sexy dancing for everybody at the party. It’s a pretty good sexy, isn’t it?’
‘It’s … sexy … sure. How are things here?’
‘Very fine. No problem. Oh, Lin! I forgot! Johnny, he is making a marriage also. He will be married with Sita, the sister of my own beautiful Parvati.’
‘Where is he? I want to say hello.’
‘He is down at the seashore, you know, at the place where he sits on the rocks, for being lonely—the same place where you also enjoy a good lonely. You’ll find him there.’
I walked off, glancing back over my shoulder to see Prabaker encouraging the band with mechanical, piston-like thrusts of his narrow hips. At the edge of the slum, where black boulders tumbled to the sea, I found Johnny Cigar. He was dressed in a white singlet and a chequered green lungi. He braced himself with his arms, leaning back, and staring out to sea. It was almost exactly the same spot where he’d told me about seawater, sweat, and tears on the evening of the cholera outbreak, so many months before.
‘Congratulations,’ I said, sitting beside him and offering him a beedie cigarette.
‘Thanks, Lin,’ he smiled, shaking his head. I put the packet away, and for a while we both watched the small petulant waves smack at the rocky shore.
‘You know, I was brought into this life—conceived, I mean, not born —just over there, in the Navy Nagar,’ he said, nodding his head toward the compound of the Indian Navy. A curve of coastline separated us from the Nagar, but a direct line of sight across the small bay gave us a clear view of the houses, huts, and barracks.
‘My mother was from Delhi-side originally. Her family, they were all Christians. They made good money in the service of the British, but they lost their position, and their privileges, after the Independence. They moved to Bombay when my mother was fifteen years old. Her father took employment with the navy, working as a clerk. They lived in a zhopadpatti near here. My mother fell in love with a sailor. He was a tall, young fellow from Amritsar, with the best moustache in the whole Nagar. When she became pregnant with me, her family threw her out. She tried to get some help from the sailor who was my father, but he left the Nagar, and she never saw him or heard about him again.’
He paused, breathing through his nose, with his lips pressed tightly together. His eyes squinted against the glare from the glittering sea, and the fresh, persistent breeze. Behind us we could hear the noises of the slum—hawkers’ cries, the slap of clothes on stone in the washing area, children playing, a bickering complaint, and the jangling music for Prabaker’s piston-hips.
‘She had a tough time of it, Lin. She was heavily pregnant with me when they threw her out. She moved to a pavement-dweller settlement, across in Crawford Market area, and wore the widow’s white sari, pretending that she’d had a husband, and pretending that he was dead. She had to do that—she had to become a widow, for life, before she was even married. That’s why I never got married. I’m thirty-eight years old. I can read and write very well—my mother made sure I was educated—and I do the bookwork for all the shops and businesses in the slum. I do the taxes for every man who pays them. I make a good living here, and I have respect. I should’ve been married fifteen or even twenty years ago. But she was a widow, all her life, for me. And I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t allow myself to get married. I kept hoping I would see him, the sailor with the best moustache. My mother had one very old, faded photograph of the two of them, looking very serious and stern. That’s why I lived in this area. I always hoped I would see him. And I never married. And she died last week, Lin. My mother died last week.’
He turned to me, and the whites of his eyes were blazing with the tears he wouldn’t let them shed.
‘She died last week. And now, I’m getting married.’
‘I’m sorry to hear about your mother, Johnny. But I’m sure she’d want you to get married. I think you’ll make a good father. In fact, I know you’ll make a good father. I’m sure of it.’
He looked at me, his eyes talking to me in a language I could feel but couldn’t understand. When I left him, he was staring at the ceaselessness of the sea, irritated to chequered, white rifts by the wind.
I walked back through the slum to the clinic. A conversation with Ayub and Siddhartha, the two young men I’d trained to run the clinic, reassured me that all was well. I gave them some money to keep, as an emergency float, and left money with Prabaker for his wedding preparations. I paid a courtesy visit to Qasim Ali Hussein, allowing him to force the hospitality of chai upon me. Jeetendra and Anand Rao, two of my former neighbours, joined us, with several other men I knew well. Qasim Ali led the conversation, referring to his son Sadiq, who was working in the Gulf. In turn, we spoke of religious and communal conflict in the city, the construction of the twin towers, still at least two years from completion, and the weddings of Prabaker and Johnny Cigar.
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. I’d only walked a few paces, however, when the young Sikh, Anand Rao, caught up, and fell into step beside me.
‘Linbaba, there is a problem here,’ he said quietly. He was an unusually solemn man at the best of times, but at that moment his expression was unambiguously grim. ‘That Rasheed, that fellow I used to be sharing with. Do you remember?’
‘Yes. Rasheed. I remember him,’ I replied, recalling the thin, bearded face and restless, guilty eyes of the man who’d been my neighbour, with Anand, for more than a year.
‘He is making a bad business,’ Anand Rao dec
lared bluntly. ‘His wife and her sister came from their native place. I went from that hut when they came. He has been living with them alone now, for some time.’
‘And … whatï I asked, as we walked out on to the road together. I had no idea what Anand Rao was driving at, and I had no patience for it. It was the kind of vague, insinuated complaint that had come to me almost every day when I’d lived in the slum. Most of the time, such complaints came to nothing. Most of the time, it was in my best interests to have nothing to do with them.
‘Well,’ Anand Rao hesitated, perhaps sensing my impatience, ‘it is … he is … something is very bad, and I am … there must be …’
He fell silent, staring at his sandaled feet. I reached out to put a hand on his broad, proud, thin shoulder. Gradually his eyes lifted, and met mine in a mute appeal.
‘Is it money?’ I asked, reaching into my pocket. ‘Do you need some money?’
He recoiled as if I’d cursed him. He held the stare, for a moment, before turning and walking back into the slum.
I strode on through familiar streets, and told myself that it was okay. Anand Rao and Rasheed had shared a hut for more than two years. If they were falling out because Rasheed’s wife and her sister had moved to the city, and Anand had been forced from the hut, it was probably to be expected. And it was no business of mine. I laughed, shaking my head as I walked, and trying to figure out why Anand Rao had reacted so badly to the offer of money. It wasn’t an unreasonable thing for me to assume or to offer. On the thirty-minute walk from the slum to Leopold’s, I gave money to five other people, including both of the Zodiac Georges. He’ll get over it, whatever it is, I told myself. At any rate, it’s got nothing to do with me. But the lies we tell ourselves are the ghosts that haunt the empty house of midnight. And although I pushed Anand and the slum from my mind, I felt the breath of that ghosted lie on my face as I walked through the long, thronging Causeway on that hot afternoon.