‘Sorry for her?’ I offered.
‘No, baba. I felt …’
‘Sad? You felt sad for her?’
‘No, baba. I felt a erection, in my pants, you know, when the penis is getting all hard, like your thinking.’
‘For God’s sake, Prabu! I know what an erection is!’ I grumbled. ‘Get on with it. What happened?’
‘Nothing happened,’ he replied, puzzled by my irritation, and somewhat chastened. ‘But from that time only, I never forgot my big, big feeling for her. Now I am making a marriage, and that big, big feeling is getting bigger every day.’
‘I’m not sure that I like where this is going, Prabu,’ I muttered.
‘I am asking you, Lin,’ he said, choking on the words. He faced me. Tears bulged and rolled from his eyes into his lap. His voice came in stuttering sobs. ‘She is too beautiful. I am a very short and small man. Do you think I can make a good and sexy husband?’
I told Prabaker, sitting in his cab and watching him cry, that love makes men big, and hate makes them small. I told him that my little friend was one of the biggest men I ever met because there wasn’t any hate in him. I said that the better I knew him, the bigger he got, and I tried to tell him how rare that was. And I joked with him, and laughed with him until that great smile, as big as a child’s biggest wish, returned to his gentle round face. He drove away toward the bachelor party that was waiting for him in the slum, and sounded the horn triumphantly until he was out of sight.
The night that walked me, long after he left, was lonelier than most. I didn’t go back to Leopold’s. I walked instead along the Causeway, past my apartment, and on to Prabaker’s slum at Cuffe Parade. I found the place where Tariq and I fought the vicious pack on the Night of the Wild Dogs. There was still a small pile of scrap timber and stones on the spot. I sat there, smoking the darkness, and watching the slow elegance of the slum-dwellers drifting back along the dusty track to the huddle of huts. I smiled. Thinking of Prabaker’s mighty smile always made me smile reflexively, as if I was looking at a happy, healthy baby. Then a vision of Modena’s face flowed from the flickering lanterns and vaporous wreaths of smoke, and faded again to nothing before it was fully formed. Music started up inside the slum. A strolling group of young men quickened their pace to jog toward the stirring sound. Prabaker’s bachelor party had begun. He’d invited me, but I couldn’t bring myself to go. I sat near enough to hear the happiness, but far enough away not to feel it.
For years I’d told myself that love had made me strong when the prison guards tried to force me to betray the actress and our affair. Somehow, Modena had haunted the truth from me. It wasn’t love for her that had kept me silent, and it wasn’t a brave heart. It was stubbornness that had given me the strength to bite down; stiff-necked, bull-headed stubbornness. There was nothing noble in it. And for all my contempt for the cowardice of bullies, hadn’t I become a bully when I was desperate enough? When the dragon-claws of heroin sickness dug into my back I became a small man, a tiny man. I became so small that I had to use a gun. I had to point a gun at people, many of them women, to get money. To get money. How was I different, in that, to Maurizio bullying women to get money? And if they’d shot me during one of those hold-ups, if the cops had gunned me down as I’d wanted and expected at the time, my death would’ve aroused and deserved as little pity as that of the crazed Italian.
I stood up and stretched, looking around me and thinking of the dogs and the fight and the bravery of the little boy Tariq. When I started back toward the city, I heard a sudden eruption of happy laughter from many voices at Prabaker’s party, followed by a cloudburst rattle of applause. And the music dwindled with the distance until it was as faint and diminishable as any moment of truth.
Walking through the night, alone with the city for hours, I loved her with my wandering, just as I’d done when I lived in the slum. Near dawn I bought a newspaper, found a cafe, and ate a big breakfast, lingering over a second and then a third pot of chai. There was an article on page three of the paper describing the miraculous gifts of the Blue Sisters, as Rasheed’s widow and her sister had become known. It was a syndicated article, written by Kavita Singh and published across the country. In it she gave a brief history of their story and then related several first-hand accounts of miraculous cures that had been attributed to the mystical powers the girls exercised. One woman claimed to have been cured of tuberculosis, another insisted that her hearing had been fully restored, and an elderly man declared that his withered lungs were strong and healthy again after he merely touched a hem of their sky-blue garments. Kavita explained that the name Blue Sisters wasn’t their own choice: they wore blue, always, because they woke from their comas with a shared dream about floating in the sky, and their devotees had settled on the name. The article concluded with Kavita’s own account of a meeting with the girls, and her conviction that they were, beyond any doubt, special—perhaps even supernatural—beings.
I paid the bill, and borrowed a pen from the cashier to circle the article with several lines. As the streets unwound the tangled morning coil of sound, colour, and commotion, I took a cab and jounced through reckless traffic to the Arthur Road Prison. After a wait of three hours, I made my way into the visiting area. It was a single room divided down the centre by two walls of cyclone wire that were separated by an empty space of about two metres. On one side were the visitors, squeezed together and holding their places by clinging to the wire. Across the gap and behind the other wire fence were the prisoners, crushed together and also grasping at the wire to steady themselves. There were about twenty prisoners. Forty of us crowded into an equal space on the visitors’ side. Every man, woman, and child in the divided room was shouting. There were so many languages—I recognised six of them, and stopped counting as a door opened on the prisoners’ side. Anand entered, pushing his way through to the wire.
Anand! Anand! Here!’ I shouted.
His eyes found me, and he smiled in greeting.
‘Linbaba, so good to see you!’ he shouted back at me.
‘You look good, man!’ I called out. He did look well. I knew how hard it was to look well in that place. I knew what an effort he’d put into it, cleaning body lice from his clothes every day and washing in the worm-infested water. ‘You look real good!’
‘Arrey, you look very fine, Lin.’
I didn’t look fine. I knew that. I looked worried and guilty and tired.
‘I’m … a bit tired. My friend Vikram—you remember him? He got married yesterday. The day before yesterday, actually. I’ve been walking all night.’
‘How is Qasim Ali? Is he well?’
‘He’s well,’ I replied, reddening a little with shame that I didn’t see the good and noble head man as often as I used to, when I’d lived in the slum. ‘Look! Look at this newspaper. There’s an article in it about the sisters. It mentions you. We can use this to help you. We can build up some sympathy for you, before your case comes to court.’
His long, lean, handsome face darkened in a frown that drew his brows together and pressed his lips into a tight, defiant crease.
‘You must not do this, Lin!’ he shouted back at me. ‘That journalist, that Kavita Singh, she was here. I sent her away. If she comes again, I will send her away again. I do not want any help, and I will not allow any help. I want to have the punishment for what I did to Rasheed.’
‘But you don’t understand, I insisted. ‘The girls are famous now. People think they’re holy. People think they can work miracles. There’s thousands of devotees coming to the zhopadpatti every week. When people know you were trying to help them, they’ll feel sympathy for you. You’ll get half the time, or even less.’
I was shouting myself hoarse, trying to be heard above or within the clamouring din. It was so hot in the crush of bodies that my shirt was already soaked, and clung to my skin. Had I heard him correctly? It seemed impossible that he would reject any help that might reduce his sentence. Without that help, he was sure to se
rve a minimum of fifteen years. Fifteen years in this hell, I thought, staring through the wire at his frowning face. How could he refuse our help?
‘Lin! No!’ he cried out, louder than before. ‘I did that thing to Rasheed. I knew what I was doing. I knew what would happen. I sat with him for a long time, before I did it. I made a choice. I must have the punishment.’
‘But I have to help you. I have to try.’
‘No, Lin, please! If you take this punishment away, then there will be no meaning for what I did. There will be no honour. Not for me, not for them. Can’t you see it? I have earned this punishment. I have become my fate. I am begging you, as a friend. Please do not let them write anything more about me. Write about the ladies. The sisters. Yes! But let me have the peace of my fate. Do you promise me? Linbaba? Do you swear it?’
My fingers clutched at the diamonds of the wire fence. I felt the cold rusty metal bite at the bones within my hands. The noise in that wooden room was like a wild rainstorm on the ragged rooftops of the slum. Beseeching, entreating, adoring, yearning, crying, screaming, and laughing, the hysterical choruses shouted from cage to cage.
‘Swear it to me, Lin,’ he said, the distress reaching out to me desperately from his pleading eyes.
‘Okay, okay’ I answered him, struggling to let the words escape from the little prison of my throat.
‘Swear it to me!’
‘All right! All right! I swear it. For God’s sake, I swear … I won’t try to help you.’
His face relaxed, and the smile returned, burning my eyes with the beauty of it.
‘Thank you, Linbaba!’ he shouted back happily. ‘Please don’t be thinking I am ungrateful, but I don’t want you to come back here again. I don’t want you to visit me. You can put some money for me, sometimes, if you think of it. But please don’t come back again. This is my life now. This is my life. It will be hard for me, if you come back here. I will think about things. I thank you very much, Lin, and I wish a full happiness for you.’
His hands released their hold on the wire fence. He held them together in a praying gesture of blessing, bowing his head slightly, so that I lost contact with his eyes. Without that strong grip on the fence he was at the mercy of the crowd of prisoners, and in seconds he fell back, vanishing into the bubbling wave of faces and hands at the wire. A door at the back of the room opened behind the prisoners, and I watched Anand slip through into the hot yellow light of day with his head high and his thin shoulders bravely squared.
I stepped out onto the street outside the prison. My hair was wet with sweat, and my clothes were soaked. I squinted in the sunlight and stared at the busy street, trying to force myself into its rhythm and rush, trying not to think about Anand in the long room with the overseers, with Big Rahul, with the hunger and the beatings and the filthy, swarming pests. Later that night I would be with Prabaker and Johnny Cigar, Anand’s friends, while they celebrated the double wedding. Later that night, Anand would be crammed into a writhing, lice-crawling sleep with two hundred other men on a stone floor. And that would go on, and on, for fifteen years.
I took a cab to my apartment and stood under a hot shower, scorching the slither and itch of memory from my skin. Later, I phoned Chandra Mehta to make the final arrangements for the dancers I’d hired to perform at Prabaker’s wedding. Then I phoned Kavita Singh, and told her that Anand wanted us to pull out of the campaign. She was relieved, I think. Her kind heart had fretted for him, and she’d feared from the first that the campaign would fail and then crush him with the weight of fallen hope. She was also glad that he’d given his blessing to her stories about the Blue Sisters. The girls fascinated her, and she’d arranged for a documentary film-maker to visit them in the slum. She wanted to talk about the project, and I heard the sparkling enthusiasm in her voice but I cut her off, promising to call again.
I went out to my little balcony, and let the sound and smell of the city settle on the skin of my bare chest. In a courtyard below, I saw three young men rehearsing the moves and steps of a dance routine they’d copied from a Bollywood film. They laughed helplessly when they messed up the moves of the party piece, and then gave a cheer when they finally danced through one whole routine without error. In another yard some women were squatting together, washing dishes with small anemones of coir rope and a long bar of coral-coloured soap. Their conversation came to me in laughing gasps and shrieks as they scandalised one another with gossip and sardonic commentaries on the peculiar habits of their neighbours’ husbands. Then I looked up to see an elderly man sitting in a window opposite me. My eyes met his, and I smiled. He’d been watching me as I’d watched the others below. He wagged his head from side to side, and smiled back at me with a happy grin.
And it was all right. I dressed, and went down to the street. I made the rounds of the black-market currency collection centres, and checked in at Abdul Ghani’s passport factory, and inspected the gold-smuggling ring I’d restructured in Khader’s name. In three hours I committed thirty crimes or more. And I smiled when people smiled at me. When it was necessary, I gave men enough bad head, as gangsters call it, to make them draw back and lower their eyes in fear. I walked the goonda walk, and in three languages I talked the talk. I looked good. I did my job. I made money, and I was still free. But in the black room, deep in my mind, another image added itself to the secret gallery—an image of Anand, holding the palms of his hands together, as his radiant smile became a blessing and a prayer.
Everything you ever sense, in touch or taste or sight or even thought, has an effect on you that’s greater than zero. Some things, like the background sound of a bird chirping as it passes your house in the evening, or a flower glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, have such an infinitesimally small effect that you can’t detect them. Some things, like triumph and heartbreak, and some images, like the image of yourself reflected in the eyes of a man you’ve just stabbed, attach themselves to the secret gallery and they change your life forever.
That last image of Anand, the last time I ever saw him, had that effect on me. It wasn’t compassion for him that I felt so deeply, although I did pity him as only a chained man could. It wasn’t shame, although I was truly ashamed that I hadn’t listened when he’d first tried to tell me about Rasheed. It was something else, something so strange that it took me years to fully comprehend. It was envy that nailed the image to my mind. I envied Anand as he turned and walked with his back straight and his head high into the long, suffering years. I envied his peace and his courage and his perfect understanding of himself. Khaderbhai once said that if we envy someone for all the right reasons, we’re half way to wisdom. I hope he wasn’t right about that. I hope good envy takes you further than that, because a lifetime has passed since that day at the wire, and I still envy Anand’s calm communion with fate, and I long for it with all my flawed and striving heart.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
EYES CURVED like the sword of Perseus, like the wings of hawks in flight, like the rolled lips of seashells, like eucalyptus leaves in summer—Indian eyes, dancers’ eyes, the most beautiful eyes in the world stared with honest, unbeguiling concentration into mirrors held for them by their servants. The dancers I’d hired to perform at the wedding ceremonies for Johnny and Prabaker were already in costume beneath the modest covering of their shawls. In a chai shop near the entrance to the slum, emptied of customers for the purpose, they made the final adjustments to their hair and make-up, professionally swift amid excited chattering. A cotton sheet strung across the doorway was just sheer enough in the golden lamplight to reveal thrillingly indistinct shadows, inflaming fierce desires in many of those who crowded outside, where I stood guard and kept the curious at bay.
At last they were ready, and I threw the cotton screen back. The ten dancers from Film City’s chorus lines emerged. They wore traditional tight choli blouses and wrap-around saris. The costumes were lemon yellow, ruby, peacock blue, emerald, sunset pink, gold, royal purple, silver, cream, and tangerine. Their je
wels—hair clusters, plait tassels, ear rings, nose rings, necklaces, midriff chains, bangles, and anklets—struck such sparks of light from lanterns and electric bulbs that people blinked and flinched to look at them. Each heavy anklet carried hundreds of tiny bells and, as the dancers began their slow, swaying walk through the hushed and adoring slum, the sizzling clash of those silver bells was the only sound that marked their steps. Then they began to sing:
Aaja Sajan, Aaja
Aaja Sajan, Aaja
Come to me, my lover, come to me
Come to me, my lover, come to me
The crowds that preceded and surrounded them roared their approval. A platoon of small boys scrambled along the rough path ahead of the girls, removing stones or twigs, and sweeping the way clear with palmleaf brooms. Other young men walked beside the dancers, cooling them with large pear-shaped fans of fine, woven cane. Further ahead along the path, the band of musicians I’d hired with the dancers approached the wedding stage silently in their red and white uniforms. Prabaker and Parvati sat to one side, and Johnny Cigar sat with Sita on the other side. Prabaker’s parents, Kishan and Rukhmabai, had travelled from Sunder for the event. They planned to spend a full month in the city, staying in a slum hut beside Prabaker’s own. They sat at the front of the stage with Kumar and Nandita Patak. A huge painting of a lotus flower filled the space behind them, and coloured lights formed glowing vines overhead.
When the dancers slowly entered the space, singing love, they stopped as one and stamped their feet. They twirled in place, turning clockwise in perfect unison. Their arms moved with the grace of a swan’s neck. Their hands and fingers rolled and swirled like silk scarves sailing the wind. Then suddenly they stamped their feet three times, and the musicians struck up a wild, enravishing rendition of that month’s most popular movie song. And with the cheering in every throat around them, the girls danced into a million dreams.