"What you're saying is that we're finally going to get down to the real deal."
"Real will be full, baba," Prabaker assured me, "and deal will be plenty also. Now you will see it the really city. Usually, I am never taking the tourists to these places. They are not liking it, and I am not liking their not liking. Or maybe sometimes they are liking it too much, in these places, and I am liking that even less, isn't it? You must have it a good heads, to like these things, and you must be having a good hearts, to not like them too much. Like you, Linbaba. You are my good friend. I knew it very well, on that first day, when we were drinking the whisky, in your room. Now my Bombay, with your good heads and your good hearts, you will see it all."
We were riding in a taxi along Mahatma Gandhi Road past Flora Fountain and towards Victoria Station. It was an hour before noon, and the swash of traffic that coursed through that stone canyon was swollen by large numbers of runners pushing tiffin carts. The runners collected lunches from homes and apartments, and placed them in tin cylinders called jalpaans, or tiffins.
They pushed huge trays of the tiffins on long wooden carts, six men and more to a cart. Through the heavy metal-traffic of buses, trucks, scooters, and cars, they made deliveries at offices and businesses all over the city. None but the men and women who operated the service knew exactly how it was done: how barely literate men evolved the bafflingly complex system of symbols, colours, and key numbers to mark and identify the cylinders; how, day after day, hundreds of thousands of those identical containers swept through the city on their wooden axles, oiled with sweat, and reached the right man or woman, among millions, every time; and how all that was achieved at a cost measured in cents rather than dollars. Magic, the trick that connects the ordinary to the impossible, was the invisible river that ran through every street and beating heart in Bombay in those years, and nothing, from the postal service to the pleading of beggars, worked without a measure of it.
"What number that bus, Linbaba? Quickly, tell it."
"Just a second." I hesitated, peering out of the half-open window of the taxi and trying to read the curlicue numbers on the front of a red, double-decker bus that had stopped opposite us momentarily. "It's, ah, it's a one-zero-four, isn't it?"
"Very very fine! You have learn your Hindi numbers so nicely. Now no problem for you, reading numbers for bus, and train, and menu card, and drugs purchase, and other good things. Now tell me, what is alu palak?"
"Alu palak is potato and spinach."
"Good. And nice eating also, you have not mention. I love to eat it, alu palak. What is _phul _gobhi and bhindi?"
"That's... oh yeah, cauliflower and... and okra."
"Correct. And also good eating, again you are not mention. What is baingan masala?"
"That's, ah, spiced eggplant."
"Again right! What is it, you're not enjoying eating baingan?"
"Yes, yes, all right! Baingan is good eating, too!"
"I don't like it baingan so much," he sneered, wrinkling up his short nose. "Tell me, what am I calling chehra, munh, and dill?"
"Okay... don't tell me... face, mouth, and heart. Is that right?"
"Very right, no problem. I have been watching it, how nicely you eat up your foods with the hand, like a good Indian style. And how you learn to ask for the things-how much this, how much that, give me two cups of tea, I want more hashish-speaking only Hindi to the people. I have seen this all. You are my best student, Linbaba. And I am your best teacher also, isn't it?"
"It is, Prabu," I laughed. "Hey! Watch out!"
My shout alerted the taxi driver, who swerved just in time to avoid an ox-cart that was attempting to make a turn in front of us. The taxi driver-a burly, dark-skinned man with a bristling moustache-seemed to be outraged at my impertinence in saving our lives. When we first took the taxi he'd adjusted his mirror until he saw nothing in it but my face. After the near miss he glared at me, snarling a growl of insults in Hindi. He drove the cab like a getaway car, slewing left and right to overtake slower vehicles. There was an angry, bullying pugnacity in his attitude to everyone else on the road. He rushed to within centimetres of every slower car in his path, sounding his horn, then all but nudging it out of the way. If the slower car moved a little to the left, in order to let him pass, our driver drew beside it, pacing it for a time and shouting insults. When he spied another slow vehicle ahead, he sped forward to repeat the procedure. From time to time he opened his door and leaned out over the road to spit paan juice, taking his eyes off the traffic ahead for long seconds as we hurtled along in the rattling cab.
"This guy's a nut-case!" I muttered to Prabaker.
"Driving is not so good," Prabaker replied, bracing himself with both arms against the back of the driver's seat. "But I have to say, the spitting and insulting is a first-class job."
"For Christ's sake, tell him to stop!" I shouted as the cab accelerated into a squall of traffic, lurching in the swerve left and right. "He's going to kill us!"
"Band karo!" Prabaker shouted. Stop!
He added a pithy curse, for good measure, but the driver only became more enraged. With the car hurtling along at top speed, he turned his head to snarl at us. His mouth was wide open, and his teeth were bared. His eyes were huge, their blackness streaked with rage.
"Arrey!" Prabaker shrieked, pointing past the driver.
It was too late. The man turned quickly. His arms stiffened at the wheel, and he hit the brakes hard. There was a skating, sliding second... two seconds... three seconds. I heard a guttural gasp of air from deep in his throat. It was a sucking sound, like the lifting of a flat stone from the moist clay on the edge of a riverbed. Then there was the whump and crash as we slammed into a car that had stopped in front of us to make a turn. We were thrown forward into the back of his seat, and heard two thumping explosions as two other cars rammed into us.
Shattered glass and chrome fragments rattled on the road like thin metallic applause in the sudden silence that followed the impacts. My head had hit the door in the tumble spill of the accident. I felt blood flowing from a cut above my eye, but I was otherwise unhurt. As I wriggled myself up from the floor, and onto the back seat once more, I felt Prabaker's hands on me. "Nothing broken you are, Lin? You are okay?"
"I'm okay, I'm okay."
"You are sure? Everything not broken?"
"Jesus, Prabu, I don't care how good this guy's spitting is," I said, laughing nervously, and ragged with relief, "he doesn't get a tip. Are you all right?"
"We must get out, Lin!" he answered, his voice rising to a hysterical whine. "Out! Out of here! Now!"
The door on his side was jammed shut, and he began to push at it with his shoulder. He couldn't budge it. He reached across me to try the door on my side, but saw at once that another car was jammed against it, pinning it shut. Our eyes met, and there was such fear in him, such terror in the white-rimmed bulge of his eyes, that I felt the coldness of it deep in my chest. He turned at once, and threw himself again at the door on his side.
My mind was muddy water, and one idea splashed up from it, clear and exclusive: FIRE. Is that what he's afraid of! Once I'd asked myself the question I couldn't stop thinking it. I looked at the terror that pulled at Prabaker's gasping mouth, and I was sure the taxi was going to catch fire. I knew we were trapped there.
The rear windows, in all the Bombay taxis I'd seen, didn't open beyond a few centimetres. The doors were jammed, and the windows wouldn't open, and the taxi was going to explode in fire, and we were trapped. Burned live... Is that why he's so scared?
I looked to the driver. He was slumped, awkwardly, between the steering wheel and the door. His body was still, but I heard him moaning. Beneath the thin shirt, the abacus ridge of his spine rose and fell with each slow and shallow breath.
Faces appeared at the windows of the cab, and I heard excited voices. Prabaker looked out at them, turning this way and that, his face cramped in an expression of terrible anguish. Suddenly, he clambered over the seat into the front of the car and wrestled the passenger door open. Turning swiftly and grabbing at my arms with surprising strength, he tried to drag me by main force over the seat that divided us.
"This way, Lin! Get out, now! Hurry! Hurry!"
I climbed up and over the seat. Prabaker got out of the car, pushing his way into a crowd of onlookers. I reached out to the driver, trying to prise him from the obstructing rim of the steering wheel, but Prabaker's hands were on me again, brutally rough. The fingernails of one hand tore into the skin of my back, and the other wrenched at the collar of my shirt.
"Don't touch him, Lin!" he almost screamed. "Don't touch him!
Leave him and get out. Get out now!"
He dragged me from the car and through the hedge of bodies pressing in on the accident. On a footpath nearby, we sat beneath a fringe of hawthorn leaves that overhung a fence of wrought-iron spears, and inspected one another for injuries. The cut on my forehead, above my right eye, wasn't as serious as I'd thought.
The bleeding had already stopped, and it began to weep a clear, plasmic fluid. I was sore in a few places, but it was no cause for concern. Prabaker cradled his arm-the same arm that had pulled me from the car with such irresistible power-and it was obvious that he was in pain. A large swelling had already formed near the elbow. I knew it would leave a nasty bruise, but nothing seemed to be broken.
"Looks like you were wrong, Prabu," I chided, smiling as I lit a cigarette for him.
"Wrong, baba?"
"Getting us out of the car in such a panic and all. You really had me going. I thought the damn thing was going to catch fire, but it looks okay."
"Oh," he replied softly, staring straight ahead. "You think I was frightening for fire? Not fire in the car, Lin, but fire in the people. Look, now. See the public, how they are."
We stood, stretching the ache from shoulders and whip-lashed necks, and looked toward the wreckage some ten metres away. About thirty people had gathered around the four crashed vehicles. A few of them were helping drivers and passengers from the damaged cars. The rest huddled together in groups, gesturing wildly and shouting. More people streamed toward the site from every direction. Drivers of other cars that had been blocked from travelling further, left their vehicles and joined the crowd. The thirty people became fifty, eighty, then a hundred as we watched.
One man was the centre of attention. It was his car that had been trying to turn right, his car we'd smashed into with the brakes on full lock. He stood beside the taxi, bellowing with rage. He was a round-shouldered man, in his middle forties, wearing a grey, cotton safari suit that had been tailored to accommodate the extravagant boast of his large paunch. His thinning hair was awry. The breast pocket of his suit had been torn, there was a rip in his trousers, and he'd lost one sandal. That dishevelment combined with his theatrical gestures and persistent shouting to present a spectacle that seemed to be more enthralling, for the crowd of onlookers, than the wreckage of the cars. His hand had been cut from the palm to the wrist. As the staring crowd grew more silent, subdued by the drama, he smeared blood from the wound on his face and beat the redness into the grey of his suit, shouting all the while.
Just then, some men carried a woman into the little clear space around the man, and placed her on a piece of cloth that was stretched out on the ground for her. They shouted instructions to the crowd, and in moments a wooden cart appeared, pushed by bare- chested men wearing only singlets and short lungis. The woman was lifted onto the cart, her red sari gathered up in folds and wrapped about her legs. She may have been the man's wife-I couldn't be sure-but his rage suddenly grew hysterical. He seized her roughly by the shoulders and shook her. He pulled at her hair. He appealed to the crowd with enormous, histrionic gestures, flinging his arms wide and then striking his own blood- streaked face. They were the gestures of pantomime, the exaggerated simulations of silent films, and I couldn't help thinking they were absurd and funny. But the injuries people had sustained were real, as were the rumbling threats that surged through the ever-increasing crowd.
As the semi-conscious woman was trundled away on the humble cart, the man hurled himself at the door of the taxi, wrenching it open. The crowd reacted as one. They dragged the dazed and injured taxi driver from his cab in an instant and flung him on the bonnet of the car. He raised his arms in feeble pleading, but a dozen, twenty, fifty hands punched and tore at him. Blows drummed on his face, chest, stomach, and groin. Fingernails scratched and ripped, tearing his mouth open on one side almost to the ear, and shredding his shirt to rags.
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...
But there was another thought, dark and secret then, and all too clear to me now: the man was an idiot, an insulting and belligerent idiot, whose reckless stupidity had risked Prabaker's life and mine. A splinter of spite had pierced my heart when the crowd turned on him, and at least some small particle of their revenge-a blow or a shout or a shove-was my own. Helpless, craven, ashamed, I did nothing.
"We've got to do something..." I said lamely.
"Enough people are doing, baba," Prabaker replied.
"No, I mean, we've got to... can't we help him, somehow?"
"For this fellow is no helping," he sighed. "Now you see it, Lin.
Accidents is very bad business in Bombay. Better you get out of that car, or taxi, or what is it you are in, very, very quickly.
The public are not having patience for such business. See now, it is too late for that fellow."
The beating was swift, but savage. Blood streamed from many cuts on the man's face and naked torso. At a signal, perceived, somehow, through the howl and shriek of the crowd, the man was lifted up and carried off at head height. His legs were pressed together and stretched out, held rigid by a dozen hands. His arms were splayed out at right angles to his body and held fast. His head lolled and fell back, the soft, wet flap of skin hanging from cheek to jaw. His eyes were open, conscious, staring backward and upside down: black eyes, scudded with fear and imbecile hope. Traffic on the far side of the road parted to let the people pass, and the man slowly disappeared, crucified on the hands and shoulders of the crowd.
"Come on, Lin. Let's go. You are okay?"
"I'm all right," I mumbled, forcing myself to shuffle into step beside him. My self-assurance had melted through muscle and bone to settle in my knees. Each step was leaden and willed. It wasn't the violence that had shaken me. I'd seen worse, and with far less provocation, in prison. It was, instead, the too-sudden collapse of my stilted complacencies. 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.
"What... what are they going to do with him?"
"They will take him to police, I think so. Behind Crawford Market is one police station, for this area. Maybe he will have the luck - maybe alive, he will reach there. Maybe not. He has a very quickly Karma, this fellow."
"You've seen this before?"
"Oh, many times, Linbaba. Sometimes, I drive it my cousin Shantu's taxi. I have seen so many angry publics. That is why I was getting so afraid for you, and for my good self also."
"Why does it happen like that? Why did they get so crazy about it?"
"That is nobody knows, Lin," Prabaker shrugged, quickening his pace a little.
"Wait a minute," I paused, slowing him with a hand to his shoulder. "Where are we going?"
"Still going for the tour, isn't it?"
"I thought... maybe... you want to call it off, for today."
"Calling off why? We have it a real and full deal to see, Linbaba. So, let's go, na?"
"But what about your arm? Don't you want to get it seen to?"
"No problem this arms, Lin. For last of the touring, we will have some whisky drinks in a terrible place I know. That will be a good medicine. So come on, let's go now, baba."
"Well, okay, if you say so. But we were going the other way, weren't we?"
"Still going the other way, baba," Prabaker replied with some urgency. "But first going this way only! Over there is a telephone, at the station. I must call my cousin, working now at Sunshine restaurant, as the dishes-washing boy. He is wanting a taxi-driving job, for his brother, Suresh, and I must give it the number and boss-name of the driver, now gone with the people.
That fellow's boss will be needing a new driver now, and we must hurry for such a good chance, isn't it?"
Prabaker made that call. Seconds later, he continued his tour of the dark side of the city without a heartbeat of hesitation, in another taxi, as if nothing had happened. Nor did he ever raise the matter with me again. When I occasionally spoke of it, he responded with a shrug, or some bland comment about our good luck in avoiding serious injury. For him, the incident was like a brawl in a nightclub, or a clash of rival supporters at a football match-commonplace and unremarkable, unless you happen to be in the centre of it.
But for me that sudden, savage, bewildering riot, the sight of that taxi- driver floating away on a rippling wave of hands, shoulders, and heads was a turning point. A new understanding emerged from it. I suddenly realised that if I wanted to stay there, in Bombay, the city I'd already fallen in love with, I had to change. I had to get involved. The city wouldn't let me be a watcher, aloof and apart. If I wanted to stay, I had to expect that she would drag me into the river of her rapture, and her rage. Sooner or later, I knew, I would have to step off the pavement and into the bloody crowd, and put my body on the line.
And with the seed of that resolve, born in that convulsion and portent, Prabaker's dark circuit of the city began. When we resumed our tour, he took me to a slave market not far from Dongri, an inner suburb famous for its mosques, bazaars, and restaurants specialising in Mughlai dishes. The main road became streets and the streets became lanes and, when those proved too narrow for the taxi to negotiate, we left the vehicle and walked together in the sinuous busyness of the crowds. The further we travelled into the Catiline lanes, the more we lost of the day, the year, the very age in which we lived. As automobiles and then scooters disappeared, the air became clearer, sharper, with the scents of spices and perfumes undulled by the diesel and petrol fumes prevalent elsewhere. Traffic noise faded, ceased, and was replaced by street sound-a class of children reciting verses from the Koran in a little courtyard; the whirr and scrape of stone on stone, as women ground spices in doorways; and the whining optimism of cries from knife sharpeners, mattress- fluffers, stove repairers, and other hawkers. They were people sounds, everywhere, played with voice and hand.
At one turn in the puzzle alleyways we passed a long metal rack where bicycles were parked. From then on, even those simple machines vanished. Goods were transported by bearers with enormous bundles on their heads. One burden usually carried by all, the thudding pressure of the Bombay sun, was lifted from us: the lanes were dark, cool, shadowless. Although only three and at most four storeys tall, the buildings leaned in upon the winding pathways, and the sky was reduced to a thin brush stroke of pale blue.
The buildings themselves were ancient and dilapidated. Stone facades, which had once been splendid and impressive, were crumbling, grimed, and patched with haphazard necessity. Here and there, small balconies jutted out to meet one another overhead, so close that neighbours could reach across and pass things with an out-stretched hand. 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 was clear that the plumbing was rudimentary, where it was connected at all. We passed several places where women gathered with metal or clay pots to collect water from a single, outside tap. And skeined over all the buildings like metal cobwebs were complicated traceries of electrical conduits and wires, as if even that symbol and source of the modern age and its power was no more than a fragile, temporary net that might be swept away by a rough gesture.
Just as the contracted lanes seemed, with every twist and turn, to belong to another age, so too did the appearance of the people change as we moved deeper into the maze. I saw less and less of the western-style cotton shirts and trousers, so common everywhere else in the city, until finally those fashions disappeared from all but the youngest children. Instead, the men wore traditional garments of colourful diversity. There were long silk shirts that descended to the knee and were fastened with pearl buttons, from neck to waist; kaftan robes in plain colours or stripes; hooded cloaks that resembled the garb of monks; and an endless variety of skull caps, in white or beaded colours, and turbans in yellow, red, and electric blue. The women were more conspicuously bejewelled, despite the indigence of the quarter, and what those jewels lacked in money's worth was found in the extravagance of their design. No less prominent were caste mark tattoos on some foreheads, cheeks, hands, and wrists. And every bare feminine foot was graced by anklets of silver bells and coiled brass toe-rings.
It was as if all of those hundreds of people were costumed for home, for themselves, not for the public promenades. It was as if they were safe, there, to clothe themselves in tradition and display. And the streets were clean. The buildings were cracked and smeared, the constricted passageways were crowded with goats, chickens, dogs, and people, and each thin face showed the shade and hollows of penury, but the streets and the people were stainlessly, scrupulously clean.
We turned then into more ancient alleyways, so narrow that two persons passed one another only with difficulty. People stepped into doorways, waiting for us to walk past before they moved on.
The passages had been covered with false ceilings and stretched awnings, and in the darkness it wasn't possible to see more than a few metres in front or behind. I kept my eyes on Prabaker, fearful that I wouldn't find my way out alone. The little guide turned often, drawing my attention to a loose stone in the path ahead, or a step, or some obstruction overhead. Concentrating on those perils, I lost my orientation. My mental map of the city turned, blurred, faded, and I couldn't guess at the direction of the sea, or the major landmarks-Flora Fountain, VT. station, Crawford Market-we'd passed on our way to the quarter. I felt myself to be so deep in the flow and reflux of those narrow lanes, so smothered by the intimacy of open doors and perfumed bodies, that it seemed I was walking inside the buildings, inside the very homes, rather than between them.
We came upon a stall where a man in a sweat-stained cotton vest stirred battered foods frying in a dish of bubbling oil. The blue flames of his kerosene stove, eerie and claustral, provided the only light. Emotion haunted his face. It was anguish, some kind of anguish, and the dull, stoic anger that hangs in the eyes of repetitive, ill-paid work. Prabaker moved past him and into the darkness beyond. As I approached the man he turned to face me, and his eyes met mine. For a moment, the full-force of his blue- lit anger was directed at me.
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...
Still staring at me, he grasped the handles of his dish. For one, two, thudding heartbeats, I was gripped by the ridiculous, terrifying thought that he was going to throw the boiling oil in my face. Fear jerked at my feet and I moved, easing my way past him with my hands flat against the damp surface of the stone wall. Two steps beyond him, my foot struck a crack in the path and I stumbled, and fell, dragging another man down with me. He was an elderly man, thin and frail. I could feel the wicker- basket of his bones through his coarse tunic. We fell heavily, landing near the open entrance to a house, and the old man struck his head. I scrambled to my feet, slipping and sliding on a pile of shifting stones. I tried to help the man to stand, but there was an elderly woman who squatted on her haunches there, in the open doorway, and she slapped at my hands, warning me away. I apologised in English, struggling to find the words for I'm sorry in Hindi-What are they? Prabaker taught me the words... Mujhako afsos hain... that's it-I said it three, four times. In that dark, quiet corridor between the buildings, the words echoed like a drunkard's prayer in an empty church.
The old man moaned quietly, slouching in the doorway. The woman wiped his face with a corner of her headscarf, and held the cloth out for me to see the bright stain of blood. She said nothing, but her wrinkled face was creased with a frown of contempt. With that simple gesture, holding out the bloodstained cloth, she seemed to be saying Look, you stupid oaf, you great clumsy barbarian, look what you've done here...
I felt choked by the heat, smothered by the darkness and the strangeness of the place. The walls seemed to press upon my hands, as if only my arms prevented them from closing in on me altogether. I backed away from the elderly couple, stumbling at first, and then plunging headlong into the shadow-land of the tunnel street. A hand reached out to grab at my shoulder. It was a gentle touch, but I almost shouted out loud.
"This way, baba," Prabaker said, laughing quietly. "Where are you taking yourself? This way only. Along this passage now, and you must be keeping your two feets to the outside because too much dirty it is, in the middle of the passages, okay?"
He was standing in the entrance to a narrow gap formed between the blank walls of two buildings. Feeble light gleamed in the teeth and eyes of his smile, but beyond him was only blackness.
He turned his back to me, spread his feet out until they touched the walls, braced himself with his hands, and then shuffled off, sliding his feet along the walls in small, dragging steps. He expected me to follow. I hesitated, but when the awkward star of his shuffling form melted in the darkness and vanished, I too put my feet out against the walls and shambled after him.
I could hear Prabaker ahead of me, but it was so dark that I couldn't see him. One foot strayed from the edge of the wall, and my boot squelched into a muddy slime that rested in the centre of the path. A foul smell rose up from that viscous ooze, and I kept my feet hard against the walls, sliding them along in short steps. Something squat and heavy slithered past me, rasping its thick body against my boot.
Seconds later, another and then a third creature waddled past me in the darkness, rolling heavy flesh over the toes of my boots.
"Prabu!" I bellowed, not knowing how far ahead of me he was.
"There are things in here with us!"
"Things, baba?"
"On the ground! Something's crawling on my feet! Something heavy!"
"Only rats are crawling here, Lin. There are no things."
"Rats? Are you kidding? These things are as big as bull terriers.
Jesus, this is some tour, my friend!"
"No problem big rats, Lin," Prabaker answered quietly from the darkness in front of me. "Big rats are friendly fellows, not making mischief for the people. If you don't attack them. Only one thing is making them bite and scratch and such things."
"What's that, for God's sake?"
"Shouting, baba," he replied softly. "They don't like the loud voices."
"Oh, great! Now you tell me," I croaked. "Is it much further?
This is starting to give me the creeps and-"
He'd stopped, and I bumped into him, pressing him against the panelled surface of a wooden door.
"We are here," he whispered, reaching out to knock with a complex series of taps and pauses. There was a scrape and clunk as a heavy bolt slid free, and then the door swung open, dazzling us with sudden bright light. Prabaker grasped my sleeve and dragged me with him. "Quickly, Lin. No big rats allowed inside!"
We stepped inside a small chamber, hemmed in by blank walls and lit from high above by a raw silk rectangle of sky. I could hear voices from deeper within the cul-de-sac. A huge man slammed the gate shut. He put his back to it and faced us with a scowl, teeth bared. Prabaker began to talk at once, placating him with soft words and fawning gestures. The man shook his head repeatedly, interjecting regularly to say _no, no, no.
He towered over me. I was standing so close to him that I could feel the breath from his wide nostrils, the sound of it like wind whistling through caves on a rocky shore. His hair was very short, exposing ears as large and nubbled as a boxer's practice mitts. His square face seemed to be animated by more strong muscle tissue than the average man has in his back. His chest, as wide as I was from shoulder to shoulder, rose and fell with each breath, and rested upon an immense belly.
The fine dagger-line of his moustache accentuated his scowl, and he looked at me with such undiluted loathing that a little prayer unfurled itself in my mind. Please God, don't make me fight this man.
He raised the palms of his hands to stop Prabaker's wheedling cajolery. They were huge hands, gnarled and calloused enough to scrape the barnacles off the side of a dry-docked oil tanker.
"He says we are not allowed inside," Prabaker explained.
"Well," I replied, reaching past the man and attempting with unforced enthusiasm to open the door, "you can't say we didn't try."
"No, no, Lin!" Prabaker stopped me. "We must argue with him about this matter."
The big man folded his arms, stretching the seams of his khaki shirt with little ripples of sound.
"I don't think that's such a good idea," I mumbled, under a tight smile.
"Certainly it is!" Prabaker insisted. "Tourists are not allowed here, or to any of the other people-markets, but I have told him that you are not one of these tourist fellows. I have told him that you have learned the Marathi language. He does not believe me. That is our problem only. He doesn't believe any foreigner will speak Marathi. You must for that reason speak it a little Marathi for him. You will see. He will allow us inside."
"I only know about twenty words of Marathi, Prabu."
"No problem twenty words, baba. Just make a begin. You will see.
Tell him your name."
"My name?"
"Yes, like I taught it to you. Not in Hindi, but in Marathi.
Okay, just begin..."
"Ah, ah, maza nao Lin ahey," I muttered, uncertainly. My name is Lin.
"Baapree!" the big man gasped, his eyes wide with genuine surprise. Good Lord!
Encouraged, I tried a few more of the phrases Prabaker had taught me during the last few weeks.
"Maza Desh New Zealand ahey. Ata me Colabala rahella ahey." My country is New Zealand. I am living in Colaba now.
"_Kai _garam _mad'chud!" he roared, smiling for the first time.
The phrase literally means, What a hot motherfucker! It's so frequently and inventively applied in conversation, however, that it can be loosely translated as Son of a gun!
The giant grasped my shoulder, squeezing it with amiable severity.
I ran through the range of my Marathi phrases, beginning with the first words I'd asked Prabaker to teach me-I love your country very much-and concluding with a request I was often forced to make in restaurants, but which must've seemed spectacularly inappropriate in the little alcove: Please turn off the fan, while I am eating my soup...
"Enough now, baba," Prabaker gurgled through his wide grin. When I fell silent, the big man spoke swiftly and exuberantly.
Prabaker translated for him, nodding and gesturing expressively with his hands. "He says he is Bombay policeman, and his name is Vinod."
"He's a cop?"
"Oh yes, Lin. A police-cop, he is."
"Do the cops run this place?"
"Oh, no. This is part-time work only. He says he is so very, very happy to meet you...
"He says you are the first gora he ever met who can speak Marathi ...
"He says some foreigners speak Hindi, but nobody foreigner can speak Marathi...
"He says Marathi is his language. His native place is Pune...
"He says they speak it a very pure Marathi in Pune, and you must go there to hear it...
"He says he is too happy! You are like a son to him...
"He says you must come to his house, and eat foods and meet his family...
"He says that will be one hundred rupees."
"What was that?"
"Baksheesh, Lin. To go inside. One hundred rupees, it is. Pay him now."
"Oh, sure." I fumbled a few notes from my pocket, peeled off one hundred rupees, and handed it over. There's a special sleight of hand that's peculiar to policemen: the conjuring trick that palms and conceals banknotes with a skill that experienced shell-game swindlers envy. The big man collected the money with a two-handed handshake, smeared a palm across his chest as if brushing away crumbs after eating a sandwich, and then scratched at his nose with practised innocence. The money had vanished. He pointed along the narrow corridor. We were free to enter. Two sharp turns and a dozen paces beyond the gate and its shaft of bright light, we came upon a kind of courtyard. Several men sat on rough wooden benches, or stood in talking groups of two or three. Some were Arabs, dressed in loose, cotton robes and kaffiyehs. An Indian boy moved among them, serving black tea in long glasses. Some of the men looked at Prabaker and me with frowning curiosity. When Prabaker smiled widely and waved a greeting they turned away, concentrating their attention once more on their conversation. Occasionally, one or another of them looked up to inspect a group of children who sat together on a long wooden bench beneath a ragged canvas awning.
It was darker there, after the bright light of the entrance chamber. A patchwork of canvas scraps provided an uneven cover that screened out most of the sky. Blank brown and magenta walls rose up all around us. The few windows I could see, through tears in the canvas coverings, were boarded over. Not a real courtyard, the roughly square space seemed unplanned, a kind of mistake, an almost forgotten architectural accident formed by building and rebuilding on the ruins of other structures within the congested block. The ground was paved with haphazard collections of tiles that had once been the floors of kitchens and bathrooms. Two naked bulbs, strange fruit on the withered vines of bare wires, provided the poor light.
We moved to a quiet corner, accepted tea when it was offered, and sipped it in silence for a while. Then, speaking quietly and slowly, Prabaker told me about the place he called the people- market. The children sitting beneath the tattered canopy were slaves. They'd come from the cyclone in West Bengal, the drought in Orissa, the cholera epidemic in Haryana, the secessionist fighting in Punjab. Sourced in calamity, recruited and purchased by scouts, the children had journeyed to Bombay by train, often alone, through all the many hundreds of kilometres.
The men gathered in the courtyard were purchasers or agents.
Although they seemed to express no great interest, talking amongst themselves and for the most part ignoring the children on the wooden bench, Prabaker assured me that a restrained haggling was taking place, and that bargains were being struck, even as we watched.
The children were thin, vulnerable, and small. Two of them sat with their four hands bunched together in a beehive-ball. One child embraced another within the huddle of a protective arm. All of them stared out at the well-fed, well-clothed purchasers and agents, following every change of expression or emphatic gesture of their bejewelled hands. And the eyes of those children were like the black gleam at the bottom of a sweetwater well.
What does it take to harden a man's heart? How could I see that place, look at those children, and not put a stop to it? Why didn't I contact the authorities? Why didn't I get a gun, and put a stop to it myself? The answer to that, like the answers to all the big questions, came in many parts. I was a wanted man, a hunted criminal, living on the run. Contacting police or government authorities wasn't an option for me. I was a stranger in that strange land: it wasn't my country, and it wasn't my culture. I had to know more. I had to know the language that was spoken, at the very least, before I could presume to interfere.
And I'd learned, the hard way, that sometimes, even with the purest intentions, we make things worse when we do our best to make things better. If I came back with a gun and stopped the slave market there, in that crooked concrete maze, it would start up again somewhere else. Stranger that I was, I knew that much.
And maybe the new slave market, in a different place, would be worse. I was helpless to stop it, and I knew it.
What I didn't know then, and what troubled me for a long time after that Day of the Slaves, was how I could be there, and look at the children, and not be crushed by it. I realised, much later, that a part of the answer lay in the Australian prison, and the men I'd met there. Some of those men, too many of them, were serving their fourth or fifth prison sentences. Many of them had begun their imprisonment in reform schools-Boys' Homes, they were called, and Youth Training Centres-when they were no older than those Indian slave children. Some of them had been beaten, starved, and locked in solitary confinement. Some of them, too many of them, had been sexually abused. Ask any man with a long- enough experience of prisons, and he'll tell you that all it takes to harden a man's heart is a system of justice.
And strange and shameful as it is to admit it, I was glad that something, someone, some experience had flinted my heart. That hard stone within my chest was all that protected me from those first sounds and images of Prabaker's dark tour of the city.
Hands clapped in brittle echoes, and a little girl stood up from the bench to sing and dance. It was a love song from a popular Hindi movie. I heard it many times, hundreds of times, during the following years, and it always reminded me of that child, ten years old, and her surprisingly strong, high, thin voice. She swayed her hips, pushing up her non-existent breasts in a child's imitation of a temptress burlesque, and new interest quirked the heads of the purchasers and agents.
Prabaker played the Virgil. His soft voice was ceaseless, explaining all that we saw, and all that he knew. He told me that the children would've died, if they hadn't found their way to the people-market. Professional recruiters, known as talent scouts, roamed from one catastrophe to another, from drought to earthquake to flood. Starving parents, who'd already watched one or more of their children sicken, and die, blessed the scouts, kneeling to touch their feet. They begged them to buy a son or a daughter, so that at least that one child would live.
The boys on sale there were destined to work as camel jockeys in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and other Gulf States. Some would be maimed in the camel races that provided afternoon entertainment for the rich sheiks, Prabaker said. Some would die. The survivors, grown too tall to ride in the races, were often abandoned to fend for themselves. The girls would work in households throughout the Middle East. Some of them would be used for sex.
But they were alive, Prabaker said, those boys and girls. They were the lucky ones. For every child who passed through the people-market there were a hundred others, or more, who'd starved in unutterable agonies, and were dead.
The starving, the dead, the slaves. And through it all, the purr and rustle of Prabaker's voice. There's a truth that's deeper than experience. It's beyond what we see, or even what we feel.
It's an order of truth that separates the profound from the merely clever, and the reality from the perception. We're helpless, usually, in the face of it; and the cost of knowing it, like the cost of knowing love, is sometimes greater than any heart would willingly pay. It doesn't always help us to love the world, but it does prevent us from hating the world. And the only way to know that truth is to share it, from heart to heart, just as Prabaker told it to me, just as I'm telling it to you now.