As exhaustion finally claimed me, submerging my doubts and confusions, the shrewd clarity of near-sleep suddenly showed me what it was that those new friends—Khaderbhai, Karla, Abdullah, Prabaker, and all the others—had in common. They were all, we were all, strangers to the city. None of us was born there. All of us were refugees, survivors, pitched up on the shores of the island city. If there was a bond between us, it was the bond of exiles, the kinship of the lost, the lonely, and the dispossessed.
Realising that, understanding it, made me see the hard edges of the way I’d treated the boy, Tariq, himself a stranger in my raw and ragged fragment of the city. Ashamed of the cold selfishness that had stolen my pity, and pierced by the courage and loneliness of the little boy, I listened to his sleeping breath, and let him cling to the ache in my heart. Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears. In the end that’s all there is: love and its duty, sorrow and its truth. In the end that’s all we have—to hold on tight until the dawn.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
‘THE WORLD IS RUN by one million evil men, ten million stupid men, and a hundred million cowards,’ Abdul Ghani pronounced in his best Oxford English accent, licking the sweet honey cake from his short, thick fingers. ‘The evil men are the power—the rich men, and the politicians, and the fanatics of religion—whose decisions rule the world, and set it on its course of greed and destruction.’
He paused, looking toward the whispering fountain in Abdel Khader Khan’s rain-splashed courtyard as if he was receiving inspiration from the wetness and the shimmering stone. He reached out with his right hand and took another honey cake, popping it whole into his mouth. The little beseeching smile he gave me as he chewed and swallowed seemed to say, I know I shouldn’t, but I really can’t help it.
‘There are only one million of them, the truly evil men, in the whole world. The very rich and the very powerful, whose decisions really count—they only number one million. The stupid men, who number ten million, are the soldiers and policemen who enforce the rule of the evil men. They are the standing armies of twelve key countries, and the police forces of those and twenty more. In total, there are only ten million of them with any real power or consequence. They are often brave, I’m sure, but they are stupid, too, because they give their lives for governments and causes that use their flesh and blood as mere chess pieces. Those governments always betray them or let them down or abandon them, in the long run. Nations neglect no men more shamefully than the heroes of their wars.’
The circular courtyard garden at the heart of Khaderbhai’s house was open to the sky at its centre. Monsoon rain fell upon the fountain and surrounding tiles: rain so dense and constant that the sky was a river, and our part of the world was its waterfall. Despite the rain, the fountain was still running, sending its frail plumes of water upward against the cascade from above. We sat under cover of the surrounding veranda roof, dry and warm in the humid air as we watched the downpour and sipped sweet tea.
‘And the hundred million cowards,’ Abdul Ghani continued, pinching the handle of the teacup between his plump fingers, ‘they are the bureaucrats and paper shufflers and pen-pushers who permit the rule of the evil men, and look the other way. They are the head of this department, and the secretary of that committee, and the president of the other association. They are managers, and officials, and mayors, and officers of the court. They always defend themselves by saying that they are just following orders, or just doing their job, and it’s nothing personal, and if they don’t do it, someone else surely will. They are the hundred million cowards who know what is going on, but say nothing, while they sign the paper that puts one man before a firing squad, or condemns one million men to the slower death of a famine.’
He fell silent, staring into the mandala of veins on the back of his hand. A few moments later, he shook himself from his reverie and looked at me, his eyes gleaming in a gentle, affectionate smile.
‘So, that’s it,’ he concluded. ‘The world is run by one million evil men, ten million stupid men, and a hundred million cowards. The rest of us, all six billion of us, do pretty much what we are told!’
He laughed, and slapped at his thigh. It was a good laugh, the kind of laugh that won’t rest until it shares the joke, and I found myself laughing with him.
‘Do you know what this means, my boy?’ he asked, when his face was serious enough to frame the question.
‘Tell me.’
‘This formula—the one million, the ten million, the hundred million—this is the real truth of all politics. Marx was wrong. It is not a question of classes, you see, because all the classes are in the hands of this tiny few. This set of numbers is the cause of empire and rebellion. This is the formula that has generated our civilisations for the last ten thousand years. This built the pyramids. This launched your Crusades. This put the world at war, and this formula has the power to impose the peace.’
‘They’re not my Crusades,’ I corrected him, ‘but I get your point.’
‘Do you love him?’ he asked, changing the subject so swiftly that he took me by surprise. He did that so often, shifting the ground of his discourses from theme to theme, that it was one of the hallmarks of his conversation. His skill at performing the trick was such that even when I came to know him well, even when I came to expect those sudden deviations and deflections, he still managed to catch me off guard. ‘Do you love Khaderbhai?’
‘I … what sort of question is that?’ I demanded, still laughing.
‘He has great affection for you, Lin. He speaks of you often.’
I frowned, and looked away from his penetrating gaze. It gave me a rush of intense pleasure to hear that Khaderbhai liked me and spoke of me. Still, I didn’t want to admit, even to myself, how much his approval meant to me. The play of conflicting emotions—love and suspicion, admiration and resentment—confused me, as it usually did when I thought of Khader Khan, or spent time with him. The confusion emerged as irritation, in my eyes and in my voice.
‘How long do you think we’ll have to wait?’ I asked, looking around at the closed doors that led to the private rooms of Khaderbhai’s house. ‘I have to meet with some German tourists this afternoon.’
Abdul ignored the question and leaned across the little table separating our two chairs.
‘You must love him,’ he said in an almost seductive whisper. ‘Do you want to know why I love Abdel Khader with my life?’
We were sitting with our faces close enough for me to see the fine red veins in the whites of his eyes. The embroidery of those red fibres converged on the auburn iris of his eyes like so many fingers raised to support the golden, red-brown discs. Beneath the eyes were thick, heavy pouches, which gave his face its persistent expression of an inwardness filled with grieving and sorrow. Despite his many jokes and easy laughter, the pouches beneath his eyes were swollen, always, with a reservoir of unshed tears.
We’d been waiting half an hour for Khaderbhai to return. When I’d arrived with Tariq, Khader had greeted me warmly and then retired with the boy to pray, leaving me in the company of Abdul Ghani. The house was utterly silent, save for the splash of falling rain in the courtyard and the bubble of the fountain’s over-burdened pump. A pair of doves huddled together on the far side of the courtyard.
Abdul and I stared at one another in the silence, but I didn’t speak, I didn’t answer his question. Do you want to know why I love this man? Of course I wanted to know. I was a writer. I wanted to know everything. But I wasn’t so happy to play Ghani’s question-and-answer game. I couldn’t read him, and I couldn’t guess where it was going.
‘I love him, my boy, because he is a mooring post in this city. Thousands of people find safety by tying their lives to his. I love him because he has the task, where other men do not even have the dream, of changing the whole world. I worry that he puts too much time and effort and money into that cause, and I have disagreed with him many times about it, but I love him for hi
s devotion to it. And most of all, I love him because he is the only man I ever met—he is the only man you will ever meet—who can answer the three big questions.’
‘There are only three big questions?’ I asked, unable to keep the sarcasm from my voice.
‘Yes,’ he answered equably. ‘Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? Those are the three big questions. And if you love him, Lin, my young friend, if you love him, he will tell you these secrets, as well. He will tell you the meaning of life. And when you hear him speak, when you listen to him, you will know that what he says is true. And no-one else you will ever meet will answer these three questions for you. I know. I have travelled the Earth many times over. I have asked all the great teachers. Before I met Abdel Khader Khan, and joined my life to his, as his brother, I spent a fortune—several fortunes—seeking out the famous seers and mystics and renowned scientists. None of them ever answered the three big questions. Then I met Khaderbhai. He answered the questions for me. And I have loved him, as my brother, my soul’s brother, ever since that day. I have served him from that day until the little minute that we share. He will tell you. The meaning of life! He will solve the mystery for you.’
Ghani’s voice was a new current in the wide, strong river that carried me: the river of the city and its fifteen million lives. His thick, brown hair was streaked with grey, and smudged completely white at the temples. His moustache, more grey than brown, rested on finely sculptured, almost feminine lips. A heavy gold chain gleamed at his neck in the afternoon light, and matched the gold that flashed in his eyes. And as we stared at one another in that yearning silence, tears began to fill the redrimmed cups of his eyes.
I couldn’t doubt the real depth of his feeling, but I couldn’t fully understand it, either. Then a door opened behind us, and Ghani’s round face dissolved into its usual mask of facetious affability. We both turned to see Khaderbhai enter with Tariq.
‘Lin!’ he said, with his hands resting on the boy’s shoulders. ‘Tariq has been telling us how much he learned with you in the last three months.’
Three months. At first I’d thought it impossible to endure the boy’s company for three days. Yet three months had passed too swiftly; and when the time came to bring him home, I’d returned him to his uncle against the wishes of my heart. I knew that I would miss him. He was a good boy. He would be a fine man—the kind of man I once had tried, and failed, to be.
‘He’d still be with us, if you hadn’t sent for him,’ I replied. There was a hint of reproach in my tone. It seemed to me a cruel arbitrariness that, without warning, had put the boy with me for months and had taken him away just as suddenly.
‘Tariq completed his training at our Koranic school during the last two years, and now he has improved his English, with you. It is time for him to take his place at college, and I think he is very well prepared.’
Khaderbhai’s tone was gentle and patient. The affectionate and slightly amused smile in his eyes held me as firmly as his strong hands held the shoulders of the solemn, unsmiling boy standing in front of him.
‘You know, Lin,’ he said softly, ‘we have a saying, in the Pashto language, and the meaning of it is that you are not a man until you give your love, truly and freely, to a child. And you are not a good man until you earn the love, truly and freely, of a child in return.’
‘Tariq’s okay,’ I said, standing to shake hands and take my leave. ‘He’s a good kid, and I’ll miss him.’
I wasn’t the only one who would miss him. He was a favourite with Qasim Ali Hussein. The head man had visited the boy often, and had taken him on his rounds of the slum. Jeetendra and Radha had spoiled him with their affection. Johnny Cigar and Prabaker had teased him good-naturedly, and they’d included him in their weekly cricket game. Even Abdullah had developed an emotional regard for the child. After the Night of the Wild Dogs, he’d visited Tariq twice every week to teach him the arts of fighting with sticks, scarves, and bare hands. I saw them often, during those months, their silhouettes carved on the horizon like figures from a shadow-play as they practised on the one small strip of sandy beach near the slum.
I shook hands with Tariq last, and looked into his earnest, truthful, black eyes. Memories from the last three months skipped across the fluid surface of the moment. I recalled his first fight with one of the slum boys. A much bigger boy had knocked him down, but Tariq drove him back with the power of his eyes alone, forcing shame into the boy with his stare. The other boy broke down and wept. Tariq embraced him in a solicitous hug, and their close friendship was sealed. I remembered Tariq’s enthusiasm in the English classes that I’d set up for him, and how he soon became my assistant, helping the other children who joined in to learn. I saw him struggling against the first monsoon flood with us, digging a drainage channel out of the rocky earth with sticks and our bare hands. I remembered his face peeping around the flimsy door of my hut one afternoon when I was trying to write. Yes! What is it, Tariq! I’d asked him irritably. Oh, I’m sorry, he’d replied. Do you want to be lonely?
I left Abdel Khader Khan’s house, and began the long walk back to the slum, alone and diminished by the absence of the boy. I was less important, somehow, or suddenly less valuable in the different world that closed in on me without him. I kept my appointment with the German tourists, at their hotel, quite near Khaderbhai’s mosque. They were a young couple, on their first trip to the sub-continent. They wanted to save money by changing their Deutschmarks on the black market, and then buy some hashish for their journey around India. They were a decent, happy couple—innocent, generous-hearted, and motivated by a spiritual notion of India. I changed their money for them, on a commission, and arranged the purchase of the charras. They were very grateful, and tried to pay me more than we’d agreed. I refused the extra money—a deal is a deal, after all—and then accepted their invitation to smoke with them. The chillum I prepared was average strength for those of us who lived and worked on the streets of Bombay, but much stronger than they were accustomed to smoking. They were both stoned to sleep when I pulled the door of their hotel room closed, and walked on through dozy afternoon streets.
I made my way along Mohammed Ali Road to Mahatma Gandhi Road and the Colaba Causeway. I could’ve taken a bus, or one of the many prowling taxis, but I loved the walk. I loved those kilometres from Chor bazaar, past Crawford Market, V.T. Station, Flora Fountain, the Fort area, Regal Circle, and on through Colaba to Sassoon Dock, the World Trade Centre, and the Back Bay. I walked them a thousand times in those years, and they were always new, always exciting, and always inspiring. As I rounded Regal Circle and paused momentarily to check the Coming Attractions posters outside Regal Cinema, I heard a voice calling my name.
‘Linbaba! Hey! Oh, Lin!’
I turned to see Prabaker leaning from the passenger window of a black-and-yellow taxi. I walked over to shake his hand and greet the driver, Prabaker’s cousin, Shantu.
‘We’re going back to home. Jump yourself inside, and we’ll give you a lifts.’
‘Thanks, Prabu,’ I smiled. ‘I’ll keep walking. I’ve got a couple of stops to make on the way.’
‘Okay, Lin!’ Prabaker grinned. ‘But you don’t take too much time, like sometimes too much time you’re taking, if you don’t mind that I’m telling your face. Today is a special day, isn’t it?’
I waved until his smile disappeared in the thicket of traffic, and then I jumped in fright as a car slammed to a screeching smash beside me. An Ambassador had tried to overtake a slower car and had crashed into a wooden hand-cart, forcing the heavy cart into the side of a taxi, only two metres away from me.
It was a bad accident. The hand-cart puller was seriously injured. I could see that the ropes attached to his neck and shoulders—the reins and harness—had trapped him in the yoke of the cart. His body, constrained by the ropes, had somersaulted, and he’d hit his head hard on the unyielding surface of the road. One arm was twisted backward at a sickeningly unnatural angle. A pie
ce of shinbone on one leg protruded below the knee. And those ropes, the very ropes he used every day to drag his cart through the city, were tangled about his neck and chest, and dragging him toward choking death.
I rushed forward with others, pulling my knife from its scabbard in the belt at the back of my trousers. Working fast, but as carefully as possible, I cut through the ropes and freed the man from the wreckage of his cart. He was an older man, perhaps sixty years old, but he was fit and lean and healthy. His fast heartbeat was regular and strong: a powerful current with which to charge his recovery. His airways were clear, and he was breathing easily. When I opened his eyes gently with my fingers, his pupils reacted to the light. He was dazed and shocked, rather than unconscious.
With three other men, I lifted him from the road to the footpath. His left arm hung limply from its shoulder, and I eased it into a curve at the elbow. Onlookers donated their handkerchiefs when I called for them. Using four of the handkerchiefs, attached at the corners, I confined the arm to his chest in a makeshift sling. I was examining the break in his leg when a frenzy of screaming and shouts near the damaged cars forced me to my feet.
Ten or more men were trying to seize the driver of the Ambassador. He was a huge man, well over six feet, half again as heavy as I was, and twice as broad across the chest. He planted his thick legs against the floor of the vehicle, braced one arm against the roof, and gripped the steering wheel with the other. The furious crowd gave up after a minute of fruitless, desperate struggle, and turned their attention to the man in the back seat. He was a stocky man with strong shoulders, but he was much slighter and leaner. The mob dragged him from the back seat, and thrust him against the side of the car. He covered his face with his arms but the crowd began beating him with their fists and tearing at him with their fingers.
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