I couldn’t explain that love to Karla, or anyone else, including myself. I never believed in love at first sight until it happened to me. Then, when it did happen, it was as if every atom in my body had been changed, somehow: as if I’d become charged with light and heat. I was different, forever, just for the sight of her. And the love that opened in my heart seemed to drag the rest of my life behind it, from that moment onward. I heard her voice in every lovely sound the wind wrapped around me. I saw her face in brilliant mirrored flares of memory, every day. Sometimes, when I thought of her, the hunger to touch her and to kiss her and to breathe a cinnamon-scented minute of her black hair clawed at my chest and crushed the air in my lungs. Clouds, heavy with their burden of monsoon rain, massed above the city, above my head, and it seemed to me in those weeks that all grey heaven was my brooding love. The very mangroves trembled with my desire. And at night, too many nights, it was my restive sleep that rolled and turned the sea in lusted dreaming, until the sun each morning rose with love for her.
But she wasn’t in love with me, she’d said, and she didn’t want me to love her. Didier, trying to warn me, trying to help me or save me, perhaps, had said once that nothing grieves more deeply or pathetically than one half of a great love that isn’t meant to be. And he was right, of course, up to a point. But I couldn’t let it go, that hope of loving her, and I couldn’t ignore the instinct that enjoined me to wait, and wait.
Then there was that other love, a father’s love, and the son’s love that I felt for Khaderbhai. Lord Abdel Khader Khan. His friend, Abdul Ghani, had called him a mooring post, with the lives of thousands tied to his life for safety. My own life seemed to be one of those harnessed to his. Yet I couldn’t clearly see the means by which fate had bound me to him, nor was I completely free to leave. When Abdul had spoken of his search for wisdom, and the answers to his three big questions, he’d unwittingly described my own private search for something or someone to believe. I’d walked that same dusty, broken road toward a faith. But every time I’d heard the story of a belief, every time I’d seen some new guru, the result was the same: the story was unconvincing in some way, and the guru was flawed. Every faith required me to accept some compromise. Every teacher required me to close my eyes to some fault. And then there was Abdel Khader Khan, smiling at my suspicions with his honey-coloured eyes.
‘It is very beautiful, isn’t it?’ Johnny Cigar asked, sitting beside me and staring out at the dark, impatient restlessness of the waves.
‘Yeah,’ I answered, passing him a cigarette.
‘Our life, it probably began inside of the ocean,’ Johnny said quietly. ‘About four thousand million years before now. Probably near hot places, like volcanoes, under the sea.’
I turned to look at him.
‘And for almost all of that long time, all the living things were water things, living inside the sea. Then, a few hundred million years ago, maybe a little more-just a little while, really in the big history of the Earth-the living things began to be living on the land, as well.’
I was frowning and smiling at the same time, surprised and bewildered. I held my breath, afraid that any sound might interrupt his musing.
‘But in a way you can say that after leaving the sea, after all those millions of years of living inside of the sea, we took the ocean with us. When a woman makes a baby she gives it water, inside her body, to grow in. That water inside her body is almost exactly the same as the water of the sea. It is salty, by just the same amount. She makes a little ocean, in her body. And not only this. Our blood and our sweating, they are both salty, almost exactly like the water from the sea is salty. We carry oceans inside of us, in our blood and our sweat. And we are crying the oceans, in our tears.’
He fell silent, and at last I spoke my amazement.
‘Where the hell did you learn that?’ I snapped, perhaps a little harshly.
‘I read it in a book,’ he replied, turning to me with shy concern in his brave, brown eyes. ‘Why? Is it wrong? Have I said it wrongly? I have the book, in my house. Shall I get it for you?’
‘No, no, it’s right. It’s… perfectly right.’
It was my turn to lapse into silence. I was furious with myself. Despite my intimate knowledge of the slum-dwellers, and the debt I owed them-they’d taken me in, and given me all the support and friendship their hearts could hold-I still fell into the bigot’s trap. Johnny shocked me with his knowledge because, somewhere in my deepest appraisal of the slum-dwellers, there was a prejudice that they had no right to such knowledge. In my secret heart I’d judged them as ignorant, even though I knew better, simply because they were poor.
