Karla stayed for six days, the worst of it, and visited several times in the weeks that followed. When the infection rate dropped to zero, and the crisis had passed for the most serious cases, I took a three-bucket shower, changed into clean clothes, and headed for the tourist beat in search of business. I was almost broke. The rain had been heavy, and the flooding in many areas of the city was as hard on the touts, dealers, guides, acrobats, pimps, beggars, and black marketeers who made their living on the street as it was on the many businessmen whose shops were submerged.
Competition in Colaba for the tourist dollar was cordial, but creatively emphatic. Yemeni street vendors held up falcon-crested daggers and hand-embroidered passages from the Koran. Tall, handsome Somalis offered bracelets made from beaten silver coins. Artists from Orissa displayed images of the Taj Mahal painted on dried, pressed papaya leaves. Nigerians sold carved, ebony canes with stiletto blades concealed within their spiral shafts. Iranian refugees weighed polished turquoise stones by the ounce on brass scales hung from the branches of trees. Drum sellers from Uttar Pradesh, carrying six or seven drums each, burst into brief, impromptu concerts if a tourist showed the faintest interest. Exiles from Afghanistan sold huge, ornamental silver rings engraved with the Pashto script and encircling amethysts the size of pigeons’ eggs.
Threading through that commercial tangle were those who made their living servicing the businesses and the street traders themselves-incense wavers, bringing silken drifts of temple incense on silver trays, stove cleaners, mattress fluffers, ear cleaners, foot massagers, rat catchers, food and chai carriers, florists, laundry-men, water carriers, gas-bottle men, and many others. Weaving their way between them and the traders and the tourists were the dancers, singers, acrobats, musicians, fortune-tellers, temple acolytes, fire-eaters, monkey men, snake men, bear-handlers, beggars, self-flagellators, and many more who lived from the crowded street, and returned to the slums at night.
Every one of them broke the law in some way, eventually, in the quest for a faster buck. But the swiftest to the source, the sharpest-eyed of all the street people, were those of us who broke the law professionally: the black marketeers. The street accepted me in that complex network of schemes and scammers for several reasons. First, I only worked the tourists who were too careful or too paranoid to deal with Indians; if I didn’t take them, no-one did. Second, no matter what the tourists wanted, I always took them to the appropriate Indian businessman; I never did the deals myself. And, third, I wasn’t greedy; my commissions always accorded with the standard set by decent, self-respecting crooks throughout the city. I made sure, as well, when my commissions were large enough, to put money back into the restaurants, hotels, and begging bowls of the area.
And there was something else, something far less tangible but even more important, perhaps, than commissions and turf-war sensitivities. The fact that a white foreigner-a man most of them took to be European-had settled so ably and comfortably in the mud, near the bottom of their world, was profoundly satisfying to the sensibility of the Indians on the street. In a curious mix of pride and shame, my presence legitimised their crimes. What they did, from day to day, couldn’t be so bad if a gora joined them in doing it. And my fall raised them up because they were no worse, after all, than Linbaba, the educated foreigner who lived by crime and worked the street as they did.
Nor was I the only foreigner who lived from the black market. There were European and American drug dealers, pimps, counterfeiters, con men, gem traders, and smugglers. Among them were two men who shared the name George. One was Canadian and the other was English. They were inseparable friends who’d lived on the streets for years. No one seemed to know their surnames. To make the distinction, they were known by their star signs: Scorpio George and Gemini George. The Zodiac Georges were junkies who’d sold their passports, as the last valuable things they’d owned, and then worked the heroin travellers-tourists who came to India to binge-hit heroin, for a week or two, before returning to the safety of their own countries. There were surprisingly large numbers of those tourists, and the Zodiac Georges survived from their dealings with them.
The cops watched me and the Georges and the other foreigners who worked the streets, and they knew exactly what we were doing. They reasoned, truly enough, that we caused no violent harm, and we were good for business in the black market that brought them bribes and other benefits. They took their cut from the drug and currency dealers. They left us alone. They left me alone.
