Khaderbhai had told me some of Khaled’s history when he’d briefed me for my first lessons. I’d learned that Khaled, at only thirty-four, was alone in the world. His parents, both renowned scholars, had been prominent in the Palestinian struggle for an independent nation-state. His father had died in prison, in Israel. His mother, his two sisters, his aunts and uncles, and his mother’s parents had all been killed in the massacres at Shatila, in Lebanon. Khaled, who’d trained with Palestinian guerrilla units in Tunisia, Libya, and Syria, and had fought for nine years in dozens of operations across a score of conflict zones, broke down after the bloody deaths of his mother and all the others at the refugee camp. His Fattah Group commander, knowing the signs of that breakdown and the risks it posed, had released him from duty.
Although still devoted to the cause of Palestinian statehood in his words, he was in fact lost to any cause but the suffering he’d endured and the suffering he lived to inflict. He’d drifted to Bombay on the recommendation of a senior guerrilla fighter who knew Khaderbhai. The mafia don took him in. Impressed with his education, language skills, and obsessive dedication, the permanent members of Khaderbhai’s council had rewarded the young Palestinian with successive promotions. Three years after Shatila, at the time that I met him, Khaled Ansari was in charge of Khaderbhai’s black-market currency operation. The position carried with it a place on the council. And when I felt strong enough to put in a full day of study, not long after my release from Arthur Road Prison, the bitter, lonely, battle-scarred Palestinian began my instruction.
‘People say that money is the root of all evil,’ Khaled told me when we met in his apartment. His English was rich with accents of New York and Arabic and the Hindi that he spoke reasonably well. ‘But it’s not true. It’s the other way round. Money isn’t the root of all evil.
‘You make your living from it,’ I said, curious to know how he would respond.
‘So?’
‘So, how do
‘I don’t feel anything about it, one way or the other. Suffering is the truth. Not suffering is the lie. I told you that, once before. That’s just the way the world is.’
‘But surely some money has more suffering attached to it,’ I persisted, ‘and some money has less.’
‘Money only comes in two kinds, Lin-
‘Or, in this case,
Khaled laughed. It was a short, sad laugh, and the only one that was left in him.
‘We make money for Abdel Khader, true, but a part of everything we make is ours. And it’s the little part of everything that belongs to
‘I’m not sure what you mean.’
‘I’ll ask it in a different way’ Khaled smiled. The thick scar that started at his throat, below the left ear, and cut a groove in his face all the way to the corner of his mouth, gave the smile a lopsided and unsettling twist. The scarred half of his face didn’t smile at all, which meant that the other half seemed menacing, or pained, when he was trying hardest to be kind. ‘How is it that we can buy one American dollar from a tourist for, say, eighteen rupees, when the banks are only offering fifteen or sixteen?’
‘Because we can sell them for
‘Good. Good. Now, how can we do that?’
‘Because… someone wants to buy them at that price, I guess.’
‘Exactly. But who are we selling them to?’
‘Look, the most I ever did was put tourists together with black-market guys, and take my cut. I don’t really know what happens to the dollars after that. I never went that far into it.’
