I visited Prabaker, Johnny, Qasim, and Jeetendra often, and I continued to help out at the clinic, attending to patients for two afternoons every week. But the strange mix of arrogance and insouciance that had permitted me to be the slum doctor was gone, and I didn’t expect it to return. There’s a little arrogance at the heart of every better self. That arrogance left me when I failed to save my neighbour’s life-failed even to know that she was ill. And there’s an innocence, essential and unblinking, in the heart of every determination to serve. That innocence faltered when I stumbled from the Indian prison: my smile, no less than my footsteps, hobbled by the memory of the leg-irons. Moving out of the slum had as much or more to do with the state of my soul as it did with the wounds on my body.
For their part, my friends from the slum accepted my decision without question or comment. They greeted me warmly whenever I visited, and involved me in the daily routines and celebrations of the slum-weddings, festivals, community meetings, or cricket games-as if I still lived and worked with them. And despite their shock and sorrow when they saw my emaciated frame, and the scars that the overseers had branded on my skin, they never once mentioned the prison. A part of that, I think, was sensitivity to the shame they knew I must’ve been feeling; the shame that they would’ve felt had they been imprisoned. Another part, in the hearts of Prabaker, and Johnny Cigar, and perhaps even Qasim Ali, might’ve been found in guilt-that they hadn’t been able to help me because they hadn’t thought to search for me. None of them had realised that I’d been arrested. They’d assumed that I’d simply tired of life in the slum, and that I’d returned to my comfortable life in my comfortable country, like every other tourist or traveller they’d ever known.
And that, too, found its way into my reluctance to return to the slum. It astonished me, and it hurt me, after all I’d done there, and for all that they’d included me in the ragged skein of their too-many lives, that they still expected me to leave them, without a word of farewell, whenever the whim possessed me.
So, when my health improved and I began to earn real money, I didn’t move back to the slum. Instead, with Khaderbhai’s help, I rented an apartment in Colaba at the landward end of Best Street, not far from Leopold’s. It was my first apartment in India, and my first indulgence of space and privacy and domestic luxuries such as a hot shower and a functioning kitchen. I ate well, cooking high-protein and high-carbohydrate meals, and forcing myself to finish off a bucket of ice cream every day. I put on body weight. I slept for ten hours at a stretch, night after night, healing my lacerated body with sleep’s ravelling repair. But I woke often, with my arms flailing, fighting, and the wet-metal smell of blood still fresh from the nightmare.
I trained in karate and weightlifting with Abdullah at his favourite gym in the fashionable suburb of Breach Candy. Two other young gangsters-Salman Mustaan and his friend Sanjay, whom I’d met at my first visit to Khader’s council-often joined us. They were strong, healthy men in their late-twenties who liked to fight about as much as they liked sex, and they liked sex just fine. Sanjay, with his movie-star looks, was the joker. Salman was quieter and more serious. Although inseparable friends since childhood, they were as hard on one another in the ring as they were when they boxed Abdullah and me. We worked out five times each week, with two days off to allow our torn and swollen muscles to recover. And it was good. It helped. Pumping iron is Zen for violent men. Little by little, my body regained its strength, muscular shape, and fitness.
But no matter how fit I became, I knew that my mind wouldn’t heal, couldn’t heal, until I found out who’d arranged with the police to have me picked up and sent to Arthur Road Prison. I needed to know who did it. I needed to know the reason. Ulla was gone from the city-in hiding, some said, but no-one could guess from whom, or why. Karla was gone, and no-one could tell me where she was. Didier and several other friends were digging around for me, trying to find the truth, but they hadn’t found anything that might tell me who’d set me up.
Someone had arranged with senior cops to have me arrested, without charge, and imprisoned at Arthur Road. The same person had arranged to have me beaten-severely and often-while I was in the prison. It was a punishment or an act of revenge. Khaderbhai had confirmed that much, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t say more, except to tell me that whoever it was who’d set me up hadn’t known that I was on the run. That information, about the escape from Australia, had emerged from the routine fingerprint check. The cops concerned had realised, at once, that there might be profit in keeping quiet about it, and they’d shelved my file until Vikram approached them on Khader’s behalf.
