I continued the weight training and karate with Abdullah, Salman, and Sanjay. We were fit and strong and fast. And as the days of training became weeks, Abdullah and I grew closer, as friends and brothers, just as Salman and Sanjay were with one another. It was the kind of closeness that didn’t need conversation to sustain itself: quite often we would meet, travel to the gym, work out on the weights, box a few rounds, spend half an hour sparring at karate, and speak no more than ten words to one another. Sometimes, with no more than a look in my eye or an unusual expression on his face, we would laugh, and keep on laughing so hard that we collapsed to the practice mats. And in that way, without words, I slowly opened my heart to Abdullah, and I began to love him.
I’d spoken to the head man of the slum, Qasim Ali Hussein, and to several others, including Johnny Cigar, when I’d first returned from Goa. I saw Prabaker in his taxi every other day. But there were so many new challenges and rewards in Ghani’s passport -workshop, and they kept me so busy and excited, that I stopped working, even occasionally, at the slum clinic I’d founded in the little hut that had been my home.
On my first visit to the slum in several weeks, I was surprised to find Prabaker in the wriggling convulsions of a dance while the slum musicians were rehearsing one of their popular songs. The little guide was dressed in his taxi driver’s khaki shirt and white trousers. He wore a purple scarf around his neck, and yellow plastic sandals. Approaching him unobserved, I watched him in silence for a while. His dance managed to combine obscenely lewd and suggestive thrusts of his hips with the facial expressions and hand-whirling gestures of a child-like innocence. With clownish charm he held his open palms beside his smiling face one moment, and then pumped his groin back and forth with a determined little grimace the next. When he finally turned and saw me, his face exploded in that huge smile, that uniquely wide and heart-filled smile, and he rushed to greet me.
‘Oh, Lin!’ he cried, squeezing his head into my chest in an affectionate hug. ‘I have a news for you! I have it such a fantastic news! I was looking for you in every place, every hotel with naked ladies, every drinking bar with black-market peoples, every dirty slum, every -’
‘I get the picture, Prabu. So, what’s your news?’
‘I am to be getting married! I am making a marriage on Parvati! Can you believe it?’
‘Sure, I can believe it. Congratulations. I take it you were practising, just now, for the wedding party.’
‘Oh, yes!’ he agreed, lunging at me with his hips a few times. ‘I want a very sexy dancing for everybody at the party. It’s a pretty good sexy, isn’t it?’
‘It’s… sexy… sure. How are things here?’
‘Very fine. No problem. Oh, Lin! I forgot! Johnny, he is making a marriage also. He will be married with Sita, the sister of my own beautiful Parvati.’
‘Where is he? I want to say hello.’
‘He is down at the seashore, you know, at the place where he sits on the rocks, for being lonely-the same place where you also enjoy a good lonely. You’ll find him there.’
I walked off, glancing back over my shoulder to see Prabaker encouraging the band with mechanical, piston-like thrusts of his narrow hips. At the edge of the slum, where black boulders tumbled to the sea, I found Johnny Cigar. He was dressed in a white singlet and a chequered green lungi. He braced himself with his arms, leaning back, and staring out to sea. It was almost exactly the same spot where he’d told me about seawater, sweat, and tears on the evening of the cholera outbreak, so many months before.
‘Congratulations,’ I said, sitting beside him and offering him a beedie cigarette.
‘Thanks, Lin,’ he smiled, shaking his head. I put the packet away, and for a while we both watched the small petulant waves smack at the rocky shore.
‘You know, I was brought into this life-conceived, I mean, not born -just over there, in the Navy Nagar,’ he said, nodding his head toward the compound of the Indian Navy. A curve of coastline separated us from the Nagar, but a direct line of sight across the small bay gave us a clear view of the houses, huts, and barracks.
‘My mother was from Delhi-side originally. Her family, they were all Christians. They made good money in the service of the British, but they lost their position, and their privileges, after the Independence. They moved to Bombay when my mother was fifteen years old. Her father took employment with the navy, working as a clerk. They lived in a zhopadpatti near here. My mother fell in love with a sailor. He was a tall, young fellow from Amritsar, with the best moustache in the whole Nagar. When she became pregnant with me, her family threw her out. She tried to get some help from the sailor who was my father, but he left the Nagar, and she never saw him or heard about him again.’
