What I gained from the mission was ten thousand American dollars, field experience, and an introduction to the African branch of Ghani’s network. The network and the experience were worth the risk, it seemed to me then. The money was unimportant. I would’ve done the job for half the wage or less. I knew that most of the human lives in Bombay came and went much cheaper.
More than that, there was the danger. For some people, danger’s a kind of drug or even an aphrodisiac. For me, living as a fugitive, living every day and every night of my life with the fear of being killed or captured, danger was something else. Danger was one of the lances I used to kill the dragon of stress. It helped me to sleep. When I went to dangerous places and I did dangerous things, a rush of new and different fear swept over me. That new fear covered the dread that too often worried me awake. When the job was done, and the new fear subsided and passed away, I drowned in an exhausted peace.
And I wasn’t alone in that hunger for dangerous work. In the course of the job I met other agents, smugglers, and mercenaries whose excited eyes and adrenaline-fired reflexes matched my own. Like me, they were all running from something: they were all afraid of something that they couldn’t really forget or confront. And only danger money, earned with reckless risk, helped them to escape for a few hours and to sleep.
A second, third, and fourth trip to Africa followed without incident. I used three different passports, departing and arriving from different Indian international airports each time and then taking domestic flights back to Bombay. The double-shuffle flights between Delhi and Bombay continued. The specialist tasks that I performed with Khaled’s currency dealers and some of the gold traders kept me busy-busy enough, most of the time, not to think too long and too hard of Karla.
Toward the end of the monsoon I visited the slum, and joined Qasim Ali on his daily tour of inspection. As he checked the drainage channels and ordered the repair of damaged huts, I recalled how much I’d admired and depended upon him when I’d lived there in the slum. Walking beside Qasim Ali in my new boots and black jeans, I watched the strong young men in bare feet and lungis dig and scrape with their hands, as I’d once done. I watched them shore up the retaining walls and clear the clogged drains, ensuring that the slum would remain dry to the end of the rains. And I envied them. I envied the importance of the work and their earnest devotion to it. I’d known it once, so well-that fervent and unquestioning dedication. I’d earned the smiles of pride and gratitude from the slum-dwellers when the dirty work was done. But that life was gone for me. Its virtues and its solaces beyond price were as remote and irrecoverable as the life I’d known and lost in Australia.
Perhaps sensing my sombre mood, Qasim directed us toward the open area where Prabaker and Johnny were making the first preparations for their weddings. Johnny and a dozen or so of his neighbours were erecting the frame for a
Inviting me to drink tea, Johnny led us to the team of stage builders. My former neighbour Jeetendra was the supervisor for the project. He seemed to have recovered from the grief that had enfeebled him for many months after his wife’s death in the cholera epidemic. He wasn’t so robust-the once-familiar paunch had shrunk to a tight little mound beneath his T-shirt-but his eyes were bright with hope again, and his smile wasn’t forced. His son, Satish, had grown in a rapid burst since his mother’s death. When I shook hands with him, I passed a hundred-rupee note in the press of hands. He accepted it just as secretively, and slid it into the pocket of his shorts. The smile he gave me was warm, but he was still wounded by his mother’s death. There was a hollowness in his eyes: a black hole of shocked grieving that swallowed all the questions and released no answers. When he returned to his work, cutting lengths of coconut-fibre rope for the men to tie around bamboo bracing poles, his young face assumed a numb expression. I knew that expression. I sometimes caught it, by chance, in the mirror: the way we look when the part of happiness that’s trusting and innocent is ripped away, and we blame ourselves, rightly or wrongly, for its loss.
‘You know where I got my name?’ Johnny asked me as we sipped hot, delicious slum chai.
