‘I am asking you, Lin,’ he said, choking on the words. He faced me. Tears bulged and rolled from his eyes into his lap. His voice came in stuttering sobs. ‘She is too beautiful. I am a very short and small man. Do you think I can make a good and sexy husband?’
I told Prabaker, sitting in his cab and watching him cry, that love makes men big, and hate makes them small. I told him that my little friend was one of the biggest men I ever met because there wasn’t any hate in him. I said that the better I knew him, the bigger he got, and I tried to tell him how rare that was. And I joked with him, and laughed with him until that great smile, as big as a child’s biggest wish, returned to his gentle round face. He drove away toward the bachelor party that was waiting for him in the slum, and sounded the horn triumphantly until he was out of sight.
The night that walked me, long after he left, was lonelier than most. I didn’t go back to Leopold’s. I walked instead along the Causeway, past my apartment, and on to Prabaker’s slum at Cuffe Parade. I found the place where Tariq and I fought the vicious pack on the Night of the Wild Dogs. There was still a small pile of scrap timber and stones on the spot. I sat there, smoking the darkness, and watching the slow elegance of the slum-dwellers drifting back along the dusty track to the huddle of huts. I smiled. Thinking of Prabaker’s mighty smile always made me smile reflexively, as if I was looking at a happy, healthy baby. Then a vision of Modena’s face flowed from the flickering lanterns and vaporous wreaths of smoke, and faded again to nothing before it was fully formed. Music started up inside the slum. A strolling group of young men quickened their pace to jog toward the stirring sound. Prabaker’s bachelor party had begun. He’d invited me, but I couldn’t bring myself to go. I sat near enough to hear the happiness, but far enough away not to feel it.
For years I’d told myself that love had made me strong when the prison guards tried to force me to betray the actress and our affair. Somehow, Modena had haunted the truth from me. It wasn’t love for her that had kept me silent, and it wasn’t a brave heart. It was stubbornness that had given me the strength to bite down; stiff-necked, bull-headed stubbornness. There was nothing noble in it. And for all my contempt for the cowardice of bullies, hadn’t I become a bully when I was desperate enough? When the dragon-claws of heroin sickness dug into my back I became a small man, a tiny man. I became so small that I had to use a gun. I had to point a gun at people, many of them women, to get money. To get money. How was I different, in that, to Maurizio bullying women to get money? And if they’d shot me during one of those hold-ups, if the cops had gunned me down as I’d wanted and expected at the time, my death would’ve aroused and deserved as little pity as that of the crazed Italian.
I stood up and stretched, looking around me and thinking of the dogs and the fight and the bravery of the little boy Tariq. When I started back toward the city, I heard a sudden eruption of happy laughter from many voices at Prabaker’s party, followed by a cloudburst rattle of applause. And the music dwindled with the distance until it was as faint and diminishable as any moment of truth.
Walking through the night, alone with the city for hours, I loved her with my wandering, just as I’d done when I lived in the slum. Near dawn I bought a newspaper, found a cafe, and ate a big breakfast, lingering over a second and then a third pot of chai. There was an article on page three of the paper describing the miraculous gifts of the Blue Sisters, as Rasheed’s widow and her sister had become known. It was a syndicated article, written by Kavita Singh and published across the country. In it she gave a brief history of their story and then related several first-hand accounts of miraculous cures that had been attributed to the mystical powers the girls exercised. One woman claimed to have been cured of tuberculosis, another insisted that her hearing had been fully restored, and an elderly man declared that his withered lungs were strong and healthy again after he merely touched a hem of their sky-blue garments. Kavita explained that the name Blue Sisters wasn’t their own choice: they wore blue, always, because they woke from their comas with a shared dream about floating in the sky, and their devotees had settled on the name. The article concluded with Kavita’s own account of a meeting with the girls, and her conviction that they were, beyond any doubt, special-perhaps even supernatural-beings.
