‘How long did it take you to feel comfortable here, Karla? I mean, you always seem so relaxed and at home. It’s like you’ve always been here.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. It’s the right place for
‘It’s funny you say that. I felt a bit like that myself. Within an hour of landing at the airport, I had this incredibly strong feeling that this was the right place for me.’
‘And I suppose that the real breakthrough came with the language. When I started to dream in Hindi, I knew that I was at home here. Everything has fallen into place since then.’
‘Is that it now? Are you going to stay here forever?’
‘There’s no such thing as forever,’ she answered in her slow, deliberate way. ‘I don’t know why we use the word.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘Yeah. Yeah. Well, I’ll stay until I get what I want. And then, maybe, I’ll go somewhere else.’
‘What do you want, Karla?’
She frowned in concentration, and shifted her gaze to stare directly into my eyes. It was an expression I came to know well, and it seemed to say,
‘I want everything,’ she replied with a faint, wry smile. ‘You know, I said that once, to a friend of mine, and he told me that the real trick in life is to want nothing, and to succeed in getting it.’
Later, after we’d negotiated the crowds on the Causeway and the Strand, and walked the leafy arches of the empty streets behind the night-silent Colaba Market, we stopped at a bench beneath a towering elm near her apartment.
‘It’s really a paradigm shift,’ I said, trying to explain a point I’d been making as we’d walked. ‘A completely different way of looking at things, and thinking about things.’
‘You’re right. That’s exactly what it is.’
‘Prabaker took me to a kind of hospice, an old apartment building, near the St George Hospital. It was full of sick and dying people who’d been given a piece of floor-space to lie down and die on. And the owner of the place, who has this reputation as a kind of saint, was walking around, tagging the people, with signs that told how many useful organs they had. It was a huge organ-bank, full of living people who pay for the privilege of a quiet, clean place to die, off the street, by providing organs whenever this guy needs them. And the people were pathetically grateful to the guy for it. They revered him. They looked at him as if they loved him.’
‘He put you through it in the last two weeks, your friend, Prabaker, didn’t he?’
‘Well, there was much worse than that. But the real problem is that you can’t
‘It’s good to know what’s wrong with the world,’ Karla said, after a while. ‘But it’s just as important to know that sometimes, no matter how wrong it is, you can’t change it. A lot of the bad stuff in the world wasn’t really that bad until someone tried to change it.’
‘I’m not sure I want to believe that. I know you’re right. I know we make things worse, sometimes, the more we try to make them better. But I want to believe that if we do it right, everything and everyone can change for the better.’
‘You know, I actually ran into Prabaker today. He told me to ask you about the water, whatever that means.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ I laughed. ‘Just yesterday, I went down from my hotel to meet Prabaker on the street. But on the stairwell, there were these Indian guys, one after the other, carrying big pots of water on their heads, and climbing the stairs. I had to stand against the wall to let them pass. When I made it to the bottom, I saw this big wooden barrel with iron-rimmed wheels attached to it. It was a kind of water wagon. Another guy was using a bucket, and he was dipping it into the barrel and filling the big carry-pots with water.
‘I watched this for ages, and the men made a lot of trips, up and down the stairs. When Prabaker came along, I asked him what they were doing. He told me that that was the water for my shower. That the shower came from a tank on the roof, and that these men filled the tank with their pots.’
‘Of course.’
