It was a large room, with three single beds covered by sheets, one window to the seaward side, and a row of windows that looked down upon a busy street. Each of the walls was painted in a different shade of headache-green. The ceiling was laced with cracks. Papery scrolls of paint dangled from the corners. The cement floor sloped downwards, with mysterious lumps and irregular undulations, toward the street windows. Three small plywood side-tables and a battered wooden dressing table with a cracked mirror were the only other pieces of furniture. Previous occupants had left evidence of their tenure: a candle melted into the neck of a Bailey’s Irish Cream bottle; a calendar print of a Neapolitan street scene taped to one wall; and two forlorn, shrivelled balloons hanging from the ceiling fan. It was the kind of room that moved people to write their names and other messages on the walls, just as men do in prison cells.
‘I’ll take it,’ I decided.
‘Yes!’ Prabaker cried, scurrying away at once toward the foyer.
My companions from the bus looked at one another and laughed.
‘I can’t be bothered arguin’ with this dude. He’s crazy.’
‘I hear ya,’ the shorter one chuckled. He bent low and sniffed at the sheets before sitting down gingerly on one of the beds.
Prabaker returned with Anand, who carried the heavy hotel register. We entered our details into the book, one at a time, while Anand checked our passports. I paid for a week in advance. Anand gave the others their passports, but lingered with mine, tapping it against his cheek thoughtfully.
‘New Zealand?’ he murmured.
‘So?’ I frowned, wondering if he’d seen or sensed something. I was Australia’s most wanted man, escaped from a jail term of twenty years for armed robberies, and a hot new name on the Interpol fugitive list.
‘Hmmm. Okay, New Zealand, New Zealand, you must be wanting something for smoke, some lot of beer, some bottles whisky, change money, business girls, good parties. You want to buy something, you tell me, na?’
He snapped the passport back into my hand and left the room, glaring malevolently at Prabaker. The guide cringed away from him in the doorway, cowering and smiling happily at the same time.
‘A great man. A great manager,’ Prabaker gushed, when Anand was gone.
‘You get a lot of New Zealanders here, Prabaker?’
‘Not so many, Mr. Lindsay. Oh, but very fine fellows they are. Laughing, smoking, drinking, having sexes with women, all in the night, and then more laughing, smoking, and drinking.’
‘U-huh. I don’t suppose you’d happen to know where I could get some hashish, Prabaker?’
‘Noooo problem! I can get it one tola, one kilo, ten kilos, even I know where it is a full warehouse…’
‘I don’t need a warehouse full of hash. I just want enough for a smoke.’
‘Just it happens I have it one tola, ten grams, the best Afghan charras, in my pocket. You want to buy?’
‘How much?’
‘Two hundred rupees,’ he suggested, hopefully.
I guessed that it was less than half that price. But two hundred rupees-about twelve dollars American, in those years-was one-tenth of the price in Australia. I tossed a packet of tobacco and cigarette papers to him. ‘Okay. Roll up a joint and we’ll try it out. If I like it, I’ll buy it.’
My two roommates were stretched out on their parallel beds. They looked at one another and exchanged similar expressions, raising their foreheads in sedimentary wrinkles and pursing their lips as Prabaker pulled the piece of hashish from his pocket. They stared with fascination and dread while the little guide knelt to make the joint on the dusty surface of the dressing table.
‘Are you sure this is a good idea, man?’
‘Yeah, they could be settin’ us up for a drug bust or somethin’!’
‘I think I feel okay about Prabaker. I don’t think we’ll get busted,’ I replied, unrolling my travel blanket and spreading it out on the bed beneath the long windows. There was a ledge on the window sill, and I began to place my keepsakes, trinkets, and lucky charms there-a black stone given to me by a child in New Zealand, a petrified snail shell one friend had found, and a bracelet of hawk’s claws made by another. I was on the run. I had no home and no country. My bags were filled with things that friends had given me: a huge first-aid kit that they’d pooled their money to buy for me, drawings, poems, shells, feathers. Even the clothes I wore and the boots on my feet were gifts that friends had given me. Every object was significant; in my hunted exile, the windowsill had become my home, and the talismans were my nation.
‘By all means, guys, if you don’t feel safe, take a walk or wait outside for a while. I’ll come and get you, after I have a smoke. It’s just that I promised some friends of mine that if I ever got to India, the first thing I’d do is smoke some hash, and think of them. I mean to keep that promise. Besides, the manager seemed pretty cool about it to me. Is there any problem with smoking a joint here, Prabaker?’
