I returned to Karla and Prabaker. When we turned to leave the den, Abdullah was already gone. The alley outside was deserted, and within a few minutes we caught a taxi back to Colaba. Karla was silent during the ride, and I too said nothing, miserable that my attempt to impress her had ended in such confusion and near disaster. Only Prabaker felt free to speak.
‘What a lucky escapes!’ he said, from the front seat, grinning at us in turn as we sat together but apart in the back of the taxi. ‘I thought a sure thing that fellow would chop us up in teeny pieces. Some of the people should not be smoking the charras, isn’t it? Some of the people get very angry when they relax their brains.’
At Leopold’s I got out of the taxi and stood with Karla while Prabaker waited. A late-afternoon crowd surged around the island of our silent stare.
‘You’re not coming in?’
‘No,’ I answered, wishing that the moment was more like the strong, confident scene I’d imagined through most of that day. ‘I’m going to collect my stuff from the India Guest House, and move to the slum. In fact, I won’t be coming to Leopold’s for a while, or anywhere else for that matter. I’m going to… you know… get on my feet… or… I don’t know… find my feet… or… I’m going to… what was I saying?’
‘Something about your feet.’
‘Yeah,’ I laughed. ‘Well, you gotta start somewhere.’
‘This is kind of goodbye, isn’t it?’
‘Not really’ I muttered. ‘Well, yes. Yes, it is.’
‘And you only just got back from the village.’
‘Yeah,’ I laughed again. ‘From the village, to the slum. It’s quite a jump.’
‘Just make sure you land on your -’
‘-feet. Okay. I got it.’
‘Listen, if it’s a question of money, I could -’
‘No,’ I said quickly. ‘No. I want to do this. It’s not just money. I…’
For three seconds I balanced on the edge of telling her about my visa problems. Her friend, Lettie, knew someone at the Foreigner Registration Branch. She’d helped Maurizio, I knew, and there was a chance that she could help me. But then I drew back from the edge, and covered the truth with a smile. Telling Karla about the visa would lead to other questions that I couldn’t answer. I was in love with her, but I wasn’t sure that I could trust her. It’s a fact of life on the run that you often love more people than you trust. For people in the safe world, of course, exactly the opposite is true.
‘I… think this will be quite an adventure. I’m… actually looking forward to it.’
‘Okay’ she said, nodding her head slowly in acceptance. ‘Okay But you know where I live. Come by and see me, when you get the chance.’
‘Sure,’ I answered, and we both smiled, and we both knew that I wouldn’t visit her. ‘Sure. And you know where I am, with Prabaker. You do the same.’
She reached out to take my hand in hers, and then leaned over to kiss me on the cheek. She turned to leave, but I held her hand.
‘Don’t you have any advice for me?’ I asked, trying to find another laugh.
‘No,’ she said impassively. ‘I’d only give you advice if I didn’t care what happens to you.’
It was something. It wasn’t much, but it was something to hold on to and shape my love around, and keep me wishing. She walked away. I watched her step into the brittle brightness and banter of Leopold’s, and I knew that a door to her world had closed, for a time. For as long as I lived in the slum, I would be exiled from that little kingdom of light. Living in the slum would consume me, and conceal me, as effectively as if the mad swordsman had struck me with his blade.
I slammed the door of the taxi and looked at Prabaker, whose wide and beaming smile across the seat in front of me became the world.
‘
We pulled up, forty minutes later, outside the slum in Cuffe Parade, beside the World Trade Centre. The contrast between the adjacent and roughly equal plots of land was stark. To the right, looking from the road, the World Trade Centre was a huge, modern, air-conditioned building. It was filled to three levels with shops, and displays of jewels, silks, carpets, and intricate craftworks. To the left was the slum, a sprawling ten acres of wretched poverty with seven thousand tiny huts, housing twenty-five thousand of the city’s poorest people. To the right there were neon lights and floodlit fountains. To the left there was no electricity, no running water, no toilets, and no certainty that the whole shamble and bustle of it wouldn’t be swept away, from one day to the next, by the same authorities that reluctantly tolerated it.
