‘This is very little money, Lin brother,’ he said, his nose wrinkling and his mouth puckering with contempt. ‘This is tiny, tiny, very small money.’
‘Well, it might be tiny to you,’ I mumbled defensively, ‘but it’s enough to keep me going for a couple of weeks or so.’
‘And now you are free, isn’t it?’
‘Free?’
‘You have no patients?’
‘No.’
‘And you have no little commission business to do?’
‘No.’
‘Good. Then we go together, now.’
‘Oh, yeah? Where are we going?’
‘Come, I will tell you when we get there.’
We stepped out of the hut and were greeted by Johnny Cigar, who’d obviously been eavesdropping. He smiled at me, and scowled at Abdullah, then smiled at me again with traces of the scowl in the shadows of his smile.
‘Hi, Johnny. I’m going out for a while. Make sure the kids don’t get into the medicines, okay? I put some new stuff into the shelves today, and some of it’s dangerous.’
Johnny thrust his jaw out to defend his wounded pride.
‘Nobody will touch anything in your hut, Linbaba! What are you saying? You could put millions of rupees in there, and nobody would touch anything. Gold also you could put in there. The Bank of India is not as safe as this, Linbaba’s hut.’
‘I only meant that…’
‘And diamonds, also, you can leave in there. And emeralds. And pearls.’
‘I get the picture, Johnny.’
‘No need to worry about all that,’ Abdullah interjected. ‘He makes such tiny money that nobody would have the interest to be taking it. Do you know how much money he made last week?’
Johnny Cigar seemed suspicious of Abdullah. The hostile scowl pinched his face a little tighter, but he was intrigued by the question, and his curiosity got the better of him.
‘How much?’
‘I don’t think we need to go into this right now, guys,’ I grumbled, struggling to head off what I knew could become a one-hour discussion of my tiny money.
‘One thousand rupees,’ Abdullah said, spitting for emphasis.
I seized him by the arm and gave him a shove along the path between the huts.
‘Okay, Abdullah. We were going somewhere, weren’t we? Let’s get on with it, brother.’
We took a few steps, but Johnny Cigar came after us and tugged at my shirtsleeve, pulling me a pace or two behind Abdullah.
‘For God’s sake, Johnny! I don’t want to talk about how much money I made, right now. I promise, you can nag me about it later but…’
‘No, Linbaba, not about that,’ he rasped, in a scratchy whisper. ‘That man, that Abdullah-you shouldn’t trust him! Don’t do any business with him!’
‘What is this? What’s the matter, Johnny?’
‘Just don’t!’ he said, and might’ve said more, but Abdullah turned and called to me, and Johnny sulked off, vanishing in a twist of lane.
‘What is the problem?’ Abdullah asked as I drew level with him, and we set off between the snaking lines of huts.
‘Oh, no problem,’ I muttered, knowing that there was. ‘No problem at all.’
Abdullah’s motorcycle was parked on the roadway, outside the slum, where several kids were watching over it. The tallest of them snapped up the ten-rupee tip Abdullah gave them, and then led his ragged urchin band away at a whooping run. Abdullah kicked the engine over, and I climbed up onto the pillion seat behind him. Wearing no helmets, and only thin shirts, we swung out into the friendly chaos of traffic, heading parallel to the sea towards Nariman Point.
If you know bikes at all, you can tell a lot about a man by how he rides. Abdullah rode from reflex rather than concentration. His control of the bike in motion was as natural as his control of his legs in walking. He read the traffic with a mix of skill and intuition. Several times, he slowed before there was an obvious need, and avoided the hard braking that other, less instinctive riders were forced to make. Sometimes he accelerated into an invisible gap that opened magically for us, just when a collision seemed imminent. Although unnerving at first, the technique did soon inspire a kind of grudging confidence in me, and I relaxed in the ride.
At Chowpatty Beach, we turned away from the sea, and the cool breeze from the bay was stilled and then choked off by streets of tall terraces. We joined shoals of traffic in a steamy drift towards Nana Chowk. The architecture there was from the middle period of Bombay’s development as a great port city. Some of the buildings, constructed in the sturdy geometries of the British Raj, were two hundred years old. The detailed intricacies of balconies, window surrounds, and stepped facades reflected a luxurious elegance that the modern city, for all its chrome and glamour, rarely afforded itself.
