"No, no, we call that a bear hug," I explained, gesturing with my hands, as if they were claws. "Bears, you know, the furry animals that eat honey and sleep in caves. When you hold someone like that, we say you're giving them a bear hug."
"Caves? Sleeping in caves?"
"It's okay. Don't worry about it. I liked it. It was... good friendship. It was what friends do, in my country, giving a bear hug like that."
"My brother," he said, with an easy smile, "I will see you tomorrow, with Sunil, from the lepers, with new medicine."
He rode off, and I walked alone into the slum. I looked around me, and that place I'd once regarded as grievously forlorn seemed sturdy, vital, a miniature city of boundless hope and possibility. The people, as I passed them, were robust and invigorated. I sat down in my hut, with the thin plywood door closed, and I cried.
Suffering, Khaderbhai once told me, is the way we test our love, especially our love for God. I didn't know God, as he'd put it, but even as a disbeliever I failed the test that day. I couldn't love God-anyone's God-and I couldn't forgive God. The tears stopped after a few minutes, but it was the first time I'd cried for too long, and I was still deep in the mud of it when Prabaker came into my hut and squatted down beside me.
"He is a danger man, Lin," he said without preamble.
"What?"
"This Abdullah fellow, who came here today. He is a very danger man. You are better not for any knowing of him. And doings with him are even worsely dangerous, also."
"What are you talking about?"
"He is..." Prabaker paused, and the struggle was explicit in his gentle, open face. "He is a killing man, Lin. A murdering fellow.
He is killing the people for money. He is a goonda-a gangster fellow-for Khaderbhai. Everybody knows this. Everybody, except of you."
I knew it was true without asking any more, without a shred of proof beyond Prabaker's word. It's true, I said in my mind. In saying it, I realised that I'd always known, or suspected it. It was in the way other people treated him, the whispers he inspired, and the fear I'd seen in so many of the eyes that looked into his. It was in the ways that Abdullah was like the best and most dangerous men I'd known in prison. That, or something like that, had to be true.
I tried to think clearly about what he was, and what he did, and what my relationship to him should or shouldn't be. Khaderbhai was right, of course. Abdullah and I were very much alike. We were men of violence, when violence was required, and we weren't afraid to break the law. We were both outlaws. We were both alone in the world. And Abdullah, like me, was ready to die for any reason that seemed good enough on the day. But I'd never killed anyone. In that, we were different men.
Still, I liked him. I thought of that afternoon at the lepers' slum, and I recalled how self-assured I'd been there with Abdullah. I knew that a part of whatever equanimity I'd managed to display, perhaps most of it, had really been his. With him I'd been strong and able to cope. He was the first man I'd met, since the escape from prison, who'd had that effect on me. He was the kind of man that tough criminals call a
Because men like that are so often the heroes in films and books, we forget how rare they are in the real world. But I knew. It was one of the things that prison taught me. Prison pulls the masks away from men. You can't hide what you are, in prison. You can't pretend to be tough. You are, or you're not, and everyone knows it. And when the knives came out against me, as they did more than once, and it was kill or be killed, I learned that only one man in hundreds will stand with you, to the end, in friendship's name.
Prison also taught me how to recognise those rare men when I met them. I knew that Abdullah was such a man. In my hunted exile, biting back the fear, ready to fight and die every haunted day, the strength and wildness and will that I found in him were more, and better, than all the truth and goodness in the world. And sitting there in my hut, striped with hot white light and cooling shadows, I pledged myself to him as brother and friend, no matter what he'd done, and no matter what he was.
I looked up into Prabaker's worried face, and smiled. He smiled back at me, reflexively, and in an instant of unusual clarity I saw that, for him, I was the one who inspired something of that confidence: as Abdullah was to me, so was I to Prabaker.
Friendship is also a kind of medicine, and the markets for it, too, are sometimes black.
"Don't worry," I said, reaching out to put a hand on his shoulder. "It'll be all right. It'll be fine. Nothing's going to happen to me."
