"Next to our brother Keki is Farid. He is the youngest of our group, and the only one of us who is a native Maharashtrian, by virtue of being born in Bombay, although his family came here from Gujarat. Sitting next to you is Madjid, who was born in Teheran, but has lived here, in our city, for more than twenty years."
A young servant entered with a tray of glasses and a silver pot of black tea. He served us, beginning with Khaderbhai and ending with me. He left the room, returned momentarily to place two bowls of ladoo and barfi sweets on the table, and then left us once more.
Immediately afterward, three men joined us in the room, making a place for themselves on another patch of carpet that was near, but a little apart from us. They were introduced to me-Andrew Ferreira, a Goan, and Salman Mustaan and Sanjay Kumar, both from Bombay-but from that moment they never spoke again. They were, it seemed, young gangsters on the next rung below council membership: invited to listen at the meetings, but not to speak.
And they did listen, very attentively, while watching us closely.
I turned, often, to find their eyes on me, staring out from the kind of grave appraisal I'd come to know too well in prison. They were deciding whether to trust me or not, and how hard it would be-as a purely professional speculation-to kill me, without a gun.
"Lin, we usually talk about some themes, at our discussion nights," Abdul Ghani said in a clipped, BBC-accented English, "but first we would like to ask you what you make of this."
He reached across, pushing toward me a rolled poster that was lying on the table. I opened it out and read through the four paragraphs of large, bold typeface.
People of Bombay, listen to the voice of your King. Your dream is come to you and I am he, Sapna, King of Dreams, King of Blood. Your time is come, my children, and your chains of suffering will be lifted from you.
I am come. I am the law. My first commandment is to open your eyes. I want you to see your hunger while they waste food. I want you to see your rags while they wear silk. See that you live in the gutter while they live in palaces of marble and gold. My second commandment is to kill them all. Do this with cruel violence.
Do this in memory of me, Sapna. I am the law.
There was more, a lot more, all of it in the same vein. It struck me as absurd at first, and I started to smile. The silence in the room and the stares of tense concentration they turned on me stifled the smile to a grimace. They took it very seriously, I realised. Stalling for time, because I didn't know what Ghani wanted from me, I read through the ranting, insane tract again.
While I read the words, I remembered that someone had painted the name Sapna on the wall at the Village in the Sky, twenty-three floors off the ground. I remembered what Prabaker and Johnny Cigar had said about brutal murders done in Sapna's name. The continuing silence and expectant seriousness in the room filled me with a chill of menace. The hairs on my arms tingled with it, and a caterpillar of sweat inched down the groove of my spine.
"Well, Lin?"
"Sorry?"
"What do you make of it?"
The stillness was so complete that I could hear myself swallowing. They wanted me to give them something, and they expected it to be good.
"I don't know what to say. I mean, it's so ridiculous, so fatuous, it's hard to take it seriously."
Madjid grunted, and cleared his throat loudly. He drew his thick black eyebrows down over a thick black scowl.
"If you call cutting a man from the groin to the throat, and then leaving his organs and his life's blood all around his house serious, then it is a serious matter."
"Sapna did that?"
"His followers did it, Lin," Abdul Ghani answered for him. "That, and at least six more murders like it, in the last month. Some were even more hideous killings."
"I've heard people talking about Sapna, but I thought it was just a story, like an urban legend. I haven't read anything about it in any of the newspapers, and I read them every day."
"This matter is being handled in the most careful way,"
Khaderbhai explained. "The government and the police have asked for co-operation from the newspapers. They have been reported as unrelated things, as deaths that happened during simple, unconnected robberies. But we know that Sapna's followers have committed them, because the blood of the victims was used to write the word Sapna on the walls and the floors. And despite the terrible violence of the attacks, not much of any real value was stolen from the victims. For now, this Sapna does not officially exist. But it is only a matter of time before everyone knows of him, and of what has been done in his name."
"And you... you don't know who he is?"
"We are very interested in him, Lin," Khaderbhai answered. "What do you think about this poster? It has been seen in many markets and hutments, and it is written in English, as you see. Your language."
I sensed a vague hint of accusation in those last two words.
