The car drove off, and I turned toward the slum, staring at the gold-lettered business card for a full block before I put it in my pocket. A few minutes later, I passed the World Trade Centre and entered the compound of the slum, remembering, as I always did, the first time I entered those blest and tormented acres.
As I passed Kumar's chai shop, Prabaker came out to greet me. He was wearing a yellow silk shirt, black pants, and red-and-black patent leather high-heeled platform shoes. There was a crimson silk scarf tied at his throat.
"Oh, Lin!" he called out, hobbling across the broken ground on his platform shoes. He clung to me, as much for balance as in friendly greeting. "There is someone, a fellow you know, he is waiting for you, in your house. But one minute please, what happened on your face? And your shirts? Have you been having it some fights, with some bad fellow? Arrey! Some fellow gave you a solid pasting. If you want me, I will go with you, and tell that fellow he is a bahinchudh."
"It's nothing, Prabu. It's okay," I muttered, striding toward the hut. "Do you know who it is?"
"Who it... is? You mean, who it is, who was hitting your face?"
"No, no, of course not! I mean, the man who's waiting in my hut.
Do you know who it is?"
"Yes, Lin," he said, stumbling along beside me and clutching my sleeve for support.
We walked on for a few more seconds in silence. People greeted us on every side, calling out invitations to share chai, food, or a smoke.
"Well?" I asked, after a while.
"Well? What well?"
"Well, who _is it? Who's in my hut?"
"Oh!" he laughed. "Sorry, Lin. I thought you want some surprises, so I didn't tell you." "It's hardly a surprise, Prabu, because you told me there was someone waiting for me in my hut."
"No, no!" he insisted. "You don't know it his name yet, so still you get the surprise. And that is a good things. If I don't tell you there is somebody, then you go to your hut, and you get the shocks. And that is a bad things. A shocks is like a surprise, when you are not ready."
"Thank you, Prabu," I replied, my sarcasm evaporating as it was uttered.
He needn't have concerned himself with sparing me the shock. The closer I came to my hut, the more often I was informed that a foreigner was waiting to see me. Hello, Lin baba! There's a gora in your house, waiting for you!
We arrived at my hut to find Didier sitting in the shade of the doorway on a stool, and fanning himself with a magazine.
"It's Didier," Prabaker informed me, grinning happily.
"Yes. Thank you, Prabu," I turned to Didier, who rose to shake hands. "This is a surprise. It's good to see you."
"And good to see you, my dear friend," Didier replied, smiling despite the distressing heat. "But, I must be honest, you look a little worse for wear, as Lettie would say."
"It's nothing. A misunderstanding, that's all. Give me a minute to wash up."
I stripped off my torn, bloody shirt, and poured a third of a bucket of clean water from the clay matka. Standing on the flattened pile of stones beside my hut, I washed my face, arms, and chest. Neighbours passed me as I washed, smiling when they caught my eye. There was an art to washing in that way, with no wasted drop of water and no excess of mess. I'd mastered that art, and it was one of the hundred little ways my life imitated theirs, and folded into the lotus of their loving, hoping struggle with fate.
"Would you like a chai?" I asked Didier as I slipped on a clean, white shirt in the doorway of my hut. "We can go to Kumar's."
"I just had one full cup," Prabaker interjected before Didier could reply. "But one more chai will be okay, for the friendship sake, I think so."
He sat down with us in the rickety chai shop. Five huts had been cleared to make space for a single, large room. There was a counter made from an old bedroom dresser, a patchwork plastic roof, and benches for the customers made from planks resting precariously on piles of bricks. All the materials had been looted from the building site beside the slum. Kumar, the chai shop owner, fought a running guerrilla war with his customers, who tried to pilfer his bricks and planks for their own houses.
Kumar came to take our order himself. True to the general rule of slum life that the more money one made, the more poverty-stricken one had to look, Kumar's appearance was more dishevelled and ragged than the meanest of his customers. He dragged up a stained wooden crate for us to use as a table. Appraising it with a suspicious squint, he slapped at the crate with a filthy rag and then tucked the cloth into his singlet.
"Didier, you look terrible," I observed, when Kumar left to prepare our tea. "It must be love."
He grinned back at me, shaking his head of dark curls and raising the palms of his hands.
