Listening to the band, watching the children, and thinking of Tariq-missing the boy already-I remembered an incident from the prison. In that other world-within-a-world, back then, I moved into a new prison cell and discovered a tiny mouse there. The creature entered through a cracked air vent, and crept into the cell every night. Patience and obsessional focus are the gems we mine in the tunnels of prison solitude. Using them, and tiny morsels of food, I bribed the little mouse, over several weeks, and eventually trained it to eat from the edge of my hand. When the prison guards moved me from that cell, in a routine rotation, I told the new tenant-a prisoner I thought I knew well-about the trained mouse. On the morning after the move, he invited me to see the mouse. He'd captured the trusting creature, and crucified it, face down, on a cross made from a broken ruler. He laughed as he told me how the mouse had struggled when he'd tied it by its neck to the cross with cotton thread. He marvelled at how long it had taken to drive thumbtacks into its wriggling paws.
Are we ever justified in what we do? That question ruined my sleep for a long time after I saw the tortured little mouse. When we act, even with the best of intentions, when we interfere with the world, we always risk a new disaster that mightn't be of our making, but that wouldn't occur without our action. Some of the worst wrongs, Karla once said, were caused by people who tried to change things. I looked at the slum children dancing like a movie chorus and capering like temple monkeys. I was teaching some of those children to speak, read, and write English. Already, with just the little they'd learned in three months, a few of them were winning work from foreign tourists. Were those children, I wondered, the mice that fed from my hand? Would their trusting innocence be seized by a fate that wouldn't and couldn't have been theirs without me, without my intervention in their lives?
What wounds and torments awaited Tariq simply because I'd befriended and taught him?
"Joseph beat his wife," Prabaker explained as the couple drew near. "Now the people are a big celebration."
"If they parade like this when a man beats his wife, what parties they must throw when one is killed," Didier commented, his eyebrows arched in surprise.
"He was drunk, and he beat her terribly," I said, shouting above the din. "And a punishment was imposed on him by her family and the whole community."
"I gave to him a few good whacks with the stick my own self!"
Prabaker added, his face aglow with happy excitement.
"Over the last few months, he worked hard, stayed sober, and did a lot of jobs in the community," I continued. "It was part of his punishment, and a way of earning the respect of his neighbours again. His wife forgave him a couple of months ago. They've been working and saving money together. They've got enough, now, and they're leaving today on a holiday."
"Well, there are worse things for people to celebrate," Didier decided, permitting himself a little shoulder and hip roll in time to the throbbing drums and snake-flutes. "Oh, I almost forgot. There is a superstition, a famous superstition attached to that Hassaan Obikwa. You should know about it."
"I'm not superstitious, Didier," I called back over the thump and wail of the music.
"Don't be ridiculous!" he scoffed. "Everyone in the whole world is superstitious."
"That's one of Karla's lines," I retorted.
He frowned, pursing his lips as he strained his memory to recall.
"It is?" "Absolutely. It's a Karla line, Didier."
"Incredible," he muttered. "I thought it was one of mine. Are you sure?"
"I'm sure."
"Well, no matter. The superstition, about him, is that everyone who meets Hassaan Obikwa, and exchanges names with him in a greeting, will one day find himself a client of his-either a living client or a dead one. To avoid this fate, you don't tell him your name when you meet him the first time. No-one ever does.
You didn't tell him your name, did you?"
A roar went up from the crowd surrounding us. Joseph and Maria were close. As they approached, I saw her radiant, hopeful, brave smile and his competing expressions of shame and determination.
She was beautiful, with her thick hair trimmed short and styled to match the modern cut of her best dress. He'd lost weight, and looked fit, healthy, and handsome. He wore a blue shirt and new trousers. Husband and wife pressed against one another tightly, step for step, all four hands balled into a bouquet of clenched fingers. Family members followed them, holding a blue shawl to catch notes and coins thrown by the crowd.
