"Me? I'd be fuckin' angry, yaar. I don't wear this cowboy stuff because I like cows-I wear it because I like the way those cowboy fuckers handled things in those days. Me, I'd want to find out who tried to fuck me over, and I'd want to get some damn revenge on him. Me, when I was ready, I'd accept Khader's offer, and go to work for him, and get my revenge. But hey, that's me, and I'm an Indian madachudh, yaar.
And that's what an Indian madachudh would do."
I looked in the mirror once more. The new clothes felt like salt on the raw wounds, but they covered the worst of it, and I looked less alarming, less confronting, less hideous. I smiled at the mirror. I was practising, trying to remember what it was like to be me. It almost worked. I almost had it. Then a new expression, not quite my own, swirled into the grey of my eyes. Never again.
That pain wouldn't happen to me again. That hunger wouldn't threaten me. That fear wouldn't pierce my exiled heart. Whatever it takes, my eyes said to me. Whatever it takes from now on.
"I'm ready to see him," I said. "I'm ready right now."
Working for Abdel Khader Khan was my first real instruction in organised crime-until then I'd been no more than a desperate man, doing stupid, cowardly things to feed a stupid, cowardly heroin habit, and then a desperate exile earning small commissions on random deals. Although they were crimes that I'd committed, and some of them were very serious, I was never really a criminal until I accepted Khaderbhai as my teacher. I'd been a man who committed crimes, up to then, rather than a criminal, and there's a difference between the two. The difference, as with most things in life, lay in the motive and the means. Being tortured in Arthur Road Prison had given me the motive to cross the line. Another man, a smarter man than I was, might've run away from Bombay as soon as he was freed from the prison. I didn't. I couldn't. I wanted to know who'd put me in there, and why. I wanted revenge. The safest and fastest way to that vengeance was to join Khaderbhai's branch of the mafia.
His instruction in the lawbreaker's arts-he sent me first to the Palestinian, Khaled Ansari, to learn the black-market money trade - gave me the means to become what I'd never tried or wanted to be: a professional criminal. And it felt good. It felt so good within the protective circle of that band of brothers. When I rode the train to Khaled's apartment every day, hanging out the door of a rattling carriage in the hot, dry wind with other young men, my heart swelled with the excitement of freedom's wild, reckless ride.
Khaled, my first teacher, was the kind of man who carried his past in the temple fires of his eyes, and fed the flames with pieces of his broken heart. I've known men like Khaled in prisons, on battlefields, and in the dens where smugglers, mercenaries, and other exiles meet. They all have certain characteristics in common. They're tough, because there's a kind of toughness that's found in the worst sorrow. They're honest, because the truth of what happened to them won't let them lie.
They're angry, because they can't forget the past or forgive it.
And they're lonely. Most of us pretend, with greater or lesser success, that the minute we live in is something we can share.
But the past for every one of us is a desert island; and those like Khaled, who find themselves marooned there, are always alone.
Khaderbhai had told me some of Khaled's history when he'd briefed me for my first lessons. I'd learned that Khaled, at only thirty four, was alone in the world. His parents, both renowned scholars, had been prominent in the Palestinian struggle for an independent nation-state. His father had died in prison, in Israel. His mother, his two sisters, his aunts and uncles, and his mother's parents had all been killed in the massacres at Shatila, in Lebanon. Khaled, who'd trained with Palestinian guerrilla units in Tunisia, Libya, and Syria, and had fought for nine years in dozens of operations across a score of conflict zones, broke down after the bloody deaths of his mother and all the others at the refugee camp. His Fattah Group commander, knowing the signs of that breakdown and the risks it posed, had released him from duty.
