Although still devoted to the cause of Palestinian statehood in his words, he was in fact lost to any cause but the suffering he'd endured and the suffering he lived to inflict. He'd drifted to Bombay on the recommendation of a senior guerrilla fighter who knew Khaderbhai. The mafia don took him in. Impressed with his education, language skills, and obsessive dedication, the permanent members of Khaderbhai's council had rewarded the young Palestinian with successive promotions. Three years after Shatila, at the time that I met him, Khaled Ansari was in charge of Khaderbhai's black-market currency operation. The position carried with it a place on the council. And when I felt strong enough to put in a full day of study, not long after my release from Arthur Road Prison, the bitter, lonely, battle-scarred Palestinian began my instruction.
"People say that money is the root of all evil," Khaled told me when we met in his apartment. His English was rich with accents of New York and Arabic and the Hindi that he spoke reasonably well. "But it's not true. It's the other way round. Money isn't the root of all evil. Evil is the root of all money. There's no such thing as clean money. All the money in the world is dirty, in some way, because there's no clean way to make it. If you get paid in money, somebody, somewhere, is suffering for it. That's one of the reasons, I think, why just about everybody-even people who'd never break the law in any other way-is happy to add an extra buck or two to their money on the black market."
"You make your living from it," I said, curious to know how he would respond.
"So?"
"So, how do you feel about it?"
"I don't feel anything about it, one way or the other. Suffering is the truth. Not suffering is the lie. I told you that, once before. That's just the way the world is."
"But surely some money has more suffering attached to it," I persisted, "and some money has less."
"Money only comes in two kinds, Lin-yours, and mine."
"Or, in this case, Khader's money."
Khaled laughed. It was a short, sad laugh, and the only one that was left in him.
"We make money for Abdel Khader, true, but a part of everything we make is ours. And it's the little part of everything that belongs to _us that keeps us in the game, na? Okay, let's get started. Why do black markets for money exist?"
"I'm not sure what you mean."
"I'll ask it in a different way," Khuled smiled. The thick scar that started at his throat, below the left ear, and cut a groove in his face all the way to the corner of his mouth, gave the smile a lopsided and unsettling twist. The scarred half of his face didn't smile at all, which meant that the other half seemed menacing, or pained, when he was trying hardest to be kind. "How is it that we can buy one American dollar from a tourist for, say, eighteen rupees, when the banks are only offering fifteen or sixteen?"
"Because we can sell them for more than eighteen?" I offered.
"Good. Good. Now, how can we do that?"
"Because... someone wants to buy them at that price, I guess."
"Exactly. But who are we selling them to?"
"Look, the most I ever did was put tourists together with black market guys, and take my cut. I don't really know what happens to the dollars after that. I never went that far into it."
"Black markets for things exist," he said slowly, as if confiding a personal secret rather than a commercial fact, "because the white markets are too strict. In this case, in the case of currencies, the government and the Reserve Bank of India control the white markets, and they're too strict. It's all about greed, and control. These are the two elements that make for commercial crime. Any one of them, on its own, is not enough. Greed without control, or control without greed won't give you a black market.
Men can be greedy for the profit made from, let's say, pastries, but if there isn't strict control on the baking of pastries, there won't be a black market for apple strudel. And the government has very strict controls on the disposal of sewage, but without greed for profit from sewage, there won't be a black market for shit. When greed meets control, you get a black market."
"You've put a lot of thought into this," I commented, laughing, but impressed and genuinely glad that he wanted to give me the ontology of currency crime, and not just the ways I could go about committing it.
"Not really," he answered self-deprecatingly.
"No, I'm serious. When Khaderbhai sent me here, I thought you were going to give me a few tables of figures-you know, today's currency exchange rates and all that-and then send me on my way."
