"You'll work with me, on the collections," Khaled announced.
"You'll learn it all, in time, but I really want you to concentrate on the tricky ones-the five-star hotels, and the airline offices. The shirt and tie jobs. I'll go with you, especially at the start, but I think it'll be good if a gora, a well-dressed, white foreigner, does the hand-overs in those places. You'll be invisible. They won't look at you twice. And our contacts will be a lot less edgy, dealing with you. After that, I want you to get into the travel business. I can use a gora there, too."
"The travel business?"
"Oh, you're gonna love it," he said, meeting my eyes with that same sad smile. "It'll make that stint you did in Arthur Road seem worth it, because it's first class all the way."
The travel racket, he explained, was an especially lucrative part of the currency trade. It involved large numbers of people from the millions of Indians who worked in Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Muscat, Bahrain, Kuwait, and elsewhere throughout the Arab Gulf. The Indian workers, employed on contracts for three, six, or twelve months as domestics, cleaners, and labourers, were usually paid in foreign currency. Most of the workers tried to exchange their wages on the black market as soon as they got back to India, in order to gain a few extra rupees. Khader's mafia council offered the employers and the workers a shortcut. When they sold their foreign currencies in bulk to Khaderbhai, the Arab employers received a slightly more favourable rate, allowing them to pay their workers in rupees, at the black-market rate, in India. That left them with a surplus of rupees, and gave them a net profit from paying their workers.
For many Gulf State employers, the temptation to such currency crime was irresistible. They, too, had caches of undeclared, untaxed money under their opulent beds. Syndicates developed to organise the payment of Indian guest workers in rupees when they returned to India. The workers were happy because they got the black-market rate but didn't have to negotiate with hard-nosed black-market dealers personally. The bosses were happy because they made profits from the payment through their syndicates. The black marketeers were happy because a steady stream of dollars, Deutschmarks, riyals, and dirhams flowed into the river of demand created by Indian business travellers. Only the government missed out, and no-one in the thousands upon thousands of people involved in the trade shamed himself beyond endurance on that account.
"I... this whole business was once something of a specialty with me...," Khaled said, when that long first lesson finally ended.
His voice trailed off, and I couldn't be certain whether he was reminiscing or simply reluctant to talk further. I waited.
"When I was studying, in New York," he went on at last, "I was working on a thesis... well, I wrote a thesis, on _un-organised trade in the ancient world. It's an area that my mother was researching, before the '67 war. When I was a kid, she got me interested in the black markets of Assyria, Akkad, and Sumer, and how they related to trade routes, and taxes, and the empires that built up around them. When I started to write it myself, I called it Black Babylon."
"It's a catchy title."
He fired a glance at me to reassure himself that I wasn't mocking him.
"I mean it," I said quickly, wanting to put him at ease because I was beginning to like him. "I think it's a good topic for a thesis, and it's a very catchy title. I think you should go ahead and finish it." He smiled again.
"Well, Lin, life has a lot of surprises, and, as my uncle in New York used to say, most of them ain't happy ones for a working stiff. Now I'm working _for a black market, instead of working on one. Now, it's Black Bombay."
The bitterness in his voice was disconcerting. His jaw began to set in a grim and almost angry expression as he stared at his joined hands. I moved to steer the conversation away from the past.
"You know, I've been involved with a part of the black market that might interest you. Have you heard of the lepers' medicine market?"
"Sure," he replied, interest glittering in his dark brown eyes.
He ran a hand over his face and up across the short, military haircut, prematurely streaked with grey and white. The gesture wiped his gloomy recollections away, and he gave me his full attention. "I heard that you met Ranjit-he's incredible, isn't he?"
We talked about Ranjitbhai, the king of his little group of lepers, and the black market they'd organised across the country.
