"It is a too much very sad situations, Linbaba," he sniffed.
"That is the end of She. What is to become of our India now, without She? I am asking myself, and not having much of answers."
She was one of the most common names for Indira: journalists, peasants, politicians, and black marketers all referred to her as She.
"Yeah. It's a mess, Prabu."
He seemed so distraught that I sat with him in silence, for a while, staring out my window toward the darkening sea. When I turned to look at him once more, I saw that he was praying, with his head bowed forward and his hands pressed together at the base of the steering wheel. I watched his lips twitch and ripple in the whispered prayer, and then he opened his hands, turned his head, and smiled at me. His eyebrows rose and fell twice as he held the huge smile.
"So, Lin, how is about some sexy perfumes, on your good self?" he asked, reaching across to press the bulb beneath the plastic Lakshmi goddess on the dashboard of his cab.
"No!" I shrieked, trying to stop him.
Too late. He crushed the bulb, and a swirling belch of the noxious chemical mixture spurted from the belly of the goddess and settled on my trousers and my shirt.
"Now," he grinned, starting the engine and pulling out onto Marine Drive again, "we are ready for the life again! We are the lucky fellows, isn't it?" "Sure it is," I grumbled, gasping for a clean breath of air at the open window. A few minutes later we neared the car park, where I'd arranged to meet Khaled. "You can let me out just here, Prabu. This is my stop, near that big tree."
He parked beside a tall date pain, and I climbed out. We fought over payment for the cab ride. Prabaker refused the money, and I insisted that he take it. I suggested a compromise. He should take the money, and use it to buy some new perfume for his plastic goddess.
"Oh, yes, Linbaba!" he cried, accepting the money at last. "What a good ideas you're having! I was just thinking that I have almost finished my perfumes bottle, and it is so much expensive that I didn't want to buy it another gallon any more. Now I can buy a big bottle, a new big bottle, and for weeks I can fill up my Lakshmi like new! Thank you, too much!"
"Don't mention it," I answered him, laughing in spite of myself.
"Good luck on your triple date."
He swung the car away from the kerb and out into the stream of traffic. I heard the car horn blaring a musical good-bye until he was out of sight.
Khaled Ansari was waiting for me in our chartered cab, fifty metres away. He sat in the back, with both doors opened for the breeze. I wasn't late, and he couldn't have been waiting more than fifteen or twenty minutes, but still there were ten cigarette butts on the ground beside the open door of the cab.
Each one of them, I knew, was an enemy crushed under his heel, a violent wish, a brutal fantasy of the suffering he would one day inflict on those he hated.
And they were many, the ones he hated. Too many. The images of violence that filled his mind were so real, he'd told me, that sometimes he was nauseous with it. The anger was an ache in his bones. The hatred locked his jaws, and made him grind his teeth on the fury. The taste of it was bitter, always, all day and night, every waking minute, as bitter as the taste of the blackened knife he'd clamped between his teeth, as a Fattah guerrilla, when he'd crawled across broken ground toward his first kill.
"It's gonna kill you, Khaled, you know."
"So I smoke too much. So what the fuck. Who wants to live forever?"
"I'm not talking about the cigarettes. I'm talking about what's inside you, making you chain-smoke them. I'm talking about what you're doing to yourself by hating the world. Someone told me once that if you make your heart into a weapon, you always end up using it on yourself."
"You're a fine one to come on with a lecture, brother," he said, and he laughed. The small laugh. The sad laugh. "You're not exactly Father Fucking Christmas, Lin."
"You know, Khader told me... about Shatila."
"What did he tell you?"
"That... you lost your family there. It must've been incredibly hard for you."
"What do you know about it?" he demanded.
It wasn't an offensive question, and it wasn't asked in an aggressive way, but there was too much hurt in it, too much of his pain for me to let it go.
"I know about Sabra and Shatila, Khaled. I've been into politics all my life. I was on the run, at the time, when it happened, but I followed the news every day, for months. It was... it was a heartbreaking story."
"I was in love with a Jewish girl once, you know?" Khaled asked.
I didn't reply. "She was... she was a beautiful girl, and smart, and maybe, I don't know, maybe the nicest human being I'm ever gonna meet. That was in New York. We were students together. Her parents, they were reform Jews-they supported Israel, but they were against the occupation of the territories. I was with that girl, making love to her, on the night my father died in an Israeli prison."
