"Drop me off, and keep the cab," he said, resting back against the seat and letting his face and body sag in a sigh of exhaustion or dejection. "Do the rounds of the guys. Tell them to make their way to Rajubhai's early tomorrow. Find as many as you can, and let them know. If it gets real bad, we'll need everyone."
"Okay. I'll get on it. You should get some sleep, Khaled. You look tired."
"I think I will," he smiled. "There won't be much sleep in the next couple days."
He closed his eyes for a moment, and allowed his head to loll and roll with the movement of the car. Then he was suddenly awake, sitting upright, and sniffing the air around him.
"Say, what the fuck is that smell, man? Is that some kind of aftershave or what? I've been gassed with tear gas that smelled better than that!"
"Don't ask," I replied, suppressing a grin through clenched teeth, and rubbing at Prabaker's perfume stain on the front of my shirt. Khaled laughed, and turned his eyes to the starless dark, where night met the sea.
Sooner or later, fate puts us together with all the people, one by one, who show us what we could, and shouldn't, let ourselves become. Sooner or later we meet the drunkard, the waster, the betrayer, the ruthless mind, and the hate-filled heart. But fate loads the dice, of course, because we usually find ourselves loving or pitying almost all of those people. And it's impossible to despise someone you honestly pity, and to shun someone you truly love. I sat beside Khaled in the darkness as the taxi took us to the business of crime. I sat beside him in the drift of coloured shadows, loving the honesty and toughness in him, and pitying the hatreds that weakened him and lied to him. And his face, reflected sometimes in the night that filled the window, was as drenched in destiny, and as radiant, as the faces found in paintings of doomed and haloed saints.
"Wherever you go in the world, in any society, it is always the same when it comes to questions of justice," lord Abdel Khader Khan, my mafia boss and my surrogate father, told me when I'd been six months in his service. "We concentrate our laws, investigations, prosecutions, and punishments on how much crime is in the sin, rather than how much sin is in the crime."
We were sitting in the busy, steamy, wondrously aromatic Restaurant Saurabh, in the Sassoon Dock area. The Saurabh served what many regarded as Bombay's best masala dhosas, in a city where five thousand restaurants vied for the honour. Despite that distinction, or because of it, the Saurabh was small and relatively unknown. Its name didn't appear in any of the guidebooks for tourists or the epicure columns in the daily newspapers. It was a worker's restaurant, and it was full, from morning until evening, with working men and women who cherished it and kept its secret to themselves. Accordingly, the meals were cheap and the decor was a functional minimum. Nevertheless, the restaurant was spotlessly clean, and the spectacular, baroque sails of the crispy dhosas, swept to the tables by waiters who worked at a run, housed the most delicious mixes of spices that could be found in any dish, anywhere in the city.
"For me," he went on as we ate, "the opposite is true. For me, the most important thing is the amount of sin that is in the crime. You asked me, just now, why we do not make money from prostitution and drugs, as the other councils do, and I tell you it is because of the sin that is in those crimes. It is for this reason that I will not sell children, or women, or pornography, or drugs. It is for this reason that I will not permit those businesses in any of my areas. In all of these things, the sin in the crime is so great that a man must give up his soul for the profit he makes. And if a man gives his soul, if he becomes a soul-less man, it takes nothing less than a miracle for him to regain it."
"Do you believe in miracles?"
"Certainly, I do. In our hearts, we all believe in miracles."
"I'm afraid I don't," I stated, smiling.
"I'm sure that you do," he insisted. "Wouldn't you say that your rescue from the prison at Arthur Road was a miracle, for example?"
"It _felt like a miraculous thing at the time, I have to admit."
"And when you escaped from the prison in your home country, Australia-was that not a miraculous thing?" he asked quietly.
It was the first time he'd ever mentioned the escape. I was sure that he knew, of course, and I was sure he must've thought about it many times. But by broaching the subject with me he was raising the real nature of the rescue from Arthur Road Prison.
The fact was that he'd rescued me from two prisons-one in India and one in Australia-and I owed him a double debt.
"Yes," I answered, slowly but steadily. "It was something of a miracle, I guess."
