No-one else in Khaderbhai's network seemed to share my sense of outrage or my shame. There's probably no single group of citizens who are more cynical about politics and politicians than professional criminals. In their view, all politicians are ruthless and corrupt, and all political systems favour the powerful rich over the defenceless poor. And in time, and in a sense, I began to share their view because I knew the experience in which it was grounded. Prison had given us an intimate acquaintance with human-rights violations, and every day the courts confirmed what we'd learned about the law: the rich in any country, and any system, always got the best justice money could buy.
On the other hand, the criminals in Khader's network displayed a kind of egalitarianism that would've filled communists and Gnostic Christians with admiring envy. They didn't care about the colour, creed, race, or political orientation of clients, and they didn't judge them when asking about their past. Every life, no matter how innocent or evil, reduced to only one question: How bad do you need the book? The answer established the going rate, and every customer who had the money to pay it was born again, with no history and no sin, in the moment of the deal. No client was better than any other, and none was worse.
Abdul Ghani, propelled by the purest amoral spirit of market forces, serviced the needs of generals, mercenaries, misappropriators of public funds, and murderous interrogators without a hint of censure or dismay. Their freedom brought in about two million dollars each year in clear profit. But although he wasn't ethically squeamish about the source of the income, or receiving it, Abdul Ghani was religiously superstitious about spending it. Every dollar earned in saving that poisonous clientele went to a refugee rescue program that Khaderbhai had established for Iranians and Afghans displaced by war. Every passport bought by one of the warlords or their apparatchiks bought fifty more books, identity cards, or travel documents for Iranian and Afghan refugees. Thus, in one of those psychic labyrinths that fate likes to build around greed and fear, the high prices paid by tyrants rescued many of those made wretched by tyranny.
Krishna and Villu taught me everything they knew about the passport business, and in time I began to experiment, creating new identities for myself with American, Canadian, Dutch, German, and British books. My work wasn't as good as theirs, and never would be. Good forgers are artists. Their artistic vision must encompass the deliberate creative smudge that gives each page its counterfeit authenticity, no less than the accuracy of altered or manufactured details. Each page that they create is a miniature painting, a tiny expression of their art. The precise angle of one slightly skewed stamp or the casual blurring of another are as significant to those small canvasses as the shape, position, and colour of a fallen rose might be in a grand master's portrait. The effect, no matter how skilfully achieved, is always born in the artist's intuition. And intuition can't be taught.
My skills, instead, found expression in the stories that had to be invented for every newly created book. There were often gaps of months, or even years, in the record of travel contained within the books that we got from foreigners. Some had overstayed their visas, and that lapse had to be expunged from the book before it could be used. Stamping an exit from Bombay airport before the last visa's expiry date, as if the passport holder had left the country within the life of the visa, I then set about establishing a history of movement from one country to another for every book, using the bank of exit and entry stamps that Villu had created. Little by little, I brought each book up to date, and finally supplied it with a new visa for India and an entry stamp at Bombay airport.
The chain of entries and exits that linked that lapsed time was always carefully plotted. Krishna and Villu had a library of logbooks from the major airlines, listing all of the flights in and out of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas with their departure dates and arrival times. If we put a stamp into a British book stating that the holder had arrived in Athens on July the fourth, say, we were sure that a British Airways flight had connected at Athens airport on that day. In that way, every book had a personal history of travel and experience backed up by logs, timetables, and weather details which gave the new bearer a credible personal history.
