He drove away toward the bachelor party that was waiting for him in the slum, and sounded the horn triumphantly until he was out of sight.
The night that walked me, long after he left, was lonelier than most. I didn't go back to Leopold's. I walked instead along the Causeway, past my apartment, and on to Prabaker's slum at Cuffe Parade. I found the place where Tariq and I fought the vicious pack on the Night of the Wild Dogs. There was still a small pile of scrap timber and stones on the spot. I sat there, smoking the darkness, and watching the slow elegance of the slum-dwellers drifting back along the dusty track to the huddle of huts. I smiled. Thinking of Prabaker's mighty smile always made me smile reflexively as if I was looking at a happy, healthy baby. Then a vision of Modena's face flowed from the flickering lanterns and vaporous wreaths of smoke, and faded again to nothing before it was fully formed. Music started up inside the slum. A strolling group of young men quickened their pace to jog toward the stirring sound. Prabaker's bachelor party had begun. He'd invited me, but I couldn't bring myself to go. I sat near enough to hear the happiness, but far enough away not to feel it.
For years I'd told myself that love had made me strong when the prison guards tried to force me to betray the actress and our affair. Somehow, Modena had haunted the truth from me. It wasn't love for her that had kept me silent, and it wasn't a brave heart. It was stubbornness that had given me the strength to bite down; stiff-necked, bull headed stubbornness. There was nothing noble in it. And for all my contempt for the cowardice of bullies, hadn't I become a bully when I was desperate enough? When the dragon-claws of heroin sickness dug into my back I became a small man, a tiny man. I became so small that I had to use a gun. I had to point a gun at people, many of them women, to get money. To get money. How was I different, in that, to Maurizio bullying women to get money? And if they'd shot me during one of those hold-ups, if the cops had gunned me down as I'd wanted and expected at the time, my death would've aroused and deserved as little pity as that of the crazed Italian.
I stood up and stretched, looking around me and thinking of the dogs and the fight and the bravery of the little boy Tariq. When I started back toward the city, I heard a sudden eruption of happy laughter from many voices at Prabaker's party, followed by a cloudburst rattle of applause. And the music dwindled with the distance until it was as faint and diminishable as any moment of truth.
Walking through the night, alone with the city for hours, I loved her with my wandering, just as I'd done when I lived in the slum.
Near dawn I bought a newspaper, found a cafe, and ate a big breakfast, lingering over a second and then a third pot of chai.
There was an article on page three of the paper describing the miraculous gifts of the Blue Sisters, as Rasheed's widow and her sister had become known. It was a syndicated article, written by Kavita Singh and published across the country. In it she gave a brief history of their story and then related several first-hand accounts of miraculous cures that had been attributed to the mystical powers the girls exercised. One woman claimed to have been cured of tuberculosis, another insisted that her hearing had been fully restored, and an elderly man declared that his withered lungs were strong and healthy again after he merely touched a hem of their sky-blue garments. Kavita explained that the name Blue Sisters wasn't their own choice: they wore blue, always, because they woke from their comas with a shared dream about floating in the sky, and their devotees had settled on the name. The article concluded with Kavita's own account of a meeting with the girls, and her conviction that they were, beyond any doubt, special-perhaps even supernatural-beings.
I paid the bill, and borrowed a pen from the cashier to circle the article with several lines. As the streets unwound the tangled morning coil of sound, colour, and commotion, I took a cab and jounced through reckless traffic to the Arthur Road Prison. After a wait of three hours, I made my way into the visiting area. It was a single room divided down the centre by two walls of cyclone wire that were separated by an empty space of about two metres. On one side were the visitors, squeezed together and holding their places by clinging to the wire. Across the gap and behind the other wire fence were the prisoners, crushed together and also grasping at the wire to steady themselves. There were about twenty prisoners. Forty of us crowded into an equal space on the visitors' side. Every man, woman, and child in the divided room was shouting. There were so many languages-I recognised six of them, and stopped counting as a door opened on the prisoners' side. Anand entered, pushing his way through to the wire.
"Anand! Anand! Here!" I shouted.
