"I'm all right," I mumbled, forcing myself to shuffle into step beside him. My self-assurance had melted through muscle and bone to settle in my knees. Each step was leaden and willed. It wasn't the violence that had shaken me. I'd seen worse, and with far less provocation, in prison. It was, instead, the too-sudden collapse of my stilted complacencies. The weeks of the city I'd thought I was beginning to know-the Bombay of temples, bazaars, restaurants, and new friends-had cindered in the fires of that public rage.
"What... what are they going to do with him?"
"They will take him to police, I think so. Behind Crawford Market is one police station, for this area. Maybe he will have the luck - maybe alive, he will reach there. Maybe not. He has a very quickly Karma, this fellow."
"You've seen this before?"
"Oh, many times, Linbaba. Sometimes, I drive it my cousin Shantu's taxi. I have seen so many angry publics. That is why I was getting so afraid for you, and for my good self also."
"Why does it happen like that? Why did they get so crazy about it?"
"That is nobody knows, Lin," Prabaker shrugged, quickening his pace a little.
"Wait a minute," I paused, slowing him with a hand to his shoulder. "Where are we going?"
"Still going for the tour, isn't it?"
"I thought... maybe... you want to call it off, for today."
"Calling off why? We have it a real and full deal to see, Linbaba. So, let's go, na?"
"But what about your arm? Don't you want to get it seen to?"
"No problem this arms, Lin. For last of the touring, we will have some whisky drinks in a terrible place I know. That will be a good medicine. So come on, let's go now, baba."
"Well, okay, if you say so. But we were going the other way, weren't we?"
"Still going the other way, baba," Prabaker replied with some urgency. "But first going this way only! Over there is a telephone, at the station. I must call my cousin, working now at Sunshine restaurant, as the dishes-washing boy. He is wanting a taxi-driving job, for his brother, Suresh, and I must give it the number and boss-name of the driver, now gone with the people.
That fellow's boss will be needing a new driver now, and we must hurry for such a good chance, isn't it?"
Prabaker made that call. Seconds later, he continued his tour of the dark side of the city without a heartbeat of hesitation, in another taxi, as if nothing had happened. Nor did he ever raise the matter with me again. When I occasionally spoke of it, he responded with a shrug, or some bland comment about our good luck in avoiding serious injury. For him, the incident was like a brawl in a nightclub, or a clash of rival supporters at a football match-commonplace and unremarkable, unless you happen to be in the centre of it.
But for me that sudden, savage, bewildering riot, the sight of that taxi- driver floating away on a rippling wave of hands, shoulders, and heads was a turning point. A new understanding emerged from it. I suddenly realised that if I wanted to stay there, in Bombay, the city I'd already fallen in love with, I had to change. I had to get involved. The city wouldn't let me be a watcher, aloof and apart. If I wanted to stay, I had to expect that she would drag me into the river of her rapture, and her rage. Sooner or later, I knew, I would have to step off the pavement and into the bloody crowd, and put my body on the line.
And with the seed of that resolve, born in that convulsion and portent, Prabaker's dark circuit of the city began. When we resumed our tour, he took me to a slave market not far from Dongri, an inner suburb famous for its mosques, bazaars, and restaurants specialising in Mughlai dishes. The main road became streets and the streets became lanes and, when those proved too narrow for the taxi to negotiate, we left the vehicle and walked together in the sinuous busyness of the crowds. The further we travelled into the Catiline lanes, the more we lost of the day, the year, the very age in which we lived. As automobiles and then scooters disappeared, the air became clearer, sharper, with the scents of spices and perfumes undulled by the diesel and petrol fumes prevalent elsewhere. Traffic noise faded, ceased, and was replaced by street sound-a class of children reciting verses from the Koran in a little courtyard; the whirr and scrape of stone on stone, as women ground spices in doorways; and the whining optimism of cries from knife sharpeners, mattress- fluffers, stove repairers, and other hawkers. They were people sounds, everywhere, played with voice and hand.
