The boy, Mukul, sent his eyes left and right, lizard quick, and passed a small, white packet to the tourist. The man was about twenty years old: tall and fit and handsome. I guessed him to be a German student, and I had a good eye. He hadn't been in the city long. I knew the signs. He was new blood, with money to burn and the whole world of experience open to him. And there was a spring in his step as he walked away to join his friends. But there was poison in the packet in his hand. If it didn't kill him outright, in a hotel room somewhere, it would deepen in his life, maybe, as it did once in mine, until it poisoned every breathing second.
I didn't care-not about him or me or anyone. I wanted it. I wanted the drug, just then, more than anything in the world. My skin remembered the satin-flush of ecstasy and the lichen stippled creep of fever and fear. The smell-taste was so strong that I felt myself retching it. The hunger for oblivion, painless, guiltless, and unsorrowing, swirled in me, shivering from my spine to the thick, healthy veins in my arms. And I wanted it: the golden minute in heroin's long leaden night.
Mukul caught my eye and smiled from habit, but the smile twitched and crumbled into uncertainty. And then he knew. He had a good eye, too. He lived on the street, and he knew the look. So the smile returned, but it was different. There was seduction in it- It's right here... I've got it right here... It's good stuff ... Come and get it-and the dealer's tiny, vicious, little sneer of triumph. You're no better than me... You're not much at all ... And sooner or later, you'll beg me for it...
The day was dying. Each jewelled shimmer, dazzling from the waves in the bay, turned from glittering white to pink, and weak, blood red. Sweat ran into my eyes as I stared back at Mukul. My jaws ached, and my lips quivered with the strain of it: the strain of not responding, not speaking, not nodding my head. I heard a voice or remembered it:
But Mukul... Mukul smiled, promising peace. And I knew there were so many ways to find that peace-I could smoke it in a cigarette, or chase it on a piece of foil, or snort it, or puff it in a chillum, or spike it into my vein, or just eat it, just swallow it and wait for the creeping numbness to smother every pain on the planet. And Mukul, reading the sweating agony like a dirty page in a dirty book, inched his way closer to me, sliding along the wet stone wall. And he knew it. He knew everything.
A hand touched my shoulder. Mukul flinched as if he'd been kicked, and backed away from me, his dead eyes dwindling to nothing in the burning splendour of the setting sun. And I turned my head to stare into the face of a ghost. It was Abdullah, my Abdullah, my dead friend, killed in a police ambush too many suffering months before. His long hair was cut short and thick like a movie star's. His black clothes were gone. He wore a white shirt and grey trousers with a fashionable cut. And they seemed strange, those different clothes-almost as strange as seeing him standing there. But it was Abdullah Taheri, his ghost, as handsome as Omar Sharif on his thirtieth birthday, as lethal as a big cat prowling, a black panther, and with those eyes the colour of sand in the palm of your hand a half-hour before sunset. Abdullah.
"It is so good to see you, Lin brother. Shall we go inside and drink some chai?"
That was it. Just that.
"Well, I... I can't do that."
"Why not?" the ghost asked, frowning.
"Well, for starters," I mumbled, shielding my eyes from the late afternoon sun with my hand as I stared up at him, "because you're dead."
"I am not dead, Lin brother."
"Yes..."
"No. Did you speak to Salman?"
"Salman?"
"Yes. He arranged it, for me to meet with you, in the restaurant.
It was a surprise."
"Salman... told me... there was a surprise."
"And I am the surprise, Lin brother," the ghost smiled. "You were coming to meet me. He was supposed to be making it a surprise for you. But you left the restaurant. And the others, they have been waiting for you. But you didn't come back, so I went to find you.
Now the surprise is really a shocks."
"Don't say that!" I snapped, remembering something Prabaker had once said to me, and still reeling, still confused.
"Why not?"
"It doesn't matter! Fuck, Abdullah... this is... this is a fuckin' weird dream, man."
"I am back," he said calmly, a little frown of worry creasing his brow. "I am here, again. I was shot. The police. You know about it."
