"Well, it is much better than that!"
"A doctor and a bear," I called out above the growl of the engine. "There's a lot of space between them, brother. One more hint."
"Ha!" he laughed, coming to a stop at a set of traffic lights. "I will say to you this-the surprise is so good that you will forgive me for all that you suffered when you thought I was dead."
"I do forgive you, Abdullah."
"No, Lin brother. I know you do not forgive me. I have too many bruises, and I am too much sore from our boxing and karate."
It wasn't true: I never hit him as hard as he hit me. Although he was healing well, and he was very fit, he'd never fully recovered the uncanny strength and charismatic vitality he'd known before the police shooting. And when he removed his shirt to box with me, the sight of his scarred body-it was as if he'd been savaged by the claws of wild animals and burned with hot iron brands- always made me pull my punches. Still, I never admitted that to _him.
"Okay," I laughed. "If that's the way you're gonna play it, I don't forgive you!"
"But when you see this surprise," he called out, laughing with me, "you will forgive me completely, with a full heart. Now, come on! Stop asking me about it, and tell me, what did Salman say to Sanjay about that pig-that Chuha?"
"How did you know that's what we were talking about?"
"I can see the look in Salman's face," he shouted back. "And Sanjay, he told me, this morning, that he wants to ask Salman- again-to make business with Chuha. So, what did Salman say?"
"You know the answer to that one," I replied a little more quietly as we stopped in traffic.
"Good! Nushkur'Allah." Thanks be to God. "You really hate Chuha, don't you?"
"I don't hate him," he clarified, moving off with the flow of cars. "I just want to kill him."
We were silent for a while, breathing the warm wind and watching the black business unfold on the streets we'd both roamed so often. There were a hundred large and small scams and deals going down around us every minute, and we knew them all.
When we found ourselves twisted into a knot of traffic behind a stalled bus, I looked along the footpath and noticed Taj Raj, a pickpocket who usually worked the Gateway area near the Taj Mahal Hotel. He'd survived a machete attack years before that had all but severed his neck. The wound caused him to speak in a rattling whisper, and his head was set at such an ill-balanced angle that when he wagged it to agree with someone he almost fell over. He was working the stumble-fall-pilfer game with his friend Indra serving as the stumbler. Indra, known as the Poet, spoke almost all of his sentences in rhyming couplets. They were deeply moving in their beauty, for the first few stanzas, but always found their way into sexual descriptions and allusions so perverse and abhorrent that strong, wicked men winced to hear them. Legend had it that Indra had once recited his poetry through a microphone during a street festival, and had cleared the entire Colaba Market of shoppers and traders alike. Even the police, it was said, had shrunk back in horror until exhaustion overcame the Poet, and then they'd rushed him as he paused for breath. I knew both men, and liked them, though I never let them get closer than an arm's stretch from my pockets. And sure enough, as the bus finally grumbled to life and the traffic began to ease forward, I watched Indra pretending to be blind-not his best performance, but good enough-and stumbling into a foreigner. And Taj Raj, the helpful passer-by, assisted both of them to their feet, and relieved the foreigner of his burdensome wallet.
"Why?" I asked, when we were moving through free space again.
"Why what?"
"Why do you want to kill Chuha?"
"I know he had a meeting... with the men from Iran," Abdullah shouted over his shoulder. "People say it was just business- Sanjay, he says it was just business. But I think more than business. I think he work with them, against Khader Khan. Against us. For that reason, Lin."
"Okay," I called back, pleased to have my own instincts about Chuha confirmed, but worried for my wild, Iranian friend. "But don't do anything without me, okay?"
He laughed, and turned his head to show me the white teeth of his smile.
"I'm serious, Abdullah. Promise me!"
"Thik hain, Lin brother!" he shouted in reply. "I will call you, when the time is right!"
He coasted the bike to a stop and parked it outside the Strand Coffee House, one of my favourite breakfast dives, near the Colaba Market.
"What the hell's going on?" I demanded as we walked toward the market. "Some surprise-I come here nearly every day."
"I know," he answered, grinning enigmatically. "And I am not the only one who knows it."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"You will find out, Lin brother. Here are your friends."
We came upon Vikram Patel and the Zodiac Georges, Scorpio and Gemini, sitting comfortably on bulging sacks of lentils beside a pulses stall, and drinking chai from glasses.
