Every life, every love, every action and feeling and thought has its reason and significance: its beginning, and the part it plays in the end. Sometimes, we do see. Sometimes, we see the past so clearly, and read the legend of its parts with such acuity, that every stitch of time reveals its purpose, and a kind of message is enfolded in it. Nothing in any life, no matter how well or poorly lived, is wiser than failure or clearer than sorrow. And in the tiny, precious wisdom that they give to us, even those dread and hated enemies, suffering and failure, have their reason and their right to be.
Money stinks. A stack of new money smells of ink and acid and bleach like the fingerprinting room in a city police station. Old money, vexed with hope and coveting, smells stale like dead flowers kept too long between the pages of a cheap novel. When you put a lot of money, new and old, into one room-millions of rupees counted twice and snapped into bundles with rubber bands- it stinks. _I love money, Didier once said to me, but I hate the smell of it. The more happiness I get from it, the more thoroughly I have to wash my hands afterwards. I knew exactly what he meant. In the counting-room for the mafia money-change racket, an airless cavern in the Fort area where the hot lights were bright enough to search through the best counterfeit, and the overhead fans never turned fast enough to lift a stray note from the counting tables, the smell of money was like the sweat and the dirt on a gravedigger's boots.
Some weeks after the meeting with Modena, I pushed my way out through the door of Rajubhai's counting room, shoving the goondas aside with the kind of childish rough play we all enjoyed, and gasped at the fresher air in the stairway. A voice called my name, and I stopped on the third step, my hand on the wooden rail. I looked up to see Rajubhai leaning out of the doorway. The short, fat, bald currency-controller for Khader's-no, Salman's- mafia council was dressed, as always, in a dhoti and a white singlet. He leaned out of the doorway, I knew, because he never actually left the room until he sealed it, at close to midnight, every night. When he needed to relieve himself, he used a private facility that was fitted with a one-way mirror so that he could watch the room. He was a dedicated accountant-the mafia's best- but it wasn't just the duty of his profession that held Rajubhai to the activity on his counting tables. Away from the busy room he was a grumpy, suspicious, and strangely wizened man. In the counting room he was plumper, somehow, and expansively self-assured. It was as if the physical attachment linked him to a psychic force: so long as a part of his body was still in the room, he was still connected to the energy, the power, the money.
"Linbaba!" he shouted down at me, with the lower part of his body hidden by the door frame. "Don't forget the wedding! You are coming, isn't it?"
"Sure," I smiled back at him. "I'll be there!"
I did the quick walk-fall down three flights of the stairway, teasing and shoving the goondas on duty at every level, and bumped past the men at the street door. At the end of the street I acknowledged the smiles of two more men watching the door.
There were some exceptions, but for the most part the young mafia gangsters liked me. I wasn't the only foreigner working with the Bombay mafia-there was an Irish gangster in the Bandra council, an American freelancer making a name in major drug deals, a Dutchman working with a gang in Khar, and there were other men across the city-but I was the only gora in the Salman council. I was their foreigner. And those years, as Indian pride was rising like new green, white, and orange vines from the scorched post colonial earth, were the last years when being foreign, being British, or looking and sounding British was enough to win hearts and intrigue minds.
