Next to him at the table was Lisa Carter. Her thick, blonde hair had grown long enough, after the short cut, to fall beside the oval cameo of her face. Her blue eyes were clear and glittering with passionate intent. She was tanned and very healthy. She'd even gained a little extra weight-something she decried, but that I and every other man within her sight-horizon was bound to admire. And there was something new and very different in her manner: a warm, unhurried softness in her smile; a willing laugh that won the laughter of others; and a lightness of spirit that looked for and often found the best in those she met. For weeks, months, I'd watched those changes shift and settle in her, and at first I'd thought they'd grown from my affection. Although no formal relationship had been declared-she continued to live in her apartment, and I lived in mine-we were lovers, and we were far more than friends. After a time, I realised that the changes were not mine, but hers alone.
After a time, I began to see how deep the well of her loving was, and how much her happiness and confidence depended on drawing that love into the light, and sharing it. And love was beautiful in her. It was a clear sky she gave us with those eyes, and a summer morning with her smile.
She kissed my cheek when I greeted her. I returned the kiss, wondering, as I stepped back, why a small concerned frown rippled from her brow to her cornflower-blue eyes.
Sitting next around the long table were the print journalists Dilip and Anwar. They were young, only a few years out of college, and still learning their trade in the anonymous vaults of The Noonday, a Bombay daily. At night, with Didier and his little court, they discussed the big breaking stories of the day as if they'd played key parts in the scoops or had followed their own instincts to the investigation's end. Their excitement, enthusiasm, ambition, and limitless hope for the future so delighted everyone in the Leopold's crowd that Kavita and Didier felt obliged to respond, occasionally, with sardonic sniping.
Dilip and Anwar reacted well, laughing and often giving as good as they got until the whole group was shouting and pounding the table in delight.
Dilip was a tall, fair, almond-eyed Punjabi. Anwar, a third generation native of Bombay, was shorter, darker, and the more serious of the two. New blood, Lettie had said to me with a smile, a few days before that afternoon. It was a phrase she'd once used about me, soon after I'd arrived in Bombay. And as I made my way around the table and looked at the two young men talking with such passion and purpose, it occurred to me that once, before heroin and crime, my life had been like theirs. Once I'd been just as happy and healthy and hopeful as they were. And I was glad to know them, and to know they were a part of the pleasure and promise of the Leopold's crowd. It was right that they were there, just as it was right that Maurizio was gone, and Ulla and Modena were gone, and that I, too, would one day be gone.
Returning their warm handshakes, I moved past the young men to Kavita Singh sitting beside them. Kavita stood to give me a hug.
It was the tender, close hug that a woman gives a man when she knows she can trust him, or when she's sure his heart belongs to someone else. It was a rare enough embrace between foreigners.
Coming from an Indian woman, it was uniquely intimate in my experience. And it was important. I'd been in the city for years;
I could make myself understood in Marathi, Hindi, and Urdu; I could sit with gangsters, slum-dwellers, or Bollywood actors, claiming their goodwill and sometimes their respect; but few things made me feel as accepted, in all the Indian worlds of Bombay, as Kavita Singh's fond embrace.
I never told her that-what her affectionate and unconditional acceptance meant to me. So much, too much, of the good that I felt in those years of exile was locked in the prison cell of my heart: those tall walls of fear; that small, barred window of hope; that hard bed of shame. I do speak out now. I know now that when the loving, honest moment comes it should be seized, and spoken, because it may never come again. And unvoiced, unmoving, unlived in the things we declare from heart to heart, those true and real feelings wither and crumble in the remembering hand that tries too late to reach for them.
On that day, as the grey-pink veil of evening slowly enclosed the afternoon, I said nothing to Kavita. I let my smile, like a thing made of broken stones, fall and slide from the peak of her affection to the ground beneath her feet. She took my arm and steered me into an introduction to the man who sat beside her.
"Lin, I don't think you've met Ranjit," she said as he stood and we shook hands. "Ranjit is... Karla's friend. Ranjit Choudry meet Lin."
I suddenly knew what Lettie had meant with her cryptic comment, Keep your cool, lad, and why Lisa couldn't shift the frown that creased her brow.
