The legends say that the loved one is instantly recognised because she’s loved in every gesture, every expression of thought, every movement, every sound, and every mood that prays in her eyes. The legends say that we know her by her wings—the wings that only we can see Fate needs accomplices I look back, now, and I know that the naming moment, which seemed so insignificant then, which seemed to demand no more than an arbitrary and superstitious yes or no, was in fact a pivotal moment in my life. And sexy girls, if we go there, on a cool night, if we are feeling a big needy swelling in our haggling is the economical thing to do. Most of the time, it’s the shrewd and amiable way to conduct your business in India. But he was wrong, too. The manager, Anand, and I became good friends, in the years that followed. The fact that I trusted him on sight and didn’t haggle, on that first day, that I didn’t try to make a buck out of him, that I worked on an instinct that respected him and was prepared to like him, endeared me to him. I was tough, which is probably the saddest thing you can say about a man. the faces of the two women produced the strongest and most unexpected contrast. Lettie’s gaze was seductive, direct, self-assured, and sparkling with ironies and secrets, while Ulla’s wide blue eyes, for all the make-up and clothing of her professional sexuality, showed nothing but innocence—honest, vacuous innocence. her green eyes were radiant with purpose and pleasure average Indian guy has a sexual maturity of about fourteen. Optimism is the first cousin of love, and it’s exactly like love in three ways: it’s pushy, it has no real sense of humour, and it turns up where you least expect it. ‘I think that we all, each one of us, we all have to earn our future,’ she said slowly. ‘I think the future is like anything else that’s important. It has to be earned. If we don’t earn it, we don’t have a future at all. And if we don’t earn it, if we don’t deserve it, we have to live in the present, more or less forever. Or worse, we have to live in the past. I think that’s probably what love is—a way of earning the future.’ In the beginning we feared everything—animals, the weather, the trees, the night sky—everything except each other. Now we fear each other, and almost nothing else. He rode just like Clint, in High Plains Drifter Are you going to stay here forever?’ ‘There’s no such thing as forever,’ ‘I want everything,’ she replied with a faint, wry smile. ‘You know, I said that once, to a friend of mine, and he told me that the real trick in life is to want nothing, and to succeed in getting it.’ ‘You’ve always got some wise advice, haven’t you?’ she moved into the warm, yellow light near the door of her apartment, and it was as if my watching eyes had made her shadow come to life, as if my heart alone had painted her from darkness with the light and colours of love. when the good guys use handcuffs to chain you to a wall, and then take turns to stomp and kick you, it’s the whole system, it’s the whole world, that’s breaking your bones. His gentle face was stamped with a sadness that invited sympathy. It was the kind of sadness that’s a companion, all too often, to scrupulous and uncompromising honesty. The Babas were also comprehensively, celestially, and magnificently stoned. They smoked nothing but Kashmiri—the best hashish in the world—grown and produced at the foothills of the Himalayas in Kashmir. And they smoked it all day, and all night, all their lives. Like every other tough, angry man I knew, I avoided fighting until it came to me, and then I enjoyed it. ‘Oh, of course, naturally, God is impossible. That is the first proof that He exists.’ I fell as fearlessly into my fate, that afternoon, as a man falls into love with a shy woman’s best smile. It was hard not to look at them, and then hard not to stare when I did look. Some of the people had no noses, most of them had no fingers, the feet of many were bound in bloody bandages, and some were so advanced into the deteriorations that their lips and ears were missing. He was the kind of man that tough criminals call a hundred-percenter. the kind of man who’ll put his life on the line if he calls you his friend; the kind who’ll put his shoulder beside yours, without question or complaint, and stand with you against any odds. Because men like that are so often the heroes in films and books, we forget how rare they are in the real world. I was the one who inspired something of that confidence: as Abdullah was to me, so was I to Prabaker. Friendship is also a kind of medicine, and the markets for it, too, are sometimes black. find ourselves in a luxuriant garden of smiles Qasim was given his power by a people who loved him. Khaderbhai had seized his power, and held it by strength of will and force of arms. Qasim took no part in the running of the business, and he paid all the household expenses, so the money made by his wives was their own to spend or save as they wished. In time, the tailors bought slum huts around Qasim’s own, and their wives and children lived side by side with Qasim’s, making up a huge, extended family of thirty-four persons who looked upon the head man as father and friend. It was a relaxed and contented household. There was no bickering or bad temper. The children played happily and did their chores willingly. And several times a week, he opened his large main room to the public as a majlis, or forum, where the slum-dwellers could air their grievances or make requests. Sunita was delighted that she’d pleased me, and stared back at me with a furious little smiling-frown. She wore a scarlet dress with the words MY CHEEKY FACES printed in English across the front. ‘Such a big, strong fellow you are! So brave to beat your wife, who is half your size. Come on and beat me, hero! Come on, take this stick of yours, and beat a man with it, you cheap goonda.’ He shouted for water, but they offered him only the daru bottle. I could see that he wanted to refuse it, but his thirst was becoming desperate. He accepted the bottle with trembling hands. Just as the first drops touched his parched tongue, the stick came down again. ‘The women of your family, and Maria’s family, have decided what is to be done,’ Qasim said slowly, firmly. ‘Are you sorry—do you know what you have done to your wife, and are you sorry for it?’ ‘Yes, Qasimbhai,’ Joseph wept. ‘I’m so sorry, so sorry.’ ‘The women have decided that you must not see Maria for two months. She is very ill. You almost killed her, and she must take two months to recover. In this time, you will work every day. You will work long hours and hard. You will save your money. You will not drink even one drop of daru or beer or anything but water. Do you understand? No chai or milk or anything but water. You must observe this fast, as part of your punishment.’ ‘Maria may decide not to take you back. You must know this also. She may want to divorce you, even after the two months—and if she does, I will help her in this. But at the end of two months, if she wants to accept you again, you will use the money you have saved by this extra hard work, and you will take her on a holiday to the cool mountains. During retreat in that place, with your wife, you will face this ugliness in yourself, and you will try to overcome it. Inshallah, you will make a happy and virtuous future, for your wife and yourself. This is the decision. Go now. No more talking. Eat now, and sleep.’ justice is a judgement that is both fair and forgiving. Justice is not done until everyone is satisfied, even those who offend us and must be punished by us. You can see, by what we have done with these two boys, that justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try to save them.’ Poverty and pride are devoted blood brothers until one, always and inevitably, kills the other. The presence of the beast provoked the ghetto dogs to madness. Not daring to come within reach, they turned on one another in their fierce rage. the communication of an animal sadness, undiluted by reason and complete in its passion Qasim Ali decided at last to have noisy bells put on all the monkeys while they were within the slum. The creatures displayed an inventive resourcefulness in divesting themselves of the bells or in smothering them. They live up here. Eat, work, and sleep. They’ve got farm animals and kitchens and everything. Goats for milk, and chickens for eggs, everything they need is sent up to them. It’s sort of like a base camp that mountaineers use when they climb Everest.’ ‘The Village in the Sky!’ she shouted back. The Lewis Carrolls, Karla called it. I’m so stoned, she used to say, I’m getting the Lewis Carrolls. young men with lean bellies and heads full of scrambled foreign dreams; young men who went without food to buy clothes that they imagined made them look like the cool foreigners in magazines and films. Human skin is tougher and more resilient than it looks. It’s also relatively simple to stitch, and the thread can be pulled quite tightly without tearing the tissue. I shook hands with him, his small hand vanishing in mine. Nothing ever fits the palm so perfectly, or feels so right, or inspires so much protective instinct as the hand of a child. ‘A favour?’ she asked, as if the word was a euphemism for some kind of infection. she was early drunk, in that squall of coherence before slurred speech and clumsiness and collapse ‘I thought you didn’t like kids.’ ‘I don’t. They’re so … innocent. Except that they’re not. They know exactly what they want, and they don’t stop till they get it. It’s disgusting. All the worst people I know are just like big, grown-up children. It’s so creepy it makes me sick to my stomach.’ ‘Hannibal. You were going to tell me how he died.’ ‘Oh, him. Well, he kinda led this army of thirty thousand guys over the Alps into Italy, and fought the Romans for like, sixteen years. Six-teen goddamn years! And he never got beaten, even one time. Then, after a lot of other shit, he went back to his own country, where he became a big honcho, what with being a big hero and all. But the Romans, those guys never forgot that he embarrassed the fuck outta them, so they used politics, and they got his own people to turn on him, and kick him out. Are you getting any of this?’ Nothing in the world is so soft and pleasing to the touch as the skin of a woman’s thigh. No flower, feather, or fabric can match that velvet whisper of flesh. you know the old saying—a king is a bad enemy, a worse friend, and a fatal family relation.’ a wicked man would derive such benefit from good works. A good man, on the other hand, would simply be worn out and bad tempered.’ I smoked in those days because, like everyone else in the world who smokes, I wanted to die at least as much as I wanted to live. It’s a characteristic of human nature that the best qualities, called up quickly in a crisis, are very often the hardest to find in a prosperous calm. Freud said we’re motivated by the drive for sex. Adler disagreed, and said that it was the drive for power. Then Victor Frankl, he said sex and power were important drives, but when you can’t get either one—no sex and no power—there’s still something else that drives us on and keeps us goin’—’ ‘Yes, yes, the drive for meaning,’ Gemini added. ‘Which is really just the same thing in different words. We have a drive for power because power gives us sex, and we have a drive for meaning because that helps us to understand sex. That’s why I lived in this area. I always hoped I would see him. And I never married. And she died last week, Lin. My mother died last week.’ He turned to me, and the whites of his eyes were blazing with the tears he wouldn’t let them shed. ‘She died last week. And now, I’m getting married.’ ‘I’m sorry to hear about your mother, Johnny. But I’m sure she’d want you to get married. I think you’ll make a good father. In fact, I know you’ll make a good father. I’m sure of it.’ He looked at me, his eyes talking to me in a language I could feel but couldn’t understand. But the lies we tell ourselves are the ghosts that haunt the empty house of midnight. In the long years since that conversation I’ve asked myself a thousand times how different my life might’ve been if only I’d asked him what he meant by that remark. Instead, my head full of assumptions and my heart full of pride, I changed the subject. The one and only time that I saw the whole of the truth in his eyes—on a snow-covered mountain called Sorrow’s Reward—it was already too late, and I never saw it again. When all the guilt and shame for the bad we’ve done have run their course, it’s the good we did that can save us. But then, when salvation speaks, the secrets we kept, and the motives we concealed, creep from their shadows. They cling to us, those dark motives for our good deeds. She was a good passenger: the kind who surrenders her will in unconditional trust, and blends her body to the nuance of the rider. Through my thin white shirt I felt the press of her breasts against my back. And from the pink and purple palette of the perished evening, a blue-black night rose up around us as we rode. We plunged with the sea-wind into tunnels of light. The robe of sunset slipped from the shoulders of the city. ‘It’ll be okay. Just block the door. Don’t phone anyone else. Don’t speak to anyone, and don’t let anyone in. Make two cups of coffee, with lots of milk and sugar—four spoons of sugar—and sit down with Ulla to drink them. Give her a stiff drink, as well, if she needs it. I’m on my way. I’ll be there in ten minutes. Hang in there, and stay cool.’ I detest bullies for their cowardice, and despise them for their cruelty. I never knew a tough man who preyed on the weak. Tough men hate bullies almost as much as bullies hate tough men. His second mistake was that he held the knife as if it was a sword and he was in a fencing match. A man uses an underhand grip when he expects his knife, like a gun, to do the fighting for him. But a knife isn’t a gun, of course, and in a knife fight it isn’t the weapon that does the fighting: it’s the man. The knife is just there to help him finish it. The winning grip is a dagger hold, with the blade downward, and the fist that holds it still free to punch. That grip gives a man maximum power in the downward thrust and an extra weapon in his closed fist. We communicated in the shorthand shared by artists everywhere in the world: rhythm, and elation. Each dead man is a temple in ruins I didn’t know then that good soldiers are defined by what they can endure, not by what they can inflict. And for all my contempt for the cowardice of bullies, hadn’t I become a bully when I was desperate enough? When the dragon-claws of heroin sickness dug into my back I became a small man, a tiny man. I became so small that I had to use a gun. I had to point a gun at people, many of them women, to get money. To get money. How was I different, in that, to Maurizio bullying women to get money? public repudiation of the ancient, gorgeously elaborate Hindu wedding they’d long planned for him. A man is truly a man when he wins the love of a good woman, earns her respect, and keeps her trust. Without a good woman, a man like you—men like you and me—we’re just asking for trouble, yaar.’ Geeta’s silver spandex top and white jeans were tight enough to be anatomically explicit. HEROIN IS A SENSORY DEPRIVATION TANK for the soul. Floating on the Dead Sea of the drug stone, there’s no sense of pain, no regret or shame, no feelings of guilt or grief, no depression, and no desire. The sleeping universe enters and envelops every atom of existence. Insensible stillness and peace disperse fear and suffering. like any survivor from any disaster: dazed, wounded forever, and glad to be alive. There’s no animal in the world with a deeper sense of parody than a horse. A cat can make you look clumsy, and a dog can make you look stupid, but only a horse can make you look both at the same time. And then, with nothing more than the flick of a tail or a casual stomp on your foot, it lets you know that it did it on purpose. There are three things that no Indian man can resist: a beautiful face, a beautiful song, and an invitation to dance. My lips unrolled the curled leaf of her heart. the cold sorrow in our eyes drove the downward curves of his face into willow-wreaths of disappointment Salman was a natural leader but, like many men who have the gift of command and the instinct to rule, he was deeply troubled by every expression of the leadership art. He was, at heart, a humble man, and that humility made him an honourable man. the elevator down to the foyer alone with the crowd of my mirror selves: beside and behind me, still and silent, not one of them was able to meet my eye. The cuts had healed into long Y-shaped scars that dragged down the lower lids of his eyes and ran like the trails of hideous, mocking tears. The lower lids, permanently red and raw, gaped open in little trenches of agony that revealed the whole globe of each eye. The wings and septum of his nose had been cut through to the bone. The skin, when it closed together, had fused in jagged whorls at the sides but not at all in the centre, where the laceration was too deep. The wide hole where his nostrils had been resembled the snout of a pig, and flared with every inward breath. Personality and personal identity are in some ways like co-ordinates on the street map drawn by our intersecting relationships. We know who we are and we define what we are by references to the people we love and our reasons for loving them.