"I give you my word," he said solemnly, and we shook hands.

We were silent again, and after a few moments I reached over to tap the driver on the shoulder.

"Just here is fine," I said, perhaps a little more harshly than I'd intended. "I'll get out here."

The car pulled into the kerb, a few blocks from the slum. I opened the door to leave, but Hassaan gripped my wrist. It was a very strong grip. For a second, I calculated all the long way upward to the much greater strength I knew must be in Raheem's grip.

"Please, remember my name-Hassaan Obikwa. You can find me at the African ghetto, in Andheri. Everyone knows me there. Whatever I can do for you, please tell me. I want to clear my debt, Lin Ford.

This is my telephone number. You can reach me, from here, at any time of the day or the night."

I took the card-it bore only his name and number-and shook his hand. Nodding to Raheem, I left the car.

"Thank you, Lin," Hassaan called out through the open window.

"Inshallah, we'll meet again soon."

The car drove off, and I turned toward the slum, staring at the gold-lettered business card for a full block before I put it in my pocket. A few minutes later, I passed the World Trade Centre and entered the compound of the slum, remembering, as I always did, the first time I entered those blest and tormented acres.

As I passed Kumar's chai shop, Prabaker came out to greet me. He was wearing a yellow silk shirt, black pants, and red-and-black patent leather high-heeled platform shoes. There was a crimson silk scarf tied at his throat.

"Oh, Lin!" he called out, hobbling across the broken ground on his platform shoes. He clung to me, as much for balance as in friendly greeting. "There is someone, a fellow you know, he is waiting for you, in your house. But one minute please, what happened on your face? And your shirts? Have you been having it some fights, with some bad fellow? Arrey! Some fellow gave you a solid pasting. If you want me, I will go with you, and tell that fellow he is a bahinchudh."

"It's nothing, Prabu. It's okay," I muttered, striding toward the hut. "Do you know who it is?"

"Who it... is? You mean, who it is, who was hitting your face?"

"No, no, of course not! I mean, the man who's waiting in my hut.

Do you know who it is?"

"Yes, Lin," he said, stumbling along beside me and clutching my sleeve for support.

We walked on for a few more seconds in silence. People greeted us on every side, calling out invitations to share chai, food, or a smoke.

"Well?" I asked, after a while.

"Well? What well?"

"Well, who _is it? Who's in my hut?"

"Oh!" he laughed. "Sorry, Lin. I thought you want some surprises, so I didn't tell you." "It's hardly a surprise, Prabu, because you told me there was someone waiting for me in my hut."

"No, no!" he insisted. "You don't know it his name yet, so still you get the surprise. And that is a good things. If I don't tell you there is somebody, then you go to your hut, and you get the shocks. And that is a bad things. A shocks is like a surprise, when you are not ready."

"Thank you, Prabu," I replied, my sarcasm evaporating as it was uttered.

He needn't have concerned himself with sparing me the shock. The closer I came to my hut, the more often I was informed that a foreigner was waiting to see me. Hello, Lin baba! There's a gora in your house, waiting for you!

We arrived at my hut to find Didier sitting in the shade of the doorway on a stool, and fanning himself with a magazine.

"It's Didier," Prabaker informed me, grinning happily.

"Yes. Thank you, Prabu," I turned to Didier, who rose to shake hands. "This is a surprise. It's good to see you."

"And good to see you, my dear friend," Didier replied, smiling despite the distressing heat. "But, I must be honest, you look a little worse for wear, as Lettie would say."

"It's nothing. A misunderstanding, that's all. Give me a minute to wash up."

I stripped off my torn, bloody shirt, and poured a third of a bucket of clean water from the clay matka. Standing on the flattened pile of stones beside my hut, I washed my face, arms, and chest. Neighbours passed me as I washed, smiling when they caught my eye. There was an art to washing in that way, with no wasted drop of water and no excess of mess. I'd mastered that art, and it was one of the hundred little ways my life imitated theirs, and folded into the lotus of their loving, hoping struggle with fate.

"Would you like a chai?" I asked Didier as I slipped on a clean, white shirt in the doorway of my hut. "We can go to Kumar's."

"I just had one full cup," Prabaker interjected before Didier could reply. "But one more chai will be okay, for the friendship sake, I think so."

He sat down with us in the rickety chai shop. Five huts had been cleared to make space for a single, large room. There was a counter made from an old bedroom dresser, a patchwork plastic roof, and benches for the customers made from planks resting precariously on piles of bricks. All the materials had been looted from the building site beside the slum. Kumar, the chai shop owner, fought a running guerrilla war with his customers, who tried to pilfer his bricks and planks for their own houses.

Kumar came to take our order himself. True to the general rule of slum life that the more money one made, the more poverty-stricken one had to look, Kumar's appearance was more dishevelled and ragged than the meanest of his customers. He dragged up a stained wooden crate for us to use as a table. Appraising it with a suspicious squint, he slapped at the crate with a filthy rag and then tucked the cloth into his singlet.

"Didier, you look terrible," I observed, when Kumar left to prepare our tea. "It must be love."

He grinned back at me, shaking his head of dark curls and raising the palms of his hands.

"I am very fatigued, it is true," he said, managing a shrug of elaborate self-pity. "People do not understand the truly fantastic effort required in the corruption of a simple man. And the more simple the man, the more effort it requires. They do not realise what it takes out of me to put so much decadence into a man who is not born to it."

"You might be making a rod for your own back," I mocked.

"Each thing in its own time," he replied, smiling thoughtfully.

"But you, my friend, you look very well. Only a little, how shall I say it, lonely for information. And to that end, Didier is here. I have all the latest news and gossip for you. You know the difference between news and gossip, don't you? News tells you what people did. Gossip tells you how much they enjoyed it."

We both laughed, and Prabaker joined in, laughing so loudly that everyone in the chai shop turned to look at him.

"Well then," Didier continued, "where to start? Oh yes, Vikram's pursuit of Letitia proceeds with a certain bizarre inevitability.

She began by loathing him-"

"I think loathing is bit strong," I argued.

"Ah, yes, perhaps you're right. If she loathes me-and it is completely certain that she does, the dear and sweet English Rose - then her feeling for Vikram was indeed something less. Shall we say detest?"

"I think detest would cover it," I agreed.

"Et bien, she began by detesting him but, through the persistence of his devoted romantic attentions, he has managed to arouse in her what I can only describe as an amiable revulsion."

We laughed again, and Prabaker slapped at his thigh, hooting with such hilarity that every head turned toward him. Didier and I inspected him with quizzical looks of our own. He responded with an impish smile, but I noticed that his eyes darted away quickly to his left. Following the glance, I saw his new love, Parvati, preparing food in Kumar's kitchen. Her thick, black plait of hair was the rope by which a man might climb to heaven. Her petite figure-she was tiny, shorter even than Prabaker-was the perfect shape of his desire. Her eyes, when she turned in profile to look at us, were black fire.