The night duty officer was a squat, overweight Maharashtrian who, like many of his colleagues in the police force, squeezed himself into a uniform that was at least two sizes too small for him. The thought occurred to me that the discomfort it must've caused might help to explain his evil disposition. There was certainly no humour in him or any of the ten cops who surrounded me, and I felt a perverse urge to laugh out loud as their scowling, heavy breathing silence persisted. Then the duty officer addressed his men, and the laughter in me died.

"Take this motherfucker and beat him," he said matter-of-factly.

If he knew that I spoke Marathi, and could understand him, he gave no indication of it. He spoke to his men as if I wasn't there. "Beat him hard. Give him a solid beating. Don't break any bones, if you can help it, but beat him hard, and then throw him into the jail with the others."

I ran. I pushed through the circle of cops, cleared the landing outside the duty room in a single leap, and hit the gravel yard of the compound, running. It was a stupid mistake, and not the last I was to make in the next few months. Mistakes are like bad loves, Karla once said, the more you learn from them, the more you wish they'd never happened. My mistake that night took me to the front gate of the compound, where I collided with a round-up party, and collapsed in a tangle of tied and helpless men.

The cops dragged me back to the duty room, punching and kicking me all the way. They tied my hands behind my back with coarse, hemp rope, and removed my boots before tying my feet together.

The short, fat duty officer produced a thick coil of rope, and ordered his men to bind me with it from ankles to shoulders.

Puffing and panting with his rage, he watched as I was trussed in so many coils of rope that I resembled an Egyptian mummy. The cops then dragged me to an adjoining room, and hoisted me up to hang me at chest height from a hook, face down, with the hook jammed through several coils of rope at my back.

"Aeroplane..." the duty officer growled, through clenched teeth.

The cops spun me around faster and faster. The hook held my bound hands in the bunched ropes, and my head hung down, level with my drooping feet. I whirled and spun until I lost my sense of up or down in the twirling room. Then the beatings began.

Five or six men hit my spinning body as hard and as often as they could, cracking their cane lathis against my skin. The stinging blows struck with piercing pain through the ropes, and on my face, arms, legs, and feet. I could sense that I was bleeding.

The screaming rose up in me, but I clenched my jaws and gave the pain no sound of my own. I wouldn't let them have it. I wouldn't let them hear me scream.

Silence is the tortured man's revenge. Hands reached out, stopping my body, holding it still, while the room continued to whirl. Then they spun me in the opposite direction, and the beating began again.

When their sport was done, they dragged me up the metal steps to the lock-up-the same metal steps I'd climbed with Prabaker when I'd tried to help Kano's bear-handlers. Will someone come to help _me? I asked myself. No-one had seen my arrest on the deserted street, and no-one knew where I was. Ulla, if she came to Leopold's at all, if she wasn't actually involved in my arrest, wouldn't know that I'd been arrested. And Karla-what could Karla think, but that I'd abandoned her after we'd made love? She wouldn't find me. Prison systems are black holes for human bodies: no light escapes from them, and no news. With that mysterious arrest, I'd vanished into one of the city's darkest black holes. I'd disappeared from the city as completely as if I'd caught a plane to Africa.

And why was I arrested? The questions buzzed and swarmed in my whirling mind. Did they know who I really was? If they didn't know-if it was something else, if it had nothing to do with who I really was-there would still be questions, identification procedures, maybe even fingerprint checks. My prints were on file all over the world, through the Interpol agency. It was only a question of time before my real identity emerged. I had to get a message out to... someone. Who could help me? Who was powerful enough to help me? Khaderbhai. Lord Abdel Khader Khan. With all of his contacts in the city, especially in the Colaba area, he would surely find out that I'd been arrested. In time, Khaderbhai would know. Until then, I had to sit tight, and try to get a message out to him.

Trussed up in the mummifying ropes, dragged up the hard metal stairs one bruising bump at a time, I forced my thoughts to settle on that mantra, and I repeated it to the thumping beat of my heart: Get a message to Khaderbhai... Get a message to Khaderbhai...

At the top landing of the stairs, they threw me into the long prison corridor. The duty officer ordered prisoners to remove the ropes from my body. He stood in the gateway of the lock-up, watching them with his fists on his hips. At one point, he kicked me two, three times to encourage them to work faster. When the last of the ropes was removed and passed through to the guards, he ordered them to lift me and stand me up, facing him at the open gate. I felt their hands numbly on my deadened skin, and I opened my eyes, through blood, to see his grimace of a smile.

He spoke to me in Marathi and then spat in my face. I tried to raise my arm to hit back at him, but the other prisoners held me fast. Their hands were gentle, but firm. They helped me into the archway of the first open cell-room, and eased me to the concrete floor. I looked up to see his face as he shut the gate. Loosely but accurately translated, he'd said to me, You're fucked. Your life is over.

I saw the steel bars of the gate swing shut, and felt the creeping coldness numb my heart. Metal slammed against metal. The keys jangled and turned in the lock. I looked into the eyes of the men around me, the dead eyes and the frenzied, the resentful eyes and the fearing. Somewhere, deep inside me, a drum began to beat. It mightVe been my heart. I felt my body, my whole body, tense and clench as if it was a fist. There was a taste, thick and bitter, at the back of my mouth. I struggled to swallow it down and then I knew, I remembered. It was the taste of hatred- my hatred, theirs, the guards', and the world's. Prisons are the temples where devils learn to prey. Every time we turn the key we twist the knife of fate, because every time we cage a man we close him in with hate.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The first floor of the lock-up at Colaba police station had four big cell rooms beyond the flexi-steel gate. A corridor connected the four rooms. On one side the corridor gave access to the rooms. On the other side it looked out, through steel mesh, onto the quadrangle of the police compound. There were more cells below. It was in one of those ground-floor cells that Kano the bear had been detained. Transients, who spent only one or two nights in custody, were held on the ground floor. Anyone likely to stay for a week or longer in the Colaba lock-up climbed the steps or was dragged up them, as I was, and passed through the sliding steel gate into one of hell's antechambers.

There were no doors beyond the steel gate. Each of the four rooms was accessed through a blank arch that was slightly wider than the average house doorway. The rooms were roughly three metres square. The corridor was just wide enough for two men to pass each other with their shoulders touching, and it was about sixteen metres long. At the end of the corridor there was a urinal and a keyhole-shaped squatting-toilet, both without doors.

A tap, providing water for washing and drinking, was fixed above the urinal.