CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Working for Abdel Khader Khan was my first real instruction in organised crime-until then I'd been no more than a desperate man, doing stupid, cowardly things to feed a stupid, cowardly heroin habit, and then a desperate exile earning small commissions on random deals. Although they were crimes that I'd committed, and some of them were very serious, I was never really a criminal until I accepted Khaderbhai as my teacher. I'd been a man who committed crimes, up to then, rather than a criminal, and there's a difference between the two. The difference, as with most things in life, lay in the motive and the means. Being tortured in Arthur Road Prison had given me the motive to cross the line. Another man, a smarter man than I was, might've run away from Bombay as soon as he was freed from the prison. I didn't. I couldn't. I wanted to know who'd put me in there, and why. I wanted revenge. The safest and fastest way to that vengeance was to join Khaderbhai's branch of the mafia.

His instruction in the lawbreaker's arts-he sent me first to the Palestinian, Khaled Ansari, to learn the black-market money trade - gave me the means to become what I'd never tried or wanted to be: a professional criminal. And it felt good. It felt so good within the protective circle of that band of brothers. When I rode the train to Khaled's apartment every day, hanging out the door of a rattling carriage in the hot, dry wind with other young men, my heart swelled with the excitement of freedom's wild, reckless ride.

Khaled, my first teacher, was the kind of man who carried his past in the temple fires of his eyes, and fed the flames with pieces of his broken heart. I've known men like Khaled in prisons, on battlefields, and in the dens where smugglers, mercenaries, and other exiles meet. They all have certain characteristics in common. They're tough, because there's a kind of toughness that's found in the worst sorrow. They're honest, because the truth of what happened to them won't let them lie.

They're angry, because they can't forget the past or forgive it.

And they're lonely. Most of us pretend, with greater or lesser success, that the minute we live in is something we can share.

But the past for every one of us is a desert island; and those like Khaled, who find themselves marooned there, are always alone.

Khaderbhai had told me some of Khaled's history when he'd briefed me for my first lessons. I'd learned that Khaled, at only thirty four, was alone in the world. His parents, both renowned scholars, had been prominent in the Palestinian struggle for an independent nation-state. His father had died in prison, in Israel. His mother, his two sisters, his aunts and uncles, and his mother's parents had all been killed in the massacres at Shatila, in Lebanon. Khaled, who'd trained with Palestinian guerrilla units in Tunisia, Libya, and Syria, and had fought for nine years in dozens of operations across a score of conflict zones, broke down after the bloody deaths of his mother and all the others at the refugee camp. His Fattah Group commander, knowing the signs of that breakdown and the risks it posed, had released him from duty.

Although still devoted to the cause of Palestinian statehood in his words, he was in fact lost to any cause but the suffering he'd endured and the suffering he lived to inflict. He'd drifted to Bombay on the recommendation of a senior guerrilla fighter who knew Khaderbhai. The mafia don took him in. Impressed with his education, language skills, and obsessive dedication, the permanent members of Khaderbhai's council had rewarded the young Palestinian with successive promotions. Three years after Shatila, at the time that I met him, Khaled Ansari was in charge of Khaderbhai's black-market currency operation. The position carried with it a place on the council. And when I felt strong enough to put in a full day of study, not long after my release from Arthur Road Prison, the bitter, lonely, battle-scarred Palestinian began my instruction.

"People say that money is the root of all evil," Khaled told me when we met in his apartment. His English was rich with accents of New York and Arabic and the Hindi that he spoke reasonably well. "But it's not true. It's the other way round. Money isn't the root of all evil. Evil is the root of all money. There's no such thing as clean money. All the money in the world is dirty, in some way, because there's no clean way to make it. If you get paid in money, somebody, somewhere, is suffering for it. That's one of the reasons, I think, why just about everybody-even people who'd never break the law in any other way-is happy to add an extra buck or two to their money on the black market."

"You make your living from it," I said, curious to know how he would respond.

"So?"

"So, how do you feel about it?"

"I don't feel anything about it, one way or the other. Suffering is the truth. Not suffering is the lie. I told you that, once before. That's just the way the world is."

"But surely some money has more suffering attached to it," I persisted, "and some money has less."

"Money only comes in two kinds, Lin-yours, and mine."

"Or, in this case, Khader's money."

Khaled laughed. It was a short, sad laugh, and the only one that was left in him.

"We make money for Abdel Khader, true, but a part of everything we make is ours. And it's the little part of everything that belongs to _us that keeps us in the game, na? Okay, let's get started. Why do black markets for money exist?"

"I'm not sure what you mean."

"I'll ask it in a different way," Khuled smiled. The thick scar that started at his throat, below the left ear, and cut a groove in his face all the way to the corner of his mouth, gave the smile a lopsided and unsettling twist. The scarred half of his face didn't smile at all, which meant that the other half seemed menacing, or pained, when he was trying hardest to be kind. "How is it that we can buy one American dollar from a tourist for, say, eighteen rupees, when the banks are only offering fifteen or sixteen?"

"Because we can sell them for more than eighteen?" I offered.

"Good. Good. Now, how can we do that?"

"Because... someone wants to buy them at that price, I guess."

"Exactly. But who are we selling them to?"

"Look, the most I ever did was put tourists together with black market guys, and take my cut. I don't really know what happens to the dollars after that. I never went that far into it."

"Black markets for things exist," he said slowly, as if confiding a personal secret rather than a commercial fact, "because the white markets are too strict. In this case, in the case of currencies, the government and the Reserve Bank of India control the white markets, and they're too strict. It's all about greed, and control. These are the two elements that make for commercial crime. Any one of them, on its own, is not enough. Greed without control, or control without greed won't give you a black market.

Men can be greedy for the profit made from, let's say, pastries, but if there isn't strict control on the baking of pastries, there won't be a black market for apple strudel. And the government has very strict controls on the disposal of sewage, but without greed for profit from sewage, there won't be a black market for shit. When greed meets control, you get a black market."

"You've put a lot of thought into this," I commented, laughing, but impressed and genuinely glad that he wanted to give me the ontology of currency crime, and not just the ways I could go about committing it.

"Not really," he answered self-deprecatingly.

"No, I'm serious. When Khaderbhai sent me here, I thought you were going to give me a few tables of figures-you know, today's currency exchange rates and all that-and then send me on my way."