The two young men escaped, with Villu's sister, a cousin, Krishna's grandparents, and his two young nieces, who were under five years old. A fishing boat brought them to India, on the people-smuggling route between Jaffna and the Coromandel coast.
They made their way to Bombay and then lived on a footpath, under a sheet of plastic, as pavement dwellers.
They'd survived that first year by taking ill-paid jobs as day labourers, and by committing a variety of petty crimes. Then, one day, a footpath-neighbour, who'd learned that they could read and write well in English, asked them to change a licence document.
Their work was good, and it brought a steadily increasing stream of visitors to their plastic awning on the Bombay footpath.
Hearing of their skill, Abdul Ghani had recommended to Khaderbhai that they be given a chance to prove themselves. Two years later, at the time that I met them, Krishna and Villu shared a large, comfortable apartment with the surviving members of their two families, saved money from their generous salaries, and were arguably the most successful forgers in Bombay, India's counterfeiting capital.
I wanted to learn everything. I wanted the mobility and security that their passport skills offered me. They spoke English well.
My enthusiasm fuelled their natural congeniality, and that first conversation flowed with good humour. It was a propitious start to the new friendship.
I visited Krishna and Villu every day for a week after that meeting. The young men worked long hours, and on some days I remained with them for ten hours at a stretch, watching them work, and asking my several hundred questions. The passports that they worked on fell into two main groups-those they obtained as genuine, used passports, and those that were blank and unused.
The used passports had been stolen by pickpockets, lost by tourists, or sold by desperate junkies from Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. The blank passports were rare. They'd been sold by corrupt officials at consulates and embassies and departments of immigration, from France to Turkey to China. Those that found their way into Khaderbhai's area of influence were bought immediately, at any price, and given to Krishna and Villu.
They showed me a blank, original, unused passport from Canada, as an example. It was housed in a fireproof safe with others from the United Kingdom, Germany, Portugal and Venezuela.
With sufficient patience, expertise, and resources, the two forgers could change almost anything in a passport to suit a new user's requirements. Photographs were substituted, and the ridge marks or indentations of a heavy stamp were imitated, using something as humble as a crochet hook. Sometimes the stitching that bound a passport was carefully removed, and whole groups of pages were replaced, using clean pages from a second passport.
Dates, details, and stamps were all altered or erased with chemical solvents. New data was inserted in an appropriate shade, selected from a comprehensive catalogue of printer's inks. Some of the changes defied the scrutiny of experts, and none of them was detectable in routine examinations.
During that first week of passport studies, I found a new, safe, comfortable apartment for Ulla in neighbouring Tardeo, not far from the Haji Ali Mosque. Lisa Carter, who'd visited Ulla almost every day at Abdullah's apartment-and visited, far more warmly, with Abdullah himself- agreed to share the new place. We moved them and their belongings in a small fleet of taxis. The two women liked one another, and got on well. They drank vodka, cheated at Scrabble and gin rummy, enjoyed the same kinds of movies on video, and swapped clothes.
They'd also discovered, in the weeks they'd spent in Abdullah's surprisingly well-stocked kitchen, that they liked one another's cooking. The new apartment was a new beginning for them and, despite Ulla's lingering fears about Maurizio and his crooked deals, she and Lisa were happy and optimistic.
I continued the weight training and karate with Abdullah, Salman, and Sanjay. We were fit and strong and fast. And as the days of training became weeks, Abdullah and I grew closer, as friends and brothers, just as Salman and Sanjay were with one another. It was the kind of closeness that didn't need conversation to sustain itself: quite often we would meet, travel to the gym, work out on the weights, box a few rounds, spend half an hour sparring at karate, and speak no more than ten words to one another.
Sometimes, with no more than a look in my eye or an unusual expression on his face, we would laugh, and keep on laughing so hard that we collapsed to the practice mats. And in that way, without words, I slowly opened my heart to Abdullah, and I began to love him.
I'd spoken to the head man of the slum, Qasim Ali Hussein, and to several others, including Johnny Cigar, when I'd first returned from Goa. I saw Prabaker in his taxi every other day. But there were so many new challenges and rewards in Ghani's passport workshop, and they kept me so busy and excited, that I stopped working, even occasionally, at the slum clinic I'd founded in the little hut that had been my home.
On my first visit to the slum in several weeks, I was surprised to find Prabaker in the wriggling convulsions of a dance while the slum musicians were rehearsing one of their popular songs.
The little guide was dressed in his taxi driver's khaki shirt and white trousers. He wore a purple scarf around his neck, and yellow plastic sandals. Approaching him unobserved, I watched him in silence for a while. His dance managed to combine obscenely lewd and suggestive thrusts of his hips with the facial expressions and hand-whirling gestures of a child-like innocence.
With clownish charm he held his open palms beside his smiling face one moment, and then pumped his groin back and forth with a determined little grimace the next. When he finally turned and saw me, his face exploded in that huge smile, that uniquely wide and heart-filled smile, and he rushed to greet me.
"Oh, Lin!" he cried, squeezing his head into my chest in an affectionate hug. "I have a news for you! I have it such a fantastic news! I was looking for you in every place, every hotel with naked ladies, every drinking bar with black-market peoples, every dirty slum, every-"
"I get the picture, Prabu. So, what's your news?"
"I am to be getting married! I am making a marriage on Parvati!
Can you believe it?"
"Sure, I can believe it. Congratulations. I take it you were practising, just now, for the wedding party."
"Oh, yes!" he agreed, lunging at me with his hips a few times. "I want a very sexy dancing for everybody at the party. It's a pretty good sexy, isn't it?"
"It's... sexy... sure. How are things here?"
"Very fine. No problem. Oh, Lin! I forgot! Johnny, he is making a marriage also. He will be married with Sita, the sister of my own beautiful Parvati."
"Where is he? I want to say hello."
"He is down at the seashore, you know, at the place where he sits on the rocks, for being lonely-the same place where you also enjoy a good lonely. You'll find him there."
I walked off, glancing back over my shoulder to see Prabaker encouraging the band with mechanical, piston-like thrusts of his narrow hips. At the edge of the slum, where black boulders tumbled to the sea, I found Johnny Cigar. He was dressed in a white singlet and a chequered green lungi. He braced himself with his arms, leaning back, and staring out to sea. It was almost exactly the same spot where he'd told me about seawater, sweat, and tears on the evening of the cholera outbreak, so many months before.
"Congratulations," I said, sitting beside him and offering him a beedie cigarette.
"Thanks, Lin," he smiled, shaking his head. I put the packet away, and for a while we both watched the small petulant waves smack at the rocky shore.