As I rode the wind, a week after Khader's little lecture on ethics, weaving the bike through ancient-modern traffic beneath a darkening, portentous tumble of clouds, those words echoed in my mind. The wrong thing, for the right reasons. I rode on and, even when I stopped thinking about Khader's lesson, those words still murmured in the little grey daydream-space where memory meets inspiration. I know now that the words were like a mantra, and that my instinct-fate's whisper in the dark-was trying to warn me of something by repeating them. The wrong thing... for the right reasons.

But on that day, an hour after Didier's confession, I let the murmured warnings fade. Right or wrong, I didn't want to think about the reasons-not my reasons for doing what I did, or Khader's, or anyone's. I enjoyed the discussions of good and evil, but only as a game, as an entertainment. I didn't really want the truth. I was sick of truth, especially my own truth, and I couldn't face it. So the thoughts and premonitions echoed and then whipped past me into the coils of humid wind. And by the time I swept into the last curve of coast near the Sea Rock Hotel, my mind was as clear as the broad horizon clamped upon the limit of a dark and tremulous sea.

The Sea Rock, which was as luxurious and opulently serviced as the other five-star hotels in Bombay, offered the special attraction that it was literally built upon the sea rocks at Juhu. From all its major restaurants, bars, and a hundred other windows, the Sea Rock scanned the endlessly shifting peaks and furrows of the Arabian Sea. The hotel also offered one of the best and most comprehensively eclectic smorgasbord lunches in the city. I was hungry, and glad to see that Lisa was waiting for me in the foyer. She wore a starched, sky-blue shirt with the collar turned up, and sky-blue culottes. Her blonde hair was wound into the praying-fingers of a French braid. She'd been clean, off heroin, for more than a year. She looked tanned and healthy and confident. "Hi, Lin," she smiled, greeting me with a kiss on the cheek.

"You're just in time."

"Great. I'm starving."

"No, I mean you're just in time to meet Kalpana. Just a minute- here she comes now."

A young woman with a fashionably western short haircut, hipster jeans, and a tight, red T-shirt approached us. She wore a stopwatch around her neck on a lanyard, and carried a clipboard.

She was about twenty-six years old.

"Hello," I said when Lisa introduced us. "Is that your rig outside? The broadcast vans, and all the cables? Are you shooting a movie?"

"Supposed to be, yaar," she replied in the exaggerated vowels of the Bombay accent that I loved and found myself unconsciously imitating. "The director has gone off somewhere with one of our dancers. It's meant to be a secret, yaar, but the whole damn set is talking about it. We've got a forty-five minute break.

Although, mind you, that's about ten times as long as our guy will need, from what all I'm told about his prowess."

"Okay," I suggested, smacking my hands together. "That gives us time for lunch."

"Fuck lunch, let's get stoned first, yaar," Kalpana demurred.

"Have you got any hash?"

"Yeah," I shrugged. "Sure."

"Did you bring a car?"

"I'm on a Bullet."

"Okay, let's use my car. It's in the car park."

We left the hotel, and sat in her new Fiat to smoke. While I prepared the joint, she told me that she was an assistant to the producer of that and several other films. One of her duties was to oversee the casting of minor roles in the films. She'd subcontracted the task to a casting agent, but he was experiencing difficulty in finding foreigners to fill the small, non-speaking, decorative roles.

"Kalpana got talking about this at dinner last week," Lisa summed up when Kalpana began to smoke. "She told me that her guys couldn't find foreigners to play the parts in the movies-you know, the people at a disco or a party scene or, like, British people, in the time of the British Raj and like that. So... I thought of you." "U-huh."

"It would be a great help if you could get the goras for me when we need them," Kalpana said, offering me what seemed to be a well-practised leer. Practised or not, it was damned effective.

"We provide a cab to bring them to the shoot and take them home again. We give them a full lunch during the break. And we pay about two thousand rupees a day, per person. We pay that to _you, plus a bonus commission per head. What you pay them, well, it's up to you. Most of them are happy to do it for nothing, and are real surprised, you know, when they find out we actually pay them to be in the movies."

"Whaddaya say?" Lisa asked me, her eyes gleaming through the rose filter of her stone.

"I'm interested."

My mind was trawling through the possible lateral benefits in the arrangement. Some of them were obvious. The moviemakers were a fairly affluent crowd of frequent flyers who might need black market dollars and documents, from time to time. It was clear to me, as well, that the casting job was important to Lisa. On its own, that was reason enough for me to get involved. I liked her, and I was glad that she wanted to like me.

"Good," Kalpana concluded, opening the door and stepping out to the car park. We walked back to the hotel foyer, each of us with sunglasses clamped to our eyes. We shook hands at the same spot where we'd met half an hour before.

"Have your lunch," she said. "I'll go back to the set. We're in the ballroom. When you're all done, follow the cables and you'll find me. I'll introduce you to the guys, and you can start right away. We need a few foreigners for tomorrow's shoot, here. Two guys and two gals, yaar. Blonde, Sweden types, if you can find them. Hey-that was Kashmiri hash, _na? We'll get along just fine, Lin, you and me. Ciao! Ciao, baby."

In the restaurant, Lisa and I heaped our plates high, and sat facing the sea to eat.

"Kalpana's okay," she said between mouthfuls. "She's sarcastic as all hell, sometimes, and she's a real ambitious girl-don't make any mistake about that-but she's a straight talker and a real friend. When she told me about the casting job, I thought about you. I thought you might be able to... make something out of it ..." "Thanks," I said, meeting her eye and trying to read her. "I appreciate the thought. Do you want to be partners in it with me?"

"Yes," she answered quickly. "I was hoping... hoping you'd want to."

"We could work it out together," I suggested. "I don't think I'll have any trouble getting foreigners to work in the movies, but I don't really want to do the rest of it. You could do that part, if you like. You could organise picking them up, looking after them on the set, and making the payments and all that. I'll talk them into it, and you take it from there. I'd be glad to work with you, if you're interested."

She smiled. It was a good smile; the kind you like to keep.

"I'd love to do it," she gushed, flushing pink with embarrassment under her tan. "I really need to do something, Lin, and I think I'm ready. When Kalpana ran this casting thing by me, I wanted to jump at it, but I was too nervous to take it on alone. Thanks."

"Don't mention it. How's it going with you and Abdullah?"

"Mmmm," she mumbled, finishing a mouthful of food. "I'm not working, if you know what I mean, so that's something. I'm not working at the Palace, and I'm not using. He gave me money. A lot of money. I don't know where he got it. I don't really care. It's more money than I've ever seen in one bundle before in my whole life. It's in this case, this metal case. He gave it to me, and asked me to look after it for him, and to spend it whenever I need it. It was real spooky, kinda like... I dunno... like his last will and testament, or something."

I raised one eyebrow unconsciously in a quizzical expression. She caught the look, reflected a moment, and then responded.