On the other hand, the criminals in Khader's network displayed a kind of egalitarianism that would've filled communists and Gnostic Christians with admiring envy. They didn't care about the colour, creed, race, or political orientation of clients, and they didn't judge them when asking about their past. Every life, no matter how innocent or evil, reduced to only one question: How bad do you need the book? The answer established the going rate, and every customer who had the money to pay it was born again, with no history and no sin, in the moment of the deal. No client was better than any other, and none was worse.
Abdul Ghani, propelled by the purest amoral spirit of market forces, serviced the needs of generals, mercenaries, misappropriators of public funds, and murderous interrogators without a hint of censure or dismay. Their freedom brought in about two million dollars each year in clear profit. But although he wasn't ethically squeamish about the source of the income, or receiving it, Abdul Ghani was religiously superstitious about spending it. Every dollar earned in saving that poisonous clientele went to a refugee rescue program that Khaderbhai had established for Iranians and Afghans displaced by war. Every passport bought by one of the warlords or their apparatchiks bought fifty more books, identity cards, or travel documents for Iranian and Afghan refugees. Thus, in one of those psychic labyrinths that fate likes to build around greed and fear, the high prices paid by tyrants rescued many of those made wretched by tyranny.
Krishna and Villu taught me everything they knew about the passport business, and in time I began to experiment, creating new identities for myself with American, Canadian, Dutch, German, and British books. My work wasn't as good as theirs, and never would be. Good forgers are artists. Their artistic vision must encompass the deliberate creative smudge that gives each page its counterfeit authenticity, no less than the accuracy of altered or manufactured details. Each page that they create is a miniature painting, a tiny expression of their art. The precise angle of one slightly skewed stamp or the casual blurring of another are as significant to those small canvasses as the shape, position, and colour of a fallen rose might be in a grand master's portrait. The effect, no matter how skilfully achieved, is always born in the artist's intuition. And intuition can't be taught.
My skills, instead, found expression in the stories that had to be invented for every newly created book. There were often gaps of months, or even years, in the record of travel contained within the books that we got from foreigners. Some had overstayed their visas, and that lapse had to be expunged from the book before it could be used. Stamping an exit from Bombay airport before the last visa's expiry date, as if the passport holder had left the country within the life of the visa, I then set about establishing a history of movement from one country to another for every book, using the bank of exit and entry stamps that Villu had created. Little by little, I brought each book up to date, and finally supplied it with a new visa for India and an entry stamp at Bombay airport.
The chain of entries and exits that linked that lapsed time was always carefully plotted. Krishna and Villu had a library of logbooks from the major airlines, listing all of the flights in and out of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas with their departure dates and arrival times. If we put a stamp into a British book stating that the holder had arrived in Athens on July the fourth, say, we were sure that a British Airways flight had connected at Athens airport on that day. In that way, every book had a personal history of travel and experience backed up by logs, timetables, and weather details which gave the new bearer a credible personal history.
My first test of the passports I'd forged for myself was on the domestic transfer route, known as the double-shuffle. Thousands of Iranian and Afghan refugees in Bombay tried to find asylum in Canada, Australia, the United States, and elsewhere, but the governments of those countries refused to consider them. If they could land there, in those western countries, they could declare themselves to be asylum-seekers and submit to the processes of assessment that determined the merit of their applications.
Because they were political refugees and genuine asylum-seekers, the applications they launched within the nominated country were often successful. The trick was to get them into Canada, or Sweden, or some other country of choice in the first place.
The double-shuffle was the system we used. When Iranians or Afghans in Bombay tried to buy tickets to the asylum countries, they were required to show current visas for those countries. But they couldn't obtain the visas legally, and false visas were impracticable because they were immediately checked against the consular register. So I purchased a ticket to Canada or Sweden with a false visa. As a gora, a well-dressed foreigner of European appearance, I was never subjected to anything but a cursory examination. No-one ever bothered to check if my visa was genuine. The refugee I was helping then purchased a ticket for the domestic leg-from Bombay to Delhi-on the same plane. As we boarded the plane, we received boarding passes: mine was the green international boarding pass, and his was the red domestic pass. Once in the air, we swapped our boarding passes. At Delhi airport, only those with green international boarding passes were permitted to remain on board. Clutching my domestic pass, I got down at Delhi and left the refugee to continue on to Canada, or Sweden, or whatever the destination of the flight we'd chosen.
Upon arrival, he would declare himself to be an asylum-seeker, and the process of his recognition would begin. In Delhi, I would spend the night at a five-star and then purchase another ticket to repeat the process-the double-shuffle-with another refugee on the Delhi to Bombay route.
The system worked. In those years we smuggled hundreds of Iranian and Afghan doctors, engineers, architects, academics, and poets into their nominated countries. I received three thousand dollars for a double-shuffle, and for a while I did two doubles per month. After three months of internal flights from Bombay to Delhi, Calcutta, Madras, and back, Abdul Ghani sent me on my first international courier run. I carried a package of ten passports to Zaire. Using photographs of the recipients-sent from Kinshasa, the capital-Krishna and Villu had worked the passports into perfect counterfeit books. After sealing them in plastic, I taped them to my body under three layers of clothing, and flew into the steaming, well-armed mayhem of Kinshasa's international airport.
It was a dangerous mission. At that time, Zaire was a neutral no man's-land between the bloody proxy wars that raged in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Sudan, Uganda, and the Congo. It was the personal fiefdom of the conspicuously insane dictator Mobutu, and a percentage of the profit from every crime in the kingdom slithered into his pocket. Mobutu was a darling of the western powers because he bought every costly killing weapon they offered to sell him. If it mattered to them that Mobutu turned the weapons on trade unionists and other social reformers in his own country, they never expressed the concern publicly. Those governments hosted the dictator in lavish style at royal and presidential receptions while hundreds of men and women were being tortured to death in his prisons. The same governments were hunting me through the international police agency, Interpol, and there was no doubt in my mind that their ally would've taken great pleasure in finishing me off for them-as a bonus, so to speak-if the passport mission had gone wrong and I'd found myself arrested in his capital city.