"You are good. You'll do good wherever you go."

"No. This is my chance. I'm not going back-I'm not going anywhere-until I've made it. If I don't do that, if I don't try, then the whole thing will be for nothing. Maurizio... and everything else that's happened will be for nothing. If I leave here, I want to do it with my head on straight, and a pocket full of money that I earned myself."

I looked into the wind, feeling the day alternately warm and cool and warm again on my face and arms as the breeze turned and returned across the bay. A small fleet of fishing canoes drifted past us on their way back to the fishermen's sandy refuge near the slum. I suddenly remembered the day in the rain, sailing in a canoe across the flooded forecourt of the Taj Mahal Hotel and beneath the booming, resonant dome of the Gateway Monument. I remembered Vinod's love song, and the rain that night as Karla came into my arms.

And staring, then, at the ceaseless, eternal waves, I remembered all that had been lost since that storming night: prison, torture, Karla gone, Ulla gone, Khaderbhai and his council gone, Anand gone, Maurizio dead, Modena probably dead, Rasheed dead, Abdullah dead, and Prabaker-it was impossible-Prabaker, also dead. And I was one of them: walking and talking and staring at the wilding waves, but as dead in my heart as all the rest.

"And what about you?" she asked. I could feel her eyes on me, and I could hear the emotions in her voice: sympathy, tenderness, maybe even love. "If I stay-and I'm definitely going to stay- what are you going to do?"

I looked at her for a while, reading the runes in her sky-blue eyes. Then I stood from the wall, held her in my arms, and kissed her. It was a long kiss. We lived out a life together in that kiss: we lived and loved and grew old together, and we died. Then our lips parted, and that life we might've had retreated, shrinking to a spark of light we would always recognise in one another's eyes.

I could've loved her. Maybe I already did love her a little. But sometimes the worst thing you can do to a woman is to love her.

And I still loved Karla. I loved Karla.

"What am _I going to do?" I said, repeating her question. I held her shoulders in my hands, keeping her at the distance of my arms. I smiled. "I am going to get stoned."

I rode away, and never looked back. I paid three months' rent on my apartment, and paid substantial baksheesh to the watchman in the car park and the watchman in the building. I kept one good, forged passport in my pocket, put all my spare passports and a bundle of cash into a satchel, and left it with my Enfield Bullet bike in Didier's care. Then I took a cab to Gupta-ji's opium den near the Street of Ten Thousand Whores, Shoklaji Street. I climbed the worn wooden steps to the third floor and walked into the cage that junkies build for themselves, one shiny, sharp, steel bar at a time.

Gupta-ji provided a large room with twenty sleeping mats and wooden pillows for his opium smokers. For those with special needs he reserved other rooms behind that open den. Through a very small doorway, I entered the discreet corridor that led to those back rooms. It was so low that I had to stoop, almost to crawling. The room I chose had a cot with a kapok mattress, a weathered carpet, a small cabinet with wickerwork doors, a lamp with a silk lampshade, and a large clay matka filled with water. The walls on three sides were made from reed matting stretched upon wooden frames. The last wall, at the head of the bed, looked out over a busy street of Arab and local Muslim traders, but its windows were shuttered so that only a few bright stars of sunlight gleamed in the chinks and gaps. There was no ceiling. Instead, the view overhead was of heavy rafters crossing and joining one another in support of the clay tile roof. I got to know that view very well.

Gupta-ji took money and instructions, and left me alone. The room, so close to the roof, was very hot. I took my shirt off, and switched off the lamp. The dark little room was like a cell; a prison cell at night. I sat on the bed and, almost at once, the tears came. I'd cried before, in Bombay. I'd shed tears after I met Ranjit's lepers, and when the stranger had washed my tortured body in Arthur Road Prison, and with Prabaker's father at the hospital. But that sorrow and suffering had always been stifled: somehow, I'd managed to choke back the worst of it, the flood of it. Then, alone in that little opium cell with my ruined love for those dead friends, Abdullah and Prabaker, I let it go.

The tears, when they come to some men, are worse than beatings.

They're wounded worse by sobbing, men like that, than they are by boots and batons. Tears begin in the heart, but some of us deny the heart so often, and for so long, that when it speaks we hear not one but a hundred sorrows in the heartbreak. We know that crying is a good and natural thing. We know that crying isn't a weakness, but a kind of strength. Still, the weeping rips us root by tangled root from the earth, and we crash like fallen trees when we cry.

Gupta-ji gave me time. When at last I heard the sliding, scuffing sound of his chappals as he approached the door I smeared the sorrow from my face, and switched on the lamp. He'd brought what I'd asked for-a steel spoon, distilled water, disposable syringes, heroin, and a carton of cigarettes-and he set the items out on the little dresser. There was a girl with him. He told me that her name was Shilpa, and that he'd assigned her to me as a servant. She was young, years less than twenty, but already scarred with the glum expression of the working professional.

Hope, ready to snarl or grovel like a beaten cur, cowered in her eyes. I sent her and Gupta-ji away, and cooked up a taste of heroin.

The dose sat in the syringe for almost an hour. I picked it up and put the needle against a fat, strong, healthy vein in my arm five times, only to put it down again unused. And for the whole of that sweating hour I stared at the liquid in the syringe. That was it. The damnation drug. That was the big one, the drug that had driven me to commit stupid, violent crimes; that had put me in prison; that had cost me my family, and lost my loved ones.

The everything-and-nothing drug: it takes everything, and gives you nothing in return. But the nothing that it gives you, the unfeeling emptiness it gives you, is sometimes all and everything you want.

I pushed the needle into the vein, pulled back the rose of blood that confirmed the clean puncture of the vein, and pressed the plunger all the way to the stop. Before I could pull the needle from my arm, the drug made my mind Sahara. Warm, dry, shining, and featureless, the dunes of the drug smothered all thought, and buried the forgotten civilisation of my mind. The warmth filled my body as well, killing off the thousand little aches, twinges, and discomforts that we endure and ignore in every sober day.

There was no pain. There was nothing.

And then, with the desert still in my mind, I felt my body drowning, and I broke the surface of a suffocating lake. Was it a week after that first taste? Was it a month? I crawled onto the raft and floated there on the lethal lake in the spoon, carrying the Sahara in my blood. And those rafters overhead: there was a kind of message in them, a message about how and why we all intersected, Khader and Karla and Abdullah and I. Our lives, all of us, in the link to Abdullah's death, intersected in some uniquely profound way. It was there, in the rafters, a key to the code.

But I closed my eyes. I remembered Prabaker. I remembered that he was working so hard and so late on the night he died because he owned the taxi, and was working for himself. I'd bought the taxi for him. He'd be alive if I hadn't bought that taxi for him. He was the little mouse that I'd trained and fed with crumbs in my prison cell; the mouse that was crucified. And sometimes the breeze of a clear, unstoned hour gave me an image of Abdullah in the minute before he died, alone in the killing circle. Alone. I should've been there. I was with him every day. I should've been with him then. Friends don't let friends die like that-alone with death and fate. And where was his body? And what if he was Sapna?