Could my friend, my friend I loved, really have been that ruthless, insane mutilator? What did Ghani say? Pieces of Madjid's slaughtered body were found all over his house... Could I have loved the man who did that? What did it mean, that some small, insistent part of me feared that he was Sapna, and loved him anyway?

And I fired the silver bullet into my arm again, and fell back on the floating raft. And I saw the answer in the rafters overhead.

And I was sure I would understand it with a little more dope, and a little more, and a little more.

I woke to see a face glaring at me and speaking fiercely in a language I couldn't understand. It was an ugly face, a scowling face, defined by deep lines that descended in curved chines from his eyes and nose and mouth. Then the face had hands, strong hands, and I found myself lifted from the raft of my bed and propped unsteadily on my feet.

"You come!" Nazeer growled in English. "You come, now!"

"Fuck..." I said slowly, pausing for maximum effect, "... off."

"You come!" he repeated. The anger in him was so close to the surface that he trembled with it, and opened his mouth unconsciously to bare his teeth in an underbite.

"No," I said, turning to the bed once more. "You... go!"

He pulled me around to face him again. There was enormous power in his arms. He clamped the metal grapples of his hands on my arms.

"Now! You come!"

I'd been three months in the room at Gupta-ji's. They were three months of heroin every day, and food every other day, and the only exercise a short walk to the toilet and back. I didn't know it then, but I'd lost twelve kilos-the best thirty pounds of muscle on my body. I was thin and weak and still stupid on drugs.

"Okay," I said, feigning a smile. "Okay, let me go, will ya. I have to get my stuff."

He relaxed his grip as I nodded toward the little table where my wallet, watch, and passport rested. Gupta-ji and Shilpa waited in the corridor beyond. I gathered up the possessions and put them into my pockets, pretending to co-operate with Nazeer. When I judged the moment to be right, I swung round at him with an overhand right. It should've hit him. It would've hit him when I was healthy and sober. I missed him completely, and threw myself off balance. Nazeer drove a fist into my solar plexus, just under the heart. I doubled over, winded and helpless, but my knees locked stiffly and my legs wouldn't fold. He raised my head, with his left hand locked into a patch of my hair, pulled his right fist back at shoulder height, hesitated in the precision of his aim, and then rammed his fist into my jaw. The full force of his neck, shoulders, and back were in the blow. I saw Gupta-ji's lips pout and his eyes squint in a wince, and then his face exploded in a shower of sparks that left the world darker than a cave full of sleeping bats.

It was the only time in my life I was ever knocked out cold. It seemed that I was falling forever, and the ground was impossibly far away. After a time I was dimly aware of movement, floating through space, and I thought, It's okay, this is all a dream, a drug dream, and I'm going to wake up any minute now, and take more drugs.

Then I came down with a rumpled crash on the raft once more. But the raft-bed that I'd floated on for three long months had changed. It was different, somehow-soft and smooth. And there was a new and wonderful smell, a gorgeous perfume. It was Coco. I knew it well. It was Karla. It was the perfume on Karla's skin.

Nazeer had carried me over his shoulder all the way down the flights of stairs and out into the street, where he'd dumped me into the back seat of a taxi. Karla was there. My head rested in her lap. And I opened my eyes to look into her lovely face. And her green eyes looked back at me with compassion and concern and something else. I closed my eyes, and in the moving darkness I knew what it was, that something else in her eyes. It was disgust. She was disgusted by my weakness, my heroin habit, my stink of neglect and self-indulgence. Then I felt her hands on my face, and it was like crying, and her fingers moving the caress across my cheek were the tears.

When the taxi finally stopped, Nazeer carried me up two flights of steps as easily as he might've lugged a sack of flour. I came to consciousness again draped over his shoulder, looking down at Karla as she climbed the steps behind us. I tried to smile at her. We entered a big house through a back door that led to a kitchen. Beyond the large, modern kitchen, we came into an enormous, open-plan living room, with one wall of glass that looked out upon a golden beach and the dark sapphire sea.

Flipping me over his shoulder, Nazeer lowered me with more gentleness than I'd expected to a pile of cushions near the glass feature wall. The last hit I'd injected, just before he'd kidnapped me from Gupta-ji's, was a big dose. Too big. I was groggy and lapsing. The urge to close my eyes and surrender to the stone swept over me in almost irresistible, immersible waves.

"Don't try to get up," Karla said, kneeling beside me and washing my face with a wet towel.

I laughed, because standing was the last thing on my mind. In the laugh I felt the soreness, dimly, through the stone, on the point of my chin and the hinge of my jaw.

"What's going on, Karla?" I asked, hearing my voice crack and warble as I spoke. Three months of utter silence and soul-fog had distorted my speech with dysphasic lapses and creaking fumbles.

"What are you doing here? What am I doing here?"

"Did you think I would leave you there?"

"How did you know? How did you find me?"

"Your friend Khaderbhai found you. He asked me to bring you here."

"He asked you!"

"Yes," she said, staring into my eyes with such intensity that it cut through the stone like sunrise piercing the morning's hazy mist.

"Where is he?"

She smiled, and the smile was sad because it was the wrong question. I know that now. I'm not stoned now. That was my chance to know the whole of the truth, or as much of the truth as she knew. If I'd asked her the right question, she would've told me the truth. That was the power behind her intense stare. She was ready to tell me everything. She might've even loved me, or begun to love me. But I hadn't asked the right question. I hadn't asked about her. I'd asked about him.

"I don't know," she answered, raising herself with her hands to stand beside me. "He was supposed to be here. I think he'll be here soon. I can't wait, though. I have to go."

"_What?" I sat up, and tried to push the stone curtains aside in order to see her, to speak to her, to keep her with me.

"I have to go," she repeated, walking briskly to the door. Nazeer waited for her there, his thick arms jutting out from the swollen trunk of his body. "I can't help it. I've got a lot of things to do before I leave."

"Leave? What do you mean, leave?"

"I'm leaving Bombay again. I've got some work. It's important, and I... well, I have to do it. I'll be back in about six or eight weeks.

I'll see you then, maybe."

"But this is crazy. I don't get it. You should've left me there, if you're only going to leave me now."

"Look," she said, smiling patiently, "I just got back yesterday, and I'm trying not to stay. I'm not even going back to Leopold's.

I saw Didier this morning-he says hello, by the way-but that's it. I'm not sticking around. I agreed to help get you out of that little suicide pact you had going with yourself at Gupta-ji's.

Now you're here, you're safe, and I have to go."

She turned and spoke to Nazeer. They were speaking Urdu, and I understood only every third or fourth word of their conversation.

He laughed, listening to her, and turned to look at me with his customary contempt.

"What did he say?" I asked her when they fell silent.