"I'm okay, I'm okay."

"You are sure? Everything not broken?"

"Jesus, Prabu, I don't care how good this guy's spitting is," I said, laughing nervously, and ragged with relief, "he doesn't get a tip. Are you all right?"

"We must get out, Lin!" he answered, his voice rising to a hysterical whine. "Out! Out of here! Now!"

The door on his side was jammed shut, and he began to push at it with his shoulder. He couldn't budge it. He reached across me to try the door on my side, but saw at once that another car was jammed against it, pinning it shut. Our eyes met, and there was such fear in him, such terror in the white-rimmed bulge of his eyes, that I felt the coldness of it deep in my chest. He turned at once, and threw himself again at the door on his side.

My mind was muddy water, and one idea splashed up from it, clear and exclusive: FIRE. Is that what he's afraid of! Once I'd asked myself the question I couldn't stop thinking it. I looked at the terror that pulled at Prabaker's gasping mouth, and I was sure the taxi was going to catch fire. I knew we were trapped there.

The rear windows, in all the Bombay taxis I'd seen, didn't open beyond a few centimetres. The doors were jammed, and the windows wouldn't open, and the taxi was going to explode in fire, and we were trapped. Burned live... Is that why he's so scared?

I looked to the driver. He was slumped, awkwardly, between the steering wheel and the door. His body was still, but I heard him moaning. Beneath the thin shirt, the abacus ridge of his spine rose and fell with each slow and shallow breath.

Faces appeared at the windows of the cab, and I heard excited voices. Prabaker looked out at them, turning this way and that, his face cramped in an expression of terrible anguish. Suddenly, he clambered over the seat into the front of the car and wrestled the passenger door open. Turning swiftly and grabbing at my arms with surprising strength, he tried to drag me by main force over the seat that divided us.

"This way, Lin! Get out, now! Hurry! Hurry!"

I climbed up and over the seat. Prabaker got out of the car, pushing his way into a crowd of onlookers. I reached out to the driver, trying to prise him from the obstructing rim of the steering wheel, but Prabaker's hands were on me again, brutally rough. The fingernails of one hand tore into the skin of my back, and the other wrenched at the collar of my shirt.

"Don't touch him, Lin!" he almost screamed. "Don't touch him!

Leave him and get out. Get out now!"

He dragged me from the car and through the hedge of bodies pressing in on the accident. On a footpath nearby, we sat beneath a fringe of hawthorn leaves that overhung a fence of wrought-iron spears, and inspected one another for injuries. The cut on my forehead, above my right eye, wasn't as serious as I'd thought.

The bleeding had already stopped, and it began to weep a clear, plasmic fluid. I was sore in a few places, but it was no cause for concern. Prabaker cradled his arm-the same arm that had pulled me from the car with such irresistible power-and it was obvious that he was in pain. A large swelling had already formed near the elbow. I knew it would leave a nasty bruise, but nothing seemed to be broken.

"Looks like you were wrong, Prabu," I chided, smiling as I lit a cigarette for him.

"Wrong, baba?"

"Getting us out of the car in such a panic and all. You really had me going. I thought the damn thing was going to catch fire, but it looks okay."

"Oh," he replied softly, staring straight ahead. "You think I was frightening for fire? Not fire in the car, Lin, but fire in the people. Look, now. See the public, how they are."

We stood, stretching the ache from shoulders and whip-lashed necks, and looked toward the wreckage some ten metres away. About thirty people had gathered around the four crashed vehicles. A few of them were helping drivers and passengers from the damaged cars. The rest huddled together in groups, gesturing wildly and shouting. More people streamed toward the site from every direction. Drivers of other cars that had been blocked from travelling further, left their vehicles and joined the crowd. The thirty people became fifty, eighty, then a hundred as we watched.

One man was the centre of attention. It was his car that had been trying to turn right, his car we'd smashed into with the brakes on full lock. He stood beside the taxi, bellowing with rage. He was a round-shouldered man, in his middle forties, wearing a grey, cotton safari suit that had been tailored to accommodate the extravagant boast of his large paunch. His thinning hair was awry. The breast pocket of his suit had been torn, there was a rip in his trousers, and he'd lost one sandal. That dishevelment combined with his theatrical gestures and persistent shouting to present a spectacle that seemed to be more enthralling, for the crowd of onlookers, than the wreckage of the cars. His hand had been cut from the palm to the wrist. As the staring crowd grew more silent, subdued by the drama, he smeared blood from the wound on his face and beat the redness into the grey of his suit, shouting all the while.

Just then, some men carried a woman into the little clear space around the man, and placed her on a piece of cloth that was stretched out on the ground for her. They shouted instructions to the crowd, and in moments a wooden cart appeared, pushed by bare- chested men wearing only singlets and short lungis. The woman was lifted onto the cart, her red sari gathered up in folds and wrapped about her legs. She may have been the man's wife-I couldn't be sure-but his rage suddenly grew hysterical. He seized her roughly by the shoulders and shook her. He pulled at her hair. He appealed to the crowd with enormous, histrionic gestures, flinging his arms wide and then striking his own blood- streaked face. They were the gestures of pantomime, the exaggerated simulations of silent films, and I couldn't help thinking they were absurd and funny. But the injuries people had sustained were real, as were the rumbling threats that surged through the ever-increasing crowd.

As the semi-conscious woman was trundled away on the humble cart, the man hurled himself at the door of the taxi, wrenching it open. The crowd reacted as one. They dragged the dazed and injured taxi driver from his cab in an instant and flung him on the bonnet of the car. He raised his arms in feeble pleading, but a dozen, twenty, fifty hands punched and tore at him. Blows drummed on his face, chest, stomach, and groin. Fingernails scratched and ripped, tearing his mouth open on one side almost to the ear, and shredding his shirt to rags.

It happened in seconds. I told myself, as I watched the beating, that it was all too fast, that I was dazed, and there was no time to react. What we call cowardice is often just another name for being taken by surprise, and courage is seldom any better than simply being well prepared. And I might've done more, I might've done something, anything, if it had happened in Australia. It's not your country, I told myself, as I watched the beating. It's not your culture...

But there was another thought, dark and secret then, and all too clear to me now: the man was an idiot, an insulting and belligerent idiot, whose reckless stupidity had risked Prabaker's life and mine. A splinter of spite had pierced my heart when the crowd turned on him, and at least some small particle of their revenge-a blow or a shout or a shove-was my own. Helpless, craven, ashamed, I did nothing.

"We've got to do something..." I said lamely.

"Enough people are doing, baba," Prabaker replied.

"No, I mean, we've got to... can't we help him, somehow?"

"For this fellow is no helping," he sighed. "Now you see it, Lin.

Accidents is very bad business in Bombay. Better you get out of that car, or taxi, or what is it you are in, very, very quickly.