Lettie had once said that she found it strange and incongruous to hear me describe criminals, killers, and mafiosi as men of honour. The confusion, I think, was hers, not mine. She'd confused honour with virtue. Virtue is concerned with what we do, and honour is concerned with how we do it. You can fight a war in an honourable way-the Geneva Convention exists for that very reason-and you can enforce the peace without any honour at all. In its essence, honour is the art of being humble. And gangsters, just like cops, politicians, soldiers, and holy men, are only ever good at what they do if they stay humble.

"You know," he remarked, as we moved to the wider footpath opposite the cloisters of the university buildings, "I'm glad it didn't work out with your friends-the ones you wanted to help you with the passports, right at the start."

I frowned, and remained silent, keeping pace with his rapid step.

Johnny Cigar and Kishore had refused to join me in the passport factory, and it had shocked and disappointed me. I'd assumed that they would jump at the chance to make money-to make more money with me than either of them had ever dreamed of making alone. I'd never anticipated the saddened and offended expressions that closed their smiles when they understood, at last, that I was offering them nothing more than the golden opportunity to commit crimes with me. It had never occurred to me that they wouldn't want to do it. It had never occurred to me that they would refuse to work with criminals, and for criminals.

I remembered turning away from their stony, closed, embarrassed smiles that day. I remembered the question that had knotted into a fist in my mind, right behind the eyes: Was I so far out of touch with the thoughts and feelings of decent men? The question still rankled six months later. The answer still stared back at me from the mirrored windows of the shops we passed as we walked.

"If those guys of yours had worked out," Salman continued, "I wouldn't have put Farid with you. And I'm damn glad that I did put him with you. He's a much happier guy now. He's a much more relaxed kind of guy. He likes you, Lin."

"I like him, too," I replied quickly, smiling through my frown.

And it was true. I did like Farid, and I was glad that we'd become close friends.

Farid, the shy but capable youngster I'd met on my first visit to Khader's mafia council more than three years before, had toughened up to a hard, fearless, angry man whose sense of loyalty assumed the full measure of his young life. When Johnny Cigar and Kishore rejected my offers of work, Salman had put Farid and the Goan, Andrew Ferreira, to work with me. Andrew had been genial and talkative, but he'd moved only reluctantly from the company of his young gangster friends, and we hadn't become close. Farid, however, had spent most days and many nights with me, and we liked and understood one another.

"He was right on the edge, I think, when Khader died and we had to clean out Ghani's guys," Salman confided. "It got pretty rough - you remember-we all did some... unusual things. But Farid was wild. He was starting to worry me. You have to get heavy sometimes in our business. That's just how it is. But you got a problem on your hands when you start to _enjoy it, na? I had to talk to him. `Farid`, I said to him, `cutting people up should not be the first option. It should be a long way down the list.

It shouldn't even be on the same page as the first option.` But he went right on doing it. Then I put him with you. And now, after six months, he's a much calmer guy. It worked out well, yaar. I think I'll just have to put all the really bad and mad motherfuckers with you, Lin, to straighten them out."

"He blamed himself for not being there when Khader died," I said as we rounded the curve of the domed Jehangir Art Gallery. Seeing a small gap in the traffic, we jogged across the roundabout at Regal Circle junction, dodging and weaving between the cars.

"We _all did," Salman muttered softly when we took up a position outside the Regal Cinema.

It was a tiny phrase, three small words, and it said nothing new, nothing more than I already knew to be true. Yet that little phrase thundered in my heart, and an avalanche of grieving began to tremble, shift, and slide. For almost a year, and until that very moment, my anger at Khaderbhai had shielded me from the pain of grieving for him. Others had crumbled and withered and raged in their shock and sorrow at his death. I'd been so angry with him that my share of grief was still up there, beneath the smothering snow, in those mountains where he'd died. I'd felt a sense of loss. I'd suffered almost from the start. And I didn't hate the Khan-I'd loved him, always, and still loved him in that instant as we stood outside the cinema, waiting for our friends.

But I hadn't really grieved for him-not in the way that I'd grieved for Prabaker or even Abdullah. Somehow, Salman's casual remark that we all blamed ourselves for not being with Khader when he died had shaken my frozen sorrowing free, and the slow, inexorable snowslip of its heartache began, right there and then.

"We must be a bit early," Salman observed cheerily, and I flinched as I forced myself into the moment with him. "Yeah."

"They're coming by car, we're walking, and still we beat them here."

"It's a good walk. At night it's even better. I do that walk a lot: the Causeway to VT. and back. It's one of my favourite walks in the whole city."

Salman looked at me, a smile on his lips and a frown exaggerating the slightly crooked tilt of his almond-brown eyes.

"You really love this place, don't you?" he asked.

"Sure I do," I replied, a little defensively. "That doesn't mean I like everything about it. There's a lot that I don't like. But I do love the place. I love Bombay, and I think I always will."

He grinned and looked away down the street. I struggled to hold the set of my features, to keep my expression calm and even. But it was too late. The heartgrief had already begun.

I know now what was happening to me, what was overwhelming me, what was about to consume and almost destroy me. Didier had even given me a name for it-assassin grief, he'd once called it: the kind of grief that lies in wait and attacks from ambush, with no warning and no mercy. I know now that assassin grief can hide for years and then strike suddenly, on the happiest day, without discernible reason or exegesis. But on that day, six months after my work in the passport factory had begun, and almost a year after Khader's death, I couldn't understand the dark and trembling mood that was moving in me, swelling to the sorrow I'd too long denied. I couldn't understand it, so I tried to fight it as a man fights pain or despair. But you can't bite down on assassin grief, and will it away. The enemy stalks you, step for step, and knows your every move before you make it. The enemy is your own grieving heart and, when it strikes, it can't miss.

Salman turned to me once more, his amber eyes gleaming in the cast of his thoughts.

"That time, when we had the war to get rid of Ghani's guys, Farid was trying to be a new Abdullah. He loved him, you know. He loved him like a brother. And I think he was trying to _be Abdullah. I think he got the idea that we needed a new Abdullah to win the war for us. But it doesn't work, does it? I tried to tell him that. I tell that to all the young guys-especially the ones who try to be like me. You can only ever be yourself. The more you try to be like someone else, the more you find yourself standing in the way. Hey, here's the guys!"

A white Ambassador stopped in front of us. Farid, Sanjay, Andrew Ferreira, and a tough, forty-year-old Bombay Muslim named Amir got out of the car and joined us. We shook hands as the car drove off.

"Let's wait a minute, guys, while Faisal parks the car," Sanjay suggested.