What I didn't know then, and what troubled me for a long time after that Day of the Slaves, was how I could be there, and look at the children, and not be crushed by it. I realised, much later, that a part of the answer lay in the Australian prison, and the men I'd met there. Some of those men, too many of them, were serving their fourth or fifth prison sentences. Many of them had begun their imprisonment in reform schools-Boys' Homes, they were called, and Youth Training Centres-when they were no older than those Indian slave children. Some of them had been beaten, starved, and locked in solitary confinement. Some of them, too many of them, had been sexually abused. Ask any man with a long- enough experience of prisons, and he'll tell you that all it takes to harden a man's heart is a system of justice.

And strange and shameful as it is to admit it, I was glad that something, someone, some experience had flinted my heart. That hard stone within my chest was all that protected me from those first sounds and images of Prabaker's dark tour of the city.

Hands clapped in brittle echoes, and a little girl stood up from the bench to sing and dance. It was a love song from a popular Hindi movie. I heard it many times, hundreds of times, during the following years, and it always reminded me of that child, ten years old, and her surprisingly strong, high, thin voice. She swayed her hips, pushing up her non-existent breasts in a child's imitation of a temptress burlesque, and new interest quirked the heads of the purchasers and agents.

Prabaker played the Virgil. His soft voice was ceaseless, explaining all that we saw, and all that he knew. He told me that the children would've died, if they hadn't found their way to the people-market. Professional recruiters, known as talent scouts, roamed from one catastrophe to another, from drought to earthquake to flood. Starving parents, who'd already watched one or more of their children sicken, and die, blessed the scouts, kneeling to touch their feet. They begged them to buy a son or a daughter, so that at least that one child would live.

The boys on sale there were destined to work as camel jockeys in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and other Gulf States. Some would be maimed in the camel races that provided afternoon entertainment for the rich sheiks, Prabaker said. Some would die. The survivors, grown too tall to ride in the races, were often abandoned to fend for themselves. The girls would work in households throughout the Middle East. Some of them would be used for sex.

But they were alive, Prabaker said, those boys and girls. They were the lucky ones. For every child who passed through the people-market there were a hundred others, or more, who'd starved in unutterable agonies, and were dead.

The starving, the dead, the slaves. And through it all, the purr and rustle of Prabaker's voice. There's a truth that's deeper than experience. It's beyond what we see, or even what we feel.

It's an order of truth that separates the profound from the merely clever, and the reality from the perception. We're helpless, usually, in the face of it; and the cost of knowing it, like the cost of knowing love, is sometimes greater than any heart would willingly pay. It doesn't always help us to love the world, but it does prevent us from hating the world. And the only way to know that truth is to share it, from heart to heart, just as Prabaker told it to me, just as I'm telling it to you now.

CHAPTER FOUR

"Do you know the Borsalino hat test?"

"The what?"

"The Borsalino hat test. It is the test that reveals whether a hat is a genuine Borsalino, or an inferior imitator. You know about the Borsalino, non?"

"No, I can't say I do."

"Aaaaah," Didier smiled. The smile was composed of one part surprise, one part mischief, and one part contempt. Somehow, those elements combined in an effect that was disarmingly charming. He leaned slightly forward and inclined his head to one side, his black curly hair shaking as if to emphasise the points in his explanation. "The Borsalino is a garment of the first and finest quality. It is believed by many, and myself included, to be the most outstanding gentleman's head covering ever made."

His hands shaped an imaginary hat on his head.

"It is wide-brimmed, in black or white, and made from the furs of the lapin."

"So, it's just a hat," I added, in what I thought to be an agreeable tone. "We're talking about a rabbit-fur hat."

Didier was outraged.

"Just a hat? Oh, no, my friend! The Borsalino is more than just a hat. The Borsalino is a work of art! It is brushed ten thousand times, by hand, before it is sold. It was the style expression of first choice by discerning French and Italian gangsters in Milan and Marseilles for many decades. The very name of Borsalino became a synonyme for gangsters. The wild young men of the underworld of Milano and Marseilles were called Borsalinos. Those were the days when gangsters had some style. They understood that if you were to live as an outlaw and steal and shoot people for a living, you had a responsibility to dress with some elegance.

Isn't it so?" "It's the least they could do," I agreed, smiling.

"But of course! Now, sadly, there is all attitude and no style.

It is the mark of the age in which we live that the style becomes the attitude, instead of the attitude becoming the style."

He paused, permitting me a moment to acknowledge the turn of phrase.

"And so," he continued, "the test of a real Borsalino hat is to roll it into a cylinder, roll it up into a very tight tube, and pass it through a wedding ring. If it emerges from this test without permanent creases, and if it springs back to its original shape, and if it is not damaged in the experience, it is a genuine Borsalino."

"And you're saying..."

"Just so!" Didier shouted, slamming a fist down on the table.

We were sitting in Leopold's, near the square arch of the Causeway doors, at eight o'clock. Some foreigners at the next table turned their heads at the noisy outburst, but the staff and the regulars ignored the Frenchman. Didier had been eating and drinking and expostulating at Leopold's for nine years. They all knew there was a line you could cross with him, a limit to his tolerance, and he was a dangerous man if you crossed it. They also knew that the line wasn't drawn in the soft sand of his own life or beliefs or feelings. Didier's line was drawn through the hearts of the people he loved. If you hurt them, in any way, you roused him to a cold and deadly rage. But nothing anyone said or did to him, short of actual bodily harm, ever really offended or angered him.

"Comme %ca! That is my point! Your little friend, Prabaker, has put you through the hat test. He rolled you into a tube, and dragged you through the wedding ring, to see if you are a real Borsalino or not. That was his purpose in taking you on the tour of the bad sights and sounds of the city. It was a Borsalino test."

I sipped my coffee in silence, knowing that he was right-

Prabaker's dark tour had been a kind of test-but not willing to give Didier the trophy of conceding the point.

The evening crowd of tourists from Germany, Switzerland, France, England, Norway, America, Japan, and a dozen other countries thinned out, giving way to the night crowd of Indians and expatriates who called Bombay home. The locals reclaimed places like Leopold's, the Mocambo, Cafe Mondegar, and the Light of Asia every night, when the tourists sought the safety of their hotels.

"If it was a test," I did at last concede, "he must've given me a pass. He invited me to go with him to visit his family, in his village in the north of the state."

Didier raised his eyebrows in theatrical surprise.

"For how long?"