"Hey, I went there every day for three weeks, yaar," Vikram continued. "I thought that if I just spent enough time there, I'd get used to it, like all the super-cool Danes."

"Get used to what?" Ulla asked.

Vikram frowned at her, bewildered, and then turned to Lettie.

"It was no good. It was useless. After three weeks, I still had to wear the towel. No matter how often I went there, when I saw those bouncy bits going up and down, and side-to-side, I stiffened up. What can I say? I'm too Indian for a place like that."

"It is the same for Indian women," Maurizio observed. "Even when they are making love, it is not possible to be naked."

"Well, that's not always true," Vikram went on, "And anyway, it's the guys who are the problem here. Indian women are ready to change. Young Indian chicks from middle-class families are wild about change, yaar. They're educated, and they're ready for short hair, short dresses, and short love affairs. They're ready for it, but the guys are holding them back. The average Indian guy has a sexual maturity of about fourteen."

"Tell me about it," Lettie muttered.

Kavita Singh had approached our table moments before, and stood behind Vikram while he made his observations about Indian women.

With short, styled hair, and wearing jeans and a white sweatshirt bearing the emblem of New York University, she was the living woman, the physical representation of what Vikram had been saying. She was the real thing.

"You're such a chudd, Vikkie," she said, taking a place opposite him and on my right side. "You say all this, but you're just as bad as all the rest. Look at how you treat your own sister, yaar, if she dares to wear jeans and a tight sweater."

"Hey, I bought her that tight sweater, in London, last year!"

Vikram protested.

"But you still gave her buckets of grief when she wore it to the jazz yatra, na?"

"Well, how was I to know that she would want to wear it outside the apartment?" he countered lamely, provoking laughter and derision from the whole group. None laughed harder than Vikram himself.

Vikram Patel was of average height and build, but average stopped just there, with those characteristics. His thick, curly, black hair framed a handsome, intelligent face. The bright and animated light brown eyes stared out confidently above a long, hawk-like nose and a sharp, immaculately trimmed Zapata moustache. His clothes were black-cowboy boots, jeans, shirt, and leather vest - and he wore a flat, black Spanish flamenco hat on his back, hanging from a leather thong at his throat. His bolo tie, dollar- coin belt, and hatband were all in silver. He looked like a hero in a spaghetti western movie, and that was, in fact, the inspiration for his style. Vikram had an obsession with Sergio Leone's films, Once Upon A Time In The West, and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Later, when I knew him better, when I watched him win the heart of the woman he loved, and when we stood together to face and fight enemies who wanted to kill me, I learned that he was a hero, and that he would've held his own with any of the gunslingers he adored.

Sitting opposite him on that first meeting, I was struck by the ease with which he assumed his black cowboy dream, and the stylish assurance that carried it off. Vikram is the kind of man who wears his sleeve on his heart, Karla once said. It was an affectionate joke, and one that we all understood, but there was a brittle filament of scorn in it, as well. I didn't laugh with the others when she said it.

People like Vikram, people who can wear an obsession with panache, always win me over because their honesty speaks directly to my heart.

"No, it's true!" he persisted. "In Copenhagen there was this club. It's what they call a telephone club. There's all these tables, yaar, and every table has a number that's lit up in red lights. If you see someone interesting, someone really hot, sitting at table twelve, you just dial up number twelve, and speak to them. Fucking deadly system, man. Half the time you don't know who's calling you, or they don't know who you are.

Sometimes you talk for an hour, trying to guess who's talking to you, because everybody is talking at the same time. And then you tell each other what table you're at. I had a real nice party there, I can tell you. But if they tried to do it here, it wouldn't last five minutes, because the guys couldn't handle it.

So many Indian guys are chutias, yaar. They'd be swearing, and saying all sorts of indecent shit, the childish motherfuckers.

That's all I'm saying. In Copenhagen, the people were a lot cooler, and we've still got a damn long way to go, here, before India catches up to them on the cool scale."

"I think that things are getting better," Ulla volunteered. "I get the feeling the future of India is a good future. I am sure things will be good, you know, like better than now, and there will be a lot of better living, for a lot of the people."

We all turned to stare at her. The table was silent. We were stunned to hear such sentiments expressed by a young woman who made her living as the sexual plaything of those Indians who were rich enough to exploit her. She was used and abused, and I, for one, would've expected her to be more cynical. Optimism is the first cousin of love, and it's exactly like love in three ways: it's pushy, it has no real sense of humour, and it turns up where you least expect it.

"Really, my dear foolish Ulla, nothing changes at all," Didier said, curling his lip in disgust. "If you want to curdle the milk of your human kindness, or turn your compassion into contempt, get a job as a waitress or a cleaner. The two fastest ways to develop a healthy loathing for the human race and its destiny is to serve it food, or clean up after it, on the minimum wage. I have done both jobs, in those terrible days when I was forced to work for a living. It was horrible. I shudder now in thinking about it. That's where I learned that nothing ever really changes. And to speak the truth, I am glad of it. In a better world, or a worse one, I would make no money at all."

"Bullshit," Lettie declared. "Things can get better, and things can get a lot worse. Ask the people in the slum. They're experts in how much worse things can get. Isn't that right, Karla?"

We all turned our attention to Karla. She toyed with her cup for an instant, turning it slowly in the saucer with her long index finger.

"I think that we all, each one of us, we all have to _earn our future," she said slowly. "I think the future is like anything else that's important. It has to be earned. If we don't earn it, we don't have a future at all. And if we don't earn it, if we don't deserve it, we have to live in the present, more or less forever. Or worse, we have to live in the past. I think that's probably what love is-a way of earning the future."

"Well, I agree with Didier," Maurizio stated, finishing his meal with a glass of iced water. "I like things just as they are, and I am content if they do not change."

"How about you?" Karla asked, turning to face me.

"What about me?" I smiled.

"If you could be happy, really happy, for just a while, but you knew from the start that it would end in sadness, and bring pain afterwards, would you choose to have that happiness or would you avoid it?"

The attention and the question unsettled me, and I felt momentarily uncomfortable in the expectant silence that awaited my reply. I had the feeling that she'd asked the question before, and that it was a kind of test. Maybe she'd already asked the others at the table. Maybe they'd given their answers, and were waiting to hear mine. I wasn't sure what she wanted me to say, but the fact was that my life had already answered the question.

I'd made my choice when I escaped from prison.

"I'd choose the happiness," I replied, and was rewarded with a half-smile of recognition or amusement-perhaps it was both-from Karla.