Khaderbhai also took a sugar cube and sipped his tea through it, endowing the little custom with a peculiar dignity and solemnity, as in fact he did with every expression and even the most casual gesture. He was the most imperial human being I'd ever met.

Looking at him, then, as he inclined his head to listen to Abdullah's light-hearted conversation, the thought came to me that in any life, and in any world, he would command men, and inspire their obedience.

Three singers joined the musicians, and sat a little in front of them. A gradual silence settled in the room, and then all of a sudden the three men began to sing in powerful, thrilling voices.

It was a luscious sound-a layered and gorgeous music of passionate intensity. The men weren't just singing, they were crying and wailing in song. Real tears ran from their closed eyes and dripped onto their chests. I was elated, listening to it; and yet, somehow, I felt ashamed. It was as if the singers had taken me into their deepest and most intimate love and sorrow.

They sang three songs then quietly left the stage, disappearing through a curtain into another room. No-one had spoken or moved during the performance, but then everyone spoke at once as we forced ourselves to break the spell that had enveloped us.

Abdullah stood up and crossed the room to talk with a group of Afghans at another table.

"How do you like the singing, Mr. Lin?" Khaderbhai asked me.

"I like it very much. It's incredible, amazing. I've never heard anything like it. There was so much sadness in it, but so much power as well. What language was it? Urdu?"

"Yes. Do you understand Urdu?"

"No, I'm afraid I don't. I only speak a little Marathi and Hindi.

I recognised it as Urdu because some of the people speak it around me, where I live."

"Urdu is the language of gazals, and these are the best gazal singers in all Bombay," he replied.

"Are they singing love songs?"

He smiled, and leaned across to rest his hand on my forearm.

Throughout the city, people touched one another often during their conversations, emphasising the points they made with a gentle squeeze of pressure. I knew the gesture well from daily contact with my friends in the slum, and I'd come to like it.

"They are love songs, yes, but the best and most true of all love songs. They are love songs to God. These men are singing about loving God."

I nodded, saying nothing, but my silence prompted him to speak again.

"You are a Christian fellow?" he asked.

"No. I don't believe in God." "There is no believing in God," he declared, smiling again. "We either know God, or we do not."

"Well," I laughed, "I certainly don't know God, and frankly I'm inclined to think that God is impossible to believe in, at least most of the notions of God that I've come across."

"Oh, of course, naturally, God is impossible. That is the first proof that He exists."

He was staring at me intently, his hand still resting warm on my arm. Be careful, I thought. You're getting into a philosophical discussion with a man who's famous for them. He's testing you.

It's a test, and the water's deep.

"Let me get this straight-you're saying that because something is impossible, it exists?" I asked, pushing a canoe of thought out into the uncharted water of his ideas.

"That is correct."

"Well, wouldn't that mean that all the possible things don't exist?"

"Precisely!" he said, smiling more widely. "I am delighted that you understand."

"I can say those words," I answered, laughing to match his smile, "but that doesn't mean I understand them."

"I will explain. Nothing exists as we see it. Nothing we see is really there, as we think we are seeing it. Our eyes are liars.

Everything that seems real, is merely part of the illusion.

Nothing exists, as we think it does. Not you. Not me. Not this room. Nothing."

"I still don't get it. I don't see how possible things don't exist."

"Let me put it another way. The agents of creation, the energy that actually animates the matter and the life that we think we see around us, cannot be measured or weighed or even put into time, as we know it. In one form, that energy is photons of light. The smallest object is a universe of open space to them, and the entire universe is but a speck of dust. What we call the world is just an idea-and not a very good one, yet. From the point of view of the light, the photon of light that animates it, the universe that we know is not real. Nothing is. Do you understand now?"

"Not really. It seems to me that if everything we think we know is wrong, or is an illusion, then none of us can know what to do, or how to live, or how to stay sane."

"We lie," he said with a flash of real humour in the gold-flecked amber of his eyes. "The sane man is simply a better liar than the insane man. You and Abdullah are brothers. I know this. Your eyes lie, and tell you that this is not so. And you believe the lie, because it is easier."

"And that's how we stay sane?"

"Yes. Let me tell you that I can see you as my son. I was not married, and I have no son, but there was a moment of time, yes, when it was possible for me to be married, and to have a son. And that moment of time was-how old are you?"

"I'm thirty."

"Exactly! I knew it. That moment of time, when I could have been a father, was exactly thirty years ago. But if I tell you that I see it clearly, that you are my son, and I am your father, you will think that it is impossible. You will resist it. You will not see the truth, that I see now, and that I saw in the first moments when we met, a few hours ago. You will prefer to make a convenient lie, and to believe it-the lie that we are strangers, and that there is no connection between us. But fate-you know fate? Kismet is the word, in the Urdu language-fate has every power over us, but two. Fate cannot control our free will, and fate cannot lie. Men lie, to themselves more than to others, and to others more often than they tell the truth. But fate does not lie. Do you see?"

I did see. My heart knew what he was saying, even as my rebellious mind rejected the words and the man who spoke them.

Somehow, he'd found that sorrow in me. The hole in my life that a father should've filled was a prairie of longing. In the loneliest hours of those hunted years, I wandered there, as hungry for a father's love as a cellblock full of sentenced men in the last hour of New Year's Eve.

"No," I lied. "I'm sorry, but I just don't agree. I don't think you can make things true, just by believing them."

"I have not said that," he replied, patiently. "What I am saying is that reality-as you see it, and as most people see it-is nothing more than an illusion. There is another reality, beyond what we see with our eyes. You have to _feel your way into that reality with your heart. There is no other way."

"It's just... pretty confusing, your way of looking at things.

Chaotic, in fact. Don't you find it chaotic, yourself?"

He smiled again.

"It is strange, at first, to think in the right way. But there are a few things we can know, a few things to be sure of, and it is relatively easy. Let me show you. To know the truth, all you have to do is close your eyes."

"It's that easy?" I laughed.

"Yes. All you have to do is close your eyes. We can know God, for example, and we can know sadness. We can know dreams, and we can know love. But none of these are real, in our usual sense of things that exist in the world and seem real. We cannot weigh them, or measure their length, or find their basic parts in an atom smasher. Which is why they are possible."

My canoe of thought was taking water, and I decided to bail out, fast.

"I've never heard of this place before. Are there many places like this?"

"Perhaps five," he replied, accepting the change of topic with tolerant equanimity. "Is that many, do you think?"