He laughed out loud, his chest heaving with the pleasure and the force of the laugh.

"I think he did!" he replied.

"Hey! This isn't the way back to the slum. Where are we going now?"

"We are going to visit the place where you will be getting your medicines."

"My what?"

"Khaderbhai has arranged for you to get medicines, every week.

The things I brought you today-those are the first. We are going to the medicine black market."

"A black market for medicine? Where is it?"

"In the slum of the lepers," Abdullah answered, matter-of-factly.

Then he laughed again as he pushed the bike to greater speed through a gap in the traffic that opened for him, even as he reached it. "Just leave it to me, Lin brother. Now you are part of the plan, isn't it so?"

Those words-now you are part of the plan-should've woken some fear in me. I should've sensed... something... even then, right at the start. But I wasn't afraid. I was almost happy. The words seemed exciting. They rushed my blood. When my fugitive life began, I was exiled from my family, homeland, and culture. I thought that was the whole of it. Years into the banishment, I realised that I was exiled _to something, as well. What I escaped to was the lonely, reckless freedom of the outcast. Like outcasts everywhere, I courted danger because danger was one of the few things strong enough to help me forget what I'd lost. And staring into the warmth of the afternoon wind, riding with Abdullah into the web of streets, I fell as fearlessly into my fate, that afternoon, as a man falls into love with a shy woman's best smile.

The journey to the lepers' camp took us to the outskirts of the city. There were several treatment colonies for Bombay's lepers, but the men and women we went to see refused to live in them. Funded by state and private contributions, the colonies provided medical attention, caring support, and clean environments. The rules and regulations that governed them were strict, however, and not all the lepers could bring themselves to conform. As a result, some chose to leave, and some were forced out. At any one time, a few dozen men, women, and children lived outside the colonies, in the wider community of the city.

The elastic tolerance of slum-dwellers-who accommodated every caste and race and condition of person within their sprawl of huts-rarely extended to lepers. Local councils and street committees didn't endure their presence for long. Feared and shunned, the lepers formed themselves into mobile slums that settled, within an hour, in any open space they could find, and made a traceless departure in even less time. Sometimes they established themselves for several weeks beside a rubbish dump, fending off the permanent rag-pickers, who resisted their incursion. At other times they set up their camp on a swampy patch of vacant land or some outfall for industrial waste. When I first visited them with Abdullah, that day, I found that they'd built their ragged shelters on the rusty stones of a railway siding near the suburb of Khar.

We were forced to park Abdullah's bike, and enter the railway land as the lepers did, through gaps in fences and across ditches. The rusty plateau was a staging area for most trains on the urban route and many of the goods wagons carrying produce and manufactured articles out of the city. Beyond the sub-station itself were office outbuildings, storage warehouses, and maintenance sheds. Further on was a vast shunting area-an open space marked by dozens of railway lines and their confluences. At the outer edges, high wire fences enclosed the space.

Outside was the commerce and cosiness of suburban Khar: traffic and gardens, balconies and bazaars. Within was the aridity of function and systems. There were no plants, no animals, and no people. Even the rolling stock were ghost trains, trundling from shunting stop to shunting stop without staff or passengers. Then there was the lepers' slum.

They'd seized a diamond of clear space between the tracks for themselves, and patched their shelters together in it. None of the huts was taller than my chest. From a distance, they looked like the pup tents of an army bivouac wreathed in the smoke of cooking fires. As we neared them, however, we saw that their appalling raggedness made the slum huts where I lived seem like solid, comfortable structures.

They were made from scraps of cardboard and plastic held aloft with crooked branches, and braced with thin string. I could've knocked the whole camp to rubble with an open hand, and it would've taken me less than a minute, yet thirty men, women, and children made their lives there.

We entered the slum unchallenged, and made our way to one of the huts near the center. People stopped and stared at us, but no-one spoke. It was hard not to look at them, and then hard not to stare when I did look. Some of the people had no noses, most of them had no fingers, the feet of many were bound in bloody bandages, and some were so advanced into the deteriorations that their lips and ears were missing.

I don't know why-the price, perhaps, that women pay for their loveliness--but the disfigurements seemed more ghastly for the women than they were for the men. Many of the men had a defiant and even a jaunty air about them-a kind of pugnacious ugliness that was fascinating in itself. But shyness just looked cowed in the women, and hunger looked predatory. The disease was indiscernible in the many children I saw. They looked fit, if uniformly thin, and quite well. And they worked hard, all of those children. Their small fingers did the grasping for the whole of their tribe.

They'd seen us coming, and must've passed the word because, as we approached the hut, a man crawled out and stood to greet us. Two children came at once and supported him. He was tiny, reaching to just above my waist, and severely stricken with the disease. His lips and the lower part of his face were eaten away to a hard, knobby ridge of dark flesh that extended downwards from the cheeks to the hinges of his jaw. The jaw itself was exposed, as were the teeth and gums, and the gaping holes where his nose had been.

"Abdullah, my son," he said, in Hindi. "How are you? Have you eaten?"

"I am well, Ranjitbhai." Abdullah replied in respectful tones. "I have brought the gora to meet you. We have just now eaten, but we will drink tea, thank you."

Children brought stools to us, and we sat there in the open space in front of Ranjit's hut. A small crowd gathered and sat on the ground, or stood around us.

"This is Ranjitbhai," Abdullah told me, in Hindi, speaking loudly enough for all to hear. "He is the boss here, the senior fellow, in the slum of the lepers. He is the king here, in this club for kala topis."

Kala topi means black hat in Hindi, and it's a phrase used, sometimes, to describe a thief, referring to the black-banded hats that convicted thieves were forced to wear in Bombay's Arthur Road Prison. I wasn't sure exactly what Abdullah had meant by the remark, but Ranjit and the other lepers took it well enough, smiling and repeating the phrase several times.

"Greetings, Ranjitbhai," I said, in Hindi. "My name is Lin."

"Aap doctor hain?" he asked. You are a doctor?

"No!" I almost shouted in panic, disconcerted by the disease and my ignorance of it, and afraid he would ask me to help them. I turned to Abdullah, and switched to English. "Tell him I'm not a doctor, Abdullah. Tell him I just do a little first aid, and treat rat bites and scratches caused by the barbed wire, and things like that. Explain to him. Tell him that I haven't had any real training, and I don't know the first thing about leprosy."

Abdullah nodded, and then faced Ranjitbhai.

"Yes," he said. "He is a doctor."

"Thank you very much, Abdullah," I gnashed out through clenched teeth.

Children brought full glasses of water for us, and tea in chipped cups. Abdullah drank his water in quick gulps. Ranjit tilted his head back, and one of the children tipped the water in a gurgle down his throat. I hesitated, fearful of the grotesque sickness around me. One of the slum words in Hindi for lepers can be translated as the undead, and I felt that I was holding the nightmares of the undead in my hands. All the world of suffering disease was concentrated in that glass of water, it seemed to me.