We rushed out of the hut and ran towards the sound. Not far away, we discovered a noisy mob of men, women, and children. We pushed our way to the centre, where two young men were wrestling and punching at one another. Their names were Faroukh and Raghuram.
They were from the team that was helping Prabaker to gather poles and lengths of wood. Iqbal and Johnny Cigar separated the combatants, and Qasim Ali stepped between them, his presence quieting the raucous crowd at once.
"What is happening here?" he asked, his voice unusually stern.
"Why are you fighting?"
"The Prophet, may Allah grant him peace!" Faroukh shouted. "He insulted the Prophet!"
"And he insulted the Lord Ram!" Raghuram countered.
The crowd supported one or the other with shrieks and condemnations. Qasim Ali gave them half a minute of noise, and then raised his hands for silence.
"Faroukh, Raghuram, you two are friends, good friends," he said.
"You know that fighting is no way to settle your differences. And you both know that fighting between friends and neighbours is the worst fighting of all."
"But the Prophet, peace be upon him! Raghu insulted the Prophet.
I had to fight with him," Faroukh whined. He was still angry, but Qasim Ali's hard stare was causing him to wilt, and he couldn't meet the older man's eye.
"And what of insulting the Lord Ram?" Raghuram protested. "Isn't that also a reason to-"
"There is no excuse!" Qasim Ali thundered, silencing every voice.
"There is no reason that is good enough to make us fight with each other. We are all poor men here. There are enemies enough for all of us outside this place. We live together, or we die.
You two young fools have hurt our people, your own people. You have hurt all of our people, of every faith, and you have shamed me terribly."
The crowd had grown to more than a hundred people. Qasim's words caused a stir of rumbling comments that rippled through them, as heads touched together. Those closest to him, at the centre, repeated what he'd said, relaying the message to others at the edges of the group. Faroukh and Raghuram hung their heads wretchedly. Qasim Ali's charge that they'd shamed him, rather than themselves, was a telling blow.
"You must both be punished for this," Qasim said, a little more gently, when the crowd was quieter. "Your parents and I will choose a punishment for you tonight. Until then, you will work for the rest of the day at cleaning the area around the latrine."
New murmurs buzzed through the crowd. Conflicts based on religion were potentially dangerous, and people were glad to see that Qasim took the matter seriously. Many of the voices around me spoke of the friendship between Faroukh and Raghuram, and I realised that what Qasim had said was true-the fighting between close friends of different faiths had hurt the community. Then Qasim Ali removed the long green scarf that he wore around his neck, and held it aloft for all to see.
"You will work in the latrine now. But first, Faroukh and Raghuram, I will bind you together with this, my scarf. It will remind you that you are friends and brothers, while cleaning the latrine will fill your noses with the stink of what you have done to each other today."
He knelt then, and tied the two young men together at the ankle, Faroukh's right to Raghuram's left. When it was done, he stood and told them to go, pointing with outstretched arm in the direction of the latrine. The crowd parted for them, and the young men tried to walk, but they stumbled at first, and soon realised that they had to hold on tightly and walk in step if they were to make any progress at all. They clasped their arms around one another, and hobbled away on three legs.
The crowd watched them walk, and began to chatter in praise of Qasim Ali's wisdom. Suddenly there was laughter where a minute before there'd been tension and fear. People turned to speak to him, but discovered that Qasim was already walking back to his hut. I was close enough to him to see that he was smiling.
I was lucky, and shared that smile often in those months. Qasim visited my hut two and sometimes three times a week, checking on my progress with the increasing number of patients who came to me after Doctor Hamid began to accept my referrals. Occasionally, the head man brought someone with him-a child who'd been bitten by rats, or a young man who'd been injured at the construction site beside the slum. After a while, I realised that they were people he'd chosen to bring to me, personally, because for one reason or another they were reluctant to come alone. Some were simply shy. Some had resentments against foreigners, and refused to trust them. Others were unwilling to try any form of medicine other than traditional, village remedies.
I had some trouble with the village remedies. In the main I approved of them, and even adopted them wherever it was possible, preferring some of the ayurvedic medicines to their western pharmaceutical equivalents. Some treatments, however, seemed to be based on obscure superstitions rather than therapeutic traditions, and they were as contrary to common sense as they were to any notions of medical science. The practice of applying a coloured tourniquet of herbs to the upper arm as a cure for syphilis, for example, struck me as particularly counter-productive. Arthritis and rheumatism were sometimes treated by taking cherry-red coals from the fire with metal tongs, and holding them against the knees and elbows of the sufferer. Qasim Ali told me, privately, that he didn't approve of the more extreme remedies, but he didn't prohibit them. Instead, he visited me regularly; and because the people loved him, they followed his example and came to me in greater numbers.
Qasim Ali's nut-brown skin, stretched over his lean and sinewy body, was as smooth and taut as a boxer's glove. His thick, silver-grey hair was short, and he sported a goatee beard one shade lighter than his hair. He most often wore a cotton kurtah and plain, white, western-style trousers. Although they were simple, inexpensive clothes, they were always freshly washed and ironed, and he changed them twice every day. Another man, a less revered man with similar habits of dress, would've been considered something of a dandy. But Qasim Ali raised smiles of love and admiration wherever he went in the slum. His immaculately clean, white clothes seemed to all of us a symbol of his spirituality and moral integrity-qualities we depended on, in that little world of struggle and hope, no less urgently than we depended on the water from the communal well.
His fifty-five years sat lightly on his taller-than-average frame. More than once, I watched him and his young son run from the water tanks to their hut with heavy containers of water hoisted onto their shoulders, and they were neck-and-neck all the way. When he sat down on the reed mats, in the main room of his hut, he did so without touching his hands to the ground. He crossed his feet over and then lowered himself to a sitting position by bending his knees. He was a handsome man, and a great part of his beauty derived from the healthy vitality and natural grace that supported his inspirational and commanding wisdom.
With his short, silver-grey hair, lean figure, and deeply resonant voice, Qasim reminded me often of Khaderbhai. I learned, some time later, that the two powerful men knew each other well, and were in fact close friends. But there were considerable differences between them, and perhaps none more significant than the authority of their leadership, and how they'd come by it. Qasim was given his power by a people who loved him. Khaderbhai had seized his power, and held it by strength of will and force of arms. And in the contrast of powers, it was the mafia lord's that dominated. The people of the slum chose Qasim Ali as their leader and head man, but it was Khaderbhai who'd approved the choice, and who'd allowed it to happen.