"I think so. It's the best thing I've come up with. I talked it over with Lisa, and she says she thinks it'll work. If Madame Zhou gets her money, and if she believes you're from the embassy, and if she's convinced that she'll get into trouble with the embassy or the government if she hassles Lisa any more, I think she'll leave her alone. There's a lot of ifs in there, I know. A lot of it really depends on you."

"It depends on her, too, this... Madame. Do you think she'll believe it-believe _me?"

"We'll have to play it exactly right. She's more cunning than clever, but she's not stupid."

"Do you think I can do this?"

"How's your American accent?" she asked with a little embarrassed laugh.

"I was an actor once," I muttered, "in another life."

"That's great!" she said, reaching out to touch my forearm. Her long, slender fingers felt cool against my warm skin.

"I don't know," I frowned. "It's a lot of responsibility if it doesn't go down right. If something happens to the girl, or to you..."

"She's my friend. It's my idea. The responsibility's mine."

"I'd feel better about it, you know, just fighting my way in there, and fighting my way out again. This embassy thing-there's so many ways it could go wrong."

"I wouldn't ask you if I didn't think it was the right way to go, and if I wasn't sure you could do it, Lin."

She fell silent, waiting. I let her wait, but I knew the answer already. She might've thought I was weighing it up, trying to make up my mind. In fact, I was only thinking about why I was going to do it. Is it for her? I asked myself. Am I committed, or just interested? Why did I hug the bear?

I smiled.

"When do we do this?"

She smiled back.

"In a couple of days. I've got to do a bit of stuff first, to set it all up." She threw the finished beedie away, and took a step towards me. I think she might've kissed me, but just then a frightened clamour of shouting and shrieks started up among the people, and they ran to join us at the windows. In the jam of bodies, Prabaker pushed his head through, under my arm and next to Karla.

"Municipality!" he shouted. "B.M.C. is coming! Bombay Municipal Corporation. Look there!"

"What is it? What's happening?" Karla asked. Her voice was all but lost in the shouts and screams.

"It's the council. They're going to tear down some houses," I called back, my lips close to her ear. "They do this every month or so. They're trying to keep the slum under control, to stop it from spreading outside the edge, there, where it meets the street."

We looked down near the main street to see four, five, six large, dark blue police trucks rolling into an open area that was a kind of no man's land, enclosed by the crescent of the slum. The heavy trucks were covered with canvas tarpaulins. We couldn't see inside them, but we knew they contained squads of cops, twenty or more men to each truck. An open tray-truck, loaded with council workers and their equipment, drove between the parked police vehicles and stopped near the huts. Several officers climbed down from the police trucks and deployed their men in two rows.

The council workers, themselves mostly slum-dwellers from other slums, leapt from their truck, and set about their task of demolition. Each man had a rope and grappling hook that he swung onto the roof of a hut until it caught fast. He then tugged on the rope, collapsing the fragile hut. The people had just enough time to gather the bare essentials-babies, money, papers.

Everything else was tumbled and raked into the wreckage: kerosene stoves and cooking pots, bags and bedding, clothes and children's toys. People scattered in panic. The police stopped some of them, and then marched a few young men away to the waiting trucks.

The people at our windows grew silent as they watched. From our vantage point, we could see the destruction far below, but we couldn't hear even the loudest noise of it. Somehow, the soundlessness of that methodical, scouring obliteration struck at us all. I hadn't noticed the wind until then. It was a moaning wail in that eerie quiet. I knew that all through the thirty-five floors of the building, above and below us, other people stared mute witness, just as we did.

Although the houses of construction workers in the legal slum were safe, all work on the site stopped in sympathy. The workers understood that when the building was finished it would be their own homes that would lie in ruins. They knew that the ritual they'd all seen so many times before would be played out for the last time: the ghetto would be gutted and burned, and a car park for limousines would take its place.

I looked at the faces around me; faces struck with compassion and dread. In the eyes of some, I saw smoulders of shame for what the council's power had forced too many of us to think: Thank God...

Thank God it's not me...

"Great luck, your house is safe, Linbaba! Yours and mine also!"

Prabaker said as we watched the cops and council workers climb back onto their trucks and drive away. They'd scythed and smashed a swath, one hundred metres long and ten metres wide, at the north-eastern corner of the illegal slum. About sixty houses had been obliterated, the homes of at least two hundred people. The entire operation had taken less than twenty minutes.

"Where will they go?" Karla asked quietly.

"Most of it will be back again by this time tomorrow. Next month they'll come and knock them down again, or another bunch of huts just like them in another part of the slum. Then that'll be rebuilt. But it's still a big loss. All their things have been smashed up. They have to buy new bamboo and mats and stuff, to make new houses. And people got arrested-we might not see them again for months."

"I don't know what scares me more," she declared, "the madness that smashes people down, or their ability to endure it."

Most of the people had left the window, but Karla and I remained as close together as we'd been in the push and shove of the crowd. My arm was around her shoulder. On the ground, twenty floors below, people began to pick through the rubble of their homes. Canvas and plastic shelters were already being erected for the elderly, the babies, and the smallest children. She turned to face me, and I kissed her.

The taut bow of her lips dissolved on mine in concessions of flesh to flesh. There was such sad tenderness in it that, for a second or two, I floated free, and was adrift in its inexpressible kindnesses. I'd thought of Karla as street-wise and tough and almost cold, but that kiss was pure, undisguised vulnerability. The gentle loveliness of it shocked me, and I was the first to pull away.

"I'm sorry. I didn't..." I faltered.

"It's okay," she smiled, leaning away from me with her hands on my chest. "But we might be making one of those pretty girls at the feast jealous."

"Who?"

"Are you saying you don't have a girl here?"

"No. Of course not." I frowned.

"I've got to stop listening to Didier," she sighed. "It was his idea. He thinks you must have a girlfriend here. He thinks that's the only reason you'd stay in the slum. He said that's the only reason any foreigner would stay in the slum."

"I don't have a girlfriend, Karla, not here or anywhere. I'm in love with you."

"No you're not!" she snapped, and it was like a slap.

"I can't help it. For a long time now I-"

"Stop it!" she interrupted me again. "You're not! You're not! Oh, God, how I hate love!"

"You can't hate love, Karla," I said, laughing gently, and trying to lighten her mood.

"Maybe not, but you sure as hell can be sick of it. It's such a huge arrogance, to love someone, and there's too much of it around. There's too much love in the world. Sometimes I think that's what heaven is-a place where everybody's happy because nobody loves anybody else, ever."