"I am helping that used-to-be-beating-his-wife-and-badly drinking-fellow, that Joseph," Prabaker said, in a stage whisper that could be heard twenty metres away. "You are wanting any things, before I'm going?"

"No. Thanks. Good night, Prabu."

"Shuba ratri, Lin," he grinned. Good night. "Have it sweet dreams for me, yes?"

He turned to leave, but I stopped him.

"Hey, Prabu."

"Yes, Lin?"

"Tell me, what is suffering? What do you think? What does it mean, that people suffer?"

Prabaker glanced along the dark lane of ramshackle huts to the hovering glow-worm of Joseph's lamp. He looked back at me, only his eyes and his teeth visible, although we were standing quite close together.

"You're feeling okay, Lin?"

"I'm fine," I laughed.

"Did you drink any daru tonight, like that badly-drinking Joseph?"

"No, really, I'm fine. Come on, you're always defining everything for me. We were talking about suffering tonight, and I'm interested to know, what do you think about it?"

"Is easy-suffering is hungry, isn't it? Hungry, for anything, means suffering. Not hungry for something, means, not suffering.

But everybody knows that."

"Yes, I guess everybody does. Good night, Prabu."

"Good night, Lin."

He walked away, singing, and he knew that none of the people sleeping in the wretched huts around him would mind. He knew that if they woke they would listen for a moment, and then drift back to sleep with a smile because he was singing about love.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

"Wake up, Lin! Hey, Linbaba, you must awake up now!"

One eye opened, and focused on a hovering, brown balloon that had Johnny Cigar's face painted on it. The eye closed again.

"Go away, Johnny."

"Hello to you, too, Lin," he chuckled, infuriatingly happy. "You have to get up."

"You're an evil man, Johnny. You're a cruel and evil man. Go away."

"One fellow has an injury, Lin. We need your medicine box, and your good medical self also."

"It's still dark, man." I groaned. "It's two o'clock in the morning. Tell him to come back in the daylight, when I'm alive."

"Oh, certainly, I will tell him, and he will go, but I think you should know that he is bleeding very swiftly. Still, if you must have more sleep, I will beat him away from your door, this very instant, with three-four good shots from my slipper."

I was leaning out over the deep pool of sleep but that word, bleeding, pulled me back from the edge. I sat up, wincing at the numbed stiffness of one hip. My bed, like most of the beds in the slum, was a blanket, folded twice and placed on the hard-packed earth. Kapok mattresses were available, but they were impractical. They took up too much space in the small huts, they quickly became infested with lice, fleas, and other vermin, and rats found them irresistible. After long months of sleeping on the ground, I was as used to it as a man gets, but there wasn't much flesh on my hips, and I woke up sore every morning.

Johnny was holding a lamp quite close to my face. I blinked, pushing it aside to see another man squatting in the doorway with his arm held out in front of him. There was a large cut or gash on the arm, and blood seeped from it, drip, drip, drop, into a bucket. Only half awake, as I was, I stared stupidly at the yellow plastic bucket. The man had brought his own bucket with him to stop the blood from staining the floor of my hut, and that seemed more disturbing, somehow, than the wound itself.

"Sorry for trouble, Mr. Lin," the young man said.

"This is Ameer," Johnny Cigar grunted, whacking the injured man on the back of the head with a resounding slap. "Such a stupid fellow he is, Lin. Now he's sorry for trouble. I should take my slipper and beat your black, and beat some of your blue also."

"God, what a mess. This is a bad cut, Johnny." It was a long, deep slash from the shoulder almost to the tip of the elbow. A large, triangular flap of skin, shaped like the lapel of an overcoat, was beginning to curl away from the wound. "He needs a doctor. This has to be stitched up. You should've taken him to the hospital."

"Hospital naya!" Ameer whined. "Nahin, baba!"

Johnny slapped him on the ear.

"Shut up, you stupid! He won't go to a hospital or a doctor, Lin.

He's a cheeky fellow, a goonda. He's afraid of police. Aren't you, hey, you stupid? Afraid of police, na?"

"Stop hitting him, Johnny. It's really not helping. How did this happen?"

"Fighting. His gang, with the other gang. They fight, with swords and choppers, these street gangsters, and this is the result."

"The other fellows started it. They were doing the Eve-teasing!"

Ameer complained. Eve-teasing was the name given to the charge of sexual harassment, under Indian law, and it covered a range of offences from insulting language to physical molestation. "We warned them to stop it. Our ladies were not walking safely. For that reason only we did fight them."

Johnny raised his broad hand, silencing Ameer's protest. He wanted to strike the young man again, but my frown gave him reluctant pause.

"You think this is a reason to fight with swords and choppers, you stupid? Your mummy will be very happy that you stop the Eve teasing, and get yourself hacked up into teeny pieces, na? Very happy she'll be! And now you want Linbaba to sew you up, and make nice repairs to your arm. Shameful, you are!"

"Wait a minute, Johnny. I can't do this. It's too big, too messy ... it's too much."

"You have the needles and cotton in your medical boxes, Lin." He was right. The kit contained suture needles and silk thread.

But I'd never used them.

"I've never used them, Johnny. I can't do it. He needs a professional-a doctor or a nurse."

"I told you, Lin. He won't go to a doctor. I tried to force him.

Someone in the other gang was hurt even more seriously than this stupid boy. Maybe he will die also, this other fellow. It is a police matter now, and they are asking questions. Ameer won't go to any doctor or hospital."

"If you give me, I will do myself," Ameer said, swallowing hard.

His eyes were huge with fright and horror-struck resolve. I looked at him full in the face for the first time, and I saw how young he was: sixteen or seventeen years old. He was wearing Puma sneakers, jeans, and a basketball singlet with the number printed on the front. The clothes were Indian copies of famous western brands, but they were considered fashionably hip by his peers in the slum, other young men with lean bellies and heads full of scrambled foreign dreams; young men who went without food to buy clothes that they imagined made them look like the cool foreigners in magazines and films.

I didn't know the kid. He was one of thousands I'd never seen, although I'd been there for almost six months, and no-one in the place lived more than five or six hundred metres from my hut.

Some men, such as Johnny Cigar and Prabaker, appeared to know everyone in the slum. It seemed extraordinary to me that they should know intimate details from the lives of so many thousands of people. It was even more remarkable that they cared-that they encouraged and scolded and worried about all of them. I wondered how that young man was connected to Johnny Cigar. Ameer shivered in the swirling chill of night, pressing his lips into a wide, noiseless whine as he contemplated taking needle and thread to his own flesh. I wondered how it was that Johnny, standing above him, knew him well enough to be sure he would do it; to nod at me with the message, Yes, if you give him the needle, he will do it himself.

"Okay, okay, I'll do it," I surrendered. "It's going to hurt. I haven't got any anaesthetic."