"Hurt!" Johnny boomed happily. "Pain is no problem, Lin. Good you have pains, Ameer, you chutia. Pains in your brains, you should be having."

I sat Ameer down on my bed, covering his shoulders with another blanket. Pulling the kerosene stove from my kitchen box, I pumped it up, primed it, and set a pot of water on it to boil. Johnny hurried off to ask someone to make hot, sweet tea. I washed my face and hands hurriedly, in the dark, at the open bathroom-space beside my hut. When the water boiled, I put a little into a dish, and threw two needles into the pot to sterilise them with further boiling. Using antiseptic and warm soapy water, I washed the wound and then dried it off with clean gauze. I bound the arm tightly with gauze, leaving it in place for ten minutes to press the wound together, in the hope that it would make the stitching easier.

Ameer drank two large mugs of sweet tea at my insistence, as a counter to the symptoms of shock that had begun to show. He was afraid, but he was calm. He trusted me. He couldn't know that I'd only done the procedure once before, and under ironically similar circumstances. A man had been stabbed during a prison fight. The problem between the two antagonists, whatever it was, had been resolved in the violent encounter, and the matter was finished so far as they were concerned. But if the stabbed man had reported to the prison infirmary for treatment, the authorities would've placed him in an isolation unit for prisoners on protection. For some men, child molesters and informers particularly, there was no alternative to being placed on protection because they wouldn't otherwise have survived. For others, men placed there against their will, the protection unit was a curse: the curse of suspicion, slanders, and the company of men they despised. The stabbed man had come to me. I'd stitched his wound closed with a leatherwork needle and embroidery thread. The wound healed, but it left an ugly, rippling scar. The memory of it never left me, and I wasn't confident about the attempt to stitch Ameer's arm.

The sheepish, trusting smile that the young man offered me was no help. People always hurt us with their trust, Karla said to me once. The surest way to hurt someone you like, is to put all your trust in him.

I drank tea, smoked a cigarette, and then set to work. Johnny stood in the doorway, ineffectually scolding several curious neighbours and their children away from the door. The suture needle was curved and very fine. I supposed that it should've been used with some kind of pliers. I had none in my kit. One of the boys had borrowed them to fix a sewing machine. I had to push the needle into the skin, and pull it through with my fingers. It was awkward and slippery, and the first few cross-shaped stitches were messy. Ameer winced and grimaced inventively, but he didn't cry out. By the fifth and sixth stitches I'd developed a technique, and the ugliness of the work, if not the pain involved, had diminished.

Human skin is tougher and more resilient than it looks. It's also relatively simple to stitch, and the thread can be pulled quite tightly without tearing the tissue. But the needle, no matter how fine or sharp, is still a foreign object and, for those of us who aren't inured to such work through frequent repetition, there's a psychological penalty that must be paid each time we drive that alien thing into another being's flesh. I began to sweat heavily despite the cool night. It was a measure of the distress involved that Ameer became brighter as the work progressed, while I grew more tense and fatigued.

"You should've insisted that he go to a hospital!" I snapped at Johnny Cigar. "This is ridiculous!"

"You're doing very excellent sewing, Lin," he countered. "You could make up a very fine shirt, with stitches like that."

"It's not as good as it should be. He'll have a big scar. I don't know what the fuck I'm doing here."

"Are you having trouble with toilet, Lin?"

"What?"

"Are you not going to toilet? Are you having it hard motions?"

"For Chrissakes, Johnny! What are you babbling about?"

"Your bad temper, Lin. This is not your usual behaviour. Maybe it is a problem with hard motions, I think so?"

"No," I groaned.

"Ah, then it is loose motions you're having, I think."

"He had it loose motions for three days last month," one of my neighbours chipped in from the open doorway. "My husband told me that Linbaba was going three-three-four times to toilet every day then, and again three-three-four times every night. The whole street was talking."

"Oh yes, I remember," another neighbour recalled. "Such pain he had! What faces he pulled when he was at toilet, yaar. Like he was making a baby. And it was a very runny, loose motion. Like water, it was, and it came out so fast, like when they explode the cannons on Independence Day. Da-dung! Like that, it was! I recommended the drinking of chandu-chai that time, and his motions became harder, and a very good colour again."

"A good idea," Johnny muttered appreciatively. "Go and get it some chandu-chai for Linbaba's loose motions." "No!" I moaned. "I don't have loose motions. I don't have hard motions. I haven't had a chance to have any motions at all yet.

I'm only half awake, for God's sake! Oh, what's the use? There, it's finished. You'll be okay, Ameer, I think. But you should have a tetanus injection."

"No need, Linbaba. I had it injections before three months, after the last fighting."

I cleaned the wound once more and dusted it with antibiotic powder. Covering the twenty-six stitches with a loose bandage, I warned him not to get it wet, and instructed him to come back within two days to have it checked. He tried to pay me, but I refused the money. No-one paid for the treatment I dispensed.

Still, it wasn't principle that made me refuse. The truth was that I felt curiously, inexplicably angry-at Ameer, at Johnny, at myself-and I ordered him away curtly. He touched my feet, and backed out of the hut, collecting a parting slap on the head from Johnny Cigar.

I was about to clean up the mess in my hut when Prabaker rushed inside, grasped at my shirt, and tried to drag me out through the door.

"So good that you are not sleeping, Linbaba," he gasped breathlessly. "We can save the time of waking you up. You must come now with me! Hurry, please!"

"For God's sake, what is it now?" I grumbled. "Let go of me, Prabu. I've got to clean up this mess."

"No time for mess, baba. You come now, please. No problem!"

"Yes problem!" I contradicted him. "I'm not going anywhere until you tell me what the hell is going on. That's it, Prabu. That's final. No problem."

"You absolutely must come, Lin," he insisted, dragging at my shirt. "Your friend is in the jail. You must help!"

We abandoned the hut and rushed out through the narrow, shadow clogged lanes of the sleeping slum. On the main street outside the President Hotel we caught a cab, and swept along the clean, silent streets past the Parsee Colony, Sassoon Dock, and the Colaba Market. The cab stopped outside the Colaba police station, directly across the road from Leopold's. The bar was closed, of course, with the wide metal shutters rolled down to the pavement.

It seemed preternaturally quiet: the haunted stillness of a popular bar, closed for business.

Prabaker and I passed the gates of the police station and entered the compound. My heart was beating fast, but I looked outwardly calm. All the cops in the station spoke Marathi-it was a requirement of their employment. I knew that if they had no special reason to suspect or challenge me, my proficiency with the Marathi language would please them as much as it surprised them. It would make me popular with them, and that small celebrity would protect me.

Still, it was a journey behind enemy lines, and in my mind I pushed the locked, heavy box of fear all the way to the back of the attic.