Prabaker spoke quietly to a havaldar, or police constable, at the foot of a long flight of metal stairs. The man nodded, and stepped to the side. Prabaker wagged his head, and I followed him up the steel steps to a landing, with a heavy door, on the first floor. A face appeared at the grille set into the door. Large brown eyes stared left and right, and then the door opened for us. We stepped into an antechamber that contained a desk, a small metal chair, and a bamboo cot. The guard who opened the door was the watchman on duty that night. He spoke briefly with Prabaker and then glared at me. He was a tall man with a prominent paunch and a large, expressively bristly moustache, tinged with grey.

There was a metal gate made from hinged, concertina-style lattices behind him. Beyond the gate, the faces of a dozen prisoners watched us with intense interest. The guard turned his broad back on them, and held out his hand.

"He wants you to-" Prabaker began.

"I know," I stopped him, fishing into the pocket of my jeans. "He wants baksheesh. How much?"

"Fifty rupees," Prabaker grinned, looking up with his biggest smile into the face of the tall officer.

I handed over a fifty-rupee note, and the watchman palmed it. He turned his back to me and approached the metal gate. We followed him. More men had gathered there, all wide awake and chattering, despite the late hour. The watchman stared at them, one by one, until all were silent. Then he called me forward. When I faced the bars of the steel gate, the crowd of men parted and two fantastic figures pushed their way to the front. They were the bear-handlers, the blue-skinned men who'd brought Kano the bear to my slum at Abdullah's request. They reached the gate and grasped at the bars, chattering at me so quickly and urgently that I only caught every fourth or fifth word.

"What's going on, Prabu?" I asked, completely mystified. When Prabaker told me that my friend was in jail, I'd assumed that he'd meant Abdullah. I was expecting to find Abdullah behind the bars, and I moved left and right, trying to see beyond the bear-handlers and the other men crowding at the gate.

"These are your friends, isn't it?" Prabaker asked. "Don't you remember, Lin? They came with Kano to have your bear hugs."

"Yes, sure, I remember them. Did you bring me to see them?"

Prabaker blinked at me, and then turned quickly to check the expressions on the faces of the watchman and the bear-handlers.

"Yes, Lin," he said quietly. "These men were asking you to come.

Do you... do you want to leave?"

"No, no. I just... never mind. What do they want? I can't make out what they're saying."

Prabaker asked them to explain what they wanted, and the two blue-skinned men shouted their story, clutching at the lattices of the gate as if they were the boards of a raft on the open sea.

"They say, they tell it, that they are staying near to the Navy Nagar, and they found there some other fellows, who also are bear handling fellows, and having it one very sad and skinny bear,"

Prabaker explained, urging the men to be calm and to speak more slowly. "They say that these others were not treating their bear with respect. They were beating that bear with a whip, and that bear was crying, with pains all over him."

The bear-handlers spoke in a rush of words that kept Prabaker silent, listening and nodding, with his mouth open to speak.

Other prisoners approached the gate to listen. The corridor beyond the gate had long windows on one side covered by a metal grille. On the other side of the crowded prison corridor there were several rooms. Men streamed from those rooms, swelling the throng at the gate to a hundred or more prisoners, all of them listening with fascination to the bear-handler's story.

"So hard, those bad fellows were beating their poor bear,"

Prabaker translated. "And even when it cried, those fellows didn't stop beating it, that bear. And, you know, it was a girl bear!"

The men at the gate reacted with outraged, angry shouts and sympathetic cries.

"Our fellows here, they were very upset about the others, beating that other bear. So, they went up to those others, and they told them they must not be beating any bear. But they were very bad and angry, those fellows. There was a lot of shouting, and pushing, and bad language. One of those fellows, he called our fellows the sisterfuckers. Our fellows, they called the other ones the arse-holes. The bad ones, they called our fellows motherfucking bastards. Our fellows, they called them brotherfuckers. The other ones, they said a lot more about something-and-anything-fucking. Our fellows, they said back a lot about-"

"Get to the point, Prabu."

"Yes, Lin," he said, listening intently. There was a lengthy pause.

"Well?" I demanded.

"Still a lot of bad language, Lin," he replied, shrugging helplessly. "But some of it, I have to say, is very, very fine, if you want to hear it?"

"No!"

"Okay," he said, at last, "at the end, somebody called it the police to come. Then there was a big fight."

He paused again, listening to the next instalment of the story. I turned to look at the watchman, and saw that he was as deeply engrossed in the unfolding saga as the prisoners were. He chewed paan as he listened, his thorn-bush of a moustache twitching up and down, and unconsciously emphasising his interest. A roar of approval for something in the story went up from the attentive prisoners, and the watchman was united with them in the appreciative shout.

"At first, the other fellows were winning that big fight. So much fighting there was, Lin, like in Mahabharata. Those bad fellows had a few friends, who all made a contribution of punches and kicking and slapping with slippers. Then, Kano the bear, he got upset. Just before the police arrived, Kano the bear got into that fight, to help his bear-handling fellows. He stopped that fight too fast. He was knocking those other fellows right, and left also. That Kano is a very good fighting bear. He beat those bad fellows, and all their friends, and gave them a solid pasting!"

"And then the blue guys got arrested," I concluded for him.

"Sad to say it, yes. Arrested, they were, for the charge of Breaking the Peaces."

"Okay. Let's talk."

Prabaker, the watchman, and I took two steps away from the gate and stood at the bare metal desk. Over my shoulder, I could see that the men at the gate were straining to hear our conversation.

"What's the Hindi word for bail, Prabu? Find out if we can bail the guys out of jail." Prabaker asked, but the watchman shook his head, and told us that it was out of the question.

"Is it possible for me to pay the fine?" I asked in Marathi, using the commonly accepted euphemism for a police bribe.

The watchman smiled, and shook his head. A policeman was hurt in the scuffle, he explained, and the matter was out of his hands.

Shrugging my helplessness, I turned back to the gate and told the men that I couldn't bail or bribe them out of the jail. They rattled away at me in such a swift and garbled Hindi that I couldn't understand them.

"No, Lin!" Prabaker announced, beaming a smile at me. "They don't worry for themselves. They worry for Kano! He is arrested also, that bear. They are very worried for their bear. That is what they want you to help them for!"

"The bear is arrested?" I asked the watchman, in Marathi.

"Ji, ha!" he replied, a flourish of pride rippling in his wild moustache. Sir, yes! "The bear is in custody downstairs!"

I looked at Prabaker, and he shrugged.

"Maybe we should see it that bear?" he suggested.

"I think we should see it that bear!" I replied.

We took the steel steps down to the ground-floor level, and were directed to a row of cells directly beneath the rooms we'd seen upstairs. A ground-level watchman opened one of the rooms, and we leaned inside to see Kano the bear sitting in the middle of a dark and empty cell. It was a large room, with a keyhole toilet in the floor in one corner. The huge muzzled bear was chained at his neck and on his paws, and the chains passed through a metal grille at one of the windows. He sat with his broad back against a wall, and his lower legs splayed out in front of him. His expression-and I have no other way of describing the set of his features, other than as an expression-was disconsolate and profoundly distressed. He let out a long, heart-wrenching sigh, even as we watched him.