Prabaker was standing a little behind me. I turned to ask him a question, and found that he was crying, his face contorted with miserable sobbing. Before I could speak, he moved past me toward the bear, evading the outstretched hand of the watchman. He reached Kano, with his arms before him in a wide embrace, and pressed himself to the creature, resting his head against Kano's and stroking the shaggy fur with murmurs of tenderness. I exchanged glances with the ground-level watchman. The man raised his eyebrows, and wagged his head from side to side energetically. He was clearly impressed.

"I did that first, you know," I found myself saying, in Marathi.

"A few weeks ago. I hugged that bear first."

The watchman wrinkled his lips in a pitying and contemptuous sneer.

"Of course you did," he mocked. "Absolutely, you did."

"Prabaker!" I called out. "Can we get on with this?"

He pulled himself away from the bear and approached me, wiping tears from his eyes with the backs of his hands as he walked. His wretchedness was so complete that I was moved to put my arm around him to comfort him.

"I hope you are not minding, Lin," he cautioned. "I smell quite much like bears."

"It's okay," I answered him softly. "It's okay. Let's see what we can do."

Ten more minutes of discussion with the watchmen and the other guards resolved that it was impossible for us to bail out the handlers or their bear. There was nothing to be done. We returned to the metal gate and informed the bear-handlers that we were unable to help them. They broke into another animated dialogue with Prabaker.

"They know all that we cannot be helping," Prabaker clarified for me, after a few minutes. "What they want is to be in that lock-up cell with Kano. They are worried for Kano because he is lonely.

Since a baby, he has never been sleeping alone, even one night.

For that only, they are a big worried. They say that Kano, he will be frightened. He will have a bad sleep, and have too many bad dreams. He will be crying, for his loneliness. And he will be ashamed, to be in the jail, because he is normally a very fine citizen, that bear. They want only to go down to that lock-up cell with Kano, and keep him some good companies."

One of the bear-handlers stared into my eyes when Prabaker finished his explanation. The man was distraught. His face was creased with worry. Anguish drew his lips back into something that resembled a snarl. He repeated one phrase again and again, hoping that with repetition and the force of his emotion he might make me understand. Suddenly, Prabaker burst into tears once more, sobbing like a child as he grasped the metal bars of the gate.

"What's he saying, Prabu?"

"He says a man must love his bear, Lin," Prabaker translated for me. "He says like that. A man must love his bear."

Negotiations with the watchmen and the other guards were spirited once we presented them with a request that they could grant without bending the rules to their breaking point. Prabaker thrived in the theatrically energetic barter, protesting and pleading with equal vigour. At last he arrived at an agreed sum- two hundred rupees, about twelve American dollars-and the moustachioed watchman unlocked the gate for the bear-handlers while I handed over the bundle of notes. In a strange procession of people and purposes, we filed down the steel stairs, and the ground-floor watchman unlocked the cell that housed Kano. At the sound of their voices, the great bear rose from his seated position, and then fell forward on all fours, dragged downward by the chains. The bear swayed its head from side to side in a joyful dance, and pawed at the ground. When the bear-handlers rushed to greet him, Kano drove his snout into their armpits, and nuzzled in their long, dread-locked hair, snuffling and sniffing at their scent. For their part, the blue men smothered him in affectionate caresses, and sought to ease the stress of the heavy chains. We left them in the enclosure of that embrace. When the steel cell door slammed shut on Kano and his handlers the sound rattled through the empty parade ground, gouging echoes from the stone. I felt that sound as a shiver in my spine as Prabaker and I walked out of the police compound.

"It is a very fine thing that you have done tonight, Linbaba,"

Prabaker gushed. "A man must love his bear. That is what they said, those bear-handling fellows, and you have made it come true. It is a very, very, very fine thing that you have done."

We woke a sleeping cab driver outside the police station, on Colaba Causeway. Prabaker joined me in the back seat, enjoying the chance to play tourist in one of the cabs he frequently drove. As the taxi pulled out from the kerb, I turned to see that he was staring at me. I looked away. A moment later, I turned my head and found that he was still staring. I frowned at him, and he wagged his head. He smiled his world-embracing smile for me, and placed his hand over his heart.

"What?" I asked irritably, although his smile was irresistible, and he knew it, and I was already smiling with him in my heart.

"A man..." he began, intoning the words with sacramental solemnity.

"Not again, Prabu." "... must love his bear," he concluded, patting at his chest and wagging his head frantically.

"Oh, God help me," I moaned, turning again to look at the awkward stir and stretch of the waking street.

At the entrance to the slum, Prabaker and I separated as he made his way to Kumar's chai shop for an early breakfast. He was excited. Our adventure with Kano the bear had given him a fascinating new story-with himself cast in an important role-to share with Parvati, one of Kumar's two pretty daughters. He hadn't said anything to me about Parvati, but I'd seen him talking to her, and I guessed that he was falling in love. In Prabaker's way of courtship, a young man didn't bring flowers or chocolates to the woman he loved: he brought her stories from the wider world, where men grappled with demons of desire, and monstrous injustice. He brought her gossip and scandals and intimate secrets. He brought her the truth of his brave heart, and the mischievous, awe-struck wonder that was the wellspring of his laughter, and of that sky-wide smile. And as I watched him scurry toward the chai shop, I saw that already his head was wagging and his hands were waving as he rehearsed the story that he brought to her as the new day's gift.

I walked on into the grey pre-morning as the slum murmured itself awake. Smoke swirling from a hundred small fires roved the lanes.

Figures wrapped in coloured shawls emerged, and vanished in the misty streams. The smells of rotis cooking on kerosene stoves, and chai boiling in fragrant pots joined the people-smells of coconut hair oil, sandalwood soap, and camphor-soaked clothing.

Sleepy faces greeted me at every turn in the winding lanes, smiling and offering the blessings of the morning in six languages and as many different faiths. I entered my hut and looked with new fondness at the humble, comfortable shabbiness of it. It was good to be home.

I cleaned up the mess in my hut and then joined the morning procession of men who filed out onto the concrete pier that we used as a latrine. When I returned, I discovered that my neighbours had prepared two full buckets of hot water for my bath. I rarely bothered with the laborious and time-consuming procedure of heating several pots of water on the kerosene stove, preferring the lazier, if less luxurious, option of a cold-water bath. Knowing that, my neighbours sometimes provided it for me.

It was no small service. Water, the most precious commodity in any slum, had to be carried from the communal well in the legal compound, some three hundred metres away beyond the barbed wire.

Because the well was only open twice a day, there were hundreds of people in the shove and wrestle for water, and each bucket was dragged into the light with bluff and scratch and shout. Carried back and hoisted through the wire, the water had to be boiled in saucepans on small kerosene stoves, at some cost of the relatively expensive fuel. Yet when they did that for me, none of my neighbours ever took credit for it or expected thanks. The water I used mightVe been boiled and brought there by Ameer's family as a sign of appreciation for the treatment I'd given him.