“You know that chap who goes around from house to house offering to pay twenty rupees if you sell him your old cartons of Johnnie Walker Red Label?” Abbasi said. “To whom does he sell those cartons in return?”

The others laughed.

“For a Muslim, you’re a real innocent, Abbasi,” Padiwal, the silk and rayon salesman, said with a laugh. “Of course he sells them to the bootlegger. That’s why the Johnnie Walker Red you buy from the store, even if it comes in a genuine bottle and genuine carton, is bootlegged.”

Abbasi spoke slowly, drawing circles in the air with his finger: “So I sold the carton…to the man who will sell it to the man who will bootleg the stuff and sell it back to me? That means I’ve cheated myself?”

Padiwal shot a look of wonderment at Sunil Shetty and said, “For a Muslim, this fellow is a real…”

This was a sentiment that was widespread among the industrialists-ever since Abbasi had shut down his factory because the work was damaging the eyesight of his employees. Most of the snooker players owned, or had invested in, factories that employed women in the same manner; none had dreamed of closing a factory down because a woman here or a woman there went blind.

Sunil Shetty said, “The other day I read in the Times of India that the chief of Johnnie Walker said there is more Red Label consumed in the average small Indian town than is produced in all of Scotland. When it comes to three things”-he counted them off-“black marketing, counterfeiting, and corruption, we are the world champions. If they were included in the Olympic Games, India would always win gold, silver, and bronze in those three.”

After midnight, Abbasi staggered out of the club, leaving a coin with the guard, who got up from his chair to salute him and help him into his car.

Drunk by now, he raced out of the town and up to the Bunder, finally slowing down when the smell of sea breeze got to him.

Stopping by the side of the road when his house came into view, he decided he needed one more drink. He always kept a small bottle of whiskey under his seat, where his wife would not find it; reaching down, he slapped his hand around the floor of the car. His head banged against the dashboard. He found the bottle, and a glass.

After the drink, he realized he couldn’t go home; his wife would smell the liquor on him the moment he got past the threshold. There would be another scene. She never could understand why he drank so much.

He drove up to the Bunder. He parked the car next to a rubbish dump and walked across to a tea shop. Beyond a small beach the sea was visible; the smell of roasted fish wafted through the air.

A blackboard outside the tea shop proclaimed, in letters of white chalk, WE CHANGE PAKISTANI MONEY AND CURRENCY. The walls of the shop were adorned with a photograph of the Great Mosque of Mecca along with a poster of a boy and a girl bowing to the Taj Mahal. Four benches had been arranged in an outdoor veranda. A dappled white and brown goat was tied to a pole at one end of the veranda; it was chewing on dried grass.

Men were sitting on one of the benches. Abbasi touched one of the men on his shoulder; he turned around.

“Abbasi.”

“Mehmood, my brother. Make some room for me.”

Mehmood, a fat man with a fringe beard and no mustache, did so, and Abbasi squeezed in next to him. Abbasi had heard that Mehmood stole cars; he had heard that Mehmood’s four sons drove them to a village on the Tamil Nadu border, a village whose only business was the purchase and sale of stolen cars.

Alongside Mehmood, Abbasi recognized Kalam, who was rumored to import hashish from Bombay and ship it to Sri Lanka; Saif, who had knifed a man in Trivandrum; and a small white-haired man who was only called the Professor-and who was believed to be the shadiest of the lot.

These men were smugglers, car thieves, thugs, and worse; but while they sipped tea together, nothing would happen to Abbasi. It was the culture of the Bunder. A man might be stabbed in daylight, but never at night, and never while sipping tea. In any case, the sense of solidarity among the Muslims at the Bunder had deepened ever since the riots.

The Professor was finishing up a story of Kittur in the twelfth century, about an Arab sailor named bin Saad who sighted the town just when he had given up hope of finding land. He had raised his hands to Allah and promised that if he arrived safely on land, he would never again drink liquor or gamble.

“Did he keep his word?”

The Professor winked. “Take a guess.”

The Professor was always welcome at late-night chitchats at the tea shop because he knew many fascinating things about the port: how its history went back to the Middle Ages, for instance, or how Tippu Sultan had once installed a battery of French-made cannons here to scare away the British. He pointed a finger at Abbasi: “You’re not your usual self. What’s on your mind?”

“Corruption,” Abbasi said. “Corruption. It’s like a demon sitting on my brain and eating it with a fork and knife.”

The others drew closer to listen. Abbasi was a rich man; he must have an intimacy with corruption that exceeded theirs. He told them about the morning.

Kalam, the drug dealer, smiled and said, “That’s nothing, Abbasi.” He gestured toward the sea. “I have a ship, half full of cement and half full of something else, that has been waiting two hundred meters out at sea for a month. Why? Because this inspector at the port is squeezing me. I pay him and he wants to squeeze me even more, too much more. So the ship is just drifting out there, half full of cement and half full of something else.”

“I thought things would get better with this young fellow Rajiv taking over the country,” Abbasi said. “But he’s let us all down. As bad as any other politician.”

“We need one man to stand up to them,” the Professor said. “Just one honest, brave man. That fellow would do more for this country than Gandhi or Nehru did.”

The remark was greeted by a chorus of agreement.

“Yes,” Abbasi agreed, stroking his beard. “And the next morning he would be floating in the Kaliamma River. Like this.”

He mimicked a corpse.

There was general agreement over this too. But even as the words left his mouth, Abbasi was already thinking, Is it really true? Is there nothing we can do to fight back?

Tucked into the Professor’s trousers he saw the glint of a knife. The effect of the whiskey was wearing off, but it had carried him to a strange place, and his mind was filling up with strange thoughts.

Another round of tea was ordered by the car thief, but Abbasi, yawning, crossed his hands in front of him and shook his head.

The next day, he turned up to work at ten-forty, his head throbbing with pain.

Ummar opened the door for him. Abbasi nodded, and took the mail from him. With his head down to the floor, he moved to the stairs that led up to his office; then he stopped. At the threshold of the door that led to the factory floor, one of the stitching women was standing staring at him.

“I’m not paying you to waste time,” he snapped.

She turned and fled. He hurried up the stairs.

He put on his glasses, read the mail, read the newspaper, yawned, drank tea, and opened a ledger bearing the logo of the Karnataka Bank; he went down a list of customers who had paid and not paid. He kept thinking of the previous evening’s game of snooker.

The door creaked open; Ummar’s face popped in.

“What?”

“They’re here.”

“Who?”

“The government.”

Two men in polyester shirts and ironed blue bell-bottoms pushed Ummar aside and walked in. One of them, a burly fellow with a big potbelly and a mustache like that of a wrestler in a village fair, said, “Income Tax Department.”

Abbasi got up. “Ummar! Don’t just stand there! Get one of the women to run and bring tea from the tea shop by the sea. And some of those round Bombay biscuits as well.”