"She's right, Lin," Karla added. "This is not India. There are people here from every part of India, but Bombay isn't India.

Bombay is an Own-world, a world in itself. The real India is out there."

"Out there?"

"Out there, where the light stops."

"I'm sure you're right," I answered, smiling in appreciation of the phrase. "But I like it here, so far. I like big cities, and this is the third-biggest city in the world."

"You're beginning to sound like your tour guide," Karla joked. "I think, maybe, Prabaker has been teaching you too well."

"I guess he has. He's been filling my head with facts and figures every day for two weeks-quite amazing really, for a guy who left school when he was seven, and taught himself to read and write here on the streets."

"What facts and figures?" Ulla asked.

"Well, for instance, the official population of Bombay is eleven million, but Prabu says the guys who run the illegal numbers racket have a better idea of the real population, and they put it at anything from thirteen to fifteen million. And there are two hundred dialects and languages spoken in the city every day. Two hundred, for God's sake! It's like being in the centre of the world."

As if in response to that talk of languages, Ulla spoke to Karla quickly and intently in German. At a sign from Modena she stood, and gathered her purse and cigarettes. The quiet Spaniard left the table without a word, and walked toward the open archway that led to the street.

"I have a job," Ulla announced, pouting winsomely. "See you tomorrow, Karla. About eleven o'clock, ja? Maybe we'll have dinner together tomorrow night, Lin, if you're here? I would like that. Bye! _Tschus!"

She walked out after Modena, followed by leers and admiring stares from many of the men in the bar. Didier chose that moment to visit several acquaintances at another table. Karla and I were alone.

"She won't, you know."

"Won't what?"

"She won't have dinner with you tomorrow night. It's just her way."

"I know," I grinned.

"You like her, don't you?"

"Yeah, I do. What-does that strike you as funny?"

"In a way, yes. She likes you, too."

She paused, and I thought she was about to explain her remark, but when she spoke again it was to change the subject.

"She gave you some money. American dollars. She told me about it, in German, so Modena wouldn't understand. You're supposed to give it to me, and she'll collect it from my place at eleven tomorrow."

"Okay. Do you want it now?"

"No, don't give it to me here. I have to go now. I have an appointment. I'll be back in about an hour. Can you wait till then? Or come back, and meet me then? You can walk me home, if you like."

"Sure, I'll be here."

She stood to leave, and I stood also, drawing back her chair. She gave me a little smile, with one eyebrow raised in irony or mockery or both.

"I wasn't joking before. You really should leave Bombay."

I watched her walk out to the street, and step into the back of a private taxi that had obviously been waiting for her. As the cream-coloured car eased into the slow stream of night traffic, a man's hand emerged from the passenger window, thick fingers clutching a string of green prayer beads, and warning away pedestrians with a wave.

Alone again, I sat down, set my chair against the wall, and let the activity of Leopold's and its clamorous patrons close over me. Leopold's was the largest bar and restaurant in Colaba, and one of the largest in the city. The rectangular ground-floor room occupied a frontage equal to any four other restaurants, and was served by two metal doors that rolled up into wooden arches to give an expansive view of the Causeway, Colaba's busiest and most colourful street. There was a smaller, more discreet, air- conditioned bar on the first floor, supported by sturdy columns that divided the ground floor into roughly equal sections, and around which many of the tables were grouped. Mirrors on those pillars, and on much of the free wall space, provided the patrons with one of the bar's major attractions: the chance to inspect, admire, and ogle others in a circumspect if not entirely anonymous fashion. For many, the duplication of their own images in two or more mirrors at the same time was not least among the pleasures of the pastime. Leopold's was a place for people to see, to be seen, and to see themselves in the act of being seen.

There were some thirty tables, all of them topped with pearl- smoked Indian marble. Each table had four or more cedar chairs-

sixty-minute _chairs, Karla used to call them, because they were just uncomfortable enough to discourage customers from staying for more than an hour. A swarm of broad fans buzzed in the high ceiling, stirring the white-glass pendulum lights to a slow, majestic sway. Mahogany trim lined the painted walls, surrounded the windows and doors, and framed the many mirrors.

Rich fruits used in desserts and juices-paw paw, papaya, custard apples, mosambi, grapes, watermelon, banana, santra, and, in the season, four varieties of mango-were displayed across the whole surface of one wall in gorgeous abundance. A vast, solid-teak manager's counter presided, like the bridge of a sailing ship, over the busy deck of the restaurant. Behind that, along a narrow corridor, one corner of the frantic kitchen was occasionally visible beyond the scurry of waiters and the sweating clouds of steam.

A faded but still sumptuous elegance struck and held the eyes of all who walked through those wide arches into Leopold's little world of light, colour, and richly panelled wood. Its chief splendour was truly admired by none but its humblest workers, however, for it was only when the bar was closed, and the cleaners removed all the furniture each morning, that the beauty of the floor was exposed.

Its intricate tile-work replicated the pattern used in a north Indian palace, with hexagons in black, cream, and brown radiating from a central sunburst. And thus a paving designed for princes, all but invisible to the tourists with their eyes on their own reflections in the dazzling mirrors, revealed its luxurious perfections only in secret to the naked feet of cleaners, the city's poorest and meekest working men.

For one cool, precious hour each morning after it opened, and the floors had been cleaned, Leopold's was an oasis of quiet in the struggling city. From then, until it closed at midnight, it was constantly crowded with visitors from a hundred countries, and the many locals, both foreign and Indian, who came there from every part of the city to conduct their business. The business ranged from traffic in drugs, currencies, passports, gold, and sex, to the intangible but no less lucrative trade in influence- the unofficial system of bribes and favours by which many appointments, promotions, and contracts were facilitated in India.

Leopold's was an unofficial free zone, scrupulously ignored by the otherwise efficient officers of the Colaba police station, directly across the busy street. Yet a peculiar dialectic applied to the relationships between upstairs and down, inside and outside the restaurant, and governed all of the business transacted there. Indian prostitutes, garlanded with ropes of jasmine flowers and plumply wrapped in bejewelled saris, were prohibited downstairs, and only accompanied customers to the upstairs bar. European prostitutes were only permitted to sit downstairs, attracting the interest of men who sat at other tables, or simply paused on the street outside. Deals for drugs and other contraband were openly transacted at the tables, but the goods could only be exchanged outside the bar. It was common enough to see buyer and seller reach agreement on price, walk outside to hand over money and goods, then walk back inside to resume their places at a table. Even the bureaucrats and influence peddlers were bound by those unwritten rules: agreements reached in the dark booths of the upstairs bar could only be sealed, with handshakes and cash, on the pavement outside, so that no man could say he'd paid or received bribes within the walls of Leopold's.