She winked at me, the start of a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.

"You may not be the first one he asked. You may be the first one of his tourists crazy enough to actually say yes, but it amounts to the same thing."

"Do you think I'm crazy to accept the invitation?"

"Not at all! Or at least, crazy in the right way, like the rest of us. Where is the village?"

"I don't know, exactly. It's in the north of the state. He told me it takes a train and two bus rides to get there."

"Didier's right. You have to go. If you want to stay here, in Bombay, as you say then you should spend some time in the village. The village is the key."

A passing waiter took our last order, and moments later brought a banana lassi for Karla and a chai for me.

"How long did it take you to feel comfortable here, Karla? I mean, you always seem so relaxed and at home. It's like you've always been here."

"Oh, I don't know. It's the right place for me, if you understand what I mean, and I knew that on the first day, in the first hour that I came here. So, in a sense, I was comfortable from the beginning."

"It's funny you say that. I felt a bit like that myself. Within an hour of landing at the airport, I had this incredibly strong feeling that this was the right place for me."

"And I suppose that the real breakthrough came with the language.

When I started to dream in Hindi, I knew that I was at home here.

Everything has fallen into place since then."

"Is that it now? Are you going to stay here forever?"

"There's no such thing as forever," she answered in her slow, deliberate way. "I don't know why we use the word."

"You know what I mean."

"Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'll stay until I get what I want. And then, maybe, I'll go somewhere else."

"What do you want, Karla?"

She frowned in concentration, and shifted her gaze to stare directly into my eyes. It was an expression I came to know well, and it seemed to say, If you have to ask the question, you have no right to the answer.

"I want everything," she replied with a faint, wry smile. "You know, I said that once, to a friend of mine, and he told me that the real trick in life is to want nothing, and to succeed in getting it."

Later, after we'd negotiated the crowds on the Causeway and the Strand, and walked the leafy arches of the empty streets behind the night-silent Colaba Market, we stopped at a bench beneath a towering elm near her apartment.

"It's really a paradigm shift," I said, trying to explain a point I'd been making as we'd walked. "A completely different way of looking at things, and thinking about things."

"You're right. That's exactly what it is."

"Prabaker took me to a kind of hospice, an old apartment building, near the St George Hospital. It was full of sick and dying people who'd been given a piece of floor-space to lie down and die on. And the owner of the place, who has this reputation as a kind of saint, was walking around, tagging the people, with signs that told how many useful organs they had. It was a huge organ-bank, full of living people who pay for the privilege of a quiet, clean place to die, off the street, by providing organs whenever this guy needs them. And the people were pathetically grateful to the guy for it. They revered him. They looked at him as if they loved him."

"He put you through it in the last two weeks, your friend, Prabaker, didn't he?"

"Well, there was much worse than that. But the real problem is that you can't do anything. You see kids who... well, they're in a lot of trouble, and you see people in the slums-he took me to the slum, where he lives, and the stink of the open latrine, and the hopeless mess of the place, and the people staring at you from the doorways of their hovels and... and you can't change anything. You can't do anything about it. You have to accept that things could be worse, and they'll never be much better, and you're completely helpless in the face of it."

"It's good to know what's wrong with the world," Karla said, after a while. "But it's just as important to know that sometimes, no matter how wrong it is, you can't change it. A lot of the bad stuff in the world wasn't really that bad until someone tried to change it."

"I'm not sure I want to believe that. I know you're right. I know we make things worse, sometimes, the more we try to make them better. But I want to believe that if we do it right, everything and everyone can change for the better."

"You know, I actually ran into Prabaker today. He told me to ask you about the water, whatever that means."

"Oh, yeah," I laughed. "Just yesterday, I went down from my hotel to meet Prabaker on the street. But on the stairwell, there were these Indian guys, one after the other, carrying big pots of water on their heads, and climbing the stairs. I had to stand against the wall to let them pass. When I made it to the bottom, I saw this big wooden barrel with iron-rimmed wheels attached to it. It was a kind of water wagon. Another guy was using a bucket, and he was dipping it into the barrel and filling the big carry- pots with water.

"I watched this for ages, and the men made a lot of trips, up and down the stairs. When Prabaker came along, I asked him what they were doing. He told me that that was the water for my shower.

That the shower came from a tank on the roof, and that these men filled the tank with their pots."

"Of course."

"Yeah, you know that, and I know that now, but yesterday was the first I heard of it. In this heat, I've been in the habit of taking three showers a day. I never realised that men had to climb six flights of stairs, to fill a damn tank, so that I could take those showers. I felt horrible about it, you know? I told Prabaker I'd never take another shower in that hotel again. Not ever."

"What did he say?"

"He said, No, no you don't understand. He called it a _people-

_job. It's only because of tourists like me, he explained, that those men have a job. And he told me that each man is supporting a family of his own from his wages. You should have three showers, four showers, even five showers every day, he told me."

She nodded in agreement.

"Then he told me to watch the men while they got themselves ready to run through the city again, pushing their water wagon. And I think I knew what he meant, what he wanted me to see. They were strong, those guys. They were strong and proud and healthy. They weren't begging or stealing. They were working hard to earn their way, and they were proud of it. When they ran off into the traffic, with their strong muscles, and getting a few sly looks from some of the young Indian girls, I saw that their heads were up and their eyes straight ahead."

"And you still take a shower in the hotel?"

"Three a day," I laughed. "Tell me, why was Lettie so upset with Maurizio?"

She looked at me, staring hard into my eyes for the second time that evening.

"Lettie has a pretty good contact at the Foreigner Registration Branch. He's a senior police official who has an obsession with sapphire gems, and Lettie supplies them to him at the wholesale rate, or a little below. Sometimes, in exchange for this... favour... she can arrange to have a visa renewed, almost indefinitely. Maurizio wanted to extend his visa for another year. He allowed Lettie to think he was in love with her-well, you can say he seduced her-and when he got what he wanted, he dumped her."

"Lettie's your friend..."

"I warned her. Maurizio is not a man to love. You can do everything else with him, but not love him. She didn't listen to me."

"You still like Maurizio? Even after he did that to your friend?"

"Maurizio did exactly what I knew he would do. In his own mind, he made a trade of his affection for the visa, and it was a fair trade. He would never try anything like that with me."