I was about to take a sip from the bottle, but an impulse made me offer it to Prabaker first.

"Thank you too much, Mr. Lindsay," he gushed, his eyes wide with delight. He tipped his head backward and poured a measure of whisky into his mouth, without touching the bottle to his lips.

"Is very best, first number, Johnnie Walker. Oh, yes."

"Have some more, if you like."

"Just a teeny pieces, thank you so." He drank again, glugging the liquor down in throat-bulging gulps. He paused, licking his lips, then tipped the bottle back a third time. "Sorry, aaah, very sorry. Is so good this whisky, it is making a bad manners on me."

"Listen, if you like it that much, you can keep the bottle. I've got another one. I bought them duty free on the plane."

"Oh, thank you..." he answered, but his smile crumpled into a stricken expression.

"What's the matter? Don't you want it?"

"Yes, yes, Mr. Lindsay, very yes. But if I knew this was my whisky and not yours, I would not have been so generous with my good self in the drinking it up."

The young Canadians laughed.

"I tell you what, Prabaker. I'll give you the full bottle, to keep, and we'll all share the open one. How's that? And here's the two hundred rupees for the smoke."

The smile shone anew, and he swapped the open bottle for the full one, cradling it in his folded arms tenderly.

"But Mr. Lindsay, you are making a mistake. I say that this very best charras is one hundred rupees, not two."

"U-huh."

"Oh, yes. One hundred rupees only," he declared, passing one of the notes back to me dismissively.

"Okay. Listen, I'm hungry, Prabaker. I didn't eat on the plane.

Do you think you could show me to a good, clean restaurant?"

"Very certainly, Mr. Lindsay sir! I know such excellent restaurants, with such a wonder of foods, you will be making yourself sick to your stomach with happiness."

"You talked me into it," I said, standing and gathering up my passport and money. "You guys coming?"

"What, out there? You gotta be kidding."

"Yeah, maybe later. Like, much later. But we'll watch your stuff here, and wait for you to come back."

"Okay, suit yourselves. I'll be back in a couple of hours."

Prabaker bowed and fawned, and politely took his leave. I joined him, but just as I was about to close the door, the tall young man spoke.

"Listen... take it easy on the street, huh? I mean, you don't know what it's like here. You can't trust no-one. This ain't the village. The Indians in the city are... well, just be careful, is all. Okay?" At the reception desk, Anand put my passport, travel cheques, and the bulk of my cash in his safe, giving me a detailed receipt, and I stepped down to the street with the words of the young Canadian's warning wheeling and turning in my mind like gulls above a spawning tide.

Prabaker had taken us to the hotel along a wide, tree-lined, and relatively empty avenue that followed a curve of the bay from the tall, stone arch of the Gateway of India Monument. The street at the front of the building was crammed with people and vehicles, however, and the sound of voices, car horns, and commerce was like a storm of rain on wood and metal roofs.

Hundreds of people walked there, or stood in talking groups.

Shops, restaurants, and hotels filled the street side by side along its entire length. Every shop or restaurant featured a smaller sub-shop attached to the front of it. Two or three attendants, seated on folding stools, manned each of those small encroachments on the footpath. There were Africans, Arabs, Europeans, and Indians. Languages and music changed with every step, and every restaurant spilled a different scent into the boiling air.

Men with bullock wagons and handcarts wound their way through heavy traffic to deliver watermelons and sacks of rice, soft drinks and racks of clothes, cigarettes and blocks of ice. Money was everywhere: it was a centre for the black-market trade in currencies, Prabaker told me, and thick blocks of bank notes were being counted and changing hands openly. There were beggars and jugglers and acrobats, snake charmers and musicians and astrologers, palmists and pimps and pushers. And the street was filthy. Trash tumbled from the windows above without warning, and garbage was heaped in piles on the pavement or the roadway, where fat, fearless rats slithered to feast.

Most prominent on the street, to my eyes, were the many crippled and diseased beggars. Every kind of illness, disability, and hardship paraded there, stood at the doorways of restaurants and shops, or approached people on the street with professionally plaintive cries. Like the first sight of the slums from the windows of the bus, that glimpse of the suffering street brought a hot shame to my healthy face. But as Prabaker led me on through the roistering crowd, he drew my attention to other images of those beggars that softened the awful caricature presented by the performance of their piteousness. One group of beggars sat in a doorway, playing cards, some blind men and their friends enjoyed a meal of fish and rice, and laughing children took turns to ride with a legless man on his little trolley.

Prabaker was stealing sideways glances at my face as we walked.

"How are you liking our Bombay?"

"I love it," I answered, and it was true. To my eyes, the city was beautiful. It was wild and exciting. Buildings that were British Raj-romantic stood side to side with modern, mirrored business towers. The haphazard slouch of neglected tenements crumbled into lavish displays of market vegetables and silks. I heard music from every shop and passing taxi. The colours were vibrant. The fragrances were dizzyingly delicious. And there were more smiles in the eyes on those crowded streets than in any other place I'd ever known.

Above all else, Bombay was free-exhilaratingly free. I saw that liberated, unconstrained spirit wherever I looked, and I found myself responding to it with the whole of my heart. Even the flare of shame I'd felt when I first saw the slums and the street beggars dissolved in the understanding that they were free, those men and women. No-one drove the beggars from the streets. No-one banished the slum-dwellers. Painful as their lives were, they were free to live them in the same gardens and avenues as the rich and powerful. They were free. The city was free. I loved it.

Yet I was a little unnerved by the density of purposes, the carnival of needs and greeds, the sheer intensity of the pleading and the scheming on the street. I spoke none of the languages I heard. I knew nothing of the cultures there, clothed in robes and saris and turbans. It was as if I'd found myself in a performance of some extravagant, complex drama, and I didn't have a script.

But I smiled, and smiling was easy, no matter how strange and disorienting the street seemed to be. I was a fugitive. I was a wanted man, a hunted man, with a price on my head. And I was still one step ahead of them. I was free. Every day, when you're on the run, is the whole of your life. Every free minute is a short story with a happy ending.

And I was glad of Prabaker's company. I noticed that he was well known on the street, that he was greeted frequently and with considerable warmth by a wide range of people.

"You must be hungry, Mr. Lindsay," Prabaker observed. "You are a happy fellow, don't mind I'm saying it, and happy always has it the good appetites." "Well, I'm hungry enough, all right. Where is this place we're going to, anyway? If I'd known it would take this long to get to the restaurant, I would've brought a cut lunch with me."

"Just a little bit not much too very far," he replied cheerfully.

"Okay..."

"Oh, yes! I will take you to the best restaurant, and with the finest Maharashtra foods. You will enjoy, no problem. All the Bombay guides like me eat their foods there. This place is so good, they only have to pay the police half of usual baksheesh money. So good they are."