‘Thank you very much,’ he says lamely.
Zafar waves his hand dismissively. ‘It’s nothing. Let me call the people downstairs and let them know you’ll be down now.’
‘All right. Thank you. Bye.’ He brushes against a sudden melancholy: maybe it is just exhaustion. He reaches out his right hand towards Zafar who takes it, gives it a perfunctory, businesslike shake and says, ‘Give me a call. I’m here for the week. Take care. Will you be able to see yourself out? Just take the lift downstairs, it shouldn’t be too difficult. Turn left and then left again.’ The words have something of his handshake in them, too.
He accompanies Ritwik through the enormous living and dining rooms to the mahogany door. ‘By the way,’ he says, ‘was that enough? You can have some more. .’
By the time Ritwik has found an embarrassed stammer of ‘No, no, that’s more than enough’, the door has shut behind him.
That night he lies awake in his narrow bed, with his bedside light off for long periods so he can watch the rare London moonlight slant along the carpet in an elastic parallelogram, thinking of a small boy with unruly curls being flung up in the air by his father and then caught again in his sure arms amidst delighted squealing and laughter.
Three days later Ritwik is back walking King’s Cross again on a raw evening threatening rain. He has the momentary luxury of telling himself that if he doesn’t get lucky in the next fifteen minutes he will go home; he doesn’t need to work for the next three weeks at least. An emaciated girl with a black eye and scabby lips imperfectly disguised, even in this light, by loud lipstick comes out of the shadows and crosses the street into another set of shadows. He can hear stray words from a murmured bargaining going on between a man in a car and a busty woman leaning and resting her elbows on the window edge, showing her extraordinary cleavage to full effect. They are about ten metres away from him. He decides to take a left turn and walk down to the narrow canal between York Way and Caledonian Road.
Two men are standing a few metres apart on the street. Something in the way that both of them hold themselves and turn around simultaneously to look at Ritwik sends off alarm signals in his head. Before he has the chance to do an about-turn and seek the safety of a main road, the men are beside him. Fear explodes in a starburst inside him. One of the men touches his arm and pushes him gently towards the towpath. ‘Come with us. Don’t make noise.’
Foreigners, Ritwik thinks. They are both young and goodlooking in a footballer stud sort of way. They push him against the wall of a sealed-up public lavatory and stand very close to him. They say something to each other in their language — Albanian, perhaps, Ritwik guesses wildly, not only from the sound but also from their looks — and one of them lights a cigarette. In the brief flare of the yellow light of the lighter they look like textbook criminals.
The leaner of the two asks him, ‘You come here every day?’
‘No. Only very rarely.’ His voice sounds unfamiliar to his own ears.
‘What you say?’
Ritwik speaks slowly, ‘No, I don’t come here every day. Once a week. Maybe less.’
The smoking man takes something out of his pocket, flicks it open, shuts it and then repeats the motions several times over so that Ritwik is left in no doubt as to what it is. No ordinary clients, he thinks, as his mind races through the worst scenarios — unprotected gang rape, torture, mutilation, death, another statistic found by a dirty canal path in London.
The speaking man puts his hand around Ritwik’s throat and lifts him clean off the ground while keeping his back against the wall. Halfway through it, his jacket, jumper and T-shirt get hitched up and the exposed brick scrapes the skin off his lower back. He chokes and coughs. The man loosens his hand and lets Ritwik fall. He is still coughing uncontrollably when the man says, ‘You lie. You here every day. We know. We see you.’
Ritwik protests, ‘No, no. .’
A fist pummels into his stomach. He doubles over, choked with pain. After what seems like hours, his eyes focus on the man’s shoes, right next to his face. He feels he can never rise up on his feet again. He lies there, his mind concentrated by the pain, waiting for it to run its course. Even the fear of having more blows inflicted on him is displaced by the pain.
The man lifts him up on his feet, steadies him against the wall and asks, ‘Who you with?’
Ritwik cannot answer the question because he doesn’t understand it in the first place. He thinks the blow to his stomach has done some damage to his rational faculties. He tries to lean sideways and retch but the man is holding him straight by the scruff of his neck. After a couple of dry heaves, he hears the question repeated.
‘Who you with?’
‘No one.’
‘You want hit again?’
‘No,’ Ritwik cries out, ‘no, I don’t. .’ The man cuts him short by clamping his iron hand on his mouth.
‘Don’t make one noise.’ The hand seems to churn his jaws. He lifts it and wipes off Ritwik’s saliva on his jacket with disgust.
The man turns to his partner, breaks into their own language again, then returns his attention on Ritwik. ‘Who your boss?’
Ritwik doesn’t understand, yet again, and foolishly answers, ‘I don’t have a boss.’
This time the other man takes out something from his pocket and hands it to the interrogator. It looks like a small glass flask. Ritwik’s mind is whirling.
‘You take business from here. You tell who your boss. This is not your boss streets. This not his ground. You don’t come here again. You see this?’ he asks pointing to the glass bulb.
Ritwik nods. Slowly, clarity is dawning, but it is so scary he wants to remain in ignorance.
‘This acid. You come here again, we burn your face.’ There is no trace of anger or any other emotion in his voice, not even violence.
‘You understand?’ he repeats.
Ritwk nods again, vigorously. The pimp lets go of him and has another brief conversation with his friend. They give him one last look and move away. Suddenly, the interrogator wheels around and throws the glass bulb against the wall on which Ritwik is still leaning. He starts and jumps a few feet away, in a saving miracle of reflex action, as the glass explodes with a sharp noise, followed by the smoking hiss of the acid splattering and eating into the wall.
He runs blindly, along alleys, lanes, past houses, dark buildings, empty stretches of wasteland, the backs of railway sheds and only stops when he almost collides with a car moving towards him. The car brakes to a halt and Ritwik, winded and breathless, stops for a second, enough time for him to recognize the dark blue Bentley. Zafar gets out of the car — he has seen and recognized Ritwik a while before Ritwik has him — and looks incredulously at him. Without asking any questions, he says, ‘Get in. Now.’
Ritwik cannot have asked for a greater salvation. He obeys meekly, straps himself in and shuts his eyes to taste the sweet relief flooding him.
He doesn’t know how many minutes or hours elapse before he opens his eyes to the question, ‘Why were you running? Are you in trouble?’
Ritwik answers disjointedly, ‘This pimp beat me up. They threatened me with an acid bulb. My stomach hurts, it hurts if I breathe in or out. The acid, the acid, they threw it, it missed me by a couple of inches. Some sort of turf war between competing pimps. The crossfire, I think I got caught in it. I don’t know. .’ he stops and starts again.