There are men who just know they are good looking and take great pride in looking their best. Salim was tall, fair, spoke mostly in Hindi and Urdu with a sprinkling of English when the sentence needed weight. He told me he was from a royal family in Gujarat that had long since lost their kingdom and their subjects : all that remained was the bearing, inherited like a piece of furniture nobody could afford to keep polished. His grandfather had moved to Bombay and worked for a merchant. His father followed suit. Salim found his calling in the export/import business : gold, cigarettes, and anything that required circumventing customs.
Apprenticed to his uncle, he built his own network slowly : contacts in customs, in the police, in the municipal bureaucracy, the quiet men who make a city’s paperwork move or not move. His strength was never the merchandise. It was the network. And the network, flattered into loyalty, began to give him ideas of flying solo. Small batches first. Then larger consignments. Then a falling out with his uncle, and after that he answered to no one.
Money began to gush like a fountain, and it became natural to visit the dance bars every other night and throw cash around. He entertained his contacts lavishly, drank without counting, and the youth in him began to believe in his own infallibility. Wealth, women, wine. God is great, he liked to say, and he said it the way a man says thank you to a machine that keeps paying out.
He was married, and described his wife as a beautiful woman. Two children, a daughter and a son, whom he adored without any visible contradiction. In his breezy way he told me about the girlfriends from the bars : several worked through and set aside, two who had stayed faithful, neither aware the other existed. He knew his wife would be devastated if she found out. He said this the way one reports a fact about the weather in another city. When I offered that fidelity was, in most places, understood as a kind of ethical floor, he gave me a blank stare. It simply did not register. Not defiance. Not guilt withheld. The category itself had never been installed.
I want to be exact about what I mean when I say Salim was amoral rather than immoral. A man who breaks a code he believes in will, afterward, produce some private accounting : a justification, a wince, a story he tells himself to survive his own mirror. Salim produced none of these, because there was no ledger to balance. Money arriving was the only entry that mattered, and everything else in his life was simply what happened to be standing near the till when it opened.
It made him, oddly, easy to like. There was no menace in him, no calculation aimed at hurting anyone. The wife’s grief, had she known, would have been collateral, not intention. This is the part people miss about men like Salim : the harm they do is a byproduct of appetite, never the object of it, and an absence is a far harder thing to be angry at than a cruelty would be.
One evening at the bar it was his girlfriend’s turn to dance. The stage lit in glitter and colour, the music loud enough to sit in the chest, the girls coming out decked in sequins that showed leg and waist and cleavage, moving through Bollywood routines the whole room already knew by heart. Between routines they would leave the stage and circulate, hips close to a man’s face, hair falling across his shoulder, a lap dance that stopped exactly at the edge of touching, because touching was the one rule that held. The men answered in five-hundred-rupee notes, thrown like something between tribute and rain.
That night his girlfriend finished her set and went straight to another table, dancing close, eyes on Salim the whole time. Deliberate. A tease with teeth in it. Salim froze for a second and then, by his own account, called over a girl he knew to be her rival and began showering her with notes instead, extravagantly, publicly, until the evening ended with him handing his own girlfriend off to another guest entirely, like something no longer needed at the table. He told me this months later with no change in his voice. For Salim it was simply another evening at the bar. I felt something go cold in me hearing it, and understood that the cold was mine to carry, not his.
Another time, he was walking his wife and children past a shop window. The children wanted the clothes on display. His wife told them, gently, that the clothes was expensive and not to be bought on a whim, that she would bring them back for an occasion, that children are hungry in the eye before they are hungry in fact, and forget what they wanted within the week. That if they were not firm now the children would grow up believing money had no edges.
Salim flipped. His children would have whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted it. He walked them back in and bought both the clothes they wanted on the spot. How, he asked me later, genuinely puzzled that I might see it differently, can you deny your own children what they want.
Then there was the arrest : a container of contraband, his name attached to it. His account was that it had been a fractional container with several owners, that someone else’s consignment had been wrongly tagged to him. He never denied that he traded in such things from time to time only that this particular container wasn’t his doing. The paperwork appeared to support him. He was released on bail some twenty-nine months later, a number he mentioned the way another man might mention a difficult flight connection.
I saw him once more, at a hospital reception, years after. I was on my way out from visiting a friend when I caught, from the corner of my eye, a flash of colour and dark glasses that could only be him. His father had been admitted, he said. I asked how he was doing, and he said rebuilding takes time, but that he was using the time to reconnect with his wife and children.
He asked after my friend. He straightened his collar without thinking about it, the old reflex of a good-looking man keeping himself presentable even in a corridor built for waiting and worse. I did not ask about the bars, or the girlfriends, or whether the wife had ever found out. I already knew, in the way you know a market has not actually changed its character just because the ticker has gone quiet for a season, that the instrument in him was the same instrument it had always been. Bail conditions, not conviction, had turned the volume down.
A nurse called a name that wasn’t his. He smiled the old easy smile, said we should catch up properly sometime, and walked off toward whatever number was waiting for him next.