The old man came in on a Tuesday, carrying his own bag, which told me everything I needed to know before he’d said a word. A man who carries his own bag on his first day hasn’t yet learned that he doesn’t have to. I took it off him before he could protest, walked him to his strip of floor, showed him where to keep his things so the rats wouldn’t find them. He thanked me the way people from his world thank people from mine, warmly, but with a kind of surprise in it, as if kindness in a place like that was the unexpected thing rather than the ordinary thing, which tells you something about the world he’d come from and nothing at all about the one he’d landed in.
I needed a sponsor. I’ll say that plainly, because he would have worked it out anyway, and a man who works something out for himself trusts it more than a man who’s told. He looked like money the way certain men do, not the clothes, exactly, more a stillness they carry, the stillness of someone who has never had to make noise to be heard. In our barrack that stillness is worth more than the clothes ever were. So yes, I was looking for a sponsor when I picked up his bag. And I liked him within the hour, and both of those things sat next to each other without any trouble, the way two true things do when you stop insisting they have to fight.
He joined my handi inside a week, which meant we ate better and he worked less and slept without one eye open. I never once heard him ask why a nobody like me would trouble himself over an old man he’d known for six days. Maybe he already knew why. Maybe he’d decided not to ask, the way you don’t ask a shopkeeper why he’s smiling at you before you’ve bought anything. I liked that about him too, that he let a thing be two things at once and didn’t need to pick.
He wanted to know about my life the way educated men often do, slowly, without pushing, the questions arriving so far apart you almost don’t notice you’re being interviewed. I didn’t mind. There is nothing in my life I’ve ever needed to hide, which surprises people who’ve never had to build a life the way mine was built from the ground, with the materials that were actually lying around, rather than the materials somebody wished had been lying around instead.
We are Iranian by the time anyone remembers, which is to say we aren’t, not really — Shia, married among ourselves, settled two centuries into a strip of land by the railway line near Kalyan that people call Chor Galli without meaning to insult us, because it’s accurate, and accuracy isn’t cruelty. I never sat in a classroom. There wasn’t a version of a boy’s life in that lane that ran through one. What there was instead: mornings for play, and by the time you were old enough to be trusted with a rooftop, evenings and nights for the trade.
My father did it. His brothers did it. My own brother did it before me. My uncle — I introduced him to the old man once, a delighted, wiry man who’d tell anyone with the patience to listen that he could lift a piece off a jeweller’s counter without the shopkeeper’s nose so much as twitching; called it skill, and drew the word out like he was polishing it. He told the old man I was already better than he’d been at my age. I was proud of that the way another boy might be proud of a school medal, because it was the same thing; evidence from someone who mattered that I had learned my subject well.
Houses were mine. Going in first, finding the money before the others, the cupboards, the safes hidden behind wedding photographs, and coming out the way I’d gone in, without a sound. I was always the last man out, because being last means you’re the one who’s checked everything twice. Some families woke up mid-robbery. I won’t pretend that never happened. You show them the knife. People go quiet fast when they’re frightened for their own skin, and nobody has to get hurt for the knife to do its work. The knife’s job is to be seen, not used. I’ve told that to men who flinched at hearing it, and I never understood the flinch. A carpenter doesn’t apologise for owning a saw.
By fifteen I was full time. There was a man above our crew, not quite a boss, more someone who brought us the target house, told us what was inside it, informed us when the family would be away, and those targets came, in the quiet way these arrangements work themselves out, from certain sources who took their half without ever having to climb a wall. We rotated the arrests among ourselves the way any well-run outfit rotates its shifts, so no one man carried the weight of it too long, and we learned young how to take a beating without giving anyone a name worth having.
My family came every mulakat as if dressed for the fair. Ten minutes is all we were allowed to spend with our family on these occasions but it felt like a festival every single time. We laughed, swapped stories and caught up with the latest gossip. They sent what money they could and kept lawyers working my cases, thirty-odd of them stacked against my name, which troubles me about as much as a parking fine troubles a man with a car worth having.
He used to tease me about it, the old man — how I could put away ten rotis where another man managed two, then ask for the rice after. I never minded the teasing, because I liked the arithmetic of it as much as he seemed to. Rations were fixed, so some evenings he’d push half his own plate toward me without being asked, and a couple of the others in the handi did the same, quietly, the way you make room for someone whose furnace runs hotter than yours. I never thought of it as excess. A body only ever gives back what you feed it, and mine had a lot of work to do.
That work started every morning before the rest of the barrack had properly opened its eyes — pull-ups on whatever bar was available, push-ups, crunches until my stomach gave out, laps of the yard, volleyball if there were enough men for two sides, and somewhere inside all of that, long stretches of walking that had no destination anyone watching could have named. I never skipped a day, inside or out. People mistake that kind of discipline for vanity, a man keeping himself handsome for no one in particular, and it never once occurred to them that it was closer to a mechanic keeping his tools oiled.
Going over a wall, dropping from a ledge, crossing a rooftop in the dark without a sound underfoot, none of that forgives a man who’s let himself go soft. My body was the one tool the police could never confiscate off me. I kept it sharp the way another man keeps a blade sharp, because the day it failed me was the day I’d have failed the men coming in behind me.
The old man asked me once, carefully, the way he asked most things, whether it had been worth it. I could hear the shape of the question he thought he was asking. I didn’t hear a judgment in it, because there wasn’t one I needed to defend against. “I’m twenty-two,” I told him. “I started at fifteen. I bought my mother a house. I set my brother up with a computer repair shop. I got my sister married, properly, no shortcuts. I have a place of my own, on rent right now, while I stay with my mother.” I counted it off the way I imagine he’d have counted off a promotion, a car, a flat because that’s exactly what it was. Evidence of a life gone right. I watched something cross his face while I said it, and I understood, without either of us naming it, that he was trying to find the place in his own arithmetic where my numbers were supposed to go wrong, and not finding it, and being unsettled by not finding it. I didn’t help him find it. It wasn’t there to find.
The trade had modernised past what an old man like him would have pictured. Seven or eight of us flying to Bangalore, seats scattered across the same plane, meeting at a fixed point once we landed, a van waiting. We’d survey the night’s houses, eat, rest a little, then work with a coordination that only comes from having done a thing more times than you’ve bothered counting. By morning, a flight to the next city. Seven or ten days, and we’d all be home in Kalyan again. Fifty lakhs a trip, some trips. One or two trips a year. I told him this without needing to impress him, only because he’d asked, and I watched him go quiet doing the arithmetic against whatever he’d earned in a year of doing things the honest way.
What I don’t think he ever said to me, though I felt it sitting behind most of his questions, was that he was trying to work out how a man could be as happy as I plainly was while living the life I was describing to him. I gave the last of my food to men poorer than me in that barrack because that’s what you do, not because it bought me anything. I carried an old man’s bag before he’d asked me to, and I’d have carried it if he’d turned out to have nothing at all. He kept circling the question without landing it, and I let him circle, because I didn’t have an answer that would have made his circling stop, and I’m not sure he wanted one that would.
There were days, though, when none of that cheerfulness was in me at all. I’d go quiet for a stretch — two days, sometimes four – and the men in my handi learned to leave me be rather than ask, because asking only made the quiet sit heavier. The old man was one of the few who noticed the pattern itself rather than just the mood, and one evening, further into a quiet spell than usual, he asked me plainly what sat behind it. I hadn’t planned on telling him. It came out sideways, in pieces, the way these things do, and once I’d started I found I didn’t especially want to stop.
There had been an earlier sentence, a different jail, men who decided a boy alone in a barrack belonged to them to use, and nobody in a position to stop it who thought it worth stopping. I’m not going to tell that story in full here, and I didn’t tell it in full to him either. What I’ll say is that I came out the other side able to function, able to laugh, able to eat ten rotis and mean the laughing while I did it and also came out with days when none of that was available to me at all, and I’ve never fully worked out which of those two men is the real one, or whether that’s even a sensible question to ask about a person. The old man went quiet after I told him. I could see him doing the thing men like him do, filing it somewhere, trying to make it explain me. I let him try. It doesn’t, not fully. Nothing does, and I stopped expecting it to a long time before he asked.
“So this is your life,” he said to me once, near the end of an evening, the way a man says a sentence he’s been saving up. “Yes,” I told him, and I meant it the way I’ve always meant it, without a flicker of the doubt he seemed to be waiting for. “It’s all I know to do.”
He wrote something down after that, later, when he thought I wasn’t watching. I never asked what, not that evening, and not the other evening either, the one with the quiet in it. I’ve wondered since whether he ever worked out where to file me: the appetite, the discipline, the thieving, the two days gone quiet, the boy in the other jail nobody thought worth protecting. Whether an old man like that has a single drawer wide enough for all of it, or whether I simply sat there, unfiled, taking up a space in his ledger that wouldn’t close. I hope it didn’t close. I think a life like mine is worth a page that never quite settles.