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Farid rose and placed a huge, ornate hookah, with six snaking lines, on the floor between us next to the table. He passed the smoking tubes out, and squatted next to the hookah with several matches held ready to strike. The others closed off their smoking tubes with their thumbs and, as Farid played a flame over the tulip-shaped bowl, I puffed it alight. It was the mix of hashish and marijuana known as ganga-jamuna, named after the two holy rivers, Ganges and Jamner. It was so potent, and came with such force from the water-pipe, that almost at once my bloodshot eyes failed in focus and I experienced a mild, hallucinatory effect: the blurring at the edges of other people’s faces, and a minuscule time-delay in their movements. The Lewis Carrolls, Karla called it. I’m so stoned, she used to say, I’m getting the Lewis Carrolls. So much smoke passed from the tube that I swallowed it and belched it out again. I closed off the pipe, and watched in slow motion as the others smoked, one after another. I’d just begun to master the sloppy grin that dumped itself on the plasticine muscles of my face when it was my turn to smoke again.

It was a serious business. There was no laughing or smiling. There was no conversation, and no man met another’s eye. The men smoked with the same mirthless, earnest impassiveness I might’ve found on a long ride in an elevator full of strangers.

‘Now, Mr. Lin,’ Khaderbhai said, smiling graciously as Farid removed the hookah and set about cleaning the ash-filled bowl. ‘It is also our custom for the guest to give us the theme for discussion. This is usually a religious theme, but it need not be so. What would you like to talk about?’

‘I… I… I’m not sure what you mean?’ I stammered, my brain soundlessly exploding in fractal repetitions of the pattern in the carpet beneath my feet.

‘Give us a subject, Lin. Life and death, love and hate, loyalty and betrayal,’ Abdul Ghani explained, waving a plump hand in effete little circles with each couplet. ‘We are like a debating society here, you see. We meet every month, at least one time, and when our business and private matters are finished, we talk about philosophical subjects and the suchlike. It’s our amusement. And now we have you, an Englishman, to give us a subject to discuss, in your language.’

‘I’m not English, actually.’

‘Not English? Then what are you?’ Madjid demanded to know. Deep suspicions were planted in the furrows of his frown.

It was a good question. The false passport in my backpack in the slum said that I was a New Zealand citizen. The business card in my pocket said that I was an American named Gilbert Parker. People in the village at Sunder had re-named me Shantaram. In the slum they knew me as Linbaba. A lot of people in my own country knew me as a face on a wanted poster. But is it my own country, I asked myself. Do I have a country?

It wasn’t until I’d asked myself the question that I realised I already had the answer. If I did have a country, a nation of the heart, it was India. I knew that I was as much a refugee, a displaced and stateless person, as the thousands of Afghans, Iranians, and others who’d come to Bombay across the burning bridge; those exiles who’d taken shovels of hope, and set about burying the past in the earth of their own lives.

‘I’m an Australian,’ I said, admitting it for the first time since I’d arrived in India, and obeying an instinct that warned me to tell Khaderbhai the truth. Strangely, I felt it to be more of a lie than any alias I’d ever used.

‘How very interesting,’ Abdul Ghani remarked, lifting one eyebrow in a sage nod to Khaderbhai. ‘And what will you have as a subject, Lin?’

Any subject?’ I asked, stalling for time.

‘Yes, your choice. Last week we discussed patriotism-the obligations of a man to God, and what he owes to the state. A most engaging theme. What will you have us discuss this week?’