Lin and Khaled Ansari

Lin and Khaled Ansari’s relationship joins apprenticeship to friendship and, ultimately, to a sharp disagreement about hatred and survival. Sent to Khaled to learn the black-market currency trade, Lin gains the means to become a professional criminal after choosing Abdel Khader Khan’s organization as the route to revenge. Their daily lessons grow into intellectual companionship, but Lin’s conviction that forgiveness helped him survive prison stands against Khaled’s belief that hatred kept him alive.

An apprenticeship born of revenge

Before meeting Khaled, Lin understood himself as a desperate exile who had committed crimes, not as a criminal by profession. His imprisonment and torture at Arthur Road Prison changed the direction of that life: rather than leave Bombay after his release, he wanted to discover who had put him in prison and why, and he wanted revenge. Joining Abdel Khader Khan’s branch of the mafia seemed to offer the safest and quickest means of pursuing it.

Abdel Khader Khan sent Lin first to Khaled, who was responsible for the organization’s black-market currency operation. The instruction supplied practical means for the role Lin had chosen, while also drawing him into the protection and fellowship of the criminal group. Lin recalls the daily train journey to Khaled’s apartment as charged with the reckless exhilaration of movement and freedom. That feeling sits uneasily beside its cause: his new freedom was taking shape inside organized crime, as the practical answer to a grievance born in prison.

Khaled’s history and position

When Lin began his lessons, Khaled was thirty-four and, as Lin learned from Abdel Khader Khan, alone in the world. Khaled’s parents were renowned scholars and prominent in the Palestinian struggle for an independent state. His father died in an Israeli prison; his mother, sisters, aunts, uncles, and maternal grandparents were killed in the massacres at Shatila. Khaled had trained with Palestinian guerrilla units in Tunisia, Libya, and Syria, and had fought for nine years in operations across numerous conflict zones. After the deaths of his family, he broke down, and his commander in the Fattah Group released him from duty because of the condition he was in and the risks it carried.

Khaled remained verbally devoted to Palestinian statehood, but Lin understood that his life had become organized around the suffering he had experienced and the suffering he intended to inflict. A senior guerrilla fighter who knew Abdel Khader Khan recommended him to Bombay. Abdel Khader Khan took him in, and the council promoted him in recognition of his education, language skills, and intense dedication. By the time Lin met him, three years after Shatila, Khaled ran the currency operation and held a place on the council. His authority in the organization thus came together with a past shaped by political commitment, loss, and continuing anger.

Work, study, and friendship

Khaled’s first lessons covered more than the mechanics of currency dealing. He presented the black market as inseparable from suffering, arguing that even money made through apparently ordinary transactions had costs for someone. Lin’s curiosity about the moral logic of the trade became part of their intellectual connection. When he raised the lepers’ medicine market, Khaled responded with interest, especially to the account of Ranjitbhai and the nationwide network organized by Ranjitbhai’s group. Khaled approached its history as a scholar, recalling the historian his mother had been and the historian he had once hoped to become; Lin was drawn to the suffering behind the market and the community’s response to it. They agreed to visit Ranjitbhai together to learn more.

That shared curiosity established what Lin describes as a bond of intellectual respect between two exiles, a scholar and a writer. Their friendship formed quickly, in the unhesitating manner Lin associates with people shaped by crime, war, and disaster. He visited Khaled every day in his sparsely furnished apartment near Andheri station. Their five- or six-hour sessions ranged from ancient history and anthropology to reserve-bank interest rates and fixed and floating currencies. Lin says he learned more about the currency trade in a month with Khaled than many street traders learned in a year.

Once the lessons were complete, Lin worked with Khaled every morning and evening, seven days a week. The pay was substantial: he was often paid in thick blocks of rupees still stapled together from the bank. The work gave the relationship a practical dimension as well as an intellectual one. Khaled was not only Lin’s instructor; he was also his route into a remunerative position in the organization and a daily companion in the work. The wealth Lin earned marked how far he had moved from his life among the slum’s neighbors, friends, and patients.

Two accounts of survival

Their closeness did not make their histories interchangeable. While waiting for Lin, Khaled sat in a chartered cab with its doors open; ten cigarette ends lay beside it, although Lin knew Khaled had waited only fifteen or twenty minutes. Lin read them as signs of the enemies Khaled carried in his thoughts. Khaled had told him that violent images could become so vivid that they made him feel ill, and that anger had become a constant part of his life. The scene gives their relationship an intimate but uneasy quality: Lin can recognize the force of Khaled’s hatred without sharing its claim to be necessary.

Lin explains that, during his own prison ordeal, he felt he had to choose between hatred and forgiveness. He says he forgave the men who were tormenting him, not because his anger simply disappeared, but because he believed hatred would have overwhelmed him before Abdel Khader Khan could get him out. Khaled understands the account but refuses to equate his own experience with Lin’s. He tells Lin that Israeli violence had done more to him and says that, if he had endured what Lin did in an Indian prison, he would hate Indians. Lin answers that he does not hate them: he loves the country and the city where he has made his life.

Khaled’s explanation of his own survival turns the disagreement into a difference in moral understanding. He describes his hatred as having been hidden and displaced for years, like a refugee outside himself, before returning as he gained money and power while working for Abdel Khader Khan. He regards that returning hatred as something he needs and relies on. For Lin, forgiveness made endurance possible; for Khaled, hatred is a survivor that has preserved him through loss. Their friendship can hold this disagreement without resolving it. Their shared work and respect bring them close, but the same candor reveals the boundary between Lin’s effort to release hatred and Khaled’s insistence that it remains his source of strength.

The relationship’s significance

The bond changes the meaning of Lin’s entrance into crime. His work with Khaled is not a sudden or abstract transformation: it proceeds through lessons, daily travel, long conversations, and regular employment. Yet the relationship also makes clear that the skills Lin acquires are serving a motive rooted in prison and revenge. Khaled’s teaching gives form and professional discipline to the direction Lin has chosen, while the companionship around that work makes the choice feel, to Lin, like belonging as well as transgression.

Their contrasting responses to suffering give the relationship its lasting tension. Lin can listen to Khaled’s account without reducing him to either a friend or an enemy, and Khaled can recognize the force of Lin’s experience while maintaining that it does not explain his own. The friendship therefore rests not on a shared conclusion but on sustained attention: study, work, curiosity, and difficult conversation. In Khaled, Lin encounters a fellow exile whose history has made hatred central to survival; in Lin, Khaled encounters someone who believes survival demanded the opposite. That difference gives their intellectual respect its human weight.