Lin is arrested in Colaba after police intercept him on a deserted street and take him to the Colaba Police Station. The arrest is the abrupt threshold between his life outside and the prison system that will conceal him from the people who might search for him: no one witnesses his capture, and he is left without a way to explain where he has gone.

Capture in the deserted streets

After leaving Karla, Lin runs through the empty market toward Arthur Bunder Road. The white canvas covering the stalls makes them look like shrouded bodies in a morgue, while his footsteps echo along streets emptied of the crowds that usually fill them. He turns onto Mereweather Road, then takes a side street to avoid the flooding. Ahead, a policeman rides a bicycle; another emerges from a dark driveway as Lin passes. A police jeep appears at one end of the street, another comes up behind him, and the cyclists converge. When the first jeep draws alongside, Lin stops. Five officers get out and surround him, holding the silence for several seconds before demanding that he get into the vehicle.

Lin tries to speak to the officers in Marathi, but the commander cuts him off. The police already know he speaks the language, and one officer threatens to beat him with lathis if he refuses to enter the jeep. Lin climbs into the covered back, where six men sit with their hands on him. They drive the two short blocks to the Colaba Police Station, opposite Leopold’s. The street outside the bar is deserted; Ulla, who had said she would meet him there, is absent. Lin briefly suspects that she may have arranged his arrest, though he recognizes that the thought makes little sense. The cause of the arrest remains unclear to him, and that uncertainty turns the capture into the beginning of a disappearance as well as a detention.

Torture in the police station

At the Colaba Police Station, the night duty officer orders ten policemen to beat Lin, telling them to hit him hard but, if possible, avoid breaking his bones before throwing him into the lock-up. Lin understands the instruction, though the officer gives no sign of knowing that. He bolts through the circle of policemen and reaches the compound yard, only to run into a round-up party at the gate and fall among men whose hands are tied. The attempted escape ends with the officers dragging him back, punching and kicking him as they go.

The police tie Lin’s hands behind his back with coarse hemp rope, bind his feet, and wind a thick coil around him from ankles to shoulders until he resembles a mummy. They carry him into another room and suspend him face down from a hook caught in the ropes. At the duty officer’s command, the policemen spin him faster and faster, then beat his body with cane lathis as it whirls. They strike his face, arms, legs, and feet; when his body is held still, they turn him in the opposite direction and begin again. Lin senses that he is bleeding, but clenches his jaw and refuses to let the men hear him scream. His silence becomes the one form of resistance still within his control.

When the beating is over, the policemen drag Lin up the metal steps to the lock-up. The familiar stairs recall an earlier visit with Prabaker, when Lin had tried to help Kano’s bear-handlers; now the same route carries him into custody as a prisoner. The duty officer has the other prisoners remove the ropes, kicks Lin to hurry them, and orders them to stand him before the open cell gate. Lin is too battered to strike back when the officer spits in his face. The prisoners hold him fast, but their hands are gentle as they guide him into the cell and lower him to the concrete floor.

Disappearance, identity, and hatred

Once the other prisoners have eased Lin onto the cell floor, the arrest’s most frightening consequence becomes clear: nobody saw him taken, and nobody knows where he is. Ulla may never have reached Leopold’s; even if she did, she would not know he had been arrested. Karla, after their night together, could only think he had abandoned her. Lin imagines himself erased from the city as completely as if he had flown to Africa. In his metaphor, prisons are black holes for human bodies: neither light nor news escapes.

His uncertainty deepens into a practical fear about identity. Lin does not know why the police have arrested him, or whether they know who he really is. If the arrest concerns something else, identification procedures and fingerprint checks may still expose him; his prints are on file around the world through Interpol. He needs to get word to someone powerful enough to help. He fixes on Abdel Khader Khan, whose contacts, especially around Colaba, might eventually reveal that Lin has been detained. Until then, he has only a plan: hold on and find a way to send a message. As he is dragged up the metal stairs, he repeats that intention like a mantra, giving his thoughts a single direction amid the pain.

At the cell gate, the duty officer spits at Lin and delivers a threat that Lin understands as a declaration that his life is over. The other prisoners restrain him when he tries to strike back, but then handle him gently and lower him to the concrete. That contrast does not undo the violence; it marks the small, immediate care available inside it. The gate shuts, the lock turns, and the sight of the prisoners’ dead, frantic, resentful, and fearful eyes brings Lin to the taste of hatred—his own, the guards’, and the world’s. The arrest thus closes not only a cell around him but a circuit of hostility: the prison cages people with the very hatred that its punishments produce, and Lin recognizes that each turn of the key tightens that bond.

The departure from Karla

The capture follows a quiet, unfinished exchange with Karla: Lin apologizes and runs a hand through her thick black hair, while she watches him closely and softly tells him to go. That parting gives his flight through the empty streets a personal cost beyond the danger of arrest. Lin has been sent away by Karla, yet the police disappearance that follows leaves her with no way to know what happened; from her perspective, his sudden absence can resemble a choice to leave her after their intimacy. The tenderness of the farewell and the silence imposed by his arrest therefore pull in opposite directions, turning a brief separation into a misunderstanding neither can immediately resolve.