Lin's grief and despair after the deaths of loved ones

Lin’s grief after losing Abdullah and Prabaker in the same week becomes a crisis of identity as well as mourning. With no body to bury for Abdullah and no confidence in the loyalties that once anchored him, Lin feels unmoored from his friends, his community, and the man he had revered as a father. His despair deepens into heroin use, where grief returns repeatedly as guilt, suspicion, and questions he cannot answer.

Loss and the work of mourning

There is no funeral for Abdullah: his body has disappeared in the riot, leaving those who loved him without a place to gather around his remains. Lin does take part in Prabaker’s funeral. He runs with the others through the streets beneath the small body carried to the ghat, chanting the names of God, and watches it burn. The mourners gather near the place where Prabaker was married only weeks earlier; remnants of the wedding still hang from the huts. The closeness of that recent celebration to the funeral makes the loss feel especially difficult to contain.

Lin speaks with Qasim Ali, Johnny Cigar, Jeetendra, and Kishan Mango Kharre, but cannot remain with the friends and family gathered to mourn. He leaves them and rides to Dongri to seek answers from Abdel Khader Khan. The movement away from the mourning community does not resolve his sorrow; it carries him toward another source of uncertainty. The two losses are different in circumstance—one friend is cremated, the other cannot be buried—but both leave Lin without the ordinary acts through which grief might be shared.

A damaged map of identity

Lin understands his sense of self through his relationships. He had occupied a point between Abdullah’s wild violence and Prabaker’s happy gentleness; losing both, he feels that the coordinates by which he located himself have vanished. His grief is therefore not only for the friends themselves. It also unsettles his knowledge of who he is, because the people who helped define him are no longer present to answer or reflect him.

That disorientation extends to Abdel Khader Khan and the council. Lin finds Khader’s house near Nabila Mosque locked and silent, and learns that Abdul Ghani, Khaled Ansari, and other council members are also away or unavailable. The organization’s work continues through its contacts, and Lin remains expected at its depots and exchanges, but no one has explained the sudden absence of its leaders. The contrast between the routine of the business and the disappearance of the people at its center intensifies Lin’s isolation: he can still perform his role, yet does not know what that role means or why he has been left without an explanation.

Lin recognizes that he has come to depend on the council’s presence, despite having had only cursory dealings with many of its members. Their absence compounds the loss of his closest friends. He feels abandoned even while knowing that Khader’s men remain in Bombay and that his own work is secure. The feeling is not a claim that everyone has literally deserted him; it is the emotional consequence of bereavement and uncertainty converging at once.

Anger, suspicion, and divided loyalty

Lin’s anger gathers around Abdel Khader Khan. He blames Khader for failing to protect or save Abdullah and suspects that Khader may have some connection to Sapna and the killings. He cannot accept that Abdullah, the friend he loved, could have been the ruthless killer he fears Sapna to be, but neither can he dismiss the possibility. The unresolved question makes grief inseparable from suspicion: Lin mourns Abdullah while struggling to understand what Abdullah may have done.

Khader’s absence feels like a further betrayal. Lin knows that his sense of being personally abandoned is self-aggrandizing, since Khader’s organization remains active and Lin still encounters its workers. Nevertheless, his attachment to Khader changes. He still loves him and remains bound to him like a son to a father, but no longer sees him as a flawless hero. Doubt and fear enter a relationship that had once offered reassurance, without erasing the love that sustains it.

A saying Lin recalls from a mujaheddin fighter describes fate as bringing each person three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves, whose identities become clear only after love, separation, or conflict. In his bereaved state, Lin begins to think of Khader as an enemy, but one he still loves. The phrase captures the contradiction rather than settling it: grief can make a beloved person seem threatening, while affection continues to bind the grieving person to him.

Retreat into heroin and recurring memory

Lin’s loss culminates in a private breakdown in a room at Gupta-ji’s opium establishment. The small room, with its cot, shuttered windows, and exposed roof rafters, becomes the place where he finally lets himself cry. He recalls having suffered before—in response to the lepers he met, the stranger who washed him in Arthur Road Prison, and Prabaker’s father at the hospital—but says that he had previously held back the full force of sorrow. Alone with memories of Abdullah and Prabaker, he no longer suppresses it. His reflection on tears presents crying as a painful release after prolonged denial, not as a simple end to grief.

Heroin offers the opposite kind of relief: it empties the mind and quiets pain, but does not answer the questions driving Lin toward it. Before injecting, he waits for nearly an hour with the prepared syringe, repeatedly bringing it to his arm and putting it down. He knows the drug has contributed to crimes, imprisonment, and the loss of loved ones, yet longs for the numbness it provides. Once he begins using, the rafters above the bed become a recurring focus. Lin believes their intersecting lines hold an answer about how his life, Khader’s, Karla’s, and Abdullah’s are connected; each time, he closes his eyes or decides that more heroin will bring the answer within reach.

In the drugged intervals, grief returns as a series of specific accusations against himself. Lin remembers that Prabaker was working late on the night of his death because he owned the taxi Lin had bought for him. He imagines that Prabaker would still be alive if he had not bought it. He also sees Abdullah alone in the moment before his death and reproaches himself for not being there. These are Lin’s guilt-ridden conclusions, not proof that either death was his responsibility. His questions about Abdullah and Sapna remain open, including whether he could have loved the person responsible for the killings. The grief persists because neither the drug nor the remembered image of the rafters can turn uncertainty into knowledge.

Accumulating losses and despair

Looking back at the losses gathered since the stormy night when Karla came into his arms, Lin counts not only Abdullah and Prabaker but also Karla’s departure, Ulla’s departure, Khader and the council’s absence, Anand’s loss, and the deaths of Maurizio and Rasheed; he believes Modena may also be dead. The breadth of this inventory places the two friends’ deaths within a larger collapse of attachments and safety. Lin describes himself as alive in outward appearance but dead in his heart. The image marks the extreme of his despair, while the continuing return of memory shows that grief has not become quiet or resolved: it remains active, shaping his sense of responsibility, his relationships, and his search for an explanation.