Lin’s heroin relapse follows a moment in which loss seems to have made any future feel unreachable. Faced with a woman who intends to stay and build a life on her own terms, he leaves rather than accept the possibility of a life together. His return to heroin is both an act of retreat and an attempt to silence grief that has accumulated through prison, bereavement, and the disappearance of the people who had given his life meaning.

The choice to withdraw

The decision comes after Lin remembers the stormy night when he and Karla were together, then measures that memory against everything lost since. Prison and torture, Karla and Ulla’s departures, the disappearance of Abdel Khader Khan and his council, and the deaths of Anand, Maurizio, Rasheed, Abdullah, and Prabaker crowd into the same reckoning. Lin feels alive in outward appearance but dead inside. The contrast is central to the relapse: his return to heroin does not follow a single loss, but a sense that the whole world of relationships and purpose has collapsed.

The woman asks what he will do if she stays. Lin holds her, kisses her, and briefly imagines the life they might have shared, extending from love and growing old to death. When the kiss ends, that possible future recedes. He recognizes that he might have loved her, perhaps already does to some degree, but remains in love with Karla. Instead of committing himself to the life the kiss evokes, he says he will get stoned. The decision turns an intimate encounter into a parting: tenderness is present, but it cannot displace his attachment to Karla or his impulse to escape feeling.

Preparation and return to the den

Lin leaves without looking back. His actions are deliberate rather than impulsive in every respect: he pays three months’ rent on his apartment, gives substantial baksheesh to the two watchmen, keeps one forged passport with him, and entrusts his spare passports, cash, and Enfield Bullet bike to Didier. These arrangements preserve practical options even as he chooses a course that abandons his immediate life. He then takes a cab to Gupta-ji’s opium den on Shoklaji Street and enters one of its private rooms.

The room is close to the roof and furnished simply, with a cot, a small cabinet, a lamp, water, and reed-mat walls. Its enclosed, makeshift character recalls a prison cell to Lin. There, alone, he cries for Abdullah and Prabaker. Earlier grief had surfaced at several points in Bombay, including after he met the lepers, after a stranger washed his tortured body in Arthur Road Prison, and beside Prabaker’s father at the hospital. Each time, however, he had contained it. In the room above the den, mourning is no longer interrupted by other people, and the sorrow he had kept back comes through.

The dose and its immediate effect

Gupta-ji brings the requested heroin and supplies, along with cigarettes, and introduces Shilpa, a young woman assigned to serve Lin. Lin sends them both away. The prepared dose remains unused for almost an hour. Five times he brings the needle to a vein and puts it down again. The delay makes the relapse a conscious threshold: he knows the drug has been bound up with criminal acts, imprisonment, the loss of his family, and the loss of loved ones, yet he also desires the emotional blankness it can provide.

At last Lin injects the dose. He describes its immediate effect as the silencing of thought and the dulling of ordinary discomfort. The relief is not a repair of what has happened; it is an interval in which he feels nothing. The drug’s appeal lies precisely in that vacancy, even as Lin understands that it has taken much from him and offers no lasting answer. His hesitation therefore does not resolve the conflict between knowledge and desire. It makes the choice visible before he crosses it.

Grief returns as guilt and uncertainty

Lin cannot later say whether a week or a month has passed since that first dose. In the period that follows, he returns to the image of the rafters above his room, reading them as a sign that his life, Karla’s, Abdullah’s, and Abdel Khader Khan’s had intersected in a profound way. The image offers a possible pattern in the connections surrounding Abdullah’s death, but Lin closes his eyes rather than pursue what it might mean. The episode leaves the question open instead of turning his suffering into a solved mystery.

His thoughts then fix on Prabaker. Lin remembers that Prabaker was working late on the night he died because the taxi Lin had bought for him allowed him to work for himself. Lin blames himself, imagining that Prabaker would still be alive had he not bought the taxi. He also recalls Abdullah’s death and regrets not being with him in his final moments. The guilt is joined by a more troubling uncertainty: Lin wonders whether Abdullah could have been Sapna, the ruthless killer associated with the mutilation of Madjid. He cannot reconcile the possibility with his love for his friend, yet neither can he dismiss the fear. The relapse thus marks no clean passage from grief to numbness. Even under the drug’s influence, loss returns as self-accusation, unanswered questions, and love that survives suspicion.