“Don’t worry Maxyman – no problem – we paying police!”

For as long as he’d been on the slab – from the very first walk around the place – he’d been resisting offers of hashish.

Like alcohol, it was everywhere.

“You not liking getting stoned?

“You frightened?”

“You frightened you might think something… funny?”

“Hee hee…”

The more Max relaxed, the happier he became. It seemed to him that this taste of life on the slab was perfect – a crash course in poverty. In a few days he discovered more about how poor people lived than he could ever have imagined. And it left him in awe of them. These people didn’t seem to care that they had nothing. They were excited just to be alive! Like an audience at a great event – simply being there was enough. The audience was the event.

What surprised him was how well they adapted to the deprivation of privacy. Constant scrutiny seemed to strengthen their natural resilience. It aided the development of attitude – style – the unique way of the individual. Simply put, these people were proud to be alive.

“What’s the problem Maxyman?”

“Why you no smoking with us?”

“Max – come on – … really… why?”

Back at the football club, which already seemed so long ago, Max had been called “the man with the golden lungs”. On the long pre-season runs he invariably left them gasping in his wake.

“Lungs of gold!” he said spontaneously with the memory.

This aroused them –

“What’s that?”

“Max thinking he has lungs of gold!”

“Hey… Maxyman – no golden lungs around here.”

“Three months here and your lungs becoming black as tar…”

“Like ours!”

Max never hung around the slab for long. It was fun in tiny grabs, but the show on the slab was hardly Seinfeld.

After the smoke he didn’t have, he generally went for a walk along the promenade. As his confidence grew he lengthened these walks and found his way further along the coast until he ended up in the streets around Colaba market.

As the days passed, this became his regular walk. There was something reassuring about seeing all the families together at dinner around their little oil stoves. Everyone was at their happiest then – telling stories, laughing freely – bright beacons of love in an endless sea of deprivation.