Our Friend Lin after teaching young Tariq english, continues as the local slum doctor. He spends the night with his friend Karla whom he loves but is not sure how she feels. On his way home he gets picked up by the police and thrown in jail. He spends three weeks in the holding tank in the Colaba police station.
He describes the tank as holding “Forty men with an acceptable level of discomfort … I discovered that there were, in fact, two hundred and forty of us” (405). Lins condition just continues to get continually worse as he is moved to Arthur Road prison, without a trial and without being told why he is still incarcerated.
The Road as the called it was about as corrupt as possible. The “Overseers” are convicts living out life terms. Who took out their anger on any prisoner they deemed worthy. The conditions of the prison were also deplorable, overflowing latrines, water worms and blankets filled with body lice. All these start to take a toll on Lin. Being a bit of a prison veteran somethings he is not phased by but he still at night thinks of his family and friends he had left behind. Also his friends and the people of the slum. This period spent in the prison shows a lot of reflection about how he developed a niche within the community and what would happen to the community when he disappeared. He starts to think he was set up that someone wanted him in here. At one point two of the men he is in prison with are to be released in the coming days, Lin gives them a message to tell Abdel Khader Khan, a big gangster in Bombay that Lin is close with. These men get caught and beaten in front of Lin. They get four more months in prison. And Lin is beaten and starved for the remaining time in The Road. For three months he lives this hell.
One day his friend Vikram comes to pay his bail. Someone in The Road with him knew Khader Khan and when that man was released he went and told Khan about Lins incarceration. While Lin, Vikram and the guards talk about a fair price for his release, it comes up that the guards had known about Lins former time spent in jail as soon as he was fingerprinted six months earlier. Lin’s mind starts to race, how did they not deport him? Why didn’t they say anything? The prison uses that as leverage as a way to get more money for his release. It ends up costing just over 10,000 US dollars to get him out.
Once out Lin begins to work under Khader Khan in his mafia ring. Lin learns all about under the table currency exchange, passports and gold. while Lin learns these new trades, he moves out of the slums and into an apartment. He starts making an absurd amount of money through this. But now he starts questioning his morality weather this is an acceptable way to make a living.
