Paul moved quickly toward a black and yellow taxi that had been commandeered by some of the elders. The yellow taxis were more comfortable but also more expensive, and many of their drivers wouldn't go into some of the colonies. Timothy, Jonah, and two other elders were already in the back seat, and Samuel was sitting on the single seat in the front. He motioned to Paul to squeeze in beside him. Once Paul had positioned himself, with his left arm out of the window and his right arm around the shoulders of the old man, the taxi began to wind its way through a maze of narrow alleys.

He gazed idly at the bustle on the street. Children were playing cricket with a stick and ball, men were standing together, smoking and talking. A motorcycle weaving through the crowded thoroughfare raced its engine. A stooped man tugged a donkey pulling a cart piled high with red bricks, and an angry teen-ager on a battered bicycle shouted at him to get out of the way. Big black crows sat on the rooftops of shops, waiting for a chance to dart to the street to pick up bits of garbage. As the stench of the open sewer sank into his nostrils, Paul wondered for the thousandth time why the elders couldn't manage to motivate the people to clean up the colonies. Pieces of indestructible plastic were scattered everywhere, held in place by dirt and rocks, decaying banana peels and coconut husks. The goats wandering in the streets would eat most of the edible refuse, leaving behind their manure in its place. At night the rats would eat the manure and whatever else the goats and the crows left behind during the day.

Perhaps, Paul thought to himself, we have a need for the streets to be filthy in order to make the small spaces inside our homes a haven from the wretched world. If the streets were clean, our homes would seem more shabby and barren. As it is, everyone is relieved to leave the street and step into the relative tidiness and comfort of a home, no matter how simple and poor it may be.

The taxi lurched around holes in the street and piles of loose dirt, honking the horn when a human body or animal forced the drive to jam on the brakes. Jostled in his seat by the sudden shifts of the ancient vehicle, Paul could feel the sharp shoulder bone of Samuel press against his chest. When Samuel was younger he had helped to build up the union of sanitary workers in Karachi and led it in several strikes that had forced the government to make concessions to the workers. To this day he had remained completely honest, which was exceptional even among the elders of the colonies. Samuel did not even accept gifts from neighbors in his colony, and he never paid a bribe to an official. Therefore, he remained poor but highly respected by his peers.

Samuel motioned to him with a lean finger, and Paul bent his head closer in order to hear above the noise of the street and the roar of the taxi's engine. "Don't travel alone, Paul. There are no secrets in the colonies, and word of our plans will soon be known to anyone who has money to purchase the information." Samuel paused to clear his throat. "I want Joseph to stay with you at all times. When you travel in the city, be sure that a couple of other men go along. Understand?"

Paul nodded. "But it will be tiresome," he replied, "to have Joseph with me constantly. He's such an angry young man."

Samuel brought his lips closer to Paul's ear. "Joseph needs to learn patience. You can teach him. He is very loyal and fearless. If anything happens, he won't desert you."

The taxi ground to a stop to let Timothy and Jonah out. They waved goodbye and then walked toward the crowd waiting beside a wider street for a brightly decorated bus to swerve to a stop. Paul stepped out of the car, closed the door, and seated himself carefully on the torn upholstery of the back seat. He slammed shut the battered door of the taxi, and once more it struggled forward. Soon they were out of the colony, moving more quickly now although slowing quickly at times when the driver braked for a speed bump in the road. Paul watched the cars, trucks and buses swirling around them in the heavy traffic. Ahead three young men were hanging from the grill on the back of a brightly painted bus, watched by others who had climbed to the top of the lumbering vehicle. One of the young men leaned out into the traffic, a leg and an arm fully extended to the side, as if to defy death. Alongside the taxi an old truck shifted into a lower gear, sending clouds of black smoke billowing out of its side exhaust pipe into their open windows. The sooty smell of diesel fumes moved rapidly through his nostrils and into his lungs, mingling with the putrid scent of the colony streets. Ah, sweet Karachi!

The taxi pulled off the road onto a side street and then stopped near the entrance of another colony. The Christians lived in more than a hundred neighborhoods in the city. Some of these colonies were populated entirely by Christians, but others had Hindu and Muslim residents as well. They had stopped at a particularly strong Christian colony, where Samuel had his home. It was also the colony where Joseph lived. Samuel and the other two elders moved into the street and began to mingle with the men there, while Paul waited in the taxi. In a few moments Joseph appeared with two other good-sized young men. "Fr. Paul, this is Michael and David," Joseph said. Paul got out of the taxi, shook hands with each of them, and then got in the front seat as the three younger men slid into the seat behind him. Once more the taxi worked its way through narrow alleyways to the main road and then slowly accelerated into the stream of heavy traffic.

Paul looked back at Joseph and saw in his eyes that Joseph was eager to hear more about what had happened. But this wasn't the best time. "I want to stop at Javed's office, to see if he's there, " Paul said over his shoulder. Joseph nodded and spoke to the taxi driver. Joseph would now take charge of arrangements. Samuel had made him responsible for Paul. And Joseph would never beg off this responsibility like Cain had in the story in Genesis, when he answered God's question about his missing brother, Abel, with the plaintive cry: "Am I my brother's keeper?"

It was near dusk. The sun was red from the exhaust and dust stirred up by the traffic in the city. Paul recalled the rhyme he'd heard when he was studying for a year in England: "Red sun in the morning, sailors take warning; red sun at night, sailor's delight." The rhyme had obviously been composed before cities were polluted by the exhaust of motor vehicles and the smoke of factories. Now there was always a red sun in the evening. And on days when there was no wind, at midday the air was filled with a reddish-brown haze that screened out both the sun and the natural blue of the sky.

Karachi was the Los Angeles of the Indian subcontinent. It lay sprawled around the bay that faces the Arabian Sea, stretching out along its roads toward the hills to the North and West. There was almost no center to this flat, turbulent city of more than 10 million people. A car, therefore, was indispensable in getting around, but few Christians could afford one. A majority of the Christians in Pakistan were the descendants of converted Untouchables in old India before Pakistan was created by independence from Britain and the partition of the subcontinent. Many of the Christians continued in the sanitary work of their ancestors, and only a few were well educated. In a Muslim society there was no longer any talk of caste, yet the prejudice remained. In rural areas of Pakistan many Muslims would not touch a utensil after a Christian had touched it.

It was generally better in the city. There was no distinctive dress for Christian or Muslim men, so it wasn't obvious on the street or a bus who was Christian or Muslim. But once someone knew your name and where you lived or went to school, your identity was clear. The caste names of the past followed the Christians into the present and would remain with them in the future. Moreover, workplaces and schools were often separate on the basis of religion, and Christians were segregated at the ballot box. They could only vote for Christian candidates who were given a few token seats in the National Assembly. For this reason the Muslim members who controlled the National Assembly regularly ignored the concerns of the Christians. After all, the Christian vote was irrelevant for them.

Paul noticed a woman riding on the back of a motorcycle alongside the taxi. Her head was completely covered, and the scarf covering her hair and face snapped in the wind behind her as she held on tightly to her husband to keep her balance. In Karachi most Muslim women did not cover their faces, but there was growing pressure from some of the Muslim mullahs to enforce a more restrictive interpretation of the Shari'a, the Islamic law. He wondered how long the government would be able to resist the demands of extremist Muslims.

They were closer to the port now, for he could smell the sea and feel the breeze from the bay. They passed brightly lit restaurants, shops and large homes towering above their high walls. There were many wealthy people in Karachi, some of them Pakistanis. In addition, a number of Arabs kept homes in the city in case they had to flee their own countries. These people were making a lot of money in Pakistan. Guns and drugs flowed freely into Afghanistan and out again. Construction was going on all over the city. Contractors fed at the public trough by paying bribes, and government officials who awarded contracts tucked the money away in hidden accounts. Gangs took protection money from hotels and restaurants and invested in the drug trade and prostitution.

Paul thought of the men he worked with who were or had been drug addicts on the street. They were mostly Christians, but that didn't matter to him. They were children of God who had lost their way in the city. They were the lowest of the low, addicted to drugs that were killing them, craving another hit, begging and stealing from their friends to pay for the next high, and crashing into the squalor of the street when they came down. He pitied them, loved them, hated them, and cared for them.

A few had broken the habit and were helping him now in his ministry. They were the ones who had given themselves to Christ and experienced his forgiveness and love. Their lives were transformed. They had become new men. But he kept them very busy and watched them closely, because the temptations of the streets were enormous. Drug users might fall back into their bad habits so easily. He remembered the words of St. Paul, his namesake: "The good that I would do, I do not do; but the evil that I would not do, I do." That's certainly true, he thought. We are all sinners. Even once we're saved, we remain sinners, fully capable of doing evil and hurting others and ourselves. The role of the Church was to help sinners not only experience God's forgiveness but maintain a common life and discipline in order to resist the temptations of sin. "Lord have mercy," he prayed silently, "Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy."

Paul glanced over his shoulder at the back seat. Joseph was staring straight ahead with his jaw set. He was a handsome man with a hooked nose and a scar on his cheek that drew attention to the darkness of his eyes. His cheekbones were high, and he wore a trimmed moustache, which was popular with young men in Pakistan. The scar, moustache and dark eyes gave Joseph a formidable appearance.

Michael and David were dozing now, their heads hanging loosely and rolling from side to side. Soon the taxi slowed and turned onto a side road that was deeply rutted. In the rainy season this road was impassable. Even in the dry season it was rough with holes and rocks. After a couple of blocks the taxi turned into a dark alley and then came out onto a smoother street. Paul began to wonder whether they would catch Javed before he went home for supper.

Javed's office was alongside the road, next to a hotel and a restaurant. Javed was a criminal lawyer. He made his money representing persons who were guilty of crimes, although not necessarily the crimes they had been accused of committing. Javed claimed everyone deserved a fair trail, even the criminals. And given the treatment that criminals received in the custody of the police, you could easily understand his attitude. Anyone who was arrested might be tortured in an effort to extract information. Later, if there were inquiries about his injuries, the police would simply claim that he resisted arrest. Sometimes persons who were arrested were able to obtain their release by paying a bribe. But many people didn't have the money to do that.

Javed not only defended criminals, he also volunteered time for the Human Rights Commission that represented pro bono persons who were detained and tortured during detention. Javed said he did this volunteer work because, as a Muslim, he was committed to justice. For the same reason Javed believed that Christians should be fully protected by the law. Moreover, as a Muslim he felt a special responsibility to help anyone who had faith in one or more of the prophets. And according to the teachings of Islam, Jesus is a very important prophet.

As they approached Korangi 5, one of the largest of the colonies outside Karachi, Paul heard the sound of gunfire. Korangi 5 had long been a dangerous area. Factions of the Mohajir Quami Movement, or MQM, a political party representing many of those who had immigrated from India at the time of the partition, had been fighting with each other and with the police for years. Sometimes it was hard to get even a black and yellow taxi to come out to Korangi 5, because of the danger. Then Paul had to wait for a bus and change twice before making his way home.

He sighed. Karachi. What a wicked, filthy, awful city! Yet he had to admit that he couldn't imagine living anywhere else. Karachi was his home.