Across in India, Delhi Police describe their man as a tall and good-looking, Tamil-speaking Sri Lankan who does the Chennai-Colombo grind regularly on business. The business: Narcotics.

Both men are alleged to be kingpins of the flourishing narcotics trafficking racket between India and Sri Lanka.

The existence of the man wanted by the Sri Lankans came to light after the arrest of three Indian nationals at Bandaranaike International Airport (BIA) earlier last month.

Murugaiyan Thiagarajah, 35, and Rajendran Singharayah, 39, both from Chennai, were detained by Sri Lanka's Police Narcotics Division (PND) soon after their arrival at BIA on an Indian Airlines flight on October 9.

Between them, they were carrying 2 kg of premium-grade heroin in very thinly packed plastic bags. The heroin was found inside theidentical briefcases that the two carried.

Thiagarajah and Singharayah led the police to Sundaralingam, a 23-year-old Jaffna boy, as he waited for his Indian contacts at a pre-planned rendezvous, a lodge in one of the seedier parts of the capital. Later, a search of Sundaralingam's house in the suburbs brought up 900 gm more of heroin, packed similarly, and apparently brought in from India days earlier.

Two days later, perhaps unaware of these arrests, another Indian, Kasi Vishwanathan Chellapandian, alighted from a Sri Lankan Airlines flight from Chennai. In his luggage were wooden chappati moulds. But the moulds had been hollowed out, and in the hollows, customs officers found 2 kg of heroin.

Chellapandian tried to brazen his way out by declaring that he was a police officer from Tamil Nadu. It turned out that the 67-year-old man had left the police force in the 1950s and had since worked as a driver at various places.Sri Lankan Police believe the two cases are linked and that the supplies of heroinin both came from one ``source'' based somewhere in Tamil Nadu. This ``source,'' the man for whom they have sounded an alert, hops confidently in and out of Sri Lanka and has so far evaded arrest. Delhi Police launched a manhunt for their Tamil-speaking Sri Lankan much earlier, after a shooting incident near a farmhouse in the west Delhi village of Nangloi on June 7 this year.

It was broad daylight when two ``Tamil-looking'' men shot dead a man with a sophisticated 7.63 mm pistol as he stepped out of a public telephone booth, and escaped. The dead man was identified as Sriram, a 36-year-old Sri Lankan Tamil.

As the case unravelled, the police discovered that Sriram was an associate of gangster Ashwin Naik, and had been a major supplier of heroin to a ``source'' in Tamil Nadu, the person for whom they are now looking.

Police say Sriram had, through Naik, established contact with Ali Khan, a Pakistani druglord. Ali Khan sent consignments of heroin through the Rajasthan border to Delhi, where Sriram tookcharge of it.

An expert carpenter from Tamil Nadu then worked hard at the Nangloi farmhouse fashioning hollow table tops into which the heroin was packed. The finished tables, with the heroin inside, were sent to Chennai. From there, according to the police, it was transported to Sri Lanka by sea or air.

Delhi Police suspect that the ``source'' to whom Sriram sent the heroin in Chennai had him killed because he was getting too big for his boots. Sriram had become too much the independent businessman, setting up his own contacts in the drug trade.

The Chennai-based ``source'', with his claim of monopoly over Sriram's supplies, did not like his partner's growing independence and had him eliminated.

Whether or not there is a link between the man being pursued by the Sri Lankans and the one for whom the Delhi Police have set up a manhunt, whether it is two men that the two police forces are seeking or even the same man, what has been established beyond doubt is that Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka have becomenodal points in heroin's journey from what was once described as the Golden Crescent, to its final destination in the countries of the western hemisphere.