What did I think? The Blind Singers cleared their throats noisily, and the assembly of musicians began the introduction to a new song with the plaintive wail of the harmonium and the blood-stirring passion of the tablas. I watched the long, slender fingers of the tabla players clap and caress the trembling skins of the drums, and I felt my thoughts drift away from me in the hypnotic flutter and flow of the music. My own government had put a price on my head, in Australia, as a reward for information leading to my capture. And there, across the world, I was putting another price on my head. Once more, as the wild grief and rapture of the Blind Singers rippled through a listening crowd, once more, as the eyes of that crowd blazed the ecstasy of their devotions, once more I surrendered to the fate-filled moment and felt myself, my whole life, turning with the wheel.
Then I remembered the note in my pocket: the letter from Didier that Khaled had given me in the taxi two hours earlier. Caught up in the superstitious twist of coincidence and history repeating itself, I was suddenly desperate to know what the letter said. I slipped it from my pocket and held it close to my eyes in the yellow-amber light that reached us from lamps high over our heads.
Dear Lin,
This is to tell you, mon cher ami, that I have discovered who was it—the woman who betrayed you to the police and had you put inside the prison and beaten so badly. Such a terrible thing! Even now I am still desolated by it! Well then, the woman who did this thing is Madame Zhou, the owner of the Palace. Up to this time, I have not learned the reason for what she did, but even without some understanding of her motive for doing this terrible thing to you, I have only the best sources to assure me that it is true.
I hope that I will hear from you soon.
Your dear friend,
Didier.
Madame Zhou. Why? Even as I formed the question in my mind, I knew the answer. I suddenly remembered a face staring at me with inexplicable hatred. It was the face of Rajan, Madame Zhou’s eunuch servant. I remembered that I’d seen him watching me, on the day of the flood, when we’d rescued Karla from the Taj Mahal Hotel in Vinod’s boat. I remembered the malignant hate that had filled his eyes as he’d watched me with Karla, and watched me drive away in Shantu’s taxi. Later that night the police had arrested me, and my prison torture had begun. Madame Zhou had punished me for defying her, for daring to challenge her, for impersonating an American consular officer, for taking Lisa Carter away from her and, yes, perhaps for loving Karla.
I tore the letter into pieces and put the fragments back in my pocket. I was calm. The fear was gone. At the end of that long Karachi day, I knew why I was going to Khader’s war, and I knew why I would return. I was going because my heart was hungry for Khaderbhai’s love, the father-love that streamed from his eyes and filled the father-shaped hole in my life. When so many other loves were lost—my family, my friends, Prabaker, Abdullah, even Karla—that look of love in Khader’s eyes was everything and all the world to me.
It seemed stupid, it was stupid, to go to war for love. He wasn’t a saint and he wasn’t a hero: I knew that. He wasn’t even my father. But for nothing more than those seconds of his loving gaze, I knew that I would follow him into that war, and any other. And it wasn’t any more stupid than surviving just for hate, and returning for revenge. For that’s what it came down to: I loved him enough to risk my life, and I hated her enough to survive and to avenge myself. And I would have that revenge, I knew, if I made it through Khader’s war: I would find Madame Zhou, and I would kill her.
I closed my mind around that thought as a man might close his hand around the hilt of a knife. The Blind Singers cried the joys and agonies of their love for God. Beside me, surrounding me, hearts soared in response. Khaderbhai turned his head to meet my eyes, and nodded slowly. I smiled into the golden eyes filled with tiny, swaying lamplights, and secrets, and sacred pleasures summoned by the singing. And, God help me, I was content and unafraid and almost happy.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
WE SPENT A MONTH in Quetta—a long month of waiting with the frustration of false starts. The delay was caused by a mujaheddin commander named Asmatullah Achakzai Muslim. He was the leader of the Achakzai people in the region of Kandahar, which was our ultimate destination. The Achakzai were a clan of sheep and goat herders who’d originally been members of the dominant Durrani clan. In 1750, the founder of modern Afghanistan, Ahmed Shah Abdali, divided the Achakzai from the Durrani and established them as a clan in their own right. That was in accordance with Afghan tradition, which allowed a sub-clan to be separated from its parent clan when it reached sufficient size or strength. It was also an admission by the wily warrior and nation-builder Ahmed Shah that the Achakzai were a force to be reckoned with and appeased. Through two centuries the Achakzai increased their status and their power. They earned a well-deserved reputation as fierce fighters, and every man in the clan could be counted on to follow his leader without question. During the early years of the war against the Russians, Asmatullah Achakzai Muslim formed his men into a well-armed, highly disciplined militia. In their region they became the spearhead of the independence struggle: the jihad to drive out the Soviet invaders.
Toward the end of 1985, as we prepared ourselves in Quetta for the crossing into Afghanistan, Asmatullah began to vacillate in his commitment to the war. So much depended on his militia that when he pulled his men back from active service, and began secret peace talks with the Russians and their Afghan puppet government in Kabul, the entire war of resistance in the Kandahar region collapsed. Other mujaheddin units not under Asmatullah’s control, such as Khader’s men in the mountains north of the city, remained in their positions; but they were isolated, and every supply route to them was perilously vulnerable to Russian attack. The uncertainty forced us to wait until Asmatullah decided whether to continue the jihad or switch sides and support the Russians. No-one could predict which way he would jump.
Although we were all restive and agitated with the wait—as the days limped into weeks, it seemed interminable—I used the time well. I practised phrases in Farsi, Urdu, and Pashto, and even picked up a few words in some Tajik and Uzbek dialects. I rode horses every day. While I never managed to eliminate my clownish, arm-and-leg-flapping gestures when I made the animals stop or go or turn in a desired direction, I sometimes did succeed in dismounting them by climbing down rather than being hurled to the ground on my back.
I read books every day from a bizarre, eclectic collection supplied to me by Ayub Khan, a Pakistani, and the one member of our group who’d been born in Quetta. Because it was judged too dangerous for me to leave our safe-house compound at a horse ranch on the outskirts of the city, Ayub brought me books from the central library. The library was stocked with obscure and fascinating English-language books that were an inheritance from the days of the British Raj. The name of the city, Quetta, was derived from the Pashto word kwatta, meaning fort. Its proximity to the Chaman Pass route to Afghanistan, and the Bolan Pass route to India, ensured Quetta’s military and economic significance for millennia. The British first occupied the old fort in 1840, but were forced to abandon it after sickness in the troops and ferocious resistance from the Afghans had withered the colonial force. It was reoccupied in 1876, and firmly established as the premier British possession in that region of the North West Frontier of India. The Imperial Staff College for military officers in British India was established there, and a thriving, prosperous marketcentre grew up in the spectacular, natural amphitheatre of the surrounding mountains. A cataclysmic earthquake on the last day of May in 1935 destroyed most of the city and killed twenty thousand people, but Quetta was rebuilt, and the clean, wide boulevards and pleasant weather made it one of the most popular holiday resorts in northern Pakistan.
For me, restricted then to the compound, the chief attraction of the city was the random selection of books that Ayub brought to me. Every few days he appeared at my door, grinning hopefully and handing the bundle of books to me as if they were treasures from an archa
eological dig.
And so it was that I rode during the day, acclimatising myself to the thinner air above five thousand feet, and at night read the diaries and journals of long-dead explorers, extinct editions of Greek classics, eccentrically annotated volumes of Shakespeare, and a dizzyingly passionate terza rima translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy.
‘Some of the men think you are a scholar of the holy works,’ Abdel Khader Khan said to me from the doorway of my room one night, after we’d been a month in Quetta. I closed the book that I was reading and stood to greet him at once. He took my hand and enclosed it within both of his own, muttering a whispered prayer of blessing. When he accepted the chair that I offered him, I sat down on a stool an arm’s reach away. He had a parcel wrapped in cream chamois leather under his arm. He placed it on my bed and settled back comfortably.
‘Reading is still something mysterious, in the country of my birth, and the cause of some fear and much superstition,’ Khader said wearily, rubbing a hand over his tired, brown face. ‘Only four men in ten can read at all, and half that number again for women.’
‘Where did you learn … everything you’ve learned?’ I asked him. ‘Where did you learn to speak English so well, for example?’
‘I was tutored by a very fine English gentleman,’ he laughed softly, brightening with the recollection. ‘Just as my little Tariq was tutored by you.’
I took two beedies from a pack, lit them in my hand with the play of a match, and handed one to him.
‘My father was the leader of his clan,’ Khader continued. ‘He was a stern man, but he was also a just man and a wise man. In Afghanistan men become leaders by merit—they are good speakers, wise managers of money and brave, when fighting is necessary. There is no inherited right to be a leader, and a leader’s son who has no wisdom or courage or skill at speaking to the people will be passed over for another man with better skills. My father was very anxious for me to succeed him and to continue his life-work, which was to raise his people from ignorance, and to ensure their future well-being. A wandering Sufi mystic, an old saint who visited our area when I was born, had told my father that I would grow up to become a shining star in the history of my people. My father hoped for this with all his heart but, unfortunately, I showed none of a leader’s skills, and no interest in attaining them. I was, in short, a bitter disappointment to him. He sent me to my uncle, here in Quetta. And my uncle, who was a prosperous merchant then, put me in the care of an Englishman, who became my tutor.’
‘How old were you?’
‘I was ten years old when I left Kandahar, and I spent five years as a student of Mr. Ian Donald Mackenzie Esquire.’
‘You must’ve been a good student,’ I suggested.
‘Perhaps,’ he mused in reply. ‘I think, really, that Mackenzie Esquire was a very good teacher. I have heard, in the years since I left him, that the people of Scotland are known for their sour and stern ways. Some people have told me that the people of Scotland are pessimists, who prefer to walk on the dark side of every sunny street. I think that if this is in some way true, it does not also tell us that the people of Scotland find this dark side of things to be very, very funny. My Mackenzie Esquire was a man who laughed in his eyes, even when he was most stern with me. Every time that I think of him, I remember the laughter in his eyes. And he loved it in Quetta. He loved the mountains, and the cold air in winter. His thick, strong legs were built for climbing mountain paths, and he roamed these hills every week, often with me alone for company. He was a happy man who knew how to laugh, and he was a great teacher.’
‘What happened when he finished teaching you?’ I asked. ‘Did you return to Kandahar?’
‘I did, but it was not the joyful return that my father hoped for. You see, on the day after my dear Mackenzie Esquire left Quetta, I killed a man, in the bazaar, outside my uncle’s warehouse.’
‘When you were fifteen?’
‘Yes. When I was fifteen years old I killed a man, for the first time.’
He lapsed into silence, and I pondered the weight and measure of that phrase … for the first time …
‘It was a cause that was really no cause, a trick of fate, a fight that grew out of nothing at all. The man was beating a child. It was his own child, and I should not have interfered. But it was a very cruel beating, and I could not bear to watch it. Filled with the importance of being the son of a village leader, and being the nephew of one of Quetta’s most prosperous merchants, I commanded the man to stop beating the child. He took offence, of course, and there was an argument. The argument became a fight. And then he was dead, stabbed in the chest with his own dagger—the dagger he had tried to use on me.’
‘It was self-defence.’
‘Yes. There were many witnesses. It was in the main street of the bazaar. My uncle, who had much influence at that time, spoke for me with all the authorities, and finally arranged for me to return to Kandahar. Unfortunately, the family of the man I had killed refused to accept a blood-money payment from my uncle, and they sent two men to Kandahar after me. I received a warning from my uncle, and I struck first. I killed both men by shooting them with my father’s old long rifle.’
He was silent again for a while, staring at a point on the floor between our feet. I could hear music, distant and muffled, coming from the other side of the compound. There were many rooms radiating outward from a central courtyard that was larger but less grand than that in Khader’s Bombay home. From some of the nearer rooms I could hear the low, water-bubble murmur of conversation and the tapping drum-roll of an occasional laugh. From the room next door, Khaled Ansari’s room, I heard the unmistakable clikka-k’chuck of a Kalashnikov AK-74 assault rifle being cocked and cold-fired after cleaning.
‘The blood feud that began with those killings—and with their attempt to kill me—destroyed my family and theirs,’ Khader said flatly, resuming his story. His expression was sombre, and it seemed as if the spirit was draining invisibly from his downcast eyes as he spoke. ‘One on our side, two on theirs. Two on our side, one on theirs. My father tried many times to find a way to end the feud, but it was impossible. It was a demon that moved from man to man, and made each man mad with the love of killing. I tried to leave my home, because I was the cause of the feud, but my father refused to let me leave, and I could not oppose him. The feud went on for years, and the killing went on for years. I lost my two brothers, and both of my uncles, my father’s brothers. When my own father was badly wounded in an attack, and unable to stop me, I told my family to spread the rumour that I had been killed. I left my family home. The blood feud ended some time after that, and peace was restored between the two families. But I was dead to my family, because I had sworn an oath to my mother that I would never return.’
The breeze through the metal-framed window that had been cool in the earlier evening was suddenly cold. I stood to close the window, and then poured a glass of water from the clay pitcher on my nightstand. Khader accepted the glass, whispered a prayer, and drank the water. He handed me the glass when he was finished. I poured water into the same glass and sat down on the stool to sip at my drink. I said nothing, afraid that, if I asked the wrong question or made the wrong comment, he would stop talking altogether and leave the room. He was calm, and he seemed to be completely relaxed, but the brilliant, laughing gleam was missing from his eyes. It was also disturbingly out of character for him to be so expansive about his own life. He’d talked to me for long hours about the Koran or the life of the Prophet Mohammed or the scientific, rational basis for his moral philosophy, but I’d never known him to tell me or anyone else so much about himself. In the lengthening silence I looked at the lean, sinewed face and I controlled even the sound of my breathing, lest it disturb him.
We were both dressed in the standard Afghan costume of a long, loose shirt and wide-waisted pants. His clothes were a light, faded green and mine were pale blue-white. We both wore leather sandals as house slippers. Although I was heavier and deeper in
the chest than Khaderbhai, we were roughly the same height and build across the shoulders. His short hair and beard were white-silver, and my short hair was white-blonde. My skin was tanned to a shade resembling his natural, almond-shell brown. If it wasn’t for the sky in my blue-grey eyes and the alluvial gold in his, we might’ve been taken for father and son.
‘How did you get from Kandahar to the Bombay mafia?’ I asked him at last, when I feared that the lengthening silence, more than my questions, might make him leave.
He turned to face me. His smile was radiant: a new, gentle, artless smile that had never moved his face before in any conversation with me.
‘When I ran away from my home in Kandahar, I made a journey across Pakistan and India to Bombay. Like a million others, like millions of others, I hoped to make my fortune in the city of the Hindi picture heroes. At first, I lived in a slum—like the one that I own now, near the World Trade Centre. I practised the Hindi language every day, and I learned quickly. After a while, I observed that men could make money buying tickets for popular pictures at the cinemas and then selling them for a profit when the cinemas put up the House Full signs. I decided to use the little money I’d saved to buy tickets for the most popular Hindi picture in Bombay. Then I stood outside the cinema, and when the House Full signs went up I sold my tickets for a good profit.’