Nazeer woke me before dawn, and we left the house as the first yawning rays of light stretched into the fading night. When we climbed from our taxi at the airport we saw Khaderbhai and Khaled Ansari near the entrance to the domestic terminal, but we didn't acknowledge them. Khader had laid out a complex itinerary that would take us, with four major changes of transport, from Bombay to Quetta, in Pakistan, near the Afghan border. His instructions were that we should appear at all times to be individual travellers, and that the travellers shouldn't acknowledge one another in any way. We were setting out with him to commit a score of crimes across three international boundaries, and to interfere in a war between Afghanistan's mujaheddin freedom fighters and the mighty Goliath of the Soviet Union. He was planning to succeed in his mission, but he was also allowing for failure. He was ensuring that if any of us were killed or captured at any stage, the trail of connections back to Bombay would be as cold as a mountain climber's axe.
It was a long journey, and it began as a silent one. Nazeer, scrupulous as ever in his conformity with Khaderbhai's instructions, never uttered a single word on the first leg from Bombay to Karachi. An hour after we'd checked into our separate rooms in the Chandni Hotel, however, I heard a soft tap on the door. Before the door was halfway open he slipped inside and pressed it shut behind him. His eyes were wide with nervous excitement and his manner was agitated, almost frantic. I was unsettled and a little disgusted by the conspicuousness of his fear, and I reached out to put a hand on his shoulder.
"Take it easy, Nazeer. You're freaking me out, brother, with all this cloak-and-dagger shit."
He saw the condescension behind my smile, even if he didn't understand the full meaning of the words. His jaw locked around some inscrutable resolve, and he frowned at me fiercely. We'd become friends, Nazeer and I. He'd opened his heart to me. But friendship, for him, was measured by what men do and endure for one another, not by what they share and enjoy. It puzzled and even tormented him that I almost always met his earnest gravity with facetiousness and triviality. The irony was that we were, in fact, similarly dour and serious men, but his grim severity was so stark that it roused me from my own solemnity, and provoked a childish, prankish desire to mock him.
"Russian... everywhere," he said, speaking quietly, but with a hard, breathy intensity. "Russian... know everything... know every man... pay money for know everything."
"Russian spies?" I asked. "In Karachi..."
"Everywhere Pakistan," he nodded, turning his head aside to spit on the floor. I wasn't sure if the gesture was in contempt or for luck. "Too much danger! Not speak anyone! You go... Faloodah House... Bohri bazaar... today... saade char baje."
"Half past four," I repeated. "You want me to meet someone at the Faloodah House, in the Bohri bazaar, at half past four? Is that it? Who do you want me to meet?"
He allowed me a grim little smile and then opened the door.
Glancing briefly along the corridor, he slipped out again as swiftly and silently as he'd entered. I looked at my watch. One o'clock. I had three hours to kill. For my passport-smuggling missions, Abdel Ghani had given me a money belt that was his uniquely original design. The belt was made from a tough, waterproof vinyl and was several times wider than the standard money belt. Worn flat against the stomach, the belt could hold up to ten passports and a quantity of cash. On that first day in Karachi it held four of my own books. The first of them was the British book that I'd used to purchase plane and train tickets, and register at the hotel. The second book was the clean American passport that Khaderbhai required me to use for the mission into Afghanistan. The two others, a Swiss book and a Canadian book, were spares for emergency use. There was also a ten thousand dollar contingency fund, paid in advance, as part of my fee for accepting the hazardous mission. I wrapped the thick belt around my waist, beneath my shirt, slipped my switchblade into the scabbard at the back of my trousers, and left the hotel to explore the city.
It was hot, hotter than usual for the mild month of November, and a light, unseasonable rain had left the streets hazy with a thickened, steamy air. Karachi was a tense and dangerous city then. For several years the military junta that had seized power in Pakistan and executed the democratically elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had ruled the nation by dividing it. They'd exploited genuine grievances between ethnic and religious communities by inciting violent conflicts. They'd pitted the indigenous ethnic groups-particularly the Sindis, the Pashtuns, and the Punjabis-against the immigrants, known as Mohajirs, who'd streamed into the newly founded nation of Pakistan when it was partitioned from India. The army secretly supported extremists from the rival groups with weapons, money, and the judicious application of favours. When the riots that they'd provoked and fomented finally erupted, the generals ordered their police to open fire. Rage against the police violence was then contained by the deployment of army troops. In that way the army, whose covert operations had created the bloody conflicts, were seen to be the only force capable of preserving order and the rule of law.
As massacres and revenge killings tumbled over one another with escalating brutishness, kidnappings and torture became routine events. Fanatics from one group seized supporters from another group, and inflicted sadistic torments on them. Many of those who were abducted died in that fearsome captivity. Some vanished, and their bodies were never found. And when one group or another became powerful enough to threaten the balance of the deadly game, the generals incited violent conflict within their group to weaken it. The fanatics then began to feed on themselves, killing and maiming rivals from their own ethnic communities.
Each new cycle of violence and vengeance ensured, of course, that no matter what form of government emerged or dissolved in the nation, only the army would grow stronger, and only the army could exercise real power.
Despite that dramatic tension-and because of it-Karachi was a good place to do business. The generals, who were like a mafia clan without the courage, style, or solidarity of genuine, self respecting gangsters, had seized the country by force, held the entire nation hostage at the points of many guns, and looted the treasury. They lost no time in assuring the great powers, and the other arms-producing nations, that Pakistan's armed forces were open for their business. The civilised nations responded with enthusiasm, and for years Karachi was host to junketing parties of arms-dealers from America, Britain, China, Sweden, Italy, and other countries. No less industrious in their pursuit of a deal with the camarilla of generals were the illegals-the black marketeers, gunrunners, freebooters, and mercenaries. They crowded into the cafes and hotels: foreigners from fifty countries who had crime in mind and adventure in their hearts.
In a sense, I was one of them, a ravager like the rest of them, profiting from the war in Afghanistan like the rest of them, but I wasn't comfortable in their company. For three hours I drifted from a restaurant to a hotel to a chai shop, sitting near or with groups of foreigners who were searching for a quick buck. Their conversations were dispiritingly calculating. The war in Afghanistan, most of them conjectured cheerily, had a few good years left in it. The generals were, it had to be admitted, under considerable pressure. There were rumours that Benazir, daughter of the executed prime minister, was planning to return to Pakistan from exile in London to lead the democratic alliance opposed to the junta. But with a little luck and skilful connivance, the profiteers hoped, the army might remain in control of the country-and the well-established channels of corruption-for some years yet.
The talk was of cash crops, a euphemism for contraband and black market trade goods, which were in great demand along the entire border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Cigarettes, particularly American blends, were selling at Khyber Pass for sixteen times their already inflated Karachi price. Medicines of every kind were generating profits that increased in scale from month to month. Winter clothing, suitable for snow habitats, was exceptionally marketable. One enterprising German freebooter had driven a Mercedes truck loaded with surplus German army alpine issue uniforms, complete with thermal underwear, from Munich to Peshawar. He'd sold the lot, including the truck, for five times its purchase value. The buyer was an Afghan warlord who was favoured by western powers and agencies, including the American CIA. The heavy winter clothing, after a journey of thousands of kilometres through Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan, never reached the fighting men of the mujaheddin in the snow-draped mountains of Afghanistan. Instead, the winter uniforms and underwear were stored in one of the warlord's warehouses in Peshawar, awaiting the end of the war. The renegade and his small army were sitting out the war in the safety of their fortress compounds in Pakistan. His plan was to launch a strike for power with his own troops after the real fighting against the Russians was done, and the war was won.
News of that new market-a warlord, cashed up with CIA money and hungry for supplies at any price-sent thrilling, speculative ripples through the community of foreign opportunists in Karachi.
I encountered the story of the venturesome German and his truck full of alpine uniforms in three slightly different incarnations during the course of the afternoon. In a fever, something like gold fever, the foreigners passed the story among themselves as they pursued and closed down deals for shipments of canned foods, bales of brushed fleeces, shipping containers of engine parts, a warehouse full of second-hand spirit stoves, and stocks of every kind of weapon from bayonets to grenade launchers. And everywhere, in every conversation, I heard the dark, desperate incantation: If the war goes on for another year, we'll have it made...
Vexed and gloomy with squalling emotions I entered the Faloodah House in the Bohri bazaar, and ordered one of the sweet, technicoloured drinks. The faloodha was an indecently sweet concoction of white noodles, milk, rose flavours, and other melliferous syrups. The Firni House in Bombay's Dongri area, near Khaderbhai's house, was justly famous for its delicious faloodah drinks, but they were insipid when compared to the fabulous confections served at Karachi's Faloodah House. When the tall glass of pink, red, and white sugary milk appeared beside my right hand, I looked up to thank the waiter and saw that it was Khaled Ansari, carrying two drinks.
"You look like you need something stronger than this, man," he said with a smile-a small, sad smile-as he sat down beside me.
"What's up? Or what's down, for that matter?"
"It's nothing," I sighed, offering him a smile in return.
"Come on," he insisted. "Let's have it."
I looked into his honest, open, scarred face and it occurred to me that Khaled knew me better than I knew him. Would I have noticed and realised how troubled he was, I wondered, if our roles were reversed, and he'd entered the Faloodah House with such disturbing preoccupations? Probably not. Khaled was so often gloomy that I wouldn't have given it a second thought. "Well, it's just a bit of soul-searching, I guess. I've been doing some research, digging around in some of the chaikhannas and restaurants you told me about-some of the places where the black-market guys and the mercenaries hang out. It was pretty depressing. There's a lot of people here who want the war to go on forever, and they don't give a shit who's getting killed or who's doing the killing."
"They're making money," he shrugged. "It's not their war. I don't expect them to care. That's just how it is."
"I know, I know. It's not the money thing," I frowned, searching for the words, rather than the emotion that had prompted them.
"It's just-if you wanted a definition of sick, really sick minded, you could do worse than somebody who wants a war-any war - to go on longer."
"And... you feel... kind of tainted... kind of like them?"
Khaled asked gently, looking down into his glass.
"Maybe I do. I don't know. I wouldn't even think about it-you know, if I heard people talking like that somewhere else. It wouldn't bug me if I wasn't here, and if I wasn't doing exactly the same thing myself."
"It isn't exactly the same."
"It is. Pretty much. Khader's paying me-so I'm making money out of it, like them-and I'm smuggling new shit into a shit-fight, just like they are."
"And maybe you're starting to ask yourself what the fuck you're doing here?"
"That, too. Would you believe me if I told you I haven't got a clue? I really, honestly, don't know why the fuck I'm doing it.
Khader asked me to be his American, and I'm doing it. But I don't know why."
We were silent for a while, sipping at our drinks and listening to the clatter and buzz surrounding us in the busy Faloodah House. A large portable radio was playing romantic gazals in Urdu. I could hear conversations in three or four languages from customers close to us. I couldn't understand the words, nor could I even identify which languages they were: Baluchi, Uzbek, Tajik, Farsi...
"This is great!" Khaled said, using a long spoon to scoop noodles into his mouth from the glass.
"It's too sweet for my taste," I answered him, drinking the treat nonetheless.
"Some things should be too sweet," he replied, giving me a wink as he sucked on the straw. "If faloodahs weren't too sweet, we wouldn't drink them."
We finished our drinks and walked out into the late afternoon sunlight, pausing beyond the doorway to light our cigarettes.
"We'll take off in different directions," Khaled muttered as he held a match for my cigarette in his cupped hands. "Just keep walking that way, south, for a few minutes. I'll catch you up.
Don't say goodbye."
He turned on his heel and walked away, stepping out to the edge of the road and into the fast lane of foot traffic between the footpath and the cars.
I turned and walked off in the opposite direction. Some minutes later, at the perimeter of the bazaar, a taxi slid to a stop quickly beside me. The back door opened and I jumped in next to Khaled. Another man was in the front seat beside the driver. He was in his early thirties, with short, dark brown hair receding from a high, wide forehead. His deep-set eyes were of a brown so dark as to seem black until direct sunlight pierced the irises to reveal the auburn earth tones swirling within them. His eyes stared evenly, intelligently, from beneath black brows that all but met in the centre. His nose was straight, descending to a short upper lip, a firm determined mouth, and a blunt, rounded chin. It was obvious that the man had shaved that day, and probably not long ago, but a blue-black shadow darkened the lower half of his face along the neat, sharply defined lines that governed his beard. It was a strong, square, symmetrical face, handsome in its strength and even proportions if not in any one outstanding feature.
"This is Ahmed Zadeh," Khaled announced as the cab moved off.
"Ahmed, this is Lin."
We shook hands, sizing one another up with equal candour and affability. His strong face might've seemed severe but for a peculiar expression that screwed his eyes into a gentle squint, and creased the crests of his cheeks with smile lines. Whenever he was concentrating, whenever he wasn't completely relaxed, Ahmed Zadeh wore an expression that made him look as if he was searching for a friend in a crowd of strangers. It was a disarming expression, and it endeared him to me at once.
"I've heard a lot about you," he said, releasing my hand and resting his arm on the front seat of the taxi. His accent, speaking a hesitant but clear English, was that melodious North African blend of French and Arabic. "I hope it wasn't all good," I said, laughing.
"Would you prefer people to say bad things about you?"
"I don't know. My friend Didier says that praising people behind their back is monstrously unfair, because the one thing you can't defend yourself against is the good that people say about you."
"D'accord!" Ahmed laughed. "Exactly so!"
"Shit, that reminds me," Khaled interjected, fishing through his pockets until he found a folded envelope. "I almost forgot. I saw Didier, the night before we left. He was looking for you. I couldn't tell him where you were, so he asked me to give you this letter."
I took the folded envelope and slipped it into the pocket of my shirt, to read when I was alone.
"Thanks," I muttered. "So what's going on? Where are we going?"
"To a mosque," Khaled replied, with that small, sad smile. "We're going to pick up a friend first, then we're going to meet Khader and some of the other guys who'll be going with us across the border."
"How many guys?"
"There'll be thirty or so, I think, once we're all together. Most of them are already in Quetta, or at Chaman, near the border. We leave tomorrow-you, me, Khaderbhai, Nazeer, Ahmed, and one other guy, Mahmoud. He's a friend of mine. I don't think you know him.
You'll meet him in a few minutes."
"We are the small United Nations, non?" Ahmed asked rhetorically.
"Abdel Khader Khan from Afghanistan, Khaled from Palestine, Mahmoud from Iran, you from New Zealand-I'm sorry, you are now our American-and I am from Algeria."
"And there's more," Khaled added. "We've got one guy from Morocco, one guy from the Gulf, one guy from Tunisia, two from Pakistan, and one from Iraq. The rest are all Afghans, but they're all from different parts of Afghanistan, and different ethnic groups as well."
"Jihad," Ahmed said, his smile grim and almost fearful. "Holy war - this is our holy duty, to resist the Russian invaders, and liberate a Muslim land."
"Don't get him started, Lin," Khaled winced. "Ahmed's a communist. He'll be hitting you with Mao and Lenin next."
"Don't you feel a little... compromised?" I asked, tempting fate. "Going up against a socialist army?" "What socialists?" he retorted, squinting more furiously. "What communists? Please do not misunderstand me-the Russians did some good things in Afghanistan-"
"He's right about that," Khaled interrupted him. "They built a lot of bridges, and all the main highways, and a lot of schools and colleges."
"And also dams, for fresh water, and electric power stations-all good things. And I supported them, when they did those things as a way of helping. But when they invaded Afghanistan, to change the country by force, they threw away all of the principles they are supposed to be believing. They are not true Marxists, not true Leninists. The Russians are imperialists, and I fight them in the name of Marx, Lenin, Mao-"
"And Allah," Khaled grinned.
"Yes, and Allah," Ahmed agreed, smiling white teeth at us and slapping the back of the seat with his open palm.
"Why did they do it?" I asked him.
"That is something that Khaled can better explain," he replied, deferring to the Palestinian veteran of several wars.
"Afghanistan is a prize," Khaled began. "There's no major reserves of oil, or gold, or anything else that people might want, but still it's a big prize. The Russians want it because it's right on their border. They tried to control it the diplomatic way, with aid packages and relief programs and all that. Then they worked their own guys into power there, in a government that was really just a puppet outfit. The Americans hated it, because of the cold war and all that brinkmanship crap, so they destabilised the place by supporting the only guys who were really pissed off with the Russian puppets-the religious mullah-types. Those long-beards were out of their minds at the way the Russians were changing the country-letting women work, and go to university, and get around in public without the full burkha covering. When the Americans offered them guns and bombs and money to attack the Russians, they jumped at it. After a while, the Russians decided to cut the pretence, and they invaded the country. Now we've got a war."
"And Pakistan," Ahmed Zadeh concluded, "they want Afghanistan because they are growing very fast, too fast, and they want the land. They want to make a great country by combining the two nations. And Pakistan, because of the military generals, belongs to America. So, America helps them. They are training men now, fighters, in religion schools, madrassahs, all over Pakistan. The fighters are called Talebs, and they will go into Afghanistan when the rest of us win the war. And we will win this war, Lin. But the next one, I do not know..."
I turned my face to the window, and as if that were a signal, the two men began to speak in Arabic. I listened to the smooth, swiftly flowing syllables and I let my thoughts drift on that sibilant music. Beyond the window the streets grew less ordered, and the buildings grew more shabby and unkempt. Many of the mud brick and sandstone buildings were single-storey dwellings, and although they were obviously inhabited by whole families they seemed unfinished: barely standing before they'd been possessed and used as shelters.
We passed through whole suburbs of such haphazard and impetuously constructed sprawls-dormitory suburbs thrown up to cope with the headlong rush of immigrants from villages to the rapidly expanding city. Side streets and lateral avenues revealed that the duplication of those crude, resemblant structures extended all the way to the horizon of sight, on either side of the main road.
After almost an hour of slow progress through sometimes impassably crowded streets, we stopped momentarily to allow another man to join us in the back seat. Following Khaled's instructions, the cab driver then turned his taxi around and returned along precisely the same congested route.
The new man was Mahmoud Melbaaf, a thirty-year-old Iranian. A first glimpse of his face-the thick, black hair, the high cheek bones, the eyes coloured like a sand dune in a blood-red sunset- reminded me so much of my dead friend Abdullah that I flinched around the pain of it. In a few moments the similarity dissolved:
Mahmoud's eyes protruded a little, his lips were less full, and his chin was pointed, as if it was designed to hold a goatee beard. It was, in fact, a very different face.
But in the clear thought of Abdullah Taheri and the piercing pain of missing him, I suddenly understood a part of the reason I was there, with Khaled and the others, on a journey into someone else's war. One part, a vital part of my readiness to face the risks of taking on Khader's mission, was the guilt I still felt that Abdullah had died alone, surrounded by guns. I was putting myself in the nearest equivalent, surrounding myself with enemy guns. And in the instant of thinking that thought, in the moment of daubing the unspoken words on a grey wall of my mind-death wish- I rejected it, with a shudder that shivered across the surface of my skin. And for the first time in all the months since I'd agreed to do the job for Abdel Khader Khan I felt afraid, and I knew that my life, there and then, was no more than a handful of sand squeezed into my clenched fist.
We got out of the car a block away from the Masjid-i-Tuba Mosque.
Following one another in single file, with twenty metres between each man, we reached the mosque, and removed our shoes. An ancient hajji attended to the shoes while he muttered his meditational zikkir. Khaled pressed a folded bank note into the man's calloused, arthritic hand. As we entered the mosque I looked up and gasped in surprise and joy.
The interior of the mosque was cool and immaculately clean.
Marble and stone tiles gleamed from fluted pillars, mosaic arches, and vast stretches of patterned floors. But above and beyond all that, drawing the eye irresistibly, was the enormous white marble dome. The spectacular canopy was a hundred paces across, and bejewelled with tiny, polished mirrors. As I stood there, gaping in wonder at its beauty, the electric lights in the mosque came on and the great curve of marble above us gleamed like sunshine on the million peaks and ripples of a wind-worried lake.
Khaled left us immediately, promising to return as soon as possible. Ahmed, Mahmoud, and I walked to an alcove that gave a view of the dome, and we sat down on the polished tile floor. It was some time since the evening prayer-I'd heard the call of the muezzin while we were driving in the cab-but there were still many men absorbed in private prayer throughout the mosque. When he was sure that I was comfortable, Ahmed announced that he would take the opportunity to pray. He excused himself, and walked to the bathing fount. With his face, hands, and feet washed according to ritual, he returned to a little clear space beneath the dome and commenced his prayer.
I watched him with a tiny germ of envy at the ease with which he opened his communication with God. I felt no urge to join him, but the sincerity of his meditation made me feel much more alone, somehow, in my solitary, unconnected mind.
He completed the prayer and, as he began the walk back to us, Khaled returned. He wore a troubled expression. We sat close together, our heads almost touching.
"We've got trouble," he whispered. "The police were at your hotel."
"The cops?" "The political police," Khaled answered. "The ISI. Inter-Services Intelligence."
"What did they want?" I asked.
"You. All of us. We've been made. They hit Khader's house, too.
You were both lucky. He was out of the house, and they didn't get him. What have you got with you, from your hotel? What did you leave there?"
"I've got my passports, my money, and my knife," I replied.
Ahmed grinned at me.
"You know, I am going to like you," he whispered.
"Everything else is still there," I continued. "There's not much.
Clothes, toiletries, a few books. That's it. But there's the tickets-the plane and the train tickets I bought. I left them in my carry bag. That's the only thing with a name on it, I'm pretty sure."
"Nazeer got your carry bag, and got out of there just a minute before the cops crashed in," Khaled said, offering me a reassuring nod. "But that's all he got time to grab. The manager's one of our guys, and he tipped Nazeer off. The big question is, who told the cops that we're here? It has to be someone from Khader's side. Someone on the inside, very close. I don't like it."
"I don't get it," I whispered. "Why are the cops so interested in us? Pakistan is supporting Afghanistan in the war. They should want us to smuggle stuff to the mujaheddin. They should be helping us to do it."
"They are helping some Afghans, but not all of them. The guys we're getting the stuff to, the guys near Kandahar, they're Massoud's men. Pakistan hates them because they won't accept Hekmatyar, or any of the other pro-Pakistan leaders of the resistance. Pakistan and the Americans have picked out Hekmatyar as the next ruler of Afghanistan, after the war. But Massoud's men spit every time they hear his name."
"It is crazy war," Mahmoud Melbaaf added in a coarse, throaty whisper. "Afghans fight each other for so long time, thousands years. The only thing better than fighting each other, is fighting... how do you say it... invasion. They will beat Russians, sure, but they will keep fighting."
"The Pakistanis want to be sure that they win the peace, after the Afghans win the war," Ahmed continued for him. "No matter who wins the war for them, they want to be in control of the peace.
If they could do it, they would take all of our weapons and our medicines and our other supplies, and give them to their own..."
"Proxies," Khaled murmured, the New York in his accent exploding in the whispered word. "Hey, you hear that?"
We all listened intently, and heard the sounds of singing and music from somewhere outside the mosque.
"They've started," Khaled said, rising to his feet with athletic grace. "It's time to go."
We stood and followed him out of the mosque to collect our shoes.
Walking around the building in the gathering dark, we approached the sound of the singing.
"I've... I've heard this singing before," I said to Khaled as we walked.
"You know the Blind Singers?" he asked. "Oh sure, of course you do. You were there in Bombay, with Abdel Khader, when they sang for us. That was the first time I ever saw you."
"You were there that night?"
"Sure. We were all there. Ahmed, Mahmoud, Siddiqi-you haven't met him yet. A lot of the others who'll be going with us on this trip. They were all there that night. That was the first big meeting for this run to Afghanistan. That's why we got together.
That's what the meeting was all about. Didn't you know?"
He laughed as he asked the question, and his tone was as honest and ingenuous as it ever was, but still the words stabbed into my mind. Didn't you know? Didn't you know?
Khader was planning the trip all that time ago, I thought, on the first night that I met him. I remembered with perfect clarity the large, smoky room where the Blind Singers sang for their private audience. I remembered the food that we ate, the charras we smoked. I remembered the few well-known faces I'd recognised that night. Were they all involved in the mission! I remembered the young Afghan who'd greeted Khaderbhai with such respect, bending low enough to reveal the pistol held within a fold of his shawl.
I was still thinking of that first night, still worried by the questions I couldn't answer, when Khaled and I came upon a large group of men, hundreds of them, sitting cross-legged on the tiles of a wide forecourt adjacent to the mosque. The Blind Singers finished a song and the men applauded, shouting Allah! Allah!
Subhaan Allah! Khaled led us through the crowd of men to a relatively sheltered alcove where Khader sat with Nazeer and several others. When I caught his eye Khaderbhai raised his hand, signalling for me to join him. As I reached his side he grasped my hand and pulled me down beside him. A number of heads turned in our direction. Conflicting emotions stumbled into one another in my haunted heart: fear, that I was so conspicuously associated with Khader Khan, and a flush of pride that he'd drawn me, over all others, to sit at his side.
"The wheel has moved through one full turn," he whispered to me, placing his hand on my forearm and speaking close to my ear. "We met each other, you and I, with the Blind Singers, and now we hear them again, just as we begin this important task."
He was reading my mind and I was sure, somehow, that it was deliberate: that he was fully aware of the dizzying impact of his words. I was suddenly angry with him, suddenly resentful, even of the touch of his hand on my arm.
"Did you arrange to have the Blind Singers here?" I asked him, staring straight ahead and leaving the razor's edge in my tone.
"You know, just like you arranged everything else the first time we met?"
He remained silent until at last I turned to face him. When my eyes met his I felt the sting of impulsive tears, and I mastered them by grinding my jaws together. It worked, and my burning eyes remained dry, but my mind was in turmoil. The man with the cinnamon-brown skin and the trim, white beard had used and manipulated me and everyone else he knew as if we were his chained slaves. Yet there was such love in his golden eyes that it was, for me, the full measure of something I'd always craved from the innermost coils of my heart. The love in his softly smiling, deeply worried eyes was a father's love: the only father-love I'd ever known.
"From this moment, you stay with us," he whispered, holding my stare. "You cannot return to your hotel. The police have a description of you, and they will keep looking. This is my fault, and I must give you my apology. Someone close to us has betrayed us. It is our good luck, and his bad luck, that we were not captured. He will be punished. His mistake has revealed him to us. We know now who he is, and we know what must be done to him.
But that will wait until we return from our task. Tomorrow we travel to Quetta. We must remain there for some time. When the time is right, we will make the crossing into Afghanistan. And from that day, for as long as you are in Afghanistan, there will be a price on your head. The Russians pay well for the capture of foreigners who help the mujaheddin. And we have few friends here in Pakistan. I think we will have to get some local clothes for you. We will dress you like a young man from my village-a Pashtun, like me. Yes, with a cap to cover your white hair, and a pattu, a shawl, to throw over your broad shoulders and chest. We will pass you off, perhaps, as my blue-eyed son. What do you think?"
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.