‘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 longbeards 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.
<
br /> The new man was Mahmoud Melbaaf, a thirty-year-old Iranian. A first glimpse of his face—the thick, black hair, the high cheekbones, 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 o
f 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?’
Shantaram Page 82