It’s 8 a.m., the time specified in the letter, but a six-year-old boy is the only person who approaches them, asking if they want their shoes polished.
They continue with their wait and at ten o’clock a man wearing a Kalashnikov over his shoulder appears and asks them curtly to identify themselves.
He says it’ll take twenty thousand rupees to free the bird pardoner’s son.
‘I don’t have that kind of money,’ Abdul says, and the man sighs with irritation. The mountain peaks cut white fangs into the sky around the city, the December cold intense. The rivers and streams must be flowing with shards of ice.
‘The note said you would bring the boy,’ Rohan says.
The man points to a red van at the other end of the bazaar.
They walk towards it and he opens the back door and tells Rohan and Abdul to climb in, the door closing behind them immediately. The interior is windowless, a pitch-black metal box, and Abdul snaps his cigarette lighter. The light it produces is sparse and he adjusts the lever on the side to lengthen the flame. They look around, holding their heads at an angle because of the low ceiling, and realise that the huddled shape at the other end of the space is a boy and not a pile of rags. He flinches and lets out a squeal when the bird pardoner moves towards him.
Abdul stops and looks at him and then moves to the door. ‘That’s not my son,’ he says, sounding a knock.
Rohan sees that the boy is weeping. ‘Please take me away,’ the little voice says finally, looking down. ‘They keep us in a prison. They do things to you that make you want to kill yourself. Please take me away,’ he whispers.
‘Suicide is a sin,’ Rohan says. ‘You mustn’t talk like that.’
Abdul is knocking on the door but there is no response from the other side.
‘They have this game, they call it “Nail”. They start with the youngest prisoners and ask their ages. If the boy says twelve, they send twelve men to him. If he says fourteen, he gets fourteen. They take him to a room and take off his trousers and hold him down and then the whole place fills with screams. The men yell louder than the boy – like they have gone mad or have turned into wild animals. They are shouting, “Nail! Nail! Nail!” as they do it to him.’
It would terrify even the stars. And Abdul’s fists are hitting the door louder now, the lighter flame jerking and then going out. ‘Please help me,’ says the boy’s voice. ‘Allah will reward you and your wife.’ And then suddenly the door is opened and the light floods their eyes.
Rohan and Abdul are let out and the door is closed on the boy who screams desperately for the last time, ‘I will kill myself,’ just as the van jerks forward and drives off.
‘That’s not my son,’ Abdul says, and the ransom seeker takes out a set of photographs twice the thickness of a deck of cards, and asks Abdul to look through it. Towards the end of the sheaf, Abdul recognises his Jeo.
‘We will bring him next week. Same time.’
‘I have no money for the ransom, or the journey,’ Abdul says. ‘Either I or my wife will have to sell a kidney. It’ll take some time. Can we meet again in a month?’
‘A month?’ the man considers.
‘Have you no shame?’ Rohan finds himself saying into the man’s face, having pushed Abdul aside, unable to control his distress and fury. People stare at him as they walk past and he feels at the centre of a swarm of eyes. ‘How can you hold children to ransom and force the parents to do such a terrible thing to themselves?’ He cannot even bring himself to raise the other subject, so traumatised is he by it.
The man is outraged and looks as though he will lunge at Rohan.
‘I will cut the boy’s throat and I will kill you!’ he says while Rohan glares at him. ‘Your boy was caught fighting against us. He probably killed some of our men. We need money to make sure the widows and the children of those dead men don’t become beggars.’
Abdul tries to placate him. ‘I will come back in a month and I will bring the money. Please treat my boy well in the meantime.’
‘No,’ Rohan says, suddenly determined. ‘No. We want Jeo and we will go and get him today.’
‘He’s in Afghanistan.’
‘Then we go to Afghanistan.’
‘It’s four, five hours away,’ the man points to the east of the city.
‘Afghanistan is not four or five hours away,’ Rohan says.
‘Six, seven, then.’
‘It’s more even than that but I don’t care. I want Jeo back.’
‘Yes, come with me if you want. The official ways into Afghanistan are still difficult, but I can get you there and back without any problems via old smuggling routes.’
He is aware of the dangers. Defeated and banished, Taliban and al-Qaeda gangs are roaming Afghanistan, and of course the place is full of Western soldiers.
‘The journey will cost you,’ the man says. ‘And I’ll have to make a phone call to arrange everything, to make sure it’s acceptable to my superiors.’
‘What about the twenty thousand rupees?’ Abdul asks Rohan.
Rohan reaches into his pocket and takes out the ruby on its black cord. Both Abdul and the ransom seeker are taken aback by the size and beauty of the jewel, the unimprovable red light collected inside it. They cannot take their eyes off the stone, and they stare at the pocket where it is when Rohan puts it back into his coat.
Rohan looks around. ‘The Street of Storytellers is that way. Which way is the Jewellers’ Bazaar?’
*
The ransom seeker has a car and, after the ruby has been appraised at the Jewellers’ Bazaar, they drive towards the eastern outskirts of Peshawar. The legitimate path into Afghanistan is the Khyber Pass, but they are taking narrower roads, slipping through hillocks overgrown densely with mesquite bushes. In the limestone Maneri hills there are veins of marble mottled black, green and yellow, or pure green and pure yellow, and the rosary in Rohan’s hands is made from these, the two-coloured beads alternating. On the boulders on the riverbanks the words
Jihad is your duty
are daubed, white against the grey and black. They were not there in October when Rohan was roaming these areas with Yasmin and Basie.
Victory or martyrdom. Telephone now for jihad training
. There is a phone number.
The gem merchant valued the ruby at fifty thousand rupees. The sign above the shop said the proprietor was a genealogist of precious stones and could tell the origin and race of every precious stone on earth. Rohan asked him to write down the amount while the ransom seeker watched.
‘I will give your warlord this gem instead of the money, and he will give us Jeo.’
As they drive towards the Afghan border, the ransom seeker talks. ‘Seventy people from my village were killed when the Americans dropped a bomb,’ the man says. ‘I blame America but I also blame the foreign fighters – the likes of your boy – who the Americans were trying to kill.’
And repeatedly he wants to be handed the ruby.
At a secluded place near the border he stops the car and asks them to disembark, saying he has to go away for an hour. And yet again he wants the ruby. ‘It’ll save you the journey. Give me the jewel and I will bring the boy to you.’
But Rohan refuses and he drives away. The valley of Peshawar has the appearance of having been, centuries ago, the bed of a vast lake, whose banks were bound by the cliffs and peaks of the surrounding Himalayas, and Rohan has the feeling of being submerged within that vast inland sea.
*
I was given the following words of the Prophet by Adam bin Ayaas, who was given them by Ibn Abi Zyeb, who was given them by Syed Makbari, who in turn was given them by Abu Horaira. The Prophet said, ‘If anyone has been unjust towards someone, he should secure himself a pardon from the victim before it is too late. Otherwise, on Judgement Day, when the only valid currency will be a person’s good conduct on earth, the good deeds of an unjust man will be transferred to his victim. And if he has no good deeds, then the victim’s sins will be transferred to him.
Rohan is reading the
Book of Prophet’s Sayings
, turning the pages at random – pausing on this, the saying number 2,286, for a few moments. He shivers in the cold. It has been two hours since the man left with the car. The bird trapper is asleep, wrapped in a blanket under a tree.
‘Why do you look so troubled?’ a woman’s voice asks.
Rohan looks up – her hair is white, the features of the face caught in a net of wrinkles. He smiles and shakes his head.
She points to the boulders and the screen of bushes on the other side of the road. Rohan sees that behind the leaves and branches there is a low mud wall.
‘Go there.’
Rohan returns to the book.
Number 2,279: I was given the following words of the Prophet by Osman Ibn Ani Sheeba, who was given them by Hasheem, who was given them by Obaidullah bin Abu Bakr bin Uns, who was given them by Hameed Tavail, who in turn was given them by Uns bin Malik. The Prophet said, ‘Always help your (Muslim) brother, whether he is a tyrant or victim.’
The woman is hovering and now touches his shoulder. ‘It is a graveyard. The body of a boy who died fighting the Americans in Afghanistan was brought out and is buried here. He is a martyr and will intercede on your behalf with Allah. Go and ask Mikal for your suffering to be alleviated.’
Rohan closes the book and places it in his shoulder bag and stands up. He crosses the road and enters the graveyard that contains about a hundred souls, a few decaying tombs and thorn trees. The mountains loom overhead vertiginously, the land and slopes marked with evidence of the lost sea, the effort of currents, waves, springs, streams and rivers. Verses of the Koran are on every headstone – as though the graves are quoting them, carrying on a conversation with one another using nothing but holy words. One mound just on the other side of the boundary wall is at least ten yards long, heaped with bright flowers, river soil with pieces of freshwater shells, and chips of soft blue slate quarried from the nearby hills. A group of women is reciting verses of the Koran over the mound. A man is lighting an incense stick at its head, the smoke rising in sluggish blue strands through the cold air.
‘He was a giant.’ A woman looks up at Rohan as he approaches.
‘He wasn’t,’ the man with the incense stick corrects her, walking the ten yards to light the ones at the other end. ‘He was of normal height, but he became this size on the battlefield.’
The tombstone is carved with stars along the edges. There is Mikal’s name, the date of birth, and of death – the day after he and Jeo went to Afghanistan.
‘They say he brought down six fighter jets single-handedly and saved thirty women from being ravished by American soldiers.’
He stands looking at the blossoms piled onto the boy. The dazzle of the sun is in his eyes and his body feels suddenly tired. Claw prints of an eagle were found heading away from the martyr, the warrior saint, someone tells him. His soul must have been an eagle.
How did Mikal’s body end up here? The mayhem and chaos of war. He looks up at the cliffs. The vegetation everywhere is profuse; after the level of the sea decreased this was a tropical marsh, the resort of rhinoceros, flamingo and tiger, thick with reeds, rushes and conifers. Under his breath he reads the verse of the Koran that is etched onto the ruby.
Wealth and offspring are transitory adornments of the nearer life
. How long he stands there in that disordered state of mind he doesn’t know, coming to himself only when he hears Abdul calling out his name from the other side of the wall.
*
Through hillside, across bridges, through a dust storm a mile long, and through streams in which float – by the dozen – the shaved-off beards of fleeing al-Qaeda militants, the journey to the destination in Afghanistan takes seventeen hours. In deep twilight they cross a broad flat valley with a river and river flats in it, every bit of it scorched black where a Daisy Cutter bomb had been dropped, reducing everything to ash, pumice, lava, the sides of the hills torn up into segments, and scattered over it all is the yellow haze of the unrisen moon, the cold night falling on them out of the east, the stars beginning their slide through the black slopes. It looks like the site of a cosmic incursion such as a meteorite, not the work of men. The US casualties number twelve in the two-month war, whereas countless thousands of Afghanistanis have perished, fighters as well as bystanders, and Rohan doesn’t know who will speak the complicated truth, and he watches with attention as though at some point in the future he himself will be asked to tell what he has seen. Towards the end of the journey a convoy of American soldiers goes past their vehicle. He wonders if he can ask them to help secure the release of the boys imprisoned by the warlord. He watches the convoy disappear just as the car radio brings news that a British Muslim has been arrested trying to blow up a passenger airliner over the Atlantic Ocean with explosives hidden in his shoes.
*
Arriving at a compound at 3 a.m., they are shown into a room full of the odour of dust and are told to spend the remains of the night there. The walls are of grey cement and hundreds of broken statues lie in heaps on the floor. The Buddha and the various people from his life – torsos, arms, feet and faces of all sizes. He looks at the exact arc of the eyebrow made above a man’s eye by the carver’s chisel. The flowers as though growing out of the hair on a woman’s head. There is barely room for Rohan and the bird pardoner to stand, and they clear a space by stacking a number of the pieces onto each other, the bird pardoner lying down against a yard-long fragment of drapery – hewn from the skirts of a nymph or temple dancer. As she lay dying, Rohan remembers burning a sketch of a Bodhisattva statue that Sofia had made. And he knows some people in the neighbourhood, on hearing the news that his vision is slowly deteriorating, comment that it is Allah’s retribution for tormenting her during her last hours. ‘He didn’t want to see what she had painted, now he won’t be able to see the real things.’
He falls asleep looking at the photograph on the far wall. The warlord is shaking hands with an American colonel. The date on the frame says it was taken soon after the Taliban regime was toppled last month. The opposite of war is not peace but civilisation, and civilisation is purchased with violence and cold-blooded murder. With war. The man must earn millions of dollars for guarding the NATO supply convoys as they pass through his area, and for the militia he must have raised to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda soldiers alongside American Special Forces.