Vikas Swarup - Six Suspects

'What?'

'The Godfather,' he said and grinned.

Abu Omar had other interests. 'So how many girls have you banged, Mr Page?' he asked me.

'Excuse me?'

'I mean how many girls have you had sex with? Abu Khaled tells us in America girls start having sex when they are only ten and eleven. Is that true?'

'I dunno. I'd need to ask my niece Sandy. She's ten and she's a girl.'

'I know it is forbidden in Islam, but I keep having these immoral thoughts. All because of this Indian actress.'

'And who would that be?'

'Her name is Shabnam Saxena. The bitch is so hot, I become crazy with desire.'

I felt like walloping the pervert, but restrained myself. 'Have you seen any of her movies?' I asked.

'I can't. Films are un-Islamic.'

'Good for you,' I murmured and laid a protective hand on my wallet, which contained a picture of Shabnam as well as her number.

'Don't tell the zimmedar,' Omar whispered, 'but I once saw an American film at a video parlour in Kabul. It was called Debbie Does Dallas. Have you seen it?'

'Never heard of it. Is it about the tourist places in Dallas? I hope it showed the ballpark in Arlington and the-'

'No, no, Mr Page, the film was full of naked women. Thank Mail-Order Bride 259 God the Taliban closed down that video parlour or else I would have gone blind.'

The guy was hornier than a two-peckered billy goat.

'They say in America you can get these kinds of films even at grocery shops. Is it true?' he continued.

'I dunno. I only buy milk and bread at Quik-Pak,' I said and turned my back on him.

Teknikal was waiting on the other side to pounce on me. 'What is your view on anonymous peer-to-peer networks, Mr Page? PC Mag says that the proliferation of such networks increases the risk of a devastating attack on the networked information infrastructure. Do you agree?'

The guy had diarrhoea of words and constipation of thoughts.

'With due respect to Mr Mag, if brains were gasoline, he wouldn't have enough to run a piss ant's go-kart around the inside of a donut!' I said, and before he could figure that one out, I pulled the blanket over my head. 'If y'all excuse me, I'm now gonna get some shut-eye!'

I was sandwiched between two top-notch loonies. The rocks in Teknikal's head would fit the holes in Omar's. I don't remember when I finally fell asleep, dreaming of Shabnam in a valley full of snow.

The next day we left the house around nine a.m. A few minutes later I found myself in a street full of tumbled-down houses and charred temples.

'What the hell happened here?' I asked.

'We kicked out the Hindu Pandits from here,' grinned Teknikal.

These guys obviously knew the area pretty well. Like Bilal, they evaded all the sentry posts, and after an hour of hotfooting it across the city I found myself at a fruit-and-veg market.

They made me travel in a grain truck, hidden among sacks of wheat with a blue tarpaulin over my head. The truck took us to a Podunk town surrounded by mountains and dense forests.

We spent the night in a quaint little cottage, outside which a mad dog kept howling. Luckily, they put me in a room with Abu Khaled this time. He didn't speak a word to me, but I still couldn't sleep coz he kept getting up either to go to the toilet or to pray. The guy got up to pray even at four in the morning.

'Which prayer is this?' I asked him, rubbing my eyes.

'It is called Tahajjud. This prayer is not obligatory for Muslims. But the truly devout do not miss it.' He kneeled and touched his forehead to the ground.

I now knew how he got that dark mark on his forehead. It was from all this praying.

The next morning we took off in an open jeep which Teknikal had arranged from somewhere. From both sides, dense forests seemed to rush in like giant waves at our jeep. The clouds were so low, it felt as if I could reach out and touch them. Thankfully the wind wasn't blowing, otherwise even my warm phiran would have been as useless as a windshield wiper on a goat's ass.

The only trouble was the roads. They were so bad, even buzzards couldn't fly over them, and so crooked you could see your own tail light. Many a time the jeep narrowly avoided going into a pothole or over the edge, and I had to shut my eyes on the hairpin bends and just hang on for dear life.

We came across very little traffic, just the odd farmer tilling his land or a shepherd grazing his cattle. The jeep stopped abruptly near a mosque, and I was ordered by Khaled to get out. Teknikal said there was a big army camp just a short distance away and travelling by jeep would attract attention. So for the next couple of hours we made our way on foot up a steep mountain pathway, with Omar leading the way.

We finally neared a place called Trehgam. As we reached the top of a hill, Omar took me aside and pointed to the village in the distance. I saw a cluster of houses with corrugated-iron roofs. 'See that roof painted green on that single-storey house? That is the house of my zerrgay, my love. She lives there with her mother,' Omar said.

'Then why don't you go down and meet her? I'm sure she will be very happy to see you.'

'Are you out of your mind? The army has its brigade headquarters in Trehgam and keeps a close watch on that house. The moment they see me I will be arrested. I am not afraid of capture, I am ready to die, but I don't want to be tortured.'

We didn't stay in Trehgam village. Khaled made us climb yet another mountain. I was about to faint from exhaustion when suddenly we reached a clearing.

Under a few chinar trees was a hideout. It was a slum hut, inside the ground instead of above it. A rectangular pit had been dug, six feet deep into the ground. Two tree trunks had been planted at two corners, supporting a corrugated sheet which served as the roof. The roof had been covered with branches, leaves and shrubs, so that to a visitor coming up the mountain the foxhole would look like a little bush. There was only one entrance and exit. I descended into the foxhole and discovered there were four men already inside it. They were all young and bearded. One was bent over what seemed like a wireless set, another was reading a book, and two were cooking something. The foxhole was well equipped with provisions, a gas stove and even a pressure cooker. The mud walls were lined with blankets on all sides. There were plenty of guns and rifles lying around, together with magazines and boxes of cartridges. I reckoned the foxhole had enough ammo to take the Fidelity Bank of Texas.

'Make yourself at home, Mr Page,' Teknikal told me. 'This is where you will be staying with us for a while.'

The space inside the hideout was barely big enough to sleep six people, and there were eight of us. I'd rather have jumped barefoot into a bucketful of porcupines than stayed in that dump. In two shakes of a goat's tail, I was out of that foxhole.

'I'm sorry, folks, but I don't think this is such a good idea.'

'But there is no other place to stay,' Teknikal protested.

'I'm fixin' to go over yonder to that village. I'm sure they'll have a hotel there.'

'But the army will catch you if you go to Trehgam.'

I looked Teknikal in the eye. 'Something doesn't seem right to me. I've been thinking, why would the Indian army be after me? I've done nothing wrong.'

There was a long pause.

'You're right.' Teknikal nodded his head. 'Actually the army is not after you. It's after us.'

'Why?'

'Oh, we've done a couple of things. Like blowing up the Srinagar bus station, a market in Delhi, a temple in Akshardham, the stock exchange in Mumbai. We escaped recently from Tihar Jail.'

'Well sock my jaw! You guys are terrorists! In that case, I want nothing to do with you folks. And here I was, thinking you were my friends.'

Abu Khaled, standing by my side, laid a hand on my shoulder. 'You moron, we're not your friends. We're your kidnappers.'