Gregory David Roberts - Shantaram

"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.