Gregory David Roberts - Shantaram

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.