Gregory David Roberts - Shantaram

I read books every day from a bizarre, eclectic collection supplied to me by Ayub Khan, a Pakistani, and the one member of our group who'd been born in Quetta. Because it was judged too dangerous for me to leave our safe-house compound at a horse ranch on the outskirts of the city, Ayub brought me books from the central library. The library was stocked with obscure and fascinating English-language books that were an inheritance from the days of the British Raj. The name of the city, Quetta, was derived from the Pashto word kwatta, meaning fort. Its proximity to the Chaman Pass route to Afghanistan, and the Bolan Pass route to India, ensured Quetta's military and economic significance for millennia. The British first occupied the old fort in 1840, but were forced to abandon it after sickness in the troops and ferocious resistance from the Afghans had withered the colonial force. It was reoccupied in 1876, and firmly established as the premier British possession in that region of the North West Frontier of India. The Imperial Staff College for military officers in British India was established there, and a thriving, prosperous market-centre grew up in the spectacular, natural amphitheatre of the surrounding mountains. A cataclysmic earthquake on the last day of May in 1935 destroyed most of the city and killed twenty thousand people, but Quetta was rebuilt, and the clean, wide boulevards and pleasant weather made it one of the most popular holiday resorts in northern Pakistan.

For me, restricted then to the compound, the chief attraction of the city was the random selection of books that Ayub brought to me. Every few days he appeared at my door, grinning hopefully and handing the bundle of books to me as if they were treasures from an archaeological dig.

And so it was that I rode during the day, acclimatising myself to the thinner air above five thousand feet, and at night read the diaries and journals of long-dead explorers, extinct editions of Greek classics, eccentrically annotated volumes of Shakespeare, and a dizzyingly passionate terza rima translation of Dante's The Divine Comedy.

"Some of the men think you are a scholar of the holy works,"

Abdel Khader Khan said to me from the doorway of my room one night, after we'd been a month in Quetta. I closed the book that I was reading and stood to greet him at once. He took my hand and enclosed it within both of his own, muttering a whispered prayer of blessing. When he accepted the chair that I offered him, I sat down on a stool an arm's reach away. He had a parcel wrapped in cream chamois leather under his arm. He placed it on my bed and settled back comfortably.

"Reading is still something mysterious, in the country of my birth, and the cause of some fear and much superstition," Khader said wearily, rubbing a hand over his tired, brown face. "Only four men in ten can read at all, and half that number again for women."

"Where did you learn... everything you've learned?" I asked him.

"Where did you learn to speak English so well, for example?"

"I was tutored by a very fine English gentleman," he laughed softly, brightening with the recollection. "Just as my little Tariq was tutored by you."

I took two beedies from a pack, lit them in my hand with the play of a match, and handed one to him.

"My father was the leader of his clan," Khader continued. "He was a stern man, but he was also a just man and a wise man. In Afghanistan men become leaders by merit-they are good speakers, wise managers of money, and brave, when fighting is necessary.

There is no inherited right to be a leader, and a leader's son who has no wisdom or courage or skill at speaking to the people will be passed over for another man with better skills. My father was very anxious for me to succeed him and to continue his life work, which was to raise his people from ignorance, and to ensure their future well-being. A wandering Sufi mystic, an old saint who visited our area when I was born, had told my father that I would grow up to become a shining star in the history of my people. My father hoped for this with all his heart but, unfortunately, I showed none of a leader's skills, and no interest in attaining them. I was, in short, a bitter disappointment to him. He sent me to my uncle, here in Quetta.

And my uncle, who was a prosperous merchant then, put me in the care of an Englishman, who became my tutor."

"How old were you?"

"I was ten years old when I left Kandahar, and I spent five years as a student of Mr. Ian Donald Mackenzie Esquire."

"You must've been a good student," I suggested.

"Perhaps," he mused in reply. "I think, really, that Mackenzie Esquire was a very good teacher. I have heard, in the years since I left him, that the people of Scotland are known for their sour and stern ways. Some people have told me that the people of Scotland are pessimists, who prefer to walk on the dark side of every sunny street. I think that if this is in some way true, it does not also tell us that the people of Scotland find this dark side of things to be very, very funny. My Mackenzie Esquire was a man who laughed in his eyes, even when he was most stern with me.

Every time that I think of him, I remember the laughter in his eyes. And he loved it in Quetta. He loved the mountains, and the cold air in winter. His thick, strong legs were built for climbing mountain paths, and he roamed these hills every week, often with me alone for company. He was a happy man who knew how to laugh, and he was a great teacher."

"What happened when he finished teaching you?" I asked. "Did you return to Kandahar?"

"I did, but it was not the joyful return that my father hoped for. You see, on the day after my dear Mackenzie Esquire left Quetta, I killed a man, in the bazaar, outside my uncle's warehouse."

"When you were fifteen?"

"Yes. When I was fifteen years old I killed a man, for the first time."

He lapsed into silence, and I pondered the weight and measure of that phrase... for the first time...

"It was a cause that was really no cause, a trick of fate, a fight that grew out of nothing at all. The man was beating a child. It was his own child, and I should not have interfered.

But it was a very cruel beating, and I could not bear to watch it. Filled with the importance of being the son of a village leader, and being the nephew of one of Quetta's most prosperous merchants, I commanded the man to stop beating the child. He took offence, of course, and there was an argument. The argument became a fight. And then he was dead, stabbed in the chest with his own dagger-the dagger he had tried to use on me."

"It was self-defence."

"Yes. There were many witnesses. It was in the main street of the bazaar. My uncle, who had much influence at that time, spoke for me with all the authorities, and finally arranged for me to return to Kandahar. Unfortunately, the family of the man I had killed refused to accept a blood-money payment from my uncle, and they sent two men to Kandahar after me. I received a warning from my uncle, and I struck first. I killed both men by shooting them with my father's old long rifle."

He was silent again for a while, staring at a point on the floor between our feet. I could hear music, distant and muffled, coming from the other side of the compound. There were many rooms radiating outward from a central courtyard that was larger but less grand than that in Khader's Bombay home. From some of the nearer rooms I could hear the low, water-bubble murmur of conversation and the tapping drum-roll of an occasional laugh.

From the room next door, Khaled Ansari's room, I heard the unmistakable clikka-k'chuck of a Kalashnikov AK-74 assault rifle being cocked and cold-fired after cleaning.

"The blood feud that began with those killings-and with their attempt to kill me-destroyed my family and theirs," Khader said flatly, resuming his story. His expression was sombre, and it seemed as if the spirit was draining invisibly from his downcast eyes as he spoke. "One on our side, two on theirs. Two on our side, one on theirs. My father tried many times to find a way to end the feud, but it was impossible. It was a demon that moved from man to man, and made each man mad with the love of killing.