"Yes, you do!" he laughed. "Everybody does."

"No, I'm not doing it."

"Come on."

"No way." He climbed down, and began to prise my boots from the stirrups.

Exasperated, I climbed down and stood next to him, facing the two horses.

"Like this!" Vikram said, shaking his hips and stepping out in a movie dance routine. He began to sing, clapping his hands in time. "Come on, yaar! Put some India into it, man. Don't go all fuckin' European on me."

There are three things that no Indian man can resist: a beautiful face, a beautiful song, and an invitation to dance. I was Indian enough, in my crazy white way, to dance with Vikram, even if it was simply that I couldn't bear to see him dance alone. Shaking my head, and laughing despite myself, I joined in his routine. He guided me through the dance, adding new steps until we had the turns and walks and gestures in perfect time together.

The horses watched us with that peculiarly equine mix of white eyed timorousness and snorting condescension. Still, we danced and sang to them in that grassy wilderness of rolling hills, under a blue sky as dry as the smoke from a campfire in the desert.

And when the dance was over, Vikram spoke to my horse in Hindi, letting it snuffle at his black hat. He passed the hat to me then, and told me to wear it. I slipped it over my head and we climbed into the saddles.

Damn if it didn't work. The horses cantered off, and gently broke into a gallop. For the first and only time in my life, I almost looked like a horseman. I knew the elation, for a glorious quarter hour, of fearless synergy with the great-hearted animal.

Closely following Vikram's lead, I flew at steep inclines and conquered them to plummet over the summit, and hurtle downward into curving loops of wind and scattered shrubs. We stretched out over flatter grasslands in effortless, lunging snatches at the ground, and then Nazeer joined us with his riders at the gallop.

For a little while, for a moment, we were as wild-willed and free as the horses could teach us to be.

I was still laughing about it and chattering to Nazeer when we climbed the stairs and entered the house on the beach two hours later. I walked my excited smile through the door and saw Karla standing by the long feature-wall window and staring out at the sea. Nazeer greeted her with gruff fondness. A tiny bright smile rushed from his brow to his chin, trying to hide behind his scowl. He seized a litre bottle of water, a box of matches, and a few sheets of newspaper from the kitchen, and left the house. "He's leaving us alone," she said.

"I know. He'll make a fire, down on the beach. He does that sometimes."

I walked to her, and kissed her. It was a brief kiss, almost shy, but all the love in my heart was in it. When our lips parted, we held one another close, both of us looking at the sea. After a while we saw Nazeer, down at the beach, collecting driftwood and dry scraps for a fire. He wedged the balled up newspaper between the twigs and sticks, lit the fire, and sat down beside it, facing the sea. He wasn't cold. There was a warm breeze leaning in on a hot night. He lit the fire to show us, as night rode the waves across the setting sun, that he was still there, on the beach; that we were still alone.

"I like Nazeer," she said, her head against my throat and chest.

"He's very kind and good-hearted."

That was true. I knew that. I'd discovered it, at last, the hard way. But how had she come to know it from such a little acquaintance of him? One of the worst of my many failings, in those exile years, was my blindness to the good in people: I never knew how much goodness there was in a man or a woman until I owed them more than I could repay. People like Karla saw goodness with a glance, while I stared, and stared, and too often saw nothing past the scowl or bittering eye.

We looked down at the darkening beach and at Nazeer, sitting straight-backed beside his little fire. One of my small victories over Nazeer, when I was still weak and dependent on his strength, had been with language. I'd learned phrases in his language faster than he'd learned them in mine. My fluency had forced him to communicate with me in Urdu most of the time. When he tried to speak English, the words came out in awkward, truncated couplets, top-heavy with meanings and tottering on small feet of blunt sense. I taunted him often about the crudity of his English, exaggerating my confusion and demanding that he repeat himself, that he stumble from one cryptic phrase to another until he cursed me in Urdu and Pashto, and withdrew into silence.

Yet, in truth, his scissored English was always eloquent, and often a cadenced poetry. It was abbreviated, to be sure, but that was because the superfluous had been hacked from it, and what remained was a pure and precise language of his own-something more than slogans and less than proverbs. Against my will, and unknown to him, I'd begun to repeat some of his phrases. He said to me once, while grooming his grey mare, All horse good, all man not good. For years afterward, whenever I encountered cruelty and treachery and other kinds of selfishness, especially my own, I found myself repeating Nazeer's phrase: All horse good, all man not good. And on that night, holding Karla's heart against my own as we watched his fire dance on the sand, I remembered another of his English iterations. No love, is no life, he used to say. No love, is no life.

I held Karla as if holding her could heal me, and we didn't make love until night lit the last star in our wide window of sky. Her hands were kisses on my skin. My lips unrolled the curled leaf of her heart. She breathed in murmurs, guiding me, and I spoke rhythm to her, echoing my needs. Heat joined us, and we enclosed ourselves with touch and taste and perfumed sounds. Reflected on the glass, we were silhouettes, transparent images-mine full of fire from the beach, and hers full of stars. And at last, at the end, those clear reflections of our selves melted, merged, and fused together.

It was good, so good, but she never said she loved me.

"I love you," I whispered, the words moving from my lips to hers.

"I know you do," she replied, rewarding me and pitying me. "I know you do."

"I don't have to go on this trip, you know."

"Why are you going?"

"I'm not sure. I feel... a sense of loyalty to him, to Khaderbhai, and I still owe him, in a way. But it's more than that. It's... have you ever had the feeling-about anything at all-that your whole life is kind of a prelude, or something- like everything you've ever done has been leading you up to this one point, and you knew, somehow, that one day you'd get there?

I'm not explaining it well, but-"

"I know what you mean," she interrupted quickly. "And yes, I have felt like that. I did something, once, that was my whole life- even the years I haven't lived yet-in one second."

"What was it?"

"We were talking about you," she corrected me, avoiding my eyes.

"About you, not having to go to Afghanistan."

"Well," I smiled, "like I said, I don't have to go."

"Then don't," she said flatly, turning her head to look at the night and the sea. "Do you want me to stay?"

"I want you to be safe. And... I want you to be free."

"That's not what I meant."

"I know it's not," she sighed.

I felt the small stir of restlessness in her body, against mine, that said she wanted to move. I didn't move.

"I'll stay," I said quietly, fighting my heart, and knowing it was a mistake, "if you tell me you love me."

She closed her mouth, and pressed her lips together so tightly that they formed a white scar. Slowly, cell by cell, it seemed, her body drew back into itself all that she'd given to me a few moments before.

"Why are you doing this?" she asked.

I didn't know why. Maybe it was the cold turkey, what I'd been through in the last months, and the new life I felt I'd won.