TWO

We spent a month in Quetta-a long month of waiting with the frustration of false starts. The delay was caused by a mujaheddin commander named Asmatullah Achakzai Muslim. He was the leader of the Achakzai people in the region of Kandahar, which was our ultimate destination. The Achakzai were a clan of sheep and goat herders who'd originally been members of the dominant Durrani clan. In 1750, the founder of modern Afghanistan, Ahmed Shah Abdali, divided the Achakzai from the Durrani and established them as a clan in their own right. That was in accordance with Afghan tradition, which allowed a sub-clan to be separated from its parent clan when it reached sufficient size or strength. It was also an admission by the wily warrior and nation-builder Ahmed Shah that the Achakzai were a force to be reckoned with and appeased. Through two centuries the Achakzai increased their status and their power. They earned a well-deserved reputation as fierce fighters, and every man in the clan could be counted on to follow his leader without question. During the early years of the war against the Russians, Asmatullah Achakzai Muslim formed his men into a well-armed, highly disciplined militia. In their region they became the spearhead of the independence struggle: the jihad to drive out the Soviet invaders.

Toward the end of 1985, as we prepared ourselves in Quetta for the crossing into Afghanistan, Asmatullah began to vacillate in his commitment to the war. So much depended on his militia that when he pulled his men back from active service, and began secret peace talks with the Russians and their Afghan puppet government in Kabul, the entire war of resistance in the Kandahar region collapsed. Other mujaheddin units not under Asmatullah's control, such as Khader's men in the mountains north of the city, remained in their positions; but they were isolated, and every supply route to them was perilously vulnerable to Russian attack. The uncertainty forced us to wait until Asmatullah decided whether to continue the jihad or switch sides and support the Russians. No-one could predict which way he would jump.

Although we were all restive and agitated with the wait-as the days limped into weeks, it seemed interminable-I used the time well. I practised phrases in Farsi, Urdu, and Pashto, and even picked up a few words in some Tajik and Uzbek dialects. I rode horses every day. While I never managed to eliminate my clownish, arm-and-leg-flapping gestures when I made the animals stop or go or turn in a desired direction, I sometimes did succeed in dismounting them by climbing down rather than being hurled to the ground on my back.

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."