"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.

I tried to leave my home, because I was the cause of the feud, but my father refused to let me leave, and I could not oppose him. The feud went on for years, and the killing went on for years. I lost my two brothers, and both of my uncles, my father's brothers. When my own father was badly wounded in an attack, and unable to stop me, I told my family to spread the rumour that I had been killed. I left my family home. The blood feud ended some time after that, and peace was restored between the two families.

But I was dead to my family, because I had sworn an oath to my mother that I would never return."

The breeze through the metal-framed window that had been cool in the earlier evening was suddenly cold. I stood to close the window, and then poured a glass of water from the clay pitcher on my nightstand. Khader accepted the glass, whispered a prayer, and drank the water. He handed me the glass when he was finished. I poured water into the same glass and sat down on the stool to sip at my drink. I said nothing, afraid that, if I asked the wrong question or made the wrong comment, he would stop talking altogether and leave the room. He was calm, and he seemed to be completely relaxed, but the brilliant, laughing gleam was missing from his eyes. It was also disturbingly out of character for him to be so expansive about his own life. He'd talked to me for long hours about the Koran or the life of the Prophet Mohammed or the scientific, rational basis for his moral philosophy, but I'd never known him to tell me or anyone else so much about himself. In the lengthening silence I looked at the lean, sinewed face and I controlled even the sound of my breathing, lest it disturb him.

We were both dressed in the standard Afghan costume of a long, loose shirt and wide-waisted pants. His clothes were a light, faded green and mine were pale blue-white. We both wore leather sandals as house slippers. Although I was heavier and deeper in the chest than Khaderbhai, we were roughly the same height and build across the shoulders. His short hair and beard were white silver, and my short hair was white-blonde. My skin was tanned to a shade resembling his natural, almond-shell brown. If it wasn't for the sky in my blue-grey eyes and the alluvial gold in his, we might've been taken for father and son.

"How did you get from Kandahar to the Bombay mafia?" I asked him at last, when I feared that the lengthening silence, more than my questions, might make him leave.

He turned to face me. His smile was radiant: a new, gentle, artless smile that had never moved his face before in any conversation with me.

"When I ran away from my home in Kandahar, I made a journey across Pakistan and India to Bombay. Like a million others, like millions of others, I hoped to make my fortune in the city of the Hindi picture heroes. At first, I lived in a slum-like the one that I own now, near the World Trade Centre. I practised the Hindi language every day, and I learned quickly. After a while, I observed that men could make money buying tickets for popular pictures at the cinemas and then selling them for a profit when the cinemas put up the House Full signs. I decided to use the little money I'd saved to buy tickets for the most popular Hindi picture in Bombay. Then I stood outside the cinema, and when the House Full signs went up I sold my tickets for a good profit."

"Scalping," I said. "We call it ticket scalping. It's big business-black-market business-at the most popular football matches in my country."

"Yes. And I made an excellent profit in the first week of my work. I already began to have dreams of moving to a fine apartment and wearing the best clothes, perhaps even buying a car. Then, one night, I was standing outside the cinema with my tickets when two very big men came to me, showed me their weapons - they had a sword and a meat chopper-and demanded that I go with them."

"Local goondas," I laughed.

"Goondas," he repeated, laughing with me. For those of us who knew him as lord Abdel Khader Khan, the don, the ruler of his kingdom of crime in Bombay, it was hilarious to picture him as a shame-faced eighteen-year-old in the custody of two street thugs.

"They took me to see Chota Gulab, the Little Rose. He had that name for the mark on his cheek made by a bullet that had passed through his face, breaking most of his teeth, and leaving a scar that was pinched like a rose. He was the boss of that whole area in those days, and before he had me beaten to death, as an example to others he wanted to take a look at the impudent fellow who had trespassed on his area.

"He was furious. `What are you doing, selling tickets in my area?` he asked me, speaking a mix of Hindi and English. It was a poor English, but he wanted to intimidate me with it, as if he was a judge in a court of law. `Do you know how many men died, how many men I had to _kill, how many good men I _lost, to take control of the black-market tickets at all the cinemas in this area?`

"I was terrified, I admit it to you, and I thought that my life was but a few minutes' worth. So I threw away my caution, and I spoke boldly. `Now you will have to eliminate one more nuisance, Gulabji,` I told him, speaking an English that was far superior to his, `because I have no other way of making money, and I have no family, and I have nothing to lose. Unless, of course, you have some decent job of work that a loyal and resourceful young man can do for you.`