"Well, he laughed out loud, and he asked me where I learned to speak English so well, and when I told him, and when I told him my story, he gave me a job right away. Then he showed me his smashed teeth, opening his mouth wide to point out the gold replacements. Looking into Chota Gulab's mouth was a real honour amongst his men, and some of his closest goondas were very jealous that I got such an intimate tour of the famous mouth on my very first meeting with him. Gulab liked me, and he became a kind of father to me in Bombay, but I had enemies around me from the first time that I shook his hand.

"I went to work as a soldier, fighting with my fists and with swords and cleavers and hammers to enforce Chota Gulab's rule in the area. Those were bad days, before the council system, and there was fighting every day and night. After a while, one of his men took a special dislike to me. Resentful of my close relationship with Gulabji, he found a reason to pick a fight with me. So I killed him. And when his best friend attacked me, I killed him, too. And then I killed a man for Chota Gulab. And I killed again. And again."

He fell silent, staring ahead at the floor where it met the mud brick wall. After a time, he spoke.

"And again," he said.

He repeated the phrase into a silence that was thickening around us and seeming to press in upon my burning eyes.

"And again."

I watched him wade through the past, his eyes blazing recollections, and then he shook himself back into the moment.

"It is late. Here, I want to give you a gift."

He opened the chamois-leather parcel to reveal a pistol in a side holster, several magazines, a box of ammunition, and a metal box.

Lifting back the lid of the metal box, he displayed a cleaning kit of oil, graphite powder, tiny files, brushes, and a new, short pull-through cord.

"This is a Stechkin APS pistol," he said, taking up the weapon and removing its magazine. He checked to ensure that there was no round in the firing chamber, and handed the pistol to me. "It is Russian. You will find plenty of ammunition on the dead Russians, if you have to fight them. It is a nine-millimetre-calibre weapon, with a magazine of twenty rounds. You can fire it as a single shot, or set it on automatic. It is not the best gun in the world, but it is reliable, and the only light weapon with more bullets in it, where we are going, is a Kalashnikov. I want you to wear it, clearly displayed at all times from now on. You eat with it, you sleep with it, and when you wash yourself, you have it within your reach. I want everyone who is with us, and everyone who sees us, to know that you have it. Do you understand?" "Yes," I answered, staring at the gun in my hands.

"I told you that there is a price on the head of every foreigner who helps the mujaheddin. I want it to be so, that someone who might think of this reward, and of claiming it with your head, will also think of the Stechkin at your side. Do you know how to clean an automatic pistol?"

"No."

"Very well. I will show you how it is done. Then you must try to sleep. We leave for Afghanistan at five, before dawn, tomorrow morning. The waiting is over. The time has come."

Khaderbhai showed me how to clean the Stechkin. It was more complicated than I'd imagined, and it took the best part of an hour for him to walk me through the instructions for its complete service, repair, and handling protocols. It was a thrilling hour, and men and women of violence will know what I mean when I say that I was drunk with the pleasure of it. I confess with no little shame that I enjoyed that hour with Khader, learning how to use and clean the Stechkin automatic pistol, more than the hundreds of hours that I'd spent with him while learning his philosophy. And I never felt closer to him than I did that night as we hunched over my blanket, stripping and reassembling the killing weapon.

When he left me, I turned out the light and lay back on my cot, but I couldn't sleep. My mind was caffeine-alert in the darkness.

At first I thought about the stories Khader had told me. I moved through that different time in the city I'd come to know so well.

I imagined the Khan as a young man, fit and dangerous and fighting for Chota Gulab, the gangster boss with a little rose scar on his cheek. I knew other parts of Khader's story-I'd heard them from some of the goondas who worked for him in Bombay.

They'd told me how Khaderbhai had seized control of Gulab's little empire when the scarred one was assassinated outside one of his cinemas. They'd described the gang wars that had erupted across the city, and they'd talked of Khader's courage, and his ruthlessness in crushing his enemies. I knew, as well, that Khaderbhai was one of the founders of the council system, which had brought peace to the city by dividing territories and spoils between the surviving gangs.

I wondered, as I lay in a darkness scented with the polished floor-and-raw-linen odours of the gun and the cleaning oil, why Khaderbhai was going to war. He didn't have to go-there were a hundred more like me, prepared to die for him in his place. I remembered his strangely radiant smile when he'd told me about his first meeting with Chota Gulab.

I recalled how quick and youthful his hands had been when he'd shown me how to clean and use the gun. And it occurred to me that he might've been with us, risking his life, simply because he was hungry for the wilder days of his youth. The thought worried me because I was sure that at least some small part of it was true.

But that other motive-that he'd judged the time right to end his exile, and to visit his home and family-worried me more. I couldn't forget what he'd told me. The blood feud that had killed so many and driven him from his home had only ended with his promise, to his mother, never to return.

After a while my thoughts drifted, and I found myself reliving, moment for moment, the long night before my escape from prison.

That, too, was a night without sleep. That, too, was a night of wheeling fears and exhilaration and dread. And just as I had on that night years before, I rose from bed before the first stir and shuffle of the morning, and prepared myself in the dark.

Soon after dawn, we took the train to Chaman Pass. There were twelve from our group on the train, but none of us spoke through the several hours of the journey. Nazeer sat with me, and we were alone for much of the trip, but still he held his stony silence.

With my pale eyes concealed behind dark sunglasses, I stared through the window and tried to lose myself in the spectacular view.

The train ride from Quetta to Chaman was one of the glories of the illustrious sub-continental railway system. The tracks wound through deep gorges and crossed riverscapes of astounding beauty.

I found myself repeating, as if they were lines of poetry, the very names of the towns through which it passed. From Kuchlaagh to Bostaan, and the small river crossing at yaaru Kaarez, the train climbed to Shaadizai. At Gulistan there was another climb, with a sweeping curve that followed the ancient dry lake at Qila Abdullah. And the jewel in the twin steel-bands of that crown, of course, was the Khojak Tunnel. Built by the British over several years at the end of the nineteenth century, it smashed its way through four kilometres of solid rock, and was the longest in the sub-continent.

At Khaan Kili the train negotiated a series of sharp curves, and at the last remote regional stop before Chaman we climbed down with a few dusty locals and were met by a covered truck. When the area was deserted we climbed onto the extravagantly decorated truck, and followed the main road toward Chaman. Before we reached the town, however, we took a side road that seemed to end in a deserted track, with a stand of trees and several scrubby pastures, about thirty kilometres north of the main highway and the Chaman Pass.