I asked Gul Muhammed how he knew this and he said, in the way you explain something to a young child, “Everyone knows this. There would have been no point to Babur Amir’s revenge if it were not known; also, having it known shows that Babur Amir has no fear of the police or the courts. Thus he can act after this with impunity, and no peasant will ever challenge him again.”
Then I asked why the police didn’t arrest these men for the murders, and he said, “Because Babur Amir is well with the government of Zia, and the government of Zia hated Laghari Sahib so they will do nothing.” He made a gesture encompassing all of us. “But we will not do nothing, oh, no!”
He thought for a while, tapping his bearded chin. “You must stay here in my quarters and keep hidden.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because I say so. Wazir will bring you food. I leave tonight, and while I am gone you must not by seen by anyone but him. Say that you understand and will obey!”
I said this, happy to have someone strong in charge of me.
He smiled and patted my head. “Good. When you are older you will know why I do this.”
The next morning, he was gone, Wazir did not know where, except that he had packed his pistol and his Enfield rifle in the sidecar of his ancient BSA motorcycle. A week and a day later I was sleeping when Wazir slipped into my room and awakened me.
“What’s happening?”
“Quick. Get dressed. Wear your Pashtun clothes and take anything you want to take, but make sure you have blankets and warm clothes. One small bag only. We leave tonight.”
I dressed in a black shalwar kameez and put a felt Pashtun hat on my head. I packed a bag: underwear, socks, sweater, a lined rain jacket, boots. And my mother’s knife.
Gul Muhammed was waiting in the courtyard with his motorcycle. He pushed it out into the street and cranked it up, a sound shockingly loud in the night air. I climbed onto the pillion and we were off, through the warren of Anarkali and then past the Mayo Hospital and out onto Railway Road. We crossed through the deserted Landar Bazaar and by a tunnel under the tracks entered a part of the city I had never been in, an area of hulking godowns and small repair shops. Gul Muhammed threaded his motorcycle slowly through alleys where men pounded metal by the light of buzzing fluorescents and hissing gasoline lanterns; the work of Lahore never ends. At last he stopped in front of a godown. He unlocked and lifted a corrugated steel door, walked the idling motorcycle up a ramp, and closed the door behind us with a clang that echoed through the vast inner space of the warehouse. By the light of the motor-cycle’s headlamp I could see towers of crates and jute bags strapped to pallets. He steered the bike through the aisles of merchandise, the thumping motor sounding like a beating heart.
He stopped. Against the wall I could see the bound and gagged figure of a man. Gul Muhammed said, “Babur Amir is dead. I went to his haveli in Gulberg. He was well guarded. Three hundred meters from this house I found a tall tree, a cedar, that provided a view into the courtyard of the haveli. I climbed it and waited. Three days I waited, until Babur Amir came out to kick a ball around the courtyard with his sons. It was a long shot, but I didn’t miss. This animal is Salim Malik, who set the bomb.”
With that, he took his Webley out of the sidecar and handed it to me. I looked into the face of Salim Malik. It seemed to me that the resignation of death was already on it, but at the time I was not the expert I later became. I thought about what my grandfather and my sisters had looked like as they burned in the car, and what they looked like afterward, and what the smell was like. So it was not hard to cock the big pistol, set myself carefully so I wouldn’t get hit in the face by the recoil, and shoot Salim Malik in the head like a good Pashtun.
Gloria gave a small shriek. “You shot him? Oh, my God, how old were you?”
“Around nine. It was no big deal at the time. It was just like playing guns and Hindus with Wazir, which I guess is why those African militias recruit kids as soldiers. We numb up real fast and kill without thought. You want to hear the rest of this?”
She did, and I went on.
An hour later I was stuffed uncomfortably into the sidecar of the motorcycle, along with a twenty-five-kilo bag of rice, plastic sacks of dal, oil and spices and salt, the Enfield with its ammo; a jerrican of water was lashed onto the hull forward of the little windscreen: the commissary and armory of our tiny army. Wazir was on the pillion, leaning back against our luggage. He looked at me with a wild delight. We were going to war, to jihad against the Russians. Gul Muhammed had been brief in his explanation: the infidels had invaded Afghanistan three months ago and all Pashtuns were obliged to heed the call of religion and tribe. Also, it was no longer safe for any of us in Lahore. I recall asking about my mother and how she would find me in Afghanistan, and he’d said war was not the business of women, which seemed a reasonable answer at the time.
So we sped through the night city to the Grand Trunk Road, north out of Lahore toward Peshawar and the border. I was exhausted, and after a while I arranged the dal sacks like beanbag pillows, and fell asleep on them. I recall I awoke once; it must have been near dawn. We had stopped for some reason, and I looked up and into the face of a boy about my own age in a white shalwar kameez. He was attending an allnight roadside tea stall. He smiled and waved and I returned the salute. I thought he envied me my adventure.
We got to Peshawar on the third day after two hundred and fifty miles of hard pounding, half choked by dust and fumes. The city was already full of Afghan refugees from the communist takeover and the brief civil war that followed, but not as crammed as it would be in future, when the war really bit in. Gul Muhammed had an address of a cousin, Bacha Khan, who offered us the customary hospitality. He was a fat man with a long beard, the first fat Pashtun I had ever seen. At the time, as I gathered from the conversations of the men, the resistance was fragmented into half a dozen squabbling parties, each with their own armed force and ideas about the future of the country, but which were temporarily united as the Islamic Unity of Afghan Mujahideen. I obviously didn’t get the religious and political difference between the seven main mujahideen groups, but in the end it didn’t matter much. The clan elders of the Barakzai were going with the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan, so that’s where we went too.
The NIFA had a training camp outside of Peshawar in a village called Ali Shawr, so one day we packed up our stuff and went there. The original village had exploded into a vast improvised encampment on flat squishy land on either side of a trickling stream, thousands of people living a pickup kind of life in tents or shelters made of plastic tarpaulins, scrap wood, cardboard, and corrugated tin. Gul Muhammed found a shanty for us in the area occupied by members of his clan, and we slipped into the seething mass like a drop fallen into the sea. They say children are adaptable, and that was how it was for me. After a week or so, my life in the Laghari mansion was like a half-recalled dream; it was as if I had always lived here in the cold and the mud, with a dozen families, our neighbors, living out their lives in our laps, at full volume and odor.
A few days after we arrived, Gul Muhammed made his contacts with the NIFA command and went off to train as a guerrilla. We two boys, to our immense disappointment, discovered that we were to be sent to school at the village madrasa. I went along willingly enough, because they fed you a meal at the school, but Wazir rebelled, the first time I ever saw him defy his father, and he was savagely beaten for it, with an actual camel whip. Wazir was dying to go and kill Russians for God, although he had never seemed to be particularly religious up until then.