Minutes later I left him with the bike near the entrance to Abdul Ghani’s mansion. The watchman at the street door recognised me, and snapped his hand up in a theatrical salute. I put a twenty-rupee note in his other hand as he opened the door, and I stepped into the cool, shadowed foyer to be greeted by two servants. They knew me well, and led me upstairs with wide, friendly smiles and a little mime-show of comments on the length of my hair and the weight I’d lost. One of the men knocked on the door of Abdul Ghani’s large study, and waited with his ear to the door.
‘
The servant entered, closing the door behind him, and returned a few moments later. He wagged his head at me and opened the door wide. I walked inside, and the door closed. Brilliant sunshine blazed at the high, arched windows. Shadows reached in spikes and claws across the polished floor. Abdul was sitting in a wing chair that faced the window, and only his plump hands were visible, steepled together like sausages in a butcher’s window.
‘So it’s true.’
‘What’s true?’ I asked, walking around the chair to look at him. I was shocked to see how the months, the nine months since I’d seen him, had aged Khader’s old friend. The thick hair was grey to white, and his eyebrows were frosted with silver. The fine nose was pinched by deep lines that swept past the curve of his mouth to a sagging jaw. His lips, once the most sumptuously sensual I’d seen in Bombay, were as split and cracked as Nazeer’s had been in the snow mountains. The pouches beneath his eyes drooped past the peak of his cheekbones and reminded me, with a shiver, of those that had dragged down the eyes of the madman Habib. And the eyes-the laughing, golden, amber eyes-were dull, and drained of the soaring joys and vain deceits that once had shone in his passionate life.
‘You are here,’ he replied in the familiar Oxford accent, without looking at me. And
‘Abdul, I’m sorry-he’s dead.’ I answered at once. ‘He… he was killed by the Russians. He was trying to reach his village, on the way back to Chaman, to deliver some horses.’
Abdul clutched at his chest and sobbed like a child, mewling and moaning incoherently as the tears rolled fat and freely from his large eyes. After a few moments he recovered, and looked up at me.
‘Who survived with you?’ he asked, his mouth agape.
‘Nazeer… and Mahmoud. And a boy named Ala-ud-Din. Only four of us.’
‘Not Khaled? Where is Khaled?’
‘He… he went out into the snow on the last night, and he never came back. The men said they heard shooting, later, from a long way off. I don’t know if it was Khaled they were shooting at. I… I don’t know what happened to him.’
‘Then it will be Nazeer…’ he muttered.
The sobbing spilled over again, and he plunged his face into his fleshy hands. I watched him uncomfortably, not knowing what to do or say. Since the moment that I’d cradled Khader’s body in my arms on the snowy slope of the mountain, I’d refused to face the fact of his death. And I was still angry with Khader Khan. So long as I held that anger before me like a shield, loving Khader and grieving for him were deep and distant wonders of my heart. So long as I was angry, I could fight off the tears and miserable longing that made Ghani so wretched. So long as I was angry, I could concentrate on the job at hand-information about Krishna, Villu, and the passport workshop. I was on the point of asking him about them when he spoke again.
‘Do you know what it cost us-apart from his… his unique life-Khader’s hero curse? Millions. It cost us millions to fight his war. We’ve been supporting it, in one way and another, for years. You might think we could afford it. The sum is not so great, after all. But you’re wrong. There is no organisation that can support such an insane hero curse as Khader’s. And I couldn’t change his mind. I couldn’t save him. The money didn’t mean anything to him, don’t you see? You can’t reason with a man who has no sense of money and its… its value. It’s the one thing all civilised men have in common, don’t you agree? If money doesn’t mean anything, there is no civilisation. There is nothing.’
He trailed off into indecipherable mumbles. Tears rolled into the little rivers they found on his cheeks, and dropped through the yellow light into his lap.
‘Abdulbhai,’ I said, after a time.
‘What? When? Is it
‘Abdulbhai, I want to know where you moved the workshop. Where are Krishna and Villu? I went to the old workshop, but there’s no-one there. I need some work on my book. I need to know where you moved to.’
The fear shrank to a pinpoint in his eyes, and they glittered with it. His mouth swelled in something like the old voluptuary smile, and he looked into my eyes with avid, hungering concentration.
