"Well, just at the point in my studies of philosophy and religion when I came to need the special knowledge of a scientist, one appeared for me. I knew that there were many answers for me in the science of life and stars and chemistry. But, unfortunately, these were not the things that my dear Mackenzie Esquire taught to me, except in the most elementary fashion. Then I met a physicist, a man who was working at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Bombay. He was a very good man, but he had a weakness for gambling at that time. He found himself in big trouble. He lost a lot of money that was not his to lose. He was gambling at one of the clubs owned by a man I knew well-a man who worked for me, if I needed it. And there was more trouble. The scientist was involved with a woman-he fell in love with her, and he did stupid things for the sake of this love, and so there were many dangers. When he came to me, I solved the problems of this scientist, and kept all the matters strictly between us. No-one else ever knew the details of his indiscretions, or of my involvement in solving them. And, in exchange for this, the man has been teaching me ever since that day. His name is Wolfgang Persis, and I have arranged it that you will meet him, if you wish, soon after we return."
"How long has he been teaching you?"
"We have been studying together once every week for the past seven years."
"Jesus!" I gasped, thinking, with a little curl of mean delight, that wise and mighty Khader hacked out his pound of flesh when it suited him. In another heartbeat I was ashamed of the thought: I loved Khader Khan enough to follow him into a war. Wasn't it possible that the scientist loved him just as well? And in thinking that, I knew I was jealous of the man, the scientist I didn't know and probably would never meet. Jealousy, like the flawed love that bears it, has no respect for time or space or wisely reasoned argument. Jealousy can raise the dead with a single, spiteful taunt, or hate a perfect stranger for nothing more than the sound of his name.
"You are asking about life," Khader said gently, changing tack, "because you are thinking about death. And you are thinking about the taking of a life, if it happens that you must shoot a man. Am I right in this?"
"Yeah," I muttered. He was right, but the killing that preoccupied me wasn't in Afghanistan. The life I wanted to take was perched on a throne, in a secret room in a grotesque brothel called The Palace, in Bombay. Madame Zhou.
"Remember," Khader said insistently, resting his hand on my forearm to emphasise his words. "Sometimes it is necessary to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. The important thing is to be sure that our reasons are right, and that we admit the wrong- that we do not lie to ourselves, and convince ourselves that what we do is right."
And later, as the wedding whirled and clamoured to the last wail of its rejoicing, and as we rejoined our men and scrambled, clattered, and strained our way across new mountains, I tried to unwind the wreath of thorns that Khader had coiled around my heart with his words. The wrong thing for the right reasons...
Once before he'd tormented me with that phrase. I chewed at it, in my mind, as a bear will chew at a leather strap that binds it by the leg. In my life, the wrong things were almost always done for the wrong reasons. Even the right things that I did were too often goaded by the wrong reasons.
A gloomy mood enwrapped me. It was a sullen, doubting temper that I couldn't shake off, and as we rode into the winter I thought often of Anand Rao, my neighbour from the slum. I remembered Anand's face smiling at me through the metal grille of the visitor's room at Arthur Road Prison: that gentle, handsome face, so serene, and softened with the peace that had suffused his heart. He'd done the wrong thing for the right reasons, as he saw it. He'd calmly accepted the punishment that he'd earned, as he said to me, as if it was a privilege or a right. And at last, after too many thinking days and nights, I cursed Anand. I cursed him to drive him from my mind because a voice kept telling me-my own voice, or maybe it was my father's-that I would never know that peace.
I would never come to that Eden in the soul, where acceptance of punishment and acknowledgement of wrong and right roll away the troubles that lodge like stones in the barren field of an exiled heart.
Moving north again at night, we climbed and crossed the narrow Kussa Pass in the Hada Mountains. The journey of thirty crow kilometres was closer to one hundred and fifty climbing-and descending-kilometres for us. Then, exposed to the wide sky, we travelled over flatter land for almost fifty kilometres to cross the Arghastan River and its tributaries three times before we reached the foothills of the Shahbad Pass. And there, with my mind still choked on its rights and wrongs, we were fired on for the first time.
