Читать книгу Kandahar Cockney: A Tale of Two Worlds - James Fergusson - Страница 8

Ihad told Mir in Islamabad that I would help him into the country but that once he was here he would be on his own, barring emergencies. That was our deal – and as far as I was concerned the sooner he started taking responsibility for his new life in the West, the better.

Even so, I grew anxious as the date of his flight drew nearer, because the question of where he would stay in London had not been resolved in advance. In truth I had no idea what I would do if he simply turned up and threw himself on my mercy. I might have been justified in holding him to the strict terms of the deal and turning him away, but we both knew I wouldn’t do that, not now. I could end up having to put him up, and it wasn’t hard to envisage a night on my sofa turning into two nights, three nights, weeks. After all, he had made a corner of the Live News offices in Islamabad his home for well over a month. I certainly didn’t want that happening to me. My flat was simply too small.

He had told me that he would find somewhere all right. I had asked him about it several times but he always gave the same vague answer, that he thought he knew some Afghans who would help him, no problem. So with two days to go I was relieved to hear via the Live News office telephone that he would be staying with Hamid, a family friend from his hometown of Mazar-i-Sharif who was already resident here. What was more, he did not want me to meet him at the airport because Hamid would be collecting him himself. His plane would not be landing until midnight, he said, and since it was far from certain how long it would take him to clear immigration I should stay away because he did not wish to inconvenience me. Although this was precisely the outcome I had connived at, I couldn’t help feeling a little cheated. Mir’s first landfall in the West would have been worth witnessing. I imagined him shambling through the sliding doors at the end of the customs and excise chicane, wide-eyed at the size of the place, the high-tech travelators, the carpeted hush, the adverts for booze, the lights and the clean steel lines and the unequivocal Western-ness of Heathrow Airport. His expression would have been something to see. But I made myself be glad instead that he had responded as intended to my arm’s-length attitude, that he seemed after all to have understood the terms and spirit of our agreement. On the day of his flight therefore I merely made sure he had my telephone number and instructed him to ring immediately once he had arrived at Hamid’s, whatever the time of night.

– No problem, he said, a little too cheerily for my liking.

– And you know what to do? You’re a tourist until they ask for your passport. Then you ask for political asylum.

– Ask for passport – then say, ‘political asylum’. I understand.

I enunciated slowly, and not just because of the crackling on the line to Islamabad, nor even out of consideration for his imperfect English. It was mainly nervousness at all the things that could still go wrong. There could be a spot check by immigration officials at Islamabad airport, for instance. Such things had happened before, and there was a serious risk that his story would not hold up under close interrogation. I thought again of my letter of sponsorship, carefully designed to persuade the British High Commission in Islamabad to grant him a tourist visa. This document had gone through many drafts, but thinking back it still struck me as clunkingly bogus.

Dear Mirwais. I am very much looking forward to seeing you again on your short holiday to London. I can’t wait to show you Big Ben, Tower Bridge and the other sights you wanted to see. Our time will be short but I’m sure we will manage to fit them all in. Also, I have many journalist friends here who are anxious to meet you. Some of them could be very helpful to you in your career as a media worker when you return to Afghanistan…

– You will be unobtrusive, won’t you?

– Unobwhat?

– Unobtrusive. Never mind. Just act natural – try to look like everyone else, OK?

I had already told Mir to go straight to his seat when he boarded the plane, to talk to no one, to stay put throughout the flight. Now I told him again.

– No problem, no problem, he sang.

It was hard to tell if he had really understood. He had an Afghan’s happy-go-lucky attitude to life, a shoulder-shrugging approach born of the certainty that nothing on this earth happens without God’s say-so. I had seen this doctrine of insha’allah in action many times in his homeland. It caused pedestrians to stroll out into fast-moving traffic without a glance to either side; it led soldiers to ignore totally the warning whistle of an incoming shell. This Muslim mindset had its philosophical charms, but these would probably be lost on the average Heathrow immigration officer. For that reason I had gone over the drill with Mir three or four times, including in writing. The timing was vital. If he claimed asylum too early he could quickly find himself on a plane back to Pakistan; too late, and the entire long process of immigration could be declared invalid. It had to be done at British passport control and there would probably be no second opportunity. We went through other last-minute arrangements. Did he have enough money? Phone numbers? How much had he packed? Too many belongings could cause suspicion in Islamabad. But he assured me that his entire worldly possessions would fit into a single bag, and eventually I could think of nothing more to say. The rest was down to him – and no doubt to Allah. I wished him a good trip and told him once again to call me when he arrived. He promised he would.

– And, James? he said finally.

– Yes, Mir?

– I am werry excited.

– Good, I said. We’ll talk when you get here.

– Insha’allah, he replied.

But he didn’t call that evening, causing me to spend a good part of the night wondering what had gone wrong. Perhaps it had been a mistake after all to allow someone else to collect him. I had stupidly taken no telephone number or address for Hamid. Mir was therefore in a position simply to melt into the immigrant underworld forever if he chose, because there would be no practical means of tracing him. And what then? What of the legal responsibility I bore as his official sponsor? How far did that extend? It would be a simple matter for Mir to give the officials at Heathrow a false address. Could they hold me to account if that happened? Yet I knew I was right to have taken this risk, and my conscience was clear.

By working as an interpreter-fixer for me and other foreign journalists, Mir’s and indeed his family’s prospects for a normal life in Mazar had been wrecked. I thought of the Hazara Shi’ites who had come banging on the doors of his family home one night, wild mountain men who reeked of dirt and blood, grenades dangling from their long, matted hair. Mir had exited through a back window with a small prepacked suitcase and kept on running, days and nights of dodging patrols and tramping the secret goat paths of the Hindu Kush, a heroic journey of danger and hardship that had ended in virtual destitution on an Islamabad office sofa. There was no question: we, the Western press collectively, owed him a second chance. I had talked over the decision to help him with friends of mine, fellow journalists as well as expatriate aid workers with years of experience in Afghanistan. They mostly thought I was mad. They said I didn’t know what I was letting myself in for, and nor did he – the immigrant life would be nothing like his imagination. The streets of London were not paved with gold. Far from disappearing into the underworld, they predicted, Mir would pester me forever. Alone in the West he would fade, not thrive, and sooner or later he would return to his only certain source of financial and psychological support: me. These expats were not cynics. But they said I needed to understand that an Afghan refugee was for life, not just for Christmas. They understood what it meant to give a poor Third Worlder a leg-up. After all, that was what they did for a living. At the same time they were surrounded by so much suffering in their daily work that they had developed a tough skin, a means of separating themselves from the poor they sought to help. The best and most humane among them would no doubt like to help everyone they met. But the obvious impossibility of this, the ethical difficulty of picking out some for special treatment while ignoring others, meant that they had a blanket rule: arm’s length for all of them, and no exceptions. Otherwise there would be moral as well as organisational chaos.

Perhaps it was once possible to put this dilemma aside, to box it off as one of the hazards of working in the Third World, but in these post-9/11 days it is a harder issue to ignore. Like it or not, the armies of the West have reengaged in Central Asia. They are fighting in our name, and our taxes are paying for them. For them at least, the dilemma is inescapable. In the spring of 2002 the BBC made a documentary about the tiny force of British paratroopers charged with keeping the peace in Kabul, the West’s advance guard. They were shown patrolling in full battle order through neighbourhoods where buildings had been reduced to broken stumps by shellfire a decade before, their trademark red berets bobbing in the market crowds. We saw them struggling to comprehend the vengeful motives of duplicitous warlords, eating the same rations day after day, manning their Spartan barracks on full alert by night. At one point the interviewer asked a lieutenant what the most difficult thing about his mission was. The officer’s name was Oz Mohammed, which must have titillated the documentary’s producers, and he thought hard before answering. Was it the danger? The discomfort? The frustrations of working in an alien language and culture?

– No, he said. The most difficult thing is when a kid comes up and asks for something. You can’t respond, obviously, because then you’d have to give all of them something. That’s the hardest thing. Because these people have got absolutely nothing at all.

A year before Mir’s arrival at Heathrow I touched down in Mazar-i-Sharif in a tiny Red Cross plane armed with $1000 in cash, a two-thirds-grown beard and a scrappy map showing how to get to the Oxfam compound from the airport. The plane made the trip from Peshawar two or three times a week, weather permitting, and at that time was the only practical means of reaching northern Afghanistan from the outside; yet there were no other passengers. The other seats were heaped with packages and supplies for the offices of the various international aid agencies scattered around the town. It was a glorious spring morning, so bright that I had to narrow my eyes to look out through the little portholes. We flew low over the snowy tops of sun-blitzed mountain peaks, jagged and cruel-looking. I’d read somewhere that Hindu Kush means Indian Killer: it was not a place to crash. After an hour or so we cleared the mountain range and flew high over rolling hills and then, in a wide dusty plain, the dun-coloured blocks of Mazar itself. The buildings sprawled outwards from the famous shrine in the city’s very centre, the lustrous cobalt of its domes and mosaic-studded flanks glittering like an eye.

I had chosen Mazar as my entry point into Afghanistan because it was the only major city still unconquered by the Taliban. Over the winter it had become an important focus of resistance, the gathering place for the various factions of the new opposition Northern Alliance. This unlikely grouping of Uzbeks, Tajiks, Hazara Shi’ites and others had spent an uneasy winter preparing for the spring fighting season. The previous summer the Taliban had seemed unstoppable. In September they had taken Jalalabad and then Kabul, where they dragged the Western-backed President Mohammed Najibullah from his UN safe-house and hanged him in the street. Massoud and Rabbani, the Tajik leaders who had been holding the capital, fled northwards in disarray. Only the onset of winter, when the stupefying cold and snowbound passes make fighting in Afghanistan impractical, saved the resistance from being routed. But now the snows were melting and the unconquered part of the country was holding its breath for what would happen next.

There was no doubt that the Taliban wanted Mazar badly. The city was the key to control of the northern regions where most of the country’s agriculture and almost all of its gas and mineral reserves were located. Moreover the new regime craved international recognition, which had so far been withheld on the grounds that it did not control all of the country. Conquest of Mazar therefore represented the ultimate prize of legitimacy to power. The Afghans called Mazar a city. In reality it was no more than a large town, although its population was greatly swollen now by refugees from the war and by an influx of fighting men from all over the country. This was interesting from a purely anthropological point of view, a rare cross-section of the country’s extraordinary ethnic diversity. In the words of an old Afghan hand I had met in London, Mazar was like the bar scene in Star Wars.

And indeed the mix of people I found there was extraordinary. There were Uzbeks, Tajiks, Pashtuns, Arabs, Ismaili, Hazara, Turkmen and Mongols. There were men in turbans and silk sashes, in flat caps and in skullcaps, in combat gear and in waistcoats, in robes and in trousers, in long-sleeved chapans and in shalwar qamiz, the long cotton shirt and matching baggy trousers favoured throughout the region. The women were mostly veiled, though many were not; the men were bearded and unbearded, with slant eyes and kohl eyes, brown, green and even blue eyes. There were subtleties here, ethnic and social gradations unfathomable to a stranger like me. Stopping to ask for directions it was impossible at first to make myself understood, and a curious crowd quickly gathered. Even in this ethnic melting pot my disguising beard had evidently fooled nobody. An old man was pushed forward and gave me directions in what sounded like broken Russian. It was a relief to reach the sanctuary of the Oxfam compound, its blue steel doors decorated with a small poster of a crossed-out Kalashnikov and the slogan Working for a Fairer World. The Oxfam staff rented out a few dormitory-like rooms for $40 a night. It was one of the few places that visiting foreigners were permitted to stay.

Over the following two days I took courage and went out to explore Mazar on foot. The atmosphere of the city was strange. The streets were filled with men armed with the tools of choice in Afghanistan, a Kalashnikov slung casually over a shoulder or a rocket-propelled grenade with its butt rested on a hip, the distinctive lozenge shape of its sharp end cocked at the sky. Hi-Lux trucks roared by from time to time, the soldiers swaying in the back covering their mouths with their turbans against the dust clouds. The crowds who scattered to let them pass always closed ranks again, and normal life resumed. Almost uniquely in Afghanistan, Mazar had not been touched by fighting in recent times, not even during the Soviet invasion of the 1980s. Perhaps that was why the population seemed to behave as though the town was immune. It was a phoney war in which they had been waiting for something to happen for so long that they now believed nothing ever would. A certain defiance was detectable in the shops and markets, where business was clearly booming despite the rate of inflation in the north. The afghani exchange rate to the dollar was nearly triple what it had been a year before, yet the stalls were well stocked, the people far from starving. The main square was dotted with groups who sat around story-tellers, guardians of an oral tradition stretching back to biblical times. The wares on sale in the markets were mostly dry goods at this time of year: the melons for which Mazar is famous were not yet in season. At one or two places they even sold Murree beer imported from Pakistan. It was easier to procure alcohol here than across the border to the east, where retail outlets were tightly controlled and foreigners had to obtain a permit and ration book if they wanted to drink.

Only once on my rambles around Mazar was I brought up short, while attempting to inspect the inside of the shrine in the city centre. An old guidebook I had bought in Peshawar described the building as the finest in the country. It commemorates Hazrat Ali, the dragon-slaying cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed, who was assassinated in 661. The original shrine was destroyed in the early thirteenth century by Genghis Khan, who thought there was gold buried beneath its pillars. The present building is a fifteenth-century replacement.

– Not the least of its charms are thousands of white pigeons who make their home here, I read. Local belief has it that should a grey pigeon join the flock, it will become totally white in just forty days, so holy is the site.

I had removed my shoes and was about to pass through the great south gate when a bent old man on a stick came out and began to scold me, jabbing a gnarled finger in my face. He wore the white robes of a mullah, and I backed away, grinning dumbly: I had meant no offence. But the torrent of invective merely strengthened and the inevitable crowd gathered. I raised my hands in an exaggerated sign of surrender, which some of the crowd found funny. It wasn’t clear if they were laughing at my expense or the mullah’s, although they didn’t seem to share the old man’s anger. Then one of them called out in English, the first I had heard from a Mazari resident. He was a neat man with small round glasses who spoke precisely with a slight American elision.

– Where are you from? What are you doing here?

– From England. Inglistan. I wish only to see the inside of this beautiful holy place.

The man in glasses translated my answer: the mullah shouted back. The bystanders turned their heads to watch like the crowd at a tennis match.

– He says foreigners are not permitted.

– Please tell him that if this is true then I will leave, I said, pointing amiably at my shoes. Although, please also tell him that I have visited many mosques in many countries, and have never been forbidden to enter before.

My translator hesitated.

– Does it say in the Koran that foreigners may not enter? I added.

A smile flickered across the English-speaker’s lips, and then he nodded vigorously.

– You are right. I agree.

He translated once again in a loud voice for the benefit of the crowd, who began to murmur among themselves, enjoying this spontaneous public debate. But the mullah’s eyes blazed. He shook his stick, spittle flecking his beard, his harangue rising to a shriek before he turned on his heel and hobbled off at speed into the recesses of the shrine. The exchange was suddenly over, and the crowd, muted, began to disperse. The man in glasses smiled and shook his head.

– What did he say?

– He said, all foreigners are spies.

– But I’m not a spy, I’m a journalist.

– Don’t worry. The mullah is a crazy old man.

– So it’s OK – I can go in?

But the Afghan looked uneasy, clearly afraid of the mullah’s authority, however mad he might be. I gave up and put my shoes on again, and asked him about his English. He had learned it from watching American movies on television, he said. Despite his scholarly appearance he was a soldier, on leave from the front. Tomorrow he would have to return to his unit, which was a blow because I had been on the point of offering him a job as my interpreter. Instead I asked him where his unit was stationed, but he merely smiled.

– Perhaps the mullah was right, he said archly. Perhaps you are an English spy.

This was a good joke, but despite my efforts my new friend refused to move beyond polite formality. All too soon he was looking at his watch.

– You are welcome in Mazar, he said finally. This is a good city, with good people. You will be safe here.

I watched him pad away across the square through an explosion of doves, wondering if it was really possible to learn such good English simply by watching television.

Mir was already working for another group of visiting journalists when we met. He was returning with them from a two-day trip to the Hazarajat, the Northern Alliance’s southern front against the Taliban. I had been told about these English-speaking journalists by the kindly Oxfam people and was hoping they might be able to help me. My search for a good interpreter-fixer over the previous two days had been fruitless. One or two volunteers had presented themselves at the compound doors, having heard somehow that a foreigner with dollars in his pockets was looking for someone, but it was quickly obvious that their English wasn’t up to the job. The problem was fast becoming urgent. Despite the assurances from the man at the shrine, there was a limit to the amount of wandering around on my own that it was sensible to do. In any case, having found my bearings in the city I was keen to use it as a base camp from which to explore the neighbouring regions of the country as soon as possible.

The party of journalists finally trooped in at dusk, shedding camera bags and laughing loudly, tired and dusty from their journey. I introduced myself to Ewan, a British writer based in Eastern Europe, Rick, a Canadian agency photographer, and Al, a cameraman with Live News. I met Mir last.

– Pleased to meet you, he murmured with a slight bow. My name is Mirwais, but everyone calls me Mir. Mir means ‘peace’ in Russian, you know?

He had dark round eyes in a chubby face, cheeks as shiny as apples, a wisp of immature beard on his chin. His frame was portly and he shuffled when he walked, his feet turned slightly inwards. Black curls poked from beneath an embroidered pillbox cap worn in the Uzbek style, although his nose and other features were distinctly Pashtun. His family was evidently wealthy – only the relatively rich could afford the education implied by his spoken English. They were originally from the south, he explained. His father Amanullah, a judge, still owned land and houses in the Pashtun heartlands around Kandahar, as well as in Kabul, but he had moved to Mazar when Mir was still a child. Mir asked where I was from in a quiet, attentive way that I immediately liked. It contrasted with the raucousness of the Anglo-Saxons, who were growing louder as they relaxed. He was barely nineteen, yet there was something trustworthy about him, a quizzical puppyish-ness that made guile seem improbable. There was intelligence in his eyes as well as a willingness to please, despite his obvious tiredness. Most important of all, his English, although heavily accented in the usual Afghan way, a bit guttural, a bit sing-song, was serviceable.

Out on the balcony the journalists collapsed into some waiting chairs. Ewan ordered Mir to make some tea. The imperiousness of this command surprised me. I had assumed they were working together as a team, with approximately equal status. In my limited experience I had found the relationship between journalist and fixer to be a symbiotic one, an interdependence that was usually founded on mutual respect, not on the master-servant archetype. But if Mir felt resentment he did not show it. Instead he scurried away to the kitchen, doing as he was told like a Gunga Din. On his return the muezzins began their call to evening prayers, one minaret triggering another until the city was filled with their eerie wail. Woodsmoke rose up from a hundred cooking fires, the plumes unnaturally straight in the clear, still air. The journalists were briefly silenced by the moment. Mir, keen to get back to his family before dark, gave a discreet cough.

– You can go, said Ewan airily, but don’t be late tomorrow like you were today, eh?

Mir shrugged this off with the simple explanation that he had no watch. But if Ewan cared to buy him one…well, then he would be a paragon of punctuality – or so he heavily implied.

– In your dreams, said Ewan.

– In my dreams, replied Mir, I have a Citizen Quartz. Or a Tag Heuer.

– Yeah, right.

– No, but I think you should buy me this watch. Then I can be more professional. How can I be professional with no watch?

– I’ve already promised you my radio when I leave, said Ewan. I think that’s quite enough, don’t you? Or perhaps you’d like one of Rick’s cameras as well? Hmm?

– A camera would be OK also, said Mir, considering this.

– In your dreams, said Rick.

There was a recognisable theme here. Like other locals I had met, Mir seemed covetous of our possessions, our watches, our cameras, our pens, even our shirts and boots. They had their eye out for the main chance, a canny way of extracting promises, presents, favours. Mir was evidently an expert: he knew when to push, when to leave off, how to retreat by turning a request into a joke. The banter was easy enough to handle, but it also wore you down. In an unguarded moment you could easily find yourself pledging away a radio without really meaning to, and in a society where a man’s word was his bond it could be difficult to retract such a pledge without causing offence. From our vantage point on the balcony we watched Mir shuffle off into the gathering gloom, and I set about making friends. Al was at the end of his trip and heading back to Live News’s offices in Islamabad the next day, but Ewan and Rick had plans to take Mir up to the western front. They weren’t talking much about those plans yet because they were still catching their breath, still adrenalised by their experiences in the Hazarajat.

– You should definitely go down there, said Rick. Man, they put on a good show. My ears are still ringing. Ewan, are your ears still ringing?

He was squatting out of sight in the corner of the balcony and rolling a joint in his lap. His understanding of the country’s labyrinthine politics seemed limited. He was much more interested in smoking the powerful local chars, which he did almost all the time, to stupor-inducing effect. He spoke more slowly than was normal, and sometimes mispronounced his ‘r’s in the manner of a true pothead. His photography might have been excellent, but he struggled hopelessly with the names of the people and places he was photographing, relying on Ewan to annotate his rolls of film as they spewed from his cameras. Ewan was English public school-educated, a tall man with a big voice and a maverick attitude to his work. He could tell a good story and needed little prompting to recount what had happened that day, relating with relish the baffling illogicality of the Hazara Shi’ites they had met. It had been his idea to go to the front line, partly, he admitted, because he had never been under fire before and wanted to see what it was like. He was a risk-taker and an adventurer, which suited me fine – because an adventure was one of the things that I wanted from Afghanistan too.

Karim Khalili, the Hazara Shi’ite leader, had given them permission to visit the system of shallow trenches on high ground just south-east of Bamiyan, the Hazarajat capital in central Afghanistan. The Taliban were dug in a mile or so away on the other side of a valley, with their supply lines running all the way back to Kabul. The sector the journalists visited had been quiet for the past several weeks, but the arrival of a party of Westerners, well equipped with cameras, had prompted the sector commander to put on a display. After making sure that the visitors were seated comfortably, he ordered his artillery to open up on the Taliban positions across the valley.

– It was great, said Ewan, until the Talibs started firing back.

Which they apparently did with considerable accuracy, having had the whole winter to calibrate the range. Ewan and the others had suddenly found themselves crouching behind a wholly inadequate rock. Shells exploded in front of, behind and only just along the line from their position.

– The shock waves made our teeth rattle, said Ewan, savouring the memory of it.

– Yeah, said Rick, his jaw already slack from the spliff. We ate dirt, man.

– And Mir – we sent him back to the truck to get some water just at the wrong time, Ewan went on. I saw him walking up to us, right out in the open – just walking! And there were shells going off all over the place and I shouted out to him, Run! Mirwais, get your arse up here, fucking run!

– Yeah, Rick sniggered, passing the joint to Ewan. And then he dropped the water and you sent him back again to fetch it.

– You did what? I said.

– He’s overweight. He needed the exercise, said Ewan with studied preposterousness, tilting back his head and exhaling a long stream of smoke into the evening air.

– Jesus, I said. He might have been killed. Was anybody hit?

Ewan gave me a cool look.

– You don’t understand. Anybody might have been hit. There was no cover up there at all. The trenches were hopeless. It didn’t make any difference where you were.

– But was anybody hit?

Ewan looked away at the sky again and did not reply.

– Some guys up the line got smoked, said Rick after a pause.

– You think, said Ewan.

– Nah, they did. I told you, I saw it. A shell came down right on top of them. There was nothing left. I think they must have been blown to pieces. I really wish I’d photographed it.

There was another silence. With the probable exception of Rick, we were all thinking the same thing: journalists are supposed to report objectively on events, not provoke them. People dying, just so that a journalist from Eastern Europe could see what it was like to come under fire? This was serious stuff. Al seemed soberer than the other two and had so far said little, but he had read my thoughts, and now he spoke up.

– Afghanistan isn’t like other places. I’ve been coming here a lot. You can’t always separate yourself from the story like you should. Because we’re here, we’re in it. It’s a war. And if you try to stay objective you end up reporting on nothing. Believe me, I’ve tried.

– Right on, drawled Rick.

Al ignored him.

– Publicity is a weapon for these people just like anything else. They use us like we use them. That’s just how it is. You shouldn’t lose sleep over it.

– So do you think it was worth it? I said. Worth people dying for, I mean?

– I don’t know, Al shrugged. I think I got some good stuff. I won’t know until the edit. But if the pictures are any good we’ll use them.

– Of course it was worth it, Ewan interrupted crossly. They’re frontline soldiers – they live every day with the possibility of death. They take their risks, we took ours. And it might have been us, you know? It isn’t as if we were observing from ten miles back through binoculars. Besides, we didn’t ask them to start firing. It’s their war, after all.

Al nodded agreement, but I was full of doubt. A part of me very much wanted to know what it was like to come under fire. Like many British boys of my generation I grew up in the shadow of the Second World War. My Fergusson forebears included several soldiers who fought the Russians in the Crimea, the Dervish at Omdurman and the Germans at Arras and Cambrai, but the one I remembered most was my Great-Uncle Bernard. Passionate, irascible, boastful, occasionally pompous, he was larger than life and we children loved him. He wore a monocle, led a column of Chindits against the Japanese in Burma under Orde Wingate in 1943–44 and became Governor-General of New Zealand before retiring to Scotland. When I was a child he used to pick me up and let me puff at him like a candle on a birthday cake. With a hammed-up gasp of surprise he would let his monocle drop from his eye, only to catch it with a satisfying plop far down below in the palm of his hand. Behind enemy lines in Burma, Great-Uncle Bernard was said by the newspapers of the time to have been supplied with fresh monocles by parachute.

Small wonder, then, that as a boy I spent all my pocket money on Airfix models and Commando magazines – trash mags, we called them. I drew battleships and fighter planes in the margins of schoolbooks. I played endless war games in the sandpit of our London garden, marshalling toy tanks and tiny plastic soldiers across the burning wastes of the North African desert, circa 1942.

Yet now that I had the opportunity to live out this intoxicating fantasy I found myself weighing up the matter in a manner I had not anticipated. Ewan was surely wrong. Never mind the extreme personal risk – somebody’s death, even a nameless Afghan conscript’s, was too high a price to pay for war tourism. I was under no illusion about the value of the experience from a professional point of view either. Perhaps it was justifiable for an agency cameraman whose pictures might be stored away or used in a different context to tell a story worth telling. But I was a freelance adventurer with an uncertain commission from the London Independent, and I knew that a strategically meaningless exchange of shellfire in a back-page war would be worth a column inch or two at best. It seemed better to keep my doubts to myself, however. For a first-timer in Afghanistan, travelling companions had obvious advantages – and I definitely needed the services of a good fixer-interpreter. Later that night I persuaded Ewan and Rick to let me join them.

I found my Afghan adventure all right. We flew low in an army helicopter through valleys so steep that the sheep looked down on us. The pilot, who was stoned, made me sit in the Perspex nose beyond his foot pedals, laughing maniacally as his machine pitched and rolled through the vertiginous passes. When at last we touched down in a field of poppies near the front line at Bala Murghab, guerrillas emerged from hiding places in the rocks to unload the cargo. The poorly stacked crates on which the others had been perching turned out to be filled with Iranian-made anti-personnel mines. Our visit to the western front only lasted a week, but it seemed far longer, and there was no possibility of getting off the roller-coaster. It was like a mad theme park. We lurched about the front lines on the back of a stinking tank, fired Kalashnikovs at tin cans, tracked an imaginary Mig through the cross-hairs of a fifty-year-old anti-aircraft gun, and rode out on patrol with a posse of Uzbek cavalrymen whose horses were trained not to flinch when their masters fired rocket-propelled grenades at full gallop between their ears. At night we slept fitfully in the dugouts of field commanders who were mostly psychotic or homosexual, and sometimes both, while making ourselves sick from their contaminated water supplies.

We didn’t see the enemy but they were never more than a few miles away, secreted in dugouts just like our own, watching and waiting for the spring fighting season to begin again. At dusk each evening the two sides traded insults over their field radios. Mir thought this battlefield ritual a wonderful game, and asked to take over the handset.

– Talib Talib Talib, he growled, suppressing a giggle. Your mother was a camel and your father was a Pakistani spy.

– Spawn of Satan, crackled the outraged respondent. Your offspring are all bastards. With Allah’s help we will soon put an end to your infernal mating with dogs and donkeys.

– Hooh, did you hear that? Mir whispered, wide-eyed at the profanity of it. Dogs and donkeys! Can you imagine?

Mir was an excellent fixer. His family were prominent in Mazar, and everybody seemed to know him. His father was no ordinary member of the judiciary but an ’alim, one of the hundred or so most senior Sharia judges in the country, so Mir’s family name alone commanded a certain respect. He had the knack of knowing when to drop a name, when to cajole with flattery or a gift.

Ewan could be impatient, but Mir unfailingly took this in his stride. If anything, he was sometimes too eager to please. For instance, he had never ridden a horse before, but he agreed without hesitating to go along on a cavalry expedition. Ewan and Rick hoped to persuade the Uzbeks to let us participate in a full-blown cavalry charge, which was ambitious. Ewan demonstrated his superior horsemanship by cantering around a field with one hand on his hip like some eighteenth-century cavalier, but to Mir’s relief our hosts rejected his proposal. Ewan turned sarcastic in his disappointment and blamed Mir for the failure to persuade the Uzbeks, but I found myself standing up for him. He had been hired as an interpreter, not a cavalry guide. It was hardly his fault if he was nervous of horses or that he sat slumped in the saddle like a sack of potatoes.

The journalistic high point of the trip was an interview with Ismail Khan, the legendary Mujaheddin leader and ousted governor of the far western town of Herat. The sector commanders had tried to keep us away but Mir knew one of the helicopter pilots, whom we bribed with a bottle of whisky. We saw Ismail Khan’s upturned face as the helicopter descended to the secret drop zone, his tiny band of followers standing guard around him, prophet-like with his snowy beard and pristine white shalwar qamiz blowing about him as the long grass flattened in the downwash. We were escorted to a ruined farmhouse where the old soldier displayed an outspoken determination to get back to Herat, threatening to bomb and machine-gun anyone who stood in his way. More interestingly, he scoffed at his so-called allies in the Northern Alliance.

The leaders of the non-Pashtun minorities had agreed six months earlier to set aside their differences and form a pact in the face of the Taliban onslaught, but the pact was already coming apart. The Hazaras and the Tajiks, particularly, resented the way the Uzbek leader, General Rashid Dostum, had taken the leadership of the Alliance upon himself. To hell with Dostum’s broader strategy, Khan said now. Who did Dostum think he was, anyway? He, Ismail Khan, would take Herat back from the Taliban with or without the assistance of the Alliance’s so-called and self-appointed leader. If Dostum didn’t agree, it was too bad.

Ismail Khan’s comments had important implications for the military integrity of the Northern Alliance. Back in Mazar several days later therefore, I faithfully wrote up the interview for the Independent, dictating to the copy-takers in London at budget-sapping expense via a satellite phone link. I never paused to consider the effect such an article might have, but in retrospect it was a fateful decision, the event that probably marked the start of Mir’s long slide into eventual exile. Rather to my surprise the Independent ran the story. To my even greater surprise I was informed of this editorial decision in faraway London by Mir. He bustled into the Oxfam compound one morning to announce that the BBC World Service had picked up the story and broadcast it across Afghanistan in both Pashtun and Dari. The whole town was talking about it, he said. He revelled in this triumphant proof of the power of modern media, his enthusiasm strangely touching.

It was May Day and General Dostum was planning a spectacular Soviet-style demonstration of military might. A podium had been erected for him and a long column of tanks had congregated in a sidestreet near the shrine the night before. Bunting dangled from the lamp posts and gave the town an almost carnival atmosphere. Genial crowds were already out on the streets, buying lemonade and candy from newly erected stalls or securing the best vantage points for the coming parade. I led Mir to one of the stalls and bought him a celebratory can of orange fizz called Mirinda, a lurid import from Uzbekistan that I had seen everywhere in the markets, virtually the only canned drink available in Mazar. It was the sort of useless foreign luxury that the Taliban would no doubt try to ban if they ever captured the city. Mir smacked his lips and guzzled it down, declaring it werry delicious and his favourite drink ever. I tried it and found it warm and disgustingly saccharine, the Soviet-grade chemicals cloying in my throat. I joshed him about his weight and his incorrigibly sweet tooth. He chatted fervently about his ambition to work for the BBC. It was a beautiful day, the sun was shining, and after the stomach-knotting stress of the trenches Mazar now seemed blissfully normal. And then without warning he disappeared. One minute he was dawdling along as usual at my elbow; the next he was gone. His departure was so sudden that I was left holding his coat. I thought little of it at first, but when the parade started and there was still no sign of him I began to worry. The dust thrown up by the tanks had settled, the crowds had gone home and the sun was starting to set by the time Mir reappeared in the Oxfam compound. He looked pale and was sporting two black eyes. Ewan and I clustered around him as he sat and told us in a tired voice that he had been arrested by Dostum’s secret police, Russian-trained Uzbek goons who had taken him to a cell and beaten him up.

– They are werry angry with your article, he said, nodding at me. They wanted to know, why did I help the foreigners? They think all foreigners are spies. They said I should not have translated what Ismail Khan said about the Northern Alliance. But I said, why? I am just an interpreter – how can I lie? I said I am a good Muslim and that a good Muslim always tells the truth.

Ewan and I looked at each other. Al had been right after all: it was impossible to detach oneself from the story in this crazy place, and I was already becoming embroiled.

– Don’t worry, Mir went on. These men are idiots – galamjam. You know galamjam? It means carpet-thieves.

His sang-froid was admirable but there was a danger that it was also misplaced. Mir was not streetwise. He could be alarmingly naive at times, and I didn’t like the sound of these galamjam one bit. At the very least he was now a marked man with the authorities. I told him as forcefully as I could that he would need to keep a low profile and to stop working for journalists, at least for the time being. Ewan agreed.

– Don’t worry, Mir replied in a bored voice. I’ll be fine.

We checked he was not too shaken and sent him home to his parents in a taxi.

The following morning I went to the UN office and reported the incident to a savvy Irishman who spoke Dari and knew Mazar and the Uzbeks who controlled it well. He nodded sagely and promised to keep an eye out for Mir. I was due to leave Afghanistan for Uzbekistan in a few days. The Independent had expressed an interest in a story about oil and gas politics and my interviews in Tashkent were already set up. I left for the north full of misgivings, but didn’t see what more I could do.

Mir’s future in Mazar ended a fortnight later. He didn’t keep a low profile, but teamed up with the BBC in the shape of the experienced Afghan correspondent Lionel David. Working for the BBC carried kudos in Mazar and was very lucrative. The temptation was more than he was able to resist.

From a purely professional point of view my decision to quit Mazar at the beginning of May was a disaster. I felt a certain Schadenfreude that Ewan had also left and missed the moment, although Rick had stayed behind. None of us had foreseen Dostum’s betrayal by his Uzbek ally Abdul Malik Pahlawan, or the consequent fall of Mazar to the Taliban who, at Abdul Malik’s invitation, swept with devastating speed across the undefended plains to the west in their Hi-Lux trucks. Lionel, however, had excellent Taliban contacts who had tipped him off to the impending operation, and he turned up to film their arrival in Mazar at the perfect moment. At first the Taliban occupation of the city went unopposed. But then they called a public meeting at the central mosque, where they laid out the rules of the new regime: men to wear beards, women to wear birqas and be confined to their homes; no television, no music, no kite-flying, no partridge-fighting;^* everyone to pray five times a day, or else. This was not well received. Many men walked out in the course of the meeting, shaking their heads and muttering darkly. But it was a few days later when the Taliban tried to disarm the populace, as they had successfully done everywhere else in the country, that the real trouble began.

Five years later Lionel was still able to recall the minutest details of the next hellish forty-eight hours. I sat him down with a tape recorder in my London flat where he obligingly relived the trauma for an hour and a half, the narrative bizarrely interrupted by a mobile phone call from his young son, who wanted to know if it was OK to use a tube of Bostik to fix a plastic model from his Warhammer set.

Lionel’s story began on a lovely Tuesday evening in the centre of Mazar. He was out near the shrine with Mir, shooting a piece to camera for Newsnight. All was calm. The setting sun lit up the cobalt of the shrine’s mosaics and his crew was adjusting the camera tripod to get the scene into shot. Until that moment Mazar seemed to have fallen to the Taliban as peacefully as every other city had done. But then they heard shooting coming from the Hazara Shi’ite enclave in the north-west quarter. Being Shi’ites, these people with high cheekbones and narrow eyes, descendants of Genghis Khan’s hordes who had sacked Mazar in the thirteenth century, had already been cruelly persecuted by the strictly Sunni Taliban. They evidently wanted nothing to do with the new regime. Looking half a mile down the main avenue with his BBC binoculars, Lionel spotted two colleagues running for their lives, bullets kicking up the dirt behind them like a scene from a cowboy film. One of them was Al, newly returned from the Live News offices in Islamabad.

The Hazara revolt signalled a general uprising in the town. Within moments the air above Lionel and Mir was fizzing with bullets and even artillery fire. The crew had only expected to be out for half an hour and had left their flak jackets in the hotel, a two-minute taxi ride away. Their taxi, however, had vanished, and it took them several hours to get back to relative safety, creeping through the sidestreets with their backs to the walls. En route they encountered the rebel Uzbek commander Ghafar Pahlawan. Oblivious to the gunfire exploding all around him, he was reclining outside his house in a stripy deckchair recently looted from a Western aid agency compound, comfortably shod in a pair of oriental blue slippers. Mir and the BBC men, crouching and flinching at every burst of gunfire, asked him wildly what was going on.

– You are journalists, Ghafar purred. I think you know what is going on.

Even the hotel wasn’t safe. Mir and the journalists huddled in a corridor in the centre of the building, the frightened staff congregated around them, as the battle outside raged through the night. One of the BBC crew was almost hit by a stray bullet fired more than a mile away. By morning the Taliban guard posted at the hotel’s gates the day before had disappeared, the clearest sign yet that the invaders were in deep trouble. Later, Lionel and Mir watched a Hi-Lux truckload of Talib fighters speed past the hotel gates in the direction of the shrine, shooting as they went. It was suicide – and a hundred yards further on they died the way they wanted, a glorious martyr’s death at the hands of the townspeople, who opened up on them from all sides. Such vignettes were repeated across the city throughout that terrible day.

I heard separately what had happened to Rick during the fighting. He beetled out of the Oxfam compound with his cameras the moment it started. Somewhere in the city he dived into a house to shelter from an outburst of shooting, only to find a platoon of Taliban manning the windows. The house seemed solidly built and he was minded to stay put until the shooting subsided, but a local man who had been similarly trapped insisted that it was not safe. They argued. The local won. The two of them bolted across the street to take cover in another building. Just as they reached it a tank shell sailed into the first house and flattened it.

Some six hundred Taliban were killed as they retreated desperately from house to house. Another thousand were captured out by the airport as they tried to flee. Many were said later to have been herded into truck containers that were sealed and dumped out in the desert, where they were baked to death.^* It was the first serious military reverse the Taliban had ever known, as well as a great embarrassment to the three countries – Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE – that had responded to the capture of Mazar too soon by formally recognising the legitimacy of the new regime.

These were dangerous times for Westerners in Afghanistan. They were also dangerous times for Mir. By now he should have been at home with his family, cowering beneath upturned furniture behind bolted doors. His colleagues among Mazar’s small cadre of interpreters had long since abandoned their Western charges and melted into the town. Mir never explained why he alone stayed behind. It might have been out of a sense of loyalty, or naivety, or a mixture of the two, but there is no doubt that it was another fate-sealing moment.

As the chaos continued into Thursday a collective decision was taken by the small foreign community to evacuate. The nearest border was at Hairaton, ninety miles to the north, where the Amu Darya river marks the southern edge of Uzbekistan. The UN hastily arranged a convoy.

Lionel David was staying not at the UN’s heavily sandbagged guesthouse, from where the convoy would depart, but half a mile away at the city’s main hotel. The BBC crew loaded their voluminous equipment, tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of generators, sat phones, Toko boxes and old-fashioned edit packs in silver suitcases, into the backs of two cars. But they were fatally slow in starting out. Over by the UN guesthouse a large and hostile crowd had gathered around the waiting convoy. When the mob started smashing car windows the organisers decided they could wait no longer, and set off for Hairaton. The first BBC car turned the corner and drove straight into a riot. The mob had stormed the empty UN guesthouse and was in the process of looting it. Now they turned on the equipment-laden BBC car.

Lionel and Mir arrived in the second car to see their cameraman and soundman sprinting down the street pursued by a swarm of Afghans shouting Kill the foreigners. By now it was open season on all outsiders. Everyone in Mazar understood that the Taliban were secretly armed and funded by the Pakistanis, just as the Pakistanis with their American and other Western allies had armed and funded the Mujaheddin opposition to the Soviets twenty years before. British, American, Pakistani, Taliban – what was the difference? They were all foreigners, and all guilty by association. It was their fault that jang, the fighting, had finally come to the once peaceful city of Mazar. The BBC men narrowly escaped in the second car and made it back to the hotel, where they discovered that someone had stabbed the car door, piercing the metal. Mir advised Lionel that there was nothing for it but to seek official protection. And so they all drove together to the traitor Abdul Malik’s house to see if they could find someone, anyone, in charge. They found General Majid Ruzi, one of Dostum’s senior commanders, who was full of purposeful sympathy for the foreigners.

– Leave it to me, he said. I’ll see what I can do.

Three weeks earlier I had interviewed Ruzi myself along with Ewan, Rick and Mir, in a field tent out on the western front. We sat cross-legged and drank tea in glorious sunshine on the edge of a plain tinkling with birdsong, the air filled with the scent of red and yellow spring flowers. His men were hunting partridge chicks among the brush, walking in long lines through the undergrowth with nets. He seemed an urbane and charming man. He was shrewd and educated and appeared pleased with the opportunity to discuss the war. The Northern Alliance, he told us, would never permit the Taliban to take Mazar. This was because the northern Afghans were liberal people with no time for fundamentalism. The Uzbeks believed in live and let live. Had we heard that in Kandahar the Taliban were insisting that stallions wore trousers? He roared with laughter. Were these people not preposterous?

But there was no live and let live from Ruzi now. Lionel recounted in the Observer what happened next, in what he described as an act of personal catharsis. Mir and the Westerners were escorted by Ruzi’s men back to the UN guesthouse. A quarter of an hour later Ruzi himself turned up. Then odd bits of their looted kit began to materialise. The foreigners’ metal suitcases were so conspicuous that it was easy for Ruzi’s men to retrieve them from the bazaars into which they had vanished. An open Russian jeep appeared with a sullen young man in the back, a TV camera marked BBC bouncing on the seat beside him. He was a Hazara commander, darker-skinned than the average Afghan, wearing Western-looking brown clothes. He had been arrested while carrying the camera – or so Ruzi said. Events began to accelerate. Ruzi barked orders. The milling crowd of looters, suddenly electrified, drew back. That was the moment that Mir realised his mistake in soliciting Ruzi’s help.

– Lionel, he said, he is going to kill this man.

Thinking quickly, Mir went down on his knees and touched Ruzi’s feet, the sincerest Afghan gesture of supplication and respect. Lionel followed suit and beseeched the General, Mir translating feverishly: a lump of glass and metal was not worth dying for. He would prefer the Hazara to keep the camera equipment than to pay for it with his life. But Ruzi’s decision was final. The Hazara was marched by two gunmen to a wall across the road, a look of disbelief on his face, protesting loudly over his shoulder that he was an Afghan like Ruzi, while the BBC man was just a foreigner; why was he doing this? Then the gunmen stepped back from their still protesting prisoner, flicked their Kalashnikovs to automatic, and killed him instantly in a spray of bullets. Before the noise of the gunfire had died away the crowd had fled in all directions, leaving behind a shoe or two, bits of loot from the guesthouse, a hastily abandoned bicycle.

It was time for the foreigners to leave, but even now they had to wait. Lionel, in deep shock from what had just happened, recalled playing an uncomfortably symbolic game of Risk in the trashed but re-secured guesthouse, while a friendly mechanic reinstalled the camshafts of two decommissioned UN Landcruisers parked around the back.

Two hours later the cars were ready and the foreigners reassembled, trying hard not to look at the pool of coagulated blood in the dust across the street. Mir offered to travel with them, but the convoy organisers thankfully dissuaded him: he would never be allowed to cross the border, and Hairaton would be desperately dangerous for him once the foreigners were safely out of reach in Uzbekistan. Even in his home town he knew it was only a matter of time before the relatives of the dead Hazara came looking for revenge. A big crowd had witnessed the execution, and Mazar’s grapevine was highly developed. All the town would quickly know of his involvement in the killing.

He didn’t wait around to wave goodbye. As the foreigners finally rolled northwards he already knew that this day marked a major turning point in his life, and in all probability in the lives of his family, too. He would have to abandon his home town. The alternative was to die in a vengeful hail of bullets just as the camera thief had done.

I barely slept the night of Mir’s touchdown in London, one year on. By the following morning I had almost convinced myself that I had been duped. His promise to call me on arrival had meant nothing after all: he was just another crafty Afghan who had taken the opportunity to exploit another gullible foreigner. But when at last he did call with the explanation that he had ‘forgot’, I was too relieved to be angry, as well as a little ashamed for thinking ill of him. The Heathrow immigration officers had been friendly and had done everything by the book. His processing had taken less than an hour, and when he emerged Hamid was waiting for him as arranged.

Two mornings later, a Saturday, I headed east by motorbike to the address Mir had given me, a house in Mafeking Avenue, London E6. According to my street directory this was the postcode for East Ham, in the borough of Newham. I had lived in west London all my life, and my knowledge of most districts east of the financial centre was uncertain, so my journey was punctuated by frequent stops for a look at the map. Mafeking Avenue is beyond the most easterly suburbs that even many Londoners have heard of. Almost everyone knows that West Ham has a football club. Some people know of Plaistow from the song by Ian Dury. But what is there to say about East Ham, or the communities of Plashet, Wallend or Manor Park? And these are still places with ‘proper’ London postcodes. Out beyond the eastern arc of the North Circular ringroad the capital straggles on for another five miles at least, through Barking and Dagenham, barely thinning through Hornchurch and Upminster to the limits of the street directory. The immensity of the city was sobering. I had not expected my involvement with Mir to be broadening my horizons again so soon – certainly not this horizon, the eastern edge of my own home town.

On the A13 approach road some wag had prefixed a ‘T’ to a road sign marked Urban Clearway, but I was still unprepared for what I found. By the time I arrived it felt as though I had travelled out of London altogether and come to another city; or another continent. The street that ran past Upton Park tube station resembled more closely than seemed possible a Pakistani street bazaar. At first sight the crowds milling along the pavements appeared almost entirely Asian, many of the men in shalwar qamiz beneath tatty Argyle sweaters or bulky down jackets, the women in saris and headscarves. The crowds were thickest outside Queen’s Market, a cacophony of stalls close to the station.

I pulled in, switched off the engine, and stared. The stalls stretched far back into impenetrable darkness beneath a low concrete roof, the shoppers mostly chattering in Urdu as they hurried to and fro with bags of groceries. The stall-keepers were hawking the same exotic fruits, the same halal meat, the same plastic tat and £2 watches and bolts of primary-coloured cloth that are the stock-in-trade of the Saddar Market in Peshawar, treats for magpies. The place even smelled the same, a spicy-sweet mustiness that was two parts curry house and one part poverty.

Mir was waiting, but a closer look at this market was irresistible. I strolled with my helmet through the stalls, inhaling Central Asia again, feeling like an alien in the city of my birth.^* Women in saris swarmed around the vegetable stands, bargaining with the stall-keepers, sifting through the foodstuffs with practised brown fingers. Among the recognisable goods were species of vegetation that were new to me – mooli and tindora, papadi and cho-cho, patra and parval, long dhudi, posso, china karella. There were over a dozen types of flour with names like dhokra and dhosa mix, mathia and oudhwa, mogo, raja-gro, singoda. There were packets of moth beans and gunga peas, sliced betelnut and sago seeds. There was a mouth freshener called mukhwas manpasand, and something called red chowrie, that was not to be confused with brown chorie, which according to the label was also known as pink cow peas.

There were implications to all this variety. It spoke of hours and hours spent in kitchens, of women’s lives (because the food shoppers were almost entirely women) in which the preparation of meals loomed far larger than it ordinarily did in the West. I was conscious of how little I knew about food, how little I cooked. The last time I used any kind of flour was in a domestic science class at boarding school when I was ten. I thought of the cling-film-wrapped vegetables I occasionally cooked for myself, steamed broccoli or little packets of pre-washed green beans, always identical green beans that were imported and sorted and chopped to the regulation length: junk veg. They went all right with a pre-cooked chicken kiev or a frozen lasagne, but I really bought them because, like a fast-food burger, their consumption required no thought.

Back outside, I noticed for the first time that it was a match day. Fans wearing the claret and blue of West Ham Football Club were making their way south towards the end of the street, where the floodlights and the tops of the stands of Upton Park stadium were visible. They were mostly working-class white, some of them looking like National Front archetypes with their earrings and shaven heads. According to the tabloid version of modern England this was a classic recipe for a bloodbath, yet there was no sense of racial tension here. I had been to football matches and witnessed at first hand the thuggery that English supporters are sometimes capable of, but these West Ham fans were turning that preconception on its head. They did not look angry or furtive or alienated. There was no nervous cordon of fluorescent-jacketed police. They just shambled along the pavement without a second glance, ordinary people on an ordinary Saturday going to an ordinary late-season football match.

I suddenly saw how easy it was to sit in the white-majority fastness of west London and pontificate about multiculturalism, while it was quite another thing to live as a minority in one’s homeland. It was astounding to find that multiculturalism actually seemed to work. Did the West Ham fans feel their national identity was under threat? Did they sit around in shabby pubs plotting to petrol bomb the modest homes of immigrants, the modern European equivalent of a Deep South lynching? They gave no sign of it. Further along the street was a stall selling paraphernalia in claret and blue, scarves and flags and football shirts with the names and numbers of the team’s heroes on them. The names of the players were not Asian, but some of them were unmistakably foreign – Miklosko, Berkovic, Lazaridis. It was hard to see how a fan could be a xenophobe when he supported a team like that.

The house was in the middle of Mafeking Avenue, an unexceptional double row of Victorian terraces typical of the late-nineteenth-century London housing boom during which they had been built. Avenues named after Ladysmith and Kimberley ran parallel, forming a mini-memorial to a corner of a vanished empire. These street names must have meant little to the neighbourhood’s modern inhabitants. The Boer War was just another imperial milestone, a bitter battle between Afrikaners and the British for control over turf that arguably belonged to neither, a hundred years ago and a distant continent away. And yet London’s success and status in the world owed everything to Britain’s imperial past. The Boer War was about control of South African diamonds and gold, riches that thousands of British soldiers had fought and died for at places like Mafeking. The relief of this obscure outpost in 1900 after a 217-day siege inspired such public jubilation in London that a new verb, ‘to maffick’, was added to the English language.

It was the stuff of history, and it was also the source of the prosperity that had attracted the immigrant scions of the colonised to come here in the first place. Kimberley was one of the greatest diamond mines the world has ever seen, and London is still littered with memorials to the battles by which the Empire was accrued. In the index of my street directory I counted six streets named Mafeking, nine Ladysmiths and twenty-two Kimberleys. The town planners of the early twentieth century were unimaginative: what would they have made of their streets’ present-day occupants? Did they perhaps imagine that they were building houses for returning troops, homes fit for heroes? Were they now turning in their graves?

I wondered if Mir had ever heard of Mafeking. He had been a diligent student, but the late-Victorian scramble for Africa seemed unlikely to have featured very high on the Mazari school curriculum. It was a pity that he had not ended up in that concentration of streets in SW11 that commemorate Britain’s Afghan Wars: Afghan Road, Khyber Road, Cabul and Candahar Road spelled the old-fashioned way. That would have grabbed his attention, for there are few Afghans who do not know the stories from the time of the British.

Nor are stories the only things that are passed from generation to generation. I once visited the Panjshir Valley in a bid to interview the late Tajik leader Ahmed Shah Massoud. On an exploratory walk along the valley road I came across a twelve-year-old boy shooting ducks on the river. The antique gun over his shoulder was almost as tall as him, and I asked with the help of sign language if I could examine it. The boy seemed pleased by my interest and I handled the gun admiringly, feeling the balance and heft of it. The cellophaned stock was decorated in the Afghan taste, with a gruesome colour photograph of someone undergoing open heart surgery taken from the brochure of some Western aid organisation. The metalwork was worn but had been carefully oiled and polished. Decorative tassels and a small felt pouch of gunpowder dangled from the trigger guard. It was obviously old, a heavy matchlock muzzle-loader from the era that preceded cartridges and bolt-action loading, more musket than modern rifle. Turning it over, I found an inscription on the sideplate that read VR 1840: Victoria Regina. I was holding a relic of the First Afghan War.

The weapon had in all probability been taken from one of the unfortunates who died on the legendary 1842 retreat. A general of quite breathtaking incompetence called William Elphinstone (Elphinstone Court SW16; Elphinstone Road E17; Elphinstone Street N5) tried to lead his force ninety miles back to Jalalabad in the middle of winter. Some twenty thousand people set out from Kabul, including barefoot Indian sepoys and several thousand women and children camp followers. Their tents were lost in the confusion of departure. Snow lay a foot deep on the ground, and at night the temperature dropped to -24°C. According to legend only one European survived the retreat, a surgeon named Brydon who straggled into Jalalabad on a donkey. Those who did not freeze to death were picked off without mercy by tribesmen armed with long-barrelled jezails who ambushed them in the high passes. Hordes of ululating women descended on the dead and dying and emasculated them with knives. There is an account of a redcoat who rounded a corner of the mountain path to find an Afghan boy of six attempting to hack off the head of a dead comrade. Without hesitating he hoisted the child on his bayonet and pitched him out into the abyss. The retreat was the worst military disaster the British Empire had ever known.

The gun’s new owner let me fire it. He tipped in powder from the pouch, then a handful of gravel snatched up from the road, before ramming it all home with a rod that slotted into a bracket beneath the barrel. He pointed down to the river where half a dozen wooden decoy ducks were moored in the current, crudely fashioned silhouettes like targets at a funfair. I squatted on my haunches and rested my elbows on my knees for balance as the boy indicated. The recoil was tremendous, the bang even more so. The sound bounced off the rocks and steep cliffs, reverberating far up and down the valley for long seconds before the echo died. The silence that followed seemed unnaturally still, and the boy and I grinned guiltily at each other, co-conspirators in shattering the Panjshir’s peacefulness – 160 years of Anglo-Afghan history captured in a single gunshot.

Outside the house in Mafeking Avenue a black man was sitting in an old white BMW, revving the engine to clean out the carburettor. The spluttering noise masked the sound of my bike’s engine, but Mir was on the lookout and came onto the street the moment I arrived. It was several weeks since we had waved goodbye to each other through a taxi window in Islamabad. I hadn’t forgotten the look on his face, hopeful and anxious at the same time, no doubt wondering if a foreigner would really deliver on a promise to help him. I could see it was no easy thing for him to relinquish the lifeline that I represented for him, even temporarily. Now in Mafeking Avenue the anxiety was gone. He beamed, and fell on me with unaffected joy, hugging me and slapping my back.

– I am here, he said at last, as if he still couldn’t quite believe it. I am here.

– Welcome to London, I replied, smiling – because in the end his presence here was improbable. I had stepped into this person’s life and with a simple letter to the British High Commission in Islamabad had turned it upside down, altering its direction forever. It was an act of the purest existentialism, as though Mir and I had colluded outrageously to upset the natural order of things.

He looked the same: a little less chubby-cheeked than I remembered, maybe, but with the same shambling, flat-footed gait that made me laugh. He was wearing the same clothes I had last seen him in, a washed-out navy blue shalwar qamiz, the uniform of a zillion Pakistanis. I wondered what other clothes he had, but quickly veered away from the thought and asked him how the trip had gone.

– Hohh, he said, his dark eyes wide with unironic amazement.

– Go on – what was it like?

– It was…strange to start. This plane is werry big. And fast.

He made a jet taking off with the flat of his hand and, leaning back, stared straight ahead in imitation of the unexpected G-force as he accelerated down the runway at Islamabad. I had forgotten that his previous flying experience was limited to military helicopters.

– But after, it was nice, he added equably. Specially the food. And the women: hohh.

I had insisted that Mir fly British Airways, reckoning on balance that a BA aircrew would be more sympathetic as well as better informed about the immigration rules in the event of some disaster en route. But I hadn’t told him about the air hostesses he would meet on board, their dyed hair uncovered, their legs clearly on view beneath their uniforms. They may look unexceptional to Westerners, but to an untravelled Muslim they must have constituted a preview of paradise. Mir had begun arriving in the West from the moment he stepped from the tarmac at Islamabad. I could tell he was still high from the experience, still processing all the new and unexpected things he had already seen, his dislocation no doubt heightened by jetlag.

– Is this your motorbike? he asked.

I told him to climb on. It was a tired old Honda trail-bike, covered in EBC brake-pad stickers and oily from a cracked sump, but he sat astride the machine making vrooming noises, trying it out for size, his eyes as shiny as a schoolboy’s.

– Hohh, he laughed. James Bond.

Eventually he led me up the path by the house’s front garden. This had been left to weeds and was littered with household rubbish and the scurf of the street. Inside the door he flipped off his shoes with an ease that had long ago become automatic and that made me feel clumsy in my unAfghan lace-up boots. He called out for Hamid, who emerged from the back of the house and shook my hand solemnly in the traditional Pashtun way, bowing almost imperceptibly as he placed his right hand on his heart, muttering an inaudible welcome. He was thin and unhealthy-looking compared to Mir. His cheeks were pockmarked and he wore Western clothes, jeans and a cheap leather jacket. He was older than Mir, in his thirties perhaps, and he did not seem entirely pleased that I was there. But Mir ignored him and ushered me further into the house with something like pride. I was his VIP, the honoured guest, and he was as eager to please as ever.

He led me up the narrow stairs, and I could see he had been at work. Beds had been carefully made. A mildewed bathroom had recently been doused in bleach. But no amount of tidying up could mask the pervading smell of damp, the threadbare carpets, the grubby wallpaper that bulged in places, a broken windowpane that had been replaced with cardboard. The place was as dire as I had expected. The tour was short, and finished in the front room. Cheap armchairs lined the walls, their springs and stuffing showing. A second-hand television burbled in the corner, the picture hopelessly fuzzy. A coffee table was loaded with little cut-glass bowls full of boiled sweets, pine-kernels and sugared mulberries, just like at home. Mir bustled out and reappeared carrying a large rolled-up carpet.

– For you, he declared, spreading it out with a practised flourish. I could hardly believe he had brought it with him on the plane. But as he searched my face anxiously for a reaction, it was clear that this was more than just a gesture: it was an expression of family debt.

– I spoke to my father, he explained. He said I should bring you this. Do you like it?

It was impossible not to like it. The carpet was a beautiful thing, a rich black and orange asymmetric swirl, the patterns interspersed with figurative flowers and minarets, the ends finely tasselled. I thanked him formally and he nodded his satisfaction, serious for a moment. It was certain that this exchange would be relayed back to Mazar somehow.

I had brought my own welcoming present, but hesitated now before presenting it because I realised it wasn’t really suitable. It was a single bottle of designer lager spontaneously bought in Oddbins called Freedom Beer. It was intended as a joke for the teetotal Mir, a symbol of the moral confusion and temptation that he would surely find in the West. He took it and placed it with solemn reverence in the centre of the mantelpiece. It was hard to tell what he really made of it. His face was a mask.

Hamid came in and sat down in an armchair opposite, silently studying me. I had not been mistaken: he was uncomfortable with my presence here. And there was something more, a jaded, beaten quality in the way he walked and sat, a certain unhappiness in the set of his mouth and the deep lines on his forehead. The light in his eyes had been somehow deadened.

– This is a nice house, I said to him. Is it yours?

– It belongs to a friend, he replied evenly.

– Hamid is a tour guide, said Mir brightly.

– A tour guide? Really? You must know London well.

Hamid looked at Mir and laughed hollowly.

– Not is, he said. Was. Now I drive a van. I am a dispatch driver in London.

– You were a tour guide in Mazar? What, before the war?

It seemed unlikely: he was surely too young to have worked in Afghan tourism, an industry that had effectively died with the Russian invasion twenty years before.

– Hamid’s father was a tour guide, Mir explained. It was his family’s business. Hamid was taught everything about Mazar history, but the tourists never came back.

It was a sad example of an all too common story in Afghanistan, where war had spoiled the lives of so many people in surprising, incalculable ways. Hamid’s no doubt long apprenticeship had been utterly pointless.

– When did you come here? Have you been in London for long?

– Years, Hamid snorted, swatting angrily at an imaginary fly. He didn’t want to expand.

– Hamid has a best friend here who was once a tour guide in Kabul, added Mir. His name is Isa.

– Isa, Hamid snorted again. A stupid bastard.

Mir looked momentarily put out by this, but recovered quickly.

– Isa had a bakery in…another city here. With a Moroccan man. But the Moroccan man was bad and took all Isa’s money and went back to Rabat.

Hamid silenced Mir with a hard look. There was obviously more to this story, and when Hamid went to the kitchen to fetch tea, Mir leaned forward and began speaking in a breathless stage whisper. It seemed that Isa had spent the previous night at Mafeking Avenue.

– This Isa. He is very bad. James, he smokes a lot of chars! Hamid also. They are both…hash-heads. And Isa has a girlfriend. From Mexico!

He began to speak more quickly, clasping my arm as something clattered in the kitchen.

– Isa gambles. He lost £8000 in a gambling house. In one night!

It seemed an impressive amount of money for an Afghan refugee to own, let alone lose. But Hamid returned before more information could be extracted and Mir recomposed himself, the conspiracy neatly concealed.

The conversation turned to Mir’s bid for asylum, and Hamid at last became less reticent. He had been through all the hoops of the system himself and knew exactly what Mir now needed to do. He said that the granting of ELR – Exceptional Leave to Remain – was usually automatic for Afghans, and would almost certainly be so in Mir’s case. The trick would be to persuade the Home Office to upgrade Mir’s ELR to the full refugee status of ILR, Indefinite Leave to Remain. A case would have to be mounted, for which a solicitor would have to be found – a legal aid solicitor, of course. In the meantime Mir could stay with him for as long as he liked. He would show him how to sign on for unemployment benefit, maybe even help him find a job.

– You will also help him, he added bluntly. You must write letters. You and the man from the BBC. Witness statements. Character testimonials.

– How long will it take? How long did it take for you?

– A long time. Years. And it is harder now. There are too many asylum seekers here. The Home Office doesn’t know what to do.

– I’m sure we’ll manage, I said.

– Insha’allab, grinned Mir.

We talked on for an hour or so, drinking tea and nibbling nuts. We discussed the Afghan community in London, the finer points of the immigration system and the war at home. Things were not going well for the men of Mir’s family, who had been persecuted as I feared they would be by the Hazara Shi’ites in proxy revenge for his role in the death of the looter. Mir’s face fell for a moment as he described how his brothers had been imprisoned by the Hazaras, but he was too happy about being in London to allow himself to dwell on it, and quickly changed the subject.

When the time came to go Mir followed me out to the street and helped me strap the carpet onto the back of the bike.

– Will you be all right?

– I will be fine, James Bond.

– You shouldn’t worry about Hamid smoking spliff…chars. You’re in London now. A lot of people smoke chars in London.

– In Afghanistan also, said Mir contemptuously. But I do not. It is werry bad to smoke chars. It is against Islam.

As we spoke a Pakistani family had advanced down the pavement towards us, the father loping along in a brown shalwar qamiz, the red and gold folds of the mother’s sari flapping, three querulous children in tow. We stepped aside to let them pass. Mir eyed the Pakistani, and the Pakistani eyed him back. Something flashed between them, a sort of ethnic face-off, but it was Mir who looked away first. He giggled when he saw that I’d noticed.

– Hohh, he said wonderingly, when the family were out of earshot. The Pakis are ewerywhere!

– It’s a big city. A lot of people live here, including a lot of Pakis.

– It is exactly like Islamabad, he said, shaking his head. Is all of London like this?

– Not all of London, no. You’ll see.

We looked up and down Mafeking Avenue. Never mind the liberal principles of multiculturalism: to this Afghan newcomer, his place in E6’s social pecking order looked depressingly familiar.

– You’ll see what London is like. I’ll show you. You must come and visit me.

– I’ll come soon, James Bond.

I looked back at the house and saw Hamid through the window. He was holding the bottle of beer and studying the label with such a proprietary air that I knew at once that he intended to drink it. I caught his eye and wagged my finger jokily, letting him know that I knew what he was thinking, but there was no smile, no discernible sign that we had just spent over an hour together or that anything had passed between us. Too bad, I thought to myself. Mir is in London now, and there’s nothing you can do about it. There was no knowing where all this would lead or end, but at that moment it didn’t matter. Mir’s optimism was infectious. I winked at him and he smiled back like the sun.