Читать книгу Kandahar Cockney: A Tale of Two Worlds - James Fergusson - Страница 9

Aaron Stein’s office in Islington was on the front line of the immigration war. From three rooms in a rundown house off Upper Street he waged a heroic and almost single-handed battle against the massed forces of the Home Office, which constantly threatened to overwhelm his position. Rows of wonky filing cabinets burst with case histories, correspondence with officialdom, notices of changes to the law. The precarious stacks of papers on his desk added to the impression of a hard-pressed general in a well sandbagged bunker. In the Stygian corridor, made gloomier by the grime on the frosted glass above the door onto the street, the traffic of applicants for asylum never stopped. It was interesting to try to guess their nationalities – Kurds, Iraqis, Tamils, Albanians. During office hours the door was left on the latch so they could come and go, for as an underpaid legal aid lawyer Aaron could not afford the luxury of a receptionist. It felt a long way from the Inns of Court in central London, with their oak-panelled and book-lined chambers, their aura of history and learning and respectful hush. Aaron Stein’s legal practice operated in a permanent state of near chaos.

We squeezed past other asylum seekers who waited patiently in the corridor or on the narrow staircase like medieval supplicants. There was a queue to use a payphone on which someone was jabbering in a subcontinental tongue. Aaron, one telephone jammed to his ear, another ringing unanswered somewhere beneath the awesome clutter of his desk, beckoned us in with a perfunctory wave.

– The name is Chandrasekaran, he was saying. All one word. First name Bari, not Chandra. That’s B,A,R,I…No, B. B for Bravo…

He spoke with a slight but unmistakably Semitic sibilance. There was a recognisable archetype here, a north London Jewish lawyer fighting for international justice in an underfunded garret of an office, principled, romantic, determinedly left wing. He looked younger than he had sounded on the telephone, only a little older than I was, although behind his John Lennon glasses his eyes were supremely tired. The telephone conversation went on and on. Some vital application form had been lost in the Home Office system. The consequence for Bari Chandrasekaran, who appeared to have been filed away as Chandra Sekaran, would be a significant delay in his asylum decision. Aaron was arguing the unfairness of this, but it seemed there was nothing the Home Office could do. Bari Chandrasekaran, properly logged and registered, would have to go to the back of the queue and start again.

– Three months, said Aaron flatly, putting down the phone at last. Another three months, she says. At least.

He looked up for the first time and took us in with a quick, joyless little smile.

– The system is utterly screwed, he observed. They never get the names right, never. Now, what can I do you two for?

I realised that he had no idea who we were, and reminded him of the letter I had sent the previous week, outlining what had happened to Mir in Afghanistan and the case for his political asylum. Aaron looked uncertain at first, but then it came back to him. He fished in a pile of papers and emerged with my letter with a speed that suggested there was at least some reason in the madness of his desk.

– I remember of course, he nodded, rereading the letter. It’s quite a story. Quite a story.

Hamid the former tour guide had been correct in his assertion that Exceptional Leave to Remain was virtually automatic for Afghans. In fact it was so automatic that a significant number of asylum seekers from other countries had taken to destroying their identity papers and claiming Afghan nationality. There was a particular problem with applicants from Iran and Pakistan, Aaron explained. Twenty years of war had driven some three million people across Afghanistan’s borders into these neighbouring countries, where many had settled and intermingled. Pashtu is the majority language of Afghanistan and is widely spoken in north-west Pakistan. Dari is the secondary language, and is a dialect of Persian. It was therefore a simple matter for Pakistanis and Iranians to dress up as Afghans and hoodwink unwary immigration officers at Britain’s ports. Disentangling the true asylum seeker from the false was one of the greatest challenges the system faced. Some Afghan refugees claimed that fully a quarter of their purported number in Britain, possibly tens of thousands of people, were fakes.

Aaron couldn’t see any problem in Mir’s case, which he said was open and shut. Sponsorship from two credible Western journalists was unusual, and would almost certainly be decisive in countering any challenge from the Home Office. In short, he would be delighted to take us on. He thought we should apply for ILR, Indefinite Leave to Remain, right away. He wanted more detail, and began to ask questions. When, precisely, had Mir become aware that his life was in danger? As a Pashtun, how dangerous had life been in the Northern Alliance town of Mazar before the arrival of the Taliban? Mir’s father was a Sharia judge: did he also play a role in the political life of Mazar, and what was his relationship with the Hazara Shi’ite community? None of this was easy to answer, and Mir responded hesitantly. I tried to help him along, but Aaron swiftly raised his hand.

– No, no, no. I appreciate your intentions, Mr Fergusson, I really do, but this is official testimony and I’d like to hear it from Mirwais himself, if you don’t mind.

Mir began again. Aaron scribbled notes on the back of my letter, but I could see he was having trouble concentrating. The phone rang again and he took the call. Then he was forced to break off to deal with a query from an assistant.

Mir spoke badly. Mazari politics were labyrinthine, difficult enough to explain even for a native English-speaker, and he went into much more detail than necessary. It was all taking far too long. Aaron furrowed his brow but the effort was clearly too much, and little by little his expression glazed over.

– All right, he sighed eventually, putting down his pen. I’ve heard enough. It won’t matter in the end anyway. They’ll definitely grant ILR.

I stole a look at his notes. Mir had been speaking for fifteen minutes, yet Aaron had barely covered half a page.

Aaron explained what would happen next. He would write to the Home Office and the Home Office would issue a case number. They could demand a hearing, but it was more likely in his opinion that they would simply upgrade Mir to full refugee status by return of post. The Home Office was supposed to adjudicate within three months, but the backlog of cases had grown so huge that it was unable to cope – which was why the Home Secretary was in the process of trying to reform the system with a new Immigration and Asylum Act.

– I predict disaster, said Aaron, with the undisguised relish of the vindicated critic. But he added that it was a good time to claim asylum. The backlog was a political embarrassment, and the government was desperate to get the numbers down for appearance’s sake. Due process was going by the board.

Mir sat mute throughout this discussion. Back out in the street, it soon became clear that he had understood little of it, but he didn’t seem to care. Britain, he said simply, was a good country. If Allah willed it then the system would work fine. Nevertheless, I could see that there was something on his mind.

– This man, he said by and by. Do you think he is a good man?

– I think he’s excellent.

– But where is he from?

– You mean his name?

– Jewish? said Mir. I thought so.

There was a pause.

– Is that a problem?

– The Jews are everywhere, he said, shaking his head.

I had come across Muslim anti-Semitism often enough in the past, but it was disconcerting to find such fear and prejudice in Mir.

– In London everyone is everywhere, I said lightly.

– You don’t think that he might not want to help me because I am a Muslim?

– Of course not! You shouldn’t think of him as Jewish. Think of him as your lawyer.

Mir looked thoughtful and did not reply. We walked on past the shops and restaurants of Upper Street towards the tube station.

– You know I am Ghilzai, he said eventually, naming one of the two main branches of the Pashtun nation. Some people say the Ghilzai are Children of Israel – one of the lost tribes. This is why the Tajiks sometimes call the Talibs ‘Bloody Jews’.

– Well, if you’re Jewish you can’t have a problem with Aaron Stein, can you?

– Personally I do not believe this Ghilzai tradition. It is werry stupid – maybe even Zionist propaganda.

– So what’s your point?

– Only that the Jews are werry clever people, he said.

I did my best to fulfil my side of the bargain with Mir. The initial euphoria of getting him in subsided soon enough. I was uninitiated in British immigration procedures, and the grinding inefficiency of the Home Office machinery was shocking. I began belatedly to read into the subject, snipping out relevant newspaper articles and buttonholing certain lawyers and political types I knew on the drinks and dinner-party circuit. I soon concluded that the Home Office wasn’t being deliberately callous: it was simply overwhelmed. It was obvious too that the situation was getting worse. Asylum seekers were turning up in Britain in ever-increasing numbers – twenty-two thousand in 1993, thirty-two thousand in 1997, and (as it later turned out) forty-six thousand in 1998. No wonder the officials couldn’t cope. Mir was part of a 42 per cent rise in asylum seekers over the previous year alone. In some cases they had been waiting literally years for a final decision. Such people lived in fear of a knock on the door, or perhaps just a formulaic letter that would launch them back to whatever disaster area they had come from. While the civil servants deliberated, these people were forced to live in a terrible limbo, an immigrant half-world whose inhabitants were in constant dread of the future and who had almost no status in the present. It seemed a cruel sort of sanctuary to offer people who had fled for their lives, and it was certainly no foundation for a young man trying to start a new life in the West. I resolved to do one more thing for Mir to make his limbo period as short as possible. I spoke to an uncle, a former Foreign Office Minister.

– Go and see his MP, he advised. It’s amazing what a letter on House of Commons writing paper will do to speed things up. It’s one of the few areas of government where the MP system actually works.

This wasn’t quite the offer of direct intervention I had hoped for. Mir was disappointed too, because where he came from nepotism was not so much the oil in the engine as the motor that drove the entire machine. But it was still a sensible suggestion, so not long afterwards we set off together to visit Tony Banks, the Member of Parliament for West Ham, in his constituency office in Stratford High Street.

We were late as usual for our appointment. Mir, full of enthusiasm for the possibilities of London life and excited by the prospect of the short journey to Stratford, had insisted on procuring a minicab to take us there from Mafeking Avenue.

– I’ll be two minutes, he cried; and disappeared out through the door for thirty. Hamid was out, and I was left alone in the front room, nibbling sugared mulberries and listening to the silence of the suppurating house. Mir returned at last in a dented Toyota driven by a decrepit Pashtun tribesman who spoke no English and had even less idea than I did how to get to Stratford High Street.

– He is a werry good man, Mir explained in a whisper. He lives close to here. I believe he is in need of the work.

It was a wet London evening that slowed the traffic in the tortuous gyratory system of central Stratford to a crawl. I sat low in the collapsed and greasy front seat, swatting irritably at the condensation on the windscreen and trying to match the prismatic chaos in the dark outside to the tattered road map on my lap. Ever deferential, Mir had insisted on sitting in the back. He chattered happily at the deaf old tribesman, who turned out to be an Afridi, from the Pakistani side of the Khyber Pass.

Tony Banks’s office was in a lone redbrick Victorian building, incongruous amidst the 1970s brutalism that surrounded it. The windows were protected by stout grilles. A large Labour Party banner mounted on the façade seemed defiant, like a Union Jack above some lonely imperial outpost in a foreign land.

We arrived so late that the officious young volunteer on the reception desk almost turned us away. We had missed our slot, he said, and there were many other people wanting to see Mr Banks. From the little waiting room over his shoulder a dozen brown faces silently turned to look at us, upturned white eyes in a small sea of turbans and beards. But the volunteer relented when we pleaded, and eventually we were granted an audience.

I had always admired Tony Banks, and recognised his famous pixie-like face at once. He was a maverick, one of the country’s few true conviction politicians, a left winger of the old school in the mould of Tony Benn or Tam Dalyell. The horde in his surgery waiting room suggested that he looked kindly on the plight of ethnic minorities in his constituency. I felt a spark of hope.

– You look busy tonight, I offered.

– I’m always busy, he snapped. I’ve got very little time. What do you want?

But his crinkled features softened as I rolled out the story once again, his shrewd eyes darting between me and Mir, who sat with pasha-like calm in the corner. He didn’t once question my motivation in helping Mir. If it was unusual for a white man to come pleading an Afghan’s case, he gave no indication of it. He was overworked and irascible, but I knew I had found a valuable ally to the cause. When I had finished he looked down at his desk with his head in his hands and exhaled deeply.

– The Home Office is useless, he muttered, almost to himself. Bloody useless. Take a note, Eileen, he added to a secretary who had slipped into the office. We’ll write to them and see if we can stir them up. He stood and nodded purposefully at Mir who was still watching and smiling pleasantly in the corner. Call me in a month if you haven’t heard from me by then, OK?

I felt elated as we bowed our way out. There was a terrier-like determination about Tony Banks that made me certain he would not let this case languish in a Home Office in-tray for long. Once again, however, it was uncertain how much of the meeting Mir had really understood.

– Is it good? he asked, out in the rain again.

– Good? It’s brilliant. I’d say he’s definitely going to help you.

– He is a nice man, Mir replied with cheerful equanimity. Perhaps I will give him a carpet also.

In the days and weeks that followed I tried to resist the impulse to check up on Mir. Technically I had fulfilled my side of the bargain we had struck in Islamabad. I thought I understood the dangers of meddling, of trying to shape or influence his new life. I had no intention of adopting a protege or, worse, of treating him like some kind of social experiment. This was not Pygmalion. Mir was a real person, not Eliza Doolittle, and I did not see myself as Henry Higgins. Yet at the same time I was deeply curious to know what he made of this alien land. His first impressions of the West might be valuable, and I wanted to record them. Moreover, I had promised to show him where and how I lived, and he kept asking for a ride on the motorbike. So one day I invited him over to my side of town.

He came out of the tube station where we’d arranged to meet, looking shaken.

– A man shouted at me, he explained. I thought he would hit me. It was werry embarrassing.

A racist, I thought immediately. He was bound to bump into one eventually: what a shame that it had happened so soon. It was a warm spring day, but it surely wasn’t the heat that made him mop at his brow with his sleeve.

– It was my fault, he continued. I was staring at his woman.

– James! he protested when I laughed. I could not help it. She was wearing a dress so short that it was…that it was no dress at all!

Later Mir confirmed that the greatest cultural shock, the most astonishing thing he had so far seen in London, was not the shops or the traffic or the size of the place – it was the women. I could understand the difficulty he was having in adjusting. He had grown up in a purdah environment where, with the possible exception of his immediate family, the female form was almost permanently hidden from view. All social activity was sexually segregated. There were no women’s magazines, no advertising hoardings. Under the Taliban, television sets were banned on the grounds that the female shape distracted the citizenry from their pious duties in the mosque. I had experienced the effect of such sensory depravation at first hand, and found that the Taliban probably had a point. Freud, according to a poster I once owned, reckoned that the average red-blooded male thinks about sex every three minutes, but in Afghanistan I hardly thought about it at all. This realisation had only dawned on me when I left the country. My first contact with non-Muslims had been in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent, where, according to my overtuned antennae, the streets seemed weirdly crammed with blondes in miniskirts. Like Mir in London I found myself staring at these apparitions. It was like seeing green grass again after a long sea voyage. Yet I had been in Afghanistan for just a few weeks. How much more amazing must London have been for Mir, who had been denied the sight of women’s legs for a lifetime?

The attitude towards women had always struck me as the main faultline of misunderstanding between the Islamic world and the West. I’d first experienced it years before, in the newsagent’s around the corner from my parents’ house in Kensington. The shop was run by a Mr Haroun and his family. They were friendly, diligent and always open, as well as charmingly loyal to their regulars, a comparative rarity in that cosmopolitan part of London. We weren’t on first-name terms, quite, yet there was always time to stop and chat. We did not think of them as Muslims, or even as foreigners, particularly. If we ever wondered about their country of origin or how they had come to settle in London, we certainly never asked. We observed that they were Asian, of course, but to us they were really just great shopkeepers, whose longer-than-average tenure in that high-turnover neighbourhood made them a valued focal point for the community. So it was a shock when one day Mr Haroun’s plump, easy-going son was accused of sexual assault by an Australian backpacker. I had gone over to buy a pint of milk, and could not help but notice the backpacker’s girlfriend standing by the door as I entered. She was wearing sandals, cut-off shorts and a spectacularly tight T-shirt, her tanned arms folded protectively across her well-developed breasts. Her beach-blonde hair, however, framed an expression of thunderous self-righteousness. The backpacker had broached sacred ground and gone behind the till. He was wagging his finger viciously at Mr Haroun’s son, who had backed away pathetically into the corner, too astonished and frightened to defend himself.

– And if you ever, EVER touch my girlfriend again, the backpacker was saying, I’ll come back and kill you and I’ll freakin’ torch your pissy little shop, understand? IS THAT UNDERSTOOD?

This was delivered at an antipodean bellow, the antithesis of the ‘quiet word’ that an Englishman would deploy in similar circumstances. There were two or three other customers in the shop, who had been browsing on autopilot like the locals they were, but like me they now stood frozen. Nobody spoke. The backpacker was a big, fit man who seemed even bigger in the cramped space behind the counter. For a moment it looked as though he might punch Mr Haroun’s son, but in the end he withdrew.

– Come on, Charlene. Let’s get out of this shitheap, he said.

He marched towards the entrance, spitefully dashing a handful of confectionery to the floor as he went. Charlene turned on her heel with an audible harumph and followed him out. For a second nobody moved. Then the shoppers simultaneously returned to their ordinary business. Still no one spoke as Mr Haroun’s son shakily emerged from behind the counter, his face pale with shock.

– They’re crazy, he said, looking around desperately at his customers. I didn’t do anything. You saw!

But the customers wouldn’t meet his eye. You could tell they were unsure if he was telling the truth. They hadn’t seen anything. Besides, it was nothing to do with them. They had come in here to buy a newspaper or a bar of chocolate, not to get embroiled in unpleasantness. And now the shopkeeper was asking them to bear witness; what temerity, what an imposition! Hadn’t they endured enough already? Why didn’t he understand that it was much better just to pretend the whole thing had never happened? That was the way things were done in this country. Mr Haroun’s son looked at me then, the last customer to come into the shop. He knew I wasn’t a witness, yet he was beseeching me to believe him.

– Don’t worry, I muttered. That reaction was totally over the top. Totally.

He looked at me in utter bafflement.

– These Australians, you know? I added lamely, turning a finger at the side of my head. What can you do?

He turned away without a shrug or a smile. This wasn’t the validation he sought, and we both knew it. I left the shop as quickly as possible, leaving him alone among the incomprehensible foreigners he had served for half his life, forlornly picking Kit-Kats off the floor.

Mir’s scare on the tube was a useful lesson, and I decided to drive it home by taking him to Soho. We were soon prowling the narrow streets west of Wardour Street. It was barely noon but there were already one or two raddled-looking working girls lurking in the doorways. I pointed one out to Mir, who stared in disbelief, then looked away in confusion as she caught his eye and asked if he was looking for business, luv. He kept close by me after that, but his curiosity soon got the better of him.

– Hohh, what is it? What is it? he whispered, transfixed by the sight of a dildo in a sex-shop window. It was a foot long at least and crafted from solid black latex, its flanks gleaming menacingly in the shop lights like an upended miniature Stealth bomber. I explained its purpose in clinical terms, feeling like a father telling a twelve-year-old son the facts of life.

– But it’s huge! he said, openly dismayed.

– Oh, I don’t know. Is it? I teased him.

It was harder to explain the sado-masochist display we saw in another window. It was simply beyond Mir’s comprehension, and he seemed only mildly reassured when I told him that whips and leather and chains were not to my taste. I coaxed him into a large porn shop. If I was surprised, he was stunned to see that the clientele largely comprised Asian men. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder facing the magazine racks on the walls, shifting their weight awkwardly as they readjusted their erections, their eyes flickering furtively across the lurid pages. It was as quiet as a library but the atmosphere was thick and charged and seminal, and we hastily backed out. Mir looked shocked, and I wondered briefly if I might not have overdone this baptism of fire, but decided that there was no point in trying to protect his innocence. London was London, and if he was going to live here then he needed to know what to expect.

I took him home via a Tesco supermarket in order to buy something for lunch, but by the sliding doors he stopped and gawped at the glittering aisles like Aladdin at the entrance to his cave.

– So much, he said. So much.

I hadn’t anticipated that Tesco’s would confound him. I suddenly understood that in East Ham he must have been buying his food in small shops, or perhaps from the covered market by Upton Park – but that resembled the markets in Islamabad. Mir had never seen anything like this. Deeper inside he moved like a trespasser. He kept a respectful distance from the overpackaged goods on the shelves as though they were tainted, or bombs.^* I had little idea of what he might want to eat, and he offered no guidance when I asked.

– I don’t know, he shrugged. Whatever you like.

– Are you hungry? Some meat? Should we get some bread?

– It doesn’t matter. As you wish.

– But it’s your lunch, I said, irritated. I want it to be as you wish.

– I don’t know.

I thought the chill-cabinet of microwave-ready meals might inspire him. There was a meals-for-one section, 250g per portion, a range that I knew all too well. Back at home Mir’s meals had been prepared by the women in his family. Afghan men did not cook. But that was going to have to change now that he was alone in London. He scanned the neat packages and the mendacious photographs on their lids, as exotic to him as meals for astronauts. In the photographs the meals were garnished with a sprig of greenery and laid out on a table suggestive of a farmhouse kitchen, a full place-setting glinting in soft candlelight.

– Like in a restaurant, Mir observed doubtfully. They look werry expensive.

– Don’t worry about that. I’m going to pay.

– No, I am going to pay, he said, showing decisiveness for the first time.

– You most certainly are not. You’re my guest and you’re in my country now. Choose something.

But we didn’t buy a ready meal. There was an obvious difficulty about Tesco’s prepared food that I had overlooked: it was not halal. So I steered him instead towards the fruit and veg section, but he remained tentative. The melons resembled the ones found in Mazar, but he was suspicious because they were out of season. He would concede nothing beyond the fact that he quite liked the look of the string beans. With increasing desperation I eventually selected an avocado, pitta bread and a tub of taramosalata. Even in the soft-drinks section he was paralysed by the choice on offer.

– Which one is best? he said simply. There was no Mirinda for him to latch onto here.

– Maybe Tango? I sighed. I think you’ll like Tango.

– As you wish, said Mir.

But back at my flat, he did like the Tango. Once he had established to his satisfaction that it contained no alcohol he slurped it down. He hesitated at the avocado, testing the surface of the peeled flesh with a podgy finger, but he tasted it and immediately declared it werry delicious, like a nut. Nothing could make him try the taramosalata however. He conceded that it was probably halal because it was made from fish roe, but when he asked where the fish had come from, and how it had been caught and killed, there was no answer I could give.

I pondered this Afghan placidly munching on my sofa. There was a pleasing symmetry to guiding and teaching the person who had once taught and guided me. At times in Afghanistan, Ewan, Rick and I had been wholly, scarily dependent on Mir’s interpretation of what was going on around us. Now the boot was on the other foot and I felt a sweet sort of satisfaction, almost like revenge. There was a helpless, childlike quality about him here, as though he had just been born into a new world. If so, then I was the midwife. But I understood also that I had a duty of care towards this young man that went beyond mere technical assistance in the initial asylum process. After all, in Afghanistan I too had stumbled like a child and been selflessly rescued by the people who lived there.

A few months previously, on my second visit to Afghanistan, I had been lost in the Salang Tunnel, a showcase of Soviet engineering eleven thousand feet up in the Hindu Kush. A lack of helicopters and time had forced me to return overland to Mazar from the Panjshir Valley, a two-day trip that for complex reasons I was forced to tackle alone. It was still winter, and the mine-lined road up to the pass was blocked by snow for several miles at either end.

The tunnel itself was two miles long and pitch-dark. Half a mile in, my torch batteries went flat. The surface of the tunnel floor was badly decayed, full of slippery rocks and deep holes filled with freezing slush and ice.^* I was already tired from the journey, and after what seemed like hours of cursing and floundering in this terrible place, my legs soaked, my knees and shins bashed and aching from countless falls, I felt badly demoralised. Just then an unseen presence reached out of the darkness and took me by the hand. Friend or foe? There wasn’t a chink of light by which to tell, and the hand’s owner never said a word. Instead, he or she began pulling me gently but firmly along the tunnel. This person seemed to know the topography of the worst rock-falls and how to avoid the deepest pools. Even so, it was another half an hour before we rounded a gradual bend and a pinprick of light revealed itself.

As the rocks and ruts of the tunnel floor took form I released the hand and stole a glance at my saviour. He was a man of about my age, with the high cheekbones and narrow eyes of a Hazara. The tatty clothes and sandals he wore indicated that he was a porter, a regular passenger through this tunnel. At the other end I had passed men like him bearing jerry-cans of diesel on their backs. This one wore a Burberry scarf around his head.

When at last we reached the full-beam dazzle of the tunnel’s exit he put on a pair of battered pink sunglasses and marched ahead without changing pace. I kept up with him, smiling and waiting for him to communicate, but he trudged on without once speaking or raising his eyes from the ground. So it went for another two hours, the road winding gently down between peaks as crisp and white as a toothpaste advertisement. Below the snowline we heard an engine. A smart Toyota Landcruiser rounded a corner and stopped when it saw me. The driver wound down the window and the man in the passenger seat leaned across him, looking me up and down.

– Need a lift? the passenger asked mildly, in flawless English. I was exhausted, and thanked him from my heart as I scrambled in, leaving the door open for my silent tunnel guide. But as the guide moved to join me, the driver barked something in Dari, stopping him dead, and leaned back over his seat to slam the door shut. I pleaded with the English-speaker, but he shook his head, unmoved.

– No room, he said, untruthfully. As the truck turned around I looked guiltily out at the man who had delivered me from the tunnel. He had propped his pink sunglasses on his forehead and stared sullenly back, his shoulders slumped, stock still at the side of the road.

– Here, said the English-speaker, producing a flask of hot sweet tea. Drink.

The Landcruiser was already turning around for the descent down the hill. The decent thing to do would have been to show solidarity with the porter by climbing back out, but I was too tired and the Landcruiser was too comfortable, and the moment was quickly lost. My rescuer was the mayor of the next town down the road. He said he came up this way each evening to monitor the pedestrian traffic and to help anyone in need. I looked back, but my guide was already out of sight. I realised with an awful pang that I had neglected even to pay him for his help. I never saw him again, but the tea, as I cautiously sipped it in the back of the lurching vehicle, tasted like elixir.

Tony Banks’s intervention with the Home Office was masterly. A month after our surgery visit Mir rang to announce that he had received a letter granting him Indefinite Leave to Remain. He sounded pleased and relieved to be on the road to full refugee status so soon. ILR status meant he was eligible for all kinds of benefits not conferred on those with ELR. For instance, he could apply for an education grant to continue his medical studies, begun in Mazar. The Home Office would also issue him with new identity papers, blue ones instead of brown, that were almost as good as a passport because they permitted their holder to travel abroad. And in five to seven years, if he was still here he could apply for full British citizenship and a passport the same colour as mine: Dieu et mon Droit and all that. In the short term ILR was a valuable psychological fillip for Mir, who had some other exciting news to share: he had secured his first job, in a West Ham restaurant. Would I care to come and visit him there? He wanted to speak to me, he said, as well as to show me some proper Pashtun hospitality.

The restaurant was a busy diner just up the road from the football stadium on Green Street. Dun-coloured curries bubbled cheerfully beneath hot-lamps along a stainless-steel counter, but it still seemed an unwelcoming place. It smelled and sounded alien, acoustic clatter bouncing from its linoleum floors and utilitarian walls. I slipped into a formica-clad booth, conspicuous among the other customers, who were exclusively Asian, and waited for Mir to make an appearance. The laminated menu was in Urdu, and non-speakers were invited to select from photographs. Whatever they were, the dishes on offer were absurdly cheap by west London standards, further evidence that a virtual parallel economy operated in this part of the city. I ordered what looked like a chicken tikka masala and a glass of lassi. I had assumed Mir was a waiter here, but the grubby dishcloth slung over his shoulder when he finally crept in from the back indicated that as yet he was no more than the bus boy. He asked permission to join me from the manager, who looked at his watch before reluctantly agreeing.

– The boss. Paki bastard, Mir muttered mischievously as he slid in opposite me.

He seemed happy but tired, and it soon became apparent why. He had been washing floors and dishes in this place for twelve hours a day all week.

– It’s no problem, he said. I don’t have to work these hours. I can work for as long or as short as I wish, and the money is good.

But it wasn’t good. Mir was being paid £2 an hour for his labours, cash in hand and no questions asked. Here at last was hard evidence of the fabled immigrant black economy. No one really knew what jobs like Mir’s cost the country in lost taxes each year, but sections of the press and certain politicians were fond of suggesting it ran into billions.

– The money is not the problem, said Mir. I have heard of some people who are paid £1 an hour. The problem is Hamid. He is a bad man. I need to move somewhere else.

It wasn’t just the fact that Hamid sometimes smoked chars or drank alcohol that was troubling the teetotal Mir. His host was a Pashtun like him, but he was a hypocrite who lived in flagrant breech of Pashtunwali, the code of honour that was supposed to govern the social behaviour of their tribe. Mir had explained the four pillars of this code in detail in Afghanistan. The first was badal, meaning revenge, and the obligation to exact it. Such Old Testament thinking was not confined to Afghanistan’s Pashtuns – the persecutors of Mir’s family in Mazar were Hazara, after all – but the language of vendetta was one that Mir understood. It was the threat of badal that had prompted his flight to Britain. The second pillar was nanwatai, the obligation to show humility to the victor in a fight or dispute. Nang, meanwhile, meant honour, especially the honour of family and clan and the obligation to defend it. It applied particularly to the women of the family and could be enforced if necessary by a lashkar, a sort of tribal raiding party. A recent horror-story in the Western press told how a lashkar had gang-raped a woman from a rival family to avenge the insult of an unapproved liaison. Such things were not uncommon among the Pashtuns, particularly in the tribal areas of north-west Pakistan. It was an example of the application of nang gone mad. Finally there was malmastia, the obligation to show hospitality to all visitors, even to one’s enemies, and to do so selflessly and without expectation of recompense.

But as Mir had discovered, there was little selflessness about Hamid’s conduct in London. He had lost no time in guiding Mir to the local social security office in order to apply for the emergency housing benefit to which he was entitled. Mir’s gratitude had turned to astonishment when Hamid told him in terms none too equivocal that he expected him to hand over that and any other money he might possess without delay.

There was worse. It took some prompting– as a Pashtun, Mir was touchingly reluctant to betray almost any personal confidence – but over the chicken curry he eventually confessed that Hamid was more than just a secret tippler. He made a comfortable living from his job as a dispatch driver, about £400 a week, much of which Mir reckoned he spent on drink; and his friend Isa was even more profligate.

– They sound unhappy, I suggested.

I was building an image of two depressed and dislocated men who had been seduced and corrupted by the temptations of the West. In turning their backs on the Islamic principles of home they had badly lost their way. Perhaps they ought even to be pitied. But Mir didn’t feel pity for them – he merely disapproved of them, although their behaviour also mystified him. For instance, Hamid’s friend Isa had a wife and children in Pakistan, and he had been in the UK long enough to have earned the right to bring them over to join him, yet he had chosen not to, opting instead for a seedy bachelor half-life that was no kind of substitute in Mir’s eyes. Isa had replaced his wife with a girlfriend of sorts, a poor lost Mexican student whom Mir had met once or twice at the house on Mafeking Avenue. Isa was in the house often, Mir said, because the shared bedsit he rented nearby was so small and uncomfortable. Isa never introduced or explained the Mexican, who spoke little English and appeared not even to like her lover very much. It was Mir’s theory that the girl was essentially homeless, and sometimes stayed at the house or at Isa’s bedsit only because she had nowhere else to go. No wonder Mir hated it there.

The final straw had come the previous week, when Isa had brought Mir along to a crowded bedsit party on a housing estate in Forest Gate. Homesick and keen for fresh company, Mir had been looking forward to the evening but was appalled by what he found there. The ex-Kabul tour guide’s friends were a mixed bag of Afghan men, Pashtuns, Hazaras and Tajiks. One of them described himself as being in the motoring trade, but Mir soon realised he was really just a small-time car thief. Like some of the others he had entered the country illegally via the Channel Tunnel, hidden in the back of a truck. His identity papers were naturally false. As far as the authorities in Britain were concerned he simply did not exist. From the way Mir wrinkled his nose it was plain that he had found the bedsit squalid, the people squashed into it morally contaminated. Like Isa these people had developed a taste for sex and alcohol and drugs; they were bad Muslims who had let themselves go.

– They are crazy people, he insisted. This thief. He keeps bullshitting. He says he wants to buy a gun so that he can shoot people, pow, pow!

The party had begun amicably, but as the second vodka bottle circulated they began to discuss domestic politics and the gathering grew fractious. A Pashtun man swore his undying support for the Taliban. A Tajik lost his temper and threw a punch, at which point Isa stepped into the fray. Somebody toppled back hard into a table, splintering it. Then a knife was pulled and suddenly a new front in the Afghan civil war had broken out in London E7. It was fortunate that an irate neighbour had already called the police, who arrived just in time to mediate a ceasefire. They ordered the partygoers out into the street, where they were frisked, but no drugs or weapons were found. Either the search was too cursory or the Afghans were too crafty for the officers, who responded by cautioning them with a little lecture. If they caught them misbehaving again, they said, they would speak to the housing authorities, who at their command would instantly disperse them to different cities around the country. It seemed a weak sort of threat to Mir, and the dreaded demand for identity papers never came. He assumed that disturbances among the immigrant community of Forest Gate were so common that the police had developed a local policy of lenience. Or perhaps they simply couldn’t be bothered with the extra paperwork that arrests that evening would entail.

Either way, the partygoers felt great relief – except for Mir, who mostly felt just anger. He had not escaped the summary justice of Afghanistan in order to get into trouble here. Spreadeagled against the cold council estate wall, he determined to speak to the local housing authorities himself as soon as possible in order to escape the world inhabited by the likes of Hamid and Isa. This was not a decision he took lightly, for these were still the only Afghans he knew in London; but for the sake of his spiritual well-being and integrity he was ready to cut himself off from their company and to make his way alone. He would never succumb to the decadent pleasures of the West, he wanted to assure me. London was his land of opportunity, and he was not about to blow it. Success, insha’allah, would surely attend the good Pashtun who kept to the path of righteousness with piety and iron discipline. I knew he had already located his nearest mosque in West Ham and was still rigorous about praying five times a day. I heard the conviction in his voice and gave him a silent cheer.

The curry was barely finished when Mir’s manager sternly tapped his watch from across the room. Mir smiled unctuously back, and grimaced privately at me. I produced some coins but he closed his hand over mine and insisted that it was his turn to pay. Lunch had cost all of £4.20, small change to me but a sum representing two hours and six minutes of drudgery to him. The ensuing pantomime of protest and counter-protest did not end when I slapped the money down and headed smartly for the door. He chased after me, sweeping the coins from the table and fluidly stuffing them back into my jacket pocket.

– Mir, it’s different here, I began. You can’t afford such generosity in your situation. You need this money to survive.

– This is the Pashtun way, came the inevitable reply. He retreated triumphantly to the dark regions of the diner and I was forced to leave.

The exchange was disquieting. Although I could understand and even approved of his decision to move out of Mafeking Avenue, it was far from certain that Mir was capable of surviving on his own so soon after his arrival. The tenacity with which he clung to his Pashtun principles was surely an indication of how much he still had to learn about his adopted country. Money, meanwhile, looked as if it could quickly become a serious problem. The bus boy job was far beneath his capabilities, and £24 for a twelve-hour day was a truly desperate wage for London. He would never manage to save anything at that rate, especially if he insisted on giving it away. He had set his sights on a medical conversion course at the Newham College of Further Education, and savings of some sort were going to be vital if he was serious about enrolling there. Surely better employment could be found for him without too much difficulty. Anything was better than £2 an hour. And so it was that a few days later I took him to my parents’ house in Kensington. There was a day’s work that needed doing in the garden, for which my father was prepared to pay him a respectable £5 an hour.

– Hohh, you live in a palace, Mir said with infinite satisfaction as he came inside.

Mum and Dad’s house was certainly different from the cramped terraces replicated around Mafeking Avenue. It had four floors, seven bedrooms, a large garden with a garage at the end and off-street parking for three cars. Here at last was the Western affluence of Mir’s dreams. And yet the houses in our street were not so very different from the developments in the East End. They had been built in the early nineteenth century, at the beginning of the same explosion of urban expansion that had swept through the parish of West Ham.^* A hundred yards away stood a red granite memorial to Victoria, Empress of India. The Great White Queen, born at Kensington Palace just up the road, looked sternly down on our house with bulbous eyes above sagging jowls, one of the capital’s many celebrations of the colonial conquest that had made London’s expansion possible and turned it into the greatest city in the world. Perhaps the Queen would have been amused after all by this unlikely visitation, an Afghan in the Royal Borough of Kensington.

The heavily burglar-alarmed drawing room was large and light and filled with pretty paintings and delicate antiques. An ornate grand piano that my father liked to improvise on in the evenings gleamed in the corner of the room. Mir stroked its silky rosewood surfaces as though it were a cat.

– It is beauuutiful, he crooned.

It had stood there all my life, an object so familiar that it had become practically invisible to me. Now I reexamined the intricately painted cherubs and garlands that curled around its polished sides, and saw that Mir was quite right.

My father came in, and immediately looked dubious. The travelling clothes that Mir had arrived in, still practically the only gear that he owned, were starting to show their age. The sole of one of his scuffed leather shoes was coming away, and his cheap nylon raincoat smelled strongly of eau-de-cologne. Mir knew he looked out of place, which only added to his clumsiness in front of my father, whom he treated with the toe-curling deference that is always shown to a paterfamilias in Afghan society. Routinely asking after the well-being of the extended family was another social tradition back home that didn’t quite fit in a west London drawing room.

– And how is your wife? Mir enquired politely.

– Er, fine thanks, said my father, startled.

– And your other children?

– Umm, I think they’re fine too.

– Allah be praised, Mir beamed.

Then the dog Biscuit came in. She was a small, neurotic terrier bitch with the awkward habit of snarling at all young children, uniformed officials and foreigners. Even in the back of the car on the way to the park she used to go berserk at the sight of a black man passing along the pavement. Mir backed away in terror, another common Muslim trait that I had forgotten about. Dogs are used for hunting and herding in the Islamic world, but are considered fundamentally unclean and are seldom kept as pets. Biscuit was hastily spirited away to another room.

– Thank you. Sorry, said Mir as his panic subsided. I hate dogs. When they bark the angels fly away.

In the garden my father showed him the garage that needed tidying, and the potting shed and the tools he should use. He pointed out the ivy that needed stripping from the garage walls and the weeds that choked the flowerbeds, Mir nodding politely all the while. I had an editing shift on a newspaper that day and was already late, so once I was satisfied that he really did know what he was supposed to be uprooting I left him to it.

This was a mistake. I phoned in the afternoon to find that Mir had already gone. My father sounded perplexed and a little indignant. He reported how Mir had laboured all day in the garage and garden, thoroughly enough but with excruciating slowness, my father anxiously checking on him from time to time to make sure he wasn’t pulling up the roses. My mother had offered him tea and something to eat but he refused it all. He only paused once in his work, when he requested a quiet corner of the house in which he might pray. There were a few circumstances in life that could interrupt Mir’s devotional schedule, but weeding a garden in Kensington was certainly not one of them. My father told him he was very welcome to use the drawing room. Mir thanked him profusely but indicated that the drawing room would not do. The dog had been in there, so the carpets were unclean. It was regrettable, he said, but there would undoubtedly be dog hairs tangled in the weft.

– So I put him downstairs in the library, Dad explained. The dog’s been in there too, of course. The dog goes everywhere. But it seemed best not to tell him that. I mean, there are limits. And then he wanted to know which direction Mecca was in, so I pointed him south-east, towards Earl’s Court. Do you think that was about right?

More baffling still, when Mir had finished in the garden he had adamantly refused payment.

– He said he couldn’t possibly take monies from the honoured father of his esteemed friend, or words to that effect. And then he left. It was awful.

I groaned inwardly, imagining exactly the deferential murmur with which this little homily would have been delivered, one hand on heart, the head tilted in a respectful bow. Mir’s notions of debt and service might have been old-fashioned and charming, but they were hopelessly misplaced. He had defeated the entire point of the gardening exercise. I thanked my father for his help and promised to pass on the £40 he had tried to pay Mir. Actually I intended to do rather more than that, and to give him a severe talking-to. He would have to adapt or even abandon his Pashtun principles if he was ever going to survive in this city.

Taking Mir home to my parents seemed to ratchet up the bond between us by several notches. From that moment on, every single encounter with him was prefaced by a lengthy enquiry after the health of my family. It made no difference if I was in a hurry or the topic of our conversation was urgent. The ritual simply had to be gone through. But with time I learned to tolerate and even to respect this tradition, for it was more than just a silly social formality. Mir spoke often about his own family, whose continued well-being was his first and greatest concern. His parents, two brothers and two sisters, not to mention a distant orphaned cousin, his wife and three children who also lived with his family, had all stayed behind when he fled Mazar the year before. He had spent the whole of his short life with this extended family, in a pleasant compound just north-east of the great shrine. Like most Afghans he had never anticipated or wished for any other kind of existence, not even after marriage. The wrench he felt at finding himself alone in a distant country at the age of twenty was naturally enormous. Unlike typical Westerners he had not been raised in the expectation of being ejected from the parental nest on reaching adulthood. Instead he had been trained to live with his parents forever and to support them as they grew old. Filial duty demanded it. In the traditional Afghan family the father is the centre around which the rest of the family revolves, its unquestioned decision-maker as well as its financial comptroller and moral and spiritual guide. And Mir’s judge father had brought up his boys very traditionally indeed. Mir therefore instinctively put the interests of his family above his own. It was hard for him to comprehend that an entirely different formula operated here in the West, where the interests of the individual are generally considered paramount. His assiduity towards my family was thus an instance of the most heartfelt transference.

I knew that he was homesick, that the very thought of home was sustaining him through the lonely days and nights of his new life. He could ill afford it, but he was spending a lot of money in the telephone bucket-shops that dot every East End High Street in his efforts to glean news from home. Connecting to Afghanistan’s shattered telephone system is challenging at the best of times, but it was worse now. Afghanistan was in chaos. An earthquake hit the north-east of the country, the second to strike in three months. Nine thousand people were killed. Then in August the Taliban managed at the second attempt to capture and hold Mir’s home town, and all resistance was quashed.

Four thousand Hazaras were massacred in revenge for the debacle the previous year. Eleven Iranian diplomats in their Mazar consulate were also murdered, an act so heinous that Tehran considered it a casus belli and began to mass 200,000 troops along the Afghan border. Meanwhile Osama bin Laden was being held responsible for the bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, prompting Bill Clinton to order a Cruise missile attack on his training camps in Jalalabad and Khost. Direct phone links to Mazar remained down, so Mir’s ability to communicate with his family depended on their ability to borrow a sat phone. There were few of these in Mazar, and fewer still that worked. More often Mir would receive messages passed on by third, fourth or even fifth parties that were always confused and several days out of date. The news was sporadic, but when it did get through it became more and more alarming.

The men of Mir’s family’s incarceration in a Hazara jail had been traumatic, but it hadn’t lasted long. Not all the Hazara Shi’ites were evil, and Mir’s father had used his connections in the community to obtain their release. The eventual fall of Mazar to the Taliban in August should have spelt deliverance for a Pashtun family like Mir’s, but it seemed that the opposite was the case. First Mir learned that his older brother Habibullah, an orthopaedic surgeon, had been press-ganged into operating on the Taliban’s war wounded, and was virtually imprisoned in one of the military forts to the west of the city. Then he received a garbled message that his father, younger brother and cousin had been arrested by the Taliban on charges unknown.

After that there was an ominous silence. Mir was unable to reach Mazar by sat phone or to discover anything at all about what had happened to them. Weeks went by and there was still no news. I was concerned for them, particularly for Musa, the younger brother who had acted as Mir’s stand-in interpreter on a brief trip I had made the year before to inspect the Buddhas of Bamiyan. Mir kept me informed of developments, or the lack of them. His voice over the telephone was audibly tense, but there was little I could do other than offer sympathy. Apart from anything else, as 1998 progressed my career as a freelance journalist had at last taken off. I landed assignments in the Caribbean, Egypt, Zimbabwe, Bosnia, even Taiwan. I was busy writing and travelling, and it was early autumn before I saw Mir again.

By now he had extracted himself from the clutches of the ex-tour guides and was installed in his own bedsit in Kitchener Road, a ten-minute walk from Queen’s Market and the West Ham football stadium.^* It was a warm evening and it was pleasant to stroll past the shops on Green Street. I had been back in the country for less than twenty-four hours, so that familiar things seemed somehow marvellous, almost poetic in the way they represented London and home. I heard music in the squealing brakes of a black cab; a polystyrene coffee cup skewered on the wheelnut of a Routemaster bus made me wish for a camera. But the shops along the pavement were as unfamiliar as ever. They were trading in a socio-economic bracket wholly alien to me, while the variety of races and creeds they represented was repeated nowhere else that I had ever been.

Yet there were intelligible clues to the immigrant history of this place. In the faded telephone numbers that the shopfronts carried, the countless newcomers who had washed the long shores of east London’s High Streets had left tidemarks. As all Londoners know, the telephone-number prefix for the capital changed with annoying frequency during the 1990s. Businesses were required to change their stationery or the sides of their delivery vans three times in ten years, from 01 to 071 or 081, then to 0171 or 0181, finally to 0207 or 0208. However, West Ham’s shopkeepers either couldn’t afford or couldn’t be bothered to make the necessary adjustments. For instance, Place Victoire (African cosmetic produits, exotic food & CD video), Bindia (Specialists in wedding sarees, suites and lenghas) and Farha Fashion (Wedding accessories, beauty cases, Sherwani & Kabuli) all advertised 0181 numbers. Their owners had clearly arrived here before the 0208s such as Al-Madina (Islamic goods, videos, ahrams, hijabs and Islamic clothing), Bismillah (Gent’s hairdressers) and Malik Hairstylist (& International call box) – but after the 081-prefixed Good Luck Restaurant (Chinese takeaway) – while Carlos, the eponymous owner of a unisex hairdressing salon still displaying an 01 number, must have regarded the whole lot of them as irritating parvenus. Meanwhile Duncan’s, a Dickensian-looking institution selling traditional East End pie, mash and eels (jellied and stewed), was sandwiched between an 0208 halal butchers and the 0181 Rana Food Store (purveyors of green bananas and minicabs), and was so old and established that it didn’t deign to carry a phone number at all.

I felt I had discovered an intriguing new sociology, and arrived at Mir’s new address quite pleased with myself, but his appearance at the door checked me. His face looked grey and he had lost weight. He ushered me into a sour-smelling hall and up a dingy staircase, a worse place by far than the Mafeking Avenue house. His room was tiny and he was paying a Rachmanite Pakistani landlord £40 a week for it, no deposit or advance required. He had cleaned it thoroughly, but damp still seeped into the corner of one ceiling and the frame of the curtainless window looked rotten.

He sat me down in the only chair and himself on the mattress on the floor and began to relate the latest news from Mazar. He had managed to speak to an uncle who had a farm fifteen miles west of Mazar, near the ancient ruined city of Balkh. His father, younger brother and cousin had somehow managed to get out of prison and were now in hiding nearby. It seemed the Taliban had accused them of being traitors and spies, of hoarding boxes full of dollars and gold, and of much else besides. It was trumped-up nonsense, and I knew that Mir’s earlier collusion with Western journalists was largely responsible. His younger brother Musa had been tortured, left hung upside down for days. The jailers had beaten his feet so badly that there was some question as to whether he would ever walk properly again, while their father had been forced to listen to his screams from a neighbouring cell in a bid to extort a confession, or money, or both. His father was old, and the weeks in prison had gravely damaged his health. Mir said he could no longer sleep at nights. He was in despair, and didn’t know what to do. Squatting there on the mattress, his pitifully few possessions neatly arranged around him – a cheap alarm clock, a copy of the Koran – he suddenly looked small and sad, as though someone had punched him, the loneliest person in the world.

I questioned him about his fellow tenants. He replied that two Pakistanis, a Malaysian and an Iranian also lived there, all of them men. The Malaysian was all right. He worked at the Ford plant in Dagenham, three or four miles to the east. But Mir strongly disapproved of the Iranian, who for asylum purposes was pretending to be an Afghan, the con trick that Aaron Stein had mentioned. The two Pakistanis mostly kept themselves to themselves, although Mir suspected that one of them, too, was an illegal immigrant. They shared the downstairs sitting room that had been partitioned into two bedsits, leaving just a small kitchen as the only non-bedroom living area. There were two bathrooms, but the loo in one of them was permanently blocked and so smelly that the room was unusable. Mir said he spent much time cleaning and sprucing up the other bathroom, but that here too he was fighting a losing battle. A newly installed shower curtain had already been torn, and no one had owned up to it.

We went down to the kitchen to make tea. The surfaces were squalid and the carpet was stained and greasy with trodden-in food. There was a bench along one wall and a single broken chair by a rickety round table. Mir, explaining that they mostly cooked eggs and rice, was crestfallen to find that someone had been into the fridge and stolen the milk he had bought especially for my visit.