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?
–