– 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.