Excerpt of The Warlord's Son by Dan Fesperman
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Chapter One
The sun does not rise in Peshawar.
It seeps--an egg-white smear that brightens the eastern horizon behind a veil of
smoke, exhaust and dust. The smoke rises from burning wood, cow patties and old
tires, meager flames of commerce for kebab shops and bakers, metalsmiths and
brick kilns. The worst of the exhaust sputters from buzzing blue swarms of motor
rickshaws, three-wheeled terrors that careen between horse carts and overloaded
buses.
But it was the dust that Najeeb Azam knew best. Like him, it had swirled down
from the arid lands of the Khyber and never settled, prowling restlessly in the
streets and bazaars as if awaiting a fresh breeze to carry it to some farther,
better destination.
In the morning it coated his pillow, a faint powder flecked with soot. In the
evening he wiped it from his face and coughed cinders into a handkerchief, never
quite able to flush it from either pores or lungs. Wherever he traveled it went
along for the ride, a parasite, a little gift from his adopted home. He was
respectful of its mysterious cloaking powers, because things had a way of
disappearing in Peshawar--people, ideas, entire political movements. They would
be loud and noticeable one day, only to vanish without a trace the next, and
with each new day someone or something else always seemed to have gone missing.
A Peshawar dawn nonetheless had its charms, and Najeeb liked to rise early to
savor them. So, on a warm morning in mid-October he stood in the darkness of his
small kitchen a half hour before sunrise, brewing tea while listening to
Mansour's horse cart leaving for the bazaar. He knew without looking that the
old man stood like a charioteer on a narrow wooden flatbed, reins in hand,
pomegranates and tomatoes piled behind him, the baggy folds of his shalwar
kameez flowing ghostlike in the pale light. The lonely clip-clop was soothing,
yet also a sort of warning, like the ticking of a bomb. It was part of
Peshawar's daily countdown to chaos. Soon enough the narrow streets would
explode with vehicles, animals and people, beggars and merchants elbow to elbow
as both cried out for rupees.
The loudspeaker of a nearby mosque crackled to life. Najeeb strolled to the
living room, setting his teacup on a shelf and kneeling, lowering his forehead
to the rug in prayer. This, too, was a ritual of tranquillity, yet it never
seemed quite peaceful enough here.
In the tribal lands of his boyhood the muezzin's cry had been a solitary call,
haunting and lovely. He used to pretend the message was for him alone, and to
Najeeb there was still no grander expression of power than the words Allahu
akbar, "God is great," when carried on a morning breeze across empty
countryside. But in Peshawar there were more muezzins than he could count, and
their calls became an unruly conversation--one voice trumping another in a war
above the rooftops. Cats yowling over turf. Or perhaps Najeeb was turning into
an infidel, a worldly backslider. A Kafir, as his father's Pashtun tribesmen
would have said. Life never seemed half so holy now as it once had, and in a
country where not only a man's calling but also his marriage was generally set
in stone by age eighteen, Najeeb was still a work in progress at twenty-seven.
As a boy he'd roamed a wonderland of extremes, a rural princeling at play among
bearded, turbaned men with rifles slung on their backs, all of whom owed their
allegiance to his father. After breakfast he might sprint barefoot through the
dew of waist-high poppies, dodging marauding boys from the village with
slingshots round their necks. As the sun climbed higher he sought the refuge of
high defiles to watch smuggler parades of camels and horses, teatime caravans
swaying and clanking through the passes. Then, off to bed on the verandah of his
father's hujera, the men's guest house, where he gazed up at stars so icy bright
that it seemed they might pierce his skull. Pleasantly weary, he stretched out
on a rope bed, eavesdropping on his father's guests and supplicants --smoky,
piratical gatherings in the hujera's great room, with hubble-bubble hookahs and
high-caliber bandoleers, lulling him to sleep with the streamside murmur of
their mutter and growl, and the whine and hum of their radio, beaming news from
the great beyond. Occasionally a burst of laughter or an angry shout shouldered
into his dreams, but by morning there were only him and the muezzin beneath
another clear sky.
Excerpted from The Warlord's Son by Dan Fesperman Copyright © 2004 by
Dan Fesperman. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House,
Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or
reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
