In the street where Sultan has his bookshop there are several other bookshops and shops that sell writing materials, bind books or copy documents for people. Rahimullah works in one of these stalls. He sometimes drops in on Mansur to drink tea and gossip. This time Mansur slips over to him to pour out his troubles. Rahimullah just laughs.

‘You mustn’t try it on with a student. They are too virtuous. Try someone who needs money. Beggars are the easiest. Some of them are not too bad. Or go to where the UN doles out flour and oil. There are lots of young widows there.’

Mansur gapes. He knows the corner where they distribute food to the most needy, primarily war widows and little children. They get a ration every month and some of them stay standing on the corner trying to exchange part of the ration for money.

‘Go there and find someone who looks young. Buy a bottle of oil and ask her to come here. “If you come to my shop I will help you in the future,” I usually say. When they come I offer them some money and take them into the back room. They arrive in a burka, they leave in a burka – no one is suspicious. I get what I want and they get money for the children.’

Mansur looks at Rahimullah with disbelief. Rahimullah opens the door to the back room, barely a metre square. On the floor lie several cardboard boxes, dirty and trodden down. Dark blotches stain the cardboard.

‘I take off the veil, the dress, the sandals, trousers. Having got there it is too late for regret. It would be useless to scream, because if anyone came to the rescue, the fault would lie with her, no matter what. The scandal would ruin her for life. It’s easy with the widows. But if they are young girls, virgins, I do it between their legs. I just ask them to press their legs together. Or I do it from, well, you know, from behind,’ says the merchant.

Mansur looks at the salesman in disbelief. How could he talk about things like that in such an easy and casual way?

When he stops by the mass of blue burkas that same afternoon, he realises it is not as easy as all that. He buys a bottle of oil. But the hands selling it are rough and worn. He looks around and sees only poverty. He throws the bottle on to the back seat and drives off.

He has given up swotting words from Bollywood. But one day he thinks he might need them after all. A young girl enters the shop and asks for an English dictionary. Mansur puts on his most charming manner. He finds out that she has enrolled in English classes for beginners. The gallant bookseller’s son offers his help.

‘Very few people come in here, so I can examine your homework, now and again.’ But the girl never returns.

‘My heart is dirty,’ he confides to his younger brother. He knows he should not think about girls.

A little girl comes into the shop. Maybe she is twelve, maybe fourteen. She reaches out a dirty hand and looks pleadingly up at them. Over her head is a dirty-white shawl with red flowers. She is too young to wear the burka. That is only donned once the girl has reached puberty.

Beggars often come into the shops. Mansur usually sends them packing. But Rahimullah remains standing and watches the childish heart-shaped face and takes ten notes out of his pocket. The beggar girl looks at them wide-eyed and grabs them greedily. But just as she is about to get them Rahimullah’s hand slips away. He makes a large circle in the air with his hand and holds her gaze.

‘Nothing is free in life,’ he says.

The girl’s hand freezes. Rahimullah gives her two notes.

‘Go to a hammam, wash and come back, and I’ll give you the rest.’

She quickly puts the money in the pocket of her dress and hides her face behind the dirty shawl with the red flowers. She looks at him through one eye. One cheek has smallpox scars from old sores. Sandflies have left their mark on her forehead. She turns and leaves; the slim body disappears down Kabul ’s streets.

A few hours later she returns, clean.

‘What the hell,’ says Rahimullah, in spite of her wearing the same dirty clothes. ‘Come with me to the back room and I’ll give you the rest of the money.’ He smiles at her and they go into the room.

Mansur is uncomfortable, left on his own in the shop – he doesn’t know if he should leave. Suddenly the salesman comes back out.

‘She is yours,’ he says to Mansur.

Mansur is frozen to the spot. He stares at Rahimullah. He glances at the door to the back room, then tears out of the shop.

He feels sick for days. Unforgivable, he thinks. Unforgivable. He tries to wash, but nothing helps. He tries to pray, but to no avail. He searches the Koran, he visits the mosque, but he feels dirty, dirty. The unclean thoughts he has been harbouring of late make him a bad Muslim. God will punish him. Everything you do comes back to you, he thinks. A child. I have sinned against a child. I let him abuse her. I did nothing.

The nausea turns to world-weariness when, after a time, the memory of the beggar girl recedes. He is tired of life, the routine, the hassle. He is bad-tempered and grumpy towards everyone. He is angry with his father who chains him to the shop while life goes on without him.

I am seventeen, he thinks. Life is over before it has even started.

He sits moping behind the counter, elbows on the tabletop, forehead in his hands. He lifts his head and looks around: at books about Islam, the Prophet Muhammad, famous interpretations of the Koran. He sees books on Afghan fairytales, biographies of Afghan kings and sovereigns, large tomes about the wars against the British, magnificent books about Afghan precious stones, textbooks on Afghan embroidery, and thin ‘pancakes’ from photocopied books about Afghan custom and traditions. He scowls at them and bangs his fist on the table.

Why was I born an Afghan? I hate being an Afghan. All these pig-headed customs and traditions are slowly killing me. Respect this and respect that; I have no freedom, I can’t decide anything. Sultan is only interested in counting money from sales, he thinks. ‘He can take his books and stuff them,’ he says under his breath. He hopes no one heard him. Next to Allah and the prophets, ‘father’ is the single most important person within the Afghan social order. To oppose him is impossible, even for an operator like Mansur. Mansur quarrels with and walks all over everyone else – his aunts, his sisters, his mother, his brothers – but never, never his father. I’m a slave, he thinks. I am worked to the bone for board and lodging and clean clothes. Most of all Mansur wants to study. He misses his friends and the life he led in Pakistan. Here he has no time for friends, and the one friend he had, Rahimullah, he does not want to see again.

It is just before the Afghan New Year – nauroz. Big feasts are planned all over the country. For the last five years the Taliban forbade feasting. They considered nauroz a heathen celebration, a worship of the sun, because its roots were in the Zoroastrian religion – the worship of fire – which originated in Persia in the sixth century BC. And so they also forbade the traditional New Year’s pilgrimage to Ali’s tomb in Mazar-i-Sharif. For centuries pilgrims had flocked to Ali’s grave, to purge themselves from sin, ask forgiveness, be healed and greet the new year, which according to the Afghan calendar starts on 21 March, the spring equinox, when night and day are of equal length.

Ali was the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law and he was the fourth caliph. He is the cause of the polemic between Shia Muslims and Sunni Muslims. To Shia Muslims Ali is second in the order of succession after Muhammad, to Sunni Muslims he is fourth. But even for Sunni Muslims, like Mansur and most Afghans, he is one of Islam’s great heroes. A brave warrior, sword in hand, says history. Ali was murdered in Kufa in 661, and, according to most historians, buried in Najaf in Iraq. But Afghans maintain that his followers, who feared that enemies would take revenge on his body and mutilate it, exhumed him. They lashed his body to the back of a white she-camel and made it run as far as it could. Where it collapsed they would bury him. That was, according to legend, the place that came to be known as Mazar-i-Sharif, ‘the tomb of the exalted’. For five hundred years only a small stone marked the grave, but in the twelfth century a small tomb was built after a local mullah was visited by Ali in a dream. Then Genghis Khan arrived on the scene and desecrated the tomb, and once again the grave lay unmarked for several hundred years. At the beginning of the fifteenth century a new mausoleum was built above what Afghans believe are the remains of Ali. It is this burial chamber – and the mosque that was later built beside it – that draws the pilgrims.