Mansur is determined to make the pilgrimage. He has been thinking about it for some time. He needs only to get Sultan’s permission, as the journey will entail being away from the shop for several days. If there is anything Sultan hates, it is Mansur being away.

He has even got hold of a travelling companion, in the shape of an Iranian journalist who often buys books from him. They got into a conversation about New Year’s Eve celebrations and the Iranian said he had room in his car. I am saved, Mansur thought. Ali calls me. He wants to forgive me.

But then Sultan says no. His father will not do without him for the short time the trip will take. He says Mansur must catalogue, supervise carpenters putting up new shelves, sell books. He won’t trust anyone else. He won’t even trust his future brother-in-law Rasul. Mansur seethes with anger. Because he dreaded asking his father he postponed it until the last night before departure. But not on your life. Mansur nagged, his father refused.

‘You are my son and you jolly well do what I say,’ says Sultan. ‘I need you in the shop.’

‘Books, books, money, money, all you think of is money,’ Mansur shouts. ‘I’m supposed to sell books about Afghanistan, without knowing the country. I’ve hardly ever been outside Kabul,’ he says crossly.

The Iranian leaves next morning. Mansur is in revolt. How could his father deny him this? He drives his father to the shop without a word, and gives monosyllabic answers when asked a question. The accumulated hatred against his father rages inside him. Mansur had only finished ten classes when his father took him out of school and put him into the bookshop. He never completed high school. He gets a no to all his demands. The only thing his father has given him is a car, to enable Mansur to drive him around, and the responsibility for a bookshop where he is turning to dust amongst the shelves.

‘As you like,’ he says suddenly. ‘I will do everything you ask me to, but please do not think I am doing it willingly. You never let me do what I want. You’re crushing me.’

‘You can go next year,’ Sultan says.

‘No, I’ll never go. And I’ll never ask you for anything again.’

It is alleged that only those whom Ali calls can go to Mazar. Why does Ali not want him? Were his thoughts so unforgivable? Or does his father not hear that Ali calls him?

Sultan is chilled by Mansur’s hostility. He glances over at the repressed, tall teenager and is frightened.

Having driven his father to his shop and the two brothers to theirs, Mansur opens up his own and sits down behind the dusty desk. He sits in his ‘think-dark-thoughts’ position with elbows on the counter and feels life imprisoning and overwhelming him with dust from the books.

A new consignment of books has arrived. For the sake of appearances he feels he must know what is in them. It is a collection of poems from the mystic Rumi, one of his father’s favourite poets and the best-known of the Afghan Sufists, Islamic mystics. Rumi was born in the 1200s in Balkh, near Mazar-i-Sharif. Yet another sign, Mansur thinks. He decides to look for signs that will underpin his decision and show his father up. The poems are about cleansing oneself in order to get closer to God – who is Perfection. They deal with forgetting oneself, one’s own ego. Rumi says: ‘The Ego is a veil between humans and God.’ Mansur reads how he can turn to God and how life should revolve around God and not around oneself. Mansur feels dirty again. The more he reads the more he is determined to go. He keeps returning to one of the simpler poems:

The water said to the dirty one, ‘Come here.’

The dirty one said, ‘I am too ashamed.’

The water replied: ‘How will your shame be washed away

without me?’

The water, God and Rumi all seem to be deserting Mansur. The Iranian is no doubt high up in the snow-clad Hindu Kush mountains by now. Mansur is angry all day. When night falls it is time to lock up, fetch his father and brothers and take them home, to yet another bowl of rice, to yet another evening in the company of his witless family.

As he fastens the shutters over the door with a heavy-duty padlock, Akbar, the Iranian journalist, suddenly appears. Mansur thinks he is seeing ghosts.

‘Haven’t you gone?’ he asks in an astonished voice.

‘We did, but the Salang tunnel was closed today, so we’ll try tomorrow,’ he says. ‘I met your father down the road, he asked me to take you with him. We’ll leave my place at five tomorrow morning, as soon as the curfew is lifted.’

‘Did he really say that?’ Mansur is speechless. ‘It must be Ali calling – imagine that, he really did call me,’ he mumbles.

Mansur spends the night with Akbar to make sure he wakes up and as a guarantee that his father won’t change his mind. The next morning, before dawn, they are off. Mansur’s only luggage consists of a plastic bag full of Coke and Fanta cans and biscuits with banana and kiwi filling. Akbar has a friend with him and everyone is in high spirits. They play Indian film music and sing at the top of their voices. Mansur has brought his treasure with him, a western cassette, Pop from the 80s. ‘Is this love? Baby, don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me no more’, resounds out into the cool morning. Before they have driven half an hour Mansur has eaten the first packet of biscuits and drunk two Cokes. He feels free. He wants to scream and shout, and sticks his head out of the window. ‘Ouhhhh! Aliiii! Ali! Here I come!’

They pass areas he has never before seen. Immediately north of Kabul is the Shomali Plain, one of the most war-torn areas of Afghanistan. Here bombs from American B52s shook the ground only a few months ago. ‘How beautiful, ’ Mansur shouts. And from a distance the plain is beautiful, against the backdrop of the mighty snow-clad Hindu Kush mountains that proudly rise up to the sky. Hindu Kush means the Hindu killer. Thousands of Indian soldiers have frozen to death in these mountain ranges, during military sorties on Kabul.

When one enters the plateau the landscape of war is apparent. In contrast to the Indian soldiers, the Hindu Kush did not stop the B52s. Many of the Taliban’s bombed-out camps have not yet been cleared. Their shelters have been turned into large craters or are strewn over the area, exploding when the bombs hit the ground. A twisted iron bed, where a Taliban might have been shot in his sleep, resembles a skeleton by the roadside. A bullet-ridden mattress lies near by.

But the camps have mostly been looted. Mere hours after the Taliban fled the local population was in there, pilfering soldiers’ washbasins, gas lamps, carpets and mattresses. Poverty made the plundering of corpses inevitable. No one cried over dead bodies by the roadside or in the sand. On the contrary, the locals desecrated many of them: eyes gouged out, skin torn off, body parts cut off or chopped into bits. That was revenge for the Taliban having terrorised the Shomali Plain people for years.

For five years the plain was the front line between the Taliban and Massoud’s men from the Northern Alliance, and sovereignty of the Plain changed six times. Because the front was continually moving, the local population had to flee, either up towards the Panshir valley or south towards Kabul. The locals were mostly Tajiks and anyone who dragged their feet might suffer the Taliban’s ethnic cleansing. Before the Taliban withdrew they poisoned wells and blew up water pipes and dams, vital to the dry plain, which before the war had been part of Kabul ’s bread basket.

Mansur stares in silence at the awful villages they pass. Most of them are in ruins and rear up in the landscape like skeletons. The Taliban systematically razed many of the villages to the ground when they tried to subdue the last part of the country, the missing tenth, the Panshir valley, the Hindu Kush mountains and the desert areas bordering Tajikistan. They might have made it had September 11 not happened and the world started to care about Afghanistan.