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imperilled.
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    In Usha they know Marcus Caldwell by his Muslim name. He believes in no god but had converted to Islam to marry Qatrina, to silence any objection. Like him she would have been satisfied with a non-religious ceremony, indifferent to the idea of supreme beings and their holy messengers, but she had agreed on condition that a woman perform the rites. “We have to help change things,” she said. “Nowhere does the Koran state that only men may conduct the wedding.”
    These days, Marcus seldom says more than a few words to anyone in Usha, communicating in the bazaar with just nods and gestures as much as he can and then leaving. He knows he is not the only casualty in this place. Afghanistan had collapsed and everyone’s life now lies broken at different levels within the rubble. Some are trapped near the surface while others find themselves entombed deeper down, pinned under tons of smashed masonry and shattered beams from where their cries cannot be heard by anyone on the surface, only—and inconsequentially—by those around them.
    Yes, he knows he is not the only one who is suffering but he cannot be sure who among the inhabitants of Usha had been present the day Qatrina was put to death by the Taliban. A public spectacle after the Friday prayers, the stoning of a sixty-one-year-old adulteress. A rain of bricks and rocks, her punishment for living in sin, the thirty-nine-year marriage to Marcus void in the eyes of the Taliban because the ceremony had been conducted by a female. A microphone had been placed close to her for her screams to be heard clearly by everyone.
    He began to avoid the light of the sun, keeping to the hours of darkness as much as possible. He took every clock and watch in the house and put them away in a drawer. At first the ticking was amplified entreatingly by the wood but one by one they all came to a standstill, as though suffocated. In this way he removed the sense and measurement of time from his surroundings. He knocked onto its side the pedestal bearing the sundial in the garden. A time of deepest darkness. The numerals painted on the sundial might as well have been dates engraved on a tombstone. The food in the cupboards ran out and he had nothing to eat. The entire world it seemed had fought in this country, had made mistakes in this country, but mistakes had consequences and he didn’t know who to blame for those consequences. Afghanistan itself, Russia, the United States, Britain, Arabia, Pakistan? One day he thought of capturing a bulbul that had flown into the house. In the end he knew he could never eat anything he had heard sing.
    He recalled the desolation that used to occasionally overpower his mother, a sadness at whose very centre lay his father’s death. Marcus’s father was a doctor in the Afghan frontier and was murdered by a tribesman in 1934, a few months before his birth. The motive for the killing was never established though the killer had a son who had recently declared an interest in Christianity. The family had tried starving him, but when it didn’t have an effect the father tied a grenade to the son and threatened to pull the pin if he did not renew his vow of faith in Islam. Having murdered his son this way, he set out to take revenge on the doctors at the missionary hospital where the boy had come into contact with ideas that made an unbeliever of him. No attempt at conversion was made at the hospital but a chapter from the Gospels was indeed read in the wards every night.
    Marcus’s mother continued as a nurse in the heart of the British Empire’s most turbulent province, returning to England only when Marcus was five years old. Kabul, Kandahar, Peshawar, Quetta—some of the earliest words he heard were the names of these cities of Asia. And he visited them during the years of his young adulthood, meeting the stately Qatrina in