But when they arrived at the police-thana the doors were closed — the policemen thought the crowd was there to storm the station. Qayyum, tall enough to see above the heads of almost everyone else present, smiled at the unfolding spectacle: Congress leaders pleading with the police, insisting they were there to be imprisoned; policemen refusing to let them in. And the crowd, larger in size now, entirely peaceful, urging the police to arrest their leaders between cries of Inqilaab Zindabad. It would be enough to make any Englishman’s head spin. Finally, finally, the doors opened; the Congress leaders entered to great whoops of support from the men outside. Someone threw a handful of petals at them as if they were brides entering their marital home for the first time.

— That was fun.

Qayyum nodded in agreement with the Congresswalla standing next to him, when he saw the face of one of the Indian policemen behind the gates — terrified, blood-drained. Of course, every policeman must be thinking of Chauri Chaura, eight years earlier, when a clash between police and Congress volunteers during the first Non-Cooperation Movement led to the deaths of twenty-six civilians and twenty-one policemen, the policemen all burnt alive in their thana.

You live in your history, we live in ours. The thought made him tired, unwilling to join the group of Khudai Khidmatgar who were dancing in a circle near the jail door, and he had turned to walk away when he heard a sound which didn’t make sense and looked up to see armoured cars driving through Kabuli Gate.

After that the morning spooled dramatically away from anything that was predictable — accelerating cars, men crushed beneath wheels, machine guns, fire, screams of death and slogans of freedom, bullets and stones. The Street of Storytellers turned into a battleground with the troops on one side and freedom fighters on the other. One round of bullets, one round of deaths, then a pause, negotiations — first you withdraw, no, first you withdraw — and the numbers on the Street of Storytellers grew. Not just the red-shirted Khudai Khidmatgar and their Congress and Khilafat allies but other men of Peshawar who had heard what was happening and came to witness, came to cry out Inqilaab Zindabad. Soon the street was crowded. From the balconies and roofs of buildings spectators watched, some threw stones; on the ground the King’s forces — on foot, on horse, in armoured cars, all armed with rifles and bayonets and machine guns — occupied the space between Kabuli Gate and Dakhi Nalbandi. Beyond that, hundreds of Peshawaris planted their feet on the Street of Storytellers and said no, they would not retreat. If a man is to die defending a land let the land be his land, the people his people.

Hours passed; the stand-off continued. You withdraw; no, you withdraw. The men standing further back began to jostle and push. What was all this talk? Qayyum, weaponless at the front, understood that something would shift soon, something would happen. But for the moment he saw no need to stifle the unexpected love he felt for the uniformed men of the British Indian Army, seeing in each one the comrades he had lost at Vipers, and himself, too, as glimpsed through a dead eye. Earlier in the day, when the Garhwal Rifles had refused to fire on the unarmed men ranged against them he felt terror on their behalf rather than any sense of victory at knowing the strategy to shame those who would cut you down without mercy if you fought back was already beginning to work. The Sikh soldiers returned to the barracks with shoulders unslumped, necks unbowed, but Qayyum knew they would already be thinking of what would follow: court martial, perhaps a firing squad. The English would not act gently with Indian soldiers who sided with revolutionaries. No one had forgotten 1857, or even 1915.

And so, rather than enmity, it was love he felt; love and pity. Pity for the lives lost when the armoured cars charged in and the troops opened fire, pity for those Indian soldiers whose minds were enslaved, pity for the families whose hearts would shatter today. Even, a kernel of pity for the English officers. That sense of honour which the English and the Pashtun had in common, as the officers of the 40th Pathans so often reminded their men, was now a weapon wielded by one against the other. Today the officers would give orders to fire on unarmed men, and almost all the soldiers would obey — but tomorrow if asked to return here and do the same, their wills would sag. Or if not tomorrow than next month, next year.

And then, he had his only moment of fear: a girl stepped out from the lines of the Peshawari men, walked through the ranks of sepoys who stepped aside as if she were a djinn whose touch might burn them, and stopped in front of an armoured car. Everyone silenced. The girl — bare-headed, plait swinging — picked up a turban lying near the wheel of the armoured car and moved back into the crowd which parted to make space for her and then closed up again in her wake. Qayyum glanced up towards the rooftops and balconies of the Street of Storytellers. Women and children were leaning down, watching. There must be something wrong in the girl’s head — like the molasses-seller’s son who had to continually be watched so he didn’t present himself to danger as if it were a game. Whoever should have been minding the girl must have been too intent on watching the Street of Storytellers to notice her slip away. He should find her and lead her back to safety, but the press of men made it difficult to move or to know where she had disappeared.

Then the firing started, the bayonets followed. Fall back, fall back — Inqilaab Zindabad, Inqilaab Zindabad. Bullets and the screams of men, and a stench of blood. But this was nothing like Vipers, here he was fearless, here he would die if he must and he wouldn’t ask why. Yet somehow the bullets didn’t touch him though around him men fell; too many of them to lift up and carry away, and more soldiers had arrived, firing now even on those who were bearing the dead; impossible to hold ground any more. Fall back, fall back. Through the alleys, soldiers giving chase, two behind and one up ahead, all converging on Qayyum.

— I’ll rip out my own eye before you can touch me!

He bellowed the words, reaching up and prising out the glass eye with an exaggerated gesture. The soldier up ahead pressed himself against a doorway, bayonet falling from his grasp, and Qayyum held the eye up towards him as he ran past. He could hear the other soldiers stop to ask what had happened, what had the soldier seen, and he laughed as he ran, a warrior who had found his battle.

The buoyancy left him as the sound of bullets and booted feet continued to echo through the Walled City. The troops were chasing men through Peshawar as though it were an English hunt. At any moment he might hear a bugle, or step over a corpse with its lips sewn shut. He turned into a street so narrow it allowed in no light, and a man could press himself against a doorway and become shadow.

Years earlier, Qayyum’s mother had tried to find a wife for him. Everything was agreed on when the girl fell ill and suddenly died. The whispers were quick to follow — Qayyum Gul, the half-blind man, was ill-fated. Any family which gave their daughter to him would risk disaster. Enough, Qayyum told his mother. Don’t search any more. There seemed an inevitability to it; his life was already moving in the direction of politics. From the moment under the blue tarpaulin when he heard Ghaffar Khan speak of the need for Pashtuns to break their addiction to violence and revenge he knew he had found a general he could follow into any battle. When the battle was over there would be time for a wife and children — men didn’t age as women did. And until then, what he wanted with immediacy and couldn’t always deny himself was available here, on the Street of Courtesans.