Where were the dead, the wounded? He was up to his ankles in water now; no blood, just water.

He saw a man approach the troops stationed beside the closed doors of Kabuli Gate, hands raised above his head; Return home! came the order and the man backed away. So, no one would enter or exit the Walled City tonight. Najeeb would have to spend the night in the Museum, and in the meantime his brother would try to understand what had happened here, how all the bodies had disappeared so quickly.

On the balcony of the carpet-seller’s house, located at the corner of the Street of Storytellers and an alley, three men stood like gods in judgement. One of the men was pointing to something on the street; the second man, elbows resting on the balcony, covered his eyes with his hands. The third man, in a bright green kameez, stood slightly apart, his posture revealing nothing. All the other balconies on the street were empty — those three men were the only witnesses he could see.

Qayyum ducked back into the alley, cut across the smaller side streets, twice hiding in doorways to avoid soldiers, and finally emerged into the alley with the doorway to the carpet-seller’s house. He was raising his hand to knock on the door when someone pushed it open and a man with a bloodied shirt walked out.

— Were you shot?

The man looked confused by Qayyum’s question for a moment, then glanced down at his shirt and shook his head.

— It’s not my blood, the man said. Did she give you water?

— Who?

— The girl.

— Which girl?

But before he received an answer a young man in a red-brown kameez walked out of the house, his features in disarray. Qayyum knew all the Khudai Khidmatgar in Peshawar, and this man was not one of them.

— Where did you leave her? the young man asked the blood-shirted man, who responded in a tone weary with sadness.

— I’m telling you, they took the bodies away.

— I want to see where she was.

— All right. Come, I’ll show you.

The two men walked onto the Street of Storytellers and Qayyum pushed open the door to the carpet-seller’s house and entered. Everything here spoke of prosperity. He was on the first-floor landing when a woman’s voice called out from behind a door which was slightly ajar.

— Come inside. Don’t try to escape — I have a gun.

His instinct was to run, but it would be ridiculous to survive the English troops only to be shot by a woman. Qayyum pushed the door open with his foot and stood in the doorway with hands raised above his head. The shuttered room was vast, carpeted end to end, and lit with electric lamps. At the far end stood an uncovered woman in a green kameez, pointing a pistol at Qayyum.

— Come closer.

Qayyum looked down at his wet sandals, which squelched as he shifted his weight. He lifted a foot out of his sandal and — standing on one leg — dried it as effectively as possible against his shalwar, before repeating the procedure with the other foot. He wished he wasn’t so aware that the woman — just a few years past girlhood but impossible to mistake for a girl — had green eyes and long, unbound hair, and was tall enough and beautiful enough to be part-djinn. He stepped from carpet to carpet as he approached her, his bare feet treading on a startled deer, a parrot’s beak. Two-thirds of the way into the room, he stopped, his eyes trying to look over her shoulder or to the left of her ear but unable to keep from sliding back to her face, which had light reddish smears around the hairline. So he looked up to the ceiling instead — a mosaic of intersecting stars and circles, with pieces of mirrorwork which captured the carpet patterns and made them part of the ceiling’s intricate geometry. But when the woman spoke it was impossible to look anywhere but at her.

— Why are you here?

— I’m sorry. I’ll leave.

Raising his hands he started to walk backwards towards the door, his eyes fixed on the ground.

— Your shirt. You’re one of the Khudai Khidmatgar?

— Yes.

— Where did they take the bodies?

The desperation in her voice made him look up.

— I don’t know what happened, he said. I came up because I thought someone up here might have seen. Was someone from your household. .?

— My husband’s sister. She was down there. Diwa.

As she said the name ‘Diwa’ she lowered the arm holding the pistol, and stepped out onto the balcony. He strode quickly across the room to reason with her to return inside. But arriving at the balcony he saw that the fire engines had left, the street was deserted, though troops still stood guard around and on top of Kabuli Gate. The buildings had ripples of sunlight running along their facades. All the windows were shuttered, all the rooftops deserted — no one to see Qayyum standing on a balcony over an urban river with another man’s wife. The woman raised the arm still holding on to the pistol, pointing it in the direction of the soldiers at Kabuli Gate. His hand on her wrist, forcing it down; the leap of her pulse against his fingers. She rotated her wrist and he saw the imprint of his fingers, red against her pale skin.

— Do you think I don’t know a bullet from this gun won’t carry all that way?

— It’s the bullets from the soldiers’ guns which I was worrying about. But I’m sorry, I beg forgiveness from my heart. I shouldn’t have touched you. And your sister — Ina lillahi wa inna illayhi rajiun.

— I don’t want your prayers. Where is she?

— I don’t know. I’ll ask. If I hear anything, I’ll come back. You said she was down there — forgive me, but what do you mean?

— When men become women and approach an enemy armed with nothing but chants then it falls to a woman to take the role of Malala of Maiwand and walk onto the battlefield to show you what a warrior looks like. She was down with the men, and there was more of a man’s fire in her than in all of you.

Her arms, folded together, pressed against her torso as though she were trying to staunch a wound. Ya Allah, how many women had been on the street? He had never been comfortable with Ghaffar Khan’s insistence that Pashtun women must be brought into the political movement, and now he saw with complete clarity the extent to which the man he revered above all others was wrong in this matter. In the Khudai Khidmatgar training camps Qayyum knew how to teach the men to meet violence with non-violence, and insults with patience, but what words could he say to prepare Pashtun men for this: women may be shot, their wounded bodies may need to be lifted away by strange hands, you may hear them call out in pain, you may watch them die — and to all this you can respond with nothing but a cry of Inqilaab Zindabad. The havoc it would cause (that thrum of terror which ran through the Pashtuns when the girl with the plait walked out from the ranks of men). The green-eyed woman turned her back to him, and then he couldn’t find a way to stay.

He returned home, the elation of earlier in the day gone. His neighbour, the cobbler Hari Das, rushed out to greet him.

— Qayyum Gul, thank God you’re safe. And Najeeb? Is Najeeb with you?

— He’ll have been at the Museum all day. He probably doesn’t even know what’s been going on.

— I saw him walk out of here this morning, wearing an English-style achkan — I didn’t know where he was going. But he left only a few minutes before the first gunshots.

He had been wearing his frock-coat? For the Englishwoman, no doubt. Idiot, Najeeb, are you with her now? Toasting a tarnished piece of silver? If there was one man in all of Peshawar to avoid a protest, stride away from gunfire, it was the Assistant at the Peshawar Museum — Hari Das knew Najeeb well enough to know this. But the old man was looking at Qayyum helplessly, not really wanting an answer about Najeeb so much as seeking reassurance that everything would be all right despite this day of gunfire and blood.