He pats his head, feels beneath the yards of cloth for the silver band. The previous night he dreamed he was standing on a train platform, and as the train pulled in and a carriage door opened to allow out the only passenger he untied his turban only to realise he’d wound it around nothing more than the ordinary hard cap. He sets off along the alley in large strides, laughing at the cobbler Hari Das’ cry of Viceroy Najeeb! aware how impressive he looks in his long-tailed turban, gleaming white shalwar and the black frock-coat which is the pride of his wardrobe. At the train station she’ll see him, she’ll smile and take his arm and they’ll walk together the short distance to the Museum — and there, in the Hall of Statues, between the two standing Buddhas, he’ll place the end of the turban cloth in her hand and he’ll spin. Round and round like a dervish, one arm bent at the elbow, palm forward, fingers spread apart. The cloth unravelling from the turban. A blur, a circlet! Miss Spencer’s laughter, her delight, her gratitude.

Through the alleys he goes, through one bazaar and then the other. Everything silent and bolted, so it is as though he is looking at a half-finished sketch of his city. Everything static, except for him. Oh, and a large red butterfly drifting lazily through the wafting stench of a caravan of camels.

He is grateful that the clutter of the present is largely absent so that nothing obstructs his view of the Old City walls and arched gateways, the ancient hills and mountains. What he most loves in Peshawar is the proximity of the past. All around the broken bowl of the Peshawar Valley his glance knows how to burn away time. So in a single day he might encounter the Chinese monk Fa-Hien throwing flowers into the Buddha’s alms bowl at Gor Khatri while recalling the eight elephants who with their united strength could not drag the alms-bowl away from the monastery; the Kushan king Kanishka laying the foundation for the Great Stupa which the Buddha had prophesied he would build; the Mughal Emperor Babar, seated on the back of an elephant, hunting rhinos in the swampy marshland where later his descendants would create gardens; the Sikh maharaja Ranjit Singh standing on the heights of Bala Hisar Fort, surveying the city below through his one eye about which his foreign minister wrote, The Maharaja is like the sun and the sun has only one eye. The splendour and luminosity of his single eye is so much that I have never dared to look at his other eye; and Scylax. Sometimes, time braids and there goes Babar’s spear, missing a rhino and wounding Nearchus who falls at the feet of a Gandharan sculptor carving a stupa with Atlas at its base holding up the elevated figure of the Buddha which Marco Polo sketches on a leaf stolen out of his hand by Scylax and buried deep in the ground by an unnamed heroine to protect it from the marauding White Huns.

The weight on his head grows heavier. There is a single irritation brought about by the protest strike — it denies him the chance to bring Miss Spencer from the train station straight to the Street of Storytellers where ‘Darius and the Betrayal of Scylax’ is now a familiar and well-loved tale. But perhaps that isn’t such a terrible thing after all; the last time he’d heard it told Ashfaq the Storyteller had added in extra verses to capture the new mood of the times:

On Caria’s streets Scylax cursed the Persians on parade

But a crown of silver and —! He gave them a country to invade.

In his dreams Darius throws that crown like a disc through the air,

It shears through Heraclides’ neck while his lips part in prayer.

Does Scylax dream of Carian seas or of Persian fountains?

No, in every dream he dreams he’s surrounded by our mountains.

Which man of Peshawar won’t understand those dreams?

Our land’s beauty, its perfume, makes poets write reams.

We stand here with open arms to embrace you as a guest

But instead you try to enslave us, our leaders to arrest.

Qayyum denied he’d told the Storyteller to recite those couplets but Najeeb remains unconvinced. Each day his brother moves deeper into a world in which everything touched by the British is tainted, even Peshawar’s ancient history.

A commotion heads towards Najeeb in the form of several men wearing the red-brown shirts of Ghaffar Khan’s unarmed army. Najeeb sometimes pretends to himself that his disdain for the Khudai Khidmatgar is primarily an urban Peshawari’s response to everything that comes from the rural surroundings, including political movements, but in truth he knows he is the adoring younger brother jealous of those to whom the object of his hero-worship has turned his attention.

— Inqilaab Zindabad!

At the sound of the Khudai Khidmatgar boys’ cry a window shutter opens and an old woman darts her head out like a cuckoo in an English clock.

— What now? What’s happening?

— The English have locked up our leaders at the Kabuli Gate thana. Send your sons to join the protest.

Najeeb reconsiders his route to the train station. There is a new kind of shouting. A man comes running into the alley.

— They’re killing us.

One of the red-shirted boys catches the man by the shoulder. Najeeb tells himself the man is speaking in metaphor, but he knows this isn’t true. Something in his expression has been stripped away or pasted on — it isn’t clear which, but Najeeb knows the man, has seen him hundreds of times selling sweetmeats in the bazaar, and yet he almost didn’t recognise him.

Despite his crazed air, when the man speaks he is lucid: armoured cars drove into the crowd of party workers accompanying the leaders who had presented themselves at the jail, as promised, for arrest, and there are bodies along the Street of Storytellers, how many dead, how many wounded it’s hard to say. He has barely finished speaking when Najeeb takes off, running.

He runs into a tumult. Everyone in the Walled City seems to have heard what has happened, dozens making their way to the Street of Storytellers; people standing on roofs and leaning from balconies catching rumours out of air and tossing them down into the alley. A car on fire. An Englishman knocked down with a stone. A horse, something about a horse. An Englishman run over by a horse. No, an Englishman run over by a motorcycle. No, an Englishman on a motorcycle run over by a horse. No, a horse which refused to fight killed by an Englishman. An armoured car reversing into — a horse? An Englishman? A motorcycle? A gun. A stone. An unarmed crowd.

Then gunfire. Not one bullet, or two, but a machine-gun staccato. Where there were people standing on rooftops now there is sky. Through sheer will Najeeb forces past the paralysing terror and picks up speed.

The noise as he approaches the Street of Storytellers is too dense to separate into its components. A door opens and a woman in a bright green kameez with eyes to match steps out. He calls to her to return inside to safety, but she ignores him and continues forward. He catches the scent of walnuts and plums. The chaddar covering her head is streaked with the red-brown of the Khudai Khidmatgar. It’s still wet with dye, and her face has red-brown smears where the fabric clings to her skin. A knife-blade flashes in her hand before she disappears around the corner.

Sounds from above draw his attention and he sees people moving about on a roof — the carpet-seller’s roof, which commands a clear view of the Street of Storytellers. The woman with the dyed face failed to securely close the door to the house, and Najeeb hesitates only a moment before entering and making rapid progress up the stairs and through the topmost door. There are no men, only women and children up here. The women are standing on the lip of the roof and looking over the matting to the street below, the children sitting on the broad partition wall which divides this roof from the one next door. The sight of the uncovered women makes him hesitate until one, in a blue kameez with mirrorwork on its sleeves and a braid reaching down to the dip of her back, turns to look at him and then shrugs as if to say, Why not? The walnut-plum scent is strong. He passes the bucket from which it emanates. Next to it a clothes line draped with men’s garments dyed red-brown. Sun strikes a dyed shirt — a heart explodes.