a former field hockey player who had been in and out of prison for years and who was serving ten years for stabbing an undercover policeman.
Every prison has a man like Salim, Tariq said.
There was always someone who was cunning and connected, who worked the system and found you things,
someone around whom the air buzzed with both opportunity and danger.
It was Salim who had sent out Tariq's queries about his mother,
Salim who had sat him down and told him, in a soft, fatherly voice, that she had died of exposure.
Tariq spent seven years in the Pakistani prison. “I got off easy,” he said. “I was lucky.”
“The judge sitting on my case, it turned out, had a brother who'd married an Afghan woman. Maybe he showed mercy. I don't know.”
When Tariq's sentence was up, early in the winter of 2000, Salim gave him his brother's address and phone number.
The brother's name was Sayeed. “He said Sayeed owned a small hotel in Murree,” Tariq said.
“Twenty rooms and a lounge, a little place to cater to tourists. He said tell him I sent you.”
Tariq had liked Murree as soon as he'd stepped off the bus: the snow-laden pines;
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