Free The Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam

Bihzad’s vehicle is stationary outside the school building. Perhaps he has seen Marcus and is waiting for him to catch up. He quickens his pace, going past the cluster of palm trees David had pointed to from the minaret, the loud chatter of birds coming to him from the fronds. For the next fraction of a second it is as though the truck is in fact the picture of a truck, a photograph printed on flimsy paper, and that the rays of the sun have been concentrated onto it with a magnifying glass. And then the ground falls away from his feet and a light as hard as the sun in a mirror fills his vision. The tar on a part of the road below him has caught fire. Soon they will feed you the entire world. The explosion has created static and a spark leaps from his thumb towards a smoking fragment of metal flying past him. Then he is on the ground. Beside him has landed a child’s wooden leg, in flames, the leather straps burning with a different intensity than the wood, than the bright blood-seeping flesh of the severed thigh that is still attached. A woman in a burka on fire crosses his vision. He hears nothing and then slowly, as he gets to his feet in the midst of this war of the end of the world, scream soldered onto scream. He thinks the silence was the result of momentary deafness but the survivors had in all probability needed time to comprehend fully what had just taken place. The souls will need longer still, he knows, and they may not begin their howls for months and years.
    O NLY IN THE EARLY EVENING do Marcus and David leave Jalalabad for Usha, journeying under the first constellations.
    David had heard the truck explode from a mile away. Elsewhere he would have thought it was thunder, but in this country he knew what it was, what it had to be.
    At the site he found Marcus and gathered him into his arms amid all the black smoke. There were no injuries on him, just a few grazes to the skin. A woman carried a severed hand up to them and had to be told that Marcus had lost his own years before today. David went deeper into the soft black talcum of the smoke, to learn all he could about the event. Around him the word “fate” was being used in reference to the chance passers-by who had been killed along with the staff and children. Fate—it is the nearest available word when the name of the destroyer or the destroying thing is not known.
    When Marcus told him he had seen Bihzad at the wheel of the truck, David had gone to the police. The boy’s house was searched and they learnt that he had spent time in captivity, under suspicion of being al-Qaeda. The story of his sister’s death last year also came to light. A sister in possession of a love letter: while the brother was giving her the beating he thought she deserved for being shameless, she had escaped from his grip and run off into a field near a former Taliban weapons depot that the United States had repeatedly struck in 2001 with cluster bombs, some of which had failed to explode and still lay undisturbed—in that field and also elsewhere within the already mine-laden cities and countryside.
    David and Marcus were also told by the neighbours that Bihzad was in no way related to doctors or Englishmen of any kind. Though he grew up in various orphanages and madrassas, his lineage was known to everyone—both his parents were Afghans and had died in the Soviet bombing of a refugee caravan back in the 1980s.
    The statement from the terrorists appeared after four hours, the group calling itself Tameer-e-Nau. David and Marcus listen to the words as they are repeated on the radio during the journey towards Usha:
     
    A passionate servant of Allah has carried out a glorious act in Jalalabad. He wrote this declaration personally to be read after his death. We have hundreds more young men like him, lovers of Muhammad, peace be upon him, who are willing and eager to give their lives in this jihad against the infidels . . .
     
    Scarcely anything can be seen in the deepening