'What has fascinated me, Mr Page, is your Page Rank technology. How on earth did you get the idea to use an iterative algorithm which corresponds to the principal eigenvector of the normalized link matrix of the web to determine the ranking of an individual site?'
I didn't have a clue what he was blabbering about, but I said 'Yeah… Yeah,' and nodded my head a couple of times. 'Page Rank. Now that was a terrific idea, wasn't it? Third best thing to come along since sliced bread.'
The guy was persistent. 'What exactly was your tipping point, Mr Page?'
'You mean the point when it tipped over?'
'I mean the point when you and Sergey knew that you had a winner.'
'That was in April, I would say. Yeah. In April we knew we had a winner.'
That shut him up.
'Won't you introduce me to your friends?' I asked.
'Oh yes, sorry, Mr Page. This is Abu Khaled,' he said, referring to the turbaned guy. 'He's our emir, our leader, our zimmedar.'
'What about him?' I pointed to the pyjama dude.
'That is Abu Omar.'
'So are you guys brothers or what? All of you are called Abu.'
'We are brothers in arms, Mr Page,' he smiled. 'But we're not related to each other. In fact we don't even speak the same language. I'm from Pakistan, from Rawalpindi. Abu Khaled is from Egypt and Abu Omar is from Afghanistan. I speak Urdu, Abu Khaled speaks Arabic and Abu Omar speaks Pashto. So we talk to each other only in English.'
'Good for me. But what are you folks doing in Kashmir?'
'We are helping our friends like Bilal in their fight against the infidels. I am glad you sympathize with our point of view, Mr Page. It is wonderful to have the support of someone as influential as you.'
'Glad to be of assistance, but when do you think I can get back to Delhi? I got a plane to catch, you know – my private 767.' I winked.
'Soon, Mr Page, very soon. But first we need to take you to a safe place. You need to rest now because tomorrow we will go on a very long journey.'
We slept in a small room which was not half as cosy as the one in Bilal's house. What was worse, I had Abu Teknikal on my left and Abu Omar on my right for company. And they kept pestering me with questions half the night.
'You know what,' Teknikal told me. 'Ever since I was seven, it has been a dream of mine to visit America, abode of the internet and the Xbox 360. Home of the Blue Gene and the BigDog. I actually cried when I saw a picture of the Cray X-MP in my school. But your achievements dwarf even those of Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn. If the internet is heaven, then Google is God. Do you know what that makes you, Mr Page?'
'What?'
'The Godfather,' he said and grinned.
Abu Omar had other interests. 'So how many girls have you banged, Mr Page?' he asked me.
'Excuse me?'
'I mean how many girls have you had sex with? Abu Khaled tells us in America girls start having sex when they are only ten and eleven. Is that true?'
'I dunno. I'd need to ask my niece Sandy. She's ten and she's a girl.'
'I know it is forbidden in Islam, but I keep having these immoral thoughts. All because of this Indian actress.'
'And who would that be?'
'Her name is Shabnam Saxena. The bitch is so hot, I become crazy with desire.'
I felt like walloping the pervert, but restrained myself. 'Have you seen any of her movies?' I asked.
'I can't. Films are un-Islamic.'
'Good for you,' I murmured and laid a protective hand on my wallet, which contained a picture of Shabnam as well as her number.
'Don't tell the zimmedar,' Omar whispered, 'but I once saw an American film at a video parlour in Kabul. It was called Debbie Does Dallas. Have you seen it?'
'Never heard of it. Is it about the tourist places in Dallas? I hope it showed the ballpark in Arlington and the-'
'No, no, Mr Page, the film was full of naked women. Thank Mail-Order Bride 259 God the Taliban closed down that video parlour or else I would have gone blind.'
The guy was hornier than a two-peckered billy goat.
'They say in America you can get these kinds of films even at grocery shops. Is it true?' he continued.
'I dunno. I only buy milk and bread at Quik-Pak,' I said and turned my back on him.
Teknikal was waiting on the other side to pounce on me. 'What is your view on anonymous peer-to-peer networks, Mr Page? PC Mag says that the proliferation of such networks increases the risk of a devastating attack on the networked information infrastructure. Do you agree?'
The guy had diarrhoea of words and constipation of thoughts.
'With due respect to Mr Mag, if brains were gasoline, he wouldn't have enough to run a piss ant's go-kart around the inside of a donut!' I said, and before he could figure that one out, I pulled the blanket over my head. 'If y'all excuse me, I'm now gonna get some shut-eye!'
I was sandwiched between two top-notch loonies. The rocks in Teknikal's head would fit the holes in Omar's. I don't remember when I finally fell asleep, dreaming of Shabnam in a valley full of snow.
The next day we left the house around nine a.m. A few minutes later I found myself in a street full of tumbled-down houses and charred temples.
'What the hell happened here?' I asked.
'We kicked out the Hindu Pandits from here,' grinned Teknikal.
These guys obviously knew the area pretty well. Like Bilal, they evaded all the sentry posts, and after an hour of hotfooting it across the city I found myself at a fruit-and-veg market.
They made me travel in a grain truck, hidden among sacks of wheat with a blue tarpaulin over my head. The truck took us to a Podunk town surrounded by mountains and dense forests.
We spent the night in a quaint little cottage, outside which a mad dog kept howling. Luckily, they put me in a room with Abu Khaled this time. He didn't speak a word to me, but I still couldn't sleep coz he kept getting up either to go to the toilet or to pray. The guy got up to pray even at four in the morning.
'Which prayer is this?' I asked him, rubbing my eyes.
'It is called Tahajjud. This prayer is not obligatory for Muslims. But the truly devout do not miss it.' He kneeled and touched his forehead to the ground.
I now knew how he got that dark mark on his forehead. It was from all this praying.
The next morning we took off in an open jeep which Teknikal had arranged from somewhere. From both sides, dense forests seemed to rush in like giant waves at our jeep. The clouds were so low, it felt as if I could reach out and touch them. Thankfully the wind wasn't blowing, otherwise even my warm phiran would have been as useless as a windshield wiper on a goat's ass.
The only trouble was the roads. They were so bad, even buzzards couldn't fly over them, and so crooked you could see your own tail light. Many a time the jeep narrowly avoided going into a pothole or over the edge, and I had to shut my eyes on the hairpin bends and just hang on for dear life.
We came across very little traffic, just the odd farmer tilling his land or a shepherd grazing his cattle. The jeep stopped abruptly near a mosque, and I was ordered by Khaled to get out. Teknikal said there was a big army camp just a short distance away and travelling by jeep would attract attention. So for the next couple of hours we made our way on foot up a steep mountain pathway, with Omar leading the way.
We finally neared a place called Trehgam. As we reached the top of a hill, Omar took me aside and pointed to the village in the distance. I saw a cluster of houses with corrugated-iron roofs. 'See that roof painted green on that single-storey house? That is the house of my zerrgay, my love. She lives there with her mother,' Omar said.
'Then why don't you go down and meet her? I'm sure she will be very happy to see you.'
'Are you out of your mind? The army has its brigade headquarters in Trehgam and keeps a close watch on that house. The moment they see me I will be arrested. I am not afraid of capture, I am ready to die, but I don't want to be tortured.'