Durrani had been able to hide any visible evidence of his Hazara bloodline because he had not inherited the distinctive physical Mongol characteristics of that ethnic group. Instead, he had acquired his father’s angular, long-nosed, lighter-skinned features. His mother had died of some illness when he was eight before he had developed any curiosity about his male parent. By that time they were living in abject poverty in Kabul in a small mud hut on the outskirts of a residential area at the foot of a hill occupied by an old British military fort that had long since been abandoned.
The memories of the day she died were now cloudy but Durrani remembered being very hungry and his mother lying on the blanket that was their bed, calling weakly for God to help her. God had not heard her: she eventually stopped making heavy and laboured breathing noises and her open eyes became still and unfocused. He shook her and asked her to wake up. When blood trickled from her lips and down the side of her mouth he knew she would never talk to him again. He did not look for anyone to help for there was no one. He could not remember ever talking to anyone else but his mother in those days and as far as he knew she had only ever talked to him - unless begging counted as talking to others. He remembered that his days with her included collecting water in a bucket from a tap and walking miles to get wood for the fire on which she cooked their paltry meals. Looking back it was hard to see how they had survived.
Hunger eventually forced Durrani to leave his mother’s body in their dark, miserable hut and walk the streets of the city, ragged and unwashed, scavenging for something to eat. He remembered sorting through rotten food in gutters, competing for it with filthy dogs and cats, and sleeping in abandoned dwellings. Then one day - perhaps weeks later, he had no idea how long - he was literally picked up off the street and carried into a house by a man who turned out to be a schoolteacher. After nursing Durrani back to health the teacher placed him in an orphanage where he joined a dozen or so other children.
Durrani said his name was Po-po, his mother’s nickname for him, but when asked for his family name he said, quite accurately, that he did not know. He might have told them what little he did know about his family but for reasons he could not fully understand at the time he was afraid to. His mother had never explained the complexities of race discrimination to him but he was aware that he and she had been different from the Pashtun majority and not in any positive way. Weeks later, after much badgering by the orphanage staff and the other kids, he finally muttered the only name he knew that linked him with his family. To his surprise the reaction had been most favourable, which gave him the confidence to stick with it.
One day a little girl with features similar to his mother’s arrived at the orphanage. Durrani immediately went to befriend her but he was pulled aside and told by the other children to leave her alone because she was of a low caste. It was Durrani’s first lesson in how Hazaras were considered inferior to the Pashtuns. The Hazara children were often taunted by the others, treated like animals and made to act as if they were slaves. The schoolmasters did not appear to see anything wrong in it and only intervened when they saw the Hazara being severely beaten.
Durrani soon realised how imperative it was that he should never mention his mother’s Hazara ethnicity. He became so fearful of the ramifications that his denial turned into a phobia.When walking the streets he would avoid eye contact with any Hazara he passed for fear that they might recognise him. A memorable exception was the day he saw coming towards him a young woman who looked exactly as he remembered his mother. He could not take his eyes off her until she was feet away, at which point he dropped his gaze and turned his back to her in case she really was his parent. He was afraid she might talk to him.
When the woman had passed Durrani he ran up the street as fast as he could and didn’t stop until he found somewhere to hide. He did not feel shameful about his reaction. On the contrary, he was relieved at avoiding a close call. But he could not shake loose the memory of the girl’s face and he gradually became confused about his mother’s death, doubting whether she had actually died at all.The frightening implications of that were that if she was still living he could be exposed.
Since the day Durrani had walked out of his hut, leaving his mother’s corpse inside, he had never returned to the area where they had lived. But a few days after seeing the Hazara woman in the street he was filled with the urge to learn if his mother really was still alive. The need to know was not based on any sudden longing to be with her again. His fear of being labelled a Hazara was now greater than any affection he had ever had for his mother.To avoid being seen he waited until the sun had dropped behind the mountains before making his way to the top of the hill that overlooked the area. He crept inside the old British fort and climbed the ramparts of the weathered but still imposing walls to search for the hut from afar. He could not find it where he thought it should have been. But after walking from one end of the fortifications to the other and back several times, identifying some vaguely familiar reference points, he came to the conclusion that the dwelling no longer existed.
Durrani remained on the battlements for many hours, gazing down at the huts and houses, the people coming and going and the handful of children playing where he used to, watching in case his mother should turn up. He left when it was completely dark and all he could see was the glow of kerosene lamps inside the houses, never to return to the place again. From time to time throughout his life, whenever he caught a glimpse of the old fort as he passed through the city, his thoughts went back to those days. The most vivid memory was that of his mother lying in the hut with blood trickling from her mouth.
So fearful was Durrani of being exposed as a Hazara that to maintain his security at the orphanage he decided to keep to himself, rarely talking to the other children. When asked about his family he shrugged and said he knew nothing other than that they were Pashtun.
Durrani was nineteen and working in a barber shop as a floor sweeper when the Russians marched into Kabul by invitation to support the beleaguered Communist government. He might have stayed in the city if it had not been for another orphan, Rog, a Pashtun boy Durrani’s age. Rog was the only person in Durrani’s life whom he had allowed to get close enough to call a friend. When Rog one day declared that they should leave Kabul and join the mujahideen to fight against the Russian invaders Durrani experienced his first taste of the lure of adventure. It was an enticement that would subsequently tempt him many times. The following night he and Rog left the city together.
After several days of mostly walking, with the occasional ride on a truck, they arrived at a village in the hills outside Kandahar where Rog had a relative.Within a week they had joined a band of mujahideen.
Thus Durrani began a nomadic guerrilla existence that would span practically all of his next two and a half decades and end with his capture and incarceration in the most impregnable prison on the planet.
The pair were initially employed by the mujahideen as general dogsbodies: carrying ammunition, fetching supplies, cooking and washing. But after Rog was killed in a Russian helicopter attack along with a dozen others in the group, Durrani was handed a rifle and from that day became one of the fighters. A year later, while being treated for a wound and recovering at a training ground in the Hindu Kush mountains, he met a fellow soldier who had recently lost an eye, a quiet, tall, muscular man with an intense and unusually charismatic personality. His name was Omar and the next time Durrani saw him, a decade later, the man had become a mullah and also the leader of a powerful new force that would eventually become known to the rest of the world as the Taliban.