LAHORE, Pakistan — Faisal Rahman pushed through the streets, looking for his boys.
It was just after sunup. The crowds in Lahore were already hot and unruly. His two sons, Bahram, 16, and Moona, 12, worked at a tea cart, putting little white cups on little cracked saucers and serving boiling-hot tea.
But when he got there, Bahram was gone.
Faisal Rahman sat for a moment with Moona, a beautiful boy with huge brown eyes, and sipped some tea.
The old man spilled one mouthful at a time onto the saucer, where it would cool quickly, so he could slurp from the little plate and savor the delicious coating left on his tongue. It tasted like creamy candy.
When he returned to the tea cart in the afternoon, Bahram still had not come.
"I don't know where he is," Moona said.
Then, Faisal Rahman would remember later, he heard men talking excitedly in an alley. He moved closer and leaned against a tree to hear. The men were from his village.
"The boys left today," he heard a tall man say. "They went to fight the infidels. They went with a mullah who took them to Afghanistan."
Someone else blew a kiss into the air. "Congratulations!" he said to the tall man. "Your son is now a Taliban! It was his fate, his kismet. Blessed that kismet!"
Faisal Rahman listened. He did not want to talk. Something inside him had broken, like the little saucer in his hand.
*
For boys from a poor village, the mullah's message was a call too spellbinding to ignore.
Faisal Rahman is from Gunbat Banda, a village near the Afghan border where mountain peaks cut white teeth into the sky and the hillsides are sown with wheat and rice. It is in the northwestern corner of Pakistan, and most of its people are Pushtuns, the dominant ethnic group in southern Afghanistan that brought the Taliban to power six years ago.
Once Rahman had a farm in Gunbat Banda, but a drought baked his soil hard as stone.
He left with his two sons and found work as a mosque watchman in the city of Lahore, 300 miles away. For the boys, this meant no school, no dreams, only countless cups of tea and the steady ticking of time. Sometimes, on long, empty afternoons, Faisal Rahman would take his boys to a juice bar and buy them cool banana shakes with what little money he had.
Sometimes his sons would return to visit their mother. Just the other day, for instance, Bahram had asked if he could go.
Fine, Rahman recalls saying, but be back soon.
