Capital

months. Although no member of the Kamal family ever referred to this as anything other than a joke, it hadn’t felt like a joke at the time to Shahid. Chechnya itself had been horrible, a brutal disillusionment – Shahid mainly remembered being shouted at, a permanent sense of moral ambiguity where he’d expected to find a shining light of virtue, a feeling that it was hard, among the good guys, to tell who the good guys were, and being cold and hungry and frightened, right up until he came down with diphtheria and was smuggled back out the same way he’d come in. But the trip there had been sensational, the best time of his life: he’d set out on his own, hooked up with some fellow idealists in Brussels, and then they travelled out by cadging lifts and bumming rides all the way to the Russian border, before blagging their way onto a convoy and riding the scary, exhilarating trail through Russian-held territory, through Chechen lines into the besieged homeland. He hadn’t really had a clue what he was doing, other than expressing a vague sense that his brothers were in danger and that Muslims were being killed and no one was doing anything about it, so it was his duty to do something – but it was a rule of life that you were allowed to do silly, half-baked, idealistic things when you were eighteen. The best thing about it had been the sense of purpose, of a shared goal and larger meaning, that they’d all had on the trip there, he and two blokes from Birmingham, a French-Algerian called Yakoub, and three Belgian Muslims, two of whom were converts, all of them high on the sense of purpose and discipline and willingness to fight for a cause. He almost never thought about Chechnya but he often thought about the trip there. Shahid was also aware of the irony that he who prized his freedom and willingness to seek truth had been happiest when he had a defined purpose, a sense of duty and obligation, and a specific destination in mind.
    Since then he hadn’t done anything much, or nothing which would look like much on a CV. He spent a couple of months recovering from his stomach bug, and one large irony was that his system could no longer tolerate alcohol – it instantly gave him the runs. So after giving up on his mission to save the umma he was now doomed to be a lifelong teetotaller. Not that he had ever been a heavy drinker but he did like a glass of cider every now and then . . . After getting better he’d worked in the shop and pursued a series of interests, many of which had looked like turning into jobs: he’d been a martial arts bum, learning first t’ai chi, then wing chun, then karate, and had spent every conscious non-working moment for several years in one dojo or another. He liked the discipline and the implicit spirituality of the martial arts, and the way respect and courtesy were built into their fabric: it had the rigour of religious practice but no supernatural or political baggage. Also you learned to kick the shit out of people. But his interest in karate faded just at the point when he’d taken and passed his karate black belt exam; that would have been the moment at which he took up teaching, and something about the idea of being in authority over people, telling them what to do, bossing them about – that, to Shahid, just wasn’t him.
    After his martial arts phase Shahid got interested in computers. This was the end of the nineties and the internet was starting to take off. He taught himself HTML and began helping people to make websites – first friends and friends of friends and then gradually building up a word-of-mouth business. It was a time when you could make a living by having read roughly two books about writing code, so he did, and earned more money than at any other time in his life. Perhaps that was the problem. Somewhere deep in Shahid’s sense of himself was the idea of being a seeker, a drifter, a man not tied down; he could feel the cash, four-figure sums in a good week, starting to tether him. Shahid could tell that it wouldn’t be long before he wanted the life to go with the money, so on the day he was offered a proper, full-time job – setting up a website for a friend’s cousin, who’d made a shedload importing cloth, and was planning to make several shedloads more – instead he just stopped writing code. These days he spent very little time surfing the web, which now seemed, on reflection, a giant collective conspiracy to waste time. Given infinite