35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

‘I LIKE TOO MUCH THE PHFIT-PHFIT’
in turn crumpled down onto incongruous black patent Gucci loafers.
He also reeked of cologne. A neatly trimmed beard framed his broad,
cruel face, with its protruding bloodshot eyes, and, most unusual
here, his bare head.
‘I Hadji,’ he announced, when Ray introduced me.
His name, I learned, was actually Waris Khan, but he liked to be
called Hadji, since he had made the hadj, or pilgrimage to Mecca.
More importantly, too, the name protected his identity – as being
called Singh would have in Amritsar. He looked around
suspiciously, then urged us to follow him at a distance of several
feet.
Through a dark labyrinth of narrow streets he led us, until we
turned a corner to find a new Toyota sedan waiting with black glass
windows, doors open, engine running. With one glance to check that
no one was in sight, Hadji bundled us into the plush back seat,
slammed the door and climbed into the front beside a driver wearing
more traditional Pathan clothes. The stench of cologne inside was
almost suffocating. Hadji pulled an atomiser of Paco Rabanne from
the glove compartment, sprayed his burly neck extravagantly, and
offered it to us.
‘I too much like phfit-phfit,’ he explained, phfit-phfiting the roof. ‘It
give good cool to body, yes?’ Then he smashed a cassette into the
tape deck, and as Bob Marley loudly maintained that no woman
should cry, we shot like a runaway roller-coaster through streets
and alleys not much wider than the car, and pitch-dark.
‘I like too much the Bob Mally,’ Hadji announced, cackling and
beating the dashboard in time to the music’s thumping beat with
fingers as thick as country sausages.
Fifteen minutes later, I deduced that we were passing through
some kind of suburb: lanes of low houses set behind walled
enclosures, clumps of trees visible inside them. Our car swerved
into a narrow alley, and men swiftly shut large gates behind us as we
slammed to a halt within what looked like a fortified compound.
After my prolonged encounter with Paco Rabanne, I was relieved
to clamber out. The first smell to greet my nose was hashish. Not
burning hashish, but simply hashish. There must have been a ton
of the stuff nearby. From the shadows emerged several ominous
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