The Bard of Blood by Bilal Siddiqi

and a spare part of a goat or cow. Since these particular prisoners were Indian, and primarily Hindus, they were tauntingly given small morsels of undercooked beef or other unsavoury entrails of a cow. None of the four Indians touched these and just ate the bland, dry rice instead.
    Besides this, the torturers had learned to exhaust their prisoners mentally before carrying out a gruesome physical assault. They played with the prisoners’ natural biological cycles and sleep patterns. The prisoners had no clue as to what time of day it was. The tormentors would switch on a blinding white light for hours together—something that would make a man lose his mind if exposed to it even for twenty minutes. To add to that, they would simultaneously play a constant buzzing sound at a deafening volume, in the background. They would do this for hours at a stretch, and then suddenly switch the lights off along with the sound. Instead of this having even a remotely soothing effect on the prisoners, it would begin to play on the mind even more, leaving the prisoners fighting to maintain their sanity. They recorded all of this on a camera that was strategically placed to watch every move the prisoner made. The Taliban had learned to combine modern techniques along with their traditional brutality.
    ‘Rajveer Bharadwaj,’ Mullah Baradar read as he held up an Indian’s identification card and walked over to the sweaty man who lay on the floor. ‘Case attaché at the Indian embassy in Kabul. It is really worrying to know how negligent you Indians can be.’
    Mullah Baradar was a tall man of about six feet two, and had a wild, black beard on his long face. His eyes were unforgiving, and he had prominent cheekbones that were set above a small mouth.
    He grabbed a handful of the fifty-year-old Bharadwaj’s grey woolly hair, making him look directly at him. Bharadwaj’s eyes were bloodshot, his face gaunt. His breath smelled foul. He opened his mouth to say something, but words failed to find their way out.
    ‘You should be extremely sorry that the ISI wants to keep you and these men alive,’ Baradar continued. ‘Our Amir was more than happy to grant you kafirs an easy death. A lot easier than you deserve for trying to spy on us.’
    On 25 July 2014, a senior Taliban member had received a call from an Indian source that four Indian intelligence agents, headed by the attaché of the Indian embassy in Kabul, were on their way to Quetta. The same source informed them that they were about to set up shop in a safe house that was being managed by the Americans to spy on the Quetta Shura. However, the reality was slightly different. The Indians had arrived in Quetta to fund the local Baloch rebels in their civil war against the Pakistani government and the ISI.
    Balochistan, being a poor and neglected province, has been home to a radical insurgency orchestrated by ethnic Baloch leaders demanding separation from Pakistan. So far the Baloch tribes have rebelled at least five times since 1947. But each time their insurgency had been crushed brutally. Baloch militants have targeted the security forces with assassinations, ambushes, and landmines or ‘flowers’, but this led to large-scale collateral damage, that has also robbed non-Baloch settlers of their lives. The security forces retaliate by detaining, torturing and killing ordinary Baloch civilians and students. The assassination of Nawab Akbar Bugti and thirty of his men in 2006 by the ISI and the Pakistani Army triggered a wider spread of insurgency. The counter-insurgency in response, led by Pakistan, was and still is barbaric. However, Mullah Omar’s Taliban has been careful to maintain fairly decent relations with the Balochis, refusing to get involved in their civil war. But there have been instances, as in Bugti’s assassination, where the ISI used them as a silent force to get at the Balochis.
    Soon enough, the four Indian agents who had arrived at the safe house had been