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“Kim. I am sorry I was not able to find you a friend. I tried, but I failed.”

He shook his head, looked genuinely sad about the failure of the project.

“That’s OK,” I said. “Really. I don’t really want a friend right now. I am perfectly happy without a friend. I want to be friendless.”

He paused. And then, finally, the tiger of Punjab pounced. “I would like to be your friend.”

I didn’t even let him get the words out. “No. Absolutely not. Not going to happen.”

“Hear me out.” He held his hand toward me to silence my negations as he made his pitch. He could have said anything—that he was a purported billionaire who had built my favorite road in Pakistan, that he could buy me a power plant or build me a nuclear weapon. But he opted for honesty.

“I know, I’m not as tall as you’d like,” Sharif explained. “I’m not as fit as you’d like. I’m fat, and I’m old. But I would still like to be your friend.”

“No,” I said. “No way.”

He then offered me a job running his hospital, a job I was eminently unqualified to perform. “It’s a huge hospital,” he said. “You’d be very good at it.” He said he would only become prime minister again if I were his secretary.

I thought about it for a few seconds—after all, I would probably soon be out of a job. But no. The new position’s various positions would not be worth it. Eventually, I got out of the tiger’s grip, but only by promising that I would consider his offer. Otherwise, he wouldn’t let me leave. I jumped into the car, pulled out my tape recorder, and recited our conversation. Samad shook his head. My translator put his head in his hands.

“I’m embarrassed for my country,” he said.

After that, I knew I could never see Sharif again. I was not happy about this—I liked Sharif. In the back of my mind, maybe I had hoped he would come through with a possible friend, or that we could have kept up our banter, without an iPhone lurking in the closet. But now I saw him as just another sad case, a recycled has-been who squandered his country’s adulation and hope, who thought hitting on a foreign journalist was a smart move. Which it clearly wasn’t.

The next morning, Samad drove us to Faridkot. As soon as we pulled into town, dozens of men in cream-colored salwar kameezes flanked our car. One identified himself as the mayor—he denied all knowledge of the surviving militant and his parents. Other Pakistani journalists showed up—we had all found out about the same time that this was the Mumbai assailant’s hometown, a dusty village of ten thousand people in small brick houses along brick and dirt paths. My translator said many of the cream-attired men here were ISI. Another journalist recognized an ISI commander. Their job: to deny everything and get rid of us.

They tried flattery. I was their first foreigner ever. Would I like some tea? Sure, I said.

Then they tried intimidation. Two journalists who worked for an international news agency started filming. Alleged villagers screamed about the privacy of their women, rushed the journalists, and punched and kicked them. Someone took their cell phones and digital-video cassettes (DVs). The mayor called us inside a building to talk. I figured we were getting somewhere. But in a dark room, the mayor’s lackeys put my translator and me in rickety chairs. “Just wait,” the mayor said.

Outside, Samad stood near his precious car, worried that we had been kidnapped. A few men talked about smashing its windows and stealing my purse, locked inside. “Just burn their car,” one said.

Samad started yelling. He called my translator on his phone and shouted what was happening outside. We pushed past the men watching us and ran down the stairs. A boy ran up to us.

“I know everything,” he said.

“Just keep quiet,” a man told him.

“Are you mad?” another asked.

Finally we were allowed to walk around, but only down one street, and only flanked by an escort of about twenty so-called villagers.

“This is entirely pointless,” I said, as one man after another told us that no, this was not the Faridkot we were looking for.

“We should go,” my