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Sabit, who was in his sixties, was a bizarre combination, sporting the long white beard of an Islamic fundamentalist and the bespoke gray suit of an English gentleman. He was an ethnic Pashtun, and he looked it, with wild white hair, bright hazel eyes, and exaggerated features—big ears, big fingers. He reminded me of a skinny yet somehow menacing Santa Claus. Sabit had asked where I lived, and after I told him how often I traveled, he grunted. He quoted a Pashtun proverb about never being friends with a traveler. But that didn’t stop him from trying. At our first meeting, he invited me to his house to meet his wife, a raven-haired woman about my age. Although she was fluent in at least three languages, including English, and had been working on a doctorate degree in Canada, she was not allowed to work. For appearance’s sake. Whenever she went out in public, she wore a black abaya that covered everything but her eyes.

During that first dinner, Sabit had agreed to take me along on a raid of bars and brothels on the coming Friday night. But when Friday rolled around, I had forgotten about our date, and by the time his driver called, I had already downed a glass of red wine. Regardless, I jumped in the backseat of Sabit’s SUV, filled with his flunkies. We then picked up Sabit, who on this night wore a long cape-like green coat with purple stripes, similar to the coat favored by Karzai. We went from brothel to bar to restaurant. Everywhere, Sabit was the customer no one wanted. As soon as he knocked on a gate, whoever answered shouted out warnings. But he wouldn’t take no for an answer and pushed his way inside, flanked by his minions—and me, of course.

At one dark brothel with bordello-red walls, a Chinese woman had dressed in a fur jacket, fishnet stockings, a white miniskirt, and white boots—a bit of overkill, given the all-encompassing burqas that many Afghan women still wore.

“Look at that,” Sabit muttered. The only customer was a Western man, sitting by himself.

At another fully stocked bar, Sabit insulted the Turkish manager.

“You are Muslim, aren’t you?” Sabit said. “You aren’t allowed to serve this liquor.”

“We are Muslim,” the man replied. “But this is business.”

The night ended in violence, as did so many things in Afghanistan. After we checked on a guesthouse, even inspecting the bedrooms, a cop on the street failed to properly address Sabit and show him enough respect. Sabit yelled and screamed at the man. I hopped in the backseat of the SUV. Sabit continued to yell, and then started punching the younger man repeatedly in the face, the body. I watched through the window.

“You have to help him,” his driver told me. “Mr. Sabit is a crazy man. I’m too scared.”

“No way,” I said. “I’m going nowhere near him.”

Sabit climbed into the passenger seat after making sure the ignorant officer was carted off to jail for the night. He adjusted his coat and looked forward.

“Write that in your story, and I’ll kill you,” he said.

I wasn’t stupid. And I knew a good connection when I found one. From then on, whenever we planned an occasional gathering at a brothel or a major party, I would call Sabit and ask him what he was doing. If he planned to go on raids, I planned to stay home. And that’s how I knew that The Delicious Barbecue was a safe bet.

But Sabit required a lot of care and feeding, and he was often impossible to please. Even showing slight annoyance with Sabit’s demands sent him into months of silence and furious complaints about me to mutual acquaintances. Just after I returned to India, Sabit flew to New Delhi to have surgery for something related to his ability to digest, a procedure he was incredibly explicit about. He demanded that I pick him up at the airport. I spent five hours waiting for him inside the Indian capital’s dingy airport before he finally wandered into the lobby, several hours after all the other Afghans. Only then, I found out that the Afghan embassy had also sent a welcome delegation and a car. After Sabit was admitted to the hospital, he expected me