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ABDULLAH TAHERI was born in Tehran city. The son of a hard-working and deeply religious notary public, Abdullah was educated to take his place in the public service structure that was orchestrated by the British in Iran, inherited by the Shah, and secretly administered by the secret service agencies of the USA.In those early years of his life, Abdullah was a determined child, with a fierce, almost obsessive focus and, even as a child, an unbreakable will. Perhaps because his father was a frail man, who never fully recovered from the tuberculosis he contracted while living in a slum on the outskirts of the city, Abdullah devoted a great deal of his time to physical fitness, bodybuilding, boxing, and karate.
In his teenage years, Abdullah assumed the leadership of a loosely aggregated gang of young men from the streets surrounding his house. The gang was apolitical and secular - thrown together more from the restless pursuit of fun than any other cause. Nevertheless, the gang gained some small fame for its support of the helpless and its opposition to the cruelties of other, less principled gangs.
When the Ayatollah Khomeini took power in the Islamic revolutionary reaction to the excesses of the Shah's American proxy rule in Iran, Abdullah's father lost his position as a minor functionary on the edges of government. Abdullah, who was seen as a potential revolutionary leader because of his leadership of a principled street gang, was offered a position as a policeman. When it was made clear to him that he would be required to name friends and strangers who might be thought to have views opposed to the revolution, Abdullah refused the position. That very night, the young man was dragged from his house by a group of masked men. His family never saw him again.
Press-ganged into joining a military front-line unit, Abdullah was sent to the region bordering Iraq, and given a rudimentary army training. Very soon after his training was completed, and on the eve of his long hoped for visit to his parents, war broke out between Iran and Iraq. Abdullah's unit was engulfed in the first of the fighting, and for two years he served in one front-line unit after another. Again and again, the men around him were killed. Several times, he was the sole survivor. Yet there was no rest for the young warrior, for each time he crawled back to his own lines, the officers sent him back into action with another group of ever-younger, ever-greener recruits. After one particularly fierce battle in the withered, mosquito-infested marshlands, Abdullah woke from a grenade concussion to find himself alone, in the midst of the dead. He robbed the battlefield bodies of their valuables and their scraps of food, and then began the long walk to freedom.
Months later, after enduring many hardships, he arrived in Bombay to discover that a community of expatriate Iranians had settled there. One of those exiles put the young fighter in touch with Abdel Khader Khan, the Great Khan, the Lord of Bombay's mafia clans. Within a short time, Abdullah had proved his worth to the Khan as a fighter, and as a leader of men.
An intensely private man, Abdullah allowed himself few close friends. At the time that he met Lin, Abdullah lived alone in an apartment in the suburb of Worli. He trained for two hours every day in a variety of sports, from karate to bodybuilding, and from stick-fighting to boxing. He rode an Enfield of India motorcycle, wore black clothes, and ate mostly vegetarian food, with occasional allowances of boiled chicken for protein. Lin came to know that he had intimate friendships with at least three girlfriends, whom he visited from time to time, but that he was not married and never expected to marry. The last decision, not ever to marry, followed the news of the deaths of his family in Iran at the hands of secret policemen. Abdullah's sorrow at those deaths was inconsolable, and the fierceness of the man became something much harder, and much worse.
Looking at him, sometimes, in the years after the deaths of his family, Lin could sense in Abdullah the workings of a terrible and inevitable fate, as if the man's heart had itself become the clockwork mechanism that ticked down the months and hours to a savage destiny.