beginning of

the book, which he's the character in the book who is most closely drawn from life, is the one who I'm going to describe here.

The real Bayezid also... was an orphan boy from Rawalpindi and was brought up in a tea stall where he was the tea stall boy.

So this is the guy I'm describing.

Bayezid never knew how he came to be a little boy alone in the streets of Rawalpindi.

He had a memory more of forces than of people, a crowd, a hand, a hand no more.

Yet the bazaars in those early 1950s were not so crowded as that, and Rawalpindi a town small enough that a lost little boy should be found.

And here he is contemplating what happened.

Doesn't even know exactly what it was.

Bayazid never knew how he came to be a little boy alone in the streets of Rawalpindi.

He had a memory more of forces than of people, a crowd, a hand, a hand no more.

Yet the bazaars in those early 1950s were not so crowded as that, and Rawalpindi, a town small enough that a lost little boy should be found.

That was a bitter day when he accepted years later that there might have been no hand, no desperate parent seeking him in the crowd.

He might have been abandoned, not lost.

Karim Khan, the owner of the tea and curry stall where his known history began, could tell him only that he had been sitting in front of the stall on a fine winter day, three or four years old, wearing just a Shalwar Kameez, barefoot and clean, holding a new pair of cheap plastic shoes tightly in his arms.

Help us understand what that means in their slice of Pakistan.

And now, here's Daniel Muwinadin reading Two Pilgrims by Peter Taylor.

Two Pilgrims.

We were on our way from Memphis to a small town in northern Alabama where my uncle, who was a cotton broker, had a lawsuit that he hoped could be settled out of court.

Mr. Lowder, my uncle's old friend and lawyer, was traveling with him.

I had just turned 17, and I had been engaged to come along in the capacity of chauffeur.

I sat alone in the front seat of the car.

The two men didn't discuss the lawsuit along the way, as I would have expected them to do.

What do you think is going on there?

Doesn't even know exactly what it was.

Bayezid never knew how he came to be a little boy alone in the streets of Rawalpindi.

He had a memory more of forces than of people.

A crowd, a hand, a hand no more.

Yet the bazaars in those early 1950s were not so crowded as that, and Rawalpindi a town small enough that a lost little boy should be found.

That was a bitter day when he accepted years later that there might have been no hand, no desperate parent seeking him in the crowd.

He might have been abandoned, not lost.

Help us understand what that means in their slice of Pakistan.