'Out! Get out, and don’t come back,' they ordered the traumatised family.

'Please! Oh please, let me grab some things,' Daoud’s mother pleaded.

'Go now or we will shoot you all,' they warned.

The evictors did not see the heavy gold bracelet Daoud’s mother was wearing under her sleeve. The yellow metal provided funds for a guide to lead them across the mountains to Pakistan. To avoid the Taliban’s Khyber checkpoints, they travelled on goat tracks, and only at night.

'One more minute, the Doctor said, and he would have been finished. They got him to the hospital just in time Sir.'

Knowing that clan vendettas and blood feuds go on and on in Pashtun society, I ask the obvious question. “What was the argument about?”

 'It was a kite, Sir!'

Now I get it - passions rise fast in the kite flying season. These days the afternoon sky is full of brilliantly coloured paper diamonds swooping and diving to gain advantage over each other. The objective is to sever the string of your opponent, and eliminate him. As his malfunctioning paper bird drifts to the ground, the first to seize it is the esteemed new owner. Regardless of busy road traffic or the risk of falling from flat-roofed houses, the sky-staring kite runners compete with each other, for the honour of claiming the next prize. 

Daoud is an expert combatant and has liberated dozens of kites from the control of their frustrated owners. It seems that someone couldn’t take a beating and has pulled a knife on my dextrous student.

The taxi runs another red light in our rush to the Islamabad hospital.

'We don’t know exactly how it happened, Teacher. His boss just rang and told us to get to the hospital fast. It’s something to do with his motor bike as well.'

 Now I’m wondering if it really was Daoud’s bike. I’d never seen him with one. Did he “borrow” it from someone else, and they caught him and handed out some retribution?

 We rush through the paint-peeling, phenyl-fumed corridors of the hospital, looking for the emergency section.

 I inwardly gasp when I set eyes on my student. Daoud is weak and ghostly pale. He has a blood-weeping bandage around his neck and a drip in his arm.

 A doctor enters. He’s sporting the two mandatory symbols of his elevation above the rest of us ordinary mortals: a white coat and a stethoscope.

'Cut right through the jugular, he’s lucky to be alive. It’s a clean cut and we’ve stitched him up.'

Groggy Daoud sees that I’m in the room, and he wants to communicate.

'Teacher,' he whispers, 'Left shop on boss’s motorbike ... to get parts. Ran into kite string. Didn’t see it. Hardly felt it. Blood spurt everywhere. Over clothes ... over motor bike ... onto road. Turned back to shop. Grabbed my throat.'

'He collapsed on the steps,' one of his shop-mates chips in, “luckily there was a taxi parked close to the shop.”

Immediately I comprehend what has happened. The kite enthusiasts increase the cutting power of their kite-strings by coating them with a mixture of glue and powdered glass.  Today has been very windy and obviously the taut death-string was angled across the road. With the speed of the bike, it would have scythed through Daoud’s flesh like a high-speed band saw. No wonder the doctor said it was a clean cut.

Perhaps this is why the Taliban banned this kite madness in Afghanistan. Maybe these anti-music, anti-TV fun-haters saved some lives. But they also deprived the men and boys of something to take their mind off the country’s woes and destruction.

I offer to pray. Daoud readily agrees. Unlike many Westerners, Muslims are very God-conscious and always ready for a blessing through intercession. All present join in the final ‘Ameen,’ and according to the local custom, we lift our open palms toward our faces, as if to draw in the blessing.

I doubt that this accident will take away Daoud’s passion for kite flying, and the struggle to be the last survivor in the sky.

But he is the lucky one.

Back in Kabul, countless slum-dwellers never have the time for this neck-wrenching recreation. Theirs is also a struggle against elimination ... unemployed, foodless elimination from the human race.

Will anyone run to catch the severed souls, of those falling from humanity’s angry sky?