A suicide bombing is being planned in Manchester, and Saleem Khan, an atheist, and seventy years of age, is carrying the bag. He is also holding vivid memories -- some of regret and yearning, some humorous and yet others overshadowed by the surreal brutality of war.
In the 60s, he left his lover, his job as a teacher and his home in rural Pakistan and emigrated to Bradford, a town crackling with racism. He finds a job working in a mill on an all-Asian night-shift, becomes an active trade unionist and when the mills close down, he drives a taxi.
But in the 1980s Pakistan draws him back, and he gets involved as the English-speaking partner in his cousin's transport business. When a truck driver he knows, does not return to base, he sets out to find him and unwittingly gets drawn across the border and into the killing fields of Afghanistan. Here, among Russian soldiers, Saudi Arabian Sheikhs, American Pirs, prostitutes and the holy warriors of the Mujahadeen, who receive their orders and weapons from the United States, he meets Gulzarina, the woman whose life and experiences in a war without end allow him to finally make sense of his own.
