Who was the girl in a bloody shift lying dead at the side of a winding mountain road? And who’s the winner when the CIA teams with Afghan mujahideen?

When the death of an abducted child bride is covered up by a moonlighting police officer for his cult leader, the hopes for easy money by DIG Akbar of the Punjab Police are dashed. He is misled and mistreated, forced to endure humiliation, abduction, and imprisonment in a deadly swamp. Yet, he is determined to find the girl’s identity. To discover it, he must use his wits and the extra-regulation skills he acquired as an officer within the civil service of Pakistan. Paydirt is a story of ordinary people caught up in the extraordinary circumstances brought about by war, extremism, vengeance and corruption; of a colonial past that refuses to release its grip on a struggling society.

Paydirt is set in 1980s Pakistan when the CIA teams with Afghan mujahideen to fight a proxy war with the Soviets, the unlikely investigation becomes obsession as the story explores themes of justice and identity along the mountainous borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan, in the fabled Anarkali Bazaar of Lahore, the forbidding swamps alongside the Indus River, and a lonely shrine in the sweltering Thar desert.

Paydirt explores a society striving to escape the colonial past that haunts it. The young man who flees the accident and runs to join the mujahideen when threatened by the henchman doctoring the site of the traffic accident, like the senior civil servant whose father died defending the British in Burma, is symbolic of his society and will undoubtedly be viewed with sympathy by listeners as he flees the sinister forces that pursue him. If he represents the vibrant promise of a better future, his shocking fate will be a stark reminder of bitter geopolitical realities.