"the greatest guitarist you’d never heard about"

Osman Samiuddin writes an incredibly moving piece chasing the ghost of a legendary Karachi guitarist:

But two things Max said kept me hooked. First, he confirmed—if somewhat cryptically—that a girl had broken Iggy’s heart, leading to his death by suicide. Then, as he began to explain how Iggy had gotten so deep into guitars, he paused. I wasn’t sure whether he was weighing up the right way to say what he wanted to, or whether he was rethinking if he wanted to say it at all.

Eventually he did.

“He was too good to be a good guitarist, you know? There had to be something wrong with him to be that good.”

Max, I would learn, was no-nonsense. He played things down, not up. He paused, asked me to turn off the recorder, and then, lowering his voice in a way that suggested God should not hear this, whispered:

“We used to think he must have sold his soul to the devil to be that good.”