The Blind Man's Garden (6 page)

He invited distinguished clerics and holy women to the house to help her see again the beauty of belief. In his mind he accused her of misrepresenting herself to him before marriage, because he would never have chosen someone with such monstrous doubts. The marriage was in all likelihood null – a Muslim could not remain married to an unbeliever – but he also kept reassuring himself that her condition was reversible, waiting for God to make His presence felt to her once more.

After the first child the doctors had warned her against having another but he was somewhat glad when Jeo was conceived, thinking the marvel of a new life would renew her soul.

He reads the Holy Book, trying not to think of how her beautiful body is receiving injuries inside the ground at this very moment, a toy for Allah’s demons. Tortures known as
Kabar ka
Aazab
. She is alive down there, fully sensate and conscious, the underworld from where no smoke or cry escapes. A person is brought to life immediately after the grave is closed up and is even said to clearly hear the receding footsteps of the men who had come to bury him.

After her death he gave away Ardent Spirit to Ahmed the Moth, wishing to concentrate on the alleviation of her death-suffering, fully able to imagine her calling out in pain from beneath his feet. There was little time for Jeo and Yasmin, the eight-year-old daughter. He would leave to meet with scholars and seek rare books, pursuing doctrines, commentaries and records of controversies, searching for anything that might absolve her of her sin, coming back from some journeys more shaken than when he had left, at peace from some others.

While he was preoccupied with this, Ahmed the Moth distorted his vision beyond recognition and adapted Ardent Spirit’s crescent-shaped layout to his own ends. A green flag was designed with six flames arranged in a curve at its centre, each flame rising out of a pair of crossed swords. It flies on the roof of Ardent Spirit every day, and the boys wear green turbans which, when unwound, reveal the same six swords-and-flames on them. The six centres of vanished glory, whose loss is to be avenged with blade and fire.

In the small bathroom Rohan washes the tears off his face and performs his ablutions again. When the apostate dies the spot of earth which is to be his grave cries out in vehemence and pain, unwilling to receive him. As she breathed her last breaths he had kept asking her quietly, ‘Tell me what you see,’ because in a minute, in ten minutes, everything would have become irreversible, because it is too late to repent once the dying eyes begin to glimpse the Angel of Death.

But after two decades of thought he does sometimes suspect that his conduct had resembled sin, the sin of pride. Had he really decided that Allah lacked compassion, even for an apostate? Yes, he sometimes fears that his grief at her death – and before that at her doubts and renunciation – had driven him to something resembling an offence. How can he know for certain that the area of earth that became her grave hadn’t rejoiced at her death, ‘adorning itself like a bride, exulting in having to embrace her soon’, as the books of spiritual devotion say about the virtuous?

She had founded the school with him and had taught there but disagreements had emerged very soon and she had finally stopped teaching when he expelled a pupil whose mother was revealed to be a prostitute.

He raises the louvred blinds and looks out at the train tracks and the Grand Trunk Road running along them. Eternity suspended over human time, the stars are shining above the world like grains of light, this world that she had loved and called the only Paradise she needed. Preparing himself for blindness he commits everything to memory as she committed everything to paper, painting the garden’s flowers and birds onto his mind, and for several years after she was gone the garden looked as though something important had befallen it. The limes and the acacia trees seemed to mourn her, the rosewood and the Persian lilacs, the peepal and the corals, and all their different fruits, berries and spores, the seeds tough as cricket balls, or light enough to remain afloat for half an hour. Inside the earth the roots mourned her even without having seen her, and the white teak whose bark came off in plates the size of footprints, the lemon tree that produced twenty-five baskets of fruit each year. He was sure that all of them, as well as the lightning-fast lizards of the garden, were mourning her with him, and the stiffly rustling dragonflies and the blue-winged carpenter bees and the black chains of the ants and the tough-carapaced beetles and the various snails. In grief he had whispered her name as he walked the red paths set loose in the garden, and the word had gone among the glistening black brilliance of the crows and the butterflies floating in the sunlight – the Himalayan Pierrot, the Chitrali Satyr, the blue tigers and the common leopard and the swallowtails and the peacocks. She had loved them and the world in which they existed, saying, ‘God is just a name for our wonder.’ There was no soul, only consciousness. No divine plan, only nature, and we were simply among the innumerable results of its randomness. Saying, ‘I will miss this because this is all there is,’ her last words, and then she had slipped out of his life, consigning him to decades of apprehension on her behalf, because
he
knew that the soul existed, and not only that, it was accountable to Allah and His providential rage. Unlike her he knew that the dead were not beyond harm.

6

Arriving in Peshawar, Rohan accompanies Jeo to the hospital where the boy is to spend the next month. Afterwards, the early morning sunlight flooding the roads, he takes a rickshaw towards his former pupil’s house, to thank the family for the books. It’s much colder here in the mountains, 1,600 feet above sea level, and he buttons his coat to the neck and turns up the collar. Out there are mountains higher than the Alps placed onto the Pyrenees. Glaciers that Tamerlane’s soldiers had had to crawl over on hands and knees in 1398.

It is appropriate in some ways that the books had arrived in a truck painted brilliantly with mythological creatures, with saints and figures of legend, birds and garlands of flowers. The rickshaw is decorated similarly, and as it moves deeper into the city it encounters a crowd of demonstrators, the roads suddenly filled with men of all ages, holding placards and banners. A display of support for victims of the war in Afghanistan. As the rally grows the rickshaw-wallah has to reduce his speed, and soon enough they can neither move back nor go forwards, and so Rohan gets out and begins to walk with the crowd flowing like a river through the bazaars and streets, the sun falling through the noise and the raised placards. ‘Why didn’t three thousand Jews turn up for work at the World Trade Center on 11 September …’ someone is asking, while another says, ‘The West wants to take over Pakistan’s nuclear weapons …’

Eventually he decides to turn around and make his way back to the hospital, to be with Jeo until the rally is over.

It’s past noon when he arrives at the hospital. No one can tell him where he might find Jeo and he walks around the maze of corridors, the wards chaotic because the rally has turned violent out there, resulting in injuries and fatalities, the police opening fire. Parts of the city are an inferno and soon there are flames in the vicinity of the hospital too. He asks for the doctor to whom he had entrusted Jeo and is told to go to an upper level. A canister of teargas enters through a window and explodes in the staircase, enveloping him in a bitter choking fog. He finds himself trembling with consternation and foreboding, his eyes streaming. Outside slogans are being shouted, about ancient history as well as this week’s news, the people of today as distressed about things that happened a thousand years ago as the people who had lived through them. Perhaps more. But with a caustic half-smile a nurse shakes her head and says into the air of the room, ‘Would someone tell the marchers that visas to Western countries are being given away in the next street. That’ll disperse them.’

He turns into a corridor with a handkerchief on the lower half of his face. The doctor is examining an English journalist who is bleeding from the head and has a broken arm, the enraged crowd having set upon him. He is weak but keeps saying he holds no grudge, that if he were someone from these lands he too would be unable to stop himself from venting his anger at the first Western person he saw.

When the doctor is free for a few moments Rohan reaches forward and asks him about Jeo and is told that Jeo and his companion Mikal left three hours ago. Jeo had told one of the nurses that they were on their way to the battlefields of Afghanistan, had asked what essential medicines might be needed over there.

‘Mikal?’ Rohan asks. He points to the area between his eyebrows.

The doctor nods. ‘Yes, that’s him.’

*

Feeling inadequate and too old for the emergency, he moves towards the nearest phone and dials the number for Mikal’s brother Basie in Heer, to ask him for advice, to tell him to come to Peshawar immediately. They must follow the two boys into the conflict and bring them back. With each minute they are moving deeper and deeper towards the war, into the crosshairs of history.

It’s mayhem in Afghanistan. The Taliban are ruling with an iron fist, punishing traitors, informers, spies and those inciting rebellion. But the people are rising up, encouraged by America’s covert help – the Special Forces soldiers are moving on horseback from village to village, between towns and cities, dressed in shalwar kameez and shawls and woollen caps, emboldening, bribing and arming the population. Ahmed the Moth died there ten days ago while visiting his Taliban friends. A group of ordinary citizens had grabbed hold of him and a Taliban soldier on the street corner and forced them to the ground. Every ounce of rage – every rape, every disappearance, every public execution, every hand amputated during the past seven years of the Taliban regime, every twelve-year-old boy pressed into battle by them, every ten-year-old girl forcibly married to a mullah eight times her age, every man lashed, every woman beaten, every limb broken – was poured into the two men by fist, club, stick, foot and stone, and when they finished and dispersed nothing remained of the pair. It was as if they had been eaten.

7

The door has opened and both of them have entered the future. Jeo sits in the back of the van with Mikal as they are driven through the shadowland of hill and plateau, the use of headlights kept to a minimum so that at times there is no knowing what lies a mere five seconds into the darkness. Later in the night lightning appears overhead and illuminates not only the earth and the clouds but also the place in the mind where the line of fear crosses the thoughts, and the ground glows blue for a few seconds with a crystal immediacy, vistas opening up as in a vision, with black shapes looming in them, shadows perhaps, perhaps creatures who can be fought only with the weapons forged by the spirit, not the flesh, and then as the night deepens the stars come out and wheel overhead, smearing the sky with ancient phosphorescence.

There are ten men and there is silence between them. A few, including Mikal, are in deep sleep. Occasionally, without realising it, one of the waking men begins to read aloud the verses of the Koran he must be reading in his heart and the voice materialises in the darkness and after a few moments is gone.

Jeo reaches into Mikal’s bag. His fingers touch the very cold metal of the handgun’s spare bullets. Switching on his small flashlight, he sees that interspersed with the maps he has taken out there are letters, and he smiles immediately, feeling as though he’s sixteen years old once again, when all the girls were in love with Mikal. He separates the letters carefully and places them back in the bag just as the vehicle enters an expanse strewn with bright yellow packets of food air-dropped by Americans. The packs crunch and explode softly as the tyres go over them, and he pulls out the letters again. A name had caught his eye at the end of the text in one, and now he sees that it is there on another. And another. Suddenly his skin is burning because the handwriting in all of them is identical, and it is hers. It’s almost as though Naheed’s face appears behind the sentences, the eyes looking just past his shoulder.

Mikal stirs at the noise from outside and Jeo drops everything back into the bag and quickly zips it up. It could be another Naheed.
Has
he recognised her handwriting?

He needs to look at the letters again. He thinks of the night early in the marriage when he had come out of sleep to discover her weeping in the darkness. Months later in the garden he would hold her and she would be smiling and suddenly her eyes would fill up. Was she sorrowful at having forgotten Mikal for a few instants? Feeling blameworthy for
not
loving Jeo?

To look into her eyes was to realise that eyes were part of the brain. Thoughts were visible through and in them. Was he mistaken?

The driver has a handheld Motorola radio with which he is communicating with the other two vans in their convoy. Jeo and Mikal have been told that they can expect to arrive at the medical centre at noon the next day. The other eight men in the truck will go elsewhere.

There are cries of jackals in the distance.

‘Are you all right?’ Mikal says, draping his arm along Jeo’s back.

‘Yes.’

She is the miracle in his life, granted to him suddenly last year, he who had resigned himself to loneliness, his studies being his primary horizon, knowing he wouldn’t experience certain aspects of life until he married after completing his education in his mid-twenties. He closes his eyes, and when he opens them his wristwatch tells him he has slept for two hours. It is still dark but the vehicle has halted on an elevated ridge and the driver has stepped outside, looking around with a flashlight. Jeo thinks of his father. At this hour he would be awake and saying prayers for his mother.

‘We are lost,’ Mikal says, pointing to the stars. ‘I told him an hour ago but he wouldn’t listen. We haven’t been going in the right direction for some time.’ He gets out of the van with his bag over his shoulder and Jeo watches him talk to the driver, gesturing at the sky and at the maps. Jeo goes out to join them as do the others, each wrapped in a blanket against the cold air, their several flashlights revealing that they are in the remains of a very extensive iron foundry, the surface of the hills for many hundreds of yards covered with the ruins of ancient furnaces made of soapstone, indestructible in the fire, for the smelting of iron ore. Relics of the departed Buddhist races of these lands. The ground strewn with small cubes of iron pyrites. And as they stand there surrounded by the strange earth and the strange sky, Jeo hears what he has never heard before, the awful crump of tank shells, explosions and gunfire in the far distance.