The Good Son (27 page)

Then she is out of the dreamlike state; she is back in the stable, and her back is covered with rats, their sharp teeth tearing at her open wounds.

She rises with a scream and the rats fall off her and vanish into the straw. She knows they will return, attracted by the smell of her blood. She wedges herself into a corner and sits trembling in terror, with her penlight in her hand. Its little beam wavers, grows yellow, fades to a tiny glow.

Sonia is still in this position when the trapdoor opens again, revealing a figure holding an oil lamp. She lets out a sob. It cannot be time for dawn prayer already, time for her next beating; it is still black outside. Then she sees it is not her guard but the girl, Rashida. She has not covered her face for once, and Sonia can see that she has a nose after all, and that she is a beauty.

The girls clucks when she sees that the naan has not been eaten, that it has been gnawed by the rats. She says, “I have brought you a new kameez. Here, let me help you put it on.”

“No, it is too painful to have anything next to my skin. And besides, they will only tear it again, and you are not rich enough to afford five new ones a day.”

“But they are saying you will not be beaten in this way anymore. The mullah says it is immodest for men to see your body through the rips in the cloth. So, God willing, they will beat you on your feet.”

“Thanks be to God,” says Sonia. “I will be a cripple, but not shamed.”

The girl does not detect any irony in this statement, and says, “Yes, thank God. I have some grease my mother gave me. We put it on burns.
I will dress your back. I also have some cloths that my mother says will keep the cuts from turning bad.”

“Thank you. God will reward you for this mercy.”

Rashida rubs grease on Sonia’s back with a delicate hand and ties on the cloths. The pain seems to diminish a little. The girl helps her on with the new kameez and says, “Is it true that you cast the evil eye on Mahmoud Saiyed?”

“Is that his name?” says Sonia. Speaking to the girl seems to calm her. I’ve been hallucinating, she thinks, and shudders, but the details of the near-dream are starting to fade. She wills them out of her mind. “No, I cast no curse,” she says. “I’m not a witch. I asked him for his name so I could intercede for him on the Day of Judgment, since he is going to kill me unjustly in the name of God, which is a great sin.”

She sees the girl’s face twist in puzzlement. “Why would you do that?”

“Because I was taught to be merciful to my enemies and forgive them, as God forgives us.”

“Only a fool would forgive an enemy. That would just give him another chance to attack you.”

“And so? What if he attacks?”

“He might kill you.”

“And so? We are called to be mujahideen, we are called to struggle for the sake of God. In the lesser jihad we struggle against the enemies of Islam and for justice, and if we fall we are taken to Paradise. In the greater jihad we struggle against ourselves. We strive to become like God, and what is God if not compassionate and merciful? If we fall in that struggle, the Prophet, peace be upon him, has told us that we gain a higher rank in Paradise than those who fell by the sword.”

The girl looks down at her hands. She says, “I should not listen to you. You are a blasphemer. But look, I have had a dream.”

“Tell it,” says Sonia.

“I was on the bank of a river, a swift-flowing stream,” says the girl. “On the other side was. . . a boy. He was holding a gold ring and beckoning to me, but I couldn’t cross. Then I saw there were corpses in the water: oxen, horses, and some men, too. I was afraid, and I awakened.”

Sonia says, “The river is the future, which flows ever toward us and cannot be stopped. The gold is the prospect of a successful marriage.
The corpses mean that the marriage cannot take place until someone, perhaps many, have died. And the boy is whom you love. What is his name?”

“Batur,” says the girl immediately, and then gasps and holds her hand up to her mouth.

Sonia says, “Yes, Batur. He is from a good family in another village. He loves you and would marry you, but your father has promised you to someone else, an older man.” It is only a guess, but Sonia knows such sorrows are the common lot of Pashtun village girls.

Rashida’s eyes grow wide, glistening, reflecting the small yellow flame of the lamp. “How did you know that?”

“I know many things,” says Sonia. “And this older man is. . .”

“Khaliq Sumro. He has one eye and he stinks like a goat. He is of the mujahideen and advises Idris Ghulam. He has one wife in Peshawar but he wants one here.”

“Never fear that you will marry him. His death is foretold and will come soon. Your father may have a dream. Tell your mother what I have told you, and she will use the ways of women to make him come and see me and I will interpret that dream as well.”

The girl nods and assures Sonia she will do this and pushes forward a closed basket. She says there is food in it, and she will leave the oil lamp there, to stave off the rats. Then she darts up the ladder and closes the trapdoor. Sonia hears the bolt shoot home.

What a precious thing a little light is! Sonia thinks, and a little kindness as well. She cradles the small lamp in her hands. By its glow she can make out the shapes of the rats moving and from time to time the glow of their tiny fierce eyes. She wonders if the oil will last until dawn. Probably not. Perhaps that is part of the torment. Hope and some slight relief from the worst are the best weapons of any tormentor; the torturer smiles and offers a cigarette.

This adds incalculably to the most dreadful element in her situation, the anticipation of pain to come; anyone with an interior life knows that psychic pain is what breaks you. Sonia knows she is breaking. She is brave enough when free, with room to maneuver. She has confidence in her own cleverness, but now it is entirely gone. Her plan was a stupid one, and now here she is. She has always been a little claustrophobic, she has always sought the open skies, avoided tight spaces both physical
and social; her life has been based on this preference, and now she is in this tiny grave packed with rats.

She sobs, letting the misery flow without constraint. She cannot bear the prospect of more pain. Easy to talk of torture, to discuss it as a phenomenon in a living room where the torturer is far away; one thinks on those occasions, perhaps,
Well, I could stand it, I’m no baby
, and then one sees people who have been tortured and they look the same as us; they laugh, they joke. How bad could it be? Secret, shameful thoughts, but there they are. Sonia has known any number of the tortured—they are common enough in Pakistan—and she has had these thoughts.

But now she knows they will take her out in front of the mosque tomorrow and lay her on the ground and tie her feet up to a chair and whip the skin from their soles. And a few hours later again, cutting the intricate weave of muscles and tendons into red jam and bringing her back to lie in this filth. Infection will set in immediately, she will die of septic shock, delirious and alone. She knows, too, that even this is not the worst. She knows that what utterly shatters the soul is this: when the pain is applied, sooner or later the victim feels in her deepest core that she would yield her place to anyone; she would say in her heart,
Torture my babies, torture my son, torture my husband, all my loved ones, but not me!
Thus the victory of the torturer is the absolute victory of the self: Hell incarnate.

Yes, the self, the nafs, what the Sufis spend their lives trying to control. Sonia thinks this, the word
nafs
is present in her mind, and all at once, astonishingly, her weeping turns into a bubbling laugh. So
this
is what you meant, my
murshid
!

Now, in darkness, hungry for the brassy colossal skies of Asia, she thinks of her journey with Ismail, which she put into her first book and which made her enjoyably famous for a season, although Ismail had told her that fame was like wax dripping on the nafs from a great candle, thicken -ing it and making the soul more than ever its prisoner. She thinks about warming his bedroll, which she did not put into that book. And most of all she thinks of his lessons, the Sufi training he gave her, for despite his lighthearted manner he was a hard master in the ways that
the murshids of his order had, over six centuries, devised to strip the self from the body and allow God to burn it away to nothing.

From a pocket of her ruined kameez she takes a Sufi rosary of thirty-three beads, a
tasbi-e-Fatima
, the kind given by the angel to Hazrat Bibi Fatima, daughter of the Prophet and mother of all Sufis. Sonia rolls the wooden beads through her hands as she begins the recitation, the
zikr
, at the heart of Sufi practice. The zikr she recites is the Name of God. As she does so she visualizes the calligraphic representation of the Name, in Arabic, in the approved golden-wheat color. Before, when she was with Ismail, she never quite achieved the reported glow, her visuali -zation flickered like the neon of a cheap motel sign. Somewhere after three hundred of the usual thousand repetitions, her concentration would flag and the self would issue forth like a fungus. She confessed this to her murshid. He told her not to worry. He told her to wait for God. He said God would find her when the conditions were right.

Now, obviously, the conditions are right, for the Name of God shines like the noon sun on a field of grain and she is also able to visualize her murshid. There he floats in the black cell, grinning, vastly amused, his face lit by the golden glow. The beads fly through her fingers; the Name echoes in her head like a gong. Apparently the right conditions for one such as her is the prospect of being tortured to death. Ismail thinks this is amusing and so does she, and all at once she understands that God is laughing too. Nothing is as she thought; everything familiar is now wonderful, and the esoteric is plain as bread. She understands that she is departing the
alam-e-nasuf
, the material world, and entering the
alam-e-malakut
, the realm of angels, the ground reality of the universe. In her ears, faint at first but growing louder, is a sound, indescribable, which is the
sout-e-sarmadi
, the eternal sound that permeates all the worlds, of which the most beautiful music is but a shadow.

Sonia chants without thinking, listening to the breath of God; the sound fills her, it removes the pain of her wounds, it banishes her fear—or not really, she thinks, looking back at herself as from a great distance, it’s more like the pain is still there, but the being, the poor nafs, that feels it, the horrible person who behaved so badly to Farid and Theo and Wazir, who suffered under the whip and the rats and merited that torture, is not the real person.

I will never be able to explain this to anyone, she thinks, as Ismail was
never able to explain it to me. I thought it was a trick to be learned, like legerdemain, but it’s not. It’s a grace. How peculiar not to have known it all along, although, now that she thinks of it, she
did
know it all along, but the nafs cast a cloud between her soul and the knowing, for it did not want to die.

The sound is still in her ears when the trapdoor swings open, letting in a flood of light and the guard, Mahmoud. She continues with the beads and smiles at Mahmoud. She realizes she can see the real person in him too, the image of his Maker, and she can also see, like an encrusting leprosy, the structure of pride, greed, lust, and folly that controls the man Mahmoud in the alam-e-nasuf. She climbs the ladder effortlessly, or so it seems, she feels like she floats on the rungs. Mahmoud seems taken aback now; he was expecting a cowed and beaten woman—the only sort of woman he has ever known, in fact—and now he sees something quite different and he is frightened, Sonia can see his fear, like worms roiling the shadows behind his eyes.

It is the time of Fajr, the dawn prayer. She is brought to the same wide place before the mosque, the same crowd of turbaned men are there, having just finished praising the Compassionate One and looking forward to seeing a woman tortured. Above, the sky is still pink, shading to the palest possible blue. Sonia is still handling her beads. She notices that the men have seen this, and there are murmurs. The mullah stands out of the crowd and gives a speech, in which he again describes Sonia’s blasphemy and offers her a chance to confess. She answers in a loud but mild voice, as if explaining something to a child, that she has not been judged according to the sharia and therefore it is haram for her to be punished. She quotes the Qur’an on the wages of injustice.

The mullah shouts at her, although he does not quote from the Qur’an. Like most village mullahs he is an ignoramus on the subjects of sharia and Islamic theology, substituting a crude bullying style for both. Some men drag out a heavy wooden chair. Sonia is made to sit on the ground. Her legs are tied together and her ankles are lashed to the slats of the chair back. She is as modest now as could be wished. Mahmoud does this work and he is clumsy doing it, so she offers a word of encouragement.

“Mahmoud Saiyed, I forgive you your crime. In Hell you will be repaid for this, but although your feet will be lashed with red-hot wires
forever, but I will look down from Paradise and beg the demon to temper the strokes.”