The Blind Man's Garden Read online

  The gem merchant valued the ruby at fifty thousand rupees. The sign above the shop said the proprietor was a genealogist of precious stones and could tell the origin and race of every precious stone on earth. Rohan asked him to write down the amount while the ransom seeker watched.

  ‘I will give your warlord this gem instead of the money, and he will give us Jeo.’

  As they drive towards the Afghan border, the ransom seeker talks. ‘Seventy people from my village were killed when the Americans dropped a bomb,’ the man says. ‘I blame America but I also blame the foreign fighters – the likes of your boy – who the Americans were trying to kill.’

  And repeatedly he wants to be handed the ruby.

  At a secluded place near the border he stops the car and asks them to disembark, saying he has to go away for an hour. And yet again he wants the ruby. ‘It’ll save you the journey. Give me the jewel and I will bring the boy to you.’

  But Rohan refuses and he drives away. The valley of Peshawar has the appearance of having been, centuries ago, the bed of a vast lake, whose banks were bound by the cliffs and peaks of the surrounding Himalayas, and Rohan has the feeling of being submerged within that vast inland sea.

  *

  I was given the following words of the Prophet by Adam bin Ayaas, who was given them by Ibn Abi Zyeb, who was given them by Syed Makbari, who in turn was given them by Abu Horaira. The Prophet said, ‘If anyone has been unjust towards someone, he should secure himself a pardon from the victim before it is too late. Otherwise, on Judgement Day, when the only valid currency will be a person’s good conduct on earth, the good deeds of an unjust man will be transferred to his victim. And if he has no good deeds, then the victim’s sins will be transferred to him.

  Rohan is reading the Book of Prophet’s Sayings, turning the pages at random – pausing on this, the saying number 2,286, for a few moments. He shivers in the cold. It has been two hours since the man left with the car. The bird trapper is asleep, wrapped in a blanket under a tree.

  ‘Why do you look so troubled?’ a woman’s voice asks.

  Rohan looks up – her hair is white, the features of the face caught in a net of wrinkles. He smiles and shakes his head.

  She points to the boulders and the screen of bushes on the other side of the road. Rohan sees that behind the leaves and branches there is a low mud wall.

  ‘Go there.’

  Rohan returns to the book. Number 2,279: I was given the following words of the Prophet by Osman Ibn Ani Sheeba, who was given them by Hasheem, who was given them by Obaidullah bin Abu Bakr bin Uns, who was given them by Hameed Tavail, who in turn was given them by Uns bin Malik. The Prophet said, ‘Always help your (Muslim) brother, whether he is a tyrant or victim.’

  The woman is hovering and now touches his shoulder. ‘It is a graveyard. The body of a boy who died fighting the Americans in Afghanistan was brought out and is buried here. He is a martyr and will intercede on your behalf with Allah. Go and ask Mikal for your suffering to be alleviated.’

  Rohan closes the book and places it in his shoulder bag and stands up. He crosses the road and enters the graveyard that contains about a hundred souls, a few decaying tombs and thorn trees. The mountains loom overhead vertiginously, the land and slopes marked with evidence of the lost sea, the effort of currents, waves, springs, streams and rivers. Verses of the Koran are on every headstone – as though the graves are quoting them, carrying on a conversation with one another using nothing but holy words. One mound just on the other side of the boundary wall is at least ten yards long, heaped with bright flowers, river soil with pieces of freshwater shells, and chips of soft blue slate quarried from the nearby hills. A group of women is reciting verses of the Koran over the mound. A man is lighting an incense stick at its head, the smoke rising in sluggish blue strands through the cold air.

  ‘He was a giant.’ A woman looks up at Rohan as he approaches.

  ‘He wasn’t,’ the man with the incense stick corrects her, walking the ten yards to light the ones at the other end. ‘He was of normal height, but he became this size on the battlefield.’

  The tombstone is carved with stars along the edges. There is Mikal’s name, the date of birth, and of death – the day after he and Jeo went to Afghanistan.

  ‘They say he brought down six fighter jets single-handedly and saved thirty women from being ravished by American soldiers.’

  He stands looking at the blossoms piled onto the boy. The dazzle of the sun is in his eyes and his body feels suddenly tired. Claw prints of an eagle were found heading away from the martyr, the warrior saint, someone tells him. His soul must have been an eagle.

  How did Mikal’s body end up here? The mayhem and chaos of war. He looks up at the cliffs. The vegetation everywhere is profuse; after the level of the sea decreased this was a tropical marsh, the resort of rhinoceros, flamingo and tiger, thick with reeds, rushes and conifers. Under his breath he reads the verse of the Koran that is etched onto the ruby. Wealth and offspring are transitory adornments of the nearer life. How long he stands there in that disordered state of mind he doesn’t know, coming to himself only when he hears Abdul calling out his name from the other side of the wall.

  *

  Through hillside, across bridges, through a dust storm a mile long, and through streams in which float – by the dozen – the shaved-off beards of fleeing al-Qaeda militants, the journey to the destination in Afghanistan takes seventeen hours. In deep twilight they cross a broad flat valley with a river and river flats in it, every bit of it scorched black where a Daisy Cutter bomb had been dropped, reducing everything to ash, pumice, lava, the sides of the hills torn up into segments, and scattered over it all is the yellow haze of the unrisen moon, the cold night falling on them out of the east, the stars beginning their slide through the black slopes. It looks like the site of a cosmic incursion such as a meteorite, not the work of men. The US casualties number twelve in the two-month war, whereas countless thousands of Afghanistanis have perished, fighters as well as bystanders, and Rohan doesn’t know who will speak the complicated truth, and he watches with attention as though at some point in the future he himself will be asked to tell what he has seen. Towards the end of the journey a convoy of American soldiers goes past their vehicle. He wonders if he can ask them to help secure the release of the boys imprisoned by the warlord. He watches the convoy disappear just as the car radio brings news that a British Muslim has been arrested trying to blow up a passenger airliner over the Atlantic Ocean with explosives hidden in his shoes.

  *

  Arriving at a compound at 3 a.m., they are shown into a room full of the odour of dust and are told to spend the remains of the night there. The walls are of grey cement and hundreds of broken statues lie in heaps on the floor. The Buddha and the various people from his life – torsos, arms, feet and faces of all sizes. He looks at the exact arc of the eyebrow made above a man’s eye by the carver’s chisel. The flowers as though growing out of the hair on a woman’s head. There is barely room for Rohan and the bird pardoner to stand, and they clear a space by stacking a number of the pieces onto each other, the bird pardoner lying down against a yard-long fragment of drapery – hewn from the skirts of a nymph or temple dancer. As she lay dying, Rohan remembers burning a sketch of a Bodhisattva statue that Sofia had made. And he knows some people in the neighbourhood, on hearing the news that his vision is slowly deteriorating, comment that it is Allah’s retribution for tormenting her during her last hours. ‘He didn’t want to see what she had painted, now he won’t be able to see the real things.’

  He falls asleep looking at the photograph on the far wall. The warlord is shaking hands with an American colonel. The date on the frame says it was taken soon after the Taliban regime was toppled last month. The opposite of war is not peace but civilisation, and civilisation is purchased with violence and cold-blooded murder. With war. The man must earn millions of dollars for guarding the NATO supply convoys as they pass through his area, and for the
militia he must have raised to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda soldiers alongside American Special Forces.

  He wakes up before the stars are down and says his predawn prayers. He had slept on the palm of a seven-foot hand, using the swollen base of the thumb as his pillow. He thinks he hears shouts of ‘Nail! Nail!’ from some nearby room and he interrupts his prayers and moves from point to point within the compound’s darkness, but the howling has stopped, nothing but the waning moon overhead casting his faint shadow on the ground, and the clear chart of the constellations that makes him think of Mikal, the bone geometry of stars.

  *

  A man with grave coal-black eyes enters the room, late in the morning, and asks Rohan and the bird pardoner to follow him. Guided by him they descend into the warlord’s underground prison, going along the buried hallways lined on both sides with barred cells. There is a large pool through one wide arch, but it is full of stored gasoline, the grimy walls painted with the still-beautiful flowers and parakeets and bulbuls from when it must have been used for indoor swimming. There are pumps to put the gasoline into tins for vehicles or electricity generators. As they continue along the hallways, shadow-people thrust their arms through the bars of the cells and shake dirty beakers and call out, ‘Water.’ The place smells of sweat, urine and excrement, of rotting wounds and flesh. These prisoners must all be insignificant, because the important ones are handed over to the Americans for $5,000 each.

  A barred door is unlocked and the guide motions for the occupant to step out. The boy who emerges is in a daze, standing at an angle in the half dark, and the man pushes him towards the bird pardoner. He wears a dirty shalwar kameez and is ghostly thin and his hands shake as he lifts them to wipe away tears. When the father embraces him the boy’s arms come out of the torn sleeves and Rohan sees that the skin is crisscrossed with deep cuts. Abdul keeps up the glad words of reunion but the child is silent, looking as though he would rather understand than speak.

  *

  Rohan hands the ruby to the guide when they are back in the original room. Immediately he says that it is not acceptable.

  ‘This is mere glass,’ the man says.

  ‘It is not glass,’ Rohan says. ‘It’s an authentic and indisputable jewel.’

  The man stands with it in the palm of his hand. Then he sighs and tells them that the warlord is not present and that they must wait for his return. He goes away with it and Rohan walks to the door to see which of the many rooms lining the courtyard he will disappear into. Posters of the warlord are pasted to the walls in the compound. He clearly hopes to have a role in the government.

  ‘How did you end up here?’ Rohan asks Jeo, but the boy won’t speak – unwilling to recall the time and the place where his ties with the human had broken. He looks at his father and whispers, ‘Have you come to get me back?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘One boy’s father came last week. He is an ice seller and said he is trying to save ten rupees a day to free his son. It’ll take him twenty years. You have to take me with you today.’

  ‘We are here to take you away, this morning, don’t worry,’ Rohan says, looking in the direction the man went with the ruby, gently placing a hand on the boy’s head.

  The boy recoils under the touch.

  ‘You don’t need to be afraid of him,’ Abdul says. ‘He is a good man.’

  ‘How many prisoners are down there in the cells?’ Rohan asks, looking at the floor. They are perhaps directly under his feet.

  ‘About a hundred. The others who came with me died.’

  Rohan recognises the warlord from the photograph on the wall the moment he enters the room, holding the ruby in his hand, clearly delighted by its beauty. He is one-eyed with a big head and chest, the breast thrust forward as though by the force of the heart beating unafraid of any man or thing.

  ‘I have come to see the man who has brought me this gift.’ He smiles as he walks towards Rohan. ‘You can take the boy,’ he says, holding out his hand to be shaken.

  Rohan looks down at the hand but does not take it, unable to hide his feelings, and the man stops smiling. His servants gathered behind him stiffen: the proffered hand remains hanging in the air and Rohan might as well have slapped him. Everyone waits while the ruby shines in the man’s other hand. Valour is associated with this gemstone. The courage to seek the truth at all times. To be able to look tyrants in the eyes. This world of havoc, malice and destruction, where the blood of the innocent is of no consequence, is perfect for him and his kind.

  Rohan walks out of the door, followed by Jeo and the bird pardoner, leaving the men of war behind. But he is beginning to regret his act as it could jeopardise the safety of Abdul and the boy.

  They go out through the gate, not meeting the eyes of the armed men standing guard. People are gathered outside the front gate, all there to pay homage to the warlord or seek money and help. The moment the guards open the gate to let the three of them out, the crowd begins to shout out its needs, frenziedly waving pieces of paper in the air, asking to see the lord. The voices of women coming from under the folds of blue or cream-coloured burkas. Near the road people are eating breakfasts of tea and packets of biscuits.

  Jeo stares at a cat walking along a wall. He says to his father, ‘They forget to feed you for days sometimes down there, and one day I was hungry this cat brought me a dead hoopoe to eat.’

  Rohan sees the convoy of American vehicles coming down the road.

  ‘The other prisoners are just there,’ Jeo says pointing back to the warlord’s compound, his eyes almost vibrating with intensity. ‘See that row of barred windows at the base of the wall? They are the high windows we looked up at, in our underground cells.’

  The Americans’ six-vehicle convoy has drawn near and Rohan steps into the middle of the road before it.

  The lead vehicle stops ten yards away from him and the white boy-soldier behind the steering wheel looks at him through the windshield. His companion in the passenger seat leans out with his gun after a few seconds and shouts, ‘Get out of the way!’

  Above him the sky has suddenly opened into the cold of the cosmos.

  *

  Tormented by dreams of justice on earth, Jeo wants to do something like a star shooting off light to make itself. Before his father knows what he is doing, he picks up a section of broken brick lying at his feet and throws it solidly at the men guarding the building, missing one of them by a mere two feet. He stands defiant, as though gaining strength from being under the open sky, having found this way of announcing his place in the world, the family of man. One of the guards comes running towards him with a raised rifle but Abdul moves forward to placate him. Taking a cigarette from his pocket, Abdul puts it in the guard’s mouth and even lights it, keeping up words of apology.

  *

  ‘Get out of the way!’

  Rohan does not heed the order. Instead he begins to walk towards the jeep. The other vehicles have halted behind the first one and soldiers are leaning out with weapons at the ready, some in confusion, some in alarmed fear.

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ Rohan says in English.

  ‘Get out of the way!’

  Rohan puts up both his arms. The soldiers will not see him as a harmless aged man. ‘I need your help in getting some children out of this building,’ he says, pointing with his head.

  ‘Not our problem.’

  ‘They are being abused in there.’

  ‘Not our problem. This is your last warning!’ They are aiming at him and in every other direction, behind them, to the left, right, at the crowd of petitioners, the gun barrels unceasing as the panic mounts. ‘Move! Now! This is your last warning!’

  Rohan catches a glimpse of Jeo, who has walked towards the windows of the dungeon and is peering down through them.

  Slowly Rohan walks to the very edge of the tarmac – unable to bring himself to vacate the road completely, still searching for words he might say to these soldiers, and the vehicles begin to come towards him
suspiciously, in extreme slowness, the zigzag pattern on the tyres moving down inch by inch, and he watches as the gate to the building opens and the warlord emerges. He stands looking at Rohan.

  One of the warlord’s men has rushed forward to drag Rohan away from the road, throwing him forcibly onto the ground. As he falls he sees the American convoy speed up, he also sees that Jeo has taken off his shirt for some reason, revealing the gaunt, sickeningly bruised body. Snatching the lighter from Abdul’s hand the boy sets the shirt alight and with this burning rag he runs – towards the row of windows to the underground cells.

  Rohan lies in the dust, thinking that the warlord’s man had wished nothing more than to remove the obstruction from the path of the Americans. But the man is still holding Rohan down – and now others have appeared, pinning him so hard against the ground he thinks it is an attempt to bury him alive, that using nothing but their arms they want to push him into the earth. The warlord is standing above him with his hand extended, the hand he had rejected. Time slows down as the warlord lowers the hand and Rohan sees that the pulverised remains of the ruby are in the palm, the stone crushed into tiny fragments. Calmly the man presses a fingertip into the shattered jewel, coating it with the razor grit, and brings the fingertip towards Rohan’s eyes.

  *

  One second, two, three – and the pool of gasoline erupts, Jeo having dropped the burning shirt onto it from above.