The Blind Man's Garden Read online

  ‘Sometimes when I sang, I almost knew. For about half a second, but then it would be gone.’

  ‘Your singing told you what you were searching for?’

  ‘Sometimes. Mostly I kept saying to myself, “You’ll know it when you see it.” But I didn’t.’

  Jeo folds the map into a square and takes another from the sheaf and opens it. ‘You didn’t see it, or you saw it but didn’t realise that that was what you were searching for?’

  ‘Isn’t it the same thing?’

  ‘This is giving me a headache.’

  ‘Me too.’

  Jeo returns to the map. ‘They are saying the war won’t be quick. If Kabul falls, it won’t be for at least a year or eighteen months. I don’t think the real fighting will start until the spring thaw next year. Western soldiers will just sit on the hills and mountains, eating boiled goat and keeping their heads down around dung fires, battered by winter blizzards.’ He looks at his watch. ‘I think I should get back in there soon, Father might wake up.’

  ‘I’ll come to your hospital late in the morning. Leave the maps with me until then.’

  ‘We’ll have to visit a bazaar quickly to buy a satellite phone, so I can call home from Afghanistan and pretend I am calling from Peshawar.’

  Jeo turns to go and he, with a small touch under his arm where the Beretta sits in the holster, says, ‘Jeo, yes I do have one.’

  After Jeo leaves he lights a cigarette and smokes it, exhaling out of the window. He picks the lock of a cabin in the adjoining carriage and slides in, moving through its pitch-dark interior, guiding himself with his hands held out like a blind man, towards the mass of plastic lilies he had glimpsed being taken into the cabin earlier in the evening. Two stations along, the son of a feudal lord is getting married and the family has been visiting nearby towns to buy flowers. If they had been real Mikal would have moved by scent. Musk, cinnamon, river-mud, ether, blood, monsoon moss. They grow in Rohan’s garden and he takes out one flower from each bundle and returns to the window in the corridor, holding the white cluster of them against his body – an obligatory tithe. Out there is the cyclorama of night and each time the train passes a shanty or a hut he throws one of the large white blooms in its direction, whipping his head to look back as it arrives and sticks in the rotting thatched roof or in the jute sack and cardboard that serve as a wall.

  He comes back to his seat and closes his eyes. The afternoon he approached Naheed for the first time – to hand her the first ever letter – she had been waiting for a rickshaw in the shade of a tree. And he had entered that shade, a pattern of leaf-shadow covering them both, but had then stepped back into open sunlight and had even turned the peak of his baseball cap backwards, bringing his features in full view.

  The train tracks curve under him and there is a swing of gravity in the blood.

  One day – after they had been exchanging letters and meeting in secret for six weeks – she mentioned the beauty of a neighbourhood boy and then quickly offered something like an apology, in case his pride was injured. But he had just shrugged.

  ‘But then I am sure you look at other girls,’ she said.

  He had shaken his head.

  ‘That means you love me more than I love you.’

  ‘I know.’

  The revelation seemed to strike her almost with a physical force. ‘And it is not a problem?’

  ‘No. I am grateful that you love someone like me at all.’

  She said that it was after that conversation that she had fallen in love with him completely.

  He opens his eyes and looks into the darkness, pulling his jacket around him tighter against the cold.

  What was he doing in the mountains? By the age of thirteen he had begun to play truant, sneaking onto any bus out of Heer that he could, ending up halfway to Karachi or at the base of K2, wandering with a band of itinerant singers in Southern Punjab and climbing into cinema halls through the roofs, surviving in the Baluchi desert by drinking water from wells dug by smugglers.

  Rohan would implore him to say what was wrong, what might be done to make him remain at home, and he followed Mikal one morning when he was fifteen years old and discovered that he had found work as a car mechanic. He would not reveal why he needed the money, where he spent some of his nights, and everyone feared the possibility of heroin or the jihad in Kashmir.

  The money was of course for the room he was renting, the high room with the pictures on the walls, with doves and wood pigeons as his immediate companions, in the dilapidated century-old neighbourhood where more than half the lanes had dead ends. Avoided by outsiders because it was where domestic servants and day labourers had their homes, eunuchs and wedding entertainers, beggars and rag pickers, and by implication thieves and prostitutes and other criminals.

  ‘What is the meaning of this?’ his brother Basie asked, having tracked him down to the room one day.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Mikal remembers saying, the eyes stinging suddenly. He had hidden his face and begun to weep in the manner of very young children and infants – humans before they have learned language.

  Basie came forward and collected him in his arms. That room was where both Basie and Mikal were born, where the Communist comrades of their father and mother had come for meetings, and from where the father was taken away by the agents of the government aligned with the United States, the enemy of Communism.

  As he dreamed of a revolution, their father had seen no need to make provision for the family, allaying their mother’s and his own occasional doubts by saying, ‘We don’t need to worry about the future of these two. By the time they are adults, life’s basic necessities will be free for everyone. There will be no personal wealth and these boys will be equals among equals. Let’s concentrate on bringing about that state of affairs.’

  Mikal more or less moved out of Rohan’s house at seventeen and began to live in the room, the others coming to visit him as much as possible. Being eight years older than Mikal, Basie had deeper and more vivid memories of their mother, while Mikal hadn’t known their father at all.

  Basie would lie on the mattress and talk endlessly, sometimes drinking from a bottle of Murree’s whisky he’d bring with him, bought from one of the clandestine bars in Heer where there were locked cages for female drinkers, to prevent them from being sexually assaulted by the inebriated male clientele, as well as to stop the drunk women from killing every man in sight. According to Basie, his smart brother, full of gregariousness and laughter most of the time, with a good-natured swear word in every fifteenth sentence.

  ‘I think he’s alive,’ Mikal said to Basie once when the bottle of Murree’s was nearly empty.

  ‘No. He was tortured to death, most probably in the dungeons of Lahore Fort.’ Basie opened his eyes. ‘Is that what this is about? You wanted to come back here to wait for him.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Basie would go back to Rohan’s house – having failed yet again to persuade him to return with him, or he would stay with Mikal for days at a time.

  Terrified of darkness Mikal never switched off the lights when he slept, and each week he put into a box the money he earned, not knowing what to do with it beyond the few essential needs, holding the meaningless pile of it in his hands one day and looking around at the walls of the empty room. He had placed it in a bowl in the middle of the floor and set it on fire, reducing it all to ash.

  He saw her near Rohan’s house when he was eighteen, the girl with the serene yellow gaze. He noticed her more and more after that and she was too beautiful for him to think about without suffering, but then one afternoon she had held his gaze. The smile was brief. Nothing when seen, everything when contemplated.

  *

  Something in the train’s motion as it moves through the night awakens Rohan and he turns on the small light above his head. Jeo is asleep on the upper bunk – the light shines down at Rohan from directly beneath the boy’s chest.

  Sometimes he feared he was distant from
Jeo in his childhood, the boy’s existence a trial for him, a constant reminder of his loss, and he remembers asking him one day, ‘Do you know I love you?’

  Jeo must have been about four years old and he had dismayed Rohan by shaking his head.

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘No.’ Then the child began to look carefully at his face, even raising his hands to touch the features. ‘How do you know if someone loves you?’

  He thought it might be an observable mark or seal. Something he had missed.

  Jeo’s arm is hanging out beyond the edge of the bunk and swaying in the air, and Rohan turns the hand gently to look at the wristwatch. It’s almost 4 a.m. Rohan should get up and read a chapter of the Koran for the repose of Sofia’s soul.

  With a solemn effort he sits up and runs his hands over his face and beard. The sun will rise at six, and the predawn prayers can be said at any time from five onwards.

  He stands beside the sleeping Jeo and sees how beautiful he is, how young.

  One of his feet has emerged from the blanket and Rohan begins to rearrange the folds to cover it, unable to bear how vulnerable and naked to the world it looks. There is a small rust-brown mole halfway along the arch and it is something he didn’t know about his son. The mystery of another human being. The places these feet have trod and will tread, of which the father will have no knowledge. He leans forward and places a kiss on his grown-up son’s face.

  In the bathroom he performs the ritual ablutions and comes out and begins to read the Koran, asking Allah to look after her in her death, just as He is looking after him and his children in their lives. To forgive her. The subject of the Koran is mankind, and for him the verse that induces most fear is in the chapter entitled Man. In itself it is somewhat beautiful, speaking of the rewards awaiting the faithful and the steadfast in Afterlife, but when he had quoted it to Sofia in her dying moments she had corrected a small mistake of his. It was evidence that she knew intimately and precisely what she was rejecting. And there lies the source of his terror for her soul. Sofia had died an unbeliever, an apostate.

  Until the time she is resurrected on Judgement Day, she will be subjected to torments, the consequences of her rejection of God. After the world ends she will be cast into Hell. In her last hours he had tried desperately to make her repent. It was a gradual and unsudden thing, her loss of faith, growing slowly around them like a plant, its rings widening.

  Apostasy was punishable by death in Pakistani law so it had to remain a secret after she revealed it to him.

  ‘I will continue to pretend for the sake of appearances and for our safety. But I have to share with you the fact that I am no longer a believer.’

  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.’