The Blind Man's Garden Page 7

  How easy it is to create ghosts, he thinks as he begins to die a minute later, feeling his mind closing chamber by chamber, the memory of Naheed contained in each one. And despite it all it means much to have loved. Just before the world vanishes, a hope surfaces in him that this wasn’t necessarily everything, that he will return somehow.

  His arm rises, remembering when it used to be a wing.

  8

  ‘Night’ was the word employed for the long period during which Muhammad did not receive a revelation from Allah.

  Naheed lies awake in her mother’s place, looking into the darkness. Five days ago there was a telephone call from Rohan in Peshawar, saying Jeo and Mikal had disappeared towards Afghanistan. Basie and his wife – Jeo’s sister Yasmin – had immediately set off for Peshawar to join Rohan. They are still there, searching, and they ring Heer every evening but don’t have any news.

  The clock sounds its alarm to awaken her mother, Tara, for her predawn prayers. The amplified call from the loudspeakers attached to the mosque’s minarets cannot be relied upon, because electricity is sometimes absent. So Tara sets the alarm as a precaution.

  But Tara remains asleep now. This happens on occasion, when she has stayed awake late into the night with her seamstress work, her back bent over the sewing machine.

  Naheed will not rouse her. So what if she misses a prayer? Allah understands. Sometimes Naheed even gets up during the night and switches off the alarm so it won’t go off. Let her rest.

  Naheed sits up, with a need to be in the room where she sleeps with Jeo. There is a series of minute scars where her glass bangles had broken accidentally against his chest on the wedding night. Where the skin on a man’s body is soft, it is softer than any place on a woman’s body. She had discovered this fact by touching Jeo.

  Invoking protection from the angel who looks after the fifth hour of the night, she steps out into the darkness. From the balcony she looks down, hearing the splash of water as the owner of the building, Sharif Sharif, performs his ablutions downstairs. Freezing in winter, burning during the summer months, Naheed grew up in this first-floor room that Tara rents from him.

  Descending noiselessly she raises her hand to undo the latch of the front door.

  ‘Where are you going at this hour?’

  She doesn’t turn around. ‘I need to go to the other house for something.’

  ‘At this hour?’ he says behind her. ‘Wait, I’ll come with you.’

  ‘There is no need, it’s only a few minutes away.’

  Arms and shoulders as powerful as a gravedigger’s, Sharif Sharif’s large body is taut with animal life, erect and distinct in its bearing. As Naheed had entered her teenage years his conduct towards her had taken an inappropriate turn. One day last year he came upstairs with a book and asked her if she knew the meaning of the English word he had underlined. When Tara returned from her errand, Naheed told her about the incident. Tara had reacted calmly but it was obvious that she was frightened. After several hours of careful thought Tara had gone to see Rohan, who – and Naheed was unaware of this – had promised some years ago to make Naheed his daughter-in-law. ‘I am too old and weak to look after her now,’ Tara said. ‘She’s eighteen, a grown woman, and she belongs to you. I beg you to do something.’ Her acute trepidation meant that Jeo and Naheed were married within a fortnight, and Naheed moved away to live at Rohan’s house.

  *

  She is not sure if she is being followed. It could be the sound of her own feet echoing differently in the silence, more audible than they are during the day. She quickens her pace and takes the next turn, and looking back she is sure she can see a figure in the shadows a few yards behind her. Resisting the thought of breaking into a run, with her veil floating off her head, she goes past the shop that djinns are said to visit in the dead of night, to buy incense sticks and perfume. A hope surfaces in her that the neighbourhood watchman might be making his last rounds in the vicinity. The English word Sharif Sharif had underlined was Nude.

  The air is cold and blue and the street appears white as salt in the moonwash. As she is unlocking the padlock on Rohan’s gate, a grey saluki appears and stands looking at her from the other side of the street. The animal tilts its head and then perhaps a man appears and stands behind it, and the next time she looks they have both vanished. Blackness nestling within deeper blackness around her, she walks through the garden, the paths forking, returning, disappearing in every direction, the shadows washing over them, and there are movements and sounds overhead but they could be the birds trapped in the snares. The bird pardoner has not returned to the house as he said he would. The earliest birds must have been caught the day Jeo left and they must be long dead by now.

  She bolts the bedroom door. She leans closer to the windowpane to look at the garden, the paths that at night lead to the constellations in the pond or the shattered reflection of the moon when there is a moon. Crossing the tiled floor of the veranda the saluki stops and looks in her direction and she stills herself, unable to recall if dogs have night vision. The hound moves on but she is not sure if she isn’t hearing its sporadic growl, isn’t sure she is not hearing intermittent human footsteps just outside the room.

  *

  The sun has risen and she is carrying a chair through the garden. She places it under the large Persian lilac tree, against the trunk twisted as though struggling with some unseen force. Standing on the chair she looks up into the high leaves made luminous by the early morning light. The brilliant rays fall onto her face as patches of heat. A pair of scissors in her mouth, she reaches up and begins to climb, her soles against the roughness of the bark as her hands grab onto the branches and knotholes, branches thick as human limbs, making her feel she’s being helped up. There is a massed chatter of birds, but there is no way for her to know which of the songs are those of free birds, responding in elation to the coming day, and which those of the trapped, calling out in distress. How many songs are missing from the chorus she is hearing? She doesn’t know.

  She climbs higher into the mighty sighing organism. Arriving inside the canopy she looks around and realises the sheer size of it, sees all around her the several dozens of captive birds. Some are upside down, hanging by the claws, by the wings, hanging with nooses around their necks. The brightness of the eyes has become opaque in several, the insects roaming over the bodies, the ants entering the open beaks or disappearing under feathers. But others are struggling. A golden oriole beats its wings like a wind-maddened fire. A few others are motionless but begin to strive when they feel her. She can identify the sound of flies in her ears.

  In momentary madness she tries to whistle, thinking it would calm those who are panicking at her presence, making them think she is one of them, but her mother had thought whistling rakish and had discouraged it, and so now she cannot manage it.

  Becoming sure of her balance inside the seldom motionless sea of leaves, she leans forward with the scissors and cuts a wire so that the green bee-eater, spinning slowly in the air by its claw, falls onto her other hand. She blows her breath onto it gently and sees how delicate it is, how small. She places it on a branch and slowly moves her hand away. It remains sitting low on its claws for a moment and she gives a small cry when it falls off and lands on the ground thirty feet below, and the jerk she gives makes her head touch a wire and a knot appears and closes around a trailing lock of her hair. A large heron crashes into the canopy as she is freeing herself, the sandy-gold beak coming at her like a lance. She sees the knot closing around its neck to trap it, feels the wind from its ghostly white wings on her face.

  The nearer she gets the more it struggles, the noose tightening so that blood issues and lands with a sound on the leaves below. As fast as she can she cuts away the wirework, ignoring the black vulture, the fierce beak as thick as her wrist – they can swallow bones, she knows. It has come to consume the dead birds and inside its eyes moves the knowledge of another world.

  Holding the blood-drenched heron a
gainst herself with one arm she begins to climb down, suddenly aware that she has been hearing a knock on the gate for some time, realising also that the sound of the flies had disappeared a minute or two ago, as though they had gone elsewhere.

  ‘Is this the house of a Rohan-sahib?’ the man asks when she opens the door.

  Buraq – the winged, woman-headed horse that took Muhammad to Paradise from the minaret in Jerusalem – is painted on the side of the truck parked behind him. Flying through a rain of roses.

  ‘Yes. But he’s away,’ she tells him. ‘Have you brought us more books?’

  ‘Books? No, I have the body of his son in there.’ He looks at the piece of paper in his hand. ‘Jeo, his name is, it says here.’

  The heron falls onto the ground and makes no effort to stand, its bleeding neck slowly relaxing along the ground. The man is saying something and pointing to the back of the truck whose tailgate has been dropped for two other men to take out a body lying on a cot. Draped in a white sheet.

  Naheed looks to either side of her. It is an ordinary morning. The sound of a radio is coming from an open door on the opposite side of the street – a woman listening to music as she does housework. Sure enough, the woman comes to the door holding a dripping broom and stands watching the body being borne towards Naheed, raises her hand to her mouth, and then goes back in and the music is switched off. Confirming the disaster for Naheed. Two vultures are sitting on the roof of the house next door and Naheed watches as another raises its head from the top of the truck.

  The body is coming closer, with the shirt she had made for Jeo lying on top of the white sheet, the shirt’s grey fabric soaked in blood with flies circling around it. Her hands reach about in the air and finally take hold of the frangipani tree, the weak branch snapping and beginning to bleed thick white milk drop by drop, extremely fast.

  She steps back as the gate is opened wide by the men, and she notices the puzzled expressions on their faces as they look upwards into the canopies – seeing the trapped birds whipping the air up there as though drowning, the feathers of all colours slowly sinking towards the ground. They set the cot in front of her, beside the dazed heron, and they lift the white sheet and open the folds of the shrouds underneath to expose Jeo’s swollen, pulped, blood-smeared face for her to identify.

  *

  Tara is looking through her basket of fabric cuttings. A little girl who lives in the same street as Rohan has come to ask for them, to make dresses for dolls.

  When Tara awoke Naheed’s bed was empty so she knew she must have gone to the house to wait for the bird pardoner. Tara had overslept and missed her predawn prayers. It is a sin to miss a prayer, but she is allowed to offer the compensatory qaza prayer this afternoon. Allah has full knowledge of human weakness and has made provisions.

  ‘Why are you crying?’ the little girl asks.

  ‘I am not.’

  ‘Yes you are. I can see it.’

  ‘There is a war.’

  She woke up thinking of Jeo and his decision to go to Afghanistan. She has been wondering if Mikal is responsible for this crisis, Mikal who came here to ask Tara for Naheed’s hand last year – just days before Naheed’s wedding to Jeo. Has he now taken Jeo to Afghanistan so he will be killed? But, no, she mustn’t give in to these thoughts. Allah will bring Jeo home any day, perfectly safe. And since Allah disapproves of slander she mustn’t think or say anything about Mikal until she has full knowledge of all the facts.

  The knees of her trousers are minutely wrinkled from the extra prayers she has said over the last five days to ask Allah to look after Jeo in the war zone. But she cannot jettison her fears completely because 2001 had begun on a Monday, a sign according to the almanacs that the weak would suffer greatly at the hands of the strong and the unthinking during these twelve months.

  She hands the scraps of fabric to the girl who is thrilled by their brightness and colour, the garden of printed flowers and geometric designs.

  ‘You shouldn’t be out here this early,’ Tara tells her as she leaves.

  ‘There is a big crowd near my house,’ the girl says. ‘I think it’s a wedding. I came out to look at it and then came to your house.’

  Tara fills a bowl of water and sprinkles it on the henna tree that grows in a fractured pot on the roof terrace.

  She thought she was facing a madman when Mikal had appeared here and said he loved Naheed. The unfairness of it had almost reduced her to tears – just when she thought she had put her daughter out of Sharif Sharif’s reach. She knew Mikal of course, knew of his troubled past and his disappearances, having seen Jeo and him together at Rohan’s house.

  ‘Surely you see that as her mother I cannot allow Naheed to marry you,’ she had said. ‘You cannot provide a better future for her than a doctor.’

  He said that he would tell everything to Jeo and Rohan and have the wedding cancelled, his eyes intense, the eyebrows meeting in the middle so his glance seemed weighed down by some dark mystery.

  ‘We love each other.’

  ‘Is that how you will repay Jeo, by stealing his bride? The boy whose family took you in.’ His face had crumpled at that but she had continued, her own dreads and distress too great. ‘You cannot betray Jeo.’

  ‘I cannot betray Naheed either.’

  ‘I would like to know where you will live. In that room they say you rent in a dogfight and rubbish-heap district?’

  ‘There is nothing wrong with where I live,’ he said quietly. ‘My parents lived there.’

  As if the story of his parents didn’t frighten her. The father vanishing as he tried to bring about a revolution after which there would be no God, and the mother wearing herself out searching for him, slapped by policemen and officials from whom she thought she could demand answers.

  Tara had said this to him and he was perfectly motionless, almost as though he had died standing up. Without knowing it, the unfortunate boy had become the outlet for the loneliness and suffering of her own life.

  ‘Even if she loves you, you should do her the kindness of never seeing her again. Her life will be better with Jeo.’

  She promised Allah she would say five hundred prayers of gratitude if the wedding went ahead as planned. And she followed the trail of the chained mendicant as he passed through the streets of Heer and asked him to add a link to his chains: her wish was Naheed’s happiness, for Mikal to disappear.

  And it was granted – the link must have vanished from about the mendicant’s person.

  Now, as she waters the henna plant, she tells herself to trust in Allah again.

  There is a note of feedback from the mosque’s loudspeaker and the cleric clears his throat. Tara becomes alert. No prayer is called at this hour, so it must be a special announcement, and they are mostly about a death in the neighbourhood, or a lost child. She thinks of the little girl who just left with the fabrics.

  ‘Gentlemen, please listen to the following announcement …’

  Sometimes on hearing this, Naheed mutters to herself, ‘And what about us ladies?’ – earning herself a look of admonition from Tara, who is unable to accept criticism in any matter concerning the mosque. The man announces that Jeo, the son of Rohan-sahib, the former headmaster of Ardent Spirit, has died, that the body is laid out at home and the funeral will be held after the noon prayers. The words are like a blow to her head and chest but for several seconds their meaning eludes her. There is pain but it cannot find its focus as she descends the stairs slowly and goes out of the door.

  The ground threatens to dissolve under her feet when she approaches Rohan’s house, where there is indeed a crowd as the child had said. She negotiates a way through the mass and walks into the garden, knowing where to find Naheed, at the head of the corpse, but there is no corpse and no Naheed.

  *

  She touches the face. It is broken but it is him. There is a cut in the cheek, the flesh swollen around it and the blood congealed in dark colours under the skin, the features that would be unrecognisab
le if she didn’t know them as well as she does. The mole on the back of the ear that even he didn’t know he had. Women have been knocking on the door ever since they discovered that she had locked herself in here with him but she ignores them, looking instead now into his eyes that are open, the ruined porcelain of them looking back at her. Carefully she uncovers him entirely. There are incisions and bullet wounds throughout and she imagines him crying out as each of these wounds was made. The stomach has been cut open in two diagonal strokes, deep enough to slice through the intestines. The bruises so vivid she thinks they would stain her fingers, but they remain fast, as though painted on the reverse side of the skin. She touches the mouth which is a purple blotch, full of syrupy plasma and clots of blood, the lips and tongue that came together to form a word or a kiss, and she bends to sniff the dead air inside the nostrils and she sniffs the riven shirt, the cold moth smell of it. Normally the body would be taken away to be washed at the mosque and brought back smelling of vetiver and the essence of camphor, but she heard someone say earlier that he must not be bathed, that a martyr is buried with the blood of the battle still on him.

  Dipping the nib into an inkpot filled with his own blood, the cleric at the nearby mosque has been transcribing the Koran into a blank book for more than a decade, intending to complete the entire Holy Book out of his own body. But occasionally, when he is delighted by an act of piety performed by a child, the cleric allows the child to donate a speck of red from a fingertip. As a child Jeo was proud to have been asked to make a contribution – a pair of dots in the name of the prophet Ayub.