The Blind Man's Garden Read online

  She rebinds the shroud carefully and covers him with the sheet and then walks to the door to let them in.

  *

  Nothing anyone does can alter the fact that he is dead. Not even God can change the past.

  By nightfall most people have gone – just a few men lingering outside the house, someone looking for their child’s lost shoe on the veranda, a few women in the kitchen washing and putting away dishes, and then they too leave. Messages have been left in Peshawar for Rohan, Yasmin and Basie but they cannot be located – gone away to look for Jeo and Mikal, following rumours to nearby towns.

  The neighbourhood women had taken control of the house and of the situation – apportioning tasks, taking flowers off the vines to cover the body and later the grave, sending young men up into the trees to remove the snares. Surrounding and comforting Tara and Naheed, each woman recalled the last time she saw Jeo, offering memories of his intelligence and kindness and remembering details of their wedding.

  Naheed wanders through the large house. It is ten o’clock and candlelight is all there is, the electricity having disappeared. She walks down the darkened corridor towards Cordoba House with a flame, then stops and leans against the wall, the wax dripping at her feet. On the wall hangs a picture of Jeo and she stares at it questioningly. The three men who brought the body did not have much information. All they said was that they were employees of an ordinary truck-hire company in Peshawar and that a man had come to their depot and paid them to deliver Jeo’s body to this address in Heer.

  But at one level it is too soon for such details to matter. When a woman had asked Tara, ‘How did he die?’ Tara had said, ‘I don’t care yet.’

  The house drifts in darkness. The girl thinks of the time the garden had pulled her into its brilliance, the sunlight and the invasion of delicate insects, the smells from the Tree of Sorrows and the Sorrowless Tree. She knows it will never again be the same because, tarnished, exposed, corroded, stained, blinded, her eyes have been made different, imperfect.

  Where is Mikal? She sits down on the floor with her back against the wall and becomes still. When she and Mikal began to meet, there was something like embarrassment in her initially. It had all seemed a pretence, and she had perhaps tried to make light of what they were doing. But his intensity had compelled her to take her own life seriously, made her see that beauty and happiness were her right too.

  11 p.m. and Tara is in a nearby room with a lamp and a Koran. Midnight and there is a perfect quietness as if the house has become detached from the earth and floated clear. The two of them alone with a war, the gutted burned insides of it. The times have something to tell them through this occurrence but neither knows what it is.

  Soon after the body arrived a rumour spread in the neighbourhood that American soldiers had killed Jeo. One man had loaded his rifle on hearing this and rushed out of his house, thinking the American army had actually invaded Heer.

  The ash on Naheed’s clothes has marked her wrists and neck. Upon learning that Tara had sent for ash, for the mourning clothes to be dyed with it, almost all the women had become perplexed, saying that these must be poor people’s customs, those of villagers. They wondered once again how a seamstress had managed to get her daughter married into this big house. Rose-ringed parakeets have to be buried under neem trees, so when Tara’s had died two decades ago she had come here and asked if they would allow her to bury the bird under their neem. That was how she had met the family, though Rohan was also a very distant relative of her dead husband.

  Naheed sits in Rohan’s room with the telephone receiver in her hand. 1 a.m. She has tried contacting Rohan again in Peshawar but there is no answer.

  There is a ruby on the table. It was discovered in Jeo’s stomach and its surface is carved finely with Koranic verses, the colour brilliant and clean. It is polished to a perfect smoothness in the areas where there are no words and it had made people gasp, such loveliness had entered them at the sight, in spite of the occasion. A woman remembered that it had belonged to Sofia and that it had disappeared from the house long ago, presumed stolen. The cleric said that the drops of blood Jeo had donated as a child to the calligraphy of his Koran had appeared as a jewel within him.

  Naheed is still sitting beside the telephone at two o’clock, the candle long spent. She gets up and searches for another. There are some hours when a human being needs company even if it is only a small flame. In its light she lowers herself onto Rohan’s bed.

  9

  Rohan dreams of an American soldier and a jihadi warrior digging the same grave.

  He opens his eyes and looks out of the car, moving towards Heer along the Grand Trunk Road, vast stretches of it without light. They have been travelling all night and the dashboard clock says 4.30 a.m. They’ll be home around eight in the morning. Basie is driving and Yasmin is asleep in the back seat. They have been unable to discover any clues to Jeo and Mikal’s whereabouts, and are returning to Heer exhausted after the various searches they have conducted in and around Peshawar – all three of them stunned by the past few days.

  Earlier in the evening they telephoned home but there was no answer. Naheed must be at Tara’s place, and there is no telephone there. In all honesty they were relieved that no one had picked up.

  They have no news to give and would have had to tell them that they would be returning empty-handed. It can wait until they get home. The thought comes to him that Jeo and Mikal might die, a terror in the black leaf-encumbered forest that is his mind, but he turns away from it immediately, almost cowering.

  Out on the plains a river is shining like poured metal now that starlight has caught it at the right angle and hundreds of bats can be seen passing over the sheetwater on their leather wings as they hunt for moths. Just ahead of them a church has come into view and then Basie has to bring the car to a sudden screeching halt. A bearded man, of Rohan’s own age, has appeared before the vehicle, crossing the road less than five yards ahead. He carries a weak lamp whose flame is lost in the white glare of the headlights, and he presents an extraordinary sight because he is bound heavily in thick chains. They are wrapped around his torso like thread on a spool, covering the entire area from his hipbones to his armpits. At least two dozen chains also hang from a metal ring around his neck – they fall to just below his knees and then rise, half of them joining a ring that he wears on his left wrist, the other half attaching themselves to the right wrist.

  He looks directly at Rohan as everyone in the car recovers from the shock.

  ‘Should we get out and help him?’ Yasmin asks.

  ‘He just needs time to get across, I imagine.’ Basie looks back to see if there are any vehicles behind them but there is nothing and the man is in no danger.

  Basie makes a small courteous detour around him and he doesn’t acknowledge them as he continues his slow walk to the other edge of the road. His beard is matted and dust-filled like the hair on his head and he is thin, his face deeply lined and sunburnt, but there is a peaceful expression.

  A thick metal garment.

  ‘As a child Mikal thought he was our father,’ Basie says quietly as they leave him behind.

  The chains must weigh as much as two healthy men at least and must be a very heavy burden – they account for the slow progress.

  ‘I have heard about him but never seen him,’ Rohan says, looking back. He is soon lost to view as they pick up speed but then they hear the hard metallic sound like a colossal hammer coming down on an anvil of equal proportions. A noise so loud the air itself bends.

  ‘Someone just blew up the church,’ Yasmin says.

  ‘Turn around.’

  ‘He could be hurt. He was crossing towards it.’

  This is the second attack on a church in two days. Yesterday it was during the daylight hours and it had injured several people. Those claiming responsibility had said that since Western Christians were bombing and destroying mosques in Afghanistan, they were beginning a campaign to annihilate churches in
Pakistan.

  The blaze can be seen from two hundred yards away, the building engulfed in a powerful inferno and the smoke billowing up into the black sky. The explosion was on the ground floor and long flames are emerging from the windows to climb the facade. At the fire’s height the tips of the flames break off again and again, vanishing into the darkness.

  They park by the roadside and get out and Rohan feels the light like a hard rain on his face, on his eyes, and he has to look away every few seconds. The fire inside the church is brighter and hotter – the outside flames dull by comparison. One blaze seems to be escaping another more ferocious blaze.

  Even though it is night there is soon the beginning of a traffic jam and in the chaos people are getting out to help, bear witness or complain. Yasmin and Basie tell Rohan to stay beside their car as they themselves go forwards, to see if they can be of assistance.

  Though he doesn’t say anything, standing with his back to the bright light, he doesn’t want them to go. There could be a secondary explosion, meant to injure the people who are trying to save the building. Or men on motorbikes could drive by and spray the rescuers and onlookers with machine guns. Fearfully he looks over his shoulder and watches them leave.

  The burning gives off a roar that reaches the last little place inside him, where each man keeps his courage, and when the wind pivots there is nothing but that roar, a reminder that the noise of fire had resounded on earth before the speech of man.

  Basie and Yasmin both teach at the Christian school in Heer, and the thought comes to him that they could be in danger when they return, with their school and the church attached to it a possible target.

  A few in the crowd around him are delighted. To them this isn’t madness but, on the contrary, is beauty.

  *

  Rohan is some way from the Grand Trunk Road when he sees the lamp lying on its side in the grass, still intact, still burning. He sees the knee-high mound of chains under a wayside cypress tree, each link someone’s wish, and his first thought is that they have been torn from the fakir’s body by the explosion, that he would find the body somewhere nearby, but now the heaped-up metal gives a stir and an uncertain hand comes into view.

  Rohan moves forward with the lamp as the fakir sits upright in a dazed condition, and begins to pick the debris off his chains. He must have been close to the church when the device exploded, and has come away and collapsed here. In all probability he has been saved by the chains, the armour of other people’s needs.

  Sometimes when Allah does not take pity on him – does not hear his prayers on others’ behalf, making the links vanish – the chains continue to grow, so that he has to drag several yards of them behind him.

  Rohan watches him as he stands up in a series of gradual accomplishments – that incredible weight.

  He begins to walk away, removing bits of brick and stone that the explosion had thrown onto him to be embedded in the links, as another man might brush off dust from his clothes.

  ‘Brother, are you all right?’

  He stops, the chains continuing to swing.

  ‘I didn’t mean to disturb you,’ Rohan says.

  They are a dozen or so steps from a pond and with his lamp and the clinking of his chains he walks in up to his knees, making the water golden with the lamplight as he leans forwards and lowers his face to the water. As if to take its odour. Then he begins to sip.

  Rohan watches him alertly lest the weight make him lose balance, fearing he would drown within the coils, but he straightens and returns successfully.

  He places the lamp on the ground and then lowers himself onto the ground beside Rohan and they look towards the east from where the sun will rise.

  ‘I am waiting for my daughter and son-in-law.’ Rohan points to the line of trees behind them, where the sky is a dark orange from the church fire.

  The fakir looks for a long moment in that direction, his breath steaming weakly in the air of the October night. The chains must be cold, Rohan thinks. The wrists are calloused where each thick ring or bracelet has been rubbing against the skin for decades.

  ‘We have been away from home for some days,’ Rohan says, surprised by the tears he is trying to control. ‘Looking for my son and foster son.’

  A need to talk. After trying to appear courageous before Yasmin and Basie over the past few days.

  The man gazes ahead. He appears to be a soul without a self.

  ‘How can anyone explain the world?’ Rohan says to himself, looking down at his hands. ‘Sometimes I despair that it can’t be done.’

  The man clears his throat gently and the voice is almost all rasp when it comes. ‘It can be.’

  With great care, as though writing the words instead of uttering them, he begins to speak. ‘It can be done. Ahl-e-Dil and Ahle-Havas. We all are divided into these two groups. The first are the People of the Heart. The second are the People of Greed, the deal makers and the men of lust and the hucksters.’ He pauses to gather sufficient energy to continue. Some say that he is a djinn, and also that God has graced him with the lifelong innocence of dervishes, and also that he had used the chains to capture a djinn in the wilderness who had then converted to Islam. After his silence he says, ‘The first people will not trample anyone to obtain what they desire. The second will. Here lies this world.’

  Rohan says, ‘That could be one way of reading the world, yes.’

  ‘If I take dust in my hand and ask you if that is all the dust there is, you will answer that dust is everywhere on earth. More specks than can ever be numbered. So I can give you a handful of truth only. Besides this there are other truths. More than can ever be numbered.’

  The earliest glimmers of light are appearing in the sky, and they sit without words and a scent comes to Rohan and he looks around for its source because he has the same tree growing in his garden. The blossoms produce this roaming perfume but are green and very small, almost invisible to the eye – choosing to be represented, rather than revealing themselves.

  The last time he spoke to Naheed the bird pardoner had yet to return to the house.

  He touches one of the chains. ‘Why do you carry these?’

  With the tip of his index finger the man writes a word in the dust, the dust in which his chains had made swirls when he sat down.

  ‘You were once one of the Ahl-e-Havas?’

  The man remains silent.

  ‘You hurt someone?’

  ‘It cannot unhappen.’

  ‘Someone was harmed?’

  The word he has written is Desire.

  ‘I made mistakes when my son was a child,’ Rohan says. ‘His mother had died in the state of apostasy and as a result I enforced an extreme form of piety on myself and on my children, making them pray and keep fasts, revealing to them things inappropriate for their ages. The transience of this life, the tortures of Hell and, before that, of the grave. I stopped eventually, seeing the error, but it must have marked them. I wonder if that is why he went to Afghanistan.’

  The fakir looks at the thousands of chain links surrounding him, perhaps wondering if any of them have vanished in the night. The light is caught in hazy smears on the metal.

  ‘We believe my two boys are in Afghanistan. What you said about Ahl-e-Dil and Ahl-e-Havas, does that explain what is happening in Afghanistan? The armies from the West. The extremes of the Taliban.’

  He is not sure if the fakir is listening, his eyes on the first sunlight, the rays spanning the gap between the unseen and the seen, but then the man looks at him. ‘Whoever has power desires to hold on to power. That is the case both with the Taliban and the West.’ He sits breathing in the morning air and then with careful movements of his hands – as diligent as he was when he was writing – he erases the word he has written, letter by letter.

  ‘What did you do before this?’

  ‘I worked with law. Twenty years ago, thirty.’ He shakes his head. ‘Nothing is ever over. Time is unimportant.’

  ‘You were a policeman.�
�

  ‘Worse.’ The man extinguishes his lamp. ‘A judge.’

  The sun is an orb of boiling glass before them, the light remaking the world once again, and now the fakir rises slowly and begins to walk along the rim of the dawn-lit pond. ‘My day is only a day, my name only a name,’ he says with one hand on his breast in the gesture of swearing fidelity. Rohan watches him disappear as the sunlight erupts from the water in shards.

  *

  It is late morning when they arrive in Heer. The gate to the house is locked and Rohan lets them in with the key.

  He is immediately relieved to see that the bird pardoner’s steel wires are lying in a tangle at the foot of the young mango tree. So the snares have been taken down. He spends a few moments examining the health and progress of the tree. Jeo loves its fruit, with a tinge of turpentine to its flavour, the pulp almost liquid and having to be sucked through a hole one makes at the top.

  Turning around to move deeper into the garden he notices with unhappiness the branch that has been broken off the frangipani tree. He touches the wound and from the consistency of the congealed latex can tell that the damage occurred sometime yesterday.

  Basie walks along one of the red paths towards the house. He enters a room but emerges a minute later with a sense of an unidentifiable wrong. The corridors are unswept – which is understandable since Naheed has probably been staying with her mother – but there is evidence of many footsteps in the dust on the floors. It is as though the characters and personalities from the boxes of books had come alive and wandered the house.