Nadeem Aslam: The Blind Man's Garden

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.’

He turns into a corridor with a handkerchief on the lower half of his face. The doctor is examining an English journalist who is bleeding from the head and has a broken arm, the enraged crowd having set upon him. He is weak but keeps saying he holds no grudge, that if he were someone from these lands he too would be unable to stop himself from venting his anger at the first Western person he saw.

When the doctor is free for a few moments Rohan reaches forward and asks him about Jeo and is told that Jeo and his companion Mikal left three hours ago. Jeo had told one of the nurses that they were on their way to the battlefields of Afghanistan, had asked what essential medicines might be needed over there.

‘Mikal?’ Rohan asks. He points to the area between his eyebrows.

The doctor nods. ‘Yes, that’s him.’

*

Feeling inadequate and too old for the emergency, he moves towards the nearest phone and dials the number for Mikal’s brother Basie in Heer, to ask him for advice, to tell him to come to Peshawar immediately. They must follow the two boys into the conflict and bring them back. With each minute they are moving deeper and deeper towards the war, into the crosshairs of history.

It’s mayhem in Afghanistan. The Taliban are ruling with an iron fist, punishing traitors, informers, spies and those inciting rebellion. But the people are rising up, encouraged by America’s covert help — the Special Forces soldiers are moving on horseback from village to village, between towns and cities, dressed in shalwar kameez and shawls and woollen caps, emboldening, bribing and arming the population. Ahmed the Moth died there ten days ago while visiting his Taliban friends. A group of ordinary citizens had grabbed hold of him and a Taliban soldier on the street corner and forced them to the ground. Every ounce of rage — every rape, every disappearance, every public execution, every hand amputated during the past seven years of the Taliban regime, every twelve-year-old boy pressed into battle by them, every ten-year-old girl forcibly married to a mullah eight times her age, every man lashed, every woman beaten, every limb broken — was poured into the two men by fist, club, stick, foot and stone, and when they finished and dispersed nothing remained of the pair. It was as if they had been eaten.

The door has opened and both of them have entered the future. Jeo sits in the back of the van with Mikal as they are driven through the shadowland of hill and plateau, the use of headlights kept to a minimum so that at times there is no knowing what lies a mere five seconds into the darkness. Later in the night lightning appears overhead and illuminates not only the earth and the clouds but also the place in the mind where the line of fear crosses the thoughts, and the ground glows blue for a few seconds with a crystal immediacy, vistas opening up as in a vision, with black shapes looming in them, shadows perhaps, perhaps creatures who can be fought only with the weapons forged by the spirit, not the flesh, and then as the night deepens the stars come out and wheel overhead, smearing the sky with ancient phosphorescence.

There are ten men and there is silence between them. A few, including Mikal, are in deep sleep. Occasionally, without realising it, one of the waking men begins to read aloud the verses of the Koran he must be reading in his heart and the voice materialises in the darkness and after a few moments is gone.

Jeo reaches into Mikal’s bag. His fingers touch the very cold metal of the handgun’s spare bullets. Switching on his small flashlight, he sees that interspersed with the maps he has taken out there are letters, and he smiles immediately, feeling as though he’s sixteen years old once again, when all the girls were in love with Mikal. He separates the letters carefully and places them back in the bag just as the vehicle enters an expanse strewn with bright yellow packets of food air-dropped by Americans. The packs crunch and explode softly as the tyres go over them, and he pulls out the letters again. A name had caught his eye at the end of the text in one, and now he sees that it is there on another. And another. Suddenly his skin is burning because the handwriting in all of them is identical, and it is hers. It’s almost as though Naheed’s face appears behind the sentences, the eyes looking just past his shoulder.

Mikal stirs at the noise from outside and Jeo drops everything back into the bag and quickly zips it up. It could be another Naheed. Has he recognised her handwriting?

He needs to look at the letters again. He thinks of the night early in the marriage when he had come out of sleep to discover her weeping in the darkness. Months later in the garden he would hold her and she would be smiling and suddenly her eyes would fill up. Was she sorrowful at having forgotten Mikal for a few instants? Feeling blameworthy for not loving Jeo?

To look into her eyes was to realise that eyes were part of the brain. Thoughts were visible through and in them. Was he mistaken?

The driver has a handheld Motorola radio with which he is communicating with the other two vans in their convoy. Jeo and Mikal have been told that they can expect to arrive at the medical centre at noon the next day. The other eight men in the truck will go elsewhere.

There are cries of jackals in the distance.

‘Are you all right?’ Mikal says, draping his arm along Jeo’s back.

‘Yes.’

She is the miracle in his life, granted to him suddenly last year, he who had resigned himself to loneliness, his studies being his primary horizon, knowing he wouldn’t experience certain aspects of life until he married after completing his education in his mid-twenties. He closes his eyes, and when he opens them his wristwatch tells him he has slept for two hours. It is still dark but the vehicle has halted on an elevated ridge and the driver has stepped outside, looking around with a flashlight. Jeo thinks of his father. At this hour he would be awake and saying prayers for his mother.