Nadeem Aslam - The Blind Man's Garden

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.

Yasmin stands looking at the garden from the veranda, wondering why the vines and the branches are flowerless, wondering why there is a ghostly impression of a figure in coal dust or ash against a wall.

At the pond Rohan sees the heap of dead birds, insects rising from it in a glittering black vortex as he lifts a paradise flycatcher with its pair of long white ribbons for a tail, three times the length of its body. He walks towards the clothesline strung between the eucalyptus tree and the tall glad jacaranda. He had passed the line earlier without really seeing what was hanging on it: a single item and it seems to be the shirt Jeo wore to Peshawar six days ago. It is pinned upside down, the sleeves almost reaching the grass. The fabric has many gashes in it and its original grey colour is stained by what appears to be blood or dark red ink. A rag with which someone tried to clean something rusty. Did Naheed make two of these? This must be one of the earlier practice ones. And he stands examining it for seams.

From a shelf Basie picks up the large sphere of ruby-coloured glass with verses of the Koran indented into it. It must be glass — too heavy and too clear to be plastic. It is a pendant for a necklace or a talisman to be worn around the neck on a black cord. He has never seen it before and he brings it to the window and holds it up to see the sun enter and inhabit it, illuminating the verses from within.

He walks to Tara’s place but there is no one there. A man is sitting in the sun in front of the neighbouring house. He has wet henna paste on his hair and a sheet of newspaper is protecting the collar of his shirt from stains and he tells Basie that the two women are at Naheed’s in-laws’.

‘I have just come from there,’ Basie says.

The man shrugs. ‘Then maybe they have gone to the doctor. Or the bazaar. Who can understand women and their whims?’

Basie returns and hears Yasmin and Tara, hears Naheed and Rohan. He doesn’t know what they are saying, only their voices reaching him from somewhere, and then he sees Naheed walking towards him, dressed in ash as though she has been caught in a lightning storm.

A follower of Allah knows nothing of chance. In this life everything is significant and meaningful. So why has this happened? A drop of his bloody soul struggle, the ruby shines in Rohan’s palm.

He looks at the clock with its black hands. Before Jeo was born, he had placed his ear to Sofia’s skin, just above and to the left of the navel, and listened to the small second heartbeat, there in the darkness before life began. Now the boy is in the other darkness and Rohan doesn’t know where to find a sign of him, what wall or barrier or skin or veil to place his ear on.

In the night garden the hibiscus blossoms sway on the vine like birds, their crimson darkened by several shades. The berries of the Persian lilac trees are poisonous so they remain on the branches throughout the year. The bulbul is the only bird that seems to have immunity and all day they were feeding noisily on the clusters.

‘Uncle.’

He turns to see Basie on the red path, a storm lantern in his hand. Behind him is Tara.

‘Aunt Tara says she would like to speak to the two of us.’

‘Just a few moments of your time, brother-ji,’ Tara says.

He points towards the bench under the Mysore fig tree.

‘I want to talk to you about Naheed’s future,’ she says, sitting rigidly.