Nadeem Aslam: The Blind Man's Garden

As the rebels turned to leave, the ground splintered slowly before them and a crack grew and became a star-shaped fracture. A small sphere of blackest glass materialised at the centre of the star. Then they realised that it was in fact an eye, an ancient glare directed up at them through the grains of earth. A phantom. A chimera. One more instant and the entire head of the horse had emerged from the ground, the large-muscled neck giving a thrust and spraying soil into the eclipse-darkened air. The hooves found whatever purchase they needed and the rest of the grunting animal unearthed itself, the mighty ribcage and the great, potent haunches. Flesh tearing itself away from the living planet.

The ground exploded. A dozen horses, then almost two dozen, their diverse screams filling the air after the hours spent in the dark. An eruption of furious souls from below. The thrown earth and the shrieking of freed jaws and the terror of men during the daylight darkness.

Rohan’s great-grandfather had been informed the day before that Mutineers being hunted by the British would attempt to appropriate his animals. Over several hours he and his nine sons had prepared a trough deeper than their tallest stallion and had then led all twenty-five of their horses to it, their black, white, tobiano and roan colours shining in the oblique rays of the setting sun.

The horses were loved and they trusted the masters when they were blindfolded and led into the pit, but they reacted when the men began to pour earth onto them, beating their hooves against the ground as the level of soil rose higher along the legs. Stripes of white salt-froth slid down each body and in low voices the men spoke the phrases or words each animal was known to like. To comfort them if possible. But they continued with the work steadily and with determination all night as the stars appeared and hung above them like a glass forest, and later when a storm approached and the night became wild with electricity, the sky looking as though there was war and rebellion in heaven too, because not a single one of the horses would be allowed to fall into the hands of the Mutineers, who Rohan’s great-grandfather was convinced were misguided, his loyalty aligned with the British.

With only the horses’ necks remaining visible, the men leapt down into the trench and packed the earth with their feet, running among the twenty-five heads growing out of the earth as specks of soft blue fire came down from the lightning-filled sky to rest in the manes and in the men’s own beards and hair.

Allah had said to the South Wind, ‘Become!’ and the Arabian horse was created.

The thought of clemency entering their hearts at last, the ten men went down the rows and placed a large basket upside-down over each head, a hood of woven grass fibres and reeds and palm fronds, a pocket of air for the animal to continue breathing. Then they climbed out and began the final throwing on of the soil, making sure not to cover the baskets entirely, leaving a thumbprint-sized entrance in each for air to slide in. There was nothing but a faint ground-shudder of hooves from within the earth as the horizon became marked with a brilliant red line behind the men and the sun rose and they began to wait for the arrival of the Mutineers, conscious suddenly of their weight on the ground.

*

Insects are being attracted by the lantern in Rohan’s hand as he walks back to the house, moths that look like shavings from a pencil sharpener, and moths that are so outsized and intensely pigmented they can be mistaken for butterflies.

There is a black feather on the path ahead of him, dropped by a struggling bird overhead.

The Mutiny was eventually put down across the land and one thousand years of Islamic rule came to an end in India, Britain assuming complete possession. A Muslim land was lost to nonbelievers and Rohan’s ancestors played a part in it.

This was the century-old taint that Rohan had tried to remove by spreading the soils of Allah’s six beloved cities here. Mecca. Baghdad. Cordoba. Cairo. Delhi. Istanbul. Scattering them broadly in the shape of the trench in which the horses were interred, the cleft out of which they had resurrected themselves.

The boundary wall of the house is draped in poet’s jasmine, Pakistan’s national flower. Jeo walks along it and enters the room that had been his mother’s study. He places the burning candle on the desk, its surface covered with ink stains from her fountain pen. The leaf of the calendar hasn’t been changed since her death, the month he was born.

He opens a large book of maps, its pages and his own breath the only sounds in the room. He has lied about going to Peshawar. Wishing to be where he is most needed — to be as close as possible to the carnage of this war — he has arranged in secret to cross over into Afghanistan from Peshawar.

Leaning close to the maps in the frail light, he looks at the geography of the North-West Frontier Province, to where he will be journeying with his father tonight. His eyes move from place to place. Here is the mountain ridge named Pir Sar that Alexander laid siege to in 326 BC — a redoubt so formidable that Heracles himself, son of Zeus, was said to have found it impregnable. And in 1221, Genghis Khan had pursued the last Muslim prince of Central Asia to this place just south of Peshawar. And here is Pushkalavati, visited regularly by Chinese pilgrims during the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries, because the Buddha had made an alms offering of his eyes here.

That he will cross the boundary into Afghanistan is a secret not just from his father. Jeo hasn’t disclosed his intentions to his wife of twelve months either, or to his sister and brother-in-law, sparing them all the unnecessary fear. Rohan will go with him tonight to Peshawar and return home the day after tomorrow, by which time Jeo will already be in Afghanistan.

As a child he would fall asleep listening to the stories being told by his father and he would dream of martyrs. He would see them where they lay with their souls just emerging from their bodies assisted subtly by angels and other winged beings, the sun and the clouds red and the birds appearing bloodstained as they flew. And in the dream he would know that they had fought with a fearsome will and a fearsome strength, both of which were not forged by war but revealed by it, placed in their souls long before birth, and as he slept Jeo knew that they were all him, that they were the men he was before he was this man, the ghostly thousands stretching back through the generations and as he slept they imparted things to him not just of life and death but of eternal life and death.

From the book he carefully tears out several maps, and in this light Afghanistan’s mountains and hills and restlessly branching corridors of rock appear as though the pages are crumpled up, and there is a momentary wish in him to smooth them down. Laser-guided bombs are falling onto the pages in his hands, missiles summoned from the Arabian Sea, from American warships that are as long as the Empire State Building is tall.

He emerges from the room and crosses the garden, releasing movements and shadows in every direction as he brushes against foliage, looking upwards. Once a bird has become trapped in the initial knot, a series of further knots will be activated instantly, to hold the entire body in place, to stop it from thrashing and harming itself.

On the veranda he transfers the maps to his travel bag. There is lamplight in the window of the room he shares with his wife Naheed, the glide of her shadow across a wall. The light is amber like the colour of her eyes and his mind evokes the dark Niagara of her hair and the weight of her hand on his chest during the night. Desire appears in him yet again today, a wish for her to be within arm’s reach, knowing he will not see her for some time after tonight. He crosses the black hallway and enters the room and she turns towards him.