Nadeem Aslam - The Blind Man's Garden

‘This is mere glass,’ the man says.

‘It is not glass,’ Rohan says. ‘It’s an authentic and indisputable jewel.’

The man stands with it in the palm of his hand. Then he sighs and tells them that the warlord is not present and that they must wait for his return. He goes away with it and Rohan walks to the door to see which of the many rooms lining the courtyard he will disappear into. Posters of the warlord are pasted to the walls in the compound. He clearly hopes to have a role in the government.

‘How did you end up here?’ Rohan asks Jeo, but the boy won’t speak — unwilling to recall the time and the place where his ties with the human had broken. He looks at his father and whispers, ‘Have you come to get me back?’

‘Yes.’

‘One boy’s father came last week. He is an ice seller and said he is trying to save ten rupees a day to free his son. It’ll take him twenty years. You have to take me with you today.’

‘We are here to take you away, this morning, don’t worry,’ Rohan says, looking in the direction the man went with the ruby, gently placing a hand on the boy’s head.

The boy recoils under the touch.

‘You don’t need to be afraid of him,’ Abdul says. ‘He is a good man.’

‘How many prisoners are down there in the cells?’ Rohan asks, looking at the floor. They are perhaps directly under his feet.

‘About a hundred. The others who came with me died.’

Rohan recognises the warlord from the photograph on the wall the moment he enters the room, holding the ruby in his hand, clearly delighted by its beauty. He is one-eyed with a big head and chest, the breast thrust forward as though by the force of the heart beating unafraid of any man or thing.

‘I have come to see the man who has brought me this gift.’ He smiles as he walks towards Rohan. ‘You can take the boy,’ he says, holding out his hand to be shaken.

Rohan looks down at the hand but does not take it, unable to hide his feelings, and the man stops smiling. His servants gathered behind him stiffen: the proffered hand remains hanging in the air and Rohan might as well have slapped him. Everyone waits while the ruby shines in the man’s other hand. Valour is associated with this gemstone. The courage to seek the truth at all times. To be able to look tyrants in the eyes. This world of havoc, malice and destruction, where the blood of the innocent is of no consequence, is perfect for him and his kind.

Rohan walks out of the door, followed by Jeo and the bird pardoner, leaving the men of war behind. But he is beginning to regret his act as it could jeopardise the safety of Abdul and the boy.

They go out through the gate, not meeting the eyes of the armed men standing guard. People are gathered outside the front gate, all there to pay homage to the warlord or seek money and help. The moment the guards open the gate to let the three of them out, the crowd begins to shout out its needs, frenziedly waving pieces of paper in the air, asking to see the lord. The voices of women coming from under the folds of blue or cream-coloured burkas. Near the road people are eating breakfasts of tea and packets of biscuits.

Jeo stares at a cat walking along a wall. He says to his father, ‘They forget to feed you for days sometimes down there, and one day I was hungry this cat brought me a dead hoopoe to eat.’

Rohan sees the convoy of American vehicles coming down the road.

‘The other prisoners are just there,’ Jeo says pointing back to the warlord’s compound, his eyes almost vibrating with intensity. ‘See that row of barred windows at the base of the wall? They are the high windows we looked up at, in our underground cells.’

The Americans’ six-vehicle convoy has drawn near and Rohan steps into the middle of the road before it.

The lead vehicle stops ten yards away from him and the white boy-soldier behind the steering wheel looks at him through the windshield. His companion in the passenger seat leans out with his gun after a few seconds and shouts, ‘Get out of the way!’

Above him the sky has suddenly opened into the cold of the cosmos.

*

Tormented by dreams of justice on earth, Jeo wants to do something like a star shooting off light to make itself. Before his father knows what he is doing, he picks up a section of broken brick lying at his feet and throws it solidly at the men guarding the building, missing one of them by a mere two feet. He stands defiant, as though gaining strength from being under the open sky, having found this way of announcing his place in the world, the family of man. One of the guards comes running towards him with a raised rifle but Abdul moves forward to placate him. Taking a cigarette from his pocket, Abdul puts it in the guard’s mouth and even lights it, keeping up words of apology.

*

‘Get out of the way!’

Rohan does not heed the order. Instead he begins to walk towards the jeep. The other vehicles have halted behind the first one and soldiers are leaning out with weapons at the ready, some in confusion, some in alarmed fear.

‘I need to talk to you,’ Rohan says in English.

‘Get out of the way!’

Rohan puts up both his arms. The soldiers will not see him as a harmless aged man. ‘I need your help in getting some children out of this building,’ he says, pointing with his head.

‘Not our problem.’

‘They are being abused in there.’

‘Not our problem. This is your last warning!’ They are aiming at him and in every other direction, behind them, to the left, right, at the crowd of petitioners, the gun barrels unceasing as the panic mounts. ‘Move! Now! This is your last warning!’

Rohan catches a glimpse of Jeo, who has walked towards the windows of the dungeon and is peering down through them.

Slowly Rohan walks to the very edge of the tarmac — unable to bring himself to vacate the road completely, still searching for words he might say to these soldiers, and the vehicles begin to come towards him suspiciously, in extreme slowness, the zigzag pattern on the tyres moving down inch by inch, and he watches as the gate to the building opens and the warlord emerges. He stands looking at Rohan.

One of the warlord’s men has rushed forward to drag Rohan away from the road, throwing him forcibly onto the ground. As he falls he sees the American convoy speed up, he also sees that Jeo has taken off his shirt for some reason, revealing the gaunt, sickeningly bruised body. Snatching the lighter from Abdul’s hand the boy sets the shirt alight and with this burning rag he runs — towards the row of windows to the underground cells.

Rohan lies in the dust, thinking that the warlord’s man had wished nothing more than to remove the obstruction from the path of the Americans. But the man is still holding Rohan down — and now others have appeared, pinning him so hard against the ground he thinks it is an attempt to bury him alive, that using nothing but their arms they want to push him into the earth. The warlord is standing above him with his hand extended, the hand he had rejected. Time slows down as the warlord lowers the hand and Rohan sees that the pulverised remains of the ruby are in the palm, the stone crushed into tiny fragments. Calmly the man presses a fingertip into the shattered jewel, coating it with the razor grit, and brings the fingertip towards Rohan’s eyes.

*

One second, two, three — and the pool of gasoline erupts, Jeo having dropped the burning shirt onto it from above.

*

Rohan stands up. The light is so strong everything disintegrates in it — it is like being in a field of pure energy. Rohan sweeps at his head to remove the white cloth that has come to rest over his eyes but realises there is no cloth. The world moves away and everything becomes smaller but then the vision returns for a few moments and he sees the fire eddying along the ground. He is tired, tired of living without Sofia, and as he stumbles against something and falls, feeling a patch of meagre grass under his hands, he knows he is blind.