Nadeem Aslam - The Blind Man's Garden

Mikal is coming with him to Afghanistan. It was a chance encounter last week, when Jeo rode his motorcycle out of the house and went towards the other side of the city, along the Grand Trunk Road. There he formally presented himself at the headquarters of the organisation that is sending men into Afghanistan. They need doctors and — although Jeo is only in the third year at medical school, his education anything but complete — they were delighted at his offer of help. The organisation is a charity and includes a madrasa, providing literacy to the children of the poor — twenty rooms, each of them alive with voices murmuring like a honeycomb of warning and praise — and he was on his way out when he saw the figure emerging from a nearby door. The face that held a look of unbreakable isolation.

‘Mikal.’

If love was the result of having caught a glimpse of another’s loneliness, then he had loved Mikal since they were both ten years old.

Mikal looked up and Jeo went forward and they placed their arms around each other.

‘What are you doing here?’ Jeo asked when they separated.

Mikal embraced him again. ‘I was delivering some guns I mended for them,’ he said eventually, speaking as always with a gravity to his words, a minute shifting of those eyebrows that joined in the middle. ‘I work at a gun shop.’

Around them the madrasa was noisy with the voices of children who, knowing little but life’s deprivations, prayed the way they ate, with a deep hunger.

Jeo did not hesitate in telling Mikal about Afghanistan. This almost-brother. This blood-love in everything but name. Mikal was ten years old when he and his older brother came to live at Jeo’s house, Mikal carrying a book of constellations under one arm, the large pages full of heroes and beasts caught in diamond-studded nets. The puppy he held in the crook of the other elbow would have to be given away within two months when it became apparent that it was a wolf. Mikal and Jeo were the same age and had soon become inseparable, a dedication in Jeo for Mikal’s watchfulness and self-containment, the grace that shaped his every move, though it was interrupted by short spells when something would madden in him and he would refuse to be found.

‘You are going to Afghanistan?’ Mikal said when Jeo finished speaking.

‘Just for a month. Later I might go for a longer period.’

‘What about your studies?’

‘I’ll catch up.’ Rohan had taken Jeo to watch his first surgical operation at the age of twelve, and he knew at thirteen some of the things that were taught to his first-year class at medical school.

As the motorcycle sped through the traffic — he was taking Mikal to the gun shop — he said over his shoulder, ‘You still haven’t told me why you completely disappeared last year. Missing my wedding. And nothing but a short visit to the house since then. I wonder if you even remember my wife’s name.’

‘I didn’t know you were getting married,’ Mikal said.

Mikal’s parents had been Communists, and his father was arrested around the time Mikal was born, never to be seen again. It was the mother’s death a decade later that led to Rohan taking in Mikal and his brother. People fallen on hard times would come and ask Mikal to say a prayer for them, because orphaned children were among those beings whose prayers Allah was said never to ignore.

At the gun shop, AK-47s were stacked six high on the shelves. If genuine, these rifles would cost eighty thousand rupees each, but these were replicas at a quarter of the price. The day after the West invaded Afghanistan, a ‘piety discount’ was introduced for those who wished to buy the weapon to go to the jihad. There were reproductions of older guns too, of rifles to be found in the armouries of the Tower of London, 30 calibre Chinese pistols, Argentinian Ballester-Molinas. On the wall was a large photograph of a flock of eagles that had been trained to fight in human wars, the wings outspread at a slant like living book-rests — a dream from the land’s past.

The proprietor gave Mikal instructions regarding various repairs and left to answer the muezzin’s call. The trigger was stiff on a shotgun and the owner of a revolver wished it to make a louder sound when fired. Prising off the forearm, Mikal unbreeched the shotgun and lifted away the barrel. ‘So. Afghanistan,’ he said.

‘You are the only person I have told.’

‘What if something happens to you?’

‘Will you come to the house before I leave?’ The ties between them had strengthened — Jeo’s sister was now married to Mikal’s brother.

‘Jeo. Something could happen to you out there. You could be killed, or come back without your sanity, your limbs, or your eyes.’

‘What if everyone began to think that way?’

Mikal’s glance remained on him and then he returned to his work. Jeo could sense the careful mind addressing the task. Anything mechanical, Mikal had to know its secrets. Once he almost stole a helicopter. ‘They should never have left the keys in,’ he said. ‘But I thought better when I saw the number of gears.’ By the age of fourteen he had driven a bulldozer, various cars, a boat.

‘You used to make toys,’ Jeo said.

Mikal leaned back on his stool and, without looking, opened the cupboard behind him and took out a small windup truck. He turned its key several times and placed it on the glass counter. Jeo held the palm of his hand beyond the edge for it to arrive and fall onto.

‘Keep it. It’s yours.’ Mikal slid the key towards him along the counter. ‘What if I said I’d come with you?’

‘I don’t need to be looked after.’

Mikal had thumbed open the gate of the revolver and put the hammer at half cock but now he paused and looked up. ‘I didn’t mean that.’ He turned the cylinder and ejected the round from the chamber with the ejector rod.

He lit a Gold Flake and said with a grin, ‘I smoke five a day. My five prayers.’

Jeo was forced to smile. ‘You’re going to Hell.’ Then he said, ‘Are you serious about coming with me?’

‘Yes. I’ll go back later today and give them my name.’

‘What will you do there?’

‘I’ll carry the wounded to you from the battlefield.’ And after a while without looking at him he added,

‘And I do remember her name, Jeo. Her name and the fact that she is descended from the Prophet.’

*

Naheed lifts Jeo’s arm from around her waist. He’ll leave with Rohan to catch the train for Peshawar in just under two hours but for now he has closed his eyes in shallow sleep. She buttons the neck of her tunic and is walking away from the bed when a small jolt makes her look back. He is lying on her veil. Moving closer through the candlelit air she sees that he has in fact tied a corner of it to the index finger of his right hand. She releases the knot and her glass bangles rattle as she gently slaps his bare shoulder. He smiles with eyes still closed, the inch-long dimple materialising in each cheek. He had stunned her one day by saying, ‘I’d like to die watching you.’

She looks out of the window, past the low rosewood bough from which a sheep is hung every year to be disembowelled and skinned just minutes from its last conscious moments, to mark the Sacrifice of Abraham. It is bought fully grown a few days earlier but ideally should be raised from a lamb, given love, and then killed.

She turns to see him gazing at her. Rising on one elbow he picks up the toy truck from the stack of books on the bedside table. It comes towards her between the clothes he had shed on the floor earlier and goes past and is soon out of sight under the armchair, the sound of its tin gears vanishing suddenly where it must have met the wall.

‘Mikal gave me that toy,’ he says, lying down again.