Nadeem Aslam - The Blind Man's Garden

The air of the February evening is dabbed with fog and the saluki appears and disappears within it. Major Kyra walks into Ardent Spirit’s Baghdad House. The boy who had opened the school’s gate for him is a few paces ahead, calling to the hound. He is in his late teens and is known for his passionate nature, his limbs full of disciplined movements, and eyes capable of a sudden flaring as when straw is thrown onto a fire. He owns a deadly dagger as beautiful as a toy, and his name is Ahmed. Five months ago his father was at work in the ice factory when a rectangular block of ice slid down a ramp and shattered. A foot-long splinter flew up and pierced his diaphragm from below. It continued through the left lung and entered his heart. He fell backwards onto the floor and that was where he was discovered half an hour later. By then the ice fragment inside him had melted away. The neighbourhood women insisted he had been killed with a ghost dagger by Ahmed’s mother, who had died the previous year and who had known nothing but contempt and ruthlessness from her husband while she was alive.

He joined the jihad in October and went away towards Kabul, returning only a fortnight ago.

Major Kyra follows him along a corridor, having tied the saluki to a chair leg in the hallway.

The day-to-day affairs of Ardent Spirit’s six houses — Mecca, Baghdad, Cairo, Cordoba, Delhi and Ottoman — are the responsibility of six senior boys, Ahmed being one of them. And they are all gathered in the room when Major Kyra and Ahmed enter.

The candlelight casts oversized shadows on the walls. Kyra lowers himself onto the woollen carpet bought from the smugglers’ market in the North-West Frontier Province. The six boys position themselves before him in a semicircle.

With his flame-scarred hands — they look as though they’ve been put together from scraps of leather — Ahmed holds a piece of paper towards Kyra. On it are the layouts of Heer’s Christian school and church. All sides of the two buildings have their lengths written down next to them, and all the surrounding roads are named.

‘Bombing the church or the Christian school will not achieve anything,’ Kyra says. ‘Such explosions in other places have not deterred the West from continuing with its war, nor forced the Pakistani government to withdraw its support for the Western occupiers.’

‘We are the world’s seventh nuclear power,’ the boy from Ottoman House says quietly, ‘and yet our government does the bidding of the Americans, as though we were nothing but beggars.’ The knowledge of his helplessness is making him angry, he the brother of someone who had gone to Afghanistan in October and is now believed to be in US custody.

‘Twenty or thirty Pakistanis, be they Christian or Muslim, dying in an explosion in Pakistan isn’t going to matter at all,’ Kyra says. ‘Neither our own government nor anyone in the West will care about it.’

The head of Ottoman House says, ‘If we don’t send a message now they will attack other Muslim countries.’

The boy from Delhi House extends a hand towards Ahmed. ‘Tell him.’

‘Tell me what?’ Kyra asks. There is a companionship among the boys that will probably never be bettered in their lives.

‘Why don’t we raid the school and hold everyone hostage? The teachers and the students. Release a list of demands. We should ask for the Americans to leave Afghanistan and free all our brothers who are being held prisoner by them.’

Kyra studies the paper. ‘Do we have enough men for such an operation?’

‘The six of us will form a sufficiently strong core. Beyond that we need a dozen or so others. We can find them.’

‘The siege could last several days,’ Kyra says.

‘Yes,’ Ahmed says. ‘We need to calculate exactly how many weapons we’ll need and of what kind. We’ll have to buy some.’

With Ardent Spirit no longer linked to the Pakistani military and the ISI, the influx of funds has disappeared. Arranged by the ISI, there used to be donation boxes in many cities across Pakistan. Two years ago, during the festival to mark the Sacrifice of Abraham, Ardent Spirit had received contributions of almost $2 million, mostly from the hides of the sacrificed sheep. During the same month millions more were raised from the 675,000 Pakistanis who live in Britain. Money also came from Muslims in India — Kashmir, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Gujarat. But access to all of this is now denied Kyra. He will have to use his own money.

‘It will be hazardous but it is a cause worth dying for,’ Ahmed is saying. ‘And as for the other side, the founder and headmaster of the school, Father Mede, is an infidel. The teachers at the school are Muslim but traitors to Islam, filling the heads of the children with un-Islamic things like music and biology and English literature. And the students too are traitors.’

‘They laugh at us,’ says the boy from Ottoman House. ‘They refer to us who attend schools like Ardent Spirit as “donkeys”. They say we and our like have made Pakistan unlivable.’

‘Father Mede is white,’ Kyra says. ‘An Englishman. It’ll become an international affair.’

‘Exactly,’ says the head of Mecca House, leaning forward. ‘They will pay attention if something happens to a white person. We could kill a few teachers to indicate our seriousness and hold him as the chief bargaining and negotiating asset.’

‘There will be no bargaining or negotiating, brother,’ the head of Cairo House says.

‘Leverage, then.’

‘He is over seventy years old,’ Ahmed says.

‘Do you think they are asking to see birth certificates before dropping bombs in Afghanistan?’

‘Brother,’ Ahmed says, ‘you misunderstand me. I was just thinking that it would make the authorities act with speed. It’s in our favour. How do you feel about capturing him and bringing him here?’

‘It’s not good to have infidels in the house,’ three of the boys say in unison.

The doorbell sounds and Ahmed leaves the room to answer it, making sure his back is never turned towards the Koran and other religious texts on the shelf.

Kyra opens the book of the Prophet’s sayings. Number 813: I was given the following words of the Prophet by Hukm bin Nafa, who was given them by Shoaib, who was given them by Zehri, who was given them by Abu Salma, who was given them by Abu Horaira. The Prophet said, ‘The End of the World won’t be until two armies have gone to war proclaiming an identical goal.’

*

When Ahmed returns he is accompanied by a middle-aged woman wrapped in a shawl, her face marked with the deep lines of resignation and self-control. Maintaining a pointedly respectful distance from the sphere of candlelight in which the men are, she greets everyone and sits down in the far corner.

‘How can I be of help, sister-ji?’ Kyra asks.

She smiles. ‘I am the mother of one of the former students at Ardent Spirit. He is about to go abroad to study.’

‘I am delighted to hear that one of our students is prospering.’

‘He was given a good start here by your elder brother, may he rest in peace,’ the woman says to Kyra. ‘My boy was at Ardent Spirit for just the first two years of his education, then we moved to another neighbourhood so I had to take him out.’

‘May Allah grant him continued success so he can make Pakistan and Islam proud. Which country will he be going to? Indonesia, Malaysia, Egypt?’

‘He has a scholarship to America. His entire education will be paid for by a university there.’

Kyra considers this. ‘It would have been preferable if he had chosen a Muslim country instead of the West with its blood-stained wealth. Which city in America will he go to?’