Nadeem Aslam: The Blind Man's Garden

She collects his clothes and places them at the foot of the bed. She had made this shirt for him — in great secrecy, not revealing to anyone how it is possible that not a single seam or stitch can be discovered upon it.

She takes a lamp from a ledge in the hallway and steps out into the cold darkness. Looking up into the trees. After Rohan and Jeo leave for Peshawar tonight, she will walk to her mother’s place a few streets away, but she will return early tomorrow morning to wait for the bird pardoner. Rohan has instructed for all ensnared birds to be set free. ‘And he must take down the wires. I do not recall giving him permission.’ She raises her arm and the light from the lamp breaks up into sharp glints on several high wires above her.

She wonders where Mikal is at this moment. In some respects, grief for the lost and missing is worse than grief for the dead, and sometimes just for a fraction of a second its intensity makes her wish Mikal would cease to exist, so she wouldn’t have to wonder if she will ever see him again.

‘Let’s just leave,’ he had said to her a week before she was to marry Jeo. He had pointed into the night. ‘Let’s just disappear out there somewhere.’ She had been shocked by the suggestion, but had then agreed, suddenly fierce in her determination.

But on the agreed hour, he hadn’t come for her.

She moves along one of the many red paths that wander in the garden.

The crescent-shaped house was the original building of Ardent Spirit, the school Rohan and his wife Sofia had founded. When the number of pupils outgrew it, a new building was constructed on the other side of the river that flows behind the house. This building then became Rohan and Sofia’s home.

Decades ago when they formed the idea of Ardent Spirit, Rohan had used matchsticks to explain the layout to Sofia.

It is divided into six pairs of rooms, arranged in an elegant curve, a screened corridor linking them all. Each pair of rooms is named after one of those six centres of Islam’s bygone brilliance.

Mecca House is situated amid Arabian date palms that release their fruit onto the roof throughout summer, the dates that are like sweet chewable leather in the mouth. A tablet carrying the name is affixed beside the entrance, reading, It was in order to determine the exact direction of Mecca that Muslims had developed an interest in geometry and mathematics, and had eventually invented trigonometry . The words were intended to remind the children of their legacy, Islam’s long inheritance of knowledge and achievement.

The calligraphy is in Sofia’s hand and its grace makes the reader aware of, and even feel responsible for, the soul of the calligrapher.

Climbing roses curtain Baghdad House, spreading on the walls in lean assessing tendrils, and the undone petals lie on the tiles to return loaned light deep into the evening. The children were informed that in Baghdad there was a ‘House of Wisdom’ as early as the year 830.

Spanish almond trees and carnations grow around Cordoba House. According to the tablet outside it, the flower the king of djinns presented to Solomon, to give to the Queen of Sheba, was a carnation. She would wear it in her hair. The tablet records that the Muslims of Spain had manufactured the first paper in Europe around 1150, and also that in 1221 the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II had declared all official documents written on paper to be invalid — paper having become associated in Europe with Muslims.

Egyptian blue lotuses stand in crystal-tight arrays in a triangular pool before Cairo House, the blossoms closing at night and sinking underwater to re-emerge in the morning. Cairo, where the ‘House of Science’ was created in 995 and where the Fatimid palace library had comprised forty rooms, its collections including eighteen thousand manuscripts on the ‘Sciences of the Ancients’ alone, the staff comprising mathematicians, astronomers, physicians, grammarians, lexicographers, copyists and readers of the Koran.

Beside that, sheltered by a century-wide banyan, are the two rooms named after Delhi, and next to that is Ottoman House. According to Mikal’s book of constellations, in the sixteenth century the clergymen had convinced Sultan Murat III to destroy Istanbul’s first ever observatory, telling him that the lenses were peering too far into the secrets of Allah’s heavens in the name of progress and science, and would result in divine wrath being visited on his kingdom.

Mikal.

One afternoon just over two months into the marriage, Jeo brought him home, thinking they were meeting for the first time.

She heard him whisper something when Jeo briefly stepped out of the room. He was sitting on the edge of the chair, looking down at the floor. She still had the letters he had written to her in the months before she learned she was to marry Jeo. Several times she had taken them to the river but had failed to relinquish them.

He looked at her and said, more clearly, ‘I couldn’t betray him. He is a brother to me.’

She remembers nodding. Concentrating on remaining composed.

They were both silent and eventually, listening out for Jeo’s return to the room, she had said, ‘Nothing can be done now.’

‘Yes.’ He had to attempt the word twice and it came out unshapely as though a bone was broken somewhere inside it.

He stood up. ‘Tell Jeo I had to go.’

‘It might make things easier for me if I don’t see you. I must learn to love him, none of this is his fault.’

‘I won’t come again. I’ll try to leave the city.’

It was the sixty-sixth day of her marriage and the last time she saw him.

She looks up at the sky. He said Orion was shaped like the cow’s hide from which he was born nine months after it was urinated on by Zeus, Hermes and Poseidon. He told her that some Arab astronomers saw a woman’s hand dyed with patterns of henna in the constellations Cassiopeia and Perseus, while others said it was the hand of Fatima stained with drops of blood — Fatima, the daughter of Muhammad, Naheed’s ancestor.

She hears the two-note call of a bird and, bending into a tunnel of foliage, sets out to search for it, the moonlight pale as watered ink. She stops beside the citrus tree whose branches filled entirely with white flowers Sofia had mistaken for an angel as she lay dying. From their faultless portraits painted by Sofia, Naheed can recognise almost all the trees and plants in this garden, the seedpods and leaves and the berries dense with sugar.

She had also made pictures of living things but Rohan had burned them during her last hours, fearing she would be judged for disobeying Allah, who forbade such images lest they lead to idolatry. The black smoke of the fire had sidled up to her deathbed. The sketch of a bull’s skull and that of a fossil from the Bannu hills were destroyed too — these creatures were already dead when she drew them, but they had lived once, and he wished to eradicate all doubt to ensure her salvation. He asked her to tell him where the rest of the paintings and drawings were, to tell him the address of the friend for whose home she had designed several murals. In his fear he had cleansed the house of every other image too, every photograph and picture, even those not created by her.

And then a decade after her death, he saw her looking in his direction through a high window. It was the last day of Ramadan: a group of distinguished citizens had been invited to climb the minaret of the Friday mosque in the city centre, to view the new month’s crescent moon. As the binoculars passed over the city he recognised her eyes among the rooftops, the face turned three-quarters towards him, the pattern of her aquamarine tunic. It took him some time to bring her back into the glass and the distance between them was in miles — too many streets and at least three bazaars. Beside her was a giant bearded head, and in her hands she held several flower bulbs with lilies sprouting out of them, and curled up inside each bulb was a very young human infant, perhaps a foetus.