Nadeem Aslam - The Blind Man's Garden

*

‘What is your name?’ David asks.

Mikal sits still.

Just then there comes the sound of screaming from the other side of the wall. Someone in terrible agony.

‘Who is that?’

‘Who do you think?’ David says. ‘Jeo lied to us, so now we are making him tell us the truth.’

The boy next door sounds like an animal in sacrificial torment.

It’s not Jeo . He must remain composed.

‘What is your name?’

It’s not Jeo. Does anyone in the world know where the two of them are? Is anyone searching for them?

‘What is your name?’

But he is unable to bear it and says at last, ‘Stop beating him.’

‘We are just making sure we know the truth. Stay in your chair.’

‘Please stop it. Don’t hurt him, please. You said you wouldn’t torture.’ He stands up and reaches for David with his hands, then in the same movement turns and rushes towards the door in disordered confusion, to go and help Jeo. As he falls to the floor — given a blow to the kidneys by the MP’s club — he is struck again on the shoulder and he hits the man with his handcuffed wrists just above the ear and once again below the ear with greater force, and the man leans over him and punches his face, once, twice, three times, Mikal’s neck pressed against the concrete under the man’s boot. He tastes blood and is not sure which of the screams are his and which from the next room. Then he is snatched back into the chair.

‘He’s telling the truth,’ he says, ‘he’s telling the truth. I did take the oath with Osama bin Laden. Stop hurting him, please, stop hurting him. I was the one who lied, not him.’ Drops of blood fall from his face onto the table, joining up and becoming a large blot with an amazing quickness.

‘What’s your name?’

Next door Jeo continues to scream, and there are other sounds, of him being slammed against the walls. The cubicle shakes with each impact.

‘What’s your name? Where are you from? What happened to your hands and body, and when were you shot?’

They could bring his brother here — they could bring all of them here from Heer — and, armed with suspicions and false accusations, do to them what they are doing to Jeo. Basie and Yasmin and Rohan and Naheed. They’ll put them in the cages next to him.

‘I am a prisoner. They sold me to you for money. I have nothing to do with this war.’ His ribs and face in agony from the strikes, the pain in the bullet wounds fully awakened.

Next door Jeo is whimpering.

‘What is your name? If you are innocent we will free you the instant you eliminate our suspicions. You must show us that you support justice by co-operating with us. All the people who were captured with you have already been released. You with your behaviour are going to end up in Cuba.’

‘I will tell you everything if you let me see Jeo.’

‘Impossible.’

He looks at the wall separating him from Jeo whose sobs have become fainter now.

Finally he says to David, ‘I will tell you everything, if you ask Jeo to tell you something only I would know.’

*

He is brought to a chamber whose walls, floor and ceiling are painted entirely black, and his raised arms are shackled to a ring overhead. After the Military Policemen leave the light is switched off, the room becoming a perfect vacuumed blank. It is like the shadow darkness of the grave after death. He is not sure when last he saw a star or the red dawn light pulsing like the bloodbeat of a living creature, but now time ceases to exist altogether as he stands or slumps in the measureless void — for half a day, two, a week? He is sure that men have died in the chamber, and he sees their ghosts. At some point the light comes on and a white man Mikal has never seen before makes his entry. Nineteen keepers are appointed over Hell, according to the Koran. The man stands before him and suddenly bursts into laughter, and he doesn’t stop — the soulless glance fixed at Mikal and laughing loudly at him for having made the mess on the floor, for being worthless, for the disaster that is his love for Naheed, for not being able to help Jeo, for Pakistan and its poverty, a laughter tinged with contempt for him and his nation where the taps don’t have water, and the shops don’t have sugar or rice or flour, the sick don’t have medicines and the cars don’t have petrol, his disgusting repulsive country where everyone it seems is engaged in killing everyone else, a land of revenge attacks, where the butcher sells rotten meat to the milkman and is in turn sold milk whose volume has been increased with lethal white chemicals, and they both sell their meat and their milk to the doctor who prescribes unnecessary medicines in order to win bonuses from the drug companies, and the factory where the drugs are made pours its toxic waste directly into the water supply, into rivers and streams, killing, deforming, blinding, lacerating the sons and daughters of the policeman who himself dies in a traffic accident while he is taking a bribe, an accident caused by a truck the transport inspector has taken a bribe to declare roadworthy, a country full of people whose absolute devotion to their religion is little more than an unshakable loyalty to unhappiness and mean-spiritedness, and the white man continues to laugh with eyes full of hatred and accusation and hilarity and mirth at this citizen of a shameless beggar country full of liars, hypocrites, beaters of women and children and animals and the weak, brazen rapists and unpunished murderers, torturers who probably dissolved his father’s body in a drum of acid in Lahore Fort, delusional morons and fools who wanted independence from the British and a country of their own, but who now can’t wait to leave it, emigrate, emigrate, emigrate to Britain, USA, Canada, Australia, Dubai, Kuwait, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Japan, China, New Zealand, Sweden, South Africa, South Korea, Norway, Germany, Belgium, Chile, Hong Kong, Holland, Spain, Italy, France, anywhere, anywhere, anywhere, anywhere but Pakistan, they can’t wait to get out of there, having reduced the country to a wasteland, their very own caliphate of rubble. Like a malevolent god the man pours his laughter into Mikal, his skin becoming red as he laughs, sweat welling from his brow, and even though he makes Mikal relive every shame, indignity, humiliation, dishonour, defeat and disgrace he has ever experienced in his twenty years, Mikal begins to whisper back at him now: ‘What about you? What about you? what about you what about you …’ He struggles against the chain and begins to shout. ‘What about the part you played in it?’ He wishes he knew how to say it in English. If I agree with you that what you say is true, would you agree that your country played a part in ruining mine, however small? He wonders if the man is real, despite the fact that his laugh is continuing to swell in the air of the room, roaring like a giant wave getting louder as it encircles his head. He remembers how after they had interrogated a prisoner for twenty-nine consecutive hours he was brought back to the cage hallucinating, was seeing people and things that were not there. And then suddenly the light goes off and the laughter stops, nothing in the room but his own breathing. The pain in his arms is so intense it is screaming at him in a real voice, using human words.

*

‘I want to see Jeo,’ he says in the interrogation room.

‘Shut up. When did you take the oath with Osama bin Laden?’

He must say something or they’ll begin to hurt Jeo again on the other side of the wall.

‘I can’t remember. What date did Jeo give?’ He is having trouble focusing his eyes after the dark chamber.

‘You don’t get to ask me questions. Get on your knees and stick your arms out.’