Nadeem Aslam - The Blind Man's Garden

Father Mede turns the key in the assembly-hall door and walks back towards to his office.

Restore us again, O God of our salvation,

And put away your indignation towards us.

Will you be angry with us forever?

Will you prolong your anger to all generations?

Michael is said to have written these lines. Psalm 85. The lines that are employed to invoke him.

‘Don’t step on that piece of ground,’ Naheed cautions Rohan as they walk in the garden. ‘I buried the dead birds there back in October.’

Rohan looks at the soil. He can see a little today, the places where the sunlight is clear and unrestricted. She had found him with the Koran open in his hands earlier, one of his great torments being that he cannot read it for the comfort of Sofia’s soul.

‘Is the pomegranate in flower?’

She guides his hand and he touches the blossoms, the tough outer cups, and the scraps of wrinkled silk at the centre that are the petals, and as he takes in their scent he tells her that the name Granada derives from the pomegranates that grew in that region of Spain. Basie and Yasmin have had a number of conversations with the eye specialist since Naheed and Rohan visited him, and the procedures he suggested are the only answer.

‘Spain was once a Muslim land,’ Rohan says, cupping the flowers in his hands. ‘In October 1501, the Catholic monarchs ordered the destruction of all Islamic books and manuscripts. Thousands of Korans and other texts were burned in a public bonfire.’

She lets him talk as she looks around for Mikal. Nothing but a kingfisher stitching together the two banks of the river with the bright threads of its flight.

‘A shopkeeper was arrested because he muttered “O Muhammad!” after someone refused to buy his wares. Another man, brought before an Inquisitor for washing his hands in a suspect Muslim-looking manner, confessed under torture to being a Muslim and denounced a number of his neighbours, only to revoke his confession immediately afterwards. He was tortured a second time and died of his injuries in prison.’

She holds his hand in hers. These days she is having to make sure he eats everything on his plate, disregarding his objections that he no longer feels hungry. She and Tara make his chapattis bigger and thicker, with the result that when he thinks he is eating just one, he is in fact eating one and a quarter, or one and a half.

She is relieved Basie and Yasmin are dealing with the eye specialist himself. Seeing the nurses at the clinic had provoked anxiety in her. The mind fighting phantoms, a strange fear had appeared that one of them could be the nurse who had given her the injections to destroy the child back in November, that the doctor — enraged at Rohan — could reveal this fact to him. Why am I afraid? she had asked herself initially. What could anyone do to me if they learned about what I had done? But, no. She is not concerned for herself, she is afraid of distressing Rohan, Yasmin and Basie. The truth would hurt them . That is why the matter has to be kept secret.

Rohan has noticed her silence. ‘What is it?’

‘Just a headache.’

‘Has your mother said something?’

She shakes her head. Then, wondering if he has seen the gesture, says, ‘No.’

‘I had a conversation with her yesterday.’

She doesn’t reply. A movement in the grape arbour where the very first green beads have appeared on the branches; by June they will have grown and the skin will slip liquidly from the pulp.

‘She is concerned for you.’

‘There’s no need.’

‘You should think of getting married again.’

She looks up where the tamarind tree shifts its branches, in its stately thirst for movement. The dying leaves that had covered it in a copper haze last month are gone, replaced by a luminous green.

‘It’s too soon,’ she says.

‘It probably is. Your mother has selected a boy, but by the time the necessary enquiries and arrangements have been made, an appropriate amount of time would have passed. These things move slowly. I know the marriage with Jeo was rapid but that was an exception.’

Last week Naheed had said to Tara, ‘This year I will help Father through the trouble with his eyes. After that I will begin studying for a diploma to become a teacher.’ She has discovered a sudden appetite for books as though the boxes had arrived at the house just for her. She dips her hands into them at random. Lyrics and fictions from all periods, volumes of photographs and paintings, works of Eastern and Western history. Some telling her to exchange reason for wonder, others to replace wonder with reason. She lifts the slender gossamer paper from a painted page and a bandit in a glowing orchard is revealed, the Persian sky coated entirely with gold leaf above him. Mikal surfaced when she looked at and opened al-Shirazi’s fourteenth-century work entitled A Book I Have Composed on Astronomy But I Wish to Be Absolved of All Blame . Late into the night she reads stories from South America, Iceland, India. She turned herself into a doe and sped away from him, but he transformed himself into a stag and — overtaking her — coupled with her. Afterwards she was a peahen running away from him but he became a peacock and mated with her again. Next she was a cow pursued by him in the shape of a bull, coupling with her a third time …

‘You mustn’t be concerned,’ says Rohan as they walk back to the house. ‘We will check everything thoroughly. Once Tara has asked the initial questions, she will tell me and Basie, and Basie will conduct a full investigation. He is your brother.’

Suddenly she is overwhelmed. The tears coming so fast she needs two hands to catch them.

‘Why has this happened?’ she whispers.

Rohan turns and after groping in the air for a few moments — coming in from the sunlight has dimmed his vision further — encloses her in his arms.

He strokes her head gently. Distant acquaintances continue to arrive to give condolences for Jeo’s death, having heard about it only just now. They come and find his own eyes in bandages. With Jeo and Mikal’s deaths he was just as wounded, and it is an astonishment that no one could see that wound. It is one of life’s great mysteries, human beings living with secret grief, unseen, and unsympathised. And so it is that Naheed carries Jeo’s death secretly inside her, the mountainous weight of it. Yasmin and Basie carry it too. And Tara. But if all of them were to walk into a place, it would be Rohan who would be seen to be afflicted. The wounds in the souls and the hearts remain unsensed. Requiring another kind of vision.

When the girl is somewhat comforted he lets her go. He had intended to ask her in detail about the bird pardoner’s son, she and Tara having visited the family last evening. The boy is making a slow recovery but still the subject is a melancholy one and he decides not to broach it.

She takes him forward and lowers him into his armchair.

‘It’s eleven o’clock,’ she tells him.

He no longer has any need to wear a wristwatch. His blindness almost coincided with the death of the two boys. They seem the same event. In the coming years when he is asked how long he has been sightless, he would ask himself how long Jeo and Mikal have been gone.

‘He said he’d come about this time.’

A message had arrived at the house from Major Kyra last week, requesting a meeting with Rohan. Rohan had attempted to visit him on hearing the news of Ahmed the Moth’s death, but again and again the boys at the Ardent Spirit gate had informed him that he was not on the premises, something like hostility appearing in them as soon as Rohan gave his name.