Nadeem Aslam - The Blind Man's Garden

Mikal looks through the window of the gun factory, owned and supervised by Akbar’s father and elder brother. When Akbar told him about it he understood why he had kept hearing gunfire through his fever, the workers testing the weapons they were making. The floor is covered with ash and strewn with pieces of metal the thickness and size of books and magazines, out of which the shapes of pistols have been cut like stencils. There are piles of wood meant to be burned in the smelting and there are carved pieces of wood that will become stocks of rifles and shotguns.

Long low skeins of mist rise from the river that flows in a half-circle around the house, its densely wooded bank enclosing three sides of the large building. The cub wanders away towards the side of the building and when he follows it he sees the girl under an arch, the mist drifting on the young silky air while above her the last stars cling to the white sky, and the zone of containment and poise about her person remains intact as she begins to withdraw into the darkness of the house on seeing him. Human contact is as vast as any wilderness , he remembers thinking the day he approached Naheed for the first time, and demands all daring, but he lowers his eyes as he advances towards the animal, like someone looking for a lost coin or key, gathering the cub to his chest like a collection of loose things, the creature’s ears flattening with fear at the sudden upheaval, and he turns around under the flashing gaze of the chained Airedales, the disc of the sun both blinding and illuminating. ‘Where do you think you are going?’ he says into the fur, walking away fast. ‘Do you know what they’ll do to her if they catch her near a stranger?’

*

‘You need to see this.’ Akbar hands him the leaflet.

A column of text in English and two black-and-white photographs of Mikal. Taken at the brick factory back in January, one with the long hair and beard, the other after they had removed the hair on the head and jaw.

‘Where did you find this?’ Mikal asks.

‘Someone brought it from Peshawar. I’m told there is one in Urdu as well.’

He tries to read the text but soon gives up. ‘What does it say?’

‘They are searching for you. There is a description. Your height, your complexion —’

‘Akbar. You know what I am asking.’

Akbar doesn’t answer immediately. Eventually he nods and says, ‘They both died.’

*

Twenty days. Strong moons hang above the house at that season. After spending months indoors, he sleeps on the twenty-five-foot boundary wall that encircles the house, the leopard curled with him under the folds of the blanket, and he wakes in the night to see stars imprinting their numberless fires on the blue-black sky, and in the centre is a golden moon, serene and distended, and then there are the bronze moons, ugly and threateningly dagger-like to him in his convalescent state, resembling the ones that had come at his fingers. He works in the gun factory with Akbar’s brother and the men he employs, one of whom says his joined eyebrows are evil luck. He operates the six-inch Herbert lathe for the heavy work and the three-and-a-half-inch Myford. The Boley watchmaker’s lathe. The Senior milling machine. The Boxford shaper. The large and small drill presses. On the walls are several rifles and he levers opens the breeches and looks down the barrels and he runs his hands on the stock of a hundred-year-old gun, etched with a scene of warriors on horseback going off to meet the Crusaders, with proud pennants and spears and large empty cages in which they hope to bring back captive infidel kings.

One night he walks up to Akbar’s bed and very gently shakes him until the boy awakens. He lowers himself onto the edge of the bed. No light except the sweep of the moon through the window.

‘My name is Mikal.’

He hears Akbar swallowing drowsily, taking deep breaths in the dark air.

‘I come from a town in Punjab called Heer, it’s next to Gujranwala. I went to Afghanistan with my foster brother Jeo last October. I don’t know where he is.’

‘I think the pedestal fan in the corner is made in Gujranwala,’ Akbar says, sitting up and feeling for his pack of cigarettes and lighting one.

‘It is. The city’s famous for them.’

‘So your name is Mikal.’

‘Yes.’ Mikal feels his gaze on him even without the light.

‘Let me have that for a second.’ Mikal takes the cigarette from him and inhales the smoke and then hands it back and lights one for himself. He rises and goes to sit on the windowsill and looks out at the wild flowers that had closed at sunset but have opened once again in response to the moonlight.

‘I have to leave soon.’

‘You can stay as long as you like. You are my brother.’

‘I have to find Jeo. Or maybe I should go to Heer first. What if Jeo has already gone back? I need to go and see.’

‘The Americans could be waiting for you there.’

‘I know. They don’t know my name, but there are the photographs and my fingerprints.’

Akbar gets up and turns on the light. ‘Stay until you are stronger. You are perfectly safe here.’ He takes a piece of paper and a pen from a drawer. ‘Let me show you something, now that we trust each other.’ He makes a thick dot and surrounds it with several concentric circles. He points to the dot with the tip of the pen and says, ‘This is you right now.’

‘I am the target?’

Akbar smiles. ‘These concentric circles are walls. Invisible ones. Defences that insulate al-Qaeda leaders who are on the run from the Americans.’

‘What al-Qaeda leaders?’

Akbar holds his gaze.

Mikal smokes the cigarette in silence for almost a minute, holding it between the tips of the thumb and the second finger. Then he says, ‘In this house?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where?’

‘The entire wing on the southern side.’

Now Mikal knows why the doors there are of welded metal.

‘When I brought you here there were objections, concerns that you could be a spy. They said they wouldn’t pay the agreed sum for the use of the wing, that they would leave immediately.’

‘I didn’t realise I was so … discussed . I live mostly inside my head.’

‘I told them how the Americans had tortured you at the brick factory, how you had killed two of them, how you lost your fingers to infidel-in-all-but-name Muslims who were fighting for the Americans. So they reconsidered.’

‘I don’t know them but I know you, and I would never betray your trust.’

‘When I told them you were a fugitive, having killed two Americans, they became unhappy for another reason. They said you will betray them to the Americans in exchange for having your own crimes pardoned.’

Mikal smokes, the red light opening and closing before his face.

‘It is an understandable reaction,’ Akbar shrugs. ‘They are being hunted and have to think of every possibility. Two of them worked with you in the gun factory one afternoon and they were very taken by your seriousness. They had had trouble believing you shot anyone with those hands, but when they saw you at work they finally believed it.’ Akbar gets up and turns out the light and walks back to his bed in the darkness. ‘I don’t want you to worry. The Pakistani military is helping the Americans hunt down al-Qaeda heroes in these parts, but those circles of protection mean enough of an early warning in the event of a raid.’

Out there the light of the moon dissolves all hardness from the world and the grasses are becoming milk and murmuring, and the bats are plunging through the leaves in their soft songless flight.

‘Is that why your father doesn’t like me? All these suspicions.’

‘My father likes you,’ Akbar says after a while.