Nadeem Aslam: The Blind Man's Garden

Rohan hadn’t known that she had included her own portrait in the mural for the eight walls and two ceilings of her friend’s home, the coloured skin of the rooms. Rohan would set out across the city to locate them, systematically entering the narrow lanes and alleyways, arriving at his destination several weeks later. ‘I have permission to speak about one of the eight angels that hold up Allah’s throne,’ the Prophet had said. ‘So large is he that the distance between his earlobe and shoulder will require a journey of seven hundred years.’ And the giant head next to Sofia’s portrait belonged to one of the eight angels.

Naheed takes a gulp of air and extinguishes the lamp, standing perfectly still in the night, the smoke withering around her.

She listens, determined to locate the trapped bird that had called out from within the madness of suffering. But there is only silence now, not even a halting fragment. Ali! Ali! A dervish, having renounced dealings with all words except that one, never utters another, in any circumstance … The sentence enters her mind from a book she had been looking at earlier. Her gaze is drifting across the sky where the moon sits in a great cold ring as she recalls more and more words. Only one thing matters, only one word. If we speak, it is because we have not found that thing, nor shall find it .

*

Mikal has never stopped being surprised at how heavy a bullet is, given its size.

He is in the high room he rents in an alley winding off the Grand Trunk Road. The first time he dreamed of Jeo dying, he woke up to find the air of this room full of his frightened shouts. It was just before the wedding, and the nightmares had continued over the following months.

He takes a bag of bullets and various other items from the cupboard and places them in a canvas rucksack, getting ready to catch the same overnight train as Jeo and Rohan. A Monday evening during a world war. He is wearing a navy-blue sweater and over it the black jacket of a Western suit, and in a holster under the sweater is the M9 Beretta handgun.

His parents had lived in this apartment, and he himself had lived here until the age of ten. Almost two months after his mother’s death he had opened the door to a dignified and imposing stranger who wore a sherwani frock coat and a Jinnah cap. Mikal remembers him saying that he had come to look at the pictures on the walls, remembers staring at the man wordlessly and then stepping back to allow him in. The stranger was transfixed by one painted woman in particular, the face situated between a high wall of books and a chair. He stood before her as though he wished to memorise her. And then his clothes rustled as he lowered himself into the chair and gently began to question Mikal, asking his name, asking him where the adults were. Mikal, who hadn’t spoken since the funeral, told him that he and his eighteen-year-old brother were living there by themselves.

‘Mikal, my name is Rohan,’ the man said. ‘I am here to take you and your brother home with me.’ He pointed to the woman on the wall. ‘She sent me.’

Mikal looks at his wristwatch. He heard the word ‘death’ thirteen times in the half hour he spent at the charity headquarters when he went to sign up, and ever since then he has felt himself move closer and closer to the unknown. According to a newspaper a brick from the pulverised home of Mullah Omar has been flown to the United States as a war trophy for the White House. And, according to another, on 19 September a CIA paramilitary officer was told by his chief at Langley, Virginia, ‘I want bin Laden’s head shipped in a box filled with dry ice. I want to show it to the President. I promised him I would do that.’

A candle flickers in an alcove near him as he stands at the window. There is no wind and it is dark and the constellations are burning with a frozen fire, dripping fragile light onto Heer, his city. He scans the high view before him to see which other areas of Heer are without electricity tonight. His city within his fraught and poor nation, here in the Third World. He looks into the far distance to the right of him, towards Rohan’s neighbourhood. A memory comes to him of the day he was singing and she had lifted his hands and put them on her ears, one on each side, holding them tightly in place. She stood listening to the song that travelled into her through his arms instead of through air, flowing down his bone, blood and muscle. There was nothing between her and the song but him and it would become a ritual between two lovers, a custom to be repeated and a game of wonder.

Switching on the transistor radio, he lies down on the sheetless mattress on the cement floor and listens to the news, his eyes closed. The Taliban are still in power in Afghanistan but the Americans have sent in Special Forces soldiers — guerrilla warriors who are building alliances among the local population and orchestrating rebellion. And all the while the air and the sky are being traversed by jets and bombs weighing tens of thousands of pounds. And that is where Jeo wants to go.

‘Are you sure about this?’ Mikal had asked him when he came to see him here earlier today.

‘Yes.’

‘Did you hear how the Taliban are putting inexperienced Pakistani boys on the frontlines, where they are getting slaughtered?’

‘The organisation I am dealing with has nothing to do with combat. We are not going there to fight.’

Mikal had nodded and said, ‘All right.’

Now he looks at the wristwatch again. Shouldering his rucksack, he pinches off the candle without looking and after locking the door he climbs down the stairs and goes out into the dark street. Remembering too late about the radio, but not turning back. Thinking of it filling the room with song and news until the batteries die.

*

Any minute now the rickshaw will arrive to take them to the train station. Rohan listens for the driver’s horn as he enters Sofia’s room and discovers two large books of maps lying open on the table, their colours brilliant even in this light. And even in this light he notices that a number of pages have been torn out of them. He wonders when it had happened.

He touches the colours, almost in farewell. He is sixty years old and his eyes have been deteriorating for almost two decades now. Five more years of looking is what remains, at most. After that illumination will slip into mystery. He must bathe his eyes in belladonna and honey thinned in dew and must avoid light beyond a certain strength, but even now there are durations, each lasting several moments, when a shadow can appear white to him, or the entire sky green, his hands black as coal. There are small indigo shapes like landmasses across his vision. Or suddenly there is a golden absence of everything, a luminous annihilation he perceives even with his eyelids shut.

He has come in here to select something he might wish to read during the journey. This is Baghdad House, wrapped thickly in the rose of Iraq, the two rooms made into one for Sofia. He carries the atlases to the other side of the long interior. Two hundred boxes filled with books had arrived at the house the previous week. The truck driver who brought them produced a letter addressed to Rohan and Sofia. One of their former students — from the earliest days of Ardent Spirit — had recently passed away. He had written the letter shortly before dying and in it he said that the couple had instilled a keen love of learning in him, that he had gone on to collect thousands of books over the course of his life. And these he was bequeathing to Ardent Spirit, remembering how impoverished the school library had been in those days. Twenty of the boxes were placed here in Sofia’s room and the rest distributed elsewhere in the house, a corridor suddenly narrowing to half its size.