Nadeem Aslam - The Blind Man's Garden

Naheed slows down as she climbs the stairs, taking the last five steps one at a time. She can hear someone in the room ahead of her.

‘Mother, is that you?’ Even though she knows Tara has gone to the haberdasher’s in Anarkali Bazaar.

She enters to discover Sharif Sharif. He stands up from his crouching position beside the bed. In his left hand is the box in which she keeps Mikal’s letters. One of them is in his right hand. It falls onto the bed as he stands up, surprised.

‘I just thought I’d come up and see how things are.’

She looks at him, unable to speak.

‘I wanted to see if you needed something. Do you need anything?’

Naheed shakes her head.

‘How are you managing? I haven’t asked after you for a while.’

Naheed looks at the letter on the counterpane.

He takes a step towards her. ‘Who wrote you those letters? They are all signed “Mikal”?’

She back away and he asks,

‘Is that Mikal as in Basie’s brother?’

She looks at the table where the scissors lie. He notices.

‘I am here to fulfil your every need. You don’t need anyone else.’

She sees how carefully he has placed himself between her and the scissors.

‘I have my family. My mother, my father-in-law.’

‘I will pour all my money at your feet. You could have anything you wanted.’

She shakes her head.

‘I’ll buy you a house, here or in Lahore. You won’t have to live with the other wives downstairs. Come away with me.’ He glances at the box on the floor. ‘Are they love letters?’

‘You have to leave,’ she says.

He goes back to the bed and picks up the letter. ‘Come away with me. I will even pay for Rohan’s eyes.’

There is the sound of someone on the stairs and Naheed moves forward and snatches the letter from him.

‘What are you doing here?’ Tara says to him fiercely as she comes in.

‘I came to see if you needed anything.’

‘We don’t need anything.’ She points to the door. ‘You must leave or I will scream. Now go.’

Buttons, snaps, collar stays and a seam ripper have spilled out of the plastic bag that Tara had let drop onto the floor as she came in. ‘I don’t know why you must pretend to be so innocent,’ he says as he steps over them to leave. ‘Both of you.’

After he has left Tara comes and holds Naheed. ‘What happened?’

Tara is thin. The months have taken so much out of her.

‘Nothing. I am fine,’ Naheed says, folding the letter and placing it in the box, securing it with a rubber band.

‘You have to throw them away,’ Tara says.

She places the box in the suitcase under the bed. She turns the key and takes it out of the lock.

Tara comes forward, holding out an envelope towards her.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s a photograph of the boy you will be engaged to soon.’

About to unseal it, Naheed lifts her finger away from the flap immediately.

Not a day goes by when a living person’s eventual burial site does not call out in a clear and unambiguous voice, ‘O child of Adam, you have forgotten me.’

In Baghdad House, Rohan is reading the Koran for Sofia, recalling the verses from memory.

Allah created four homes for Adam. Eden, the Earth, Purgatory and Paradise. And He has given four homes to the Children of Adam too. The womb, the Earth, the grave, and then Paradise or Hell.

After the burial a person is asked by the angels, who have materialised inside the grave, ‘What do you think of Islam?’ The second question he is asked is, ‘What do you have to say about Muhammad?’ If the answers are satisfactory, he is shown a glimpse of the tortures of Hell. ‘You have been spared this,’ he is told, and a vision of Paradise is granted him. ‘This will be your eventual home.’ The grave widens and seven doors open in its sides to allow the fragrant breezes of Paradise to circulate until Judgement Day. The opposite is true if it is a sinful person: seven entrances to Hell open up and the grave shrinks until the ribs crack past each other, the demons descending on the body to begin the tortures.

Rohan makes his way around her room and stands at the window, listening to the garden. The Prophet said there will be no tree in Paradise whose trunk is not of gold. Paradise, which Sofia will enter after Judgement Day, he is sure. Though about himself he cannot say anything.

He moves his head in the air of the room, aligning his dead eyes for a chink of light. Her voice seems present in the walls. Everything in this room has outlived her: he senses the lamp looking at him with that knowledge, the paintings of flowers on the walls, the ink-stained table. It’s all here except her. It is as though she still exists but is choosing to stay away from his eyes.

*

‘Naheed.’

Tara calls out to the girl.

‘Naheed.’

‘She’s not here, sister-ji,’ Rohan answers.

He comes to the veranda, feeling along the walls. The tips of his fingers are the precise length that his gaze can travel now — his eyes bandaged.

‘I thought she was here,’ Tara says, looking around, and she calls out again.

‘I have been alone all morning. I thought she was with you.’

Tara takes his hand and guides him back into his room. ‘You’ve been alone all morning?’

‘Yes. What time is it?’

‘It’s past noon. I just came in to help her prepare lunch.’ With the beginning of panic in her voice she shouts the girl’s name once more.

‘She’ll be here any minute, I’m sure,’ Rohan says as she lowers him into his chair. He sighs and slowly reaches out for the notebook on the table. ‘I have been trying to write.’

The pages are empty because, unknown to him, the pen doesn’t have any ink in it.

‘Where could she be?’ Tara says, moving towards the window.

‘Perhaps she’s gone to the bazaar.’

‘She would have told me, brother-ji. Her behaviour has been somewhat erratic these past few days but she wouldn’t go anywhere without telling me. Or leave you here all by yourself.’

She enters the garden hoping to see her step out of a pocket of greenery, dressed in ash, and she walks towards the pond where the water lilies burn in the sunlight and then recoils at the thought that enters her mind on seeing the moss floating at the water’s edge, looking like long hair.

As she cooks in the kitchen — and attends to the disorder Rohan has unknowingly created in making himself breakfast or pouring a glass of water — she remains alert to every movement out there, every sound.

By the time Yasmin and Basie return from St Joseph’s, at three, she is close to tears.

‘I am sure there’s a perfectly simple explanation,’ Basie says. ‘Don’t be alarmed.’

‘Yes. She’ll be here soon,’ Yasmin says.

‘Have you asked the neighbours?’

She shakes her head.

‘I’ll go,’ says Yasmin.

Tara reacts with pain. ‘Don’t.’

‘Someone might have seen her, Aunt Tara.’

‘No,’ she says firmly. ‘We have to be careful who we ask. If we tell them she is missing, the thought will enter their minds that she has a secret life, and later they’ll easily accuse her of immorality and unchastity.’

Yasmin half-heartedly comes back to her chair.

‘Let’s just wait for a little while longer,’ Basie says. ‘I am sure she’ll be back any minute.’

As the afternoon advances, Tara ties on her burka and goes back to her room five streets away. Before climbing up she stops to exchange a few words with Sharif Sharif’s wives but they don’t mention Naheed. On a shelf in her room there are stacks of clothes, folded as neatly as newspapers. They are the sewing work she has finished over the past week, and she carries these around the neighbourhood now, taking them to the customers’ houses. In each house she mentions Naheed’s name several times, with a pretend casualness, in case someone says something about having seen the girl, in case someone remembers something Naheed had said recently and provides a clue to her disappearance.