Nadeem Aslam - The Blind Man's Garden

When she returns to Rohan’s house it is almost dusk and the stars are beginning to come out in the east, where it is darkest.

She is sitting with Yasmin and Basie in the kitchen when Rohan makes his way towards them through the banana grove. ‘Where is Naheed?’ he asks from out there.

Basie goes out and offers him his arm to lead him in but Rohan refuses to take even a single step. ‘Where is Naheed?’ The voice is louder now.

Basie makes to say something but then stops.

‘Answer me, someone. I know you are all here. Basie? Yasmin? Tara? Where’s my Naheed?’

‘She’s not here, Father,’ Yasmin says.

‘Where is she?’

‘She’ll be here soon, brother-ji,’ Tara says.

‘What time is it?’

Nothing but silence from them. Basie wondering whether it is possible to lie to him as he had tried to earlier. But the night prayers have been called from the minaret so he must have a very good idea of the hour.

‘I said what time is it? Eight? Eight thirty?’

‘It’s just gone past nine, Father.’

He reacts as though a sword has fallen onto the back of his neck. ‘Why are you just sitting here? Why aren’t you out there looking for her?’ He turns around and rushes through the banana trees into the garden, seeing with the light of his grief. Terror is not knowing where the pain is coming from — and so in his desperation he begins to shout, the word echoing through every dark canopy and trunk, turning in every direction, batting at various things. As Yasmin and Basie try to help him, Tara sits holding the envelope containing the photograph of Naheed’s prospective husband, still unopened.

*

At midnight Yasmin and Basie are sitting on the steps of the veranda. An insect-swirled candle burning beside them. There was rain earlier and hundreds of snails are roaming the garden, their shells conical in shape, and tiny, no bigger than the exposed lead of a well sharpened pencil. The bodies are bright yellow.

‘She’ll return,’ he tells her.

‘I wish Father would stop insisting we look in the pond and the river.’

‘He can still frighten me when he is angry.’

‘Me too. We should keep reminding ourselves we are twenty-eight years old.’ She leans her head against his shoulder in tiredness. ‘After Mother died he’d make me pray five times a day for her. Even Jeo when he was five or six was being made to do it. He was so strict, a disciplinarian. I joke about it with him now sometimes, and he claims not to remember being severe.’

He looks towards Rohan’s room. From a confused anger Rohan had slipped into melancholy and despair. Saying this place was ill-fated. This building defines the line of the trench in which the horses were buried during the Mutiny. The surrounding lands were gifted to Rohan’s great-grandfather by the British as a reward for his loyalty during the rebellion. But in the decades since 1857, several members of the bloodline refused the tainted inheritance. Businesses begun on it would fail. Locusts descended on the wheat fields. Orchards rotted. Rohan too had wanted nothing of it, and only at Sofia’s pragmatic insistence had decided to build Ardent Spirit here, only at her insistence had he used the parcel on the other side of the river to build the bigger building. It is possible that he gave it all away to Ahmed the Moth with relief.

Basie inhales the damp scents in the air, the cold moonlight. The Rangoon creeper above them has been adding new leaves to itself every day this month, a dense opaque green, branch crowding branch, while the new leaves on the banyan and the peepal are a soft red.

‘What are you thinking?’

‘I am thinking when will I see my husband smile again.’

She feels him hold his breath at this, the mechanism of the body becoming still.

‘I am sorry,’ he says after a while.

‘And when will I hear my husband use a swear word? Mikal said you taught him such filthy things as a child.’

He tightens his arm around her. ‘Motherfucker.’

She gives a small sleepy laugh.

When Rohan brought them home all those years ago, the ten-year-old Mikal had a book of constellations and the eighteen-year-old Basie was dragging the trunkful of his father’s jazz records. This veranda was where she had seen him for the first time.

‘I am married to a Pakistani nicknamed after Count Basie,’ she says now, wanting him to talk, to be comforted by his voice and to make his own mind disappear towards another topic for however brief a period. Even if she has heard what he will say many times already.

‘Hey, hey,’ he responds, heavy-eyed but play-acting to make her happy; if he had the energy he would smile. ‘Jazz and Pakistan have a long history. Chet Baker was married to a Pakistani woman. Halema Alli. There is a song named “Halema”, for her, and their son is named Chesney Aftab.’

‘Fiction.’

‘She is the beautiful woman with him in the famous William Claxton photographs. I have a print of one hanging on the wall at home. The woman who is now my wife bought it for me on my twenty-first birthday …’

*

Six days later he walks into the police station on the Grand Trunk Road and asks to see the house officer. As he waits to be shown into the office he wonders what is occurring in the room on the other side of the wall directly in front of him. It is difficult to suppress a shudder every time the police solve a crime in Pakistan. There is no knowing if the confession is genuine, and there is no knowing how many innocents have been tortured to get even that.

When the government began hunting Communists in 1980 — for criticising it and the USA — Basie and Mikal’s father had gone underground and then one day the police had taken the child Basie away to make the father give himself up. Basie still remembers being held up towards the rotating ceiling fan at this very police station, as they tried to force him to tell them where his father was hiding. A plot had been uncovered — some of the younger comrades were planning to kidnap American citizens in Pakistan. ‘Your father is doing this to you, not us,’ the policemen told Basie as they struck him. When he came home his legs and face were blue and his mother’s initial thought was that they had spilled ink onto him for some reason.

Now Basie is shown into an office and he finds the police inspector seated in a black leather chair behind a large desk. Beside him on the floor squats an old emaciated woman, toothless, her meagre hair in a short plait. Her eyes are closed and she’s holding onto the man’s khaki-clad knee. She’s perfectly still, her face wholly expressionless, and his ignoring of her is total — it is as though she is not there.

‘How long has your sister-in-law been missing?’ the inspector asks.

‘Since Thursday.’ He cannot help but glance towards the woman.

‘Why have you come to report it only now?’ the inspector asks.

‘We thought she’d gone to visit relatives.’

‘Does she do that often?’

‘What?’

‘Does she do that often? Go to visit relatives without telling you?’

‘No.’

The sparrow-like woman must be about eighty. Is she begging the release of a grandson picked up on a false charge? Begging the police to do something about a missing son? A daughter threatened with gang rape by enemies?

Basie wonders if he recognises the inspector. Was he the one who beat him?

‘Your sister-in-law is a widow, you say.’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you considered the possibility that she has run away with a yaar?’ He uses the lewd Punjabi word for a woman’s lover.

‘She wouldn’t do that.’

The chart hanging behind the inspector lists the six qualities a Pakistani citizen can expect to find in every member of the police force.