Nadeem Aslam - The Blind Man's Garden

Ahmed leans his head against a pillar and closes his eyes, his mind entering the nightmare of the battlefield yet again, in Afghanistan last autumn, the place where he’d learned what two hundred corpses look like. He had had to dig his way out from under them after the guns and rockets and missiles had fallen silent, emerging into the light that revealed the bodies full of insect scribble, the mouths that would ignite their red lament for him in the sunrise every morning from then on, the eyes ruined but still dreaming of returning to whatever Egypts, Algerias, Yemens, Pakistans and Saudi Arabias they had known, rotting men who were true believers and read the Koran as ravenously as they devoured meat and sugar and milk, and men who came to the jihad because, well, to be honest, Ahmed, there wasn’t much else to do, and men who thought of death to the exclusion of all matters so that in the end life was easy to give up. They lay all around him then, slain, slaughtered, stinking, cleansed at last of the burden of being who they were on earth, the souls pulled clean out of them, the arms twisted, the heads severed, the feet separated from legs that had been separated from torsos, and the dark decaying mulch of the names, Omar Fareed Abdul Yusuf Khalid Salman Faisal Shakeel Musharaf Anwar Imran Rashid Saleem Hussein Noman Ibrahim Mansoor Ikram Mushtaq Nim Asim Taha Hanif, and he stood above their corpses, puffing out wide flowers of breath into the Afghanistani air, a dawn light so pure and undeceiving it might have been the dawn that Adam saw. For an instant he wanted Allah to appear and explain it all to him, not just watch from His high distance through unappalled eyes. He hadn’t known he could summon such deep feelings, and in his madness he had wondered whether this earth was nothing more than a toy with six billion moving parts for Him. A thought for which he later asked forgiveness. And he was enraged at the peace that reigned at that very moment on other parts of the planet, and in grief he had cursed the lives that were continuing uninterrupted elsewhere …

‘Brother Ahmed,’ one of the women says as she approaches him. ‘I have something to suggest.’

He opens his eyes. ‘What is it, sister?’

‘It regards the time when the police will surround the building and open fire on us.’

‘Yes?’

‘We should make one of the children stand up on the window-sill wherever the firing is heaviest. It will silence the guns.’

Ahmed says after a few moments, ‘I will give it some thought, sister. Thank you.’

‘It has nothing to do with me,’ she says, her voice serious and earnest. ‘The solution was revealed to me by an angel during sleep last night.’

Her husband had gone to Kashmir some years ago. She had set off after him, spending two months of snowblindness and winter windburn in the mountains, evading Indian and Pakistani bullets. But she had come upon him eventually — he had stepped on a landmine and was lying unconscious beside a boulder. He didn’t survive and her dearest wish is to follow him into martyrdom.

She returns to sit in a multi-cusped arch with the other young woman — who is among those from whom the truth has been withheld, who think they are on their way to attack a government building instead of a school. The pistol she has been given does not function. She had worked as a cook in the house of a Shia cleric and had poisoned him, so her brave-naturedness and commitment to the cause of true Islam is undoubted, but there are doubts about her willingness to do the truly unpleasant for the long-term benefit.

Beside the two women is a heap of smashed glass bottles. It is what remains of the shards that are packed around the eighteen bombs being taken into St Joseph’s.

The twenty-fourth man has now arrived. As lethal as a krait, in his youth he had murdered two men during a dispute over a woman’s honour but had then discovered peace through Islam. Fighting the Russians in Afghanistan his arm was blown off and later his son was born without an arm, as though he had passed on the mark of holy sacrifice.

At just past seven o’clock they get into the truck and begin the journey towards Heer, avoiding the Grand Trunk Road as well as the other main routes, those sitting in the back of the truck feeling the jolts and bumps of the country lanes and dust tracks, the potholed minor roads.

Ahmed, behind the steering wheel, had hoped to avoid being stopped by the traffic police, but as soon as they approach Heer that is exactly what happens.

‘Can I see your documents?’ the policeman says to Ahmed. ‘Aren’t you aware that this is not officially a road?’

The policeman does not extend the hand to receive the forged documents Ahmed proffers. All he wants is two or three hundred rupees and Ahmed gives it to him and they move on.

Soon after half past eight the main gate of the school is within sight, the words on the arch above it telling everyone that St Joseph is the Patron Saint of the Dying, of the Fathers of Families, of Social Justice and Workingmen.

Ahmed stops the truck and leaps out to help an aged beggar woman cross the road, remembering what Abu Darda — one of the Prophet’s forty-two nominated transcribers of the Koran — had said: ‘Do a good deed before battle. For one fights with one’s deeds.’

*

Basie parks in the narrow lane that runs behind the school, the shade from the dense bougainvillea overhead preventing the car’s interior from baking during the course of the day. He enters by the small door in the boundary wall and takes the path lined with cypress trees towards his office. There will be dyed eggs hidden in the tall grasses at Easter here. He enters the room and stops.

‘Naheed.’

She stands looking at him. Her veil is arranged carelessly on her head, one end of it trailing on the floor.

‘Naheed. What are you doing here? Where have you been?’

She continues to stare at him and he moves towards her. She struggles to speak, as though she hasn’t spoken for days.

‘Mikal is alive,’ she says at last.

‘What?’ He approaches and puts his arms around her. ‘Naheed, where have you been for two weeks?’

‘Did you hear what I said? Mikal is alive.’

‘What are you talking about?’

She looks thinner and exhausted.

‘There’s no one in his grave.’

‘His grave? His grave is in Peshawar.’ He is thinking fast, trying to understand. ‘You went to Peshawar?’

She nods. ‘I wanted to see it. Basie, there’s no one buried there.’

‘How do you know?’

‘It’s just an empty pit. People say the Pakistani followers of the Taliban and al-Qaeda fired rockets into that grave, to stop women from coming there. But no remains were discovered there.’

Basie raises his hand to his forehead.

‘I saw nothing but a scorched pit. Some people say it wasn’t the work of al-Qaeda or the Taliban, but of the American soldiers, who secretly took away the body to conduct tests on the bones to identify him. “Even our dead are not safe,” the women were saying.’

‘You saw the empty pit?’

‘Yes. The earth was black from the rocket fire.’

‘It doesn’t mean he’s not dead.’

‘He is alive, Basie.’

He looks at her. ‘When did you get back?’

‘Just now. I arrived at the bus station and was on my way home in a rickshaw but when we passed the school I got out. I knew you and Yasmin would be here by now. So I came in. Just a minute ago.’

‘How did you pay for the journey?’ On the first Monday of every month Yasmin goes to the bank and withdraws money for Rohan’s household expenses. The rubber-banded roll is kept at the back of a wardrobe, in the inside pocket of one of Sofia’s paisley jackets. When Naheed went missing Tara had counted the money. But it was intact.