Nadeem Aslam - The Blind Man's Garden

Naheed touches her empty earlobes to indicate that she has sold her earrings.

‘You’ve been gone two whole weeks.’

‘I didn’t want to come back, I just wanted to keep going. And I also got lost, several times.’

‘I wish you had told us.’

She shakes her head.

‘I’ll get someone to take you home. And I’d better telephone Father right now.’ He moves towards the phone but stops, both of them hearing the unison shouts of ‘ Allahu Akbar! ’ from outside, followed by automatic gunfire.

‘The worse, the better,’ Ahmed murmurs, behind the steering wheel of the truck. ‘The more ruthless we are, the more visible our fury.’

Every morning two-thirds of the 1,100 staff and pupils have arrived by eight thirty. The youngest children are the four-year-olds from the nursery, the oldest sixteen. A few of them notice in passing that the guard is absent from his post outside the gate this morning.

The head of Mecca House gets out of the truck’s passenger side and walks up to the gate and opens it and the truck moves onto the premises.

Ahmed, holding a Kalashnikov and with a black hood over his head, leaps out among the children. He is wearing gloves to hide the flame scars from when he had emulated Ahmed the Moth as a child. A six-year-old is the first to see him, a fraction of a second before the others do, and he has watched enough movies to immediately raise his arms in the air.

The twenty-eight men and two women who were sitting locked in the back of the truck emerge and fan out onto the colonnaded verandas, while the head of Mecca House — a hood now pulled over his head too — begins to close the gate.

The sound of boots slamming onto the floors. Three hooded figures run towards the three other points of entry into the building, pushing the puzzled children aside, while behind them a dozen men have raised their weapons and — with those proclamations of ‘Allahu Akbar!’ — opened fire into the air.

It is all done with such speed and efficiency that it takes a while to become apparent that the school is under attack, the panic beginning.

Running towards Father Mede’s office, leaping over the wild jasmine hedges, the head of Cordoba House sees two fifteen-year-old boys escaping over the boundary wall — the gardener’s grandsons — and he stops and takes aim and shoots at their legs, hearing their screams as they drop and land on the other side.

The only laws they are breaking are shallow laws, the head of Ottoman House tells himself as he tries to locate Basie, Kyra having given them specific instructions regarding him. It feels unreal but what is occurring here is believable at the deepest level, has a perfect legitimacy and even beauty. Any incongruity is a shallow incongruity.

*

In the assembly hall, angels hang from the ceiling. Only a few have been raised to their eventual height, the rest hovering from varying lengths of wire. They hover in many attitudes. The stiff white robes of the Man Cloaked in Linen, as Gabriel is described in the Book of Ezekiel, are low enough to be just a few inches above an adult’s head. The unnamed Angel of Presence, who told Moses the story of Creation, is suspended at an acute angle and appears to be plunging headfirst towards the floor.

Half an hour after the gates are shut, all the children and teachers have been brought to the hall. The children, gathered on one side of the hall, are like bodies rolling in a sea-swell. The lower halves of the terrorists’ hoods have a stuffed look due to their beards, and they are firing bullets towards the ceiling, perhaps in an effort to curtail the screams of the children, perhaps in an effort to make them scream louder so they can be heard outside. Or perhaps they just wish to destroy the angels as distasteful idols, splinters of coloured wood coming away.

The noise is deafening. A hooded figure walks up to Basie who is squatting beside an unconscious seven-year-old. ‘Where is the white man?’ he asks but he is barely audible above the tumult. ‘Tell everyone to shut up,’ he shouts at Basie, and adds, ‘Where is Father Mede?’

‘This boy needs water,’ Basie says and reaches for a plastic flask lying on the floor a few feet away.

‘Get up and tell them to be quiet.’

‘Tell your men to stop firing,’ the deputy headmaster approaches and says. The undeveloped quality in the terrorist’s voice — he is almost a boy — has led to the teacher thinking of a student in need of discipline.

The terrorist grabs the teacher by the lapel, a tinge of death in the dark mask. ‘Watch your manner, you … you running dog of imperialism.’

‘You don’t know what imperialism means,’ the incensed man says. ‘You’re too stupid.’

The eyes watch him through the holes in the black hood. ‘Where did you learn to look down on people? One of those big villas in Model Town?’

‘I grew up in a one-room house in old Heer, and I still live there. My father was a car mechanic and I am proud of him and grateful to him for teaching me to respect those who deserve my respect.’

‘You don’t think we deserve your respect?’

‘I know you don’t.’

‘We are warriors of Allah.’

‘You are thugs with Korans.’

The terrorist walks him by his necktie to the centre of the assembly hall. ‘Everyone must be quiet at once,’ he shouts, to no avail. He repeats his words but the children continue to scream, some of the four- and five-year-olds actually shrieking with terror at the guns bursting towards the ceiling.

‘I will remember you,’ the deputy headmaster says with the starkness of a last prayer as the terrorist puts the barrel of his pistol to the back of his head and pulls the trigger. This bullet, entering a human body instead of empty air, sounds different from others and the effect on the assembly hall is immediate. The dead man falls to the floor in complete silence.

The shot leaves an echo under every skin. Over the next ten minutes, after the dead body has been removed — Basie wishing he could hold his hand over the eyes of each one of the children to stop them from seeing — the males and females are separated to either side of the hall and they sit in rows with the stillness and silence of hunted animals. The women and girls are made to face the wall so as not to provoke lustful thoughts in any of the males, and all boys have been told to take off their neckties, a symbol of the West.

‘Where is the white man?’

When Basie says, ‘He’s not here today, he had to go to Islamabad,’ several of the terrorists are beside themselves with wrath.

‘He’s not here today,’ Basie says again. He takes a step towards the hooded figure closest to him. ‘Look, these wounded people need medical attention.’

‘We want the teacher named Jibrael, known as Basie. Which one of you is he? He must be made an example of too.’

Before Basie can identify himself the English teacher says from behind him, ‘He’s not here either. He doesn’t usually come in until just before nine.’

*

Moving fast, the hooded figures are wiring the assembly hall with bombs, grenades and rockets, the skills taught to some of them by the Pakistani military for use in Kashmir. They ask children to hold the bombs while they climb onto chairs and weave a network of wires between the angels, each bomb slightly bigger than a briefcase and wrapped in either electrical or clear tape, this second allowing a glimpse of the ball bearings and glass shards packed inside. Once the cat’s cradle is ready, the bombs are hung from it at various points. At the only unlocked door out of the hall there is a bomb attached to an improvised switch made of two pieces of plywood, one of the terrorists keeping his foot on it to prevent it from exploding. It is as though the very soul of each hostage has been packed with dynamite.