Nadeem Aslam - The Blind Man's Garden

‘Oh God.’ He is grateful eyes are incapable of seeing souls.

‘Do you remember you told me the fuse of the headlights can be replaced with a twenty-two-calibre bullet? The bullet heats up and fires itself as if from a gun.’

*

Akbar spends almost an hour looking for him, calling out in the darkness, Mikal having turned away from him and run into the bandit hills, and he stays hidden with his revulsion, the cold fury and confusion. He watches Akbar get into the car and drive away at last. His mind uncentring, he wanders in the darkness and sees a stream flowing upwards at dawn, but realises it is flowing downwards after all when he looks again, the sky full of quivering incidents of daybreak, the light slipping on the hillsides, inventing colours.

Early morning — and he walks out of the hills into Megiddo’s bazaar and buys a cup of tea and then enters a shop and asks for four aspirin tablets, swallowing them with water from a tap on the outside wall, but they are chalk and he spits them out and stands looking at the shop. In another shop across the street he waits for his turn behind schoolchildren buying sweets and small booklets containing mantar spells to help them pass exams. After swallowing the aspirin he leans against the pillar that serves as a bus stop and waits to begin the journey to Heer, while a small child with a very solemn expression — as if visited by something terrible — comes up to him and tries to sell him two bent iron nails.

On the second afternoon of the siege, Rohan, Yasmin and Tara are standing in the crowd looking towards St Joseph’s, the chaos and fear out here no doubt matched by the chaos and fear inside the building, the interplay of glances, no one knowing how to drain the event of its power. They are under a tarpaulin that someone has spread from a silk-cotton tree and the tip of the fibreglass nuclear monument. The terrorists opened fire from the building soon after the siege began, to force everyone away, and this is the safest distance. And here they stand and listen and watch, face to face with this demon onto which sacred Arabic verses have been painted to make it blend in with the rest of their religion.

There is a dust-edged wind.

Yesterday all schools and colleges in and around Heer had closed at the news of St Joseph’s, in case it was a co-ordinated attack on several institutions.

‘Has there been any change?’ Rohan asks, his head bent as he stands. Because of the wind the trees around them sound as though things are crashing into them.

‘No, brother-ji,’ Tara says.

He sense the two women on either side of him, full of that care beyond exhaustion that makes every woman in the world a heroine.

A large concentration of army, police and other emergency services have established a cordon around the school and the area has acquired the look of a zone of infection.

Tara’s eyes are tired from the wait and search for Naheed, the endless night hours spent looking for her in her mind, to think where she might be. Now she hopes she might see Naheed among the people gathered around her, raising herself on tiptoe to look over shoulders every few minutes. Her knees no longer ache and to her it is evidence of the love Allah feels towards her, giving her a new pain but balancing it by easing another one.

At 11 a.m. yesterday, two and a half hours after it was shut, the school gate had opened.

‘I think the siege is ending,’ Tara had said and she had immediately turned her face to the sky in gratitude.

‘It’s Basie,’ Yasmin said, moving through the crowd for a clearer and closer view.

Yasmin and Tara had watched as a soldier approached Basie and talked to him and received a piece of paper from his hand, with several people shouting, ‘Run towards us,’ at Basie.

He had turned and gone back inside and the gate had closed. Five minutes later they heard that the paper in Basie’s hand was a list of the terrorists’ demands. Folded within it was another sheet that was said to be a message to the entire planet.

‘They want Father Mede to come to the school,’ Yasmin told Rohan and Tara. ‘The note says, “If Mede presents himself to us we will release all children under thirteen years of age, except the Shias, Christians and Ahmadiyas.”’

But Father Mede has not been heard from since the siege began.

*

The phone lines into the school have been severed by the terrorists. The number of the satellite phone Ahmed carries was given out with the list of demands, and now he stands in the library, talking to the commissioner, reiterating his demands, telling him once again that there will be no need to send in food for the children, because the children have all announced a hunger strike in sympathy with the hostage takers’ cause. He hangs up with the warning, ‘Do not try to storm the building.’

He stands still for a few moments.

The library has been trashed, the books full of Western knowledge pulled out of the shelves and thrown onto the floor, the page upon page loud with lies about the story of the world, nothing but the blood-soaked abstractions of the so-called civilised world. As ephemeral to him as the Pyramids because they are un-Islamic and unjust.

He hasn’t slept for two days. The floor-to-ceiling windows of the library are draped in trumpet vine, thick clusters of orange flowers hanging from the tendrils, full of bees and glistening black ants, and a plaque informs the children that the plant was originally named after the Abbé Jean-Paul Bignon who was Louis XIV’s librarian, and that its wood when cut transversely is marked with a cross . All the pupils at this school are too young and impressionable to be taught anything but the Koran and the sayings of Muhammad. At his feet are dictionaries containing all the many meanings of the rose, and the seventeen words Urdu has for rain, and they are a blasphemy because they do not refer to Allah anywhere, just as the science books don’t. Why not say that two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom come together if Allah wills to form a molecule of water? Through his speeding mind runs the text of the statement he has sent out with his list of demands. His outrage transmuted into language, the pain fixed into durable words. This is a message from the warriors of Islam to all the world’s Infidels, Crusaders, Jews, and their operatives in the Muslim Kinhood. We are the followers of Allah’s mission and let it be known that that mission is the spreading of the truth, not killing people. Peace not war. We ourselves are victims of murder, massacre and incarceration. The West’s invasion of Afghanistan — the only true Islamic country in the world — is an unprecedented global crime, and our brothers and sisters and children are being killed as we write this, abducted and taken away to be tortured. Jihad is obligatory under these circumstances, as it is for taking back Spain, Sicily, Hungary, Cyprus, Ethiopia and Russia, and for the restoration of Islamic rule over all parts of India … These are not mere words. Out there is the truth of them played out with living figures, taking on dimensions through his energy and force, and he stands with his forehead pressed against a wall, his head rolling from side to side as he tries to breathe with a regular rhythm.

The second phone in his pocket rings and the delighted Kyra offers him his congratulations.

‘The news has been spreading,’ he says. ‘It’s on every national TV channel now. But they are belittling your achievement by giving the incorrect figure for the hostages.’

They claim that there are only three hundred or so people inside.

Yesterday Ahmed was in the assembly hall at ten thirty in the morning when the man with his foot on the detonator had turned up his radio to listen to the news. The newsreader said that a school in Heer was under siege and then lied that ‘negotiations are under way’. It was the fifth story in the bulletin and was given only two lines, and the holy warriors were enraged when it was said that only fifty or sixty pupils and teachers were inside the school. Two of his hooded companions had gone into the corridor and begun to slam chairs and tables into the walls, howling with tetherless fury, screaming, ‘Jihad! Jihad! Jihad!’ until others from every corner of the school had joined in and they had continued until hoarse. The man with his foot on the pedal of the bomb had looked as though he would get up and join them.