Nadeem Aslam - The Blind Man's Garden

‘You must help me put an end to it.’

‘I have to go.’

Basie grabs him by the arm. ‘Do some of the others feel like you?’

The man tries to free himself and raises his gun towards Basie, perhaps in reflex, perhaps in genuine affront at his audacity.

But Basie refuses to let go. ‘Find me during the night. Come and talk to me when you see I am alone.’ The man wrenches himself free and walks away with a firm-footed pace, the swagger of a street tough.

Michael took Adam to Heaven in a chariot of flames and buried him after his death with the help of the angels Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel. And Basie looks up at him as he enters the hall, thinking of Mikal, alive out there somewhere.

*

Father Mede heard about the siege an hour after it began. He was in his hotel room in Islamabad, waiting for a former pupil and now friend who was arriving on the flight from England with the various medicines his aged body needs to stay functional, some of which he has difficulty acquiring here in Pakistan. Chlorphen-amine, pantoprazole, mebeverine, codeine phosphate, irbesartan, amoxicillin, ezetimibe, metoclopramide, Dicloflex, finasteride, doxazosin … A list as long as a catalogue of Homeric ships. He tried to get back to Heer but was prevented by the authorities. His driver and car vanished and when he tried to arrange a taxi the telephone in his hotel room lost its dial tone. In the lobby, full of policemen, he was told that all phone lines in the hotel were down and would you very kindly return to your room, sir. It was only a few hundred miles away but he might as well have been in Borneo, Adelaide or Rio de Janeiro.

The government obviously did not want a white person being visibly linked with the affair. His frustration had turned to anger and some substance was administered to him through the cup of tea he asked for at noon. He was unconscious for almost thirty-six hours.

Now, 2 a.m, he is on the Grand Trunk Road, being driven towards Heer.

He is being followed by several vehicles that have made no attempt to disguise the pursuit. Their guns, their everywhere eyes. He had woken just after eleven this evening. There were puncture marks on his arms where he must have been injected with further drugs. Demanding to be let out of the hotel, he was told that he was free to go to Heer if he could. His driver and car had then appeared, the driver telling him that the vehicle had been mysteriously towed away and that he was sent from place to place by the authorities as he tried to locate it, that when he arrived at the hotel yesterday evening he was told Father Mede had left.

The public phones he approaches are always occupied, the person engaged in a long conversation, and thirteen times they have been flagged down by police for ‘random’ security checks. There have been seven long detours, four of them ending in culs de sac.

Around four in the morning, as he turns off the Grand Trunk Road towards St Joseph’s a police car cuts him off and he is told that if he tries to go near the building he will be arrested immediately. He sits wordlessly looking out of the car window for several minutes, imagining the rain falling on the frangipani tree that Sofia had sent to be planted outside his office, the flowers large and beautiful like mysteries in a tale. Then he asks the driver to turn around. An hour later he is still trying to gain access to his home or a telephone, encountering repeated roadblocks and obstructions. As he stops at a roadside tea stall someone says that another school on the other side of Heer has been attacked with grenades, bombs and gunfire.

‘But that is a Muslim school,’ Father Mede’s driver says upon hearing the name. ‘Do they really want to destroy all schools, not just the Christian ones?’

‘It must be the commandos rehearsing the storming of St Joseph’s,’ Father Mede tells him. ‘It is the only explanation.’

‘They will kill everyone inside,’ the driver responds, and begins to murmur the verses of the Koran under his breath to avert disaster. And he reassures Father Mede. ‘Allah is a friend to the broken-hearted.’

*

On the outskirts of Heer, Kyra opens the back door of the Land Rover and gets in, the saluki jumping in after him.

‘Whose idea was the siege?’ the man behind the steering wheel asks. A sense of massed impending force in the voice.

‘It was suggested by six students and I approved it.’

‘What are their names? I want —’

‘Let me explain,’ Kyra says.

‘I want you to write down the names of all thirty-two people in the building and if you interrupt me again I’ll empty a syringe of mercury in your skull.’

The man hands Kyra a small notebook over his shoulder, without looking back.

‘I hope they are not stupid enough to reveal their faces to anyone. If any civilian has seen them without the hoods, I want that person or persons to be isolated, so they can be eliminated during the raid. Was the school’s guard the only person approached during the planning?’

‘Yes.’

‘He’ll be found in a sack near Muridke in about an hour.’

The man has short hair and precise short sideburns, the nape razored clean and neatly finished, much like Kyra’s own. He wears a sky-blue shalwar kameez made of the fabric KT. Kyra can’t see it but he knows that on the right side under the kameez is a handgun.

He is in the ISI, but not one of its ordinary tens of thousands of agents. He is a lieutenant general, wanted for questioning by the United Nations for supporting the Muslim fighters of Bosnia against the Serbian army in the 1990s. Despite the UN’s ban on supply of arms to the besieged Bosnians, he had successfully airlifted sophisticated anti-tank guided missiles, which had turned the tide in favour of Bosnian Muslims and forced the Serbs to lift the siege.

The Pakistani government has informed the UN that the lieutenant general has ‘lost his memory’ following a recent road accident, and is therefore unable to face any investigations into the matter.

He takes the notebook and quickly glances at what Kyra has written. A man used to getting things done and accustomed to being obeyed, a man who casts a shadow even in darkness.

‘You tell this Ahmed that the building will be stormed late in the morning.’

‘I’ll tell him,’ Kyra says, barely able to contain his rage. The saluki lifts its head from his knee and stands and clambers over to the front, the man reaching out its hand to lovingly stroke its fur.

‘I can’t prevent his capture or death. And you remain free because of your former connection with the army.’

For several moments the man sits in a profound and expectant silence, like a prophet in the depth of receiving a revelation.

‘Now was not the time for such an operation. Do you really think we don’t have plans to undermine the American army in this part of the world, an army made up of homosexuals and women? Just who do you think you are — trying to do something of this magnitude without telling us?’

‘The brothers and relatives of some of the men are being held by the Americans.’

‘What does that do, change every motherfucking thing in the world? Luckily the white man was away.’

They sit in another silence and then the man turns his neck and looks at Kyra for the first time.

‘What are you waiting for? Get out.’

Kyra’s own gun is in exactly the same place, under his clothes, as this man’s.

He steps out and just as he reaches for the front door for the saluki the Land Rover drives off at great speed.

*

Naheed is in the corridor when through the arches she sees Mikal in the grove of crepe myrtles. Blue in the dawn light. He looks at her and then disappears into the fallen rosewood trees by the south wall. Crepe myrtle, Rohan has told her, is among the longest blooming trees known to man, capable of remaining in flower for up to 120 days.