Nadeem Aslam - The Blind Man's Garden

*

‘Yasmin, my sorrow,’ Rohan says quietly from the other side of the room.

Yasmin and Mikal sit side by side, their upper bodies turned in an embrace. She who has lost a brother and a husband. They are gone but they are still here, in the hearts of those they left behind. War couldn’t destroy that. War is weak after all . He feels no consolation in such thoughts, in this sentiment.

‘Who did it?’ he asks. ‘Who held up the school?’

‘No one knows,’ Yasmin says.

‘When the soldiers raided the school,’ Naheed says, ‘the terrorists were either killed or they escaped.’

‘And Father Mede is still missing?’

Yasmin nods. ‘The surviving terrorists took him away with them. Some newspapers are saying the siege was the work of the CIA and Mossad.’

He goes and stands at the window.

‘Are you staying?’ Yasmin asks.

‘I don’t know what I will do.’

‘It’ll be more than a century in prison?’

‘Almost two centuries. I keep thinking I could hide away forever but the reward on me is in millions. Someone is bound to report on me eventually.’

‘Some people will be reluctant to sell out a fellow Muslim.’

‘Some, yes.’

Later in the evening he eats alone sitting on the steps in the garden and watches it rain. He sets the plate on the floor and gets up and goes out into the street, looking both ways before stepping out, looking out through the veil of water fringing the umbrella’s rim, as he turns into the street where Tara lives. Where Sharif Sharif lives. Inside his pocket his fingers rest beside the knife. The weapon almost like the missing digit.

He crosses the courtyard and looks towards the door to the room where Sharif Sharif is usually found. He approaches and calls out but the man is not here this evening. After a while he climbs the stairs to Tara.

She is oiling her sewing machine, having dismantled it completely, the dozens of metal pieces lying on a newspaper beside her as she sits crosslegged on the floor. He leans against the door jamb and watches and she doesn’t look up after the initial glance. Naheed has no doubt told her about his return.

When she cannot shift a screw he comes forward and gently takes the screwdriver from her and loosens it for her.

‘It has remained stuck for two years,’ she says quietly. ‘I wasn’t able to unscrew it when I cleaned the machine last year either. I don’t know where I got the strength to tighten it so firmly in the first place.’

‘You didn’t,’ he says. ‘I tightened it, two years ago. I was visiting Naheed while you were out and the dismantled pieces were lying out on the table and I began putting them together.’

She doesn’t say anything, continuing with her work, handling the small curved and bent pieces and dripping oil onto them. They look like relics of metal saints.

She gets up and washes her hands. She smells them and then washes them once again, and then goes into the kitchen and begins to cook a handful of lentils. A woman who has spent most of her life in impoverished solitude.

‘I will not allow Naheed to marry Sharif Sharif.’

‘He won’t get a drink of that water while I am alive,’ she says. ‘I had found another boy for her. I haven’t said no to that family yet.’

Fate’s renegade. A fugitive from international justice. He’s still not good enough for her daughter. Or is she waiting to see what he plans to do?

He turns around to leave, thinking this is enough for now. He is halfway down the stairs when she calls out to him and he climbs back up.

She points to the chair. ‘Take a seat.’ She turns the flame low under the pot and carries a stool to him, sitting down to face him.

He doesn’t understand immediately but then remembers that the dead have to be talked of with respect and formality. She says, ‘I am sorry about your brother.’

Yasmin said he had been shot eighty-six times.

‘He was a good man. I had grown to love him like a son.’

‘He was a good man. Does it get better?’

‘I wouldn’t say better.’ She lost her husband when she was very young: she knows her condition and her answer is instant. He might as well have asked her the colour of the sky.

‘What then?’

‘Life gets in the way of your grief.’ She begins to fan herself with a palm-leaf fan. ‘You make yourself forget about the pain because there are other things to take care of. But when you do remember it … well … it’s a strange kind of hurting, like someone has lost a razorblade inside your soul.’

‘I don’t know how long I should grieve or mourn, don’t know when it would be right to stop.’

She touches his shoulder.

‘Would you stay and eat with me?’

‘No, thank you. I’d better get back.’

He returns through the rain-filled street and sitting on the veranda he counts to see what is left of the money Akbar gave him. The green shirt he is wearing has white buttons. The tailor said the plain white buttons were a dozen for a rupee, while the green would cost twice as much.

*

She looks out during the night to see him asleep on the chair on the veranda, his hands in his pockets. Gently she arranges a thin cotton sheet over him and lights a mosquito coil and places it next to him on the tiles, making sure her glass bangles don’t rattle. She had started wearing the bangles and had put away the dark clothes because she had wished to signal to Sharif Sharif that she no longer mourns Jeo.

He wakes just after dawn when she is collecting fallen mulberries from the grass, the inked blue fruit that the rain has brought down, glossy blue clots, red, green, white, pink, the flesh sweet with sugar, turning the fingers sticky as it is eaten as though they contain blood, leaving stains on the tongue and hands.

He sits up in the chair, wincing from the stiffness and wrapping the sheet around himself against the mild chill. ‘I dreamt there was a city of burning minarets.’

She leans against a tree, pushing back strands of loose hair with one hand. ‘Are you sure it’s not something you saw in real life? The American bombing in Afghanistan? A photograph in a newspaper?’

He shakes his head. The dragon-ridden days of the planet.

‘I keep seeing the burning angels when I fall asleep,’ she says. ‘But that really did happen. They hung in flames above everyone’s head in St Joseph’s after the soldiers appeared. The school has been decimated from the explosions. Just a pile of rubble.’ In sleep she also sees again and again the thirsty children drinking urine at St Joseph’s on the second day of the siege. She sees again, on the first day of the siege, the deputy headmaster being shot and then males and females sitting on either side of the hall, a red dividing line having been created on the floor by two terrorists taking hold of the deputy’s corpse and dragging it from one end to the other.

She is sitting beside him now, both of them looking silently at the garden. The mulberries’ liquid is already beginning to slip out of the flesh.

‘How does it feel to be back?’

He smiles.

‘Could you not explain to the Americans what happened?’

‘It won’t work.’

After a while he says, ‘I am sorry. About everything.’ And without turning towards her he adds,

‘I am in Hell without you.’

He had said this to her before, sixty-six days into her marriage, and she had not reacted. This time she answers him.

‘I’ll put it out with my breath.’

*

She walks to the crossroads to buy a packet of Gold Flake for him, sensing his restlessness, a definite but quiet desperation in him at not being able to leave the house.

‘There is someone outside,’ she tells him, trying to conceal her panic when she returns with the cigarettes.