Nadeem Aslam - The Blind Man's Garden

He raises his head above the poet’s jasmine on the boundary wall but there is no one in the street.

‘I saw him when I left and he was still there when I came back.’

‘What did he look like?’

Will they raid the house? he wonders as he climbs down and stands looking at her, the trees bending in the wind around them as if borne forward by the earth’s spinning.

*

It is 1219, the time of the Fifth Crusade, and Francis — the future saint of Assisi — and his brother Illuminato have crossed enemy lines to gain an audience with the Sultan of Egypt, Malik al-Kamil. It is late September and the landscape they pass through is still littered with corpses from the battle that took place on 29 August.

Yasmin turns the page. For centuries artists have depicted the various episodes of the astonishing encounter, one of the most extraordinary in the history of belief. The bearded Sultan in his brocade robes and silk turban, and Francis in his rough and patched brown tunic.

According to some accounts, Muslim sentries fell upon Francis and Illuminato the moment they saw them, savagely beating them before putting them in chains. But according to others, when the sentinels saw them coming they thought they were messengers, or perhaps had come to convert to Islam. Soldiers on both sides of the Fifth Crusade had converted, and so the sentinels led them to the Sultan.

Yasmin touches the flames with her fingers. The fire burns in the book of paintings she is holding. St Francis of Assisi is standing inside the blaze — entering a bonfire to prove that his faith was superior to Islam.

But that didn’t happen either and was invented later. The Sultan and the future saint had talked of war and faith but the encounter was perfectly peaceful — no enraged and fulminating Muslim clerics had appeared, as is claimed, to demand that the Sultan behead the monk.

She closes her eyes, her hand on her belly where Basie’s child is growing, small as a wren. He died before she discovered she was pregnant.

There are moments when Basie is not dead, when she turns around to share something with him, but then she remembers.

It is as though the house and the world are suffering from a kind of physical amnesia. They have forgotten him.

When they shot him they shot him dead in each one of her memories. Eighty-six bullets. One for the way he smiled, one for the way he frowned to himself when he read, one for the way his left hand sometimes rested on his thigh as he drove, one for the way he had become tearful when he said he had to find out who the old woman was who sat holding the police inspector’s knees, one for the way he liked eating mangoes with skin still on them, one for the beautiful way he danced to Count Basie’s ‘One o’Clock Jump’, quietly concentrating to himself, one for the way he said about his father, slipping into a drunken impersonation of the man, ‘He had a beard but he would gently correct those who mistook him for a cleric. My beard is not religious. It’s a revolutionary one, inspired by Castro, Che and Marx,’ one for the way he said with a smile, ‘Allow me to complicate you, your holiness,’ whenever Father Mede said, ‘I am just a simple man of God,’ one for the way he said Islam was a religion whose past could not be predicted, one for the way he didn’t know how to say his prayers, looking for surreptitious guidance to the people praying beside him, one for the way he liked walking on dew-covered grass, one for the way he looked up from Tolstoy’s big novel and said that the infernal summer heat was to Pakistan what snowbound winters were to Russia …

She listens for movements in Rohan’s room. When after a quarrel with Sofia he would forgo a meal, saying quietly from his room that he was not hungry, she would take food to him in secret, and she would grin as he pretended not to care initially but would then ask, ‘What have you brought?’

She looks down at the book. The Sultan gave Francis the key to his private prayer room, and on parting he accepted one gift from the Sultan, an ivory horn, which is kept today in Assisi. The inscription on it says that Francis used it to summon people and birds to hear him preach.

*

The black shadow of the railing falls on her white tunic and makes it appear as though the fabric is patterned. The candle flame swaying on the floor beside her. He leans and places his mouth on her neck, his hunger shouting from underneath his skin. Every object around them is heightened, everything surprised. He feels ashamed for seeking happiness so soon after his brother’s death. Something terrible will happen to him. He is inviting punishment. He thinks of Salomi, and he thinks of Jeo who has only been dead for four days — for him. Pushing past the confusion in the darkness he lifts her wrists and begins to break the glass bangles, eliminating the possibility of Sharif Sharif from her. ‘I want my breath,’ he says. His hand under the tunic on her breast on her stomach on the curve of her spine and now he panics. He has been in a world war and he can sense blood. She pushes him away gently because she knows about blood too — she is a woman. A breaking bangle has torn into her left wrist. They light the candle that had extinguished itself a moment ago and see the thin line of red emerging from the puncture. He lifts it to his mouth and with his teeth works out the small shard of glass lodged under the skin, not stopping as she stands up and leads him indoors, the glass disappearing into him the way the ruby had entered Jeo’s body.

*

He crosses the Grand Trunk Road and enters the night-dark alley, moving towards the high painted rooms, visualising the doves and pigeons in one of them. When he notices a shadow behind him, there is a surge of anger in his body at not realising he was being followed. Squeezing through the narrow gaps between the fenders and bumpers of two parked trucks, he looks over his shoulder. They won’t just pick you up, they’ll spirit away everyone you know.

He climbs the stairs two at a time towards his room. It’s Basie’s birthday tomorrow and he has a bottle of Murree’s whisky hidden behind a loose brick in the wall.

He looks down from the window. There doesn’t seem to be anyone out there, at least not in the few areas where light is falling.

He turns and stands looking at the coloured walls, then leans against one of the painted angels and closes his eyes. ‘To them everything was about helping others,’ Basie said about their parents, getting drunk on the mattress in this room. ‘They’d always find that aspect. Once I wanted to see a cowboy film — it was on at the Capri cinema, I remember — and Father said he himself loved cowboy films because they were about someone coming to the aid of a town terrorised by the wicked and the powerful.’ They and their friends took poets into factories and mills, to inspire them to write songs about the terrible conditions the workers had to endure. They found itinerant storytellers and introduced them to the screenwriters in Lahore, so that the land’s age-old tales of resisting the unjust could be incorporated into contemporary movies.

There is a sound outside the door.

‘Akbar.’ The tension snapping into relief, of a kind.

Akbar comes forward and embraces him.

‘What are you doing here?’

The boy looks dishevelled and unslept, the eyes dark.

‘They found out I killed my father,’ he says quietly.

‘The military. The people he was trying to bring to your house?’

‘Yes.’ He looks around him. He is carrying a shoulder bag and he places it at Mikal’s feet. ‘You have to take this to Megiddo.’

‘What is it?’

‘Salomi is married. She and her new husband need to get out of Pakistan. They will be safe in Yemen.’