Nadeem Aslam - The Blind Man's Garden

He tells himself not to let Akbar see his reaction.

‘What’s in the bag?’

‘They need money to get out.’

‘I would have thought he had enough.’

Akbar shakes his head. ‘He did. But before my father went off that night he burnt it all in the furnace in the gun factory. Not a single rupee was left. Everything turned to ash.’ He points to the bag. ‘You have to go and give this to Salomi, so the pair of them can leave.’

Akbar unzips the bag. It is full of clothes but from under it he pulls out three bundles of American dollars, each the thickness of a telephone directory.

‘When did she get married?’

‘The morning you left.’ Akbar replaces the money and fastens the zip. ‘It’s fifty-five thousand dollars.’

‘I don’t think I can do this, Akbar.’

‘Please. The soldiers, backed by the Americans, will raid the house very soon, if they haven’t already. The pair of them will have to bribe their way out of the towns and cities, find places to shelter. Otherwise people will hand them both to the Americans for the reward.’

‘I can’t.’ At the brick factory the Americans had asked him if he had ever transferred monies for al-Qaeda. And yet he knows he must see Salomi and explain himself to her, if he can.

‘Just go and give it to her and come back,’ Akbar says, and adds, ‘You are my brother.’

*

He sits beside the bag, smoking, the room full of night’s darkness. Three days have passed since Akbar gave him the money and it is still here. He moves towards the window and looks at the garden, the blossoms beautiful as Eden, where every memory of every man is said to have its origin, and after a while he turns and walks towards where she lies on the bed.

*

When he is naked beside her she sees the bullet wounds. She watches him, pale brown with calves and forearms darkly hairy, thin but sinewy and sheerly beautiful with the candlelight running over him.

From a book she has learned what a human body is worth. The chemical elements making up a living person are said to have the market value of about $4 or $5. His sweeping laughter, the merged eyebrows, the flavour of his breath and saliva when he leans every few minutes to kiss her for minutes at a time. $4 or $5. The features take shape under the red point of brilliance when he inhales from the cigarette in the darkness. It is as though he is sucking in light through the white tube, light that then runs under his skin to reveal him softly. She watches him as he gets up during the night and sits crouching beside the shoulder bag. Jeo came back wearing a tight-fitting suit of bruises, and now she doesn’t want Mikal to go to Waziristan.

One night before she married, Mikal had broken into her and Tara’s room. She was terrified to find him standing beside her bed in the dead of night, her mother only a few feet away. She had taken his hand and led him out to the roof. ‘I can’t sleep,’ he had told her.

‘Recite a poem. That helps. One that rhymes.’

‘I don’t know any poems.’

‘You sing all the time.’

‘They are songs not poems.’

‘They are the same thing.’

The next day she had bought him a book of poems by Wamaq Saleem from Urdu Bazaar, verses in which the dove called out in adoration to its lover the cypress tree. It was as though the poet knew nothing of the aeons of separateness that lay between these two things, and between the bulbul and the rose, and between the bee and the lotus blossom, and so the dove called and called, the rose continued to open for the bulbul, and the bee circled and circled and circled the lotuses.

‘Will they allow you to receive letters in the prison?’ she asks him now, when he comes away from the bag containing the dollars.

‘What are you talking about? I promise you I will come back.’

‘What about visitors?’ She is sitting up in bed. ‘Will the Americans allow you to have visitors?’

He encloses her in his arms. ‘Don’t say that.’

‘I don’t even know how much a plane ticket to the United States is. It must be thousands of rupees. I’ll never be able to visit you.’

What woke them was the sound of the rain stopping, the sudden calm in the middle of the night. A silence packed with distances.

‘It’ll be just a quick journey,’ he says. ‘Two days there, two days back. Four days — five maximum.’ On a map he has drawn a line from Heer to Megiddo. Taking small buses, avoiding all major stations. A long jagged stroke of ink resembling the constellation of Hydra. And now they speak quietly into each other’s skin. It is in the watches of the night that impressions are strongest and words most eloquent: she thinks of these words from the Koran. His fingers are on the chain around her neck that has little leaves all along its length, a string of foliage. ‘Did you play with your mother’s jewellery when you were a child?’ she asks.

‘Yes. I used to wear it as well.’

She takes it off and puts it around his neck just as the call to the predawn prayers sounds and they remain in each other’s arms, sinning in a time of holiness, and when he gets out of bed she feels for the clasp of the chain, to take it off. ‘Let me wear it,’ he says.

‘But it’s a woman’s.’

‘I don’t care.’ And then he adds, ‘Isn’t the soul a woman?’ Outside the sun would begin to rise in the bloody reefs of the clouds within the hour and the birds are already looking for light to fly into.

*

Tara is mending a broken umbrella. ‘You are leaving?’

‘For a few days.’

She continues to hold his eye.

‘A friend needs help.’

She nods.

‘I just wanted to talk to you about Naheed,’ he says. ‘None of us wants her to marry Sharif Sharif, but you mentioned this other man you have found. There is no need for him. Naheed wants to get qualifications and become a teacher —’

‘I know what my daughter needs and wants. She can get qualifications after she is married.’

‘Yes, she can.’ He looks at his hands. ‘I don’t know what I want to say. I still can’t offer her the kind of life you’d want for her. I could be caught any time and taken away, leaving her on her own once again.’

She puts the umbrella aside. ‘I stood in your way once, I won’t this time. I suppose when it comes down to it it’s a man’s word that counts. That’s all the security a woman needs. Who cares if the buttons on his shirt don’t match the fabric.’

‘I will come back in five days.’

‘Then I will be happy to call you my son-in-law.’

‘I am sorry I didn’t think of the consequences for you when I suggested to Naheed that we run away before her wedding to Jeo.’

‘It would have caused terrible difficulties for me, yes.’

‘I am sorry I didn’t think of that.’

‘Would you do it again?’

‘Wanting to do it is not what I am apologising for here.’

She appraises him openly. ‘That’s a good reply. Now I am going to be equally honest with you. You let down my daughter once, by not turning up when you said you would. I won’t allow you to disappoint her again. Is that clear?’

‘Yes. But didn’t you say that her running away would have been bad for you?’

‘That’s a matter between me and her, nothing to do with you. As far as you or anyone else is concerned, I am on her side. Don’t you ever disappoint her again.’

‘I am sorry I did it once.’

‘That’s another good thing to say to me. And you might want to rethink some of the guilt you’ve been carrying around about shooting those Americans.’

‘I’ll try. The men I killed had mothers, fathers, probably wives and children. I killed them and must pay for the crime.’

‘But there’s no need to be so hard on yourself, at least until perfect order reigns in the world. Life is difficult at times and they goaded you and you were confused. Part of the blame lies with them. Don’t hold yourself to too exacting a standard.’