Nadeem Aslam - The Blind Man's Garden

*

Mikal is ravenous when he wakes after just two hours of sleep. The sun is up. Taking four eggs from the refrigerator he cooks them and carries the frying pan out to the riverbank, watching the water as he eats, a warm wind coming from the desert. He washes the pan and puts it back on the shelf and looks at his wristwatch. The woman who came to cook at the house every day lives a mile upriver, but it is too early to pay her a visit. He digs a hole and then goes into the south wing and wraps the two dogs in a bedsheet and carries them out. Rather than break the stiff limbs he widens the hole he has dug.

The bag with the dollars has stayed at his side at all times, but now he places it in the wardrobe in Akbar’s room, arranging clothes around and on top until nothing can be seen. He is about to lock the wardrobe when he stops. Guns have been combined with keys, with knives, forks and spoons, and in Akbar’s father’s room there is a steel chest made to contain valuables which has a percussion pistol mounted inside it. If the lid is opened without setting a special catch, the pistol fires. This is where he deposits the bag. Afterwards he looks at his wristwatch once again and walks out of the house and goes along the riverbank.

A man is sitting on the cook’s veranda reading a newspaper. He is in his fifties, with untidy pewter stubble and an Adam’s apple as pronounced as his nose. He looks up and examines Mikal.

‘Uncle, my name is Mikal. I am Akbar’s friend,’ he says and nods over his shoulder. ‘From the house.’

The man doesn’t answer for a while. Then he calls into the house. ‘Fatima.’

The woman appears at the door with one hand shading her eyes. Then she comes forward wiping her hands on her veil and stands beside the man. She has recognised Mikal.

‘Have you just come from the house?’ the man asks.

‘Yes, I spent the night there.’

The woman gasps.

They tell him about the ten-hour firefight. The army cordoning off a zone around the house. The assault included paramilitary forces from the Frontier Corps and Waziristan Scouts. This was Pakistan’s first ever operation against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, under pressure from America. Members of the security forces as well as Chechen, Uzbek and Arab militants were killed. Many foreigners fled into the desert and the hills.

‘All this was three nights ago,’ the woman says. ‘No one has gone there since.’

‘So you don’t know where everyone is. Akbar’s brother … and sister.’

They both shake their heads and since there is nothing else to say he turns to go.

‘Come back for lunch,’ the woman says.

‘Thank you, I will,’ he says.

‘Will you bring my rosary? It has green and white beads and is hanging on a nail near the—’

‘I have seen it.’

Arriving back he undoes the catch and opens the steel chest to see that the money is still there. He stands looking at it, his fingertips playing with Naheed’s chain at his neck.

Half an hour later he is on the narrow path that leads to the yellow flowers. He walks through the field and on towards the hills. The western face of the range is composed of thick beds of Miocene rock, dipping west. On the eastern aspect several rocks of older formations appear under the Miocene and form a bold escarpment of white stone, which has given its name to the range. He climbs to the site where Akbar’s father had died in the crashed pickup. Thin beds of lignite, of Jurassic limestone, and nothing but sections of broken glass and green flakes on the boulder where the paintwork had scraped against it.

‘You son of a bitch,’ someone says behind him quietly.

He turns to see him squatting on the ground ten yards away. The man Salomi was betrothed to, the man he had met in the room with the boxes of books and other texts.

‘What are you doing here?’ the man asks.

‘I could ask you the same question.’

‘Are you alone?’ The man looks around. He brings his eyes back to Mikal and puts his AK-47 over his shoulder and stands up. He wears the same shalwar kameez he was wearing the day Mikal saw him last, now filthy with dust and grime.

‘How much money do you have?’

‘Just a few rupees,’ Mikal says.

‘You son of a bitch.’

He will give the dollars either to Akbar’s brother or to Salomi, not him.

‘What are you doing out here?’ the man asks.

‘I am looking for one of the Airedales. It ran away.’

‘Where have you been for the past several days?’

‘I should leave,’ Mikal says and turns around.

‘I asked you where have you been.’

‘I had to go away for a while.’

‘Just before the raid took place.’

‘What are you trying to say?’

The man spits in the dust. ‘I want the rupees in your pockets.’

‘I need them myself.’

The man lifts the rifle. ‘I wasn’t asking.’

Mikal takes out the money and the man gestures for it to be dropped.

‘Where is the bag with the American money Akbar gave you?’

‘It’s at the house.’

‘Bring it here tonight.’

‘Are Akbar’s brother and sister here too, hiding with you?’

‘What concern is that of yours?’ The man holds a pointed silence, then adds, ‘I saw the dog.’ He gestures towards a boulder ten yards away. Mikal walks up to it but there is nothing there. He rounds the curve and after a while he comes back. ‘That’s a jackal.’

‘I know. The dog killed it.’

‘Couldn’t you have warned me before sending me over there?’

The man doesn’t say anything, his eyes half closed against the glare of the sun. ‘Be here with the money at midnight.’

*

When he arrives for lunch he tells them he’ll be leaving tomorrow. And also that he would like to leave a bag with them, to be given to Akbar or any member of his family should they return. The couple tell him that a friend stopped by an hour ago and brought some news.

‘Someone saw Salomi in the hills,’ the man says.

‘Whereabouts?’

‘It wasn’t Salomi,’ the woman says. ‘It was her ghost. Her ghost was seen.’

‘Fatima,’ the man says in consternation.

‘Let me tell him,’ she says. ‘He fought in a war. No one believes in ghosts more than soldiers.’

‘It’s nothing but talk,’ her husband says to Mikal. ‘Salomi has either been captured by the Americans, or she has gone away with the al-Qaeda people and joined the jihad. A woman’s anonymity is an asset to those people. She could deliver messages in her burka.’

*

Since he is now without rupees he will take a few dollars out of the bag and exchange them in the bazaar in Megiddo. Going there is a risk but there is no alternative. He’ll also find a telephone there and talk to Naheed, tell her that he will begin the return journey tomorrow.

He falls asleep in Akbar’s room, using the pillow that is embroidered with verses of the Koran, meant to banish nightmares. Waking after sundown he opens the steel chest and sees that the bag is missing.

He is instantly desperate.

He examines the floor for blood and looks at the opposite wall for a possible bullet scar, sniffs the pistol within the chest to see if it has fired. He even goes back to Akbar’s wardrobe where he had originally concealed the bag, and pulls out the clothes in severe dismay, separating them one by one, and then looks under the bed and behind the armchair.

In the yellow light from the lantern in his hand he feels himself being watched.

From the gun factory he takes a hammer, a pair of wire-cutters, a flathead screwdriver and a crosshead screwdriver and walks towards the car whose wing mirror he tore off last night. He smashes the window and gets in and pounds the flathead screwdriver into the ignition and turns it like a key but the car remains dead. He unscrews the panels of the steering column to expose the wires running inside it, letting the freed screws fall onto the floor. Cutting the red wires, he strips their ends and connects them by twisting them together. Then he cuts the starter wires: he touches the exposed ends and there are five blue sparks of varying sizes and a sputter and the vehicle comes to life. Lastly he unlocks the steering by jamming the flathead screwdriver in the slot between the top of the steering column and the wheel.