Nadeem Aslam - The Blind Man's Garden

Past caring, he drives out of the front gate, which he hasn’t approached since he arrived.

He travels haphazardly into the hills and then into the surrounding desert, the darkness so complete his eyes hurt as they try to see, a darkness resembling the black room in the American prison. Eventually the moon coins out and its light stretches in a white haze on the curves and plains of the desert. One by one the hills to the west offer their slopes to the moon in a pale glowing union, rising up out of the shadows. At midnight he returns to where he was supposed to bring the dollars but no one meets him and now he begins to shout the man’s name in all directions. He stands listening — nothing but wind and windborne echoes — and time no longer feels human to him, stretching and contracting, as unsettled as liquid. 1 a.m. and he is searching for her and her ghost and for the bag with the dollars and talking to himself, standing on the broken land at the edge of the desert, a flashlight in his right hand, remembering a story about a soldier who enters a night forest where the spirit of his dead lover is said to roam, transformed into a rapacious beast.

*

At the house he picks up the dead telephone and dials his parents’ number in Heer, remembering it from the days of his childhood, and stands listening in the darkness, imagining the faraway painted room. Then he dials Rohan’s house and talks to Naheed for almost an hour.

*

Two mock suns rise with the real sun, one on either side. His body a wreckage after only an hour’s sleep, he opens his eyes and in a half-awakened state watches his hands on the bedsheet, the missing fingers making him think for a moment he’s disappearing slowly. He sits up in alarm.

He walks to the steel chest but the money is still missing, and he wonders with stabs of shame and bafflement if the cook and her husband have stolen it.

The husband is on the veranda when Mikal arrives, reading the same newspaper as the first time he visited, newspapers being difficult to obtain in Waziristan. ‘Have you come to say goodbye?’

He shakes his head.

‘I thought you said you were leaving today.’

He stands there without words and says after a while, ‘I need to find some work to earn the fare back. I think I’ll go into Megiddo.’

‘How much do you need? We can give it to you.’

‘Thank you, uncle, but I’d rather earn it.’ He can see that they are anything but wealthy.

‘You could run an errand for me,’ the man says. ‘It’ll save me a trip. You need to deliver some scrap metal to Sara. It’s a small town about thirty-five miles—’

‘I know it. Akbar mentioned it once.’

‘I’ll give you directions. You take my pickup with the metal loaded onto the back. It should take about three hours to get there. Three hours back.’

‘I can do that. I need to get a little more sleep first.’

‘You can leave after lunch. You’ll be able to get back before sunset. I wouldn’t advise you to be out there after nightfall.’ The man folds the newspaper, his fingers full of ink. ‘This just sums it up,’ he says. ‘You have to wash your hands after reading this country’s newspaper.’

Mikal looks at the pages. To see if there’s any news of Father Mede. But the country has moved on to other crises. Carnage at the US Consulate in Karachi is the headline in three-inch-tall letters. A truck with a fertiliser bomb, being driven by a suicide bomber, was detonated outside the building, killing twelve people and injuring fifty-one — all Pakistanis.

Enraged Mob Beats Suspected Thief to Death …

Illegal Pakistani Migrants Drown Off Italian Coast …

Senator Defends Burying Alive of Women Who Dishonour Their Menfolk …

‘We levelled it,’ US Army Major General Franklin Hegenbeck said, speaking of the destruction of three villages in the Shaikot Valley in Afghanistan. ‘There was nobody left, just dirt and dust .’ …

He puts down the newspaper and watches the river sparkling under the three suns. This time tomorrow I’ll be on my way towards Heer, he thinks.

‘It’s a bad omen,’ the man says, of the sun and the two sundogs. Going through a grove of pomegranate and henna trees, he is leading Mikal to the back of the house. Mikal enters a wooden shed and finds himself looking at a mass of chains piled up as high as his waist. This is the metal he has to transport.

He approaches silently and drops to his haunches before the heap, touching it gently.

‘What’s wrong?’ the man asks from the shed door.

Mikal shakes his head, snatches of memory flowing through him.

‘They belonged to a mendicant who wandered all over the place,’ the man says.

‘I know,’ Mikal says after a while. He lifts the hoops that had attached the chains to the man’s wrists. There is the hoop for the neck. ‘Where did you get them? Where is the fakir?’

‘He was found dead by the roadside.’

Mikal stands up, letting the strands fall from his fingers, and looks at the man with distress.

‘The first time I ran away from home was to meet him. I followed his trail in the dust but couldn’t catch up.’

‘Well. Now you have found him. Or some of him. He appeared in the bazaar here and the al-Qaeda Arabs became enraged and abused him. Saying how dare he pretend to intercede with Allah on Muslims’ behalf. They beat him but people intervened, knowing how pious he was, but the next day the body was discovered.’

‘He wouldn’t have been able to run,’ Mikal says under his breath. Bullet cartridges are caught in the links of the chains like little gold fish in a net.

‘No. The chains were so heavy and so long he was having to drag them along with both hands. They trailed behind him for several yards. Some say he just vanished from inside the chains. They were the only thing that fell to the ground.’

‘I thought he was my father.’

They drag the coils out through the trees to the pickup. He drops the vehicle’s tailgate and climbs up onto the bed and pulls a fistful of the chains after him and the man begins to feed the rest to him very fast as Mikal walks backwards along the bed.

He was seen in Mecca once, never having left Pakistan physically, and several times he was seen in various parts of Pakistan simultaneously.

‘Fatima is reading a chapter of the Koran to comfort his soul,’ the man says, a little out of breath, once the chains are up on the bed and Mikal has jumped down. ‘When she finishes she’ll make us breakfast. There is only one town between here and Sara. It’s called Allah-Vasi. And that is where Fatima’s sister lives. She might want to go with you. You can drop her off, move on to Sara, and then pick her up on the way back.’

*

The sun and the sundogs follow the pickup across the sky, as he travels through open desert, an expanse of nothingness with low hills in the distance. There is not much traffic on the road but he examines each vehicle that passes him, in case someone is following him. Hasn’t he seen that man on the motorcycle before? He is half an hour from Sara when a loud screeching noise causes him to pull over. He gets out and opens the bonnet to see the shredded auxiliary belt. What remains of it is hanging off the alternator pulley, fouling the timing-belt cover, and a diesel injector feed pipe has become disconnected, spilling liquid.

He looks at the thin road, the rocks and boulders giving off heat like mirrors. An hour passes and nobody comes along and he sits on the driver’s seat with the door open, his legs hanging out, watching the dust djinns spinning across the desert floor, the interior smelling of the foodstuffs Fatima had brought as a gift for her family in several jars and baskets. He is sure the mendicant’s chains are hot to the touch.