Nadeem Aslam - The Wasted Vigil

He raises the small white plane above his head and puts his other hand into his breast pocket. He strikes the match against the bark of a nearby tree without looking, introducing a smell of smoke into the air, and brings the fire to the aeroplane’s tail. The flame touches it almost caressingly and the white paper ignites.

He releases the burning shape, watching it glide along the low tree branches.

He walks away then, travelling in the opposite direction to the airborne fire, turning around only when he is fifteen or so yards from where he was, his eyes all intensity and seriousness. The plane — or what remains of it — comes to rest precisely where he had wanted it, and the surrounding dry grass begins to burn. The flames grow quickly in size and strength. He covers his ears and the ground erupts in an explosion, a fountain of earth or a small cypress tree rising seven feet into the air. The stones and the larger pieces of soil fall back immediately but particles of finer dust float sideways, slowly drifting with the breeze.

He had found the mine thirty minutes ago, had immediately warned the others in the surrounding houses against venturing out, telling women to make sure all the children were in, and then set to work. It was from the time of the Soviets. Perhaps as old as he was. He dripped petrol onto the grass above it. After an early childhood spent in the company of bird-stunning catapults, and the later years with various guns in the jihad training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan, he knew he could make the paper plane land on the target precisely. At several locations around him are planes whose trajectory he had been unable to hone, those that had looped or corkscrewed away towards this or that high branch.

Once he had seen a mine detonating in a grove of pomegranate trees with such force that the skin of every fruit on every branch had cracked, the red seed spilling out.

He enters the small brick building he shares with seven others, mostly taxi drivers — like he used to be — or day labourers who work in the centre of the city not far away. After the US invasion, he — someone with links to the Taliban and al-Qaeda — had begun to drive taxis, first in Kabul and then here in Jalalabad. One day he took a passenger to a poppy farm beyond the northern outskirts of the city and ended up being introduced to the people there, Nabi Khan’s men, and he has been with them since.

Even though he wishes to take off his shirt and enter his bed, he performs his ablutions and begins to wait for the time to say the night prayer. Today was a long day and he is tired, but Nabi Khan’s organisation has achieved all it hoped. A message had come from Pakistan that if they could arrange this spectacle — the proposal had been sent to Peshawar last month — then they’d have funding and support for other greater missions, culminating in the eventual taking of Usha, Nabi Khan’s home base somewhere to the south of the city. Though nothing was made explicit, the message that came down the Khyber Pass from Pakistan was from a former Pakistani Army officer by the name of Fedalla. He had been at the ISI, the Pakistani spy agency, but when Afghanistan was attacked in 2001, he had resigned in protest because the Pakistani government had chosen to side with the Americans instead of the Taliban. Some say he had not resigned but had been forced to leave. When the Taliban were uprooted he had smiled and said that the Americans should not exult: ‘The war hasn’t ended. The real war is about to begin.’ He is renegade, they say, a rogue. He and other like-minded individuals in Pakistan are indispensable in the jihad against the Americans and their Afghan supporters. The message he had sent ended with an exhortation not to lose heart, never to give up the struggle against Islam’s enemies:

When Nimrod built a pyre to burn Allah’s prophet Ibrahim, the hoopoe carried water in its beak and released it onto the flames from above. An onlooker, some Dick Cheney of his time, asked the hoopoe whether it thought the two drops of water would put out the mighty blaze. ‘I don’t know,’ replied the bird. ‘All I know is that when Allah makes a list of those who built this fire and those who tried to put it out, I want my name to be in the second column.’

Casa listens to the muezzin and spreads the prayer mat on the floor. Night has fallen and the call to the last prayer of the day has begun to issue from the minarets. The mechanism of the Islamic world functioning with precision.

THE SOUND OF AN APPROACHING VEHICLE brings Lara to a window. A tree quivers and shakes in the glass pane, its leaves outlined in bright light against the sky. Walking away from the book she has been reading and the lamp that burns in an alcove beside her chair, she emerges from the house to meet the Englishman in the darkness. She stops upon drawing near and, burying her face in her hands, begins to weep silently. She hears him cover the distance between them. Placing her face on his chest she releases the sobs, her hands clutching the lapels of his jacket, the fabric drenched in smoke. When he did not return yesterday she was certain he had died somewhere. The long hours of imagining the absolute worst, too afraid to approach the radio.

He puts his arms around her and at their touch she tightens her grip on the lapels, thinking it is an attempt at separation. A brief squeal-like sound of protest, until she realises he wishes to hold her. They stand joined like this for two minutes. In the darkness surrounding them, her white clothes seem to glow. Light from the lamp had soaked into them.

Going past the rosemary plant that is said never to grow taller than Christ, she brings him into the house. She knows now from one of his notebooks on perfume that rosemary increases in breadth rather than height after thirty-three years.

He requests with a gesture and she dilutes condensed milk in water and brings it to a boil for him to drink. Through all this they do not say a word. She is still trembling with sorrow. Only when she is in another section of the house to wash the tears off her face does she think of the man who had driven Marcus here. She returns to see him standing beside Marcus. He holds in his earth-covered hands a bottle of whisky. He must have gone off into the night to dig for it the moment he arrived. Like a gold muscle or sinew he pours a measure of it into Marcus’s milk.

*

Past midnight, and all three of them are motionless, her fingers interlaced with Marcus’s where he lies in a bedroom on the ground floor. David in a chair on the other side of the room.

‘A daughter, a wife, a grandson,’ Marcus had been saying earlier. ‘You could say this place took away all I had.’ She was sitting beside him on the bed, as now. ‘I could so easily appear to be one of those unfortunate white men you hear about, who thought too lovingly of the other races and civilisations of the world, who left his own country in the West to set up home among them in the East, and was ruined as a result, paying dearly for his foolish mistake. His life smashed to pieces by the barbarians surrounding him.’

David’s eyes seemed fixed on some random detail in a corner.

‘But, you see, the West was involved in the ruining of this place, in the ruining of my life. There would have been no downfall if this country had been left to itself by those others.’

‘Don’t do this,’ Lara had said quietly. ‘You must try to sleep.’

Now she stands up and turns the small wheel at the side of the lamp, reducing the diameter of light so that darkness appears to take a step closer. A thought she dislikes. ‘I’ll be in the room next door tonight in case you need something. Just on the other side of this wall, I’ll listen for you.’