Nadeem Aslam - The Wasted Vigil

‘I am sorry.’ Muhammad had personally saved portraits of Jesus, Mary and Abraham from the Kaaba shrine while ordering others to be smashed.

‘I thought you said you had converted to Islam.’

‘True.’

‘Then I don’t understand why you are disrespecting the Holy Book.’

‘I wasn’t aware that I was. But I’ll say nothing more on the subject.’

‘Thank you.’

At breakfast neither David nor Marcus had known how to react to Casa’s words. Qatrina, of course, would have gently but firmly challenged him. Sometimes it is important to say things, she’d claim. And although, yes, Marcus remembers change taking place in him because of what he had heard someone say, some conviction of theirs that was startling to him, he doesn’t wish to argue with the boy now. ‘I sometimes wonder’, Qatrina once said, ‘if one shouldn’t let people hear a sentence like, “I do not believe in the existence of Allah.” They’ll be stunned but will go away and think about it. They might have heard about such people but to have it come from a person with a skin, with a mouth and eyes, a person who is standing at the same level as them — that has a different impact altogether. They must see that I am someone whose pulse they could feel if they stretched out their hand and placed it on my neck vein, and yet still I haven’t been struck by lightning because of what I have just said.’

Marcus examines the back of the head in silence and then reties the bandage, their three hands working together, rising and falling. Replace just one carbon atom with one silicon atom in the 1,1-dimethylcyclohexane molecule and the smell goes from eucalyptus to unpleasant. Who knows how the boy ended up with these opinions? What small thing could the others in the world have done differently for a happier outcome, what small mistake was made? Wolves exhibiting strange behaviour — caught in traps and thrashing about, injured by other creatures or by bullets, pups suffering from epilepsy — are attacked and killed by their pack members. But here everyone is human and must try to understand each other’s mystery. Each other’s pain.

He hasn’t said anything about himself except that he is an itinerant labourer from a village in the nearer ridges of the mountain above them.

He thanks Marcus for the bandage and asks if there is anything he can do to repay his kindness. Marcus tells him to just rest.

‘Was it a landmine — your hand?’

Marcus shakes his head and stands up to leave.

‘Does it hurt?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘I am sorry. What happened?’

‘The Taliban cut it off.’

Casa does not miss a beat. The information not even remotely troubling or unusual to him. ‘You stole something?’

‘Yes.’

‘May Allah keep us all on the correct path,’ he says and then lies down again.

When Richard the Lionheart displayed brute strength by breaking an iron bar with his sword, Saladin’s delicately sharp scimitar countered it by slicing a silk handkerchief in two. What has been lost is the desire to believe in and take pride in Saladin’s gentleness.

Marcus goes up the stairs, giving the Buddha a last glance — its stone the light-brown colour of an apple moth found in English gardens, having arrived there from Australia.

He emerges into the clean clear morning. The world is apricot light and blue shadows. In sura 27, Solomon laughs on hearing the conversation of two ants — a rare example of humour in the Koran — and there is a third-century Buddhist version of that tale with two butterflies instead of ants. It’s no point sharing with the boy the delightful essential idea that tales can travel, or that two sets of people oceans apart can dream up similar sacred myths.

And yet he can comprehend the believers’ anxiety about pollution — of not wishing to be infected or contaminated by their surroundings. On the flight back from India decades ago — he’d gone to visit the fabled suppliers of perfume raw materials along Bombay’s Muhammad Ali Road — he had discerned Hanuman and Ganesh and Radha in the shapes of the clouds below him, so overwhelming had been the sight of the Hindu gods and goddesses, so strongly had their flying and dancing forms imprinted themselves onto his consciousness. Little wonder Sanskrit poetry celebrated the beauty of the lifted foot and the lotus-stalk waist . All this hadn’t been there on the way into India. ‘Pollution’ had occurred while he was there.

Iris-root butter from Florence. Lemon. Bulgarian rose. The wood of the Indian oudh tree that has been eaten by fungus. These were some of the ingredients he contemplated when he blended the perfume for Zameen — the daughter he has been missing now for longer than he had actually known her.

The sweet-smelling putchuk of Kashmir was used in Europe in 288 BC as an offering to Apollo.

*

When a soldier dies his weapon is referred to by his brothers on the battlefield as ‘the widow’. In addition, Casa remembers being told that he must guard his gun ‘like his eyes’. Looking for his Kalashnikov, he begins to retrace his path from the night of the shabnama . He goes through the orchard, trying to see if his blood is in the dust. Not spilled, but rather given to Allah.

He shouldn’t have said anything to Marcus about the Buddha. He should rein in his words when talking to these people, must try to be pleasant. If he’s banished from here he’d have no safety.

He has to maintain composure. And he must look for his rifle.

‘You have been a thought in the mind of Allah from all eternity.’ With these words of encouragement the fourteen-year-old Casa and one thousand others had been sent from his madrassa in Pakistan in 1996. To conquer Kabul from the seven warring factions. To take it in the name of One True God. ‘History is Allah working through man,’ they had been told. ‘You are not new to this: you are taking back what has always been yours.’ In the flow of secular Christian time they would have appeared to be just a band of ragged boys, but in the corresponding year of the Islamic calendar — 1417 — they were warriors who were drawing their swords and throwing the scabbards aside for ever, tightening their clothes to themselves in order to fight unhindered, a continuation of a long line from Muhammad onwards, kings of tomorrow, who hated the carnage they must cause but cause it they must.

Swarms of their Datsun trucks with heavy.50 calibre machine guns, cannons, anti-aircraft guns and multiple-barrelled rocket launchers mounted in the beds — all supplied by Saudi Arabia and the ISI, the lovers of Allah — had swept into Kabul. The former Communist president — who, as the head of the Afghan secret service, had sanctioned and overseen the torture of thousands of Afghans during his time — had sought shelter in the UN compound, thinking it sacrosanct, but five Taliban had just walked in during the night, the guards having fled earlier at the sound of the gunfire from the city limits.

Beating the president and his brother until they were senseless, the Taliban bundled the pair into a pickup and drove to the darkened Presidential Palace. There they castrated him and dragged his body behind a jeep for several rounds of the Palace, and then they shot him dead. The brother was similarly tortured and throttled to death. Just before daybreak Casa’s convoy arrived at the scene and — because it was important to terrorise the inhabitants of the city into submission — he assisted in the hanging up of the two swollen and bloodied cadavers from steel-wire nooses on a traffic post, just a few blocks from the UN compound.

He is about to emerge from the orchard when he sees that the old man and the woman are there a few yards ahead of him. Retreating to a safe distance he watches her face through the branches, the leaves glowing bright from the sun. He feels engulfed in a green fire as he looks at her. Anyone can envision Paradise, can try to clothe the other side with the colours of this world. But whenever during his time as a taxi driver the Western passengers questioned him about the Islamic afterlife, their prurience was an offence to him. He didn’t know a single Muslim whose first thought on hearing the word ‘Paradise’ was Seventy-two virgins . The trials of the world were so immense and harsh that committing sins was unavoidable, and so on being granted entry into Paradise a believer was first and foremost glad to have been spared Hell. That was the first thought, and the second and the third and the fourth and the fifth. Everything else came much later, including the demands of that thing which was the first thing the angels created when Allah asked them to mould Adam out of clay.