Nadeem Aslam - The Wasted Vigil

The children were asked to walk to the house in twos and threes to avoid drawing attention to themselves from the Taliban’s Religious Police. One group came in the morning, the other in the afternoon. This way the forty children were divided into two groups of twenty, each group sitting around the Buddha for four hours every day. Marcus tried not to talk of danger with the children: they were there to learn, not discuss problems that could not be solved. The youngest ones had little idea of certain forms of play. If a kite flies too high, one of them asked, does it catch fire from the sun? High on a wall in the kitchen, Marcus painted a diamond, with three coloured bows threaded along its tail, and attached an actual string to it: if a child excelled at his lessons he or she could go and hold the string and pretend to fly the kite as a reward.

An entertainment they had devised on their own had to be stopped when he discovered it to his horror. They banged their feet on the ground where the piano and the two rababs were buried, leaping from place to place, managing to strike some of the keys this way, to vibrate some of the rababs’ strings, and listening as the notes seeped out of the soil.

For himself, denied music, he carried strips of paper in various pockets on which he had scrawled musical phrases, his fingertip touching the inked score like a stylus making contact with the groove of a record –

— and flooding his mind with the remembered melody. Silently. I’ll lament until Laila emerges from the house. I will lament for mercy from beloved Allah, like a bulbul saddened by her cage . Centuries-old lyrics granted new relevance.

Four months after he started the school, danger found its way to the doorstep. Qatrina was sitting in the factory along the avenue of Persian lilac trees, holding an English primer upside down and chanting along with the two youngest children, ‘A for Apple, B for Ball,’ when Marcus saw the four men arriving from the direction of Usha, panicking a swarm of small birds from a clump of tall grass as they came. He had come out to the house to get a cloth for Qatrina’s ink-stained fingers, or for the rest of the day she’d leave miniature herds of zebra on everything she touched. She was not the only one who was suffering mentally, he knew. A little boy had told him that his widowed mother, forced now to beg, beat him and his siblings when they asked for food, threatening to kill them and herself.

‘How can I help you?’ Marcus came out of the house and greeted the men. ‘Has there been an injury?’

He wasn’t sure whether he was just imagining it but he could hear the children’s voices like a bit of fragrance on the breeze.

‘We think you have been teaching children here — teaching them things other than the Koran.’

‘That’s not true.’

The men were staring at him. He recognised one of them. He had shot dead a man in the street last week for having missed prayers at the mosque on three consecutive days.

‘There’s nobody here but my wife and I. She’s unwell.’

‘I hope for your sake you are telling the truth.’ They were looking up at the windows, looking towards the orchard, the Persian lilacs.

‘I barely have enough time to take care of her, to take care of myself — how could I teach children at the same time?’

A man leaned forward and said something into the leader’s ear. There was a marked change in his demeanour suddenly — he even took half a step back. ‘Is it true that she has become possessed by the djinn of late?’

‘Only Allah, the Pitying Friend of the Helpless, knows.’

He nodded. ‘If you have lied to us about the school, we’ll come back and kill you both,’ he said and then they were gone.

He was going up the stairs of the perfume factory six days later when he saw the first of them materialise on the top step. Marcus went backwards, not taking his eyes off the black figure. Then there were others, twenty-five of them, all with guns, and they were coming down the stairwell at great speed. In no time they were down there with the Buddha. One of them gripped Marcus’s throat and crashed his head against the wall and as the children began to scream in terror a fist connected with his jaw, bone colliding against bone. Marcus wondered how mere meat — the human body — could generate such ripping pain.

In shock and confusion, he raised his hand to his face where the blow had landed but then remembered that hand had been cut off. One young man — a boy in his teens — rushed to the staircase when he heard Qatrina’s voice from up there. He grabbed her by the hair and threw her down the steps all the way from the top. ‘Dirty prostitute. Innovator. Living without marriage with an infidel.’

More men came down and reported what they had seen in the six rooms of the house. ‘You have both been sentenced to death.’ Qatrina and the children were shrieking. ‘Children — leave now and if you ever come back we’ll burn you alive.’ The very air seemed crazed. ‘There has been a mistake,’ Marcus said, ‘we are married.’ They pulled Marcus and Qatrina up the steps, Marcus hearing his own cries now also, his arm beginning to bleed at the stump, his body hurting in various other places. ‘Your marriage ceremony was performed by a woman so it doesn’t count.’ They hit him every time he touched Qatrina or tried to block a blow intended for her, because, in their eyes, she was a stranger to him. Outside there was a fleet of pickups with mounted machine guns in their beds, and they hauled them into two separate ones. He heard gunfire from the house: who were they killing in there? He lost consciousness in the back of the pickup and when he regained his senses it was the middle of the night, he was in the orchard, at first not sure what had happened. Not remembering any firm details. He must have escaped, must have walked off the truck, but why hadn’t they come after him?

In the darkness he walked to Usha and knocked on the door of the first house. They wouldn’t open, just telling him from the other side to go away, but at dawn when they had to emerge from the house to go to the mosque — or be killed — they told him she had been stoned to death yesterday afternoon.

Upon returning from the Pakistani exile, Marcus had revealed to everyone what lay behind the djinn that were said to haunt the area around the lake. David had told Marcus everything Zameen had seen on the night she was picked up by the Soviet soldiers. Two of the cleric’s wives were buried there. The myth of the djinn was too deeply ingrained in Usha’s psyche so people remained afraid when approaching that part of the lake; nevertheless, when the cleric made his way back to Usha from Pakistan, he was told that he was no longer welcome.

He left, staying away for years, but — Marcus learned now, these hours after Qatrina’s death — he had come back to Usha recently, and in order to take revenge, in order to ingratiate himself with the Taliban, he revealed the details of Marcus and Qatrina’s life to them. Saying they had entered churches on their visits to Europe. That their daughter had been a fallen woman in Peshawar. That under the pretext of obtaining a sample, the two doctors had once tricked him into urinating into a vessel on which was affixed a label bearing his full name, which included the sacred and beautiful word ‘Muhammad’.

He issued an amulet to the Taliban to guarantee their safety when they invaded the house.

Months would go by before Marcus learned the full facts of the raid at his house, how a ghost said to be that of Zameen had appeared in the house to put the men to flight, how the Buddha had bled gold. He learned that they didn’t actually kill her through the stoning, had dragged her off in a heap from the field in front of the mosque. Letting everyone think she was dead. They had given themselves the spectacle they wanted but had actually become afraid of the reappearance of Zameen’s ghost. She was taken and thrown into a cell at the back of a building, some hidden pocket in a mud-and-brick garment.