Nadeem Aslam - The Wasted Vigil

‘Yes. Around the time of Christ. A long time before Muhammad.’

The boy takes the scissors from his hand and turns towards the door.

*

The roots of several trees have grown around a television set. The Englishman at some point must have tried to unearth it but then abandoned the effort, unable to unclasp the woody fingers that can still be seen gripping the half-buried machine. Casa goes past this small ditch in the orchard. Casa and others would sometimes watch Hollywood action movies at the training camps, searching for ideas and inspiration. The burning exploding American cities were their dreams made real on the screen, though later when he was alone the unearthly beauty of some of the actresses and actors would fill him with a disturbing and shameful pain.

The thought comes to him that tonight at Nabi Khan’s farm he would have known intimacy with a woman for the first time.

‘You said you have made one of these canoes before?’ he asks David, returning with the scissors and resuming work.

‘I built one with my brother when I was young. And later also with James, the son of a friend, when he was a boy. Do you have a brother, Casa?’

‘I have no family.’

‘The war with the Soviets?’

‘Probably.’

‘I am sorry.’

‘It wasn’t your fault … Now I must go and say my prayers …’ It’s still early for worship but he needs to be alone. Who is she? Gul Rasool has sent her to the house to spy on him, he is sure, the Americans from yesterday having told Rasool of their encounter.

Tan butterflies rise up briefly from the muddy edge to allow him to pass and then come down again to settle in slightly different places, as though the letters of a word had been rearranged to spell a new word.

Behind him the radio is on at the lake. A jail being expanded has been bombed by the Taliban and al-Qaeda forces in the neighbouring province. And the driver of a tanker supplying fuel to the NATO forces has been found butchered. The Americans have asked the Pakistani government to control the spread of what they call militant Islam within its borders — as though you can treat the government of a country as a friend but its people as an enemy.

As though, along with mere bodies, you can bomb ideas out of existence too. They have sent a few arrows towards the sky and think they have killed Allah.

As he passes the mulberry tree with its tiers of strong leaves there is a muffled noise from the ground, from the patch of grass where his foot has just landed. He freezes, then slowly shifts his weight onto the other leg, beginning to say in his head the verse of the Koran the believers must recite at the moment of death. Perhaps he felt it instead of hearing it, he is not sure. It is as though two adjacent rooms in Marcus’s house have had their common wall removed, the combining of two senses.

He takes a shovel from the glasshouse and begins to dig down. The implement is made of the beaten scrap metal of Soviet planes — faint Cyrillic script is visible at the back. He stops when the plastic sheet comes into view and uses his hands to brush away the earth. It’s a thin flat rectangle held in place by fibrous roots. Making a small tear in the plastic accidentally, he rips it all off in frustration. A young woman’s face is looking up at him from the pit, the glass in the frame shattered in two places by his weight.

He brings the image out — blowing away two coffin cutters, as woodlice are sometimes referred to in Afghanistan — and overcome with revulsion drops it back into the pit. Allah forbids photography. The only exception to this a Muslim must reluctantly make in today’s world is the photo needed for a passport: to go on the pilgrimage in Mecca, or to cross borders for the purposes of jihad. He drops a handful of soil onto her and then turns around, having heard Marcus approach.

‘What did you find?’

He quickly pulls the image from the hole, letting the dry soil slide down the glass, and, smiling, stands up. He carries it towards Marcus who tells him the photograph is of his daughter.

It’s like a large stone thrown at his breast when he looks up and sees that the girl Dunia is standing at a high window. If she has been there for a few minutes she must have seen him discover and then begin to rebury the photograph.

She is looking directly at him. Their eyes meet briefly and then she turns away.

THE RHINOCEROS HORN SUTRA advocates the merit of asceticism for pursuing enlightenment, as opposed to being a householder or living in a community of monks and nuns. Almost all the verses end with the admonition for seekers to wander alone, like a rhinoceros.

The perils of communal life. The benefits of solitude.

Dunia sits in an armchair in a half-revealed interior. They have persuaded her — she has let them think they have persuaded her — that she should spend the entire day here, stay for lunch and for the evening meal.

She has just said her prayers. When she turned around after finishing, she saw Casa sitting just outside the room. He pointed towards the prayer mat to indicate that he was waiting for it to be free so he could offer his own prayers. Walking away wordlessly when she handed it to him. Perhaps not hearing the apology she murmured for having delayed him.

She closes her eyes against the daylight.

Tomorrow is Friday so there is no school — but in fact classes won’t be held the day after either. As there have been none today. The cleric at the mosque has publicly accused her of being dissolute, and the school has been forcibly shut down. It is said that the night the shabnama appeared, a man was seen knocking on the window of her room. She doesn’t know who he was, but it’s the chance the cleric had long been praying for, to uproot the school. He had started a rumour about her which she had disregarded but a group of dog-headed thugs from the mosque had arrived at the school the day before yesterday to tell her they will not tolerate its continuing presence in Usha.

Last month the cleric — he is the son of the old cleric, the one banished from Usha for having killed two of his wives — had expressed the wish to marry her, take her as his third wife, but both her father and she had turned him down. Perhaps this is his revenge.

This cleric’s mother was the first woman his father killed — accidentally during a beating because she would not consent to him taking another wife. But after secretly burying her near the lake and spreading the story about the djinn, he realised he had got away with it: so the next murder was deliberate.

He could have just divorced that woman. It’s not as though Allah in his inscrutable wisdom has made it difficult for a man to divorce his wife: he just says the words ‘I divorce thee’ three times and all connections are severed. But the new wife the cleric had wanted to replace her with was her younger sister: her family would not have given him her hand in marriage had he thrown out the older woman. By killing her and saying she had run away from him, he actually placed them under obligation, to supply the substitute.

Dunia defied the people at the mosque yesterday and held classes as usual, but at dawn today she found a bowl placed in the centre of the courtyard of her house. Someone had broken in during the night. She approached it and saw that it was filled with water and held a single bullet. Her own face reflected on the surface was a warning — a shot in the head.

The Americans want a school here, and therefore so does Gul Rasool, and the cleric and his cohorts have had to put up with it so far — both boys and girls are taught at the school and the cleric often tells the people at the mosque that ‘three million bastards are born in Britain every year because of mixed education’ — but now they have invented or been handed this excuse. To paint her as shameless and to have the doors of the school locked until a replacement can be found for her. A small victory for the time being.