Nadeem Aslam - The Wasted Vigil

With two servants holding up a curtain between them, she accompanied the traveller into the bamboo grove within the walled enclosure of the large house. The sun was setting and it was cooler now. He regaled her with stories of his travels: how in Baghdad he had come across a treatise on Prophet Muhammad’s slippers, peace be upon him; how he had seen Mother Eve’s hundred-foot-long grave in Jeddah; how Noah’s father, Lam, was buried right here in a forty-eight-foot-long grave near Jalalabad — he’d appeared in a dream to Sultan Ghazni in the eleventh century, expressing regret that his resting place lay unhonoured and forgotten; following the instructions given to him in the dream, the Sultan arrived at a place within this valley and plunged his sword into the ground, from where a red fountain emerged, and there he built a shrine visited and revered to this day.

The bamboos stirred their leaves in the breeze around them, and that was where they were found by the returning pilgrims an hour or so later: she had been overpowered by the man, and the stabbed servants were lying unconscious near by.

He fled. She told them it was rape but no one believed her. The cleric at the mosque demanding she produce — as Islamic law required of a violated woman — four witnesses who must be male and must be Muslim to confirm that she had not consented. This was Allah’s commandment and could not be questioned.

The servants fortunately did not die, and they corroborated that they had been attacked — but one of them was female and the other, though male, was a Turkoman unbeliever so his testimony was void. Women and infidels were forever plotting against the Muslim manhood. In any case Malalai and her lover could easily have harmed the servants as a ruse in case they were discovered.

With an axe she entered the bamboo grove one night and — despite the fact that her body was bruised and her collarbone was cracked from the beatings she had received during the previous days — tried to fell the trees. She managed to flatten six before she was discovered and stopped. She would not explain what she was doing, but whenever she had the opportunity she went in there with axes and saws — and once even a small knife — to hack at the bamboos. They knew she had lost her mind when she revealed that she planned to construct flutes out of the bamboo stems. The grove had witnessed her assault, it knew she was innocent, and sooner or later there would be found a flute that would speak with a human voice — announcing the truth of that afternoon to the world around her.

The traveller, an investigation revealed shortly, was in fact a man from within Usha, an ancestor of Nabi Khan, a feud beginning between the two houses that would continue through the years and decades.

Malalai herself, sitting surrounded by piles of discarded flutes — they had all remained silent about what they had seen — was eventually sent out of Afghanistan to a far shore of the family, to the Waziristan tribal belt, the area that would one day become part of Pakistan, and where Marcus’s father was killed in the 1930s.

*

The centuries-old Buddhist paintings on the walls of many of Afghanistan’s caves were covered in mud to prevent them from being damaged by Muslim invaders, white circles pockmarking the ceilings where soldiers and hunters had delighted in using the images for target practice. The memory of visiting the caves with Qatrina and Zameen was where Marcus got the idea of coating the walls of this house. In the city of Herat lives the only living Afghan artist to have been trained in the style of Bihzad, and he was summoned to the governor’s building when the Taliban took Herat: he had laboured for seven years in the building, lovingly painting the intricate scenes recreating the classical glory of his city. He was made to watch stunned with grief as the walls were completely painted over.

The water in the bowl is a deep brown now, mud from a square foot of the wall transferred to it. He replaces it with clean water, looking out of a window when he hears the sound of an Apache helicopter in the sky. He returns to the wall and continues the work. Like Marcus’s father, Malalai died in the 1930s. But she was eighty, unlike his father, and she had spent most of her life as little more than a servant, someone abused and worthy of contempt because of that event in her distant past.

A series of aerial assaults by the British was under way in Waziristan at that time, and she died because her masters dragged her from her bed one night, dressed her in men’s clothing, and tied her to a post in an open field — to be able to say in the morning that the British were flying around in aeroplanes murdering innocents.

The masters had kidnapped a Sikh girl from India, and despite conferences with the British administrators, and their increasingly ominous threats, had failed to hand her back. At first plainly denying any knowledge of the matter, the kidnappers refused to attend the meetings altogether eventually, becoming belligerent and saying no government had the right to prevent them from abducting infidels — the girls and boys for pleasure, the men to be forcibly circumcised and converted to Islam — or from raiding into India and Afghanistan. All this was a way of life to them, an expression of freedom, as was the shooting of government officials and the patrolling soldiers.

Malalai, tied to the ground in crouching position, could not scream because her mouth had been gagged. There was no one to come to her aid in any case. She had soiled her clothing with terror, knowing that with the arrival of dawn the air raid would begin, if jackals and wolves and the djinn hadn’t consumed her by then. She was little more than carrion.

The British had recently begun to use aerial bombardment in the Frontier to curtail some of the tribal wildness, and though there was much outrage at the League of Nations, and in the world press, the bombing was not indiscriminate. Leaflets, printed on white paper, had been dropped from an aircraft all across the tribe’s land nine days earlier, warning that aerial proscription against the tribe would result in a week unless the Sikh girl and her kidnapper and a fine of a hundred rifles materialised. The leaflets — a sheaf of them had landed around Malalai when she was fetching water from the well — also defined a safe area, an enclave big enough to hold all the people of the tribe with their flocks, but not big enough to graze the flock or live comfortably in.

Twenty-four hours before the aerial raid, thousands more leaflets were dropped, these on red paper as a last warning. Once the allotted time passed, anyone caught outside the enclave was to be attacked from above with machine-gun fire and twenty-pound bombs, though no buildings were to be targeted unless seen to be used for hostile purposes. Animals sent out to graze were also killed, the corpses attracting wolves and vultures.

The tribes in the neighbouring areas had been warned not to shelter outlaws or join in the fight. But it was clear to the kidnappers that the other tribes had to be persuaded to do just that. That was when it was decided that Malalai should be taken to the forbidden zone during the night, her mouth silenced.

LARA OPENS THE BOOK and begins to read.

I think that all people — those living,

those who have lived

And those who are still to live — are alive now.

I should like to take that subject to pieces,

Like a soldier dismantling his rifle.

It is the translation of a Russian poem she knows. The letter a in the word ‘alive’ is missing — taken away by the iron nail — but the eye supplies it from memory.

She is in the room at the top which is filled with smeared velvet-like light at this hour. The mosaic she had assembled of the two lovers is still here, beside her chair. She lowers her arm when she hears David enter the room, feeling suddenly that it contains no strength, and she puts the book face down on the fragments, imagining for a moment the pages becoming slightly coated with the coloured dust of the plaster.