Nadeem Aslam - The Wasted Vigil

But whatever any of them thought, one thing was always certain: even though they suffered, and had to struggle at times to bring meaning and even the most basic dignity into their existence, and even though in their search for justice and truthfulness they were beaten down and met with disappointment again and again — their lives were not available for use as an illustration. Theirs were not stories that could be read as an affirmation of another system.

IN THE ORCHARD Casa is in danger of being engulfed by flames. Mid-prayer, he has rearranged his blanket around him, flinging the loose end over the shoulder, so that one corner has draped itself on the lamp burning on the ground beside him. Just to the left of where he sits on the prayer mat. His eyes closed and head bowed, he has little idea of the change in the quantity of light in his vicinity. The light around a person in prayer is uniform in any case, Allah dispatching angels to hold a four-cornered canopy of rays above him for the duration.

Dunia reclines against the trunk of the tree, hands folded at the spine to cushion the roughness of the bark. Dusk. If she moves forward to pull the thin fabric off the scorching glass and metal she might despoil his worship, introducing a worldly element into his act of contemplation. Perhaps he is aware of the possible fire and deems it trivial. An eventuality he can control.

She’ll keep watch over him. Only ten steps separate them, sufficient for her to lunge and slap away the beginning of any flame.

A girl surrounded by red flowering trees.

Her mother died in a Katyusha rocket attack carried out by the Soviets when she was still a child and she has learned that the weapon was named after a wartime Russian song, Katyusha the girl who stood forlorn in an orchard full of apple and pear blossom, longing for the return of the soldier lover. He will guard the land of dear homeland … ‘There is a crescendo in the third line of each stanza,’ Lara said when she asked her about it, ‘so it must have seemed fitting to name the rocket after it. Why do you ask?’

The mountains soar above the orchard. There are villages in the folds of some of those heights, amid the stone dust and ice glitter, and her father loves to say his prayers up there whenever he visits them. She imagines it’s because he feels more aware of Allah up there. They are quite a large and obvious handprint of His.

Casa finishes and she watches him pull the blanket away from the lamp, a strand of smoke just beginning from it. On seeing her he brings the prayer mat to her. All his life is in his glances, making her understand why the first gesture by which a formerly living body is declared a corpse is the closing of the eyes.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing.’

He is about to leave but stops. ‘Then why do you appear so frightened?’

She hadn’t suspected that her feelings might be readable.

‘I thought you were going to get hurt.’

‘The fire?’

She nods.

‘But you don’t even know me.’

She shakes her head, nods. ‘All of a sudden I couldn’t move. I didn’t know what to do.’ Has fleeing Usha exhausted her? If she were to encounter danger here, she suddenly fears she’ll surrender.

Touching her eye she brings away a teardrop that has grains of kohl dissolved in it. She is as amazed as he seems to be when her hand advances towards his face and the dissolved kohl is rubbed onto his right cheek. A small daub. A dark bee-wing.

‘What are you doing?’ he asks in a hollow voice. The forehead is creased in evenly spaced lines that lose all uniformity in the centre like two opposing sets of waves crashing into each other.

‘To keep off the bad eye.’ Rendering a perfect thing a little less perfect, to stop the djinn from coveting it.

Looking overwhelmed, he parts his lips. She watches the face in anticipation, to see what he would say. It is like watching the tip of a pen make contact with paper: what would that dot become — a poem, a riddle, a letter?

‘I … I wish I didn’t feel alone all the time,’ he says at last, very quietly.

‘What have you done?’

For reasons she doesn’t understand he brings his hands forwards and displays the palms. He thinks she can see something in his lifelines? But what he says next makes it clear that he is someone traumatised by the United States invasion:

‘I hate America.’

There is a deliberation before each of his words, which seem carefully chosen as a result. She has the feeling that he is searching for the most stable and most direct bridge between his inner self and the world.

‘Sometimes nothing makes sense and I become afraid,’ he says.

‘There’s no need for you to feel alone.’

‘There are so many questions.’

‘Those questions are being asked by everyone. You have no need to feel alone.’

He lowers his head. ‘We’ll destroy America the way the Soviet Union was destroyed.’

‘The Soviet Union was hated by its own people. The USA is loved by its people so it can’t be destroyed.’ She moves her fingers towards his lips.

‘But how can we let someone obliterate Islam?’

‘They can’t. And for the same reason. Muslims love Islam. But Muslims hate fundamentalism. That can be destroyed.’ She touches the corner of his mouth. ‘What happened here? This small scar. What we have to make sure is that Muslims don’t fall in love with the ways of the fundamentalists — then we’d be in trouble.’

He flinches now and steps away, bringing her out of her own trance too. Even the sound of her consciousness had been stilled. He wipes off the kohl, rubs at it as though it’s sulphuric acid. ‘Practices and habits of infidels, of star-worshippers.’

She’d rather leave — it’s obvious that with him the source of prayer isn’t delight, it’s fear of Allah’s retribution — but she pauses, clutching the folded mat to her breast, because of what he says next.

‘And aren’t you ashamed of going about the way you do?’ There’s something thorn-like in his voice now. ‘A Muslim woman should keep her face covered.’

‘Who told you that?’ A shot of furious energy in the blood.

‘What?’ He clearly wasn’t expecting this. It’s as though he’s heard a heartbeat in a rock.

‘You heard me perfectly well.’

‘It’s in the Koran.’

There was near-revolt in Kandahar when King Daoud’s daughters appeared unveiled in public in 1959, obliging the King to send a delegation of clerics and religious scholars — Qatrina’s father among them — to debate the issue with the mullahs of the city, asking them to point out where exactly in the Holy Book it said that women must hide their faces.

While he waited for her to finish her prayer earlier today he had been sitting in the corridor, and later she noticed that one-third of a gazelle’s neck had been scratched away from the painted wall. The illusion of sun on the creature’s fur makes it appear as though clothed in gold needles, and she is sure she would have found bronze and yellow flakes under his fingernails if he hadn’t performed his ablutions to say his prayers since then.

‘I saw what you did to the wall in the house earlier. You think such things are orphans?’

‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’

‘Who are you, what are you doing here?’ She has encountered this kind of behaviour countless times before, from men with nothing but passion where knowledge should be. ‘You think no one loves those pictures, and the practices and habits of this country?’

He has no answer.

Although remorseful, because exhibitions of anger displease Allah, she continues to hold his eye until at last he turns away and, collecting the lamp, disappears towards the lake, the suddenly abandoned moths flying off in various directions in search of the disappeared light.