Nadeem Aslam - The Wasted Vigil

Objects were sent or brought to James from around the whole globe in fact, with scrawled notes dropped in the packages. There was a nomad chief’s poignard from here in Afghanistan, the postage stamps depicting the one-thousand-five-hundred-year-old Buddhas of Bamiyan. Yes, James knew about Afghanistan — Watson had just returned from there when he met Sherlock Holmes. And David brought him tales collected from Vietnam and Angola. Told him how Shah Jahan’s treasury had included four thousand songbirds.

David’s voice was like music being played to the metronome inside the young boy — it had the unhurried rhythm of James’s own thoughts.

Now he gets up and meets the others out in the night, going past a locked door behind which — he had discovered when he managed to open it stealthily — are stockpiled several tons of food donated by the World Food Program, meant for the poor of this region but appropriated by the warlord.

They sleep in shifts here. And so, while some are going off to bed, others, like him, woke up only minutes ago and are ready for the night.

The Afghans among them are discussing the latest ruling by the gathering of distinguished Muslim clergymen in the United Arab Emirates: yes, under Islamic law a man can divorce his wife through SMS text messaging.

James tries to maintain a neutral expression. To think that America has had to get involved this closely with people like these.

More or less every day someone asks him about emigrating to the United States. And, while he is willing to help in any way possible, a small part of him does sometimes fear that they — with their fasts and their prayers, and their desire for four wives and the segregation of the sexes, their fondness for crimes of passion and their abhorrence of the very word ‘alcohol’, not forgetting their belligerent self-pity — will not adjust to life in the First World. Wouldn’t it be better for them and for the USA if they just stayed where they were? A group of terrorists — Muslims, and descendants of Muslims who moved to America from these parts — was arrested last month for attempting to set up jihadi training camps in the wilds of Oregon.

He doesn’t wish to deny anyone a chance of a better life. He just wishes they were better informed about what they were getting into. There is every possibility that disappointment and rage await them at the end of the journey to the West. Earlier, he had seen them riveted by the DVD of a Hollywood thriller — every scene was full of sleek cars or shiny women or blasting guns — making him understand why the rest of the world thought Americans were crazy. Only minutes later, however, he wasn’t too sure. When you learn that the rest of the world thinks this is what life in America is like, that this isn’t just throwaway entertainment, isn’t understood by sane Americans as fantasy or momentary diversion, you realise how crazy the rest of the world is.

Everyone everywhere — including the people who are living in the United States and the West — is allowed to hold any view he wishes about the United States and the West. That is as it should be. The owner of the convenience store near James’s house keeps Islamic Radio on all day and has yet to learn more than a few words of English. James has tried to interest him and his family in listening to American stations but without success. Apart from what he sees of it on al-Jazeera, America does not concern him, it seems. When he bought the store he removed vacuum-packed bacon, tinned ham, alcohol, and anything that offended him and his family, even though the neighbourhood is ninety-five per cent white. He refuses to stock Jewish newspapers and has informed James with great pride that at home he watches only al-Jazeera or the Islam Channel. When James’s fiancée asked the man’s wife and daughters to accompany her to a music recital, they reacted as though she had suggested something obscene. None of that is a problem for James, but when your beliefs lead you to start planning the mass murder of Americans — of your fellow Americans — you have to be stopped. By all possible means.

Two years after talking to her while she sat in a supersonic jet and he crawled or huddled in Afghanistan’s dusty landscape, he had met up with the weapons-systems officer — someone who grew up in one-bedroom apartments where she slept on foldout cots, the daughter of an itinerant salesman from Detroit. James proposed to her at the beginning of this year and they’ll marry in September. He wants David to be there.

And no, the convenience-store owner’s wife and daughters didn’t know that she had taken part in the bombing of Afghanistan. But if they did, and if that is why they refused to socialise with her, then they should know she was helping to uproot terrorists, that efforts were made to keep the civilian casualties to a minimum.

And they are not going to learn any of that from things like the Islam Channel and the Arabic newspapers, which teach them nothing except how to invent grievances.

It’s hard to appreciate the beauty of a place when you doubt its very validity.

The moon spills its light onto him, a clarity that seems to belong to the beginning of day, rather than the early part of night. Rules are being drawn up in America for space tourism and it is recommended that the tourist companies consult Homeland Security’s no-fly list to make sure no terrorists ever get into space. ‘So these Westerners intend to keep enraging us Muslims,’ one of the Afghans had said in Pashto when he learned about this, ‘if they think terrorism will exist in the future too.’ Well, today they are angry at wrongs done to them two centuries ago. Who knows when their long memories and their addiction to brooding on ancient wounds are going to disappear?

James pretends to them that he has only minimal knowledge of their language, to let them think they can talk in it freely amongst themselves in his presence.

Within the vast walled compound of Gul Rasool’s house is an overgrown lot containing beat-up old Russian cars. Volgas, Zhigulis, Moskviches. Dating from the time of the Soviets, when both Gul Rasool and Nabi Khan had proved adept at kidnapping and murdering Communists. Each to this day claims that the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan with the specific purpose of killing just him.

He goes down the corridor towards Gul Rasool’s rooms, to ask him about the Soviet soldier who had had an oak leaf upon his person, and tomorrow he’ll convey the answer to David. Visiting them at the house should give him another chance to examine that young man they’ve got living with them. If a person’s gestures and comportment speak of the work he does, then this Casa is no labourer, as he is said to be.

A caged chakor partridge hangs in the corridor. When he had pointed out to the Afghans back there that loneliness and captivity had driven the unfortunate bird insane — it sits rocking its head back and forth all day — they were astounded. He was unable to see it, they said in English, calling him a ‘secular soulless Westerner’ in Pashto, but the bird was in fact praising Allah, the way Muslim children keep time when they read the Koran in madrassas and mosques.

They need education, these people, or they’ll go on being cruel without realising it.

The response to this is frequently: ‘They are like this because the Western powers favour rotten despots, who keep their people in ignorance and darkness.’ Yes, the United States is openly friendly towards the Saudi royals: probably the most corrupt family in human history, their kingdom a place where, to pick just one example from a long and repulsive list, hundreds of criminals — women and children among them — are publicly beheaded every single year. But here’s the thing. Does anyone really think that if tomorrow the Saudis suspended these barbaric practices the USA would withdraw its support from the kingdom? In fact it would be a cause of delight for the Americans. The savage practices are older than the US support for the Saudi rulers. They are older than the United States itself!