Nadeem Aslam - The Wasted Vigil

‘They want to shut down the school, that’s all.’ Dunia’s words are almost a whisper. ‘I haven’t told anyone this but I did hear someone knock on the window that night, the night of the wicked shabnama .’

Casa remains at the door for a few more minutes, declining the invitation to enter and take a chair.

He steps away and slowly goes back to the water, walking past the spot from where Marcus had yesterday dug out a small idol, saying it was of the Christian saint who protects doctors and who had painted a picture of Jesus’ mother from life. Emerging from the glasshouse last night, after having spent the previous hours looking at the Bihzad book, Casa had dropped the book into the now-empty hole and filled it up, throwing the earth in with the sideways movements of his feet, tamping it all down until it was firm, telling himself that when the time is right he’ll burn down the animals and birds in the glasshouse too.

THE LATE-MORNING SUN is coming in and illuminating the wall beside Marcus’s chair. A spray of pale orange blossoms and grey foliage, the petals and the leaves more or less the same size. He has seen chintz for Afghan women’s dresses that has a design of mobile phones interspersed with hibiscus and frangipani flowers. Lara and the young girl are in the adjoining room now, he can hear them talking as he lowers himself into the chair. For a girl from this land, Dunia has long bones. Some of Qatrina’s relatives would insist her parents starve her when she was growing up, withhold meat and eggs and milk from her, lest she became too tall for a woman.

He looks up at the ceiling. Both Qatrina and he had been concerned that they didn’t really know how the world worked, the various mechanisms of it. Nor did they know much about the many disciplines that allowed the exercise of the imagination. They had trained as doctors but there was a residual shortcoming to their knowledge and they felt they must now teach themselves about history and religions, about paintings and music. So they had slowly collected books, becoming readers. Learning about ancient and modern events. About the best fiction and poetry.

How Gul Bakaoli and Taj ul Maluk were captured and imprisoned by the djinn.

What Xerxes, riding his chariot over a bridge of boats from Asia to Europe, had said.

The immense power of the druids was the weakness of the Celtic polity, Julius Caesar had written in his memoirs. No nation that is ruled by priests drawing their authority from supernatural sanctions is capable of true progress .

Aware of these gaps in their own earlier knowledge, Marcus has never really been convinced that the members of the terrorist team that carried out the 2001 attacks were educated men in the real sense. Most of them had a university education but that education wasn’t in history or literature or politics. At his university in Germany, Muhammad Atta had refused to shake hands with the professor who supervised his dissertation, because she was a woman. When it came down to it the terrorists’ opinions and beliefs were as devoid of nuances as Casa’s seem to be. Viewing the world in very stark terms.

There is even a joke about it in Arabic. In Egypt they say the extremist Muslim Brotherhood is really the Engineering Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood itself is aware of this and has tried to recruit students from the literature, politics and sociology departments of the universities but without any luck.

As he closes his eyes for a moment, time seems to distort itself: the kite of sunlight has moved a great distance along the wall when he opens his eyes again, is about to fly out of the room. He rises and approaches the window. Casa can be seen out there at various times of the day, taking a nap under a tree in the bee-filled orchard, stretching and yawning upon rising, his hands disappearing into the blossoming branches overhead. Or, silent as a deer, he’d be saying his prayers somewhere near by, the body compactly folded like the unborn in the womb when he bows, having performed ablutions at the lake beforehand, his face damp and clean. The teeth he brushes with a fragrant twig, selected after experimenting with the trees and bushes in the vicinity, chewing one end until it resembles a brush. He saw the intensity on the boy’s face as he listened to Dunia at dinner last night, caught it again and again, his mind straying into a reverie about the two youngsters. Yes, love is still a possibility in a land such as this, though love means an eradication of selfishness and it could easily be assumed that in a country like this selfishness was the main tool of survival, everyone a mercenary.

In the corridor he goes past the statue of St Luke he had found in the ground, not sure how Casa felt as he watched it being lifted into sunlight. ‘The Muslims say they revere Christ,’ Qatrina had said, ‘pointing out the fact that Mary is the only woman mentioned by name in the Koran, and that Jesus is mentioned more times in there than Muhammad. But, according to them, his teachings were made obsolete by those of Muhammad. There isn’t a single Christian in the lands of Islam who isn’t under pressure to convert — a subtle pressure if he’s lucky. A remarkable way of showing respect and reverence towards someone.’

He is sweeping the path outside the house — putting the broom down and giving the lemon tree a vigorous shake to make it drop the weaker leaves, extending the period of tidiness by a few hours — when he looks up to find James Palantine walking towards him.

*

A rope has been stretched from one side of the room to the other. Lara comes in through the door and sees it, sees the figure balanced on it acrobatically, his toes clutching the thick woven strand secured on a wardrobe at one end and the bars of the window at the other. A young Caucasian. His arms are raised towards the ceiling and he is peeling off a book with both hands, the body in perfect hovering suspension, throwing a corner glance towards her when he becomes aware of her. He tosses the freed book down onto a sofa, where there are others, she now sees. He has obviously been doing this for some time. His khaki clothes are a contrast against the brilliant walls. Khaki: dust-like. A word the British carried away from this region into the wider world, from when they were fighting the tribes here in the nineteenth century — the colour of the terrain, the colour of the hills, the British soldiers dipping their uniforms in vats of infused tea as the nearest available camouflage.

The young man on the single-filament bridge lowers his arms and, holding them horizontally, gives a small leap and spins through the air so that when he lands back on the rope he is facing her. He smiles at her and then once again tilts his face towards the nailed volumes above him.

It is like cold steel, the shock, when she realises that this must be James Palantine — she knows the reason why he is here.

‘Are you James?’

He shakes his head near the ceiling. ‘I came with him, got bored, and decided to do this. He’s out there.’

She turns and slowly takes the two steps out of the room, looking back at the small burst of laughter from the rope-walking boy as he almost loses his balance.

Marcus and David are walking towards her from the other end of the corridor, their strides shortening when they see her.

Suddenly she wishes to postpone the moment, perhaps even cancel it, but she knows she must listen to the words and sentences these men have brought her. This is what she has been journeying towards ever since she left St Petersburg. There is no alternative, any more than streams can flow uphill, any more than smoke can enter fire. For a moment she is so afraid she wouldn’t know her name if asked. The whole of her reduced just to a single emotion, a single fact.