The Blind Man's Garden

  ‘I came to see if you needed anything.’

  ‘We don’t need anything.’ She points to the door. ‘You must leave or I will scream. Now go.’

  Buttons, snaps, collar stays and a seam ripper have spilled out of the plastic bag that Tara had let drop onto the floor as she came in. ‘I don’t know why you must pretend to be so innocent,’ he says as he steps over them to leave. ‘Both of you.’

  After he has left Tara comes and holds Naheed. ‘What happened?’

  Tara is thin. The months have taken so much out of her.

  ‘Nothing. I am fine,’ Naheed says, folding the letter and placing it in the box, securing it with a rubber band.

  ‘You have to throw them away,’ Tara says.

  She places the box in the suitcase under the bed. She turns the key and takes it out of the lock.

  Tara comes forward, holding out an envelope towards her.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a photograph of the boy you will be engaged to soon.’

  About to unseal it, Naheed lifts her finger away from the flap immediately.

  29

  Not a day goes by when a living person’s eventual burial site does not call out in a clear and unambiguous voice, ‘O child of Adam, you have forgotten me.’

  In Baghdad House, Rohan is reading the Koran for Sofia, recalling the verses from memory.

  Allah created four homes for Adam. Eden, the Earth, Purgatory and Paradise. And He has given four homes to the Children of Adam too. The womb, the Earth, the grave, and then Paradise or Hell.

  After the burial a person is asked by the angels, who have materialised inside the grave, ‘What do you think of Islam?’ The second question he is asked is, ‘What do you have to say about Muhammad?’ If the answers are satisfactory, he is shown a glimpse of the tortures of Hell. ‘You have been spared this,’ he is told, and a vision of Paradise is granted him. ‘This will be your eventual home.’ The grave widens and seven doors open in its sides to allow the fragrant breezes of Paradise to circulate until Judgement Day. The opposite is true if it is a sinful person: seven entrances to Hell open up and the grave shrinks until the ribs crack past each other, the demons descending on the body to begin the tortures.

  Rohan makes his way around her room and stands at the window, listening to the garden. The Prophet said there will be no tree in Paradise whose trunk is not of gold. Paradise, which Sofia will enter after Judgement Day, he is sure. Though about himself he cannot say anything.

  He moves his head in the air of the room, aligning his dead eyes for a chink of light. Her voice seems present in the walls. Everything in this room has outlived her: he senses the lamp looking at him with that knowledge, the paintings of flowers on the walls, the ink-stained table. It’s all here except her. It is as though she still exists but is choosing to stay away from his eyes.

  *

  ‘Naheed.’

  Tara calls out to the girl.

  ‘Naheed.’

  ‘She’s not here, sister-ji,’ Rohan answers.

  He comes to the veranda, feeling along the walls. The tips of his fingers are the precise length that his gaze can travel now – his eyes bandaged.

  ‘I thought she was here,’ Tara says, looking around, and she calls out again.

  ‘I have been alone all morning. I thought she was with you.’

  Tara takes his hand and guides him back into his room. ‘You’ve been alone all morning?’

  ‘Yes. What time is it?’

  ‘It’s past noon. I just came in to help her prepare lunch.’ With the beginning of panic in her voice she shouts the girl’s name once more.

  ‘She’ll be here any minute, I’m sure,’ Rohan says as she lowers him into his chair. He sighs and slowly reaches out for the notebook on the table. ‘I have been trying to write.’

  The pages are empty because, unknown to him, the pen doesn’t have any ink in it.

  ‘Where could she be?’ Tara says, moving towards the window.

  ‘Perhaps she’s gone to the bazaar.’

  ‘She would have told me, brother-ji. Her behaviour has been somewhat erratic these past few days but she wouldn’t go anywhere without telling me. Or leave you here all by yourself.’

  She enters the garden hoping to see her step out of a pocket of greenery, dressed in ash, and she walks towards the pond where the water lilies burn in the sunlight and then recoils at the thought that enters her mind on seeing the moss floating at the water’s edge, looking like long hair.

  As she cooks in the kitchen – and attends to the disorder Rohan has unknowingly created in making himself breakfast or pouring a glass of water – she remains alert to every movement out there, every sound.

  By the time Yasmin and Basie return from St Joseph’s, at three, she is close to tears.

  ‘I am sure there’s a perfectly simple explanation,’ Basie says. ‘Don’t be alarmed.’

  ‘Yes. She’ll be here soon,’ Yasmin says.

  ‘Have you asked the neighbours?’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘I’ll go,’ says Yasmin.

  Tara reacts with pain. ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Someone might have seen her, Aunt Tara.’

  ‘No,’ she says firmly. ‘We have to be careful who we ask. If we tell them she is missing, the thought will enter their minds that she has a secret life, and later they’ll easily accuse her of immorality and unchastity.’

  Yasmin half-heartedly comes back to her chair.

  ‘Let’s just wait for a little while longer,’ Basie says. ‘I am sure she’ll be back any minute.’

  As the afternoon advances, Tara ties on her burka and goes back to her room five streets away. Before climbing up she stops to exchange a few words with Sharif Sharif’s wives but they don’t mention Naheed. On a shelf in her room there are stacks of clothes, folded as neatly as newspapers. They are the sewing work she has finished over the past week, and she carries these around the neighbourhood now, taking them to the customers’ houses. In each house she mentions Naheed’s name several times, with a pretend casualness, in case someone says something about having seen the girl, in case someone remembers something Naheed had said recently and provides a clue to her disappearance.

  When she returns to Rohan’s house it is almost dusk and the stars are beginning to come out in the east, where it is darkest.

  She is sitting with Yasmin and Basie in the kitchen when Rohan makes his way towards them through the banana grove. ‘Where is Naheed?’ he asks from out there.

  Basie goes out and offers him his arm to lead him in but Rohan refuses to take even a single step. ‘Where is Naheed?’ The voice is louder now.

  Basie makes to say something but then stops.

  ‘Answer me, someone. I know you are all here. Basie? Yasmin? Tara? Where’s my Naheed?’

  ‘She’s not here, Father,’ Yasmin says.

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘She’ll be here soon, brother-ji,’ Tara says.

  ‘What time is it?’

  Nothing but silence from them. Basie wondering whether it is possible to lie to him as he had tried to earlier. But the night prayers have been called from the minaret so he must have a very good idea of the hour.

  ‘I said what time is it? Eight? Eight thirty?’

  ‘It’s just gone past nine, Father.’

  He reacts as though a sword has fallen onto the back of his neck. ‘Why are you just sitting here? Why aren’t you out there looking for her?’ He turns around and rushes through the banana trees into the garden, seeing with the light of his grief. Terror is not knowing where the pain is coming from – and so in his desperation he begins to shout, the word echoing through every dark canopy and trunk, turning in every direction, batting at various things. As Yasmin and Basie try to help him, Tara sits holding the envelope containing the photograph of Naheed’s prospective husband, still unopened.

  *

  At midnight Yasmin and Basie are sitting on the steps of the veranda.
An insect-swirled candle burning beside them. There was rain earlier and hundreds of snails are roaming the garden, their shells conical in shape, and tiny, no bigger than the exposed lead of a well sharpened pencil. The bodies are bright yellow.

  ‘She’ll return,’ he tells her.

  ‘I wish Father would stop insisting we look in the pond and the river.’

  ‘He can still frighten me when he is angry.’

  ‘Me too. We should keep reminding ourselves we are twenty-eight years old.’ She leans her head against his shoulder in tiredness. ‘After Mother died he’d make me pray five times a day for her. Even Jeo when he was five or six was being made to do it. He was so strict, a disciplinarian. I joke about it with him now sometimes, and he claims not to remember being severe.’

  He looks towards Rohan’s room. From a confused anger Rohan had slipped into melancholy and despair. Saying this place was ill-fated. This building defines the line of the trench in which the horses were buried during the Mutiny. The surrounding lands were gifted to Rohan’s great-grandfather by the British as a reward for his loyalty during the rebellion. But in the decades since 1857, several members of the bloodline refused the tainted inheritance. Businesses begun on it would fail. Locusts descended on the wheat fields. Orchards rotted. Rohan too had wanted nothing of it, and only at Sofia’s pragmatic insistence had decided to build Ardent Spirit here, only at her insistence had he used the parcel on the other side of the river to build the bigger building. It is possible that he gave it all away to Ahmed the Moth with relief.

  Basie inhales the damp scents in the air, the cold moonlight. The Rangoon creeper above them has been adding new leaves to itself every day this month, a dense opaque green, branch crowding branch, while the new leaves on the banyan and the peepal are a soft red.

  ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘I am thinking when will I see my husband smile again.’

  She feels him hold his breath at this, the mechanism of the body becoming still.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he says after a while.

  ‘And when will I hear my husband use a swear word? Mikal said you taught him such filthy things as a child.’

  He tightens his arm around her. ‘Motherfucker.’

  She gives a small sleepy laugh.

  When Rohan brought them home all those years ago, the ten-year-old Mikal had a book of constellations and the eighteen-year-old Basie was dragging the trunkful of his father’s jazz records. This veranda was where she had seen him for the first time.

  ‘I am married to a Pakistani nicknamed after Count Basie,’ she says now, wanting him to talk, to be comforted by his voice and to make his own mind disappear towards another topic for however brief a period. Even if she has heard what he will say many times already.

  ‘Hey, hey,’ he responds, heavy-eyed but play-acting to make her happy; if he had the energy he would smile. ‘Jazz and Pakistan have a long history. Chet Baker was married to a Pakistani woman. Halema Alli. There is a song named “Halema”, for her, and their son is named Chesney Aftab.’

  ‘Fiction.’

  ‘She is the beautiful woman with him in the famous William Claxton photographs. I have a print of one hanging on the wall at home. The woman who is now my wife bought it for me on my twenty-first birthday …’

  *

  Six days later he walks into the police station on the Grand Trunk Road and asks to see the house officer. As he waits to be shown into the office he wonders what is occurring in the room on the other side of the wall directly in front of him. It is difficult to suppress a shudder every time the police solve a crime in Pakistan. There is no knowing if the confession is genuine, and there is no knowing how many innocents have been tortured to get even that.

  When the government began hunting Communists in 1980 – for criticising it and the USA – Basie and Mikal’s father had gone underground and then one day the police had taken the child Basie away to make the father give himself up. Basie still remembers being held up towards the rotating ceiling fan at this very police station, as they tried to force him to tell them where his father was hiding. A plot had been uncovered – some of the younger comrades were planning to kidnap American citizens in Pakistan. ‘Your father is doing this to you, not us,’ the policemen told Basie as they struck him. When he came home his legs and face were blue and his mother’s initial thought was that they had spilled ink onto him for some reason.

  Now Basie is shown into an office and he finds the police inspector seated in a black leather chair behind a large desk. Beside him on the floor squats an old emaciated woman, toothless, her meagre hair in a short plait. Her eyes are closed and she’s holding onto the man’s khaki-clad knee. She’s perfectly still, her face wholly expressionless, and his ignoring of her is total – it is as though she is not there.

  ‘How long has your sister-in-law been missing?’ the inspector asks.

  ‘Since Thursday.’ He cannot help but glance towards the woman.

  ‘Why have you come to report it only now?’ the inspector asks.

  ‘We thought she’d gone to visit relatives.’

  ‘Does she do that often?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Does she do that often? Go to visit relatives without telling you?’

  ‘No.’

  The sparrow-like woman must be about eighty. Is she begging the release of a grandson picked up on a false charge? Begging the police to do something about a missing son? A daughter threatened with gang rape by enemies?

  Basie wonders if he recognises the inspector. Was he the one who beat him?

  ‘Your sister-in-law is a widow, you say.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you considered the possibility that she has run away with a yaar?’ He uses the lewd Punjabi word for a woman’s lover.

  ‘She wouldn’t do that.’

  The chart hanging behind the inspector lists the six qualities a Pakistani citizen can expect to find in every member of the police force.

  Politeness. Obedience. Loyalty. Intelligence. Courteousness. Efficiency.

  ‘You say you are a teacher,’ the man says, ‘and you look like a respectable man. You don’t know what I witness every day. I have made you uncomfortable, I know, but you don’t know how depraved humanity can be.’

  A constable opens the door and beckons the inspector. He gets up from behind his desk, detaching his knee from the woman’s hand. ‘I shall return. Certain matters require privacy,’ he says to Basie with a smile as he leaves. ‘Among the sacred names of Allah, there is the Veil.’

  The woman slumps against the chair. Her scratched and grimy spectacles, lacking earpieces, are tied to her head with a fraying cord.

  The children tell a joke about a man who had lost his horse. He went to the American police but it proved fruitless. He went to the British police and their investigation too failed. As did those of the Germans, the French, the Dutch. He came to the Pakistani policemen, who listened to him and went away. When they came back the next day they were leading an elephant by a chain. The animal had been severely beaten and was in bad shape and could barely walk. ‘I am a horse, I am a horse,’ it was screaming.

  ‘Good aunt, what is the matter?’

  But she doesn’t acknowledge him.

  ‘Would you like some water?’

  She shakes her head.

  The inspector returns but then goes to the door once again and shouts to someone out there: ‘Just make sure he has a bad night.

  ‘So. What would you like me to do?’ he asks Basie, settling in his chair, and extending his knee a little until the woman connects herself to it again. Metal reacting to nearby magnet.

  ‘I was hoping you would look for her.’

  ‘Are you saying she has been kidnapped?’

  ‘I want you to find that out.’

  The inspector opens his arms in exasperation. ‘How do you expect me to do that? It’s a big country, there are millions of people.’

  ‘Inspector-sahib, I wish to repo
rt my sister-in-law as missing,’ Basie says firmly.

  The man does not like the tone but ignores it for now. ‘Let me just say that an hour ago we captured a truck that contained two dozen machine guns, dozens of pistols, thirty Kalashnikovs and thirty sacks of bullets. And you want me to waste my time with a girl who has run away from home.’

  ‘How do you know she has run away? Anything could have happened.’

  The man waves the comment away as foolish. ‘She has run away with someone who has filled her head with his talk. When they realise how difficult life is, she’ll return. Hunger is the best cure for illusions.’

  ‘I wish to report my sister-in-law as missing.’

  He wants a bribe from Basie before proceeding. Bribes exist in other countries too, he knows, but there they are an incentive towards performing illegal acts. Here they must be paid to induce an official to do what he is supposed to do.

  ‘When was she widowed?’ he asks brusquely.

  ‘In October.’

  ‘Did you discover last week that she is pregnant and now she is buried in your garden?’

  ‘You can come and dig up the garden.’

  ‘We might have to. Tell me again why you waited six days before coming here.’

  ‘We thought she’d return.’ When on the third day Basie had wondered aloud whether they should contact the police, both Rohan and Tara had been horrified, and Yasmin had almost cried out, ‘You might as well tattoo the word “prostitute” on her forehead.’

  ‘She probably will return. Come back and see us in another month if she hasn’t.’

  ‘A month?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says, holding Basie’s eye. ‘If she hasn’t come back by then we’ll come and take your statements. We’ll have to talk to the neighbours about her character and personality, about her mother’s character and personality.’ He notices Basie glance at the woman and shakes his head. ‘And stop looking at her. This doesn’t concern you.’

  ‘What does she want?’

  ‘What do criminals always want?’ the inspector says with contempt. ‘To evade justice. Left unchecked they will destroy everything. Look at America and how it is behaving.’ He stands up, pushing the woman away. ‘Now I have other matters to attend to.’