The Blind Man's Garden

by Aslam, Nadeem

  1437. The Portuguese are defeated at Tangier by the Moors. The Moors extract a promise from the Portuguese to return to Ceuta; the King’s brother Fernando offers himself as hostage but the Portuguese fail to return and Fernando is abandoned in the dungeons at Fez. James I of Scotland is stabbed to death by Sir Robert Graham, whom the king had banished. Graham is tortured and executed …

  She leans forward and blows out the candle, and it is as though she has just breathed out darkness through her mouth, enough to fill up the room. Assaulted by answers, she walks away from the book, out into the lightning.

  34

  ‘So you have returned,’ the policeman says to Naheed.

  He sips his tea, looking over the rim at her and then at Tara.

  ‘Yes,’ Tara says. ‘She had gone to visit some relatives.’

  He had appeared at the house half an hour ago, a two-foot length of bamboo cane under his left arm.

  The man puts the cup on the table. ‘We have to take you to the police station and ask a few questions,’ he tells Naheed. ‘Put on your shoes and veil.’ He lifts the cane from his lap and touches his earlobe with the tip of it.

  ‘What kind of questions?’ Tara says. ‘There is no more to tell.’

  The man’s gaze is firmly on her face. ‘What did you say your name was? What does your husband do?’

  ‘My husband is dead.’

  ‘Just like your daughter’s.’ The man smiles and picks up the tea and sits drinking without further words.

  The heat is intense despite last night’s storm. A tatiri bird is crying out in the branches outside. ‘It’s praying for rain,’ Tara had told her as a child and Naheed had wondered why it didn’t take a drink from the taps like the sparrows. ‘It neglected to give water to a holy man and he put a curse on it,’ Tara said. ‘Now it can never drink through its beak, only through a small opening at the top of its head. It prays for rain so a raindrop might fall through that hole and into its throat.’

  ‘What are you waiting for?’ the policeman asks.

  ‘I don’t want her to go to the police station,’ Tara says quietly.

  ‘Well, Tara, Naheed,’ the policeman says, ‘both of you must agree that it is far from decent behaviour for a girl to disappear from her home without telling anyone.’

  ‘She did leave a letter but we didn’t see it till later.’

  ‘Where is the letter?’ The man touches his earlobe with the cane again.

  ‘I can’t remember where I put it,’ Tara says, wondering if she should wake Rohan. But he needs his rest – Kyra visited earlier, to offer his sincere condolences for the death of Basie, and to say that the St Joseph’s siege was the work of Indian agents posing as Muslims, but he also reiterated his demand that the house must be vacated, as soon as possible.

  ‘You can’t remember where you put the letter?’ The man nods. ‘Tara, I am one of the moral guardians of this land. You cannot expect me not to have suspicions regarding your daughter’s character, given that you yourself were arrested and put in prison for wanton behaviour. Your husband too was dead when it happened. Just like hers.’

  Tara, who has risen from her seat, having decided to call Rohan after all, sits down again.

  ‘Yes,’ the man says. ‘We looked into your background.’ He turns to Naheed. ‘What are you waiting for? I won’t tell you again. Go and get ready.’ He leans back in the chair and looks up at the ceiling, the tip of the cane touching the earlobe.

  Tara removes her earrings and stands up and goes up to him and turns his left hand palm upwards and places the earrings on it. Closing his fingers around them.

  He stays in that position for another few moments, then he stands up briskly with a smile. ‘Well, I am glad you have returned safely to your family, Naheed. I think I’ll go now. Everything seems to be in order here.’

  Naheed steps away from the door to let him pass.

  ‘I’ll be back regularly to ask after your wellbeing,’ he tells her.

  35

  As he approaches Heer it is as though he is looking at his own memories.

  *

  He gets off the bus two towns earlier and enters a fabric store to buy enough material for a new shalwar kameez. He intends it to be white linen, but the woman ahead of him is buying twelve yards of it for a shroud, and an uneasy thought enters his mind that he will wear clothing made out of the same bolt. When his turn comes no more of the white cloth remains in any case. He points randomly to another colour. Taking the deep green material to the tailor on the other side of the street, he asks how long it will take to sew a new set of clothes. He buys a disposable Bic razor from the general store next door and has a shave and bathes in the mosque bathroom. He goes up into a secluded corner and opens a copy of the Koran and keeps his eyes on the page so no one will approach him, and after a while he lies down and dozes, with his face turned to the wall. Two hours later when he goes back to the tailor his shalwar kameez suit is ready. He puts it on and resumes his journey.

  It’s ten o’clock at night when his rickshaw enters the central bazaar and then continues on towards the other end of Heer. Not wishing to be seen, he sits with his spine and head pressed against the back of the seat. At the Khan Mahal cinema he buys a ticket and goes into the main hall and falls asleep in the back row, while on the screen a woman sits at a piano singing a song, her eyes shyly returning to a man’s framed photograph placed on the piano lid.

  When he climbs the boundary wall of Rohan’s house it is past one o’clock. Lifting himself from the top of the wall into the limbs of the peepal, going along various sturdy branches of other trees, he drops down into the garden and moves towards the veranda, his feet crushing a scent from the fallen guava leaves. He approaches the veranda where the entire far wall is covered top to bottom with nocturnal lizards, who flee at his approach.

  Creak by creak, he opens the transom window above the main corridor. How many times had he done this in the past, coming home from a late film. He climbs down, as does his image in the glass of the far door, so that he is present at both ends of the passage for a few moments.

  He enters Rohan’s room and stands beside the bed, looking at him. A lamp burns on the bedside table. Rohan opens his eyes, but it is as though he doesn’t see Mikal. The old man’s eyes are fixed on him without any reaction or acknowledgement. He stands rooted to the spot with things shining softly in the lamplight around him. Were it not for the evidence of the lizards, he would feel he was invisible. Rohan’s eyes watch him for a while and then Rohan blinks, on the verge of a word. But, no, he closes his eyes instead. Mikal looks at the Chinaman who supports the clock on the mantelpiece. Half past one.

  He walks out into the hallway and glances towards the closed door to Jeo and Naheed’s room.

  In an alcove is the toy truck he had given Jeo back in October, a lifetime ago.

  His feet scatter the melon seeds left out to dry on a cloth sheet on the veranda as he makes his way out. He scales the boundary wall and goes deeper into the darkened neighbourhood, looking up for several minutes at the window to Naheed and Tara’s home. He is walking towards Basie’s house when he stops and frowns and turns back.

  Entering Rohan’s room for the second time in less than an hour, he reaches out his hand towards the pillow and picks up the garment lying beside Rohan’s head. It’s the shirt Jeo was wearing when they left for Peshawar in October. It contains numerous gashes. One above the heart. Several in the stomach. Some in the arms.

  He leaves the house with the bloodstained shirt in his hands, moving towards the cemetery, breaking into a run as he gets closer. There are thorns on fresh graves to stop dogs from unearthing the bodies. Some of them catch on his clothes but he keeps running between the mounds, towards where Rohan’s family has its plots.

  *

  When he enters the garden around midmorning the next day he sees Naheed immediately. The grass is strewn with the red blooms of the gulmohar trees, a wide display of all its tints, holding onto light long a
fter they are dead. She is at the opposite end of the garden and he walks towards her, stopping a few feet away. This is the other side of the wound. After the war and violence and the madness of being inside pain, and the ugliness of intention and deed, her beauty seems an improbability, causing a sense of gratefulness in him. What it means to be alive long enough to love someone. To be granted yet another day above ground.

  She is tending to a vine and she comes towards him and looks him directly in the eye – and then continues towards the shed.

  She emerges with a length of cord and goes back to the flower-laden vine – a brief look over her shoulder at him.

  She ties the vine in three places, squinting when the petals fall onto her face, and they fall onto her hair and even enter the kameez through the neckline and her sleeves which she proceeds to shake out. The fourth tendril she wishes to secure is too high and she fails to reach it despite several attempts. This time she doesn’t look at him as she goes back to the shed, no doubt for something to stand on, but her clothes almost brush his. He reaches up and ties the branch in place and walks away towards the pond, the hundred water lilies standing open on the water, the white of the herons too sharp to look at in the sun. He hears her walk back to the vine and then he hears her give a half-scream, the sound of someone just woken from a nightmare.

  *

  ‘It’s not a ghost,’ he says. She has approached and is touching his incomplete hands tentatively, her own fingers so fine, the eyelids doeskin.

  ‘I am not dead.’

  She looks at him. ‘If I thought you were dead I wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ he places his hand on her arm. ‘I’d want you in the world whether I was in it or not.’

  ‘You look so thin.’

  ‘And you.’

  She sits down on the log that has always been here at the edge of the water, heavy as an anchor.

  He kneels before her almost in a daze himself. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, but then slowly shakes her head and keeps shaking it until she is able to speak again. ‘No, I’m not.’

  Gathering herself she adds, ‘I kept saying if you were here with me, everything would be fine.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have been of much use.’

  ‘It’s not that. None of the terrible things would have gone away, but I could have managed. With you next to me.’

  ‘I am here now.’

  ‘Jeo is dead.’

  He nods.

  She looks at him for a long time, holding him in the relentless amber of her eyes.

  ‘We haven’t seen each other since that day Jeo brought you home and I asked you to go away. Sixty-six days into our marriage.’

  ‘I caught a glimpse of you a few times after that. Here and there, once in the bazaar.’

  ‘It’s been four hundred and seventy-nine days since I saw you last. I feel like I have been in four hundred and seventy-nine wars.’

  She looks up, past the nodding kite-high tips of the silk-cotton trees.

  ‘Do you hold it against Jeo for not telling you he was going to Afghanistan?’

  ‘I am angry at him for going, and going without telling us. I am angry at you for not telling us about his intentions. I am angry at myself for not having detected it myself. I am angry at the Americans for invading Afghanistan. I am angry at al-Qaeda and the Taliban for doing what they did. What does it matter?’

  ‘It matters.’

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He sits still, looking at her. So many dragonflies in a patch of sun behind her the air seems to be made of cellophane. The trees and all their various seasons of sorrow – the season of what has departed, the season of what has never arrived, of what refuses to be undone, of what will never happen.

  ‘We can’t tell anyone about me being here. I killed people.’

  She lowers her head and hides her face in her hands.

  ‘Two Americans.’

  ‘They are looking for you?’

  ‘Yes. They frightened and confused me. I was half crazed and thought they were about to kill me. They had lied to me before. That’s not an excuse. I know I shouldn’t have done it.’

  ‘If they catch you they’ll take you away?’

  ‘Yes. In all likelihood they’ll imprison me forever. They might even execute me.’

  Pale leaves. A green shoot is growing out of the fallen log. Thorns as thin and as long as the hands of a pocket watch. ‘You said “terrible things”. What else has happened?’

  She remains with her head bowed.

  ‘What terrible things have happened, Naheed?’

  She takes a deep breath and stands up. ‘I’ll tell you tomorrow.’ She points to the kitchen and says, ‘I need some water.’

  And with that she leaves and after a while he walks to the veranda and sits down on the steps. From there he hears Rohan in his room and he goes in to him, moving towards his armchair.

  He comes and crouches beside him. ‘Uncle,’ he says, the image of the man dissolving before him because of his tears.

  Rohan opens his eyes.

  Mikal lowers his head into his lap and begins to weep – the deepest of sadnesses, wishing to empty everything out of himself. He feels Rohan place a hand on his head. ‘Who is this?’

  ‘It’s me. Mikal.’

  He looks up at the face and Rohan does not react, looking down at him blankly, the eyes tired.

  ‘Mikal?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve come back.’ He sobs uncontrollably, ‘I know Jeo has died …’

  But something is badly wrong. Above all else, Rohan looks as if he carries news of some atrocious misfortune that no one else has heard of yet. They both hear Naheed come in and he looks towards her, Rohan continuing to stare at the wall. In a soft voice Rohan is saying Mikal’s name again and again, questioningly, and he is touching Mikal’s face, but Mikal still doesn’t understand what Rohan is doing and then Naheed comes forward and begins to explain.

  *

  ‘We thought you were dead,’ Rohan says.

  ‘Jeo’s death wasn’t my fault,’ he says. ‘Or maybe it was. I should have protected him.’

  ‘I wish you had told us he was thinking of going to Afghanistan,’ Rohan says.

  Mikal does not respond.

  ‘But I can understand why you didn’t. Where have you been until now?’

  ‘I was a prisoner, first of the Afghan warlords and then of the Americans.’

  He examines Rohan’s face. As a child he had read that if a star falls into the eye of a blind man he can see again.

  He stands up. ‘I have to go to Basie’s house. How are they, he and Yasmin?’

  Naheed looks at him and then at Rohan.

  ‘What is it?’

  But both of them are too distressed to speak. Eventually Rohan says, ‘Things became terrible while you were dead.’

  *

  He opens the door and steps out into the dark afternoon of the garden. She is there, watching the rain, the gusts of wind injuring the bamboo grove, their delicate tresses littering the paths. How much more beautiful she is in life than in his memories. Its location now lost, somewhere here is the invisible and nameless _____ tree in which an aged djinn is said to reside, Tara having sensed it, advising them that they must take their clothes off upon encountering a djinn. It thinks you are capable of removing your skin and backs away.

  He sits down beside her.

  ‘Sometimes I think it isn’t just you I’ve lost,’ she says, ‘but everything else in the world.’

  ‘You haven’t lost me.’

  ‘I told you I have agreed to marry Sharif Sharif.’

  ‘And I told you it will not happen.’

  ‘He will buy the house for us.’

  He shakes his head. ‘It won’t happen.’

  ‘He’ll pay for Father’s operations.’

  ‘Naheed. Look at me. I am not going to let it happen.’

  ‘It was after Basie died tha
t I said yes. We were left all alone. Father, Yasmin and my mother were against it, they still are. But I didn’t know what to do.’

  ‘I am here now.’

  ‘If he sees you as a threat, all he has to do is go to the police. You’ll be picked up and handed over to the Americans.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘He knows about you. He saw your letters to me. If he finds out you are alive, that you are here …’

  There is a crack of thunder like a rending of the earth’s surface down to the very core and they feel the glass rattle in the window-frames. He watches the trees as the rainwater pours itself from the higher tiers of foliage to the lower, moving from leaf to leaf in the canopies like unending stairs.

  ‘What if I asked you to come away with me?’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I have to think of Father’s eyes. My mother. Yasmin. I have to help them through all this. They need me.’

  ‘I know.’

  She turns her head to look at him. ‘They need us.’

  They look up at the lightning, her eyes shining with a dark brilliance, a warm wind in the leaves, the flashes illuminating the clouds.

  ‘Your hands. They work?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you keep them in the pockets just to make people think you are rich, holding onto your wallet?’ A brief smile from her.

  He looks into her face. ‘They work.’ The sound of a radio is issuing from a neighbour’s house. A song lost and found again and again in the rain. Kithay lai aaya sanu pyar, sajna. Kini dur reh gai vairi jag day nain … How much is expected of the two of them, who in their union must conserve and maintain all those who are now apart, or have never been together.

  *

  ‘Yasmin, my sorrow,’ Rohan says quietly from the other side of the room.

  Yasmin and Mikal sit side by side, their upper bodies turned in an embrace. She who has lost a brother and a husband. They are gone but they are still here, in the hearts of those they left behind. War couldn’t destroy that. War is weak after all. He feels no consolation in such thoughts, in this sentiment.