The Place of Shining Light

by Nazneen Sheikh

  Also by Nazneen Sheikh

  Ice Bangles

  Chopin People

  Heartbreak High

  Camels Can Make You Homesick and Other Stories

  Tea and Pomegranates:

  A Memoir of Food, Family and Kashmir

  Moon over Marrakech:

  A Memoir of Loving Too Deeply in a Foreign Land

  THE

  PLACE

  OF

  SHINING

  LIGHT

  NAZNEEN SHEIKH

  Copyright © 2015 Nazneen Sheikh

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Distribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of copyrighted material; purchase only authorized electronic editions. We appreciate your support of the author’s rights.

  House of Anansi Press

  110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801

  Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4

  Tel. 416-363-4343

  Fax 416-363-1017

  www.houseofanansi.com

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Sheikh, Nazneen, author

  The place of shining light / Nazneen Sheikh.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-4870-0014-1 (pbk.).—ISBN 978-1-4870-0015-8 (html)

  I. Title.

  PS8587.H379P53 2015C813’.54 C2015-902051-4

  C2015-902052-2

  Cover design: Alysia Shewchuk

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

  For Laara, Zorana, Lotus, and Ciaran

  “The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”

  — Jalal ad-Din Rumi

  ONE

  THE HALF-TRUCK MOVED WITH great speed along the rutted road through eastern Afghanistan. The route from the Bamiyan valley to Torkham, Pakistan, was not exactly a joyride. But the driver did not have to bother about slowing down for potholes; the seventy-kilogram package he was transporting had withstood war and destruction for almost five thousand years.

  Adeel, the man seated next to the driver, kept a semi-automatic rifle at his feet and had a revolver tucked into a holster under his waistcoat. His face was gentle and his physique deceptively slight. He chain-smoked steadily while staring out the window. Two hours earlier he had undergone a unique yet troubling experience that had left him feeling disoriented.

  Adeel was a passionate man often ashamed of the intensity of his responses and the bewildering array of emotions evoked in him by various circumstances. He had spent fifteen years in the army and his last assignment, three years ago, had been with the Pakistani patrol team on the Siachen Glacier. The glacier, seventy-eight kilometres in length and eighteen thousand feet above sea level, was called the “highest battleground on earth.” The area was hotly contested by India and Pakistan, as though an extra foot of snow and ice on either side could alter the nature of the conflict. The boundaries of the glacier separated India from Central Asia and Pakistan from China. Adeel was a seasoned mountain climber and a marksman of exceptional skills and he had learned to endure cold and silence well. The stillness of his mountaintop aerie had taught him that his skills of observation could be polished like the facets of a gem. The high-powered lenses of the binoculars he used to survey the ridges of the glacier sometimes played tricks on his mind. A fold of snow could easily become the figure of a man, though an actual man never did appear. Watching the unchanging vastness day after day also gave rise to boredom, and Adeel would allow his mind to wander. Even the hope that an animal might suddenly appear on the glacier — an animal he would shoot, splattering its crimson blood across the white snow — seemed to fade and wither away with time.

  At the end of his mountain assignment, Adeel obtained a mysterious discharge from the army and embarked on equally mysterious missions that were presented to him by people he hardly knew but who seemed to have a dossier of his multiple skills. He had been singled out for his athletic abilities and reliability, and was often approached with assignments along these lines. If his brain had been examined during one of these briefings, it would have displayed a seemingly endless grid of interconnected responses. While the details were still being explained, he had already mentally executed the task.

  Adeel was on a new assignment now and his responsibility was to faithfully complete his task. He had been handed a vehicle with a driver and two sturdy, brutish-looking men who had been chosen for their physical strength. A bread loaf-sized bundle of banknotes had been tossed at him along with three sets of fake identification papers. Adeel didn’t say a word; he simply nodded at his employer and walked away. But nothing in his life had prepared him for the emotions he experienced nine hours later in a torch-lit cave on the cliffs of Bamiyan. The four-foot-high stone statue facing him — a stunning example of Buddhist art that had been placed here by the fourth-century cave dwellers of the region — turned his life upside down.

  Adeel crawled toward the statue, moved by the serenity that radiated from the stone. The lidless eyes, curving lips, and sculpted stone folds of the robe exuded a hypnotic power. Tears pricked his eyes, his chest constricted, and he wondered if he was having a heart attack. The two men crawling behind him almost collided with him when he stopped moving. Adeel brushed his eyes with one hand and with the other he withdrew a pencil-thin flashlight from his pocket. He clicked it on and aimed it at the head of the statue, moving it downward very slowly. The dust-laden form appeared to be in perfect condition. He moved toward it, pulled off the black scarf wound around his neck, and rubbed it on the face of the sculpture. The sheen of pale and unspoiled marble resembled human skin; his hand moved of its own volition and his fingers cradled the face, stroking it gently.

  Outside, a full moon lit the gentle valley of Bamiyan, where two rivers irrigated the land. The destruction wrought six years earlier by Afghan zealots on two gigantic Buddhist sculptures embedded in a cliff wall was followed by excavations for a copper mine in the vicinity. But this historic site formed no part of Adeel’s world. Although he knew that there were museums in Pakistan that at least pretended reverence for historical monuments, an ideologically divisive Muslim diaspora meant that he was expected to pay greater homage to artifacts representing Islamic spirituality.

  The statue was placed on its side on a heavy woollen blanket and rolled toward the mouth of the cave and onto a wooden wheelbarrow by the two burly men and pushed down the tortuous incline of the cliff face. The primitive wheels of the cart splintered on the rock-strewn path and it stopped as though in protest at this act of outlandish thievery. The cart itself was then lifted and carried down the hill. The statue was wrapped in two padded quilts and placed in the back of the truck. Adeel had been warned about dodging the ragtag group of Afghan government patrolmen, who cheerfully violated their vigilant stance whenever a roll of banknotes was slipped deftly from palm to palm.

  Adeel and the men drove out of Bamiyan and headed toward Kabul, hoping to reach the outskirts of the city before dawn. He knew that the night drive through the Afghan interior would pose few challenges, but the capital would be a different matter. A basket of stiff chapattis and a container full of greasy mutton, cooked with potatoes, had been placed in the truck so that food stop
s would be unnecessary. However, the two men at the back had savaged the entire supply earlier and now complained because they wanted the hot tea that customarily accompanied meals. They churlishly used the quilt-covered package as a resting place for their dirt-laden feet. Adeel looked at them contemptuously and informed them that there would be no stops on the way. He had already confiscated two hashish cigarettes from the driver when the man had foolishly offered one. Sitting in the passenger seat, Adeel methodically drew walnuts out of a bag at his feet and cracked them with his teeth, ate the meat of the nut, and hurled the shells out the window of the moving truck.

  For the first time in his life, Adeel was filled with apprehension about his task. The sculpture — always referred to as the “package” by the man who had employed him — had unleashed a series of dangerous questions in his mind, questions that addressed the faith in which he was raised. For a Muslim, devotion was absolute, while the manifestation of faith was a prescribed set of edicts that, for Adeel, had evolved into a series of robotic exercises. On the odd occasions when Adeel entered a mosque, or touched the venerated Koran, or stroked the small amulet his mother had placed around his neck, an incomprehensible vacuum filled his mind. He gave a perfunctory respect to all of these symbols of his faith, but the stone Buddha had done something that none of them was able to do: it had filled him with tranquility, made him feel as if he’d been touched by an infinite universe that was beyond even the scope of his imagination. And Adeel had surrendered to the sensation. He felt as though he was standing at the edge of a pool where strife sank, like a pebble, to the bottom and disappeared forever.

  Although, the more disciplined and practical aspect of his nature fought against this surrender, his soul had spontaneously embraced it. Who were these ancient people, he thought, who could create such wondrous art and then disappear without a trace? The Afghan guide who’d led them to the cave mentioned that the Buddhists preceded the invaders who, between the eighth and twelfth centuries, destroyed temples and statues, including the fort of Bamiyan. After the invasions Buddhism declined in the region, and Islam spread throughout all of Afghanistan.

  Adeel closed his eyes and tried to force these thoughts from his mind. If he was to complete the theft with which he’d been tasked, he had to empty his mind of all doubts in the few hours it would take to reach Kabul. He needed the large sum of cash offered by the antiquities dealer in Pakistan in order to settle an old family debt. Adeel’s widowed mother had been eased out of her comfortable room in the modest family home that had been built by his father and forced into a small, airless room by the spiteful wife of his older brother. Even her kitchen privileges were viewed with disdain by his insensitive sister-in-law. Adeel felt that his weak-willed brother, who had permitted his domineering wife to take such liberties, had dishonoured his mother, and he wanted to build an addition to the house where his mother would have her own living and eating space. The money from smuggling the statue would enable him to begin construction.

  As Adeel stared out at the dark night, the winding road illuminated by the truck’s headlights, he fought the impulse to order the driver to stop so that he could go around to the back and gaze at the face of the sculpture again. The two burly men who guarded it hailed from the Pakhtunkhwa region of Pakistan, and one of them had spat on the floor, declaring the statue unclean and from the “farangi.” Adeel toyed with the idea of placing a well-aimed blow at the man’s chin to drop him to his knees before deciding to ignore his ignorant gesture. He regarded both men as oxen, dumb brutes who had one purpose, and that was to be beasts of burden. However, they were also fighters who could disarm an assailant without the use of weapons. Adeel knew any display of emotion in front of them could disrupt the chain of command.

  For Adeel, the sculpture was a talisman, and proof that war and destruction could never completely erase history. He remembered the village school he’d attended as a teenager, where he was beaten savagely for stealing a book belonging to the history teacher. He had simply meant to go through it at his leisure and then slip it back into the schoolmaster’s desk. But he was caught when a boy in his class reported the theft to the teacher. The book was pulled out of Adeel’s worn school satchel and the blows of a thin reed cane rained down on his neck and shoulders. When he returned home from school his mother wept as she applied a balm to the red welts, while Adeel completely dismissed the subject of history and abandoned the luxury of intellectual curiosity. He matriculated successfully from the school without reading by consigning lectures to memory.

  His father’s sudden death had forced Adeel to abandon college and join the army. Adeel blossomed in the military and won approval for his intelligence and his ability to accept discipline and the rigours of physical training. By a stroke of luck he won a place at the military academy and graduated with honours as a second lieutenant. The commanding officer of the unit, Major Zamir, kept a close eye on Adeel and singled him out as an example for the men in his unit. Not wanting to win the disfavour of his friends, Adeel diplomatically kept his distance from his superior. The major was a maverick. He was often seen at the officers’ mess hall with his face buried in a book. He was known as a dreamer who occasionally disregarded military protocol. Adeel often felt that Major Zamir belonged to another time, when men wore flowing capes and rode their horses like the wind.

  Years later, it was Zamir who arranged for Adeel to be part of the Siachen Glacier patrol unit. At the time, Adeel had noticed with a pang of sorrow the web of fine lines surrounding Zamir’s eyes, the hardening of his fine features, and his smoker’s cough. The man seemed to have lost his soul somewhere along his dazzling career path. What sacrifice had life exacted from him? Adeel had thanked him for his new position, saluted him, and walked away without realizing that the next time they met would be under vastly different circumstances.

  THE FIRST BLUSH of dawn rose over Kabul as the half-truck entered the city. Plonked onto a dusty plain, the city revealed all the ravages of civil unrest — the destruction of property along with defensive barricades, sandbags, and barbed wire. Military vehicles were present, along with trucks bearing nato symbols. Although the residents of Kabul slept peacefully, elsewhere in the rough sprawl of Afghanistan, bombs exploded, rifles were discharged, and fires raged, burning people and vehicles with relentless frequency.

  Adeel, used to sublimating both environments and actions to his will, knew he could easily be out of his depth in Afghanistan. A random barrier or checkpoint could materialize around any bend, creating unmanageable problems. Sleep-deprived, yet with the alertness of a hunter, Adeel knew he had to guide the driver quickly to the road that led out of the city, where a rendezvous had been arranged. They were to meet a man named Gul-Nawaz at a teashop with a green door. Gul-Nawaz had arranged for the local guide, who had led them to the cave, and payment had to be made for his services. The smuggling operation worked through a network of agents who always had to be kept happy. Any slip-up meant that the next border crossing, at Torkham, would not take place.

  THE TWO MEN in the back of the truck banged on the panel separating them from Adeel and the driver. Adeel knew they would have to stop, but he told the driver to head in the direction of the highway leading out of town. It took them another twenty minutes to reach the small mud and stucco teashop with the green door. When the driver halted the truck in front of it, the two men in the back jumped out immediately, turning their backs to urinate at the side of the road. Adeel climbed into the back to check on the quilt-wrapped package. Then he returned to the front to pull out the small nylon bag lying under his seat. He counted forty notes and stuffed them in his pocket, zipped the bag, and pushed it back under the seat.

  When Adeel banged on the green door, there was no sound from inside. He banged again, heard movement and the sound of a metal bolt sliding back.

  When the door opened, a man stood before Adeel, rubbing sleep from his eyes. Behind him were rows of shelves lined with enamel teap
ots.

  “Wait. I have to light the fire,” he mumbled and retreated back into the shop.

  Adeel followed him. Inside, he pulled the roll of money from his pocket and held it out. “This is for Gul-Nawaz. We need tea. You must hurry.”

  Gas hissed out of a canister and the Afghan set a kettle of water on the tiny stove. He ignored Adeel, lined up six enamel teapots, and spooned green tea leaves into each one.

  “Are you Gul-Nawaz?” Adeel asked.

  “Who wants to know?”

  “The money is for him. Where is he?” Adeel said sharply and stuffed the roll of notes back into his pocket.

  “Don’t be frightened,” the man said.

  Adeel did not respond. He stood silently until he heard the water hissing to a boil. The man swung around, brandishing two teapots in his hands. Adeel leaned forward and took them from him.

  “Wait,” said the man, lifting a cracked saucer with small crystals of crude sugar.

  “No. We are Pakistanis,” Adeel said. “Drop the sugar in the teapot.”

  “And I am Afghan,” replied the man, “and you have come to steal in my country.”

  Adeel’s guards entered the room. The Afghan handed them two small bowls, and they grabbed the teapots and stepped back out into the street. Adeel took a third teapot and bowl and headed out to find the driver. The man was kneeling by the side of the road saying his prayers. Adeel placed the teapot and bowl on the hood of the truck and went back into the shop.

  “I must leave the money and go at once,” Adeel said, ignoring the teapot that was being held out to him.

  “Drink your tea. Your journey is long,” replied the man.

  Adeel took the bowl and swallowed the boiling tea, singeing his tongue.

  “How much money do you have for me?” asked the man, holding out his hand.

  “Enough,” replied Adeel, pulling out the wad of Afghanis and handing them to the man.