The Blind Man's Garden (31 page)

Around them some of the graves are in flames, from the oil that has been spilled by the broken lanterns.

‘What strange times are these,’ says Tara as they wend their way through the dead to safety, ‘when Muslims must fear other Muslims.’

At home he examines the cut on Yasmin’s head and bandages it. Agony gently vibrates out of her eyes as she tries to fall asleep.

He stays in the chair beside her and just before dawn listens to Tara and Rohan get up to say the first prayers of the day. He goes up to the roof and finds comfort in the brightening sky, receiving his share of the earth through the five senses, the dawn glow of ochre and cinnabar, the light calling things into existence, the thin voices of birds. As the sun rises higher he walks through the garden where a near-thousand flowers are opening and goes out into the streets to call the doctor, the neighbourhood waking up around him – the inevitable dailiness, the shops being opened at the crossroads, the butcher unloading the skinned carcasses he has brought from the slaughterhouse in a rickshaw, an early-rising child leaning against a doorframe, a look of suspicion and hostility in his eyes about the world of the adults, a woman carrying a small Madagascar
gulmohar
tree on her head for fuel, the branches trailing behind.

He stops on realising that he had caught a glimpse of a figure in a side street that had had a gait resembling Naheed’s. Two minutes ago. He turns back and breaks into a run, but she is just another one of the dozens of girls he has mistaken for her since she vanished.

The doctor says Yasmin’s cuts are superficial and he places stitches on the scalp with a tiny crescent needle. He tells her to rest, perhaps take a day off work. Basie kisses her mouth when they are alone in the room and astonishingly she wants more, an intensity in her body as when adolescence’s delight had first found completion years ago, in both of them, here in these very rooms, and he walks to the door and bolts it shut and comes to her, shedding his clothes on the stripes of light blazing on the floor. Mortality? When he is near her his impermanence has no power over him.

He bathes and eats the breakfast Tara has cooked, and Yasmin reminds him that Father Mede has asked for a few cuttings from the garden. Over half the plants at St Joseph’s are from here. At eight o’clock he gets into his car alone, to drive to St Joseph’s four miles away. A rose tree, bronze with thorns, sprinkles dewdrops onto his crisp white shirt just before he leaves the house, the cotton becoming grey in an everyday miracle.

*

The six head boys from the six houses of Ardent Spirit have been awake since before dawn. Ahmed, the head of Baghdad House, gives everyone the final instructions. But the assault and the siege have been planned meticulously over the past several weeks and there is little need for further words. They sit and collect their thoughts before setting off for St Joseph’s.

They are in a ruined seventeenth-century mausoleum that is approached along the blacktop road in an easterly direction from Heer, parallel to the old thoroughfare that disappears towards Amritsar. A large domed building with four stubby minarets at each corner, constructed on a high plinth from deep red sandstone but now in an advanced state of decrepitude. Avoided by the people of the vicinity because it is said to be haunted.

Deo Minara.
Minaret of Demons.

In addition to the six Ardent Spirit boys and the twenty-four recruited men, there are two young women – to contain and supervise the school’s female staff and children during the siege. Covered in black, they wear pistols under their cloaks and belts of ammunition are wound about their waists.

Among the twenty-six recruits there are seven who don’t know what today’s destination is, and what is planned once they reach that destination. Nineteen are in the know. There was pleasure in Ahmed’s mind when he recalled that the number of men who were alleged to have carried out the attacks in the United States last September was nineteen.

‘Who is buried here?’ the head of Mecca House asks him as he approaches a crumbling arch to watch the 147 rucksacks of supplies being loaded onto a truck that was stolen by the head of Ottoman House late last night.

‘The governor of the area during the time of the Emperors Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb.’

Shah Jahan who built the Taj Mahal, which is now lost to Hindu India.

Aurangzeb who empowered officials to enter and break musical instruments anywhere they heard the sound of music, who barred women from visiting shrines to prevent lasciviousness in holy and sombre places, a virtuous and humble man who forbade the writing of the chronicle of his reign as an impious conceit, but whom they now belittle by saying he had no vision, only ambition, no reach, only grab.

Aurangzeb who in April 1669 had ordered the eradication of all religions except Islam in his realm.

Ahmed leans his head against a pillar and closes his eyes, his mind entering the nightmare of the battlefield yet again, in Afghanistan last autumn, the place where he’d learned what two hundred corpses look like. He had had to dig his way out from under them after the guns and rockets and missiles had fallen silent, emerging into the light that revealed the bodies full of insect scribble, the mouths that would ignite their red lament for him in the sunrise every morning from then on, the eyes ruined but still dreaming of returning to whatever Egypts, Algerias, Yemens, Pakistans and Saudi Arabias they had known, rotting men who were true believers and read the Koran as ravenously as they devoured meat and sugar and milk, and men who came to the jihad because, well, to be honest, Ahmed, there wasn’t much else to do, and men who thought of death to the exclusion of all matters so that in the end life was easy to give up. They lay all around him then, slain, slaughtered, stinking, cleansed at last of the burden of being who they were on earth, the souls pulled clean out of them, the arms twisted, the heads severed, the feet separated from legs that had been separated from torsos, and the dark decaying mulch of the names, Omar Fareed Abdul Yusuf Khalid Salman Faisal Shakeel Musharaf Anwar Imran Rashid Saleem Hussein Noman Ibrahim Mansoor Ikram Mushtaq Nim Asim Taha Hanif, and he stood above their corpses, puffing out wide flowers of breath into the Afghanistani air, a dawn light so pure and undeceiving it might have been the dawn that Adam saw. For an instant he wanted Allah to appear and explain it all to him, not just watch from His high distance through unappalled eyes. He hadn’t known he could summon such deep feelings, and in his madness he had wondered whether this earth was nothing more than a toy with six billion moving parts for Him. A thought for which he later asked forgiveness. And he was enraged at the peace that reigned at that very moment on other parts of the planet, and in grief he had cursed the lives that were continuing uninterrupted elsewhere …

‘Brother Ahmed,’ one of the women says as she approaches him. ‘I have something to suggest.’

He opens his eyes. ‘What is it, sister?’

‘It regards the time when the police will surround the building and open fire on us.’

‘Yes?’

‘We should make one of the children stand up on the window-sill wherever the firing is heaviest. It will silence the guns.’

Ahmed says after a few moments, ‘I will give it some thought, sister. Thank you.’

‘It has nothing to do with me,’ she says, her voice serious and earnest. ‘The solution was revealed to me by an angel during sleep last night.’

Her husband had gone to Kashmir some years ago. She had set off after him, spending two months of snowblindness and winter windburn in the mountains, evading Indian and Pakistani bullets. But she had come upon him eventually – he had stepped on a landmine and was lying unconscious beside a boulder. He didn’t survive and her dearest wish is to follow him into martyrdom.

She returns to sit in a multi-cusped arch with the other young woman – who is among those from whom the truth has been withheld, who think they are on their way to attack a government building instead of a school. The pistol she has been given does not function. She had worked as a cook in the house of a Shia cleric and had poisoned him, so her brave-naturedness and commitment to the cause of true Islam is undoubted, but there are doubts about her willingness to do the truly unpleasant for the long-term benefit.

Beside the two women is a heap of smashed glass bottles. It is what remains of the shards that are packed around the eighteen bombs being taken into St Joseph’s.

The twenty-fourth man has now arrived. As lethal as a krait, in his youth he had murdered two men during a dispute over a woman’s honour but had then discovered peace through Islam. Fighting the Russians in Afghanistan his arm was blown off and later his son was born without an arm, as though he had passed on the mark of holy sacrifice.

At just past seven o’clock they get into the truck and begin the journey towards Heer, avoiding the Grand Trunk Road as well as the other main routes, those sitting in the back of the truck feeling the jolts and bumps of the country lanes and dust tracks, the potholed minor roads.

Ahmed, behind the steering wheel, had hoped to avoid being stopped by the traffic police, but as soon as they approach Heer that is exactly what happens.

‘Can I see your documents?’ the policeman says to Ahmed. ‘Aren’t you aware that this is not officially a road?’

The policeman does not extend the hand to receive the forged documents Ahmed proffers. All he wants is two or three hundred rupees and Ahmed gives it to him and they move on.

Soon after half past eight the main gate of the school is within sight, the words on the arch above it telling everyone that St Joseph is the Patron Saint of the Dying, of the Fathers of Families, of Social Justice and Workingmen.

Ahmed stops the truck and leaps out to help an aged beggar woman cross the road, remembering what Abu Darda – one of the Prophet’s forty-two nominated transcribers of the Koran – had said: ‘Do a good deed before battle. For one fights with one’s deeds.’

*

Basie parks in the narrow lane that runs behind the school, the shade from the dense bougainvillea overhead preventing the car’s interior from baking during the course of the day. He enters by the small door in the boundary wall and takes the path lined with cypress trees towards his office. There will be dyed eggs hidden in the tall grasses at Easter here. He enters the room and stops.

‘Naheed.’

She stands looking at him. Her veil is arranged carelessly on her head, one end of it trailing on the floor.

‘Naheed. What are you doing here? Where have you been?’

She continues to stare at him and he moves towards her. She struggles to speak, as though she hasn’t spoken for days.

‘Mikal is alive,’ she says at last.

‘What?’ He approaches and puts his arms around her. ‘Naheed, where have you been for two weeks?’

‘Did you hear what I said? Mikal is alive.’

‘What are you talking about?’

She looks thinner and exhausted.

‘There’s no one in his grave.’

‘His grave? His grave is in Peshawar.’ He is thinking fast, trying to understand. ‘You went to Peshawar?’

She nods. ‘I wanted to see it. Basie, there’s no one buried there.’

‘How do you know?’

‘It’s just an empty pit. People say the Pakistani followers of the Taliban and al-Qaeda fired rockets into that grave, to stop women from coming there. But no remains were discovered there.’

Basie raises his hand to his forehead.

‘I saw nothing but a scorched pit. Some people say it wasn’t the work of al-Qaeda or the Taliban, but of the American soldiers, who secretly took away the body to conduct tests on the bones to identify him. “Even our dead are not safe,” the women were saying.’

‘You saw the empty pit?’

‘Yes. The earth was black from the rocket fire.’

‘It doesn’t mean he’s not dead.’

‘He is alive, Basie.’

He looks at her. ‘When did you get back?’

‘Just now. I arrived at the bus station and was on my way home in a rickshaw but when we passed the school I got out. I knew you and Yasmin would be here by now. So I came in. Just a minute ago.’

‘How did you pay for the journey?’ On the first Monday of every month Yasmin goes to the bank and withdraws money for Rohan’s household expenses. The rubber-banded roll is kept at the back of a wardrobe, in the inside pocket of one of Sofia’s paisley jackets. When Naheed went missing Tara had counted the money. But it was intact.

Naheed touches her empty earlobes to indicate that she has sold her earrings.

‘You’ve been gone two whole weeks.’

‘I didn’t want to come back, I just wanted to keep going. And I also got lost, several times.’

‘I wish you had told us.’

She shakes her head.

‘I’ll get someone to take you home. And I’d better telephone Father right now.’ He moves towards the phone but stops, both of them hearing the unison shouts of ‘
Allahu Akbar!
’ from outside, followed by automatic gunfire.

30

‘The worse, the better,’ Ahmed murmurs, behind the steering wheel of the truck. ‘The more ruthless we are, the more visible our fury.’

Every morning two-thirds of the 1,100 staff and pupils have arrived by eight thirty. The youngest children are the four-year-olds from the nursery, the oldest sixteen. A few of them notice in passing that the guard is absent from his post outside the gate this morning.

The head of Mecca House gets out of the truck’s passenger side and walks up to the gate and opens it and the truck moves onto the premises.

Ahmed, holding a Kalashnikov and with a black hood over his head, leaps out among the children. He is wearing gloves to hide the flame scars from when he had emulated Ahmed the Moth as a child. A six-year-old is the first to see him, a fraction of a second before the others do, and he has watched enough movies to immediately raise his arms in the air.

The twenty-eight men and two women who were sitting locked in the back of the truck emerge and fan out onto the colonnaded verandas, while the head of Mecca House – a hood now pulled over his head too – begins to close the gate.