The Blind Man's Garden (4 page)

Switching on the transistor radio, he lies down on the sheetless mattress on the cement floor and listens to the news, his eyes closed. The Taliban are still in power in Afghanistan but the Americans have sent in Special Forces soldiers – guerrilla warriors who are building alliances among the local population and orchestrating rebellion. And all the while the air and the sky are being traversed by jets and bombs weighing tens of thousands of pounds. And that is where Jeo wants to go.

‘Are you sure about this?’ Mikal had asked him when he came to see him here earlier today.

‘Yes.’

‘Did you hear how the Taliban are putting inexperienced Pakistani boys on the frontlines, where they are getting slaughtered?’

‘The organisation I am dealing with has nothing to do with combat. We are not going there to fight.’

Mikal had nodded and said, ‘All right.’

Now he looks at the wristwatch again. Shouldering his rucksack, he pinches off the candle without looking and after locking the door he climbs down the stairs and goes out into the dark street. Remembering too late about the radio, but not turning back. Thinking of it filling the room with song and news until the batteries die.

*

Any minute now the rickshaw will arrive to take them to the train station. Rohan listens for the driver’s horn as he enters Sofia’s room and discovers two large books of maps lying open on the table, their colours brilliant even in this light. And even in this light he notices that a number of pages have been torn out of them. He wonders when it had happened.

He touches the colours, almost in farewell. He is sixty years old and his eyes have been deteriorating for almost two decades now. Five more years of looking is what remains, at most. After that illumination will slip into mystery. He must bathe his eyes in belladonna and honey thinned in dew and must avoid light beyond a certain strength, but even now there are durations, each lasting several moments, when a shadow can appear white to him, or the entire sky green, his hands black as coal. There are small indigo shapes like landmasses across his vision. Or suddenly there is a golden absence of everything, a luminous annihilation he perceives even with his eyelids shut.

He has come in here to select something he might wish to read during the journey. This is Baghdad House, wrapped thickly in the rose of Iraq, the two rooms made into one for Sofia. He carries the atlases to the other side of the long interior. Two hundred boxes filled with books had arrived at the house the previous week. The truck driver who brought them produced a letter addressed to Rohan and Sofia. One of their former students – from the earliest days of Ardent Spirit – had recently passed away. He had written the letter shortly before dying and in it he said that the couple had instilled a keen love of learning in him, that he had gone on to collect thousands of books over the course of his life. And these he was bequeathing to Ardent Spirit, remembering how impoverished the school library had been in those days. Twenty of the boxes were placed here in Sofia’s room and the rest distributed elsewhere in the house, a corridor suddenly narrowing to half its size.

Rohan places the atlases in one of the boxes. He is accompanying Jeo to Peshawar because he wishes to visit his dead pupil’s family there, to express his gratitude for the gift and say a prayer at the grave.

He briefly opens
The Epic of Gilgamesh
and then
The Charterhouse of Parma and Taoos Chaman ki Mynah
, and then looks into a book of history while the candle burns in his other hand.

After Granada fell in 1492 two hundred thousand Muslims were forcibly converted to Christianity. The Inquisition had corpses dug up to make sure they had not been buried facing Mecca, and women were forbidden from veiling themselves
…

He hears the rickshaw driver’s horn at the gate. As he secures the windows he looks towards the river where egrets and herons must be settling for the night in the tall reeds and cattails. The new building of Ardent Spirit, situated on the other side of the green, barely moving water, is concrete, glass and steel, but still divided into six Houses. Five years ago Rohan was forced out, the place taken over by a former student who could no longer tolerate Rohan’s criticism of what the children were being taught.

He emerges and bolts the door to Baghdad House. He is immensely proud of Jeo’s desire to go to Peshawar and be of help. He knows that had he been a young man himself he would not have stopped at Peshawar: he doesn’t know how he would have resisted entering Afghanistan. And not just for help and aid – he would have fought and defended with his arms. And, yes, had he been present in the United States of America back in September, he would have done all he could to save the blameless from dying in those attacked cities, partaken in their calamity.

How not to ask for help these days – from others, from God – when it seems that one is surrounded by the destruction of the very idea of man?

He mouths verses of the Koran as he walks towards Jeo’s room.

It is possible to think of fragrance existing before flower was created to contain it, and so it is that God created the world to reveal Himself, to reveal Mercy.

Once or twice a year, perhaps three times, a woman visits the garden, her face ancient, the eyes calm but not passive as she approaches the rosewood tree and begins to pick and examine each fallen leaf. Whether she is in full possession of her mental faculties, no one is sure. Perhaps she is sane and just pretending madness for self-protection. Many decades ago – long before the house was built, when this place was just an expanse of wild growth – she had discovered the name of God on a rosewood leaf, the green veins curving into sacred calligraphy. She picks each small leaf now, hoping for the repetition of the miracle, holding it in her palms in a gesture identical to prayer. The life of the house continues around her and occasionally she watches them, following the most ordinary human acts with an attention reserved by others for much greater events. If it is autumn she has to remain in the garden for hours, following the surge and pull of the wind as it takes the dropped foliage to all corners. Afterwards, as the dusk begins to darken the air, they sit together, she and the tree, until only the tree remains.

What need her search fulfils in her is not known. Perhaps healing had existed before wounds and bodies were created to be its recipient.

4

When a coin is minted, the devil kisses it.

Major Kyra stands on the roof of Ardent Spirit with the hound beside him. A saluki is said to have watched over the Prophet while he was at prayer, so there is a certain fondness towards this breed of dog in Islam.

He paces the long crescent-shaped roof with his military gait, the tips of his fingers touching the saluki’s fur, wet from the long grasses and reeds of the riverbank, and the Ardent Spirit flag shifts in the darkness. High above him in the night’s silence he hears clearly a flight of cranes migrating from Central Asia to the deserts of Pakistan, the creaking of wings and a series of thin trembling calls.

Time and again he looks towards the school’s old building, the intermittent points of candlelight in the windows. It is home now to the founder, Rohan. Following his wife’s death twenty years ago Rohan had signed the school over to a former student, Ahmed, because money carried the devil’s taint, because he wished to erase from his life the entanglements of wealth and assets and possessions. Staying on at the school only as the salaried headmaster.

Ahmed died in Afghanistan ten days ago and, as his brother, Major Kyra has inherited Ardent Spirit.

The hound watches the moon as if surprised by it. The mist rises from the river in long winding sheets, appearing chalky above the black reeds. Ahmed was known as Ahmed the Moth, acquiring the name at the age of five at his childhood mosque in Abbottabad. There one day he was told that the bag thrown onto the fire contained money and toys and he had watched it burn, but when he was told that the bag was in fact full of Koranic pages, Ahmed had burnt his hands trying to retrieve it, carrying the scars and the name into adulthood.

Last year during a visit to Ardent Spirit, Major Kyra witnessed a number of small boys emerging from classrooms with bandaged hands. They had been imitating Ahmed the Moth as part of their education.

He knows Rohan’s son Jeo and foster son Mikal are on their way to Afghanistan tonight. And he has been given guarantees that they will not return. At least not alive.

Kyra has not slept for almost seventy-two hours. He resigned from the army the day before yesterday, unable to accept the alliance that the Pakistani government has formed with the United States and the West, helping these empires as they annihilate Afghanistan.

Nine-Eleven. Everything about it is a lie, he is beginning to believe. A conspiracy. Flying large aircraft at low altitudes in an urban sky is not a simple thing. There had to be somebody manipulating air traffic control. There had to be somebody who switched off the warning system for the Pentagon. From what he has read and heard it seems that the air force did not scramble for more than an hour. Kyra is a military man so he knows about such basic things. It was all staged, to invent an excuse to begin invading Muslim lands one by one.

He looks towards the arch above Ardent Spirit’s front gate. It was removed from the entrance of the original building and brought here when the school changed premises. When Rohan and his wife founded it, the arch had read
Education is the basis of law and order
. Soon the word
Islamic
was added before
Education
, by Rohan himself, apparently against his wife’s wishes. Over the years it has been amended further, going from
Islamic education is the basis of law and order
to
Islam is the basis of law
and then to
Islam is the purpose of life
, while these days it says
Islam is the purpose of life and death
.

Under Ahmed the Moth, Ardent Spirit had developed links with Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI. Pupils were selected to be trained in combat at jihadi camps run by the ISI, and ultimately sent to carry out covert operations in Kashmir. It was the reason for Rohan’s clashes with Ahmed, the reason why Rohan was eventually forced out five years ago.

But with Ahmed dead the immediate link with the intelligence agency has been severed. Kyra could have maintained the connection but he feels nothing but revulsion at the army and the ISI, for abandoning Afghanistan. The Ardent Spirit pupils now belong to him alone and through them he’ll set his plans in motion, moulding them to be warrior saints, brilliant in deceit against the West and its sympathisers here at home.

We are not men of hate, but we must be men of justice
.

When he arrived to assume control of the school yesterday the older pupils were preparing to depart for the fight in Afghanistan, many in tears at the news of the destruction and slaughter. One million new refugees have entered Pakistan and eight million will require aid. Some of the teachers and the older children were telling stories of rescue and heroism from Islam’s past, of populations in distress saved by pious gallants, and the listeners, becoming impassioned, were letting out cries of ‘Fear not! Help is on its way from Heer!’ Hoping to be heard across thousands of years.

In a quarter to the east of the city there is a charity and madrasa which was operated by Ahmed the Moth but is owned by the ISI. The charity is a facade: boys and young men are transformed into jihadi warriors behind it. And yesterday he was brought a stack of papers by one of the people there – Kyra had wished to understand in detail how Ahmed had managed his day-to-day affairs.

The man had selected a sheet covered with names and handed it to him. ‘The name at the top of the third column.’

To Kyra the name Jeo hadn’t meant anything, but a sound of surprise escaped his mouth when he saw ‘Rohan’ written in the box provided for
Father’s Name
.

‘He wants to go to a medical centre near one of the battlefields in Afghanistan,’ the man said, ‘without telling his family.’

Kyra had stared at the paper. ‘Why is he joined with a red line to this other name further down? Mikal.’

‘That is Rohan’s foster son. A mud-child and drifter. A disappearer. I have thought about telling Rohan. I am wondering whether we do not owe him that much because of his former links with Ardent Spirit.’

Kyra’s fury had surprised even him. The lack of sleep. The manner of his brother’s death less than two weeks ago. ‘This is not the time to be tempted by sympathy and forgiveness,’ he said. ‘Let me say this as plainly as possible. I would like this boy to be sent to the very heart of the war, or bring one of the battles to where he is. Do this in Ahmed’s memory. You owe him before you owe Rohan. Do you know where precisely he is going?’

‘Of course. We are the ones who are sending him. We not only know the location, we more or less know the route he will take.’

‘Then do it.’

A bomb had exploded in a market in Kashmir, killing bystanders as well as two Indian soldiers. Simultaneously, in another part of Kashmir, a device went off ahead of time and killed the boy who was planting it. When both of these incidents were traced back to Ardent Spirit, Rohan had confronted Ahmed, and Ahmed had let Rohan know that he had long had doubts about the soundness of his faith.

‘You promised me again and again that nothing to do with jihad would occur at this school,’ Rohan said. ‘You gave me your word.’

‘I gave it to an infidel.’

‘It was your word.’

‘It’s who you give it to.’

And then Rohan had proceeded to sicken and enrage everyone by saying that he was glad the second boy had died while installing the explosive device, pleased and thankful that he had been spared the act of killing his fellow men. ‘Allah took pity on the misguided child before he could shed innocent blood.’

It was then that he was forced out of Ardent Spirit.