The Blind Man's Garden

1

History is the third parent.

As Rohan makes his way through the garden, not long after nightfall, a memory comes to him from his son Jeo’s childhood, a memory that slows him and eventually brings him to a standstill. Ahead of him candles are burning in various places at the house because there is no electricity. Wounds are said to emit light under certain conditions — touch them and the brightness will stay on the hands — and as the candles burn Rohan thinks of each flame as an injury somewhere in his house.

One evening as he was being told a story by Rohan, a troubled expression had appeared on Jeo’s face. Rohan had stopped speaking and gone up to him and lifted him into his arms, feeling the tremors in the small body. From dusk onwards, the boy tried to reassure himself that he would continue to exist after falling asleep, that he would emerge again into light on the other side. But that evening it was something else. After a few minutes, he revealed that his distress was caused by the appearance of the villain in the story he was being told. Rohan had given a small laugh to comfort him and asked,

‘But have you ever heard a story in which the evil person triumphs at the end?’

The boy thought for a while before replying.

‘No,’ he said, ‘but before they lose, they harm the good people. That is what I am afraid of.’

2

Rohan looks out of the window, his glance resting on the tree that was planted by his wife. It is now twenty years since she died, four days after she gave birth to Jeo. The scent of the tree’s flowers can stop conversation. Rohan knows no purer source of melancholy. A small section of it moves in the cold wind — a handful of foliage on a small branch, something a soldier might snap off before battle and attach to his helmet as camouflage.

He looks towards the clock. In a few hours he and Jeo will depart on a long journey, taking the overnight train to the city of Peshawar. It’s October. The United States was attacked last month, a day of fire visited on its cities. And as a consequence Western armies have invaded Afghanistan. ‘The Battle of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon’ is what some people here in Pakistan have named September’s terrorist attacks. The logic is that there are no innocent people in a guilty nation. And similarly, these weeks later, it is the buildings, orchards and hills of Afghanistan that are being torn apart by bombs and fire-shells. The wounded and injured are being brought out to Peshawar — and Jeo wishes to go to the border city and help tend to them. Father and son will be there early tomorrow morning, after a ten-hour journey through the night.

The glass pane in the window carries Rohan’s reflection — the deep brown iris in each eye, the colourless beard given a faint brilliance by the candle. The face that is a record of time’s weight on the soul.

He walks out into the garden where the first few lines of moonlight are picking out leaves and bowers. He takes a lantern from an alcove. Standing under the silk-cotton tree he raises the lantern into the air, looking up into the great crown. The tallest trees in the garden are ten times the height of a man and even with his arm at full stretch Rohan cannot extend the light beyond the nearest layer of foliage. He is unable to see any of the bird snares — the network of thin steel wires hidden deep inside the canopies, knots that will come alive and tighten just enough to hold a wing or neck in delicate, harmless captivity.

Or so the stranger had claimed. The man had appeared at the house late in the morning today and asked to put up the snares. A large rectangular cage was attached to the back of his rusting bicycle. He explained that he rode through town with the cage full of birds and people paid him to release one or more of them, the act of compassion gaining the customer forgiveness for some of his sins.

‘I am known as “the bird pardoner”,’ he said. ‘The freed bird says a prayer on behalf of the one who has bought its freedom. And God never ignores the prayers of the weak.’

Rohan had remarked to himself that the cage was large enough to contain a man.

To him the stranger’s idea had seemed anything but simple, its reasoning flawed. If a bird will say a prayer for the person who has bought its freedom, wouldn’t it call down retribution on the one who trapped and imprisoned it? And on the one who facilitated the entrapment? He had wished to reflect on the subject and had asked the man to return at a later time. But when he woke from his afternoon nap he discovered that the bird pardoner had taken their perfunctory exchange to be an agreement. While Rohan slept, he visited the house again and set up countless snares, claiming to Jeo that he had Rohan’s consent.

‘He told me he’ll be back early tomorrow morning to collect the birds,’ Jeo said.

Rohan looks up into the wide-armed trees as he moves from place to place within the garden, the thousands of sleeping leaves that surround his house. The wind lifts now and then but otherwise there is silence and stillness, a perfect hush in the night air. He is certain that many of the snares have already been activated and he cannot help but imagine the fright and suffering of the captured birds, who swerve and whistle delicately in the branches throughout the day, looking as though their outlines and markings are drawn with a finer nib than their surroundings, more sharply focused. Now he almost senses the eyes extinguishing two by two.

The bigger the sin, the rarer and more expensive the bird that is needed to erase it. Is that how the bird pardoner conducts his business? A sparrow for a small deception, but a paradise flycatcher and a monal pheasant for allowing a doubt about His existence to enter the mind.

He places his hand on a tree’s bark, as if transmitting forbearance and spirit up into the creatures. He was the founder and headmaster of a school, and his affection for this tree lies in its links with scholarship. Writing tablets have been made from its wood since antiquity, a use reflected in its Latin name. Alstonia scholaris.

Carrying his lantern he begins to walk back to the house that stands at the very centre of the garden. Before building it he had visited the cities of Mecca, Baghdad, Cordoba, Cairo, Delhi and Istanbul, the six locations of Islam’s earlier magnificence and possibility. From each he brought back a handful of dust and he scattered it in an arc in the air, watching as belief, virtue, truth and judgement slipped from his hand and settled softly on the ground. That purifying line, in the shape of a crescent or a scythe, was where he had dug the foundations.

In the nineteenth century, Rohan’s great-grandfather had bred horses on this stretch of land, his animals known for their wiriness and nimble strength, the ability to go over the stoniest ground without shoes. During the Mutiny against the British in July 1857 a band of men had visited the horse breeder, the day of the eclipse, and in the seventeen minutes of half-darkness the Mutineers spoke about cause and nation, aiming these words like arrows against the Empire’s armoured might. Britain was the planet’s supreme power at the time and nothing less than the fate of the world hung in the balance. They needed his help but he told them there were no horses for him to give. The Norfolk Trotter and the Arab stallions, the Dhanni, Tallagang and Kathiawar mares — they had been sent to a remote location to escape the Ludhiana Fever sweeping the district.

As the rebels turned to leave, the ground splintered slowly before them and a crack grew and became a star-shaped fracture. A small sphere of blackest glass materialised at the centre of the star. Then they realised that it was in fact an eye, an ancient glare directed up at them through the grains of earth. A phantom. A chimera. One more instant and the entire head of the horse had emerged from the ground, the large-muscled neck giving a thrust and spraying soil into the eclipse-darkened air. The hooves found whatever purchase they needed and the rest of the grunting animal unearthed itself, the mighty ribcage and the great, potent haunches. Flesh tearing itself away from the living planet.

The ground exploded. A dozen horses, then almost two dozen, their diverse screams filling the air after the hours spent in the dark. An eruption of furious souls from below. The thrown earth and the shrieking of freed jaws and the terror of men during the daylight darkness.

Rohan’s great-grandfather had been informed the day before that Mutineers being hunted by the British would attempt to appropriate his animals. Over several hours he and his nine sons had prepared a trough deeper than their tallest stallion and had then led all twenty-five of their horses to it, their black, white, tobiano and roan colours shining in the oblique rays of the setting sun.

The horses were loved and they trusted the masters when they were blindfolded and led into the pit, but they reacted when the men began to pour earth onto them, beating their hooves against the ground as the level of soil rose higher along the legs. Stripes of white salt-froth slid down each body and in low voices the men spoke the phrases or words each animal was known to like. To comfort them if possible. But they continued with the work steadily and with determination all night as the stars appeared and hung above them like a glass forest, and later when a storm approached and the night became wild with electricity, the sky looking as though there was war and rebellion in heaven too, because not a single one of the horses would be allowed to fall into the hands of the Mutineers, who Rohan’s great-grandfather was convinced were misguided, his loyalty aligned with the British.

With only the horses’ necks remaining visible, the men leapt down into the trench and packed the earth with their feet, running among the twenty-five heads growing out of the earth as specks of soft blue fire came down from the lightning-filled sky to rest in the manes and in the men’s own beards and hair.

Allah had said to the South Wind, ‘Become!’ and the Arabian horse was created.

The thought of clemency entering their hearts at last, the ten men went down the rows and placed a large basket upside-down over each head, a hood of woven grass fibres and reeds and palm fronds, a pocket of air for the animal to continue breathing. Then they climbed out and began the final throwing on of the soil, making sure not to cover the baskets entirely, leaving a thumbprint-sized entrance in each for air to slide in. There was nothing but a faint ground-shudder of hooves from within the earth as the horizon became marked with a brilliant red line behind the men and the sun rose and they began to wait for the arrival of the Mutineers, conscious suddenly of their weight on the ground.

*

Insects are being attracted by the lantern in Rohan’s hand as he walks back to the house, moths that look like shavings from a pencil sharpener, and moths that are so outsized and intensely pigmented they can be mistaken for butterflies.

There is a black feather on the path ahead of him, dropped by a struggling bird overhead.

The Mutiny was eventually put down across the land and one thousand years of Islamic rule came to an end in India, Britain assuming complete possession. A Muslim land was lost to nonbelievers and Rohan’s ancestors played a part in it.

This was the century-old taint that Rohan had tried to remove by spreading the soils of Allah’s six beloved cities here. Mecca. Baghdad. Cordoba. Cairo. Delhi. Istanbul. Scattering them broadly in the shape of the trench in which the horses were interred, the cleft out of which they had resurrected themselves.

3

The boundary wall of the house is draped in poet’s jasmine, Pakistan’s national flower. Jeo walks along it and enters the room that had been his mother’s study. He places the burning candle on the desk, its surface covered with ink stains from her fountain pen. The leaf of the calendar hasn’t been changed since her death, the month he was born.

He opens a large book of maps, its pages and his own breath the only sounds in the room. He has lied about going to Peshawar. Wishing to be where he is most needed — to be as close as possible to the carnage of this war — he has arranged in secret to cross over into Afghanistan from Peshawar.

Leaning close to the maps in the frail light, he looks at the geography of the North-West Frontier Province, to where he will be journeying with his father tonight. His eyes move from place to place. Here is the mountain ridge named Pir Sar that Alexander laid siege to in 326 BC — a redoubt so formidable that Heracles himself, son of Zeus, was said to have found it impregnable. And in 1221, Genghis Khan had pursued the last Muslim prince of Central Asia to this place just south of Peshawar. And here is Pushkalavati, visited regularly by Chinese pilgrims during the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries, because the Buddha had made an alms offering of his eyes here.

That he will cross the boundary into Afghanistan is a secret not just from his father. Jeo hasn’t disclosed his intentions to his wife of twelve months either, or to his sister and brother-in-law, sparing them all the unnecessary fear. Rohan will go with him tonight to Peshawar and return home the day after tomorrow, by which time Jeo will already be in Afghanistan.

As a child he would fall asleep listening to the stories being told by his father and he would dream of martyrs. He would see them where they lay with their souls just emerging from their bodies assisted subtly by angels and other winged beings, the sun and the clouds red and the birds appearing bloodstained as they flew. And in the dream he would know that they had fought with a fearsome will and a fearsome strength, both of which were not forged by war but revealed by it, placed in their souls long before birth, and as he slept Jeo knew that they were all him, that they were the men he was before he was this man, the ghostly thousands stretching back through the generations and as he slept they imparted things to him not just of life and death but of eternal life and death.

From the book he carefully tears out several maps, and in this light Afghanistan’s mountains and hills and restlessly branching corridors of rock appear as though the pages are crumpled up, and there is a momentary wish in him to smooth them down. Laser-guided bombs are falling onto the pages in his hands, missiles summoned from the Arabian Sea, from American warships that are as long as the Empire State Building is tall.

He emerges from the room and crosses the garden, releasing movements and shadows in every direction as he brushes against foliage, looking upwards. Once a bird has become trapped in the initial knot, a series of further knots will be activated instantly, to hold the entire body in place, to stop it from thrashing and harming itself.

On the veranda he transfers the maps to his travel bag. There is lamplight in the window of the room he shares with his wife Naheed, the glide of her shadow across a wall. The light is amber like the colour of her eyes and his mind evokes the dark Niagara of her hair and the weight of her hand on his chest during the night. Desire appears in him yet again today, a wish for her to be within arm’s reach, knowing he will not see her for some time after tonight. He crosses the black hallway and enters the room and she turns towards him.

Mikal is coming with him to Afghanistan. It was a chance encounter last week, when Jeo rode his motorcycle out of the house and went towards the other side of the city, along the Grand Trunk Road. There he formally presented himself at the headquarters of the organisation that is sending men into Afghanistan. They need doctors and — although Jeo is only in the third year at medical school, his education anything but complete — they were delighted at his offer of help. The organisation is a charity and includes a madrasa, providing literacy to the children of the poor — twenty rooms, each of them alive with voices murmuring like a honeycomb of warning and praise — and he was on his way out when he saw the figure emerging from a nearby door. The face that held a look of unbreakable isolation.

‘Mikal.’

If love was the result of having caught a glimpse of another’s loneliness, then he had loved Mikal since they were both ten years old.

Mikal looked up and Jeo went forward and they placed their arms around each other.

‘What are you doing here?’ Jeo asked when they separated.

Mikal embraced him again. ‘I was delivering some guns I mended for them,’ he said eventually, speaking as always with a gravity to his words, a minute shifting of those eyebrows that joined in the middle. ‘I work at a gun shop.’

Around them the madrasa was noisy with the voices of children who, knowing little but life’s deprivations, prayed the way they ate, with a deep hunger.

Jeo did not hesitate in telling Mikal about Afghanistan. This almost-brother. This blood-love in everything but name. Mikal was ten years old when he and his older brother came to live at Jeo’s house, Mikal carrying a book of constellations under one arm, the large pages full of heroes and beasts caught in diamond-studded nets. The puppy he held in the crook of the other elbow would have to be given away within two months when it became apparent that it was a wolf. Mikal and Jeo were the same age and had soon become inseparable, a dedication in Jeo for Mikal’s watchfulness and self-containment, the grace that shaped his every move, though it was interrupted by short spells when something would madden in him and he would refuse to be found.

‘You are going to Afghanistan?’ Mikal said when Jeo finished speaking.

‘Just for a month. Later I might go for a longer period.’

‘What about your studies?’

‘I’ll catch up.’ Rohan had taken Jeo to watch his first surgical operation at the age of twelve, and he knew at thirteen some of the things that were taught to his first-year class at medical school.

As the motorcycle sped through the traffic — he was taking Mikal to the gun shop — he said over his shoulder, ‘You still haven’t told me why you completely disappeared last year. Missing my wedding. And nothing but a short visit to the house since then. I wonder if you even remember my wife’s name.’

‘I didn’t know you were getting married,’ Mikal said.

Mikal’s parents had been Communists, and his father was arrested around the time Mikal was born, never to be seen again. It was the mother’s death a decade later that led to Rohan taking in Mikal and his brother. People fallen on hard times would come and ask Mikal to say a prayer for them, because orphaned children were among those beings whose prayers Allah was said never to ignore.

At the gun shop, AK-47s were stacked six high on the shelves. If genuine, these rifles would cost eighty thousand rupees each, but these were replicas at a quarter of the price. The day after the West invaded Afghanistan, a ‘piety discount’ was introduced for those who wished to buy the weapon to go to the jihad. There were reproductions of older guns too, of rifles to be found in the armouries of the Tower of London, 30 calibre Chinese pistols, Argentinian Ballester-Molinas. On the wall was a large photograph of a flock of eagles that had been trained to fight in human wars, the wings outspread at a slant like living book-rests — a dream from the land’s past.

The proprietor gave Mikal instructions regarding various repairs and left to answer the muezzin’s call. The trigger was stiff on a shotgun and the owner of a revolver wished it to make a louder sound when fired. Prising off the forearm, Mikal unbreeched the shotgun and lifted away the barrel. ‘So. Afghanistan,’ he said.

‘You are the only person I have told.’

‘What if something happens to you?’

‘Will you come to the house before I leave?’ The ties between them had strengthened — Jeo’s sister was now married to Mikal’s brother.

‘Jeo. Something could happen to you out there. You could be killed, or come back without your sanity, your limbs, or your eyes.’

‘What if everyone began to think that way?’

Mikal’s glance remained on him and then he returned to his work. Jeo could sense the careful mind addressing the task. Anything mechanical, Mikal had to know its secrets. Once he almost stole a helicopter. ‘They should never have left the keys in,’ he said. ‘But I thought better when I saw the number of gears.’ By the age of fourteen he had driven a bulldozer, various cars, a boat.

‘You used to make toys,’ Jeo said.

Mikal leaned back on his stool and, without looking, opened the cupboard behind him and took out a small windup truck. He turned its key several times and placed it on the glass counter. Jeo held the palm of his hand beyond the edge for it to arrive and fall onto.

‘Keep it. It’s yours.’ Mikal slid the key towards him along the counter. ‘What if I said I’d come with you?’

‘I don’t need to be looked after.’

Mikal had thumbed open the gate of the revolver and put the hammer at half cock but now he paused and looked up. ‘I didn’t mean that.’ He turned the cylinder and ejected the round from the chamber with the ejector rod.

He lit a Gold Flake and said with a grin, ‘I smoke five a day. My five prayers.’

Jeo was forced to smile. ‘You’re going to Hell.’ Then he said, ‘Are you serious about coming with me?’

‘Yes. I’ll go back later today and give them my name.’

‘What will you do there?’

‘I’ll carry the wounded to you from the battlefield.’ And after a while without looking at him he added,

‘And I do remember her name, Jeo. Her name and the fact that she is descended from the Prophet.’

*

Naheed lifts Jeo’s arm from around her waist. He’ll leave with Rohan to catch the train for Peshawar in just under two hours but for now he has closed his eyes in shallow sleep. She buttons the neck of her tunic and is walking away from the bed when a small jolt makes her look back. He is lying on her veil. Moving closer through the candlelit air she sees that he has in fact tied a corner of it to the index finger of his right hand. She releases the knot and her glass bangles rattle as she gently slaps his bare shoulder. He smiles with eyes still closed, the inch-long dimple materialising in each cheek. He had stunned her one day by saying, ‘I’d like to die watching you.’

She looks out of the window, past the low rosewood bough from which a sheep is hung every year to be disembowelled and skinned just minutes from its last conscious moments, to mark the Sacrifice of Abraham. It is bought fully grown a few days earlier but ideally should be raised from a lamb, given love, and then killed.

She turns to see him gazing at her. Rising on one elbow he picks up the toy truck from the stack of books on the bedside table. It comes towards her between the clothes he had shed on the floor earlier and goes past and is soon out of sight under the armchair, the sound of its tin gears vanishing suddenly where it must have met the wall.

‘Mikal gave me that toy,’ he says, lying down again.

She collects his clothes and places them at the foot of the bed. She had made this shirt for him — in great secrecy, not revealing to anyone how it is possible that not a single seam or stitch can be discovered upon it.

She takes a lamp from a ledge in the hallway and steps out into the cold darkness. Looking up into the trees. After Rohan and Jeo leave for Peshawar tonight, she will walk to her mother’s place a few streets away, but she will return early tomorrow morning to wait for the bird pardoner. Rohan has instructed for all ensnared birds to be set free. ‘And he must take down the wires. I do not recall giving him permission.’ She raises her arm and the light from the lamp breaks up into sharp glints on several high wires above her.

She wonders where Mikal is at this moment. In some respects, grief for the lost and missing is worse than grief for the dead, and sometimes just for a fraction of a second its intensity makes her wish Mikal would cease to exist, so she wouldn’t have to wonder if she will ever see him again.

‘Let’s just leave,’ he had said to her a week before she was to marry Jeo. He had pointed into the night. ‘Let’s just disappear out there somewhere.’ She had been shocked by the suggestion, but had then agreed, suddenly fierce in her determination.

But on the agreed hour, he hadn’t come for her.

She moves along one of the many red paths that wander in the garden.

The crescent-shaped house was the original building of Ardent Spirit, the school Rohan and his wife Sofia had founded. When the number of pupils outgrew it, a new building was constructed on the other side of the river that flows behind the house. This building then became Rohan and Sofia’s home.

Decades ago when they formed the idea of Ardent Spirit, Rohan had used matchsticks to explain the layout to Sofia.

It is divided into six pairs of rooms, arranged in an elegant curve, a screened corridor linking them all. Each pair of rooms is named after one of those six centres of Islam’s bygone brilliance.

Mecca House is situated amid Arabian date palms that release their fruit onto the roof throughout summer, the dates that are like sweet chewable leather in the mouth. A tablet carrying the name is affixed beside the entrance, reading, It was in order to determine the exact direction of Mecca that Muslims had developed an interest in geometry and mathematics, and had eventually invented trigonometry. The words were intended to remind the children of their legacy, Islam’s long inheritance of knowledge and achievement.

The calligraphy is in Sofia’s hand and its grace makes the reader aware of, and even feel responsible for, the soul of the calligrapher.

Climbing roses curtain Baghdad House, spreading on the walls in lean assessing tendrils, and the undone petals lie on the tiles to return loaned light deep into the evening. The children were informed that in Baghdad there was a ‘House of Wisdom’ as early as the year 830.

Spanish almond trees and carnations grow around Cordoba House. According to the tablet outside it, the flower the king of djinns presented to Solomon, to give to the Queen of Sheba, was a carnation. She would wear it in her hair. The tablet records that the Muslims of Spain had manufactured the first paper in Europe around 1150, and also that in 1221 the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II had declared all official documents written on paper to be invalid — paper having become associated in Europe with Muslims.

Egyptian blue lotuses stand in crystal-tight arrays in a triangular pool before Cairo House, the blossoms closing at night and sinking underwater to re-emerge in the morning. Cairo, where the ‘House of Science’ was created in 995 and where the Fatimid palace library had comprised forty rooms, its collections including eighteen thousand manuscripts on the ‘Sciences of the Ancients’ alone, the staff comprising mathematicians, astronomers, physicians, grammarians, lexicographers, copyists and readers of the Koran.

Beside that, sheltered by a century-wide banyan, are the two rooms named after Delhi, and next to that is Ottoman House. According to Mikal’s book of constellations, in the sixteenth century the clergymen had convinced Sultan Murat III to destroy Istanbul’s first ever observatory, telling him that the lenses were peering too far into the secrets of Allah’s heavens in the name of progress and science, and would result in divine wrath being visited on his kingdom.

Mikal.

One afternoon just over two months into the marriage, Jeo brought him home, thinking they were meeting for the first time.

She heard him whisper something when Jeo briefly stepped out of the room. He was sitting on the edge of the chair, looking down at the floor. She still had the letters he had written to her in the months before she learned she was to marry Jeo. Several times she had taken them to the river but had failed to relinquish them.

He looked at her and said, more clearly, ‘I couldn’t betray him. He is a brother to me.’

She remembers nodding. Concentrating on remaining composed.

They were both silent and eventually, listening out for Jeo’s return to the room, she had said, ‘Nothing can be done now.’

‘Yes.’ He had to attempt the word twice and it came out unshapely as though a bone was broken somewhere inside it.

He stood up. ‘Tell Jeo I had to go.’

‘It might make things easier for me if I don’t see you. I must learn to love him, none of this is his fault.’

‘I won’t come again. I’ll try to leave the city.’

It was the sixty-sixth day of her marriage and the last time she saw him.

She looks up at the sky. He said Orion was shaped like the cow’s hide from which he was born nine months after it was urinated on by Zeus, Hermes and Poseidon. He told her that some Arab astronomers saw a woman’s hand dyed with patterns of henna in the constellations Cassiopeia and Perseus, while others said it was the hand of Fatima stained with drops of blood — Fatima, the daughter of Muhammad, Naheed’s ancestor.

She hears the two-note call of a bird and, bending into a tunnel of foliage, sets out to search for it, the moonlight pale as watered ink. She stops beside the citrus tree whose branches filled entirely with white flowers Sofia had mistaken for an angel as she lay dying. From their faultless portraits painted by Sofia, Naheed can recognise almost all the trees and plants in this garden, the seedpods and leaves and the berries dense with sugar.

She had also made pictures of living things but Rohan had burned them during her last hours, fearing she would be judged for disobeying Allah, who forbade such images lest they lead to idolatry. The black smoke of the fire had sidled up to her deathbed. The sketch of a bull’s skull and that of a fossil from the Bannu hills were destroyed too — these creatures were already dead when she drew them, but they had lived once, and he wished to eradicate all doubt to ensure her salvation. He asked her to tell him where the rest of the paintings and drawings were, to tell him the address of the friend for whose home she had designed several murals. In his fear he had cleansed the house of every other image too, every photograph and picture, even those not created by her.

And then a decade after her death, he saw her looking in his direction through a high window. It was the last day of Ramadan: a group of distinguished citizens had been invited to climb the minaret of the Friday mosque in the city centre, to view the new month’s crescent moon. As the binoculars passed over the city he recognised her eyes among the rooftops, the face turned three-quarters towards him, the pattern of her aquamarine tunic. It took him some time to bring her back into the glass and the distance between them was in miles — too many streets and at least three bazaars. Beside her was a giant bearded head, and in her hands she held several flower bulbs with lilies sprouting out of them, and curled up inside each bulb was a very young human infant, perhaps a foetus.

Rohan hadn’t known that she had included her own portrait in the mural for the eight walls and two ceilings of her friend’s home, the coloured skin of the rooms. Rohan would set out across the city to locate them, systematically entering the narrow lanes and alleyways, arriving at his destination several weeks later. ‘I have permission to speak about one of the eight angels that hold up Allah’s throne,’ the Prophet had said. ‘So large is he that the distance between his earlobe and shoulder will require a journey of seven hundred years.’ And the giant head next to Sofia’s portrait belonged to one of the eight angels.

Naheed takes a gulp of air and extinguishes the lamp, standing perfectly still in the night, the smoke withering around her.

She listens, determined to locate the trapped bird that had called out from within the madness of suffering. But there is only silence now, not even a halting fragment. Ali! Ali! A dervish, having renounced dealings with all words except that one, never utters another, in any circumstance … The sentence enters her mind from a book she had been looking at earlier. Her gaze is drifting across the sky where the moon sits in a great cold ring as she recalls more and more words. Only one thing matters, only one word. If we speak, it is because we have not found that thing, nor shall find it.

*

Mikal has never stopped being surprised at how heavy a bullet is, given its size.

He is in the high room he rents in an alley winding off the Grand Trunk Road. The first time he dreamed of Jeo dying, he woke up to find the air of this room full of his frightened shouts. It was just before the wedding, and the nightmares had continued over the following months.

He takes a bag of bullets and various other items from the cupboard and places them in a canvas rucksack, getting ready to catch the same overnight train as Jeo and Rohan. A Monday evening during a world war. He is wearing a navy-blue sweater and over it the black jacket of a Western suit, and in a holster under the sweater is the M9 Beretta handgun.

His parents had lived in this apartment, and he himself had lived here until the age of ten. Almost two months after his mother’s death he had opened the door to a dignified and imposing stranger who wore a sherwani frock coat and a Jinnah cap. Mikal remembers him saying that he had come to look at the pictures on the walls, remembers staring at the man wordlessly and then stepping back to allow him in. The stranger was transfixed by one painted woman in particular, the face situated between a high wall of books and a chair. He stood before her as though he wished to memorise her. And then his clothes rustled as he lowered himself into the chair and gently began to question Mikal, asking his name, asking him where the adults were. Mikal, who hadn’t spoken since the funeral, told him that he and his eighteen-year-old brother were living there by themselves.

‘Mikal, my name is Rohan,’ the man said. ‘I am here to take you and your brother home with me.’ He pointed to the woman on the wall. ‘She sent me.’

Mikal looks at his wristwatch. He heard the word ‘death’ thirteen times in the half hour he spent at the charity headquarters when he went to sign up, and ever since then he has felt himself move closer and closer to the unknown. According to a newspaper a brick from the pulverised home of Mullah Omar has been flown to the United States as a war trophy for the White House. And, according to another, on 19 September a CIA paramilitary officer was told by his chief at Langley, Virginia, ‘I want bin Laden’s head shipped in a box filled with dry ice. I want to show it to the President. I promised him I would do that.’

A candle flickers in an alcove near him as he stands at the window. There is no wind and it is dark and the constellations are burning with a frozen fire, dripping fragile light onto Heer, his city. He scans the high view before him to see which other areas of Heer are without electricity tonight. His city within his fraught and poor nation, here in the Third World. He looks into the far distance to the right of him, towards Rohan’s neighbourhood. A memory comes to him of the day he was singing and she had lifted his hands and put them on her ears, one on each side, holding them tightly in place. She stood listening to the song that travelled into her through his arms instead of through air, flowing down his bone, blood and muscle. There was nothing between her and the song but him and it would become a ritual between two lovers, a custom to be repeated and a game of wonder.

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.

Major Kyra — he must learn to think of himself as just Kyra — descends the stairs into Baghdad House, the saluki bounding ahead of him and turning from the lowest step to climb back all in one smooth motion. As he lights a lamp he catches a glimpse of himself in a windowpane, the face scarred by an explosion during the war with India two years ago.

He thinks of the train carrying Rohan and the two boys to Peshawar at this very moment, and opening the Koran he begins to read. By the charging stallions of war, snorting! Which strike sparks with their hooves, as they gallop to the raid at dawn, and with a trail of dust penetrate and split apart a massed army! Verily, man is ungrateful to his Lord. To this he himself shall bear witness …

5

Three hours into the train journey Mikal gets out of his seat. Jeo has given him the number of the cabin he and Rohan have reserved for themselves. Four carriages along from where he is. The other passengers don’t stir as he moves down the aisles, the noise of the train unable to disturb them behind the thick door of sleep.

Jeo undoes the latch and comes out on his first knock, a tenderness in Mikal on catching a glimpse of Rohan’s sleeping form, thin and frail under a blanket on the lower bunk. Rohan doesn’t know about Mikal coming to Peshawar. They haven’t told him to keep away needless questions, fearing something in an answer might lead to suspicion.

Jeo has the maps with him. Going down the long narrow passageway, they sit side by side against the Formica-lined carriage wall and examine them with a torch, the night sliding by in the window above their heads. The bright circle of torchlight moves on the terrain making it look as though the sun has drawn very close to the earth, as the Koran says it will on Judgement Day, the height of a spear and a half. Mikal reads the English words on the maps extremely slowly, syllable by syllable. Sometimes letter by letter. The language was the greatest difficulty of his school days. Let alone read, write or speak it, he couldn’t remember some of the alphabet the last time he tried.

‘I worked with a group of men panning for gold up there last year,’ he says, pointing to a mountain.

‘There is gold in the mountains of Pakistan?’

‘In places. And when I was here, this slope, the snow was so heavy on the peaks it drove the wolves down into the village.’

‘When we come back from Afghanistan we’ll go. Have you brought a gun with you, Mikal?’

‘It can be so quiet up there you can hear the snowflakes land. I’ll take you.’

‘Naheed will love it.’

Mikal stands up and turns to face the window, looking out as the train passes through a station with the bone-coloured lights of houses scattered in the far distance, and the moon like a single luminous music note in the wires beside the tracks, its reflection being creased by the flow of the water in a flat braided river, and the nighthawks are hunting high among the stars.

‘Around here is where we’ll be.’ Jeo too has risen to his feet and is pointing to an area on the map just inside Afghanistan. The territory of clans and tribes. Where along with jewellery and land, children inherit missiles.

‘It looks like a web made out of rock.’ Mikal holds the map at arm’s length.

Jeo smiles. ‘If I get lost you’ll find me.’ Mikal knows the names and locations of all fifty-seven navigational stars.

They look out at the darkness.

‘What were you doing up in the mountains?’

‘Sometimes when I sang, I almost knew. For about half a second, but then it would be gone.’

‘Your singing told you what you were searching for?’

‘Sometimes. Mostly I kept saying to myself, “You’ll know it when you see it.” But I didn’t.’

Jeo folds the map into a square and takes another from the sheaf and opens it. ‘You didn’t see it, or you saw it but didn’t realise that that was what you were searching for?’

‘Isn’t it the same thing?’

‘This is giving me a headache.’

‘Me too.’

Jeo returns to the map. ‘They are saying the war won’t be quick. If Kabul falls, it won’t be for at least a year or eighteen months. I don’t think the real fighting will start until the spring thaw next year. Western soldiers will just sit on the hills and mountains, eating boiled goat and keeping their heads down around dung fires, battered by winter blizzards.’ He looks at his watch. ‘I think I should get back in there soon, Father might wake up.’

‘I’ll come to your hospital late in the morning. Leave the maps with me until then.’

‘We’ll have to visit a bazaar quickly to buy a satellite phone, so I can call home from Afghanistan and pretend I am calling from Peshawar.’

Jeo turns to go and he, with a small touch under his arm where the Beretta sits in the holster, says, ‘Jeo, yes I do have one.’

After Jeo leaves he lights a cigarette and smokes it, exhaling out of the window. He picks the lock of a cabin in the adjoining carriage and slides in, moving through its pitch-dark interior, guiding himself with his hands held out like a blind man, towards the mass of plastic lilies he had glimpsed being taken into the cabin earlier in the evening. Two stations along, the son of a feudal lord is getting married and the family has been visiting nearby towns to buy flowers. If they had been real Mikal would have moved by scent. Musk, cinnamon, river-mud, ether, blood, monsoon moss. They grow in Rohan’s garden and he takes out one flower from each bundle and returns to the window in the corridor, holding the white cluster of them against his body — an obligatory tithe. Out there is the cyclorama of night and each time the train passes a shanty or a hut he throws one of the large white blooms in its direction, whipping his head to look back as it arrives and sticks in the rotting thatched roof or in the jute sack and cardboard that serve as a wall.

He comes back to his seat and closes his eyes. The afternoon he approached Naheed for the first time — to hand her the first ever letter — she had been waiting for a rickshaw in the shade of a tree. And he had entered that shade, a pattern of leaf-shadow covering them both, but had then stepped back into open sunlight and had even turned the peak of his baseball cap backwards, bringing his features in full view.

The train tracks curve under him and there is a swing of gravity in the blood.

One day — after they had been exchanging letters and meeting in secret for six weeks — she mentioned the beauty of a neighbourhood boy and then quickly offered something like an apology, in case his pride was injured. But he had just shrugged.

‘But then I am sure you look at other girls,’ she said.

He had shaken his head.

‘That means you love me more than I love you.’

‘I know.’

The revelation seemed to strike her almost with a physical force. ‘And it is not a problem?’

‘No. I am grateful that you love someone like me at all.’

She said that it was after that conversation that she had fallen in love with him completely.

He opens his eyes and looks into the darkness, pulling his jacket around him tighter against the cold.

What was he doing in the mountains? By the age of thirteen he had begun to play truant, sneaking onto any bus out of Heer that he could, ending up halfway to Karachi or at the base of K2, wandering with a band of itinerant singers in Southern Punjab and climbing into cinema halls through the roofs, surviving in the Baluchi desert by drinking water from wells dug by smugglers.

Rohan would implore him to say what was wrong, what might be done to make him remain at home, and he followed Mikal one morning when he was fifteen years old and discovered that he had found work as a car mechanic. He would not reveal why he needed the money, where he spent some of his nights, and everyone feared the possibility of heroin or the jihad in Kashmir.

The money was of course for the room he was renting, the high room with the pictures on the walls, with doves and wood pigeons as his immediate companions, in the dilapidated century-old neighbourhood where more than half the lanes had dead ends. Avoided by outsiders because it was where domestic servants and day labourers had their homes, eunuchs and wedding entertainers, beggars and rag pickers, and by implication thieves and prostitutes and other criminals.

‘What is the meaning of this?’ his brother Basie asked, having tracked him down to the room one day.

‘I don’t know,’ Mikal remembers saying, the eyes stinging suddenly. He had hidden his face and begun to weep in the manner of very young children and infants — humans before they have learned language.

Basie came forward and collected him in his arms. That room was where both Basie and Mikal were born, where the Communist comrades of their father and mother had come for meetings, and from where the father was taken away by the agents of the government aligned with the United States, the enemy of Communism.

As he dreamed of a revolution, their father had seen no need to make provision for the family, allaying their mother’s and his own occasional doubts by saying, ‘We don’t need to worry about the future of these two. By the time they are adults, life’s basic necessities will be free for everyone. There will be no personal wealth and these boys will be equals among equals. Let’s concentrate on bringing about that state of affairs.’

Mikal more or less moved out of Rohan’s house at seventeen and began to live in the room, the others coming to visit him as much as possible. Being eight years older than Mikal, Basie had deeper and more vivid memories of their mother, while Mikal hadn’t known their father at all.

Basie would lie on the mattress and talk endlessly, sometimes drinking from a bottle of Murree’s whisky he’d bring with him, bought from one of the clandestine bars in Heer where there were locked cages for female drinkers, to prevent them from being sexually assaulted by the inebriated male clientele, as well as to stop the drunk women from killing every man in sight. According to Basie, his smart brother, full of gregariousness and laughter most of the time, with a good-natured swear word in every fifteenth sentence.

‘I think he’s alive,’ Mikal said to Basie once when the bottle of Murree’s was nearly empty.

‘No. He was tortured to death, most probably in the dungeons of Lahore Fort.’ Basie opened his eyes. ‘Is that what this is about? You wanted to come back here to wait for him.’

‘I don’t know.’

Basie would go back to Rohan’s house — having failed yet again to persuade him to return with him, or he would stay with Mikal for days at a time.

Terrified of darkness Mikal never switched off the lights when he slept, and each week he put into a box the money he earned, not knowing what to do with it beyond the few essential needs, holding the meaningless pile of it in his hands one day and looking around at the walls of the empty room. He had placed it in a bowl in the middle of the floor and set it on fire, reducing it all to ash.

He saw her near Rohan’s house when he was eighteen, the girl with the serene yellow gaze. He noticed her more and more after that and she was too beautiful for him to think about without suffering, but then one afternoon she had held his gaze. The smile was brief. Nothing when seen, everything when contemplated.

*

Something in the train’s motion as it moves through the night awakens Rohan and he turns on the small light above his head. Jeo is asleep on the upper bunk — the light shines down at Rohan from directly beneath the boy’s chest.

Sometimes he feared he was distant from Jeo in his childhood, the boy’s existence a trial for him, a constant reminder of his loss, and he remembers asking him one day, ‘Do you know I love you?’

Jeo must have been about four years old and he had dismayed Rohan by shaking his head.

‘You don’t?’

‘No.’ Then the child began to look carefully at his face, even raising his hands to touch the features. ‘How do you know if someone loves you?’

He thought it might be an observable mark or seal. Something he had missed.

Jeo’s arm is hanging out beyond the edge of the bunk and swaying in the air, and Rohan turns the hand gently to look at the wristwatch. It’s almost 4 a.m. Rohan should get up and read a chapter of the Koran for the repose of Sofia’s soul.

With a solemn effort he sits up and runs his hands over his face and beard. The sun will rise at six, and the predawn prayers can be said at any time from five onwards.

He stands beside the sleeping Jeo and sees how beautiful he is, how young.

One of his feet has emerged from the blanket and Rohan begins to rearrange the folds to cover it, unable to bear how vulnerable and naked to the world it looks. There is a small rust-brown mole halfway along the arch and it is something he didn’t know about his son. The mystery of another human being. The places these feet have trod and will tread, of which the father will have no knowledge. He leans forward and places a kiss on his grown-up son’s face.

In the bathroom he performs the ritual ablutions and comes out and begins to read the Koran, asking Allah to look after her in her death, just as He is looking after him and his children in their lives. To forgive her. The subject of the Koran is mankind, and for him the verse that induces most fear is in the chapter entitled Man. In itself it is somewhat beautiful, speaking of the rewards awaiting the faithful and the steadfast in Afterlife, but when he had quoted it to Sofia in her dying moments she had corrected a small mistake of his. It was evidence that she knew intimately and precisely what she was rejecting. And there lies the source of his terror for her soul. Sofia had died an unbeliever, an apostate.

Until the time she is resurrected on Judgement Day, she will be subjected to torments, the consequences of her rejection of God. After the world ends she will be cast into Hell. In her last hours he had tried desperately to make her repent. It was a gradual and unsudden thing, her loss of faith, growing slowly around them like a plant, its rings widening.

Apostasy was punishable by death in Pakistani law so it had to remain a secret after she revealed it to him.

‘I will continue to pretend for the sake of appearances and for our safety. But I have to share with you the fact that I am no longer a believer.’

He invited distinguished clerics and holy women to the house to help her see again the beauty of belief. In his mind he accused her of misrepresenting herself to him before marriage, because he would never have chosen someone with such monstrous doubts. The marriage was in all likelihood null — a Muslim could not remain married to an unbeliever — but he also kept reassuring himself that her condition was reversible, waiting for God to make His presence felt to her once more.

After the first child the doctors had warned her against having another but he was somewhat glad when Jeo was conceived, thinking the marvel of a new life would renew her soul.

He reads the Holy Book, trying not to think of how her beautiful body is receiving injuries inside the ground at this very moment, a toy for Allah’s demons. Tortures known as Kabar ka Aazab. She is alive down there, fully sensate and conscious, the underworld from where no smoke or cry escapes. A person is brought to life immediately after the grave is closed up and is even said to clearly hear the receding footsteps of the men who had come to bury him.

After her death he gave away Ardent Spirit to Ahmed the Moth, wishing to concentrate on the alleviation of her death-suffering, fully able to imagine her calling out in pain from beneath his feet. There was little time for Jeo and Yasmin, the eight-year-old daughter. He would leave to meet with scholars and seek rare books, pursuing doctrines, commentaries and records of controversies, searching for anything that might absolve her of her sin, coming back from some journeys more shaken than when he had left, at peace from some others.

While he was preoccupied with this, Ahmed the Moth distorted his vision beyond recognition and adapted Ardent Spirit’s crescent-shaped layout to his own ends. A green flag was designed with six flames arranged in a curve at its centre, each flame rising out of a pair of crossed swords. It flies on the roof of Ardent Spirit every day, and the boys wear green turbans which, when unwound, reveal the same six swords-and-flames on them. The six centres of vanished glory, whose loss is to be avenged with blade and fire.

In the small bathroom Rohan washes the tears off his face and performs his ablutions again. When the apostate dies the spot of earth which is to be his grave cries out in vehemence and pain, unwilling to receive him. As she breathed her last breaths he had kept asking her quietly, ‘Tell me what you see,’ because in a minute, in ten minutes, everything would have become irreversible, because it is too late to repent once the dying eyes begin to glimpse the Angel of Death.

But after two decades of thought he does sometimes suspect that his conduct had resembled sin, the sin of pride. Had he really decided that Allah lacked compassion, even for an apostate? Yes, he sometimes fears that his grief at her death — and before that at her doubts and renunciation — had driven him to something resembling an offence. How can he know for certain that the area of earth that became her grave hadn’t rejoiced at her death, ‘adorning itself like a bride, exulting in having to embrace her soon’, as the books of spiritual devotion say about the virtuous?

She had founded the school with him and had taught there but disagreements had emerged very soon and she had finally stopped teaching when he expelled a pupil whose mother was revealed to be a prostitute.

He raises the louvred blinds and looks out at the train tracks and the Grand Trunk Road running along them. Eternity suspended over human time, the stars are shining above the world like grains of light, this world that she had loved and called the only Paradise she needed. Preparing himself for blindness he commits everything to memory as she committed everything to paper, painting the garden’s flowers and birds onto his mind, and for several years after she was gone the garden looked as though something important had befallen it. The limes and the acacia trees seemed to mourn her, the rosewood and the Persian lilacs, the peepal and the corals, and all their different fruits, berries and spores, the seeds tough as cricket balls, or light enough to remain afloat for half an hour. Inside the earth the roots mourned her even without having seen her, and the white teak whose bark came off in plates the size of footprints, the lemon tree that produced twenty-five baskets of fruit each year. He was sure that all of them, as well as the lightning-fast lizards of the garden, were mourning her with him, and the stiffly rustling dragonflies and the blue-winged carpenter bees and the black chains of the ants and the tough-carapaced beetles and the various snails. In grief he had whispered her name as he walked the red paths set loose in the garden, and the word had gone among the glistening black brilliance of the crows and the butterflies floating in the sunlight — the Himalayan Pierrot, the Chitrali Satyr, the blue tigers and the common leopard and the swallowtails and the peacocks. She had loved them and the world in which they existed, saying, ‘God is just a name for our wonder.’ There was no soul, only consciousness. No divine plan, only nature, and we were simply among the innumerable results of its randomness. Saying, ‘I will miss this because this is all there is,’ her last words, and then she had slipped out of his life, consigning him to decades of apprehension on her behalf, because he knew that the soul existed, and not only that, it was accountable to Allah and His providential rage. Unlike her he knew that the dead were not beyond harm.

6

Arriving in Peshawar, Rohan accompanies Jeo to the hospital where the boy is to spend the next month. Afterwards, the early morning sunlight flooding the roads, he takes a rickshaw towards his former pupil’s house, to thank the family for the books. It’s much colder here in the mountains, 1,600 feet above sea level, and he buttons his coat to the neck and turns up the collar. Out there are mountains higher than the Alps placed onto the Pyrenees. Glaciers that Tamerlane’s soldiers had had to crawl over on hands and knees in 1398.

It is appropriate in some ways that the books had arrived in a truck painted brilliantly with mythological creatures, with saints and figures of legend, birds and garlands of flowers. The rickshaw is decorated similarly, and as it moves deeper into the city it encounters a crowd of demonstrators, the roads suddenly filled with men of all ages, holding placards and banners. A display of support for victims of the war in Afghanistan. As the rally grows the rickshaw-wallah has to reduce his speed, and soon enough they can neither move back nor go forwards, and so Rohan gets out and begins to walk with the crowd flowing like a river through the bazaars and streets, the sun falling through the noise and the raised placards. ‘Why didn’t three thousand Jews turn up for work at the World Trade Center on 11 September …’ someone is asking, while another says, ‘The West wants to take over Pakistan’s nuclear weapons …’

Eventually he decides to turn around and make his way back to the hospital, to be with Jeo until the rally is over.

It’s past noon when he arrives at the hospital. No one can tell him where he might find Jeo and he walks around the maze of corridors, the wards chaotic because the rally has turned violent out there, resulting in injuries and fatalities, the police opening fire. Parts of the city are an inferno and soon there are flames in the vicinity of the hospital too. He asks for the doctor to whom he had entrusted Jeo and is told to go to an upper level. A canister of teargas enters through a window and explodes in the staircase, enveloping him in a bitter choking fog. He finds himself trembling with consternation and foreboding, his eyes streaming. Outside slogans are being shouted, about ancient history as well as this week’s news, the people of today as distressed about things that happened a thousand years ago as the people who had lived through them. Perhaps more. But with a caustic half-smile a nurse shakes her head and says into the air of the room, ‘Would someone tell the marchers that visas to Western countries are being given away in the next street. That’ll disperse them.’

He turns into a corridor with a handkerchief on the lower half of his face. The doctor is examining an English journalist who is bleeding from the head and has a broken arm, the enraged crowd having set upon him. He is weak but keeps saying he holds no grudge, that if he were someone from these lands he too would be unable to stop himself from venting his anger at the first Western person he saw.

When the doctor is free for a few moments Rohan reaches forward and asks him about Jeo and is told that Jeo and his companion Mikal left three hours ago. Jeo had told one of the nurses that they were on their way to the battlefields of Afghanistan, had asked what essential medicines might be needed over there.

‘Mikal?’ Rohan asks. He points to the area between his eyebrows.

The doctor nods. ‘Yes, that’s him.’

*

Feeling inadequate and too old for the emergency, he moves towards the nearest phone and dials the number for Mikal’s brother Basie in Heer, to ask him for advice, to tell him to come to Peshawar immediately. They must follow the two boys into the conflict and bring them back. With each minute they are moving deeper and deeper towards the war, into the crosshairs of history.

It’s mayhem in Afghanistan. The Taliban are ruling with an iron fist, punishing traitors, informers, spies and those inciting rebellion. But the people are rising up, encouraged by America’s covert help — the Special Forces soldiers are moving on horseback from village to village, between towns and cities, dressed in shalwar kameez and shawls and woollen caps, emboldening, bribing and arming the population. Ahmed the Moth died there ten days ago while visiting his Taliban friends. A group of ordinary citizens had grabbed hold of him and a Taliban soldier on the street corner and forced them to the ground. Every ounce of rage — every rape, every disappearance, every public execution, every hand amputated during the past seven years of the Taliban regime, every twelve-year-old boy pressed into battle by them, every ten-year-old girl forcibly married to a mullah eight times her age, every man lashed, every woman beaten, every limb broken — was poured into the two men by fist, club, stick, foot and stone, and when they finished and dispersed nothing remained of the pair. It was as if they had been eaten.

7

The door has opened and both of them have entered the future. Jeo sits in the back of the van with Mikal as they are driven through the shadowland of hill and plateau, the use of headlights kept to a minimum so that at times there is no knowing what lies a mere five seconds into the darkness. Later in the night lightning appears overhead and illuminates not only the earth and the clouds but also the place in the mind where the line of fear crosses the thoughts, and the ground glows blue for a few seconds with a crystal immediacy, vistas opening up as in a vision, with black shapes looming in them, shadows perhaps, perhaps creatures who can be fought only with the weapons forged by the spirit, not the flesh, and then as the night deepens the stars come out and wheel overhead, smearing the sky with ancient phosphorescence.

There are ten men and there is silence between them. A few, including Mikal, are in deep sleep. Occasionally, without realising it, one of the waking men begins to read aloud the verses of the Koran he must be reading in his heart and the voice materialises in the darkness and after a few moments is gone.

Jeo reaches into Mikal’s bag. His fingers touch the very cold metal of the handgun’s spare bullets. Switching on his small flashlight, he sees that interspersed with the maps he has taken out there are letters, and he smiles immediately, feeling as though he’s sixteen years old once again, when all the girls were in love with Mikal. He separates the letters carefully and places them back in the bag just as the vehicle enters an expanse strewn with bright yellow packets of food air-dropped by Americans. The packs crunch and explode softly as the tyres go over them, and he pulls out the letters again. A name had caught his eye at the end of the text in one, and now he sees that it is there on another. And another. Suddenly his skin is burning because the handwriting in all of them is identical, and it is hers. It’s almost as though Naheed’s face appears behind the sentences, the eyes looking just past his shoulder.

Mikal stirs at the noise from outside and Jeo drops everything back into the bag and quickly zips it up. It could be another Naheed. Has he recognised her handwriting?

He needs to look at the letters again. He thinks of the night early in the marriage when he had come out of sleep to discover her weeping in the darkness. Months later in the garden he would hold her and she would be smiling and suddenly her eyes would fill up. Was she sorrowful at having forgotten Mikal for a few instants? Feeling blameworthy for not loving Jeo?

To look into her eyes was to realise that eyes were part of the brain. Thoughts were visible through and in them. Was he mistaken?

The driver has a handheld Motorola radio with which he is communicating with the other two vans in their convoy. Jeo and Mikal have been told that they can expect to arrive at the medical centre at noon the next day. The other eight men in the truck will go elsewhere.

There are cries of jackals in the distance.

‘Are you all right?’ Mikal says, draping his arm along Jeo’s back.

‘Yes.’

She is the miracle in his life, granted to him suddenly last year, he who had resigned himself to loneliness, his studies being his primary horizon, knowing he wouldn’t experience certain aspects of life until he married after completing his education in his mid-twenties. He closes his eyes, and when he opens them his wristwatch tells him he has slept for two hours. It is still dark but the vehicle has halted on an elevated ridge and the driver has stepped outside, looking around with a flashlight. Jeo thinks of his father. At this hour he would be awake and saying prayers for his mother.

‘We are lost,’ Mikal says, pointing to the stars. ‘I told him an hour ago but he wouldn’t listen. We haven’t been going in the right direction for some time.’ He gets out of the van with his bag over his shoulder and Jeo watches him talk to the driver, gesturing at the sky and at the maps. Jeo goes out to join them as do the others, each wrapped in a blanket against the cold air, their several flashlights revealing that they are in the remains of a very extensive iron foundry, the surface of the hills for many hundreds of yards covered with the ruins of ancient furnaces made of soapstone, indestructible in the fire, for the smelting of iron ore. Relics of the departed Buddhist races of these lands. The ground strewn with small cubes of iron pyrites. And as they stand there surrounded by the strange earth and the strange sky, Jeo hears what he has never heard before, the awful crump of tank shells, explosions and gunfire in the far distance.

‘Do you hear it?’

‘Yes,’ Mikal replies.

‘It’s a battle, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s the world,’ one of the other men says. ‘The world sounds like this all the time, we just don’t hear it. Then sometimes in some places we do.’

There is a string of massive impacts and suddenly he is unable to glance at a spot of earth without imagining pieces of metal speeding towards it, large and small and of all shapes. The moon has long since disappeared but the stars are so many that they are still casting shadows within the roofless ruin, and now everything has fallen silent and from very high overhead he hears the slender calls of birds moving eastwards in faint calligraphy-like lines and strokes, thousands of them amid all the smouldering silver.

‘Before we go, we need to refill our water bottles,’ the driver says. He points to Mikal and Jeo. ‘We passed a spring a few minutes back. Take the empty bottles from the truck and fill them. Follow the tracks the jeep made in the dust and you will avoid the landmines.’

‘I’ll go on my own,’ says Mikal.

‘No, take your friend. We’ll wait here for you.’

‘I said I’ll go alone,’ Mikal says, with surprising firmness in the voice. ‘I want Jeo to stay here with you.’

The driver walks up to him and grabs him by the lapels with his large thick-wristed hands, Mikal almost losing his balance. They both stand glaring at each other in silent opposition and then just as suddenly the man releases him. ‘Do as you are told.’

Jeo takes Mikal’s sleeve in a light grip. ‘I’ll come with you.’

*

They take the two gallon bottles and walk back along the tyre marks through the pebbles and fragments of quartz, primitive limestone and mica, but fail to locate the spring. Just as they are about to abandon the search, however, the sound of falling water reaches them from the other side of a gorge, accessed through clay slates and traprock. They climb down into another geological age and walk towards the water through the scar of a dried riverbed, dwarfed between boulders lying where they had fallen ten thousand years ago.

‘Make sure you fill it to the very top,’ Mikal says as Jeo holds one of the bottles under the vertical trickle of water falling from a hill spur, a rope of thin silk that breaks at the merest contact. ‘You’d hear it sloshing a mile off otherwise.’

His feet sunk in muddy earth, Jeo is tightening the cap back on when he becomes aware of a figure in black sitting on the ground just ten yards away. The man is perfectly motionless with his back to them, but there is no prayer mat under him and he is facing in the wrong direction, otherwise Jeo would have thought of him as someone at prayer.

Keeping the flashlight trained on his back they slowly walk towards him. The small stones that cover the ground shine in the beam of light as if wrapped in foil. They approach through all that moon debris and Mikal clears his throat to alert the stranger. They walk to his front and see that a piece of cardboard is held in place on his chest by the broken-off tip of a spear, driven into him between the fifth and sixth ribs.

Jeo withdraws the spear and blood jets out of the wound onto the lap.

‘I thought the dead didn’t bleed,’ Mikal says, taking a step backwards.

‘They don’t. The right side of the heart holds liquid blood after death — the spear must have punctured it.’

He hands the freed cardboard sign to Mikal, who knows Pashto.

‘It says, This is what happens to those who betray Allah’s beloved Taliban.’

Mikal runs the torch into the darkness around them, along the strata of the hills aligned northwest to southwest. ‘We should go.’

Jeo takes off his blanket and covers the dead man with it and stands up. ‘We’ll say a prayer for him later.’

They get back with the water to find that the three vans have driven off. On the dusty ground — that sends up a puff at the lightest step — the imprints of the tyres stretch away into the darkness, and they stand wordlessly beside each other for some minutes.

‘All my things were in the truck,’ Jeo says. ‘The satellite phone, the bag of medical supplies, my clothes.’

Mikal still has his rucksack strapped to his back and he is looking up at the stars, examining their positions. And all the while, over the ridge, the battles are continuing.

‘Something happened and they had to drive off in a hurry. They’ll come back for us.’

‘They are not coming back.’

Jeo looks at Mikal. ‘What do you mean?’

‘They wanted to leave us here, that’s why they insisted you go with me.’ He looks into the darkness while he speaks as if addressing the night. ‘I think we’ve been exchanged for weapons. Or were we sold for money? The Taliban need soldiers, reinforcements, and I think we are two of them.’

‘You were talking about this back in Heer. You are wrong.’

‘I think we should get as far away from here as possible. Someone is coming to pick us up and take us to a battlefield.’

‘You want to walk out into the night? Are you trying to get me killed?’

‘What?’

‘Are you trying to get me killed?’

Jeo grabs the torch from him and looks into the darkness with its raw glare and then at his face. ‘Why are you really here? Why did you decide to come with me suddenly?’

‘Have you lost your mind?’

Jeo moves forward and puts his hand on the rucksack. ‘Give me the maps.’

Mikal steps away from him, whipping around. ‘Let me get them,’ he says. Taking the bag off and plunging his hands in there with his back to Jeo. Jeo spends his week at the medical school in Lahore and comes home at the weekend — do Mikal and Naheed meet in his absence?

‘They know I am not a fighter,’ Jeo says quietly as Mikal hands him the maps.

‘They’ll make you fight, Jeo. They’ve paid for you. We have to get away from here as fast as we can.’

*

In the darkness thirty minutes away they find a cave and they send in the beam of light ahead of them, onto the curved walls of rock in which sharply polished pieces of a mineral are embedded, reflecting their eyes and fragments of their faces all the way up to the ceiling — a stirring awake of deep yellow and deep red wherever the torchlight lands. There is a powerfully heightened sense that the two of them have been imprisoned in the mountain and are now moving around inside it.

Jeo gathers an armful of dusty wood and Mikal collects the dried-up swallow droppings from the back of the cave. Taking the spark-mechanism of a dead cigarette lighter from his pocket, he starts a fire and they rub their hands before the flames, run them up and down on their clothing to gather the soaked heat while their reflections look at them from the other side of the mountain.

‘Mikal, we have to go back and bury the dead man.’

‘I know.’

To look for more wood Jeo stands up and walks over to the high piles of rocks that lead to the depths of the cave and there he finds an electricity generator and a cardboard box filled with glass light bulbs. When he returns carrying the box, Mikal is surrounded by a group of armed men, dressed in black like beings provoked out of the absolute darkness. One of them motions with the gun for Jeo to join Mikal.

‘What is that in your hands?’

‘I just found these. I don’t know what they are.’

One of the men examines the contents of the box while the others watch Jeo and Mikal with slow movements of their eyes.

‘Are you trying to send signals to the Americans?’

One of the men says that he had recently seen a string of electric light bulbs laid out on a plateau on the outskirts of his village, hooked to a gas-powered generator. The bulbs lay glowing on the ground and then a helicopter had landed, guided by them, and several white men had emerged, wearing jeans and carrying computers and guns and heavy black canvas bags. They had gone away with the warlord who controlled the village — a Taliban loyal who is now with the Americans. The black canvas bags were no doubt full of dollars with which he was bought.

‘We have nothing to do with any Americans,’ Mikal says.

Jeo could have shown them his medical supplies but they are in the van. He tells them that he is training to be a doctor and is here to help his Afghan brothers and sisters.

‘So which of you is Jeo and which Mikal?’ one of the men asks, looking at them carefully. ‘We were told one of you knows the language of stars.’

‘How do you know our names?’

‘We met the convoy you were with. Now you will travel with us.’ Half the light from the coloured mirrors scattered on the cave wall has been obscured by the black the men are wearing.

Outside there is a glowing shiver of the unrisen sun in the darkness to the east and the morning star has climbed higher. Trucks are parked among the boulders and their occupants get out and embrace Jeo and Mikal, calling them ‘brothers’. Everyone says the predawn prayers with their faces turned to the dense blackness in the west.

A long fan of light comes from the sky when the sun rises and they get into a truck and the convoy moves onwards. The metal roof is perforated with a line of evenly spaced bullet holes, where one of the boys had madly opened fire at an American helicopter overhead, unable to contain his rage.

‘How old are you?’ Mikal asks the boy next to him.

‘Sixteen.’

Mikal reaches out and feels his throat for the Adam’s apple. ‘You are twelve. Thirteen at most.’

*

Full of courage and the sense of duty, the new boys are fighters and veterans of various jihad training camps. They have a feeling of relief and a subdued stimulation in them at the prospect of holy combat drawing near, their clothes marbled with sweat and dust, their shoes in disrepair, their skins deeply weathered. They talk earnestly about the Crusades and jihad, of legendary weapons and famed warriors, and they are from all parts of Pakistan and the wider Muslim world, Egyptians, Algerians, Saudi Arabians and Yemenis, between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, recruited through a fatwa issued by the Saudi cleric Sheikh al-Uqla, a fatwa praising the Taliban for creating the only country in the world where there are no man-made laws. There are Uzbeks and Chechens also and a group from northern England, several of them with turbans wound around baseball caps so they are easy to remove. Among them though there is one Pakistani who just wants to catch an American soldier and collect the bounty being offered by Osama bin Laden, one hundred thousand dollars per soldier, more than a million rupees.

*

Interrupting the journey only to say the noon and afternoon prayers, they travel all day and in the evening they arrive at a mud-built village on the lower slope of a hill. The fort at the top is the area’s Taliban headquarters and they drive through the village towards it, the speed reduced due to the narrowness of the streets, men and women withdrawing to either side on seeing the Taliban vehicle, hugging the walls with eyes lowered. The doors and windows of many houses have had splinters torn out of the wood by bullets and in one place a number of people have been lined up and shot in recent days, their blood remaining in bursts on the walls. One of these is at the height of a child’s head.

A grey dog yaps at the truck and a Taliban soldier jumps down and delivers it an expertly placed kick under the jaw and then, when it recovers and snarls back, shoots it dead with his AK-47, the truck coming to a sudden stop and the driver leaning his head out of his window to assess the situation. He tells the soldier to get back in but just then a small metallic sound issues from the burka of one of the women standing against a wall — a bangle or an earring. An item of audible jewellery. The driver reaches under his seat and takes out a leather whip with dozens of coins stitched along its length. He gets out with the two-yard-long instrument and, enraged, demands to know who it is that is wearing the loud jewellery, attracting the men of faith by her wiles.

‘Who is it?’

The women huddle together and the driver whips this mass of dirty blue fabrics several times, running around to aim at whoever cries out, while with the stock of his AK-47 the other soldier tears open the head of the man who dares to intervene.

‘Are you a Muslim or aren’t you? Does Allah forbid women from such things or doesn’t He?’

The fighters in the truck view the punishment with a sense of justice on their faces and one of them beseeches Allah to prevent everyone from sinning.

Mikal touches Jeo’s sleeve. ‘To your left.’ His lips barely move.

Jeo glances in that direction but is not sure what he is looking for.

‘Did you see him?’ Mikal whispers.

Jeo shakes his head.

Mikal looks quickly. ‘He’s gone.’

‘Who?’

‘An American.’

*

The white man was in an upper-storey window on the other side of the street. It was a fleeting glimpse, and suddenly the air had become much colder for Mikal. They are here. They are organising an attack on the Taliban headquarters — the place where he and Jeo are being taken.

As they move on towards the fort, another thin dog appears and follows them for a distance and then stands watching them. There are tank tracks in the dust leading out of the fort’s tall arched gate. The truck goes through it and stops before a complex of buildings inside, the gate closing behind them, and they climb out stiff-limbed.

Jeo is taken away immediately to tend to a group of injured Taliban soldiers. His eyes hot from fatigue, Mikal assesses the boundary wall — it is at least thirty feet high and twenty feet thick, and along the parapet there are holes for guns, wide enough to accommodate the swing of a barrel.

He doesn’t see Jeo until everyone gathers for the night prayer at the fort’s mosque.

‘There are just over a hundred and twenty men here,’ Mikal tells him. ‘There were many hundreds until two days ago but they have gone to reinforce an important battle a few villages away, taking tanks and armoured vehicles.’

‘Tell me about the American.’

‘This place will be attacked.’

‘I heard a few al-Qaeda members were here,’ Jeo says. ‘But they disappeared very soon after 11 September.’

‘We could try to steal a truck.’

The fort is — it must be — the most hated and feared place in the region. The people in the village will show no mercy when they come in with American reinforcement and weaponry.

‘In the morning I will ask them for a gun and I want you to learn how to fire it.’

‘No.’

‘Jeo. I am not going to shoot anyone either if I can help it. I just want you to memorise how the gun works and keep it with you.’

‘When the attackers see a gun in my hand they’ll think I am the enemy.’

‘They are not going to be that discerning. You saw how these Taliban treat them. They will not leave even a sparrow alive in this place.’

*

Mikal awakens with the sense that someone is looking at him through the darkness. They are sharing the sleeping quarters with a group of young men, the mattresses greasy and infested. A hand has brushed his face, perhaps a fingernail has come into contact with a metal button on his coat. He was using his rucksack as a pillow and now realises that it is missing. He puts his hand into his pocket and brings out the flashlight. Muffling its light by cupping a palm over the glass, he raises it in the air, a glowing stone in his hand. Sending a spray of light over the sleeping bodies. Jeo isn’t in the room.

He steps out into the night, being tracked by the moon as he walks across the vast courtyard, keeping the flashlight’s beam turned to the ground as much as possible. The area enclosed by the fort walls is the size of a neighbourhood — there are stables, plots of corn and wheat, and there is a stream and a rose garden. ‘Jeo?’ he whispers repeatedly. He tries the door handles of the trucks parked near the gate but all of them are locked, the metal freezing to his fingertips. One stable is filled to the rafters with weaponry — grenades, rockets and firearms, crates of ammunition, anything made for killing, even Lee Enfield rifles with dates stamped on the bayonets — 1913 — from the time that the British were contesting the area. He washes his face from the stream to remain focused. Walking back through the rose garden he finds a letter torn in half — written a year ago by a woman in the village below, addressed to the United Nations, saying she’s a teacher and is in Hell, it is my 197th letter over the past five years, please help us … He looks up into the darkness above the world and orients himself by locating Cassiopeia in the north and the two fused diamonds of Orion to the west, staring as if the secret design of the world will be revealed to him. To the east is the planet Venus.

‘Jeo?’

The Angel of Death is said to have no ears, to stop him from hearing anyone’s pleas.

‘Yes.’

Mikal locates him with the light. ‘Do you have my bag?’

‘No. I thought you went away with it somewhere.’

‘It’s gone.’

‘You are an accursed liar.’ The voice comes out of the black air.

Two men with Kalashnikovs appear before them. ‘What are you doing out here?’ The words issue on gleaming vapour.

‘We couldn’t sleep.’

The men come forward. They are in Pakistani dress but one of them is clearly an Uzbek. He says to Mikal, in Punjabi, ‘We asked you if you had any maps and you said you didn’t. We found them in your bag just now.’

‘They are his, not mine. You asked me not him.’

‘I gave them to him for safekeeping,’ Jeo says.

‘Do you — either of you — have any money?’

‘Just a small amount to get by.’

‘No dollars?’

‘No. No dollars.’

‘You are an accursed liar.’

The other says, ‘What are you doing out here in the middle of the night? If you were in our place wouldn’t you think you were spying for the Americans?’

‘We just came out here to talk. We did not want to disturb the sleepers.’

‘Why are you looking up? Are you expecting American planes? Why didn’t you want us to have the maps? Your brothers and sisters are being murdered all across Afghanistan as we speak and you are too selfish to help.’

‘That is not true,’ Jeo says. ‘We are here because we want to help.’

‘Selfish people like you are the reason Islam is in the state it is.’

‘Just give me one map and you can keep the rest.’

‘People who don’t want to make sacrifices,’ the Uzbek says contemptuously. ‘Now go back in and don’t come back out again.’

They return to their mattresses, not stirring until just before dawn when in the bitter cold everyone walks to the mosque to say their prayers, and as the sun rises the fighters begin their exercises with cries of ‘God is great!’ at every exertion, firing bullets into telephone directories of Pakistani cities soaked in water, proof that the Taliban were supported and funded by the Pakistani government and military, and then, exactly what Mikal has been expecting, the Taliban announce that an informer from the village has just sent news of an imminent attack on the fort.

*

Evacuating is an impossibility since the paths out of the fort have been blocked. Out there is the gathering of half a dozen villages from the surrounding area, a flash of bayonets in an unbroken circle around the base of the hill.

There is a day moon composed of white ash in the sky.

Mikal feels the whole mass of the war bearing down on them with nothing but their bodies and selves to hold it at bay. He needs the spare bullets for his Beretta and must look for his rucksack, asking around and almost breaking into a run as he moves from location to location. The fort was used in the 1980s by Soviet soldiers to torture and imprison the population, and there is graffiti in Russian on several walls. Someone told Mikal yesterday that there is a skeleton chained to the wall in an underground chamber, making him think of his father in Lahore Fort.

‘Your friend Jeo was also asking about the rucksack just now,’ one man tells him, opening the door to the arsenal Mikal saw last night — the weapons are soon piled up under a mulberry tree, clusters of them dragged zigzagging across the dust so that they leave a wide trail. He stands still for a few moments, looking at it, trying to bring clarity into his mind. And then as he hurries forward he remembers following the adder-like trace that a holy man had left in the streets — a fakir, a traveller. Mikal was about eight years old and he had overheard someone say that the holy man had a certain resemblance to his father, with his head of a sad and wise lion. As penitence for a grave transgression in the past, the mendicant wandered around Pakistan with massive lengths of chain wound about his body, dripping in loops from his neck and wrists, and trailing behind him from his ankles, and Mikal had set out to look for him, following the trail of him for miles, but unable to find him. It was the first time he had strayed from home, Basie and his mother frantic in the painted rooms.

‘Half these boys are not soldiers,’ Mikal says to a Taliban leader. ‘They’d be better off lying low.’

‘They will be better off but not our cause,’ the man says. ‘Everyone has to fight.’ And he adds with finality, ‘Allah has plans that includes this.’

*

His mind fails to locate intimations of a higher order behind any aspect of this place, a site all the more crude for its distance from the real world, a cold and barren frontierland of life.

From the weapons under the mulberry tree — the sun has broken the chill of the various metals and a butterfly has appeared to collect warmth from a trigger guard — he picks up two Chinese Type 56 SMGs and begins to look for Jeo. The mulberry leaves — with their outlines composed of many sudden curves — have always made him want to draw them. No wonder Jeo’s mother couldn’t resist making paintings of them.

In the sleeping quarters he places one of the guns on the floor and examines the other, looking up when Jeo appears in the doorway.

‘Pick it up,’ he points at the SMG at his feet. ‘I’ll make sure you don’t have to use it. I’ll do whatever I can. But if there is no alternative I want you to know what to do.’

He can hear boys shouting ‘Allah is great!’ out there.

Jeo remains where he is, staring at him from the door. There is a paper in his left hand, half crumpled up in the fist.

Mikal walks towards him with the SMG held out. ‘You must try to shoot a gunman under the nose. The bullet will go through and sever the brainstem so the hand will be paralysed and won’t pull the trigger, not even in reflex.’ Working together they had built a computer when they were twelve years old. He closes Jeo’s fingers around the gun. ‘Keep your right hand here …’

A drop of water falls onto his wrist and he looks up, puzzled, seeing Jeo’s eyes full of strange light.

‘My father …’ Jeo says.

‘What?’

Jeo raises the hand with the paper and Mikal sees that it is one of Naheed’s letters.

‘My father …’ Jeo says again, pulling out the others from his pocket.

‘The letters are old, Jeo. From before you two were married. You can check the dates.’

But Jeo’s mind is on something else. ‘My father …’ He is trembling, breathing fast as he looks at Mikal with terror in his face. ‘My father caused my mother’s death?’ Rapidly he goes through the letters. ‘It says here …’ He can’t find the one he is looking for and then releases his hold on all of them, letting them fall as he looks at him and asks pleadingly, ‘My father killed my mother?’

Mikal shakes his head. ‘That’s not what happened.’

On his knees among the scattered papers, Jeo pushes some aside to uncover others, reading disjointed phrases from them, searching both sides of the sheets.

‘She was dying and he didn’t want her to be damned eternally. He withheld her medicines till she let go of her doubts, forcing her to embrace Allah once again before it was too late. Some people say she had a heart attack during those moments … The sudden lack of drugs …’ He raises his hands to his forehead. ‘Oh God. Why did you read them?’

He moves towards him but Jeo lets out a strangled bark. ‘Get away from me.’

Mikal stops.

‘Naheed.’ Jeo drops the letters, one of which has seven coloured flowers glued to it like stains on the page. She had gone to collect them from Rohan’s garden, without knowing she would marry Jeo within months.

‘She loves you,’ Mikal says.

Jeo gets up and pushes him hard into the wall. ‘How do you know?’ The shock emptying the breath out of Mikal, his head slamming against the deep blue paint and Jeo has now picked up the gun and is trying to work it, keeping it pointed at Mikal. The gun is capable of firing four hundred bullets every minute and it goes off eventually, Jeo’s finger pressing the trigger for two or three seconds, a duration long enough to release thirty bullets, gouging a curved line of chips from the wall behind Mikal.

For a while Mikal’s wildly beating heart is the only point of reference in the formless darkness that has filled his eyes. The empty cartridges fall to the ground like a chain rattling. You told the mendicant to add a link to one of the chains hanging on his body for your sake, a link representing a need of yours, a wish. And as he wandered through the land he prayed for the need to be alleviated. When and if it was, the link disappeared miraculously from about the fakir’s person, the chain shortening. To him it was proof that Allah had taken pity on him and somewhat lightened his burden, that he was forgiven a little for his transgression.

And now they hear, both Mikal and Jeo, what they hadn’t before — the rocket-propelled grenades being fired into the fort’s main gate. They hear the splinters exploding from the wood as the gate begins to cave inwards.

*

There are a few seconds of utter silence and then more than a thousand attackers penetrate the smoke and dust, firing and being fired on, kissing their guns before pulling the triggers, both sides shouting Allah’s name. A panic spreading like a flicker in a shoal of fish whenever there is a sound from an unexpected direction. Noises from the mouths of humans and the mouths of guns. In the form of screams, in the form of bullets, as if the men are shouting at the weapons and the weapons are shouting back. Mikal knows they will be in this room in less than five minutes. ‘Remember,’ he tells himself. ‘Short controlled bursts.’ He turns around to where he last saw Jeo, a second or a lifetime ago.

Jeo is motionless and then begins to collect Naheed’s letters. Calmly walking across the room to place them in an alcove.

Six Taliban men enter and bolt the door from the inside. Eight humans and their fate. ‘Not one of you is allowed to die until he has killed twenty of the enemy,’ one of them says; he was the driver who brought them here, the owner of the leather lash reinforced with Saudi coins.

Mikal crouches by the window and raises his head to look out. Rooms, trucks and trees are on fire, as is the golden dome of the mosque, and he cannot believe the intensity of the fight, hundreds of guns firing at the same time. The attackers are advancing and are being brutal with each person they find. They had expected more Taliban in the fort, and — disappointed at the small number — they are pouring the rage and violence and metal meant for several men into just one. Each man is dying ten, twenty or thirty deaths.

*

Someone is trying to break down the door, the wood receiving forceful blows. And all the while someone injured out there is screaming with pain, ‘Help me, somebody help me, somebody please help me!’

A rocket-propelled grenade — fired from the other side of the courtyard — lodges itself in the room’s wall, emerging halfway into the interior without going off. It remains there and begins to vibrate. Grit and plaster falling to the floor and onto the man standing directly below it. He — and Mikal and Jeo, and everyone else — watch the grenade with rapt fascination for a few seconds, everything reduced to fear and marvel. It should’ve exploded but it can’t because the wall is constraining it. It begins to burn instead, sending a stream of brilliant liquid flame and metal directly onto the chest of the man below with a piercing whistle. The man’s torso melts, is consumed, and the rest of him falls backwards and the blinding red and white lava continues to shower onto him, the high-pitched sound echoing off the walls.

*

The second RPG comes and gets stuck in the wall directly above Jeo and Mikal, vibrating again but without any loudness. Nothing except a hum, the sound of a finality beyond all illusion. Mikal breaks out of his paralysis and moves Jeo and himself from under it. Because there hasn’t been a blow on the door for a while Jeo opens it and looks out while Mikal reaches for Naheed’s letters. The base of Mikal’s neck erupts in blood, Jeo looking back and seeing him fall. The corridor outside is filled with dense smoke and the young woman who comes rushing out of it towards Jeo wears a look of wildness on her face, her eyes crazed with a radiant power. When was the last time he saw a woman? The tip of the foot-long dagger enters Jeo’s face through the left cheek — going through the gap between the lower and upper jaw. The sharp metal cuts through the roof of the mouth and reaches under the brain. The blade grates against the bone of the skull that it splinters, and it grates again immediately afterwards when she pulls it out. He hears both sounds — from the inside, between the ears. The pain is something he could not have imagined. ‘This is for what your people did to my man,’ she says, armed with love’s vengeance. Part of his mind remarks on the woman’s beauty, notices the blossoms on her dress. He has fallen with his face to one side and he sees Mikal lying prone on the other side of the room, the red coming out of his mouth as though it is something he is saying, his last words.

How easy it is to create ghosts, he thinks as he begins to die a minute later, feeling his mind closing chamber by chamber, the memory of Naheed contained in each one. And despite it all it means much to have loved. Just before the world vanishes, a hope surfaces in him that this wasn’t necessarily everything, that he will return somehow.

His arm rises, remembering when it used to be a wing.

8

‘Night’ was the word employed for the long period during which Muhammad did not receive a revelation from Allah.

Naheed lies awake in her mother’s place, looking into the darkness. Five days ago there was a telephone call from Rohan in Peshawar, saying Jeo and Mikal had disappeared towards Afghanistan. Basie and his wife — Jeo’s sister Yasmin — had immediately set off for Peshawar to join Rohan. They are still there, searching, and they ring Heer every evening but don’t have any news.

The clock sounds its alarm to awaken her mother, Tara, for her predawn prayers. The amplified call from the loudspeakers attached to the mosque’s minarets cannot be relied upon, because electricity is sometimes absent. So Tara sets the alarm as a precaution.

But Tara remains asleep now. This happens on occasion, when she has stayed awake late into the night with her seamstress work, her back bent over the sewing machine.

Naheed will not rouse her. So what if she misses a prayer? Allah understands. Sometimes Naheed even gets up during the night and switches off the alarm so it won’t go off. Let her rest.

Naheed sits up, with a need to be in the room where she sleeps with Jeo. There is a series of minute scars where her glass bangles had broken accidentally against his chest on the wedding night. Where the skin on a man’s body is soft, it is softer than any place on a woman’s body. She had discovered this fact by touching Jeo.

Invoking protection from the angel who looks after the fifth hour of the night, she steps out into the darkness. From the balcony she looks down, hearing the splash of water as the owner of the building, Sharif Sharif, performs his ablutions downstairs. Freezing in winter, burning during the summer months, Naheed grew up in this first-floor room that Tara rents from him.

Descending noiselessly she raises her hand to undo the latch of the front door.

‘Where are you going at this hour?’

She doesn’t turn around. ‘I need to go to the other house for something.’

‘At this hour?’ he says behind her. ‘Wait, I’ll come with you.’

‘There is no need, it’s only a few minutes away.’

Arms and shoulders as powerful as a gravedigger’s, Sharif Sharif’s large body is taut with animal life, erect and distinct in its bearing. As Naheed had entered her teenage years his conduct towards her had taken an inappropriate turn. One day last year he came upstairs with a book and asked her if she knew the meaning of the English word he had underlined. When Tara returned from her errand, Naheed told her about the incident. Tara had reacted calmly but it was obvious that she was frightened. After several hours of careful thought Tara had gone to see Rohan, who — and Naheed was unaware of this — had promised some years ago to make Naheed his daughter-in-law. ‘I am too old and weak to look after her now,’ Tara said. ‘She’s eighteen, a grown woman, and she belongs to you. I beg you to do something.’ Her acute trepidation meant that Jeo and Naheed were married within a fortnight, and Naheed moved away to live at Rohan’s house.

*

She is not sure if she is being followed. It could be the sound of her own feet echoing differently in the silence, more audible than they are during the day. She quickens her pace and takes the next turn, and looking back she is sure she can see a figure in the shadows a few yards behind her. Resisting the thought of breaking into a run, with her veil floating off her head, she goes past the shop that djinns are said to visit in the dead of night, to buy incense sticks and perfume. A hope surfaces in her that the neighbourhood watchman might be making his last rounds in the vicinity. The English word Sharif Sharif had underlined was Nude.

The air is cold and blue and the street appears white as salt in the moonwash. As she is unlocking the padlock on Rohan’s gate, a grey saluki appears and stands looking at her from the other side of the street. The animal tilts its head and then perhaps a man appears and stands behind it, and the next time she looks they have both vanished. Blackness nestling within deeper blackness around her, she walks through the garden, the paths forking, returning, disappearing in every direction, the shadows washing over them, and there are movements and sounds overhead but they could be the birds trapped in the snares. The bird pardoner has not returned to the house as he said he would. The earliest birds must have been caught the day Jeo left and they must be long dead by now.

She bolts the bedroom door. She leans closer to the windowpane to look at the garden, the paths that at night lead to the constellations in the pond or the shattered reflection of the moon when there is a moon. Crossing the tiled floor of the veranda the saluki stops and looks in her direction and she stills herself, unable to recall if dogs have night vision. The hound moves on but she is not sure if she isn’t hearing its sporadic growl, isn’t sure she is not hearing intermittent human footsteps just outside the room.

*

The sun has risen and she is carrying a chair through the garden. She places it under the large Persian lilac tree, against the trunk twisted as though struggling with some unseen force. Standing on the chair she looks up into the high leaves made luminous by the early morning light. The brilliant rays fall onto her face as patches of heat. A pair of scissors in her mouth, she reaches up and begins to climb, her soles against the roughness of the bark as her hands grab onto the branches and knotholes, branches thick as human limbs, making her feel she’s being helped up. There is a massed chatter of birds, but there is no way for her to know which of the songs are those of free birds, responding in elation to the coming day, and which those of the trapped, calling out in distress. How many songs are missing from the chorus she is hearing? She doesn’t know.

She climbs higher into the mighty sighing organism. Arriving inside the canopy she looks around and realises the sheer size of it, sees all around her the several dozens of captive birds. Some are upside down, hanging by the claws, by the wings, hanging with nooses around their necks. The brightness of the eyes has become opaque in several, the insects roaming over the bodies, the ants entering the open beaks or disappearing under feathers. But others are struggling. A golden oriole beats its wings like a wind-maddened fire. A few others are motionless but begin to strive when they feel her. She can identify the sound of flies in her ears.

In momentary madness she tries to whistle, thinking it would calm those who are panicking at her presence, making them think she is one of them, but her mother had thought whistling rakish and had discouraged it, and so now she cannot manage it.

Becoming sure of her balance inside the seldom motionless sea of leaves, she leans forward with the scissors and cuts a wire so that the green bee-eater, spinning slowly in the air by its claw, falls onto her other hand. She blows her breath onto it gently and sees how delicate it is, how small. She places it on a branch and slowly moves her hand away. It remains sitting low on its claws for a moment and she gives a small cry when it falls off and lands on the ground thirty feet below, and the jerk she gives makes her head touch a wire and a knot appears and closes around a trailing lock of her hair. A large heron crashes into the canopy as she is freeing herself, the sandy-gold beak coming at her like a lance. She sees the knot closing around its neck to trap it, feels the wind from its ghostly white wings on her face.

The nearer she gets the more it struggles, the noose tightening so that blood issues and lands with a sound on the leaves below. As fast as she can she cuts away the wirework, ignoring the black vulture, the fierce beak as thick as her wrist — they can swallow bones, she knows. It has come to consume the dead birds and inside its eyes moves the knowledge of another world.

Holding the blood-drenched heron against herself with one arm she begins to climb down, suddenly aware that she has been hearing a knock on the gate for some time, realising also that the sound of the flies had disappeared a minute or two ago, as though they had gone elsewhere.

‘Is this the house of a Rohan-sahib?’ the man asks when she opens the door.

Buraq — the winged, woman-headed horse that took Muhammad to Paradise from the minaret in Jerusalem — is painted on the side of the truck parked behind him. Flying through a rain of roses.

‘Yes. But he’s away,’ she tells him. ‘Have you brought us more books?’

‘Books? No, I have the body of his son in there.’ He looks at the piece of paper in his hand. ‘Jeo, his name is, it says here.’

The heron falls onto the ground and makes no effort to stand, its bleeding neck slowly relaxing along the ground. The man is saying something and pointing to the back of the truck whose tailgate has been dropped for two other men to take out a body lying on a cot. Draped in a white sheet.

Naheed looks to either side of her. It is an ordinary morning. The sound of a radio is coming from an open door on the opposite side of the street — a woman listening to music as she does housework. Sure enough, the woman comes to the door holding a dripping broom and stands watching the body being borne towards Naheed, raises her hand to her mouth, and then goes back in and the music is switched off. Confirming the disaster for Naheed. Two vultures are sitting on the roof of the house next door and Naheed watches as another raises its head from the top of the truck.

The body is coming closer, with the shirt she had made for Jeo lying on top of the white sheet, the shirt’s grey fabric soaked in blood with flies circling around it. Her hands reach about in the air and finally take hold of the frangipani tree, the weak branch snapping and beginning to bleed thick white milk drop by drop, extremely fast.

She steps back as the gate is opened wide by the men, and she notices the puzzled expressions on their faces as they look upwards into the canopies — seeing the trapped birds whipping the air up there as though drowning, the feathers of all colours slowly sinking towards the ground. They set the cot in front of her, beside the dazed heron, and they lift the white sheet and open the folds of the shrouds underneath to expose Jeo’s swollen, pulped, blood-smeared face for her to identify.

*

Tara is looking through her basket of fabric cuttings. A little girl who lives in the same street as Rohan has come to ask for them, to make dresses for dolls.

When Tara awoke Naheed’s bed was empty so she knew she must have gone to the house to wait for the bird pardoner. Tara had overslept and missed her predawn prayers. It is a sin to miss a prayer, but she is allowed to offer the compensatory qaza prayer this afternoon. Allah has full knowledge of human weakness and has made provisions.

‘Why are you crying?’ the little girl asks.

‘I am not.’

‘Yes you are. I can see it.’

‘There is a war.’

She woke up thinking of Jeo and his decision to go to Afghanistan. She has been wondering if Mikal is responsible for this crisis, Mikal who came here to ask Tara for Naheed’s hand last year — just days before Naheed’s wedding to Jeo. Has he now taken Jeo to Afghanistan so he will be killed? But, no, she mustn’t give in to these thoughts. Allah will bring Jeo home any day, perfectly safe. And since Allah disapproves of slander she mustn’t think or say anything about Mikal until she has full knowledge of all the facts.

The knees of her trousers are minutely wrinkled from the extra prayers she has said over the last five days to ask Allah to look after Jeo in the war zone. But she cannot jettison her fears completely because 2001 had begun on a Monday, a sign according to the almanacs that the weak would suffer greatly at the hands of the strong and the unthinking during these twelve months.

She hands the scraps of fabric to the girl who is thrilled by their brightness and colour, the garden of printed flowers and geometric designs.

‘You shouldn’t be out here this early,’ Tara tells her as she leaves.

‘There is a big crowd near my house,’ the girl says. ‘I think it’s a wedding. I came out to look at it and then came to your house.’

Tara fills a bowl of water and sprinkles it on the henna tree that grows in a fractured pot on the roof terrace.

She thought she was facing a madman when Mikal had appeared here and said he loved Naheed. The unfairness of it had almost reduced her to tears — just when she thought she had put her daughter out of Sharif Sharif’s reach. She knew Mikal of course, knew of his troubled past and his disappearances, having seen Jeo and him together at Rohan’s house.

‘Surely you see that as her mother I cannot allow Naheed to marry you,’ she had said. ‘You cannot provide a better future for her than a doctor.’

He said that he would tell everything to Jeo and Rohan and have the wedding cancelled, his eyes intense, the eyebrows meeting in the middle so his glance seemed weighed down by some dark mystery.

‘We love each other.’

‘Is that how you will repay Jeo, by stealing his bride? The boy whose family took you in.’ His face had crumpled at that but she had continued, her own dreads and distress too great. ‘You cannot betray Jeo.’

‘I cannot betray Naheed either.’

‘I would like to know where you will live. In that room they say you rent in a dogfight and rubbish-heap district?’

‘There is nothing wrong with where I live,’ he said quietly. ‘My parents lived there.’

As if the story of his parents didn’t frighten her. The father vanishing as he tried to bring about a revolution after which there would be no God, and the mother wearing herself out searching for him, slapped by policemen and officials from whom she thought she could demand answers.

Tara had said this to him and he was perfectly motionless, almost as though he had died standing up. Without knowing it, the unfortunate boy had become the outlet for the loneliness and suffering of her own life.

‘Even if she loves you, you should do her the kindness of never seeing her again. Her life will be better with Jeo.’

She promised Allah she would say five hundred prayers of gratitude if the wedding went ahead as planned. And she followed the trail of the chained mendicant as he passed through the streets of Heer and asked him to add a link to his chains: her wish was Naheed’s happiness, for Mikal to disappear.

And it was granted — the link must have vanished from about the mendicant’s person.

Now, as she waters the henna plant, she tells herself to trust in Allah again.

There is a note of feedback from the mosque’s loudspeaker and the cleric clears his throat. Tara becomes alert. No prayer is called at this hour, so it must be a special announcement, and they are mostly about a death in the neighbourhood, or a lost child. She thinks of the little girl who just left with the fabrics.

‘Gentlemen, please listen to the following announcement …’

Sometimes on hearing this, Naheed mutters to herself, ‘And what about us ladies?’ — earning herself a look of admonition from Tara, who is unable to accept criticism in any matter concerning the mosque. The man announces that Jeo, the son of Rohan-sahib, the former headmaster of Ardent Spirit, has died, that the body is laid out at home and the funeral will be held after the noon prayers. The words are like a blow to her head and chest but for several seconds their meaning eludes her. There is pain but it cannot find its focus as she descends the stairs slowly and goes out of the door.

The ground threatens to dissolve under her feet when she approaches Rohan’s house, where there is indeed a crowd as the child had said. She negotiates a way through the mass and walks into the garden, knowing where to find Naheed, at the head of the corpse, but there is no corpse and no Naheed.

*

She touches the face. It is broken but it is him. There is a cut in the cheek, the flesh swollen around it and the blood congealed in dark colours under the skin, the features that would be unrecognisable if she didn’t know them as well as she does. The mole on the back of the ear that even he didn’t know he had. Women have been knocking on the door ever since they discovered that she had locked herself in here with him but she ignores them, looking instead now into his eyes that are open, the ruined porcelain of them looking back at her. Carefully she uncovers him entirely. There are incisions and bullet wounds throughout and she imagines him crying out as each of these wounds was made. The stomach has been cut open in two diagonal strokes, deep enough to slice through the intestines. The bruises so vivid she thinks they would stain her fingers, but they remain fast, as though painted on the reverse side of the skin. She touches the mouth which is a purple blotch, full of syrupy plasma and clots of blood, the lips and tongue that came together to form a word or a kiss, and she bends to sniff the dead air inside the nostrils and she sniffs the riven shirt, the cold moth smell of it. Normally the body would be taken away to be washed at the mosque and brought back smelling of vetiver and the essence of camphor, but she heard someone say earlier that he must not be bathed, that a martyr is buried with the blood of the battle still on him.

Dipping the nib into an inkpot filled with his own blood, the cleric at the nearby mosque has been transcribing the Koran into a blank book for more than a decade, intending to complete the entire Holy Book out of his own body. But occasionally, when he is delighted by an act of piety performed by a child, the cleric allows the child to donate a speck of red from a fingertip. As a child Jeo was proud to have been asked to make a contribution — a pair of dots in the name of the prophet Ayub.

She rebinds the shroud carefully and covers him with the sheet and then walks to the door to let them in.

*

Nothing anyone does can alter the fact that he is dead. Not even God can change the past.

By nightfall most people have gone — just a few men lingering outside the house, someone looking for their child’s lost shoe on the veranda, a few women in the kitchen washing and putting away dishes, and then they too leave. Messages have been left in Peshawar for Rohan, Yasmin and Basie but they cannot be located — gone away to look for Jeo and Mikal, following rumours to nearby towns.

The neighbourhood women had taken control of the house and of the situation — apportioning tasks, taking flowers off the vines to cover the body and later the grave, sending young men up into the trees to remove the snares. Surrounding and comforting Tara and Naheed, each woman recalled the last time she saw Jeo, offering memories of his intelligence and kindness and remembering details of their wedding.

Naheed wanders through the large house. It is ten o’clock and candlelight is all there is, the electricity having disappeared. She walks down the darkened corridor towards Cordoba House with a flame, then stops and leans against the wall, the wax dripping at her feet. On the wall hangs a picture of Jeo and she stares at it questioningly. The three men who brought the body did not have much information. All they said was that they were employees of an ordinary truck-hire company in Peshawar and that a man had come to their depot and paid them to deliver Jeo’s body to this address in Heer.

But at one level it is too soon for such details to matter. When a woman had asked Tara, ‘How did he die?’ Tara had said, ‘I don’t care yet.’

The house drifts in darkness. The girl thinks of the time the garden had pulled her into its brilliance, the sunlight and the invasion of delicate insects, the smells from the Tree of Sorrows and the Sorrowless Tree. She knows it will never again be the same because, tarnished, exposed, corroded, stained, blinded, her eyes have been made different, imperfect.

Where is Mikal? She sits down on the floor with her back against the wall and becomes still. When she and Mikal began to meet, there was something like embarrassment in her initially. It had all seemed a pretence, and she had perhaps tried to make light of what they were doing. But his intensity had compelled her to take her own life seriously, made her see that beauty and happiness were her right too.

11 p.m. and Tara is in a nearby room with a lamp and a Koran. Midnight and there is a perfect quietness as if the house has become detached from the earth and floated clear. The two of them alone with a war, the gutted burned insides of it. The times have something to tell them through this occurrence but neither knows what it is.

Soon after the body arrived a rumour spread in the neighbourhood that American soldiers had killed Jeo. One man had loaded his rifle on hearing this and rushed out of his house, thinking the American army had actually invaded Heer.

The ash on Naheed’s clothes has marked her wrists and neck. Upon learning that Tara had sent for ash, for the mourning clothes to be dyed with it, almost all the women had become perplexed, saying that these must be poor people’s customs, those of villagers. They wondered once again how a seamstress had managed to get her daughter married into this big house. Rose-ringed parakeets have to be buried under neem trees, so when Tara’s had died two decades ago she had come here and asked if they would allow her to bury the bird under their neem. That was how she had met the family, though Rohan was also a very distant relative of her dead husband.

Naheed sits in Rohan’s room with the telephone receiver in her hand. 1 a.m. She has tried contacting Rohan again in Peshawar but there is no answer.

There is a ruby on the table. It was discovered in Jeo’s stomach and its surface is carved finely with Koranic verses, the colour brilliant and clean. It is polished to a perfect smoothness in the areas where there are no words and it had made people gasp, such loveliness had entered them at the sight, in spite of the occasion. A woman remembered that it had belonged to Sofia and that it had disappeared from the house long ago, presumed stolen. The cleric said that the drops of blood Jeo had donated as a child to the calligraphy of his Koran had appeared as a jewel within him.

Naheed is still sitting beside the telephone at two o’clock, the candle long spent. She gets up and searches for another. There are some hours when a human being needs company even if it is only a small flame. In its light she lowers herself onto Rohan’s bed.

9

Rohan dreams of an American soldier and a jihadi warrior digging the same grave.

He opens his eyes and looks out of the car, moving towards Heer along the Grand Trunk Road, vast stretches of it without light. They have been travelling all night and the dashboard clock says 4.30 a.m. They’ll be home around eight in the morning. Basie is driving and Yasmin is asleep in the back seat. They have been unable to discover any clues to Jeo and Mikal’s whereabouts, and are returning to Heer exhausted after the various searches they have conducted in and around Peshawar — all three of them stunned by the past few days.

Earlier in the evening they telephoned home but there was no answer. Naheed must be at Tara’s place, and there is no telephone there. In all honesty they were relieved that no one had picked up.

They have no news to give and would have had to tell them that they would be returning empty-handed. It can wait until they get home. The thought comes to him that Jeo and Mikal might die, a terror in the black leaf-encumbered forest that is his mind, but he turns away from it immediately, almost cowering.

Out on the plains a river is shining like poured metal now that starlight has caught it at the right angle and hundreds of bats can be seen passing over the sheetwater on their leather wings as they hunt for moths. Just ahead of them a church has come into view and then Basie has to bring the car to a sudden screeching halt. A bearded man, of Rohan’s own age, has appeared before the vehicle, crossing the road less than five yards ahead. He carries a weak lamp whose flame is lost in the white glare of the headlights, and he presents an extraordinary sight because he is bound heavily in thick chains. They are wrapped around his torso like thread on a spool, covering the entire area from his hipbones to his armpits. At least two dozen chains also hang from a metal ring around his neck — they fall to just below his knees and then rise, half of them joining a ring that he wears on his left wrist, the other half attaching themselves to the right wrist.

He looks directly at Rohan as everyone in the car recovers from the shock.

‘Should we get out and help him?’ Yasmin asks.

‘He just needs time to get across, I imagine.’ Basie looks back to see if there are any vehicles behind them but there is nothing and the man is in no danger.

Basie makes a small courteous detour around him and he doesn’t acknowledge them as he continues his slow walk to the other edge of the road. His beard is matted and dust-filled like the hair on his head and he is thin, his face deeply lined and sunburnt, but there is a peaceful expression.

A thick metal garment.

‘As a child Mikal thought he was our father,’ Basie says quietly as they leave him behind.

The chains must weigh as much as two healthy men at least and must be a very heavy burden — they account for the slow progress.

‘I have heard about him but never seen him,’ Rohan says, looking back. He is soon lost to view as they pick up speed but then they hear the hard metallic sound like a colossal hammer coming down on an anvil of equal proportions. A noise so loud the air itself bends.

‘Someone just blew up the church,’ Yasmin says.

‘Turn around.’

‘He could be hurt. He was crossing towards it.’

This is the second attack on a church in two days. Yesterday it was during the daylight hours and it had injured several people. Those claiming responsibility had said that since Western Christians were bombing and destroying mosques in Afghanistan, they were beginning a campaign to annihilate churches in Pakistan.

The blaze can be seen from two hundred yards away, the building engulfed in a powerful inferno and the smoke billowing up into the black sky. The explosion was on the ground floor and long flames are emerging from the windows to climb the facade. At the fire’s height the tips of the flames break off again and again, vanishing into the darkness.

They park by the roadside and get out and Rohan feels the light like a hard rain on his face, on his eyes, and he has to look away every few seconds. The fire inside the church is brighter and hotter — the outside flames dull by comparison. One blaze seems to be escaping another more ferocious blaze.

Even though it is night there is soon the beginning of a traffic jam and in the chaos people are getting out to help, bear witness or complain. Yasmin and Basie tell Rohan to stay beside their car as they themselves go forwards, to see if they can be of assistance.

Though he doesn’t say anything, standing with his back to the bright light, he doesn’t want them to go. There could be a secondary explosion, meant to injure the people who are trying to save the building. Or men on motorbikes could drive by and spray the rescuers and onlookers with machine guns. Fearfully he looks over his shoulder and watches them leave.

The burning gives off a roar that reaches the last little place inside him, where each man keeps his courage, and when the wind pivots there is nothing but that roar, a reminder that the noise of fire had resounded on earth before the speech of man.

Basie and Yasmin both teach at the Christian school in Heer, and the thought comes to him that they could be in danger when they return, with their school and the church attached to it a possible target.

A few in the crowd around him are delighted. To them this isn’t madness but, on the contrary, is beauty.

*

Rohan is some way from the Grand Trunk Road when he sees the lamp lying on its side in the grass, still intact, still burning. He sees the knee-high mound of chains under a wayside cypress tree, each link someone’s wish, and his first thought is that they have been torn from the fakir’s body by the explosion, that he would find the body somewhere nearby, but now the heaped-up metal gives a stir and an uncertain hand comes into view.

Rohan moves forward with the lamp as the fakir sits upright in a dazed condition, and begins to pick the debris off his chains. He must have been close to the church when the device exploded, and has come away and collapsed here. In all probability he has been saved by the chains, the armour of other people’s needs.

Sometimes when Allah does not take pity on him — does not hear his prayers on others’ behalf, making the links vanish — the chains continue to grow, so that he has to drag several yards of them behind him.

Rohan watches him as he stands up in a series of gradual accomplishments — that incredible weight.

He begins to walk away, removing bits of brick and stone that the explosion had thrown onto him to be embedded in the links, as another man might brush off dust from his clothes.

‘Brother, are you all right?’

He stops, the chains continuing to swing.

‘I didn’t mean to disturb you,’ Rohan says.

They are a dozen or so steps from a pond and with his lamp and the clinking of his chains he walks in up to his knees, making the water golden with the lamplight as he leans forwards and lowers his face to the water. As if to take its odour. Then he begins to sip.

Rohan watches him alertly lest the weight make him lose balance, fearing he would drown within the coils, but he straightens and returns successfully.

He places the lamp on the ground and then lowers himself onto the ground beside Rohan and they look towards the east from where the sun will rise.

‘I am waiting for my daughter and son-in-law.’ Rohan points to the line of trees behind them, where the sky is a dark orange from the church fire.

The fakir looks for a long moment in that direction, his breath steaming weakly in the air of the October night. The chains must be cold, Rohan thinks. The wrists are calloused where each thick ring or bracelet has been rubbing against the skin for decades.

‘We have been away from home for some days,’ Rohan says, surprised by the tears he is trying to control. ‘Looking for my son and foster son.’

A need to talk. After trying to appear courageous before Yasmin and Basie over the past few days.

The man gazes ahead. He appears to be a soul without a self.

‘How can anyone explain the world?’ Rohan says to himself, looking down at his hands. ‘Sometimes I despair that it can’t be done.’

The man clears his throat gently and the voice is almost all rasp when it comes. ‘It can be.’

With great care, as though writing the words instead of uttering them, he begins to speak. ‘It can be done. Ahl-e-Dil and Ahle-Havas. We all are divided into these two groups. The first are the People of the Heart. The second are the People of Greed, the deal makers and the men of lust and the hucksters.’ He pauses to gather sufficient energy to continue. Some say that he is a djinn, and also that God has graced him with the lifelong innocence of dervishes, and also that he had used the chains to capture a djinn in the wilderness who had then converted to Islam. After his silence he says, ‘The first people will not trample anyone to obtain what they desire. The second will. Here lies this world.’

Rohan says, ‘That could be one way of reading the world, yes.’

‘If I take dust in my hand and ask you if that is all the dust there is, you will answer that dust is everywhere on earth. More specks than can ever be numbered. So I can give you a handful of truth only. Besides this there are other truths. More than can ever be numbered.’

The earliest glimmers of light are appearing in the sky, and they sit without words and a scent comes to Rohan and he looks around for its source because he has the same tree growing in his garden. The blossoms produce this roaming perfume but are green and very small, almost invisible to the eye — choosing to be represented, rather than revealing themselves.

The last time he spoke to Naheed the bird pardoner had yet to return to the house.

He touches one of the chains. ‘Why do you carry these?’

With the tip of his index finger the man writes a word in the dust, the dust in which his chains had made swirls when he sat down.

‘You were once one of the Ahl-e-Havas?’

The man remains silent.

‘You hurt someone?’

‘It cannot unhappen.’

‘Someone was harmed?’

The word he has written is Desire.

‘I made mistakes when my son was a child,’ Rohan says. ‘His mother had died in the state of apostasy and as a result I enforced an extreme form of piety on myself and on my children, making them pray and keep fasts, revealing to them things inappropriate for their ages. The transience of this life, the tortures of Hell and, before that, of the grave. I stopped eventually, seeing the error, but it must have marked them. I wonder if that is why he went to Afghanistan.’

The fakir looks at the thousands of chain links surrounding him, perhaps wondering if any of them have vanished in the night. The light is caught in hazy smears on the metal.

‘We believe my two boys are in Afghanistan. What you said about Ahl-e-Dil and Ahl-e-Havas, does that explain what is happening in Afghanistan? The armies from the West. The extremes of the Taliban.’

He is not sure if the fakir is listening, his eyes on the first sunlight, the rays spanning the gap between the unseen and the seen, but then the man looks at him. ‘Whoever has power desires to hold on to power. That is the case both with the Taliban and the West.’ He sits breathing in the morning air and then with careful movements of his hands — as diligent as he was when he was writing — he erases the word he has written, letter by letter.

‘What did you do before this?’

‘I worked with law. Twenty years ago, thirty.’ He shakes his head. ‘Nothing is ever over. Time is unimportant.’

‘You were a policeman.’

‘Worse.’ The man extinguishes his lamp. ‘A judge.’

The sun is an orb of boiling glass before them, the light remaking the world once again, and now the fakir rises slowly and begins to walk along the rim of the dawn-lit pond. ‘My day is only a day, my name only a name,’ he says with one hand on his breast in the gesture of swearing fidelity. Rohan watches him disappear as the sunlight erupts from the water in shards.

*

It is late morning when they arrive in Heer. The gate to the house is locked and Rohan lets them in with the key.

He is immediately relieved to see that the bird pardoner’s steel wires are lying in a tangle at the foot of the young mango tree. So the snares have been taken down. He spends a few moments examining the health and progress of the tree. Jeo loves its fruit, with a tinge of turpentine to its flavour, the pulp almost liquid and having to be sucked through a hole one makes at the top.

Turning around to move deeper into the garden he notices with unhappiness the branch that has been broken off the frangipani tree. He touches the wound and from the consistency of the congealed latex can tell that the damage occurred sometime yesterday.

Basie walks along one of the red paths towards the house. He enters a room but emerges a minute later with a sense of an unidentifiable wrong. The corridors are unswept — which is understandable since Naheed has probably been staying with her mother — but there is evidence of many footsteps in the dust on the floors. It is as though the characters and personalities from the boxes of books had come alive and wandered the house.

Yasmin stands looking at the garden from the veranda, wondering why the vines and the branches are flowerless, wondering why there is a ghostly impression of a figure in coal dust or ash against a wall.

At the pond Rohan sees the heap of dead birds, insects rising from it in a glittering black vortex as he lifts a paradise flycatcher with its pair of long white ribbons for a tail, three times the length of its body. He walks towards the clothesline strung between the eucalyptus tree and the tall glad jacaranda. He had passed the line earlier without really seeing what was hanging on it: a single item and it seems to be the shirt Jeo wore to Peshawar six days ago. It is pinned upside down, the sleeves almost reaching the grass. The fabric has many gashes in it and its original grey colour is stained by what appears to be blood or dark red ink. A rag with which someone tried to clean something rusty. Did Naheed make two of these? This must be one of the earlier practice ones. And he stands examining it for seams.

From a shelf Basie picks up the large sphere of ruby-coloured glass with verses of the Koran indented into it. It must be glass — too heavy and too clear to be plastic. It is a pendant for a necklace or a talisman to be worn around the neck on a black cord. He has never seen it before and he brings it to the window and holds it up to see the sun enter and inhabit it, illuminating the verses from within.

He walks to Tara’s place but there is no one there. A man is sitting in the sun in front of the neighbouring house. He has wet henna paste on his hair and a sheet of newspaper is protecting the collar of his shirt from stains and he tells Basie that the two women are at Naheed’s in-laws’.

‘I have just come from there,’ Basie says.

The man shrugs. ‘Then maybe they have gone to the doctor. Or the bazaar. Who can understand women and their whims?’

Basie returns and hears Yasmin and Tara, hears Naheed and Rohan. He doesn’t know what they are saying, only their voices reaching him from somewhere, and then he sees Naheed walking towards him, dressed in ash as though she has been caught in a lightning storm.

10

A follower of Allah knows nothing of chance. In this life everything is significant and meaningful. So why has this happened? A drop of his bloody soul struggle, the ruby shines in Rohan’s palm.

He looks at the clock with its black hands. Before Jeo was born, he had placed his ear to Sofia’s skin, just above and to the left of the navel, and listened to the small second heartbeat, there in the darkness before life began. Now the boy is in the other darkness and Rohan doesn’t know where to find a sign of him, what wall or barrier or skin or veil to place his ear on.

In the night garden the hibiscus blossoms sway on the vine like birds, their crimson darkened by several shades. The berries of the Persian lilac trees are poisonous so they remain on the branches throughout the year. The bulbul is the only bird that seems to have immunity and all day they were feeding noisily on the clusters.

‘Uncle.’

He turns to see Basie on the red path, a storm lantern in his hand. Behind him is Tara.

‘Aunt Tara says she would like to speak to the two of us.’

‘Just a few moments of your time, brother-ji,’ Tara says.

He points towards the bench under the Mysore fig tree.

‘I want to talk to you about Naheed’s future,’ she says, sitting rigidly.

‘Naheed’s future? As long as I am alive, sister-ji, the girl will be provided for. This remains her home.’

Basie, sitting beside her, assents too.

‘No.’ She shakes her head. ‘I want her to marry again.’

Basie and Rohan look at each other.

‘Of course,’ Rohan says. ‘She should. She’s only nineteen years old.’

The light of the lantern is caught under the dark canopy of the tree, shadows washing over the ground as they converse quietly.

‘I know it’s too soon to talk about these matters,’ Tara says, ‘and I feel ashamed for having brought it up when Jeo is buried not even ten days, but I just didn’t want you to forget that you have a responsibility to Naheed.’

‘That will never happen,’ Rohan says. ‘She is like Yasmin to me.’

‘I don’t want my daughter to spend the rest of her life as a widow.’

‘We’ll find a good man for her,’ Basie says. ‘Let’s allow a period of time to pass, and then we’ll begin to look.’

‘That is all I wanted to hear,’ the woman nods.

‘You mustn’t ever think you are alone, Aunt Tara,’ Basie tells her. ‘You have us.’

‘What does Naheed think?’ Rohan asks.

‘I haven’t yet spoken to her about this matter.’

‘Of course.’

They remain where they are, surrounded by a penetrating silence until Naheed appears at the kitchen door with a candle, the banana fronds made luminous by the light, and she looks at the three of them across the distance. ‘The food is ready.’

She comes forward and takes Rohan by the hand and leads him away, Tara following. Very quickly after she came into the house as a bride with her forehead decorated with starlike dots, the girl had taken responsibility for the everyday affairs of the family. Yasmin’s work had flourished because of her; Naheed cooked, and insisted that Yasmin and Basie come here after school instead of going to their own place. She took over the running of several aspects of their household too, allowing Yasmin to concentrate on her teaching, and at the weekends — when Jeo returned from medical school in Lahore — the entire family gathered here, and it was all arranged and organised by her, with unobtrusive advice and guidance from Tara.

‘I’ll join you in a minute,’ Basie tells them.

He sits on the veranda where Jeo’s motorcycle is parked beside the pillar. Basie has visited several organisations that have been sending boys to Afghanistan but has been unable to discover who sent Jeo and Mikal. He doesn’t even know who managed to bring Jeo’s body back from the war. Nor do they know where Mikal is, alive or dead.

*

On Fridays the dead person is said to recognise the visitor to his grave. Rohan, accompanied by Tara, Yasmin and Naheed, arrives at the cemetery to say prayers for the comfort of Jeo’s soul.

At the entrance there stand four women veiled head to toe in black and holding yard-long sticks. Around their heads they wear green bands with the flaming-swords motif of Ardent Spirit’s flag. The black-clad figures bar their way and one of them says, pointing to Naheed, Tara and Yasmin, ‘You three cannot enter.’

‘What do you mean?’ Tara asks.

‘Women are not allowed into graveyards according to our religion.’

They express their disbelief but are told the same thing again:

‘It is not allowed in our religion for women to visit graveyards.’

‘Since when?’ Rohan asks. ‘Muslim women have been visiting graves for hundreds of years.’

‘That is an innovation and has to be put an end to. We are here for that purpose.’

Confronted with the necessity of exposing their eyes through the slits of their cloaks, the women are hiding the true colour of their irises by wearing coloured contact lenses, the green, red and blue circles darting.

Yasmin gives a sound of annoyance and tries to move past them but the women stiffen and raise their canes.

Yasmin stops. ‘I have to see my brother. He died in Afghanistan.’

They seem to consider the fact for a moment. ‘It doesn’t mean anything as far as this matter is concerned. You will not go in, it is Allah’s wish.’

‘My mother is buried here,’ Yasmin says, adding with a gesture towards Naheed: ‘And her father.’

‘You can say prayers for the soul of your dead at home. And rest assured that we too will do that for the man martyred in Afghanistan. He was our brother and died defending Islam.’

‘You are stopping a martyr’s widow from visiting him,’ Tara says. ‘This is my daughter and she was married to the dead man.’

‘If you are a martyr’s widow,’ a woman turns to Naheed, ‘what are you doing stepping outside the house with your face uncovered?’ All of them look towards Naheed now. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself. He gave his life for Allah and you are disgracing him.’

Another woman visitor who has been barred from entry is standing under a nearby tree. ‘My one-year-old son is buried in there,’ she says to Tara.

Yasmin moves and one of the figures swings at her face with the metal-tipped cane twice in quick succession, coming a step closer with every swing, Yasmin taking a corresponding step back each time. The tip passes just an inch from her face.

‘It’s because of people like you,’ the woman points to them all with her cane, ‘that Islam has been brought so low. Filthy, disgusting, repulsive infidels are attacking Muslim countries with impunity.’ And to Rohan she says, ‘Don’t you know better than to walk around with your women uncovered, you vile pimp?’

Yasmin, the gentlest and most congenial of women, raises her voice. ‘Don’t talk in that manner to someone three or four times your age.’

‘Age doesn’t mean anything,’ says the woman furiously. ‘If he is wrong I am his superior in Allah’s eyes and He gives me authority to reprimand the abhorrent wretch.’

It is obvious that nothing can be done. Rohan goes in alone to say a prayer while Tara, Naheed and Yasmin wait outside. They will have to visit the grave in the darkness, deep at night.

11

Naheed’s face appears among the reeds and she gasps for air, her eyes filling up with light after the minutes under the water. She climbs out of the river, her hair falling with a shifting weight along her back. She stands coughing up water while around her brilliant groups of butterflies sun themselves on the muddy green slime. They often leave the garden to roam the arches above the worshippers in the mosque on the other side of the crossroads. She walks through the garden, where spots of sunlight are going in and out of focus as the foliage shifts overhead, and enters the house and changes into a dry set of clothes. She lowers herself onto the bed, lightly brushing the counterpane, white with a geometric pattern of raised white threads.

Out there Rohan is sitting in a square of mild sunlight and he opens his eyes at her approach.

She crouches beside him.

‘Do you say the prayers I told you to?’ he asks. ‘To atone for the sin of having seen Jeo’s body after his death.’

‘Yes.’

The marriage contract is dissolved at the moment of death. A wife becomes a stranger to her husband and must not lay eyes on him.

‘Strictly speaking you shouldn’t even have looked at the face. But Allah understands. We humans are weak so it’s hard to avoid committing sins.’ He closes his eyes. ‘It is always better to begin atoning for them as soon as possible. That way we won’t have to fear the consequences in the grave and later on Judgement Day.’

She looks around.

‘I wanted to see Sofia’s face before she was buried,’ he is saying, ‘more than anything, but I knew I shouldn’t.’

Suddenly she gets up and, leaving him there, goes back to the house with hurried steps and enters the room she shared with Jeo.

She stands looking at the far corner, the heart beginning to beat painfully in her chest. She raises her hands to her forehead, eyes fixed on the dark brocade of the armchair.

She moves towards it and drops onto her knees and reaches underneath, the open palm skimming the floor as it moves blindly forwards. When her fingertips make contact with the cold metal object down there she almost cries out. She withdraws her hand and looks at the fingers as though expecting to see an injury there.

She reaches out with both hands — as when trying to capture a bird — and grips the toy truck that has been standing stationary against the back wall since the evening of Jeo’s departure.

Her fingers grip the painted wheels so they won’t spin and empty out the energy that had flowed into the toy from Jeo’s body when he wound it up with the key. She stands holding it tightly, locking the gears and cogs of its mechanism.

She is shaking. As a test she releases the pressure on the wheels for a fraction of a second and the wheels turn in the air and she gives out a sound of pain.

At last she places it on the floor and watches it move away from her. She walks alongside it to the other end of the room and then continues out of the door, overtaking and leaving it behind, unable to bear witness to the moment it stops.

12

Mikal sits with his back against the wall in the cold interior, the chain at his ankles rattling with every movement of his body. Never away from his mind, not even for a single second, is the thought of flight. Not since he regained consciousness at the Taliban fort in October.

He doesn’t know where Jeo is.

The last thing he remembers of the fighting on that October day is the battle-torn smoke and a bright burst of poppy before his face. They tied him up with lengths of barbed wire while he was insensible and carried him outside, and when he opened his eyes he couldn’t move and near him a pack of dogs was eating the blood-soaked earth of the fort’s courtyard.

He caught a brief glimpse of the group of American soldiers who had co-ordinated the battle against the Taliban fort. The Americans were now confronted with the corpses of more than a hundred enemy men, and they told their Afghan allies to dispose of them as quickly as possible before they were filmed by a passing satellite.

Mikal became the prisoner of a warlord, who cut off the trigger finger on each of his hands and nailed the two pieces to a doorframe along with those taken from dozens of other captives.

Fearing gangrene, he begged them to extract the bullets from his body, but to no avail. But then two nights later, while he slept, a large group of them came at him with scalpels and blades. A rumour had circulated that the Americans had used solid gold bullets.

He spoke to ask them where Jeo was, asked if they knew someone named Jeo, but received no information.

Carefully he pulls his bandaged hands into his sleeves for warmth. His body is combat-seamed and a little raw elsewhere too, where the bullets went in, where the bullets were taken out. The left arm, that was torn open by a dagger-tip in search of gold, is restricted in its functions — he can touch the right shoulder with it but not the left one.

He must escape and find Jeo and then both of them must go back to Heer.

13

Naheed enters the room where Tara is sitting in a chair.

‘Mother, I am pregnant.’

Tara is attaching a red glass button to a tunic. She completes the stitch she has begun and only then stands up, carefully, placing both her hands on her knees.

‘Mother, did you hear what I said? I am pregnant.’

‘Are you sure?’

The reaction is more muted than Naheed had expected.

‘Yes. I have counted and …’ She shakes her head. ‘It doesn’t matter. I am pregnant.’

‘When was the last time you and Jeo —?’

‘Just before he left.’ Naheed comes and stands in front of her. She links her arms around Tara’s neck and rests her head on her shoulder. Tara embraces her with reluctance.

‘We’ll have to tell Father,’ Naheed says. She is about to part but Tara won’t allow the embrace to be broken, their faces inches away from each other. The woman looks directly into her eyes and says, very firmly,

‘No.’

It is a few moments before Naheed realises what Tara means. She steps away.

‘We are not telling anyone about this.’ Tara moves towards the door and shuts it while Naheed looks on aghast. ‘No one will marry you if you have a child.’

‘I don’t care about that.’

‘I do.’

‘I can’t contemplate even for a second what you are suggesting.’

Tara is standing with her back resolutely against the closed door. But after a while, in a softer voice, she says, ‘I am not suggesting anything. I just think we should wait a little before telling Rohan.’ She doesn’t meet Naheed’s eye as she speaks. ‘Don’t you think he is in enough anguish already? We should wait until completely sure. If it turns out that you are mistaken, you would have raised the poor man’s hopes needlessly.’

Tara moves away from the door.

Naheed sits down on the chair but then shakes her head and stands up.

‘Stay away from the door, Naheed. I can marry you off if you are just a widow. But a widow with a baby — you’ll be alone for the rest of your life.’

Naheed can hardly believe she is living through these moments. Tara strikes her face with such strength that she has to back away and lean against a wall. In the few seconds it takes her to recover, Tara has gone out and bolted the door from the other side.

*

The emergency deepening around her with every minute, Tara tells herself to think fast. She knows a woman who can be of help in this matter.

Hundreds of thousands of poor defenceless Afghanistanis have been murdered by the Americans in cold blood. No one tells you about it … From outside comes the sound of a loudspeaker fixed on top of a van, telling everyone that it is a critical moment for the holy war in Afghanistan, encouraging them to join the jihad. Several such vehicles have been roaming Heer of late, all with the Ardent Spirit flag painted on the sides.

Tara reaches for her burka.

And hundreds of thousands of American soldiers have been killed by the brave Muslim fighters. No one tells you about those either. The Americans are on the verge of defeat so we need just a few more volunteers …

Fastening the ties and buttons of the burka, she goes down the stairs and out into the street. Once again she is taken aback by the silent implacable passing of time, the months and the years. The truth is that she hadn’t noticed Naheed growing up until the day she found a blood-soaked handkerchief in a corner of the room, and her first thought was that a cat must have brought in a dead sparrow and eaten it there. Naheed meanwhile was under the impression that something like a large pimple must have burst somewhere inside her, and was staunching the blood with whatever piece of cloth came to hand.

She visits the woman who lives in Soldier’s Bazaar and then stops to buy a padlock in a narrow alley that is full of jobless young men sitting outside the shops, angry and humiliated, some of them former students at Ardent Spirit, and they look longingly at every girl who passes by, frustration and unemployment causing them to erupt into passion and violence at any time, while the students at the good schools like the one where Basie and Yasmin teach want only to emigrate to Western lands, saying young men like these have made this country uninhabitable.

She recognises one of them and calls out to him and tells him she will sew the item that he had asked her to the previous week, something to which she had said no at the time. But now she will need the money. The substance she will administer to Naheed is very strong, even life-threatening, and she will fall severely ill after taking it. There will be medical expenses.

She gives a rupee to a beggar and asks him to pray for her daughter’s health and happiness, and getting home she puts the padlock on the staircase door, blocking the only way out.

She stands at the closed door to the room, listening intently to the heavy silence on the other side. In the kitchen she begins to prepare the medication. Then she cooks the evening meal and when it is ready she unlocks the room, on alert in case the girl tries to rush out.

But Naheed is sitting still in the chair and remains that way. Tara places the plate of spinach and two chapattis wrapped in a white napkin before her.

‘You’ve put something in it.’

‘I haven’t.’

Naheed touches the rim of the plate with a fingertip and slowly begins to slide it away from her. It goes over the edge of the table and shatters on the floor.

Tara brings another.

‘In your condition a woman must eat to maintain her strength.’

There is no response from Naheed.

‘I didn’t put anything in it,’ she encourages. ‘Surely you know you’ll damage the child’s development if you don’t eat.’

Naheed breaks off a piece of chapatti and scoops an amount of spinach from the new plate and raises it to her mouth but then drops it.

‘I didn’t invent this world, Naheed. Your life will be ruined.’

‘This is Jeo’s last reminder in the world.’

‘He didn’t think of you when he went to Afghanistan, why are you thinking of him?’

‘This is my child. I’ll bring him up myself.’

‘How exactly will that happen?’

‘I’ll get a diploma and become a teacher and when he grows up he’ll look after me.’

‘He? What if it’s a girl? Where will we get the money to marry her off in twenty years? Or will she too get a diploma and prepare her own dowry?’

‘I am not listening to any of this.’

‘And are you sure you are intelligent enough to get a diploma? You didn’t even pass high school.’

Naheed looks fiercely at her, stung. ‘I failed my classes because of you. Your imprudence, that landed you in prison for two years. And you were mad even before that.’

Tara takes a step closer. ‘Why are you speaking to me in this manner?’

‘When you came back from prison, I had to contend with the months of madness yet again. You and your djinns.’

‘What do you mean by these remarks?’ Tara says.

‘Nothing. Forget it.’

‘I was ill a few times, that’s all. I did my best to bring you up.’

‘As will I.’

She is silent but then she speaks. ‘What do you mean by those remarks?’

Naheed looks at her. In her childhood she was afraid of Tara. Terrified of the djinns that visited her. Tara would not speak for days and just lay in bed facing the wall. Naheed learned to cook and care for her from very early on. One day a child even threw a stone at Tara as children do at lunatics. Naheed has always wondered how much of those weeks and months her mother recalls. They have never been mentioned by either of them with any directness. When she became a teenager, Naheed acquired the idea of becoming a teacher, of one day carrying a purse and walking confidently, clipping the front strands of her hair to rest on her cheeks. But her schoolwork was suffering. She remembers the humiliation of having to repeat her classes, and then Tara was arrested.

‘Father will help in bringing up the child.’

‘He hasn’t much of anything,’ Tara says from the armchair. ‘I thought he was wealthy but I was mistaken. Even the house belongs to the people who own the school, and they might want it back one day. Jeo becoming a doctor was the only secure future he, and you, had.’

Naheed looks at the plate and then pushes it away.

‘Your Jeo’s last gift to you will be you becoming the plaything of that man downstairs, or of someone else like him, for the next decade and a half. And then you will be cast aside. Do you wish to make a life around that? Once a month, in the dead of night, you and your child can walk through the dark streets to pay a visit to Jeo’s grave.’

Naheed carries the tray back into the kitchen and returns with a rag and begins to clean the mess of the first plate from the floor.

‘I will wait for a few days, until I am absolutely sure, and then I will tell Father and Yasmin. I’ll find someone to marry me, with my child. You can win great merit from Allah for marrying a martyr’s widow. Everyone says that.’

‘It’s all talk.’

Naheed rises to her feet and looks at her. ‘Then I’ll live on my own.’

*

As Tara stands on the prayer mat and bows down towards Mecca, she has a sense that the girl is standing behind her. From the small metallic sound she knows that she is holding the pair of scissors. After twenty years of handling them Tara knows every possible sound they make. When she finishes her prayers, however, and turns around the girl is still on the bed. The scissors have moved from the shelf to the windowsill. Or perhaps they were there to begin with.

*

Sometimes Tara thinks she has asked too little from life. Sometimes she thinks she has asked too much.

When Naheed was fourteen years old, Tara had been assaulted by a man she had recently met. She went to the police and they demanded — in accordance with Sharia law — proof from four male witnesses that it was indeed an assault and not consensual intercourse. There were no such witnesses, of course, and Tara was jailed for adultery. Naheed went to live with her village grandmother while Rohan tried to have Tara released.

It was while she was incarcerated, terrified of the future, that Rohan had reassured her by promising to make Naheed his daughter-in-law.

And that madness of hers that Naheed mentioned, her djinns — her mind would feel broken into during those hours and days. A young widow, her youth slipping away, she had wanted her husband to be alive again. She cannot believe she is thinking this while sitting on a prayer mat — recalling the days of combatting desire, the feeling of guilt in her whenever she thought of a man, feeling like a criminal for wanting something as basic as love and an end to loneliness, feeling maimed in her very soul. What will Naheed do about these things? Sharif Sharif used Tara for a few years after she was widowed and then threw her aside. He already had two wives and her hope of becoming the third came to nothing. She wants to stand up but her knees won’t let her so she raises herself a little on her haunches and pulls the velvet prayer mat from under her and folds it with a kiss and puts it on her lap. Sitting on the cold floor, she knows she mustn’t allow the girl to repeat her own mistake. The matchmakers said again and again that the presence of the daughter reduced her chances of remarrying, and they advised her to have Naheed adopted. ‘They change their mind when they hear you’ll be bringing another mouth to feed. A girl whose upbringing will have to be provided for, whose honour and virginity protected, for whom a dowry will have to be given one day.’

She sent the child away to live in the village, but even then the marriage talks failed to progress beyond a certain point. People were invariably delighted to learn that she was descended from the Prophet, the idea that through her they could connect with Muhammad’s bloodline, but she would invite the prospective in-laws to this roof and of course it would be a mistake to let them see the poverty. One room with a small balcony at the front, the steep stairs, and a cubby she called kitchen. The last man who came here ended up marrying someone whose family owned a business in Riyadh, the bride no doubt bringing a car and a washing machine in the dowry, a colour television and a VCR. ‘So much for Muhammad’s blood unaided by Saudi gold,’ said the matchmaker.

She brought Naheed back and the years kept passing. She began to fantasise about a man she saw walk by in the street regularly, and one day she talked to him briefly at someone’s house, convincing herself that he loved her too. She wrote a long letter to him and he came up here and according to him it was not an assault, her letter being the proof of his innocence.

*

The lock on the stairs remains in place, its key in Tara’s pocket, and for two days and two nights Naheed does not eat anything Tara brings.

*

‘One reason I can’t do what you want me to do,’ Naheed says, her face turned away, ‘is that I know he is alive.’

‘A woman can’t feel the child inside her at such an early stage.’

‘I am talking about Mikal.’

‘Mikal?’ Tara looks at her. ‘Have you heard something? Has he been in touch?’ Then she stiffens. ‘Why are you waiting for him anyway?’

‘I know he is alive and that he will come back to me. We loved each other.’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘Yes you did. He didn’t say anything but I think he came here to ask for my hand. You must have made him feel like a worthless beggar. I know. We planned to disappear from here before the wedding, we agreed on a time, but he didn’t come. I waited, and I never really stopped.’ She pauses and takes a deep breath. ‘Maybe this new waiting is just part of the old one.’

‘Did you two plan all this?’ Tara says quietly. ‘He took Jeo away to have him killed and now you’ll wait for his return? Is this Mikal’s child?’

‘It’s nothing like that, Mother. I just know he’s alive, I feel him.’

‘You can’t build a life on a feeling, Naheed. I may be mad but I know that much.’

‘There is no body, there is no grave.’

‘That doesn’t mean he is not dead. Some boys who went to Kashmir or Bosnia or Tajikistan didn’t come back, just the news of their death.’

Naheed breaks into tears. ‘Oh Mother, I don’t know what to think. But please understand I can’t do what you are telling me. And I did not say you were mad.’

Tara gets up. She stops at the door. ‘He did come here and I sent him away. You’ve known all along?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you were going to run away?’ She looks devastated as she asks this. ‘Leaving me behind, with those wedding preparations I’d made, having to explain to Jeo’s family and the entire neighbourhood what happened? Everyone would have said that I, being a wanton woman, had raised a brazen disgraceful daughter.’

There is a pained silence from both and then Tara comes back and takes the key from her pocket and places it next to Naheed on the bed.

She brings in a tray of food, telling her it is unadulterated, but Naheed still cannot bring herself to trust her.

‘You’ll fall ill with weakness. Believe me and eat something,’ Tara says, pointing to the tray and then to the fridge in the corner — the kitchen is too small to accommodate it so it stands here in the bedroom, their only room, filling the air faintly with the odour of chemicals that have been leaking from its mechanisms ever since it was bought second- or third-hand a decade ago.

Finally Tara unlocks the door to the stairs herself.

‘Then go to Rohan’s house and eat something from there.’

It’s almost midnight.

‘I’ll go in the morning,’ the girl tells her.

*

Hunger awakens her a few hours later, deep in the night, and she comes out of the room and stands under the star-coated sky. There is a pomegranate in the kitchen, from the trees in Rohan’s garden, that she had brought for Tara some days ago. It has been skinned and the seeds lie glitteringly in a steel bowl, surrounded by their own reflections, the red making her think of the ruby. She lifts a seed and places it on her tongue, then expels it. Tara could have sprinkled something on them.

She looks down from the roof into Sharif Sharif’s courtyard. Towards his family’s kitchen, almost dizzy with hunger. She walks down the stairs and the screen door squeaks as she enters the kitchen, a small bird noise, a cicada. She stops and looks around more or less frantic with the thought that she must nourish the life inside her. Her fingers reach out and blindly lift the lid of a jar and she can tell from the syrupy smell that it is sugar. She places a large pinch onto her tongue, feeling the crystals melt in the saliva. She hears a sound, a breath suddenly drawn in. Or is it the rasp of a matchstick being struck? Will a small yellow flame soon illuminate Sharif Sharif’s face somewhere in the blackness? She drops the jar and hears it break with a sound louder than she would have expected, hears the smaller sound of sugar scattering within the breaking of the glass, a muted hiss. There is graininess under her feet as she rushes out.

Upstairs she eats the pomegranate, lifting the seeds to her mouth with both hands.

When Tara gets up an hour later for her predawn prayers, she is still awake. She asks Tara for breakfast and ten minutes later Tara brings her a paratha and an omelette with coriander, onions and green chillies. When the sun comes up she walks out towards Rohan’s house.

*

She takes a sip of water and a crimson thread swirls into the glass.

She puts it back on the table and lies down on the bed again, shaking with fever. Her skin burns and she feels as though she is looking out through fire.

‘What time is it?’

‘Night,’ Tara says.

‘What day?’

‘Thursday.’

Tara places her hand on her forehead — the hands of kindness and a weak human mercy. Naheed looks into her eyes, the eyes through which she had seen tears enter the world for the first time. She hears Tara say, ‘This isn’t anything to do with me. I didn’t put anything in your food.’

On Friday morning the amber eyes open and she sits up in bed and asks if she can help with the housework. Tara gives her a basket of peas to shell. Ten minutes later when Tara comes into the room she finds her asleep in the chair, with the basket fallen on the floor, the peas scattered.

On Saturday she works on the hem of a tunic that Tara has sewn. Afterwards she goes to the bathroom — Tara reminding her yet again not to lock the door — and spends a long time in there, Tara standing anxiously outside, sounding a knock on the door now and then, gently like a heartbeat, but there is no response.

When at last she emerges Tara asks, ‘Did something happen?’

She gives a nod. ‘It’s over.’

*

She sleeps for a long time but the body temperature remains high, Tara sitting beside the bed with her Koran or her seamstress work.

‘I heard someone say that you sew things, good aunt,’ the young man had said, appearing on the stairs the week before.

Tara makes women’s clothes, but sometimes boys come to her to have their trousers and shirts altered — usually tightened, which their own mothers refuse to do for them.

‘Would you stitch an American flag for me?’

‘An American flag?’

‘Yes, we have to burn it at a protest rally in the bazaar.’

Tara was reluctant. ‘I don’t make such things,’ she told him as she said no. ‘And I would rather not get involved.’ She had imagined herself being arrested for a crime involved with public disorder.

But now she is glad she saw the boy at the shops again. If Naheed’s fever does not abate, the visit to the doctor will cost twenty-five rupees. In all probability, Naheed will not manage the walk to the clinic, and the doctor will have to come here, and that will cost more.

‘What does it look like?’ she had asked the boy.

She brought him into the room and he drew a picture of the flag on a piece of paper. ‘This bit is blue. These stripes are red, and these white.’

‘Oh.’ She held the picture at arm’s length. ‘It’s not as plain and simple as our flag, is it? Would I have to stitch on the stars too?’

‘Yes. I think there are supposed to be a hundred. Or is it eighty? I can’t remember. Just fill the whole blue area in the corner with rows of them.’

‘When do you need it by?’

‘It’s for after the Friday prayers next week. It has to be large, about the size of four bed sheets. And can you please make sure that it is of a material that doesn’t burn too fast or too slowly? The flames have to look inspiring and fearsome in the photographs.’

Just before leaving he had asked her respectfully if there was anything he could do, and she had told him to replace the dead light bulb at the top of the stairs, the socket being too high for her to reach even when standing on a chair and she did not want to ask Sharif Sharif.

She spends the rest of the day setting fire to small strips of cloth to measure the texture, intensity and evenness of the various flames — linen, cotton, the textiles named after women’s films and novels, Teray Meray Sapnay and Dil ki Pyas and Aankhon Aankhon Mein. She settles eventually on a mixture, interspersing the fast burners with the more languidly flammable. She cuts up strips from a bolt of white KT — as pure as the pilgrimage to Mecca — and she makes red strips from a length of red linen. For the dark blue rectangle in the flag’s corner there is a large leftover piece from the indigo tunics she sewed for the uniforms of a nearby girls’ school. Blue as the colour a candle flame is said to become when a ghost is near. As she measures it she says a small prayer for the school’s caretaker who cannot afford the expensive operation he needs for his heart.

For the stars she makes a template with a piece of cardboard and begins to cut them out of white satin, pleased with the fact that the material is shiny, dropping them on the floor one by one where they lie around her full of gloss. She must do this well, in case the boy is dissatisfied and pays less than the agreed amount, and so again and again she consults the picture he drew for her, rubbing her knees occasionally because there is a touch of November in her joints. But pain at her age is no longer a surprise and she continues with the work, wondering what the various elements of the flag signify.

Are the white and red stripes rivers of milk and wine, flowing under a sky bursting with the splendour of stars?

Or are they paths soaked with blood, alternating with paths strewn with bleached white bones, leading out of a sea full of explosions?

Perhaps the blue in the flag means that the Americans own all the blue in the world — water, sky, blood seen through veins, the Blue Mosque in Tabriz, dusk, the feather with which she marks her place in her Koran, her seamstress’s chalk, the spot on the lower back of newborn babies, postmarks, the glass eyes of foreign dolls. Muhammad swore by the redness of the evening sky, and Adam means both ‘alive’ and ‘red’. Do the Americans own these and all other reds? Roses, meats, certain old leaves, certain new leaves, love, the feathers under the bulbul’s tail, dresses and veils of brides, dates marking festivals on calendars, garnets and rubies, happiness, blushes, daring, war, the Red Fort in Delhi, the spate of violent robberies after which people from the neighbourhood had gone to the police and were told to stop being a nuisance and hire private security guards instead, soda pop, the binding of her Koran — these and all the other shades of red, crimson, vermilion, scarlet, maroon, raspberry, obsidian, russet, plum, magenta, geranium, the tearful eyes of the woman from three doors down, who had told Tara she did not want her to sew her daughter’s dowry clothes after discovering that Tara was possessed by the djinn, fearing Tara would stitch her bad luck into the garments, the red flags of the revolution dreamt by Mikal and Basie’s parents, the Alhambra in Spain, the paths in Rohan’s garden, carpets woven in Shiraz, shiny cars that the rich import into Pakistan only to find that there are no good roads to drive them on. The setting sun. The rising sun.

She works without pause, the large flag materialising slowly in the interior as the hours go by, half the size of the room. She looks at Naheed but the girl remains asleep, hair sweat-pasted to the edges of the face. Winter will arrive soon like a blade opening and the room is cold. She lights a brazier of coals and places it next to Naheed whose body is now chilled. She turns up the volume of the radio a little when it is time for the news and the bulletin informs her that Kabul has fallen earlier today, that the Taliban have fled, after looting everything in sight including six million dollars from the national bank. Afghanistan is liberated and American troops are being handed sweets and plastic flowers by the free citizens of Kabul, music shops are being reopened, but while men are shaving off their beards, the women are choosing to remain hidden in their burkas for the time being. And Tara knows they are wise. During her adult life there has not been a single day when she has not heard of a woman killed with bullet or razor or rope, drowned or strangled with her own veil, buried alive or burned alive, poisoned or suffocated, having her nose cut off or entire face disfigured with acid or the whole body cut to pieces, run over by a car or battered with firewood. Every day there is news that a woman has had these things done to her in the name of honour-and-shame or Allah-and-Muhammad, by her father, her brother, her uncle, her nephew, her cousin, her husband, her husband’s father, her husband’s brother, her husband’s uncle, her husband’s nephew, her husband’s cousin, her son, her son-in-law, her lover, her father’s enemy, her husband’s enemy, her son’s enemy, her son-in-law’s enemy, her lover’s enemy. So now Tara commends the women of Kabul for being wise enough to stay in their burkas, because more often than not there are no second chances or forgiveness if you are a woman and have made a mistake or have been misunderstood.

She works until midnight and then 1 a.m. and it seems no one is awake but her. She alone is Islam.

*

Naheed opens her eyes and sits up.

‘You do believe me when I say I didn’t do anything, don’t you?’ Tara asks. ‘I threw the substance away. I didn’t put it in your food after the first few times, I swear on the Koran.’

‘I know,’ Naheed says weakly.

‘Sometimes Allah Himself does what He knows is the best thing for us.’

‘I went to a nurse and asked her to give me some injections,’ the girl says. She looks at Tara. ‘It wasn’t Allah. I did it myself.’

14

The leaves of the Sorrowless Tree are abrasive and therefore ideal for polishing. Workers from the furniture shop at the crossroads often come to ask for them. As he answers the doorbell this morning, that is who Rohan thinks is outside the house.

‘You don’t recognise me?’ the man says.

‘Forgive me, but I don’t.’ Perhaps he is a seller of bees.

‘I came to your house back in October to put up bird snares. I am Abdul, the bird pardoner.’

In his mind’s eye Rohan sees the bicycle with the giant cage attached to the back.

‘I have come to get back my wires.’ The man looks up into the canopies above the boundary wall of the house. ‘I can’t see them. They must have been taken down.’

Rohan finds himself staring speechlessly at the small soft-featured man, the light brown skin stubbled white at the jaws, a side tooth missing in the mouth.

‘You don’t seem to remember me at all,’ Abdul says.

‘I do. Come in, we have your wires.’ Rohan had spent an entire morning untangling them and then neatly winding them around foot-long sections of a rosewood branch.

The bird pardoner is a few paces behind him as they walk towards the garden shed. The north corner is full of smoke because he has been pruning, burning the twigs and branches that would otherwise carry disease. A golden-backed wood-pecker crosses their path with its undulating flight, dropping out of the whistling pine to escape the smoke and then rising to disappear into the tamarind tree, several of whose branches, bare in winter, are like a net of nerves overhead.

Rohan stops and turns to face the man. ‘I fail to see why you cannot make a living by another means.’

The bird pardoner lets the words hang in the air between them for a moment. Then he says, ‘I am sorry I didn’t come the day I was supposed to.’

‘You should be.’ Rohan is surprised to discover anger in his voice, and equally surprising is the speed with which the man’s eyes fill up with tears. But Rohan’s anger persists. ‘What excuse can there be for your conduct?’

Abdul wipes his eyes by lifting the loose front of his shirt to his face. ‘I can’t apologise enough for having inconvenienced you.’

‘I was speaking on behalf of the birds, who remained trapped up there for five days. Hungry, thirsty, terrified.’

The bird pardoner takes a sheet of folded paper from his pocket and holds it towards Rohan. ‘This will explain what has happened to me.’

Rohan takes the paper — with hesitation, nor does he unfold it.

‘After I put up the snares that afternoon, I got home and learned that my fourteen-year-old boy had run away to fight in Afghanistan. I couldn’t come to your house the next day to collect the birds because I had to go and find him. I took the train to Peshawar that very night.’

Rohan gazes at him and then at the piece of folded paper in his hand.

‘I couldn’t find him in Peshawar, and I have spent these months looking for him. Every time I enter the house his mother asks, “Do you have any news of him?” She has gone half mad and cries as if he’s already dead.’ The man points to the paper. ‘And then suddenly yesterday we got this letter. It was pushed under the door. He is being held in a warlord’s prison in Afghanistan. They captured him fighting for the Taliban, and the warlord’s people want to meet me in Peshawar to discuss how I can free him.’

Rohan slowly unfolds the sheet and reads the few lines.

Be present at electricity pole number 29 in the Coppersmiths’ Bazaar in Peshawar. Eight in the morning on Saturday 22 December. We will bring your son so you’ll know we have him.

‘The date is two days from now,’ Rohan says.

‘Yes. I thought I would come and see if you would let me put up the snares again, to catch some birds. I have no more money for the train fare to Peshawar. My wife has already sold her earrings and I my bicycle. They were the only bits of wealth we had.’

‘You must forgive me but I cannot allow you to put up the snares.’

‘Then I’ll have to find another place full of trees. The bicycle is gone so I’ll carry the cage filled with them on my back.’

Rohan looks at the letter. Don’t go to the police. We will kill him or hand him over to Americans to be tortured.

‘You probably don’t know,’ Abdul says, ‘but thousands of our boys have gone to Afghanistan.’

‘I do know.’

‘All I can say is if September’s terrorist attacks had to happen, I am sorry that they happened in my lifetime. They have destroyed me. And I live so far from where they took place. What does Heer know about New York, or New York about Heer? They are two different worlds.’

‘Is that your son’s name?’ Rohan asks, looking at the place in the letter where it is mentioned. ‘Jeo.’

The man nods and Rohan hands the paper back and turns and they continue towards the shed. Rohan takes the rosewood spools of wire — knotted branches like bones of trees — and puts them in a cloth bag and then watches the bird pardoner leave down the path and out of the gate, the ground littered with the last flowers of the rusty shield bearer. The exhaustion in the man’s eyes resembles the exhaustion in Basie’s eyes, who has been following rumours of Mikal ever since they came back from Peshawar, his spirit almost defeated, for now. His energy will revive with time no doubt. Whenever a boy from the neighbourhood ran away to help liberate Kashmiri Muslims from Indian rule, people continued to speculate, bringing true or false leads to his house for months and years. The missing boy was seen in a forest in Anantnag and was suffering from amnesia. He had started his life over again in China. He was abducted by dacoits and was being held for ransom right here in Pakistan, in a lime kiln near Quetta. The ghosts of the missing boys were said to haunt mansions in Delhi, they were said to have been strangled by gamblers in Mansehra, and burnt in houses in Srinagar. Once a young man appeared at a house claiming to be the missing son but he was an escaped mental patient.

Rohan walks to the gate. The bird pardoner has almost reached the end of the street, but Rohan has never raised his voice in public. He looks around for a child who can be asked to shout out and draw the man’s attention. Just then the bird pardoner happens to look over his shoulder and Rohan lifts his hand and beckons him.

‘I will go to Peshawar with you,’ he tells the man. ‘We will meet the warlord’s people together and see what can be done to bring back Jeo.’

*

He fears being unable to convince Naheed, Yasmin and Basie about the journey. He is prepared to remind them that in his youth he had visited Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Spain, Egypt, India and Turkey with little money or guidance. He is sure they would argue that that was a long time ago, so he does not tell them about the bird pardoner’s son. He tells them he is going to Peshawar to see his former pupil’s family, to thank them for the boxes of books, something that had had to be postponed during the last trip.

*

At the Coppersmiths’ Bazaar in Peshawar, they locate electricity pole number 29 and wait to be contacted. They are just outside a rickshaw repair shop, across from a stall collecting money and blood for the Taliban. Sounds of grief were heard from a number of houses in Rohan’s neighbourhood in Heer when Kabul fell. The cleric at the mosque near Rohan’s house had wept for most of his two-hour Friday sermon, the tears broadcast over the loudspeaker. The person in the Ardent Spirit van said that he had been reading the Koran when the news came of the West having conquered Afghanistan — and the Holy Book, overcome with shame, had disappeared from his hands.

It’s 8 a.m., the time specified in the letter, but a six-year-old boy is the only person who approaches them, asking if they want their shoes polished.

They continue with their wait and at ten o’clock a man wearing a Kalashnikov over his shoulder appears and asks them curtly to identify themselves.

He says it’ll take twenty thousand rupees to free the bird pardoner’s son.

‘I don’t have that kind of money,’ Abdul says, and the man sighs with irritation. The mountain peaks cut white fangs into the sky around the city, the December cold intense. The rivers and streams must be flowing with shards of ice.

‘The note said you would bring the boy,’ Rohan says.

The man points to a red van at the other end of the bazaar.

They walk towards it and he opens the back door and tells Rohan and Abdul to climb in, the door closing behind them immediately. The interior is windowless, a pitch-black metal box, and Abdul snaps his cigarette lighter. The light it produces is sparse and he adjusts the lever on the side to lengthen the flame. They look around, holding their heads at an angle because of the low ceiling, and realise that the huddled shape at the other end of the space is a boy and not a pile of rags. He flinches and lets out a squeal when the bird pardoner moves towards him.

Abdul stops and looks at him and then moves to the door. ‘That’s not my son,’ he says, sounding a knock.

Rohan sees that the boy is weeping. ‘Please take me away,’ the little voice says finally, looking down. ‘They keep us in a prison. They do things to you that make you want to kill yourself. Please take me away,’ he whispers.

‘Suicide is a sin,’ Rohan says. ‘You mustn’t talk like that.’

Abdul is knocking on the door but there is no response from the other side.

‘They have this game, they call it “Nail”. They start with the youngest prisoners and ask their ages. If the boy says twelve, they send twelve men to him. If he says fourteen, he gets fourteen. They take him to a room and take off his trousers and hold him down and then the whole place fills with screams. The men yell louder than the boy — like they have gone mad or have turned into wild animals. They are shouting, “Nail! Nail! Nail!” as they do it to him.’

It would terrify even the stars. And Abdul’s fists are hitting the door louder now, the lighter flame jerking and then going out. ‘Please help me,’ says the boy’s voice. ‘Allah will reward you and your wife.’ And then suddenly the door is opened and the light floods their eyes.

Rohan and Abdul are let out and the door is closed on the boy who screams desperately for the last time, ‘I will kill myself,’ just as the van jerks forward and drives off.

‘That’s not my son,’ Abdul says, and the ransom seeker takes out a set of photographs twice the thickness of a deck of cards, and asks Abdul to look through it. Towards the end of the sheaf, Abdul recognises his Jeo.

‘We will bring him next week. Same time.’

‘I have no money for the ransom, or the journey,’ Abdul says. ‘Either I or my wife will have to sell a kidney. It’ll take some time. Can we meet again in a month?’

‘A month?’ the man considers.

‘Have you no shame?’ Rohan finds himself saying into the man’s face, having pushed Abdul aside, unable to control his distress and fury. People stare at him as they walk past and he feels at the centre of a swarm of eyes. ‘How can you hold children to ransom and force the parents to do such a terrible thing to themselves?’ He cannot even bring himself to raise the other subject, so traumatised is he by it.

The man is outraged and looks as though he will lunge at Rohan.

‘I will cut the boy’s throat and I will kill you!’ he says while Rohan glares at him. ‘Your boy was caught fighting against us. He probably killed some of our men. We need money to make sure the widows and the children of those dead men don’t become beggars.’

Abdul tries to placate him. ‘I will come back in a month and I will bring the money. Please treat my boy well in the meantime.’

‘No,’ Rohan says, suddenly determined. ‘No. We want Jeo and we will go and get him today.’

‘He’s in Afghanistan.’

‘Then we go to Afghanistan.’

‘It’s four, five hours away,’ the man points to the east of the city.

‘Afghanistan is not four or five hours away,’ Rohan says.

‘Six, seven, then.’

‘It’s more even than that but I don’t care. I want Jeo back.’

‘Yes, come with me if you want. The official ways into Afghanistan are still difficult, but I can get you there and back without any problems via old smuggling routes.’

He is aware of the dangers. Defeated and banished, Taliban and al-Qaeda gangs are roaming Afghanistan, and of course the place is full of Western soldiers.

‘The journey will cost you,’ the man says. ‘And I’ll have to make a phone call to arrange everything, to make sure it’s acceptable to my superiors.’

‘What about the twenty thousand rupees?’ Abdul asks Rohan.

Rohan reaches into his pocket and takes out the ruby on its black cord. Both Abdul and the ransom seeker are taken aback by the size and beauty of the jewel, the unimprovable red light collected inside it. They cannot take their eyes off the stone, and they stare at the pocket where it is when Rohan puts it back into his coat.

Rohan looks around. ‘The Street of Storytellers is that way. Which way is the Jewellers’ Bazaar?’

*

The ransom seeker has a car and, after the ruby has been appraised at the Jewellers’ Bazaar, they drive towards the eastern outskirts of Peshawar. The legitimate path into Afghanistan is the Khyber Pass, but they are taking narrower roads, slipping through hillocks overgrown densely with mesquite bushes. In the limestone Maneri hills there are veins of marble mottled black, green and yellow, or pure green and pure yellow, and the rosary in Rohan’s hands is made from these, the two-coloured beads alternating. On the boulders on the riverbanks the words Jihad is your duty are daubed, white against the grey and black. They were not there in October when Rohan was roaming these areas with Yasmin and Basie. Victory or martyrdom. Telephone now for jihad training. There is a phone number.

The gem merchant valued the ruby at fifty thousand rupees. The sign above the shop said the proprietor was a genealogist of precious stones and could tell the origin and race of every precious stone on earth. Rohan asked him to write down the amount while the ransom seeker watched.

‘I will give your warlord this gem instead of the money, and he will give us Jeo.’

As they drive towards the Afghan border, the ransom seeker talks. ‘Seventy people from my village were killed when the Americans dropped a bomb,’ the man says. ‘I blame America but I also blame the foreign fighters — the likes of your boy — who the Americans were trying to kill.’

And repeatedly he wants to be handed the ruby.

At a secluded place near the border he stops the car and asks them to disembark, saying he has to go away for an hour. And yet again he wants the ruby. ‘It’ll save you the journey. Give me the jewel and I will bring the boy to you.’

But Rohan refuses and he drives away. The valley of Peshawar has the appearance of having been, centuries ago, the bed of a vast lake, whose banks were bound by the cliffs and peaks of the surrounding Himalayas, and Rohan has the feeling of being submerged within that vast inland sea.

*

I was given the following words of the Prophet by Adam bin Ayaas, who was given them by Ibn Abi Zyeb, who was given them by Syed Makbari, who in turn was given them by Abu Horaira. The Prophet said, ‘If anyone has been unjust towards someone, he should secure himself a pardon from the victim before it is too late. Otherwise, on Judgement Day, when the only valid currency will be a person’s good conduct on earth, the good deeds of an unjust man will be transferred to his victim. And if he has no good deeds, then the victim’s sins will be transferred to him.

Rohan is reading the Book of Prophet’s Sayings, turning the pages at random — pausing on this, the saying number 2,286, for a few moments. He shivers in the cold. It has been two hours since the man left with the car. The bird trapper is asleep, wrapped in a blanket under a tree.

‘Why do you look so troubled?’ a woman’s voice asks.

Rohan looks up — her hair is white, the features of the face caught in a net of wrinkles. He smiles and shakes his head.

She points to the boulders and the screen of bushes on the other side of the road. Rohan sees that behind the leaves and branches there is a low mud wall.

‘Go there.’

Rohan returns to the book. Number 2,279: I was given the following words of the Prophet by Osman Ibn Ani Sheeba, who was given them by Hasheem, who was given them by Obaidullah bin Abu Bakr bin Uns, who was given them by Hameed Tavail, who in turn was given them by Uns bin Malik. The Prophet said, ‘Always help your (Muslim) brother, whether he is a tyrant or victim.’

The woman is hovering and now touches his shoulder. ‘It is a graveyard. The body of a boy who died fighting the Americans in Afghanistan was brought out and is buried here. He is a martyr and will intercede on your behalf with Allah. Go and ask Mikal for your suffering to be alleviated.’

Rohan closes the book and places it in his shoulder bag and stands up. He crosses the road and enters the graveyard that contains about a hundred souls, a few decaying tombs and thorn trees. The mountains loom overhead vertiginously, the land and slopes marked with evidence of the lost sea, the effort of currents, waves, springs, streams and rivers. Verses of the Koran are on every headstone — as though the graves are quoting them, carrying on a conversation with one another using nothing but holy words. One mound just on the other side of the boundary wall is at least ten yards long, heaped with bright flowers, river soil with pieces of freshwater shells, and chips of soft blue slate quarried from the nearby hills. A group of women is reciting verses of the Koran over the mound. A man is lighting an incense stick at its head, the smoke rising in sluggish blue strands through the cold air.

‘He was a giant.’ A woman looks up at Rohan as he approaches.

‘He wasn’t,’ the man with the incense stick corrects her, walking the ten yards to light the ones at the other end. ‘He was of normal height, but he became this size on the battlefield.’

The tombstone is carved with stars along the edges. There is Mikal’s name, the date of birth, and of death — the day after he and Jeo went to Afghanistan.

‘They say he brought down six fighter jets single-handedly and saved thirty women from being ravished by American soldiers.’

He stands looking at the blossoms piled onto the boy. The dazzle of the sun is in his eyes and his body feels suddenly tired. Claw prints of an eagle were found heading away from the martyr, the warrior saint, someone tells him. His soul must have been an eagle.

How did Mikal’s body end up here? The mayhem and chaos of war. He looks up at the cliffs. The vegetation everywhere is profuse; after the level of the sea decreased this was a tropical marsh, the resort of rhinoceros, flamingo and tiger, thick with reeds, rushes and conifers. Under his breath he reads the verse of the Koran that is etched onto the ruby. Wealth and offspring are transitory adornments of the nearer life. How long he stands there in that disordered state of mind he doesn’t know, coming to himself only when he hears Abdul calling out his name from the other side of the wall.

*

Through hillside, across bridges, through a dust storm a mile long, and through streams in which float — by the dozen — the shaved-off beards of fleeing al-Qaeda militants, the journey to the destination in Afghanistan takes seventeen hours. In deep twilight they cross a broad flat valley with a river and river flats in it, every bit of it scorched black where a Daisy Cutter bomb had been dropped, reducing everything to ash, pumice, lava, the sides of the hills torn up into segments, and scattered over it all is the yellow haze of the unrisen moon, the cold night falling on them out of the east, the stars beginning their slide through the black slopes. It looks like the site of a cosmic incursion such as a meteorite, not the work of men. The US casualties number twelve in the two-month war, whereas countless thousands of Afghanistanis have perished, fighters as well as bystanders, and Rohan doesn’t know who will speak the complicated truth, and he watches with attention as though at some point in the future he himself will be asked to tell what he has seen. Towards the end of the journey a convoy of American soldiers goes past their vehicle. He wonders if he can ask them to help secure the release of the boys imprisoned by the warlord. He watches the convoy disappear just as the car radio brings news that a British Muslim has been arrested trying to blow up a passenger airliner over the Atlantic Ocean with explosives hidden in his shoes.

*

Arriving at a compound at 3 a.m., they are shown into a room full of the odour of dust and are told to spend the remains of the night there. The walls are of grey cement and hundreds of broken statues lie in heaps on the floor. The Buddha and the various people from his life — torsos, arms, feet and faces of all sizes. He looks at the exact arc of the eyebrow made above a man’s eye by the carver’s chisel. The flowers as though growing out of the hair on a woman’s head. There is barely room for Rohan and the bird pardoner to stand, and they clear a space by stacking a number of the pieces onto each other, the bird pardoner lying down against a yard-long fragment of drapery — hewn from the skirts of a nymph or temple dancer. As she lay dying, Rohan remembers burning a sketch of a Bodhisattva statue that Sofia had made. And he knows some people in the neighbourhood, on hearing the news that his vision is slowly deteriorating, comment that it is Allah’s retribution for tormenting her during her last hours. ‘He didn’t want to see what she had painted, now he won’t be able to see the real things.’

He falls asleep looking at the photograph on the far wall. The warlord is shaking hands with an American colonel. The date on the frame says it was taken soon after the Taliban regime was toppled last month. The opposite of war is not peace but civilisation, and civilisation is purchased with violence and cold-blooded murder. With war. The man must earn millions of dollars for guarding the NATO supply convoys as they pass through his area, and for the militia he must have raised to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda soldiers alongside American Special Forces.

He wakes up before the stars are down and says his predawn prayers. He had slept on the palm of a seven-foot hand, using the swollen base of the thumb as his pillow. He thinks he hears shouts of ‘Nail! Nail!’ from some nearby room and he interrupts his prayers and moves from point to point within the compound’s darkness, but the howling has stopped, nothing but the waning moon overhead casting his faint shadow on the ground, and the clear chart of the constellations that makes him think of Mikal, the bone geometry of stars.

*

A man with grave coal-black eyes enters the room, late in the morning, and asks Rohan and the bird pardoner to follow him. Guided by him they descend into the warlord’s underground prison, going along the buried hallways lined on both sides with barred cells. There is a large pool through one wide arch, but it is full of stored gasoline, the grimy walls painted with the still-beautiful flowers and parakeets and bulbuls from when it must have been used for indoor swimming. There are pumps to put the gasoline into tins for vehicles or electricity generators. As they continue along the hallways, shadow-people thrust their arms through the bars of the cells and shake dirty beakers and call out, ‘Water.’ The place smells of sweat, urine and excrement, of rotting wounds and flesh. These prisoners must all be insignificant, because the important ones are handed over to the Americans for $5,000 each.

A barred door is unlocked and the guide motions for the occupant to step out. The boy who emerges is in a daze, standing at an angle in the half dark, and the man pushes him towards the bird pardoner. He wears a dirty shalwar kameez and is ghostly thin and his hands shake as he lifts them to wipe away tears. When the father embraces him the boy’s arms come out of the torn sleeves and Rohan sees that the skin is crisscrossed with deep cuts. Abdul keeps up the glad words of reunion but the child is silent, looking as though he would rather understand than speak.

*

Rohan hands the ruby to the guide when they are back in the original room. Immediately he says that it is not acceptable.

‘This is mere glass,’ the man says.

‘It is not glass,’ Rohan says. ‘It’s an authentic and indisputable jewel.’

The man stands with it in the palm of his hand. Then he sighs and tells them that the warlord is not present and that they must wait for his return. He goes away with it and Rohan walks to the door to see which of the many rooms lining the courtyard he will disappear into. Posters of the warlord are pasted to the walls in the compound. He clearly hopes to have a role in the government.

‘How did you end up here?’ Rohan asks Jeo, but the boy won’t speak — unwilling to recall the time and the place where his ties with the human had broken. He looks at his father and whispers, ‘Have you come to get me back?’

‘Yes.’

‘One boy’s father came last week. He is an ice seller and said he is trying to save ten rupees a day to free his son. It’ll take him twenty years. You have to take me with you today.’

‘We are here to take you away, this morning, don’t worry,’ Rohan says, looking in the direction the man went with the ruby, gently placing a hand on the boy’s head.

The boy recoils under the touch.

‘You don’t need to be afraid of him,’ Abdul says. ‘He is a good man.’

‘How many prisoners are down there in the cells?’ Rohan asks, looking at the floor. They are perhaps directly under his feet.

‘About a hundred. The others who came with me died.’

Rohan recognises the warlord from the photograph on the wall the moment he enters the room, holding the ruby in his hand, clearly delighted by its beauty. He is one-eyed with a big head and chest, the breast thrust forward as though by the force of the heart beating unafraid of any man or thing.

‘I have come to see the man who has brought me this gift.’ He smiles as he walks towards Rohan. ‘You can take the boy,’ he says, holding out his hand to be shaken.

Rohan looks down at the hand but does not take it, unable to hide his feelings, and the man stops smiling. His servants gathered behind him stiffen: the proffered hand remains hanging in the air and Rohan might as well have slapped him. Everyone waits while the ruby shines in the man’s other hand. Valour is associated with this gemstone. The courage to seek the truth at all times. To be able to look tyrants in the eyes. This world of havoc, malice and destruction, where the blood of the innocent is of no consequence, is perfect for him and his kind.

Rohan walks out of the door, followed by Jeo and the bird pardoner, leaving the men of war behind. But he is beginning to regret his act as it could jeopardise the safety of Abdul and the boy.

They go out through the gate, not meeting the eyes of the armed men standing guard. People are gathered outside the front gate, all there to pay homage to the warlord or seek money and help. The moment the guards open the gate to let the three of them out, the crowd begins to shout out its needs, frenziedly waving pieces of paper in the air, asking to see the lord. The voices of women coming from under the folds of blue or cream-coloured burkas. Near the road people are eating breakfasts of tea and packets of biscuits.

Jeo stares at a cat walking along a wall. He says to his father, ‘They forget to feed you for days sometimes down there, and one day I was hungry this cat brought me a dead hoopoe to eat.’

Rohan sees the convoy of American vehicles coming down the road.

‘The other prisoners are just there,’ Jeo says pointing back to the warlord’s compound, his eyes almost vibrating with intensity. ‘See that row of barred windows at the base of the wall? They are the high windows we looked up at, in our underground cells.’

The Americans’ six-vehicle convoy has drawn near and Rohan steps into the middle of the road before it.

The lead vehicle stops ten yards away from him and the white boy-soldier behind the steering wheel looks at him through the windshield. His companion in the passenger seat leans out with his gun after a few seconds and shouts, ‘Get out of the way!’

Above him the sky has suddenly opened into the cold of the cosmos.

*

Tormented by dreams of justice on earth, Jeo wants to do something like a star shooting off light to make itself. Before his father knows what he is doing, he picks up a section of broken brick lying at his feet and throws it solidly at the men guarding the building, missing one of them by a mere two feet. He stands defiant, as though gaining strength from being under the open sky, having found this way of announcing his place in the world, the family of man. One of the guards comes running towards him with a raised rifle but Abdul moves forward to placate him. Taking a cigarette from his pocket, Abdul puts it in the guard’s mouth and even lights it, keeping up words of apology.

*

‘Get out of the way!’

Rohan does not heed the order. Instead he begins to walk towards the jeep. The other vehicles have halted behind the first one and soldiers are leaning out with weapons at the ready, some in confusion, some in alarmed fear.

‘I need to talk to you,’ Rohan says in English.

‘Get out of the way!’

Rohan puts up both his arms. The soldiers will not see him as a harmless aged man. ‘I need your help in getting some children out of this building,’ he says, pointing with his head.

‘Not our problem.’

‘They are being abused in there.’

‘Not our problem. This is your last warning!’ They are aiming at him and in every other direction, behind them, to the left, right, at the crowd of petitioners, the gun barrels unceasing as the panic mounts. ‘Move! Now! This is your last warning!’

Rohan catches a glimpse of Jeo, who has walked towards the windows of the dungeon and is peering down through them.

Slowly Rohan walks to the very edge of the tarmac — unable to bring himself to vacate the road completely, still searching for words he might say to these soldiers, and the vehicles begin to come towards him suspiciously, in extreme slowness, the zigzag pattern on the tyres moving down inch by inch, and he watches as the gate to the building opens and the warlord emerges. He stands looking at Rohan.

One of the warlord’s men has rushed forward to drag Rohan away from the road, throwing him forcibly onto the ground. As he falls he sees the American convoy speed up, he also sees that Jeo has taken off his shirt for some reason, revealing the gaunt, sickeningly bruised body. Snatching the lighter from Abdul’s hand the boy sets the shirt alight and with this burning rag he runs — towards the row of windows to the underground cells.

Rohan lies in the dust, thinking that the warlord’s man had wished nothing more than to remove the obstruction from the path of the Americans. But the man is still holding Rohan down — and now others have appeared, pinning him so hard against the ground he thinks it is an attempt to bury him alive, that using nothing but their arms they want to push him into the earth. The warlord is standing above him with his hand extended, the hand he had rejected. Time slows down as the warlord lowers the hand and Rohan sees that the pulverised remains of the ruby are in the palm, the stone crushed into tiny fragments. Calmly the man presses a fingertip into the shattered jewel, coating it with the razor grit, and brings the fingertip towards Rohan’s eyes.

*

One second, two, three — and the pool of gasoline erupts, Jeo having dropped the burning shirt onto it from above.

*

Rohan stands up. The light is so strong everything disintegrates in it — it is like being in a field of pure energy. Rohan sweeps at his head to remove the white cloth that has come to rest over his eyes but realises there is no cloth. The world moves away and everything becomes smaller but then the vision returns for a few moments and he sees the fire eddying along the ground. He is tired, tired of living without Sofia, and as he stumbles against something and falls, feeling a patch of meagre grass under his hands, he knows he is blind.

15

To one side of the house in Heer, between the window to Rohan’s study and the cluster of the towering silk-cotton trees, a bathroom sink is affixed to the wall. As children Jeo and Mikal loved to wash their faces there in the mornings, amid birdsong and the breezes of the garden. At certain hours the sun’s rays shine in the mirror that hangs above it, and above the mirror is a bougainvillea with its heart-like leaves and tissue-paper blossoms, its long branches sometimes covering the mirror so that they have to be parted for the face to be seen. Sometimes they are tied back or are cut away in a square shape to expose the mirror. The colour of rust on apple slices, the deep orange blossoms of the bougainvillea fall into the sink by the dozen and have to be lifted out before the taps are turned.

Naheed splashes water onto her face, avoiding eye contact with her reflection. She tilts her face to the December sun and stands there for a minute, feeling the water dry on her skin. I know he is alive, she had said to her mother, I feel him.

Walking back to the chair she picks up the book she had been reading, having selected it out of one of the boxes. Rohan went to Peshawar two days ago to thank the family of the kind donor. They are no longer a recent presence in the house but still she forgets them at times, emerging out of a doorway and walking into a column of boxes as though she wishes to enter and disappear into it.

There is no body, there is no grave. She will keep telling herself this. If the sun and the moon should doubt, they would be extinguished.

She looks up from the book now and then, her tunic patterned with grey flowers and black leaves, a garden at dusk, due to the ash.

Love does not make lovers invulnerable, she reads. But even if the world’s beauty and love are on the edge of destruction, theirs is still the only side to be on. Hate’s victory does not make it other than what it is. Defeated love is still love.