The Blind Man's Garden

16

Adam was pardoned in winter.

The thought comes to Mikal as he stands in the cold air, his breath appearing and disappearing before him. In his bandaged right hand he holds the small dried flowers he has kept hidden in his pocket. The index finger is missing from each hand. The flowers are faded and torn, but with all the grey around him they are still the brightest things in his gaze. He shields them as he would a candle flame, as though preventing their colours from being extinguished. He runs a finger along the centre of one, the parts small yet feelable, fine as thread with minute swellings of pollen.

He turns and walks back into the building.

It is the mountain house owned by the warlord who is holding him prisoner. The chain at his ankles is long enough for him to walk at a slow pace but not to run. He goes through the kitchen without pausing and climbs the staircase and then continues along a long corridor, towards a room filled with voices at the end.

He saw the Quadrantids meteor shower three nights ago so he knows what month it is. Meteor showers occur at approximately the same time every year and the Quadrantids are seen at the beginning of January.

He was trying to escape from here the night he saw it. The house is surrounded by towering pines and snow-covered peaks, most of its rooms locked, the only human presence being a retinue of six of the warlord’s men.

He still doesn’t know where Jeo is. During the months since his capture in October, he has been bartered and sold among various warlords, and as the weeks have gone by there have been fewer and fewer words from him, none at all on most days. The current warlord doesn’t even know his name.

He comes into the room to find the men huddled around a coal brazier. The warlord is a bandit and the son of bandits, and Mikal has heard stories of how much his bloodthirstiness is feared. Once, having received word that he was about to mount a raid, the inhabitants of a village had left their jewellery and valuables out in the streets at night, the thousands of banknotes blowing about in the air as he rode in.

Mikal lifts a pomegranate from a dish and squats in the far corner of the room, listening to them as he opens the fruit with his teeth and fingernails, careful as he manipulates the fruit because the wounds from the missing fingers are still tender these months later. Every warlord has told him that he would have to be ransomed. He had refused to give any of them a contact address, no matter what they did to him. The only way anyone could gain financially from him was to send him to work on construction sites every day — a school being built, a prison for women being expanded — and he laboured while wearing his chains, becoming thinner with each week, his clothes hanging on him in rags. His hair became long and lay on his head like a thick ungovernable cap, and he still wore the boots he had been wearing back in October, having washed the blood out of them. He worked as hard as he could because he feared they would otherwise shoot him for being just a mouth to feed. But then being worked to death was another fear.

He chews the pomegranate seeds and drips the red liquid from his mouth onto the bandaged areas of his hands, knowing it is a potent healer.

One of the men is lamenting about a pistol that keeps jamming. It is an M9 Beretta and Mikal knows how simply the trouble can be fixed. He could tell the man to put a piece of electrical tape over the hole in the bottom of the pistol’s handle to keep the dust out. But he remains silent, keenly alive to the possibility that the weapon could be turned on him at some point as he attempts to flee.

He has been brought here to the mountain house to assist in a mission, a theft. Around the fire the men are finalising the details of the plan. The Prophet Muhammad’s 1, 400-year-old cloak has been kept at the mosque in Kandahar since 1768. But when the American bombing started back in October, the cloak was brought into the mountains for safekeeping, and it hasn’t been sent back to Kandahar yet. It is still there in a high-altitude mosque a distance of fifty miles from this house, and the warlord wishes to acquire it to increase his prestige, to benefit from its miraculous powers.

The warlord’s most expert thieves will go with Mikal to acquire the Prophet’s cloak, a father-and-son team, the son the same age as Mikal. The sacred garment is no doubt guarded and if they are discovered during the crime a fight will ensue. Mikal would rather not take part in the theft but he has to obey. In addition, the warlord has said that he will consider granting Mikal his freedom if the cloak is successfully brought to him. Mikal doesn’t believe the man would keep his word, so he resolves to remain alert to every possibility of escape during the journey.

They stand up when they are ready to go, everyone beginning to walk out to the front courtyard to see them off. Mikal lingers in the room and is the last one through its door: with as much swiftness as his chained legs allow him, he picks up the bullet he had seen lying under a chair the moment he came in. He works it into the waistband of his trousers as he walks behind the others in the dark corridor, the metal cold against his skin even through the fabric.

Outside, as they walk towards the van, minute specks of frozen moisture float in the otherwise dry air. It glitters in the late morning sun like shining sand or a dust of glass. The mansion has high walls of stone with lookout posts, and five large Alsatians roam the compound at night. In spite of this he has made three attempts at escape, getting further on each successive occasion, and it was only the sub-zero cold that forced him back. He had wrapped his ankle chain in rags to muffle it but in the end he couldn’t walk fast enough to generate the necessary heat, the mountainside locked in the white iron of winter.

The father gets behind the steering wheel, and he and his son utter in unison the Arabic phrase all good Muslims are meant to use before setting out on travel: ‘I hope Allah has written a safe journey for us.’

Mikal climbs into the second row of seats. He must be ready to act at the first chance. He has known for two days that something is wrong with the vehicle, that it could break down during the journey. The day before yesterday they had gone hunting for deer in the woods, and when they came back the Alsatians had not recognised their approach, had barked as they would at the noise of an unfamiliar vehicle. Some mechanism inside the engine is about to fail, a fracture spreading in the chassis.

He touches the painful arm as they drive off. For a while his wounds had made him manically alert to bees, following the progress of each one in the air with the hope of being led to the hive, coveting the yellow colour sealed inside the cellular wax, knowing that honey can mend flesh as nothing else can, healing wounds that have remained open for a decade.

*

The air inside the van becomes colder as they climb towards the snow line, moving through the rocks and the immense boulders, the landscape ripped to pieces by its own elemental energies. They interrupt the journey when it is time for the afternoon prayers, getting out and spreading a blanket on the rock-strewn ground while the wind howls in a gorge to the left of them. Standing next to each other on the blanket with their faces turned towards the mountains in the west, they begin to bend and bow towards Mecca hundreds of miles away.

Mikal finishes earlier than the father and son and hurries back into the vehicle, his hand working the bullet out of his waistband as he goes. It’s a.22 calibre, and working as fast as he can he replaces the fuse of the van’s headlights with it. The procedure requires about thirty seconds and all through it he fears the father and son will conclude their prayers and look towards him, but his luck holds. The bullet is a perfect fit in the fusebox which is located next to the steering-wheel column. After about fifteen miles the bullet should overheat, discharge and enter the driver’s leg. It’d be as though he had been shot with a gun.

Afterwards Mikal sits looking out, waiting for them to finish praying, the sky composed of horizontal pink, yellow and grey bands repeated in Allah’s strict order above them. When they come back the father scolds him for hurrying his communion with Allah, and then they move on. The headlights — that have been in use since before they stopped to pray in the afternoon gloom — illuminate giant slabs of stone thrust out at all angles as though the place had been attacked from the inside with pickaxes and sledgehammers, resulting in entire zones of star-shaped fractures.

The days are short in the mountains and the greyness intensifies as one hour passes and another begins. While they are making a narrow turn, Mikal notices that the soles of several boots have left deep imprints on the muddy ground of the bend. America is everywhere. The boots are large as if saying, ‘This is how you make an impression in the world.’ After the victory in November, the war had quickly devolved into an endless series of raids and manhunts for terrorist leaders and lieutenants. And these must be Special Forces soldiers looking for a possible Osama bin Laden hideout or gravesite.

He sits leaning forward from the back, his head between the two front seats. When the bullet enters the driver’s body it will cause an accident: the vehicle will be damaged and it is possible that his son will not be able to drive them to safety, that they will bleed to death here in the wilds. A part of him wants to cancel the plot he has set in motion and after a while that is exactly what he tries to do.

‘Stop the van,’ he says.

‘What?’ the son asks, turning around to look at him.

‘We must say the evening prayers.’

‘It’s a little early for that,’ the driver says, and the van remains in motion, the headlights burning into the mountainside. Mikal reaches out and grabs the steering wheel and it swings violently to the left for a moment. The son takes hold of Mikal at the collar and pushes him backwards and shouts for him to be still. Mikal sits back in and the father strikes his face hard without turning around, the back of the fingers paved with coloured gems. The vehicle continues to move beyond any hope of influence, and again Mikal says, ‘We have to stop.’

After that it’s only another few seconds before the van has entered the air above the gorge with a loud tearing of steel against stone — it’s preceded by the noise of the exploding bullet but Mikal hears it only in retrospect. Twenty feet below is a river overhung with weeping trees, and as they begin their plunge towards it everything out there becomes darker, because the bullet leaving the fusebox has broken the electric connection to the headlights.

*

‘It’s a bullet wound,’ says the father with a mixture of shock and confusion, turning his back to the two of them and opening his trousers and looking down at his thigh. ‘I have been shot.’

They’ve splashed ashore, the man limping badly, barely able to stand upright. Every pain in Mikal’s body has been awakened, a jolt to the spine when the vehicle landed in the shallow river.

‘Shot? How is that possible?’ the son says, going around to look at the wound. ‘Maybe a part of the van pierced you.’

‘I know what a bullet wound looks like,’ the father says. He is a large man but at this moment just the effort to raise his voice seems too much for him.

Beyond them in the glacial water a thick rope of blood emerges from the driver’s side of the wrecked van and goes swaying down the slow current. It is as though the metal itself is bleeding.

‘We need to bring it out,’ says the father, gesturing towards the van. Mikal can see that apart from everything else both father and son are terrified at having ruined their master’s property.

‘It’s not going to move now,’ Mikal says. He looks under his shirt for any injuries. There is a pause while everyone reflects on what has happened, the drenched bodies shivering in the terrible cold, the son wincing as he touches the two-inch cut on his forehead. ‘It’s a warning from Allah,’ the boy says quietly. ‘This is a wicked and sinful thing we are attempting, stealing the blessed cloak. I think we should turn back …’

His father looks at him sharply. ‘You have no knowledge of this matter. Stop talking nonsense.’

The boy shakes his head. ‘We have to turn back. You’ve been shot with an invisible pistol. It’s a warning from Allah …’

‘Be quiet,’ the man says, attempting to remain in control, and the son looks away, torn between who he fears more, Allah or his father. The man is losing blood very fast, the red-black liquid spreading on the pebbles at his feet. It seems to be something seeping up from the earth due to the weight of his body. ‘We can’t stay here,’ he says. ‘We have to walk the five miles to the mosque.’

‘Go and see if you can rip out the seat belts,’ Mikal says to the boy. ‘We need to bind your father’s leg.’ And he asks the father, ‘Are the keys to my chain in the van?’

‘I didn’t bring them.’

Mikal is aghast. ‘How did you think I would help you steal?’ He doesn’t believe the man is telling the truth. ‘What if I’d had to run?’

The thief lifts his gun and aims it at Mikal unsteadily with shivering hands. The pain is making his eyes murderous. ‘I don’t have them. And don’t think you can run away from me. Now go and get the seat belts.’

After applying the tourniquet they begin to walk, finding a path that leads them back up to the level from which they fell, the thief leaving a glistening trail. Moving through freezing air in wet clothes, the footsteps of all three soon become less sure but they continue, wordlessly, Mikal’s chain the only sound. Two years ago in Pakistan he had gone hunting at the same latitude as this, and had prevented frostbite by duct-taping his entire face, leaving just a half-inch slot for the eyes and another for the nose. Now he watches the father and his son as they weaken. He knows they’ll fail sooner than him, the father leaning on the son as they stagger along. He must summon the last bit of warmth inside him. Naheed. The word in which all meanings converge.

The father is the first to collapse among the grey rocks just as they are approaching a ridge. The son succumbs a moment later as though he had needed permission. From where he lies the man swipes at Mikal’s shirt in sudden desperation, to hold onto him, but the mountains have sucked out all his strength, the slopes and summits that stand around them like solidified silence — time made visible in a different way, ancient and on an elongated scale.

In a trance of liberty Mikal keeps walking towards the ridge. In another half hour the darkness will be complete. He looks over his shoulder and sees that the injured man, lying on the ground, is attempting to aim his gun at him, the barrel jerking as though he is trying to shoot a butterfly that won’t settle.

He goes over the ridge and stops in his tracks, seeing what lies on the other side. ‘What the hell?’ And only after a long moment does he take another step forward.

He is facing a graveyard of planes and helicopters, Russian MiGs and Hinds, all resting at odd angles with cockpits slung open and the glass smashed, the tyres ripped and rotted. There are several dozen of them, a swathe of hulks stretching all the way to another ridge half a mile away.

He moves towards a helicopter and looks inside. There is Russian graffiti scratched onto the tarnished walls. Names, sentences, and hearts with initials in them. The interior has been stripped of everything, from the seats to the instrument dials. Each aircraft is little more than a pod or shell, a coffin meant for a giant, and the metal of each must weigh thousands of kilograms. At some point each has had a growth of lichen on it, layer upon thick layer dried now to a crust. He continues to walk in an almost straight line through and between them, climbing in and out of the doors, speaking quietly to himself as he goes, to stop the mind from losing focus. ‘Mikal is free at last. Mikal keeps walking. Mikal hears the sound of his chains. Mikal cannot feel any of his fingers. Mikal is not going to die in this metal cemetery. Mikal has probably caused the death of a man. Mikal wants to see Naheed’s face. Mikal wants to live with her in the room in Heer. Mikal must find Jeo.’ After a while he stops and turns around.

He arrives back at the first helicopter gunship and sees that the father and son have attempted to follow him — they’d made it over the ridge but have collapsed once again on this side, one prone, the other supine. He approaches and astonishingly the father raises his wildly trembling arm with the gun towards him once again. The son’s eyes remain closed but even in the state of unconsciousness his body is shaking. Mikal, shivering almost as much as them, frees the weapon from the father’s grip and standing with his feet as wide apart as possible points the barrel at the taut chain. The action is stiff from the cold, an equivalent of his own bone-deep chill, and since he is having to use a hand that has no trigger finger, there is little precision in his aim. He fires into the hard ground twice, powdered granite and the blue smoke of the gun rising very slowly towards his face.

He puts the gun in his pocket and prises loose the one from the son’s rigid fingers too. From the father’s pocket he takes out the brass cigarette lighter. The man stares up at him helplessly, too far gone. Under the darkening blue sky and the already countless stars, and with his feet still bound in chains, Mikal walks up to a MiG.

The MiG is fifteen feet high. He stands under the wing coated densely with the dried lichen and raises his hand and snaps the lighter. The lichen catches on the sixth try and an area of it glows indigo for a moment, then the glimmer spreads sideways and becomes a sheet of scarlet combustion. He steps back: at first it’s only the wing, but then the entire plane becomes sheathed in the bright flame, the tinder-dry lichen flaring abruptly with an explosion of heat. There is a brilliant upwards suck, a one-moment-long vacuum. The machine is on fire from top to bottom, back to front, in about twenty seconds, a burning transparency rushing over the fifty-foot metal shape. A bird made of flames.

He is still cold, his clothing wet, but his hand has become a little steadier and he takes the gun from his pocket and shoots into his chain, shattering the seventh of the thirteen links.

Though they are still lying where they fell, the blood of the other two is beginning to revive also, life returning to their limbs. A great roaring fills the air. Brought out of sleep to find itself in flames, the metal is screaming, and it is as though the plane might take off with the blaze.

‘Come closer,’ he calls over his shoulder.

They rise and slowly walk towards the source of heat, a blast of August temperature in January. Hand’s-breadth pieces of lichen are separating to float up as flakes of blinding light. And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the blaze completes itself and the plane starts to creak emptily and smoulders here and there. Fragments of charcoal lie on the ground with bright crimson points worming along their edges.

The scorched metal continues to give off heat and the father and son stand as close to it as they can tolerate. With a wave of the gun Mikal tells them to follow him as he walks over to another plane, flicking open the lighter once again.

They move from hulk to hulk, from one bright roaring platform to the next, the rotor blades of the Hind helicopters burning like fifty-foot-wide gold stars above them, bathing them in light. They leave a crooked wandering path behind them through that necropolis of steel, their clothes steaming.

When it begins to snow, the snowflakes hiss upon encountering the heated metal.

Eventually both Mikal and the son stop shivering, the released river-grit falling away from their dry clothes, but the father himself has lost too much blood and his condition deteriorates, his face pallid, the lips dark.

‘He’ll be fine when we get to the mosque,’ says the son.

Mikal looks at him. ‘I hope so. But I am not coming with you. I have to go my own way.’

‘Please don’t disappear,’ the boy says softly. ‘We’ll be punished by the master.’

Mikal shakes his head. ‘I have to go. Release that tourniquet every fifteen minutes.’

‘We will be beaten if you run away. Already there is the matter of the ruined van.’

‘I can’t help you. I have to go.’

‘He will kill us.’

‘Then don’t go back,’ Mikal says, suddenly full of fury at the world. ‘You disappear too.’

‘We have to go back,’ the son shouts. There is an edge of desolation to the voice. ‘Our family is where the master is. If we run away he’ll torture them to find out where we are, to force us out of hiding.’

Mikal looks to the ground, then shakes his head. ‘I can’t.’

Sitting in a half-faint, the father opens his eyes for an instant and points to Mikal’s fingers. ‘Maybe when you touch the Prophet’s cloak, the pain in your wounds will stop.’

Mikal begins to walk away, still shaking his head.

‘How can you abandon fellow Muslims like this? Just help me carry him to the mosque. After that you can leave.’

Mikal stops and looks back.

‘I can’t carry him on my own, you can see that,’ the son says, on the verge of tears. ‘He’ll bleed to death.’

‘All right. You and I will take him to the mosque and then I will leave. And we are not stealing anything.’

*

It’s past midnight when they see the mosque in the far distance, a glass moon shining above it. The sacred building stands on the expanse of blue and white snow, appearing separate and singular like something presented on the palm of the hand. The son was here on a reconnoitring trip last month but the area has been transformed by snow and ice. He whispers, ‘Glory be to Allah who changes His world and then changes it again but Himself changes not.’

The father has been babbling, hallucinating as he begins to die.

‘Run to the mosque and get help,’ the son tells Mikal when the man falls silent; then he lowers his father onto his back and, brushing the snow away from his chest, listens for a heartbeat. In his other hand he holds the torch they’d made with a branch and a torn turban. Although it has stopped snowing the snowflakes lie so thickly on them that almost half of their bodies are invisible.

Mikal shakes the whiteness off his face and clothing, patting himself into visibility, and sets off towards the mosque, at a slow pace — if he runs he grows faint. His mind retains very few impressions during the distance to its giant door. Now and then his two pieces of broken chain catch on something behind him, and thin plates of ice break under his feet when he encounters frozen puddles. He arrives at the mosque door but instead of knocking he convinces himself that there is no harm in lying down for a few minutes of rest. How long he lies there at the foot of the door he doesn’t know, but at one point when he tries to turn his head he discovers that his hair has become locked in ice, and later that the two sections of the ankle chain are also fused with the ground.

He lies looking up at the mosque that has the entire Koran inscribed on its exterior walls, domes and balconies. The calligraphy is said to be there on the interior walls and ceilings too. He watches the facade in the moonlight through half-open eyes and it is as though there has been a rain of ink — every drop that had landed on a surface had formed a word instead of a splash.

He looks at the sky as he sinks into sleep. Arabic is written up there in the cosmos too, he knows. Of the six thousand stars visible to the naked eye, 210 have Arabic names. Aldebaran, the follower. Algol, the ghoul. Arrakis, the dancer. Fomalhaut, the mouth of the fish. Altair, the bird … He falls asleep and there is a city under the stars in an undiscovered country, no lamp in any window. The only light is the constellations and the city’s minarets, each one of which is burning, a tall plume of fire, the flames streaming in the wind now and then. He enters the deserted city knowing that a group of black-clad figures is following him. Though he cannot see them he somehow knows that they have the natural fighting power of mountain lions, and he passes under several burning minarets before pushing open a door and entering a house and some time later he hears his pursuers come in. They spread out through the rooms and they make no attempt to lower their voices, to conceal their search for him. He climbs over the wall into the mosque next door. He picks up a book from a niche and removes a page and crumples it in his hand and then straightens it and places it on the floor. He does this with another page — introducing wrinkles into it and then putting it on the floor beside the first one — and then with another and then another, and eventually with all of them, lit by the light of the burning minaret, moving backwards as he leaves the paper on the floor. If anyone steps on them, he’ll hear it. When the floor around him is lined with the pages, he lies down at the centre of them and closes his eyes — a rectangular clearing, the exact dimensions of a grave.

*

There are moments of faint awareness through the dark. People moving near him. Hands that touch. Candlelight. Eventually he is able to awaken fully and things are called into being. He is on a sheet spread out on the bare floor, no pillow, and he is wearing a dry set of clothes. An aged man is tending to him with a gentle pensiveness, his beard falling to his stomach in two silver divisions.

‘Did you get them out of the snow?’

‘Who?’

‘I left two people outside.’ Mikal sits up slowly and looks around.

‘There’s no one out there.’

‘Maybe you can’t see them because it’s dark.’

‘It’s no longer night. It’s morning.’

The mosque is a ruin, and the man is burning a reed prayer mat and a heap of straw prayer caps to keep him warm. Propped up against the pillars are words that have fallen away from the walls, lines of calligraphy that curve and knot purposefully, collecting force and delight and aura as they go.

He stands up, wrapping the sheet around him as he rises. ‘In which room is the Prophet’s cloak kept?’

The man offers him a piece of bread. ‘The Prophet’s cloak is in Kandahar. What would it be doing here?’

‘I was told it was brought here.’

‘No. It’s always been in Kandahar.’ The man touches his forehead. ‘You are tired. Lie down and rest.’

‘I dreamt I tore pages out of a book of hymns to protect myself.’

The man thinks for a moment. ‘There is a kind of tree whose leaves do not fall,’ he says, ‘and in that it is like an ideal Muslim. But Allah understands if we don’t succeed in being perfect in this imperfect world.’ He smiles at Mikal.

Mikal begins to eat the bread, its core humid and porous. The man tells him that he is from Yemen, a foreigner trapped in Afghanistan. Scattered in various areas of the mosque, Mikal finds others like him, smelling more like wild animals than humans, entire families from Arab countries, destroyed-looking women and children. They have been on the run since October, making various journeys towards places of safety, to find some path back to their homelands. One little girl stands apart from other children, not participating in their activities, and he realises only after a while that she has no arms.

Though still very tired and weak, he opens the door to the south minaret and begins to climb up, looking out through the small recessed windows as he goes, the landscape altering with every turn of the spiral. Emerging into open air at the top, he examines his surroundings, the sky a water stain on paper. He is unable to understand why he was told the mosque contained the cloak, why he was sent on this trip.

Beside him on the facade, an ant is wandering in the shallow trough that forms the word ‘Allah’, carrying a wheat grain in its mouth, trying to climb out of the word but falling back into it again and again.

He turns around to leave and everything slides into place when he notices the large boot print in the snow next to his feet, a quick ray of recognition: the warlord sent him here to be picked up by the Americans. They were delivering him.

The Americans pay $5,000 for each suspected terrorist.

He rushes down the spiral — as fast as he is able, the two pieces of chain falling ahead of him and getting under his feet — and asks if they know the warlord who’d been holding him prisoner.

‘Yes,’ the bearded man answers. ‘He was the one who sent all of us to the mosque. He told us to gather here and wait to be taken out of Afghanistan.’

Mikal counts the men and they are twenty-two including him. $5,000 x 22 = $110,000.

And now his hearing picks up the outermost ring of a wave of sounds, something just on the limit of being audible, his heart giving a great leap and then seeming to go still in recoil. There is a questioning stir from everyone and then they too catch the reverberation of American helicopters arriving overhead. Cautiously, Mikal moves towards the mosque door and reaches out his hand to part the panels, but the door is opened suddenly from the other side just then and blinding snowlight fills his eyes and there is a confusion of shouts. Several figures overpower him and he watches the aged gentleman begin to run to the other side of the prayer hall, watches as an American soldier picks up a chair and launches it towards the man across the long space: a clean, effortless arc is described and then the chair connects with the fleeing man’s shoulders and he falls with a sharp cry. Mikal’s hands and feet are fastened with zip-locks and he is carried outside to the big bird with the twin propellers. He hears gunfire from the building and the screams of women and children. They leave him on his stomach beside the machine and go back inside and he watches as one by one the other men are brought out and made to lie on their stomachs beside him.

17

Naheed is in the glasshouse with Rohan.

‘I have been thinking,’ Rohan says. ‘The best method of recalling the colour red is to touch a warm surface. That sensation to the hand is what the colour red is to the eye.’

‘Your eyes will heal, Father.’ She makes sure to say it with a certain lightness, hoping the words will contain audible hints of her smile.

There are bandages over his eyes.

‘And the stars,’ he says, ‘the twinkling of them. I will remember them by holding the palm of my hand in the rain.’

She imagines him trying to find equivalent sensations for everything that is lost to him. The sky. His own hand. The transparent case of a dragonfly’s head.

There is still a certain amount of vision in the eyes but the doctors they have consulted have said that it is the very last, that it too will disappear within a few months.

‘You’ll be fine,’ she repeats. ‘The specialist we will see this morning is said to be the very best in the province.’

They are tending to his Himalayan orchids. He feels along the stem and tells her where to make the cut. She holds the scalpel inside a brazier of glowing coals to sterilise the blade every few minutes, dusting the cuts with powdered cinnamon as a guard against infection. His hands rest on the table as if to steady the world, or to make it stay there. Whenever she removes the bandages it is like taking the hood off a falcon’s head. He is alert as he hunts colours and shapes. He doesn’t know when he will be given a sighted day, and on most days he sees nothing at all.

He moves closer to the brazier.

‘Are you cold? I will take you in.’

‘They are saying the snow is very thick in the north this year. May God help the poor up there.’

She guides him into the house and then along the corridor into his room. Mecca House. He settles in the armchair of faded blue brocade. On the table are some of the books she had been reading to him, having taken them out of the boxes. There is a volume of letters that an American poet wrote to the families of American soldiers, during a war within America a long time ago.

Washington, August 10, 1863. To Mr and Mrs Haskell.

Dear Friends: I thought it would be soothing to you to have a few lines about the last days of your son Erastus Haskell, of Company K 141st New York Volunteers …

She looks down at the finger she has accidentally cut in the glasshouse. Incising her flesh it’s Jeo’s blood she sees. And that of Mikal. Rohan came back from Peshawar without his vision and with the news of Mikal’s grave. Basie has visited it since. They considered reburial in Heer but it has been turned into a shrine and they will leave it there, a profusion of myths and legends around it.

‘How is the bird pardoner’s boy?’ Rohan asks. ‘I must visit the family.’

‘Basie and Yasmin went to see them yesterday,’ she tells him. ‘The boy won’t let any man come near him.’

He nods. ‘For now, Tara, Yasmin and you can visit him. We have to help the family any way we can.’

‘Yes, Father.’

She closes the book of letters and under it the Dictionary of Colour lies open.

Dragon — A bright greenish yellow.

Dragon’s Blood — The bright red resin of the Indian Palm tree, Calamus draco (or perhaps of the shrub Pterocarpus draco).

Drop Black — An intense black pigment made from calcinated animal bones.

He had wished to have colours described to him one by one, all shades and subtleties.

Jeweller’s Rouge — A powdered red oxide used to polish gold and silver plate.

Womb Red — Illustrated as scarlet but with no clues as to the origin of the term.

She walks out and crosses the garden towards the kitchen, entering through the banana grove.

‘Have you given any thought to what I said?’ Tara asks, as she bandages the cut finger.

She leans against the wall beside her mother.

‘Naheed, have you given any thought to what I said?’

‘I am not getting married again.’

‘You said you were waiting for Mikal. We now have confirmation that he too is dead.’

She doesn’t say anything. A minute later she takes the bowlful of flour from the shelf and trails her hands through it, holding the injured finger aloft as she parts and combs small ridges and peaks, working away the lumps. She pours vanilla essence and ground almonds into her half-folded hand and adds them to the cake mixture. Then she reaches into a pan and scoops out the white butter. Deftly she squeezes it through the flour. Water-thinned milk streaming down the three undamaged fingers, she forms the dough with the other hand.

‘The dead don’t return, Naheed.’

She looks at her mother and says after a while, ‘I don’t want to think about it.’

‘I don’t want to think about it either, but I have to.’ Tara reaches forward with the salt jar and adds a pinch to the bowl, something Naheed always forgets. ‘How will I face your father on Judgement Day? What will I say when he accuses me in Allah’s presence of not having given you the best life possible?’

The girl shakes her head slowly.

‘I am going to start looking for a suitable match,’ Tara says.

Naheed turns away from her. Wetting a muslin cloth to cover the bowl of dough. ‘I have to take Father to the doctor. Would you go out to the crossroads and get us a rickshaw? Tell the driver we are going to the corner where Lumber Bazaar meets Savings Bazaar.’

Tara had wanted Yasmin and Basie to accompany Rohan to the doctor. To keep both of them away from the Christian school where they teach, for however short a period. There was another explosion at a church the day before yesterday. Their safety is a constant anxiety throughout the day. She gets up and begins to put on her burka, doing up the long row of buttons at the front. ‘I hope this new doctor will say something different from the others.’

Through the window Naheed watches her go past the pink mulberry that has a honey-like taste but only if eaten under its tree, so tender is it that it cannot even withstand being transported. But Tara is back only a few moments later, followed by Sharif Sharif. Dressed in white he has a flat brown crocodile-skin bag under one arm, its zip golden. Upon noticing Naheed he takes a comb from his pocket and passes it once along each side of his head.

She moves to the kitchen table and holds the empty cup her mother left behind. There is warmth in it still and it is transferred onto her skin. The colour red.

*

Tara leads the man along the corridor. She’d met him just outside the gate and he said he’d come to see Rohan.

She announces him and withdraws without a glance in his direction. Hate is a male domain. When she has to think of this man she feels anger instead.

‘I am here on a delicate matter,’ Sharif Sharif says. Sitting on the chair beside him he is still holding Rohan’s hand from when he shook it. ‘It concerns your daughter-in-law.’

‘Naheed?’ Rohan hears the rustle of his starched clothes, the metal clank of his wristwatch.

‘Yes. I care deeply for her.’

‘You have been good to her and her mother. The entire neighbourhood is aware that you have been taking only the minimum rent from that poor lady for some time.’

‘I do what Allah allows me to do. I seek no reward in this world. But I see that bad times have fallen on the two women again. And on you, as the only male decision maker in Naheed’s life.’ Sharif Sharif sighs. ‘But these days, with this war, it appears that Allah has decided to test all us Muslims. Anyway, I am here to tell you that I would be willing to ease your burden.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I am willing to marry Naheed to put an end to your worries and her widowhood.’

Rohan sits up in the chair.

‘I have two wives already, but our religion allows us to marry again if we can prove that we can look after the new wife financially and emotionally …’

‘Sharif Sharif-sahib, I must say I am a little surprised. She is nineteen years old.’

‘That makes her a grown woman.’

‘Indeed. But I was attempting to point out the age difference.’

He is silent. On the table are various magnifying glasses brought out of Sofia’s study and Rohan hears him touching them. With them she would study twigs, petals, beaks, feathers and pollen grains before beginning to paint, and in his sighted days Rohan has been examining the world with them, storing up information.

Sharif Sharif says at last, ‘Be kind enough to think about it. You are a wise man and must know that it’s not good for young girls to be without a man once they have been with a man. It can cause them to seek out what they once had any which way.’

Rohan stands up. ‘Thank you for your interest and your kindness.’

‘A woman’s heart is soft and trusting, she can be corrupted all too easily.’

‘Thank you for your interest and your kindness.’

‘Do think about it and let me know. But that is not the only reason why I am here. Please be seated. Please. I wished to ask about your eyes. You must need funds for treatments and operations, and I was wondering if I could help in any way.’

What exactly could this person be implying? Does he think Rohan would contemplate giving him Naheed in exchange for money? ‘I thank you for coming,’ he says curtly.

There is a silence and then he hears Sharif Sharif begin to walk out of the room. Tersely he says in the man’s direction:

‘The girl will be looked after very well as long as I am alive. And after I am gone she has Basie, who thinks of her as his sister.’

‘It appears I have offended you,’ Sharif Sharif says from the door.

‘I have raised one daughter who makes an honest and honourable living, and I will make sure Naheed too takes that path if she wishes.’

He sits down and realises he is shaking with fear and rage.

*

He listens to the streets as he travels with the girl, the rickshaw crossing the major roads and entering the density of the bazaars. She holds his right hand, her own two hands placed gently above and below it. Beneath the bandages and the closed lids there are specks of light like coloured sand in his eyes, a vast visual song of the cells expressing their internal life, and out there is another song called Heer, called Pakistan, the people buying, selling, asking, shouting, the minarets insisting on Paradise at every street corner, and in his mind he sees the shop signs painted with heartbreaking precision and beauty by barely literate men and he listens to the slap of wrestlers against each other, gleaming with oil, the arcades under which pieces of meat sizzle, cubbyhole shops selling Japanese sewing machines, English tweed and Chinese crockery, the fruit sellers standing behind walls of stacked oranges, and women’s clothes hanging in shop windows in sheaths of pure lines and colours, teaching one the meaning of grace in one’s life, and he wishes Sofia were here so he could ask her to describe these things for him, she who had made an entire life out of seeing, possessing an enraptured view of the everyday, who knew which section of the house received the most moonlight on any given night of the lunar calendar, and he wonders if this is how the dead mourn the world they have left behind, if this is how she mourns it below ground.

*

The doctor is studying Rohan’s files when they enter the office. He is a young man and has recently returned from studying in the West. He looks up, and in utter silence stares at Rohan’s face.

Removing Rohan’s bandages he lifts the cotton pads from the eyelids, parting them gently with his fingers.

‘Can you see me?’ he asks.

‘No.’

The doctor guides Rohan into the examination room adjoining the office, Naheed catching a glimpse of the heavy-seeming machinery in dull grey steel and shining chrome as the green curtain is released behind them.

She sits alone in the office, looking into the book she has brought. This specialist is the final hope. One of the others said they should stitch shut the eyelids permanently. Last week Tara had visited the cleric at the mosque, to see if any specific verses of the Koran could be read for the restoration of vision. ‘Why could you not have come to me sooner?’ the cleric had said, unable to conceal his wounded feelings. But he was not saddened or aggrieved on his own behalf. ‘You thought you were modern people, wanted to visit as many doctors as you could before turning to Allah. It seems to me to be a case of “We might as well give Him a try too.”’

Twenty minutes go by and the green curtain is lifted and the doctor leads Rohan out.

Rohan gropes for Naheed’s hand as he settles in his chair.

‘So. As I have just explained to your father-in-law,’ the doctor says to her, ‘we need to carry out a number of procedures over the next six to eight months to restore the vision.’

‘He will be able to see again?’

Before the doctor can respond, Rohan says, ‘We can’t afford the operations, Naheed.’

Naheed tries to swallow but can’t.

The doctor looks at the files. ‘I am sure we can correct his original condition too. With the new medical advances in the West there is no reason why he should ever be blind.’ Naheed cannot help but express an elated astonishment at this but again Rohan says,

‘We can’t afford the operations, Naheed.’

‘Could you not sell something?’ the doctor asks. ‘Do you still live in that building with the garden that used to be the school?’

Rohan looks towards him. ‘I wasn’t aware that we knew each other.’

‘I was a pupil of yours. You expelled me because my mother was a sinner.’

Rohan is still.

Naheed knows the story of the prostitute’s son. The boy who tried to steal a spade from the school garden. He wanted to go to the cemetery and dig up what his mother had always said was his father’s grave.

The doctor, his face utterly serious, has his eyes locked on Rohan.

‘I recognised the name the moment I saw the report, and I recognised you as you walked in.’

‘I have had occasion to think of you not a few times over the years.’

‘And I about you.’

‘You are a doctor now.’

‘The clinic is named after my late mother.’

Naheed sees how this has shaken Rohan. ‘So these operations you have suggested …’

The man swings his black chair towards her. ‘We will have to act fast. You will need to get the funds together soon. Unfortunately in a case like this almost every day counts.’

‘And the original cause is reversible too?’

‘Yes. You seem to have been given outdated advice. There has been much scientific progress.’

Is he trying to destroy Rohan? Are these operations beneficial or necessary? Will he just waste the money on unneeded procedures and then claim he did his best? But, no. It is said that something in people’s souls will not let them take advantage of the blind or deceive them. The Koran admonishes a personage — some believe it to be Muhammad himself — for ignoring a blind man in a gathering of influential tribal chiefs.

‘My reasons to expel you from Ardent Spirit seemed persuasive at the time,’ Rohan says suddenly.

The doctor ignores the comment. ‘When should I schedule the next appointment?’ He holds out the reports. Rohan extends his arm towards the sound and takes them, the hand groping in the air before grabbing, like a bird trying to alight on a branch in a strong wind.

‘When did your mother die, may I ask?’

‘The year I graduated from medical school.’

‘The name didn’t bring her to mind,’ Rohan says. ‘I am sorry to hear of her death. May Allah have compassion on her soul.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I just meant … Allah is all-forgiving …’

‘She was the most decent human being I knew.’

Naheed watches him concentrating on the man’s words. She knows from Mikal the power the voice has to reveal someone. Sometimes when he sang she would close her eyes and realise that every emotion that had been present in his facial expressions was also present in his voice.

‘I am sorry to hear of her death,’ Rohan says again. ‘There are many ways to live a good life, and Allah is all-forgiving.’

The doctor looks at him and then in a calm controlled gesture rings the bell for the next patient to be shown in.

‘Thank you,’ Naheed says, getting up. ‘We’ll contact you about the next appointment.’

‘I look forward to hearing from you,’ the doctor says without looking up.

*

Night, and he walks in his garden, hands outstretched, touching the skin of the world in the darkness. He moves beside the night scent of flowers, feels on the bark the names Jeo and Mikal had scratched when they were children.

That afternoon thirty years ago, when the boy was brought into his office, Rohan had no intimation that one of the darkest years of his marriage was about to begin. The child was amiable and conscientious but was brought in because he had attempted to steal from the school’s garden — this garden, here. Some of the more daring boys often did that, picking fruit from the trees or taking bird eggs. But he was attempting to steal an implement from the shed. At first he would not explain his motives. Eventually he said, ‘I want to dig up my father’s grave to see if it matches the picture that my mother keeps on the shelf.’ His fellow students had been taunting him. Some of them were summoned to the office and the complete details of the entire affair came to light. There was no father, the mother was a fallen woman.

Rohan went to see her that very afternoon, knocking on the door of the house and waiting while a youth, no older than the senior boys at Ardent Spirit, came out. Suddenly he had a vision of the woman corrupting his student body. There was no prejudice at Ardent Spirit. There were all sects of Islam at the school. Shias, Deobandis, Wahabis. When Rohan heard that a teacher had given a Shia student fewer marks than he deserved, he had investigated the matter immediately. But this was different.

To his utter shock the woman was unrepentant. He offered to waive her son’s fees if she would put an end to her commerce. He visited her every day for a week to try and persuade her. Almost every student knew about it by then and a number of alarmed parents had visited Rohan, threatening to withdraw their children. He went to the classroom mid-lesson and asked him to collect his things.

‘Sir, I am sorry for stealing the spade.’

‘That is not the reason for your expulsion,’ he remembers saying, looking directly ahead. ‘Your mother is a sinful woman.’

They got into the rickshaw and putting his hand into his satchel the boy brought out an eraser. ‘Sir, I borrowed this from Fareed Chaudhuri. Can you give this back to him please?’

Rohan put the item in his pocket. ‘I will do that later.’

The woman came to the door of her house and took the child in wordlessly.

Sofia raged at him. She wanted to go to the woman’s house and bring back the boy — a thought that stunned him. There would be no eye contact with her for over a year after that day. He felt persecuted, believing he had done the only correct thing possible under the circumstances, and he had begged Allah for strength and begged Him to forgive Sofia for some of the words she had uttered in fury.

In the garden one dawn, the house lit red by the sunrise, she said she was leaving him.

They had both attended Punjab University in Lahore, though at different times, he being five years older. Born and raised in Heer, and possessing an intense shyness of character, he had not fitted in at the university, or into the large city. His efforts to understand himself and his times were lonely ones, and he lived in fear of — and perhaps even a mild revulsion at — the behaviour of the other students. He stood out to the extent that he could not even bring himself to wear Western clothes — those trousers that had pockets in appallingly inappropriate places, front and back, from where items of food could then be pulled out and eaten, hands removed to be shaken, documents produced and handed over. She — who was also from Heer — had thrived at the university however. A laughing confident beauty. He was already teaching at a government school when he met her. She was the new English teacher, and a month after they were introduced she caught him opening a notebook in which she had been writing earlier: full of longing for her, he had wished to see her handwriting. Some glimpse of a thing that was intrinsically her. Intimate. And he knew she might be his only chance at happiness. At the year’s end she entered the room and, lowering herself into a sitting position before him, told him he must ask her to marry him. Covering his lying mouth with her hands when he tried to protest.

Her emotions were always closer to the surface than his.

Now she placed the large suitcase on the dresser in their bedroom and emptied her wardrobe into it, and it remained there for a year. She herself moved into her study. Some nights he would hear her come into their bedroom and he would pretend to be asleep. 2 a.m. or 3 or 4. And she would sit in the chair for a while and watch him. Then she would rise and take a few items out of the open suitcase and leave. Then one day her clothes were back in the wardrobe. Her parents were dead and her brother had his own family. She had nowhere to go, the brother reminding her that she had chosen to marry Rohan without seeking his counsel. ‘Now go and be a modern woman,’ he said. ‘Live somewhere divorced and alone.’ He had waited all these years to avenge the slight to his honour.

*

He turns his face upwards, where the visible planets must be burning in the eastern sky. He reaches the overgrown thor bush and slowly raises his hands towards the spike-filled branches, wondering how he will know which of these limbs must be amputated next year to restore symmetry.

18

The air of the February evening is dabbed with fog and the saluki appears and disappears within it. Major Kyra walks into Ardent Spirit’s Baghdad House. The boy who had opened the school’s gate for him is a few paces ahead, calling to the hound. He is in his late teens and is known for his passionate nature, his limbs full of disciplined movements, and eyes capable of a sudden flaring as when straw is thrown onto a fire. He owns a deadly dagger as beautiful as a toy, and his name is Ahmed. Five months ago his father was at work in the ice factory when a rectangular block of ice slid down a ramp and shattered. A foot-long splinter flew up and pierced his diaphragm from below. It continued through the left lung and entered his heart. He fell backwards onto the floor and that was where he was discovered half an hour later. By then the ice fragment inside him had melted away. The neighbourhood women insisted he had been killed with a ghost dagger by Ahmed’s mother, who had died the previous year and who had known nothing but contempt and ruthlessness from her husband while she was alive.

He joined the jihad in October and went away towards Kabul, returning only a fortnight ago.

Major Kyra follows him along a corridor, having tied the saluki to a chair leg in the hallway.

The day-to-day affairs of Ardent Spirit’s six houses — Mecca, Baghdad, Cairo, Cordoba, Delhi and Ottoman — are the responsibility of six senior boys, Ahmed being one of them. And they are all gathered in the room when Major Kyra and Ahmed enter.

The candlelight casts oversized shadows on the walls. Kyra lowers himself onto the woollen carpet bought from the smugglers’ market in the North-West Frontier Province. The six boys position themselves before him in a semicircle.

With his flame-scarred hands — they look as though they’ve been put together from scraps of leather — Ahmed holds a piece of paper towards Kyra. On it are the layouts of Heer’s Christian school and church. All sides of the two buildings have their lengths written down next to them, and all the surrounding roads are named.

‘Bombing the church or the Christian school will not achieve anything,’ Kyra says. ‘Such explosions in other places have not deterred the West from continuing with its war, nor forced the Pakistani government to withdraw its support for the Western occupiers.’

‘We are the world’s seventh nuclear power,’ the boy from Ottoman House says quietly, ‘and yet our government does the bidding of the Americans, as though we were nothing but beggars.’ The knowledge of his helplessness is making him angry, he the brother of someone who had gone to Afghanistan in October and is now believed to be in US custody.

‘Twenty or thirty Pakistanis, be they Christian or Muslim, dying in an explosion in Pakistan isn’t going to matter at all,’ Kyra says. ‘Neither our own government nor anyone in the West will care about it.’

The head of Ottoman House says, ‘If we don’t send a message now they will attack other Muslim countries.’

The boy from Delhi House extends a hand towards Ahmed. ‘Tell him.’

‘Tell me what?’ Kyra asks. There is a companionship among the boys that will probably never be bettered in their lives.

‘Why don’t we raid the school and hold everyone hostage? The teachers and the students. Release a list of demands. We should ask for the Americans to leave Afghanistan and free all our brothers who are being held prisoner by them.’

Kyra studies the paper. ‘Do we have enough men for such an operation?’

‘The six of us will form a sufficiently strong core. Beyond that we need a dozen or so others. We can find them.’

‘The siege could last several days,’ Kyra says.

‘Yes,’ Ahmed says. ‘We need to calculate exactly how many weapons we’ll need and of what kind. We’ll have to buy some.’

With Ardent Spirit no longer linked to the Pakistani military and the ISI, the influx of funds has disappeared. Arranged by the ISI, there used to be donation boxes in many cities across Pakistan. Two years ago, during the festival to mark the Sacrifice of Abraham, Ardent Spirit had received contributions of almost $2 million, mostly from the hides of the sacrificed sheep. During the same month millions more were raised from the 675,000 Pakistanis who live in Britain. Money also came from Muslims in India — Kashmir, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Gujarat. But access to all of this is now denied Kyra. He will have to use his own money.

‘It will be hazardous but it is a cause worth dying for,’ Ahmed is saying. ‘And as for the other side, the founder and headmaster of the school, Father Mede, is an infidel. The teachers at the school are Muslim but traitors to Islam, filling the heads of the children with un-Islamic things like music and biology and English literature. And the students too are traitors.’

‘They laugh at us,’ says the boy from Ottoman House. ‘They refer to us who attend schools like Ardent Spirit as “donkeys”. They say we and our like have made Pakistan unlivable.’

‘Father Mede is white,’ Kyra says. ‘An Englishman. It’ll become an international affair.’

‘Exactly,’ says the head of Mecca House, leaning forward. ‘They will pay attention if something happens to a white person. We could kill a few teachers to indicate our seriousness and hold him as the chief bargaining and negotiating asset.’

‘There will be no bargaining or negotiating, brother,’ the head of Cairo House says.

‘Leverage, then.’

‘He is over seventy years old,’ Ahmed says.

‘Do you think they are asking to see birth certificates before dropping bombs in Afghanistan?’

‘Brother,’ Ahmed says, ‘you misunderstand me. I was just thinking that it would make the authorities act with speed. It’s in our favour. How do you feel about capturing him and bringing him here?’

‘It’s not good to have infidels in the house,’ three of the boys say in unison.

The doorbell sounds and Ahmed leaves the room to answer it, making sure his back is never turned towards the Koran and other religious texts on the shelf.

Kyra opens the book of the Prophet’s sayings. Number 813: I was given the following words of the Prophet by Hukm bin Nafa, who was given them by Shoaib, who was given them by Zehri, who was given them by Abu Salma, who was given them by Abu Horaira. The Prophet said, ‘The End of the World won’t be until two armies have gone to war proclaiming an identical goal.’

*

When Ahmed returns he is accompanied by a middle-aged woman wrapped in a shawl, her face marked with the deep lines of resignation and self-control. Maintaining a pointedly respectful distance from the sphere of candlelight in which the men are, she greets everyone and sits down in the far corner.

‘How can I be of help, sister-ji?’ Kyra asks.

She smiles. ‘I am the mother of one of the former students at Ardent Spirit. He is about to go abroad to study.’

‘I am delighted to hear that one of our students is prospering.’

‘He was given a good start here by your elder brother, may he rest in peace,’ the woman says to Kyra. ‘My boy was at Ardent Spirit for just the first two years of his education, then we moved to another neighbourhood so I had to take him out.’

‘May Allah grant him continued success so he can make Pakistan and Islam proud. Which country will he be going to? Indonesia, Malaysia, Egypt?’

‘He has a scholarship to America. His entire education will be paid for by a university there.’

Kyra considers this. ‘It would have been preferable if he had chosen a Muslim country instead of the West with its blood-stained wealth. Which city in America will he go to?’

The woman gave a nervous laugh. ‘I can’t remember the name. I will send him to you, you can ask him yourself.’

‘Do send him.’

The woman is now leaning towards the candlelight. She appears to be someone who knows she is having one of the most important conversations of her life. ‘I have a favour to ask of you, brother Kyra. On his application form, he has chosen not to mention that he attended Ardent Spirit. You must be aware that schools such as these have developed certain connotations of late. If the Americans discover the truth they could refuse him his university place altogether. Or they could arrest him at the airport.’

Kyra watches the shock of the boys, the glazed smile appearing on Ahmed’s face as he begins to contort the rosary tightly in his hands, his jaw muscles working.

The woman seems not to know where to rest her glance. ‘Also, with the news of his good fortune spreading in the neighbourhood, some envious person could alert the Americans to my boy’s two years at Ardent Spirit. This frightens me.’

With glacial politeness, Kyra says, ‘The aim of Ardent Spirit is to teach decency and love of Islam to the young, sister-ji. That was the case in the past, it is the case in the present, and it shall be the case in the future.’

‘Insha-Allah,’ say the boys in unison.

‘I agree, but still, brother-ji, if someone comes and asks you about it, my request is that you deny my son ever attended your school.’

‘What is more important to you, good aunt,’ Ahmed asks with a sharp indrawn breath, ‘the truth or your children?’

‘Both. I want the truth to live in my children. I don’t think I have to sacrifice either.’

‘And yet you are asking us to lie for you.’

‘I feel terrible to have come to you with this,’ the woman says, confused and distressed. ‘I am an illiterate woman, so you know better than me what is occurring in the world ever since the Jews carried out the terrorist attacks in America. You know perfectly well that there is a possibility my son could lose this golden opportunity.’ Suddenly she begins to weep, covering her face with her shawl, and is unable to speak for almost half a minute. She says eventually, ‘I have nothing but him. He must become an educated and wealthy man. He has four sisters whose dowry he has to provide for.’

Ahmed stands up and gestures towards the door. ‘Let me show you out, good aunt.’

‘My brother never wanted anything but the best for his students,’ Kyra says. ‘Why can’t your son stay and study right here in Pakistan?’

The head of Ottoman House looks at the woman with an unkillable light in his eyes. ‘Good aunt, a dollar is worth seventy-two Pakistani rupees. Do you know why? Allow me to tell you. It is because each American person loves America seventy-two times more than each Pakistani person loves Pakistan. That is why.’

‘Almost all of us are traitors,’ says the boy from Cordoba House, his head low with anguish. ‘Now, good aunt, please allow brother Ahmed to show you out. It is dark and you should be home.’

The woman wipes her tears on her shawl and gets to her feet and whispers a farewell. As the two of them leave, the other boys sit in a silence that seems more and more like a seeking. Nothing remains in the room but the truth and they see the enormity of their struggle, the light from the candle weak but undeceiving. They are all aware that across the planet words are being said about them in ten languages, sinister ungodly plans being hatched to eliminate them.

‘It’s a test,’ one of them says quietly. ‘We, our very souls, are being attacked by the West from many directions.’

‘We mustn’t lose heart,’ Kyra says. ‘Remember the anvil lasts longer than the hammer.’

Ahmed returns and takes his position in the semicircle. ‘We should begin planning the siege.’ He unfolds the paper with the two drawings and studies it carefully. He turns to the boy from Cairo House. ‘What is the latest news about Father Mede?’

‘He’s not in Heer. He has gone on his annual tour around Punjab, visiting the school’s other branches. And he is inaugurating a new branch in Faisalabad.’

‘It’s provocation,’ the head of Mecca House says. ‘I stopped one of their teachers in the street last month and told her that they need to curtail their activities, not expand the Christian school, or carry out repairs and refurbishments of the building, but she looked at me as if I wasn’t there.’

Ahmed takes a pen from his pocket and draws arrows indicating all the entrances to the school. ‘They’ll notice us,’ he says. ‘We’ll drag his and his teachers’ corpses along the Grand Trunk Road if we have to. They’ll notice us soon enough.’

19

The helicopter, as it brings Mikal to the American prison, is filled with the curses and prayers of the other captives. Some of them were shot as they tried to escape or resisted capture and Mikal can smell the blood, and he can tell that some of them have lost control of their bladders with fear.

His arms and legs zip-locked, a hood covering his head, he is carried out of the Chinook and the place they bring him to has the scent of the inside of a balloon. When they remove the hood he sees that he is in a tent that has white sheets of rubber insulation buttoned onto its green canvas. There are a dozen hospital beds but he is the only one here. One of the two Americans in attendance writes the number 121 on his shirt in black felt-tip pen. I am the one hundred and twenty-first prisoner here? But it is altered to 120 when a third white man comes and says something in English to the others. They had miscounted or perhaps one of the other prisoners has just died.

Getting him to open his mouth they shine beams of light into his throat and then his ears and eyes, a pair of surgical scissors cutting away the old bloodstained strips of cloth that serve as bandages for his hands. He hears the barking of dogs. Perhaps the prisoner who has just died was trying to escape. Quickly but expertly, they clean the wounds and dress them, the new bandages overlapping each other like a basket being woven, a brilliant clean white that is painful on his eye, reminding him of the snow out of which he was plucked, and then they look at the bullet wound on his neck and expose his chest to examine the blade and bullet lesions on his torso, and the medicines they apply bring an astounding reduction of the pain. He wishes to cry out at the relief.

In another room where the dogs are louder they overpower him when he refuses to accept the removal of trousers and they cut off all his clothes and as he stands there naked they bring a circular electric saw and slice the manacles off his feet, throwing jets of soft sparks along the floor and into his leg hair. He struggles in terror when they must perform a cavity search and he snarls, roaring, and they have to pin him down and afterwards they put him in a jumpsuit and lock his ankles in their own manacles, shiny and complicated as puzzles, his wrists also in chains. Where is this place? Is he still in Afghanistan? They photograph him against a height chart and then they shave his beard and hair off and photograph him again.

His head disappearing into a hood again they leave him somewhere for a short while, just a few minutes during which he falls into dead-weighted sleep, the exhaustion making each bone feel as though wrung tight as the horn of a ram, and then they come and lead him to another place. When the black hood is removed he sees that he is in a small room, no bigger than ten feet by twelve. A cabin or a booth. A large white man sits in the left corner under a poster of the Twin Towers, the moment the second plane hit, the fireball attached to the side of the building.

There is a table with two chairs on opposite sides, facing each other, one of which Mikal is made to sit in. Another white man — equally bulky and over six foot tall — comes in with a man whose skin is the same colour as Mikal’s own. The brown-skinned man says in Pashto that he is the interpreter, and then — when Mikal does not react — says the same thing in Urdu, Punjabi and Hindko. Mikal does not alter his blank expression and he tells Mikal in all four languages that at no point must he attempt to get out of his chair. That the man in the corner under the poster is Military Police and this other white man is here to ask some questions.

‘My name is David Town,’ says the new white man through the interpreter. ‘From the US government. The doctor said you were well enough to speak to me. What is your name? I want to notify your family that you are here.’

Mikal does not answer.

‘Tell me your name and how to reach your family.’

The white man has very pale skin. Mikal has never seen a real white person at close proximity before today. The paleness is actually astonishing.

What will they do to make him talk? Hold a pistol to his head, pull out his fingernails, like the Pakistani jailers did to his father.

‘We know you can speak. You spoke in your sleep. Sometimes in the language of an Afghan, sometimes in the language of a Pakistani. Are you a Pakistani, an Afghan, or an Afghan born and raised in Pakistan?’

Mikal does not answer, his shackled hands resting on the table. Was he asleep long enough to have spoken?

The man puts a book of photographs on the table. ‘Tell me if you recognise anyone in here.’ Slowly he begins to turn the pages, Mikal staring down at the men in Arab headdress, Palestinian scarves, clean-shaven with neckties, young and old, beards long and short.

Just then another white man comes in and motions for David to step out.

When David returns a few minutes later he is an altered man. He begins to shout at Mikal even before sitting down.

‘You were found in a mosque from whose basement we recovered drums of white powder. What is that powder?’

Mikal does not answer.

‘Is it anthrax or ricin?’

Recipes for ricin were found in an al-Qaeda safe house back in November, Mikal has heard, and there are videotapes of al-Qaeda’s experiments on dogs with sarin and cyanide gas.

The man goes on shouting questions at him, his face inches from Mikal’s at times.

‘Or is it something else?’ As the man speaks Mikal keeps his eyes on his mouth, listening to the sounds coming out of it, and not looking at the interpreter beside him who turns those sounds into words. It is as though a disembodied voice in the air is making him comprehend what the white man is saying. ‘What is that substance, and where did you people get it? What were you doing at the mosque?’

Every man at the mosque was picked up. The women and children had been left behind. The man takes out a silver digital camera and shows Mikal shots of women on its flatscreen monitor. ‘These were the women at the mosque. Which one is your wife? Your sister or mother?’

All the women carry an identical expression. Afraid of the gun but contemptuous of the hand that wields it.

‘Maybe we should bring them here. Maybe they can tell me what your name is and who brought the powder to the mosque.’

He closes his eyes and the Military Police soldier shouts at him to open them.

‘If the powder does not belong to you, and was left there by someone else, you should tell us. We have done some tests and we think it could be anthrax. You must tell us what you know and tell us fast because the whole area might have been contaminated. The women and children in there must be evacuated. The only way we can get US chemical teams out to neutralise the stuff is if you tell us what you know. Don’t waste time, those women and children need your help. What is your name and what do you know about that powder?’

‘I don’t know anything,’ Mikal says. ‘I am not from the mosque. I am just a prisoner. At first someone else’s, now yours.’ He speaks Pashto, to keep them as far away as possible from his real identity.

‘What’s your name?’

‘I don’t know anything about the powder.’

‘What happened to your hands? How did you get the bullet wounds on your body? Did you fight with the Taliban against the Americans?’

‘The powder could be insecticide. I saw a large kitchen garden behind the mosque.’

‘We are sure it’s not, we have done initial tests. What’s your name? Did people in expensive Toyota SUVs ever visit the mosque?’

‘I am not from the mosque.’

He is very tired and his head nods and the Military Police soldier shouts at him to stay awake and David wants to know whether he had spent time in Sudan, whether he had fought in Kashmir, if he had any links with the man who planned to blow up Los Angeles airport in 1999, if he had been to Bosnia.

‘Say something. At least tell me we infidels will never win against the likes of you because we love life while you love death.’

As punishment for his silence David asks him to get out of the chair. He is made to lower himself onto his knees and hold out his arms at the sides. David and the interpreter leave the room, and he stays in this position for thirty-five minutes, the Military Police soldier shouting at him every time his arms droop or he slumps forward out of fatigue and the need for sleep.

When David returns he wishes to know whether he has met Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar or Ayman al-Zawahiri. Mikal refuses to speak and they take him to a bare windowless room, attach a chain to his wrists and, asking him to raise his arms above his head, fasten the chain to a ring on the ceiling. The room is filled with brilliant light. A sleep deprivation cell.

Every time he falls asleep the arms shackled to the ceiling wrench him awake.

*

The prison is an abandoned brick factory. In a vast warehouse inside the main building there are two rows of metal cages, filled with boys and young men, some with hoods over their heads, industrial white lights shining down on them at all hours.

After he loses consciousness in the sleep deprivation chamber, he awakens to discover that he has been stripped naked and is being washed with a hosepipe. A Military Policeman dries him and walks him naked to the tent that had smelled of balloons where his wounds are dressed again. They put him in a jumpsuit, put the metal back onto his limbs, and he is brought to one of the cages in the warehouse and he curls up on the floor.

‘Where are you from?’ the boy in the next cage asks.

Mikal doesn’t know whether he has reacted to the question, to the language.

‘My name is Akbar,’ he says to Mikal in Urdu and then Pashto.

As he lies on the floor the boy tells Mikal the nationality of the other people around them, pointing to each cage. Algerian. Sudanese. Russian. Saudi Arabian. His face is serious and beautiful, as is his voice, and he says he was a taxi driver in Jalalabad when he was kidnapped and sold to the Americans for $5,000.

‘What’s your name?’

Mikal closes his eyes, telling himself not to react. He has been placed in the next cage to make Mikal reveal information.

‘Where are you from? The man on my other side is from Morocco. See him, the one with his head bandaged? He is a bit unmanageable. He speaks English but his accent is terrible so he needs an interpreter, and always wants his answers to be translated precisely.’ Mikal hears the chains of the boy as he moves. ‘He hates America and feels it’s necessary to keep telling the interrogators that fact, becoming angry when the interpreter refuses to translate his full answers and says instead “and so on and so forth”. Or “Now he is prattling on about the Koran and the Crusades and the glory of Islam and the Day of Judgement,” or “And now he’s off again on his obsession with death.”’

The boy continues to talk as Mikal hears the noise of someone weeping in a nearby cage, the sound of someone praying, the barking of dogs. Though full of fatigue he focuses on everything in an effort to remain awake — fearful that he might talk in his sleep and reveal something. But the struggle to keep his eyes open is only intermittently successful. During sleep he sees someone rinsing a red garment in flowing water. Moving it around in the current. He approaches and sees that it is not a garment, but his blood, the liquid taken out of Mikal’s body as one article and entity, and being sluiced in the river, all his knowledge being extracted from it.

*

Three white men enter the interrogation booth — that smells of vomit — and begin to shout at him without the interpreter translating any of the words, just screaming into Mikal’s face for more than ten minutes. Then suddenly they stop and leave.

*

‘Did you get the women safely out of the mosque?’ Mikal hears himself asking David.

‘Tell me about Jeo.’

Mikal looks up from the table.

‘Jeo has told me everything about you two.’

‘You have Jeo?’

‘Stay in your chair.’

‘I want to see him.’

‘Impossible. Stay in the chair.’

‘Where is he?’

‘He has told us everything.’

‘There is nothing to tell. Where is Jeo? Is he all right?’

‘Tell us which escape routes the Arab fighters are using to get out of Afghanistan into Pakistan and Iran.’

‘I want to see Jeo.’

‘He says you took a bayt of loyalty to Osama bin Laden two years ago.’ He uses the Arabic word — bayt, a blood oath.

‘You are lying.’

‘Either I am or he is. I am telling you what he told me.’

‘I want to see him.’

‘So it’s a lie?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why would he lie to us?’

‘I don’t know.’ Suddenly a terrible possibility enters his head. ‘What did you do to him to make him confess to that?’

‘Stay in your chair,’ the Military Policeman says loudly from his corner. He stands up to his full height which is well over six feet, obscuring the poster behind him. Talking about the Moroccan and his bandaged head, Akbar said that a female interrogator had asked him how he’d felt when he heard about the attacks on the Twin Towers. The Moroccan said that he had been ecstatic, and when she told him that the first boy she had ever kissed had died in the Towers, he had said, ‘You kissed someone you were not married to? If you were in my family I would cut your throat and wipe the floor with the blood, you disgusting bitch.’ He had spat on her and the Military Policeman had become uncontrollable and beaten him savagely.

‘According to Jeo you have committed to memory the satellite phone numbers of several al-Qaeda lieutenants,’ David says. ‘Give them to me.’

‘Did you beat him? He’s so gentle. He’d say anything to stop the pain.’

‘If a person would say anything to stop the pain, then he would probably start with the truth. No?’

Mikal closes his eyes and incurs the wrath of the Military Policeman who bellows at him to stay awake and pay attention.

‘Let me tell you something,’ David says. ‘The reason the United States isn’t torturing you, hooking you up to electricity or drilling holes in your bones, as some countries in the world do, is not that torture doesn’t work. Torture most definitely does work. But we don’t do it because we believe it is wrong and uncivilised.’

‘I want to see Jeo.’

Did Akbar say to him, while he was going in and out of sleep, that he must never give in to the temptation of grabbing the interrogator’s gun? ‘I think they wear it in the room because they want you to grab it and try to shoot them, so they can charge you with something.’ The soldiers wear them even when they are washing and dressing the prisoners, the prisoners’ hands and feet free of iron.

‘You are lying about Jeo. If you have him then go and ask him what my name is. Come back and tell me.’

‘So what he told us is a lie? Duly noted. We’ll have to make sure he knows what the consequences are for lying to us. Now tell me what your name is and where you are from.’

‘Ask Jeo.’

‘When we captured him he had thousands of Omani rials, American dollars and Pakistani rupees on him. Why do you think he had those?’

‘Ask him.’

‘Did you ever transfer money into Afghanistan from Pakistan — given to you by your al-Qaeda handlers in Pakistan?’

‘Ask Jeo.’

*

He dreams that his father and mother are travelling across land and sea, their path lit by a soul flame. They arrive and deliver him from his chains and lead him out of the cage. He dreams that he has turned into a boar and in mysterious happiness is rushing through the bright colours of various maps, an atlas, pursuing his female and when he finds her he becomes a man in a world so intense that the sound of a flower bud opening can kill and the bulbul is in the letters that spell the word bulbul. No longer bound to their flesh, the pair of them are among the ancient stars, enclosed in perfect crystals shaped like heroes and heroines and demons, true books and instruments of music. Outside his sleep, night has sealed all mirrors but in the clear glass of the dream both of them move fearlessly across the firmament towards knowledge not only of how the world began but of how it will end.

*

‘Did you try to count the teeth of a wolf?’ Akbar asks, pointing to the missing fingers.

‘Why are there pictures in the corridor?’ Mikal says. Their bright colours had pained his eyes. He passes them whenever he is taken to the medical tent where the dressings on his torso and hands are changed, to receive what he is told are antibiotic injections.

‘They are from children in America.’

Drawings of butterflies, flowers, guns shooting at men with beards and helicopters dropping bombs on small figures in turbans.

‘They are letters to the soldiers from schoolchildren. The words say, Go Get the Bad Men and I Hope You Kill Them All and Come Home Safely. I saw one that said, We are praying for you, and said the Rosary for you today in class.’

‘I am going to escape,’ Mikal says to Akbar.

‘Don’t. They shot and killed someone who tried.’

He will have to locate and free Jeo within the factory and then they will break out. Or will he escape and come back for Jeo later?

‘How many guards are there?’ Mikal counts the MPs gathered near the cages. All captured Arabs are eventually sent to Guantánamo Bay. The others must be assessed to see if they should be. A shipment will leave today and since noon yesterday the MPs have been making preparations, laying out new jumpsuits, manacles, leg chains and spray-painted goggles on the floor in plain view of the cages. They pull on the leg chains, and lock and unlock the shiny chrome manacles, to make sure everything is in working order. No one can remain unaware of the rattling, and no one knows who will leave.

Now suddenly it is time, and the MPs are having great difficulty in getting some of the prisoners out of the cages. One prisoner clings to the wire of the cage and sobs as they prise him loose. Another falls to his knees, howling and shouting something in English. ‘He’s imploring for mercy,’ Akbar says. ‘“You promised you wouldn’t send me, Andrew. You promised, Steve, you promised.”’ Kissing the hands of the white men. Others though are just walking out, resigned to their fate, reciting the verses of the Koran.

An MP moves towards Mikal but continues past and enters the adjoining cage, which contains a Nigerian called Mansur. From him there had been complaints that everything in Afghanistan was inferior to Africa, even the rain and wind here were of an inferior quality. A Christian who had converted to Islam, and in the interrogating booth was constantly trying to convert the Americans, he is now being readied to be put on a plane.

*

‘What is your name?’ David asks.

Mikal sits still.

Just then there comes the sound of screaming from the other side of the wall. Someone in terrible agony.

‘Who is that?’

‘Who do you think?’ David says. ‘Jeo lied to us, so now we are making him tell us the truth.’

The boy next door sounds like an animal in sacrificial torment.

It’s not Jeo. He must remain composed.

‘What is your name?’

It’s not Jeo. Does anyone in the world know where the two of them are? Is anyone searching for them?

‘What is your name?’

But he is unable to bear it and says at last, ‘Stop beating him.’

‘We are just making sure we know the truth. Stay in your chair.’

‘Please stop it. Don’t hurt him, please. You said you wouldn’t torture.’ He stands up and reaches for David with his hands, then in the same movement turns and rushes towards the door in disordered confusion, to go and help Jeo. As he falls to the floor — given a blow to the kidneys by the MP’s club — he is struck again on the shoulder and he hits the man with his handcuffed wrists just above the ear and once again below the ear with greater force, and the man leans over him and punches his face, once, twice, three times, Mikal’s neck pressed against the concrete under the man’s boot. He tastes blood and is not sure which of the screams are his and which from the next room. Then he is snatched back into the chair.

‘He’s telling the truth,’ he says, ‘he’s telling the truth. I did take the oath with Osama bin Laden. Stop hurting him, please, stop hurting him. I was the one who lied, not him.’ Drops of blood fall from his face onto the table, joining up and becoming a large blot with an amazing quickness.

‘What’s your name?’

Next door Jeo continues to scream, and there are other sounds, of him being slammed against the walls. The cubicle shakes with each impact.

‘What’s your name? Where are you from? What happened to your hands and body, and when were you shot?’

They could bring his brother here — they could bring all of them here from Heer — and, armed with suspicions and false accusations, do to them what they are doing to Jeo. Basie and Yasmin and Rohan and Naheed. They’ll put them in the cages next to him.

‘I am a prisoner. They sold me to you for money. I have nothing to do with this war.’ His ribs and face in agony from the strikes, the pain in the bullet wounds fully awakened.

Next door Jeo is whimpering.

‘What is your name? If you are innocent we will free you the instant you eliminate our suspicions. You must show us that you support justice by co-operating with us. All the people who were captured with you have already been released. You with your behaviour are going to end up in Cuba.’

‘I will tell you everything if you let me see Jeo.’

‘Impossible.’

He looks at the wall separating him from Jeo whose sobs have become fainter now.

Finally he says to David, ‘I will tell you everything, if you ask Jeo to tell you something only I would know.’

*

He is brought to a chamber whose walls, floor and ceiling are painted entirely black, and his raised arms are shackled to a ring overhead. After the Military Policemen leave the light is switched off, the room becoming a perfect vacuumed blank. It is like the shadow darkness of the grave after death. He is not sure when last he saw a star or the red dawn light pulsing like the bloodbeat of a living creature, but now time ceases to exist altogether as he stands or slumps in the measureless void — for half a day, two, a week? He is sure that men have died in the chamber, and he sees their ghosts. At some point the light comes on and a white man Mikal has never seen before makes his entry. Nineteen keepers are appointed over Hell, according to the Koran. The man stands before him and suddenly bursts into laughter, and he doesn’t stop — the soulless glance fixed at Mikal and laughing loudly at him for having made the mess on the floor, for being worthless, for the disaster that is his love for Naheed, for not being able to help Jeo, for Pakistan and its poverty, a laughter tinged with contempt for him and his nation where the taps don’t have water, and the shops don’t have sugar or rice or flour, the sick don’t have medicines and the cars don’t have petrol, his disgusting repulsive country where everyone it seems is engaged in killing everyone else, a land of revenge attacks, where the butcher sells rotten meat to the milkman and is in turn sold milk whose volume has been increased with lethal white chemicals, and they both sell their meat and their milk to the doctor who prescribes unnecessary medicines in order to win bonuses from the drug companies, and the factory where the drugs are made pours its toxic waste directly into the water supply, into rivers and streams, killing, deforming, blinding, lacerating the sons and daughters of the policeman who himself dies in a traffic accident while he is taking a bribe, an accident caused by a truck the transport inspector has taken a bribe to declare roadworthy, a country full of people whose absolute devotion to their religion is little more than an unshakable loyalty to unhappiness and mean-spiritedness, and the white man continues to laugh with eyes full of hatred and accusation and hilarity and mirth at this citizen of a shameless beggar country full of liars, hypocrites, beaters of women and children and animals and the weak, brazen rapists and unpunished murderers, torturers who probably dissolved his father’s body in a drum of acid in Lahore Fort, delusional morons and fools who wanted independence from the British and a country of their own, but who now can’t wait to leave it, emigrate, emigrate, emigrate to Britain, USA, Canada, Australia, Dubai, Kuwait, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Japan, China, New Zealand, Sweden, South Africa, South Korea, Norway, Germany, Belgium, Chile, Hong Kong, Holland, Spain, Italy, France, anywhere, anywhere, anywhere, anywhere but Pakistan, they can’t wait to get out of there, having reduced the country to a wasteland, their very own caliphate of rubble. Like a malevolent god the man pours his laughter into Mikal, his skin becoming red as he laughs, sweat welling from his brow, and even though he makes Mikal relive every shame, indignity, humiliation, dishonour, defeat and disgrace he has ever experienced in his twenty years, Mikal begins to whisper back at him now: ‘What about you? What about you? what about you what about you …’ He struggles against the chain and begins to shout. ‘What about the part you played in it?’ He wishes he knew how to say it in English. If I agree with you that what you say is true, would you agree that your country played a part in ruining mine, however small? He wonders if the man is real, despite the fact that his laugh is continuing to swell in the air of the room, roaring like a giant wave getting louder as it encircles his head. He remembers how after they had interrogated a prisoner for twenty-nine consecutive hours he was brought back to the cage hallucinating, was seeing people and things that were not there. And then suddenly the light goes off and the laughter stops, nothing in the room but his own breathing. The pain in his arms is so intense it is screaming at him in a real voice, using human words.

*

‘I want to see Jeo,’ he says in the interrogation room.

‘Shut up. When did you take the oath with Osama bin Laden?’

He must say something or they’ll begin to hurt Jeo again on the other side of the wall.

‘I can’t remember. What date did Jeo give?’ He is having trouble focusing his eyes after the dark chamber.

‘You don’t get to ask me questions. Get on your knees and stick your arms out.’

Mikal does as he is told, the MP unlocking his handcuffs, and David and the interpreter leave the room, the MP remaining in his corner.

*

Half an hour later David returns and tells Mikal to sit back on the chair, his wrists locked again.

David indicates the Twin Towers poster. ‘If you think we will let you repeat what you did five months ago you are severely mistaken.’ And then, holding Mikal’s eye, he says, ‘How did you feel when it happened?’

‘It was a disgusting crime.’

‘Most of your people didn’t think so. They were pleased.’

‘Now you know we don’t all think alike.’ The man’s eyes have not left his for even a fraction of a second. ‘How many of my people have you met anyway?’

‘I have met enough of them here.’

‘Do you want me to base my opinion of your people on the ones I have met here?’ Let him ask me to get on my knees and stick my arms out.

David leans back in his chair. ‘You wanted us to ask Jeo about something only the two of you would know. He has given us one word.’

The man utters the word and it travels through Mikal, journeying along his blood vessels and then something ruptures in his mind. He is feeling weightless suddenly, what the arrow must feel when it leaves the bow. The muscles of his arms are in indescribable pain from having been in the stress position, and before that there were the ceiling shackles in the chamber, and yet he lunges at David across the table with his teeth bared, his only weapon — the animal part of him.

Naheed.

20

I curse this city. Its king erred in killing the man I love … She looks up from the page she has been reading and then closes the book. She has imagined an arrival, the presence of someone on the other side of the front gate. Perhaps there was even a knock. She emerges onto the terrace and gazes at the gate through the trees, surrounded by the natural noises of the garden. The ashes on her clothes deposit an indistinct impression on the white pillar beside her. These half-ghosts appear elsewhere in the house too, as she brushes against a wall in passing or forgetfully leans against a cupboard for support. They are faint — only she can see them — and as with the others she will brush this one away soon after becoming aware of it.

It is the first morning of steady heat this year, and she sits down on the stone steps. She opens the book on her lap and begins to read. Shilappadikaram. A text from the third century AD. The story of Kannagi who, having lost her husband to a miscarriage of justice at the court of the Pandya king, wreaked her revenge on his kingdom. When she looks up the gate has opened to admit Mikal.

His eyes locate her.

The jacaranda is in bloom and after a shower the smell enters the house at twilight so thickly she can lie there wondering if it will ever stop. It marks half the distance between Mikal and her, and she halts when she reaches it. Is it his ghost, here to convince her to build a life without him? Or is he real and her thinking has summoned him into her presence?

She backs away and he takes a corresponding step towards her.

‘When someone thinks of us, or dreams of us with enough longing and love,’ Tara had said to her once, ‘we disappear from where we are.’ Naheed had become afraid lest she think about Mikal strongly enough to make him appear in the room, unable to explain to Tara who he was.

She turns and begins to walk away, looking over her shoulder to see him following her. But when she reaches the terrace he is no longer behind her. She had taken a sideways step on approaching the walnut tree, and it is as though he had continued in his momentum and disappeared into the bark.

She touches the tree trunk.

She waits for him to emerge for ten, fifteen, twenty seconds, and then she looks around, searching inside the light that breathes down everywhere through the canopies, her glance passing over the mulberries that have both foliage and flowers on their branches now, the thick softness of the leaves gleaming amongst all the other greens of the garden, the banyan’s wide clear green, the cypresses almost black in comparison, the apple-green poplars. Eventually she sees him standing next to the peepal tree near the far boundary wall. She imagines him ascending through this trunk and then travelling along the joined crowns overhead to enter the peepal. Or perhaps he had gone down into the earth and walked through all the darkness and soil, the roots like wooden bolts of lightning around him, and then risen into the peepal.

21

As Basie and Yasmin come into the school, Father Mede stands at the window of his office and watches them. They are walking as close together as propriety allows in this land that is both less and more innocent than any other. They are lit by the March sunlight that is thick as felt. As a child he used to wonder why Eve was taken from Adam’s rib. Now, at the other end of his life, these decades later, he knows it was because the rib is close to the heart. Both Basie and Yasmin have lost a brother and he can see that they have yet to recover, if they ever will. He doubts whether he has been able to express his feelings to them adequately. He held each of them in turn and just repeated the two or three phrases humans have for grief. Two thousand years have passed since man became brother to every other man on the planet, and yet words remain uninvented for the alleviation of certain burdens.

*

‘Who is that young man on the cypress path?’ Yasmin asks, as she passes by Father Mede’s office. ‘Good morning, Father.’

‘Good morning, Yasmin,’ he looks up from the letters stacked on his desk. ‘Could it be one of the gardener’s helpers?’ Father Mede walks to the door and looks out towards the cypress trees. ‘He sometimes brings in his grandsons.’

The sky is a blue so clean it verges on joy.

‘He’s gone,’ Yasmin says. ‘He was there a minute ago.’

‘Must be the gardener’s grandson.’

Children are coming in through the gate to begin the school day, the girls in white with red sweaters, the boys all in navy. And He placed at the east of the garden of Eden cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way to the tree of life …

He looks at Yasmin. ‘You are wearing your mother’s watch.’

She glances at it.

‘It cost her two hundred and fifty rupees,’ he continues. ‘She purchased it with her first pay cheque, the late 1960s. She came here to show it to me, I still remember. She said she had done a hundred and fifteen rupees’ worth of shopping at the Army Canteen Stores. Biscuits. Coffee. Condensed milk. Chocolates. All the luxuries. And the Favre-Leuba watch.’ Father Mede taps the dial. He smiles. ‘And from the look on your face it is obvious that I have told you this many times before.’

Yasmin puts her arm into his and walks into the office with him. ‘How was your trip?’

‘Tiring.’

‘You are getting old.’

‘I don’t feel old. I just feel like someone young who has something wrong with him.’ He settles in his chair. ‘How is your father?’

She looks away for half a moment.

Father Mede nods. ‘I wish him well.’ Rohan had requested that Father Mede stay away from his house while he dealt with Sofia’s crisis of faith, had asked Sofia not to see him. The fracture was never really mended. ‘Is that ash on your sleeve?’

Yasmin tries to brush the small mark away. ‘My sister-in-law.’

‘The Greeks maintained we sprang from ash.’

‘This tunic belonged to my mother.’

‘I know.’

As she is about to leave, he indicates the paperwork that has accumulated on his desk in his absence. ‘You and Basie must spare an hour to help me deal with some of this.’

‘Father, you take advantage of us.’

‘I know. First the Raj and now this.’

The girl leaves with a smile — her mother’s daughter. When Sofia went to Punjab University in Lahore for her MA, she had become distressed by the big city within days, and had returned to Heer, insisting she wouldn’t go back. Her father — who had dreamed of having educated children — had summoned Father Mede urgently. Father Mede had been her teacher here at St Joseph’s, and the two of them had persuaded her to return to university. She agreed but was back a few weeks later, telling them that she felt a sense of exclusion from the other students, the modern Lahore girls and boys, a few of whom laughed at the way she dressed and spoke, laughed at her burka. Her father thought all week and then uttered the four words that shook the entire family to its very foundations, even the most distant branches in remote towns and villages:

‘Take off your burka.’

Sofia was speechless.

‘Can you do that?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Would it make you feel less noticeable?’

‘It might.’

‘Then try it. Modesty and decency dwell in the mind, not in a burka. I want you to get an education and it seems that this issue is distracting you from that.’

And she had gone back without her burka, much to the horror of her mother and brother, who knew that the chances of her making a decent marriage were in complete ruins now. It was bad enough already that she, an unmarried girl, was living away from her parents in a big-city hostel where there was no parental supervision.

Whether she had panicked too early at finding herself in an alien environment and would have settled in time with only minor adjustments, there was no way of knowing. What did happen was that after she went back she prospered at the university. She did try the burka again in the third year but by then she had lost the habit. She bought five Kashmiri shawls to cover her head and body when she was teaching at Ardent Spirit, and there was a dazzling wine-coloured coat with a fur collar for the coldest days of winter, pinned to whose left shoulder was a brooch shaped like the turban pin of an emperor.

*

Father Mede stands up and crosses the room that has a pattern of black and white griffins on the floor. He comes to stand before the small painting on the wall that Sofia had made for him. The crucified Christ, and the weeping figures at the foot of the cross. They are his mother and his friends and they are weeping because this — the crucifixion — is taking place, and it is powerful because the suffering of the tortured man and the suffering of those watching him are in the same picture. Are in the same glance. Injustice is not occurring in a distant hidden pocket, and the grief of the victim’s relatives is not in a far removed place, disconnected from the crime. He will die, and those who love him are watching him — and all of it being watched by the viewer.

*

‘Father, who are those two young men I just saw by the piano room?’ Basie asks, entering the office.

‘Were there two of them? I think they might be the gardener’s grandsons or his helpers.’

‘I know his grandsons. And that wasn’t them.’

‘I’ll find out.’

‘How was your tour?’ Basie asks, and he walks back to the door and casts his eyes about. ‘I think they were too neatly dressed to be the gardener’s helpers.’

Father Mede smites his forehead. ‘They must have come with the angels.’

‘The angels are back?’

Father Mede opens a drawer and takes out the key to the assembly hall.

Together they walk out onto the colonnaded corridor, the row of classroom doors stretching along on one side of them, the blazing March garden on the other. It’s early so only a handful of students have arrived and there is a conspicuous silence in the classrooms. They pass the fourteen-year-old girl who had broken down one day three years ago as she held Father Mede’s hand and wept with love and perplexity. ‘You are so good, how can you be a Christian? Why won’t you convert to Islam?’ She said she didn’t want him to burn in Hell, and he had asked her to pray for his salvation. He has always maintained a cautious attitude over religion in this country. Although St Joseph’s is a Christian school, it is no longer a mission school as in a previous age, and both the Bible and the Koran are read at public functions, the festivals of both faiths marked through the year.

Father Mede unlocks the assembly hall and reveals the floor crowded with large shapes wrapped in newspaper. There are one hundred of them in total and he removes the paper from one to reveal Raphael’s face. The angel responsible for healing the ailments and wounds of human children.

These human-sized wooden figures will be winched up on steel wires to hover overhead in the assembly hall. They were sent away to be repainted by an establishment that decorates Heer’s trucks and rickshaws, and they have returned bathed in vivid colour, Raphael’s cheeks rouged with cyclamen pink. Each eye is a turquoise disc of glass held in place with a slender nail, almost a pin. They lie on their stomachs on the floor and the wings of each rise up from their backs taller than Basie and Father Mede.

Basie removes the newspaper from the flank of the figure nearest to him. A hand holding a black chain is revealed. He uncovers the face and breast.

‘After the Fall, Gabriel was sent to comfort Adam,’ Father Mede says, ‘and Michael to comfort Eve.’

Michael, who is Mikal in Islam. Described as having emerald-green wings and being covered in minute saffron-coloured hairs, each of which has a million faces that ask Allah in a million languages to pardon the sins of the faithful.

Father Mede places a hand on Basie’s shoulder. Basie touches it and then covers up Michael’s face.

‘They are all here,’ Father Mede says. ‘The Angels of the Seven Days of the Week. The Angel of Earthquakes. The Angel of Fascination. Of Dust. Of Doves.’ He looks up at the rings attached to the ceiling from which they will be suspended.

‘So they were brought here by the boys I saw?

‘It is possible. They arrived in three trucks and there was a small gang to unload them.’

‘I must ask the guard at the gate,’ Basie says. ‘We have to be careful.’

‘Don’t frighten the children.’

Yesterday the Ardent Spirit van had mentioned reports that a religious school had been bombed by the Americans in Afghanistan, killing a number of small children. The van slowed to a crawl outside St Joseph’s. ‘We’ll reduce America to the size of India, India to the size of Israel, Israel to nothing,’ the loudspeaker said as it lingered near the public monument at the end of the road, a giant fibreglass replica of the mountain under which Pakistan’s nuclear bomb was tested. Its colour marks the precise moment the device exploded. Unstilled after millions of years, the mountain had turned a pure white. Its insides are hollow and it is lit up from within at night: in the pale evenings from the balcony of his room above the school, Father Mede watches it come on — one moment it is dead and grey but then suddenly, like a fever rising from its very core, a glow spreads on the slopes and it swells and brightens until its radiance rivals the moon, and the beggar children who shelter in there can be seen moving in silhouette on the brilliant sides.

The crinkled newspaper is straightening and coming away, and after Basie leaves Father Mede watches the figure of Michael reveal itself here and there out of the newsprint — allowing glimpses of the golden robes, the chains with which he holds Satan, the sword in the other hand. It is said that cherubim were created out of the tears Michael shed over the sins in the world. The Chief of the Order of Virtues and the Chief of Archangels, he is also the Prince of the Divine Presence, the Prince of Light and the Prince of God. He is the Angel of Repentance, Mercy and Righteousness, the Guardian of Peace and the Angel of Earth, and the patron of policemen and soldiers.

Father Mede turns the key in the assembly-hall door and walks back towards to his office.

Restore us again, O God of our salvation,

And put away your indignation towards us.

Will you be angry with us forever?

Will you prolong your anger to all generations?

Michael is said to have written these lines. Psalm 85. The lines that are employed to invoke him.

22

‘Don’t step on that piece of ground,’ Naheed cautions Rohan as they walk in the garden. ‘I buried the dead birds there back in October.’

Rohan looks at the soil. He can see a little today, the places where the sunlight is clear and unrestricted. She had found him with the Koran open in his hands earlier, one of his great torments being that he cannot read it for the comfort of Sofia’s soul.

‘Is the pomegranate in flower?’

She guides his hand and he touches the blossoms, the tough outer cups, and the scraps of wrinkled silk at the centre that are the petals, and as he takes in their scent he tells her that the name Granada derives from the pomegranates that grew in that region of Spain. Basie and Yasmin have had a number of conversations with the eye specialist since Naheed and Rohan visited him, and the procedures he suggested are the only answer.

‘Spain was once a Muslim land,’ Rohan says, cupping the flowers in his hands. ‘In October 1501, the Catholic monarchs ordered the destruction of all Islamic books and manuscripts. Thousands of Korans and other texts were burned in a public bonfire.’

She lets him talk as she looks around for Mikal. Nothing but a kingfisher stitching together the two banks of the river with the bright threads of its flight.

‘A shopkeeper was arrested because he muttered “O Muhammad!” after someone refused to buy his wares. Another man, brought before an Inquisitor for washing his hands in a suspect Muslim-looking manner, confessed under torture to being a Muslim and denounced a number of his neighbours, only to revoke his confession immediately afterwards. He was tortured a second time and died of his injuries in prison.’

She holds his hand in hers. These days she is having to make sure he eats everything on his plate, disregarding his objections that he no longer feels hungry. She and Tara make his chapattis bigger and thicker, with the result that when he thinks he is eating just one, he is in fact eating one and a quarter, or one and a half.

She is relieved Basie and Yasmin are dealing with the eye specialist himself. Seeing the nurses at the clinic had provoked anxiety in her. The mind fighting phantoms, a strange fear had appeared that one of them could be the nurse who had given her the injections to destroy the child back in November, that the doctor — enraged at Rohan — could reveal this fact to him. Why am I afraid? she had asked herself initially. What could anyone do to me if they learned about what I had done? But, no. She is not concerned for herself, she is afraid of distressing Rohan, Yasmin and Basie. The truth would hurt them. That is why the matter has to be kept secret.

Rohan has noticed her silence. ‘What is it?’

‘Just a headache.’

‘Has your mother said something?’

She shakes her head. Then, wondering if he has seen the gesture, says, ‘No.’

‘I had a conversation with her yesterday.’

She doesn’t reply. A movement in the grape arbour where the very first green beads have appeared on the branches; by June they will have grown and the skin will slip liquidly from the pulp.

‘She is concerned for you.’

‘There’s no need.’

‘You should think of getting married again.’

She looks up where the tamarind tree shifts its branches, in its stately thirst for movement. The dying leaves that had covered it in a copper haze last month are gone, replaced by a luminous green.

‘It’s too soon,’ she says.

‘It probably is. Your mother has selected a boy, but by the time the necessary enquiries and arrangements have been made, an appropriate amount of time would have passed. These things move slowly. I know the marriage with Jeo was rapid but that was an exception.’

Last week Naheed had said to Tara, ‘This year I will help Father through the trouble with his eyes. After that I will begin studying for a diploma to become a teacher.’ She has discovered a sudden appetite for books as though the boxes had arrived at the house just for her. She dips her hands into them at random. Lyrics and fictions from all periods, volumes of photographs and paintings, works of Eastern and Western history. Some telling her to exchange reason for wonder, others to replace wonder with reason. She lifts the slender gossamer paper from a painted page and a bandit in a glowing orchard is revealed, the Persian sky coated entirely with gold leaf above him. Mikal surfaced when she looked at and opened al-Shirazi’s fourteenth-century work entitled A Book I Have Composed on Astronomy But I Wish to Be Absolved of All Blame. Late into the night she reads stories from South America, Iceland, India. She turned herself into a doe and sped away from him, but he transformed himself into a stag and — overtaking her — coupled with her. Afterwards she was a peahen running away from him but he became a peacock and mated with her again. Next she was a cow pursued by him in the shape of a bull, coupling with her a third time …

‘You mustn’t be concerned,’ says Rohan as they walk back to the house. ‘We will check everything thoroughly. Once Tara has asked the initial questions, she will tell me and Basie, and Basie will conduct a full investigation. He is your brother.’

Suddenly she is overwhelmed. The tears coming so fast she needs two hands to catch them.

‘Why has this happened?’ she whispers.

Rohan turns and after groping in the air for a few moments — coming in from the sunlight has dimmed his vision further — encloses her in his arms.

He strokes her head gently. Distant acquaintances continue to arrive to give condolences for Jeo’s death, having heard about it only just now. They come and find his own eyes in bandages. With Jeo and Mikal’s deaths he was just as wounded, and it is an astonishment that no one could see that wound. It is one of life’s great mysteries, human beings living with secret grief, unseen, and unsympathised. And so it is that Naheed carries Jeo’s death secretly inside her, the mountainous weight of it. Yasmin and Basie carry it too. And Tara. But if all of them were to walk into a place, it would be Rohan who would be seen to be afflicted. The wounds in the souls and the hearts remain unsensed. Requiring another kind of vision.

When the girl is somewhat comforted he lets her go. He had intended to ask her in detail about the bird pardoner’s son, she and Tara having visited the family last evening. The boy is making a slow recovery but still the subject is a melancholy one and he decides not to broach it.

She takes him forward and lowers him into his armchair.

‘It’s eleven o’clock,’ she tells him.

He no longer has any need to wear a wristwatch. His blindness almost coincided with the death of the two boys. They seem the same event. In the coming years when he is asked how long he has been sightless, he would ask himself how long Jeo and Mikal have been gone.

‘He said he’d come about this time.’

A message had arrived at the house from Major Kyra last week, requesting a meeting with Rohan. Rohan had attempted to visit him on hearing the news of Ahmed the Moth’s death, but again and again the boys at the Ardent Spirit gate had informed him that he was not on the premises, something like hostility appearing in them as soon as Rohan gave his name.

*

‘I have no doubt they are planning to invade Iraq and Iran,’ Kyra is saying to Rohan, as Naheed enters with the tea tray. ‘And then of course it will be Pakistan’s turn, if our government disobeys them.’

Naheed pours a cup and hands it to the former soldier.

‘The US President used the word “crusade” in the first speech he gave after the terrorist attacks,’ he says. ‘And they said if Pakistan did not help them in fighting al-Qaeda and the Taliban, they would bomb us back to the Stone Age. These were their exact words.’

She leans against the doorframe. She has a feeling she knows why he is here, even if Rohan doesn’t.

He looks at her and then turns to Rohan. ‘Well, now we must talk about why I have requested the meeting.’

‘I am glad you have come,’ Rohan says. ‘I was thinking about contacting you soon …’

The man ignores him. ‘It is a delicate matter. There are not many donations for Ardent Spirit any more. The cowardly government has cut off funding to honourable patriots like us. Things are very hard since the conspiracy of last September, and people like us are being accused of sowing something called terror. I wanted to meet you to see what can be done.’

‘I don’t know how I can be of help in this matter.’

‘I was hoping you could find alternative accommodations.’

‘Alternative accommodations?’

‘Yes.’

‘He wants us to move out of here,’ Naheed says.

Kyra doesn’t acknowledge the comment. ‘It wouldn’t be straight away,’ he says to Rohan. ‘I can give you six weeks, two months, to find another place. But we do need this house.’

‘It’s my home.’ Rohan raises his hand and Naheed comes forward to take it.

‘Yes, but I own it.’ Kyra produces a set of papers from his pocket. ‘The school belongs to me. And so does this house. My brother let you live here out of the kindness of his heart, and due to the respect he felt for you. In spite of everything.’

‘I don’t need to see any papers. I remember what I signed.’

‘Then I don’t know how you can claim that this house is yours.’

‘I was thinking of contacting you to say that you must give the house back to me. It is a shameful thing to divulge but I have contemplated selling it to raise funds for my eyes.’

He can be protective with his emotions, but Naheed knows how terrified Rohan is of being blind. He hasn’t revealed the full extent of this to anyone. Perhaps because he doesn’t wish to be judged for his despair, by humans or by Allah.

‘I think you should leave,’ Naheed says to Kyra.

Kyra turns to her, his manner a mixture of cordiality and woodland bandit.

‘You heard her,’ Basie says, coming in.

Kyra straightens. ‘You must be Basie.’

‘I want you to leave,’ Basie says, a glare in his eyes. Kyra stands up slowly, squaring up with Basie.

‘One way or another I am going to destroy you,’ Basie says, a startling and violent contempt in the voice. ‘I have asked around and I think it was you who were responsible for the deaths of my brother and Jeo.’ He takes the papers from his hands and tears them up. ‘I spoke to one family,’ he says, ‘who told me you sent their son to Afghanistan. You gave the father full assurance that the boy would be given training before being sent to the battlefield. You gave your word that the boy would be looked after. But he was butchered.’

‘I had to tell the father that. He is a eunuch and a traitor and an infidel in all but name and was not granting the boy permission to go to jihad. What are we supposed to do? Bow down before America?’

‘Get out.’

‘So this is what you have learnt by being around Christians,’ Kyra says from the door, ‘by being a teacher at that Englishman’s school. Contempt for true patriots.’

After he leaves the three of them remain in the shared silence.

Eventually, looking at the photograph in the newspaper on the table, Basie says, ‘And you can go to Hell too, Mr President.’

*

‘What happened?’ Tara asks Naheed, coming into the house to help her prepare lunch.

‘Major Kyra wants us to vacate the house.’

Tara utters the verse of the Koran one is supposed to upon receiving bad news.

‘Basie asked him to leave.’

‘We have to be careful, they are dangerous people.’ Tara looks towards Rohan’s room. ‘He signed every piece of paper they put in front of him. Now he sits in there stroking his deceived beard.’

‘No one deceived him, Mother.’

‘Yes, they did. He was half mad after Sofia’s death. You could have made him do anything.’ Tara brings the basket of green gourds to Naheed. ‘But I don’t want you to worry about the house. I’ll go to the mosque and ask the cleric to give me a talisman and we’ll pray …’

‘Pray,’ Naheed mutters. ‘Who listens to our prayers?’

‘How dare you talk in this manner? One or two prayers going unheard doesn’t mean none will ever be heard.’

‘One or two?’

‘Be quiet. It was praying to Allah that got me through my time in prison.’

‘It was Allah and His laws that put you there in the first place.’

Tara takes a step towards her. ‘Be quiet! Don’t you ever utter anything like that again.’

Naheed gives her a look of fury, her eyes swimming at her entrapment and yearning, and turns away.

‘Did you hear what I said?’

‘Yes.’

As they work in the kitchen both remain locked in their anger, both silent, though Tara’s lips move in soundless recital of Koranic verses.

After a quarter of an hour, and without looking up from the gourds she is cutting into wedges, Naheed asks, ‘What did Sharif Sharif want when he came to visit Father that day?’

‘Nothing,’ Tara says, though not immediately. ‘I told you it was just a neighbourly visit. Asking about Rohan’s eyes.’

‘Mother, please.’

‘He asked for your hand in marriage.’

Naheed puts down the knife.

‘He offered to pay for his eye operation in return.’

After minutes of further silence Naheed takes the bowl full of green and white pieces of gourd to the other side of the kitchen. Turning on the tap she submerges the pieces in water, to remain fresh until cooked. ‘One more thing,’ she says quietly from there.

‘Yes?’

‘Father says you’ve found someone for me.’

‘I have a boy in mind.’ And not having received a reaction from Naheed, she adds, ‘It’s the only way.’

Naheed smiles tensely, her eyes on the point of igniting. ‘It’s not the only way, Mother. There are a thousand other ways. I am tired of being afraid all the time —’

‘The world is a dangerous place.’

‘Let me finish, Mother. It was wrong of you to frighten me into destroying my child. It was wrong of you to frighten Mikal away. I don’t care what you have been through, but you should never ever frighten those younger than you with your own fears. Caution is one thing, but you filled me with terror. Just leave me alone please. Just take this world of yours and go away with it somewhere and leave us alone. All of you.’

‘What if —’

‘What if, what if. What if the world ends tomorrow?’

‘It could. The signs are there.’

Naheed comes and places her hand gently on Tara’s shoulder. ‘Mother, you can’t be this afraid. The world is not going to end tomorrow.’

23

Kyra and the six boys from the six houses of Ardent Spirit are discussing the St Joseph’s operation.

‘The siege will go on for several days,’ Ahmed says. ‘So we’ll need sacks of almonds to take with us for energy.’

The boy from Cordoba House has produced a precisely detailed diagram of the school — the height as well as the length of each wall is marked, the number of windows in each classroom — and it lies on the carpet before them.

It has been decided that each of the six young men will bring along just four trusted companions — as the Prophet had four companions. So in all twenty-four men have to be found. They have begun the search and made a partial selection. Some of them will be students at Ardent Spirit, while others are from outside, chosen for their commitment, strength and boldness.

‘Given the possible length of the siege,’ says the head of Mecca House, ‘each of us will have to take five or six rucksacks, containing spare ammunition, medicines, bottles of water in case the authorities try to kill us by poisoning the taps.’

‘May Allah reward him somehow,’ Ahmed says, ‘the guard who stands at St Joseph’s entrance has been very helpful in providing details of the building, of the routine and flow of the staff and student body.’ The guard is a devout man in his fifties, and said he knew what kind of suspect humans the St Joseph’s students would grow up to be. Over the years he had guarded the mansions of any number of Heer’s rich people, and he was repulsed by what he had observed — the indecency of the women, the abominable traitors’ talk, the superior attitude towards the unprivileged, the consuming of alcohol, the constant blasphemies — and he had lost his job several times for daring to speak up, or had abandoned it in shame for not having the courage to say what he wished.

They said to the guard that they needed the information in order to rob and vandalise the place.

‘Once we are inside the building,’ the head of Cairo House says, pointing to the drawing, ‘this line of trees along the south wall will restrict our view of the outside. The police and army could storm the school from that direction.’

Ahmed studies the drawing. ‘We need to do something about them.’

He gets up and walks to the window, looking out. He has been feeding tactics, strategy and vigour into the boys. While in the military he had developed a silencer for the AK-47 rifle, hitherto available to only a select few internationally, and he developed what he referred to as a ‘guerrilla’ mortar gun, of a type available only to some of the world’s most advanced military forces, so small it can be hidden in a medium-sized holdall. He had specialised in urban assault training, his ideas proving to be the most important element in the series of fearful guerrilla attacks on Indian barracks in Kashmir. In February 2000 the commandos of the Indian army had raided a village in Pakistani Kashmir and killed fourteen civilians, returning to the Indian side with abducted Pakistani girls, the severed heads of three of whom they threw back at Pakistani soldiers. The Pakistani guerrilla leader who crossed into Indian-occupied Kashmir the very next day with twenty-five fighters, to conduct a revenge operation against the Indian army in Nakyal sector, had been trained by Kyra. They kidnapped an Indian officer and beheaded him, bringing the head back to be paraded in the bazaars of Kotli in Pakistani Kashmir.

He has given every aspect of the St Joseph’s operation deep thought, and has just returned from a three-day visit to China, where he had gone to procure weapons and night-vision glasses. The biggest task was to clear them through customs in Pakistan. He had called an old friend, a captain, who is the President’s security officer. The captain came to the airport in the President’s official car and received Kyra at the immigration counter. In the captain’s presence no one dared touch Kyra’s luggage. So there are some in the army with their honour intact. He visits his old military comrades regularly and tries to shame them for their weak Islamic beliefs, for continuing to serve in the Pakistani army, and he is delighted on being told that some of them are thinking of leaving, like him. After St Joseph’s, he and several others will leave to fight and kill British troops in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province.

‘So we need to do something about the trees along the south wall,’ he says, returning to the boys. ‘And we must purchase a camcorder — to film the beheadings.’

24

Yasmin comes into the assembly hall to find Basie standing amid the paper-wrapped angels. No movement within his body. His head lowered. She bolts the door behind her and walks up to him, making her way through the newspaper shapes. At any given moment we are entangled in all the past of mankind. Our heads encircled by the echo of every word that has ever been spoken. These words were written down in one of his father’s journals. Standing behind him she flattens her body against his, her arms around his waist. A moan comes from him, the most ancient of human conditions, and a shudder of grief that she absorbs into herself, the most ancient of exchanges.

He turns within the ring of her arms. ‘I want a child.’

‘Me too.’

It is as though he has not heard her. ‘I want a child,’ he repeats, the voice muffled.

‘Let’s go home.’

From the corridor come the sounds of the school having ended for the day, the din and hum of voices, snatches of intense high-pitched conversations. She leads him out into the corridor, into the current of children that parts and converges about them.

25

Mikal knows the Americans are about to execute him. What they have said is that he is being set free, but he knows it is a lie. They are about to execute him.

David Town, the interrogator, has informed him of his freedom through the interpreter. His chains have been removed, they have given him some money, and there is a new set of clothes — a pale blue shalwar kameez with a light jacket whose softness indicates it is quilted with feathers. He is being freed because the warlord who had betrayed him to the Americans has now himself been arrested. David said the warlord was firing on Western soldiers, attacking military convoys and installations, and then picking up random people to hand over to the Americans for reward. ‘He is in custody,’ David said. ‘Being held right here in the brick factory, awaiting transport to Cuba.’

But Mikal knows that these are lies. It is all preparation for his murder.

‘The freed prisoners are always dropped off at the place where they were picked up,’ David tells him as he walks out of the brick factory with him. ‘You are being taken to the mosque where we found you back in January.’ He points to the helicopter on the other side of the compound, the blades churning the dust into djinns. Ready to fly him to the wilderness and a shallow grave.

Mikal looks up at the sky, feeling lightheaded and exposed to be under it after the prolonged period indoors. ‘Where’s Jeo?’ he asks.

Although the interpreter translates the question, it is as though David does not hear it. He continues to walk, looking straight ahead.

‘Where’s Jeo?’ He turns to the interpreter. ‘Ask him where Jeo is.’

But again there is no reaction.

‘What month is it?’

‘April.’

When they arrive at the edge of the dust being raised by the rotors, David stops. Two white Military Policemen are standing beside the helicopter, inside the churning dust, and David motions Mikal towards them.

‘I am not leaving without Jeo.’

David looks at the two MPs and they advance towards Mikal, one of them taking him by the arm.

‘I am not leaving without Jeo.’

‘Good luck with the rest of your life,’ David says, extending a hand towards him.

*

He looks out of the helicopter window as they begin their descent towards the mosque. No longer winter, the snow and ice are gone. The mosque is on the edge of a lake and the released water is full of movements.

Mikal knows both the MPs. One of them had put his gloved fingers into his mouth an hour ago to see if he was hiding anything under the tongue. The man wears a battle-dress jacket onto whose sleeves have been stitched cargo pockets taken from a pair of trousers. Over several days of interrogation David had convinced a severely wounded Arab prisoner — his wrists zip-tied to the frame of the gurney as he hallucinated — that this man was his father and they had extracted useful information from him.

From the beginning of January to April. More than three months during which Mikal was administered intravenous fluids and drugs against his will and was forcibly given enemas in order to keep his body functioning well enough for the interrogations to go on. Questionings from the CIA, FBI, MI5, MI6. Restraint on a swivel chair for long periods, loud music and white noise played to prevent him from sleeping, lowering the temperature in the room until it was unbearable and then throwing water in his face, forcing him to pray to Osama bin Laden, asking him whether Mullah Omar had ever sodomised him. Threats of deportation to countries known for torturing prisoners. ‘After they are through with you, you will never get married you will never have children you will never buy a fucking Toyota.’ Threats made against his family including female members, strip searches and body searches sometimes ten times a day, forced nudity, including in the presence of female personnel, threatening to desecrate the Koran in front of him, placing him in prolonged stress positions, placing him in tight restraint jackets for many days and nights, and in addition to all this there were the times when he was actually beaten for his ‘threatening behaviour’.

As they touch ground Mikal wonders if his murder will take place inside the ruined mosque, enclosed by the words of the Koran inscribed on the walls. The wind coming off the water has a smell like metal. Are the women and children who were left behind in January, after the men were picked up, still in there?

The two MPs climb out of the machine with him.

The three of them walk to where the rotor diameter ends, and there the two men stop, gesturing to Mikal to continue.

Keeping his eye on the mosque door ahead of him, he takes one step and then another, and then he smells it, the whiff of sulphur that is the unmistakable clue that a bullet has been fired. The noise of the rotors is too great so he doesn’t hear the gunshot. He holds his breath for a pearl diver’s minute. The sulphur intensifies and then he turns around and lifts the pistol from the hip holster of one of the Military Policemen, amazed at the freedom of movement in his unchained arms, amazed that his incomplete hands are now allowing him to place the pistol directly against the man’s throat and effortlessly pull the trigger. The air behind the neck balloons in a red mist. There is a small funnel of shockwave and in a frozen moment he sees himself reflected in the man’s American eyes. Next to Mikal in each eye is the reflection of the sun, the two placed side by side in each intense blue circle. He sees now to his astonishment that he has pulled the trigger a second time and now there is a bloody wound on the man’s breast. He swings the barrel towards the other man and shoots him too, the bullet entering the arm at the elbow and coming out through the wrist. He realises too late — his trigger pulled for the fourth time, the bullet travelling towards the white man’s face at point blank range — that someone is aiming at the helicopter from the mosque, that a hail of metal is coming towards them from the minarets, the sound lagging.

*

He is running upwards into the mountain. The slope is abrupt on the east and south but gentle to the north and west. Above him the day is withdrawing from the sky in long lengths of gold and soon he is high enough on the gradient to be able to see the mosque below him, the lake whose water he had crossed in a boat. The helicopter took off without the two fallen bodies. He can see them. The pilot made several attempts to come out to collect them, to capture Mikal, but the firing from the mosque was too intense. Mikal had dropped the pistol and run towards the boat that stood in a patch of reeds and poisonous dog’s mercury at the edge of the lake. No doubt they’ll return soon in greater number to begin their hunt for him.

If this were summer he would take handfuls of wild rose petals and eat them for the sugar, for the sweet water in them, but in spring there are only the cream white blooms of the wood anemone, his fingers plucking them as he goes, the traces of pink, the faint bitter scent reminiscent of leaf mould and foxes. He fills his pockets with them as he runs. There are mountain villages in Pakistan he has been to where the first wood anemone of each year is sewn into clothing, with the idea that beauty wards off pestilence and plague. Coming to a plateau he sits by a spring and makes a small boat with one of the banknotes the Americans had given him and sets it on the current. He enters a cave but leaves it a few minutes later, having found a collection of passports in a crevice and a list of thirty-three Jewish organisations in New York City. Darkness falls but he continues to move, the overcast sky a slab of unreadable black stone above him and as always the silence of the mountain is physical — a thing, with weight — and there is a wish in him to keep walking, to continue up into the mountain and into the high ice deserts, becoming God’s neighbour.

Arriving at a small village, twenty single-storey houses around a crooked street, he knocks on the first door. After salutations, he asks the man in Pashto whether he would like to own his clothes.

The man touches the material of his shalwar kameez but says he has no money.

Mikal explains that he only wishes to exchange them for another set.

‘Is someone pursuing you?’

‘No.’

‘Are you a bandit? A lover who has killed a rival?

‘No.’

The man is suddenly anxious about the possibilities he has raised and closes the door.

The knock on the next door produces a younger man who agrees readily to Mikal’s proposal, fingering the jacket lovingly, the small logos embroidered on the shoulders and pockets in orange and raspberry thread.

‘Why do you want to exchange them?’

‘I don’t like the colour.’

The boy looks at him. ‘Are you an American?’

‘What?’

‘Are you an American?’

‘No.’

‘Do you know where I can get a visa to live in America?’

‘No, I don’t.’

Mikal steps into the house and changes into the clothes the boy brings for him. He sees a knife on the floor in the corner. ‘Can I have that?’ he asks.

The boy picks it up and pulls the six-inch rusty blade out of the brass liners. It is a lockback knife with a cracked deer-antler grip and nickel bolsters. He makes a face, but on sensing that Mikal has some need for it, he erases the expression. ‘I can’t give it to you, it’s very dear to me.’

‘I’ll buy it.’

At the other end of the street he shouts into a window and asks if he can sleep in the stable. An old man’s face appears and then a woman’s beside him, their clothes marbled with grease and grime, and from the stable the goat looks at him with its agate eyes. They are poor like everyone else in the place and they smell of smoke, wax and sweat.

‘Where are you going?’ the man asks. ‘Where is your home?’

‘I don’t know. I am alone.’

The woman lifts both her hands to her ears, overcome with despair at being told such a thing, on meeting someone who can believe such a thing. ‘No one is alone on earth,’ she says. ‘No one.’

They invite him in and he sits with them on the earthen floor of their one-room house. The man tells him that Pakistan is over the mountains, through the cliff passes, and the woman brings him a bowl of milk with a triangle of stiff bread.

‘Someone must be waiting for you,’ the man says.

‘Listen to me,’ the woman touches the side of his head. ‘You must find your way back. In the past merchants and soldiers would go away for years to other lands. But they returned, to find people waiting for them.’

‘I returned after decades and she was here,’ the old man says.

It is cold in the night and he hears helicopters hovering overhead, real or imagined, and when he wakes in the dawn light the woman is already up and has a fire burning in the corner of the room used as a kitchen, huddling over it in her thin clothes. Mikal crawls out from under the blanket and puts on his boots and walks out to study the morning as it shapes itself out of the darkness rich with gleams.

When he is ready to leave, after drinking a bowl of tea with them, the man decides to walk with him partway into the mountains, through the corridors of various limestones, often much contorted, and there, over ancient hieroglyphs carved onto calcareous flagstone, he draws Mikal the route to Peshawar, his marks moving over and through the Buddhist writings, between them and incorporating them. Mikal makes him take some of the money before they part.

Around noon he spends an hour on the edge of a cliff, sharpening the knife. A white lamb’s skull lies in an eagle’s nest just below him on the cliff face. He licks the back of his wrist and tries the blade on the hair. It is sharp but there is nothing to kill. In the evening he scoops out termites from a hollow tree and eats them, spitting out the bitter heads like pips, and has to enter the tree a few moments later on hearing helicopters, the insects climbing onto his face and clothes. Did the boy who wanted to go to America tell them about him?

He walks all through the night, Venus appearing as the hours go by and moving with him. Lyra, Pegasus, Piscis Austrinus, and all the other constellations that he hasn’t seen since he was captured at the beginning of the year are now pulsing above him, but he cannot read them fully, the shapes tangled, or threadbare like beads missing from a piece of needlework. He has forgotten some of the names, while in other cases it is the shapes and locations associated with the remembered names that he cannot recall.

From the faintly rotting corpse of a jackal he extracts the bones with the knife, cracking them open to suck out the marrow sealed inside, still without taint. He had gained some weight from the food the Americans had fed him at the prison but now he is exhausted. At dawn he falls onto his side with his eyes closed, lying on feldspar grit and stiff clay at a river’s edge. At noon he sees a rabbit in the meadow twenty feet ahead of him. He stops walking and puts two fingers to his teeth and whistles and the rabbit freezes. He takes the knife from his pocket and opens it and he watches as the blade slices the tips of the long grass on its way towards the animal. Catching the sparks from a struck rock onto a piece of dry moss, he builds a fire and roasts the skinned rabbit, eating every last morsel, not knowing if his mutilated hands will allow him the same luck again.

They don’t. He fails several times and the next day in despair he picks up a snake by its tail and, like a whip, slams the head against the rock under which it had been sheltering. And then once again to be sure. Severing the head he peels back the skin, a mute sheath of nibs, and pulls it downwards to separate it from the body. The guts are pulled out along with the skin, leaving the meat. He traps one end between a splice in a stick and wraps the length in a spiral around the stick and ties the other end with stalks and roasts the snake over an open flame.

The journey to Pakistan takes him eight days, staying away from villages, stealing from an orchard, a planted field, nests, staying away from humans because he knows the Americans are looking for him. This time they’ll lock him away for the rest of his life. In Cuba or in America itself. Or he could get the death penalty. When he climbs down out of the mountains at the outskirts of Peshawar, a storm overtaking him in a hail of ice, he hasn’t eaten in two days and he is running a constant body temperature that must be 106.

*

He is still trapped, the cage is just bigger. On several occasions he stands with the receiver of a payphone in his hand but cannot dial in case the Americans are following him. When he leaves after the call, they will trace the number. They will go to Heer and take away Basie, Yasmin, Rohan, Tara and Naheed, to put them in the cages in the brick factory. He makes several haphazard journeys into surrounding towns, within the coronet of mountains and hills that surrounds Peshawar. Getting into a bus without asking the destination, he disembarks halfway and changes direction, or continues in the same direction but on the next bus. When he is convinced at last that there is nobody behind him, in a small town thirty miles outside Peshawar, he breaks into a place called Look Seventeen Beauty Parlour and from there dials the number of Basie and Yasmin’s house. No one picks up. He rings Rohan’s house and Yasmin answers, her voice like electricity through him. Hearing her and not being able to respond makes her feel further away than she is. He is an exile in his own homeland, his eyes filled with uncrossable distances. What ghosts must feel. He hangs up and stands there, shaking from the fever. The interrogators at the brick factory had said one day that the woman screaming in the next room was Naheed. Was he told that or is he just imagining it? He knows he must go to Heer to see if they have captured Naheed. And I still have to find Jeo.

*

He opens his eyes and sees Akbar’s.

For a moment he thinks he is back in one of the cages. But then he sits up and recognises the place where he had taken shelter — the cramped windowless space under the mosque in Coppersmiths’ Bazaar in Peshawar, where the torn copies of the Koran are kept.

‘Are you talking much nowadays?’ Akbar smiles.

He tries to speak but his throat hurts. His flesh is burning, the earthen floor under him damp with sweat.

‘The Americans let you go too?’ Akbar says.

Mikal nods. For now.

‘I saw you from the other side of the bazaar. You were on the roof.’

‘I was trying to find the constellations,’ he says. He raises his trembling hand and places it on Akbar’s. ‘I don’t remember you telling me you were from Peshawar.’

‘I am not. Just visiting.’

Mikal lies down again. ‘What time is it?’

‘Three.’

‘Day or night?’

They talk for a few minutes, Mikal telling him about shooting the two Military Policemen, and though Akbar wishes to know the details he is too weak to continue, is exhausted from the few words he has spoken, lowering his head onto the wet pillow of Koranic pages and closing his eyes, lost between several worlds.

*

He senses daylight and there are movements and words near him. From time to time there is a bitter taste in the mouth, or a needle punctures his arm, after which the darkness returns. Eventually he manages to keep his eyes open long enough to see a girl standing beside him and he does not wish to breathe or blink for fear of breaking the spell, just remaining there on the very edge of inhabited time. She wears a white shalwar kameez, the sleeves coming down to her wrists, her fingers pale as porcelain.

Over several drowsy moments the details assemble into a complete picture — the room is large and clean and the walls are whitewashed. There is a tree outside the window whose foliage grows in seven-leafed fans.

She is supervising an older woman, who appears to be a servant but is respectfully addressed, and is pressing a piece of ice wrapped in flowered cloth onto Mikal’s forehead. The moment the girl notices that he has regained consciousness she pulls her veil down onto her fine-boned face and withdraws from the room in utter silence. The grey-haired older woman continues to tend to him until Akbar enters, and then she too leaves.

‘I’ve brought you a visitor,’ Akbar says, holding a snow leopard cub pressed against his chin, the fur so soft there are furrows in it from the boy’s breathing.

‘How long have I been asleep?’

‘Five days. And I think the word is unconscious.’

‘Five days,’ he whispers. ‘This is your home?’

Akbar nods and places the animal on his chest and Mikal sits up and cradles it. The pads are like pink-grey raspberries attached to the undersides of its paws, and the fur has dark markings that look as though another cub with sooty paws has walked all over it.

‘It’s about three weeks old. My sister sent it in for you. In October, her husband and my twin brother and I went to fight the Western armies in Afghanistan. They were both martyred.’

Mikal remembers Akbar telling him at the brick factory that he had had nothing to do with fighting, that he was a taxi driver and the Americans had captured him in Jalalabad on false information.

He gets up and walks to the door and looks out, suddenly untired, desiring movement. The cub is pure innocent trust as it clings to him.

The house is painted yellow, and is located in a dense grove of trees, all the same kind. One of them grows in Rohan’s garden in Heer, its small green-white flowers filling the winter evenings with a rich smell. Rohan had planted it because its wood is used for making writing tablets.

‘It used to be a clinic,’ Akbar says, as they walk in the grove, the sun falling through the sieve of leaves here and there. ‘A small hospital, owned by a doctor in the 1930s. He planted these trees. He was famous in the region for providing wooden noses to the women whose real ones had been cut off by their families. The wood of these trees was used for carving the new noses.’

‘Where am I?’

‘South Waziristan. The clinic was abandoned when it was discovered that it had links with English missionaries.’

The new pale leaves stand out against the darker foliage brightly.

‘I won’t ask you your name,’ Akbar says. ‘I know you’ll tell me when you are ready.’

Mikal nods.

‘The men you shot,’ Akbar says. ‘Do you think they are dead?’

‘They couldn’t have survived.’

‘I know what charges the Americans will bring against you. I telephoned a friend in Peshawar and he looked it up.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

Akbar takes a piece of paper from his pocket and unfolds it. ‘Let’s assume they didn’t die. For each wounded man you will be put on trial for one count of attempting to kill US nationals outside the United States. One count of attempting to kill US officers and employees. One count of assault of US officers and employees. One count of armed assault of US officers and employees. One count of using and carrying a firearm during and in relation to a crime of violence …’

‘How long?’ Mikal interrupts.

‘You will go to prison for almost two hundred years.’

‘And if they have died?’

Akbar looks at him, his eyes containing the answer.

Mikal places the cub on his knee and it lifts a paw as if to test the air, the soft leather nostrils expanding.

‘I thought they were about to kill me.’

‘I know.’

Silently they walk back to the room where two male servants are setting out dishes for their lunch, both of them with rifles over their shoulders, the straps decorated with small coloured beads and sequins.

Corn bread drenched in clarified butter, yogurt, a dish of chicken and spinach, another of lentils and potatoes, sliced onion in a saucer, oranges. A large bowl of custard with a layer of coin-like banana slices on top. Akbar sends the custard back to remain cool in the fridge until they call for it.

A few minutes into the meal Mikal says quietly, without looking up from his plate, ‘There is no way out of it, is there?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘There isn’t. They won’t ever stop looking. They’ll be trying to find me in twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years.’

‘It’s strange how much their government cares if something happens to its people.’ With a morsel of bread in his hand, Akbar extends his arm and touches Mikal’s shoulder with the back of his wrist. ‘You’ll just have to make sure they can’t find you.’

‘I don’t understand how I could have smelled the sulphur of the bullets fired from the mosque. The rotor blades should have dispersed the smell. But I smelt it. I don’t know how it’s possible.’

The leopard is perched on Mikal’s knee as he eats. They descend trees head first and he imagines the cub moving down his shin towards his foot.

‘I don’t want you to feel any guilt about it,’ Akbar says. ‘You are even with the Americans for what they did to you.’

‘They didn’t kill me.’

‘They’ve killed plenty of others.’

‘That’s not how it works. Not with me.’

*

The yellow house is just over a mile from the town of Megiddo. The town was ransacked by the British on three occasions during the Raj, the last when they were fighting the Fakir of Ippi, Akbar’s maternal grandfather, the guerrilla leader who fought a war against the British from 1935 onwards and killed thousands of soldiers in numerous pitched battles, demanding nothing but the infidels’ withdrawal — we want neither your honey nor your sting. It was said that he had supernatural powers and could predict when the British were about to attack so he could vanish long beforehand. The British convinced a few members of the clergy to speak out against him in the mosques but it was to no avail. His support and appeal continued to grow steadily, Muslim soldiers having to be court-martialled for not shooting straight at him and his fighters, or for leaking plans of attack to him. Muslim brigadiers in the British army would leave ammunition for their hero in prearranged places.

In 1940 Adolf Hitler sent two German advisers to improve the Fakir’s gun-making and help him in guerrilla training. He was the most logical person for the Axis powers to have approached in this region, in order to spread mayhem for the British in the tribal belt of their own colony. It had taken a whole year to establish contact with the Fakir and he had informed his prospective German allies that he would require a sum of £25,000 every month to keep undermining the British, as well as supplies of weapons and ammunition. The support of the Germans ended eventually, when Germany attacked Russia and it became impossible to send in the necessary arms.

The war in Europe came to a conclusion but the fighting against the enemies of Islam in the wilds of Waziristan continued. By 1947, forty thousand British troops were arrayed against Akbar’s grandfather as he hid in caves and forests and ravines, turning sticks into guns and pebbles into bullets with Allah’s direct help, some of the stone bullets still owned by Akbar’s family.

For a long time the town of Megiddo was one of the region’s major weapon-producing centres, the local clans manufacturing their guns from the iron they smelted there. Within days Mikal learns that the talk of weaponry is more or less constant in the house, the young men proposing a shooting competition a minute after meeting him.

Behind the yellow house, one dawn during the second week of his recovery, Mikal finds a courtyard that is an expanse of scrap metal, old car doors and transmissions, rotting hubcaps and castoff motor parts lying at the base of those saptaparni trees. There are empty rocket shells from the war years in Afghanistan.

The grass is clogged with dew and out of it three enormous Airedale dogs stand up at his approach long before he notices them, revealing legs that have been dyed with henna to keep them cool. Aggression has clearly been bred into them but they are chained to the tree trunks and he lets the leopard cub walk beside him in the dawn light, its fur tinted by the orange light where it is dry, darker where the dew has wet it. Its calls resemble the thin notes of birds.

Mikal looks through the window of the gun factory, owned and supervised by Akbar’s father and elder brother. When Akbar told him about it he understood why he had kept hearing gunfire through his fever, the workers testing the weapons they were making. The floor is covered with ash and strewn with pieces of metal the thickness and size of books and magazines, out of which the shapes of pistols have been cut like stencils. There are piles of wood meant to be burned in the smelting and there are carved pieces of wood that will become stocks of rifles and shotguns.

Long low skeins of mist rise from the river that flows in a half-circle around the house, its densely wooded bank enclosing three sides of the large building. The cub wanders away towards the side of the building and when he follows it he sees the girl under an arch, the mist drifting on the young silky air while above her the last stars cling to the white sky, and the zone of containment and poise about her person remains intact as she begins to withdraw into the darkness of the house on seeing him. Human contact is as vast as any wilderness, he remembers thinking the day he approached Naheed for the first time, and demands all daring, but he lowers his eyes as he advances towards the animal, like someone looking for a lost coin or key, gathering the cub to his chest like a collection of loose things, the creature’s ears flattening with fear at the sudden upheaval, and he turns around under the flashing gaze of the chained Airedales, the disc of the sun both blinding and illuminating. ‘Where do you think you are going?’ he says into the fur, walking away fast. ‘Do you know what they’ll do to her if they catch her near a stranger?’

*

‘You need to see this.’ Akbar hands him the leaflet.

A column of text in English and two black-and-white photographs of Mikal. Taken at the brick factory back in January, one with the long hair and beard, the other after they had removed the hair on the head and jaw.

‘Where did you find this?’ Mikal asks.

‘Someone brought it from Peshawar. I’m told there is one in Urdu as well.’

He tries to read the text but soon gives up. ‘What does it say?’

‘They are searching for you. There is a description. Your height, your complexion —’

‘Akbar. You know what I am asking.’

Akbar doesn’t answer immediately. Eventually he nods and says, ‘They both died.’

*

Twenty days. Strong moons hang above the house at that season. After spending months indoors, he sleeps on the twenty-five-foot boundary wall that encircles the house, the leopard curled with him under the folds of the blanket, and he wakes in the night to see stars imprinting their numberless fires on the blue-black sky, and in the centre is a golden moon, serene and distended, and then there are the bronze moons, ugly and threateningly dagger-like to him in his convalescent state, resembling the ones that had come at his fingers. He works in the gun factory with Akbar’s brother and the men he employs, one of whom says his joined eyebrows are evil luck. He operates the six-inch Herbert lathe for the heavy work and the three-and-a-half-inch Myford. The Boley watchmaker’s lathe. The Senior milling machine. The Boxford shaper. The large and small drill presses. On the walls are several rifles and he levers opens the breeches and looks down the barrels and he runs his hands on the stock of a hundred-year-old gun, etched with a scene of warriors on horseback going off to meet the Crusaders, with proud pennants and spears and large empty cages in which they hope to bring back captive infidel kings.

One night he walks up to Akbar’s bed and very gently shakes him until the boy awakens. He lowers himself onto the edge of the bed. No light except the sweep of the moon through the window.

‘My name is Mikal.’

He hears Akbar swallowing drowsily, taking deep breaths in the dark air.

‘I come from a town in Punjab called Heer, it’s next to Gujranwala. I went to Afghanistan with my foster brother Jeo last October. I don’t know where he is.’

‘I think the pedestal fan in the corner is made in Gujranwala,’ Akbar says, sitting up and feeling for his pack of cigarettes and lighting one.

‘It is. The city’s famous for them.’

‘So your name is Mikal.’

‘Yes.’ Mikal feels his gaze on him even without the light.

‘Let me have that for a second.’ Mikal takes the cigarette from him and inhales the smoke and then hands it back and lights one for himself. He rises and goes to sit on the windowsill and looks out at the wild flowers that had closed at sunset but have opened once again in response to the moonlight.

‘I have to leave soon.’

‘You can stay as long as you like. You are my brother.’

‘I have to find Jeo. Or maybe I should go to Heer first. What if Jeo has already gone back? I need to go and see.’

‘The Americans could be waiting for you there.’

‘I know. They don’t know my name, but there are the photographs and my fingerprints.’

Akbar gets up and turns on the light. ‘Stay until you are stronger. You are perfectly safe here.’ He takes a piece of paper and a pen from a drawer. ‘Let me show you something, now that we trust each other.’ He makes a thick dot and surrounds it with several concentric circles. He points to the dot with the tip of the pen and says, ‘This is you right now.’

‘I am the target?’

Akbar smiles. ‘These concentric circles are walls. Invisible ones. Defences that insulate al-Qaeda leaders who are on the run from the Americans.’

‘What al-Qaeda leaders?’

Akbar holds his gaze.

Mikal smokes the cigarette in silence for almost a minute, holding it between the tips of the thumb and the second finger. Then he says, ‘In this house?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where?’

‘The entire wing on the southern side.’

Now Mikal knows why the doors there are of welded metal.

‘When I brought you here there were objections, concerns that you could be a spy. They said they wouldn’t pay the agreed sum for the use of the wing, that they would leave immediately.’

‘I didn’t realise I was so … discussed. I live mostly inside my head.’

‘I told them how the Americans had tortured you at the brick factory, how you had killed two of them, how you lost your fingers to infidel-in-all-but-name Muslims who were fighting for the Americans. So they reconsidered.’

‘I don’t know them but I know you, and I would never betray your trust.’

‘When I told them you were a fugitive, having killed two Americans, they became unhappy for another reason. They said you will betray them to the Americans in exchange for having your own crimes pardoned.’

Mikal smokes, the red light opening and closing before his face.

‘It is an understandable reaction,’ Akbar shrugs. ‘They are being hunted and have to think of every possibility. Two of them worked with you in the gun factory one afternoon and they were very taken by your seriousness. They had had trouble believing you shot anyone with those hands, but when they saw you at work they finally believed it.’ Akbar gets up and turns out the light and walks back to his bed in the darkness. ‘I don’t want you to worry. The Pakistani military is helping the Americans hunt down al-Qaeda heroes in these parts, but those circles of protection mean enough of an early warning in the event of a raid.’

Out there the light of the moon dissolves all hardness from the world and the grasses are becoming milk and murmuring, and the bats are plunging through the leaves in their soft songless flight.

‘Is that why your father doesn’t like me? All these suspicions.’

‘My father likes you,’ Akbar says after a while.

‘I am jeopardising his income.’

‘He likes you. Go to sleep.’

*

He looks at the map, planning his four-hundred-kilometre route back to Heer.

From Megiddo he will go to Tank by the local bus. Then a bus from Tank will take him to Dera Ismail Khan in about two hours. From Dera Ismail Khan — through the salt marshes and barren parched distances that had led to the British administrators and missionaries calling it Dreary Dismal Khan — he would go to Rawalpindi by bus again, this journey lasting four or five hours.

And from Rawalpindi to Heer on the train will be another five hours.

He will have to ask Akbar for money. He could do labouring work in the bazaar but he suspects it would sully the family name to have someone associated with it do menial work for others.

The bus ticket from Tank to Dera Ismail Khan will be about eighty rupees. From Dera Ismail Khan to Rawalpindi about four hundred, and the train fare from Rawalpindi to Heer about three hundred …

But there is a chance of police checks at the Rawalpindi bus terminal — Rawalpindi being the home city of Pakistan’s military — so maybe he should go through Sargodha …

The cruelty of distance. When living in his parents’ painted room in Heer, with Naheed married to Jeo, he would think how close the neighbourhood with Rohan’s house was in some respects. It was just three miles away. It was just an hour away. It was just a nine-rupee rickshaw ride away. But it was an eternity away because his dream was there. Now Heer is probably two hundred years in prison away. Or a thousand volts of electricity fed into his body away. A lethal injection away.

He cannot jettison the feeling that the dot at the centre of the concentric circles had looked like a target. There is a dizzy sense of convergence and he feels himself being watched, now that he knows there are others here whose presence he had been unaware of. It’s dawn and he sits on the riverbank with the snow leopard on his knee, the white spot at the end of its tail curving in the air restlessly, the pulse of impatient blood.

He looks into its eyes. ‘The expression on your face says, Why do you keep looking in that direction? My answer is, “No particular reason.”’

You were looking for the girl.

‘I wasn’t.’

You were.

‘So what if I was?’

I am actually glad. The cub nudges the air with its nose, sniffs his hand. Do you think Naheed is going to leave Jeo for you?

From his pocket Mikal takes the small white ball he has carved out of a block of saptaparni heartwood in the gun factory. The wood is white when first sawn, soft and fine-textured, and coffins are also made from it, and tea chests and masks, and he rolls the ball on the ground, watching the cub set off towards it in dives. In the wild a grown snow leopard can leap seven times its body length. ‘Let’s change the subject,’ he says.

No. What do you think is going to happen between you and Naheed?

‘Are you sure you are a leopard and not a serpent?’

You have to move on.

The ice the cook had pressed into his forehead was wrapped in flowered cloth and when he unfolded it he realised it was a sleeve torn from an old kameez and he had briefly wondered who it had belonged to.

But even the most distant prospect of forming an attachment, daring to approach another, when his only experience of it so far has ended in suffering, fills him with intense dread.

From behind him a shadow advances on the slope towards them and the small desert doves drinking from the water’s edge rise in coils and he turns and sees her standing behind him.

‘I thought I heard talking,’ she says. He stands up just as the birds pass overhead in their circular flight and return to settle on the river at another spot further down, the wingbeats sounding in the cool air and scattering the haze. She turns around to leave. ‘I am sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you.’

‘I was just talking to myself,’ he says. He is too stunned to say anything more. Akbar said he could speak English because the younger children — meaning himself and his twin, and this sister — had been sent to be educated at the best schools in Lahore. She was brought back here to be married at sixteen, to the young man who would die in Afghanistan. Perhaps the time in Lahore counts for her courage in approaching him now. There were four other brothers, who had been murdered over the course of the past three decades, all involving blood feuds whose origins were several decades old.

‘I woke up when Father left for the mosque and couldn’t go back to sleep.’

‘Me too,’ Mikal says. The man drives the Datsun pickup to Megiddo to say his dawn prayers. The other four prayers of the day he might say at home, depending on the circumstances, but he likes to be at the mosque for the first one.

‘I should go.’

He inhales and realises that he had smelt the perfume on her clothes during the days he lay unconscious. ‘Thank you for the cub.’

‘He has grown.’ There is a fraction of a smile. To reveal more to this stranger would be indecency. ‘He shouldn’t be here, of course. He should be up somewhere in Chitral. One of our guests brought it with him. The mother died soon after giving birth. It hadn’t even opened its eyes when they arrived.’

‘They stay shut for the first ten days or so.’

She seems to think for a few moments. ‘It was exactly after ten days that he opened them. So he was probably only hours old when he was given to me.’

He lifts the cub and hands it to her and she holds it, the tips of her fingers disappearing into the fur. She must be eighteen years old, nineteen at most.

‘My name is Mikal.’

‘Yes, Akbar told me.’ She holds out the cub. ‘I should go.’

‘I am sorry to hear about your husband and brother.’ He lifts the saptaparni-wood ball and moves towards her and holds it before the leopard’s face, both of them almost joined through the sphere and the creature.

‘I approved of him going,’ she says. ‘I wanted them to defend Afghanistan, he and my brothers. I would have gone myself if it was permitted. Father blames the clerics who arranged for them to go, he says rageful things against al-Qaeda and the Taliban.’

That explains the man’s censoriousness towards Mikal. He thinks Mikal is a jihadi, the killer of American soldiers, the hardened militant who hadn’t even revealed his name while in American captivity. He must be in torment at the fact that Akbar and his elder brother have given shelter to al-Qaeda fugitives. One evening he had heard an argument between him and the brothers.

‘He was crazed with grief when the two bodies arrived, and Akbar was still missing. We thought Akbar’s return would bring him some peace, but —’ Suddenly she stops speaking and lets the cub slip to the ground, Mikal hearing the Datsun coming in through the gate in the boundary wall a few seconds after she has heard it.

‘My name is Salomi,’ she says as she walks away, disappearing into the grove, and he climbs up from the riverbank to see the father emerge from the pickup and go into the house, the vehicle’s paintwork smeared here and there with petals where the roadside wild flowers, dew-covered, must have thrashed against it during the journey.

After breakfast he drives to Megiddo to have the kitchen’s gas canisters refilled, parking the Datsun near a herd of black and brown camels just outside the mosque. A caravan of powindah gypsies is passing, descendants of tribes who crossed from Central Asia and Afghanistan all the way to Calcutta in the far east of the subcontinent, trading goods, song and news, the British taking them and their camels to open up the Western Australian Desert in the nineteenth century. The men of the bazaar recognise him as belonging to Akbar’s family and he is obliged to sit and drink tea. There has been a raid in a town a hundred miles away: Pakistani soldiers — assisted behind the scenes by Americans, no doubt — have raided a compound and, after a fourteen-hour battle, killed or taken away al-Qaeda figures sheltering there. Women, children, the old and the innocent — anyone who happened to be in the way — have been killed.

The person who betrayed them was a member of the family that was sheltering them — and he has been found butchered by al-Qaeda in retaliation.

He drinks the apple-green tea from a bowl. One man asks him why Akbar’s father had not attended the dawn prayer at the mosque today. ‘It just isn’t the same without him,’ the man smiles. ‘It feels like a wedding procession without a bridegroom.’

‘He has been unwell,’ Mikal says, draining the bowl and standing up, chewing the softened leaves.

‘Yes, the martyrdom of his son and son-in-law has been very hard on him,’ the man says, nodding. ‘The bodies arrived with their hands and feet tied with barbed wire.’

‘Those boys fought the thugs of the West very bravely,’ another man says. ‘They knew that a coward dies but his screams last forever.’ And all the while the adze in the shop next door, that sells coffins and ladders, is repeating, ‘… black as night … black as night … black as night …’

He returns to the house and enters the gun factory to work. He has no desire to handle another gun as long as he lives but he doesn’t know how else to repay the family for their hospitality, telling himself that it is only for a few more days. After an hour he interrupts his work, his hands black with metal dust. He takes off his shirt and wipes under his arms with it. He throws it aside and takes a clean one from a cupboard and puts it on while standing before the window, looking out at the Datsun.

He walks out to the Datsun and bends towards the door and picks off one of the flowers pasted onto the paintwork. Dried now by the sun to a scrap of crisp onion skin. He looks at it for a long time and the Airedales watch him from the shade of the trees, their dyed legs making them look as though they have waded through blood.

He has not seen these yellow flowers anywhere along the route from the house to the mosque.

Around noon when he drives into Megiddo to collect a consignment of scrap metal that a new set of gypsies has brought, he goes slower than usual so he can inspect the vegetation on either side of the narrow road. There is nothing much, just thorn bushes and certainly no yellow flowers.

On the way back he turns onto a small path, the dust blowing from under his tyres and twisting away sideways, and after fifteen minutes he comes to a field at the base of a row of hills, a meadow the size of four cricket grounds, full of tall yellow flowers, the colour so intense it makes the eyes ache.

He conducts a brief search among them but not knowing what he is expecting to find he just stands looking at the hills in the end. Who did he meet here at dawn? The Pakistani soldiers? The Americans? The hills are infested with bandits and from this distance look like pyramidal heaps of coloured earth, piled there by man instead of having an origin in nature, some taller than others, some red, others with more yellow than ochre. Was he hiring an assassin to murder the cleric who sent his boys to their deaths?

The next day the paintwork is dotted with yellow again when the father returns from the dawn prayers and Mikal watches him from the riverbank, the sky above him soaked with a gentle merciful light, and a few hours later the men in the bazaar ask him again about the father’s health. He watches the tide of movements around the house throughout the day, feeling the girl’s presence behind the slabs of walls, and suddenly they are all bodies assigned for wounds, sites of destruction.

26

He climbs down from the night wall.

Carrying the leopard in his arms he walks into the empty kitchen. Onions and coriander in a basket. Eggs. Clean pots. There is a tassel of corn silk in the basket and he strokes its softness. It is in filament form but essentially it is the same material out of which flower petals are made. On the far side is a whitewashed arch and he is looking at it — the section of the house he has never entered, where the women are. He walks towards it eventually and lifts the curtain draped across the arch to reveal a wide room with sofas against the left and right walls, a table with a mirror framed in ivory, a clock in the shape of a proud-looking mosque. In the wall directly opposite are two doors. One is set in a recessed arch, identical to the one in which he is standing, but the other is narrower and not as tall. He puts the cub on the floor to see where it will go but it remains at his feet and he squats beside it and gently encourages it to explore. Failing, he picks it up and walks towards the smaller door and opens it.

An enclosed passage hung with framed verses of the Koran.

He looks over his shoulder before entering. There is a window directly before him at the other end of the passage, the saptaparni trees visible through the diamonds of stained glass, and there is a door on either side of the window. Both have clear glass panels and when he looks in through the one on the left he sees a desk and a shelf of gold-spined religious books. The stuffed head of a black bear with a pink mouth. A framed family tree that displays only the names of the males. The right door gives onto a stone staircase but instead of climbing it he turns and rushes back, the audacity leaving him.

Five minutes later he is back, and he goes up the stairs and emerges onto a balcony lined with pots that have intensely scented orange trees blooming in them. Two whitewashed steps lead to a door.

He stands on the first step and looks in through the glass square. But only after another turning back, and returning ten minutes later, does he open the door and place the cub on the floor, and it touches the stone tiles with its nose and sets off to the other side of the room, a stride both purposeful and beautiful, and he watches it disappear through a curtained arch.

‘I have to leave here soon,’ he says quietly. ‘I have to go back home.’

Nothing from the other side of the cloth.

He turns to leave but stops on hearing the rustle of the curtain.

*

He returns to the top of the wall just before dawn, the leopard in his arms. ‘Don’t say a thing!’ he tells the animal in a low voice as he lies there. ‘Don’t you dare say a thing!’

27

Father Mede leans down towards a rose to take in its scent. It is the striped variety named Rosa Mundi. He is seventy-five years old, and as he walks towards the south boundary wall of the school, he stops now and then at various plants. Now he is at the hedge of wild jasmine. For how many generations have the children taken off the small green cap from the back of a wild jasmine flower and sucked the sweetness out of the thin tube? Making sure that he is unobserved, he does it now, and he is astonished that the drop of nectar tastes the same now as it did all those decades ago.

He knows what the word means. From the Greek. Nek tar. That which overcomes death.

He is descended from Joseph Mede, the Cambridge don and teacher of Milton, and although the family is from Wiltshire, Father Mede’s childhood was here in the Punjab during the Raj.

He resumes his walk. At the south wall is a grove composed mainly of dense rosewoods and cypresses, and one of the children had reported a hornets’ nest in an alcove somewhere along there. Father Mede wishes to determine whether it poses a threat to children, in which case the gardener will have to be told to remove it. The lines from Moses’ valedictory song go through his mind as he recalls eating the saccharine substance from hornets’ nests.

He suckled him with honey from a rock,

And oil from a flinty stone.

Soon after entering the grove he hears a sound that resembles the long dry crack that a tough cloth would give on being torn. The ground shudders and he looks around, earthquake being his first thought. He attempts to steady himself against a rosewood but the mighty trunk lightly swivels away from him, and overhead the entire crown swings sideways and the tree begins to fall. He tries to support it out of reflex and the trunk pulls him off his feet and it is like holding a fishing rod with a thousand-pound fish on the hook. He realises that the trunks of all the trees here have been severed, someone’s blade going through them at sternum height. They were just standing in place waiting for the merest touch, the meshed canopies providing the minimum steadiness until now, and they are crashing around him, the falling boughs generating a wind. In Joseph Mede’s Key of Revelation a historical meaning was given to the various symbols of Revelation and ‘winds’ had always meant ‘wars’. Dust fills his eyes, nothing but the torn leaves and branches around him as he attempts to gain a place of safety, the dark red flowers of the Madagascar gulmohar erupting into the air as the green limbs come down and he stands mercifully unscathed and watches how the place has suddenly filled up with light, the sky painfully exposed.

28

Naheed slows down as she climbs the stairs, taking the last five steps one at a time. She can hear someone in the room ahead of her.

‘Mother, is that you?’ Even though she knows Tara has gone to the haberdasher’s in Anarkali Bazaar.

She enters to discover Sharif Sharif. He stands up from his crouching position beside the bed. In his left hand is the box in which she keeps Mikal’s letters. One of them is in his right hand. It falls onto the bed as he stands up, surprised.

‘I just thought I’d come up and see how things are.’

She looks at him, unable to speak.

‘I wanted to see if you needed something. Do you need anything?’

Naheed shakes her head.

‘How are you managing? I haven’t asked after you for a while.’

Naheed looks at the letter on the counterpane.

He takes a step towards her. ‘Who wrote you those letters? They are all signed “Mikal”?’

She back away and he asks,

‘Is that Mikal as in Basie’s brother?’

She looks at the table where the scissors lie. He notices.

‘I am here to fulfil your every need. You don’t need anyone else.’

She sees how carefully he has placed himself between her and the scissors.

‘I have my family. My mother, my father-in-law.’

‘I will pour all my money at your feet. You could have anything you wanted.’

She shakes her head.

‘I’ll buy you a house, here or in Lahore. You won’t have to live with the other wives downstairs. Come away with me.’ He glances at the box on the floor. ‘Are they love letters?’

‘You have to leave,’ she says.

He goes back to the bed and picks up the letter. ‘Come away with me. I will even pay for Rohan’s eyes.’

There is the sound of someone on the stairs and Naheed moves forward and snatches the letter from him.

‘What are you doing here?’ Tara says to him fiercely as she comes in.

‘I came to see if you needed anything.’

‘We don’t need anything.’ She points to the door. ‘You must leave or I will scream. Now go.’

Buttons, snaps, collar stays and a seam ripper have spilled out of the plastic bag that Tara had let drop onto the floor as she came in. ‘I don’t know why you must pretend to be so innocent,’ he says as he steps over them to leave. ‘Both of you.’

After he has left Tara comes and holds Naheed. ‘What happened?’

Tara is thin. The months have taken so much out of her.

‘Nothing. I am fine,’ Naheed says, folding the letter and placing it in the box, securing it with a rubber band.

‘You have to throw them away,’ Tara says.

She places the box in the suitcase under the bed. She turns the key and takes it out of the lock.

Tara comes forward, holding out an envelope towards her.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s a photograph of the boy you will be engaged to soon.’

About to unseal it, Naheed lifts her finger away from the flap immediately.

29

Not a day goes by when a living person’s eventual burial site does not call out in a clear and unambiguous voice, ‘O child of Adam, you have forgotten me.’

In Baghdad House, Rohan is reading the Koran for Sofia, recalling the verses from memory.

Allah created four homes for Adam. Eden, the Earth, Purgatory and Paradise. And He has given four homes to the Children of Adam too. The womb, the Earth, the grave, and then Paradise or Hell.

After the burial a person is asked by the angels, who have materialised inside the grave, ‘What do you think of Islam?’ The second question he is asked is, ‘What do you have to say about Muhammad?’ If the answers are satisfactory, he is shown a glimpse of the tortures of Hell. ‘You have been spared this,’ he is told, and a vision of Paradise is granted him. ‘This will be your eventual home.’ The grave widens and seven doors open in its sides to allow the fragrant breezes of Paradise to circulate until Judgement Day. The opposite is true if it is a sinful person: seven entrances to Hell open up and the grave shrinks until the ribs crack past each other, the demons descending on the body to begin the tortures.

Rohan makes his way around her room and stands at the window, listening to the garden. The Prophet said there will be no tree in Paradise whose trunk is not of gold. Paradise, which Sofia will enter after Judgement Day, he is sure. Though about himself he cannot say anything.

He moves his head in the air of the room, aligning his dead eyes for a chink of light. Her voice seems present in the walls. Everything in this room has outlived her: he senses the lamp looking at him with that knowledge, the paintings of flowers on the walls, the ink-stained table. It’s all here except her. It is as though she still exists but is choosing to stay away from his eyes.

*

‘Naheed.’

Tara calls out to the girl.

‘Naheed.’

‘She’s not here, sister-ji,’ Rohan answers.

He comes to the veranda, feeling along the walls. The tips of his fingers are the precise length that his gaze can travel now — his eyes bandaged.

‘I thought she was here,’ Tara says, looking around, and she calls out again.

‘I have been alone all morning. I thought she was with you.’

Tara takes his hand and guides him back into his room. ‘You’ve been alone all morning?’

‘Yes. What time is it?’

‘It’s past noon. I just came in to help her prepare lunch.’ With the beginning of panic in her voice she shouts the girl’s name once more.

‘She’ll be here any minute, I’m sure,’ Rohan says as she lowers him into his chair. He sighs and slowly reaches out for the notebook on the table. ‘I have been trying to write.’

The pages are empty because, unknown to him, the pen doesn’t have any ink in it.

‘Where could she be?’ Tara says, moving towards the window.

‘Perhaps she’s gone to the bazaar.’

‘She would have told me, brother-ji. Her behaviour has been somewhat erratic these past few days but she wouldn’t go anywhere without telling me. Or leave you here all by yourself.’

She enters the garden hoping to see her step out of a pocket of greenery, dressed in ash, and she walks towards the pond where the water lilies burn in the sunlight and then recoils at the thought that enters her mind on seeing the moss floating at the water’s edge, looking like long hair.

As she cooks in the kitchen — and attends to the disorder Rohan has unknowingly created in making himself breakfast or pouring a glass of water — she remains alert to every movement out there, every sound.

By the time Yasmin and Basie return from St Joseph’s, at three, she is close to tears.

‘I am sure there’s a perfectly simple explanation,’ Basie says. ‘Don’t be alarmed.’

‘Yes. She’ll be here soon,’ Yasmin says.

‘Have you asked the neighbours?’

She shakes her head.

‘I’ll go,’ says Yasmin.

Tara reacts with pain. ‘Don’t.’

‘Someone might have seen her, Aunt Tara.’

‘No,’ she says firmly. ‘We have to be careful who we ask. If we tell them she is missing, the thought will enter their minds that she has a secret life, and later they’ll easily accuse her of immorality and unchastity.’

Yasmin half-heartedly comes back to her chair.

‘Let’s just wait for a little while longer,’ Basie says. ‘I am sure she’ll be back any minute.’

As the afternoon advances, Tara ties on her burka and goes back to her room five streets away. Before climbing up she stops to exchange a few words with Sharif Sharif’s wives but they don’t mention Naheed. On a shelf in her room there are stacks of clothes, folded as neatly as newspapers. They are the sewing work she has finished over the past week, and she carries these around the neighbourhood now, taking them to the customers’ houses. In each house she mentions Naheed’s name several times, with a pretend casualness, in case someone says something about having seen the girl, in case someone remembers something Naheed had said recently and provides a clue to her disappearance.

When she returns to Rohan’s house it is almost dusk and the stars are beginning to come out in the east, where it is darkest.

She is sitting with Yasmin and Basie in the kitchen when Rohan makes his way towards them through the banana grove. ‘Where is Naheed?’ he asks from out there.

Basie goes out and offers him his arm to lead him in but Rohan refuses to take even a single step. ‘Where is Naheed?’ The voice is louder now.

Basie makes to say something but then stops.

‘Answer me, someone. I know you are all here. Basie? Yasmin? Tara? Where’s my Naheed?’

‘She’s not here, Father,’ Yasmin says.

‘Where is she?’

‘She’ll be here soon, brother-ji,’ Tara says.

‘What time is it?’

Nothing but silence from them. Basie wondering whether it is possible to lie to him as he had tried to earlier. But the night prayers have been called from the minaret so he must have a very good idea of the hour.

‘I said what time is it? Eight? Eight thirty?’

‘It’s just gone past nine, Father.’

He reacts as though a sword has fallen onto the back of his neck. ‘Why are you just sitting here? Why aren’t you out there looking for her?’ He turns around and rushes through the banana trees into the garden, seeing with the light of his grief. Terror is not knowing where the pain is coming from — and so in his desperation he begins to shout, the word echoing through every dark canopy and trunk, turning in every direction, batting at various things. As Yasmin and Basie try to help him, Tara sits holding the envelope containing the photograph of Naheed’s prospective husband, still unopened.

*

At midnight Yasmin and Basie are sitting on the steps of the veranda. An insect-swirled candle burning beside them. There was rain earlier and hundreds of snails are roaming the garden, their shells conical in shape, and tiny, no bigger than the exposed lead of a well sharpened pencil. The bodies are bright yellow.

‘She’ll return,’ he tells her.

‘I wish Father would stop insisting we look in the pond and the river.’

‘He can still frighten me when he is angry.’

‘Me too. We should keep reminding ourselves we are twenty-eight years old.’ She leans her head against his shoulder in tiredness. ‘After Mother died he’d make me pray five times a day for her. Even Jeo when he was five or six was being made to do it. He was so strict, a disciplinarian. I joke about it with him now sometimes, and he claims not to remember being severe.’

He looks towards Rohan’s room. From a confused anger Rohan had slipped into melancholy and despair. Saying this place was ill-fated. This building defines the line of the trench in which the horses were buried during the Mutiny. The surrounding lands were gifted to Rohan’s great-grandfather by the British as a reward for his loyalty during the rebellion. But in the decades since 1857, several members of the bloodline refused the tainted inheritance. Businesses begun on it would fail. Locusts descended on the wheat fields. Orchards rotted. Rohan too had wanted nothing of it, and only at Sofia’s pragmatic insistence had decided to build Ardent Spirit here, only at her insistence had he used the parcel on the other side of the river to build the bigger building. It is possible that he gave it all away to Ahmed the Moth with relief.

Basie inhales the damp scents in the air, the cold moonlight. The Rangoon creeper above them has been adding new leaves to itself every day this month, a dense opaque green, branch crowding branch, while the new leaves on the banyan and the peepal are a soft red.

‘What are you thinking?’

‘I am thinking when will I see my husband smile again.’

She feels him hold his breath at this, the mechanism of the body becoming still.

‘I am sorry,’ he says after a while.

‘And when will I hear my husband use a swear word? Mikal said you taught him such filthy things as a child.’

He tightens his arm around her. ‘Motherfucker.’

She gives a small sleepy laugh.

When Rohan brought them home all those years ago, the ten-year-old Mikal had a book of constellations and the eighteen-year-old Basie was dragging the trunkful of his father’s jazz records. This veranda was where she had seen him for the first time.

‘I am married to a Pakistani nicknamed after Count Basie,’ she says now, wanting him to talk, to be comforted by his voice and to make his own mind disappear towards another topic for however brief a period. Even if she has heard what he will say many times already.

‘Hey, hey,’ he responds, heavy-eyed but play-acting to make her happy; if he had the energy he would smile. ‘Jazz and Pakistan have a long history. Chet Baker was married to a Pakistani woman. Halema Alli. There is a song named “Halema”, for her, and their son is named Chesney Aftab.’

‘Fiction.’

‘She is the beautiful woman with him in the famous William Claxton photographs. I have a print of one hanging on the wall at home. The woman who is now my wife bought it for me on my twenty-first birthday …’

*

Six days later he walks into the police station on the Grand Trunk Road and asks to see the house officer. As he waits to be shown into the office he wonders what is occurring in the room on the other side of the wall directly in front of him. It is difficult to suppress a shudder every time the police solve a crime in Pakistan. There is no knowing if the confession is genuine, and there is no knowing how many innocents have been tortured to get even that.

When the government began hunting Communists in 1980 — for criticising it and the USA — Basie and Mikal’s father had gone underground and then one day the police had taken the child Basie away to make the father give himself up. Basie still remembers being held up towards the rotating ceiling fan at this very police station, as they tried to force him to tell them where his father was hiding. A plot had been uncovered — some of the younger comrades were planning to kidnap American citizens in Pakistan. ‘Your father is doing this to you, not us,’ the policemen told Basie as they struck him. When he came home his legs and face were blue and his mother’s initial thought was that they had spilled ink onto him for some reason.

Now Basie is shown into an office and he finds the police inspector seated in a black leather chair behind a large desk. Beside him on the floor squats an old emaciated woman, toothless, her meagre hair in a short plait. Her eyes are closed and she’s holding onto the man’s khaki-clad knee. She’s perfectly still, her face wholly expressionless, and his ignoring of her is total — it is as though she is not there.

‘How long has your sister-in-law been missing?’ the inspector asks.

‘Since Thursday.’ He cannot help but glance towards the woman.

‘Why have you come to report it only now?’ the inspector asks.

‘We thought she’d gone to visit relatives.’

‘Does she do that often?’

‘What?’

‘Does she do that often? Go to visit relatives without telling you?’

‘No.’

The sparrow-like woman must be about eighty. Is she begging the release of a grandson picked up on a false charge? Begging the police to do something about a missing son? A daughter threatened with gang rape by enemies?

Basie wonders if he recognises the inspector. Was he the one who beat him?

‘Your sister-in-law is a widow, you say.’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you considered the possibility that she has run away with a yaar?’ He uses the lewd Punjabi word for a woman’s lover.

‘She wouldn’t do that.’

The chart hanging behind the inspector lists the six qualities a Pakistani citizen can expect to find in every member of the police force.

Politeness. Obedience. Loyalty. Intelligence. Courteousness. Efficiency.

‘You say you are a teacher,’ the man says, ‘and you look like a respectable man. You don’t know what I witness every day. I have made you uncomfortable, I know, but you don’t know how depraved humanity can be.’

A constable opens the door and beckons the inspector. He gets up from behind his desk, detaching his knee from the woman’s hand. ‘I shall return. Certain matters require privacy,’ he says to Basie with a smile as he leaves. ‘Among the sacred names of Allah, there is the Veil.’

The woman slumps against the chair. Her scratched and grimy spectacles, lacking earpieces, are tied to her head with a fraying cord.

The children tell a joke about a man who had lost his horse. He went to the American police but it proved fruitless. He went to the British police and their investigation too failed. As did those of the Germans, the French, the Dutch. He came to the Pakistani policemen, who listened to him and went away. When they came back the next day they were leading an elephant by a chain. The animal had been severely beaten and was in bad shape and could barely walk. ‘I am a horse, I am a horse,’ it was screaming.

‘Good aunt, what is the matter?’

But she doesn’t acknowledge him.

‘Would you like some water?’

She shakes her head.

The inspector returns but then goes to the door once again and shouts to someone out there: ‘Just make sure he has a bad night.

‘So. What would you like me to do?’ he asks Basie, settling in his chair, and extending his knee a little until the woman connects herself to it again. Metal reacting to nearby magnet.

‘I was hoping you would look for her.’

‘Are you saying she has been kidnapped?’

‘I want you to find that out.’

The inspector opens his arms in exasperation. ‘How do you expect me to do that? It’s a big country, there are millions of people.’

‘Inspector-sahib, I wish to report my sister-in-law as missing,’ Basie says firmly.

The man does not like the tone but ignores it for now. ‘Let me just say that an hour ago we captured a truck that contained two dozen machine guns, dozens of pistols, thirty Kalashnikovs and thirty sacks of bullets. And you want me to waste my time with a girl who has run away from home.’

‘How do you know she has run away? Anything could have happened.’

The man waves the comment away as foolish. ‘She has run away with someone who has filled her head with his talk. When they realise how difficult life is, she’ll return. Hunger is the best cure for illusions.’

‘I wish to report my sister-in-law as missing.’

He wants a bribe from Basie before proceeding. Bribes exist in other countries too, he knows, but there they are an incentive towards performing illegal acts. Here they must be paid to induce an official to do what he is supposed to do.

‘When was she widowed?’ he asks brusquely.

‘In October.’

‘Did you discover last week that she is pregnant and now she is buried in your garden?’

‘You can come and dig up the garden.’

‘We might have to. Tell me again why you waited six days before coming here.’

‘We thought she’d return.’ When on the third day Basie had wondered aloud whether they should contact the police, both Rohan and Tara had been horrified, and Yasmin had almost cried out, ‘You might as well tattoo the word “prostitute” on her forehead.’

‘She probably will return. Come back and see us in another month if she hasn’t.’

‘A month?’

‘Yes,’ he says, holding Basie’s eye. ‘If she hasn’t come back by then we’ll come and take your statements. We’ll have to talk to the neighbours about her character and personality, about her mother’s character and personality.’ He notices Basie glance at the woman and shakes his head. ‘And stop looking at her. This doesn’t concern you.’

‘What does she want?’

‘What do criminals always want?’ the inspector says with contempt. ‘To evade justice. Left unchecked they will destroy everything. Look at America and how it is behaving.’ He stands up, pushing the woman away. ‘Now I have other matters to attend to.’

Basie vacates his chair reluctantly. ‘You are not going to do anything?’

The inspector ignores the question. ‘You teach at St Joseph’s? A school for the children of the wealthy.’

‘I wouldn’t call them wealthy.’

‘Some of them are. The school must pay you very well.’

‘It doesn’t.’

The inspector smiles. ‘Don’t worry. She’ll probably return. And when she does I want you to bring her here.’

‘You won’t look for her now but you want to see her when she returns?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘We might have to investigate her for immorality and wantonhood. She must explain to us, as agents of decent society, where she has been all these days. A charge of decadence and wickedness might have to be brought against her.’

*

Tara sits in her black burka on the steps of a shop in Soldier Bazaar, very early in the morning. There is no one around but her. She looks at the paper in her hand, the text she has composed to be printed as a ‘Missing’ leaflet. Naheed’s age, her height, the colour of her skin and her eyes. The distribution of leaflets — suggested by Basie — is something she has resisted till now, but last night was terrible, the various fears overcoming her in the sleepless dark, and after the predawn prayers she set out for the printer’s shop.

She sits waiting for the owner to arrive and open up, her head leaning against the jamb.

Today will be the eighth day of the disappearance. From the pocket of her burka she takes out the photograph of Naheed that will be printed on the leaflet. It was taken by Jeo, a month or so before he died, and in it Naheed is standing in the garden, on the path on which she lost consciousness for several minutes when Jeo’s corpse was brought home in the truck. When the neighbourhood women came in soon afterwards they found the truck driver and his assistants taking care of her, her head in the lap of the driver who poured water into her mouth. A memory comes to Tara from that day and she straightens suddenly. ‘She fainted in the presence of three men, three strangers?’ she had overheard a woman say to another during the funeral. ‘How could she allow herself to do that?’

Tara stands up as quickly as she is able. She tears up the text and walks away down the street, horrified at what she had come here to do. At the corner she stops on seeing faint marks in the dust on the ground, and she follows them, thinking the chained fakir is making his way through Heer once again, but she turns the corner to see a woman road sweeper dragging her broom behind her, about to begin the day’s labours.

*

Deep in the night thirteen days after her disappearance, Basie drives Tara and Yasmin to the graveyard, women being barred from visiting their dead during the day by the stick-wielding cloaked figures associated with Ardent Spirit. It’s 2 a.m., and as they get out of the car and enter through the wooden gate they see a hundred scattered lanterns, the faint haze of light, where other women are making their way towards dead husbands, sons and daughters, leaning mournfully over mothers and fathers.

A quietness prevails, the only sound the lift and hushed fall of feet.

He is carrying a flashlight, known as chor batti — a thief’s light. He looks at the women, their hearts seemingly in flood as they pray amid the mounds, having brought flowers, holy verses and letters — tributes in rock, ink and gesture. Tara and Yasmin, with light on their faces and on the pages of the Koran, begin to read the sacred words. And Basie stands and watches.

When he mistakes a girl in the distance for Naheed — a quick second glance confirms it not to be her — there is a surge of pain in him followed by sudden directionless anger. As he waits for it to pass even the murmur of the Korans becomes an annoyance. Whenever he is drunk, his feelings about religion can become vocal — revealing a sham, his own and his country’s. ‘I’ll announce tomorrow that I don’t believe in Allah or Muhammad or the Koran,’ he’d said to Yasmin two evenings ago. ‘But I’ll be beaten to death by a mob for being an infidel, or taken to jail and shot dead in the middle of the night by policemen or set upon by other prisoners. So I go on pretending. But I am not a hypocrite. I’d be a hypocrite if I was free to say and act what I believed in and didn’t. But I am not free.’

There is a commotion in the distance, beside the northernmost wall, and they see the group of black-clad women has appeared and is striking the visitors with canes, the mourners’ lanterns hurrying in every direction. Each set of women is asking for help from Allah in ending the menace that is the other.

Tara stands up, kissing her Koran and closing it. ‘We should leave.’

Some of the women are fighting back. The men who have brought them here too are receiving blows from the black-clad women, or from the zealous men who brought the zealous women here.

Two cloaked figures appear behind Yasmin, their draperies moving in urgent passionate waves, their heads tied with green bands with the flaming-swords motif of Ardent Spirit. ‘Women are not allowed into graveyards,’ one of them shouts and swings at Yasmin’s head with the metal-tipped cane. ‘It’s because of people like you’, the other veiled woman says as she strikes Tara in the stomach, ‘that Allah is punishing the entire Muslim world these days.’

Basie takes hold of both canes as they are raised again for further blows, but one of them is slippery — he realises it’s Yasmin’s blood — and it slides out of his grip and comes down on Yasmin’s head again. She cries out. The other woman struggles to get her cane free and shouts, ‘We stop you from coming in the daytime and you start to come at night! There is no end to the ingenuity of the wicked.’

Yasmin is trembling on the ground, thick lines of blood pouring from beyond her hairline and into her eyes. ‘My mother is buried here,’ she says, ‘and my brother.’

Basie lets go of the other cane and bends down to her and the freed weapon is brought down onto his back, feeling as though he has been slashed with a razor.

Tara dodges the cane aimed at her and it strikes the Koran in her hand instead, brutally. ‘Look what you made me do,’ the assailant — only her contact lenses visible, her hands encased in black gloves — screams with distress and gives Tara a fierce fluent strike to the shoulder.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

Deo Minara. Minaret of Demons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

‘Naheed.’

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

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

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

‘Mikal is alive,’ she says at last.

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

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

‘What are you talking about?’

She looks thinner and exhausted.

‘There’s no one in his grave.’

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

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

‘How do you know?’

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

Basie raises his hand to his forehead.

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

‘You saw the empty pit?’

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

‘It doesn’t mean he’s not dead.’

‘He is alive, Basie.’

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

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

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

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

‘You’ve been gone two whole weeks.’

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

‘I wish you had told us.’

She shakes her head.

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

30

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

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

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

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

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

The sound of boots slamming onto the floors. Three hooded figures run towards the three other points of entry into the building, pushing the puzzled children aside, while behind them a dozen men have raised their weapons and — with those proclamations of ‘Allahu Akbar!’ — opened fire into the air.

It is all done with such speed and efficiency that it takes a while to become apparent that the school is under attack, the panic beginning.

Running towards Father Mede’s office, leaping over the wild jasmine hedges, the head of Cordoba House sees two fifteen-year-old boys escaping over the boundary wall — the gardener’s grandsons — and he stops and takes aim and shoots at their legs, hearing their screams as they drop and land on the other side.

The only laws they are breaking are shallow laws, the head of Ottoman House tells himself as he tries to locate Basie, Kyra having given them specific instructions regarding him. It feels unreal but what is occurring here is believable at the deepest level, has a perfect legitimacy and even beauty. Any incongruity is a shallow incongruity.

*

In the assembly hall, angels hang from the ceiling. Only a few have been raised to their eventual height, the rest hovering from varying lengths of wire. They hover in many attitudes. The stiff white robes of the Man Cloaked in Linen, as Gabriel is described in the Book of Ezekiel, are low enough to be just a few inches above an adult’s head. The unnamed Angel of Presence, who told Moses the story of Creation, is suspended at an acute angle and appears to be plunging headfirst towards the floor.

Half an hour after the gates are shut, all the children and teachers have been brought to the hall. The children, gathered on one side of the hall, are like bodies rolling in a sea-swell. The lower halves of the terrorists’ hoods have a stuffed look due to their beards, and they are firing bullets towards the ceiling, perhaps in an effort to curtail the screams of the children, perhaps in an effort to make them scream louder so they can be heard outside. Or perhaps they just wish to destroy the angels as distasteful idols, splinters of coloured wood coming away.

The noise is deafening. A hooded figure walks up to Basie who is squatting beside an unconscious seven-year-old. ‘Where is the white man?’ he asks but he is barely audible above the tumult. ‘Tell everyone to shut up,’ he shouts at Basie, and adds, ‘Where is Father Mede?’

‘This boy needs water,’ Basie says and reaches for a plastic flask lying on the floor a few feet away.

‘Get up and tell them to be quiet.’

‘Tell your men to stop firing,’ the deputy headmaster approaches and says. The undeveloped quality in the terrorist’s voice — he is almost a boy — has led to the teacher thinking of a student in need of discipline.

The terrorist grabs the teacher by the lapel, a tinge of death in the dark mask. ‘Watch your manner, you … you running dog of imperialism.’

‘You don’t know what imperialism means,’ the incensed man says. ‘You’re too stupid.’

The eyes watch him through the holes in the black hood. ‘Where did you learn to look down on people? One of those big villas in Model Town?’

‘I grew up in a one-room house in old Heer, and I still live there. My father was a car mechanic and I am proud of him and grateful to him for teaching me to respect those who deserve my respect.’

‘You don’t think we deserve your respect?’

‘I know you don’t.’

‘We are warriors of Allah.’

‘You are thugs with Korans.’

The terrorist walks him by his necktie to the centre of the assembly hall. ‘Everyone must be quiet at once,’ he shouts, to no avail. He repeats his words but the children continue to scream, some of the four- and five-year-olds actually shrieking with terror at the guns bursting towards the ceiling.

‘I will remember you,’ the deputy headmaster says with the starkness of a last prayer as the terrorist puts the barrel of his pistol to the back of his head and pulls the trigger. This bullet, entering a human body instead of empty air, sounds different from others and the effect on the assembly hall is immediate. The dead man falls to the floor in complete silence.

The shot leaves an echo under every skin. Over the next ten minutes, after the dead body has been removed — Basie wishing he could hold his hand over the eyes of each one of the children to stop them from seeing — the males and females are separated to either side of the hall and they sit in rows with the stillness and silence of hunted animals. The women and girls are made to face the wall so as not to provoke lustful thoughts in any of the males, and all boys have been told to take off their neckties, a symbol of the West.

‘Where is the white man?’

When Basie says, ‘He’s not here today, he had to go to Islamabad,’ several of the terrorists are beside themselves with wrath.

‘He’s not here today,’ Basie says again. He takes a step towards the hooded figure closest to him. ‘Look, these wounded people need medical attention.’

‘We want the teacher named Jibrael, known as Basie. Which one of you is he? He must be made an example of too.’

Before Basie can identify himself the English teacher says from behind him, ‘He’s not here either. He doesn’t usually come in until just before nine.’

*

Moving fast, the hooded figures are wiring the assembly hall with bombs, grenades and rockets, the skills taught to some of them by the Pakistani military for use in Kashmir. They ask children to hold the bombs while they climb onto chairs and weave a network of wires between the angels, each bomb slightly bigger than a briefcase and wrapped in either electrical or clear tape, this second allowing a glimpse of the ball bearings and glass shards packed inside. Once the cat’s cradle is ready, the bombs are hung from it at various points. At the only unlocked door out of the hall there is a bomb attached to an improvised switch made of two pieces of plywood, one of the terrorists keeping his foot on it to prevent it from exploding. It is as though the very soul of each hostage has been packed with dynamite.

A terrorist walks to the centre of the floor and speaks into the massive immobility, asking all Christian, Shia and Ahmadiya teachers and children to come forward.

Beside the door, just behind the terrorist with his foot on the plywood switch, two ten-year-old girls are about to stand up when Naheed, sitting with her arms around them, tightens her grip by a fraction and slightly shakes her head once.

31

‘You should not be here,’ Mikal whispers.

‘I dreamt about you before meeting you,’ says the girl, ignoring his words. ‘It was the night before my brother brought you home.’

‘You should not be here.’

She is with him at the top of his night wall, the snow leopard in her arms and the stars falling above the three of them in a tremendous living flood that reaches down to brush against them in slow currents of soft glass grit. The top of the wall is wide enough for four people to walk side by side, and there are raised edges to prevent a fall — edges meant to hide behind and shoot at the raiders or assailants outside during a siege. But now they are concealing the two of them. The constellations are sturdy or faint diffusions in the dark panorama and he whispers their names to her. So many intensities of light, all in flakes and bands and tilted shelves, of the light and within the light, sometimes blindingly brilliant especially to the west where the sky looks as if it is on fire from inside, blinking so forcefully it is a surprise they do not make a sound. Causing a dizziness. And down here there is her life-altering touch on his skin. He tells her of the number of occasions he was discovered lying horizontally on a bough thirty feet above ground in Rohan’s garden, watching meteorites fall or peering up through the telescope, an instrument he called ‘a glass-bottomed boat for the sky’. She tells him of an incident from her eldest brother’s childhood. ‘Something has appeared on the other side of the hill,’ he had said to his parents and uncles one day. ‘It’s black in colour and very strange.’ The men had armed themselves and left to investigate.

‘What was it?’

‘A road.’

‘You should not have come here.’

‘I turned back twice but had no alternative. You stopped coming to me.’

He raises his fingers to his brow. The place where once there was a bruise, a faint swelling. Soon after Naheed was married to Jeo, he had struck his head against the floor one night. The torment of thinking of her with someone else. The pain has awakened of late though the discolouration has long since faded. Love is a distinguishing mark, something by which a dead body can be identified.

*

As the sun rises he is in the field of yellow flowers, listening to the breeze, to his own breath. He has been here since before dawn, soon after she left the wall. He had wanted to see if Akbar’s father would arrive, and as he had waited three figures had appeared and then Mikal had heard the father’s Datsun. The man drove into the flowers and met them. It was brief. Mikal had watched from where he hid as an object exchanged hands. After he pocketed it — Mikal suspected it was a satellite phone — the men had driven away. Before leaving himself Akbar’s father had unfolded a prayer mat onto the flowers and had said his prayers, spending a longer period on them than was required.

Mikal thought they would be Americans, the three figures he met, but they were Pakistani. Military or the ISI, who will capture al-Qaeda terrorists for the Americans. And it might not be a satellite phone; it could be a vehicle-tracking beacon or a covert surveillance camera to be installed in the south wing.

When will the operation against the al-Qaeda guests be launched and how severe will it be? The raid that occurred at the village a hundred miles away had begun at 3 a.m. The forces had attacked five houses. Three helicopters had brought sixty soldiers but only two of the helicopters had landed and unloaded, the third remaining overhead, providing surveillance and aerial support. Someone said there was a fighter jet too, giving air cover during part of the fourteen-hour siege and battle. About twenty people, possibly including three women and four children, were killed. Whether the dead women were helping al-Qaeda is not known.

The sun is climbing gently, breaking free of the horizon to become rounder and solidifying the way liquid metal does. A sound behind him and he turns to see the Airedale dogs looking at him from ten yards away, standing beside each other on those blood-red legs, the eyes too appearing red in the long slow rising of the sun. He watches and listens, darting a quick glance to either side, but there is no one. At least no one who reveals himself. Suddenly certain that the three animals have killed humans he reaches into his pocket for the knife. Their heads — formidable, big of brain — are the same height as his neck. He looks down at the knife blade reflecting the rays and when he lifts his eyes only a second later the animals have vanished and he waits for something to happen, looking at the conical hills in the distance. Nothing. He walks back to the house, keeping the blade of the knife unfolded most of the way, and he goes in through the kitchen where the cook is singing a song to herself, giving voice to some quiet ache inside her. She pours him a bowl of tea. When he arrives at the gun factory the three dogs are chained up to the saptaparni trees.

*

The grass growing tall between the car husks and the empty rocket shells, he is digging in the area strewn with scrap metal outside the factory, yellow wasps flying in and out of a bullet hole in a rusting truck fender near him.

He digs to the depth of three feet until he has reached a pocket of sand and then puts away the spade and leans down into the pit, working the sand grains away with his fingers. The Mercedes-Benz of modern pistols, it is said about Glocks that they can be buried in sea sand for several weeks and removed and fired immediately. The replicas made at this factory must undergo a similar test. And so minutes after digging them up, Mikal and Akbar’s brother are firing them onto targets painted on the scrap metal.

On more than one occasion during the course of the morning Mikal interrupts work with the intention of locating Akbar, to tell him what he saw at dawn. Again and again he comes to the door, where a boy of ten sits on a woven reed mat, refilling spent bullets so they can be used again.

After the buried Glocks have been cleaned and polished, Akbar’s brother asks him to take one of them to the south wing of the house.

‘Give it to the man on the veranda.’

But there is no one there. Mikal clears his throat and stands looking around. On the wall is a plaque which has been painted over but is peeling and some of the text is visible. In any case he knows from Akbar what it says. ‘The Connolly Ward’. A white man who was executed by the Amir of Bukhara in 1842, on suspicion of spying for the British. He moved through the Central Asian republics under the name of Khan Ali, adapting it for its resemblance to his real name, and he was the one who invented the term ‘the Great Game’. Refusing to convert to Islam while the prisoner of the Amir of Bukhara, he was taunted for his faith and made to go through terrible suffering. After his death his sister would write to any new clinic or hospital when it opened, requesting to support a bed or ward in his memory.

Mikal clears his throat again and then pushes open the door and goes into the room which has light-absorbing cement walls and a cold terrazzo floor and he calls out a salutation and stands listening. Against the wall is a stack of cardboard boxes. Inside the one he opens there are hundreds of documents — booklets, instruction manuals on how to make and use explosives, training manuals for guerrilla warfare. There are notebooks, their corners rubbed off by handling and grimy like the ones in which butchers keep customer accounts. On the pages are techniques for kidnapping and assassination. He lifts out a folded letter dated 12 February 2001 to someone named Abu Khabab al-Masri. Most respected Abu Khabab, I am sending five companions, who are eager to be trained in explosives and other methods of joyful bloodshed. Concerning the expenditure, they will pay you themselves. All are trustworthy …

Killing the Pope. Killing the American President. Blowing up a dozen airliners simultaneously. Assassinations in Pakistan and the Philippines. Bombings in Iran and India among other countries. Attacks on consulates in Pakistan and Thailand. There is a drawing of a crude device for delivering anthrax, and in another box he finds gas masks and the final volume of an eleven-volume ‘encyclopaedia’ on modern weapons, including notes on where to source high explosives, like RDX and Semtex, that can be used in shaped charges to compress the nuclear core in an implosion-type nuclear device. A map shows the location of a synagogue in Tunis. Nuclear power plants in Western lands. Sports stadiums.

A sense of defilement runs in his body. They want the birth of a new world, and will take death and repeat it and repeat it and repeat it until that birth results.

‘I too was in a military prison like you and Akbar,’ he hears someone say behind him.

He turns around. ‘I was sent to give you this,’ he says quickly and holds out the gun towards the man. He is an Arab, young but with a large beard.

‘When they released you, they took you back to the mosque beside the lake, and they took Akbar back to Jalalabad. Am I right? Guess what happened to my brother.’

Mikal just wishes to leave.

‘He was captured during the exodus of Arabs after Kabul fell on 13 November, so Kabul is where they should have returned him. Instead they flew him to an unknown city and put him on a bus that took seven hours to reach its destination. He couldn’t speak the language, had no money or identification, and it was a while before he learned that he was in the country of Albania. No one believes his story, no one believes he was captured.’ He shakes his head pityingly.

Mikal gives him the gun and he turns it in his hand, holds it at various distances from his body. He gestures with it at the boxes. ‘If you find anything of interest in there you may take it.’ He smiles and adds, ‘The scholar’s ink is holier than the martyr’s blood, as they say.’

‘I was just curious.’

‘You killed two Americans. Single-handedly.’

Mikal points to the door. ‘I have to go.’ He wishes he could pick up a telephone and dial Basie’s number in Heer.

‘I must shake the hand that did the blessed deed.’ The man gives what must be his happiest smile. ‘We have the right to kill four million Americans, two million of them children. And to exile twice as many and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands. No?’

Mikal looks at the proffered hand. ‘I have a better idea,’ he says. He lets a few seconds pass for all sediment in the room to settle, to be able to speak into clear air. Looking directly into the man’s eyes, he says what he wishes to say.

*

All day he searches for Akbar but cannot locate him.

*

The moon rises almost vertically, growing smaller as it ascends.

Entering her room he places the cub on the floor, watches it disappear through the curtained arch on the other side. There is a short leaf-like rustle from the other side.

She parts the curtain and looks at him, the animal in her hands. Astoundingly she is standing in a pile of loose banknotes. Every inch of the wide floor on the other side of the curtain is heaped with dollars and rials, pounds and rupees. It is a large room and the crumpled rectangles of paper are up to her shins in places. The surface of the bed is a large white square marooned in money, a chair submerged up to the seat. A spray of blue plastic lilies sprouts close to her, the vase itself unseen.

‘I am to be married.’

He doesn’t have to ask who the bridegroom is. Al-Qaeda terrorists often cement relationships with the tribes by marrying the daughters and sisters of their hosts.

‘Within the next few weeks.’

‘I leave for my visit to Heer in the morning.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘I don’t know what’s waiting for me there. It could be dangerous.’

‘I don’t care.’

He shakes his head. ‘I will be quick. I’ll come back and then we’ll leave.’

She picks up the leopard from among the banknotes, responding to its calls of unease. It opens its mouth and the whistle comes after a few seconds of silent effort, and is followed by a silence before the mouth is closed.

‘Your father doesn’t approve of this match. Am I right?’

‘Yes. It was my brothers’ idea.’

*

The house is in darkness. Beyond the earth’s curve, beyond its weather, the high distances are blank. The tops of the palatial trees silhouetted against it. In his pocket is the envelope of money Akbar has given him for the journey to Heer. He lies on the wall fully clothed and concentrates on sounds like a blind man. He gets up and climbs down into the courtyard. He walks through the trees to Akbar’s room but the bed is empty. He knows he must disclose the father’s betrayal to the son — but how severe will be the consequences?

He returns to the wall but comes down again after what must be an hour according to the stars and walks to the kitchen.

Akbar is at the window, his arms crossed on the sill. Mikal goes to stand beside him and Akbar drapes his arm familially around his shoulder.

‘What are you looking at?’ Mikal asks.

‘There is nothing to look at. It’s night.’

He turns his face towards the boy. ‘Akbar, what’s the matter?’

He still won’t answer. After a while he takes his arm away from Mikal’s shoulder. ‘I heard what happened in the south wing. Why did you say that to a man as great as him?’

‘Akbar, are you weeping?’ Mikal asks.

He shakes his head. ‘Why did you do it?’

‘Why are you weeping, Akbar?’

He wipes his eyes on his sleeve. ‘It had to be done.’

‘What had to be done?’

‘Dishonour has to be paid for.’ He takes Mikal’s arm. ‘Come with me.’

He stands firm. ‘Why?’

‘Come with me.’

They drive out of the house, moving through the darkness, the dust of their wake sidling into the thorn bushes on either side of the car. Mikal’s heart lurches as they turn onto the small path towards the yellow field, the hills in the distance. On the other side of the hills are wild and barren plains, stretching widely away mile upon mile towards Afghanistan. Akbar drives to the centre of the field and says, ‘Let’s stop here for a while.’ Insects — different with each minute — come out of the night and fall around the headlights. Moths like golden-winged machineries. And Akbar is talking frantically about America and the West. Did you know what they did in Vietnam, did you know what happened in Bosnia, did you know, did you know, did you know. There are sallies of breeze in the flowers, the thousand sounds of the night, and the clouds lift and the countless white flames of the sky emerge.

‘Akbar, why are we here?’

‘Did the Americans ever ask you to collaborate with them?’ Akbar asks. ‘Did they say they would let you go if you spied on al-Qaeda and the Taliban for them?’

‘No. We have had this discussion already.’

‘The Malaysian boy three cages away from us was almost definitely turned into a double agent and sent back to Malaysia to spy on al-Qaeda. At the brick factory they gave him ice cream, pizza and apple pies and showed him movies.’

‘Akbar. What are we doing here?’

He looks at the dashboard clock and moves the car forwards through the flowers, towards the hills. Ahead of them their headlights illuminate the father’s Datsun. Stationary on the hillside. Mikal raises his arms and places his hands on top of his head. ‘Oh God.’ The vehicle’s front — on the passenger side — is crushed against a boulder. Akbar stops the car ten yards from the collision site and they sit looking out. At the moment of impact the driver had been thrown out of the driving seat and through the windshield.

‘Oh God.’ He is grateful eyes are incapable of seeing souls.

‘Do you remember you told me the fuse of the headlights can be replaced with a twenty-two-calibre bullet? The bullet heats up and fires itself as if from a gun.’

*

Akbar spends almost an hour looking for him, calling out in the darkness, Mikal having turned away from him and run into the bandit hills, and he stays hidden with his revulsion, the cold fury and confusion. He watches Akbar get into the car and drive away at last. His mind uncentring, he wanders in the darkness and sees a stream flowing upwards at dawn, but realises it is flowing downwards after all when he looks again, the sky full of quivering incidents of daybreak, the light slipping on the hillsides, inventing colours.

Early morning — and he walks out of the hills into Megiddo’s bazaar and buys a cup of tea and then enters a shop and asks for four aspirin tablets, swallowing them with water from a tap on the outside wall, but they are chalk and he spits them out and stands looking at the shop. In another shop across the street he waits for his turn behind schoolchildren buying sweets and small booklets containing mantar spells to help them pass exams. After swallowing the aspirin he leans against the pillar that serves as a bus stop and waits to begin the journey to Heer, while a small child with a very solemn expression — as if visited by something terrible — comes up to him and tries to sell him two bent iron nails.

32

On the second afternoon of the siege, Rohan, Yasmin and Tara are standing in the crowd looking towards St Joseph’s, the chaos and fear out here no doubt matched by the chaos and fear inside the building, the interplay of glances, no one knowing how to drain the event of its power. They are under a tarpaulin that someone has spread from a silk-cotton tree and the tip of the fibreglass nuclear monument. The terrorists opened fire from the building soon after the siege began, to force everyone away, and this is the safest distance. And here they stand and listen and watch, face to face with this demon onto which sacred Arabic verses have been painted to make it blend in with the rest of their religion.

There is a dust-edged wind.

Yesterday all schools and colleges in and around Heer had closed at the news of St Joseph’s, in case it was a co-ordinated attack on several institutions.

‘Has there been any change?’ Rohan asks, his head bent as he stands. Because of the wind the trees around them sound as though things are crashing into them.

‘No, brother-ji,’ Tara says.

He sense the two women on either side of him, full of that care beyond exhaustion that makes every woman in the world a heroine.

A large concentration of army, police and other emergency services have established a cordon around the school and the area has acquired the look of a zone of infection.

Tara’s eyes are tired from the wait and search for Naheed, the endless night hours spent looking for her in her mind, to think where she might be. Now she hopes she might see Naheed among the people gathered around her, raising herself on tiptoe to look over shoulders every few minutes. Her knees no longer ache and to her it is evidence of the love Allah feels towards her, giving her a new pain but balancing it by easing another one.

At 11 a.m. yesterday, two and a half hours after it was shut, the school gate had opened.

‘I think the siege is ending,’ Tara had said and she had immediately turned her face to the sky in gratitude.

‘It’s Basie,’ Yasmin said, moving through the crowd for a clearer and closer view.

Yasmin and Tara had watched as a soldier approached Basie and talked to him and received a piece of paper from his hand, with several people shouting, ‘Run towards us,’ at Basie.

He had turned and gone back inside and the gate had closed. Five minutes later they heard that the paper in Basie’s hand was a list of the terrorists’ demands. Folded within it was another sheet that was said to be a message to the entire planet.

‘They want Father Mede to come to the school,’ Yasmin told Rohan and Tara. ‘The note says, “If Mede presents himself to us we will release all children under thirteen years of age, except the Shias, Christians and Ahmadiyas.”’

But Father Mede has not been heard from since the siege began.

*

The phone lines into the school have been severed by the terrorists. The number of the satellite phone Ahmed carries was given out with the list of demands, and now he stands in the library, talking to the commissioner, reiterating his demands, telling him once again that there will be no need to send in food for the children, because the children have all announced a hunger strike in sympathy with the hostage takers’ cause. He hangs up with the warning, ‘Do not try to storm the building.’

He stands still for a few moments.

The library has been trashed, the books full of Western knowledge pulled out of the shelves and thrown onto the floor, the page upon page loud with lies about the story of the world, nothing but the blood-soaked abstractions of the so-called civilised world. As ephemeral to him as the Pyramids because they are un-Islamic and unjust.

He hasn’t slept for two days. The floor-to-ceiling windows of the library are draped in trumpet vine, thick clusters of orange flowers hanging from the tendrils, full of bees and glistening black ants, and a plaque informs the children that the plant was originally named after the Abbé Jean-Paul Bignon who was Louis XIV’s librarian, and that its wood when cut transversely is marked with a cross. All the pupils at this school are too young and impressionable to be taught anything but the Koran and the sayings of Muhammad. At his feet are dictionaries containing all the many meanings of the rose, and the seventeen words Urdu has for rain, and they are a blasphemy because they do not refer to Allah anywhere, just as the science books don’t. Why not say that two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom come together if Allah wills to form a molecule of water? Through his speeding mind runs the text of the statement he has sent out with his list of demands. His outrage transmuted into language, the pain fixed into durable words. This is a message from the warriors of Islam to all the world’s Infidels, Crusaders, Jews, and their operatives in the Muslim Kinhood. We are the followers of Allah’s mission and let it be known that that mission is the spreading of the truth, not killing people. Peace not war. We ourselves are victims of murder, massacre and incarceration. The West’s invasion of Afghanistan — the only true Islamic country in the world — is an unprecedented global crime, and our brothers and sisters and children are being killed as we write this, abducted and taken away to be tortured. Jihad is obligatory under these circumstances, as it is for taking back Spain, Sicily, Hungary, Cyprus, Ethiopia and Russia, and for the restoration of Islamic rule over all parts of India … These are not mere words. Out there is the truth of them played out with living figures, taking on dimensions through his energy and force, and he stands with his forehead pressed against a wall, his head rolling from side to side as he tries to breathe with a regular rhythm.

The second phone in his pocket rings and the delighted Kyra offers him his congratulations.

‘The news has been spreading,’ he says. ‘It’s on every national TV channel now. But they are belittling your achievement by giving the incorrect figure for the hostages.’

They claim that there are only three hundred or so people inside.

Yesterday Ahmed was in the assembly hall at ten thirty in the morning when the man with his foot on the detonator had turned up his radio to listen to the news. The newsreader said that a school in Heer was under siege and then lied that ‘negotiations are under way’. It was the fifth story in the bulletin and was given only two lines, and the holy warriors were enraged when it was said that only fifty or sixty pupils and teachers were inside the school. Two of his hooded companions had gone into the corridor and begun to slam chairs and tables into the walls, howling with tetherless fury, screaming, ‘Jihad! Jihad! Jihad!’ until others from every corner of the school had joined in and they had continued until hoarse. The man with his foot on the pedal of the bomb had looked as though he would get up and join them.

Now Kyra says, ‘When you speak to the representatives of the government you must tell them you are unhappy about it.’

‘He said it is up to the journalists.’

‘The government is controlling them, making sure the news doesn’t gain the attention of foreign news agencies. You must insist. Tell them you will be compelled to martyr a child if they lie again.’

‘We must have Father Mede. The Western press will not be interested unless he is here.’

‘They are saying they can’t find him. Are you sure he is not hiding somewhere inside the school?’

‘We have looked everywhere.’

‘And you don’t have Basie either. I have been trying to get past the cordon to see if his car is parked at his usual spot outside the school. I’ll try again.’

*

You will say that the hostages here in this school are Muslims. But we know what kind of Muslims they are. We know that they and their kind approved of the destruction of the Taliban regime. Anyone over the age of thirteen who takes up arms against Islam can be erased. Any Muslim who approves of the West’s actions in Afghanistan, and follows it into this Crusader war by providing material or verbal support, should be aware that he is an apostate who is outside the community of Islam. It is therefore permitted to take his money and his blood, as worthy of death as any American general with his braided glory …

*

The library door opens and the two women enter, or rather one of them is led in roughly by the other.

‘I wish to leave, brother Ahmed,’ says the one whose total commitment he had doubted. ‘You’re traumatising children. You said we were on our way to attack a government building.’

‘Sister, we have had this conversation twice already,’ Ahmed says quietly.

‘What about the children being traumatised in Afghanistan?’ the other woman says. ‘And this is a government building. These people are all instruments of the state.’

The doubting woman listens to Ahmed as he explains once again. In movement, thought and gravity, he is older than his countable years, his point of view rooted firmly, and at times all his gestures seem to be ritual gestures.

‘I don’t want any part of your death-laden victory,’ the woman says after he has finished speaking. ‘I don’t want to stay.’

‘You cannot leave.’

‘I will not watch Muslim blood on Muslim swords.’

‘You cannot leave,’ Ahmed says, raising his voice by a fraction. ‘We need to hold the children here until the white man is given to us.’

‘Most of these children are not innocent,’ the other woman says.

‘And those who are?’

‘You must believe me when I say that I too am upset about the innocent children. But I feel that Allah is asking us to sacrifice them to prove our love to Him, as He asked Ibrahim to cut the throat of his son to prove his obedience. With these few wounds we will heal Islam.’

‘You are comparing yourself to a prophet? Do you think you are sane enough to make these big decisions? You are half mad because of what you saw in Afghanistan, because your companions were captured or slaughtered.’

‘Take her away,’ Ahmed says, ‘and keep an eye on her.’ After they are gone the head of Cordoba House comes in.

‘What did the commissioner say on the phone just now?’ he asks Ahmed.

‘He was insisting yet again that they don’t know where Father Mede or Basie are, that they have no influence over the Americans to ask them to release captives, or withdraw from Afghanistan, that America is too big and too wounded at the moment for Pakistan not to obey it.’

‘We mustn’t lose faith or hope. I came in here to ask you to come and look at what is happening outside.’

They walk to a room that has a window looking out to the front of the building. A cleric has been brought in, in a van that has a loudspeaker attached to its roof. It has been driven as close to the school as possible. The man is quoting verses of the Koran against harming the innocent. He talks in minutes-long spasms and says that the passages of the Holy Book that do condone jihad have to be read in the context of the times in which they were revealed to Muhammad. ‘A verse in the Koran reads, The nearest in love to the Believers are those who say, “We are Christians.”’ He continues and once Ahmed has endured enough, he orders for the guns to open fire onto the van, onto the sickness of spirit emanating from it, and it drives away very fast towards the nuclear mountain, the tyres skidding and the terrified cleric calling for Allah’s help through the loudspeaker while telling the driver to drive faster.

*

Basie watches Naheed from the other side of the hall, as she and a female teacher take a dozen children at a time to the bathrooms. The children are exhausted and hungry and are not even allowed to drink water. When Basie takes the boys to the bathroom he lets them drink and tells them not to get any drops on their clothes and not to speak about it.

Later she walks towards him in the corridor, becoming more familiar with each step. Her eyes are downcast, and he stares at her until she realises he is looking at her. To begin with there are no words between them during this encounter: it is late afternoon but for some reason it feels dark as though light has rejected the place. Homesick for lost assurances, the children are falling asleep in clusters, the limbs going limp. The hands are holding onto fistfuls of each other’s clothing and the place feels somewhat calmer, almost hushed.

‘How are you?’ he asks eventually.

She nods, barely outlined, the face wearing the great stain of this experience, but unconsumed by the desperation he has seen in others.

‘Did Jeo know about you and Mikal?’

Her gold eyes look at him in silence for a few moments. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘I wonder. Do you think that’s why he went off to Afghanistan?’

She is leaning against a wall. ‘So you know about Mikal and me?’

He nods.

‘Who told you?’

‘You did. Just now.’

‘It was before I was married to Jeo.’

‘OK.’

‘I think he’s alive.’ A sense memory of him pulses in her blood.

‘When this is over we’ll go and search for him.’

She gives a nod and looks around. ‘Basie, where are the Christian, Shia and Ahmadiya people they took away?’ They were thirty or so, and they were removed from the hall with the words, ‘Go out and start digging your graves.’

‘I don’t know.’ Seeing her jaw harden, he adds, ‘You won’t cry, will you?’

She shakes her head.

‘I’ll keep telling myself I must get through this so we can go look for Mikal.’

‘I’ll do that too,’ he says.

She wants to experience a simple feeling — laughing with a neighbour or washing her hands, complaining to the vegetable seller that one of the aubergines he sold yesterday had had a caterpillar in it.

‘Basie, one of the terrorist women —’

‘Don’t say my name.’

She nods, shocked at her mistake. He has thought several times of revealing himself, to induce the terrorists to release the children, but he fears the English teacher who lied about him being absent will be punished. Recovering, she says, ‘One of the women doesn’t agree with all this. I have spoken to her to see if she might be willing to help us, if I and the other women teachers plan something.’

‘What are you doing?’ A hooded figure shouts at them from the other end of the corridor and Naheed quickly walks away towards the bathroom. ‘Who told you you could wander around?’

As Basie turns the corridor to the assembly hall a terrorist appears and touches his shoulder and quickly passes him a handful of sweets, whispering, ‘For the children. I didn’t know we were coming to a school,’ he says. ‘This has nothing to do with me.’

‘You must help me put an end to it.’

‘I have to go.’

Basie grabs him by the arm. ‘Do some of the others feel like you?’

The man tries to free himself and raises his gun towards Basie, perhaps in reflex, perhaps in genuine affront at his audacity.

But Basie refuses to let go. ‘Find me during the night. Come and talk to me when you see I am alone.’ The man wrenches himself free and walks away with a firm-footed pace, the swagger of a street tough.

Michael took Adam to Heaven in a chariot of flames and buried him after his death with the help of the angels Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel. And Basie looks up at him as he enters the hall, thinking of Mikal, alive out there somewhere.

*

Father Mede heard about the siege an hour after it began. He was in his hotel room in Islamabad, waiting for a former pupil and now friend who was arriving on the flight from England with the various medicines his aged body needs to stay functional, some of which he has difficulty acquiring here in Pakistan. Chlorphen-amine, pantoprazole, mebeverine, codeine phosphate, irbesartan, amoxicillin, ezetimibe, metoclopramide, Dicloflex, finasteride, doxazosin … A list as long as a catalogue of Homeric ships. He tried to get back to Heer but was prevented by the authorities. His driver and car vanished and when he tried to arrange a taxi the telephone in his hotel room lost its dial tone. In the lobby, full of policemen, he was told that all phone lines in the hotel were down and would you very kindly return to your room, sir. It was only a few hundred miles away but he might as well have been in Borneo, Adelaide or Rio de Janeiro.

The government obviously did not want a white person being visibly linked with the affair. His frustration had turned to anger and some substance was administered to him through the cup of tea he asked for at noon. He was unconscious for almost thirty-six hours.

Now, 2 a.m, he is on the Grand Trunk Road, being driven towards Heer.

He is being followed by several vehicles that have made no attempt to disguise the pursuit. Their guns, their everywhere eyes. He had woken just after eleven this evening. There were puncture marks on his arms where he must have been injected with further drugs. Demanding to be let out of the hotel, he was told that he was free to go to Heer if he could. His driver and car had then appeared, the driver telling him that the vehicle had been mysteriously towed away and that he was sent from place to place by the authorities as he tried to locate it, that when he arrived at the hotel yesterday evening he was told Father Mede had left.

The public phones he approaches are always occupied, the person engaged in a long conversation, and thirteen times they have been flagged down by police for ‘random’ security checks. There have been seven long detours, four of them ending in culs de sac.

Around four in the morning, as he turns off the Grand Trunk Road towards St Joseph’s a police car cuts him off and he is told that if he tries to go near the building he will be arrested immediately. He sits wordlessly looking out of the car window for several minutes, imagining the rain falling on the frangipani tree that Sofia had sent to be planted outside his office, the flowers large and beautiful like mysteries in a tale. Then he asks the driver to turn around. An hour later he is still trying to gain access to his home or a telephone, encountering repeated roadblocks and obstructions. As he stops at a roadside tea stall someone says that another school on the other side of Heer has been attacked with grenades, bombs and gunfire.

‘But that is a Muslim school,’ Father Mede’s driver says upon hearing the name. ‘Do they really want to destroy all schools, not just the Christian ones?’

‘It must be the commandos rehearsing the storming of St Joseph’s,’ Father Mede tells him. ‘It is the only explanation.’

‘They will kill everyone inside,’ the driver responds, and begins to murmur the verses of the Koran under his breath to avert disaster. And he reassures Father Mede. ‘Allah is a friend to the broken-hearted.’

*

On the outskirts of Heer, Kyra opens the back door of the Land Rover and gets in, the saluki jumping in after him.

‘Whose idea was the siege?’ the man behind the steering wheel asks. A sense of massed impending force in the voice.

‘It was suggested by six students and I approved it.’

‘What are their names? I want —’

‘Let me explain,’ Kyra says.

‘I want you to write down the names of all thirty-two people in the building and if you interrupt me again I’ll empty a syringe of mercury in your skull.’

The man hands Kyra a small notebook over his shoulder, without looking back.

‘I hope they are not stupid enough to reveal their faces to anyone. If any civilian has seen them without the hoods, I want that person or persons to be isolated, so they can be eliminated during the raid. Was the school’s guard the only person approached during the planning?’

‘Yes.’

‘He’ll be found in a sack near Muridke in about an hour.’

The man has short hair and precise short sideburns, the nape razored clean and neatly finished, much like Kyra’s own. He wears a sky-blue shalwar kameez made of the fabric KT. Kyra can’t see it but he knows that on the right side under the kameez is a handgun.

He is in the ISI, but not one of its ordinary tens of thousands of agents. He is a lieutenant general, wanted for questioning by the United Nations for supporting the Muslim fighters of Bosnia against the Serbian army in the 1990s. Despite the UN’s ban on supply of arms to the besieged Bosnians, he had successfully airlifted sophisticated anti-tank guided missiles, which had turned the tide in favour of Bosnian Muslims and forced the Serbs to lift the siege.

The Pakistani government has informed the UN that the lieutenant general has ‘lost his memory’ following a recent road accident, and is therefore unable to face any investigations into the matter.

He takes the notebook and quickly glances at what Kyra has written. A man used to getting things done and accustomed to being obeyed, a man who casts a shadow even in darkness.

‘You tell this Ahmed that the building will be stormed late in the morning.’

‘I’ll tell him,’ Kyra says, barely able to contain his rage. The saluki lifts its head from his knee and stands and clambers over to the front, the man reaching out its hand to lovingly stroke its fur.

‘I can’t prevent his capture or death. And you remain free because of your former connection with the army.’

For several moments the man sits in a profound and expectant silence, like a prophet in the depth of receiving a revelation.

‘Now was not the time for such an operation. Do you really think we don’t have plans to undermine the American army in this part of the world, an army made up of homosexuals and women? Just who do you think you are — trying to do something of this magnitude without telling us?’

‘The brothers and relatives of some of the men are being held by the Americans.’

‘What does that do, change every motherfucking thing in the world? Luckily the white man was away.’

They sit in another silence and then the man turns his neck and looks at Kyra for the first time.

‘What are you waiting for? Get out.’

Kyra’s own gun is in exactly the same place, under his clothes, as this man’s.

He steps out and just as he reaches for the front door for the saluki the Land Rover drives off at great speed.

*

Naheed is in the corridor when through the arches she sees Mikal in the grove of crepe myrtles. Blue in the dawn light. He looks at her and then disappears into the fallen rosewood trees by the south wall. Crepe myrtle, Rohan has told her, is among the longest blooming trees known to man, capable of remaining in flower for up to 120 days.

She enters the hall, catching Basie’s eye on the far side. The children and the teachers are asleep, and she leans against a pillar and closes her eyes.

‘Dance,’ the man says, the man with the hood over his head. ‘Dance for me,’ he approaches and places his crazed hands on her shoulders. ‘Like the girls do in the films.’

She takes a step away from him and glances towards where she last saw Basie. But Basie now sits with his foot on the pedal detonator of the bomb. The terrorist had asked him to take his position before coming towards her.

When the hooded man tries to touch her again she sees Basie and some of the teachers look up from their exhausted half-sleep. Basie knows he must keep his foot on the pedal, must accept another insult for the sake of going on living, for the sake of others. There must be a place where it doesn’t happen like this, she thinks as the hooded man pulls her into the triangular space between two cupboards. She is thirsty. Basie is standing up, his foot still pressed on the pedal, his face full of confusion and distress, wanting to come forward but unable to. She calls out to him for help without realising. The hooded figure stops and looks in the direction she has shouted and she knows that by uttering his name she has ended his life as effectively as any bullet.

*

Ahmed sits in the library with his bright knife in his hands. A cold stone has replaced his mind. He has just spoken to Kyra on the phone. The building is to be raided.

Kyra also said that Basie’s car is parked in the alleyway on the side of the school. That he must be among the teachers.

He turns and looks towards the door, all receptors working again. There is a sound of feet running in his direction, and the head of Mecca House comes in, out of breath. Less than a minute earlier Ahmed had sent him to question the teachers one by one, to bring him Basie. Now he comes in and says,

‘We have Father Mede. He has just walked up to one of the small side doors and is knocking. He says he wants the children released in exchange for himself.’

‘Don’t open the door. It’s probably a deception. They are getting ready to storm the school.’ Ahmed walks to the head of the stairs and stops suddenly because two of his men are climbing the steps towards him with the white man between them.

And just then, from the corner of his eye, he sees the soldiers pouring in over the boundary wall.

33

Naheed is carrying a thick book towards the kitchen, the banana leaves crowding the windows. 2 a.m. The house is dark and silent and it is raining and she is unable to sleep. Now and then a flash of lightning makes her think the light from the moon is briefly at her feet.

It is night, and the female relatives of the adults and children who died when the soldiers stormed St Joseph’s must be visiting their graves in secret, carrying umbrellas against the possibility of rain, lamps against the darkness. Her memories of the end are still fragmentary. The terrorists had forced women and children to stand on chairs in front of the windows, to stop the soldiers from shooting into the school from outside. She remembers the fires burning in various places, the escaping hostages shot because they were mistaken for terrorists, an explosion sending the head of an angel through the smoke and flames into the garden. Molten plastic dripping from the burning roof. The sound of a helicopter. Being brought out of her daze by a sharp pain in her scalp, realising that it was a teenager in his death throes unknowingly pulling her hair. At one point she had somehow found herself beside a soldier and, in a daze of his own, he had reached out for the edge of her veil to wipe the blood from his gun. And later she saw some other men wiping their weapons on the soft leaves of the fig tree. Outside there were not enough government vehicles and the wounded were being loaded into private vehicles, the blood-covered limbs hanging out of car boots. And a few hours later, when it was over, the bodies of some of the terrorists were shown to the television cameras, their faces mutilated beyond recognition.

*

She opens the large book on the table, the breath from the page tilting the candle flame. The book is a dictionary of dates and moves through the history of mankind, from the very beginning to the present.

According to the Islamic calendar, it is currently the early fifteenth century. The 1420s. She wonders what was occurring in Christian lands in the early fifteenth century of the Christian era.

1426. The Venetians go to war with Milan. The Duke of Bedford returns to England from France, to mediate in a clash between his brother Gloucester and the Bishop of Winchester.

1427. The Emperor Yeshaq of Ethiopia sends envoys to Aragon in an attempt to form an alliance against the Muslims. The Duke of Bedford resumes the war in France.

1428. The University of Florence begins teaching Greek and Latin literature. Venetian troops under Carmagnola conquer Bergamo and Brescia. The Treaty of Delft ends the conflict between Flanders and England …

When lightning flashes across the pages she looks up, then continues to read. She doesn’t know who these personalities are, is unsure about most of the places too, but they do form a picture of their times in her mind.

… John Wycliffe’s bones are dug up by order of the Council of Constance, burned and thrown into the River Swift.

Faith, the uncorrupted kind, and also souls hooked darkly to the corrupted kind. All the ways of error and glory.

1429. Joan of Arc, a seventeen-year-old shepherdess from Lorraine, has visions. She persuades an officer to provide her with armour and is taken to the Dauphin and liberates Orleans in May.

Naheed turns back to the previous page, to see if things had been better ten years previously. The book tells her that in 1419 an event known as the Defenestration of Prague had occurred, when the followers of the executed Jan Hus had marched on Prague Town Hall to insist on the release of imprisoned preachers. They force their way into the Town Hall and throw Catholic councillors out of the upper windows. John the Fearless is murdered following a turbulent meeting with the Dauphin …

And what of the future? Were things better in Christendom ten years on from 1429? Would things be better for Pakistan and Islam in a decade?

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

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

34

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘My husband is dead.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Naheed steps away from the door to let him pass.

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

35

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

*

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

‘I am not dead.’

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

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

‘You look so thin.’

‘And you.’

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

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

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

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

‘I wouldn’t have been of much use.’

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

‘I am here now.’

‘Jeo is dead.’

He nods.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘It matters.’

‘Does it?’

‘Yes.’

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

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

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

‘Two Americans.’

‘They are looking for you?’

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

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

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

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

She remains with her head bowed.

‘What terrible things have happened, Naheed?’

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

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

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

Rohan opens his eyes.

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

‘It’s me. Mikal.’

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

‘Mikal?’

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

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

*

‘We thought you were dead,’ Rohan says.

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

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

Mikal does not respond.

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

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

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

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

Naheed looks at him and then at Rohan.

‘What is it?’

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

*

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

He sits down beside her.

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

‘You haven’t lost me.’

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

‘And I told you it will not happen.’

‘He will buy the house for us.’

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

‘He’ll pay for Father’s operations.’

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

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

‘I am here now.’

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

‘We’ll see.’

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

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

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

‘I can’t.’

‘I know.’

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

‘I know.’

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

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

‘Your hands. They work?’

‘Yes.’

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

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

*

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

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

‘Who did it?’ he asks. ‘Who held up the school?’

‘No one knows,’ Yasmin says.

‘When the soldiers raided the school,’ Naheed says, ‘the terrorists were either killed or they escaped.’

‘And Father Mede is still missing?’

Yasmin nods. ‘The surviving terrorists took him away with them. Some newspapers are saying the siege was the work of the CIA and Mossad.’

He goes and stands at the window.

‘Are you staying?’ Yasmin asks.

‘I don’t know what I will do.’

‘It’ll be more than a century in prison?’

‘Almost two centuries. I keep thinking I could hide away forever but the reward on me is in millions. Someone is bound to report on me eventually.’

‘Some people will be reluctant to sell out a fellow Muslim.’

‘Some, yes.’

Later in the evening he eats alone sitting on the steps in the garden and watches it rain. He sets the plate on the floor and gets up and goes out into the street, looking both ways before stepping out, looking out through the veil of water fringing the umbrella’s rim, as he turns into the street where Tara lives. Where Sharif Sharif lives. Inside his pocket his fingers rest beside the knife. The weapon almost like the missing digit.

He crosses the courtyard and looks towards the door to the room where Sharif Sharif is usually found. He approaches and calls out but the man is not here this evening. After a while he climbs the stairs to Tara.

She is oiling her sewing machine, having dismantled it completely, the dozens of metal pieces lying on a newspaper beside her as she sits crosslegged on the floor. He leans against the door jamb and watches and she doesn’t look up after the initial glance. Naheed has no doubt told her about his return.

When she cannot shift a screw he comes forward and gently takes the screwdriver from her and loosens it for her.

‘It has remained stuck for two years,’ she says quietly. ‘I wasn’t able to unscrew it when I cleaned the machine last year either. I don’t know where I got the strength to tighten it so firmly in the first place.’

‘You didn’t,’ he says. ‘I tightened it, two years ago. I was visiting Naheed while you were out and the dismantled pieces were lying out on the table and I began putting them together.’

She doesn’t say anything, continuing with her work, handling the small curved and bent pieces and dripping oil onto them. They look like relics of metal saints.

She gets up and washes her hands. She smells them and then washes them once again, and then goes into the kitchen and begins to cook a handful of lentils. A woman who has spent most of her life in impoverished solitude.

‘I will not allow Naheed to marry Sharif Sharif.’

‘He won’t get a drink of that water while I am alive,’ she says. ‘I had found another boy for her. I haven’t said no to that family yet.’

Fate’s renegade. A fugitive from international justice. He’s still not good enough for her daughter. Or is she waiting to see what he plans to do?

He turns around to leave, thinking this is enough for now. He is halfway down the stairs when she calls out to him and he climbs back up.

She points to the chair. ‘Take a seat.’ She turns the flame low under the pot and carries a stool to him, sitting down to face him.

He doesn’t understand immediately but then remembers that the dead have to be talked of with respect and formality. She says, ‘I am sorry about your brother.’

Yasmin said he had been shot eighty-six times.

‘He was a good man. I had grown to love him like a son.’

‘He was a good man. Does it get better?’

‘I wouldn’t say better.’ She lost her husband when she was very young: she knows her condition and her answer is instant. He might as well have asked her the colour of the sky.

‘What then?’

‘Life gets in the way of your grief.’ She begins to fan herself with a palm-leaf fan. ‘You make yourself forget about the pain because there are other things to take care of. But when you do remember it … well … it’s a strange kind of hurting, like someone has lost a razorblade inside your soul.’

‘I don’t know how long I should grieve or mourn, don’t know when it would be right to stop.’

She touches his shoulder.

‘Would you stay and eat with me?’

‘No, thank you. I’d better get back.’

He returns through the rain-filled street and sitting on the veranda he counts to see what is left of the money Akbar gave him. The green shirt he is wearing has white buttons. The tailor said the plain white buttons were a dozen for a rupee, while the green would cost twice as much.

*

She looks out during the night to see him asleep on the chair on the veranda, his hands in his pockets. Gently she arranges a thin cotton sheet over him and lights a mosquito coil and places it next to him on the tiles, making sure her glass bangles don’t rattle. She had started wearing the bangles and had put away the dark clothes because she had wished to signal to Sharif Sharif that she no longer mourns Jeo.

He wakes just after dawn when she is collecting fallen mulberries from the grass, the inked blue fruit that the rain has brought down, glossy blue clots, red, green, white, pink, the flesh sweet with sugar, turning the fingers sticky as it is eaten as though they contain blood, leaving stains on the tongue and hands.

He sits up in the chair, wincing from the stiffness and wrapping the sheet around himself against the mild chill. ‘I dreamt there was a city of burning minarets.’

She leans against a tree, pushing back strands of loose hair with one hand. ‘Are you sure it’s not something you saw in real life? The American bombing in Afghanistan? A photograph in a newspaper?’

He shakes his head. The dragon-ridden days of the planet.

‘I keep seeing the burning angels when I fall asleep,’ she says. ‘But that really did happen. They hung in flames above everyone’s head in St Joseph’s after the soldiers appeared. The school has been decimated from the explosions. Just a pile of rubble.’ In sleep she also sees again and again the thirsty children drinking urine at St Joseph’s on the second day of the siege. She sees again, on the first day of the siege, the deputy headmaster being shot and then males and females sitting on either side of the hall, a red dividing line having been created on the floor by two terrorists taking hold of the deputy’s corpse and dragging it from one end to the other.

She is sitting beside him now, both of them looking silently at the garden. The mulberries’ liquid is already beginning to slip out of the flesh.

‘How does it feel to be back?’

He smiles.

‘Could you not explain to the Americans what happened?’

‘It won’t work.’

After a while he says, ‘I am sorry. About everything.’ And without turning towards her he adds,

‘I am in Hell without you.’

He had said this to her before, sixty-six days into her marriage, and she had not reacted. This time she answers him.

‘I’ll put it out with my breath.’

*

She walks to the crossroads to buy a packet of Gold Flake for him, sensing his restlessness, a definite but quiet desperation in him at not being able to leave the house.

‘There is someone outside,’ she tells him, trying to conceal her panic when she returns with the cigarettes.

He raises his head above the poet’s jasmine on the boundary wall but there is no one in the street.

‘I saw him when I left and he was still there when I came back.’

‘What did he look like?’

Will they raid the house? he wonders as he climbs down and stands looking at her, the trees bending in the wind around them as if borne forward by the earth’s spinning.

*

It is 1219, the time of the Fifth Crusade, and Francis — the future saint of Assisi — and his brother Illuminato have crossed enemy lines to gain an audience with the Sultan of Egypt, Malik al-Kamil. It is late September and the landscape they pass through is still littered with corpses from the battle that took place on 29 August.

Yasmin turns the page. For centuries artists have depicted the various episodes of the astonishing encounter, one of the most extraordinary in the history of belief. The bearded Sultan in his brocade robes and silk turban, and Francis in his rough and patched brown tunic.

According to some accounts, Muslim sentries fell upon Francis and Illuminato the moment they saw them, savagely beating them before putting them in chains. But according to others, when the sentinels saw them coming they thought they were messengers, or perhaps had come to convert to Islam. Soldiers on both sides of the Fifth Crusade had converted, and so the sentinels led them to the Sultan.

Yasmin touches the flames with her fingers. The fire burns in the book of paintings she is holding. St Francis of Assisi is standing inside the blaze — entering a bonfire to prove that his faith was superior to Islam.

But that didn’t happen either and was invented later. The Sultan and the future saint had talked of war and faith but the encounter was perfectly peaceful — no enraged and fulminating Muslim clerics had appeared, as is claimed, to demand that the Sultan behead the monk.

She closes her eyes, her hand on her belly where Basie’s child is growing, small as a wren. He died before she discovered she was pregnant.

There are moments when Basie is not dead, when she turns around to share something with him, but then she remembers.

It is as though the house and the world are suffering from a kind of physical amnesia. They have forgotten him.

When they shot him they shot him dead in each one of her memories. Eighty-six bullets. One for the way he smiled, one for the way he frowned to himself when he read, one for the way his left hand sometimes rested on his thigh as he drove, one for the way he had become tearful when he said he had to find out who the old woman was who sat holding the police inspector’s knees, one for the way he liked eating mangoes with skin still on them, one for the beautiful way he danced to Count Basie’s ‘One o’Clock Jump’, quietly concentrating to himself, one for the way he said about his father, slipping into a drunken impersonation of the man, ‘He had a beard but he would gently correct those who mistook him for a cleric. My beard is not religious. It’s a revolutionary one, inspired by Castro, Che and Marx,’ one for the way he said with a smile, ‘Allow me to complicate you, your holiness,’ whenever Father Mede said, ‘I am just a simple man of God,’ one for the way he said Islam was a religion whose past could not be predicted, one for the way he didn’t know how to say his prayers, looking for surreptitious guidance to the people praying beside him, one for the way he liked walking on dew-covered grass, one for the way he looked up from Tolstoy’s big novel and said that the infernal summer heat was to Pakistan what snowbound winters were to Russia …

She listens for movements in Rohan’s room. When after a quarrel with Sofia he would forgo a meal, saying quietly from his room that he was not hungry, she would take food to him in secret, and she would grin as he pretended not to care initially but would then ask, ‘What have you brought?’

She looks down at the book. The Sultan gave Francis the key to his private prayer room, and on parting he accepted one gift from the Sultan, an ivory horn, which is kept today in Assisi. The inscription on it says that Francis used it to summon people and birds to hear him preach.

*

The black shadow of the railing falls on her white tunic and makes it appear as though the fabric is patterned. The candle flame swaying on the floor beside her. He leans and places his mouth on her neck, his hunger shouting from underneath his skin. Every object around them is heightened, everything surprised. He feels ashamed for seeking happiness so soon after his brother’s death. Something terrible will happen to him. He is inviting punishment. He thinks of Salomi, and he thinks of Jeo who has only been dead for four days — for him. Pushing past the confusion in the darkness he lifts her wrists and begins to break the glass bangles, eliminating the possibility of Sharif Sharif from her. ‘I want my breath,’ he says. His hand under the tunic on her breast on her stomach on the curve of her spine and now he panics. He has been in a world war and he can sense blood. She pushes him away gently because she knows about blood too — she is a woman. A breaking bangle has torn into her left wrist. They light the candle that had extinguished itself a moment ago and see the thin line of red emerging from the puncture. He lifts it to his mouth and with his teeth works out the small shard of glass lodged under the skin, not stopping as she stands up and leads him indoors, the glass disappearing into him the way the ruby had entered Jeo’s body.

*

He crosses the Grand Trunk Road and enters the night-dark alley, moving towards the high painted rooms, visualising the doves and pigeons in one of them. When he notices a shadow behind him, there is a surge of anger in his body at not realising he was being followed. Squeezing through the narrow gaps between the fenders and bumpers of two parked trucks, he looks over his shoulder. They won’t just pick you up, they’ll spirit away everyone you know.

He climbs the stairs two at a time towards his room. It’s Basie’s birthday tomorrow and he has a bottle of Murree’s whisky hidden behind a loose brick in the wall.

He looks down from the window. There doesn’t seem to be anyone out there, at least not in the few areas where light is falling.

He turns and stands looking at the coloured walls, then leans against one of the painted angels and closes his eyes. ‘To them everything was about helping others,’ Basie said about their parents, getting drunk on the mattress in this room. ‘They’d always find that aspect. Once I wanted to see a cowboy film — it was on at the Capri cinema, I remember — and Father said he himself loved cowboy films because they were about someone coming to the aid of a town terrorised by the wicked and the powerful.’ They and their friends took poets into factories and mills, to inspire them to write songs about the terrible conditions the workers had to endure. They found itinerant storytellers and introduced them to the screenwriters in Lahore, so that the land’s age-old tales of resisting the unjust could be incorporated into contemporary movies.

There is a sound outside the door.

‘Akbar.’ The tension snapping into relief, of a kind.

Akbar comes forward and embraces him.

‘What are you doing here?’

The boy looks dishevelled and unslept, the eyes dark.

‘They found out I killed my father,’ he says quietly.

‘The military. The people he was trying to bring to your house?’

‘Yes.’ He looks around him. He is carrying a shoulder bag and he places it at Mikal’s feet. ‘You have to take this to Megiddo.’

‘What is it?’

‘Salomi is married. She and her new husband need to get out of Pakistan. They will be safe in Yemen.’

He tells himself not to let Akbar see his reaction.

‘What’s in the bag?’

‘They need money to get out.’

‘I would have thought he had enough.’

Akbar shakes his head. ‘He did. But before my father went off that night he burnt it all in the furnace in the gun factory. Not a single rupee was left. Everything turned to ash.’ He points to the bag. ‘You have to go and give this to Salomi, so the pair of them can leave.’

Akbar unzips the bag. It is full of clothes but from under it he pulls out three bundles of American dollars, each the thickness of a telephone directory.

‘When did she get married?’

‘The morning you left.’ Akbar replaces the money and fastens the zip. ‘It’s fifty-five thousand dollars.’

‘I don’t think I can do this, Akbar.’

‘Please. The soldiers, backed by the Americans, will raid the house very soon, if they haven’t already. The pair of them will have to bribe their way out of the towns and cities, find places to shelter. Otherwise people will hand them both to the Americans for the reward.’

‘I can’t.’ At the brick factory the Americans had asked him if he had ever transferred monies for al-Qaeda. And yet he knows he must see Salomi and explain himself to her, if he can.

‘Just go and give it to her and come back,’ Akbar says, and adds, ‘You are my brother.’

*

He sits beside the bag, smoking, the room full of night’s darkness. Three days have passed since Akbar gave him the money and it is still here. He moves towards the window and looks at the garden, the blossoms beautiful as Eden, where every memory of every man is said to have its origin, and after a while he turns and walks towards where she lies on the bed.

*

When he is naked beside her she sees the bullet wounds. She watches him, pale brown with calves and forearms darkly hairy, thin but sinewy and sheerly beautiful with the candlelight running over him.

From a book she has learned what a human body is worth. The chemical elements making up a living person are said to have the market value of about $4 or $5. His sweeping laughter, the merged eyebrows, the flavour of his breath and saliva when he leans every few minutes to kiss her for minutes at a time. $4 or $5. The features take shape under the red point of brilliance when he inhales from the cigarette in the darkness. It is as though he is sucking in light through the white tube, light that then runs under his skin to reveal him softly. She watches him as he gets up during the night and sits crouching beside the shoulder bag. Jeo came back wearing a tight-fitting suit of bruises, and now she doesn’t want Mikal to go to Waziristan.

One night before she married, Mikal had broken into her and Tara’s room. She was terrified to find him standing beside her bed in the dead of night, her mother only a few feet away. She had taken his hand and led him out to the roof. ‘I can’t sleep,’ he had told her.

‘Recite a poem. That helps. One that rhymes.’

‘I don’t know any poems.’

‘You sing all the time.’

‘They are songs not poems.’

‘They are the same thing.’

The next day she had bought him a book of poems by Wamaq Saleem from Urdu Bazaar, verses in which the dove called out in adoration to its lover the cypress tree. It was as though the poet knew nothing of the aeons of separateness that lay between these two things, and between the bulbul and the rose, and between the bee and the lotus blossom, and so the dove called and called, the rose continued to open for the bulbul, and the bee circled and circled and circled the lotuses.

‘Will they allow you to receive letters in the prison?’ she asks him now, when he comes away from the bag containing the dollars.

‘What are you talking about? I promise you I will come back.’

‘What about visitors?’ She is sitting up in bed. ‘Will the Americans allow you to have visitors?’

He encloses her in his arms. ‘Don’t say that.’

‘I don’t even know how much a plane ticket to the United States is. It must be thousands of rupees. I’ll never be able to visit you.’

What woke them was the sound of the rain stopping, the sudden calm in the middle of the night. A silence packed with distances.

‘It’ll be just a quick journey,’ he says. ‘Two days there, two days back. Four days — five maximum.’ On a map he has drawn a line from Heer to Megiddo. Taking small buses, avoiding all major stations. A long jagged stroke of ink resembling the constellation of Hydra. And now they speak quietly into each other’s skin. It is in the watches of the night that impressions are strongest and words most eloquent: she thinks of these words from the Koran. His fingers are on the chain around her neck that has little leaves all along its length, a string of foliage. ‘Did you play with your mother’s jewellery when you were a child?’ she asks.

‘Yes. I used to wear it as well.’

She takes it off and puts it around his neck just as the call to the predawn prayers sounds and they remain in each other’s arms, sinning in a time of holiness, and when he gets out of bed she feels for the clasp of the chain, to take it off. ‘Let me wear it,’ he says.

‘But it’s a woman’s.’

‘I don’t care.’ And then he adds, ‘Isn’t the soul a woman?’ Outside the sun would begin to rise in the bloody reefs of the clouds within the hour and the birds are already looking for light to fly into.

*

Tara is mending a broken umbrella. ‘You are leaving?’

‘For a few days.’

She continues to hold his eye.

‘A friend needs help.’

She nods.

‘I just wanted to talk to you about Naheed,’ he says. ‘None of us wants her to marry Sharif Sharif, but you mentioned this other man you have found. There is no need for him. Naheed wants to get qualifications and become a teacher —’

‘I know what my daughter needs and wants. She can get qualifications after she is married.’

‘Yes, she can.’ He looks at his hands. ‘I don’t know what I want to say. I still can’t offer her the kind of life you’d want for her. I could be caught any time and taken away, leaving her on her own once again.’

She puts the umbrella aside. ‘I stood in your way once, I won’t this time. I suppose when it comes down to it it’s a man’s word that counts. That’s all the security a woman needs. Who cares if the buttons on his shirt don’t match the fabric.’

‘I will come back in five days.’

‘Then I will be happy to call you my son-in-law.’

‘I am sorry I didn’t think of the consequences for you when I suggested to Naheed that we run away before her wedding to Jeo.’

‘It would have caused terrible difficulties for me, yes.’

‘I am sorry I didn’t think of that.’

‘Would you do it again?’

‘Wanting to do it is not what I am apologising for here.’

She appraises him openly. ‘That’s a good reply. Now I am going to be equally honest with you. You let down my daughter once, by not turning up when you said you would. I won’t allow you to disappoint her again. Is that clear?’

‘Yes. But didn’t you say that her running away would have been bad for you?’

‘That’s a matter between me and her, nothing to do with you. As far as you or anyone else is concerned, I am on her side. Don’t you ever disappoint her again.’

‘I am sorry I did it once.’

‘That’s another good thing to say to me. And you might want to rethink some of the guilt you’ve been carrying around about shooting those Americans.’

‘I’ll try. The men I killed had mothers, fathers, probably wives and children. I killed them and must pay for the crime.’

‘But there’s no need to be so hard on yourself, at least until perfect order reigns in the world. Life is difficult at times and they goaded you and you were confused. Part of the blame lies with them. Don’t hold yourself to too exacting a standard.’

‘That can be an excuse to not hold yourself to any standard at all.’

‘That too is true.’

She tells him to go with Allah and he shoulders the bag and begins to climb down.

*

From the bus station he telephones Naheed just to hear her voice and they talk about what they have planned and envisaged for themselves after his return. He whispers a few obscene things to her and she laughs quietly, and then he stands listening to her breath until the money runs out, the sun rising above Heer and the sky changing colour like someone switching from one language to another, and as in a fairy tale he knows that he’ll die if he takes off her chain from around his neck. When he hangs up it is with the bone-deep fear that beauty and loss might be inseparable, but then he thinks of a line from one of Wamaq Saleem’s poems. Love is not consolation, it is light.