The Blind Man's Garden by Nadeem Aslam Read Free Book Online

mind he accused her of misrepresenting herself to him before marriage, because he would never have chosen someone with such monstrous doubts. The marriage was in all likelihood null – a Muslim could not remain married to an unbeliever – but he also kept reassuring himself that her condition was reversible, waiting for God to make His presence felt to her once more.
    After the first child the doctors had warned her against having another but he was somewhat glad when Jeo was conceived, thinking the marvel of a new life would renew her soul.
    He reads the Holy Book, trying not to think of how her beautiful body is receiving injuries inside the ground at this very moment, a toy for Allah’s demons. Tortures known as Kabar ka Aazab . She is alive down there, fully sensate and conscious, the underworld from where no smoke or cry escapes. A person is brought to life immediately after the grave is closed up and is even said to clearly hear the receding footsteps of the men who had come to bury him.
    After her death he gave away Ardent Spirit to Ahmed the Moth, wishing to concentrate on the alleviation of her death-suffering, fully able to imagine her calling out in pain from beneath his feet. There was little time for Jeo and Yasmin, the eight-year-old daughter. He would leave to meet with scholars and seek rare books, pursuing doctrines, commentaries and records of controversies, searching for anything that might absolve her of her sin, coming back from some journeys more shaken than when he had left, at peace from some others.
    While he was preoccupied with this, Ahmed the Moth distorted his vision beyond recognition and adapted Ardent Spirit’s crescent-shaped layout to his own ends. A green flag was designed with six flames arranged in a curve at its centre, each flame rising out of a pair of crossed swords. It flies on the roof of Ardent Spirit every day, and the boys wear green turbans which, when unwound, reveal the same six swords-and-flames on them. The six centres of vanished glory, whose loss is to be avenged with blade and fire.
    In the small bathroom Rohan washes the tears off his face and performs his ablutions again. When the apostate dies the spot of earth which is to be his grave cries out in vehemence and pain, unwilling to receive him. As she breathed her last breaths he had kept asking her quietly, ‘Tell me what you see,’ because in a minute, in ten minutes, everything would have become irreversible, because it is too late to repent once the dying eyes begin to glimpse the Angel of Death.
    But after two decades of thought he does sometimes suspect that his conduct had resembled sin, the sin of pride. Had he really decided that Allah lacked compassion, even for an apostate? Yes, he sometimes fears that his grief at her death – and before that at her doubts and renunciation – had driven him to something resembling an offence. How can he know for certain that the area of earth that became her grave hadn’t rejoiced at her death, ‘adorning itself like a bride, exulting in having to embrace her soon’, as the books of spiritual devotion say about the virtuous?
    She had founded the school with him and had taught there but disagreements had emerged very soon and she had finally stopped teaching when he expelled a pupil whose mother was revealed to be a prostitute.
    He raises the louvred blinds and looks out at the train tracks and the Grand Trunk Road running along them. Eternity suspended over human time, the stars are shining above the world like grains of light, this world that she had loved and called the only Paradise she needed. Preparing himself for blindness he commits everything to memory as she committed everything to paper, painting the garden’s flowers and birds onto his mind, and for several years after she was gone the garden looked as though something important had befallen it. The limes and the acacia trees seemed to mourn her, the rosewood and the Persian lilacs, the peepal and the