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

corals, and all their different fruits, berries and spores, the seeds tough as cricket balls, or light enough to remain afloat for half an hour. Inside the earth the roots mourned her even without having seen her, and the white teak whose bark came off in plates the size of footprints, the lemon tree that produced twenty-five baskets of fruit each year. He was sure that all of them, as well as the lightning-fast lizards of the garden, were mourning her with him, and the stiffly rustling dragonflies and the blue-winged carpenter bees and the black chains of the ants and the tough-carapaced beetles and the various snails. In grief he had whispered her name as he walked the red paths set loose in the garden, and the word had gone among the glistening black brilliance of the crows and the butterflies floating in the sunlight – the Himalayan Pierrot, the Chitrali Satyr, the blue tigers and the common leopard and the swallowtails and the peacocks. She had loved them and the world in which they existed, saying, ‘God is just a name for our wonder.’ There was no soul, only consciousness. No divine plan, only nature, and we were simply among the innumerable results of its randomness. Saying, ‘I will miss this because this is all there is,’ her last words, and then she had slipped out of his life, consigning him to decades of apprehension on her behalf, because he knew that the soul existed, and not only that, it was accountable to Allah and His providential rage. Unlike her he knew that the dead were not beyond harm.

6
     
     
    Arriving in Peshawar, Rohan accompanies Jeo to the hospital where the boy is to spend the next month. Afterwards, the early morning sunlight flooding the roads, he takes a rickshaw towards his former pupil’s house, to thank the family for the books. It’s much colder here in the mountains, 1,600 feet above sea level, and he buttons his coat to the neck and turns up the collar. Out there are mountains higher than the Alps placed onto the Pyrenees. Glaciers that Tamerlane’s soldiers had had to crawl over on hands and knees in 1398.
    It is appropriate in some ways that the books had arrived in a truck painted brilliantly with mythological creatures, with saints and figures of legend, birds and garlands of flowers. The rickshaw is decorated similarly, and as it moves deeper into the city it encounters a crowd of demonstrators, the roads suddenly filled with men of all ages, holding placards and banners. A display of support for victims of the war in Afghanistan. As the rally grows the rickshaw-wallah has to reduce his speed, and soon enough they can neither move back nor go forwards, and so Rohan gets out and begins to walk with the crowd flowing like a river through the bazaars and streets, the sun falling through the noise and the raised placards. ‘Why didn’t three thousand Jews turn up for work at the World Trade Center on 11 September …’ someone is asking, while another says, ‘The West wants to take over Pakistan’s nuclear weapons …’
    Eventually he decides to turn around and make his way back to the hospital, to be with Jeo until the rally is over.
    It’s past noon when he arrives at the hospital. No one can tell him where he might find Jeo and he walks around the maze of corridors, the wards chaotic because the rally has turned violent out there, resulting in injuries and fatalities, the police opening fire. Parts of the city are an inferno and soon there are flames in the vicinity of the hospital too. He asks for the doctor to whom he had entrusted Jeo and is told to go to an upper level. A canister of teargas enters through a window and explodes in the staircase, enveloping him in a bitter choking fog. He finds himself trembling with consternation and foreboding, his eyes streaming. Outside slogans are being shouted, about ancient history as well as this week’s news, the people of today as distressed about things that happened a thousand years ago as the people who had lived