The Blind Man's Garden (30 page)

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.

P
oliteness.
O
bedience.
L
oyalty.
I
ntelligence.
C
ourteousness.
E
fficiency.

‘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.