‘Surely you see that as her mother I cannot allow Naheed to marry you,’ she had said. ‘You cannot provide a better future for her than a doctor.’
He said that he would tell everything to Jeo and Rohan and have the wedding cancelled, his eyes intense, the eyebrows meeting in the middle so his glance seemed weighed down by some dark mystery.
‘We love each other.’
‘Is that how you will repay Jeo, by stealing his bride? The boy whose family took you in.’ His face had crumpled at that but she had continued, her own dreads and distress too great. ‘You cannot betray Jeo.’
‘I cannot betray Naheed either.’
‘I would like to know where you will live. In that room they say you rent in a dogfight and rubbish-heap district?’
‘There is nothing wrong with where I live,’ he said quietly. ‘My parents lived there.’
As if the story of his parents didn’t frighten her. The father vanishing as he tried to bring about a revolution after which there would be no God, and the mother wearing herself out searching for him, slapped by policemen and officials from whom she thought she could demand answers.
Tara had said this to him and he was perfectly motionless, almost as though he had died standing up. Without knowing it, the unfortunate boy had become the outlet for the loneliness and suffering of her own life.
‘Even if she loves you, you should do her the kindness of never seeing her again. Her life will be better with Jeo.’
She promised Allah she would say five hundred prayers of gratitude if the wedding went ahead as planned. And she followed the trail of the chained mendicant as he passed through the streets of Heer and asked him to add a link to his chains: her wish was Naheed’s happiness, for Mikal to disappear.
And it was granted – the link must have vanished from about the mendicant’s person.
Now, as she waters the henna plant, she tells herself to trust in Allah again.
There is a note of feedback from the mosque’s loudspeaker and the cleric clears his throat. Tara becomes alert. No prayer is called at this hour, so it must be a special announcement, and they are mostly about a death in the neighbourhood, or a lost child. She thinks of the little girl who just left with the fabrics.
‘Gentlemen, please listen to the following announcement …’
Sometimes on hearing this, Naheed mutters to herself, ‘And what about us ladies?’ – earning herself a look of admonition from Tara, who is unable to accept criticism in any matter concerning the mosque. The man announces that Jeo, the son of Rohan-sahib, the former headmaster of Ardent Spirit, has died, that the body is laid out at home and the funeral will be held after the noon prayers. The words are like a blow to her head and chest but for several seconds their meaning eludes her. There is pain but it cannot find its focus as she descends the stairs slowly and goes out of the door.
The ground threatens to dissolve under her feet when she approaches Rohan’s house, where there is indeed a crowd as the child had said. She negotiates a way through the mass and walks into the garden, knowing where to find Naheed, at the head of the corpse, but there is no corpse and no Naheed.
*
She touches the face. It is broken but it is him. There is a cut in the cheek, the flesh swollen around it and the blood congealed in dark colours under the skin, the features that would be unrecognisable if she didn’t know them as well as she does. The mole on the back of the ear that even he didn’t know he had. Women have been knocking on the door ever since they discovered that she had locked herself in here with him but she ignores them, looking instead now into his eyes that are open, the ruined porcelain of them looking back at her. Carefully she uncovers him entirely. There are incisions and bullet wounds throughout and she imagines him crying out as each of these wounds was made. The stomach has been cut open in two diagonal strokes, deep enough to slice through the intestines. The bruises so vivid she thinks they would stain her fingers, but they remain fast, as though painted on the reverse side of the skin. She touches the mouth which is a purple blotch, full of syrupy plasma and clots of blood, the lips and tongue that came together to form a word or a kiss, and she bends to sniff the dead air inside the nostrils and she sniffs the riven shirt, the cold moth smell of it. Normally the body would be taken away to be washed at the mosque and brought back smelling of vetiver and the essence of camphor, but she heard someone say earlier that he must not be bathed, that a martyr is buried with the blood of the battle still on him.
Dipping the nib into an inkpot filled with his own blood, the cleric at the nearby mosque has been transcribing the Koran into a blank book for more than a decade, intending to complete the entire Holy Book out of his own body. But occasionally, when he is delighted by an act of piety performed by a child, the cleric allows the child to donate a speck of red from a fingertip. As a child Jeo was proud to have been asked to make a contribution – a pair of dots in the name of the prophet Ayub.
She rebinds the shroud carefully and covers him with the sheet and then walks to the door to let them in.
*
Nothing anyone does can alter the fact that he is dead. Not even God can change the past.
By nightfall most people have gone – just a few men lingering outside the house, someone looking for their child’s lost shoe on the veranda, a few women in the kitchen washing and putting away dishes, and then they too leave. Messages have been left in Peshawar for Rohan, Yasmin and Basie but they cannot be located – gone away to look for Jeo and Mikal, following rumours to nearby towns.
The neighbourhood women had taken control of the house and of the situation – apportioning tasks, taking flowers off the vines to cover the body and later the grave, sending young men up into the trees to remove the snares. Surrounding and comforting Tara and Naheed, each woman recalled the last time she saw Jeo, offering memories of his intelligence and kindness and remembering details of their wedding.
Naheed wanders through the large house. It is ten o’clock and candlelight is all there is, the electricity having disappeared. She walks down the darkened corridor towards Cordoba House with a flame, then stops and leans against the wall, the wax dripping at her feet. On the wall hangs a picture of Jeo and she stares at it questioningly. The three men who brought the body did not have much information. All they said was that they were employees of an ordinary truck-hire company in Peshawar and that a man had come to their depot and paid them to deliver Jeo’s body to this address in Heer.
But at one level it is too soon for such details to matter. When a woman had asked Tara, ‘How did he die?’ Tara had said, ‘I don’t care yet.’
The house drifts in darkness. The girl thinks of the time the garden had pulled her into its brilliance, the sunlight and the invasion of delicate insects, the smells from the Tree of Sorrows and the Sorrowless Tree. She knows it will never again be the same because, tarnished, exposed, corroded, stained, blinded, her eyes have been made different, imperfect.
Where is Mikal? She sits down on the floor with her back against the wall and becomes still. When she and Mikal began to meet, there was something like embarrassment in her initially. It had all seemed a pretence, and she had perhaps tried to make light of what they were doing. But his intensity had compelled her to take her own life seriously, made her see that beauty and happiness were her right too.
11 p.m. and Tara is in a nearby room with a lamp and a Koran. Midnight and there is a perfect quietness as if the house has become detached from the earth and floated clear. The two of them alone with a war, the gutted burned insides of it. The times have something to tell them through this occurrence but neither knows what it is.
Soon after the body arrived a rumour spread in the neighbourhood that American soldiers had killed Jeo. One man had loaded his rifle on hearing this and rushed out of his house, thinking the American army had actually invaded Heer.
The ash on Naheed’s clothes has marked her wrists and neck. Upon learning that Tara had sent for ash, for the mourning clothes to be dyed with it, almost all the women had become perplexed, saying that these must be poor people’s customs, those of villagers. They wondered once again how a seamstress had managed to get her daughter married into this big house. Rose-ringed parakeets have to be buried under neem trees, so when Tara’s had died two decades ago she had come here and asked if they would allow her to bury the bird under their neem. That was how she had met the family, though Rohan was also a very distant relative of her dead husband.
Naheed sits in Rohan’s room with the telephone receiver in her hand. 1 a.m. She has tried contacting Rohan again in Peshawar but there is no answer.
There is a ruby on the table. It was discovered in Jeo’s stomach and its surface is carved finely with Koranic verses, the colour brilliant and clean. It is polished to a perfect smoothness in the areas where there are no words and it had made people gasp, such loveliness had entered them at the sight, in spite of the occasion. A woman remembered that it had belonged to Sofia and that it had disappeared from the house long ago, presumed stolen. The cleric said that the drops of blood Jeo had donated as a child to the calligraphy of his Koran had appeared as a jewel within him.
Naheed is still sitting beside the telephone at two o’clock, the candle long spent. She gets up and searches for another. There are some hours when a human being needs company even if it is only a small flame. In its light she lowers herself onto Rohan’s bed.
9
Rohan dreams of an American soldier and a jihadi warrior digging the same grave.
He opens his eyes and looks out of the car, moving towards Heer along the Grand Trunk Road, vast stretches of it without light. They have been travelling all night and the dashboard clock says 4.30 a.m. They’ll be home around eight in the morning. Basie is driving and Yasmin is asleep in the back seat. They have been unable to discover any clues to Jeo and Mikal’s whereabouts, and are returning to Heer exhausted after the various searches they have conducted in and around Peshawar – all three of them stunned by the past few days.
Earlier in the evening they telephoned home but there was no answer. Naheed must be at Tara’s place, and there is no telephone there. In all honesty they were relieved that no one had picked up.
They have no news to give and would have had to tell them that they would be returning empty-handed. It can wait until they get home. The thought comes to him that Jeo and Mikal might die, a terror in the black leaf-encumbered forest that is his mind, but he turns away from it immediately, almost cowering.
Out on the plains a river is shining like poured metal now that starlight has caught it at the right angle and hundreds of bats can be seen passing over the sheetwater on their leather wings as they hunt for moths. Just ahead of them a church has come into view and then Basie has to bring the car to a sudden screeching halt. A bearded man, of Rohan’s own age, has appeared before the vehicle, crossing the road less than five yards ahead. He carries a weak lamp whose flame is lost in the white glare of the headlights, and he presents an extraordinary sight because he is bound heavily in thick chains. They are wrapped around his torso like thread on a spool, covering the entire area from his hipbones to his armpits. At least two dozen chains also hang from a metal ring around his neck – they fall to just below his knees and then rise, half of them joining a ring that he wears on his left wrist, the other half attaching themselves to the right wrist.
He looks directly at Rohan as everyone in the car recovers from the shock.
‘Should we get out and help him?’ Yasmin asks.
‘He just needs time to get across, I imagine.’ Basie looks back to see if there are any vehicles behind them but there is nothing and the man is in no danger.
Basie makes a small courteous detour around him and he doesn’t acknowledge them as he continues his slow walk to the other edge of the road. His beard is matted and dust-filled like the hair on his head and he is thin, his face deeply lined and sunburnt, but there is a peaceful expression.
A thick metal garment.
‘As a child Mikal thought he was our father,’ Basie says quietly as they leave him behind.
The chains must weigh as much as two healthy men at least and must be a very heavy burden – they account for the slow progress.
‘I have heard about him but never seen him,’ Rohan says, looking back. He is soon lost to view as they pick up speed but then they hear the hard metallic sound like a colossal hammer coming down on an anvil of equal proportions. A noise so loud the air itself bends.
‘Someone just blew up the church,’ Yasmin says.
‘Turn around.’
‘He could be hurt. He was crossing towards it.’
This is the second attack on a church in two days. Yesterday it was during the daylight hours and it had injured several people. Those claiming responsibility had said that since Western Christians were bombing and destroying mosques in Afghanistan, they were beginning a campaign to annihilate churches in Pakistan.
The blaze can be seen from two hundred yards away, the building engulfed in a powerful inferno and the smoke billowing up into the black sky. The explosion was on the ground floor and long flames are emerging from the windows to climb the facade. At the fire’s height the tips of the flames break off again and again, vanishing into the darkness.
They park by the roadside and get out and Rohan feels the light like a hard rain on his face, on his eyes, and he has to look away every few seconds. The fire inside the church is brighter and hotter – the outside flames dull by comparison. One blaze seems to be escaping another more ferocious blaze.
Even though it is night there is soon the beginning of a traffic jam and in the chaos people are getting out to help, bear witness or complain. Yasmin and Basie tell Rohan to stay beside their car as they themselves go forwards, to see if they can be of assistance.