Though he doesn’t say anything, standing with his back to the bright light, he doesn’t want them to go. There could be a secondary explosion, meant to injure the people who are trying to save the building. Or men on motorbikes could drive by and spray the rescuers and onlookers with machine guns. Fearfully he looks over his shoulder and watches them leave.
The burning gives off a roar that reaches the last little place inside him, where each man keeps his courage, and when the wind pivots there is nothing but that roar, a reminder that the noise of fire had resounded on earth before the speech of man.
Basie and Yasmin both teach at the Christian school in Heer, and the thought comes to him that they could be in danger when they return, with their school and the church attached to it a possible target.
A few in the crowd around him are delighted. To them this isn’t madness but, on the contrary, is
beauty
.
*
Rohan is some way from the Grand Trunk Road when he sees the lamp lying on its side in the grass, still intact, still burning. He sees the knee-high mound of chains under a wayside cypress tree, each link someone’s wish, and his first thought is that they have been torn from the fakir’s body by the explosion, that he would find the body somewhere nearby, but now the heaped-up metal gives a stir and an uncertain hand comes into view.
Rohan moves forward with the lamp as the fakir sits upright in a dazed condition, and begins to pick the debris off his chains. He must have been close to the church when the device exploded, and has come away and collapsed here. In all probability he has been saved by the chains, the armour of other people’s needs.
Sometimes when Allah does not take pity on him – does not hear his prayers on others’ behalf, making the links vanish – the chains continue to grow, so that he has to drag several yards of them behind him.
Rohan watches him as he stands up in a series of gradual accomplishments – that incredible weight.
He begins to walk away, removing bits of brick and stone that the explosion had thrown onto him to be embedded in the links, as another man might brush off dust from his clothes.
‘Brother, are you all right?’
He stops, the chains continuing to swing.
‘I didn’t mean to disturb you,’ Rohan says.
They are a dozen or so steps from a pond and with his lamp and the clinking of his chains he walks in up to his knees, making the water golden with the lamplight as he leans forwards and lowers his face to the water. As if to take its odour. Then he begins to sip.
Rohan watches him alertly lest the weight make him lose balance, fearing he would drown within the coils, but he straightens and returns successfully.
He places the lamp on the ground and then lowers himself onto the ground beside Rohan and they look towards the east from where the sun will rise.
‘I am waiting for my daughter and son-in-law.’ Rohan points to the line of trees behind them, where the sky is a dark orange from the church fire.
The fakir looks for a long moment in that direction, his breath steaming weakly in the air of the October night. The chains must be cold, Rohan thinks. The wrists are calloused where each thick ring or bracelet has been rubbing against the skin for decades.
‘We have been away from home for some days,’ Rohan says, surprised by the tears he is trying to control. ‘Looking for my son and foster son.’
A need to talk. After trying to appear courageous before Yasmin and Basie over the past few days.
The man gazes ahead. He appears to be a soul without a self.
‘How can anyone explain the world?’ Rohan says to himself, looking down at his hands. ‘Sometimes I despair that it can’t be done.’
The man clears his throat gently and the voice is almost all rasp when it comes. ‘It can be.’
With great care, as though writing the words instead of uttering them, he begins to speak. ‘It can be done.
Ahl
-
e-Dil
and
Ahle-Havas
. We all are divided into these two groups. The first are the People of the Heart. The second are the People of Greed, the deal makers and the men of lust and the hucksters.’ He pauses to gather sufficient energy to continue. Some say that he is a djinn, and also that God has graced him with the lifelong innocence of dervishes, and also that he had used the chains to capture a djinn in the wilderness who had then converted to Islam. After his silence he says, ‘The first people will not trample anyone to obtain what they desire. The second will. Here lies this world.’
Rohan says, ‘That could be one way of reading the world, yes.’
‘If I take dust in my hand and ask you if that is all the dust there is, you will answer that dust is everywhere on earth. More specks than can ever be numbered. So I can give you a handful of truth only. Besides this there are other truths. More than can ever be numbered.’
The earliest glimmers of light are appearing in the sky, and they sit without words and a scent comes to Rohan and he looks around for its source because he has the same tree growing in his garden. The blossoms produce this roaming perfume but are green and very small, almost invisible to the eye – choosing to be represented, rather than revealing themselves.
The last time he spoke to Naheed the bird pardoner had yet to return to the house.
He touches one of the chains. ‘Why do you carry these?’
With the tip of his index finger the man writes a word in the dust, the dust in which his chains had made swirls when he sat down.
‘You were once one of the
Ahl-e-Havas?’
The man remains silent.
‘You hurt someone?’
‘It cannot unhappen.’
‘Someone was harmed?’
The word he has written is
Desire
.
‘I made mistakes when my son was a child,’ Rohan says. ‘His mother had died in the state of apostasy and as a result I enforced an extreme form of piety on myself and on my children, making them pray and keep fasts, revealing to them things inappropriate for their ages. The transience of this life, the tortures of Hell and, before that, of the grave. I stopped eventually, seeing the error, but it must have marked them. I wonder if that is why he went to Afghanistan.’
The fakir looks at the thousands of chain links surrounding him, perhaps wondering if any of them have vanished in the night. The light is caught in hazy smears on the metal.
‘We believe my two boys are in Afghanistan. What you said about
Ahl-e-Dil
and
Ahl-e-Havas
, does that explain what is happening in Afghanistan? The armies from the West. The extremes of the Taliban.’
He is not sure if the fakir is listening, his eyes on the first sunlight, the rays spanning the gap between the unseen and the seen, but then the man looks at him. ‘Whoever has power desires to hold on to power. That is the case both with the Taliban and the West.’ He sits breathing in the morning air and then with careful movements of his hands – as diligent as he was when he was writing – he erases the word he has written, letter by letter.
‘What did you do before this?’
‘I worked with law. Twenty years ago, thirty.’ He shakes his head. ‘Nothing is ever over. Time is unimportant.’
‘You were a policeman.’
‘Worse.’ The man extinguishes his lamp. ‘A judge.’
The sun is an orb of boiling glass before them, the light remaking the world once again, and now the fakir rises slowly and begins to walk along the rim of the dawn-lit pond. ‘My day is only a day, my name only a name,’ he says with one hand on his breast in the gesture of swearing fidelity. Rohan watches him disappear as the sunlight erupts from the water in shards.
*
It is late morning when they arrive in Heer. The gate to the house is locked and Rohan lets them in with the key.
He is immediately relieved to see that the bird pardoner’s steel wires are lying in a tangle at the foot of the young mango tree. So the snares have been taken down. He spends a few moments examining the health and progress of the tree. Jeo loves its fruit, with a tinge of turpentine to its flavour, the pulp almost liquid and having to be sucked through a hole one makes at the top.
Turning around to move deeper into the garden he notices with unhappiness the branch that has been broken off the frangipani tree. He touches the wound and from the consistency of the congealed latex can tell that the damage occurred sometime yesterday.
Basie walks along one of the red paths towards the house. He enters a room but emerges a minute later with a sense of an unidentifiable wrong. The corridors are unswept – which is understandable since Naheed has probably been staying with her mother – but there is evidence of many footsteps in the dust on the floors. It is as though the characters and personalities from the boxes of books had come alive and wandered the house.
Yasmin stands looking at the garden from the veranda, wondering why the vines and the branches are flowerless, wondering why there is a ghostly impression of a figure in coal dust or ash against a wall.
At the pond Rohan sees the heap of dead birds, insects rising from it in a glittering black vortex as he lifts a paradise flycatcher with its pair of long white ribbons for a tail, three times the length of its body. He walks towards the clothesline strung between the eucalyptus tree and the tall glad jacaranda. He had passed the line earlier without really seeing what was hanging on it: a single item and it seems to be the shirt Jeo wore to Peshawar six days ago. It is pinned upside down, the sleeves almost reaching the grass. The fabric has many gashes in it and its original grey colour is stained by what appears to be blood or dark red ink. A rag with which someone tried to clean something rusty. Did Naheed make two of these? This must be one of the earlier practice ones. And he stands examining it for seams.
From a shelf Basie picks up the large sphere of ruby-coloured glass with verses of the Koran indented into it. It must be glass – too heavy and too clear to be plastic. It is a pendant for a necklace or a talisman to be worn around the neck on a black cord. He has never seen it before and he brings it to the window and holds it up to see the sun enter and inhabit it, illuminating the verses from within.
He walks to Tara’s place but there is no one there. A man is sitting in the sun in front of the neighbouring house. He has wet henna paste on his hair and a sheet of newspaper is protecting the collar of his shirt from stains and he tells Basie that the two women are at Naheed’s in-laws’.
‘I have just come from there,’ Basie says.
The man shrugs. ‘Then maybe they have gone to the doctor. Or the bazaar. Who can understand women and their whims?’
Basie returns and hears Yasmin and Tara, hears Naheed and Rohan. He doesn’t know what they are saying, only their voices reaching him from somewhere, and then he sees Naheed walking towards him, dressed in ash as though she has been caught in a lightning storm.
10
A follower of Allah knows nothing of chance. In this life everything is significant and meaningful. So why has this happened? A drop of his bloody soul struggle, the ruby shines in Rohan’s palm.
He looks at the clock with its black hands. Before Jeo was born, he had placed his ear to Sofia’s skin, just above and to the left of the navel, and listened to the small second heartbeat, there in the darkness before life began. Now the boy is in the other darkness and Rohan doesn’t know where to find a sign of him, what wall or barrier or skin or veil to place his ear on.
In the night garden the hibiscus blossoms sway on the vine like birds, their crimson darkened by several shades. The berries of the Persian lilac trees are poisonous so they remain on the branches throughout the year. The bulbul is the only bird that seems to have immunity and all day they were feeding noisily on the clusters.
‘Uncle.’
He turns to see Basie on the red path, a storm lantern in his hand. Behind him is Tara.
‘Aunt Tara says she would like to speak to the two of us.’
‘Just a few moments of your time, brother-ji,’ Tara says.
He points towards the bench under the Mysore fig tree.
‘I want to talk to you about Naheed’s future,’ she says, sitting rigidly.
‘Naheed’s future? As long as I am alive, sister-ji, the girl will be provided for. This remains her home.’
Basie, sitting beside her, assents too.
‘No.’ She shakes her head. ‘I want her to marry again.’
Basie and Rohan look at each other.
‘Of course,’ Rohan says. ‘She should. She’s only nineteen years old.’
The light of the lantern is caught under the dark canopy of the tree, shadows washing over the ground as they converse quietly.
‘I know it’s too soon to talk about these matters,’ Tara says, ‘and I feel ashamed for having brought it up when Jeo is buried not even ten days, but I just didn’t want you to forget that you have a responsibility to Naheed.’
‘That will never happen,’ Rohan says. ‘She is like Yasmin to me.’
‘I don’t want my daughter to spend the rest of her life as a widow.’
‘We’ll find a good man for her,’ Basie says. ‘Let’s allow a period of time to pass, and then we’ll begin to look.’
‘That is all I wanted to hear,’ the woman nods.
‘You mustn’t ever think you are alone, Aunt Tara,’ Basie tells her. ‘You have us.’
‘What does Naheed think?’ Rohan asks.
‘I haven’t yet spoken to her about this matter.’
‘Of course.’
They remain where they are, surrounded by a penetrating silence until Naheed appears at the kitchen door with a candle, the banana fronds made luminous by the light, and she looks at the three of them across the distance. ‘The food is ready.’
She comes forward and takes Rohan by the hand and leads him away, Tara following. Very quickly after she came into the house as a bride with her forehead decorated with starlike dots, the girl had taken responsibility for the everyday affairs of the family. Yasmin’s work had flourished because of her; Naheed cooked, and insisted that Yasmin and Basie come here after school instead of going to their own place. She took over the running of several aspects of their household too, allowing Yasmin to concentrate on her teaching, and at the weekends – when Jeo returned from medical school in Lahore – the entire family gathered here, and it was all arranged and organised by her, with unobtrusive advice and guidance from Tara.