‘And I about you.’
‘You are a doctor now.’
‘The clinic is named after my late mother.’
Naheed sees how this has shaken Rohan. ‘So these operations you have suggested …’
The man swings his black chair towards her. ‘We will have to act fast. You will need to get the funds together soon. Unfortunately in a case like this almost every day counts.’
‘And the original cause is reversible too?’
‘Yes. You seem to have been given outdated advice. There has been much scientific progress.’
Is he trying to destroy Rohan? Are these operations beneficial or necessary? Will he just waste the money on unneeded procedures and then claim he did his best? But, no. It is said that something in people’s souls will not let them take advantage of the blind or deceive them. The Koran admonishes a personage – some believe it to be Muhammad himself – for ignoring a blind man in a gathering of influential tribal chiefs.
‘My reasons to expel you from Ardent Spirit seemed persuasive at the time,’ Rohan says suddenly.
The doctor ignores the comment. ‘When should I schedule the next appointment?’ He holds out the reports. Rohan extends his arm towards the sound and takes them, the hand groping in the air before grabbing, like a bird trying to alight on a branch in a strong wind.
‘When did your mother die, may I ask?’
‘The year I graduated from medical school.’
‘The name didn’t bring her to mind,’ Rohan says. ‘I am sorry to hear of her death. May Allah have compassion on her soul.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘I just meant … Allah is all-forgiving …’
‘She was the most decent human being I knew.’
Naheed watches him concentrating on the man’s words. She knows from Mikal the power the voice has to reveal someone. Sometimes when he sang she would close her eyes and realise that every emotion that had been present in his facial expressions was also present in his voice.
‘I am sorry to hear of her death,’ Rohan says again. ‘There are many ways to live a good life, and Allah is all-forgiving.’
The doctor looks at him and then in a calm controlled gesture rings the bell for the next patient to be shown in.
‘Thank you,’ Naheed says, getting up. ‘We’ll contact you about the next appointment.’
‘I look forward to hearing from you,’ the doctor says without looking up.
*
Night, and he walks in his garden, hands outstretched, touching the skin of the world in the darkness. He moves beside the night scent of flowers, feels on the bark the names Jeo and Mikal had scratched when they were children.
That afternoon thirty years ago, when the boy was brought into his office, Rohan had no intimation that one of the darkest years of his marriage was about to begin. The child was amiable and conscientious but was brought in because he had attempted to steal from the school’s garden – this garden, here. Some of the more daring boys often did that, picking fruit from the trees or taking bird eggs. But he was attempting to steal an implement from the shed. At first he would not explain his motives. Eventually he said, ‘I want to dig up my father’s grave to see if it matches the picture that my mother keeps on the shelf.’ His fellow students had been taunting him. Some of them were summoned to the office and the complete details of the entire affair came to light. There was no father, the mother was a fallen woman.
Rohan went to see her that very afternoon, knocking on the door of the house and waiting while a youth, no older than the senior boys at Ardent Spirit, came out. Suddenly he had a vision of the woman corrupting his student body. There was no prejudice at Ardent Spirit. There were all sects of Islam at the school. Shias, Deobandis, Wahabis. When Rohan heard that a teacher had given a Shia student fewer marks than he deserved, he had investigated the matter immediately. But this was different.
To his utter shock the woman was unrepentant. He offered to waive her son’s fees if she would put an end to her commerce. He visited her every day for a week to try and persuade her. Almost every student knew about it by then and a number of alarmed parents had visited Rohan, threatening to withdraw their children. He went to the classroom mid-lesson and asked him to collect his things.
‘Sir, I am sorry for stealing the spade.’
‘That is not the reason for your expulsion,’ he remembers saying, looking directly ahead. ‘Your mother is a sinful woman.’
They got into the rickshaw and putting his hand into his satchel the boy brought out an eraser. ‘Sir, I borrowed this from Fareed Chaudhuri. Can you give this back to him please?’
Rohan put the item in his pocket. ‘I will do that later.’
The woman came to the door of her house and took the child in wordlessly.
Sofia raged at him. She wanted to go to the woman’s house and bring back the boy – a thought that stunned him. There would be no eye contact with her for over a year after that day. He felt persecuted, believing he had done the only correct thing possible under the circumstances, and he had begged Allah for strength and begged Him to forgive Sofia for some of the words she had uttered in fury.
In the garden one dawn, the house lit red by the sunrise, she said she was leaving him.
They had both attended Punjab University in Lahore, though at different times, he being five years older. Born and raised in Heer, and possessing an intense shyness of character, he had not fitted in at the university, or into the large city. His efforts to understand himself and his times were lonely ones, and he lived in fear of – and perhaps even a mild revulsion at – the behaviour of the other students. He stood out to the extent that he could not even bring himself to wear Western clothes – those trousers that had pockets in appallingly inappropriate places, front and back, from where items of food could then be pulled out and eaten, hands removed to be shaken, documents produced and handed over. She – who was also from Heer – had thrived at the university however. A laughing confident beauty. He was already teaching at a government school when he met her. She was the new English teacher, and a month after they were introduced she caught him opening a notebook in which she had been writing earlier: full of longing for her, he had wished to see her handwriting. Some glimpse of a thing that was intrinsically her. Intimate. And he knew she might be his only chance at happiness. At the year’s end she entered the room and, lowering herself into a sitting position before him, told him he must ask her to marry him. Covering his lying mouth with her hands when he tried to protest.
Her emotions were always closer to the surface than his.
Now she placed the large suitcase on the dresser in their bedroom and emptied her wardrobe into it, and it remained there for a year. She herself moved into her study. Some nights he would hear her come into their bedroom and he would pretend to be asleep. 2 a.m. or 3 or 4. And she would sit in the chair for a while and watch him. Then she would rise and take a few items out of the open suitcase and leave. Then one day her clothes were back in the wardrobe. Her parents were dead and her brother had his own family. She had nowhere to go, the brother reminding her that she had chosen to marry Rohan without seeking his counsel. ‘Now go and
be
a modern woman,’ he said. ‘Live somewhere divorced and alone.’ He had waited all these years to avenge the slight to his honour.
*
He turns his face upwards, where the visible planets must be burning in the eastern sky. He reaches the overgrown
thor
bush and slowly raises his hands towards the spike-filled branches, wondering how he will know which of these limbs must be amputated next year to restore symmetry.
18
The air of the February evening is dabbed with fog and the saluki appears and disappears within it. Major Kyra walks into Ardent Spirit’s Baghdad House. The boy who had opened the school’s gate for him is a few paces ahead, calling to the hound. He is in his late teens and is known for his passionate nature, his limbs full of disciplined movements, and eyes capable of a sudden flaring as when straw is thrown onto a fire. He owns a deadly dagger as beautiful as a toy, and his name is Ahmed. Five months ago his father was at work in the ice factory when a rectangular block of ice slid down a ramp and shattered. A foot-long splinter flew up and pierced his diaphragm from below. It continued through the left lung and entered his heart. He fell backwards onto the floor and that was where he was discovered half an hour later. By then the ice fragment inside him had melted away. The neighbourhood women insisted he had been killed with a ghost dagger by Ahmed’s mother, who had died the previous year and who had known nothing but contempt and ruthlessness from her husband while she was alive.
He joined the jihad in October and went away towards Kabul, returning only a fortnight ago.
Major Kyra follows him along a corridor, having tied the saluki to a chair leg in the hallway.
The day-to-day affairs of Ardent Spirit’s six houses – Mecca, Baghdad, Cairo, Cordoba, Delhi and Ottoman – are the responsibility of six senior boys, Ahmed being one of them. And they are all gathered in the room when Major Kyra and Ahmed enter.
The candlelight casts oversized shadows on the walls. Kyra lowers himself onto the woollen carpet bought from the smugglers’ market in the North-West Frontier Province. The six boys position themselves before him in a semicircle.
With his flame-scarred hands – they look as though they’ve been put together from scraps of leather – Ahmed holds a piece of paper towards Kyra. On it are the layouts of Heer’s Christian school and church. All sides of the two buildings have their lengths written down next to them, and all the surrounding roads are named.
‘Bombing the church or the Christian school will not achieve anything,’ Kyra says. ‘Such explosions in other places have not deterred the West from continuing with its war, nor forced the Pakistani government to withdraw its support for the Western occupiers.’
‘We are the world’s seventh nuclear power,’ the boy from Ottoman House says quietly, ‘and yet our government does the bidding of the Americans, as though we were nothing but beggars.’ The knowledge of his helplessness is making him angry, he the brother of someone who had gone to Afghanistan in October and is now believed to be in US custody.
‘Twenty or thirty Pakistanis, be they Christian or Muslim, dying in an explosion in Pakistan isn’t going to matter at all,’ Kyra says. ‘Neither our own government nor anyone in the West will care about it.’
The head of Ottoman House says, ‘If we don’t send a message now they will attack other Muslim countries.’
The boy from Delhi House extends a hand towards Ahmed. ‘Tell him.’
‘Tell me what?’ Kyra asks. There is a companionship among the boys that will probably never be bettered in their lives.
‘Why don’t we raid the school and hold everyone hostage? The teachers and the students. Release a list of demands. We should ask for the Americans to leave Afghanistan and free all our brothers who are being held prisoner by them.’
Kyra studies the paper. ‘Do we have enough men for such an operation?’
‘The six of us will form a sufficiently strong core. Beyond that we need a dozen or so others. We can find them.’
‘The siege could last several days,’ Kyra says.
‘Yes,’ Ahmed says. ‘We need to calculate exactly how many weapons we’ll need and of what kind. We’ll have to buy some.’
With Ardent Spirit no longer linked to the Pakistani military and the ISI, the influx of funds has disappeared. Arranged by the ISI, there used to be donation boxes in many cities across Pakistan. Two years ago, during the festival to mark the Sacrifice of Abraham, Ardent Spirit had received contributions of almost $2 million, mostly from the hides of the sacrificed sheep. During the same month millions more were raised from the 675,000 Pakistanis who live in Britain. Money also came from Muslims in India – Kashmir, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Gujarat. But access to all of this is now denied Kyra. He will have to use his own money.
‘It will be hazardous but it is a cause worth dying for,’ Ahmed is saying. ‘And as for the other side, the founder and headmaster of the school, Father Mede, is an infidel. The teachers at the school are Muslim but traitors to Islam, filling the heads of the children with un-Islamic things like music and biology and English literature. And the students too are traitors.’
‘They laugh at us,’ says the boy from Ottoman House. ‘They refer to us who attend schools like Ardent Spirit as “donkeys”. They say we and our like have made Pakistan unlivable.’
‘Father Mede is white,’ Kyra says. ‘An Englishman. It’ll become an international affair.’
‘Exactly,’ says the head of Mecca House, leaning forward. ‘They will pay attention if something happens to a white person. We could kill a few teachers to indicate our seriousness and hold him as the chief bargaining and negotiating asset.’
‘There will be no bargaining or negotiating, brother,’ the head of Cairo House says.
‘Leverage, then.’
‘He is over seventy years old,’ Ahmed says.
‘Do you think they are asking to see birth certificates before dropping bombs in Afghanistan?’
‘Brother,’ Ahmed says, ‘you misunderstand me. I was just thinking that it would make the authorities act with speed. It’s in our favour. How do you feel about capturing him and bringing him here?’
‘It’s not good to have infidels in the house,’ three of the boys say in unison.
The doorbell sounds and Ahmed leaves the room to answer it, making sure his back is never turned towards the Koran and other religious texts on the shelf.
Kyra opens the book of the Prophet’s sayings.
Number 813: I was given the following words of the Prophet by Hukm bin Nafa, who was given them by Shoaib, who was given them by Zehri, who was given them by Abu Salma, who was given them by Abu Horaira. The Prophet said, ‘The End of the World won’t be until two armies have gone to war proclaiming an identical goal.’
*
When Ahmed returns he is accompanied by a middle-aged woman wrapped in a shawl, her face marked with the deep lines of resignation and self-control. Maintaining a pointedly respectful distance from the sphere of candlelight in which the men are, she greets everyone and sits down in the far corner.