*
‘I want to see Jeo,’ he says in the interrogation room.
‘Shut up. When did you take the oath with Osama bin Laden?’
He must say something or they’ll begin to hurt Jeo again on the other side of the wall.
‘I can’t remember. What date did Jeo give?’ He is having trouble focusing his eyes after the dark chamber.
‘You don’t get to ask me questions. Get on your knees and stick your arms out.’
Mikal does as he is told, the MP unlocking his handcuffs, and David and the interpreter leave the room, the MP remaining in his corner.
*
Half an hour later David returns and tells Mikal to sit back on the chair, his wrists locked again.
David indicates the Twin Towers poster. ‘If you think we will let you repeat what you did five months ago you are severely mistaken.’ And then, holding Mikal’s eye, he says, ‘How did you feel when it happened?’
‘It was a disgusting crime.’
‘Most of your people didn’t think so. They were pleased.’
‘Now you know we don’t all think alike.’ The man’s eyes have not left his for even a fraction of a second. ‘How many of my people have you met anyway?’
‘I have met enough of them here.’
‘Do you want me to base my opinion of your people on the ones I have met here?’
Let him ask me to get on my knees and stick my arms out
.
David leans back in his chair. ‘You wanted us to ask Jeo about something only the two of you would know. He has given us one word.’
The man utters the word and it travels through Mikal, journeying along his blood vessels and then something ruptures in his mind. He is feeling weightless suddenly, what the arrow must feel when it leaves the bow. The muscles of his arms are in indescribable pain from having been in the stress position, and before that there were the ceiling shackles in the chamber, and yet he lunges at David across the table with his teeth bared, his only weapon – the animal part of him.
Naheed.
20
I curse this city. Its king erred in killing the man I love
… She looks up from the page she has been reading and then closes the book. She has imagined an arrival, the presence of someone on the other side of the front gate. Perhaps there was even a knock. She emerges onto the terrace and gazes at the gate through the trees, surrounded by the natural noises of the garden. The ashes on her clothes deposit an indistinct impression on the white pillar beside her. These half-ghosts appear elsewhere in the house too, as she brushes against a wall in passing or forgetfully leans against a cupboard for support. They are faint – only she can see them – and as with the others she will brush this one away soon after becoming aware of it.
It is the first morning of steady heat this year, and she sits down on the stone steps. She opens the book on her lap and begins to read.
Shilappadikaram
. A text from the third century AD.
The story of Kannagi who, having lost her husband to a miscarriage of justice at the court of the Pandya king, wreaked her revenge on his kingdom.
When she looks up the gate has opened to admit Mikal.
His eyes locate her.
The jacaranda is in bloom and after a shower the smell enters the house at twilight so thickly she can lie there wondering if it will ever stop. It marks half the distance between Mikal and her, and she halts when she reaches it. Is it his ghost, here to convince her to build a life without him? Or is he real and her thinking has summoned him into her presence?
She backs away and he takes a corresponding step towards her.
‘When someone thinks of us, or dreams of us with enough longing and love,’ Tara had said to her once, ‘we disappear from where we are.’ Naheed had become afraid lest she think about Mikal strongly enough to make him appear in the room, unable to explain to Tara who he was.
She turns and begins to walk away, looking over her shoulder to see him following her. But when she reaches the terrace he is no longer behind her. She had taken a sideways step on approaching the walnut tree, and it is as though he had continued in his momentum and disappeared into the bark.
She touches the tree trunk.
She waits for him to emerge for ten, fifteen, twenty seconds, and then she looks around, searching inside the light that breathes down everywhere through the canopies, her glance passing over the mulberries that have both foliage and flowers on their branches now, the thick softness of the leaves gleaming amongst all the other greens of the garden, the banyan’s wide clear green, the cypresses almost black in comparison, the apple-green poplars. Eventually she sees him standing next to the peepal tree near the far boundary wall. She imagines him ascending through this trunk and then travelling along the joined crowns overhead to enter the peepal. Or perhaps he had gone down into the earth and walked through all the darkness and soil, the roots like wooden bolts of lightning around him, and then risen into the peepal.
21
As Basie and Yasmin come into the school, Father Mede stands at the window of his office and watches them. They are walking as close together as propriety allows in this land that is both less and more innocent than any other. They are lit by the March sunlight that is thick as felt. As a child he used to wonder why Eve was taken from Adam’s rib. Now, at the other end of his life, these decades later, he knows it was because the rib is close to the heart. Both Basie and Yasmin have lost a brother and he can see that they have yet to recover, if they ever will. He doubts whether he has been able to express his feelings to them adequately. He held each of them in turn and just repeated the two or three phrases humans have for grief. Two thousand years have passed since man became brother to every other man on the planet, and yet words remain uninvented for the alleviation of certain burdens.
*
‘Who is that young man on the cypress path?’ Yasmin asks, as she passes by Father Mede’s office. ‘Good morning, Father.’
‘Good morning, Yasmin,’ he looks up from the letters stacked on his desk. ‘Could it be one of the gardener’s helpers?’ Father Mede walks to the door and looks out towards the cypress trees. ‘He sometimes brings in his grandsons.’
The sky is a blue so clean it verges on joy.
‘He’s gone,’ Yasmin says. ‘He was there a minute ago.’
‘Must be the gardener’s grandson.’
Children are coming in through the gate to begin the school day, the girls in white with red sweaters, the boys all in navy.
And
He placed at the east of the garden of Eden cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way to the tree of life
…
He looks at Yasmin. ‘You are wearing your mother’s watch.’
She glances at it.
‘It cost her two hundred and fifty rupees,’ he continues. ‘She purchased it with her first pay cheque, the late 1960s. She came here to show it to me, I still remember. She said she had done a hundred and fifteen rupees’ worth of shopping at the Army Canteen Stores. Biscuits. Coffee. Condensed milk. Chocolates. All the luxuries. And the Favre-Leuba watch.’ Father Mede taps the dial. He smiles. ‘And from the look on your face it is obvious that I have told you this many times before.’
Yasmin puts her arm into his and walks into the office with him. ‘How was your trip?’
‘Tiring.’
‘You are getting old.’
‘I don’t feel old. I just feel like someone young who has something wrong with him.’ He settles in his chair. ‘How is your father?’
She looks away for half a moment.
Father Mede nods. ‘I wish him well.’ Rohan had requested that Father Mede stay away from his house while he dealt with Sofia’s crisis of faith, had asked Sofia not to see him. The fracture was never really mended. ‘Is that ash on your sleeve?’
Yasmin tries to brush the small mark away. ‘My sister-in-law.’
‘The Greeks maintained we sprang from ash.’
‘This tunic belonged to my mother.’
‘I know.’
As she is about to leave, he indicates the paperwork that has accumulated on his desk in his absence. ‘You and Basie must spare an hour to help me deal with some of this.’
‘Father, you take advantage of us.’
‘I know. First the Raj and now this.’
The girl leaves with a smile – her mother’s daughter. When Sofia went to Punjab University in Lahore for her MA, she had become distressed by the big city within days, and had returned to Heer, insisting she wouldn’t go back. Her father – who had dreamed of having educated children – had summoned Father Mede urgently. Father Mede had been her teacher here at St Joseph’s, and the two of them had persuaded her to return to university. She agreed but was back a few weeks later, telling them that she felt a sense of exclusion from the other students, the modern Lahore girls and boys, a few of whom laughed at the way she dressed and spoke, laughed at her burka. Her father thought all week and then uttered the four words that shook the entire family to its very foundations, even the most distant branches in remote towns and villages:
‘Take off your burka.’
Sofia was speechless.
‘Can you do that?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Would it make you feel less noticeable?’
‘It might.’
‘Then try it. Modesty and decency dwell in the mind, not in a burka. I want you to get an education and it seems that this issue is distracting you from that.’
And she had gone back without her burka, much to the horror of her mother and brother, who knew that the chances of her making a decent marriage were in complete ruins now. It was bad enough already that she, an unmarried girl, was living away from her parents in a big-city hostel where there was no parental supervision.
Whether she had panicked too early at finding herself in an alien environment and would have settled in time with only minor adjustments, there was no way of knowing. What did happen was that after she went back she prospered at the university. She did try the burka again in the third year but by then she had lost the habit. She bought five Kashmiri shawls to cover her head and body when she was teaching at Ardent Spirit, and there was a dazzling wine-coloured coat with a fur collar for the coldest days of winter, pinned to whose left shoulder was a brooch shaped like the turban pin of an emperor.
*
Father Mede stands up and crosses the room that has a pattern of black and white griffins on the floor. He comes to stand before the small painting on the wall that Sofia had made for him. The crucified Christ, and the weeping figures at the foot of the cross. They are his mother and his friends and they are weeping because this – the crucifixion – is taking place, and it is powerful because the suffering of the tortured man and the suffering of those watching him are in the same picture. Are in the same
glance
. Injustice is not occurring in a distant hidden pocket, and the grief of the victim’s relatives is not in a far removed place, disconnected from the crime. He will die, and those who love him are watching him – and all of it being watched by the viewer.
*
‘Father, who are those two young men I just saw by the piano room?’ Basie asks, entering the office.
‘Were there two of them? I think they might be the gardener’s grandsons or his helpers.’
‘I know his grandsons. And that wasn’t them.’
‘I’ll find out.’
‘How was your tour?’ Basie asks, and he walks back to the door and casts his eyes about. ‘I think they were too neatly dressed to be the gardener’s helpers.’
Father Mede smites his forehead. ‘They must have come with the angels.’
‘The angels are back?’
Father Mede opens a drawer and takes out the key to the assembly hall.
Together they walk out onto the colonnaded corridor, the row of classroom doors stretching along on one side of them, the blazing March garden on the other. It’s early so only a handful of students have arrived and there is a conspicuous silence in the classrooms. They pass the fourteen-year-old girl who had broken down one day three years ago as she held Father Mede’s hand and wept with love and perplexity. ‘You are so good, how can you be a Christian? Why won’t you convert to Islam?’ She said she didn’t want him to burn in Hell, and he had asked her to pray for his salvation. He has always maintained a cautious attitude over religion in this country. Although St Joseph’s is a Christian school, it is no longer a mission school as in a previous age, and both the Bible and the Koran are read at public functions, the festivals of both faiths marked through the year.
Father Mede unlocks the assembly hall and reveals the floor crowded with large shapes wrapped in newspaper. There are one hundred of them in total and he removes the paper from one to reveal Raphael’s face. The angel responsible for healing the ailments and wounds of human children.
These human-sized wooden figures will be winched up on steel wires to hover overhead in the assembly hall. They were sent away to be repainted by an establishment that decorates Heer’s trucks and rickshaws, and they have returned bathed in vivid colour, Raphael’s cheeks rouged with cyclamen pink. Each eye is a turquoise disc of glass held in place with a slender nail, almost a pin. They lie on their stomachs on the floor and the wings of each rise up from their backs taller than Basie and Father Mede.
Basie removes the newspaper from the flank of the figure nearest to him. A hand holding a black chain is revealed. He uncovers the face and breast.
‘After the Fall, Gabriel was sent to comfort Adam,’ Father Mede says, ‘and Michael to comfort Eve.’
Michael, who is Mikal in Islam. Described as having emerald-green wings and being covered in minute saffron-coloured hairs, each of which has a million faces that ask Allah in a million languages to pardon the sins of the faithful.
Father Mede places a hand on Basie’s shoulder. Basie touches it and then covers up Michael’s face.
‘They are all here,’ Father Mede says. ‘The Angels of the Seven Days of the Week. The Angel of Earthquakes. The Angel of Fascination. Of Dust. Of Doves.’ He looks up at the rings attached to the ceiling from which they will be suspended.