Mikal nods.
‘The men you shot,’ Akbar says. ‘Do you think they are dead?’
‘They couldn’t have survived.’
‘I know what charges the Americans will bring against you. I telephoned a friend in Peshawar and he looked it up.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
Akbar takes a piece of paper from his pocket and unfolds it. ‘Let’s assume they didn’t die. For each wounded man you will be put on trial for one count of attempting to kill US nationals outside the United States. One count of attempting to kill US officers and employees. One count of assault of US officers and employees. One count of
armed
assault of US officers and employees. One count of using and carrying a firearm during and in relation to a crime of violence …’
‘How long?’ Mikal interrupts.
‘You will go to prison for almost two hundred years.’
‘And if they have died?’
Akbar looks at him, his eyes containing the answer.
Mikal places the cub on his knee and it lifts a paw as if to test the air, the soft leather nostrils expanding.
‘I thought they were about to kill me.’
‘I know.’
Silently they walk back to the room where two male servants are setting out dishes for their lunch, both of them with rifles over their shoulders, the straps decorated with small coloured beads and sequins.
Corn bread drenched in clarified butter, yogurt, a dish of chicken and spinach, another of lentils and potatoes, sliced onion in a saucer, oranges. A large bowl of custard with a layer of coin-like banana slices on top. Akbar sends the custard back to remain cool in the fridge until they call for it.
A few minutes into the meal Mikal says quietly, without looking up from his plate, ‘There is no way out of it, is there?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘There isn’t. They won’t
ever
stop looking. They’ll be trying to find me in twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years.’
‘It’s strange how much their government cares if something happens to its people.’ With a morsel of bread in his hand, Akbar extends his arm and touches Mikal’s shoulder with the back of his wrist. ‘You’ll just have to make sure they can’t find you.’
‘I don’t understand how I could have smelled the sulphur of the bullets fired from the mosque. The rotor blades should have dispersed the smell. But I smelt it. I don’t know how it’s possible.’
The leopard is perched on Mikal’s knee as he eats. They descend trees head first and he imagines the cub moving down his shin towards his foot.
‘I don’t want you to feel any guilt about it,’ Akbar says. ‘You are even with the Americans for what they did to you.’
‘They didn’t kill me.’
‘They’ve killed plenty of others.’
‘That’s not how it works. Not with me.’
*
The yellow house is just over a mile from the town of Megiddo. The town was ransacked by the British on three occasions during the Raj, the last when they were fighting the Fakir of Ippi, Akbar’s maternal grandfather, the guerrilla leader who fought a war against the British from 1935 onwards and killed thousands of soldiers in numerous pitched battles, demanding nothing but the infidels’ withdrawal –
we want neither your honey nor your sting
. It was said that he had supernatural powers and could predict when the British were about to attack so he could vanish long beforehand. The British convinced a few members of the clergy to speak out against him in the mosques but it was to no avail. His support and appeal continued to grow steadily, Muslim soldiers having to be court-martialled for not shooting straight at him and his fighters, or for leaking plans of attack to him. Muslim brigadiers in the British army would leave ammunition for their hero in prearranged places.
In 1940 Adolf Hitler sent two German advisers to improve the Fakir’s gun-making and help him in guerrilla training. He was the most logical person for the Axis powers to have approached in this region, in order to spread mayhem for the British in the tribal belt of their own colony. It had taken a whole year to establish contact with the Fakir and he had informed his prospective German allies that he would require a sum of £25,000 every month to keep undermining the British, as well as supplies of weapons and ammunition. The support of the Germans ended eventually, when Germany attacked Russia and it became impossible to send in the necessary arms.
The war in Europe came to a conclusion but the fighting against the enemies of Islam in the wilds of Waziristan continued. By 1947, forty thousand British troops were arrayed against Akbar’s grandfather as he hid in caves and forests and ravines, turning sticks into guns and pebbles into bullets with Allah’s direct help, some of the stone bullets still owned by Akbar’s family.
For a long time the town of Megiddo was one of the region’s major weapon-producing centres, the local clans manufacturing their guns from the iron they smelted there. Within days Mikal learns that the talk of weaponry is more or less constant in the house, the young men proposing a shooting competition a minute after meeting him.
Behind the yellow house, one dawn during the second week of his recovery, Mikal finds a courtyard that is an expanse of scrap metal, old car doors and transmissions, rotting hubcaps and castoff motor parts lying at the base of those
saptaparni
trees. There are empty rocket shells from the war years in Afghanistan.
The grass is clogged with dew and out of it three enormous Airedale dogs stand up at his approach long before he notices them, revealing legs that have been dyed with henna to keep them cool. Aggression has clearly been bred into them but they are chained to the tree trunks and he lets the leopard cub walk beside him in the dawn light, its fur tinted by the orange light where it is dry, darker where the dew has wet it. Its calls resemble the thin notes of birds.
Mikal looks through the window of the gun factory, owned and supervised by Akbar’s father and elder brother. When Akbar told him about it he understood why he had kept hearing gunfire through his fever, the workers testing the weapons they were making. The floor is covered with ash and strewn with pieces of metal the thickness and size of books and magazines, out of which the shapes of pistols have been cut like stencils. There are piles of wood meant to be burned in the smelting and there are carved pieces of wood that will become stocks of rifles and shotguns.
Long low skeins of mist rise from the river that flows in a half-circle around the house, its densely wooded bank enclosing three sides of the large building. The cub wanders away towards the side of the building and when he follows it he sees the girl under an arch, the mist drifting on the young silky air while above her the last stars cling to the white sky, and the zone of containment and poise about her person remains intact as she begins to withdraw into the darkness of the house on seeing him.
Human contact is as vast as any wilderness
, he remembers thinking the day he approached Naheed for the first time,
and demands all daring,
but he lowers his eyes as he advances towards the animal, like someone looking for a lost coin or key, gathering the cub to his chest like a collection of loose things, the creature’s ears flattening with fear at the sudden upheaval, and he turns around under the flashing gaze of the chained Airedales, the disc of the sun both blinding and illuminating. ‘Where do you think you are going?’ he says into the fur, walking away fast. ‘Do you know what they’ll do to her if they catch her near a stranger?’
*
‘You need to see this.’ Akbar hands him the leaflet.
A column of text in English and two black-and-white photographs of Mikal. Taken at the brick factory back in January, one with the long hair and beard, the other after they had removed the hair on the head and jaw.
‘Where did you find this?’ Mikal asks.
‘Someone brought it from Peshawar. I’m told there is one in Urdu as well.’
He tries to read the text but soon gives up. ‘What does it say?’
‘They are searching for you. There is a description. Your height, your complexion –’
‘Akbar. You know what I am asking.’
Akbar doesn’t answer immediately. Eventually he nods and says, ‘They both died.’
*
Twenty days. Strong moons hang above the house at that season. After spending months indoors, he sleeps on the twenty-five-foot boundary wall that encircles the house, the leopard curled with him under the folds of the blanket, and he wakes in the night to see stars imprinting their numberless fires on the blue-black sky, and in the centre is a golden moon, serene and distended, and then there are the bronze moons, ugly and threateningly dagger-like to him in his convalescent state, resembling the ones that had come at his fingers. He works in the gun factory with Akbar’s brother and the men he employs, one of whom says his joined eyebrows are evil luck. He operates the six-inch Herbert lathe for the heavy work and the three-and-a-half-inch Myford. The Boley watchmaker’s lathe. The Senior milling machine. The Boxford shaper. The large and small drill presses. On the walls are several rifles and he levers opens the breeches and looks down the barrels and he runs his hands on the stock of a hundred-year-old gun, etched with a scene of warriors on horseback going off to meet the Crusaders, with proud pennants and spears and large empty cages in which they hope to bring back captive infidel kings.
One night he walks up to Akbar’s bed and very gently shakes him until the boy awakens. He lowers himself onto the edge of the bed. No light except the sweep of the moon through the window.
‘My name is Mikal.’
He hears Akbar swallowing drowsily, taking deep breaths in the dark air.
‘I come from a town in Punjab called Heer, it’s next to Gujranwala. I went to Afghanistan with my foster brother Jeo last October. I don’t know where he is.’
‘I think the pedestal fan in the corner is made in Gujranwala,’ Akbar says, sitting up and feeling for his pack of cigarettes and lighting one.
‘It is. The city’s famous for them.’
‘So your name is Mikal.’
‘Yes.’ Mikal feels his gaze on him even without the light.
‘Let me have that for a second.’ Mikal takes the cigarette from him and inhales the smoke and then hands it back and lights one for himself. He rises and goes to sit on the windowsill and looks out at the wild flowers that had closed at sunset but have opened once again in response to the moonlight.
‘I have to leave soon.’
‘You can stay as long as you like. You are my brother.’
‘I have to find Jeo. Or maybe I should go to Heer first. What if Jeo has already gone back? I need to go and see.’
‘The Americans could be waiting for you there.’
‘I know. They don’t know my name, but there are the photographs and my fingerprints.’
Akbar gets up and turns on the light. ‘Stay until you are stronger. You are perfectly safe here.’ He takes a piece of paper and a pen from a drawer. ‘Let me show you something, now that we trust each other.’ He makes a thick dot and surrounds it with several concentric circles. He points to the dot with the tip of the pen and says, ‘This is you right now.’
‘I am the target?’
Akbar smiles. ‘These concentric circles are walls. Invisible ones. Defences that insulate al-Qaeda leaders who are on the run from the Americans.’
‘What al-Qaeda leaders?’
Akbar holds his gaze.
Mikal smokes the cigarette in silence for almost a minute, holding it between the tips of the thumb and the second finger. Then he says, ‘In this house?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where?’
‘The entire wing on the southern side.’
Now Mikal knows why the doors there are of welded metal.
‘When I brought you here there were objections, concerns that you could be a spy. They said they wouldn’t pay the agreed sum for the use of the wing, that they would leave immediately.’
‘I didn’t realise I was so …
discussed
. I live mostly inside my head.’
‘I told them how the Americans had tortured you at the brick factory, how you had killed two of them, how you lost your fingers to infidel-in-all-but-name Muslims who were fighting for the Americans. So they reconsidered.’
‘I don’t know them but I know you, and I would never betray your trust.’
‘When I told them you were a fugitive, having killed two Americans, they became unhappy for another reason. They said you will betray them to the Americans in exchange for having your own crimes pardoned.’
Mikal smokes, the red light opening and closing before his face.
‘It is an understandable reaction,’ Akbar shrugs. ‘They are being hunted and have to think of every possibility. Two of them worked with you in the gun factory one afternoon and they were very taken by your seriousness. They had had trouble believing you shot anyone with those hands, but when they saw you at work they finally believed it.’ Akbar gets up and turns out the light and walks back to his bed in the darkness. ‘I don’t want you to worry. The Pakistani military is helping the Americans hunt down al-Qaeda heroes in these parts, but those circles of protection mean enough of an early warning in the event of a raid.’
Out there the light of the moon dissolves all hardness from the world and the grasses are becoming milk and murmuring, and the bats are plunging through the leaves in their soft songless flight.
‘Is that why your father doesn’t like me? All these suspicions.’
‘My father likes you,’ Akbar says after a while.
‘I am jeopardising his income.’
‘He likes you. Go to sleep.’
*
He looks at the map, planning his four-hundred-kilometre route back to Heer.
From Megiddo he will go to Tank by the local bus. Then a bus from Tank will take him to Dera Ismail Khan in about two hours. From Dera Ismail Khan – through the salt marshes and barren parched distances that had led to the British administrators and missionaries calling it Dreary Dismal Khan – he would go to Rawalpindi by bus again, this journey lasting four or five hours.
And from Rawalpindi to Heer on the train will be another five hours.