He will have to ask Akbar for money. He could do labouring work in the bazaar but he suspects it would sully the family name to have someone associated with it do menial work for others.
The bus ticket from Tank to Dera Ismail Khan will be about eighty rupees. From Dera Ismail Khan to Rawalpindi about four hundred, and the train fare from Rawalpindi to Heer about three hundred …
But there is a chance of police checks at the Rawalpindi bus terminal – Rawalpindi being the home city of Pakistan’s military – so maybe he should go through Sargodha …
The cruelty of distance. When living in his parents’ painted room in Heer, with Naheed married to Jeo, he would think how close the neighbourhood with Rohan’s house was in some respects. It was just three miles away. It was just an hour away. It was just a nine-rupee rickshaw ride away. But it was an eternity away because his dream was there. Now Heer is probably two hundred years in prison away. Or a thousand volts of electricity fed into his body away. A lethal injection away.
He cannot jettison the feeling that the dot at the centre of the concentric circles had looked like a target. There is a dizzy sense of convergence and he feels himself being watched, now that he knows there are others here whose presence he had been unaware of. It’s dawn and he sits on the riverbank with the snow leopard on his knee, the white spot at the end of its tail curving in the air restlessly, the pulse of impatient blood.
He looks into its eyes. ‘The expression on your face says,
Why
do you keep looking in that direction?
My answer is, “No particular reason.”’
You were looking for the girl.
‘I wasn’t.’
You were.
‘So what if I was?’
I am actually glad
. The cub nudges the air with its nose, sniffs his hand.
Do you think Naheed is going to leave Jeo for you?
From his pocket Mikal takes the small white ball he has carved out of a block of
saptaparni
heartwood in the gun factory. The wood is white when first sawn, soft and fine-textured, and coffins are also made from it, and tea chests and masks, and he rolls the ball on the ground, watching the cub set off towards it in dives. In the wild a grown snow leopard can leap seven times its body length. ‘Let’s change the subject,’ he says.
No. What do you think is going to happen between you and Naheed?
‘Are you sure you are a leopard and not a serpent?’
You have to move on
.
The ice the cook had pressed into his forehead was wrapped in flowered cloth and when he unfolded it he realised it was a sleeve torn from an old kameez and he had briefly wondered who it had belonged to.
But even the most distant prospect of forming an attachment, daring to approach another, when his only experience of it so far has ended in suffering, fills him with intense dread.
From behind him a shadow advances on the slope towards them and the small desert doves drinking from the water’s edge rise in coils and he turns and sees her standing behind him.
‘I thought I heard talking,’ she says. He stands up just as the birds pass overhead in their circular flight and return to settle on the river at another spot further down, the wingbeats sounding in the cool air and scattering the haze. She turns around to leave. ‘I am sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you.’
‘I was just talking to myself,’ he says. He is too stunned to say anything more. Akbar said he could speak English because the younger children – meaning himself and his twin, and this sister – had been sent to be educated at the best schools in Lahore. She was brought back here to be married at sixteen, to the young man who would die in Afghanistan. Perhaps the time in Lahore counts for her courage in approaching him now. There were four other brothers, who had been murdered over the course of the past three decades, all involving blood feuds whose origins were several decades old.
‘I woke up when Father left for the mosque and couldn’t go back to sleep.’
‘Me too,’ Mikal says. The man drives the Datsun pickup to Megiddo to say his dawn prayers. The other four prayers of the day he might say at home, depending on the circumstances, but he likes to be at the mosque for the first one.
‘I should go.’
He inhales and realises that he had smelt the perfume on her clothes during the days he lay unconscious. ‘Thank you for the cub.’
‘He has grown.’ There is a fraction of a smile. To reveal more to this stranger would be indecency. ‘He shouldn’t be here, of course. He should be up somewhere in Chitral. One of our guests brought it with him. The mother died soon after giving birth. It hadn’t even opened its eyes when they arrived.’
‘They stay shut for the first ten days or so.’
She seems to think for a few moments. ‘It was exactly after ten days that he opened them. So he was probably only hours old when he was given to me.’
He lifts the cub and hands it to her and she holds it, the tips of her fingers disappearing into the fur. She must be eighteen years old, nineteen at most.
‘My name is Mikal.’
‘Yes, Akbar told me.’ She holds out the cub. ‘I should go.’
‘I am sorry to hear about your husband and brother.’ He lifts the
saptaparni
-wood ball and moves towards her and holds it before the leopard’s face, both of them almost joined through the sphere and the creature.
‘I approved of him going,’ she says. ‘I wanted them to defend Afghanistan, he and my brothers. I would have gone myself if it was permitted. Father blames the clerics who arranged for them to go, he says rageful things against al-Qaeda and the Taliban.’
That explains the man’s censoriousness towards Mikal. He thinks Mikal is a jihadi, the killer of American soldiers, the hardened militant who hadn’t even revealed his name while in American captivity. He must be in torment at the fact that Akbar and his elder brother have given shelter to al-Qaeda fugitives. One evening he had heard an argument between him and the brothers.
‘He was crazed with grief when the two bodies arrived, and Akbar was still missing. We thought Akbar’s return would bring him some peace, but –’ Suddenly she stops speaking and lets the cub slip to the ground, Mikal hearing the Datsun coming in through the gate in the boundary wall a few seconds after she has heard it.
‘My name is Salomi,’ she says as she walks away, disappearing into the grove, and he climbs up from the riverbank to see the father emerge from the pickup and go into the house, the vehicle’s paintwork smeared here and there with petals where the roadside wild flowers, dew-covered, must have thrashed against it during the journey.
After breakfast he drives to Megiddo to have the kitchen’s gas canisters refilled, parking the Datsun near a herd of black and brown camels just outside the mosque. A caravan of
powindah
gypsies is passing, descendants of tribes who crossed from Central Asia and Afghanistan all the way to Calcutta in the far east of the subcontinent, trading goods, song and news, the British taking them and their camels to open up the Western Australian Desert in the nineteenth century. The men of the bazaar recognise him as belonging to Akbar’s family and he is obliged to sit and drink tea. There has been a raid in a town a hundred miles away: Pakistani soldiers – assisted behind the scenes by Americans, no doubt – have raided a compound and, after a fourteen-hour battle, killed or taken away al-Qaeda figures sheltering there. Women, children, the old and the innocent – anyone who happened to be in the way – have been killed.
The person who betrayed them was a member of the family that was sheltering them – and he has been found butchered by al-Qaeda in retaliation.
He drinks the apple-green tea from a bowl. One man asks him why Akbar’s father had not attended the dawn prayer at the mosque today. ‘It just isn’t the same without him,’ the man smiles. ‘It feels like a wedding procession without a bridegroom.’
‘He has been unwell,’ Mikal says, draining the bowl and standing up, chewing the softened leaves.
‘Yes, the martyrdom of his son and son-in-law has been very hard on him,’ the man says, nodding. ‘The bodies arrived with their hands and feet tied with barbed wire.’
‘Those boys fought the thugs of the West very bravely,’ another man says. ‘They knew that a coward dies but his screams last forever.’ And all the while the adze in the shop next door, that sells coffins and ladders, is repeating, ‘…
black as night
…
black as night
…
black as night
…’
He returns to the house and enters the gun factory to work. He has no desire to handle another gun as long as he lives but he doesn’t know how else to repay the family for their hospitality, telling himself that it is only for a few more days. After an hour he interrupts his work, his hands black with metal dust. He takes off his shirt and wipes under his arms with it. He throws it aside and takes a clean one from a cupboard and puts it on while standing before the window, looking out at the Datsun.
He walks out to the Datsun and bends towards the door and picks off one of the flowers pasted onto the paintwork. Dried now by the sun to a scrap of crisp onion skin. He looks at it for a long time and the Airedales watch him from the shade of the trees, their dyed legs making them look as though they have waded through blood.
He has not seen these yellow flowers anywhere along the route from the house to the mosque.
Around noon when he drives into Megiddo to collect a consignment of scrap metal that a new set of gypsies has brought, he goes slower than usual so he can inspect the vegetation on either side of the narrow road. There is nothing much, just thorn bushes and certainly no yellow flowers.
On the way back he turns onto a small path, the dust blowing from under his tyres and twisting away sideways, and after fifteen minutes he comes to a field at the base of a row of hills, a meadow the size of four cricket grounds, full of tall yellow flowers, the colour so intense it makes the eyes ache.
He conducts a brief search among them but not knowing what he is expecting to find he just stands looking at the hills in the end.
Who did he meet here at dawn? The Pakistani soldiers? The Americans?
The hills are infested with bandits and from this distance look like pyramidal heaps of coloured earth, piled there by man instead of having an origin in nature, some taller than others, some red, others with more yellow than ochre.
Was he hiring an assassin to murder the cleric who sent his boys to their deaths?
The next day the paintwork is dotted with yellow again when the father returns from the dawn prayers and Mikal watches him from the riverbank, the sky above him soaked with a gentle merciful light, and a few hours later the men in the bazaar ask him again about the father’s health. He watches the tide of movements around the house throughout the day, feeling the girl’s presence behind the slabs of walls, and suddenly they are all bodies assigned for wounds, sites of destruction.
26
He climbs down from the night wall.
Carrying the leopard in his arms he walks into the empty kitchen. Onions and coriander in a basket. Eggs. Clean pots. There is a tassel of corn silk in the basket and he strokes its softness. It is in filament form but essentially it is the same material out of which flower petals are made. On the far side is a whitewashed arch and he is looking at it – the section of the house he has never entered, where the women are. He walks towards it eventually and lifts the curtain draped across the arch to reveal a wide room with sofas against the left and right walls, a table with a mirror framed in ivory, a clock in the shape of a proud-looking mosque. In the wall directly opposite are two doors. One is set in a recessed arch, identical to the one in which he is standing, but the other is narrower and not as tall. He puts the cub on the floor to see where it will go but it remains at his feet and he squats beside it and gently encourages it to explore. Failing, he picks it up and walks towards the smaller door and opens it.
An enclosed passage hung with framed verses of the Koran.
He looks over his shoulder before entering. There is a window directly before him at the other end of the passage, the
saptaparni
trees visible through the diamonds of stained glass, and there is a door on either side of the window. Both have clear glass panels and when he looks in through the one on the left he sees a desk and a shelf of gold-spined religious books. The stuffed head of a black bear with a pink mouth. A framed family tree that displays only the names of the males. The right door gives onto a stone staircase but instead of climbing it he turns and rushes back, the audacity leaving him.
Five minutes later he is back, and he goes up the stairs and emerges onto a balcony lined with pots that have intensely scented orange trees blooming in them. Two whitewashed steps lead to a door.
He stands on the first step and looks in through the glass square. But only after another turning back, and returning ten minutes later, does he open the door and place the cub on the floor, and it touches the stone tiles with its nose and sets off to the other side of the room, a stride both purposeful and beautiful, and he watches it disappear through a curtained arch.
‘I have to leave here soon,’ he says quietly. ‘I have to go back home.’
Nothing from the other side of the cloth.
He turns to leave but stops on hearing the rustle of the curtain.
*
He returns to the top of the wall just before dawn, the leopard in his arms. ‘Don’t say a thing!’ he tells the animal in a low voice as he lies there. ‘Don’t you dare say a thing!’
27
Father Mede leans down towards a rose to take in its scent. It is the striped variety named Rosa Mundi. He is seventy-five years old, and as he walks towards the south boundary wall of the school, he stops now and then at various plants. Now he is at the hedge of wild jasmine. For how many generations have the children taken off the small green cap from the back of a wild jasmine flower and sucked the sweetness out of the thin tube? Making sure that he is unobserved, he does it now, and he is astonished that the drop of nectar tastes the same now as it did all those decades ago.