Authors: Nadeem Aslam
He walks into the orchard on seeing the kitchen door being opened by David. These foreigners—who is protecting them? They are probably attached to a charity or an aid organisation, cogs in a machinery of kindness. Allah—in His wisdom—has planted these compassionate impulses in the hearts of non-believers, for Muslims to exploit and benefit from.
He had let down his guard when he took the bird’s nest to them last night. He had been looking for a place to keep his shroud and had found the discovery so enthralling that he had wished to share it with another human, the momentary fascination of it making him act out of his true character.
Having studied manuals for weapons and computers, for microprocessors and motherboards, having taken lessons in passport and creditcard forging, and having carefully examined news footage of almost every attack ever mounted on Western targets, he knows the English language. He had helped put together films at the jihadi camps in that language, to be sold in the mosques of European cities after Friday prayers—propaganda and preaching, the Jihad of the Tongue. But he cannot follow these people when they talk amongst themselves, the words coming too fast. If they communicated through written notes, he would, taking whole minutes to decipher a phrase but deciphering it nevertheless, the way he’d made himself expert on cell phones solely by studying the little booklets that came with them, warning Nabi Khan that even if the SIM card is changed, a caller who continues to use the same phone can be traced—by the police, by the Americans. Khan and his people had been told otherwise by the phone sellers, and that had been Casa’s entry into Khan’s inner circle.
The shroud, even rolled up tight, would not fit in the stone ear so he hid it in a far cupboard.
He is startled now to see David emerge from the house with a shroud of his own, then realises it is the skin of a birch tree peeled in one long piece, folded and tied up.
“It’s the material for making a boat,” he tells Casa. “I am taking it to the lake, I’ll build it there.”
Casa helps him carry to the water’s edge a box of implements and also the long pieces of wood for the vessel’s frame, the sky brightening overhead.
He examines the two antler-handled awls.
“They are for making holes in the bark. The canoe is sewn together with spruce roots,” David explains. “With these.” The peeled roots, like thick glistening strings, are in bracelet-size hoops. “No nails or screws are used to hold the canoe together.”
He unrolls the birch bark, like a length of stiff cloth about a quarter of an inch thick, one side white, the other a dark gold. There are smaller pieces too but the longest is about fifteen feet long and forty inches wide.
Apparently the canoe is an American Indian thing.
“And this is for the finer work,” David says, looking into a bag and bringing out a knife with a blade made out of a straight razor. “It’s called a crooked knife—crooked because its handle is crooked not the blade.” He hands it to Casa. “The thumb rests along the bent part of the handle—the native people did not have a vice to clamp their work so they held it in one hand and used the knife with the other.”
Casa grips it as demonstrated.
“But, Casa, I think you should rest. Go back and lie down, and you should have something to eat. I am sure Marcus is up—I’ll come and join you in a while.”
The missiles that landed in Casa’s jihad training camp were named after an American Indian weapon—Tomahawk. Casa knows other words too like Comanche and Apache and Chinook. First the Americans exterminate the Indians, then name their weapons and warplanes after them.
What did those Indians do to make the white Americans respect them?
H
E DRINKS THE RED TEA
sitting at the table with David and Marcus—on the farthest chair from them, the one nearest the door. Marcus is expressing his worry about the perfume factory being too cold during the night.
“I don’t know why you didn’t sleep in the house.”
“You are very kind.”
“And remind me to find you a prayer mat.”
He is grateful for the gentleness they are displaying towards him, and feels he should convey his gratitude to them—show them somehow that he too is mindful of their well-being.
“You are from the U.S.A.?” he asks David. “You flew here?”
“Yes.”
“You should be careful about flying.”
David shrugs. “Why?”
“In case the Jews repeat the attacks of 11 September 2001.”
David gets up suddenly and pours more tea into Marcus’s cup. And the Englishman too becomes somewhat animated, abruptly voluble. “Look at the three of us here. Like a William Blake prophecy! America, Europe and Asia.” He points to the ceiling. “I must take down the book one of these days.”
“My hands are already aching,” says David. He has spent the last three hours with the canoe—it’s past nine and he is getting ready to go to the city.
“I’ll help you build it,” Casa offers.
For the time being they are his only allies, the only people who would try to act if Nabi Khan were to come through this door right now.
Two hours ago he himself was thinking of taking the car, but the fact now is that if he saw someone trying to steal it he would do his best to prevent the theft.
He now asks about the nailed books, and Marcus tells him it had been done by his wife, the unfortunate woman losing her hold on reality in her concluding days. Using her long hair to dust surfaces. He remembers to make appropriately sympathetic noises, though of course being female it must have been easy for her to fall into madness, Muhammad, peace be upon him, saying, “Women have less reason than men.”
Marcus has told him he is a Muslim but he must still be vigilant in case the other two try to convert him to Christianity. He walks back to the perfume factory through the sun-heated orchard, a peppermint lizard squiggling away at his approach. Near by a black beetle is trying to maintain a jittery balance on the rim of a tulip blossom, exactly resembling the one that is painted on a wall in the kitchen. Something smells of resin. Something else slow and furry can be glimpsed behind a fern—a striped caterpillar. He hears a flutter and looks up to see a flash of red in a silver-leafed tree. He can’t take the car and disappear towards Kabul or Kandahar because Gul Rasool’s men have cordoned off Usha. They’ll want to know who he is, how he acquired his injury. As he enters the perfume factory, the thought of being close to the idol down there is suddenly a distress to him. Afghanistan is a Muslim country. The entire world has to submit to Islam one day: when the Messiah arrives just before Judgement Day he will issue an invitation for all to become Muslim—those refusing will be eradicated so that the earth is inhabited only by the believers.
The Pharaoh’s wife, Asiya, and Jesus’s mother, Mary, are waiting in Heaven to be married to Muhammad, peace be upon him.
Sitting in an alcove before the smiling statue, to catch the sunlight pouring from above, he looks into the notebooks stacked on a shelf half an arm’s length away. Each page filled with what appear to be drawings of constellations but are in fact the chemical formulae of various perfume molecules. Small palaces of tangled geometry. The bindings are the green of grass stains on white cloth, the colour the world appears through night-vision goggles. He had been given a pair of these glasses by someone who had come to the jihad training camp from Chechnya; he had taken them from a dead Russian soldier there and had come to Pakistan with a load of antique carpets to fund the war in his homeland.
He tries to see if the stone head can be nudged in any direction. It should be taken away and sold to non-Muslims to finance the jihad against them.
He is relieved Lara wasn’t in the kitchen while he was having breakfast. A woman seen is a Western idea, he had been told by a cleric at a madrassa when he was a child. These dozens of clerics—the emir, the haji, the hafiz, the maulana, the sheikh, the hazrat, the alhaaj, the shah, the mullah, the janab, the janabeaali, the khatib, the molvi, the kari, the kazi, the sahibzada, the mufti, the olama, the huzoor, the aalam, the baba, the syed—had frightened him as they preached when he was very young, moving unpredictably across the full register of the human voice, from the whisper to the growl to the full-throated shout, now screaming, now weeping, now vituperative and righteous, now plaintive and melodious. At the start they would recite a few verses of the Koran to signify that both the speaker and the listener were now in the realm of the sacred, but what followed was, in fact, history—a lament for Islam’s lost glory and power, a onceproud civilisation brought low by the underhandedness of others, yes, but mainly by the loss of faith among the Muslims themselves, the men decadent, the women disobedient. The child Casa was told to supplicate during prayers and beg forgiveness for not loving Muhammad enough, peace be upon him, a man whose sweat was more perfumed than a shipful of roses.
Ay naunehalan-e-Islam, Ay farzandan-e-Tawheed—
O children of Islam, O sons of the Sacred Creed . . .
And so Casa and the other children had wept. By the time he was about twelve he and the other boys at the madrassa hadn’t seen a woman for five years. There was a rumour that a group of older boys had a photograph of a female face, cut up into ten pieces and hidden in diverse corners and recesses. Travelling assorted distances, the fragments came together now and then to form her.
Casa had longed to arrive at the moment when he’d see her—the thought of it was like a butterfly attached to his heart on a string—and when at last he did lay eyes on her he shook at the very phenomenon of her. Unable to find his breath or control his heartbeat, he had lost consciousness. The first thing he remembered upon coming to was that during the Crusades beautiful girls had been sent to seduce and corrupt Salahudin and his generals, the Christian priests assuring the girls forgiveness for all sin incurred in the service of their religion.
He repented. The madrassa teachers had told the children that women’s guile was immense, their mischief noxious, that they were evil and meanspirited, that all the trials and misfortunes and woes that befell men came from women, that Muhammad, peace be upon him, had said when a woman steps out of the house Satan is delighted. And yet on a bitterly cold night he found himself with a group of others pouring petrol onto a grave and setting it alight, watching the fire leap into the air in a golden dance, their shadows thrown in the shape of a wheel onto the other mounds in the cemetery. The boy in the blazing grave—he had been martyred during a night exercise when, tired and disorientated, his foot had slipped and he had plunged into a canyon—had loved the paper woman’s eyes and, in a moment of now-regretted emotion, his friends had placed one of them in his shroud just before burial. They wanted it back now. The icy earth was solid as metal and difficult to dig through so they were employing fire to thaw it. In the absence of spades and shovels, they used the blade bones of animals slaughtered for food or as instruction. There was little hope of getting another picture because the boys were forbidden from seeing newspapers and magazines from outside the madrassa—“Where is the news in any of them to hearten the faithful? Where is the news that a Muslim army has conquered an infidel land?”
By the time he was about ten he had endured every kind of assault on his body by men or stronger boys, and—because the only way to feel any control was to distress or wound others—by the time he was about fourteen he had done the same to younger or weaker boys. At the very core of him was the belief that human beings had little to offer beyond cruelty and danger.
His apparel was often dirty and in tatters but he had learnt that he must not wish to flourish in men’s eyes, only in Allah’s.
The important thing was that he knew a gun could be smuggled onto an aircraft by concealing it in a mixture of epoxy and graphite, that he knew how to defend a house and how to storm it, how to kidnap and assassinate and how to kill with his hands, with his feet.
If you do not fight He will punish you severely and put others in your place,
said the Koran. He had been hung by his ankles and electrocuted to see if he would break under torture, his body in spasms for hours afterwards as though the current were still running through him. Testing his resistance, trying to see how deep a breakdown they could provoke, his companions had subjected him to confinement without light, without odour or sound or any fixed reference to time and place. He knew that if captured by Americans he must tell them he was fully aware of his “rights” and ask for a lawyer, tell them that he wanted to be put on trial in a court in New York or London or, best of all, in a European country, just as the youngest warriors knew what they were to tell the Westerners: that they were not “war criminals” but rather “war victims” who had been subjected to “undue adult influences” and “indoctrinated” into firing bullets and throwing grenades. Those between the ages of eight and fourteen were made to learn by heart, along with the Koranic verses, English phrases like “the special protections accorded to captured child soldiers” and “the violation of international principles.” They didn’t know what the words meant but that was no barrier to memorising them; they didn’t know what the Koranic verses they chanted day and night meant either, since they were in Arabic. One of the rare entertainments allowed the children was the acting out of a sketch about a holy warrior captured by the Americans, the prisoner’s invoking of those English phrases so frustrating to the captors that they were reduced to banging their fists helplessly on the floor, to much delighted laughter from the audience, the prisoner eventually walking free to continue on the path of armed jihad, having executed the Americans before leaving.
He knew that when a bullet hits a body you hear it, an unmistakable unforgettable sound, and knew HE38 meant the grenade was High Explosive and would burst into thirty-eight fragments. He knew gelignite smelled like the sweetmeats made with almond pulp beaten in cream.
D
AVID
, before leaving for Jalalabad, goes along the corridor towards Lara’s room. “Even to this day,” Zameen had told him at the Street of Storytellers, “my dreams take place in that house in Usha.” She had wanted to bring him here, and after that small place in the Street of Storytellers he wanted to be with her in rooms brightened by rows of windows. Curious about the transformation her face might go through against a different background, in the air of a different temperature. He fastened the small transparent buttons on Bihzad’s shirt, no bigger surely than the lens inside a nightingale’s eye, and wanted him to run and tumble in a large garden. “Like legendary heroes he was born in the middle of the night,” she said, “the hour when the wicked sleep.” Two hours after he was born the night air had filled up with butterflies.