Authors: Nadeem Aslam
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
He is about to leave but stops. “Then why do you appear so frightened?”
She hadn’t suspected that her feelings might be readable.
“I thought you were going to get hurt.”
“The fire?”
She nods.
“But you don’t even know me.”
She shakes her head, nods. “All of a sudden I couldn’t move. I didn’t know what to do.” Has fleeing Usha exhausted her? If she were to encounter danger here, she suddenly fears she’ll surrender.
Touching her eye she brings away a teardrop that has grains of kohl dissolved in it. She is as amazed as he seems to be when her hand advances towards his face and the dissolved kohl is rubbed onto his right cheek. A small daub. A dark bee-wing.
“What are you doing?” he asks in a hollow voice. The forehead is creased in evenly spaced lines that lose all uniformity in the centre like two opposing sets of waves crashing into each other.
“To keep off the bad eye.” Rendering a perfect thing a little less perfect, to stop the djinn from coveting it.
Looking overwhelmed, he parts his lips. She watches the face in anticipation, to see what he would say. It is like watching the tip of a pen make contact with paper: what would that dot become—a poem, a riddle, a letter?
“I . . . I wish I didn’t feel alone all the time,” he says at last, very quietly.
“What have you done?”
For reasons she doesn’t understand he brings his hands forwards and displays the palms. He thinks she can see something in his lifelines? But what he says next makes it clear that he is someone traumatised by the United States invasion:
“I hate America.”
There is a deliberation before each of his words, which seem carefully chosen as a result. She has the feeling that he is searching for the most stable and most direct bridge between his inner self and the world.
“Sometimes nothing makes sense and I become afraid,” he says.
“There’s no need for you to feel alone.”
“There are so many questions.”
“Those questions are being asked by everyone. You have no need to feel alone.”
He lowers his head. “We’ll destroy America the way the Soviet Union was destroyed.”
“The Soviet Union was hated by its own people. The U.S.A. is loved by its people so it can’t be destroyed.” She moves her fingers towards his lips.
“But how can we let someone obliterate Islam?”
“They can’t. And for the same reason. Muslims love Islam. But Muslims hate fundamentalism.
That
can be destroyed.” She touches the corner of his mouth. “What happened here? This small scar. What we have to make sure is that Muslims don’t fall in love with the ways of the fundamentalists—then we’d be in trouble.”
He flinches now and steps away, bringing her out of her own trance too. Even the sound of her consciousness had been stilled. He wipes off the kohl, rubs at it as though it’s sulphuric acid. “Practices and habits of infidels, of star-worshippers.”
She’d rather leave—it’s obvious that with him the source of prayer isn’t delight, it’s fear of Allah’s retribution—but she pauses, clutching the folded mat to her breast, because of what he says next.
“And aren’t you ashamed of going about the way you do?” There’s something thorn-like in his voice now. “A Muslim woman should keep her face covered.”
“Who told you that?” A shot of furious energy in the blood.
“What?” He clearly wasn’t expecting this. It’s as though he’s heard a heartbeat in a rock.
“You heard me perfectly well.”
“It’s in the Koran.”
There was near-revolt in Kandahar when King Daoud’s daughters appeared unveiled in public in 1959, obliging the King to send a delegation of clerics and religious scholars—Qatrina’s father among them—to debate the issue with the mullahs of the city, asking them to point out where exactly in the Holy Book it said that women must hide their faces.
While he waited for her to finish her prayer earlier today he had been sitting in the corridor, and later she noticed that one-third of a gazelle’s neck had been scratched away from the painted wall. The illusion of sun on the creature’s fur makes it appear as though clothed in gold needles, and she is sure she would have found bronze and yellow flakes under his fingernails if he hadn’t performed his ablutions to say his prayers since then.
“I saw what you did to the wall in the house earlier. You think such things are orphans?”
“I don’t know what you are talking about.”
“Who are you, what are you doing here?” She has encountered this kind of behaviour countless times before, from men with nothing but passion where knowledge should be. “You think no one loves those pictures, and the practices and habits of this country?”
He has no answer.
Although remorseful, because exhibitions of anger displease Allah, she continues to hold his eye until at last he turns away and, collecting the lamp, disappears towards the lake, the suddenly abandoned moths flying off in various directions in search of the disappeared light.
He’ll have to meet her again when it’s time to say the last of the day’s prayers in a few hours, regardless of what he thinks of her. They bow towards the same God.
Before dawn.
At noon.
When the sun is beginning to yellow.
With the first stars of twilight.
In darkness.
Five trysts at the prayer mat. But no, no, she must avoid further contact. What was it that made her touch him? If he now assaults her at some point, he’ll say she had encouraged him. She has to think of her dear father’s reputation. Though a doctor, he is in debt—the money needed for her brother’s treatments over the recent years, and for the bribes that keep him out of prison after his various addiction-driven robberies. The repayments are long overdue, and her father is now open to covert gestures of disrespect from the creditors. The thrill and ecstasy of owning someone. In gatherings he has to listen to humiliating barbs clearly meant for him. Earlier last month at the teahouse one of the creditors had made a comment about how brazen today’s girls were, emulating rich modern city women, going about bareheaded, even when the fathers were insolvent, beggars disguised as borrowers, unable to keep their word. The nonchalance accompanying the remark was feigned. Dunia had just walked past a few moments earlier with her scarf off her head—it was of a material that was so sheer the seller had called it “woven breeze” and it was difficult to keep in place on her sleek hair, requiring constant vigilance. The men, including her father, had taken shocked but wordless note, and the creditor had made that comment a minute or so later. Her father had come home and hit her for the first time in her life.
She begins to walk back to the house, a wave of breeze in the pomegranate trees. Through contrivance she has had herself invited to spend the night here. When they come for her, as they surely will, they’ll find her house empty tonight. The caretaker of the school—who was meant to be the nominal male presence and her guardian in the absence of her father—disappeared this morning. Bribed or threatened. “It’s not wise to have a fondness for tussling at your age,” one of the goons had told him when he came to her defence during their visit to the school. “Old bones don’t mend well after breaking.”
Darkness fills the orchard behind her, a chill in the air as there was at dawn. A bird had been singing on a branch in the courtyard and a thin plume of white vapour had emerged with the notes each time it parted its beak to sing.
T
HE WOMAN WAS FORTY THOUSAND FEET
above him. Right at the very edge of the sky. As he talked to her, James Palantine could imagine her clearly. The constellation of Orion was directly over her head and points of light were attached to her fingertips. She was a weapons-systems officer, sitting under the bubble cockpit of an F15 jet. Her seat was equipped with ejection rockets and there was a loaded 9 mm pistol in the survival vest she wore.
Had it been daytime she would have been able to see the earth’s curvature from that height. But there was no sun just now and, surrounded by sub-freezing temperature and the deepest of darknesses, she had in her sights the building where a group of men from the Taliban’s Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice was spending the night.
When she wasn’t flying above Afghanistan at the speed of sound on these ten-hour sorties, she was at the American base outside Kuwait City, completing course work for a master’s degree in aerospace engineering, her professors FedExing her videotapes of the classes from California.
Under cover of darkness, James Palantine had been dropped with three other Special Forces soldiers onto the sawtooth ridges of Afghanistan and left to fend for himself. Living on packaged food or on lizards and insects. The war to punish and destroy the theocratic tyranny of the Taliban and al-Qaeda was under way around them as his team moved back and forth through the icy moonscape of the mountains, refilling their four-wheel-drive vehicles from the giant bladder of fuel that they stored in a cave, getting a fire going by shaving onto the wood a few bits from a block of C-4 explosive. The hardships were immaterial. Perfect mental clarity was needed for the service he was performing for his nation and for the world, and he did not lose focus for a single moment, sleeping on snow, on sleet or cold rock, with the sky above him full of warplanes from the British and American Army and Air Force: so many aircraft that there was a danger of them colliding with each other, of the lower ones being clipped by bombs dropped from a plane higher up.
Teams like his were the eyes and ears of this air assault. As sensitive as wild animals to their environment, noticing the smallest of changes in the surroundings, they prowled deep inside hostile territory, in the vicinity of airports, forts, and enemy troop concentrations. He would use an infrared laser to “paint” a target on the ground and, his voice crackling into the cockpit three, four or five miles above him, tell the crew of the warplane to send the bombs down onto it.
The building where the men from the Taliban’s Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice had gathered was destroyed when the five-hundred-pound bomb landed on it. A black splash on the screen of the warplane above. Made of hard metal designed to fracture into hot shrapnel, the bomb would have vaporised anyone within a few yards of its detonation. Then James’s team set off on horseback, the stirrups too small for their boots, telling the crew of the jet that they’d be contacted again soon from a nearby village that had come under attack from Chechen and Arab fighters: the Taliban in the village had surrendered to the Americans, and the al-Qaeda fighters were carrying out a massacre in revenge.
As dawn neared, exhausted from the bombing sortie, with the bomb racks empty, the pilot and the weapons-systems officer went back to Kuwait, informing James that they intended to put the plane on autopilot high above the mountain ranges of southern Pakistan and have their Thanksgiving meal, finding the chilled food by the finger-lights on their gloves.
Although the targets that night were legitimate, James knew that others hadn’t been. It was James’s team that—following the information brought to him from the warlord Gul Rasool—had brought down a bomb onto the house of Rasool’s rival Nabi Khan, causing civilian deaths. Afterwards Rasool claimed he had not meant to deceive the Americans, that his own intelligence had been faulty.
And now here James Palantine is, in Usha, a guest and guard of Gul Rasool.
He awakens after the four hours of sleep. He lies still for a few minutes. Directly above his bed is a framed print of England’s Prince Edward being attacked by a Muslim assassin in 1272. The time of the Crusades. Sultan Baibar has sent the man—a perfidious servant—into the chamber during the hours of darkness. The dagger is poisoned. The Prince, awoken from his sleep, is attempting to turn the weapon on the assailant.
He looks along the length of his body, covered by the blanket. If he were in the ground this much soil would be displaced. This is how much earth it took to make him.
When he was younger he had loved listening to David. He remembers watching him as he climbed a frozen waterfall in Oregon during a severe winter, the ice sticking to the mountain side like molten wax down the side of a giant candle. Twice he accompanied David to Hawaii where the woman who became David’s wife for some years had grown up on a sugar-cane farm. David gave him the shoulder patch from the uniform of a Montana Highway Patrol officer, the embroidery including the number 3-7-77, the digits that were once a Vigilante ultimatum for the banishing of malefactors, but are now used as an emblem of state-sanctioned law and order in Montana, appearing on the uniforms and car-door insignia of the officers.
Objects were sent or brought to James from around the whole globe in fact, with scrawled notes dropped in the packages. There was a nomad chief ’s poignard from here in Afghanistan, the postage stamps depicting the one-thousand-five-hundred-year-old Buddhas of Bamiyan. Yes, James knew about Afghanistan—Watson had just returned from there when he met Sherlock Holmes. And David brought him tales collected from Vietnam and Angola. Told him how Shah Jahan’s treasury had included four thousand songbirds.
David’s voice was like music being played to the metronome inside the young boy—it had the unhurried rhythm of James’s own thoughts.
Now he gets up and meets the others out in the night, going past a locked door behind which—he had discovered when he managed to open it stealthily—are stockpiled several tons of food donated by the World Food Program, meant for the poor of this region but appropriated by the warlord.
They sleep in shifts here. And so, while some are going off to bed, others, like him, woke up only minutes ago and are ready for the night.
The Afghans among them are discussing the latest ruling by the gathering of distinguished Muslim clergymen in the United Arab Emirates: yes, under Islamic law a man can divorce his wife through SMS text messaging.
James tries to maintain a neutral expression. To think that America has had to get involved this closely with people like these.