Authors: Nadeem Aslam
Afghanistan was known as the Graveyard of Empires, yes, but these and other appellations of ferocity were thought up by British historians attempting to explain the end of the First Anglo-Afghan War of the nineteenth century, the most notorious defeat in British history. During the 1980s male Western journalists enthusiastically revived and embraced these martial stereotypes, to the satisfaction of agencies like the CIA.
“What do you think of the
Bliss
?” David asks Casa. “There was an American called Daniel Bliss who gave the Arab world its first modern college, in 1866, in Beirut . . .”
Casa can tell when a bird is flying out of fright. A useful indicator of danger. And in a training camp in the jungles of Pakistani-occupied Kashmir he had learned to tell if a snake was near him: by listening to monkeys in the tree canopies—snakes attacked these monkeys so frequently that there was a word for it in their language now, a specific sound telling all others to
look down because
he
has appeared.
In that camp operated by the Pakistani military and the ISI he had even witnessed a peacock mating with a peahen, which is—given all the extravagance of the mating dance—an intensely private event, so mysterious that some people believe the peahen is impregnated through tears she drinks from the male bird’s face. So now he only half-listens to David’s words, paying attention more to his surroundings.
As with monkeys and snakes, the Americans have learnt words like “jihad,” “al-Qaeda,” “taliban,” “madrassa.”
And in their cunning they know them well enough to be able to undermine Islam, to turn ordinary Muslims against the holy warriors. Instead of saying “jihadis,” the newspapers and radio are being advised to employ the word “irhabis,” which means “terrorists.” Instead of “jihad,” they are being told to use “hirabah”—“unholy war.” Instead of “mujahidin,” it’s “mufsidoon”—“the mayhem makers.”
He straightens and stretches his back, taking a moment’s break from the work, wiping the sweat off his brow. Walking to the water’s edge, he removes his shirt and splashes water onto his torso.
“How did you get the scar on your side?” David asks when he returns, buttoning up the shirt.
“Accident.”
During the previous days the two have talked only when Casa has initiated a conversation. He gives quick answers if David ever makes an enquiry, feeling safe only when information about him is concealed. Already he has made the mistake of showing Dunia his calluses. But he won’t succumb to her again.
When David asked if his name was short for Kasam, he had said no. The man hadn’t guessed the real name, so a yes wouldn’t have mattered, but it was important to make these people think their every instinct and independent idea about him was inaccurate. He will tell them what to think. “It’s short for Qaisar actually.”
Now he pretends not to hear because David is asking, “What kind of accident was it?”
One of the Tomahawks the Americans had sent into the jihad training camp had caused a sheet of corrugated metal to fly into his waist where he was bowing in prayer. The heat of the explosion had sterilised the metal just before it entered him—it was glowing, the entire width and length of it, a vibrating white-red—so there was no immediate infection but the wound had festered later, the stitches coming apart during a training expedition into remote mountains. With the hospital a week away, they had laid him on his side, scratched off onto the wound the ignitable powder from the heads of five hundred matchsticks and lit it, a method of cauterising that has left a disfigurement the size of a hand on his flank.
The look on David’s face is intense and yet, paradoxically, unfocused. Casa feels his thoughts are being read.
He wishes the man would take his eyes off him.
“How old are you, Casa? Twenty-one, twenty-two . . . ?”
“Yes.”
Perhaps his hostile confusion has seeped into his tone because David lowers his head now and goes back to work.
He remains standing, looking at the carved seat of the canoe—bone-like, smooth to the touch. David had had it made in Jalalabad and Casa had weighed it in his hands many times, testing the heft. It has been fitted in already but he could pull it out without much difficulty. The first blood spilled in Islam was with a camel’s jawbone, the idolaters had interrupted the Muslims’ prayer and blessed Saad of Zuhrah had wounded one of them with the nearest thing within reach.
David is still bent to his task, the back of his head vulnerable.
If the man is so keen to mark the coming together of the United States and the lands of Islam he could name the boat the
Guantánamo.
If it’s the celebration of heroes that is on his mind, how about the
Osama
or the
ISI
?
The voices of the two women—Dunia and the Russian—have begun to drift towards him from the direction of the orchard, and he tries to hide his alarm at that too. The landmine. But nothing can be done, so he continues ladling hot water down each wooden rib—the tough bands that have been soaking in the lake for two days—until it is supple enough and then bends it with his hands, and his feet, to put into the canoe. David said the bottom has to be more flat than circular, more circular than flat, or the craft would be tippy. The ribs will be left in overnight to stretch and shape the bark: tomorrow they’ll be taken out for a short time, have their ends trimmed to precision, and be put back in permanently.
He needs that landmine. He will not allow anyone to capture him. Bihzad said that while he was at the Bagram military prison he had tried to kill himself by chewing on an artery in his arm—becoming desperate one night after learning that, back in December 2002, two prisoners there had been beaten to death by their American captors.
The
Bagram.
Last night in the glasshouse when he had opened the book entitled
Bihzad,
he had found it to be full of coloured pictures. It was like Marcus’s house. He had spent almost two hours looking at them and reading the accompanying texts until the battery in the flashlight had gone out like someone blinded. They seemed to be some of the most beautiful things he had ever seen, despite the fact that, against Allah’s wishes, they depicted animals and humans. Rustam, the grandson of the king of Kabul, avenged his own impending death in one picture: dressed in his tiger skin, and gored by the lances that had been planted upright at the bottom of a deep pit, he called out to his brother who had set this trap for him. “Throw me my bow at least so I won’t be eaten by lions.” Overcome by mercy, the brother did what he was asked so that Rustam sent forth an arrow and shot him through the tree trunk behind which he was standing. To Rustam’s arrow, the thick-boled tree was as flimsy as the bark that is this boat.
The breeze swings and carries to him the sound of the two women again. The landmine is the pit he has dug and lined with spears. He wills the two women away from it. Asks help from Allah.
David has stopped talking because the news is being broadcast on the radio.
Casa always switches it off when the news finishes and music or discussion comes on air, telling David it is to preserve the batteries, but really because these songs and seven varieties of opinion are like stings to him, the Taliban having banned such frivolities during their regime.
How keen everyone is to make this world their home, forgetting its impermanence. It’s like trying to see and name constellations in a fireworks display.
The signs of Allah are there but they refuse to see it. After he came back from the moon and was touring the various countries of the world, Neil Armstrong had suddenly stopped in a bazaar one day, his face ashen, and asked what the sound issuing from a nearby minaret was. On being told that it was the Muslim call to prayer, he began to shed tears and told them he had heard that sound while on the moon, that it had haunted him ever since. He converted to Islam straight away.
“David, could you please come to the house for a minute?” Marcus has appeared and is beckoning with his one hand.
“Give me a minute. We’d like to finish as much of the ribbing today as possible. We’ll seal it with the gum tomorrow evening and be on the water by early morning the day after.”
“It’s rather urgent,” says the Englishman and the tone of his voice makes David look towards him.
“Right now?”
“Yes.”
Casa stays behind for a while but then follows them, standing on the threshold beside the cypress trees and looking into the kitchen where the four others have gathered.
“We thought we should tell you, David,” Marcus is saying.
“And you have no idea who it was who knocked on your window?” David asks the girl.
Dunia shakes her head. “I wasn’t going to tell you anything but the thought of going back to Usha frightens me.”
“There is no question of that,” David says, and Marcus agrees:
“Yes, you must stay here until your father comes back from Kabul.”
Lara and David exchange a few sentences in English. Marcus joins in and concludes in Pashto: “I am sure there was no one at her window—they just made that up.”
“They want to shut down the school, that’s all.” Dunia’s words are almost a whisper. “I haven’t told anyone this but I did hear someone knock on the window that night, the night of the wicked
shabnama.
”
Casa remains at the door for a few more minutes, declining the invitation to enter and take a chair.
He steps away and slowly goes back to the water, walking past the spot from where Marcus had yesterday dug out a small idol, saying it was of the Christian saint who protects doctors and who had painted a picture of Jesus’s mother from life. Emerging from the glasshouse last night, after having spent the previous hours looking at the Bihzad book, Casa had dropped the book into the now-empty hole and filled it up, throwing the earth in with the sideways movements of his feet, tamping it all down until it was firm, telling himself that when the time is right he’ll burn down the animals and birds in the glasshouse too.
T
HE LATE-MORNING SUN
is coming in and illuminating the wall beside Marcus’s chair. A spray of pale orange blossoms and grey foliage, the petals and the leaves more or less the same size. He has seen chintz for Afghan women’s dresses that has a design of mobile phones interspersed with hibiscus and frangipani flowers. Lara and the young girl are in the adjoining room now, he can hear them talking as he lowers himself into the chair. For a girl from this land, Dunia has long bones. Some of Qatrina’s relatives would insist her parents starve her when she was growing up, withhold meat and eggs and milk from her, lest she became too tall for a woman.
He looks up at the ceiling. Both Qatrina and he had been concerned that they didn’t really know how the world worked, the various mechanisms of it. Nor did they know much about the many disciplines that allowed the exercise of the imagination. They had trained as doctors but there was a residual shortcoming to their knowledge and they felt they must now teach themselves about history and religions, about paintings and music. So they had slowly collected books, becoming readers. Learning about ancient and modern events. About the best fiction and poetry.
How Gul Bakaoli and Taj ul Maluk were captured and imprisoned by the djinn.
What Xerxes, riding his chariot over a bridge of boats from Asia to Europe, had said.
The immense power of the druids was the weakness of the Celtic polity,
Julius Caesar had written in his memoirs.
No nation that is ruled by priests drawing their authority from supernatural sanctions is capable of true progress.
Aware of these gaps in their own earlier knowledge, Marcus has never really been convinced that the members of the terrorist team that carried out the 2001 attacks were educated men in the real sense. Most of them had a university education but that education wasn’t in history or literature or politics. At his university in Germany, Muhammad Atta had refused to shake hands with the professor who supervised his dissertation, because she was a woman. When it came down to it the terrorists’ opinions and beliefs were as devoid of nuances as Casa’s seem to be. Viewing the world in very stark terms.
There is even a joke about it in Arabic. In Egypt they say the extremist Muslim Brotherhood is really the Engineering Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood itself is aware of this and has tried to recruit students from the literature, politics and sociology departments of the universities but without any luck.
As he closes his eyes for a moment, time seems to distort itself: the kite of sunlight has moved a great distance along the wall when he opens his eyes again, is about to fly out of the room. He rises and approaches the window. Casa can be seen out there at various times of the day, taking a nap under a tree in the bee-filled orchard, stretching and yawning upon rising, his hands disappearing into the blossoming branches overhead. Or, silent as a deer, he’d be saying his prayers somewhere near by, the body compactly folded like the unborn in the womb when he bows, having performed ablutions at the lake beforehand, his face damp and clean. The teeth he brushes with a fragrant twig, selected after experimenting with the trees and bushes in the vicinity, chewing one end until it resembles a brush. He saw the intensity on the boy’s face as he listened to Dunia at dinner last night, caught it again and again, his mind straying into a reverie about the two youngsters. Yes, love is still a possibility in a land such as this, though love means an eradication of selfishness and it could easily be assumed that in a country like this selfishness was the main tool of survival, everyone a mercenary.
In the corridor he goes past the statue of St. Luke he had found in the ground, not sure how Casa felt as he watched it being lifted into sunlight. “The Muslims say they revere Christ,” Qatrina had said, “pointing out the fact that Mary is the only woman mentioned by name in the Koran, and that Jesus is mentioned more times in there than Muhammad. But, according to them, his teachings were made obsolete by those of Muhammad. There isn’t a single Christian in the lands of Islam who isn’t under pressure to convert—a subtle pressure if he’s lucky. A remarkable way of showing respect and reverence towards someone.”