War Comes To The Anjuman

To surpass expectations when you have books like Maps for Lost Lovers and The Wasted Vigil behind you must be no mean task. However, Nadeem Aslam makes short work of it with The Blind Man’s Garden, as he plunges the rea­der headlong, heart first, into the biggest conflict of our times with only empathy to serve as guide. Set in the months after the attack on the Twin Towers, The Blind Man’s Garden can be described as a book about the other side of 9/11, away from the images of airplanes, Ground Zero rescue ops and war-ravaged Afghanistan exploding on television. There are no innocents in this story, no one is proclaimed guilty, there are no victims, no perpetrators, just human beings—mortal, flawed and entirely beautiful.

The story follows two foster brothers, Jeo and Mikal, residents of the fictional town of Heer in Pakistan. They travel to Afghanistan to tend to the wounded in the aftermath of the American reprisal to 9/11. Betrayed and sold to the Taliban, they end up fighting against American troops. The novel is the story of Jeo’s swift death and of Mikal’s slow incarceration and torture, first at the hands of an Afghan warlord and later at the hands of the US army. It is equally the story of those they leave behind in Pakistan—their ageing father Rohan, battling blindness, self-doubt and the loss of his wife Sofia, who he may have indirec­tly killed through his excessive piety; of the beautiful, determined Naheed, who is both Jeo’s young wife and the woman Mikal loves fiercely; of her widowed mother Tara; and of their sister Yasmin and brother-in-law Basie, teachers in a Christian missionary school under threat from the students of Ard­ent Spi­rit, a school founded by Rohan and now controlled by fundamentalists.

Though this is Aslam’s most overtly political and topical work, The Blind Man’s Garden transcends politics and looks squarely at the failures of civilisation on either side of the rift. It is a deep exploration of what it means to be human, and how the things that divide the human race intersect and entangle with that which is shared. It offers a mirror, not perhaps a whole one as much as many shards of broken glass, for the two sides to find themselves in each other across the vast, cold, seemingly unbridgeable chasm of cultural differences and clashing sensibilities.

In parts, the book demands a willing suspension of the notion of pace.Rohan, as he turns blind, inhabits time differently, carefully tracing with his fingertips the changing seasons in his garden, his grief unfolding against a backdrop of shifting memories. Time hangs in dark swirls of uncertainty and does not move as Naheed awaits Mikal’s return. It loses its bearings and diurnal rhythm during the repeated cycles of sleep deprivation that make up Mikal’s interrogation. Yet the plots and subplots are neatly woven into each other and make for a seamless tale. Huge coincidences drive critical segments of the story but such is the magnificence of the rugged mountain setting that it seems only fitting, part of the grand design of life.

Aslam’s prose creates an effect very similar to that described as pentimento in painting, where images or elements that have been completely painted over by the artist become visible, revealing an earlier design trapped under the layers of the present work. There is a translucence to the author’s English which reveals an under layer of Urdu. Seeping out from beneath the grammar and syntax of his perfectly polished adopted tongue is the melancholy and ache of Urdu’s vivid images and startling metaphors: blood, pomegranates and rubies combine to capture the many inflections of pain, hurt, grief and regret. Moonlight, fireflies, flowering plants and trees, singing birds, the movement of the stars and the colour of the sky texture the narrative and act as subliminal triggers which create an emotional subtext connecting the reader to the beauty of Islam’s poetic and artistic traditions.

Like grass that grows out of abandoned ruins asserts the triumph of life over death, this is a life-affirming tale of love and redemption emerging from the stark landscape of loss. Love is not consolation, it is light. The book is Aslam’s prayer for the whole world, his attempt to bathe it in light.