Every now and then you
read a book that surprises you by its combination of contraries. No matter how
rich a lode of raw material a writer may have struck, nor how vast or
variegated a canvas he may have appropriated, regardless even of how talented
or dedicated he might be, he evokes exasperation rather absorption in his
reader. Not consistently, not always but every now and then, sometimes every
few pages but enough to make you put down the book, and pick it up again through
sheer dint of will power. For, I must confess, were it not for the purpose of
writing this review I would have abandoned Nadeem Aslam’s The Blind Man’s Garden after the first 50-odd pages. I must also
confess that the loss would have been mine. For all its ponderousness and portentousness,
The Blind Man’s Garden, hides within
it a story that was waiting to be told.
Shortly after the
American bombing of Afghanistan, we had heard of the countless Pakistanis who
volunteered to help the victims of the west’s ‘war on terror’; some crossed the
porous border into Afghanistan, others flocked to shelters and refugee camps to
help the waves of Afghan refugees who sought safe haven on Pakistan soil. But
save for stray newspaper reports, largely one-sided depending on where or by
whom they were being published, no
substantial account emerged of the compulsions of those who offered help, of
what they saw and experienced, let alone the reception they met at the hands of
the ‘victims’. In this, his fourth novel, Nadeem Aslam takes off from his
previous book, The Wasted Vigil,
which had dealt with the depravity and horrors of Taliban territory. In fact,
all of Aslam’s literary offering have been marked by the confrontation of the
East and the West, the Islamophobia that has gripped the West and the murder
and mayhem unleashed by the events of 9/11.
‘History’ is the third
parent,’ so begins The Blind Man’s Garden
as it sets off to explore the flawed marriage between politics and religion. It
is October, a month after the attacks on the Twin Towers. American forces have
launched a military offensive; the buildings, orchards and hills of Afghanistan
are being bombed, for an aggrieved America has decided that there can be ‘no
innocent people in a guilty nation’. Rohan and his son, Jeo, travel from Heer,
an imaginary town somewhere in Pakistan, to Peshawar where the wounded and
injured are being brought in. Mikal, Rohan’s foster son and the son of
Communist arrested and never seen again, is also planning to offer help; while
Jeo is a third-year medical student, Mikal works at a gun repair shop where a
day after the West invaded Afghanistan a ‘piety discount’ is being offered to
those who wish to buy an AK 47 to go to jihad. Jeo and Mikal cross the border
and are promptly sold to the Taliban; they find themselves amidst a ragtag army
of jihadis from the wider Muslim world: Egyptians, Algerians, Saudis, Yemenis,
Uzbeks and Chechens. Jeo is killed shortly thereafter in an American attack on
a Taliban fortification and a grievously wounded Mikal taken prisoner by a
warlord ‘who cut off the trigger finger on each of his hands and nailed the two
pieces to a doorframe along with those taken from dozens of other captives.’
What follows is an
unimaginable litany of horrors: A game called ‘Nail’ where a captive is asked
his age; if the boy says twelve, he is raped by twelve men, if he says
fourteen, then fourteen men are sent to him all of whom keep shouting ‘Nail!
Nail! Nail” as they go about brutalising him. Desperate parents of captive boys
who sell off a kidney to pay the ransom seekers who may be defeated or banished
Taliban, al-Qaeda gangs or rogue warlords.
A room filled with the rubble of the broken Buddha and his companions. A
graveyard of vandalised Russian helicopters, MiGs and Hinds covered with
lichens. Blood-thirsty bandits bartering their prisoners for ransom, or failing
that putting them to hard labour like galley slaves from an ancient age. With
all the solemn ponderousness of a church bell, Aslam’s voice pierces through
the veils of dispassionate reporting as, for instance, when he observes:
‘The
opposite of war is not peace but civilisation, and civilisation is purchased
with violence, and cold-blooded murder. With war. The man [a warlord] must earn
millions of dollars for guarding the NATO supply convoys as they pass through
his area, and for the militia he must have raised to fight the Taliban and
al-Qaeda soldiers alongside American Special Forces.’
Interspersed with the
brutalities of a war-ravaged land and horrifying vignettes of a people
desensitised by a relentless, never-ending chaos and carnage, is a tender
love-story – between Mikal and Naheed, Jeo’s widow. Mikal, who reminded me
constantly of Ayn Rand’s iconic protagonist, Howard Roark, because of his self-destructive
idealism, who has come to Afghanistan to fight a holy war, instead finds
himself wounded and enslaved, brutalised and humiliated, trapped and sold for
$5000 to the Americans. Through a series of incongruous twists and turns – no
less incongruous than the war that has devastated countless lives – Mikal
rescues an American stranger. In the end, while the American is rescued and
spirited away in a Chinook helicopter Mikal’s own fate is left ambiguous.
‘Damaged and scarred, he is still perfect’; he appears as a ghost to convince
Naheed, the love of his life, to continue with her life without him. Aslam’s
last words are moving and prophetic: ‘The insects weave a gauze of sound in the
air. She moves towards him and her eyes are full of a still intensity – as
though aware of the unnamed, unseen forces in the world, and attempting in her
mind to name and see them.’ Perhaps, it is these unnamed unseen forces that
govern history and the complex weave of time and circumstance.
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