The Blind Man's Garden Read Online Free PDF Page A

that one is surrounded by the destruction of the very idea of man?
    He mouths verses of the Koran as he walks towards Jeo’s room.
    It is possible to think of fragrance existing before flower was created to contain it, and so it is that God created the world to reveal Himself, to reveal Mercy.
    Once or twice a year, perhaps three times, a woman visits the garden, her face ancient, the eyes calm but not passive as she approaches the rosewood tree and begins to pick and examine each fallen leaf. Whether she is in full possession of her mental faculties, no one is sure. Perhaps she is sane and just pretending madness for self-protection. Many decades ago – long before the house was built, when this place was just an expanse of wild growth – she had discovered the name of God on a rosewood leaf, the green veins curving into sacred calligraphy. She picks each small leaf now, hoping for the repetition of the miracle, holding it in her palms in a gesture identical to prayer. The life of the house continues around her and occasionally she watches them, following the most ordinary human acts with an attention reserved by others for much greater events. If it is autumn she has to remain in the garden for hours, following the surge and pull of the wind as it takes the dropped foliage to all corners. Afterwards, as the dusk begins to darken the air, they sit together, she and the tree, until only the tree remains.
    What need her search fulfils in her is not known. Perhaps healing had existed before wounds and bodies were created to be its recipient.

4
     
     
    When a coin is minted, the devil kisses it.
    Major Kyra stands on the roof of Ardent Spirit with the hound beside him. A saluki is said to have watched over the Prophet while he was at prayer, so there is a certain fondness towards this breed of dog in Islam.
    He paces the long crescent-shaped roof with his military gait, the tips of his fingers touching the saluki’s fur, wet from the long grasses and reeds of the riverbank, and the Ardent Spirit flag shifts in the darkness. High above him in the night’s silence he hears clearly a flight of cranes migrating from Central Asia to the deserts of Pakistan, the creaking of wings and a series of thin trembling calls.
    Time and again he looks towards the school’s old building, the intermittent points of candlelight in the windows. It is home now to the founder, Rohan. Following his wife’s death twenty years ago Rohan had signed the school over to a former student, Ahmed, because money carried the devil’s taint, because he wished to erase from his life the entanglements of wealth and assets and possessions. Staying on at the school only as the salaried headmaster.
    Ahmed died in Afghanistan ten days ago and, as his brother, Major Kyra has inherited Ardent Spirit.
    The hound watches the moon as if surprised by it. The mist rises from the river in long winding sheets, appearing chalky above the black reeds. Ahmed was known as Ahmed the Moth, acquiring the name at the age of five at his childhood mosque in Abbottabad. There one day he was told that the bag thrown onto the fire contained money and toys and he had watched it burn, but when he was told that the bag was in fact full of Koranic pages, Ahmed had burnt his hands trying to retrieve it, carrying the scars and the name into adulthood.
    Last year during a visit to Ardent Spirit, Major Kyra witnessed a number of small boys emerging from classrooms with bandaged hands. They had been imitating Ahmed the Moth as part of their education.
    He knows Rohan’s son Jeo and foster son Mikal are on their way to Afghanistan tonight. And he has been given guarantees that they will not return. At least not alive.
    Kyra has not slept for almost seventy-two hours. He resigned from the army the day before yesterday, unable to accept the alliance that the Pakistani government has formed with the United States and the West, helping these empires as they annihilate Afghanistan.
    Nine-Eleven.