The Blind Man's Garden Read Online Free

Poseidon. He told her that some Arab astronomers saw a woman’s hand dyed with patterns of henna in the constellations Cassiopeia and Perseus, while others said it was the hand of Fatima stained with drops of blood – Fatima, the daughter of Muhammad, Naheed’s ancestor.
    She hears the two-note call of a bird and, bending into a tunnel of foliage, sets out to search for it, the moonlight pale as watered ink. She stops beside the citrus tree whose branches filled entirely with white flowers Sofia had mistaken for an angel as she lay dying. From their faultless portraits painted by Sofia, Naheed can recognise almost all the trees and plants in this garden, the seedpods and leaves and the berries dense with sugar.
    She had also made pictures of living things but Rohan had burned them during her last hours, fearing she would be judged for disobeying Allah, who forbade such images lest they lead to idolatry. The black smoke of the fire had sidled up to her deathbed. The sketch of a bull’s skull and that of a fossil from the Bannu hills were destroyed too – these creatures were already dead when she drew them, but they had lived once, and he wished to eradicate all doubt to ensure her salvation. He asked her to tell him where the rest of the paintings and drawings were, to tell him the address of the friend for whose home she had designed several murals. In his fear he had cleansed the house of every other image too, every photograph and picture, even those not created by her.
    And then a decade after her death, he saw her looking in his direction through a high window. It was the last day of Ramadan: a group of distinguished citizens had been invited to climb the minaret of the Friday mosque in the city centre, to view the new month’s crescent moon. As the binoculars passed over the city he recognised her eyes among the rooftops, the face turned three-quarters towards him, the pattern of her aquamarine tunic. It took him some time to bring her back into the glass and the distance between them was in miles – too many streets and at least three bazaars. Beside her was a giant bearded head, and in her hands she held several flower bulbs with lilies sprouting out of them, and curled up inside each bulb was a very young human infant, perhaps a foetus.
    Rohan hadn’t known that she had included her own portrait in the mural for the eight walls and two ceilings of her friend’s home, the coloured skin of the rooms. Rohan would set out across the city to locate them, systematically entering the narrow lanes and alleyways, arriving at his destination several weeks later. ‘I have permission to speak about one of the eight angels that hold up Allah’s throne,’ the Prophet had said. ‘So large is he that the distance between his earlobe and shoulder will require a journey of seven hundred years.’ And the giant head next to Sofia’s portrait belonged to one of the eight angels.
    Naheed takes a gulp of air and extinguishes the lamp, standing perfectly still in the night, the smoke withering around her.
    She listens, determined to locate the trapped bird that had called out from within the madness of suffering. But there is only silence now, not even a halting fragment. Ali! Ali! A dervish, having renounced dealings with all words except that one, never utters another, in any circumstance … The sentence enters her mind from a book she had been looking at earlier. Her gaze is drifting across the sky where the moon sits in a great cold ring as she recalls more and more words. Only one thing matters, only one word. If we speak, it is because we have not found that thing, nor shall find it .

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    Mikal has never stopped being surprised at how heavy a bullet is, given its size.
    He is in the high room he rents in an alley winding off the Grand Trunk Road. The first time he dreamed of Jeo dying, he woke up to find the air of this room full of his frightened shouts. It was just before the wedding, and the nightmares had