The Blind Man's Garden Read Online Free Page A

continued over the following months.
    He takes a bag of bullets and various other items from the cupboard and places them in a canvas rucksack, getting ready to catch the same overnight train as Jeo and Rohan. A Monday evening during a world war. He is wearing a navy-blue sweater and over it the black jacket of a Western suit, and in a holster under the sweater is the M9 Beretta handgun.
    His parents had lived in this apartment, and he himself had lived here until the age of ten. Almost two months after his mother’s death he had opened the door to a dignified and imposing stranger who wore a sherwani frock coat and a Jinnah cap. Mikal remembers him saying that he had come to look at the pictures on the walls, remembers staring at the man wordlessly and then stepping back to allow him in. The stranger was transfixed by one painted woman in particular, the face situated between a high wall of books and a chair. He stood before her as though he wished to memorise her. And then his clothes rustled as he lowered himself into the chair and gently began to question Mikal, asking his name, asking him where the adults were. Mikal, who hadn’t spoken since the funeral, told him that he and his eighteen-year-old brother were living there by themselves.
    ‘Mikal, my name is Rohan,’ the man said. ‘I am here to take you and your brother home with me.’ He pointed to the woman on the wall. ‘She sent me.’
    Mikal looks at his wristwatch. He heard the word ‘death’ thirteen times in the half hour he spent at the charity headquarters when he went to sign up, and ever since then he has felt himself move closer and closer to the unknown. According to a newspaper a brick from the pulverised home of Mullah Omar has been flown to the United States as a war trophy for the White House. And, according to another, on 19 September a CIA paramilitary officer was told by his chief at Langley, Virginia, ‘I want bin Laden’s head shipped in a box filled with dry ice. I want to show it to the President. I promised him I would do that.’
    A candle flickers in an alcove near him as he stands at the window. There is no wind and it is dark and the constellations are burning with a frozen fire, dripping fragile light onto Heer, his city. He scans the high view before him to see which other areas of Heer are without electricity tonight. His city within his fraught and poor nation, here in the Third World. He looks into the far distance to the right of him, towards Rohan’s neighbourhood. A memory comes to him of the day he was singing and she had lifted his hands and put them on her ears, one on each side, holding them tightly in place. She stood listening to the song that travelled into her through his arms instead of through air, flowing down his bone, blood and muscle. There was nothing between her and the song but him and it would become a ritual between two lovers, a custom to be repeated and a game of wonder.
    Switching on the transistor radio, he lies down on the sheetless mattress on the cement floor and listens to the news, his eyes closed. The Taliban are still in power in Afghanistan but the Americans have sent in Special Forces soldiers – guerrilla warriors who are building alliances among the local population and orchestrating rebellion. And all the while the air and the sky are being traversed by jets and bombs weighing tens of thousands of pounds. And that is where Jeo wants to go.
    ‘Are you sure about this?’ Mikal had asked him when he came to see him here earlier today.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Did you hear how the Taliban are putting inexperienced Pakistani boys on the frontlines, where they are getting slaughtered?’
    ‘The organisation I am dealing with has nothing to do with combat. We are not going there to fight.’
    Mikal had nodded and said, ‘All right.’
    Now he looks at the wristwatch again. Shouldering his rucksack, he pinches off the candle without looking and after locking the door he climbs down the stairs and