The Blind Man's Garden Read Online Free Page B

goes out into the dark street. Remembering too late about the radio, but not turning back. Thinking of it filling the room with song and news until the batteries die.
    *
     
    Any minute now the rickshaw will arrive to take them to the train station. Rohan listens for the driver’s horn as he enters Sofia’s room and discovers two large books of maps lying open on the table, their colours brilliant even in this light. And even in this light he notices that a number of pages have been torn out of them. He wonders when it had happened.
    He touches the colours, almost in farewell. He is sixty years old and his eyes have been deteriorating for almost two decades now. Five more years of looking is what remains, at most. After that illumination will slip into mystery. He must bathe his eyes in belladonna and honey thinned in dew and must avoid light beyond a certain strength, but even now there are durations, each lasting several moments, when a shadow can appear white to him, or the entire sky green, his hands black as coal. There are small indigo shapes like landmasses across his vision. Or suddenly there is a golden absence of everything, a luminous annihilation he perceives even with his eyelids shut.
    He has come in here to select something he might wish to read during the journey. This is Baghdad House, wrapped thickly in the rose of Iraq, the two rooms made into one for Sofia. He carries the atlases to the other side of the long interior. Two hundred boxes filled with books had arrived at the house the previous week. The truck driver who brought them produced a letter addressed to Rohan and Sofia. One of their former students – from the earliest days of Ardent Spirit – had recently passed away. He had written the letter shortly before dying and in it he said that the couple had instilled a keen love of learning in him, that he had gone on to collect thousands of books over the course of his life. And these he was bequeathing to Ardent Spirit, remembering how impoverished the school library had been in those days. Twenty of the boxes were placed here in Sofia’s room and the rest distributed elsewhere in the house, a corridor suddenly narrowing to half its size.
    Rohan places the atlases in one of the boxes. He is accompanying Jeo to Peshawar because he wishes to visit his dead pupil’s family there, to express his gratitude for the gift and say a prayer at the grave.
    He briefly opens The Epic of Gilgamesh and then The Charterhouse of Parma and Taoos Chaman ki Mynah , and then looks into a book of history while the candle burns in his other hand.
    After Granada fell in 1492 two hundred thousand Muslims were forcibly converted to Christianity. The Inquisition had corpses dug up to make sure they had not been buried facing Mecca, and women were forbidden from veiling themselves …
    He hears the rickshaw driver’s horn at the gate. As he secures the windows he looks towards the river where egrets and herons must be settling for the night in the tall reeds and cattails. The new building of Ardent Spirit, situated on the other side of the green, barely moving water, is concrete, glass and steel, but still divided into six Houses. Five years ago Rohan was forced out, the place taken over by a former student who could no longer tolerate Rohan’s criticism of what the children were being taught.
    He emerges and bolts the door to Baghdad House. He is immensely proud of Jeo’s desire to go to Peshawar and be of help. He knows that had he been a young man himself he would not have stopped at Peshawar: he doesn’t know how he would have resisted entering Afghanistan. And not just for help and aid – he would have fought and defended with his arms. And, yes, had he been present in the United States of America back in September, he would have done all he could to save the blameless from dying in those attacked cities, partaken in their calamity.
    How not to ask for help these days – from others, from God – when it seems