Aslam, Nadeem. The Blind Man's
Garden. Toronto: Bond Street
Books, 2013
“'No one from here can know what the Westerners know,' the man says. 'The Westerners are unknowable to us. The divide is too great, too final. It's like asking what the dead or the unborn know.'”
(p. 350)
Set in Afghanistan and Pakistan during
the “War on Terror” following 911, Aslam's superb novel takes us
into the land that no Westerner can know, “the divide is too great,
too final.” We are on the ground in the land of al-Qaeda and the
Taliban, militant arms of Islam running for cover as American
helicopters roar overhead. It's a land also of moderate Muslims,
lapsed Muslims, Christians. The faithful see the world through the
eyes of ingrained belief and the others have placed their confidence
in bullets and bombs.
As much as no resident of Heer in
Pakistan can understand what makes Westerners tick, so the pilots in
those helicopters, the raiding, bombastic American soldiers blindly
trespass among the peoples of cultures about which they are
effectively clueless.
For the “ordinary” citizen of
Pakistan and Afghanistan, the violent turmoil succeeding 9/11 is
unfathomable. Loyal to the idea of a brotherhood under attack, young
men sneak off to battle zones to fight the infidel, there to be
killed in battle action or captured and sold to the Americans for a
ransom by warlords with their private agendas. In such a place and
time, it's difficult knowing who is brother, who is traitor, who is
collaborator. Speaking becomes dangerous; who knows where the words
will go to come back through the barrel of a gun?
The story revolves around Rohan who
suffers daily with the loss and guilt over his beloved Sofia whose
last words to him were that she had lost her faith. Rohan has a son,
Jeo, who makes an ill-advised journey toward Kabul to practice his
newly acquired medical skills in aid of wounded soldiers. Jeo leaves
behind his young wife, Naheed, who was married by arrangement to Jeo
while she was deeply in love with Jeo's foster brother, Mikal. In the
family also are Yasmin and Basie whose lives are made more than
normally precarious by their employment in a Christian school, a
place viscerally detested by jihadists and a handy target for hostage
taking and attack.
Rohan and Sofia founded a school in
Heer meant to be progressive in a regressive society. But since
Sofia's death and Rohan's retirement, darker forces have taken it
over and turned it into a training ground for what the West calls
terrorists, but whom its students would call freedom fighters. Rohan
and his family have been allowed to remain living in their house
nearby, a house that adjoins a wonderful garden from which the title
derives. It's Aslam's sensitive and poetic depiction of the garden
and what it means to live among the trees, birds and flowers that
forms a fitting counterpoint to the chaos and murder all around.
A poignant interlude in a fast-moving,
changing story of the family has Tara—a seamstress and Naheed's
mother—taking on the job of sewing an American flag “. . . large,
about the size of four bedsheets” so that it can be burned in a
demonstration. “'It's for after the Friday prayers next week . . .
make sure that it's of a material that doesn't burn too fast or too
slowly? The flames have to look inspiring and fearsome in the
photographs.” (p. 99) As she sews, Tara wonders about the meaning
of the red, white and blue and the complicated design. “Are the
white and red stripes rivers of milk and wine, flowing under a sky
bursting with the splendor of stars? Or are they paths soaked with
blood, alternating with paths strewn with bleached white bones,
leading out of a sea full of explosions.” (p. 100)
I am, of course, a Westerner. To the
people on the streets of Kabul, Peshawar or Heer, my faith, my
culture, my motivations must be as inscrutable as theirs are to me.
Westerners need to read Aslam's book, if only to give them a little
more of the feeling of what it's like to live in a place where every
disagreement with the rest of the world looks like an attack on
Islam. Ignorance breeds contempt for the unknown; in The Blind
Man's Garden, this tendency is illustrated best when an American
soldier is rescued from death in the desert and found to have the
Arabic for INFIDEL tattooed on his back. To a devout Muslim,
this pride in being an unbeliever is a slap in Allah's face, a thing
that cannot possibly be explained or excused.
Like me, you might come away from
Aslam's book wondering: what in God's name have we done and are we
doing in the Arab world?