Nadeem Aslam, The Blind Man's Garden

Aslam, Nadeem. The Blind Man's Garden. Toronto: Bond Street Books, 2013

“The West has dared to ask itself the question, 'What begins after God?'” (p. 319)
“'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?