Free The Blind Man's Garden by Nadeem Aslam Page A

of which has seven coloured flowers glued to it like stains on the page. She had gone to collect them from Rohan’s garden, without knowing she would marry Jeo within months.
    ‘She loves you,’ Mikal says.
    Jeo gets up and pushes him hard into the wall. ‘How do you know?’ The shock emptying the breath out of Mikal, his head slamming against the deep blue paint and Jeo has now picked up the gun and is trying to work it, keeping it pointed at Mikal. The gun is capable of firing four hundred bullets every minute and it goes off eventually, Jeo’s finger pressing the trigger for two or three seconds, a duration long enough to release thirty bullets, gouging a curved line of chips from the wall behind Mikal.
    For a while Mikal’s wildly beating heart is the only point of reference in the formless darkness that has filled his eyes. The empty cartridges fall to the ground like a chain rattling. You told the mendicant to add a link to one of the chains hanging on his body for your sake, a link representing a need of yours, a wish. And as he wandered through the land he prayed for the need to be alleviated. When and if it was, the link disappeared miraculously from about the fakir’s person, the chain shortening. To him it was proof that Allah had taken pity on him and somewhat lightened his burden, that he was forgiven a little for his transgression.
    And now they hear, both Mikal and Jeo, what they hadn’t before – the rocket-propelled grenades being fired into the fort’s main gate. They hear the splinters exploding from the wood as the gate begins to cave inwards.
    *
     
    There are a few seconds of utter silence and then more than a thousand attackers penetrate the smoke and dust, firing and being fired on, kissing their guns before pulling the triggers, both sides shouting Allah’s name. A panic spreading like a flicker in a shoal of fish whenever there is a sound from an unexpected direction. Noises from the mouths of humans and the mouths of guns. In the form of screams, in the form of bullets, as if the men are shouting at the weapons and the weapons are shouting back. Mikal knows they will be in this room in less than five minutes. ‘Remember,’ he tells himself. ‘Short controlled bursts.’ He turns around to where he last saw Jeo, a second or a lifetime ago.
    Jeo is motionless and then begins to collect Naheed’s letters. Calmly walking across the room to place them in an alcove.
    Six Taliban men enter and bolt the door from the inside. Eight humans and their fate. ‘Not one of you is allowed to die until he has killed twenty of the enemy,’ one of them says; he was the driver who brought them here, the owner of the leather lash reinforced with Saudi coins.
    Mikal crouches by the window and raises his head to look out. Rooms, trucks and trees are on fire, as is the golden dome of the mosque, and he cannot believe the intensity of the fight, hundreds of guns firing at the same time. The attackers are advancing and are being brutal with each person they find. They had expected more Taliban in the fort, and – disappointed at the small number – they are pouring the rage and violence and metal meant for several men into just one. Each man is dying ten, twenty or thirty deaths.
    *
     
    Someone is trying to break down the door, the wood receiving forceful blows. And all the while someone injured out there is screaming with pain, ‘Help me, somebody help me, somebody please help me!’
    A rocket-propelled grenade – fired from the other side of the courtyard – lodges itself in the room’s wall, emerging halfway into the interior without going off. It remains there and begins to vibrate. Grit and plaster falling to the floor and onto the man standing directly below it. He – and Mikal and Jeo, and everyone else – watch the grenade with rapt fascination for a few seconds, everything reduced to fear and marvel. It should’ve exploded but it can’t because the wall is constraining it. It begins to