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

burn instead, sending a stream of brilliant liquid flame and metal directly onto the chest of the man below with a piercing whistle. The man’s torso melts, is consumed, and the rest of him falls backwards and the blinding red and white lava continues to shower onto him, the high-pitched sound echoing off the walls.
    *
     
    The second RPG comes and gets stuck in the wall directly above Jeo and Mikal, vibrating again but without any loudness. Nothing except a hum, the sound of a finality beyond all illusion. Mikal breaks out of his paralysis and moves Jeo and himself from under it. Because there hasn’t been a blow on the door for a while Jeo opens it and looks out while Mikal reaches for Naheed’s letters. The base of Mikal’s neck erupts in blood, Jeo looking back and seeing him fall. The corridor outside is filled with dense smoke and the young woman who comes rushing out of it towards Jeo wears a look of wildness on her face, her eyes crazed with a radiant power. When was the last time he saw a woman? The tip of the foot-long dagger enters Jeo’s face through the left cheek – going through the gap between the lower and upper jaw. The sharp metal cuts through the roof of the mouth and reaches under the brain. The blade grates against the bone of the skull that it splinters, and it grates again immediately afterwards when she pulls it out. He hears both sounds – from the inside, between the ears. The pain is something he could not have imagined. ‘This is for what your people did to my man,’ she says, armed with love’s vengeance. Part of his mind remarks on the woman’s beauty, notices the blossoms on her dress. He has fallen with his face to one side and he sees Mikal lying prone on the other side of the room, the red coming out of his mouth as though it is something he is saying, his last words.
    How easy it is to create ghosts, he thinks as he begins to die a minute later, feeling his mind closing chamber by chamber, the memory of Naheed contained in each one. And despite it all it means much to have loved. Just before the world vanishes, a hope surfaces in him that this wasn’t necessarily everything, that he will return somehow.
    His arm rises, remembering when it used to be a wing.

8
     
     
    ‘Night’ was the word employed for the long period during which Muhammad did not receive a revelation from Allah.
    Naheed lies awake in her mother’s place, looking into the darkness. Five days ago there was a telephone call from Rohan in Peshawar, saying Jeo and Mikal had disappeared towards Afghanistan. Basie and his wife – Jeo’s sister Yasmin – had immediately set off for Peshawar to join Rohan. They are still there, searching, and they ring Heer every evening but don’t have any news.
    The clock sounds its alarm to awaken her mother, Tara, for her predawn prayers. The amplified call from the loudspeakers attached to the mosque’s minarets cannot be relied upon, because electricity is sometimes absent. So Tara sets the alarm as a precaution.
    But Tara remains asleep now. This happens on occasion, when she has stayed awake late into the night with her seamstress work, her back bent over the sewing machine.
    Naheed will not rouse her. So what if she misses a prayer? Allah understands. Sometimes Naheed even gets up during the night and switches off the alarm so it won’t go off. Let her rest.
    Naheed sits up, with a need to be in the room where she sleeps with Jeo. There is a series of minute scars where her glass bangles had broken accidentally against his chest on the wedding night. Where the skin on a man’s body is soft, it is softer than any place on a woman’s body. She had discovered this fact by touching Jeo.
    Invoking protection from the angel who looks after the fifth hour of the night, she steps out into the darkness. From the balcony she looks down, hearing the splash of water as the owner of the building, Sharif Sharif, performs his ablutions downstairs. Freezing in winter, burning