He call’d aloud — ‘Say, Father, say
If yet my task is done!’
The father was close to death below and did not have the strength to raise his voice. When the ship’s powder magazines eventually exploded, the blast was so large it was felt fifteen miles away in Alexandria.
One day in 1988, the six-year-old Casa, known then only by the generic ‘little boy’, had exhibited similar valour and obedience, and one of the adults around him had laughed and called him Casabianca.
Casa would meet that man again in his teens and remind him of the matter. The man would remember it well — he said he’d learned about Giocante Casabianca through a poem at school — but the man would then become angry. He had begun his education at an expensive Western-style school but, because the family circumstances had deteriorated, he was taken out of there and sent to a free Islamic one, and he now believed in the primacy and supremacy of Muslims above all. He said that even back then, only minutes after referring to the brave faithful six-year-old boy as Casabianca, he had become maddened by the thought that he had been required to learn Western history at one point in his life, along with fictional stories where the principal characters could easily be Christian or Hindu. Not minor characters, not villains — but the heroes! Regardless of his bitter fury, the name he gave the little boy had stuck, shortened to Casa.
The full story of the boy whose name had become his has slipped out of Casa’s mind. Only a few vague impressions remaining.
‘Speak, father!’ once again he cried,
‘If I may yet be gone!’
*
He rises in the perfume factory just before dawn, the thought materialising in him instantly that he should do his best not to stay here for too long. Nabi Khan and his men are coming to Usha soon.
At the lake he performs his ablutions, the water so still it is as though it has been smoothed by hand, and says his prayers on a boulder, using his blanket as a prayer mat.
He sits wrapped in it afterwards and looks around as the sky starts to brighten above him, the white vapour rising from the lake looking like airborne milk. Under his breath he reads the verses one is supposed to read at the start of day.
O Allah I ask You for whatever good this day may hold
And I take refuge in You from whatever evil it may hold
And ask you to grant me victory, but do not grant victory over me.
O Allah watch over me with Your eye that never sleeps
And accept my repentance, that I may not perish.
You are my hope. My Master, Lord of bounty and majesty,
To You I direct my face, so bring Your noble face close to me
And wash away my sins, answer my supplications, and guide my heart,
And receive me with Your deepest forgiveness and generosity,
Smiling on me and content with me in Your infinite mercy.
He gets up and walks towards David’s car. He could present the car to Nabi Khan as a token of good will, convince him of the truth of what had transpired at the hospital. Wind-loosened perfume is in the air now from the flowering branches overhead as he circles the vehicle.
The keys are in the house. But David would report the missing car to the police and they might trace it to Nabi Khan, who, in any case, might not see it as the honest gift Casa intends it to be. He doesn’t want them to inflict pain on him, though he can understand how Nabi Khan might feel perfectly within his rights to use agony in ascertaining the truth. When the rumours reached Ali about the virtue of Ayesha — the wife of Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him — Ali had had Ayesha’s maidservant tortured to learn if the gossip had any basis in fact. Muhammad, peace be upon him, was aware of this.
*
The act of courageous obedience that earned him his name had occurred at a weapons warehouse situated in a heavily populated residential area near Islamabad. The United States had given about one thousand Stinger missiles to Pakistan in 1986, to be passed on to Afghan guerrillas. But one of these missiles, in October 1987, narrowly missed a United States helicopter in the Persian Gulf. And three days later, two Afghans were arrested in Pakistan for attempting to sell Stingers to representatives of the Iranian government, for one million dollars each. This led to a United States investigation and it was decided that there would be an audit of the weapons supplied to the Pakistani military. Casa cannot believe it but it is said that the ISI, its alleged corruption and duplicity about to be exposed, had set fire to the massive warehouse with the result that $100 million worth of rockets and missiles had rained down on the surrounding area, killing an estimated thousand people and maiming countless others for life.
In a mosque a block away from the warehouse, the six-year-old boy had been asked to guard the door behind which a prisoner was being kept — a Christian who had been beaten until he confessed that he was responsible for the defaced copy of the Koran found lying in a gutter outside.
He remembers the rockets falling around him again and again, bursting into giant clusters of hot sparks and metal, setting fire to the straw prayer mats that lined the floors. The heat from one blast leaving the blades of the ceiling fan curled up like a tulip. He had remained where he was asked to remain an hour ago, trembling with terror amid all the acrid smoke and ash and light, his trousers soiled and his ears in pain from the incredible noise like hammer blows, screaming for help but realising no sound would issue from his mouth. He was holding a gun that was older than him, and through all this he kept it aimed at the door as he had been shown.
He walks into the orchard on seeing the kitchen door being opened by David. These foreigners — who is protecting them? They are probably attached to a charity or an aid organisation, cogs in a machinery of kindness. Allah — in His wisdom — has planted these compassionate impulses in the hearts of non-believers, for Muslims to exploit and benefit from.
He had let down his guard when he took the bird’s nest to them last night. He had been looking for a place to keep his shroud and had found the discovery so enthralling that he had wished to share it with another human, the momentary fascination of it making him act out of his true character.
Having studied manuals for weapons and computers, for microprocessors and motherboards, having taken lessons in passport and credit-card forging, and having carefully examined news footage of almost every attack ever mounted on Western targets, he knows the English language. He had helped put together films at the jihadi camps in that language, to be sold in the mosques of European cities after Friday prayers — propaganda and preaching, the Jihad of the Tongue. But he cannot follow these people when they talk amongst themselves, the words coming too fast. If they communicated through written notes, he would, taking whole minutes to decipher a phrase but deciphering it nevertheless, the way he’d made himself expert on cell phones solely by studying the little booklets that came with them, warning Nabi Khan that even if the SIM card is changed, a caller who continues to use the same phone can be traced — by the police, by the Americans. Khan and his people had been told otherwise by the phone sellers, and that had been Casa’s entry into Khan’s inner circle.
The shroud, even rolled up tight, would not fit in the stone ear so he hid it in a far cupboard.
He is startled now to see David emerge from the house with a shroud of his own, then realises it is the skin of a birch tree peeled in one long piece, folded and tied up.