‘It’s the material for making a boat,’ he tells Casa. ‘I am taking it to the lake, I’ll build it there.’
Casa helps him carry to the water’s edge a box of implements and also the long pieces of wood for the vessel’s frame, the sky brightening overhead.
He examines the two antler-handled awls.
‘They are for making holes in the bark. The canoe is sewn together with spruce roots,’ David explains. ‘With these.’ The peeled roots, like thick glistening strings, are in bracelet-size hoops. ‘No nails or screws are used to hold the canoe together.’
He unrolls the birch bark, like a length of stiff cloth about a quarter of an inch thick, one side white, the other a dark gold. There are smaller pieces too but the longest is about fifteen feet long and forty inches wide.
Apparently the canoe is an American Indian thing.
‘And this is for the finer work,’ David says, looking into a bag and bringing out a knife with a blade made out of a straight razor. ‘It’s called a crooked knife — crooked because its handle is crooked not the blade.’ He hands it to Casa. ‘The thumb rests along the bent part of the handle — the native people did not have a vice to clamp their work so they held it in one hand and used the knife with the other.’
Casa grips it as demonstrated.
‘But, Casa, I think you should rest. Go back and lie down, and you should have something to eat. I am sure Marcus is up — I’ll come and join you in a while.’
The missiles that landed in Casa’s jihad training camp were named after an American Indian weapon — Tomahawk. Casa knows other words too like Comanche and Apache and Chinook. First the Americans exterminate the Indians, then name their weapons and warplanes after them. What did those Indians do to make the white Americans respect them?
HE DRINKS THE RED TEA sitting at the table with David and Marcus — on the farthest chair from them, the one nearest the door. Marcus is expressing his worry about the perfume factory being too cold during the night.
‘I don’t know why you didn’t sleep in the house.’
‘You are very kind.’
‘And remind me to find you a prayer mat.’
He is grateful for the gentleness they are displaying towards him, and feels he should convey his gratitude to them — show them somehow that he too is mindful of their well-being.
‘You are from the USA?’ he asks David. ‘You flew here?’
‘Yes.’
‘You should be careful about flying.’
David shrugs. ‘Why?’
‘In case the Jews repeat the attacks of 11 September 2001.’
David gets up suddenly and pours more tea into Marcus’s cup. And the Englishman too becomes somewhat animated, abruptly voluble. ‘Look at the three of us here. Like a William Blake prophecy! America, Europe and Asia.’ He points to the ceiling. ‘I must take down the book one of these days.’
‘My hands are already aching,’ says David. He has spent the last three hours with the canoe — it’s past nine and he is getting ready to go to the city.
‘I’ll help you build it,’ Casa offers.
For the time being they are his only allies, the only people who would try to act if Nabi Khan were to come through this door right now.
Two hours ago he himself was thinking of taking the car, but the fact now is that if he saw someone trying to steal it he would do his best to prevent the theft.
He now asks about the nailed books, and Marcus tells him it had been done by his wife, the unfortunate woman losing her hold on reality in her concluding days. Using her long hair to dust surfaces. He remembers to make appropriately sympathetic noises, though of course being female it must have been easy for her to fall into madness, Muhammad, peace be upon him, saying, ‘Women have less reason than men.’
Marcus has told him he is a Muslim but he must still be vigilant in case the other two try to convert him to Christianity. He walks back to the perfume factory through the sun-heated orchard, a peppermint lizard squiggling away at his approach. Near by a black beetle is trying to maintain a jittery balance on the rim of a tulip blossom, exactly resembling the one that is painted on a wall in the kitchen. Something smells of resin. Something else slow and furry can be glimpsed behind a fern — a striped caterpillar. He hears a flutter and looks up to see a flash of red in a silver-leafed tree. He can’t take the car and disappear towards Kabul or Kandahar because Gul Rasool’s men have cordoned off Usha. They’ll want to know who he is, how he acquired his injury. As he enters the perfume factory, the thought of being close to the idol down there is suddenly a distress to him. Afghanistan is a Muslim country. The entire world has to submit to Islam one day: when the Messiah arrives just before Judgement Day he will issue an invitation for all to become Muslim — those refusing will be eradicated so that the earth is inhabited only by the believers.
The Pharaoh’s wife Asiya and Jesus’s mother Mary are waiting in Heaven to be married to Muhammad, peace be upon him.
Sitting in an alcove before the smiling statue, to catch the sunlight pouring from above, he looks into the notebooks stacked on a shelf half an arm’s length away. Each page filled with what appear to be drawings of constellations but are in fact the chemical formulae of various perfume molecules. Small palaces of tangled geometry. The bindings are the green of grass stains on white cloth, the colour the world appears through night-vision goggles. He had been given a pair of these glasses by someone who had come to the jihad training camp from Chechnya; he had taken them from a dead Russian soldier there and had come to Pakistan with a load of antique carpets to fund the war in his homeland.
He tries to see if the stone head can be nudged in any direction. It should be taken away and sold to non-Muslims to finance the jihad against them.
He is relieved Lara wasn’t in the kitchen while he was having breakfast. A woman seen is a Western idea, he had been told by a cleric at a madrassa when he was a child. These dozens of clerics — the emir, the haji, the hafiz, the maulana, the sheikh, the hazrat, the alhaaj, the shah, the mullah, the janab, the janabeaali, the khatib, the molvi, the kari, the kazi, the sahibzada, the mufti, the olama, the huzoor, the aalam, the baba, the syed — had frightened him as they preached when he was very young, moving unpredictably across the full register of the human voice, from the whisper to the growl to the full-throated shout, now screaming, now weeping, now vituperative and righteous, now plaintive and melodious. At the start they would recite a few verses of the Koran to signify that both the speaker and the listener were now in the realm of the sacred, but what followed was, in fact, history — a lament for Islam’s lost glory and power, a once-proud civilisation brought low by the underhandedness of others, yes, but mainly by the loss of faith among the Muslims themselves, the men decadent, the women disobedient. The child Casa was told to supplicate during prayers and beg forgiveness for not loving Muhammad enough, peace be upon him, a man whose sweat was more perfumed than a shipful of roses.
Ay naunehalan-e-Islam, Ay farzandan-e-Tawheed — O children of Islam, O sons of the Sacred Creed …
And so Casa and the other children had wept. By the time he was about twelve he and the other boys at the madrassa hadn’t seen a woman for five years. There was a rumour that a group of older boys had a photograph of a female face, cut up into ten pieces and hidden in diverse corners and recesses. Travelling assorted distances, the fragments came together now and then to form her.
Casa had longed to arrive at the moment when he’d see her — the thought of it was like a butterfly attached to his heart on a string — and when at last he did lay eyes on her he shook at the very phenomenon of her. Unable to find his breath or control his heartbeat, he had lost consciousness. The first thing he remembered upon coming to was that during the Crusades beautiful girls had been sent to seduce and corrupt Salahudin and his generals, the Christian priests assuring the girls forgiveness for all sin incurred in the service of their religion.