He hasn’t said anything about himself except that he is an itinerant labourer from a village in the nearer ridges of the mountain above them.
He thanks Marcus for the bandage and asks if there is anything he can do to repay his kindness. Marcus tells him to just rest.
‘Was it a landmine — your hand?’
Marcus shakes his head and stands up to leave.
‘Does it hurt?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘I am sorry. What happened?’
‘The Taliban cut it off.’
Casa does not miss a beat. The information not even remotely troubling or unusual to him. ‘You stole something?’
‘Yes.’
‘May Allah keep us all on the correct path,’ he says and then lies down again.
When Richard the Lionheart displayed brute strength by breaking an iron bar with his sword, Saladin’s delicately sharp scimitar countered it by slicing a silk handkerchief in two. What has been lost is the desire to believe in and take pride in Saladin’s gentleness.
Marcus goes up the stairs, giving the Buddha a last glance — its stone the light-brown colour of an apple moth found in English gardens, having arrived there from Australia.
He emerges into the clean clear morning. The world is apricot light and blue shadows. In sura 27, Solomon laughs on hearing the conversation of two ants — a rare example of humour in the Koran — and there is a third-century Buddhist version of that tale with two butterflies instead of ants. It’s no point sharing with the boy the delightful essential idea that tales can travel, or that two sets of people oceans apart can dream up similar sacred myths.
And yet he can comprehend the believers’ anxiety about pollution — of not wishing to be infected or contaminated by their surroundings. On the flight back from India decades ago — he’d gone to visit the fabled suppliers of perfume raw materials along Bombay’s Muhammad Ali Road — he had discerned Hanuman and Ganesh and Radha in the shapes of the clouds below him, so overwhelming had been the sight of the Hindu gods and goddesses, so strongly had their flying and dancing forms imprinted themselves onto his consciousness. Little wonder Sanskrit poetry celebrated the beauty of the lifted foot and the lotus-stalk waist. All this hadn’t been there on the way into India. ‘Pollution’ had occurred while he was there.
Iris-root butter from Florence. Lemon. Bulgarian rose. The wood of the Indian oudh tree that has been eaten by fungus. These were some of the ingredients he contemplated when he blended the perfume for Zameen — the daughter he has been missing now for longer than he had actually known her.
The sweet-smelling putchuk of Kashmir was used in Europe in 288 BC as an offering to Apollo.
*
When a soldier dies his weapon is referred to by his brothers on the battlefield as ‘the widow’. In addition, Casa remembers being told that he must guard his gun ‘like his eyes’. Looking for his Kalashnikov, he begins to retrace his path from the night of the shabnama. He goes through the orchard, trying to see if his blood is in the dust. Not spilled, but rather given to Allah.
He shouldn’t have said anything to Marcus about the Buddha. He should rein in his words when talking to these people, must try to be pleasant. If he’s banished from here he’d have no safety.
He has to maintain composure. And he must look for his rifle.
‘You have been a thought in the mind of Allah from all eternity.’ With these words of encouragement the fourteen-year-old Casa and one thousand others had been sent from his madrassa in Pakistan in 1996. To conquer Kabul from the seven warring factions. To take it in the name of One True God. ‘History is Allah working through man,’ they had been told. ‘You are not new to this: you are taking back what has always been yours.’ In the flow of secular Christian time they would have appeared to be just a band of ragged boys, but in the corresponding year of the Islamic calendar — 1417 — they were warriors who were drawing their swords and throwing the scabbards aside for ever, tightening their clothes to themselves in order to fight unhindered, a continuation of a long line from Muhammad onwards, kings of tomorrow, who hated the carnage they must cause but cause it they must.
Swarms of their Datsun trucks with heavy.50 calibre machine guns, cannons, anti-aircraft guns and multiple-barrelled rocket launchers mounted in the beds — all supplied by Saudi Arabia and the ISI, the lovers of Allah — had swept into Kabul. The former Communist president — who, as the head of the Afghan secret service, had sanctioned and overseen the torture of thousands of Afghans during his time — had sought shelter in the UN compound, thinking it sacrosanct, but five Taliban had just walked in during the night, the guards having fled earlier at the sound of the gunfire from the city limits.
Beating the president and his brother until they were senseless, the Taliban bundled the pair into a pickup and drove to the darkened Presidential Palace. There they castrated him and dragged his body behind a jeep for several rounds of the Palace, and then they shot him dead. The brother was similarly tortured and throttled to death. Just before daybreak Casa’s convoy arrived at the scene and — because it was important to terrorise the inhabitants of the city into submission — he assisted in the hanging up of the two swollen and bloodied cadavers from steel-wire nooses on a traffic post, just a few blocks from the UN compound.
He is about to emerge from the orchard when he sees that the old man and the woman are there a few yards ahead of him. Retreating to a safe distance he watches her face through the branches, the leaves glowing bright from the sun. He feels engulfed in a green fire as he looks at her. Anyone can envision Paradise, can try to clothe the other side with the colours of this world. But whenever during his time as a taxi driver the Western passengers questioned him about the Islamic afterlife, their prurience was an offence to him. He didn’t know a single Muslim whose first thought on hearing the word ‘Paradise’ was Seventy-two virgins. The trials of the world were so immense and harsh that committing sins was unavoidable, and so on being granted entry into Paradise a believer was first and foremost glad to have been spared Hell. That was the first thought, and the second and the third and the fourth and the fifth. Everything else came much later, including the demands of that thing which was the first thing the angels created when Allah asked them to mould Adam out of clay.
Parental figures. Women of Lara’s age are what he looks at most closely when he gets a chance. Avoiding the disturbing faces of the younger ones, thankful when the burkas kept them out of sight during the Taliban regime. A residue from childhood — when he was without any sense of time, when he thought adults had come into being the size they were — there is a faint trace of envy in him even today when he sees a boy accompanied by his mother. Her hand must deliver anaesthetic as well as pain when she slaps the child over a misdemeanour.
He wonders about the magnitude of the sin he is committing by looking at Lara’s face, even though his thoughts are pure. A wish in him to prolong the tenderness he is suddenly experiencing in his breast. A mother. An aunt or older sister or cousin. He tears himself away from the comfort at last and turns back, to find another path towards the lake.
*
Lara and Marcus are spreading washed clothing onto a rope in the sunlight. There are no pegs so they are using large safety pins instead. If the pomegranates were in season, she thinks, they could have distributed them among the pockets to weigh down the clothes against the wind.
‘Do you miss Britain?’
‘I think about it, yes. It’s only natural.’
On one of her white sleeves, not fully bleached, one-third of a pale orange-coloured blossom is visible.