The nearer she gets the more it struggles, the noose tightening so that blood issues and lands with a sound on the leaves below. As fast as she can she cuts away the wirework, ignoring the black vulture, the fierce beak as thick as her wrist — they can swallow bones, she knows. It has come to consume the dead birds and inside its eyes moves the knowledge of another world.
Holding the blood-drenched heron against herself with one arm she begins to climb down, suddenly aware that she has been hearing a knock on the gate for some time, realising also that the sound of the flies had disappeared a minute or two ago, as though they had gone elsewhere.
‘Is this the house of a Rohan-sahib?’ the man asks when she opens the door.
Buraq — the winged, woman-headed horse that took Muhammad to Paradise from the minaret in Jerusalem — is painted on the side of the truck parked behind him. Flying through a rain of roses.
‘Yes. But he’s away,’ she tells him. ‘Have you brought us more books?’
‘Books? No, I have the body of his son in there.’ He looks at the piece of paper in his hand. ‘Jeo, his name is, it says here.’
The heron falls onto the ground and makes no effort to stand, its bleeding neck slowly relaxing along the ground. The man is saying something and pointing to the back of the truck whose tailgate has been dropped for two other men to take out a body lying on a cot. Draped in a white sheet.
Naheed looks to either side of her. It is an ordinary morning. The sound of a radio is coming from an open door on the opposite side of the street — a woman listening to music as she does housework. Sure enough, the woman comes to the door holding a dripping broom and stands watching the body being borne towards Naheed, raises her hand to her mouth, and then goes back in and the music is switched off. Confirming the disaster for Naheed. Two vultures are sitting on the roof of the house next door and Naheed watches as another raises its head from the top of the truck.
The body is coming closer, with the shirt she had made for Jeo lying on top of the white sheet, the shirt’s grey fabric soaked in blood with flies circling around it. Her hands reach about in the air and finally take hold of the frangipani tree, the weak branch snapping and beginning to bleed thick white milk drop by drop, extremely fast.
She steps back as the gate is opened wide by the men, and she notices the puzzled expressions on their faces as they look upwards into the canopies — seeing the trapped birds whipping the air up there as though drowning, the feathers of all colours slowly sinking towards the ground. They set the cot in front of her, beside the dazed heron, and they lift the white sheet and open the folds of the shrouds underneath to expose Jeo’s swollen, pulped, blood-smeared face for her to identify.
*
Tara is looking through her basket of fabric cuttings. A little girl who lives in the same street as Rohan has come to ask for them, to make dresses for dolls.
When Tara awoke Naheed’s bed was empty so she knew she must have gone to the house to wait for the bird pardoner. Tara had overslept and missed her predawn prayers. It is a sin to miss a prayer, but she is allowed to offer the compensatory qaza prayer this afternoon. Allah has full knowledge of human weakness and has made provisions.
‘Why are you crying?’ the little girl asks.
‘I am not.’
‘Yes you are. I can see it.’
‘There is a war.’
She woke up thinking of Jeo and his decision to go to Afghanistan. She has been wondering if Mikal is responsible for this crisis, Mikal who came here to ask Tara for Naheed’s hand last year — just days before Naheed’s wedding to Jeo. Has he now taken Jeo to Afghanistan so he will be killed? But, no, she mustn’t give in to these thoughts. Allah will bring Jeo home any day, perfectly safe. And since Allah disapproves of slander she mustn’t think or say anything about Mikal until she has full knowledge of all the facts.
The knees of her trousers are minutely wrinkled from the extra prayers she has said over the last five days to ask Allah to look after Jeo in the war zone. But she cannot jettison her fears completely because 2001 had begun on a Monday, a sign according to the almanacs that the weak would suffer greatly at the hands of the strong and the unthinking during these twelve months.
She hands the scraps of fabric to the girl who is thrilled by their brightness and colour, the garden of printed flowers and geometric designs.
‘You shouldn’t be out here this early,’ Tara tells her as she leaves.
‘There is a big crowd near my house,’ the girl says. ‘I think it’s a wedding. I came out to look at it and then came to your house.’
Tara fills a bowl of water and sprinkles it on the henna tree that grows in a fractured pot on the roof terrace.
She thought she was facing a madman when Mikal had appeared here and said he loved Naheed. The unfairness of it had almost reduced her to tears — just when she thought she had put her daughter out of Sharif Sharif’s reach. She knew Mikal of course, knew of his troubled past and his disappearances, having seen Jeo and him together at Rohan’s house.
‘Surely you see that as her mother I cannot allow Naheed to marry you,’ she had said. ‘You cannot provide a better future for her than a doctor.’
He said that he would tell everything to Jeo and Rohan and have the wedding cancelled, his eyes intense, the eyebrows meeting in the middle so his glance seemed weighed down by some dark mystery.
‘We love each other.’
‘Is that how you will repay Jeo, by stealing his bride? The boy whose family took you in.’ His face had crumpled at that but she had continued, her own dreads and distress too great. ‘You cannot betray Jeo.’
‘I cannot betray Naheed either.’
‘I would like to know where you will live. In that room they say you rent in a dogfight and rubbish-heap district?’
‘There is nothing wrong with where I live,’ he said quietly. ‘My parents lived there.’
As if the story of his parents didn’t frighten her. The father vanishing as he tried to bring about a revolution after which there would be no God, and the mother wearing herself out searching for him, slapped by policemen and officials from whom she thought she could demand answers.
Tara had said this to him and he was perfectly motionless, almost as though he had died standing up. Without knowing it, the unfortunate boy had become the outlet for the loneliness and suffering of her own life.
‘Even if she loves you, you should do her the kindness of never seeing her again. Her life will be better with Jeo.’
She promised Allah she would say five hundred prayers of gratitude if the wedding went ahead as planned. And she followed the trail of the chained mendicant as he passed through the streets of Heer and asked him to add a link to his chains: her wish was Naheed’s happiness, for Mikal to disappear.
And it was granted — the link must have vanished from about the mendicant’s person.
Now, as she waters the henna plant, she tells herself to trust in Allah again.
There is a note of feedback from the mosque’s loudspeaker and the cleric clears his throat. Tara becomes alert. No prayer is called at this hour, so it must be a special announcement, and they are mostly about a death in the neighbourhood, or a lost child. She thinks of the little girl who just left with the fabrics.
‘Gentlemen, please listen to the following announcement …’
Sometimes on hearing this, Naheed mutters to herself, ‘And what about us ladies?’ — earning herself a look of admonition from Tara, who is unable to accept criticism in any matter concerning the mosque. The man announces that Jeo, the son of Rohan-sahib, the former headmaster of Ardent Spirit, has died, that the body is laid out at home and the funeral will be held after the noon prayers. The words are like a blow to her head and chest but for several seconds their meaning eludes her. There is pain but it cannot find its focus as she descends the stairs slowly and goes out of the door.