‘I have come to get back my wires.’ The man looks up into the canopies above the boundary wall of the house. ‘I can’t see them. They must have been taken down.’
Rohan finds himself staring speechlessly at the small soft-featured man, the light brown skin stubbled white at the jaws, a side tooth missing in the mouth.
‘You don’t seem to remember me at all,’ Abdul says.
‘I do. Come in, we have your wires.’ Rohan had spent an entire morning untangling them and then neatly winding them around foot-long sections of a rosewood branch.
The bird pardoner is a few paces behind him as they walk towards the garden shed. The north corner is full of smoke because he has been pruning, burning the twigs and branches that would otherwise carry disease. A golden-backed wood-pecker crosses their path with its undulating flight, dropping out of the whistling pine to escape the smoke and then rising to disappear into the tamarind tree, several of whose branches, bare in winter, are like a net of nerves overhead.
Rohan stops and turns to face the man. ‘I fail to see why you cannot make a living by another means.’
The bird pardoner lets the words hang in the air between them for a moment. Then he says, ‘I am sorry I didn’t come the day I was supposed to.’
‘You should be.’ Rohan is surprised to discover anger in his voice, and equally surprising is the speed with which the man’s eyes fill up with tears. But Rohan’s anger persists. ‘What excuse can there be for your conduct?’
Abdul wipes his eyes by lifting the loose front of his shirt to his face. ‘I can’t apologise enough for having inconvenienced you.’
‘I was speaking on behalf of the birds, who remained trapped up there for five days. Hungry, thirsty, terrified.’
The bird pardoner takes a sheet of folded paper from his pocket and holds it towards Rohan. ‘This will explain what has happened to me.’
Rohan takes the paper — with hesitation, nor does he unfold it.
‘After I put up the snares that afternoon, I got home and learned that my fourteen-year-old boy had run away to fight in Afghanistan. I couldn’t come to your house the next day to collect the birds because I had to go and find him. I took the train to Peshawar that very night.’
Rohan gazes at him and then at the piece of folded paper in his hand.
‘I couldn’t find him in Peshawar, and I have spent these months looking for him. Every time I enter the house his mother asks, “Do you have any news of him?” She has gone half mad and cries as if he’s already dead.’ The man points to the paper. ‘And then suddenly yesterday we got this letter. It was pushed under the door. He is being held in a warlord’s prison in Afghanistan. They captured him fighting for the Taliban, and the warlord’s people want to meet me in Peshawar to discuss how I can free him.’
Rohan slowly unfolds the sheet and reads the few lines.
Be present at electricity pole number 29 in the Coppersmiths’ Bazaar in Peshawar. Eight in the morning on Saturday 22 December. We will bring your son so you’ll know we have him.
‘The date is two days from now,’ Rohan says.
‘Yes. I thought I would come and see if you would let me put up the snares again, to catch some birds. I have no more money for the train fare to Peshawar. My wife has already sold her earrings and I my bicycle. They were the only bits of wealth we had.’
‘You must forgive me but I cannot allow you to put up the snares.’
‘Then I’ll have to find another place full of trees. The bicycle is gone so I’ll carry the cage filled with them on my back.’
Rohan looks at the letter. Don’t go to the police. We will kill him or hand him over to Americans to be tortured.
‘You probably don’t know,’ Abdul says, ‘but thousands of our boys have gone to Afghanistan.’
‘I do know.’
‘All I can say is if September’s terrorist attacks had to happen, I am sorry that they happened in my lifetime. They have destroyed me. And I live so far from where they took place. What does Heer know about New York, or New York about Heer? They are two different worlds.’
‘Is that your son’s name?’ Rohan asks, looking at the place in the letter where it is mentioned. ‘Jeo.’
The man nods and Rohan hands the paper back and turns and they continue towards the shed. Rohan takes the rosewood spools of wire — knotted branches like bones of trees — and puts them in a cloth bag and then watches the bird pardoner leave down the path and out of the gate, the ground littered with the last flowers of the rusty shield bearer. The exhaustion in the man’s eyes resembles the exhaustion in Basie’s eyes, who has been following rumours of Mikal ever since they came back from Peshawar, his spirit almost defeated, for now. His energy will revive with time no doubt. Whenever a boy from the neighbourhood ran away to help liberate Kashmiri Muslims from Indian rule, people continued to speculate, bringing true or false leads to his house for months and years. The missing boy was seen in a forest in Anantnag and was suffering from amnesia. He had started his life over again in China. He was abducted by dacoits and was being held for ransom right here in Pakistan, in a lime kiln near Quetta. The ghosts of the missing boys were said to haunt mansions in Delhi, they were said to have been strangled by gamblers in Mansehra, and burnt in houses in Srinagar. Once a young man appeared at a house claiming to be the missing son but he was an escaped mental patient.
Rohan walks to the gate. The bird pardoner has almost reached the end of the street, but Rohan has never raised his voice in public. He looks around for a child who can be asked to shout out and draw the man’s attention. Just then the bird pardoner happens to look over his shoulder and Rohan lifts his hand and beckons him.
‘I will go to Peshawar with you,’ he tells the man. ‘We will meet the warlord’s people together and see what can be done to bring back Jeo.’
*
He fears being unable to convince Naheed, Yasmin and Basie about the journey. He is prepared to remind them that in his youth he had visited Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Spain, Egypt, India and Turkey with little money or guidance. He is sure they would argue that that was a long time ago, so he does not tell them about the bird pardoner’s son. He tells them he is going to Peshawar to see his former pupil’s family, to thank them for the boxes of books, something that had had to be postponed during the last trip.
*
At the Coppersmiths’ Bazaar in Peshawar, they locate electricity pole number 29 and wait to be contacted. They are just outside a rickshaw repair shop, across from a stall collecting money and blood for the Taliban. Sounds of grief were heard from a number of houses in Rohan’s neighbourhood in Heer when Kabul fell. The cleric at the mosque near Rohan’s house had wept for most of his two-hour Friday sermon, the tears broadcast over the loudspeaker. The person in the Ardent Spirit van said that he had been reading the Koran when the news came of the West having conquered Afghanistan — and the Holy Book, overcome with shame, had disappeared from his hands.
It’s 8 a.m., the time specified in the letter, but a six-year-old boy is the only person who approaches them, asking if they want their shoes polished.
They continue with their wait and at ten o’clock a man wearing a Kalashnikov over his shoulder appears and asks them curtly to identify themselves.
He says it’ll take twenty thousand rupees to free the bird pardoner’s son.
‘I don’t have that kind of money,’ Abdul says, and the man sighs with irritation. The mountain peaks cut white fangs into the sky around the city, the December cold intense. The rivers and streams must be flowing with shards of ice.
‘The note said you would bring the boy,’ Rohan says.