One of his feet has emerged from the blanket and Rohan begins to rearrange the folds to cover it, unable to bear how vulnerable and naked to the world it looks. There is a small rust-brown mole halfway along the arch and it is something he didn’t know about his son. The mystery of another human being. The places these feet have trod and will tread, of which the father will have no knowledge. He leans forward and places a kiss on his grown-up son’s face.
In the bathroom he performs the ritual ablutions and comes out and begins to read the Koran, asking Allah to look after her in her death, just as He is looking after him and his children in their lives. To forgive her. The subject of the Koran is mankind, and for him the verse that induces most fear is in the chapter entitled Man. In itself it is somewhat beautiful, speaking of the rewards awaiting the faithful and the steadfast in Afterlife, but when he had quoted it to Sofia in her dying moments she had corrected a small mistake of his. It was evidence that she knew intimately and precisely what she was rejecting. And there lies the source of his terror for her soul. Sofia had died an unbeliever, an apostate.
Until the time she is resurrected on Judgement Day, she will be subjected to torments, the consequences of her rejection of God. After the world ends she will be cast into Hell. In her last hours he had tried desperately to make her repent. It was a gradual and unsudden thing, her loss of faith, growing slowly around them like a plant, its rings widening.
Apostasy was punishable by death in Pakistani law so it had to remain a secret after she revealed it to him.
‘I will continue to pretend for the sake of appearances and for our safety. But I have to share with you the fact that I am no longer a believer.’
He invited distinguished clerics and holy women to the house to help her see again the beauty of belief. In his mind he accused her of misrepresenting herself to him before marriage, because he would never have chosen someone with such monstrous doubts. The marriage was in all likelihood null — a Muslim could not remain married to an unbeliever — but he also kept reassuring himself that her condition was reversible, waiting for God to make His presence felt to her once more.
After the first child the doctors had warned her against having another but he was somewhat glad when Jeo was conceived, thinking the marvel of a new life would renew her soul.
He reads the Holy Book, trying not to think of how her beautiful body is receiving injuries inside the ground at this very moment, a toy for Allah’s demons. Tortures known as Kabar ka Aazab. She is alive down there, fully sensate and conscious, the underworld from where no smoke or cry escapes. A person is brought to life immediately after the grave is closed up and is even said to clearly hear the receding footsteps of the men who had come to bury him.
After her death he gave away Ardent Spirit to Ahmed the Moth, wishing to concentrate on the alleviation of her death-suffering, fully able to imagine her calling out in pain from beneath his feet. There was little time for Jeo and Yasmin, the eight-year-old daughter. He would leave to meet with scholars and seek rare books, pursuing doctrines, commentaries and records of controversies, searching for anything that might absolve her of her sin, coming back from some journeys more shaken than when he had left, at peace from some others.
While he was preoccupied with this, Ahmed the Moth distorted his vision beyond recognition and adapted Ardent Spirit’s crescent-shaped layout to his own ends. A green flag was designed with six flames arranged in a curve at its centre, each flame rising out of a pair of crossed swords. It flies on the roof of Ardent Spirit every day, and the boys wear green turbans which, when unwound, reveal the same six swords-and-flames on them. The six centres of vanished glory, whose loss is to be avenged with blade and fire.
In the small bathroom Rohan washes the tears off his face and performs his ablutions again. When the apostate dies the spot of earth which is to be his grave cries out in vehemence and pain, unwilling to receive him. As she breathed her last breaths he had kept asking her quietly, ‘Tell me what you see,’ because in a minute, in ten minutes, everything would have become irreversible, because it is too late to repent once the dying eyes begin to glimpse the Angel of Death.
But after two decades of thought he does sometimes suspect that his conduct had resembled sin, the sin of pride. Had he really decided that Allah lacked compassion, even for an apostate? Yes, he sometimes fears that his grief at her death — and before that at her doubts and renunciation — had driven him to something resembling an offence. How can he know for certain that the area of earth that became her grave hadn’t rejoiced at her death, ‘adorning itself like a bride, exulting in having to embrace her soon’, as the books of spiritual devotion say about the virtuous?
She had founded the school with him and had taught there but disagreements had emerged very soon and she had finally stopped teaching when he expelled a pupil whose mother was revealed to be a prostitute.
He raises the louvred blinds and looks out at the train tracks and the Grand Trunk Road running along them. Eternity suspended over human time, the stars are shining above the world like grains of light, this world that she had loved and called the only Paradise she needed. Preparing himself for blindness he commits everything to memory as she committed everything to paper, painting the garden’s flowers and birds onto his mind, and for several years after she was gone the garden looked as though something important had befallen it. The limes and the acacia trees seemed to mourn her, the rosewood and the Persian lilacs, the peepal and the corals, and all their different fruits, berries and spores, the seeds tough as cricket balls, or light enough to remain afloat for half an hour. Inside the earth the roots mourned her even without having seen her, and the white teak whose bark came off in plates the size of footprints, the lemon tree that produced twenty-five baskets of fruit each year. He was sure that all of them, as well as the lightning-fast lizards of the garden, were mourning her with him, and the stiffly rustling dragonflies and the blue-winged carpenter bees and the black chains of the ants and the tough-carapaced beetles and the various snails. In grief he had whispered her name as he walked the red paths set loose in the garden, and the word had gone among the glistening black brilliance of the crows and the butterflies floating in the sunlight — the Himalayan Pierrot, the Chitrali Satyr, the blue tigers and the common leopard and the swallowtails and the peacocks. She had loved them and the world in which they existed, saying, ‘God is just a name for our wonder.’ There was no soul, only consciousness. No divine plan, only nature, and we were simply among the innumerable results of its randomness. Saying, ‘I will miss this because this is all there is,’ her last words, and then she had slipped out of his life, consigning him to decades of apprehension on her behalf, because he knew that the soul existed, and not only that, it was accountable to Allah and His providential rage. Unlike her he knew that the dead were not beyond harm.
6
Arriving in Peshawar, Rohan accompanies Jeo to the hospital where the boy is to spend the next month. Afterwards, the early morning sunlight flooding the roads, he takes a rickshaw towards his former pupil’s house, to thank the family for the books. It’s much colder here in the mountains, 1,600 feet above sea level, and he buttons his coat to the neck and turns up the collar. Out there are mountains higher than the Alps placed onto the Pyrenees. Glaciers that Tamerlane’s soldiers had had to crawl over on hands and knees in 1398.
It is appropriate in some ways that the books had arrived in a truck painted brilliantly with mythological creatures, with saints and figures of legend, birds and garlands of flowers. The rickshaw is decorated similarly, and as it moves deeper into the city it encounters a crowd of demonstrators, the roads suddenly filled with men of all ages, holding placards and banners. A display of support for victims of the war in Afghanistan. As the rally grows the rickshaw-wallah has to reduce his speed, and soon enough they can neither move back nor go forwards, and so Rohan gets out and begins to walk with the crowd flowing like a river through the bazaars and streets, the sun falling through the noise and the raised placards. ‘Why didn’t three thousand Jews turn up for work at the World Trade Center on 11 September …’ someone is asking, while another says, ‘The West wants to take over Pakistan’s nuclear weapons …’