The Blind Man’s Garden by Nadeem Aslam

Previously published in The Herald magazine. 

Nadeem Aslam’s latest novel traverses certain territory familiar to his previous book The Wasted Vigil, but The Blind Man’s Garden is a stronger, better plotted book with a large, extended narrative set in a highly detailed and researched frame. Not just is it intense and thoughtful, it will be highly informative to people unaware of the historical tensions in the Af/Pak region. 

In a town in Punjab, Jeo, young medical student, and his ‘almost brother’ Mikal secretly go to Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9/11 to help tend to the wounded. Their plans are foiled very soon after they are smuggled into the country and both find themselves caught between warlords, American soldiers and the remnants of the Taliban regime. Aslam examines the effects of war on the entire region by examining its effect on families and relationships. Writes Aslam, ‘The opposite of war is not peace but civilisation, and civilisation is purchased with violence and cold-blooded murder. With war.’

Jeo, with his more romantic notions of saving the world is clearly the weaker of the two from the very start, while Mikal, named after the warrior angel is armed with his ability to navigate via the stars; his skills with arms and ammunition mark him out almost as a sort of Pakistani McGyver - he is the true hero on an epic journey to return home, and he will survive no matter what the unforgiving terrain throws at him, understanding that some of the men he encounters ‘want the birth of a new world, and will take death and repeat it and repeat it and repeat it until that birth results’.

The Blind Man’s Garden has peripheries that creep steadily outwards but never sprawl without restraint or control. Aslam does not just examine the relationships of the two men and their family, but also of many of the people they encounter including those left behind in Pakistan are Rohan, Jeo’s father, is tormented by his own mistakes and Naheed, Jeo’s wife, is certain only that her true lover will return for her, an American operative, the young leader of a tribe in South Waziristan, his sister and their father and ‘men who were true believers and read the Koran as ravenously as they devoured meat and sugar and milk, and men who came to the jihad because, well, to be honest…there wasn’t much else to do’. There are multiple strange, interesting and tense relationships at work here, all ripe with a great deal of emotion - heavy and breathless at times, taut and spare at others but always very seriously crafted. Aslam’s language is heavily crafted with constant insights: children at a madrassa pray ‘the way they ate, with a deep hunger’, a face holds the ‘look of unbreakable isolation’, a dead man’s mouth is ‘a purple blotch, full of syrupy plasma’ and mountains are locked in the ‘white iron of winter’. 

This is a very disconcerting, ambitious novel, full of important ideas and grand, sweeping images created by highbrow, ‘literary’ language. It is not an easy book to read but is gratifying to those who persevere - the final third of The Blind Man’s Garden is quite something else, almost a thriller in its pacing without ever letting go of its more cerebral content. As much as it is about the war on terror and its effects on religion, nature and society, it is also about longing, loyalty and the haunting nature of the past.