One Grain Amongst the Storm

A Mélange of memoirs, fiction, short stories, verses, book reviews and uncorked angst.

The Blind Man’s Garden –A Review

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blindmanNadeem Aslam’s The Blind Man’s Garden is a dark story of a devout Muslim, proud and penitent of the lost glory of Islam, set against the turbulent aftermath of 9/11 massacre.  Afghanistan is smoldering in the grisly conflict between Al Qaeda and American forces. Wolfish local warlords are adding fuel to the hellfire by their cavernous greed and brinkmanship.  Pakistan is not far behind where the religious bigots are inciting the unsuspecting locals to join the jihad against infidels. Worse, the self-styled defenders of Islam are ruthlessly ripping apart the social fabric already in tatters.

Together with his liberal wife Sofia, Rohan had founded ‘Ardent Spirit’, a school to enrich the upcoming generations with the brilliance of Islamic intelligence.  Unfortunately, Sofia, gradually turns into a disbeliever.  In order to redeem her soul, Rohan withholds crucial drugs from her during her second pregnancy leading to fatal complications. He rounds up and destroys her elaborate paintings recreating nature to save her from eternal perdition. He passes on his unwavering devotion to his son, flooding him with stories of martyrs who spilled their blood to the glory of their creed.

After Sofia’s death, he relinquishes the wealth received from ancestors and consequently, his rights to the school property, honouring tenets of Islam. In the process he cedes control to Ahmed, a fanatic who is a puppet in the hands of the ISI. Ahmed alters the motto of the school, step by step, to “Islam is the purpose of life and death”. The school transmogrifies into an incubator of zealots who plan and execute subversive acts in Kashmir and elsewhere. When Ahmed is reportedly killed in Afghanistan by ‘infidels’, the command slips into the hands of Major Kyra, a rabid, ruthless extremist who plans systematic destruction of Rohan.  Meanwhile, Rohan’s son Jeo who is training as a doctor secretly enrolls with an agency that is sending youths to help the brethren suffering in Afghanistan. Jeo is accompanied by Mikal, also a foster son of Rohan, to the battlefronts. Both are eventually betrayed and sold to warlords who hurl them into the vortex of war between the Americans and Al Quaida. Jeo leaves behind his wife Naheeda who was in love with Mikal but was hurriedly married to him. While Jeo is not so fortunate, Mikal is captured and brutally interrogated by the US forces in a camp before he is eventually released with disastrous consequences. Beyond that, it is a story of many turns and twists where the fortunes of the main characters take wild, gratuitous and sometimes absurd swings.

The Blind Man’s Garden is a frequently graphic account of gory excesses, grisly violence, stark treacheries and abysmal conditions prevailing in the two countries where life and honour seem cheaper than filth in the gutters. However, reading Nadeem Aslam is like entering a rippling river of metaphors and imageries that liquefy the acridness of pages laden with accounts of religious bigotry and reigning decay. These images are hypnotic and hard-hitting, symbolizing much more than what seems to be at stake at the moment: the yearning of the human spirit to retain the beauty and purity of life, its dreams and emotions in an asphyxiating, decadent social order.

Aslam opens the book with a touching imagery of candles scattered across a house like injuries: “wounds are said to emit light under certain conditions –touch them and the brightness will stay on hands– and as the candles burn Rohan thinks of each flame as an injury somewhere in the house.” Soon after that we come upon the chilling symbolism of the bird snares set in the trees of Rohan’s garden without his permission. It not only foretells the fates of many of characters but is a lasting allegory of humans caught in the perilous state of affairs. Indeed, reader’s path will be littered with radiant images at every turn and he risks missing them in the blink of an eye. It is amazing how his diction moulds itself to reflect the moment’s mood, its speed, the radiance, the fragrance or sordidness. A romantic rendezvous under the night sky is captured swiftly and summarily, “She is with him at the top of his night wall, the snow leopard in her arms and the stars falling above the three of them in a tremendous living flood that reaches down to brush against them in slow currents of soft glass grit.” Somewhere in the book, there is a compelling symbolism of religion incarcerating life, when Mikal is lying outside the mosque by the lake, “Beside him on the facade, an ant is wandering in the shallow trough that forms the word ‘Allah’, carrying a grain of wheat in its mouth, trying to climb out of the word but falling back into it again and again.”

The author can choose to be very direct and brusque, as he is in the scathing outburst against what has become of  “his nation where the taps don’t have water… where the butcher sells rotten meat to the milkman and is in turn sold milk whose volume has been increased by lethal white chemicals, and they both sell their milk and meat to the doctor who prescribes unnecessary medicines in order to win bonuses from drug companies… a shameless beggar country full of liars, hypocrites, beaters of women and children and animals and the weak, brazen rapists and unpunished murderers… delusional morons and fools who wanted independence from the British and a country of their own, but who can’t wait to leave it, emigrate, emigrate, emigrate to Britain, USA, Canada, Australia, Dubai, Kuwait, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Japan…, anywhere, anywhere, anywhere, anywhere, but Pakistan, they can’t wait to get out of there, having reduced the country to a wasteland, their very own caliphate of rubble.”

The book has a rather tenuous plotline, more so towards the end, but fortunately, that is not what Aslam has set out to achieve. He has vividly captured a society which is more an outcome of religious dogmatism rather than vice versa, that goes to any extremes to reinforce its fences that were invented once to sustain humans but are shortchanging humanity to sustain the moribund ecosystem now.

The Blind Man’s Garden
Author: Nadeem Aslam
Pages: 415

38 comments

  1. His ‘Maps for Lost Lovers’ and ‘The Wasted Vigil’ are on the shelf, waiting. The plot of this one sounds a little complicated for me, maybe will decide after finishing off the other two 🙂

  3. I am getting repetitive on your comments, Uma, but that is because of the paucity of words at my command. You have, as usual, done a brilliant job of evoking the mood of the book in your review. That, hitherto, has been the norm in your reviews. The review gives the reader an idea of how he would feel when he actually reads the book.

  7. I’ve been meaning to read his ‘Maps for Lost Lovers’ for a while. Will now have to add this to the list. So many books, so little time.

      1. I have started reading this and am half way through it. Hasn’t disappointed me yet though he paints a bleak and depressing portrait of the times. Yet I think I love his writing. I find it quiet remarkable that he says till the age of fourteen he had studied in Urdu-medium schools and his knowledge was English was just adequate. “When I came to Britain and I didn’t have any English, I slowly learned English by copying out great books. One of the books was As I Lay Dying, another was Moby Dick. I copied out these whole books by hand. I wanted to see how they were put together.”

        1. Subroto, I have a feeling he has captured the times well. Thanks for sharing the quote. He seems to be blessed with remarkable lingustic competence.

  9. A fascinating review US. I must say I find the overall subject somewhat gloomy…wondering how we – the human race – can work things out.

    The desolation of those lands, letting us know what we are in for?
    Cheers, ic

    1. Many thanks, Ian, I hope the madness is not terminal. Religion is no subtitute to hard work and prosperity, nor is it a license to hate and destroy sanity.

  10. Great review, Uma. I’m kind of on the same page as Ian with regard to the subject matter and the outlook. I recently cancelled my subscription to the NY Times and enjoy not being able to match names, faces, places and dates to the same, relentless stories about greed, violence, deceit and exploitation.

    1. John, I have not unsubscribed from the newspapers here but I don’t read them. I make a little money instead when I sell them to the scrap dealer who invariably pays me more than the cost incurred. I also hate 24X7 news channels for the same reasons and wish I could sell them too! I know I am in a real danger of becoming statistics some day but why be reminded of it day by day?
      Thanks for liking the review.

  11. I read this after reading the post about current India – and felt this should’ve been an inspiration or rather a driving factor of the other post.

    1. Arzvi, the driving factor of the other post was the monstrous rape in Mumbai and I read The Blind Man’s Garden a few days after that. The book hammered home the reality how closely our country is following its separated twin. I was shocked to come across the outburst quoted above but I believe most of us are thinking exactly the same.

  14. Your review encourages me to pick book. Isn’t the same story of rotting society happening here or is it the overdose of the gruesome and the blighted to sell the media?

  16. Wow. That looks like a very interesting read about a tough and touchy subject – a window into a mind I can’t understand. Looks like one for my Goodreads “to read” list. Thanks!

  17. I always was curious about the stories written in backdrop of Afghanistan and Pakistan. To satisfy that I read all of Khalid Hosseini and like.

    After reading your review I am sure I’ll be grabbing a copy of this soon.

    1. In that case, Jyoti, do read The Blind Man’s Garden. You may also like Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, which you will find reviewed under the Book Reviews tab.

  18. Thanks for sharing this beautifully written review, Uma. You really have a way with words, and the author of this book is very lucky to have such a detailed and descriptive review of his work! I can’t imagine too much worse than family being ripped apart by religious beliefs. To think of how Pakistan might have been 150 years ago (I’m guessing it wasn’t a hotbed for religious zealots back then) compared to now is really heartbreaking.

    1. In fact, Kris, I consider myself lucky instead to have read Aslam’s book -I nearly skipped it because of its subject matter which, as it turned out, he has handled exquisitely. Yes, it is a tragedy for both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Thanks for the compliment.

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