Nadeem Aslam, the 46-year-old British-Pakistani writer, makes sense of the world through exploring many lives, one book at a time. If Season of the Rainbirds (1993), his debut, was an exploration into the tensions between two ways of life — the traditional Islamic way of life and the modern, secular way — in Pakistan, Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) burrowed into honour killing.
The Wasted Vigil (2009), set in the ruins of Afghanistan, told a compelling story of people devastated by the sweeping “sadness of geography”.
Aslam’s fourth and latest novel, The Blind Man’s Garden, is a dissection of the war on terror, and the ravages and human cost of such a war. In the novel, set in Pakistan (and Afghanistan) in the aftermath of 9/11, Aslam revisits the country of his origin after two decades. “It is my return to Pakistan in a way,” says Aslam. And since the texture of Pakistani life is “more or less the same” as the texture of northern Indian life, the novel is his return to the subcontinent as well.
Aslam says he can “afford” to “come back” as his “understanding” of Pakistan and the subcontinent has “deepened” over the years. “Pakistan is 65-years-old. Its problems are the problems of a developing country. Most of its problems are the problems of India as well. They are exactly the same: Poverty, lack of opportunity, discrimination, the burgeoning population for which there aren’t enough resources, the horror of what goes on in our factories and on our buildings’ sites,” says Aslam.
Aslam says that there is an “extraordinary record” we’ve lived through in the recent past, beginning with 9/11 to the Arab Spring: the war on terror, call to jihad, Guantanamo Bay, the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, Abu Ghraib, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the “murder” of Osama Bin Laden.
“I wanted to write a story which would encompass as many of these elements as possible without losing anything of itself as a work of art because first and foremost it is a novel,” says Aslam.
If The Wasted Vigil was the story of the war on terror from Afghanistan’s point of view, The Blind Man’s Garden tells the same story from Pakistan’s angle. Even though much is known about the war on terror, much remains unknown. The first part of The Blind Man’s Garden is called “Footnotes to Defeat”. “It is there for a reason. I wanted to say that you know the main facts. I am going to give you the footnotes, the things that you don’t know,” says Aslam.
If you wish to see Rohan, one of the main characters, as the guardian of a garden called Pakistan, Aslam says it’s “possible”. At one point, he has Rohan wear a sherwani and a Jinnah cap. “I leave it up to you,” says Aslam, adding that the only obvious symbol is that the school at one point was called Pure Land, meaning Pakistan.
Writing about Rohan, the blind man, Aslam wanted to find out how blindness was. So, for one week each year for three years, he taped his eyes shut. He says, “One day, I heard it raining and I went to the window and I put out my hand. When the raindrops fell on my hand, the first thing I felt was a twinkling of stars. So, Rohan says in the novel, ‘When I’d want to feel the twinkling of stars, I’d put my hand out in the rain.’”
Aslam, who is working on a novel on blasphemy and has 10 other novels mapped in his mind, will revisit Pakistan. And, hopefully India too. But his next will have its own distinct voice. “Every book arrives with its own voice. The books tell you how to write it,” says Aslam.