The Blind Man’s Garden, by Nadeem Aslam – review

Set in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Nadeem Aslam fourth novel begins with two young Pakistani men slipping over the border into Afghanistan. Jeo is a third-year medical student who has secretly volunteered to treat those wounded in the ‘war against terror’, and he is accompanied by his adopted brother Mikal, who works at a gun shop. The action moves back and forth between the bloody chaos of Afghanistan and the small Pakistani town of Heer, where Naheed, who is married to Jeo but in love with Mikal, awaits their return. Trying to do the right thing in impossible circumstances, whether in love or in war, is central to the novel.

All wars are savage, but the one depicted in The Blind Man’s Garden is particularly brutal, not only because of the many competing factions in Afghanistan, but also because of the United States policy of paying large bounties for ‘terrorist suspects’ in a desperately poor country. The result is that almost anyone can be captured or kidnapped and sold on to warlords who are guaranteed $5,000 a head for handing them over to American troops. In this way, alongside dangerous jihadists, wholly innocent young men end up in ‘interrogation facilities’, where they are subjected to various forms of torture in an attempt to elicit information they do not possess.

Things are scarcely better back in Pakistan, where the law is administered by police who refuse to investigate the disappearance of a family member, only to insist when she turns up again that any woman who has left her home voluntarily ‘must explain to us, as agents of decent society, where she has been’. A school set up with high ideals by Jeo’s father, the blind man of the novel’s title, has been taken over by fundamentalists and now trains young men for jihad; a female vigilante group decides that only men should be allowed to visit cemeteries and attacks bereaved women with metal-tipped canes; mere teenagers plot a horrifying Beslan-like siege of a Christian-run school.