The Blind Man's Garden

There are no innocent people in a guilty nation.

Love was the result of having caught a glimpse of another's loneliness.

History is the third parent.

God is just a name for our wonder.

Wounds are said to emit light under certain conditions - touch them and the brightness will stay on the hands - and as candles burn Rohan thinks of each flame as an injury somewhere in his house.

Modesty and decency dwell in the mind, not in a burka.

The opposite of war is not peace but civilisation, and civilisation is purchased with violence and cold-blooded murder. With war.

The sky is a blue so clean it verges on joy.

It is possible to think of fragrance existing before a flower was created to contain it, and so it is that God created the world to reveal Himself, to reveal Mercy. Once or twice a year, perhaps three times, a woman visits the garden, her face ancient, the eyes calm but not passive as she approaches the rosewood tree and begins to pick and examine each fallen leaf. Whether she is in possession of her full mental faculties, no one is sure. Perhaps she is sane and just pretending madness for self-protection. Many decades ago - long before the house was built, when this place was just an expanse of wild growth - she had discovered the name of God on a rosewood leaf, the green veins curving into sacred calligraphy. She picks each small leaf now, hoping for a repetition of the miracle, holding it in her palms in a gesture identical to prayer. The life of the house continues around her and occasionally she watches them, following the most ordinary human acts with an attention reserved by others for much greater events. If it is autumn, she has to remain in the garden for hours, following the surge and pull of the wind as it takes the dropped foliage to all corners. Afterwards, as the dusk begins to darken the air, they sit together, she and the tree, until only the tree remains. What need her search fulfils in her is not known. Perhaps healing had existed before wounds and bodies were created to be its recipient.

If love was the result of having caught a glimpse of another's loneliness, then he had loved Mikal since they were ten years old.... This almost-brother. This blood-love in everything but name.

What strange times are these,” says Tara as they wend their way through the dead to safety, “when Muslims must fear other Muslims.

I don’t feel old. I just feel like someone young who has something wrong with him.

Not even God can change the past.

When a coin is minted, the devil kisses it.

From the book he carefully tears out several maps, and in this light Afghanistan’s mountains and hills and restlessly branching corridors of rock appear as though the pages are crumpled up, and there is a momentary wish in him to smooth them down. Laser-guided bombs are falling onto the pages in his hands, missiles summoned from the Arabian Sea, from American warships that are as long as the Empire State Building is tall.

Tell me,' the man leans forward and says, 'have you heard of a lady called Madeleine? No? In 1996, this lady named Albright Madeleine, the US ambassador to the United Nations, was asked on television how she felt about the fact that five hundred thousand Iraqi children had died as a result of US economic sanctions? Do you know what she said? She said that it was "a very hard choice" but "we think the price is worth it". These are her exact words. How do you feel about that? 'How do you think I feel about that? And I would take your love for children more seriously if you didn't have children cleaning your floors.

The scent of the tree's flowers can stop conversation. Rohan knows no purer source of melancholy.

In some respects, grief for the lost and missing is worse than grief for the dead, and sometimes just for a fraction of a second its intensity makes her wish Mikal would cease to exist, so she wouldn’t have to wonder if she will ever see him again.

We are warriors of Allah.” “You are thugs with Korans.

As a child he used to wonder why Eve was taken from Adam’s rib. Now, at the other end of his life, these decades later, he knows it was because the rib is close to the heart.

If I take dust in my hand and ask you if that is all the dust there is, you will answer that dust is everywhere on earth. More specks than can ever be numbered. So I can give you a handful of truth only. Besides this there are other truths. More than can ever be numbered.

We are not men of hate, but we must be men of justice.

He knows that had he been a young man himself he would not have stopped at Peshawar: he doesn’t know how he would have resisted entering Afghanistan. And not just for help and aid – he would have fought and defended with his arms. And, yes, had he been present in the United States of America back in September, he would have done all he could to save the blameless from dying in those attacked cities, partaken in their calamity. How not to ask for help these days – from others, from God – when it seems that one is surrounded by the destruction of the very idea of man?

The bigger the sin, the rarer and more expensive the bird that is needed to erase it. Is that how the bird pardoner conducts his business? A sparrow for a small deception, but a paradise flycatcher and a monal pheasant for allowing a doubt about His existence to enter the mind.

She listens, determined to locate the trapped bird that had called out from within the madness of suffering. But there is only silence now, not even a halting fragment. Ali! Ali! A dervish, having renounced dealings with all words except that one, never utters another, in any circumstance...The sentence enters her mind from a book she had been looking at earlier. Her gaze is drifting across the sky where the moon sits in a great cold ring as she recalls more and more words. Only one thing matters, only one word. If we speak, it is because we have not found that thing, nor shall find it.

the slopes and summits that stand around them like solidified silence—time made visible in a different way, ancient and on an elongated scale.

but the child is silent, looking as though he would rather understand than speak.

Do you hear it?” “Yes,” Mikal replies. “It’s a battle, isn’t it?” “Yes.” “It’s the world,” one of the other men says. “The world sounds like this all the time, we just don’t hear it. Then sometimes in some places we do.