The Golden Legend by Nadeem Aslam

Author:Nadeem Aslam [Nadeem Aslam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571330768
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2017-01-04T16:00:00+00:00

When the soldiers left, the villagers managed to inform a journalist in Srinagar of the three bodies in the shallow graves in the hills. The day after the story appeared in the newspaper, the journalist’s corpse was discovered by the roadside.

20

Nargis reached down and picked up a porcupine quill from the island’s surface.

The length of the island could be traversed in twenty-five minutes, the width in twenty.

Around her were the foundations of a church and a Hindu temple. That had been the original idea, the ideal. A mosque, a temple, and a church – standing close to each other. But the murder at the mosque meant that all future plans for the island had to be abandoned.

She stood with the morning wind in her hair. Certain Hindu temples were built in the image of the human body. The construction would begin with the burial of a pot of seed. The temple was said to rise from this implanted germ, in the manner of a human being. And the different sections of the temple were named after different parts of the body. The two sides were wings or hands, the hasta. A pillar was a foot, pada, and the roof was the head, the sikhara. The innermost and darkest sanctum of the temple, the shrine, was the ‘womb house’, the garbhagrha.

She traced the outline of the temple’s foundations with her eyes, the primordial blueprint of humans in brick and cement. The low brickwork was visible here and there but was mostly lost to heaped-up earth and the wild plants. What looked like fallen ruins were in fact arrested foundations.

As always her first thought upon waking was Massud, calculating how many days it had been since his death. A sal tree grew outside her window here on the island and she recalled that when the Buddha had died in the grove of sal trees their yellow blossoms had turned white.

She walked towards the island’s centre. A band of calligraphy ran along the top of their mosque, verses from the Koran that Gabriel had dictated to Muhammad. The building was a white cube. At some level both Nargis and Massud had been thinking of the Kaaba in Mecca. Also, during their visit to Antarctica, Massud had taken a photograph of a towering iceberg that was a perfect cube, their dinghy circling its four faultlessly square sides, glowing against the impossible blue of the sea and sky.

The mosque stood at the highest place in the middle of the island, and the archangel’s words were the sole decoration. The audible made visible.

She could hear the river.

May was about to begin. In May 1857, when the Mutiny against the British broke out, the soldiers of the 26th Native Infantry Regiment stationed in Zamana had attacked their British officers. Afterwards they had fled towards this island, pursued by police and the British officers, who killed 150 of them during the flight. Another fifty were hunted down and executed here on the island – after they had surrendered. An example had to be made of them.

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