The Far Field

by Madhuri Vijay

  In the end, when it finally became clear to my father that I had no intention of helping myself, he got me a position with the daughter of one of his business associates, who had recently founded a tiny nonprofit environmental agency in Bangalore. I was to manage accounts for them, a job that, as far as I could see, consisted almost exclusively of telling them what they couldn’t do. “I’m sorry,” I would say in a firm, regretful tone, “the numbers won’t support that.” The agency, ironically enough, was located in a building overlooking an open sewer, and though I didn’t tell anybody, I thought the sludge rather beautiful, with its slow black currents that flashed green and gold during the hottest parts of the afternoon. Even the smell, ripe with rot, didn’t bother me.

  The projects the agency tried to implement were small and mostly wishful. Money in the agency was like the sewage beneath it, creeping in with sluggish reluctance, and I, for one, celebrated its immobility. It meant I had less to do. Days, then months, passed as I stared out of my window, while on my computer screen, the numbers stayed in their slots, fixed and comfortingly final.

  About a year after I began at the agency, I wandered into my parents’ bedroom one evening after work, as I did from time to time. Their cupboards faced each other in an alcove in the corner. As a child, I used to open the far door of each cupboard and hide inside, cradled by their odors: my father’s leather belts and ironed shirts and aftershave, my mother’s soap and perfume. I suddenly longed for her smell again, so I opened her cupboard, only to receive a shock; it had been swept nearly clean. My father must have, at some point, quietly given her things away. Which shouldn’t have surprised me, really. We had never been nostalgic people. Growing up, my drawings did not find a place on the fridge, my parents did not lovingly preserve my old report cards. Clothes, outgrown, were given away or ripped up for kitchen rags. Books were promptly donated to the library. We kept pace with the present, discarding as we went.

  So it took me aback for a moment, the loss I felt at the sight of those bare shelves. Where had her things gone? Stella might have taken a sari or two, the rest likely given to a charity. Her jewelry was probably locked in the safe-deposit box at the bank. Her talcum powder, her Pond’s cream, her jumble of safety pins, her comb, all of those were gone too. Only a few objects remained—a stack of stretched, discolored underwear, a snarled ball of drawstrings, and a peeling laminated photograph of the two idols in her ancestral village, which Stella, with her tidy gold cross, would have had no use for, but at the same time would not have had the heart to throw away.

  I ran my hand across the knotted drawstrings and the photograph, and lightly touched the folded underwear, which slumped over. I was just about to close the cupboard when I caught sight of something small and pale peeking from behind the fallen stack. And even before I really saw it, I knew, by some dormant instinct, what I was seeing. I reached out and seized it, clenching hard, then, in a single motion, opened my fist and looked down.

  In my palm sat the crude wooden figure of a beast, with stubby limbs and a featureless head. The wood was mottled and shiny with age, but the knife scar I remembered still showed clear across the belly, as if the animal had been injured in a fight. I had not seen it in years, not since I was a child. I’d thought it lost, in fact. I recalled how distraught I’d been when the wooden animal vanished from my room, the hours I’d spent on my hands and knees, scouring the house. Had it been in my mother’s cupboard this whole time? How had it come to be here?

  For a long moment, I thought nothing. Then, very gradually, as if I might hurt myself by going too fast, I understood. The animal had not come to be here by accident. My mother had known it was here. No, not known. She had stolen it from my room and hidden it here.

  A few months before she died, my mother called me at college. She had taken to calling at odd hours, at midnight or very early in the morning. This time it was just as I was dropping off to sleep, having studied late for a test the next day. I was tired and irritable, and, to make things worse, she didn’t seem to have much to say. As a way to get her off the phone, I told her, “Why don’t you go out tomorrow? Go shopping or something.”

  “Shopping?” I could hear the slow, mocking smile in her voice.

  “Or visit friends.”

  “A quaint idea. Except that you seem to forget I’ve never had any.”

  “That’s not true,” I said without thinking.

  “Oh?” Her sarcasm, always deadliest when it was softest. “Enlighten me then.”

  I paused before speaking his name. “What about Bashir Ahmed? Wasn’t he a friend?”

  There was silence on her end. I waited for her to answer, already regretting having mentioned his name. Then she said, “You know, I’d forgotten all about him.”

  “It’s been a while,” I agreed carefully. “Where do you think he is now?”

  “Oh, who knows. Probably went back to that village he was always going on about.”

  She hung up soon after that. To tell the truth, I’d been relieved that she hadn’t seemed all that interested in Bashir Ahmed. It had been seven years, after all, since the last time we’d seen him, and seven years were ample time for forgetting. But now, with the wooden creature balanced on my sweating palm, I understood that she had, ever so gently, lied to me. She had forgotten nothing.

  I carried the creature back to my room, and stood it on my bedside table, the very spot from which my mother had stolen it all those years ago. For the rest of the evening, as I drifted through the rooms of our house, as I paged unseeingly through books, as I sat across from my father, eating the meal Stella had cooked earlier that day, the melancholic strains of Miles Davis’s trumpet floating in from the living room, I thought only of the wooden beast, sitting beside my pillow, and, out of nowhere, a huge, unbearable joy exploded in me. Just like that, the secret I’d once shared with my mother was alive again. Looking back, I think that must have been when I decided to find him.

  I was six the first time he came, and I still remember it. How my mother had not ceased moving, even for a second, all week. How she had decided the previous morning that her lantana bushes were sick, somehow infected, and had spent three hours pulling them up, only to abruptly abandon them, leaving the garden looking like a war zone. How she had surges of intense laughter at nothing. How she cooked, a pile of vessels growing dangerously high in the sink, but how, at the same time, she claimed never to be hungry. How she seemed to have endless energy for play, devising elaborate games that soon wore me out but left her unaffected.

  When the bell rang that afternoon, I was in the living room. I moved to answer, but all of a sudden she was behind me, one hand gripping my shoulder hard. With her other hand, she threw the door open. And there he was: a dark-haired man wearing a green kurta and white skullcap, carrying over his shoulder a distended yellow bundle twice the width of his torso. His thick hair fell over his forehead, which was the color of unpolished rosewood, and his eyes were a light, stunning green. For a second, he stood there (perhaps wondering about the wrecked garden); then, in a deep, resonant voice that would become as recognizable to me as my own, he said to my mother in simple, polite Urdu, “Madam, would you wish to buy these beautiful clothes from Kashmir?”

  “Sure,” my mother answered, not missing a beat. “But if I do, what will you wear?”

  The stranger laughed. Unhesitating, glad, as though he not only had been expecting her humor, but had traveled a long way just to hear it. My mother’s grip on my shoulder tightened, though I couldn’t tell whether it upset or pleased her. She was used to people being disconcerted by the things she said; this laughter was something new.

  “Come in,” she said in a slightly milder tone. “Let me see what you have.”

  And here I must ask the unavoidable question. Why him? Of all the people who came to our house over the years, to sell, to work, to visit, why should he have been the one she fixed her mind upon? It had to do with her mood that day, of course, the glittering in her eyes that had
been there all week, but what else? The fact that he was handsome, in a style utterly foreign to our southern city? Those green eyes, which I’d never seen before, except in actors on TV? Had these things been enough, at least to start with?

  He stepped inside with a ceremonial satisfaction, which I would come to think of as his trademark, as if our house were a dazzling place he’d been told of long ago. He hauled the bundle into our living room and tugged it open with an elegant motion, and there were clothes everywhere, spreading like a bright, choppy sea. My mother took a seat on the sofa across from him. I sat in between them. I did not know it then, but these would become our fixed places, our fixed roles: Bashir Ahmed speaking, my mother listening, and me watching them both.

  He was riffling through the clothes, speaking rapidly but plainly in Urdu, a speech he’d obviously given many times before. “… six months for one piece, and everything is handmade. What shall I show you first, madam? You tell me. Kurtas? Shawls? Saris? Everything is guaranteed, one hundred percent, pure Kashmiri.”

  “One hundred percent pure Kashmiri,” she echoed in a tone that could have just as easily been mockery as admiration. Then she waved her hand. “All of it. Show me all of it.”

  He began with the shawls. Ruby with pink paisley, white with mint paisley, each edged by a row of soft tassels, sinking one after the other in soft layers across his lap. It was a performance, practiced until flawless. The whole time he did not stop talking, his green eyes moving between my mother’s face and the shawls. My mother watched their soundless descent, rapt, and even I, with my tomboy’s revulsion for all things feminine, had to admit they were beautiful. When he had shown her all the shawls, she blinked. “Anything else?”

  He launched into the same routine with his kurtas, all of which had panels of delicate embroidery down the front. This time he looked deeper into her face, and spoke in a lower, more confidential voice, but she remained still except for her eyes, which stayed riveted to the rise and fall of his hands, as though they might contain some vital code. When he came to the end of the kurtas, he started in with the saris, translucent jewel-tone chiffon with chain-stitched pansies along the borders. And when those too were rejected, he sat back on his heels, surveying the disorder around him, biting his lip, trying to hide his exasperation.

  “Hm,” my mother murmured, “now where are those beautiful clothes I was told about?”

  His frown vanished in an instant. “Madam,” he said, shaking his head sorrowfully, “I must be honest with you. I am feeling very bad right now. If I had known about you before coming here, I would have brought my friend with me.”

  She smiled. “Your friend?”

  “Yes. My friend, he sells spectacles, you see. Maybe with the right pair you would have been able to see my clothes properly, and you wouldn’t have embarrassed yourself like this.”

  I’d never heard anybody speak this way to my mother, with such liberty, such daring. She stared at him a moment then threw her head back and laughed and laughed. I imagined he would shrink at that wild, uncontrolled sound. But he didn’t. He just looked at her with his head tilted to one side, smiling. Then, as if he’d suddenly remembered, he turned his large head to me. “What about beti here?” he asked her. “Would you like to see something for beti?”

  “Yes,” my mother said before I could speak. The man dug around in the pile and came up with a white cotton blouse, sprays of delicate pink roses edging the neckline and both sleeves. He shook it out then held it up to his own chest without a trace of self-consciousness. “It is so beautiful,” he declared, “it even looks good on an ugly fool like me.”

  It sounds strange, but he was right. Not that he was ugly or a fool—he wasn’t either—but he did look startlingly beautiful in that girl’s blouse, with his dark hair falling over his forehead and his weathered throat rising so naturally from the pale, flimsy material. I glanced at my mother to find a strange expression on her face, a grimace that seemed to indicate real pain.

  “Shalini,” she said, and if nothing until then had made me sit up and take notice, that would have. She almost never used my name. “What do you think? Do you like it?”

  And even though the blouse was nothing I would have dreamed of choosing for myself, I nodded. It seemed like the only thing to do. Some aspect of her mood had communicated itself to me, but, more than that, I had sensed an unfamiliar thing in the room, a flash of new color for which I had no name. I was rewarded when she reached out and squeezed my hand.

  “It seems we’ll be taking it,” she said.

  “It makes me very happy to know that at least one of you isn’t blind,” the man said, and then he, too, smiled at me. I flushed under the weight of their combined attention, one set of eyes green, the other deepest brown.

  The man coughed discreetly into his fist and named a price, and, oddly enough, my mother, who ordinarily never lost a chance to haggle, agreed. He smiled, a figure of modest triumph, and began to pack up his wares. For a few seconds, she stared at his hands, which were busy folding and smoothing; then she said, in a rush, “When will you come back?”

  He glanced up, startled. He raked his hair back with his fingers, nudging the skullcap askew.

  “Ah. I’m not sure. I think—I’m expecting some new items in two or three months.” He glanced quickly at her. “Should I—what I mean is, do you want me to—?”

  He broke off, because she had started to scowl.

  I braced myself. Now, I thought. Now she will destroy him. Now she will cut him down.

  But, to my surprise, all she said was, “Yes. Please.”

  Then she jumped up and walked away from both of us. I gazed after her in astonishment, but the man only laughed again, a little softer this time, and kept folding.

  I stayed with him until he had knotted the bundle three times and heaved it onto his shoulder, and then I followed him out. I wasn’t sure why. As much as I liked him, I think I wanted to make sure he really left. He paused with his hand on the gate and gazed for a moment back at the house then down at me.

  “I want you to tell her,” he said, “that I will not forget. Tell her I will come again soon.”

  He spoke to me not as I was, a child of six, but as if I were an adult, his equal. That, combined with my mother’s erratic behavior, created in me a desire to match his posture, his dignity.

  I placed my hand on the gate in imitation of his. “I will tell her,” I said.

  I watched him walk up the road, the yellow bundle receding like a tiny sun. I kept watching until he turned left and disappeared.

  Back inside, I found my mother upstairs in her bedroom, her head deep inside my father’s cupboard. “Go put on your new blouse,” she said, her voice muted by his fragrant shirts.

  When she spoke like that, with that electric charge, that authority, I never disobeyed. I ran downstairs, threw off my T-shirt, and pulled the white blouse down over my shorts. It was so light I barely sensed it on my skin, but this only added to the prevailing atmosphere of unreality, and I took the stairs two at a time. Just as I reached her, my mother let out a muffled cry of triumph, emerging from the cupboard clutching my father’s old, treasured Nikon.

  She marched me out of the house, her hand on my shoulder. “Now pose,” she commanded.

  “What shall I do?”

  She smiled, and a flash went off in my eyes. “Anything you want, little beast.”

  How can I explain what it was to be around her at those times? It was like being sealed within an invisible, protective, soundproof chamber. I saw and heard and smelled nothing but her. She photographed me in the wreckage of our garden, out on the street, pretending to climb our neighbors’ gate while their ridiculous Pomeranian yipped itself into a frenzy. She photographed me in imaginary flight from the Pomeranian. Two young men were gaping at us, so she photographed them too. They fled, and that made her laugh so hard it seemed she would fly apart.

  She photographed me until the roll in the camera ran out.

  I do
n’t know what happened to those photographs. I never saw them. Within a week, I more or less forgot about the man with his green eyes and his yellow bundle, the strange, unfamiliar thing I’d so briefly sensed. The white blouse lost its magic. I had no further intention of wearing it, so I stuffed it into the very back of my cupboard, along with the clothes I’d outgrown.

  Finding the wooden animal in my mother’s cupboard loosened something in me, to be sure, but not right away. For weeks afterward, life continued unchanged. My father went to the gym and to work. Stella came to clean and to cook. I went to the agency and out in the evenings. On the weekends, I would find myself wedged in a car between strangers, driving out of the city to somebody’s “farmhouse,” which usually meant a tasteless candy-pink monstrosity looming over some tiny, dusty village, whose impoverished residents we utterly ignored except when we took it into our heads to buy some of their cheap, home-brewed hooch. On the last of these excursions, I stayed awake drinking after the others had gone to sleep. It had been my twenty-fourth birthday, a fact I’d mentioned to nobody. At 3:00 a.m. I received a message from my father, wishing me a happy birthday from Tokyo. Just before dawn, I slipped out of the farmhouse and walked up the dark country road. Light was just limning the horizon, and the air smelled of woodsmoke. The first hut in the village had a thatched shed attached to the side. Deep groans of pain floated from the shed, so I approached. A pregnant cow lay on her side, the calf’s face and forelegs protruding, filmed in milky white. The farmer sat on his haunches nearby, his lungi pulled up over his knees. He looked up when I came in, and his eyes widened, but he did not speak. We watched as the calf pushed out, its small body slick, and the gray afterbirth slithered and dropped. When the cow turned and started to lick her offspring, the farmer rose to his feet and led me around the shed, where I sat on a wooden bench facing the horizon, and a woman I took to be his wife brought me a tumbler of fresh, steaming milk. I tried to refuse, but she offered it again. So I accepted and she stepped back to watch me drink it. Right then, the sun suddenly burst into view, spilling light everywhere. And I? Well, I started to cry. The woman watched me, a drunk, weeping girl in rum-stained jeans, with a lack of sympathy that, if I had been older, I would have known to be grateful for. But the truth was, at that moment, I wasn’t thinking of the woman at all. I was thinking, scared and lonely kid that I was: I have just witnessed something true.