The Far Field

by Madhuri Vijay

  I stayed at the pool for as many hours as I could, but once the children left, the joy drained from the place, and I went home. Stella never asked why I was coming home early, and I knew she wouldn’t mention it to my father. I wasn’t sure why I was hiding it from him, other than that it gave me something to do, forced me to be wily and alert, at least until dinner was over. It was no great feat. His factory had recently run into union troubles, and he was distracted. As a belated birthday gift, he’d flown us the previous weekend to a resort in Bali, our first trip without my mother. The night we landed, he fell asleep early, and I drank at the beachfront bar with a sallow English journalist, while the bartender, a tired-looking, dark-skinned man my father’s age, looked out at the ocean.

  The week after we returned from Bali, my father flew to Seoul for a manufacturing exhibition. Grateful to abandon the sad charade of going to work, I stayed in bed every day, slinking downstairs only when I was nauseated from hunger. When Stella came, she tried my door, but I’d locked it. “Fine,” I heard her say. “You want to live in a gutter?” The murmur of her broom faded, and I slept.

  When the bell rang, I ignored it. Stella’s voice floated through my window, then a man’s voice, speaking, or so I thought, in Hindi or Urdu. I could not hear the words, but what reached me was some lilt, some familiar cadence, and suddenly I was scrambling out of bed, fighting with the locked door, and flying down the stairs to find Stella dusting the tables in the living room.

  “Who was that?” I panted.

  She shrugged. “Some fellow selling something.”

  “Selling what?”

  “I didn’t ask. Don’t I have better things to do than ask a hundred questions to everybody who rings the bell?”

  “What did he look like?”

  She gave me a keen glance, which also held a gleam of what I suspected was pity. “What did he look like?” she repeated slowly. “Why do you ask that?”

  And then I saw myself as I was, unwashed, hair matted, clothes crumpled and stinking after three days of continuous wear. I looked at her crisp, starched cotton sari.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I was just asking.”

  “Those selling fellows,” Stella said, and gave the table a last, decisive flick with her rag, “they’re all the same anyway. Useless, every single one of them.”

  The second time Bashir Ahmed came to our house, it was the monsoon and I was recovering from chicken pox. I’d stayed home from school for weeks with a fever, covered in itchy scabs that drove me mad. I remember my mother gently bending my fingers back whenever she caught me scratching, gazing into my eyes as she did so, the flicker of pain I bore without flinching. The elongated days, the thick ropes of rain, the goggle-eyed lizards that plopped from the bathroom ceilings. The house felt stuffy, sealed, as though a cold fog had laid itself over every inch of it. Once my fever broke, I came downstairs and lay on the sofa for hours, watching my mother come and go. She seemed, I noticed, to live deep inside the fog, or it lived within her. I could see it in her slowed hands as she touched her brass idols, her diminished voice. Sometimes I had the feeling it was swallowing her, that soon she would vanish altogether.

  The fog was disturbed, though not dispelled, only when my father came home, bringing with him all the energy and disorder of the world. Clicking on the TV, prying off his shoes, peeling off his black socks and tossing them carelessly onto the floor. Attacking me with his stubble, making me squirm, forcing a laugh from my weary body. Flopping down onto the sofa with a long sigh of contentment. “That’s my girl. You sound better. Back to school on Monday, I think.”

  My mother had come out of the kitchen in time to hear this. Her eyes fixed first on the socks my father had left on the floor. For a while she was silent. Then she drew herself up to her full height, folded her thin arms, and said quietly, “She isn’t ready to go back to school yet.”

  “Nonsense.” My father didn’t even glance in her direction. “Look at her. She’s fine. No point in her sitting around at home. She’s going to fall behind.”

  “Fall behind?” My mother’s voice was thick, drawling. “Oh, I’m so sorry. Forgive me. I had no idea our six-year-old was getting her PhD. How stupid of me.”

  He bristled, as he always did, when she adopted that tone. “Maybe if you bothered to look at her books even once, you’d see that some of what she’s learning isn’t all that easy.” He turned to stare at the TV. “But I know this academic stuff doesn’t really interest you,” he muttered.

  I did not dare look at either of them. It was no secret that my mother had not studied beyond the tenth standard. As I understand it, the calculations had been brutally simple: Her father had three children and earned a government employee’s salary. My mother was the youngest and the only daughter. Her two brothers went to college. She did not.

  My mother had gone rigid, and I knew it was the fog, moving up her body, curling itself around her brain, freezing her voice. Without speaking, she turned and went back into the kitchen. A tense moment later, my father stomped upstairs to change. The socks stayed on the floor all night.

  The next day, Bashir Ahmed came.

  My father had left earlier than usual for the factory. I remember my mother picking up the socks, one in each fist, as if not quite sure what they were. Then the bell rang, and when she saw him, something went out of her body with such force it was almost audible.

  He smiled at her. “See? I told you I wouldn’t forget.”

  She nodded. She appeared dazed. “Come in,” she said.

  He entered with the same satisfied expression as before. It had been raining that afternoon, and the shoulders of his green kurta were damp, which somehow made his eyes seem even brighter. He put the bundle down and ran both hands through his hair.

  “Beti,” he said to me, “three months since I saw you, and you’ve become so tall.”

  “Will you drink something?” my mother said. She was still, I realized, holding a black sock in each fist. “Tea? Coffee?”

  “Thank you,” he said, “but no.”

  “Why?” she demanded roughly. “Are you on a diet?”

  “Okay, okay.” He laughed and waved his arms like someone warding off an attack. “To you, how can I say no? I will have some tea, thank you very much.”

  She nodded, but I knew she was pleased. Once she’d gone into the kitchen, he turned back to me with an expectant smile, as if he was waiting for me to resume a conversation we’d been having. I found that I wanted to say something clever, to make him laugh the way she did.

  “Where did you go?” I asked in Hindi. “When you left here the last time?”

  “Everywhere, beti. I went everywhere.”

  “The whole world?”

  He wrinkled his nose enigmatically. “Perhaps.”

  “America?”

  “Psh, America,” he said. “Who wants to go there?” He was rummaging in his kurta pockets. “Now, before I forget, beti, give me your hand. I have brought you something.”

  I held out my hand, and he dropped into it a hard, round shell, mud brown and smooth to the touch. A thick seam ran up the middle like the one on a leather cricket ball.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Akhrot. I won’t tell you what it’s called in English. You’ll have to ask your mother.” He grinned. “She has the answers to everything.”

  When my mother came out with a cup of tea, I held it up to her. “Walnut,” she told me crisply in English. “You have to get it out of its shell.”

  “How do I get it out?”

  “Good question,” she said. “Try asking it nicely.”

  She sat down opposite him, and I sat between them, turning the walnut over in my fingers.

  “Well, madam,” he said. He had already begun working the knots of the bundle. “As I told you the last time, I have many, many beautiful new items. Even you won’t be able to deny their beauty. Nobody in Bangalore is selling items like these, believe me. You can ask around, if you want.
Shawls and kurtas and—”

  “I don’t want to see them.”

  His fingers froze. “Madam?”

  “I don’t want to see them.” She leaned forward. “Tell me, what is your name?”

  “Bashir Ahmed.”

  “Right then, Mr. Bashir Ahmed, there’s one thing you should understand straightaway about me.” It sounded as if she were dredging up the words from wet soil. They had a thick, labored feeling. “I am not one of those bored housewives you see every day, who keeps on buying new things because she doesn’t know what else to do with herself. And if you think I am one of them then, well, you’re not as intelligent as you seem.”

  There was silence after she’d spoken.

  Then Bashir Ahmed started to laugh.

  “Well,” he said, shaking his head, “I had to try.”

  And when she too started laughing, I felt relief balloon in my chest. Bashir Ahmed deftly reknotted the bundle and nudged it away with his foot. That was the last time he ever tried to sell her anything. Looking back, I can see that something powerful occurred in that moment, and it still astonishes me all these years later: Bashir Ahmed understood in about five minutes what took my father decades. And me? What did I understand back then? Nothing, except that when my mother laughed like that, it made me want a million things at once. I wanted to run until I dropped; I wanted to roll on the ground; I wanted to climb into her lap and stay there forever.

  “Where do you live?” she asked him.

  “Me? I have a room near Russell Market.”

  “No, I meant originally. In Kashmir. That’s where you’re from, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, a small village. In the mountains. You wouldn’t have heard of it.” He grinned wickedly. “You people in India, you think Kashmir begins and ends with Srinagar.”

  “Is it beautiful there?”

  “In my village? Why don’t you come and see for yourself? Oh, but I forget,” and he pointed mischievously to his green eyes, “you’re a little blind. How sad. Actually, it’s probably better if you don’t come. You will look at the Himalayas and say, ‘But where are the mountains?’”

  “Maybe I will come,” my mother declared, shaking her finger at him. “One of these days, you’ll open the door and I’ll be standing there. Then what will you do, Mr. Bashir Ahmed?”

  “I will ask, ‘Do you want tea or coffee, madam, or are you on a diet?’”

  They laughed. I found that I was also grinning, though I didn’t fully grasp the joke. All I knew was that there was a lovely hysteria in the air, and I wanted to inhale it deep, deep into my lungs. The fog that had obscured my mother for days suddenly seemed thinner. I could see her more clearly, hear the clarity and confidence in her voice.

  “And what about you, beti?” Bashir Ahmed turned to me, smiling. “Are you coming too?”

  “Yes,” I answered promptly. “I am.”

  “Good!” he said, slapping his thigh with a large palm. “My son will enjoy meeting you.”

  At that, my mother’s smile flickered. He noticed it right away and his own mouth became a tight line. In the few seconds of silence that followed, I heard the loud ticking of the clock on top of the TV. I looked from one to the other. Then Bashir Ahmed cleared his throat.

  “Beti,” he said quickly, “would you like to hear a story?”

  I glanced at my mother, but she was unreachable now, offering no clue. It was the single most devastating habit she had, to withdraw, to take back the thrilling gift of her joy as casually as she bestowed it. I’d always believed that I was the only one in the world who saw it as clearly as I did, her lightning switch from one self to another. But one look at this stranger’s face told me he understood it, too, and it gave me an odd and unexpected comfort.

  “Yes,” I said. “I would.”

  “All right,” Bashir Ahmed said, nodding. “Then listen.” His chin dropped so low it nearly touched his chest, and he took several deep breaths. His eyelids fluttered almost closed. His hands came to rest in his lap. Over the years, I would become familiar with his tactics: the long pause at the beginning, the swift rise of his deep voice followed by the precipitous drop, his trick of repeating innocuous phrases until they turned ominous.

  “In Kashmir, a long time ago,” he said, “there lived an old man. Because he had come from the city of Baghdad, in Iraq, people called him Shah Baghdadi. This old man, he was a pir. Do you know what that is, beti? A pir?”

  I shook my head.

  “A wise man,” Bashir Ahmed said solemnly. “This Shah Baghdadi had read many books, and he knew a lot about the world. He could even perform magic. People who were sick would go to him, and he would heal them. But he was very careful with his powers, you see, because he knew that they were gifts from Allah.”

  From the corner of my eye, I could see my mother’s head turn slightly.

  “Now what I forgot to tell you, beti,” Bashir Ahmed went on slowly, “was that Shah Baghdadi had a son. A son,” he said again, and I felt a chill run up my arms. “A son who was born when Shah Baghdadi was already old, and whose mother had died. His father loved him very much, but from the beginning, the boy only knew how to break his heart. And, to make things worse, it became clear that he also had his father’s powers. Shah Baghdadi tried to make him study, begged his son to understand that such powers should not be taken lightly, but the boy did not listen. When he was ten years old, he asked for a horse. Shah Baghdadi refused, so the boy became angry. He jumped up onto a wall, turned the wall into a beautiful black horse, and rode away.”

  My mother was listening, leaning forward now, but Bashir Ahmed’s eyes did not so much as flicker in her direction. He spoke to me, as though everyone but the two of us had ceased to exist.

  “This boy did these things as if they were nothing. And no matter how much his father tried to stop him, he kept doing them. Then something very sad happened. Shah Baghdadi’s son had a best friend, a little Hindu boy. The two of them were supposed to meet one evening and finish playing one of their games. But the Hindu boy never arrived. Eventually, Shah Baghdadi’s son found his best friend lying on a flat stone. A stone,” Bashir Ahmed repeated. “The poor boy had been bitten by a snake. He was dead.”

  I longed to glance at my mother, but I did not dare to take my eyes off his face.

  “The Hindu boy’s mother and father were crying and beating their heads,” Bashir Ahmed said, “but Shah Baghdadi’s son was thinking only of himself. Now he wouldn’t be able to finish his game. Then he had an idea. He said a prayer, and his friend opened his eyes. Shah Baghdadi’s son laughed and pulled him to his feet and the two of them ran off to play.

  “When the old Baghdadi heard about this, he knew that his son had finally gone too far. He was faced with a terrible decision, but he knew what he had to do. When his son came home, he called him to his side. With his own hands, he fed the boy a bowl of milk. As soon as his son had finished the milk, he closed his eyes and died.” Bashir Ahmed’s voice dropped to a whisper on these last words. “Shah Baghdadi had put poison in the milk, beti. He had killed his own son.”

  This was too much for me. I burst out, “That doesn’t make any sense! Why would he—”

  But then I stopped, because Bashir Ahmed was no longer looking at me. His green eyes were on my mother, whose own eyes, I saw, were bright. She smiled at him, a sad, radiant smile, and I saw that he had done what I believed nobody knew how to do, save for me. He had coaxed her back.

  As before, I accompanied him out to the gate. I was bursting with questions about the story but restrained myself, sensing he wished to be quiet. But then he said absently, as he pushed the gate open, “I’ve seen it, you know. The stone where the boy died and was brought back to life.”

  “You have?” I asked. “How did you see it?”

  Bashir Ahmed glanced back at the house, but my mother was no longer in the living room. “My wife’s whole family is from there. The place where it happened,” he told me, and his voice sounded, for a moment, ve
ry distant.

  Then he left, and though he didn’t ask me to tell my mother this time, I knew he would return soon. Later that day, I went out to get my towel from the clothesline and found my father’s socks hanging out, washed and shriveled and limp.

  4

  MY FATHER FLEW HOME from Seoul on a Friday, and we went out to dinner as usual on Sunday night. He was restless; he kept picking up the small vase with a white rose that stood on our table. I, on the other hand, was exhausted. Three weeks had gone by since Ritu had fired me, and everything had begun to grate: the long, pointless hours at the club, the evening cheer I put on for my father. I hadn’t talked to Hari after the night he said I frightened him. Part of me wanted to tell him I knew what he meant. He had merely seen the thing, loose and rattling and dangerous, that I had felt in myself. But the few times he’d called, I hadn’t answered.

  “The usual?” my father asked. I nodded. He ordered our drinks, whiskey for me, rum for him, and then he absently picked up the vase with the rose again.

  “It doesn’t look real,” he murmured. “It’s so perfect it could be plastic. Isn’t that odd?”

  I was already on edge, and his sudden lapse into sentimentality irritated me. “Look at this place,” I snapped. “Does it seem like the kind of place that would use plastic roses?”

  His eyebrows went up, but he didn’t take the bait. He didn’t launch into an analysis of how much the restaurant might have saved by using plastic flowers, or give me a lecture on how small frugalities kept giant businesses afloat. Instead he said, “How’s work?”