The Far Field

by Madhuri Vijay

  “I don’t need to call anyone,” I said. “But thank you.”

  After that we were both silent and the train began to move again. I closed my eyes and was aware of a sense of liberation, not exactly peaceful, and not detached from sorrow. Now, I thought, I was truly adrift. From now on, whatever happened would be my responsibility alone.

  Jammu came in pieces, boxy houses, roads growing larger, busier. At the station, I waited until the compartment had emptied; then I reached for my rucksack and walked up the aisle. My fellow travelers were gone, leaving behind crumpled paper, candy wrappers, orange rinds, the smell of sweat. A woman in a blue sari was desultorily cleaning the first compartment. When she arrived at mine, if she was careful, she would find my phone tucked into the back of the seat.

  The tout for the share taxi assured me that my bag would not fall off the roof, while at the same time hustling me almost bodily into the vehicle, which was a white Tata Sumo. He wore a red shirt, the sleeves rolled up almost to his shoulders. Sixteen or seventeen, his hair molded into an impossibly high, cresting wave, he stalked back and forth in front of the taxi, shouting, “Doda! Kishtwar! Doda! Kishtwar!” in a bored, imperious voice. From time to time, he stopped and scowled at the cloudless, innocent-looking sky. “Going to rain,” he muttered darkly to nobody in particular.

  After I’d relinquished my rucksack, I climbed in and found a seat at the very back of the taxi, next to the window. My fellow passengers were a bearded, scholarly-looking old man, and a teenage boy with his father, both of whom ate banana after banana from the largest bunch I’d ever seen, which they had placed like a third passenger on the seat between them.

  Outside on the street, Hindu and Muslim women walked by, heads loosely covered. The young Muslim men had thin, angular faces, and I fancied I could see traces of Bashir Ahmed in one or two of them, which I took, in my tiredness, to be a good omen. I leaned my head against the window. Fatigue was setting in, two continuous days of travel stiffening my muscles, pulling at the backs of my eyes.

  A thickset woman in a purple headscarf climbed into the taxi with her husband; the tout leapt in after them. There was now a plump man in the driver’s seat, dusting the windshield with a cloth. Extremely businesslike, the tout collected fares from the others then turned last of all to me.

  “How much?” I asked in Hindi, aware that every pair of eyes was on me. With my jeans and T-shirt and ponytail, I thought I knew what I looked like. A clueless tourist, a woman traveling alone. It did not occur to me that what they saw, first and foremost, was an outsider.

  The tout made a great show of impatience. “To Kishtwar? Two fifty.”

  Flustered, I handed him two hundred-rupee notes, and he glanced down at them. “Two fifty,” he muttered. “Another fifty.”

  “Oh.” My face burned. “Sorry.” I gave him another hundred, and he handed back fifty with a professional flick, then leapt out of the back door of the taxi, taking his seat next to the driver.

  And just as quickly as it had arrived, Jammu dissolved, and we were on a highway that, but for the numerous security check posts, could have been anywhere in the country, surrounded by lorries piled high with timber, bricks, iron rods. I fell asleep for a while, and when I woke up, I looked out and saw fields of smooth white rocks, and I realized, with a shock, how far below they were.

  We had entered the mountains.

  On the other side of the taxi, the teenager sent another banana peel sailing out of the window. I saw the earth torn open, great wounds for new roads. I saw intermittent signs, some on neat diamond-shaped boards, some splashed messily on rocks.

  Kashmir Is the Jewel in the Crown of India.

  Watch for Falling Rocks.

  Peep Peep Don’t Sleep.

  Be Gentle on My Curves.

  From Kashmir to Kanyakumari India Is One.

  After an hour, the driver stopped at a roadside shack with long wooden tables, and everyone trooped out. I watched them drift into groups, the brief, unconscious alliances of travelers. The teenager and his father with the driver and the tout. The scholarly old man with the headscarfed woman and her husband. I willed myself to leave the taxi, to ask if I could join one or the other of them, but all I saw was myself thrusting money into the tout’s hand, his scornful young face as he said, “Another fifty,” while the rest looked on, and, childish as it was, shame kept me pinned to my seat.

  After a while, I heard someone tapping at my window. It was the plump driver, holding up a tiny plastic cup of tea. I shook my head without thinking.

  “If you don’t drink it, I’ll throw it away. Very sad,” he said in plain Urdu, not sounding sad at all. I opened the window, took the cup, and put it to my lips. The first sip brought a welcome heat to my cheeks, and I felt twice as stupid for refusing the first time.

  “Thank you,” I said as sincerely as I could.

  “You are travelling alone.” It was not a question.

  “Yes.”

  He did not inquire further, some unwritten code of courtesy holding him back, perhaps, but I was so grateful for being spoken to at all that I thanked him again. He smiled slightly, told me we would be in Kishtwar in an hour, then climbed back into his seat, leaving the door open, one leg dangling out. It was clearly a tacit signal, because shortly afterward, the other passengers trooped back to the taxi, wiping their mouths with their sleeves.

  The tout had been right, as it turned out. It began to rain as soon as we got back on the highway. Now the driver hunched forward in concentration, the wipers hissing. All the windows were closed, and our clothes steamed, their stink mingling with the ripeness of banana. Occasionally I caught sight of the valley as we turned a hairpin bend, all that hazy, endless space, and I had to close my eyes to ignore the drop in my stomach.

  Out of nowhere, a convoy of gray-green army trucks and jeeps passed us, going in the opposite direction. Metal letters on their front grilles read Vehicle Factory Jabalpur. It took a minute for them to pass us completely; there must have been at least fifty trucks, each driven by a soldier, his face partially obscured by the visor of his cap. I guessed they were returning to the army headquarters in Udhampur. We had passed through the town of Udhampur a little while ago, and I’d remembered my father’s friend, the brigadier, thankful I would never be obliged to meet him. I knew exactly what it would be, sipping weak tea in a stuffy, overdecorated living room, while the brigadier and his wife—both stout and hearty in my imagination—bombarded me with volleys of well-intentioned but tactless questions about my dead mother and why I wasn’t married yet. All I saw of Udhampur itself was a few broad streets bristling with zigzag roadblocks that forced our taxi to slow almost to a crawl, soldiers who eyed our vehicle as it went past, and a tank hunkered in the middle of a grassy circle, its dark barrel painted in incongruous candy stripes. I was glad when we left it behind.

  We arrived in Kishtwar at dusk. The tout hoisted himself up to the roof rack and flung our luggage down piece by piece. Blue-gray mountains curved steeply up on all sides, but the town itself appeared relatively flat. It was a little like standing inside a bowl. We seemed to be in a marketplace, surrounded by taxis, tea stalls and shops, most of which were already locked and shuttered. In one stall, men tore off chunks of bread and dunked them into tiny cups of steaming tea. A stray cow shambled toward a quiet corner.

  It was all quite ordinary, but I could not shake my sense of bewilderment, perhaps because it was so ordinary. I didn’t know what I had been expecting, but I was aware of a slight sense of disappointment as I looked around. Then my eyes fell on a strange sight, the burned husk of a large, partly demolished building with a charred tower rising on one end. As I stood there, a voice rose from somewhere near or within the building, a man’s low, keening voice, which held a knife-edge of sorrow and desperation. Not a soul in the marketplace reacted, and I stood frozen, afraid to move, afraid I’d lost my mind. Then I understood: the burned building was, or had once been, a mosque. When the voice fell silent, I walked ove
r to the driver, who was inspecting a nick in the windshield.

  “Excuse me,” I said, “is there a hotel around here?”

  He looked at me, his face neither friendly nor hostile. It was as though he’d forgotten he’d bought me a cup of tea, that we had ever exchanged words.

  “Hotel?” he echoed. “You mean you don’t have anyone to stay with?” When I shook my head, he appeared to consider. Then he said, “See the mosque? The burned one? Take a left there. After a shoe shop, you’ll see some green steps. Go up.”

  “And that is a hotel?”

  “People stay there, yes. Tell them my name, and they will give you a room.”

  “And your name?”

  “Majid.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Majid.”

  He bent his head slightly in a decorous, old-worldly gesture.

  “What happened to the mosque, Mr. Majid?”

  “Better ask the people at the place you’re going. This isn’t my town.”

  I thanked him for the final time. Then I turned my back on him and the taxi and began walking toward the blackened, gutted mosque, which, I could see from patches of unburned wall, had once been pink. Once I was past it, I looked back, wanting to catch a final glimpse of the vehicle that had brought me here, of Mr. Majid, the first person who had been kind to me. But ours was one of several white vehicles in the bustling marketplace, and I could no longer see him.

  There was a staircase leading up, as he’d said, and painted green. The door at the top was closed, but light leaked from a crack at the bottom. The middle-aged man who answered my knock had clearly just finished his dinner. I could see it still laid out on the ground behind him. His hair was graying and curly, and he wore glasses with thin, round, gold-wire frames.

  “Yes?” he said in Urdu.

  “I’m looking for a room, Uncle,” I said. “Mr. Majid told me this was a hotel.”

  The man frowned. “Who said this was a hotel?”

  “Mr. Majid,” I said. “He drives a taxi. I asked him about a hotel and he sent me here.”

  “This tall?” He raised a palm to the level of his shoulder. “Slightly fat? Light eyes?”

  “Yes,” I said, though in all honesty I couldn’t recall. The hundred meters or so I’d walked from the taxi had seemed to take years. The smell of gravy drifted from the room and hit me like a hard blow. I realized I hadn’t eaten a proper meal in two days.

  The curly-haired man looked down at my rucksack. “You’ve come on holiday?” he asked. He seemed not to know what to make of me.

  Maybe it was because I was exhausted from traveling, or because of the food, but I told him the truth. I said, “I’ve come to find someone.”

  All at once, the man’s face changed. It turned grim, but with a new softness, a sympathy. He moved aside from the doorway. “Come in,” he said. “You will eat dinner?”

  “So you do have a room?” I asked, confused.

  “We will find one, don’t worry,” he said. “First eat. Then we can discuss it.”

  Too tired to wonder what this meant, I stepped into the hall. The floor was covered in a patterned cloth; colorful bolsters lined the walls. The man pointed to a small, salmon-colored sink in the corner. While I washed my hands, he carried my rucksack behind a curtain that obviously led to the rest of the house. Moments later, a woman emerged from behind the same curtain with a plate. She was stocky and broad-featured and unsmiling, and when she said, “Sit here,” her voice was like iron. It brooked no indecision, and I was glad to obey. She heaped rice onto a plate and laid a large piece of chicken on top. “Eat,” she said, and disappeared behind the curtain again.

  Left by myself, I took a mouthful of chicken and nearly wept. The rice was fragrant, the chicken tender and flavored subtly with cardamom. I ate without grace or restraint, hunching low over my plate, shoving fistfuls of rice into my mouth. Only when the man came back out did I struggle to sit up straight. He sat cross-legged beside me, and once again I glimpsed his expression: sadness but no surprise. It was almost as if, I thought with a shiver, they had been waiting for me.

  “So,” the man said. “Where have you come from?”

  “Bangalore.”

  “Bangalore,” he said gravely. “I should have guessed from the way you speak. And you are looking for somebody.” I nodded.

  “Have you tried elsewhere?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Srinagar?”

  “No.”

  “You haven’t tried anywhere else?” he said, his voice intent.

  I stared down at my food, which I badly wanted to finish. Why was he asking me these questions? He must have seen the confusion in my face, because he softened.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You are tired. We will talk about this tomorrow. Take your time to finish eating. Your room is ready for you.”

  He left me alone to finish my meal, and when I was done, the woman came back from behind the curtain. I thought I saw a glimmer of approval in her eyes at the sight of the empty plate, but when I praised the food, she did not react. I washed my hands again; then the man returned and led me past the curtain, down a small corridor with two doors on each side. The first door on the right led to a neat kitchen, where I saw the man’s wife standing at the sink. She didn’t turn.

  The first door on the left was ajar, and I caught a brief glimpse of bright yellow walls, a terrific mess of clothes on the floor, the overpowering stench of sweat. Two skinny, bearded men lay on the floor, listening to a small radio, and a third stood at the window, smoking a beedi. All three followed me with their eyes as I passed, but none of them spoke.

  The two far doors were closed. “Toilet,” my new host said, pointing to the one on the right. “And you will be in here.” He knocked smartly. A young man, about the same age as me, I guessed, came out quickly, shoving some clothes into a little backpack and apologizing. The curly-haired man waited for him to pass then led me into my new room.

  It was so tiny I could have stood in the middle and touched any wall just by stretching. It had also obviously been cleared in a hurry. The pink sheet on the bed had been tucked in askew, the door to a low wooden cabinet hung open. There was a book of some kind under the bed; I could see its black corner jutting out. The walls were painted pistachio-green, and a purple banner with silver Arabic script hung from a hook. My rucksack had been brought ahead of me; it stood in the corner beside the cabinet. There was something soothing about it.

  I looked around the room, then at the man. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “This was his room. That man who just left. You gave it to me.”

  The curly-haired man smiled. “No, no, you mustn’t think of it like that. He is leaving us soon, anyway. Now if you need anything else, please ask me or my wife.” He touched his fingers to his chest. “My name is Abdul Latief.”

  “Thank you, Latief Uncle,” I said. “How much—?”

  But he held up a hand, cutting me off. “There will be time for all that tomorrow.”

  He shut the door, and I turned to face the room. It was the first time in three days that I’d been completely alone. For a second, I couldn’t remember where I was.

  Then I heard a soft, urgent knocking. I opened the door to find the young man I’d just seen leaving with his backpack. He smiled awkwardly, his eyes darting past me into the room.

  “Your book,” I said, following his gaze. “It’s under the bed.”

  I picked it up and handed it to him, seeing as I did that it was a daily planner, turned threadbare and soft with use, the year 2002 emblazoned in gold on the bottom right corner of the cover. He opened it with a shy smile, inviting me to look. I hesitated, then stepped forward as he flipped through it. The pages were covered with a dense Urdu I couldn’t read, interspersed with what appeared to be telephone numbers. Then he gently extracted a photograph from between two pages and showed it to me. It was deeply creased and showed another man with a similar face, though a few years older, a chea
p studio portrait in which he stood against the painted backdrop of a lighthouse perched above a gloomy, whitecapped sea.

  The young man tapped the photograph with a finger. In Urdu, he said, “My brother.”

  “Very nice,” I said uncertainly. He seemed so much like a child, standing there with the photograph held out for my approval, but there was also a charged inquiry in his eyes, as if he was sure I knew his brother and was waiting for me to admit it. “It’s a very nice photo.”

  He smiled, then quickly looked somber. “Tomorrow I will go to Bhaderwah,” he announced. “Have you been to Bhaderwah already?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Tomorrow I will go there,” he said. He slid the photo back into the planner and closed it. Out in the corridor, he turned back and said, in shy and diffident English, “I wish best of luck.”

  Startled, I wanted to ask him what he meant, but I stopped myself. If it was luck, I’d take it.

  “Thank you,” I said. I held out my hand. “Best of luck to you too.”

  He grinned. We shook hands, and he walked back slowly to the room where I’d seen the three men, holding his precious book tight under his arm.

  Once he was inside, I locked my door and sat on the edge of the bed. I took off my jeans and my T-shirt. I looked at my skin then at the green walls of this new room, and I tried to make sense of the two things together. My skin and this room. My skin in this room. There was a pause, a second of blankness, and then I began to cry, pressing my palms to my mouth to keep from making a noise. After the tears, I felt better.

  I crawled under the pink sheet and gathered it tight in both my fists. I could still feel the lurching of the taxi, the valley below, the strange and terrifying pull of all that space. I tried to conjure up my mother to help me sleep, but what came instead, to my surprise, was the image of Abdul Latief’s silent wife, piling rice onto my plate, the mound growing steadily higher and higher, and I fell asleep, comforted by the thought that she was close.