The Far Field

by Madhuri Vijay

  “Alhamdulillah, he became better, or we could not have come,” the older woman put in. “And then who knows what we would be eating now. The chicken was not even cooked.” She sighed. “How many times I’ve told Zoya, this is too much for you, let me do it in my house. But she won’t listen. As if she isn’t under enough stress already, thinking about Ishfaaq, she wants to cook on top of that? But what to do? She is my husband’s sister, and he is the same way.”

  I searched my memory but was quite sure I’d never heard Zoya or Abdul Latief mention the name Ishfaaq before. But I was more arrested by what she’d said about Zoya having a brother. I tried to conjure an image of Zoya as a little girl, running after a taller, laughing boy.

  “Your husband …?”

  “Yes, the one who was reading. He and Zoya, they do what they want, and nobody can make them do anything else.” The older woman held her arms out for the baby, Musa, and her daughter handed him over. She bounced him twice on her hip then said, “I’ll go check on the chicken.” She carried him off to the kitchen, and I was left alone with the young mother.

  “I liked what your father read,” I told her.

  “Oh?” she said, smiling. “You can understand Urdu?”

  I blushed. “Not really. I only speak Hindi. But I liked the sound of it.”

  She laughed. “Then you must tell him that. It will make him very happy. He wrote it himself, you know. He writes everything—stories, plays, poems, songs. And he writes in three languages, Kashmiri, Urdu, and English.”

  “I will tell him,” I said, genuinely impressed.

  “How do you like Kishtwar?” she asked me.

  “I like it a lot,” I said.

  “My aunt told me you are from Bangalore. I’ve heard it is a big city.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Very big.”

  “Then Kishtwar must seem so quiet to you. Nothing happens here.”

  I recalled the story Stalin had told me and shifted a bit uncomfortably on my stool.

  “What about during the militancy?” I asked. “It wasn’t quiet then, was it?”

  “No,” she said gravely. “It wasn’t. That was a bad time for everybody, though, of course, it was worse for some people. Like my aunt and uncle.” She sighed. “Excuse me,” she said, before I could ask more, “I should go and make sure Musa gets his food.”

  When she’d gone, I looked about. People were sitting or standing in groups, chatting. The two little boys I’d seen earlier were doing somersaults in one corner. Nobody seemed to be paying attention to me, so I took the chance to slip behind the curtain and head back toward my room. I shut the door, and it was only when I turned that I saw I was not alone.

  Zoya was sitting on my bed. She had half risen, but when she saw who it was, she sank back down. She’d taken off her headscarf, or it had slipped off, and she was gripping it tightly in her fists. It was a shock to see her head suddenly uncovered; it made her look younger, closer to the little girl I had tried and failed to imagine.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, automatically, turning to go.

  “No, please—I just came to rest,” Zoya said. She spoke jerkily, without her usual calm force. “The room was empty, so I thought you were—I’ll go now.”

  She made a halfhearted move to stand.

  “No, it’s fine,” I said quickly. “Please stay.”

  She hesitated, then sat down again. I could hear a swell of voices from the hall.

  “Every year,” said Zoya, “there are more and more people.”

  She was speaking in a lifeless tone, more to herself than me. Her face wore a look I’d never seen before, dull and disoriented.

  “I was the one who started it,” she went on. “In the beginning, it seemed like a good idea. But now I can’t remember why. They come, they eat, they go. And what for?”

  The last thing I wanted was to interrupt her trance by speaking, so I stayed mute, watching her face, willing her to go on.

  “Is it helping anybody?” Zoya exclaimed suddenly. “Family is important, Latief says, and yes, I agree with him, but what does it have to do with Ishfaaq? I don’t know how much longer I can keep doing this, how many more years. I’m getting tired. I think—”

  She stopped and looked up, as if she’d only just realized whom she was addressing. I wanted to cry out, No! Don’t stop! but she stood and wrapped the scarf firmly around her head.

  “I’m sorry I bothered you,” she said, and her voice had become itself again, remote and unyielding. “The food is ready, or it will be soon. Please come and eat.”

  And in three swift steps, she was past me and out of the room.

  I sat down on the bed where she had been, feeling a loss I could not name. A few moments later, there was a knock and Abdul Latief poked his curly head around the door.

  “Why did you run off?” he demanded gaily. “Come, come, meet some people.”

  I stood and followed him, shaking hands with various relatives whose faces I barely registered, politely answering their questions about Bangalore, but thinking the whole time of Zoya’s bloodless face, her voice going on and on in that dead whisper.

  “Now,” Abdul Latief told me, “I want you to meet someone special.”

  He led me to the yellow room, which this afternoon resembled a sort of female durbar. In the middle, in a red plastic chair, sat a very old lady in a thick, shapeless garment. Around her were more than a dozen women, sitting on the floor with their knees drawn up. The air was stuffy with a mixture of perfumes. I quickly scanned the room; Zoya sat closest to the old woman, her head resting on the arm of the plastic chair. As soon as she saw me, she pulled herself straight.

  “Ammi-jaan,” Abdul Latief called loudly. “See who’s come to meet you? Our new guest, all the way from Bangalore.” To me he whispered, “Zoya’s mother. She’s ninety years old.”

  The old woman raised her head. Her thick eyebrows were spangled with silver and her eyelids drooped, but her voice was strong when she said, in Urdu, “Come sit down, child.”

  I picked my way across the room, the women pulling back the skirts of their kurtas to make room for me. As I approached her, I hesitated. There was nowhere to sit. But Zoya solved the problem for me by standing and abruptly leaving the room, not meeting my eyes.

  I sat, very self-consciously, in her place at the old lady’s knee. She held out her hand, and I placed mine in it. Her skin was disturbingly soft, almost without texture.

  “How are you, child?” she asked.

  “I’m fine, aunty.”

  “You are comfortable here, in my daughter’s house?”

  “Yes, aunty.”

  “And where have you come from?” She was running her thumb over and over my knuckle, the way one might absently pet a cat, but I liked it, the sensation of being so gently handled.

  “From Bangalore,” I said.

  “Bangalore,” she repeated softly. “That is far away. Your mother must be missing you.”

  She was an old lady, and it was only a platitude, but I found myself shaken. “She’s dead, aunty,” I said loudly. “My mother is dead.”

  “Your poor thing,” she murmured.

  I was struck by a sudden, savage resentment at her tone, which was pitying, yet I took a strange pleasure in it too. I sat with my head held high, tasting bitter pride in my own weakness, and hating myself for it at the same time, because, cynical and hardened as I believed myself to be at twenty-four, I had never stopped to consider that pity might, in fact, be just another facet of love.

  Suddenly, the pressure on my knuckle lifted away. I looked up to see the old woman sitting straight in her red chair. Her face wore a queer, intent look.

  “My grandson,” she said, “is also dead.”

  A peculiar reaction followed her announcement. The collective breath went out of the room. A stunning teenage girl with kohl-rimmed eyes shrank back against the woman sitting beside her. The old lady glanced around, a contemptuous amusement in her face. “What?” she asked. “Our guest h
as come from so far away, and we can’t even tell her the truth about our Ishfaaq?”

  That name again. Only then, slowly, did it began to dawn on me who this Ishfaaq might be. Who he must be. I’d seen no sign of him in the house where I’d lived for nearly a fortnight, had never heard his name mentioned, but the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. The sadness that seemed to blow over Abdul Latief and Zoya from time to time, for no apparent reason.

  Still, I had to be sure. “Aunty,” I said, “who is that?”

  “Ishfaaq?” She barely glanced down at me. “Ishfaaq is my grandson. Zoya’s son.”

  I closed my eyes, feeling a pressure in my chest, as if a hand were pushing down on it. How had I not known? How had I not sensed it, sleeping night after night after night in that tiny green room? A room perfect for a child, a son. But the old lady was not yet finished.

  “For eight years,” she went on, her hard gaze making the women around me cower, “all of you have been acting like he’s just gone away for a holiday. Like he will come back. None of you will say the truth openly, not even my daughter, but I will say it.” She tossed her head. “I will say—”

  She broke off, her eyes fixed on the doorway. I looked up and froze. Zoya stood there, her left arm raised and her mouth half open. It terrified me to look at her. The other women dropped their eyes. Even the old lady seemed uneasy.

  “Zoya,” she said.

  Zoya ignored her. “The food is ready,” she said. “Come and eat, all of you.”

  Most of the women stood up. I did the same and began to file out with them, not daring to meet Zoya’s eyes as I passed her. The old woman did not acknowledge our departure. She remained bowed over in her chair, looking exhausted.

  Zoya followed us out to the hall, where platters and bowls of food had been laid out on a plastic folding table, paper plates in a stack at one end. Several people were already eating, lined up cross-legged against the wall. I saw Musa’s mother, feeding him from a bottle of milk.

  “Please help yourself,” Zoya said to me stiffly.

  I stepped forward to the table, where I recognized the first dish, a bowl of vermicelli cooked in milk, with raisins and cashews floating in it. “Payasam,” I said involuntarily.

  “Phirni,” Zoya said from behind me.

  “We call it payasam at home.” Then I added, “My mother used to make it all the time.”

  For a while, she said nothing, but I could hear her breathing just behind my shoulder. Then she said, in a voice that was barely audible, “This is Ishfaaq’s favorite dish. He used to wait all year for Ramadan, just so he could eat this after fasting.”

  She’d spoken thickly, but without anger. I hadn’t missed her use of the present tense, either, and I said, taking a chance, “Then Ishfaaq and I are the same.”

  I turned just in time to catch her startled, vivid smile, full of pain. After another pause, she said, “I should have told you earlier.”

  “No,” I said firmly. “There was no need to tell me anything. I’m nobody.”

  She shook her head. She still seemed a little dazed. “You are not nobody,” she said. “You are—it is nice to have you here. For us—for me. A young person in the house after many years.” She straightened up. “Please,” she said again. “Start eating. I have to take some food to my mother.”

  I watched her walk away holding a plate with a few spoonfuls of rice and a tiny dollop of phirni; then I looked around the room, at their family, all of them bent over their plates, eating and talking, and I felt the absurdity of my earlier resentment. There was no reason to feel jealous of these people, who all clearly felt the same affection for Zoya and Abdul Latief as I did, who were here for the sake of Zoya’s son, who may or may not have been dead. No sooner had I had the thought, however, than it was disturbed by another: Stalin, with his stories of militants riding through the streets and local boys running after them, and a doubt twitched at the back of my mind. But I pushed it away and concentrated instead on the echo of Zoya’s voice. It is nice to have you here. For me.

  I picked up a plate, helped myself to the phirni, and looked for a spoon. I saw one at the other end of the table, but as I picked it up, I heard a man’s voice, “That one has been used.”

  It was the balding man, the one who had been reading earlier. He took the spoon from me and ran it under the tap of the small sink. The back of his neck was deeply veined, networks of blue that disappeared into the spray of dyed-orange hair. He shook the spoon and handed it back.

  “Thank you,” I said. “You are Zoya’s brother, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.” His speaking voice, too, was musical. “My name is Saleem.”

  “I heard you reading. It was beautiful. Your daughter said you wrote it?”

  He nodded. “I do not get enough time for writing. But I try to do it whenever I can.”

  “And it is true you write in Urdu, Kashmiri, and English?”

  “My daughter talks too much,” he said, evidently pleased. “But she is correct. I find that different languages are useful for different things. For instance, it is best to write poetry in Urdu. Urdu words are made for poetry and songs. For stories, Kashmiri is the best.”

  “And English?”

  “English?” He smiled. “English is excellent for signboards and maps.”

  I laughed. He was teasing me, but I didn’t care. My conversation with Zoya had lifted my spirits, given me patience enough for anything.

  “And you?” he asked. “What is your language?”

  “Tamil is my mother tongue,” I said. “I learned English and Hindi in school, so I can understand a little Urdu, but I can’t read it.”

  “You should learn to read Urdu,” he said seriously. “It is a beautiful language.”

  “I’d love to learn someday.”

  “I’d be happy to teach you if you want,” he said.

  It was just a politeness, I knew, but as soon as he said it, I wanted it to be possible. I wanted to stay in Kishtwar, become his student. I would wake each morning and walk the narrow streets to his house. Under a vast, luxuriant tree, he would teach me the elegant flowing Urdu alphabet. There would be a breeze, the jumbled shadow of leaves on the page. I would walk home in the afternoon, and wait for Abdul Latief and Zoya to return from work. We would linger over chai, and then I would recite for them what I had learned. They would listen, Abdul Latief leaning back against his bolster, Zoya knitting her blue garment, and they would praise me. Then the three of us would sit down to dinner. Why couldn’t such a thing be a life, I wondered suddenly. Why couldn’t it be mine?

  Saleem had been silent for a while, looking around the room. His right eye tended to drift slightly inward, barely noticeable except when he was looking to that side.

  “Zoya told me about your mother,” he said. “I was sorry to hear about that. It is a difficult thing to lose one’s parent.” He looked across the room. I followed his gaze, saw Zoya talking to the man with the chest hair. “As difficult as losing a child,” he said.

  I looked at him. “What happened to Ishfaaq?”

  He sighed. “We’ve heard so many different stories that we don’t even really know anymore. All we know is that he was walking home from school when he ran into them.”

  I digested this in silence for a moment. “And what happened?” I asked, thinking of the militants Stalin had told me about that morning. “Did he join them?”

  He gave me a strange look. “Join them?”

  I nodded. “The militants who took him.”

  “Who told you the militants took him?” he asked sharply.

  “You just said—”

  “It was the army,” he said, cutting me off. “He was coming home from school, and an army vehicle stopped and made him get in. That was eight years ago. On this same day,” he added. “And it was the last time any of us ever saw him. He was sixteen years old then.” He paused to note my expression. I was thinking of Abdul Latief and the way he looked at me when I told him my age. Twe
nty-four. The age his son should have been. “Have you been to Zoya’s office?” Saleem asked then, seemingly apropos of nothing.

  I shook my head.

  “You should go,” he said. He was about to say more, but then he glanced over my shoulder and quickly arranged his face into a relaxed smile. I turned to see Zoya approaching us, clutching a bouquet of spoons in her hand.

  “I forgot to put spoons out,” she said.

  “We know.” Saleem smiled at his sister. “How did you expect your guest of honor to eat your famous phirni, hm? Good thing I managed to find one and save your honor.”

  “Oh, enough of your drama,” she said to him, then turning to me, added, “Sorry.”

  Despite the shock of what I’d just learned, I still felt pleasure at the way she addressed me, not with her usual remote distrust, but with wry casualness, as if she had known me for years.

  “I was just saying she should come with you to the office one of these days,” Saleem said.

  I saw the muscles of her face tighten. “With me?”

  “Yes, why not?” Saleem said. “Maybe she could help you with some of the work.”

  Zoya looked at the floor. “She doesn’t want to do that. It would be boring.”

  “Not at all. I’d love to help,” I said quickly.

  “See?” Saleem said. “She’d love to help.” He turned to me. “Zoya and Latief told me about this person you are looking for. Bashir Ahmed, is that correct? I know a few people in the clothes-selling business. I will ask them, and together we will find him, inshallah.” He smiled at us and walked away, his sparse flame-colored hair bobbing over the crowd.

  Zoya stood there, gazing after him. “Saleem will be able to help you,” she said quietly. She seemed abstracted again, though no longer aloof in quite the same way.

  “He said I should help you,” I reminded her.

  She didn’t reply.

  “I won’t come if it’s any trouble,” I added.

  “No,” she said thoughtfully, “it’s no trouble. In fact, it will be nice to have company. I should have taken you with me before.”

  Right then someone called her name. She set the spoons on the table and looked at me again. And then she did something wholly surprising. She touched me lightly on the shoulder.