The Far Field

by Madhuri Vijay

  “Tomorrow,” she said and headed across the room.

  8

  AFTER MY BOUT WITH chicken pox, I returned to school at my father’s insistence, and my mother made no objection, or at least made none openly. But thus began one of their many wars of silences and recriminations. She spoke to him in an exaggerated mumble, an idiot’s thick accent, which drove him crazy, and eventually caused him to ignore her for an entire week. To me, too, she was frosty, and whenever she called me down to dinner, she would add, “But you should probably check with your father first, in case he knows more than I do about the latest, scientific methods of feeding children.” At the swimming pool, she sat with her arms folded, and when her new friends crowded around her, gossiping, laughing, trying to draw her out, their witty and scandalous leader, their outrageous queen, she stood up and said, loudly enough for everybody to hear, “If I spend another second listening to all of you whine about your good-for-nothing husbands and your lazy maidservants, I promise you that I’ll slit my own throat and bleed to death right here in front of your precious children. So instead I’m going to go sit over there by myself, and I would like it if all of you left me alone.” And she walked over to an unoccupied table, sat down, and folded her arms again, while I tried to avoid the furious eyes of the other women.

  If he’d had the language, my father might have reacted to my mother’s moods differently, but he had a young man’s temper then, as well as a young man’s pride, and she had an exquisite instinct for zooming in on his frailties. One evening, he came home late, grinning, and announced that my swimming coach had called his office to tell him about an upcoming competition, for which he thought I was ready. My father had stopped by the venue to register me on the way home, and now he sat back, enormously pleased with himself. I must have seemed reluctant, because he put his hands on my shoulders and fixed me with a solemn look. “Shalini,” my entrepreneur father said, “tell me this. What do you think separates the successful people of this world from the ordinary ones?”

  He did not wait for my answer.

  “Hunger,” he declared. “Pure and simple hunger. Nothing else. Talent, hard work, all of those things have their roles, yes, but they won’t make any difference if you aren’t hungry for success. How old do you think I was when I started my first factory? Twenty-four. I didn’t know the first thing about running a company. All I knew was that I was going to do it, no matter what, and I did. Mind you, people also said I was crazy. Believe me, there were plenty of people who said that.” He winked at me and put a finger to his lips. “They were right, but, shh, that’s a secret between us.”

  He laughed lightly at his own joke. And it was that laugh, so calm and self-satisfied, that goaded my mother into speaking. “Yes, Shalini,” she said mimicking his lecturing tone. “It was hunger, pure and simple. The twenty lakhs your grandfather put in, his important business contacts, all that was a complete coincidence, understand?”

  My father slowly drew himself up.

  “Why,” he asked, “must you always do that?”

  “Do what?” she said innocently.

  For a long moment, he simply stared at her; then he stalked out of the house, grabbing the car keys on the way. I heard the engine roar and, a moment later, heard it fade. My mother shrugged. “Probably got hungry again,” she said and went upstairs.

  In the end, I took part in the swimming competition, and to my own surprise, I placed second in the freestyle. My father openly wiped tears from his eyes when they placed the medal around my neck, and I could tell that my mother, though she stood stiffly next to him, lips pressed together, was also pleased. In the car on the way home, she remained quiet, almost too quiet, until we were in the middle of bustling M. G. Road, vehicles blaring their horns around us, and then, as if she couldn’t stand it any longer, she rolled down her window, climbed onto the seat, and stuck her entire torso out of the car. “My daughter is a champion!” she screamed to the vehicles whooshing by. An auto swerved away in alarm, and several motorists craned their necks back to goggle at her. “My daughter is a champion!” my mother screamed again. “A champion, a champion, a champion!”

  My father, who was driving, seemed torn between joining her and maintaining the chilly status quo that had reigned in our household since their last argument. But she looked so happy, so wild, so glowing, her arms stretched high, that he couldn’t help himself. He leaned hard on the horn, while she shrieked to the passing vehicles, “Hear ye! Hear ye! All of you will know my champion daughter someday!” I sat in the back, mortified, but with a wide, foolish grin plastered to my face, as my parents honked and hollered my success all the way back home, their rancor and bitterness forgotten in a miraculous instant. Those moments, when the two of them were in accord, came so rarely and with such blistering force that even now I can summon up the feeling they gave me, that we had all three lifted into the air and were flying.

  But they never lasted. Soon he would become distracted, and she would become sarcastic; then he would be pompous and she would smirk; he would rage, and she would stand there coolly until he was gone, slamming the door. And there was one terrible time, when she asked him to turn up the volume of the evening news, and he said, half joking, “Since when have you been so interested in what goes on in the world?” The air around her went deadly cold, and, too late, he saw his mistake. “You’re right,” she said. “Your father sent you to IIT and Columbia. My father didn’t think girls needed to go to college. So why should I be interested in the world?” He tried to apologize, but she cut him off. “Please. There’s no need,” she said. “I know what I am.”

  This, then, was the world into which Bashir Ahmed had now entered. The third time he came, he did not wait for my mother to invite him inside, but walked in as if it were his due. He laughed at everything she said, no matter how ordinary, and while she was in the kitchen, making tea, he drew from his pocket a tiny plastic box of saffron strands and presented it gravely to me. When she came back, he told us a story, this time a funny one about a man he’d known, who traveled from village to village, eating huge amounts at weddings to which he hadn’t been invited. It got to be so bad that the headmen from several villages got together to concoct a plan to teach him a lesson. They gave it out that a huge wedding would occur in a remote hamlet, certain that the wedding crasher would hear of it, as he inevitably did. Anticipating a lavish meal, he made the arduous uphill trek, but when he arrived at the hamlet, he found only a bewildered cowherd in a stone hut, his cows peacefully grazing some distance away. “Where is the wedding?” demanded the crasher. “Is there no cause for celebration here today?” “Well, yes, sir, there is,” the old cowherd replied. “Today my cows will be united with my bull in the hope of a good round of calves next year. It is for us a day of celebration indeed.” The crasher, blushing with shame, went home and never tried to attend a wedding uninvited again.

  It was a good story, and Bashir Ahmed told it well. My mother was slapping her thigh and wheezing with laughter by the time he was done. It delighted him, her unrestrained mirth, and he told her, “It was a good thing that you weren’t the one who went up to the cowherd’s hut.”

  “Why?” she asked, smiling.

  “Because that poor old cowherd would have been finished. You would have sat down in the middle of his house and refused to leave. In fact, you would have probably forced him to get one of his daughters married just so you could get your wedding meal.”

  “Naturally,” she said, pleased.

  He left soon after, promising to return in a few weeks. And he did, with another gift and another story. He always addressed these stories to me, though I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that they were really meant for my mother. I had no proof of this, but when he was in the midst of telling one, I had the feeling that if I simply stood up and left the room, neither of them would notice. She would be lying back against the sofa, her eyes partially closed, and her face, if not precisely happy, was at least free of that vague, taut
energy she so often carried around with her. When his voice fell silent, she would open her eyes to find his green ones waiting, and she would nod discreetly. Only then would he turn, smiling, to me, and say, “Did you like the story, beti?”

  His stories. They all bordered on the fantastic, with gaping holes he glossed over with a cursory wave of his hand, as if details were beneath him. He told us about a boy in a village close to where he lived, who had found two leopard cubs in a cave. Thinking they were kittens, he brought them home. His parents, of course, had known better, and his father ran to return them, but the boy had by then fallen in love with the tiny creatures, so small they hadn’t opened their eyes. He went back the next day and took them again, thinking he’d hide them under a basket and care secretly for them, but the next morning, the basket was overturned, one cub was missing, and the other lay ten feet away, its downy belly ripped open by birds. After that, Bashir Ahmed told us, the female leopard had started stalking the village. Before, she had been peaceable, almost courteous, taking only what she needed, a dog here, an old sheep there. But now she was anguished and indiscriminate. She was also strong; villagers would wake up to find the doors to their barns broken open, their livestock slaughtered. Not eaten, simply slaughtered. They began to speak of her as something more than an animal; the maulvi of the village was consulted. Men with guns sat up at night waiting for her, but she was too quick, too stealthy. The entire village suffered, and it wasn’t until the boy confessed and the maulvi put him through a rigorous cycle of penitence that she left them alone.

  Then there was the story of the chudail, a female demon who would take the form of a pretty young woman and accost lone male travelers, asking if they would escort her home. She would call out to them first from forty feet away; the next moment, she would be right beside them, and they would realize what she was and flee. When they turned back, she had vanished.

  My mother never seemed bothered by the illogical elements of his stories, but I couldn’t let them go. I tried to contain my questions in deference to the silence that prevailed whenever he came to the end of one, but sometimes I couldn’t help myself. How could a leopard break locks? I demanded to know. How did she know that the boy that stole her cubs came from that exact village? Had any of the chudail’s victims ever gone with her? What would have happened if they had? Bashir Ahmed answered my questions first with amused tolerance, but when they became too many, he would throw up his arms and plead for mercy. “Enough, beti, enough! You’re too smart for me.” And my mother, from her spot on the sofa, smiling that dreamy, content smile: “She’s too smart for all of us, believe me.” And he, turning immediately to her: “Just like someone else I know.” And a startled softness coming into her face, changing it in a way I would have never believed possible if I hadn’t been there to see it myself.

  How many times did he visit? Not so many, I realize now, though it seemed to me then that he was always there. Twelve, perhaps fifteen times over the span of three years? I grew to expect, then to await him, once every couple of months, his arrival always coinciding with the thickest of the afternoon’s shadows. He still brought his bundle, though he never again made the pretense of opening it. He would set it down by the door, where it would remain, forgotten, until he was ready to leave again. Sinking down into his place on the sofa, he would look around with a slight expression of anxiety, which cleared once he had made sure that everything was still the same. As a child, I never thought to ask myself what pleasure he gained from the quiet and comfort of our house, but it seems clear enough to me now when I consider the work he did—the long days; the callused feet; the aching neck; the endless, empty patter so inescapable for a salesman—that the pleasure must have been in part the sheer relief of being able to rest. As for what else might have kept him coming back to our house, I must have recognized it even then, in some wordless portion of my brain, and, surprisingly, it did not cause me jealousy, as perhaps it might have done for another child. I saw that he spoke to my mother in a way that nobody else did, and that because he spoke to her in this way, she responded to him in a way she did with nobody else. I saw that there was a brightness and merriment that strengthened in her while he was in the room and dimmed when he departed. And that was, for me, enough to begin to love him.

  And he loved us, too, I am certain of it. I saw him once reach out to adjust a curtain that had blown over the arm of our sofa. He pinched it between thumb and index finger and, instead of letting it drop, he gently lowered it back into place. There was such tenderness in that act: tenderness for this house, for my mother, for me, for the long afternoons when nothing beyond our living room carried any weight or reality. And when my mother was rude, when she interrupted him or laughed in a way that was mocking, he had a way of looking at me—eyebrows pulled down, stern yet humorous, warning me not to be angry with her—that produced in me a real flush of affection.

  My mother, with her typical, bizarre confidence, never once asked me to keep Bashir Ahmed’s visits a secret, but I did. It seems astounding to me now that I never let it slip out, even by accident; but children are, in their way, the most secretive of creatures, and it was, at the time, the ruling principle of my life: the two of them, Bashir Ahmed and my father, represented different worlds, and to cause those worlds to overlap, even slightly, would have brought nothing short of disaster. To my child’s mind, Bashir Ahmed belonged exclusively to the world of afternoons, with their high, walled shadows and elongated silences, to strange stories and unusual gifts. My father, on the other hand, belonged to the steady world of evenings, to comfortably rumpled office clothes and the house lit up, to homework and dinner, to the fading of energy and the coming of sleep. And it began to seem to me that as long as I kept the two separate in my mind, I could have my reward, which was to continue in this way forever.

  Then came the afternoon when my mother fell asleep on the sofa. Bashir Ahmed was with us; he had just come to the end of a long story. He seemed quiet, more so than usual, and I knew better than to ask any questions. We both looked at my mother. Her kurta had bunched up on her lap, and, as we watched, her knee slipped sideways. Then I noticed that her salwar was torn, a little to the left of her crotch, exposing a strip of her pink underwear and a section of thigh. I was mortified, yet afraid to stand up and cover her, irrationally believing that if I made no move, he would somehow miss it altogether. But after a while, he stood up himself and walked over to her. He lifted the edge of her kurta, the way he had done with the curtain, and resettled it so that the material covered the tear. All this he did with the utmost gentleness, and she did not wake up.

  I walked out with him to the gate, where he turned. And instead of saying, as usual, Tell her I will come again soon, he said, “Tell her I might be away for longer than usual, beti.”

  I was immediately afraid. “Why?”

  Because your mother has exposed herself in this indecent way. Because she does not behave like a woman is supposed to. Because I’m sorry to say I do not like her—or you—any longer. Goodbye.

  He sighed. “There are some bad things happening in Kashmir. I have to go back to my family.”

  “What kind of bad things?”

  “I’ll tell you all about it when I come back, okay?”

  “But when will that be?”

  He closed his eyes. “Beti, please. No more questions right now.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He put his hand on the gate and smiled. “It’s all right. Just tell her. Promise?”

  I nodded. And as he was walking away, it struck me for the first time that there might be far more to his life than the little bits he gave us, bound up in his gifts and his stories. That, perhaps, we were not quite as important to him as he was to us. It was a strange and painful revelation, and, in the way of children, I was utterly convinced it had come to me alone. My mother did not know, and it was my duty to shield her forever from this knowledge. I watched Bashir Ahmed turn the corner with his bundle, and then I went back insid
e to where she was sleeping on the sofa, her head lolling to one side, her nakedness so carefully concealed.

  9

  I ENTERED THE HALL the morning after the function to find Zoya ready. She stood by the door, her dark green handbag at her feet, reading an Urdu newspaper, as if she were waiting for a bus. My breakfast was on its tray as usual, two boiled eggs in a dish, along with a few slices of bread and a thermos. When I poured, however, the smell was different, and I glanced up in surprise. Zoya was smiling.

  “Coffee,” she said. “That first day, you said that’s what you drank at home. I went out and bought some this morning.”

  I’d completely forgotten having mentioned it and was, for that reason, doubly moved. I thanked her, took a sip, and nearly spit it out. It was instant coffee, and she had made it blindingly strong. She was watching me with a worried frown.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Don’t you like it?”

  “Mm hm,” I lied. “It’s very good.”

  “Good. I put in extra powder,” she said proudly. “Three full spoons extra.”

  I couldn’t help myself; I began to laugh. At first, she stiffened; then she came forward and took a cautious sip from my cup. Her eyes went wide and she wrinkled her nose like an offended cat, which only made me laugh harder. For a moment, she pressed her lips together in disapproval; then she, too, gave up and began to laugh. The sound of our laughter rang through the hall, which, without all those bodies, felt vast and peaceful.

  “I’m sorry,” Zoya said, wiping her eyes. “It tastes so bad.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s the best coffee I’ve ever tasted.” To prove my point, I drank the entire contents of the thermos. Then I washed the dishes in the kitchen, laced up my shoes, and, for the first time, Zoya and I walked together down the narrow green steps and into the day.