The Far Field

by Madhuri Vijay

  In the street, the morning haze moved like a living thing and landed cool on my skin. I had to walk slowly to keep pace with Zoya. She was quite a small woman, I realized. All these days, she had seemed so powerful, looming over me to fill my plate. I wondered briefly, with a thrill, if anyone who didn’t know us might think I was her daughter.

  We made our way up the streets of Kishtwar, now so familiar to me. Zoya’s green bag thudded occasionally against my hip. “Sorry, sorry,” she murmured in a distracted tone. Then she stopped altogether at a corner, seemed to think, then said, “Come this way, I want to show you something.” She went right then cut sharply right again, through a small, dark alleyway between a tailor and a tiny dry goods shop that smelled of cloves and cinnamon. The alleyway led out onto a wide, tree-lined street with large old houses on either side. Zoya came to a stop before a house with a tall black wrought-iron gate and waited for me to catch up to her.

  “Here,” she said.

  “This is where you work?”

  “No.” She pointed to a patch of pavement. “This is the place from where the soldiers took Ishfaaq. We found his schoolbag here.” Behind the wrought-iron gate was a cracked pathway, overgrown with weeds, which led to a large, crumbling house. I found that I couldn’t speak.

  “Right after they took him, I used to come here,” she said. Her eyes were still lowered, fixed on the pavement. “I thought I would find something. I didn’t know what. I found a pencil once, but it could have belonged to anyone, any schoolchild. After a while I stopped coming this way. This is the first time I’ve stood in this spot in almost five years.”

  I wanted to touch her arm, but I felt very clearly the distance of those years between us. Yet I was unutterably grateful that she had trusted me enough to bring me here, to show me this thing. I closed my eyes and imagined hands pulling at a boy’s school uniform, a door slamming, tires screeching, an eerie, ringing silence afterward.

  “Bastards,” I said in English.

  Zoya raised her head.

  “Bastards,” she repeated, and the careful way she said it made the oath sound even more obscene. She took a deep breath and drew herself up. “Let’s go,” she said.

  We walked away from the quiet, leafy street and the elegant old houses, and entered another neighborhood, smaller and more cramped, where Zoya stopped again.

  “This,” she said, “is my office.”

  She pushed open a low gate and led me through a tiny unkempt garden. At the end was a tiny, dilapidated bungalow, its hay-yellow paint all but peeled away. A single chipped step led up to a little verandah, covered in shoes. We slipped ours off before entering.

  Inside was a large main room, with two folding tables in the center and multiple chairs arranged around them, in the style of a conference room. Half a dozen people sat at the tables, poring over thick cardboard files. I caught the comforting smell of aged paper, the scrape of chair legs, the murmur of voices. At the end of one of the tables was a desktop computer, its screen blind with dust. I watched as a plump man with inky fingers flipped through a register like the one I’d pretended to keep at the agency. A young woman wearing a sky-blue hijab carefully copied something from a yellow form into a large legal pad. The whole place felt like an antiquated library minus its books, or some sleepy backwater government office.

  People looked up and smiled as Zoya and I crossed the room, wishing her a low, “Salaam alaikum,” and leveling curious glances at me before returning to their work.

  We stopped before a door that led off the main room. It stood slightly ajar, and I heard the rapid clicks of typing from within. Zoya entered, and I followed her into the room, which was lined with tall metal racks filled with dozens and dozens of cardboard files.

  A woman sat at a tiny desk in the middle, her hijab slipping back over her thick, cropped gray hair, a pair of thin spectacles balanced on the tip of her nose. She was somewhere in her mid-fifties, I guessed, and was peering closely at a computer screen. She waved us in without glancing up.

  Zoya stood patiently until she had finished. Then she said, “Salaam alaikum, Zarina,” adding in respectful Urdu, “This is my guest, the one I told you about.”

  “Yes, you did,” the woman, Zarina, responded. Her voice was low-pitched and somehow ragged, as if it had caught on a nail and torn. She had gray eyes and a cool, direct gaze that now fixed on me. Switching smoothly to English, she said, “Which part of India are you from?”

  “Bangalore,” I said.

  Zarina raised an eyebrow. “A long way from home,” she said. She spoke casually enough, but something about her tone made me think that she had sized me up and was not particularly impressed with what she saw. “We don’t get many tourists from Bangalore coming to Kishtwar.”

  “I’m not a tourist,” I said. “I came here to find someone.”

  She was unfazed. “Oh, yes,” she said. “Yes, I think I remember Zoya mentioning something about that. Well, you’re in good hands with her and Latief.” She nodded at Zoya. “Between the two of them, they know everybody in town. Good luck to you.”

  She was about to turn back to her computer when Zoya asked her hesitantly, in Urdu, “Is there any work she can do, Zarina? She wants to help us.”

  “Help us?” Zarina sounded surprised. “Here? In the office? We have all the help we need.”

  “Yes, I know,” Zoya said eagerly, “still I thought maybe she could—” But she broke off, seeing the expression on Zarina’s face. It shocked me to witness this flinching, deferential woman who had so suddenly taken the place of my formidable host. I could not suppress a surge of protective anger on her behalf, but I forced myself to keep my mouth shut.

  Zarina seemed to be thinking. Then she said something clipped in Kashmiri to Zoya, who nodded and looked relieved, touched me lightly on the arm, the way she’d done the night before, and quickly walked out of the room. Left alone with me, Zarina leaned back in her chair and regarded me for a long moment. I tried to make my spine straighter.

  “So,” she said, this time in English again, “has Zoya explained to you the work we do here?”

  “A little,” I lied.

  “I see. Has she told you about Ishfaaq?”

  I nodded.

  “All right, you know about him. Then you probably also know Ishfaaq isn’t the only one. A friend of mine—we were in law school together—runs an organization in Srinagar for the families of those who have been arrested by the army. I do something similar here—on a smaller scale.”

  “You find them?”

  She winced. “We try. We help people file habeas corpus, police reports, petitions. Mostly we collect cases, record testimony that kind of thing.” She waved toward the stacks of files on the metal racks.

  “All of these?” I asked, unable to hide the wonder in my voice.

  “Yes,” she said. “And we get new ones all the time.” She tapped the top file in the stack on her desk. “For example, this young man came to see me last week. His older brother had vanished about four years ago, right from their family fields. All this man knew was that, a week before it happened, his brother had some kind of disagreement with an army captain. Over a cigarette, if you can believe it. So he went to the captain, begged for the release of his brother. The captain pretended to know nothing, obviously; then he very offhandedly mentioned an amount of money. The poor boy ran around the village for weeks, trying to raise it. Then he invited the captain home for lunch, had his mother cook a huge meal, and presented the cash. A month of silence went by, then two, and the boy went to see the captain again. Do you know what the captain said?”

  I shook my head.

  Zarina leaned forward. “He said, ‘You shouldn’t have fed me rice. Rice in the afternoon makes me sleepy.’”

  She watched me, cool and evaluative, from behind her desk, the tall gray metal towers full of files rising like rows and rows of teeth around her.

  “What happened in the end?” I asked. “Did you find him? The brother?”
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  She shrugged. “Like I said, this man only came to see me last week. I don’t know what we can do, frankly. Last I heard, he was on his way to the army camp in Bhaderwah.”

  I gave a start, thinking of the earnest young man with the black book, wishing me luck.

  “This man,” I said, “did he happen to show you a photograph of his brother?”

  Instead of answering, Zarina simply opened the top file and turned it to face me. And there was the same man, standing before the same painted backdrop of lighthouse and ocean, his hands stiff by his sides, staring up at me.

  “I met that man,” I said softly. “He was staying with Zoya when I first arrived.”

  Then, all of a sudden, it hit me. I raised my head to stare at Zarina. “All of those people,” I said, “the people who stay with Zoya, are they—I mean, do they all—”

  She nodded. “Yes. They’re all looking for someone. They go out to the camp, trying to find whatever information they can. Sometimes one of the soldiers might feel sorry for some of them and tell them he saw the person they’re looking for, three months ago or three years ago, but most of the time, they just make them wait all day, then chase them off without telling them anything. But what can these people do? They have to try.”

  I gazed around at the files, some of them dusty, clearly untouched for years.

  Zarina looked toward the door. Her face had changed, grown softer, more contemplative.

  “You know,” she said, “when I began this organization, Zoya was the first person who started working with me. I met her the week Ishfaaq was taken. She was completely devastated, and she couldn’t think of anything but finding him. She came to ask me for help filing his FIR and then simply never left. Now I don’t think I would be able to run this place without her.”

  Zarina took her glasses off and wiped them on the edge of her hijab. “Sometimes I worry that she takes on too much. Especially letting people stay in her home.” She gave me a quick glance that was nonetheless full of meaning. “Zoya’s problem is that she gets too close, if you know what I mean. She wants to help everybody, no matter who it is. I understand why she does it, but all the same it takes a toll on her. And each time someone leaves, as everyone does in the end, it breaks her heart all over again. Even though she’d never show it.” She paused “I’ve told her so many times not to do it, not to let people stay with her, but—”

  “But she’s stubborn,” I finished for her.

  “Yes,” Zarina said, “she is.”

  We were silent, watching each other with, I thought, a degree of wariness. I was trying to work out what her speech was meant to convey, whether she was merely warning me of Zoya’s fragility, or whether it was something else, a way of expressing suspicion of me. The thought made me bristle, and I responded more harshly than I might have otherwise; and only now, from the remove of so many years, does it also occur to me to wonder exactly what sort of danger she thought I represented. Was it the same danger Hari had seen the night he said I frightened him?

  “Look, I just want to help Zoya,” I said firmly. “If there’s something you can think of for me to do, I’d be happy to do it. Otherwise I’ll leave and won’t trouble you anymore.”

  Zarina opened her mouth to reply, but she never got the chance, because at that moment, Zoya herself came back in waving a sheaf of old papers bound with twine. There was a smudge of dust on her nose, and it struck me as a very tender thing. I suddenly wanted to hug her.

  “I found them!” she announced happily in Urdu. “They were right at the bottom of all these boxes, so it took me a while.”

  “Thank you,” Zarina said, gravely accepting the sheaf. Then she said, “Zoya, do you remember those old bills we have? From ‘98–’99? They’re in a file somewhere, I’m almost sure.” She glanced toward me. “Maybe your friend can enter them in the computer. What do you think?”

  “Could you do that?” Zoya asked, turning toward me eagerly.

  “Yes,” I replied, and she beamed like a little girl.

  “Then it’s settled,” Zarina said. She was already turning back to her laptop screen. “I hope the rest of your stay in Kishtwar is pleasant.”

  Zoya led me back to the main room, over to the old desktop computer. I touched the mouse, and the screen flickered to life after a long moment. While she went off in search of the files, I sat before the blinking cursor, trying to make sense of everything I’d just learned. The people who passed through Zoya’s house, Ishfaaq, the stacks and stacks and stacks of files. The boy and his brother and the army captain, the disagreement over cigarettes. Cigarettes. I felt my stomach drop, thinking of the cigarette I’d shared with Stalin. While I sat there, trying to wrestle down the fear that Zoya would find out about him, she returned holding aloft a dusty file bulging with multicolored scraps of paper.

  “Here,” she said, setting it down beside me. “These are our bills from the first two years. We didn’t have a computer then. Can you make a spreadsheet of this?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Good. I’ll be here if you have any questions,” she said, touching me once on the shoulder. Then she left me to my work.

  I opened the file and began to sort through the papers. They consisted of taxi booking forms, invoices for stationery, bills, receipts, all of them thrown together haphazardly. I began sorting through them, separating them into neat, chronological piles, looking up from time to time at the others bent over their own files. It reminded me of Ritu Shah, of the agency, and I was seized all at once by vertigo, by a sense of how far I’d come from everything I’d known. I had no business being in this room with these grave people absorbed in their work, and yet, at that moment, I had no wish to be anywhere else in the world. I saw Zoya going into and out of Zarina’s office, saw her talking for a while to the young woman in the sky-blue hijab. Then I didn’t look up until I felt Zoya touch my shoulder again.

  “I think that’s enough for today,” she said gently.

  We said goodbye to the people in the room, and then we went out into the afternoon sun. As Zoya closed the low gate, she looked at me and said, “Thank you.”

  “I’m happy that I could help,” I answered automatically.

  “No,” she said. “Thank you for listening about Ishfaaq. For giving me company today.”

  My heart swelled. I recalled Zarina’s gray eyes, her dry voice saying, She gets too close, and I felt a swoop of dark foreboding. But I could not hold on to it. The sun was so bright, the mountains seemed unreal, like they were cut from gauze, I was going to walk back home with this fierce, extraordinary woman who was finally speaking to me, and—this was the truth—I was content.

  It took me three days to organize the papers in the file, after which I began to enter the information into an Excel spreadsheet. It was rote, mindless work, but that did not matter—what gave me pleasure were the murmurs of the other people in the room, the scent of those tiny white flowers in the garden, the ruffling of papers, and the clearing of throats. Zarina occasionally came out of her room, and her manner to me was unfailingly polite, though reserved. My favorite part of the day, however, was the walk home with Zoya. After the first day or two, we took to stopping at a little hotel for lunch, sitting at the same kind of long wooden table I’d once observed with envy from the back of a taxi. The skinny boy who worked at the hotel grew to expect us at the same hour. We would eat, elbow to elbow in the sun, and Zoya would talk. Most often, what she talked about was Ishfaaq. How he disliked cricket but pretended to like it because all his friends did, how he had grown three inches in a single month, how he loved food, especially phirni. Sometimes she spoke of her own childhood, the girls she’d once played with, now married and with children of their own. Back at the house, Zoya would hand me a bowl of rice from which to pick out the small, black stones. While I did so, she would cook, now and then breaking the silence to ask me to fetch an egg from the fridge, or the bottle of turmeric from her fragrant cupboard of spices.

  Each evening
, I still went into my room and peeled from my diminishing stack another five hundred rupees, which I had come to think of as payment for the continuation of this peace. They would be in the hall, Abdul Latief flipping through channels on TV and Zoya knitting her mysterious blue garment. Tea would be laid out already, a third white cup set aside for me, and so would pass the evening. When the azan sounded, and Abdul Latief left us to go to the mosque, Zoya and I would heat up the food and set it out on the living room floor, and when he returned, the three of us would eat, sitting in a close semicircle. Afterward, Abdul Latief would reach for a toothpick; Zoya would close her eyes; and I would lean back against a bolster, happy just to be in the room with them, snug in the certainty that tomorrow would bring more of the same.

  Then one afternoon, perhaps five days after I’d begun going with Zoya to the office, as we were walking home in the afternoon, I saw Stalin. We turned a corner and there he was, standing at the end of the road. There was no mistaking those long legs, that lanky torso. I almost tripped; my blood ran cold. Since the day of the function, I’d faithfully avoided the intersection with the pharmacy, determined never to encounter him again. What was he doing here?

  Zoya hadn’t noticed my agitation; she was busy talking, telling me about a friend she once had on this road, who now lived in Jammu. Stalin’s head was turned the other way, but at any moment, he would look in our direction. I could think of no way to divert her, to suggest another route home. There was nothing between him and us except twenty meters of bare pavement.

  I tried to think rationally, bravely. So what if he did see me? What did I have to fear? He might have forgotten me entirely. But even as the thoughts raced through my mind, I knew I didn’t believe them. And before I could make up my mind to do anything at all, Stalin turned. His eyes caught mine. I saw a flicker of surprise, followed by confusion, saw it darken to recognition.

  I dropped my gaze and stared at the pavement. Zoya was still talking, oblivious of my silence. I watched the ground slide back under our feet, bracing myself for that high-pitched voice, that reedy whine, but second after excruciating second went by, and I heard nothing.