The Far Field

by Madhuri Vijay

  We were almost upon him. I caught a flash of gray-green from the corner of my eye, heard the dry scrape of a boot on the pavement.

  And then we were past. I started to let out the breath I’d been holding.

  But then he giggled. A weird, high-pitched giggle, more chilling for being devoid of humor.

  “You two,” I heard him say in Hindi, though without the respectful address that a woman of Zoya’s age should have merited. “Come here.”

  I waited as long as I could before obeying. Zoya had already turned. She showed no fear, no surprise, but waited calmly for him to repeat himself: a short, fearless woman built like a mountain, a bottle-green bag stuffed under her arm.

  “Yes. You two. I’m talking to you.” Stalin nodded. “Come here.”

  We walked back toward him. I moved slowly, my legs uncooperative. Zoya, on the other hand, walked briskly up to him, as though she might embrace him. But I knew her well enough by now to recognize the strained muscles in her neck, her barreling gait. She was furious.

  Stalin surveyed us for a moment, like a man considering a purchase. His helmet had fallen forward over his eyes, and, rather than adjust it, he raised his chin to look at us. This might have been amusing in other circumstances, but his eyes were half-closed, a faint sneer hovered on his lips, and I found that I was not inclined to laugh.

  Fear roared in my ears, an oceanic sound. I tried to keep my head up, my face expressionless, fully expecting him to address me. But, to my astonishment, it was to Zoya he spoke.

  “Show me,” he said.

  I looked at her, baffled. Show him what? She was opening her bag, fumbling around inside. She brought out a laminated card, which she pinched at one corner and held out to Stalin, who gave it the most cursory of glances, and said, “What nonsense is this?”

  For the first time, Zoya’s iron composure wavered. “Sir?”

  “I’m asking,” he said, insultingly slow, “what rubbish this is that you’re trying to show me.”

  “My ID card, sir,” she said.

  “Is that so?” he jeered. “‘My ID card.’ You think I’m stupid?”

  She didn’t answer. It hadn’t been a question.

  “Show me another one,” he snapped.

  Zoya opened her mouth. Then, slowly, she closed it.

  “Quickly!” Stalin squeaked. He was toying with her, taunting her with this parody of a schoolteacher’s severity. “Don’t waste my time.”

  She let her hand hover over her bag then let it fall.

  “I don’t have another one,” she said, and then her face was no longer made of iron, it was flesh again: gray and blue capillaries, puffed fat beneath waxy skin. She was probably twice his age.

  “I don’t have another one, sir,” he corrected her.

  “I don’t have another one, sir.”

  “Then what are you doing outside?” he demanded. “Want me to arrest you, huh?”

  Only then did he look at me, and there was nearly enough malicious delight in that look to make me speak, to defend her. My mother would have spoken. She would have eyed him, and, with a few precise words, reduced him to nothing. She would have, but I did not.

  The seconds passed, and then he smiled at me. It was not a nice smile.

  “I’ll let you go this time,” he said to Zoya, sounding bored now, assured of his victory. “But this is your last chance, hear me? Next time I catch you without a proper ID, you won’t escape so easily.” He waved a contemptuous hand at her. “Now get lost, go home. I don’t want to see your face here again. I’ll be looking out for you.”

  Zoya spun on her heel and walked away, so quickly I had to jog to catch up with her. We trudged home, speaking not a word to each other until we reached the house. Finally, unable to stand it any longer, I burst out, “How can he do that?”

  Zoya didn’t respond. She began to climb the green stairs.

  “Zoya!” I called up after her again. “How can he do that?”

  She turned. “What do you want me to say, Shalini?” she asked with weary patience.

  “I don’t know,” I cried. “Say something!”

  “I think we should leave it,” she said.

  I heard the warning in her voice, but, childishly, I pressed on. “I can’t leave it! How could you stand there, listening to that—to that—”

  Then she lost patience. “What should I have done instead?” she asked. “Should I have hit him, hm? Should I have shouted at him?” She paused. “Asked him for a cigarette?”

  I stared openmouthed at her.

  “So just leave it,” she said. She turned and went inside the house, but I remained rooted to the same spot. What had she meant? Had she seen me with Stalin? Had someone told her?

  I longed to flee, but I forced myself to walk upstairs. She had already begun cooking, and I silently began to help her. After dinner, as the three of us sat in the hall, Zoya as always reaching for her knitting, I leaned toward her and whispered, “Sorry.”

  She did not stop knitting, but her hands seemed to soften. She angled her face toward me and smiled, shaking her head slightly to show she was not angry. I felt a wave of relief wash over me. Abdul Latief soon found a channel playing Bollywood songs from the seventies, and we listened in silence for a while to the scratchy old music. I thought of my father’s collection of records, his hands moving over the spines, a silent incantation, and, briefly, I missed him.

  “What are you making?” I asked Zoya.

  “A hat,” she said. “For Farzana’s baby.”

  “Farzana?”

  “Saleem’s daughter,” interjected Abdul Latief. “You met her and the baby the other day.”

  “Musa?”

  “Good memory,” he said and smiled at me.

  Then Zoya, not taking her eyes off her knitting, said, “The first thing I ever knitted was a hat for Ishfaaq. Just after he was born.”

  Abdul Latief shifted onto his side. “Oh no,” he laughed. “This story again.”

  “I was just learning,” Zoya said. “I didn’t want to rush.”

  “She took five months to make it,” Abdul Latief put in. “Five months for one hat.”

  “I was following a pattern,” Zoya said. “The pattern was very important to me.”

  “Very important,” Abdul Latief agreed solemnly, clearly enjoying his role.

  They both giggled, sounding for a moment like impish children. And then I felt a desperate need to laugh, and at the same time, a ferocious desire to hug them, to fight for them, to keep them safe from everything in the world that might ever want to harm them.

  “So what happened?” I asked.

  “It came out as big as a bag,” Zoya said. “We used to put Ishfaaq inside it in the winter.”

  She and Abdul Latief gazed at each other, their expressions sad and tender, and, for a moment, the full force of their loss blew through the room like a cold wind.

  There seemed to be no more to say after that. Zoya’s needles ticked, keeping erratic time. The black-and-white lights from the TV streaked Abdul Latief’s glasses, and his eyelids began to droop. I kept watch over them both, wishing for nothing to disturb this extraordinary peace, wishing for no intrusion, no stranger at the top of the stairs tonight, seeking a loved one vanished, his whole body burning with his great and terrible hope.

  But what disturbed us in the end was the phone on the windowsill. It shrieked its loud, burring sound and Abdul Latief blinked and leaned over to answer. “Hello,” he said. “Walaikum salaam. Yes, she’s here. Tell me.”

  He listened, then sat up, switching over abruptly to Kashmiri. I became aware that Zoya had stopped knitting and was listening intently. My first thought was that it was news about Ishfaaq, and my heart quickened. Then Abdul Latief hung up the phone. He was smiling.

  “I knew it!” he burst out. “That was Saleem.” To my astonishment, he pointed the TV remote straight at my heart. “He was calling about you.”

  “Me?”

  “He has found the fami
ly of Bashir Ahmed’s wife, the people you were looking for.”

  Next to me, Zoya set her knitting down, as if she had just discovered a mistake in the pattern. I knew that I should express joy, gratitude, but I felt nothing.

  “That’s very good news,” I said finally. “Thank you.”

  He grinned. “Saleem has told them that you wish to see Bashir Ahmed.”

  “And what did they say?”

  “Saleem didn’t say on the phone, but he did mention that this Bashir Ahmed’s village is quite close to Kishtwar. I’m sure as soon as he finds out you are here, he will come.” He laughed. “See, I told you we’d be able to help you find him! Didn’t I tell you?”

  This whole time, Zoya had not spoken. Now she picked up her knitting and began again, her eyes firmly lowered. I could not bear to look at her either. I opened my mouth, though I had no idea what I would say, but her gray needles clicked and clicked without pause, a barrier against any kind of speech, any expression of regret or sadness. Like that, we sat in silence for the rest of the evening, Zoya knitting, the TV blathering on, until Abdul Latief fell asleep with the remote still in his hand.

  10

  EVERY MARCH, WHEN I was a child, my father took precisely five days off from the factory, and the three of us went on a holiday to a resort. It didn’t much matter where; the point, I see now, was the ritual. Like so many Indians scaling the middle-class ladder in the early nineties, my father believed it was an annual comfort owed to us, like regular electricity or tax breaks. There was always a clubhouse of sorts on the premises, a swimming pool, a table tennis room, a library filled with dog-eared Reader’s Digests, and a wood-paneled card room, where men gathered in the evenings to play gin rummy. My mother never failed to mock these places and their occupants, especially the spoiled, noisy children, whom she called “resort rats,” and whom I thereafter avoided. As if to counter her cynicism, my father became doubly enthusiastic about everything. He was up at dawn for long walks around the golf course; he was ready to drive an hour to see a waterfall, even in the dry season; he was a regular at the gin rummy evenings. And I understand it, or at least I think I do. A man with his education and his experience of the world, with the income he was making, with a three-bedroom house and no great tragedy in his past—what else could he have done but celebrate his success with others like us? I think now that for him there might even have been something of the sacred in the whole thing. He rejected my mother’s idols and prayers, but he constructed his own system of worship that was no less rigorous. All year he toiled for the sake of those five days in March, and it was both reward and punishment, for it took him away from the work he loved so much and landed him in a world with my mother, who could be joyous one minute and vicious the next, so that when he returned to the factory, it was with an air of distinct relief and the washed soul of a penitent.

  Bashir Ahmed had been gone perhaps a month when the three of us went to Kerala, to a resort beside Lake Vembanad. Thousands of water hyacinths floated on the choppy brown surface, a living green carpet. My mother, who was in one of her irascible moods, dragged a chair onto the little pier and sat there watching them. I hung about her, dangling my legs off the warm wood, letting my toes skim the water, until she looked down and said, her tone distant, “You know what I hate, Shalini? It’s when you just sit there at my feet, like a sad little mouse, waiting for me to do something to entertain you. For god’s sake, can’t you leave me alone for once in your life?”

  Deeply wounded, I went and found my father, who seemed surprised and flattered at my sudden appearance. He and I spent the next few hours exploring the resort, finding in the process a stinking wire cage that housed a single obese rabbit, whom we named Garfunkel, and a badminton court with a sagging net, where we played until it was time to wash up for dinner. I ostentatiously ignored my mother throughout the meal, not even smiling when, in a poor attempt to win me back, she spoke to our waiter in an exaggerated Dracula accent, which caused the poor young man so much consternation I thought I saw tears in his eyes, and after dinner, I curled up beside my father to watch TV in our room. My mother noticed this but said nothing, instead disappearing for over an hour. She often went off like this, usually to find the nearest temple, so neither my father nor I worried too much about her. When she came back, she was smiling to herself.

  That night, I was shaken awake in darkness. My mother stood over me, fully dressed.

  “Get up,” she said.

  I asked no questions. The old excitement had ignited my belly as soon as I heard her voice, and I did not think of refusing. Anger forgotten, I scrambled out of bed. What were rabbits and silly games compared with this covert nighttime operation? I found my shoes and followed her out to the gate of the resort. The security guard was asleep in his little cabin, left hand tenderly cupping his crotch. From the dregs of pink in the sky, I guessed it was nearly morning. We walked along a wet, narrow street, canals cut deep into both sides, wide enough for little wooden boats. Little wooden bridges led to brightly painted houses. At one of the bridges, a small boy in shorts was waiting. He led us across to a mud courtyard at the back of the house, and I gasped. Tied to a stake in the corner, half-asleep on its feet, was a baby elephant. The boy pointed to a bucket with a mug bobbing in it. “I think,” my mother murmured, “you’re supposed to give it a bath.”

  I clutched her hand, grateful enough to be mute, and stumbled forward. The little creature was trusting; as soon as I got close, it bumped its forehead against the front of my shirt and nuzzled. With trembling hands, I poured a mug of warm water over its back, and it squeaked with pleasure. For the next thirty minutes, I forgot everything else. When all the water was gone, I went to my mother and wrapped my wet arms about her, a wordless apology. She bore my hug with a pained smile, and then she brought her lips down to my ear.

  “We have fun together, don’t we, little beast?”

  “Yes,” I whispered. I was starting to shiver, my lips painfully cold.

  “Tell me, do you have fun like this with anyone else?”

  I looked up at her face. “No,” I said. “Nobody else.”

  “Good,” she said, straightening up, and paid the little boy with a fistful of coins.

  My father was still asleep when we got back to the resort. I changed into my pajamas, hung my wet clothes out to dry, and climbed, trembling and exultant, into bed. Needless to say, I never mentioned the incident to my father.

  She wanted to prove to me, I think, that I was bound to her, as if I’d ever doubted it. Though now I think it must also have been her way of testing me, preparing me. A handful of minor secrets to pave the way for the final one.

  It is surprising, looking back, that it took as long as it did for my father and Bashir Ahmed to meet. The day came, shortly after our trip to Lake Vembanad, when the bell rang, my father opened the door, and there was Bashir Ahmed, already slipping off his sandals, ready to enter. My father had stayed home from the factory that day, nursing a bad cold. He was grumpy; he and my mother had tussled that morning over the question of medicine, about which they held entirely contrary positions. My father, who sermonized science and logic, hated taking pills of any sort, whereas my mother, her faith notwithstanding, was pragmatic about the treatment of illness. It had ended with her saying, “Well, if you won’t take a single tablet of Crocin, maybe you should go into the garden and dig up a few leeches instead,” and shutting herself in their bathroom.

  I did not see Bashir Ahmed at first, but I heard my father sniffle then say, in peremptory Hindi, “Thanks, but we don’t want anything.”

  And I remember this particularly: instead of protesting that he knew my mother and me, Bashir Ahmed stood meekly in the face of the closing door. If I hadn’t been passing, he would have walked off into the afternoon, and we would never have known.

  “Appa, wait!” I shouted.

  My father turned, hand still on the doorknob.

  “I know him,” I said quickly. “I mean, Amma and I do
. He’s from Kashmir.”

  Then Bashir Ahmed called from the other side of the door, “Janaab, I have not come to sell anything. Madam is my good customer, and I have brought her and beti a small gift.”

  My father opened the door and scanned him again, the enormous yellow bundle, the large hands, the weathered skin, the thick hair under the knit skullcap. “Please wait here for a minute,” he said. Then he closed the door and, after a moment’s consideration, locked it.

  “I’ll go tell Amma,” I said, already starting up the stairs.

  “Stop,” he said, and I froze. “I’ll come with you.”

  We went upstairs, leaving Bashir Ahmed locked out on our doorstep. It was all I could do not to sprint ahead, to warn her. My father rapped on the bathroom door.

  “There’s a man here,” my father said. “From Kashmir. Says he knows you.”

  From the other side of the door came the sound of water splashing on tile. For a while, she did not reply; then I heard her say, “Where is he?”

  “Waiting outside,” my father said.

  I could smell her Pond’s soap in the steam seeping from under the door. “All right,” she said.

  “What do you want me to do?” he asked. “Shall I send him away?”

  “No. I’ll come down in a minute.”

  My father glanced at his feet. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

  The water stopped falling. In the new silence, her voice rang out appallingly loud. “What,” she asked evenly, “do you mean?”

  “I’m just saying, if you’ve been watching the news at all these days, there are some pretty gory things going on up there. It doesn’t hurt to be careful.”

  There was a long silence. Then she said, “All right.”

  “All right what?”

  “Let’s be careful.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I have no idea,” she said coolly. “You tell me.”

  My father exhaled slowly through his mouth then sniffed once. Then, without another word, he went back downstairs, and I followed him. I half expected Bashir Ahmed to have left, but he was still there, back bowed under the yellow bundle. He had slipped his feet back into his sandals.