The Far Field

by Madhuri Vijay

  “I’ve been coming every day,” he burst out. “You weren’t here.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  And then I knew without a doubt that the last of the shining circle that had protected us in Italy was gone, that we were as vulnerable as we had been before. Bashir Ahmed had done what he had always done, arrived without warning and plucked her away. Rage suddenly surged up in me. I forgot the affection I had once felt for him, for his stories, for the easy and thrilling way he had with my mother. I forgot my guilt over the terrible things she had said to him in that musty apartment, forgot all those weeks that I had waited so desperately for him to return. I thought only of my mother in Italy, laughing, the stem of a wineglass between her fingers; of my parents’ dark heads bent together over a creased map; of my father singing loudly and off-key as a gondola glided smoothly up a canal, and I felt a pure, vast, consuming hatred. I hated Bashir Ahmed. I hated his unwashed clothes, his hollow face, and most of all, I hated the way he sat there and talked to her as though he had every right to arrive on our doorstep after four years and find her waiting.

  “We went on a family trip,” I said loudly. Bashir Ahmed started and blinked, as if he had not noticed I was there until that moment.

  “Beti,” he said, but he could not replicate his old gravity, his old decorum.

  “We went on a family trip,” I repeated. “We went to Italy. In case you don’t know where that is,” I added cruelly, “it’s in Europe.”

  “Very nice,” he said, without conviction.

  “I’ll make tea,” my mother offered, too hastily. Bashir Ahmed looked away from me and nodded. She nodded, too, clearly relieved to have something to do, and went off to the kitchen. I wanted badly to follow her, but I stayed where I was.

  “Where are the clothes?” I asked.

  He glanced up slowly. “What was that, beti?”

  “The clothes. Where are they?”

  “Here, beti.” He gestured to the brown suitcase at his feet.

  “Not your clothes,” I said, my heart pounding. “The clothes to sell. Where are they?”

  Understanding dawned on his face. He let his hand fall. “I didn’t bring them.”

  “Then why did you come back?” I cried. “If you didn’t have any clothes to sell, why did you come back here?”

  I left him sitting there and ran into the kitchen, where my mother was standing before the stove. I opened my mouth to speak, but something about her posture, the rigid set of her shoulders stopped me. I stood behind her, unable to make a sound. And when she didn’t move, even after minutes had elapsed and the water started to hiss in the pot, I tiptoed away.

  By the time she returned to the living room, Bashir Ahmed had washed his face and regained a bit of his old composure. My mother handed him his tea and, after a pause, sat down in her usual spot. The space between them—mine—was empty, and I knew they were waiting. No! I wanted to scream. I won’t do it! But some inexplicable force compelled me to sit, and as soon as I did, time dissolved and it was the three of us again: my mother, Bashir Ahmed, and me.

  Despite everything, I could feel the excitement building in my stomach, the same excitement that always preceded his stories. Bashir Ahmed raised his eyes to the ceiling, then brought them down to my mother, seeking permission. She leaned back and nodded once. Then he began.

  “I did what you said,” Bashir Ahmed told my mother. “I went back. Not right away. After the last time”—here his forehead creased—”after that last time I saw you, I stayed in Bangalore for another week. One day I went to the house of one of my customers, an old Hindu lady who had bought from me for years.” He smiled slightly. “She would always give me biscuits, this old lady. Her son lived in London, and he sent her a box every month. She would tell me, ‘He sends so many, eat, eat, you are like my son too.’” The smile faded. “But this time, her daughter opened the door. I never even knew she had a daughter. She looked at my cap and my beard, and she wouldn’t let me inside. I could even see the old lady, sitting on a chair. But the daughter said, ‘There’s no need for you to come back. My mother won’t buy from you anymore.’”

  He paused, collecting himself, then went on.

  “That was the night I decided to go home. It took me three days to get there. There was an army curfew in my village—nobody was allowed outside after four o’ clock. Soldiers were everywhere. I’ve never seen so many soldiers in my life. They said they were searching for militants, but to us it seemed like they were only searching for trouble.”

  It was a story like no other he’d told us, and he did not tell it with the elegant narrative tricks that had been his trademark. He spoke in bursts, urgent strings of words followed by long pauses. But it did not matter. Already I could see the changes being wrought in my mother. Her shoulders had relaxed, and her face had lost its frown lines, making her seem years younger.

  “I found a job as a laborer,” Bashir Ahmed went on. “I hated it, but there was nothing else available. Half the time the people who were hiring me did not pay. Even if they did, the money was barely enough for rice, assuming there was rice to be bought at all. Plus it was getting close to winter, and my wife fell sick. I did not know what to do. So I—” He stopped.

  We waited, but he did not start again. He simply sat there. Then my mother, who had been leaning back all this while, said in a quiet voice, “Bashir.”

  He looked at her without recognition.

  “Go on,” she said.

  Something flared in him, some last fragment of defiance, and I thought he might refuse her. But it went out of him, and he seemed to slump over.

  He began to tell us about the militants.

  “I did not want to get involved,” he said quietly. “In the beginning. Most of us didn’t, at least the older ones. The younger boys, they got excited much more quickly, especially the ones who were picked up and beaten by the army. Some of them joined militant groups, many of them were arrested or killed. My own son, alhamdulillah, was too young for all of that. But it was hard to ignore, if you know what I mean. Every night, you could hear gunfire from the forest, and you would lie awake, hoping that it did not come closer.”

  He took a breath. He seemed calmer now, as if in submitting to my mother’s command he had found rhythm, a measure of peace. “After prayers one evening, a friend of mine pulled me aside. He knew that my wife wasn’t well, and he asked if I wanted to earn some extra money. All I would have to do would be to help a few militants. They would pay me,” he said. “Not a lot, but …”

  He fell silent, looking straight into my mother eyes. “It’s not what you might have done,” he said quietly and with dignity, “but I did something.”

  They gazed at each other for a long time. Then she nodded once and lowered her chin. It was as close as she would ever come to an apology.

  “It wasn’t much, in the end,” Bashir Ahmed continued, “what they wanted from me. There were men hiding in the mountains, men who were from other countries, and they needed a place to stay for a short time. I said okay. And soon they started coming—”

  “Who were they?” I burst out, suddenly remembering what Mr. Sood told my father. I regretted my enthusiasm instantly, but Bashir Ahmed was too absorbed in his story to notice.

  “They never told me their names,” he said. “All I knew was that they were foreigners. My wife knew they were there, but she pretended not to see anything. After a day, they went away. I didn’t know what they did once they left, or what they had done before they got there. I didn’t ask. All I knew is they were fighting for us, for Kashmiris, and that was enough for me. Maybe if I had known earlier …”

  He fell silent again, and this time my mother said nothing to make him continue.

  “Anyway, I had already agreed to help them by then, so there was nothing I could do now,” Bashir Ahmed went on. “Every few weeks, a man would come to our house in the middle of the night and the next morning he would be gone. Most of them were all right, I mean they wer
e polite, they didn’t give me any trouble, but I was afraid all the time—that the army would find out and arrest me, that my family would suffer because of what I had agreed to do, even if I had agreed to do it to help my family in the first place. Still it went on for a long time and nothing bad happened. Then a few months ago, there was a knock, and I knew it was another one of them. I’d never seen a man so tall. His eyes, I swear, they were red. I don’t know why, maybe from smoke. I gave him dinner, and he didn’t speak a word the whole time, didn’t say thank you or anything. There was something about him that was not …” Bashir Ahmed shuddered. “Anyway, that night I heard a sound and woke up. And there he was, standing next to our bed, watching me and my wife. I couldn’t even tell if he was awake or asleep, and I didn’t want to scare him, but I thought we were as good as dead. But then he turned and went back to his room.”

  There was perfect silence in our living room.

  “That was all I could stand,” Bashir Ahmed said quietly. “I went to my friend and told him to find someone else to help.” He looked down at his hands, which had been lying very still in his lap. “But the next month, another militant came. I tried to send him away, but he got angry and took out his gun. If my wife had not come in at that moment, I don’t know what he would have done to me. She asked him to come in, she gave him dinner, and he went off the next day. As soon as I could, I found my friend and asked him why the militants were still coming. “He said, ‘I’ve tried talking to them, but they won’t listen. There is nothing else I can do.’ We had a big fight, and in the end he told me, ‘If you did not want to get involved, then you should not have taken the money.’”

  Bashir Ahmed nodded bitterly. “My friend said the same thing to me that you did. He said, ‘Bashir, you are a coward. It’s not as if you’re fighting. You’re just giving these men a place to sleep. You’re giving them a meal, as you would to any Muslim. They are the ones doing the fighting, and they’re doing it for you, for your son, for Kashmir.’ Yes, and that is what I told myself, too. But it was not as simple as that. These men, these militants”—and here Bashir Ahmed’s tone grew hard—”they were supposed to be fighting for us, for Kashmiris, but they were becoming bad, arrogant. Some of them started working for politicians, demanding money in exchange for protection, troubling women … Not all of them were like this, of course, but enough. The army was getting worse, too, coming around almost every week, beating people up. I thought I would go mad if I didn’t do something.”

  His voice dropped. “I knew that as long as I remained in the village,” he said, “nothing would change. So I left. When the militants see that I am no longer there, they will find another place.”

  He looked at my mother, who did not speak. Who merely looked back at him.

  “They will be fine,” he cried, and for a second I thought he still meant the militants. “My wife understands, and she will take care of my son. They will be fine. The militants will stop coming soon, the army will leave us alone, and then I can go back home.”

  My mother did not respond to this outburst. “When did you get here?” she asked.

  “Five days ago. I didn’t know where else to go.” Then, as if he could stand no more, he closed his eyes.

  And my mother? She did not call him a coward. She did not make a wry remark or stand up and walk away. Instead, she did something she had never done before. She reached out and took his hand. His eyes flew open in panic and immediately flickered to me, but she didn’t seem to notice, and he gave up, letting his hand rest in hers, letting his chin fall toward his chest. Her face was flushed but serene, and his was uneasy. We sat like that for several minutes before she spoke.

  “Your flat,” she remarked. “The one you had last time—you’re not staying there again?”

  He shook his head, and I remembered the dim, greasy light, the battered mattresses.

  She nodded, letting his hand fall. “So then it’s all right,” she said.

  He looked up. “What is all right?”

  Picking up his teacup from the table, where it had left a thin brown crescent, she stood.

  As if it were the most obvious thing in the world, she said, “For you to stay here.”

  17

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON, AS he said he would do, Mohammad Din came to fetch me for a visit. Amina, saying she had work to finish, didn’t come along. As we approached his house, a girl of about seventeen emerged from the front door. Her pale, round face was moonlike, her eyes were a light hazel. She wore a pink kurta with a matching headscarf thrown loosely over her brown hair.

  “This is Sania, my daughter,” Mohammad Din said in Urdu.

  In soft, labored English, Sania said, “It is nice meeting you first time, ma’am.”

  “She has been practicing,” Mohammad Din told me proudly. “Ever since she heard you were coming to visit, it’s all she has done.”

  I smiled, touched. “It’s nice to meet you, too, Sania.”

  We went into the same sunny room, which today had been cleared of Mohammad Din’s papers and was immaculate. Mohammad Din and I settled down on the carpet beside the window, while Sania went to the kitchen and came back with a feast: a mountain of deep-fried chicken legs, rice, egg curry, curd, and a stack of parathas. She unrolled a long plastic mat in front of me and her father, and insisted on washing my hands with a mug of warm water poured into a bowl.

  “Please, you must eat all of it, ma’am,” she said. She had lapsed into Urdu. “Don’t be shy.”

  “There’s so much food!” I exclaimed. “If I eat all this, I won’t be able to walk back.”

  “Good,” Mohammad Din said, leaning forward and beginning to eat. “That means you can stay here and have dinner with us, too.”

  Sania laughed. She had a loud, frank laugh, and I liked her immediately. She watched me with fascinated eyes as I bit into a chicken leg, as though she expected me to conduct the business of eating differently from other human beings.

  “Your father told me you want to study politics,” I said to her.

  She nodded eagerly. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “What do you want to do afterward?”

  “I want to run for elections, ma’am, like my father.”

  “And you?” Mohammad Din asked me. “What work do you do in Bangalore?”

  I explained to them about the agency, choosing to omit the fact that I no longer had a job there. Sania listened, rapt, and even Mohammad Din seemed interested, asking several questions. Their attention was gratifying and had the effect of making me talk longer than I would have done otherwise, and I found myself talking about Ritu’s various pet projects with an enthusiasm that I’d never felt, even while I’d been working on them. When I finished, Mohammad Din nodded gravely. “It sounds very worthy, what you are doing.” He wagged a finger at Sania, a gleam of humor in his eyes. “See? If you want to be like her, you have to study much harder than you do now. And stop watching all those Bollywood movies you like so much. They’re not helping you in any way.”

  Sania dropped her eyes in embarrassment, and I cleared my throat, feeling like a fraud. Mohammad Din shook his head indulgently at her then turned back to me. “Please,” he said indicating the food, “eat some more.”

  While I ate and drank, Mohammad Din told me more about the village, returning to what was clearly his favorite theme: development. With Sania hanging on his every word, he told me of the vision he had for a road connecting the village to the highway, for a modern hospital and a college, for a reliable electricity grid that would cover the entire mountain region. I found his earnestness poignant, and I remembered again what Amina had said. He helps everybody.

  When I could not eat a bite more, even for politeness’ sake, Sania washed my hands and passed me a towel to wipe them with. She began to clear the dishes and carried them away. While she was in the kitchen, Mohammad Din said in a low voice, “Thank you for talking to Sania. I can see how happy she is to have met you.”

  “It was my pleasure,” I said. �
��I’m glad I was able to meet her before I left.”

  “Have you decided when that will be?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Amina and her family have been very kind, but I don’t wish to trouble them. I think whenever Riyaz goes down the mountain next, I’ll go with him.”

  “He’s going tomorrow,” said Mohammad Din. “I’m expecting some goods, and I’ve asked him to bring them up for me.”

  “Then I’ll be leaving tomorrow.” I tried to speak lightly, but as I said it, I realized with a pang that this meant the end of my journey. I had tried my best to stave it off by coming here, but it had nonetheless arrived. Soon I would have to face the people from whom I’d fled so ungracefully, Hari and Stella and, above all, my bewildered and hurt father, who would be waiting for me to explain myself. My throat all of a sudden was dry and painful.

  “In that case,” Mohammad Din said, “we shall hope to see you back here again soon.”

  “Uncle,” I said in a rush, “could I ask you a question?”

  He nodded, pressing his fingertips together in his lap in a posture of attention.

  I took a deep breath. “Did you know Bashir Ahmed?”

  That seemed to surprise him. After a pause, he said, “Yes. I knew him.”

  “He was a friend of yours?”

  “You could say that, yes.”

  “Could you tell me what happened? How he died, I mean?”

  His eyebrows rose. “Amina hasn’t said anything to you?”

  I shook my head.

  Mohammad Din looked out of the window at the expanse of the valley. Then he turned back to me. “I’m sorry,” he said at last. “It is not something I like to talk about.”

  “Oh. But I just—”

  “I’m sorry,” he said again, sounding firm, though regretful. “It is a very sad memory for me, for all of us in the village. Besides, I believe the dead should be undisturbed once they are with Allah, no matter who they are. There is no point discussing things endlessly.”