The Far Field

by Madhuri Vijay

  “No,” I admitted. “I haven’t thought about it at all.”

  “She’s a bright girl,” Amina declared. “She’ll learn anything you teach her.”

  Sunlight filled the room with the tall windows as I walked in. Sania had her schoolbooks ready and waiting for me, and while she went into the kitchen to make tea, I paged through them. They were all standard government-issue textbooks—poorly printed and abounding in errors. I was not quite sure what I was meant to do here, what Sania or anybody could be expected to learn from me. I wanted to say as much to her, tell her there had been a mistake, I was no teacher, but when she came back in and sat across from me, she looked so sweetly expectant I could not bring myself to say more than, “Shall we try some reading first?”

  I picked the first textbook that came to hand—history—and opened it at random. Sania tucked her chin so it was almost touching her chest, and with grim determination began mangling the long, abstract English words: doctrine, annexation, treaty. I let her get through three sentences before stopping her. She looked up, blinking.

  “Good,” I said uncertainly, “that’s good. So you understood all of that?”

  She blushed and shook her head.

  “You didn’t understand any of it?”

  She shook her head. “Our school was closed for a long time, ma’am, and the teachers we have now aren’t good,” she said shyly. “They just give us the answers during exams, so we can pass and get good marks.”

  “Oh.” I took a deep breath. “Well, let’s forget about reading for today, okay? Let’s just talk, you and me. But in English. Why don’t you tell me, I don’t know, some things you like?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Like this.” In slow English, I said, “I. Like. Bollywood. Movies.”

  “I like Bollywood movies,” she repeated.

  “Good. What else?”

  “I like family.”

  “I like my family,” I corrected. “That’s very good. What else?”

  “I like my village.” Her nostrils flared with the effort of concentration. “I like my friends. I like my house.”

  “Very good,” I said. “Now tell me what you don’t like.”

  She dutifully listed the things she didn’t like: winter, milk, hospitals, and eggs. I made her construct dozens of simple first-person sentences then made her write them down, looking over her shoulder to correct her spelling. She was smart, as Amina had said, soon anticipating what I was going to ask, catching her own mistakes after a while. I felt myself slipping into the kind of rhythmic absorption that came over me when I was milking the red-and-white cow. When I finally glanced out the window again, I was shocked to see that the sky had gone the softest gray.

  Sania was beaming. “Thank you, ma’am. You are a very good teacher.”

  “I hope it was helpful, Sania.”

  “It was, ma’am. You will come again tomorrow?” she asked eagerly.

  I was about to answer, when Mohammad Din walked in with another man. He was compact and stocky, like men in these parts, but his fingers were unusually thin and long. Sania muttered a quick, “Salaam alaikum,” then disappeared to fetch tea. Mohammad Din smiled at me. “I see you’ve decided to stay longer,” he murmured. “I’m happy for that.”

  “A little longer,” I said. For a moment I wanted to blurt out to him everything I’d discovered since last night: Bashir Ahmed, the hidden room, the soldiers. But I remembered my promise to Amina and said nothing.

  Mohammad Din invited the other man to sit. They began speaking in Kashmiri, the other man doing most of the talking, with Mohammad Din putting in an occasional, “Hm” and asking now and then what sounded like a question.

  Sania brought their tea, then sat beside me, listening intently. Finally, the man fell silent and Mohammad Din spoke a few sentences, of which the only word I understood was tomorrow. The man seemed satisfied and stood up to go.

  “Khuda hafiz,” he said, nodding to us.

  “Khuda hafiz,” Sania murmured. But once he was gone, she turned to Mohammad Din, her eyes shining. “Is he telling the truth, Papa?” she asked excitedly. “Who can those people be? They don’t sound like militants.”

  “Calm down,” he told her. Seeing my confusion, he said, “That was one of our villagers. He came to tell me he saw two men, strangers, hiding near his house last night. He thinks they were robbers, because they were wearing black. But they didn’t steal anything, so I’m not sure what he wants us to do about it.” Seeing my expression, he added firmly, “It’s nothing to be worried about. This same man once went around telling everyone in the village that he’d seen an elephant near his house. It’s best not to listen to everything he says.”

  I smiled then thought of the questions the soldier had asked Amina, and I told Mohammad Din about their visit. His brow creased. “That could be a coincidence,” he said. “It’s the army’s job to ask those kinds of questions. I’m sure it will turn out to be nothing.”

  “But what if it isn’t nothing?” Sania demanded excitedly. “What will you do about it?”

  “How should I know, child?” Mohammad Din’s voice was still pleasant, but I heard the edge of annoyance. “First, we will discuss it at the panchayat meeting tomorrow.”

  Sania looked crestfallen. Mohammad Din shook his head indulgently at her then turned to me. “Thank you for helping my daughter,” he said, “even though she asks too many questions.”

  “It was my pleasure,” I said. “And,” I added, “if she wants, I’ll come again tomorrow.” At that, Sania’s face lit up with a smile so wide I thought it would split right open.

  That evening after dinner, I went out to stand at the edge of the porch, as I always did, to look out at the valley. Dinner had been, on the whole, less unpleasant than yesterday’s. Amina and Riyaz were stiff with each other, but civil, and Aaqib surprised everyone by leaving his grandmother’s side and flopping down next to me, his knee touching mine throughout the meal.

  The valley was shifting to night, lights dotting the slopes. This time, when I heard footsteps come out of the house, I knew who it was. I was prepared for him to avoid me, as usual, but then I heard his footsteps stop, heard his breathing, the whisper of cloth.

  “Ten years ago,” Riyaz said, “all of this used to be dark.”

  He stepped up beside me, looking not at me, but straight out over the valley.

  “There was no electricity in those years,” he continued. “And in the winter, no electric heater, obviously. The temperature would go down to minus ten, minus fifteen sometimes.”

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “We used to light a fire in the kitchen, lock the door, and stay there until summer.”

  I glanced sidelong at his profile. I could not tell whether he meant the last bit to be funny.

  “Sounds cold,” I said finally.

  He laughed. The sound sent a queer jolt through me, and I immediately wanted to make him laugh again. “It was,” he agreed. After a while, he added, rather gruffly, “I heard about what happened today with the soldiers. Thank you for doing what you did.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” I said.

  He made a mock bow. “In that case,” he said, “thank you for doing nothing.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said. “Nothing is what I do best.”

  He laughed again.

  What surprised me was how natural it felt to stand there with him, the silence between us as easy as breathing, as though we had known each other for years. I was keenly aware of the regular rise and fall of his chest just a few feet away from me, the shifting of the muscles in his legs, and I felt a strange excitement mounting in my chest.

  Then Riyaz said, “You know, my father used to tell me about you.”

  I glanced at him, but he was still gazing out at the valley.

  “He used to say that there was a girl in Bangalore, about my age, living in a big house with a garden. He used to tell me that one day he would take me with him to meet you.�
�� Riyaz shrugged. “Well, he never did, as you know.”

  I was silent for a while, watching the pine tree that marked their property’s end. Fewer crows than usual were roosting in it tonight.

  “Your father used to tell me about you, too,” I said. “He once gave me something you’d made. An animal. You’d made it from wood. All this while I thought it was lost, but I recently found it again.” I was about to say more, but I noticed that his face had gone rigid. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  Without a word, he dug into the pocket of his kurta and held something out on his upturned palm. At first I could not make out what it was, but just then a cloud shifted, and I saw it was a piece of wood. Barely three inches long and shapeless, the bark had been stripped away in places by a knife, leaving patches as pale as skin. I reached out and took it from his hand.

  “You still do this,” I said. For some reason, my throat was painfully tight. I was aware of his face near mine, his steady breathing, and I felt the heat of his breath flush my skin.

  “You come to stand out here every evening, don’t you?” he asked softly.

  “Yes.”

  “Will you be out here again tomorrow?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” he said. And that ended the conversation, but we stayed there without moving. Behind us the house glowed and faded, but the line of firelight stopped a few feet short of where we stood. If Amina had looked out of the kitchen window right then, she’d have seen two shadows, nearly indistinguishable from the darkness, a foot of empty space between them.

  21

  BASHIR AHMED LIVED IN our house for nineteen days in the summer of 1995 and with the passing of each of those days, he became increasingly withdrawn. By the end of the first week, he’d stopped slinking after my mother like a whipped creature. He still obeyed when she called him to help with some task around the house, though it was no longer with the broken submissiveness he had displayed in the beginning. Once the task was complete, however, he shut himself into his room again, emerging only when it was time for dinner. Slowly, he came to seem to me less like a prisoner and more like a king, albeit a king in exile, old and ravaged and tragic, sinking slowly into his madness and his remote world of memories. My mother’s first response to this was an attempt to wrest him back toward her and the world of the living. She did this by increasing the number and urgency of her demands. It was as if she believed she could bind him to her by sheer force of will and a never-ending list of household tasks. In a single week, the floors of our house were washed and rewashed, wooden railings were shined, brass pots polished, carpets smacked with broom handles, cupboards emptied and relined with newspapers, mothballs placed in drawers, but none of it helped. Bashir Ahmed drifted further and further from her, and my mother became desperate.

  There was, of course, the obvious irony. My mother, who had always herself been a drifter, tugged along by the mysterious and unknowable currents of her mind, and whom I’d spent so much of my life chasing, was now unashamedly pursuing Bashir Ahmed, battling for his attention, and it felt like nothing less than an outrage to me. And yet it was not so simple as outrage, either, for in those weeks that he lived with us, weeks in which she always seemed to be calling his name, I began to feel for my mother something else I’d never previously imagined possible. Pity.

  I pitied her for the way she listened, head cocked, for the sound of his bedroom door opening and closing. I pitied her for the way she found reasons to tiptoe past his room a dozen times a day. I pitied her for the excuses she made for him, for the way he often kept us waiting at the dinner table. I think he must be asleep. He looked tired. Or maybe he’s praying. And because I hated the idea that my flashing, unconquerable mother could ever be the recipient of anyone’s pity, let alone mine, I reacted in a way that any child would. I transformed my pity into anger, my helplessness into spite, and laid all of it squarely upon the shoulders of poor Bashir Ahmed.

  One evening after dinner, I followed him back to his room. I did it very quietly, so that it wasn’t until he placed his hand on the doorknob and pushed it open that he realized I was right behind him. Hurriedly, he yanked it shut, but not before I caught sight of his bed, rumpled and piled with clothes, and smelled the lonely, cold stench of cigarettes. I had never seen him smoke.

  “Beti,” he said, attempting a watery smile that quickly dissolved. “Do you need something?”

  “I’m not your beti,” I hissed.

  He reared back, as if he’d been slapped. I felt a raw, sick pleasure at having hurt him, followed instantly by the desire to hurt him more. Was this the kind of joy my mother felt, I wondered, when she was cruel to my father, to me, to people like the plump floor manager at my father’s factory? Was this what made her tilt her chin back and gaze down at you with contempt and say those unfeeling things? This terrible, ungovernable anger, which threatened to sizzle a hole through her veins unless she turned around and poured it into somebody else?

  “Why can’t you just go home and leave us alone?” I hissed.

  I waited, a little afraid of what I’d said, bracing for his anger. But Bashir Ahmed transferred his gaze over my shoulder. He said nothing for a long time; then he sighed and looked back at me.

  “Beti,” he said quietly, “I am going.”

  Now it was my turn to feel as though I’d been slapped. “What? When?”

  “Sunday. The day after the party.”

  “What party?” I’d completely forgotten my father’s impulsive, enthusiastic plan.

  “The party,” he said. “The one with your parents’ friends.”

  I was silent for a while. How could my mother have not said anything to me about Bashir Ahmed’s departure? How could she have kept such a thing from me?

  “What did my mother say when you told her?” I asked finally.

  But Bashir Ahmed wouldn’t answer. There was a strange look on his face, and he seemed reluctant to meet my eye. A little louder, I repeated, “What did she say?”

  Suddenly something snapped in him. “Why don’t you ask her yourself?” he cried.

  I took an involuntary step backward.

  Swallowing hard, he said, “I’m sorry, beti, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to shout at you. I’m just tired, that’s all. I’m going to sleep now, okay? Goodnight. I’m sorry.”

  He opened the door a crack, just enough to let his body slip through, not enough to afford me a view of his room. Then, very softly, he closed the door in my face.

  The next morning, the morning before the party, I watched my mother in front of her gods. With a pair of kitchen scissors, she snipped a long garland of marigolds and tucked the shorter, snipped strands around the necks of her idols. She placed individual flowers at their molded brass feet and then stood with her eyes closed. She knew I was there, of course, but she did not look at me. When she finally opened her eyes, five minutes later, the first thing she said, in a wry, impatient tone, was, “Trying to read my mind, little beast?”

  This was so close to the truth that I shivered. But I recovered myself enough to say, “I need to tell you something, Amma.” I dropped my voice to what I imagined to be a level suitable for urgency. “Bashir Ahmed is leaving. After the party.”

  She nodded.

  “You knew? How did you know?”

  She brushed a stray yellow petal from the sleeve of her kurta onto the floor. “Because it was my idea, little beast.”

  I was flabbergasted. “Your idea? You told him to leave?”

  “Yes. I did.”

  I looked up into her face. I’d always been so certain I knew what she was thinking. Like my father’s work and my mother’s shrine, it was a central tenet of my faith, that she and I were linked, in body as in brain. That I could feel what she felt, and yes, even read her mind. But now I looked at her and could read nothing. All this while, she had tried so hard to hold Bashir Ahmed here, inventing tasks to keep him busy, and now she’d suddenly changed her mind and told him to leave? It made no sense. There was so
mething else, something she wasn’t telling me.

  “Will he come back?” I asked.

  She thought about it. “No,” she said at last. “I don’t think there’d be any reason for him to.”

  What did that mean? “You should have told me, Amma,” I said, a bit uncertainly.

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  She fixed me with a calm look. “Why should I have told you?”

  “Because—” I fell silent. What was I supposed to say? Because I have always been loyal? Because I have sat in the same room, day after day, with you and Bashir Ahmed, and I have said nothing to anyone? Because if I’m not your secret-keeper, your little beast, then what am I?

  She sighed. “You can’t know everything, Shalini,” she said, and this time it was as if she were the one who’d read my mind.

  “But I—”

  My mother drew herself up to her full height. “Must I confess every thought that goes through my head to you? Are those the rules? According to whom, hm? You? And who are you supposed to be, may I ask—my best friend? In that case, I have something to tell you, since you’re so interested in what I’m thinking. You are not my best friend. You are a child. A very clever, compassionate child, to be sure, but a child nonetheless.”

  I gaped at her. I wasn’t unfamiliar with this tone of hers, icy, highhanded, but full of fury. She’d used it many times with my father during their arguments. She’d used it with Bashir Ahmed four years before when she told him to leave. She had never used it with me.

  “I have a life,” my mother informed me. “And that life, whatever you or anyone else might think of it, is something I intend to protect. Against everybody. Even you.” Perhaps it was something in my face, or perhaps she suddenly became aware of her tone, but she relaxed. “You’re going to be fine, Shalini. You’re smarter than most adults I’ve ever met. You’re certainly smarter than me. You’ll be fine, no matter what happens.”