The Far Field

by Madhuri Vijay

  I shook my head.

  “Good,” the subedar said curtly. He took another step toward me. “Because you won’t find that story. Those people are not what you think they are. They’ve given help to militants in the past, and they will do it again in the future. Do you know about the Hindus who were killed in this area?”

  I don’t know how I found the wherewithal to nod, but I did.

  “You know?” He seemed momentarily taken aback, but his eyes soon narrowed again. “Well, then maybe you should remember it before calling them your friends.”

  Even then, I had enough sense to see that the things he was saying were not, in substance, unlike the things Stalin had said to me in Kishtwar. But, unlike Stalin, who had, in the end, been a lonely boy far from home, this man, this soldier, seemed to have himself perfectly in hand. He was not trying to flirt or impress. In fact, he seemed to want nothing whatsoever from me, as Stalin had, and for that reason, what he was saying chilled me all the more.

  Guessing, I think, that his words had had their intended effect, he said nothing further. Instead he glanced around at the piles of woodchips, at the charred and blasted stumps, then pointed over my shoulder. “Your friends’ village is behind you,” he said curtly. “Keep going that way, then, where the path splits, go left. It’ll take you straight down to their mosque.”

  I managed to stammer out my thanks. I expected him to turn and walk away, but I was wrong. He said, “One more thing. It would be better if you didn’t go wandering around by yourself. There have been stories of troublemakers in this area lately, creating mischief, scaring people. As if the army doesn’t have enough to do already, we must now also be village watchmen. Good thing I saw who you were in time. Otherwise I might have thought you were one of them, and then …” He shrugged. “It would have been very sad if you had gone and gotten yourself hurt.” This time it wasn’t my imagination; his fingertips brushed his gun. “Now go home,” he told me.

  I started to walk but my legs felt like melting rubber. I could not help imagining him raising his rifle, pointing it between my shoulder blades. I tried as hard as I could to conjure up Amina’s face, the way she had held herself so straight while the soldiers plunked their teacups one by one down on the tray. She would have kept her chin high; she would have walked away from him as if he was less than nothing, but I could not. As soon as I was sure he was out of sight, I began to run.

  Panting, I skidded and slid inelegantly down the path, hoping against hope that I would not fall. Where the path split, as he said it would, I went left. I came out onto a ridge and looked down the mountain, and there, outlined against the sky, was the familiar green spire of the mosque, its windows lit up a welcoming yellow. Relief hit me so hard in the gut that I dropped to my knees, my chest heaving with dry sobs that could have just as easily been laughter.

  Just then, floating on the air, I heard my name. Someone was calling me. My head shot up, and I strained to hear it again. Was it the soldier? Had he followed me? I held my breath and did not move for fear of giving myself away. For seconds, there was nothing but the evening breeze and insects. And then I heard again: “Shalini!” It was not the soldier. I scrambled to my feet and began to jog forward. Then, turning a corner, I saw the source of the voice.

  Riyaz was standing a little way downhill, hands on his hips, looking around with a worried frown on his face. When he saw me, his eyes went wide, then almost immediately narrowed with resolution. “Stay there,” he called out, starting up. “I’ll come to you.”

  But I didn’t listen. I was so glad to see him that I started to run down even faster, no longer caring enough to look where I was stepping. My left foot found a loose stone, and I crashed hard on my hands and knees, letting out a shriek of pain. In an instant, he was beside me. His arm was around my shoulders, and his face was close to mine, I watched a bead of sweat sink down his neck and soak into his collar.

  “Are you okay?” he demanded.

  “Yes,” I panted. “How did you know where I was?”

  “One of the villagers saw you go up this way a while ago. He came up to me after namaz and said you were by yourself. When I got home and you still weren’t back, I came to find you.”

  My cheeks burned. “I’m so stupid. I don’t know what I was thinking. I just—”

  “Can you stand?” he interrupted.

  I nodded and got gingerly to my feet. Then I realized his arm was still around me, his other hand gripping my elbow. My shoulder was pressed against his chest, and his mouth was inches from my hair. He must have realized the same thing, because he swiftly let go, stepping away and saying, in a gruffer voice, “Do you think you can walk? Should I go bring one of the mules?”

  “No,” I said. “That’s all right. I can walk.”

  “Okay.” Riyaz started to move away. Then he turned back to look at me, and in his face were desire and reluctance, loneliness and confusion, and something else, close to despair. I was sure that something almost identical showed in mine. But when he said, “Are you coming?” his voice was impersonal. I nodded and followed him back down the mountain.

  As soon as I stepped onto the porch, Amina burst out of the house and hugged me. “What happened, Murgi?” she cried. “Where did you go? I was so scared!”

  “I’m sorry,” I mumbled. By now, the last of my adrenaline had drained away, and I was thoroughly tired and ashamed. “I wanted to go back to the waterfall, the one you showed me.”

  “Why didn’t you just come and ask me?” she demanded. “I would have gone with you.”

  “I thought I could find it on my own but—” I was on the verge of telling her about the subedar, but it stuck in my throat. I thought of my abject terror, the way I’d fled like a child, and I compared it with the way she’d held the tray as the soldiers set their empty cups down, the unbending iron in her spine. I couldn’t tell her.

  “I lost my way,” I said, as calmly as I could, “but I found it again. I’m fine, Amina, really.”

  She still looked worried. “Are you sure?”

  I glanced over her shoulder. Riyaz was standing in the doorway and our eyes met. A second later, he turned and disappeared indoors.

  I took a deep breath and made myself focus on Amina’s face.

  “I’m sure,” I said, forcing my lips into a smile. “Please don’t look so worried, Amina. Tell me, what kind of murgi would I be if I didn’t try to run off from time to time?”

  25

  THE NIGHT OF THE party, the same night Bashir Ahmed sneaked out of our house like a thief, I slept more deeply than I had in weeks, not waking until almost noon the next day. It was Sunday, and when I opened my eyes to the afternoon light pouring in my window, the house felt different, lighter, as though an extra force of gravity that had been operating upon it all these days had been removed without warning. I bounded out of bed, and ran downstairs to find my parents.

  They were sitting on the front porch together, drinking coffee from their white cups, and even this seemed like a sign of recovery, of imminent health. There were still some traces of the previous night in their faces; my mother’s eyes were smudged dark with the kohl she hadn’t washed away, and the skin around my father’s lips resembled wax paper, but he smiled when I appeared, and gave me a peck on the cheek. “Hello, sweetheart,” he said. “Did you sleep well?”

  I glanced at my mother’s face, trying to read her expression. Did she know yet that Bashir Ahmed had left, or did she believe he was still in his room, asleep? I went back inside and peeked into the guest bedroom. It was spotless, the soiled and crushed sheets removed from the narrow bed, leaving the frayed edges of the bare mattress, the floors and table wiped clean. The smell of disinfectant hung in the air, reminding me of the rotten sweetness of the rum from last night. So she knew. I closed the door then jumped in fright. My mother was standing at my elbow, two empty cups in her hand.

  “Amma, I was just—” I began, but stopped.

  She said, “He’s gone. He took his thing
s.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “All his things,” she said. “You know what that means?”

  I nodded, not daring to look into her eyes. And, in that moment, I knew that I would never be able to tell her what I had promised Bashir Ahmed I would. I would never be able to admit that I had been there, awake in the middle of the night, to see Bashir Ahmed leave. That I’d watched him walk up the road, suitcase in hand, and had not come to wake her.

  “So,” she said, after a moment of silence, “there you have it.”

  Then she turned on her heel and carried the cups to the kitchen, while I stood rooted to the spot, my heart hammering. Surely she guessed I knew. Surely she’d read it in my face. But I waited all day, and she did not ask me about Bashir Ahmed. My father read the newspaper on the porch, while she cleaned up the things from the party, the cloudy glasses like crystal balls, the plates streaked with gravy. In the evening, we sat in the living room while my father looked through his LPs, selecting one and placing it with especial care on the turntable. The voice that began was one I hadn’t heard before, a deep voice that seemed to emerge from a well of sorrow, soaring on spikes of pain. My mother, who hadn’t spoken since that morning, looked up.

  “Who is that?” she asked.

  “Nina Simone,” my father answered. As far as I knew, these were the first words they’d addressed to each other since the previous night.

  He came back and sat on the couch next to me, and, together, we listened to that voice that was more than a voice. Looking at the two of them, their faces pinched and tired, their bodies hunched and closed off from one another but at least occupying the same sofa, the same space, I thought, like the child I was then, that we would be okay.

  And we were, for a while. Neither my mother nor my father so much as mentioned Bashir Ahmed’s name again. It was as though they’d made a covert pact to pretend that he had never existed, a pact into which I threw myself with great willingness. It was unsettlingly easy, I discovered, this project of forgetting, and within a few weeks, I found it difficult to recall that he had ever lived with us, that he had sat across from me at the dinner table, that his clothes had ever swung next to ours on the line, that his sandals had lain upside down by the front door. School had started again, with all its chaos and crises, and though I never went back to swimming, I had more than enough to keep me occupied. And, at some point that year, I made a startling discovery: in attempting to forget Bashir Ahmed, I’d begun paying less attention to my mother. I was less attuned to her moods, less watchful of the expressions that flitted across her face. It was both a disturbing and a thrilling idea, that I could, in fact, lead a life separate from her without anything falling apart. She was still in my consciousness, of course, but whereas she had previously been its center, a colossus towering above all else, now she was at the periphery, a tiny figure lurking in the corner of my vision.

  Perhaps it was because of my new sense of being free and unmoored, but it took me longer than usual to notice that she had, in fact, changed again after Bashir Ahmed’s departure. She slept a great deal. I would return from school, and she would be asleep, stretched out on the sofa in the middle of the afternoon, like a lizard on a rock, one hand tucked under her cheek. No matter how much noise I made, how I clomped up and down the stairs, she would not wake. And when she finally did, well after sunset, she drifted around the house with a dreamy absence of purpose, setting a pot of water to boil then forgetting about it, leaving wet clothes in the washing machine for days until they acquired a green patina of mold and had to be thrown away. I would like to say that I tried to comfort her, that at the age of fourteen or fifteen, I was mature enough to see that she was genuinely struggling, but I cannot. “You’re allowed to be something else,” she’d said to me, and so I was.

  Once I brought a classmate home after school, a boy. To study, we told each other, and would have told my mother if she’d asked. But she was asleep on the sofa, as usual, so we crept up to my room and closed the door. As his palms brushed my nipples, I listened for any sound from downstairs, but, of course, there was none. When I led him downstairs again, it was nearly dusk, and my mother was still asleep. Her mouth hung open, and spit emerged from the corner of her lips, like the head of a shy worm. The boy, my classmate, paused, a faintly sickened look on his face. And suddenly I wanted him gone. Gone, not merely from the house, but from the earth. Because he had witnessed her in this state, and because—this with a quake of guilt—I was ashamed of her. I’d adored and pitied her, but now I was ashamed of my mother. I walked him to the end of the road and watched him climb into an auto and putter away. It was the last time I brought anybody home.

  My father, at the factory all day, did not know about the sleeping, as far as I was aware. But he must have noticed something, because one evening he made the suggestion of a maid, someone, as he said, to help her with the day-to-day. She shrugged. The first maid left in tears after my mother complained that her hair oil stank and was giving her a headache. The second maid was a strapping, gray-haired woman called Amba, who talked loudly and volubly, mostly about her own daughter, who had been born with cerebral palsy, and whom she had nursed and fed until the girl died at thirty-three. But my mother made so many acid comments that Amba soon walked out, saying that she was too old to be treated with disrespect by anyone. Then followed a series of other maids, who never lasted more than a few months, and whose faces and names I can no longer recall, until, finally, there was Stella. Impeccable sari, tiny gold cross. She seemed immune to my mother’s barbs, her periodic outbursts of savagery, and, eventually, they reached a kind of stalemate. My mother, who would never admit it but was, I think, grateful to her, slowly abandoned the tasks of housekeeping, falling deeper into her world of sleep, while Stella, in her efficient way, cooked and cleaned and, by and by, came to take care of us all.

  26

  I SLEPT BADLY THE night after my run-in with the soldier. Tossing on my mattress, I finally gave up and resigned myself to sitting by the window, watching the lone pine tree at the edge of the property. The nights were mostly cloudless, and I could see the shapes of the crows like heavy, upright fruit in the branches. Now and again, one would dislodge itself, swooping silently away on goodness knows what mission. When the morning came, my eyes itched for sleep, but I still went down to the barn with Amina, who herself looked as if she’d spent a restless night. After breakfast, Aaqib fetched his schoolbag, the straps dangling behind him, and we set off, hand in hand, toward the school. He had grown comfortable with me, and, as we walked, he kept up a steady stream of patter about his school and classmates, in his enthusiasm slipping for minutes together into Kashmiri, forgetting that I could not understand. When we reached the top of the slope, he let go of my hand, and ran down toward the school. I stood a while longer, listening to the screams of the children, trying to fit myself back into yesterday’s fantasy of teaching, but it felt cold and unnatural in the wake of my encounter with the subedar. How could I have been so foolish, so misguided, as to imagine I might live here, when I couldn’t get through a walk on my own without needing to be rescued?

  Amina was sweeping the porch when I got back to the house.

  “Anything I can do to help?” I asked, going up to her, but she shook her head and kept sweeping. “Are you sure I can’t help, Amina?” I pressed.

  With a burst of irritation she said, “Why do you keep asking the same question again and again, Murgi? Are you deaf? I told you there’s nothing you can do!”

  It was such an unexpected response that I could find nothing to say. I stood there in silence, and slowly Amina stopped sweeping altogether. She wiped her mouth with the edge of her headscarf, then took a long breath. “I’m sorry, Murgi, I didn’t mean to shout at you.”

  “If you’re angry about yesterday, Amina, you’re right to be. I know I scared you.”

  “No,” she said, “it’s not you. It’s—” She hesitated. “It’s something else.”

  “What is it
?”

  Amina looked down. “You know the story you told me last week, about that man, the one who said he saw those people hiding outside his house? In the middle of the night?”

  I nodded.

  “Last night, a woman was going to the bathroom, and a person came up behind her in the dark and pushed her. She didn’t get hurt, alhamdulillah, but she says she heard two men laughing.”

  “Who do you think it was?”

  “I don’t know,” she said darkly. “But I’ll tell you one thing. It’s all because of these elections next month. Whenever there are elections here, funny things start to happen. I don’t know, Murgi, it makes me worried.”

  “Because of Bashir Ahmed?”

  “What?” She looked up as if startled. “Oh, no, not him.” She paused. “Because of Riyaz.”

  I looked away. “Oh,” I said.

  “This morning, I asked him not to go down to work for a few days. The mountain will be full of soldiers, I told him, but he wouldn’t listen to me.” Her lips were pressed into a white, bloodless line. “See, he has problems with the soldiers, Murgi.”

  “What kind of problems?” I asked.

  She looked down at the broom in her hand. “You’ve seen yourself how they like to ask questions. The best thing to do is answer them, and most of the time they let you get on with your business. Well, Riyaz doesn’t answer. He just stands there, so they get angry and kick him. It’s happened so many times over the years.” She was toying with the broom now, picking out bits of straw and crushing them in her fingers, then letting them fall to the ground, where a few chickens came scurrying up to investigate. “The rest of us,” she went on, and now there was a flare of anger in her voice, “we try and avoid the soldiers. Even babies try. But him? He always finds them. Every single time. Sometimes I think, Murgi, he wants them to beat him up.”