The Far Field

by Madhuri Vijay

  For the first time since she’d started speaking, she looked at me, and, as if she’d suddenly had an idea, her brown eyes lit up. “Murgi,” she said suddenly. “Could you talk to him?”

  I could not hide my incredulity. “To Riyaz?”

  She nodded. “Could you ask him not to go down to work for a few days?”

  “But why me?”

  She shrugged. “Why not you?”

  “Because I’m not—” I swallowed. “Why would he listen to me?”

  “He respects you,” she said. “You don’t know this, but he’s always talking about how you’re from outside, how you’re from a city, how you’ve traveled and seen all kinds of things, and how we shouldn’t embarrass ourselves in front of you.” She gave me a small smile. “If you ask me, I think he’s a little scared of you. If you told him not to go down, he would listen.”

  I squirmed, unable to fathom the notion of Riyaz being scared of me. But what really gave me pause was the memory of his face when he found me lost on the mountain, the way he’d gripped my arm before leaping back. My stomach twisted, and I tried pleading with Amina again. “I don’t think I’m the right person to talk to him. Isn’t there someone else? Mohammad Din?”

  “Please, Murgi,” she said, catching hold of my hand. “I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t so important. Would you please try? For my sake?”

  There was such appeal in her voice that I was trapped. I nodded.

  “Thank you, Murgi,” she breathed. She released me, and as soon as she did so, my hand felt heavy, as though it would snap off.

  I waited until after dinner, once the plates had been cleared and Riyaz’s mother began sweeping the ashes back into the fireplace with her stubby broom. Aaqib had once again insisted on sitting by me, and he was now leaning against my shoulder, his long lashes fluttering, battling sleep. Riyaz rose first, as always, and left the kitchen, and Amina’s eyes met mine across the room. I gently lifted Aaqib’s head. He grumbled something under his breath, but I laid him down on the mat, and he curled up like a puppy. I left the kitchen, feeling Amina’s eyes trailing after me.

  Riyaz was standing at the edge of the porch, his hand fumbling in the pocket of his kurta. I stopped a few feet behind him and cleared my throat. He froze, glancing quickly over his shoulder, then glancing back again.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you, Riyaz,” I said. Earlier in my room, I had rehearsed what I would say. “I just wanted to thank you again.”

  His head didn’t turn. “What for?”

  “For coming to find me. On the mountain.”

  “What else should I have done? Left you to spend the night with the bears?”

  In spite of myself, I smiled. He could be very funny. “I would have deserved it.”

  He did not respond. I stepped up beside him at the edge of the porch, aware of our reversal of roles. That last time we had stood out here together, he had been the one to approach me.

  “Did you hear,” I said, “about the woman who was pushed down? It happened last night. She says she heard some men laughing.”

  He made a noncommittal grunt.

  “Who do you think is doing it?” I asked.

  “How should I know? Kids, mischief-makers. It’s not my problem.”

  “Amina thinks it’s because of the election.”

  He shrugged. “Could be. As I said, it’s not my problem.”

  I took a breath. “But doesn’t it frighten you?”

  “Me?” He glanced up with suspicion. “Why would it frighten me?”

  “Oh,” I said, trying to sound casual, “I don’t know. You go up and down the mountain every day, completely alone, except for your mules, of course. What if something happened to you?”

  He had tilted his head forward to listen, but now he reared back and fixed me with a sharp look. “What are you doing?” he asked disgustedly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “All this nonsense about being scared. It doesn’t sound like you at all.”

  “I just thought—”

  “Never mind,” he said. He threw a glance over his shoulder at the house. “I know exactly who’s putting these ideas in your head. You can stop now.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Shalini, please,” he said, sounding tired, “don’t you start too.”

  As much as I wanted to do what I’d promised Amina, I felt relief at being able to drop this charade. He almost never said my name, and it gave me more pleasure than I cared to admit to hear it from his mouth. I fell quiet, and in the silence, I could feel the ease again, building between us, taking a shape that was exactly the shape of the air that separated us, an ease that nonetheless had at its core something primal and alive. I wanted to stand here, not talking, letting that something swim through my body. And, more, I was sure, as sure as I’d ever been of anything, that he felt it too.

  Riyaz scratched at the beard on his cheek. “Anyway,” he told me, as if we had just left off speaking a second ago, even though several minutes had passed. “I’m not going down tomorrow.”

  “You’re not?”

  “No. There is a panchayat meeting after namaz. All the men are supposed to attend, even those from the Hindu village. We’re going to discuss the things that have been happening.’”

  “You mean these robbers?”

  “Robbers.” Riyaz snorted. “They haven’t robbed anyone, have they? Probably don’t exist. The meeting will be a waste of time, like all those meetings, and it will take at least four or five hours, enough time for everyone to disagree with everyone else, but at least Amina will be happy.”

  After a while I said, “Amina told me the soldiers sometimes beat you up because you don’t answer their questions.”

  Riyaz glanced sideways at me, then nodded. “It’s happened once or twice, yes.”

  “I don’t understand why you’d let them do that to you. Why don’t you just answer?”

  He fell silent again. I got the sense that he was not used to speaking so much. Then he said, “You already know what the people around here say about my father. What they think he did.”

  I nodded.

  “Then it shouldn’t be hard to understand,” he said flatly. “My father has decided to hide. That’s his choice. But I’ve done nothing wrong, so I won’t hide from anybody. Not from the villagers, and not from the soldiers. I’m not going to say, ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘No, sir,’ ‘Sorry, sir,’ just because some idiot with a gun wants to feel like a king by treating me like a servant.”

  “You’d rather get beaten up?”

  He shrugged.

  “And what if they do something worse?” I pressed. “How would your family feel if something happened to you? How would Aaqib feel?

  Even in the shadows, I could see the flush rise in his neck. In a low, stiff voice, he said, “Why do you care? He’s not your son.”

  He was right, of course, but it was like a slap in the face. I thought about Aaqib’s damp hand clinging on to mine, his dark eyelashes throwing filigreed shadows on his cheeks, the warm pressure of his head against my arm as he fell asleep in front of the fire.

  Minutes passed. “Riyaz,” I said, “I’m sorry for what I said. About Aaqib, about the soldiers, your father. You’re right, it’s none of my business. I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m sorry.”

  He didn’t answer me right away. Instead, he drew the piece of wood from his pocket and turned it over a few times in his fingers. I could see that he’d made progress on it in the last few days. I saw a blunt snout, two pert, upright ears.

  “I’m sorry for being rude,” he said. “Actually, I don’t mind talking about it with you.” He licked his lips, then gave a short laugh. “To tell you the truth, I’ve never spoken about these things to anyone else. Not even my own family. But with you, it’s different. Easier. I don’t know why.” He glanced at my face, then back down at the animal in his hand. Then he said, with every appearance of nonchalance, “What is Bangalore like?”

  “Ba
ngalore?” I asked, taken by surprise.

  “Yes,” he said, and I heard a suppressed excitement in his voice. “What is it like?”

  I cast my mind back, but Bangalore was very far away, blurry, impossible to envision, let alone evoke. I saw only the shadow-filled living room of our house, my mother’s sleeping form. “Well,” I said lamely, “there are lots of cars, for one thing. A lot of noise.”

  Riyaz nodded intently. “Yes, my father told me,” he said. “I remember.”

  And then I thought, with a sudden pang, how dissimilar our lives had been, and yet how similar too. We’d each grown up chasing after a parent, only to lose that parent, though in different ways. I felt a rush of sympathy for him. For a second, I longed to reach out and put my hand on his face, the coin-sized patch of gray hair at his temple. But I controlled myself, and instead I said, in as even a tone as I could manage, “And there are tall buildings everywhere. Fifty, a hundred feet tall.”

  I went on speaking like this, and slowly his expression relaxed, acquiring an abstract sort of peace. It was as if he’d left me and was walking down a busy Bangalore road, his eyes pulled in a thousand different directions by hawkers, scooters, pedestrians, shops, beggars, and temples competing for his attention. And, as I watched him, a memory lurched to life. My mother, her head lolling against our sofa, listening to Bashir Ahmed’s stories. I faltered and fell silent.

  Riyaz’s head jerked, as if from sleep. “What? Why did you stop?”

  “No reason,” I said hastily. “I mean, there’s too much to tell. It would take a long time.”

  He smiled. It was the first unguarded smile he’d ever offered me. In mute wonder, I watched as it altered his entire aspect. He looked happy and naughty and self-conscious, as if he were suddenly a kid spending a night away from his parents, instead of a husband and father.

  “Well,” Riyaz said teasingly, “if there’s one good thing about this place, it’s that we have nothing but time. I want to hear everything.”

  I went back up to the house. Riyaz stayed outside, saying he wanted to check on the animals in the barn. I passed the kitchen quickly, not wanting to be stopped and questioned by Amina about how my talk with Riyaz had gone. I caught a brief glimpse of her through the doorway. She was sitting on the straw mat where I had been, her back half turned to me, Aaqib’s head resting on her lap. She was stroking his forehead very gently, her own dark head bent toward him. When I saw that, a sharp thread of pain stretched from my chest all the way under my left armpit, as if I’d run into a length of barbed wire, and I quickly moved out of sight.

  I put a hand on the rough mud wall of the corridor, trying to ease the pain. Then I made a quick decision. It was risky—Amina was barely ten feet away and Riyaz might return to the house any minute—but I was determined. I tiptoed up the corridor to their bedroom, then, peering once over my shoulder, slipped inside.

  Their bedroom was exactly as I remembered, the mattress, the piles of clothes, the rickety chair, the slender shadowy barrel of the gun propped up in the corner, but I gave it all no more than a glance. I made straight for the white curtain, pulled it aside, and entered the passageway. There was the smell of wood and varnish, and, as before, a warm draft gusted about my ankles. But no light leaked into the passageway; the room on the other side was in darkness.

  I stepped into Bashir Ahmed’s room. The jagged silhouette of the paper streamers shivered above me. I had to take only one look at the shape under the blanket to know that he was asleep. I hesitated then quietly approached the bed.

  He was on his side, facing the entryway. The cheek that was not pressed to the pillow had sunk under the tug of gravity, making him seem especially skeletal. His beard was only a few days old; Riyaz probably helped him shave from time to time. His eyelids were waxy and creased, and they twitched slightly as I bent down, causing me a moment’s alarm, but his eyes did not open. I bent even closer, absorbing the features of his face with hunger, but more than that, with a sadness that took me by surprise. As a child, I’d never thought to wonder about his age, whether he was an old or a young man, but now it occurred to me that he looked much older than his years should have allowed. For his hair had gone completely white, and there was an unhealthy pallor to his once dark forehead. His lips were slack and undefined, and his frame itself had shrunk to half its size. I felt an emotion I could not put a name to, though in it was a widening sense of loss, the loss of the tall, strong man who’d grinned and swung his yellow bundle onto his shoulders like it was nothing, who’d walked all day in the sun to reach the cool shadows of our house. In his sleep, Bashir Ahmed moaned and shifted onto his back, his lips falling back to expose teeth that were no longer white, no longer even. I straightened up, looking down at his gaunt, sleeping face.

  “You’re afraid of something,” I whispered. “I don’t know what, but I can promise you one thing. I’m not going anywhere until you talk to me.”

  Touching the blanket with my fingertips at the place over his chest, I backed away toward the entrance. Ducking into Amina’s and Riyaz’s room, I saw that I’d been lucky. It was empty. I quickly slipped out of their room and up the corridor, closing the door as soon as I was in mine.

  27

  THE MORNING I LEFT for college, my mother, for the first time in my life, asked me to prostrate myself in front of her gods. She stood beside me as I did this, and the whole time my forehead was resting on the cold kitchen tiles, I watched her feet, the silver rings on her second toes, her cracked heels and unpainted nails. Then, feeling a little light-headed, I stood and faced her. She was dressed in an old kurta, her hair dry and split at the ends, her lips as cracked as her heels. Pulling my head down to her mouth—by eighteen I was taller than she was, and she was not a short woman—she planted a dry kiss on my forehead. I’m not proud to admit it, but I was at that point in my teenage life when the prolonged touch of either of my parents was unwelcome, and as soon as I’d left the kitchen, I wiped away the imprint of her lips with the edge of my sleeve.

  The university at which I’d been accepted was on the coast, a seven-hour drive from Bangalore. Accepted was a generous word; my final school grades had been mediocre at best. In fact, my father had been required to make a “donation” to the institution just to secure a seat for me in the Bachelor of Commerce stream. To everybody’s surprise, he’d been adamant about my attending this college, which was an overnight bus journey away, instead of any one of a dozen colleges within the city, which would have been just as easy, and probably less expensive. Now I wonder if his insistence might not have had something to do with my mother, a lingering instinct, perhaps, that it might not hurt me to be parted from her a little. For, in the years since Bashir Ahmed and the dinner party, my father had changed too. It is only fair, I think, to mention this. In my lifelong preoccupation with my mother, I do not wish to forget him, the man whose life has always been present, unfolding beside mine and my mother’s, even if I did not always see it back then. For so many years when I was younger, he had seemed so wrapped up in his factory and its mysterious workings, so sure of himself and of the world, so full of lectures and judgments and certainties, that he appeared to exist beyond my sight, and it wasn’t until just before I left for college that I realized all the ways he’d softened, grown unsure and therefore understandable. He was more private, less inclined to speak, and though he still lectured me from time to time, his lectures took on a wry, self-mocking tone, as though he knew his tendency toward bombast and was asking me, with a sad, fatherly wink, to indulge him. He was more patient with my mother, her sleeping, her moods, her anger that leapt from nowhere and disappeared into the same unfathomable place. None of this happened overnight, of course. He lost his temper often, and every time he did so, he would grab the car keys and slam the front door, returning sometimes within ten minutes, sometimes not for an hour or more.

  He was forty-seven when I left for college, as handsome as he had always been, the owner of a company that was fast becoming a s
ignificant local competitor to long-established foreign firms, and he was successful and accomplished by nearly all the world’s metrics. Nobody who looked at him would have felt sorry for him, and yet, when he appeared at my bedroom door as I was packing the last of my things, I felt a sadness for him that had nothing to do with my departure.

  “All set?” he asked.

  I nodded. He looked around my room, the cupboard hanging open and mostly empty. He came in and sat down on my bed. “You know,” he said, “I never went back to my own parents’ house after college. This could be the last time you live in this room.”

  It wouldn’t be, of course. I would sleep in this same bed the night after my mother’s death, but neither of us could have known that then.

  “I just want to say—” he began, but I would never know what it was he wanted to say. My mother came to stand in the doorway. Her cheekbones carved her face in half.

  “Having a little heart-to-heart?” she drawled. “How adorable. Like a movie.”

  My father actually blushed. As always, she had the power to make him falter. “We should go,” he said, standing up. “I just came to take Shalini’s suitcase downstairs.”

  We piled into the car, my suitcase in the boot, and began the drive down to the coast. My mother slept in the car, and I sat in the back and watched her face in the round bowl of the side mirror. Villages, hamlets, towns slipped by; lorries wheezed under loads of iron rods and bricks and timber. The car pitched over a pothole, and my mother’s head banged off the closed window. Her eyes flew open, and she stared ahead at the road, though without terror or recognition or any kind of emotion at all. A second later, she was asleep again.

  Seven hours later, we arrived at the campus, a dozen dreary vanilla-and-charcoal buildings with slivers of grass wedged between them. My father, who wasn’t allowed up into the girls’ hostel, stayed with the car, and it was my mother who walked me up to my room, with its two narrow plywood beds, who greeted my shy roommate, Rupa. She looked around, and I imagine she was thinking of the college life I was to have, the one she never did. We went downstairs, and she waited to the side until my father had hugged me. I expected her to speak, to say something cryptic, faintly sarcastic, but she merely took hold of both my shoulders and stared into my face, a long stare that I desperately wanted to break, but forced myself to hold. I also had to will myself not to cover my nose; she had neglected to brush her teeth before we left the house, and her breath stank of coffee and sour, half-digested food. Then they got into the car and my father carefully reversed.