The Far Field

by Madhuri Vijay

  “In the village,” I said. “I saw a boy. He was with your soldiers. They’d arrested him or abducted him or something. I don’t exactly know. But they’d taken him away from his home.”

  The brigadier remained silent for several seconds. Then he said, “A boy?”

  I nodded. “Yes. According to them, he hid in a tree and threw shit at them. But there was something wrong with him, the boy. Mentally, I mean. I don’t think he meant to do it.” I paused. “It was the same soldiers you sent to get me.”

  For a long time, he just looked at me. Then he said, his voice all of a sudden brusque and professional, “Tell me exactly what happened.”

  “I just told you.”

  “You saw him throw shit at them?”

  “No.”

  “But you did see this child with my soldiers.”

  I nodded.

  “Was he hurt? The boy?”

  “No,” I said. “He seemed all right.”

  The brigadier nodded. “And they told you about him? About the shit and the rest of it?”

  “Well—” I hesitated. “They didn’t tell me exactly.”

  He looked up. “Then how do you know?”

  “I overheard them talking about it to someone else.”

  “Overheard them?” The brigadier frowned.

  “Yes. They were talking about it. I was close by and I heard.”

  “Did you say anything to them about it?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I—” I broke off. “Look, you said you’d help if I told you.”

  The brigadier looked at me thoughtfully, then he slid out from under the sheets and began to dress. Just as methodically as he’d removed his clothes, he began to put them on. Briefs and vest. Pants. Shirt. Belt, socks, shoes. And, last of all, his medals. Fully clothed, he looked at me again.

  “I will help you,” he said, “but I still think there’s something you aren’t telling me. Something you’re holding back.”

  And then I couldn’t stand it anymore. I thought of all the secrets I had carried as far back into my childhood as I could remember. I felt them pile one on top of another, suffocating me.

  I was so tired.

  “Shalini,” the brigadier murmured.

  “I was hiding,” I blurted out. “I was with someone. A friend of mine. We were—we were on a walk, and we saw your soldiers. They heard us, and my friend told me to hide. He was the one they told about the child. But I was right there, and I heard every word, I swear to you.”

  The brigadier was listening intently. “You were with a friend,” he murmured. “A man?”

  I nodded. “Yes. And your soldiers, they—” I broke off, looking down, breathing hard.

  “Yes?” he prompted me.

  “They hit him,” I said. “They kicked him. I thought they were going to kill him.”

  “Who? The boy?”

  “No. My friend. They beat him for no reason at all.” My voice dropped to a whisper. “They broke his ankle, I think. He could barely walk.”

  The brigadier’s lips were pressed tight. “Is your friend all right?” he asked. “Has he seen a doctor? Is he getting treatment?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Good.” The brigadier ran his hand over his face. Then he turned to leave the room.

  “Wait!” I cried. “Where are you going? Are you going to arrest those soldiers?”

  He turned. “I promised that I would do something,” he said quietly. “And I will.”

  He walked to the door. “Ramchand will have dinner ready soon. I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t join you. It’s been a devil of a day, and I’m a bit tired.”

  He reached for the door handle then stopped.

  “Oh, one more thing,” he said. “Your friend, the one with whom you were on that … walk. I need to make sure that he’s all right. What’s his name?”

  I hesitated. Then I said, “Riyaz. Riyaz Ahmed Batt.”

  It was the first time I’d spoken his whole name aloud.

  The brigadier nodded. “You really care for this person, don’t you?”

  “I do,” I said softly, but he was already leaving. Left by myself, I realized that I was still naked. I crossed the room and picked up my clothes. I wrapped the towel around myself and slipped out into the corridor. The brigadier was in his study with the door closed, light seeping from underneath it. I went to the kitchen and found Ramchand with the back door open. He was smoking, looking out into the small yard behind the brigadier’s house.

  “Ramchand,” I said. “Would it be possible for me to get a car to Jammu tomorrow?”

  He nodded without turning to look at me.

  I went back to my room and lay on the bed, staring up at the swords and the shield. I noticed that the shield was damaged, a deep dent over the place where the heart would have been.

  VI

  38

  THE BAGGAGE CAROUSEL AT the airport jerked by like a broken movie reel. I stood before it for a long time, even though I knew it would bring me nothing. A stained red gym bag trundled past, its zipper snapped off. All around me, people crowded in, pressing up against the cracked conveyor belt, craning their necks to better see their approaching luggage. When I could no longer bear their jostling, I turned and walked out of the glass doors of the airport and into the Bangalore night.

  It took me almost no time to spot my father. It wasn’t just the simple elegance of his white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbow, or his gleaming suede shoes, that made him stand out. It was his way of resting his elbow on the metal guardrail, hands clasped lightly. He was set apart by this quietness, marked by it, and the people around him seemed to recognize it, for they granted him a hair’s breadth of distance, a tiny bubble of calm in the crowd.

  Then he glanced up. For a second our eyes met without recognition, and we saw each other, I think, not as father and daughter, linked inevitably by blood and by history, but as strangers whose ties to each other were accidental, a matter of chance. Then the second passed, and he was moving, he was gesturing toward the gap in the guardrail, I was walking toward him, and then he was hugging me, the soft material of his shirt rubbing against my cheek, his smell unchanged, tea and aftershave and shoe polish, and his hands, which were my own hands, circling me, holding me close.

  Just as he and my mother had done so many years ago in the train station, he kept his arm tight around me as we walked to the car, as if to protect me from the world, or, it suddenly occurred to me, to keep me from disappearing into it again. He paid the parking fee to a woman in a beige uniform, and then we were out on the road, heading home. The lights from the streetlamps draped themselves like gauzy scarves across our legs, across my father’s hands on the steering wheel, across the side of his face that I could see.

  Now, finally, he turned.

  “I would have understood, you know,” he said in a whisper. “Why you went. I would have understood why you felt you had to go. You could have told me. But never mind. I’m not angry. I’m not angry, because you came back.” He lifted one hand from the steering wheel and gripped mine. “You went away, but you came back.”

  Never had I heard him speak in this way. All the lecturing, the hectoring, all the logic, was gone. He was nearly praying.

  I did not leave the house for days. I stayed in my room, either sleeping or lying awake in bed, waiting for my father to come home from the factory. We ate dinner together. We sat in the living room, while he chose a record to play. We listened to the music. We did not talk about where I had been. Neither of us was ready to talk about it.

  When Stella let herself in on that first morning after my return, I impulsively threw my arms around her. She submitted to my embrace for a grudging second, then stepped back.

  “How are your children?” I asked.

  She lifted a perfect eyebrow, as though she found the question preposterous. “They are the best children a mother could have.”

  My father had, in my a
bsence, sold our old couch, and replaced it with a divan, scattered with half a dozen brightly colored pillows and bolsters. He told me he’d seen the divan in a store, arranged just like this, and had simply bought the whole thing. It was no longer the room in which my mother had slept, in which Bashir Ahmed had told his stories, the room of afternoon shadows. To my own surprise, I found I had no regrets.

  One evening, I walked into my bedroom to find a brand-new cell phone, the latest model—still in its box and sealed hermetically in plastic—which my father had bought and left there for me.

  Gradually, he and I began to talk. I told him about bathing in the waterfall, about learning to walk on mountain paths, about milking the cow every morning—which made him smile. I told him about the soft-eared mules that lugged up all the necessities of life, bags of rice and flour, sacks of cement. I described the chickens scrabbling greedily for grain, the fields of swaying corn, how I’d gone on a walk and gotten lost. Though I did not do it intentionally, the stories I told him were ones leached of trouble and secrets, the innocuous tales of a naïve, bumbling traveler. I wanted him to laugh, wanted to ease my transition back into this life, wanted him to forgive me, and so I reduced the place I’d loved—the place of hard rock and dry air, the place of dead crows and houses that clung so fiercely to the mountain—to a quaint, provincial backdrop, and I hated the ease with which I did it. But how could I explain all the rest, the things that had mattered? How could I tell him about what it had been like to walk away with Amina watching me? To watch Riyaz hobble through the night, his face a scribble of pain, both from his broken ankle and from the growing comprehension that he would spend the rest of his life in the village, going up and down the mountain with his mules until he died? And what about all the rest—Mohammad Din and his terrible crime, Bashir Ahmed in his self-imposed exile, the nighttime robbers, Kishtwar on fire, Sania with her head bent over a book, Aaqib falling asleep against my arm, the soldiers who stomped through the lives of so many? How could I explain to my father what I myself had no words for? How could I tell him about the person I’d discovered myself to be up there?

  Only once did we come close to speaking the truth. My father was sitting on the divan, looking lost amongst the piles of bright cushions, a drink in his hand.

  “So,” he said casually. “Did you finally find him?”

  I looked up. “Who?”

  “You know who. Our old Kashmiri friend. Did you find him?”

  I hesitated before replying, “I found his family. They’re the ones I stayed with.”

  “Oh,” my father said, and I could not tell if he was disappointed or relieved by my answer. “Right. He was married. I’d forgotten.”

  I waited, but there was no more forthcoming. I probably would have admitted the truth if he’d pressed me, but he didn’t. Ours has always been a story of cowardice, of things left unsaid, and neither my father nor I made any reference to Bashir Ahmed again.

  On a Sunday evening, a couple of weeks after I came home, my father suggested we go to one of his favorite restaurants for dinner. It was the first time I’d left the house, since my return. We climbed the stairs and were seated by a waiter, who greeted my father by name, and then we went through the rituals. Rum for him, whiskey for me. We ordered. We talked. About the unseasonably hot weather, about the traffic, which was worse every day, or so it seemed. He told me he was in the process of buying four acres of land for a second factory outside the city. Then he cleared his throat.

  “Just before you left,” he said, “you remember what I told you? About getting married?”

  I nodded.

  “I think I may have found someone.”

  Her name was Jaya. She was a doctor, divorced, no children, living in the U.S. Now she was thinking about returning. They’d spoken many times over the phone, exchanged several emails, and she was planning a trip to Bangalore in a few weeks. Nothing was settled, he was quick to assure me, and even if they liked each other, nothing would happen for a long time.

  I was quiet after he’d told me. Then I asked, “Do you have a photo of her?”

  He laughed, sounding relieved that my reaction was so mild. “A photo? Do I look like a teenager to you? I don’t carry one with me.” Then his face became serious, and he leaned in toward me. “Are you sure you don’t mind?”

  “Why would I mind?”

  “Because of Amma,” he said simply. “You were always her protector. Like a little bulldog.”

  “Well,” I said, looking away, “I didn’t do a very good job, did I?”

  “It wasn’t your job, Shalini. If it was anyone’s, it was mine.”

  And then he told me about the doctors. It was why he’d insisted I attend college away from Bangalore, so that I wouldn’t find out she’d been seeking treatment. I sat very still, and then I asked, “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  He shrugged. “She didn’t want me to.” Then, unexpectedly, a smile appeared on his lips. “There was one fellow, supposedly this world-famous psychiatrist. I don’t know what happened, what he said to her exactly; I was waiting outside. She was in there for barely a minute, and then she opened the door and came storming out. In the loudest voice you could possibly imagine, she told him, ‘You are the stupidest man I’ve met. Also the ugliest. I could forgive either fault on its own, but the two together are a bit too much for me.’ You should have seen the faces of the people there, Shalini.”

  I stared at him for a stunned second then burst out laughing. He glanced around guiltily, then started to laugh too. We did not lower our voices, but laughed the way my mother would have. After that, for some reason, it was easier to look at each other.

  The waiter brought our bill, and my father laid down his credit card.

  “Oh, by the way,” he said, taking another card out of his wallet. “I almost forgot about this. Your friend, the photographer, dropped it off.”

  It took me a moment. “Hari?”

  “Right.” He laid the card down on the table, and I picked it up. It was an invitation to an exhibit of Hari’s photographs at the Alliance Française. The date was the coming Friday.

  “I told him you were out of town, but he said I should give it to you anyway,” my father said. “He seemed like a nice enough chap. Maybe you should go.”

  “I don’t know.” I pressed the corner of the card into my thumb. “We didn’t exactly part on the best of terms.”

  “The only way you’ll be able to change that is if you go.”

  “‘Without action, there is only waiting for death,’ ” I said with a smile.

  “I said that? How brilliant of me,” he murmured.

  That night, I took the card up to my room and set it on the table beside the wooden animal.

  The week passed, and then on Friday, as I was flipping through channels in the late afternoon, I suddenly sat up, because there, on the screen, was Kishtwar. First, I saw a sweeping shot of the Chowgan, eerily emptied of its picnickers and cricketers and looking more like a wasteland than anything else. This was followed by a shot of various streets, a few of which I recognized, including the intersection with the pharmacy where I’d first talked to Stalin. Since my return, I’d tried to follow the news about Kishtwar, reading about how the curfew was still in place, but how “normalcy” had returned to the area, as though normalcy were a child that had wandered away and briefly gotten lost. Most of what I’d found had been on the internet; this was the first time I’d seen it covered on TV. The army, the reporter was saying, had lifted the curfew; phone and internet service had been restored. I thought of the brigadier sitting in his living room, satisfied with his work, Ramchand hovering, as usual, at his elbow.

  I sat up, relief coursing through me. Suddenly it occurred to me how I could get in touch with Zoya. I asked Riyaz to contact your people in Kishtwar, Amina had told me. They called your father. With any luck, the call would be recorded on our landline. I picked it up and scrolled through the log of received calls. And there it was, a number
with an area code I knew now to be from Jammu and Kashmir. I hastily dialed it on my new cell phone, my heart beating painfully fast in anticipation. Zoya picked up on the second ring. “Hello?”

  “Hello!” I hated how forced I sounded. “Hello, it’s me, Shalini.”

  There was a long pause. Then Zoya said, “Hello.”

  “I’m in Bangalore now, and I just wanted to call and see how you are. How things are, I mean. In Kishtwar. I was just watching the news, and they said that everything is all right. I mean, the curfew—” I broke off my babbling. “Zoya?” I said. “Hello? Are you there?”

  “Yes,” she replied evenly. “I am here.”

  “Are things all right over there?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Things are fine.”

  I couldn’t understand the coldness, the formality, in her voice. Was she annoyed that I had not kept in touch with them after I left Kishtwar? But she knew as well as I did that I had no phone.

  “Is something wrong?” I asked.

  Instead of a reply, there was a series of muffled noises, the sound, I realized, of the receiver exchanging hands.

  “This is Latief,” I heard Abdul Latief say after a moment.

  “It’s so nice to talk to you again!” I cried. “How have you been?”

  “Fine, thank you.” Again, I noticed the formality in his tone. “I’m sorry, Zoya had to go. Saleem is here with us, and his family also. Can we call you later? This is your number?”

  “Yes,” I said. “This is my number. Please call anytime. Anytime.”

  Without another word, he hung up. I stood there, staring at the sleek instrument in my hand, uneasiness at the back of my mind. Don’t be silly, I scolded myself. You just caught them at a bad time. They would call back and be themselves again.

  I waited all evening, but the call didn’t come. Finally, driven to distraction, I grabbed the invitation to Hari’s exhibit off my bedside table, sent a message to my father’s phone to tell him where I was going, and jumped into my car. My father was right, I thought. Hari had been kind enough to invite me to his exhibit after everything. The least I could do was show up. To fix what little I could. To act.