The Pathless Sky

by Chaitali Sen

  Slowly he realized the college was no longer functional. His students were often absent, the crowds on the common were more unruly, and some days everything simply came to a halt. The students called for a full strike and gathered on the lawn one day for a march to the Governor’s Palace. He and Mariam listened to some of the speeches, still about the demilitarization of the north, before they decided to come home. In the car he had asked her if she thought all these students making speeches really cared, or did they just like the attention? Mariam said some of the students seemed a little pompous and disingenuous, but not all of them. No, not all of them, he agreed. He was relieved that she’d seen some of that too, that he wasn’t just being old and cantankerous.

  At home it was a normal evening. She made dinner while he sat in the dining room reading a rather discouraging set of exam papers, but later a rising commotion brought them out to the hall. Their neighbors from the floors above them had gathered on the stairs and in the vestibule. When Dolly saw Mariam she began talking excitedly.

  “The police attacked the march on College Street. Two students have been killed.”

  “Killed?” Mariam asked.

  “Yes, two students,” Dolly cried. “Zoya is marching with them. I told her she was too young.”

  Mariam nodded then and took Dolly’s hand. “Zoya will be all right,” she said. “She knows how to take care of herself.”

  John looked around for Vic. “I’ll be right back,” he said, starting down the stairs, but he stopped when he realized Mariam had followed him, and Dolly too was close behind. “Wait here,” he said.

  Mariam stiffened and glared. He’d never seen her look so defiant. Behind her, Dolly picked up on his communication and touched Mariam’s elbow. “Stay with me, Mariam,” she said, making herself sound helpless. She kept her hand on Mariam’s elbow until at last Mariam surrendered and turned up the stairs. She looked back at John and he waited until she was on the landing before he continued down the stairs and went outside. The sun was still up, casting an even light over the street. A few people had gathered on the street viewing the disturbance on the other side of the canal, where demonstrators and riot police were in a confrontation. The police had formed a barrier and the crowd was shouting to be let through. The two sides churned back and forth, swaying like treetops in a storm. These streets never looked so narrow before. They couldn’t accommodate a crowd this size and people were flush with the canal wall. He was afraid they would start falling into the water.

  Their side of the canal wasn’t quiet for long. There was a surge of demonstrators coming toward them, and the people who had been standing with him had to either step out of the way or join the surge. John couldn’t decide what to do. By the time he thought he should go back inside, the marchers were upon him. They were elbow to elbow and there was no room for them to step around bystanders. He had to go with them or risk being trampled. Someone pulled him in and held onto him until he seemed to have the rhythm of the march. People in the front and behind him held bullhorns and led chants. The chants coming from the front were different than the ones from the back, and mostly around him people were shouting out their own slogans. John looked for gaps where he could move toward the townhouses. Even if he was pushed a long way down the street, if he could get to the sidewalk he could cut through the narrow front yards to get back home. He didn’t want to be out all night in this. If he was gone long enough, he was sure Mariam would come out, and she too would be swept up.

  At the end of the street they had to stop. John couldn’t see what was going on at the front of the march, but there were warnings over a loudspeaker for the marchers to disperse. The crowd still tried to surge forward and was pushed back, causing the swaying he had seen earlier across the canal. He was starting to feel panicked, claustrophobic and he wove his way further toward the sidewalk hoping no one would prevent him from leaving the march. He made it to one of the iron fences in front of the townhouses. Behind the gate, residents of the townhouse were passing out water. He asked to come through the gate, explaining that he needed to get back home. He had lost all sense of distance. Everything looked different with all these people and he didn’t quite know where he was. They heard glass shattering at the front of the march and someone opened the gate for him just as the crowd surged forward.

  His progress along this route was painfully slow. He couldn’t cut through the front gardens without having conversations with the people standing in them. Most of them were from the college. He recognized them and they recognized him, even if they didn’t know each other by name, and he kept explaining how he’d been pulled along with the marchers for a while but he’d left his wife at home and wanted to get back. All the while the clashes on the street seemed to be intensifying. There were sirens now, and helicopters overhead. People had brought out their radios and were listening to news reports. From windows and rooftops, cameras were flashing, leaving bursts of white light lingering in the darkening sky. Even the trees and lampposts had been invaded by people trying to get a panoramic view. John had never experienced anything so overwhelming to all of his senses. By the time he made it back home, the sky was dark and marked with clouds of white smoke. His legs ached; he must have hurdled twenty fences. Some of his neighbors were in the yard. He looked for Dolly and Mariam. He didn’t see them and went inside. From the bottom of the stairs he could hear Dolly’s television blaring.

  He sat down on the stairs for a moment, feeling strangely exhilarated by the chaos outside and unsettled being away from it. Even the people who were frightened didn’t want to miss any of it. He should have been worried about Vic and Zoya and his students, but he found it impossible to worry and felt something close to what he remembered as happiness. Then, just as soon as he remembered that feeling of happiness, it faded and was lost. He got up, suddenly weary, and lumbered up the stairs. Dolly’s door was ajar and he slipped into her apartment, looking for Mariam. Dolly and two women from upstairs, both nervous types, were huddled on the sofa watching the news on a national channel. John squinted at the screen, struggling to recognize College Street, now a scene of great violence. Dolly leaned forward. She thought she saw Zoya, but the camera moved away and she couldn’t confirm it. The other two said it wasn’t her, but Dolly didn’t seem convinced. They showed the police dispersing students with water cannons. The riots were spreading far beyond College Street now. There was a report that more shots had been fired, and the number injured was growing. They didn’t say if anyone else had been killed.

  John tapped Dolly’s shoulder. She turned and grabbed his hand.

  “Is it bad, John? Did you seee Zoya?”

  He shook his head. He wanted to tell Dolly not to worry. If there was a time for reckless fellowship, it was now. Zoya would be crazy to miss this.

  “Where’s Mariam?” he asked.

  “She said she wanted to lie down. I tried to make her wait until you came back.”

  He left Dolly’s apartment, annoyed with her for letting Mariam out of her sight. They had both seen her entranced gaze toward the outside, her pull toward the street. He hurried down the hall, calling Mariam’s name out as soon as he opened the door to their apartment. She didn’t answer. He was about to go back down the stairs, convinced she had gone outside, but Dolly had said she wanted to lie down and he decided to check the bedroom. He found her there, not sleeping but sitting up on the edge of the bed. The room was dark, and the light coming in through the window had a different quality. It was harsher and flickering, and carried with it the sounds of the riots.

  He was alarmed by her stillness and stepped forward carefully. She didn’t look at him, or give any sign that she knew he was there. He stood in front of her and knelt down. Her hands were cold. He held them, trying to warm them, and suddenly she inhaled and her eyes filled with tears. She said, “I’m tired.” It was all she said. She slipped off the bed into his arms and he cradled her, kissing her face softly, kissin
g her wet eyes and cold forehead. There was no strength left in her body. She was as slack as a wet towel and he held her until her eyes fluttered closed. He lifted her onto the bed and pulled the covers over her. She seemed to be asleep.

  He wanted to seal off the noise from the outside. He closed the curtains and left the bedroom to lock the front door and disconnect the telephone in the kitchen. When he came back in the room, he placed a towel in the gap beneath the bedroom door. The window still filtered in some light and noise, but it was muted. He got into bed beside Mariam. She was still for a while, apparently asleep, but after a few minutes she turned to him and put her hand up to his face, her fingers lightly touching his jaw. “What did you see out there?” she asked. Her eyes were a little clearer.

  He didn’t know what to describe. From the way he talked about it, what was going on outside was not much more than a rowdy parade, but still she seemed moved and on the verge of tears again. She bit her bottom lip, as if all of her emotions could be halted there. “I was watching it on the television, and then . . . ”

  “What, Mariam? What happened?”

  “I realized there wasn’t anyone else to blame this time. Not the war, not the government, not my parents. There was no one.”

  He put his thumb on her lips, knowing what she was going to say next and trying to stop her from saying it, but she went on. She said their daughter had died in her body and she was the only one to blame. She would have continued but he took hold of her chin, forcing her to look at him and not look away. The shock of it stopped her. She was frightened and though he regretted startling her, it was important that she listen to him. “It wasn’t your fault,” he said. If he ever made her feel as if it was her fault, he should be shot dead. “I know whose fault it is. I know who took her.” She frowned, looking at him as if he’d gone mad, and he did feel gripped by a certain madness. He’d been thinking about this for a long time. He told her it was Rohana Bul’s father, haunting him, cursing him until all of his children were replaced. He knew now, had known for a long time that he had killed that man. This was his first time saying it out loud, thinking it might put the dead to rest. For killing him, and going on as if nothing had happened, there had to be consequences. It was his fault. Mariam and their daughter were innocent, but they had to suffer the consequences with him.

  Mariam didn’t look away. Her gaze softened and he could see that her fear had turned to pity, and at the same time he had not convinced her. She was as committed to her own guilt now as she was before.

  He put his head back down and they were quiet for a while, recovering from his outburst. She was strangely calm. Something about his revelation had not surprised her. She must have known all along that he had beaten Rohana Bul’s father to death, but she would not have forced him to face it. He had to come to it on his own.

  “I’m sorry, Mariam.”

  “I’m sorry too, John.”

  With that, there wasn’t anything more to say about the matter. Arguing about who was to blame would not bring their daughter back. It was time to stop talking. It was time to rest. There was only one more thing Mariam wanted to know.

  “What did she look like, John? Did you hold her?”

  It wasn’t hard for him to remember their daughter’s face, her black hair smoothed over her forehead, her little dumpling cheeks, tiny eyelids and thick eyelashes. It wasn’t hard at all to go back to that time and describe her carefully, so that Mariam could see her too. “We should have held her together. I should have helped you,” he said. As much as it felt now as if their daughter had never existed, he had felt her solid form in the crook of his arm. He at least knew that she hadn’t been something they’d dreamt up. She was real. She had grown for a while.

  “I couldn’t have, John.”

  She came closer to him, fitting herself against his body, pressing her forehead to his lips. He put his arm around her waist. All he could hear were the helicopters whirring overhead, and after a while the monotony of it lulled them to sleep.

  An insistent tapping settled in his ear and woke him. Mariam was still sleeping. He rolled to the edge of the bed and grabbed his watch from the bedside table. He had no idea how long they’d been sealed up in the bedroom. He recalled getting up a handful of times, examining the light and cocking his ears to the tumult outside, drinking water and stumbling to the bathroom and tumbling back into bed. He tried to read the time on his watch. It was around six o’clock in the morning or evening. He couldn’t narrow it down.

  The tapping started again and he realized someone was knocking at the front door. He got up and put on his pants and slipped out of the bedroom, running to the door so the knocking would stop. He didn’t want Mariam to wake up. He saw Vic through the peephole and opened the door.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Vic asked, coming inside. “Why aren’t you answering your phone?”

  John shook his head. The whole apartment stank of something. He turned and started for the kitchen and stopped short. Mariam had been cooking when the riots started. They had left the food out and now it let off a sour, fermented smell.

  “Let’s go in the hall. Mariam’s sleeping,” John said. They went back out the way they just came, and John explained that he had turned the phone off because Mariam was trying to sleep. In this light Vic didn’t look that great himself. His clothes smelled musty, like they had been wet and dried against his skin, his hair was unwashed, his eyes red and his eyelids drooping, and there was something that looked like a bloodstain on his jacket.

  “What happened to you?” John asked.

  “The police couldn’t handle the uprising. They sent in the army and the militia. We’re under martial law.”

  “But what happened to you?” John asked again. He hated when Vic answered specific questions with a broad overview.

  “I fought, John, with the rest of them. The whole province is in a state of rebellion. What happened to you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He pointed to the door. “Is Mariam all right?”

  “We needed some time,” John said.

  Vic looked uncomfortable. They had never exchanged words about his daughter who never came home, but he knew that Vic was pained by it. In a way John appreciated his refusal to lapse into meaningless sentiment.

  “We needed some time,” John repeated.

  “I know,” Vic said, “but now you have to come out. There are other people who need you.”

  John doubted that, and besides that, he didn’t care. All that mattered to him was inside his apartment, and Vic who had no domestic life would never understand how that could happen. A marriage was not populous enough for Vic.

  John opened the door. “I’ll see you later. You should get some sleep. You look like shit.”

  “Call Arifah,” Vic said. “She’s been calling everyone in the building. Dolly had to convince her not to call the police.”

  He felt a little guilty, mostly because now Arifah had burdened everyone else with her hysteria. He promised Vic he would call and waved him off. He went to the kitchen to connect the phone again, but he decided to clean up the kitchen first. Then he made coffee and took a cup to the bedroom to wake Mariam. She was already sitting up, looking beautifully disheveled and alert.

  “Was that Vic?” she asked.

  He nodded, handing her the coffee. “They’ve sent in the militia. The whole province is in a state of rebellion,” he said, repeating Vic’s phrase. “We need to call your mother.” She sprung out of bed, taking the coffee and walking out to the kitchen. He opened the curtains. The sun was up. He was surprised by the silence outside.

  He went into the kitchen and watched as Mariam dialed the phone. She sipped her coffee while she waited for Arifah to pick up. He could hear the frantic hello. Mariam kept the conversation brief, saying she’d had a difficult night. “I’m sorry, Mama, I’m sorry,” she said as Arifah
carried on.

  John shook his head and signaled to her to hang up.

  “I have to go now. I’ll call you later.”

  Mariam said she was starving. She made some toast, and after breakfast they showered and dressed. They could hear the television turning on next door in Dolly’s apartment. They listened for voices, wondering if Zoya had made it home. In a while they heard Zoya and Dolly arguing.

  “Sounds like things are back to normal,” John said.

  Mariam opened the window to let some air in. The air coming in was smoky, carrying a bitter, chemical smell. “Should we go outside and see?” Mariam asked. It was still early in the morning and it seemed safe enough to go out. There were no helicopters. Everything sounded quiet. Peaceful.

  They crept down the stairs and went outside, turning their faces away from the wind. Their eyes burned and watered. When they managed to squint into the sky they saw bits of ash floating in the air. Along Canal Street whole sections of the canal wall had collapsed. The broken bricks were strewn everywhere, along with other debris, shards of glass and metal, papers and plastic cups, and strangely an incredible number of cloth rags. Across the canal they saw the burned-out frame of a police car.

  They only made it to the end of their walkway. A military jeep came out of nowhere and stopped beside them. An officer of the army, not a militia reserve, came out and told them to get off the street. John pointed to their townhouse, saying they lived right there. He wanted to argue that they were still on their own property, not on the street at all. “Go on inside then,” the man said. He wouldn’t get back in the jeep until John and Mariam were inside. They went back, shutting the door and watching him surreptitiously through the glass panel. The officer got back in the jeep and sped away.

  John looked at Mariam. “You’re crazy if you think I’m leaving you here.” All of this had to have resolved something for her, their time locked away in the bedroom, and this scene outside their door, as it had for him. He was certain they would never be free of each other. She would be a prison for him no matter how far apart they were.