The Far Field

by Madhuri Vijay

  “Fine.”

  “Still liking it?”

  I made a vaguely assenting noise. The drinks came and we raised our glasses.

  “Cheers,” my father said. If my mother had been with us, she would have been drinking a lime soda. For all her extremism, she had a prim view on alcohol. My father would have turned to her and raised his glass, and, depending on her mood, she might have returned the gesture with a flourish. Or she might have stared at the tablecloth until he flushed. But my mother wasn’t here, and my father set his glass down with a thud that startled me out of my dull absorption.

  “Look at me, Shalini,” my father said firmly.

  I dragged my eyes up. I was twenty-four years old and felt ninety.

  “It’s been three years since Amma passed away,” he said. “And I can see that you are making the mistake you were making when it first happened. You are stopping your life.”

  When my father spoke, it was with his complete mind. This was a man used to meeting with industry heads and crooked contractors, with recalcitrant employees and irate union leaders. He forgot himself, his surroundings, and became entirely immersed in what he was saying.

  “I thought you would eventually find a way out, which is why I didn’t say anything for a long time. I regret that, but enough is enough. Listen to me, Shalini. When something big happens—”

  “By ‘big,’” I said loudly, “do you mean your wife dying?” I knew it was childish, but I couldn’t help myself. I felt like a child.

  “When something big happens,” he repeated firmly, ignoring me, “whatever it is, I understand that a person’s first tendency is to freeze, to go numb and wait for something else, equally big, to come along and cancel out the first thing. Believe me, I understand. And I know that’s what you’re doing. But that’s the mistake, don’t you see? It’s faulty, wishful logic. There is no second thing. At least, not externally. There is, however, action. Action is the second thing. Without action, there is only waiting for death.”

  The waiter came up then; we ordered and handed back our menus. Then my father looked at me again. “Do you understand what I’m saying, Shalini? You cannot stand around waiting for things to change, because chances are they won’t. You must do something. You must act.”

  “What about you?” I snapped peevishly. “What are you doing? How are you acting?”

  He smiled, as though he had been waiting for me to ask precisely this question. “I like to think I’m trying. I’m working harder than I’ve ever worked, for one. And there’s something else, which I’ve been wanting to discuss with you.” Until now, he’d been looking at me, but now he looked down and took a long sip of rum. For some reason, I found myself sitting straighter.

  “I’m thinking of getting married again,” he said. Then he hastily added, “Not right away. Not even soon, but I wanted to bring it up with you. To see what you thought.”

  I stared at his hands, wrapped around his glass. I’d inherited those same hands, the long, strong fingers, the broad palms, perfect for the swimmer I once thought I’d be.

  “To whom?” I asked.

  “I have no idea.”

  “How are you going to do it then?”

  He smiled. “What am I, a dinosaur? There are all those websites.”

  I looked at my father, who was only fifty-three years old, and imagined him tapping out a description of himself on a matrimonial site. Adding a photograph, choosing Widower in the drop-down menu. Checking to see if there were any messages for him, patiently sorting through profiles for someone he liked, someone who struck him as—what, exactly? Then the exchange of messages, the cautious expression of interest, followed by a phone call, a meeting, and, finally, talk of a marriage, a wedding. I waited for myself to grow resentful, but instead I grew sad.

  “Well?” he asked, and I couldn’t miss the pleading in his voice.

  “I think it’s nice,” I said softly.

  He leaned forward to look at my eyes, and when he saw I was being sincere, he smiled. “Thank you,” he said. “It’s important to me what you think.”

  “Now you know.”

  “In that case,” he said, leaning forward, “I’ll ask again. What about you?”

  I looked up. “Me?”

  “What do you plan to do?” he pressed. “You asked me how I’m acting, and I told you. Now you need to make a similar decision. I don’t mean marriage, obviously, but it has to be something.”

  “Like what?”

  “How should I know?” Now there was an edge of impatience to his voice. “I can’t live your life for you, Shalini. You have to decide how you want to live, the way I did. It’s as simple as that.”

  The sad glow I’d been feeling vanished, replaced by anger. He looked so smug and sure of himself, sitting there in his white linen shirt, the glass of rum like a crystal ball between his palms, so pleased with his announcement of the future and my approval of it. As if he had somehow done me a favor, and now he couldn’t understand why I wasn’t falling over myself thanking him. I had never made a scene in a restaurant before, but I saw myself screaming obscenities, knocking my drink over, the other diners staring then quickly averting their eyes.

  “I have decided,” I said finally. “And my life is fine, thank you.”

  He said nothing, but the look on his face was enough to provoke me.

  “Anyway,” I said breezily. “I’m going on a trip soon.”

  That took us both by surprise. We were quiet; then my father asked, “Where?”

  I paused, weighing the next words before I spoke them. How long had this idea been in my mind, half-formed and asleep? I thought of the wooden beast waiting beside my bed, and what I felt then was not fear, but the pure, blazing exhilaration of certainty.

  “To the north,” I said. “Jammu and Kashmir.”

  I sat there, watching him frown, waiting for his reaction. If he’d spoken Bashir Ahmed’s name right then, I would have almost certainly lost my nerve. To this day, I don’t know why he didn’t say it. He just sat there staring at the table until I gathered my wits enough to say, “It’s for work. A project Ritu wants to do up there. Something about rivers, I think.”

  “Is it safe to travel there these days?”

  “Ritu wouldn’t want to do it otherwise,” I lied.

  He still looked doubtful. “How long will you be gone?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  After another pause, even longer this time, he said, “Do you need any money?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll give you some anyway.”

  I said nothing.

  “Well,” my father said heavily, “Been quite the evening of announcements, hasn’t it?”

  And then I thought of him, returning night after night to an empty house. I thought of him driving alone to this restaurant on Sundays, sitting at this table, reading the menu he already knew by heart, waiting in silence for his food. And, because I’m trying to evade nothing here, I don’t think I ever loved him more than I did at that at that moment, when I pitied him most.

  I woke early and refreshed the next morning. The first thing I did was check on the trains that would take me north. After eleven years, I’d decided, there was no reason to fly. I would sleep in a berth for a night or two. I would watch the country fall away, state by state, landscape by landscape, and only then would I begin my search for Bashir Ahmed in earnest.

  I pulled down our old atlas from its place on our bookshelf and spread it open on my bed. The tops of the pages were black. Stella’s dusting rag had evidently never ventured this far. And there it was: Kashmir, the ponderous head that had always seemed too much for its awkward, tapering body. For a while after Bashir Ahmed left us for the last time, I kept an ear open for a mention of Kashmir in the news. But it was always the same vague thing—two or four or five militants killed, an Indian soldier injured, a gun battle, rumbling threats from across the LoC. I’d listened to the names of unfamiliar towns—Poonch, Baramulla, Sopor
e—and wondered if they were anywhere near Bashir Ahmed’s home. But it had been too abstract for me to grasp as a child, and besides I’d had my reasons back then for wanting to forget Bashir Ahmed and everything connected with him. Eventually, shamefully, I’d stopped paying attention.

  Now I realized how little I knew about the place where Bashir Ahmed came from. I did not even know the name of his village. If he ever told us, I’d forgotten it. He had always spoken of mountains, but as I looked at the thousands and thousands of folded, crumpled kilometers, I understood just how useless that information was. The exhilaration I’d felt sitting across from my father slowly slipped away, replaced by doubt. I found myself scrolling blankly through train charts, days going by. The only practical preparation I made was to drive to the bank and empty out my checking account—I had a sum total of twelve thousand rupees.

  I kept expecting my father to ask when I was leaving, but he didn’t. The only mention he made of my supposed trip was to suggest that I might look up an old friend of his while I was there, a Sameer Reddy, who was supposedly a high-ranking officer, a brigadier, in the army. I’d nodded and entered the brigadier’s number into my cell phone, with no intention whatsoever of calling him.

  Several nights in a row, I woke from fretful dreams, sweating, gripped by the fear that I had been on the verge of remembering something important and had just missed it.

  But the answer, when it came, was astonishing in its simplicity. I was lying in bed, drifting into and out of sleep, when I sat bolt upright, my heart racing. In less than a minute, I was at my computer, my fingers trembling as I typed in the words: Shah Baghdadi. Son. Hindu friend revived. Kashmir. Story. The third page of search results gave me the name I was looking for.

  Kishtwar.

  It was a town that lay on the Jammu side, six thousand feet above sea level. A town whose population was almost evenly split between Hindus and Muslims. A town most famous for its shrines, especially those of two legendary Sufi saints. Shah Fariduddin Baghdadi, and his son, Shah Asraruddin Baghdadi, who had once brought a dead boy back to life. I closed my eyes and thought of Bashir Ahmed, his hand resting on our gate, saying, My wife’s whole family is from there.

  It was the slimmest of clues, but it was enough.

  II

  5

  A MAN IN A blue tracksuit was sleeping in my berth. One arm thrown over his eyes, gold ring on the thumb. I stood clutching my ticket and rucksack, while people surged up the aisle behind me, fragments of their luggage—tiffin carriers, jute bags, a table fan—jabbing me in the back. “Excuse me,” I said.

  A frail old couple sat side by side on the opposite berth. He wore a sleeveless gray sweater over a neat white shirt and she a starched magenta sari. They could have been siblings as easily as husband and wife. Their single cloth bag huddled between their socked feet, their sandals carefully hidden away. I smiled at them to say, Can you believe this? but they simply stared ahead.

  “Excuse me,” I said, a bit louder, and tapped the man on the ankle. “This is my seat.”

  He raised his elbow and squinted up at me. “Lots of space there,” he muttered, gesturing toward the empty spot on the berth next to the old couple.

  All morning I’d braced myself for disaster. My father would confront me about the real reason for my trip; I would not find the right platform; the train would be canceled. Now all of it came flooding back as unreasonable anger. I lifted my rucksack and dropped it on the man’s legs.

  He scrambled up, yelping. “Are you mad?”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” I said. “It must have slipped.”

  Cursing under his breath, he slid over to the window, and with a sense of raw, breathless triumph I sat where his legs had been, the blue Rexine still warm from his body. All around us, the station frothed and bubbled. I looked at the crowds through the cloudy yellow window, seeing instead my father at his desk above the factory floor; Stella in our kitchen, palming a small red knife; Hari cross-legged, flicking ashes onto a dirty plate, and I very nearly stood up and pushed my way back onto the platform, but right then the train began to move, and I fell back in my seat.

  Now there were acres of ugly buildings. Mud and metal shantytowns. Flat, scrubby countryside. For hours, nobody in my compartment spoke. The old man and woman took turns sipping water from a giant Bisleri bottle. The man in the tracksuit chewed his fingernails and spit the slivers discreetly on the floor. And, suddenly, I imagined that this was my family, that the old man and woman were my parents, and the man in the tracksuit my husband. It came out of nowhere, and I glanced around guiltily, as if they might have heard my thoughts. We were a family, on our way to Delhi for a holiday. I saw us posing stiffly for photographs in front of monuments. Saw us eating dinner at our hotel then climbing to our rooms. Saw the old couple wishing us goodnight. Saw my husband and me slipping into our own bed, his gold ring a point of ice against my skin.

  I felt no attraction to the man, but the fantasy gave me a strange comfort, cast our single fraught exchange in a benign light, which perfectly matched the light outside, a sad and bottomless blue. I glanced at him from the corner of my eye. He looked tired, and I wished then I had just let him sleep. When a boy in a khaki uniform brought our bedding, blankets wrapped in brown paper, pillows like firm cakes of soap, I turned to the man, intending to offer him the bottom bunk if he wanted it. But before I could speak, he addressed the boy loudly: “Better give that girl hers first. Otherwise god knows who she’ll hurt. People like that, they think the world was made for them.”

  My heart clenched, but I said nothing. The old couple might as well have been deaf, for all that they reacted. I waited until the boy had gone, and then I stood and made my way to the bogie door, which was open. The wind whipped my hair against my neck, stung my eyes to tears. I stared out at the darkening landscape, trying to fight off a sense of doom. I could make out fields in tight squares. Clusters of houses, light blooming in windows. Low hills wavering. Vehicles waiting at a railway crossing, the drivers’ faces upturned. Trash lining the tracks, a rat’s thick body streaking down a hole. And then, my mother. Standing with me at the train door, long fingers gripping the handle. Her thin body leaning far out, her mouth stretched wide in a soundless laugh. She would have laughed that man right off the train. He was nothing to us.

  I stood there, calm now, until the wind turned cold. And then I returned to my berth, to the people who were not my family.

  Delhi in the morning already showed signs of brutal heat. I sat in the station on a peeling red bench that was stained with various things I tried not to think about. The Jammu Tawi was scheduled to leave at 9:00 p.m. It was barely noon.

  My cell phone vibrated in the pocket of my jeans.

  “All okay?” my father asked. His machines thundered and roared in the background.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m in Delhi.”

  “Hello? Are you there? You have to speak up.”

  “I’m in Delhi,” I shouted.

  “Good,” he shouted back. “So everything’s okay?”

  “Yes.”

  The night before I left, he had given me money. “Here,” he’d said, holding out a thick white envelope with a clear window through which I could see the first of a stack of thousand-rupee notes. I hesitated. It seemed a betrayal to use his money for what I had in mind to do, a betrayal worse than leaving, worse than lying to him. But he looked so imploring that I knew refusal was out of the question, so I took the envelope, silently promising myself that I would not open it unless I absolutely had to—a last, wretched bargain with decency.

  “Well,” my father said now, “have a good trip. Call me if you need anything. And you can always get in touch with Reddy, too, remember.”

  “Who?”

  “The brigadier.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Right.”

  There was another pause. Then my father said, “All right then. Bye. Take lots of pictures.”

  “Bye, Appa,” I said.

  He hung
up. I sat still for a moment; then I started to laugh. In all the time I had been packing, it hadn’t occurred to me to bring a camera.

  The Jammu Tawi left on time to the minute. There was a family in the compartment with me this time. A young mother with her two children, who played Antakshari after dinner. One of them, a boy of seven or eight, sang in a pure, crystal soprano whenever it was his turn, and knew more old Hindi songs than it should have been possible for a child of his age to know.

  Just before dawn, I woke. We had stopped at a station. A single lamp burned like a beacon over the long, deserted platform. I looked at it and thought of Hari, who woke early and would likely be standing on his terrace, smoking his first joint of the day, unaware I was no longer in Bangalore. I felt a pang of guilt. Perhaps I should call, at least tell him I would be away for a while, that we could talk about everything after I returned. I dialed his number, but the call died before it connected. I tried again then saw the phone had no signal. I moved it closer to the window.

  “It won’t work,” someone said quietly.

  It was the mother of the two children, lying on her side in the opposite berth. I hadn’t noticed she was awake. Her son lay curled in the crook formed by her body, his mouth open, a damp and defenseless thing. “Your phone is prepaid?” she whispered.

  “Yes,” I whispered back.

  “Outside prepaid doesn’t work in J&K. It is the government rule.” Her son’s head rolled to the side, and she brought it back with a gentle palm. She reached around him into her purse and drew out a small Nokia in a pink rubber case. “Do you need to call someone?”

  I stared at her phone, weighing the implications of what she’d just told me. I imagined my father frowning, rubbing his stubble as he listened to the impersonal recorded voice telling him over and over again that my number was no longer reachable. His confusion, his slow-building panic.

  “No,” I whispered. “Thank you very much.”

  “Please, it’s not a problem,” she said, holding it out farther. “Use it if you need to.”