The Far Field

by Madhuri Vijay

  The three of us were silent for a while. Amina, I noticed, seemed subdued.

  “Tell me, how long are you planning to stay with us?” Mohammad Din asked. “I would love for you to meet my daughter, Sania, before you go. Perhaps tomorrow, if you are free, you could come and have lunch with us?”

  “That sounds lovely,” I said, glancing at Amina. “But I don’t want to trouble—”

  “Oh, don’t start talking about troubling us again!” she exclaimed. “Stop trying to run away, Murgi.” She explained the joke to Mohammad Din, who laughed.

  “Tomorrow, then,” he said. “I will come to fetch you after prayers. And you,” he said, looking sternly at Amina, “promise you won’t forget me again. Come visit more often.”

  We rose to go, Mohammad Din again shaking my hand in both of his. As we were leaving, an extremely old man was slipping his sandals off on the porch. His hands were covered in faint blue liver spots, and he seemed wobbly on his feet. Mohammad Din took him gently by the elbow. “Salaam alaikum, uncle. Come in and sit down. Let’s see what we can do for you today.”

  As we were walking away from the house, I caught Amina looking at me strangely.

  “Yes?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she said quickly. Then she added, “So? What did you think of him? Isn’t he wonderful? He helps everybody.”

  “He seems very nice,” I said truthfully.

  “Nice?” She shook her head. “You’ll see, Murgi. He’s the nicest person in the world.”

  When we returned to the house, I sat with Riyaz’s mother in the kitchen as she cooked lunch. Aaqib came home, immediately changing out of his school uniform—I suspected he owned only the one set—and giving me a shy, mischief-filled glance before running off to climb the tree in the yard. I followed to find him hanging upside down by his knees from one of the low branches.

  “Oh, hello,” I said, pretending surprise. “I’m sorry, I was looking for Aaqib. I didn’t mean to disturb you, Mr. Monkey.”

  He giggled, blood blooming in his cheeks, T-shirt slipping over his belly.

  “I think your tree is beautiful, Mr. Monkey,” I said. “Could I live in it with you?”

  “No!” he shouted, still giggling.

  “No?” I pouted. “You won’t let me live in this tree with you? Why? Is it because I’m not a monkey? Are only monkeys allowed to live in this tree?”

  He nodded, then abruptly swung himself up, dropped down to the ground, and scampered off into the house, leaving behind the echo of his laughter. I shook my head, smiling.

  After we’d eaten lunch, Amina took me down to their field, and showed me how to look for the thin vines that snaked around the cornstalks, how to search with my fingers and eyes to find the ripest kidney bean pods and drop them into a little bag.

  Riyaz returned with dusk and the evening azan, sung tonight by a man with a breathy, feminine voice, and after he’d finished praying at the mosque, we sat down to dinner in the darkening kitchen. The fire leapt and threw its erratic light, Amina served us one by one, and I realized that I had gone nearly all day without thinking of my mother or of Bashir Ahmed. The thought both buoyed me and caused me a strange pain. Perhaps, I thought, this was all I had needed, in the end, to see the place from which Bashir Ahmed had come, which my mother and I had been hearing about for so long, and which she would never see. I walked out onto the porch after dinner, watching as lights from other villages flickered on across the mountains.

  The spaniel, who’d followed me out, leaned against my shins, worrying her fur with her sharp front teeth, and I was conscious of an unexpected contentment. But then she shook herself and trotted away to someone behind me, and I turned to see Riyaz coming out of the house. My heart quickened. I did not want another unpleasant interaction. He was walking in my direction, but I was standing beyond the light cast from the kitchen window, and I knew he could not yet see me.

  I cleared my throat. “Hello, Riyaz.”

  He stopped, peering into the shadows. Then he said, his tone unreadable, “Hello.”

  I saw him turn his head, as if debating whether to go back inside, but in the end, he came to stand with me at the edge of the porch, pointedly leaving between us a gap of several feet. We watched the dark rise of the mountains, freckled with their hundreds of glittering homes.

  “It’s so beautiful,” I said finally, just to break the silence.

  He snorted. “If that’s what you want to call it.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “Maybe I do or maybe I don’t.” He was still looking ahead. “It’s not really important, is it?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer, instead squatting down to scratch the ears of the spaniel, who promptly rolled onto her back, offering him her soft belly. He said, “Have you always lived in Bangalore?”

  “Yes,” I said. “All my life.”

  “And do you think it’s beautiful?”

  “Bangalore?” I paused. “I’ve never really thought about it. It’s just where I was born.”

  “This place is like that for me. My whole life, I have been looking at these mountains. There is nothing in this place, not one person or one tree, that I haven’t seen ten thousand times.”

  I was silent, surprised to hear him address me at such length. He seemed to have had the same thought, because he abruptly stopped talking.

  “I think I know what you mean,” I said slowly. “But I don’t think it’s quite the same thing. Bangalore is a city, just like any other city in the world. But this place … I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. It’s like heaven,” I added lamely.

  To my surprise, Riyaz rose quickly to his feet, and the spaniel did the same. He looked at me for the first time since we’d begun talking, and what I saw in his eyes was anger. “Maybe it is,” he said coldly, “but one thing I can tell you for certain. If I had been born in a place like Bangalore, or any other city in the world, believe me, I’d have done the smart thing and stayed there.”

  I blinked. “What are you saying?”

  He stared directly into my eyes, and I felt a prickling on the back of my neck. “You should not have come here,” he said. “Heaven is not at all what you think.”

  With that, he strode down along the side of the barn, vanishing a minute later into the cornfield, the spaniel trotting in energetic pursuit. I stood in silence, not knowing what to make of his display of anger, or of the strange sensation I’d had when he looked at me.

  I did not have time to consider it further, for a second later, the spaniel began barking furiously, and there was a deafening explosion of wings. I jumped. An enormous cloud of crows rose from the pine tree at the far end of the field, the one that Amina had told me marked the end of their property, and spread out in the air, cawing and screeching. I waited, expecting them to scatter off into the night, but they did not. They simply circled the pine for several minutes, before returning one by one and settling down in the branches, still and watchful.

  15

  IT SOUNDS STRANGE TO say, but the time after the incident with Zain Shafi, the time of my disgrace, became the calmest time we had known as a family. I fully expected a stern lecture from my father, or an inscrutable remark from my mother, but neither of them breathed so much as a word about what had happened. On the contrary, I began to sense that it had rattled them, brought about a new tentative affection that centered on me, although the way they behaved with each other was altered too. My father seemed to be making an effort to come home earlier from the factory, and I watched in disbelief as my mother sauntered out from the kitchen one evening, kissed his cheek, and asked lightly, “Had a good day?” Night after night, she cooked all of my favorite dishes, while my father sat with me at the dining table, teaching me to play chess, and later, she would come to stand over my shoulder and suggest outrageously illegal moves with a perfectly straight face, while he groaned. “Yes, yes, do what your mother says. And while you’re doing it, why
don’t you just hit me over the head with the board and rearrange all the pieces while I’m unconscious? At least that would be less painful.” And they would look at each other in their new shy way, which both disturbed and thrilled me. It was as if they were trying to lure me toward them, and I alternated between a willing complicity and a dark reluctance I could not fully explain.

  Then my father came home one evening, bursting with some great secret and making hints all through dinner. When my mother curtly ordered him to spill it, he laughed and announced that, instead of our annual five-day resort trip, we would be going to Italy for an entire month; he had just bought the tickets. I was thrilled beyond measure, and even my mother could not keep her pleasure from showing in her face. We applied for visas and landed in Florence a few weeks later, tired from the flight and made quiet by the grandeur of the streets, the weight of so much ancient stone.

  We were dutiful tourists. We walked in the Florentine sun until our feet cramped; we waited for hours in line at the Uffizi, we leafed through our guidebook until the pages smudged with the sweat from our fingers. I was put in charge of the camera and took pictures of everything. From the outside, we must have seemed like any other tourist family, but I never lost sight of the fact that we were nothing short of a miracle. Here, amongst these giant buildings with their carved dates of long ago, surrounded by hordes of alien pink faces, wrapped in the buzz of so many languages we could not speak, my parents were renewed. My mother mercilessly teased my dark-skinned father when he was mistaken for a local and harangued in Italian by a woman cradling a tiny pig in her arms. And when, in a crowded piazza, my mother was accosted by an elderly man, quite obviously drunk, who insisted upon dancing with her, my father laughed so hard people backed away from him. My mother allowed herself to be led in a weaving circle, then gravely patted the old drunk on the cheek. He beamed, bowed gallantly to her, and lost himself in the crowd.

  After Florence, we went to Rome, where we pressed with the gawping crowds through the Colosseum. Then to the Vatican, into the room where everyone stood with an upturned face and a middle-aged American woman clutching a rosary began to sob at the sight of the ceiling. From there, we went to Venice, and when the first murmur of an evening breeze touched the canals, we took a gondola ride. My father got shakily to his feet and announced he would serenade us, but he couldn’t finish because my mother was giggling too hard. That set him off, too, and then they couldn’t stop, both of them with their hands pressed over their mouths, tears running down their faces, while the grumpy gondolier muttered to himself and savaged the water with his single oar. And because I didn’t like his muttering, I laughed along with my parents, the three of us cackling like the insane as we slid through the green water under an arched bridge.

  Looking back now, it was as though we were under some kind of spell. I remember nothing of what we saw, the old churches, the dark paintings of tortured saints, the famous squares roiling with pigeons. I remember the ease with which my mother touched my father’s arm as she pointed out the bell on a tower. I remember my panic when I lost sight of them in a crowd, my relief when I spotted them again, dark heads bent over a map, almost touching. I remember my mother at a pizzeria, nodding when my father asked, a little shyly, if she would like to try the house wine. My mother—my mother!—drank a glass of wine. A small glass, barely enough to make an infant unsteady, but she drank it. Afterward, she claimed that the moon seemed tilted to her, and laughed.

  I see us now during that trip as three people who had drawn a shining circle in the ground around themselves and were trying as hard as they could not to leave it. It was as though we had all made the same tacit decision, to pretend to be the kind of family we had never been, and, as the days went by, I started to fear that it would end. Cracks began to appear. My father’s tiredness revealed itself in his face, his impatience to return to his work and factory. My mother became more prone to spells of abstraction, standing lost before a painting or some unremarkable shop, until we were far ahead and would have to trudge back to find her. The churches started to blend together, the food to seem repetitive and heavy, the crowds to press in. Still the circle held and we kept our new lightness, until the last couple of days, when we went to the Alps and met the Soods.

  The Soods were the first Indians we’d spoken to in Italy. Like us, they were tourists, going up to the same Alpine town as we were. Our glass-sided cabin swayed back and forth on its metal cable, suspended far above the pines and mirrored mountain lakes, and Mrs. Sood was complaining loudly about nausea to anyone who’d listen. Glad, perhaps, of fresh company, my father moved over to their corner and struck up a conversation. It turned out they were from Bombay, where Mr. Sood was involved in real estate. They were a middle-aged couple, both built like gone-to-seed wrestlers, his pressed polo shirt the same shade of peacock blue as the glossy Dior handbag she carried.

  With the rushed, slightly false bonhomie of fellow nationals in a foreign land, my father and Mr. Sood fell into an amiable discussion. Mr. Sood told my father about the real estate market in Bombay. My father laughed the way he did with strangers he wished to impress, a lighter, more urbane laugh than usual. Mrs. Sood, meanwhile, tried to flag my mother’s attention with a breathless, banal comment about the view, but without success; my mother seemed to have become suddenly mesmerized by a loose thread on the sleeve of her kurta.

  “We like Italy,” Mr. Sood was saying to my father. “A charming country. Full of variety.”

  “Oh, absolutely,” my father said.

  “Not that the same can’t be said of India, too,” Mr. Sood added.

  “Of course, of course,” my father agreed pleasantly. “You can’t beat India for variety.”

  “Indeed. I mean, where else in the world can one find all that in a single country?” Mr. Sood said, with the air of a tycoon listing his various holdings. “Cities, palaces, temples, lakes, deserts, jungles, mountains, you name it. I know it isn’t fashionable to say these sorts of things, especially abroad, but let me tell you, I’m damned proud to be Indian.”

  “Oh, yes, me too,” my father cried.

  After that, they fell silent, each content with the other’s accord. The cabin rose. The lakes shimmered and winked below. Then Mr. Sood said, with a chuckle, “Lovely, but doesn’t really compare to the Himalayas, does it?”

  “Not in the least,” chuckled back my father, who had never set foot in the Himalayas.

  “And, of course, there’s Kashmir,” Mr. Sood added.

  “Kashmir!” cried his wife. She had given up trying to get my mother’s attention. “I adore Kashmir! I always tell Prakash that I’d like us to live there forever.”

  My mother raised her eyes, and I felt the beginning of an old, familiar dread.

  “We used to go almost every year for a while,” Mr. Sood said. “Shame it’s been ruined now. It’s not even Kashmiris doing the fighting anymore, you know. It’s these foreigners—what do you call them?—jihadis. Fellows from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and god knows where.”

  “It won’t last,” my father said confidently. “The army’s out in full force. They’ll get those chaps sooner or later.”

  “I hope so,” Mr. Sood said darkly. “All I can say is, I hope so.”

  I’d been listening to their talk, but now I turned away from them to look at my mother. She had ceased to play with her sleeve and was sitting bolt upright. Her hands were clenched in her lap and her eyes were open and fixed, but the rest of her face was a mask. My first thought was that she looked like someone staring at an oncoming vehicle, with enough time to register the impact that was milliseconds away, but too late to do anything to avoid it. Unfortunately, Mrs. Sood happened to glance over at my mother at the same moment and promptly flew to her side.

  “What’s wrong, darling?” she cried. “Do you have nausea too? Such a curse, isn’t it?”

  Wordlessly, my mother nodded.

  “Don’t worry,” commanded Mrs. Sood, rising to the occasion. She probed aro
und in her bag and drew out a round yellow tablet and a small plastic bottle of water. “Here, take this.”

  My mother obediently put the tablet into her mouth and swallowed it. Mrs. Sood placed a plump, motherly arm around her shoulders. “Take my advice and don’t leave the resort for a couple of hours, darling,” she warned. “Thin air.”

  There was just enough magic left to carry us through those final days on the pine-carpeted mountain, but on the flight back to Bangalore, with the cabin food that was too hot to taste, and the wintry blast that came through the vents, I could feel the last of it draining out of us. The morning after we landed, my father slipped off early to work, and my mother didn’t get out of bed until noon.

  I hung around the house uneasily until she woke. She took one look at the open suitcases we’d lugged all around Italy, clothes and shoes and souvenirs flowing haphazardly from them, and went to bathe. Then she went downstairs to light the lamp in her kitchen shrine. She remained standing before the metal faces of her idols for a long time, her own face just as blank.

  When the doorbell rang, she did not move immediately. I could feel her weariness, black and dense, like we were connected to the same ball and chain and it was dragging us down, down to lingering sleep. Then she left her gods and went to open the door.

  Bashir Ahmed stood on the mat outside. He had lost a frightening amount of weight. His beard was overgrown, and his eyes were red. He had no yellow bundle with him, but a small brown suitcase hung from his hand. We had not seen him in four years.

  “Aadaab,” he said.

  She said nothing, but stepped aside and let him in.

  16

  MY MOTHER LED BASHIR to the living room. He stood gazing around, as though surprised to find it the same—the dark maroon curtains, the clock on top of the television. His green kurta was dirty, and sagged a little at the shoulders. His hair was greasy and unattractively long. He sank down onto the sofa without being asked. My mother did not sit, but remained on her feet.