The Far Field

by Madhuri Vijay

  Right then, Sania came back into the room and Mohammad Din’s expression cleared. He got to his feet; I did the same, trying to fight back my disappointment. Shaking my hand, he said, in his grave, pleasant way, “It is a shame that you are not staying longer. If you were, I would have asked you to help Sania with her English.”

  “It’s very good already,” I said, glancing at Sania, who reddened charmingly.

  They walked me out onto the porch. “I’m afraid I have some panchayat work to finish. May I send Sania to walk back with you to the house?” Mohammad Din asked.

  But I declined, and so they stood together on the porch, waving as I walked away. The afternoon was warm, the corn whispering in the fields, and a desultory breeze hurried a few dried leaves across the path. I stopped on a ridge to watch it all, trying at the same time to make sense of what Mohammad Din had said just before I left, his reluctance to talk about Bashir Ahmed. Had they been such close friends that the mention of Bashir Ahmed’s death had caused him pain?

  I found my way back, stepping over the broken pipe, but when I arrived at the house, it was empty. I called all their names, but there was no answer, so I went back to my room and sat on the mattress, looking out of the window at the sunset. Gradually a strange lassitude settled in my mind, a combination of sadness, relief, and regret. Soon Amina would return to the house with Khadija Aunty, Aaqib would run to hide in his tree. Soon Riyaz would return from work or the mosque or wherever he was. In a few hours, we would eat dinner around the leaping fire, and tomorrow I would be gone.

  Without knowing it, I briefly dropped off to sleep.

  A hot breeze blew again, and I woke. Then I heard, quite distinctly, a cough. Rasping and filled with phlegm, it seemed to me to be coming from very close, from inside the house. I listened carefully, and when it did not stop, I got to my feet, my heart quickening. Perhaps one of them had come back and I hadn’t realized. Perhaps Riyaz’s mother was in the other room and was having a coughing fit. I stuck my head into the corridor, but at the same instant, the coughing stopped. I waited for several minutes but there was only silence, and I began to think I’d imagined it. I was about to return to my mattress when it began again, even more violently.

  I quickly checked the kitchen, but it was empty, the fire cold and dead. That left only Amina and Riyaz’s room. I walked up the corridor to their closed door and knocked softly. “Hello?” I called. “Khadijah Aunty? Do you need some water?”

  There was no answer. I put my ear to the door then took hold of the handle and pushed. The door swung open noiselessly. The lights were off and my eyes adjusted slowly to the dimness. I could make out the shape of a mattress, thick and rectangular, in the middle of the room, and I could tell at once it was unoccupied. The dark, indistinct shapes of crumpled clothes lay all around. An emergency lantern sat silhouetted on the windowsill, its plastic dome reflecting a dull crescent of light. A dark shape on the wall marked the colorful sheet I remembered seeing when Amina showed me around on my first day, the only attempt at decoration anywhere in the house. I stood in their room with the sense of guilt that always came with entering the private spaces of others, and I nearly forgot about the cough until it sounded again, this time coming from an altogether different direction. Could it be it some trick of the wind, a scrap of sound torn from its origin and conveyed uphill? I turned my head, trying to gauge whether the sound faded or grew. Then I noticed a thin, cylindrical shape propped in the corner beside the tapestry, and my stomach cramped with fear. It was a gun. A rifle. I didn’t realize they owned one. I moved forward warily, keeping my eyes trained on it, as though it might spring up at any moment and attack me.

  In my distraction, my foot caught on something soft, a bit of clothing, and I tripped, stumbling forward and at the same time stretching my arms out to save myself. My palms hit the sheet, but instead of the impact of brick I was bracing for, I felt nothing but air. I regained my footing and cautiously pressed against the sheet again with both hands. Once again, there was no resistance. Forgetting about the gun for the moment, I knelt down. Grasping at a corner of the sheet, I pulled it back as though it were a curtain.

  And, with a dreamlike amazement, I saw that it was a curtain. The sheet was no mere decoration, as I thought, but hid a narrow opening, barely two feet wide, leading off into a dark passageway, whose end I could see only as a lighted rectangle. Stunned, I tried to map the house in my mind, and slowly I understood that the passageway was built behind the tall wooden cupboard that stood at the far end of the house, the same cupboard from which Amina had taken the pink blanket she’d given me. Or, more accurately, the cupboard had been made much shallower that I’d imagined, leaving a gap behind it, large enough for a person to squeeze through.

  Without thinking, I stepped into the passageway, which smelled strongly of sawdust. My shoulders brushed the walls; splinters caught in my sleeve. Now I could almost see the other side, could feel warm, stale air eddy about my ankles. I ducked my head and stepped out, blinking.

  I stood in a room more cheerful than any other in the house. Paper streamers hung from the ceiling—blue, yellow, and pink, twirling slowly, as if in preparation for a child’s party. A red kerosene lantern sat in a corner, casting an arc of oily light. A low table held a white skullcap, a clock, and a steel plate with a handful of chewed-up fruit pits. The only other furniture was a bed, covered in a fleecy pink blanket, the twin of the one Amina had given me.

  And sitting up in the bed, hands folded in his lap, was an old man wearing a brown, oversized jacket, whose buttons were done up all the way to the throat. An old man with a gaunt face, greasy white hair, and green eyes that, at this moment, were staring at me with an expression that was neither fear nor shock, but something so feral and primitive that, for a second, I did not recognize him. We stared at each other for what felt like entire lifetimes, and I’ll never know how, despite the chill that had seized the base of my skull like a vise, I managed to take a step forward and speak the only phrase that came to my mind.

  “Aadaab.”

  Bashir Ahmed opened his mouth. For a long second, no sound emerged.

  Then I heard him say, “Get out.”

  His voice cut deep into me, straight to the place of memory. It was the same voice. The voice from my childhood. The voice of his stories. The voice that said, Tell her I will come again soon.

  “Get out. Get out. Get out.”

  On and on his voice went, rising in pitch and excitement until he was screaming at me, that single phrase twisting and swelling to become a vast and violent tide.

  I stumbled backward into the dark passageway and fled.

  IV

  18

  “MURGI?” AMINA STOOD AT the doorway, wiping her face with the corner of her long scarf. “You’re back already? I thought you’d still be at—” She stopped in mid-sentence, peering at me. “What happened?” she asked sharply. “What’s wrong? Why are you sitting in the dark?”

  When I did not reply, she took a step inside the room. “Murgi?” she asked.

  “I saw him.”

  She went rigid. “Who?” she asked carefully.

  Suddenly the numbness that had filled my head for the last thirty minutes exploded into rage. “What kind of joke is this?” I shouted. “What are you people trying to do to me?”

  “Murgi—” she began.

  But I didn’t let her finish. “Why did you lie to me?” I shouted. “He’s not dead! He’s not dead! Why did you lie to me?”

  “Come to the kitchen,” she said, and there was such authority in her voice that I found myself obediently standing, shuffling behind her to the kitchen, where a fire was now crackling. “Sit,” she ordered, pointing to the straw mat, and I sank down, hugging my knees to my chest.

  She squatted on a piece of sackcloth across from me and adjusted a stick in the fire. A round orange ember leapt out from the flames. I watched it sail in a perfect orange arc, leaving the afterimage of a tiny comet’s trail, landing at her fee
t on the coarse material. I stiffened, seized by a vision of the house engulfed, but Amina calmly reached out and laid her palm over the ember, killing it. I felt foolish, then all of a sudden exhausted. What was I doing in this place, with these strange people and their still stranger secrets? I did not belong here. Riyaz had been right; I should never have come. I needed to go home.

  Amina was still gazing into the fire. Finally, she looked at me.

  “Murgi,” she said, in that same firm tone, “I am sorry that we did not tell you before about Abbaji, but you must believe me when I say there was a good reason.”

  I could not reply.

  “I will try to explain everything to you now,” she continued, “but I need you to do something for me.” She reached out and placed her hand on my knee, in the same calm way she had placed it over the ember. “Please don’t tell anybody you have seen him.”

  “Not even Mohammad Din?”

  “Not even him, and I’ll tell you why,” she said. She drew in a deep breath. Then she said, “That story you were asking about yesterday? The sixteen Hindus who were shot by the militants? You said someone in Kishtwar told you about it, remember?”

  What did this have to do with anything? I nodded.

  There was movement at the doorway to the kitchen. Riyaz’s mother had entered with an armful of washed and dripping vessels. She set them down in the corner and began to dry them with a rag, cloth squeaking against metal.

  I turned back to Amina, whose eyes had not left me.

  “It happened five years ago,” she said. “Like Mohammad Din Uncle told you yesterday, the militants who did it were not Kashmiris. And they were never caught.”

  I nodded again, unable to fathom why she was repeating this grisly story. Hadn’t she and Mohammad Din assured me those militants were now gone from these mountains?

  “The thing was—” Amina hesitated, then continued. “The thing was that some people started saying that the commander of those militants was a Kashmiri.”

  I looked sharply at her.

  “It was just a stupid story, Murgi,” she said. “Nobody who knew Abbaji, nobody who had any brains, actually believed in it.”

  “Wait.” I stopped, staring at her in horror. “Do you mean they were saying that he was—that Bashir Ahmed was the one who killed those—”

  “No, no,” Amina said hastily, making Riyaz’s mother glance up from her work. We were speaking, as we always did, in Urdu, which I knew Riyaz’s mother could not understand. She looked from her daughter-in-law’s face to mine, then went back to wiping.

  “Nobody was saying that,” Amina went on, in a quieter voice. “But”—and she dropped her gaze to the sackcloth—“some people, even in this village, said that maybe he gave the order.”

  I felt a churning begin low in my stomach.

  “It wasn’t true, Murgi,” Amina said. There was a pleading note to her voice. “You know Abbaji. You know he would never do anything like that.”

  It was all too bizarre, too fantastical to be believed. Hindus killed. Never caught. Gave the order. I could not connect the gaunt old man I’d seen, buried under his pink blanket, to the words emerging from Amina’s mouth.

  “I don’t understand,” I said finally. “If he didn’t do anything, then why is he hiding?”

  At that moment, Riyaz’s mother got to her feet, and we fell quiet. She surveyed us for a long moment, then left the kitchen. Amina’s eyes trailed after her, a bit sadly. “She knows we’re talking about him,” she murmured. Then she straightened. “Murgi, something happened. To Abbaji.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She was silent for a beat. Then she sighed. “All of this was before I married Riyaz. I’ve heard this story from him, but neither Ma nor Abbaji has ever spoken about it to me. Not even once. After those Hindus were killed, Ma, Riyaz, and Abbaji were at home, when they heard a knock in the middle of the night. There was a lot of snow that year. Five or six feet maybe. Anyway, Abbaji went to open the door, and there were these soldiers standing outside. They asked him for his name, and when he told them, they caught hold of him and took him away.”

  Some sticks fell apart in the fire with a hiss, giving off a bright shower of sparks. I started.

  “I don’t know what happened next, Murgi,” Amina said. “Ma and Riyaz don’t know, either, because Abbaji has never told them. They stayed in the house, waiting. Ma didn’t want to leave the house in case he came back, and she didn’t want to send Riyaz in case the soldiers were still around. After a long time, many hours, they heard a noise outside. Ma went and opened the door, and Abbaji was standing there holding the door. He seemed fine at first. But as soon as he walked inside, he fell down and couldn’t get up. Then Ma saw that he was crying.”

  She looked up at me, with a pitying sort of resolve, as if she had wanted to spare me this.

  “They had broken his legs, Murgi.” She tapped each of her knees once. “They left him and went away, thinking he was already dead, maybe, or that he would die soon in the snow. To this day, I don’t know how he managed to get back home.”

  What followed was not silence. I could hear sounds as though from a great distance—the hissing of the fire, the gloomy bark of a dog from somewhere down the mountain, followed a second later by a responding bark from Riyaz’s honey-colored spaniel. But each sound, as soon as it formed, seemed to drop into a deep ravine of silence, never quite reaching me.

  “It was Ma’s idea, Murgi. She didn’t want the soldiers to come back and try to kill him again, so she said he’d been arrested, and when he didn’t come back, everyone just assumed he had died. It has been like that for five years, and even Aaqib has been taught not to talk about his grandfather. Have you noticed that nobody comes to visit us, Murgi? Except you, of course. The villagers stay away from this house, because of what they think Abbaji did. Mohammad Din is the only one who still talks to us, but even he doesn’t know about Abbaji. That’s why we couldn’t say anything to you.” Her voice had returned to its normal volume. “And now you know,” she said, sounding slightly relieved.

  “Yes,” said a dry voice from the entryway. Amina and I turned to find Riyaz standing there, one shoulder leaning lightly against the wooden doorframe. He was dressed in a cream kurta, and his dark hair glinted in the light of the naked bulb that hung in the corridor.

  “Now you know,” he said, his voice heavy with rage and sarcasm. “Now you know all of our dirty secrets. Congratulations.”

  I sat on my mattress in the dark, eyes closed, while behind their closed bedroom door, Amina and Riyaz fought. Their voices reached me, the crackle of anger unmistakable.

  Riyaz had not come in for dinner. I’d eaten in silence with Amina, Riyaz’s mother, and Aaqib, who had taken one look at our faces when he walked in, and pressed closer than ever to his grandmother, his beautiful eyes cast down. Feeling a surge of sympathy for his obvious distress, I tried to distract him with jokes, but he gave me a look that was both reproachful and surprisingly adult, and went on eating. I fell silent, gripped by a sense of guilt. I have done this to him, I thought. I had thrown his family into disarray with my invasion and my probing questions, but this thought was quickly followed by resentment. I might have been the one to arrive here, but I was not the one who had lied, who had dissembled. It was not only my fault.

  There was a sudden uptick in the volume of their voices, and I glanced up. I saw the shadow of a body momentarily block the light that leaked under my door, and then it was gone. Riyaz, I guessed. Sure enough, a moment later, I saw him walk out onto the porch. This time, I was prepared for him to turn, to look accusingly and angrily in my window, but he did not. He went swiftly down along the side of the barn and soon disappeared from sight.

  There was a soft knock at my door. Amina peeked inside.

  “Murgi?” she whispered. “Are you asleep?”

  “No,” I said.

  She groped for the switch beside the door, and the room flooded with light. When my eyes adjusted, I saw
that her face was suspiciously raw and scrubbed, as though she’d been crying.

  “Are you all right, Amina?”

  She nodded. “What about you?” she asked. “Are you still angry with me?”

  I shook my head. “I’m not angry. I’m sorry for shouting at you before.”

  “You do have a loud voice for a murgi,” she said with a weak, crooked grin.

  I smiled then glanced down at the floor. “Amina, can I ask you something?”

  She nodded.

  “Did you tell Bashir Ahmed that I was here? Before today, I mean. When I arrived.”

  She seemed surprised by the question. “No, Murgi, we didn’t tell him. Why do you ask?”

  “No reason,” I said.

  For a second, she looked as though she might press me, but then she said, “Sleep, Murgi. We’ll talk more about all of this tomorrow.” She turned to go.

  “Amina,” I said.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Can I see him again?”

  I saw her shoulders fall.

  “Maybe in a few days, Murgi,” she said. Her voice was apologetic but firm. “He has not been well. He needs to rest.” Without waiting for my response, she added, “Now go to sleep. I’ll wake you in the morning. For the cow, remember?” she added with the faintest shadow of a smile.

  She flicked off the light and closed the door. But I sat there, unmoving. Bashir Ahmed was on the other side of the wall, behind a mere foot of mud and paint, and the knowledge was like a drum, beating, beating, beating a relentless rhythm in my chest. I forgot that I’d intended to leave. I forgot my exhaustion and bewilderment with this place. I kept returning to the memory of his room, the blanket, the kerosene lamp, the paper streamers, and finally, to his stunned face, to his voice saying, “Get out, get out, get out.”

  The very same words he had once addressed to my mother, long ago in an apartment filled with mattresses. And then it occurred to me, the source of that howl of animal terror in his eyes when I stumbled, dazed and blinking, into his room.