The Far Field

by Madhuri Vijay

  For the first time all evening, amid the ruins of crumpled napkins and cloudy, half-full glasses and chairs left askew, my parents faced each other. Neither of them moved. Then my mother raised her chin, her earrings glinting.

  “Not a bad party,” she remarked. “Don’t you think?”

  My father’s shoulders fell.

  “I’m tired,” he said. “It’s been a long day. I’m going to sleep.”

  He took a last look around, then climbed the stairs slowly, each step seeming to cost him all the strength in his body. I heard their bedroom door softly close.

  My mother looked down at me. “That was quite the speech you made, little beast,” she said, in that same bright, brittle tone she’d used with him.

  But I didn’t respond, and then she seemed all at once to change. She dropped to her knees.

  “Shalini,” she said. “Look at me.”

  I did not want to, but I looked at her.

  “You are not me,” she told me. “What I am, what I say and do and think, none of it is your responsibility. You’re allowed to do something else, be something else. You’re allowed to hate me.”

  “I don’t hate you,” I mumbled.

  “No,” she said gravely. “Not yet. But you will.” Then she gave me a long, tight hug. “Come on, little beast,” she whispered. “Let’s go to sleep.”

  She rose, gathering up the folds of her sari and gazing around the wrecked expanse of the room. Then she sighed, turned off the lights, and we went upstairs. She disappeared into her bedroom, and I entered mine. I looked around at all my things, my posters and books, my bed and cupboard, and I felt only a faint ache, as though I had already left them far behind. Unzipping my school backpack, I emptied the contents onto my bed: brown-covered notebooks and pencil shavings, stray erasers and empty pen refills. Then I opened my cupboard and began pulling out clothes at random. I stuffed as many as I could into the bag, adding, as an afterthought, the white blouse, which was the first and only thing we had bought from Bashir Ahmed, and which I’d never worn. I added a comb and a pair of bathroom sandals, and I couldn’t think of anything else to add, so hiking the backpack onto my shoulders, I crept out onto the landing and listened. There was still light leaking from beneath my parents’ door, but as I stood there, it went off. I slunk downstairs, peering into the darkness and trying to avoid stray chairs. I found my shoes by the door and, crouching, I laced them extra tight. Then I sat down on the sofa to wait.

  I don’t know how long I’d been asleep, but I was woken by the soft click of a door. My eyes flew open and my heart began to pound. It was time. I didn’t know how I would convince them to take me, but I would think of something. She would not leave me behind. Standing, I listened for voices, but there were none. Then I saw a figure moving outside the guest bedroom: Bashir Ahmed.

  He was bent over, looking for his sandals in the pile of shoes beside the door. His suitcase stood on the ground beside him. He found the sandals and straightened up; then, catching sight of me standing in the darkness, he uttered a cry of fear and stumbled back.

  “It’s me,” I whispered, taking a step forward.

  “Beti,” he whispered back. “What are you doing? Why aren’t you sleeping?”

  “I’m coming with you,” I said. “With both of you,” I added.

  Even in the faint moonlight that came in, I could see his face blanch. “Beti,” he said.

  “Where is my mother?” I whispered.

  “She—” he began. Then he pulled his shoulders back. “I’m going alone.”

  “She’s not going with you?”

  He shook his head.

  “You’re leaving her?”

  He sank down on his haunches, gripping a sandal in each hand, and I realized, with an uncomfortable shock, that he was weeping. Not knowing what else to do, I sat down beside him. “Are you okay?” I whispered.

  He coughed quickly into his hand. “I’m fine, beti. I’m fine. Don’t pay attention to me.”

  I searched for something else to say, but the truth was I was no longer thinking of him. What was uppermost in my mind was my mother, asleep upstairs next to my father. My mother, who would wake up tomorrow to find Bashir Ahmed gone. What would she say?

  Then he stood. “I have to go, beti,” he said. The tears were gone, and there was a dull conviction in his voice. I knew he would not be dissuaded.

  “What about the militants?” I asked. “What will you do about them?”

  He raised his head, and I saw the glimmer of a smile. “You’re a sweet girl, beti,” he said. “You don’t need to worry about me. I’ll think of something.”

  For the very last time, I accompanied Bashir Ahmed out to our gate. He lifted it carefully before pushing—he knew its peculiarities as well as any of us—and its hinges made no sound. Once he was outside, he looked down at me again. His expression, I thought, was the same as it had been the first time, all those years ago, when he had appeared from nowhere on our doorstep with his yellow bundle, changing everything in a single afternoon. Wry and a little sad.

  “Please tell her, beti,” he said, “that I am sorry. For everything.”

  I did my best. I lifted my chin.

  “I will tell her,” I said.

  Now that he was at the gate, he seemed not to want to leave. “Maybe I’ll see you someday,” he said. “Maybe you can come and see my home.”

  “I would like that,” I said.

  “So would I.”

  He turned and began walking. I waited until he reached the end of our street and turned left. Then I went back inside the house, pried off my shoes, and locked the front door. I crept upstairs to my room, hid my backpack in my cupboard, and slipped into bed.

  I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling, at the slow-spinning fan.

  Thinking only:

  She is here. She is still here.

  24

  SANIA WAS READING. HER finger followed the length of the printed line, chin tucked almost to her chest. Her other hand was balled in a fist in her lap. I sat to her side and listened. When she reached the end of the chapter, she stopped. In the silence that followed, I put my hands together and started to clap. She looked up and blushed. With a quick, self-conscious laugh, she closed the book.

  “That was very good, Sania,” I said. And it was true. In the span of a week, she had shown real improvement. She could now recognize most simple English words and could sound out the more complex ones through a combination of context and instinct. And though I knew it mostly had to do with her innate grasp of language, its logic and exceptions, and nothing to do with my ability to teach, I could not help the pride that welled up in me when I looked at her, a frown of concentration creasing her forehead as she sat hunched over a book.

  While she went off to make the cup of tea that had become our custom after these sessions, I leaned back against my bolster and looked out at the green valley winking in the late afternoon sun, thinking about this place and its people, all of whom until so recently had been unknown to me, strange as that was to think. Mohammad Din’s conversation, Sania’s finger traveling across the page, Aaqib’s hand finding its way into mine, even Khadijah Aunty’s stoic face—they all felt as if they had been part of my life for years, and it was hard to believe I’d ever lived without any of them. Then, of course, there was Amina’s friendship, which I’d done nothing to deserve, and when I thought of it, I felt my first prickle of discomfort. I’d done my best to avoid Riyaz for the previous week, which had not proved especially difficult, since he seemed equally keen to avoid me. The few times our paths crossed in the narrow corridor, he pressed himself to the wall and allowed me to walk past him, his eyes fixed over my head, which was more hurtful than I’d expected. But the rest of the time, when I was crouched in the barn in the mornings, my cheek an inch from the warm, sweating flank of the red-and-white cow, or when I was working with Sania, the two of us bent over a page written in a language that was slowly unraveling for her like a scroll, I forgot abo
ut Riyaz completely, and all I thought about was the work itself, the unwavering sense of a goal, the bodily contentment and pleasant inertia that filled me whenever I was finished.

  And yet, despite my growing affection for this place and its people, I could not forget the person I had come to find: Bashir Ahmed, still on the other side of my bedroom wall, still hidden, still unreachable. If I put my ear to the wall that separated us, I could sometimes hear him clear his throat or shift in bed, and I wondered what my mother would do in my place. No doubt she would find a way to get in, by lying and sneaking if necessary, but I could not bring myself to betray Amina’s trust. She had promised me, on the day of the waterfall, that she would broach the subject with Bashir Ahmed again, but each evening, after she returned to the kitchen with his dinner plate, I would glance questioningly at her, and she would shake her head. Not tonight.

  Sania came back into the room with three cups of tea and a plate of cream biscuits, and shortly afterward, Mohammad Din joined us. “How was the lesson?” he asked.

  “Very good,” I told him. Sania’s moonlike face glowed. “She won’t need me soon.”

  Her father smiled. “I’m glad to hear she’s doing well,” he said. “But you’re wrong about her not needing you. It was one of the luckiest things in her life that she got to meet you. In fact”—and here he exchanged a glance with Sania, who grinned back mischievously—“we have been talking about something for the past few days. Sania wants to be the one to tell you about it.”

  I turned to Sania, who blushed, then suddenly reached out and took my hand in both of hers. Looking into my face, she blurted, “Ma’am, would you like to become a teacher in my school?”

  “What?” I glanced from her to Mohammad Din, who nodded.

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s where I just came from, actually, a meeting with the headmaster of the school. He said that we would have to seek official permission from the education board, but that it may be possible to hire a teacher without a B.Ed. I didn’t want to ask you until I knew whether it could be done. We would pay you, obviously, and our students would benefit so much.”

  I stared at both of them. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Say yes, ma’am,” Sania urged, shaking my arm.

  “Don’t pressure her,” Mohammad Din told his daughter. To me, he said, “I know this is very sudden, and I would understand if you said no. I know you have a good job in Bangalore, and you will probably not want to leave it, but this would be a very big thing for us. And, more important, it would be a big thing for our children; it would give them a chance to progress. So, speaking for the whole village, we would be very happy if you decided to stay. All I am asking—all we are asking—is that you think about it before you answer. Will you think about it?”

  I nodded, as if in a dream.

  Satisfied, Mohammad Din went on to talk about something else, the upcoming elections, most likely, but I heard none of it. Stay? Become a teacher? It would have seemed laughable even an hour before, but now that they’d said it, I saw myself strolling with Aaqib down the grassy slope toward that bustling, whitewashed building nestled in its shallow, sunny valley, walking into my classroom and setting down my books, saw myself cleaning the blackboard and straightening chairs, humming to myself as I waited for my students to come bursting through the door. Soon they would, in a flurry of energy and activity, calling, Good morning, ma’am! I saw myself bending over their shoulders, correcting mistakes, and gently disciplining a rude or careless child, who would love me all the more for my restraint; saw myself laughing and waving goodbye as they ran off across the mountains at the end of the day; saw myself exchanging familiar greetings with villagers as I walked back to the house and to Amina, who would rise from the outdoor tap, shading her eyes from the sun, calling, How was your day, Murgi? But here the fantasy faltered. How could I continue to stay with Amina, who had sworn not to take any money from me? Would she reconsider if I were working, making an income? Could I persuade her to let me pay rent? And what about Riyaz? How would he react when he heard? Riyaz, who so obviously wanted me gone?

  I was still thinking about all of this as I pulled on my shoes outside, shook hands with Sania and Mohammad Din, and walked away from their pretty house, tinted pink in the evening light. Halfway down the path leading back to Amina and Riyaz’s house, I hesitated, then doubled back fifty feet and instead took the trail that I knew would lead up to the waterfall.

  The path folded and unfolded exactly as I remembered, twisting back and forth, rising sharply, then flattening out into a grassy lawn, then rising again. Once I was amongst the pines, I knew I had to be close. I put my head down and listened for water, certain that I would hear the telltale murmur any minute, but the only sounds that reached me were the wind snaking through the trees and the droning legions of invisible insects. Had I missed a turning somewhere? Had there been a path I hadn’t seen, which Amina had taken me up the last time? Where was the amphitheater of rock, the pool of water? I climbed a little farther, hoping to emerge from the trees into a place I knew, but the path only narrowed and became less defined, finally losing itself altogether in a mess of rock. I then tried to retrace my steps, but before I’d gone even a hundred feet, I realized with a sinking heart that the way back did not look familiar either.

  I slowly sank down onto the bed of pine needles, wrapping my arms about my knees, trying to think calmly. Surely somebody would come along soon enough, a village woman out to cut grass for her animals, a man shooing his goats toward home, a child sent to fetch firewood. All I would need to do was wait, and someone would point me in the right direction. But I sat there, the wind growing colder by the minute, sneaking glances at the sky, which was already starting to show stains of inky black, and it seemed less and less likely that anyone would appear.

  Finally, I stood, pine needles falling in showers from my clothes, and began to walk downhill, though by this time I was so disoriented that the path seemed to swing the opposite way to the one I expected. My only hope was that the lower I got, the better chance I had of running into someone. I was losing daylight faster than I’d imagined. I emerged into a sort of clearing, empty of trees, though their stumps remained, broken off like teeth poorly extracted. My first thought was that this was a place frequented by woodcutters, and I experienced a brief surge of hope. Then I saw that the stumps were charred, that blackened woodchips lay everywhere, that the ground was stained dark and ashy. What could have done that? Lightning, I realized with a shudder. I was about to back away, when I caught sight of what was unmistakably a human figure. He or she was on the other side of the clearing, back turned to me. I thought of the black-clad robbers Mohammad Din had mentioned and felt a moment of panic, but my fear of being lost on the mountain quickly outweighed it. It was probably just a shepherd, I told myself.

  “Excuse me?” I called out, starting to move forward. “Hello? Excuse me?”

  The person did not turn right away. My eyes strained to make him out, for now I could tell that it was a man. Then he made a hitching motion with his pants, smoothly zipping them up with one hand as he turned around. I stopped in my tracks. It was a soldier.

  “Who’s that? Come forward so I can see you,” the soldier called out in Hindi. It took me a second, but then I recognized his voice. It was the cool, mustached subedar, the one who had come to the house a few days ago, the one who had asked all those questions.

  I remained frozen. He took a step forward. I saw, or perhaps imagined, his right hand twitch his rifle, and, shamefully, I felt a few drops of warm urine trickle out of me. “No, wait!” I called out, hearing the squeak of terror in my voice. “Please. My name is Shalini. You met me the other day.”

  Now I could see his face, his eyebrows drawn together in a mistrustful frown, which did not fully relax when he saw me emerge into the open. “You,” he said slowly. “You’re that girl.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “The one staying with those villagers.”

&
nbsp; “Yes,” I said.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I was going for a walk and now I can’t find the way back to the village. Could you tell me which way to go?”

  But he didn’t seem to hear me. He was staring at me, not in the dry, impersonal way he had looked at me the last time, but with a touch of knowing amusement, and it made me squirm.

  “So you are lost,” he said. His accent, I could hear, was different from that of Amina and Riyaz and the rest of the villagers, and different from my own. It was a flatter, more nasal accent, each word dropping without flourish or song, like a stone into a dry well.

  “Yes.”

  “I see.” Then, instead of answering, he fell silent again, and just as I was about to repeat my request for directions, he said, “Why did you lie to me the other day?”

  My knees nearly buckled. “Excuse me?”

  He gave me a reproving look. “Come, come. There’s no need to pretend. That day at the house. You lied to me, didn’t you?”

  I stared at him. He knew about Bashir Ahmed. There was no other explanation. How had he found out? And what would he do to him now? I willed myself to think, to come up with a plausible excuse, but my mind wouldn’t cooperate.

  “Why so quiet?” he asked dryly. “You might as well tell me, since you have nowhere to go.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said finally.

  “Fine,” he said, as if he’d abruptly lost patience with our little game. “Then I’ll tell you. It was obvious from the beginning, so I don’t know why you still feel the need to lie about it.” He drew his head back and with a triumphant twist of his lips, he said, “You are a journalist.”

  He must have read my dumbfounded expression as one of dismay at being unmasked, because he smiled scornfully. “You really thought I believed you when you said you were friends with those villagers? Come on. How stupid do I seem? People like you don’t have friends in Kashmiri villages. Only journalists and human rights people come to places like this. So tell me, what story are you searching for?” He pushed his lower lip out and dropped his voice to an effeminate whine, presumably meant to mimic me. “Are you going to write about how those poor, sweet Kashmiri villagers are suffering so badly under the army?”