The Far Field

by Madhuri Vijay

  29

  I HAD NOT EXPECTED to like college. I wasn’t sure why. But from the minute my parents drove away, my mother’s hair snapping in the wind, I was armored, prepared to dismiss each of my lecturers, my fellow students, to look down on all of it. I suppose it was, like so many other things, a trick I’d learned from my mother. To keep approval in reserve, to lead with mockery and distrust, for to reveal affection was to reveal weakness. In a few short weeks, however, I found myself genuinely interested by the things I was learning—accounting, economic theory, commerce. I liked sitting in the tiered hall, listening to my balding professor drone on about partial returns, pleasantly conscious of the anonymity of it all, the long, curving desks scratched by a hundred bored students, the screech of chalk, the cleared throats, the scrape of pen on paper. I raised my hand to clarify doubts and made copious notes, taking pleasure in the neat rows of definitions, the columns of numbers, each question tagged gratifyingly with an answer, and bit by bit, I felt my resistance falling away.

  Every Sunday, I talked to my parents. It was 2000, and most students still did not own a cell phone, unless their parents were diplomats or very wealthy. There was a mounted landline phone the color of curdled milk by the staircase at the end of my hostel corridor. I’d stand, absently wrapping the spiral cord around my finger, looking down from the window at the parking lot and, beyond that, at the basketball court. There was a group of girls who played sometimes, always at night, their legs long and liquid in the floodlights, their hair whipping, making dark shapes about their heads, the ball ringing loud on the concrete. I’d watch them as I listened to my parents’ voices. “When are your first tests?” my father would want to know. “Have they started microeconomics yet? You’ll enjoy that. What about Rupa, how is she? Tell her to come stay with us in Bangalore.” Then, his voice changing, “Hold on a second, here’s Amma.” Sometimes she wouldn’t come to the phone for nearly a minute. I’d wait, growing edgier by the second. Then I would hear her voice, far away, as if she hadn’t bothered to lift the receiver to her face. “Tell me,” she’d say, “how are things at the big, fancy college?” And that would set off in me a wave of irrational rage. “Fine,” I’d say. She’d wait, and knowing perfectly well she wanted more, even if she couldn’t bring herself to ask for it, I’d say, in a flat tone, “I have to go, Amma.” Her disappointment saturating the silence that followed. “Already?” “Yes, I’ve got to study. We’ve got tests next week.” Her voice, growing softer: “Oh. I see. Well, then, goodnight.” A click in my ear, the terrible squawk of the dial tone. I’d watch the basketball girls for a while longer, then return to my room.

  Instead of going home for the Diwali holidays in November, I made an excuse to my parents, and I went with a group of older students to the coast for the weekend. We lounged under tatty, colorful umbrellas, drinking beer and talking far too loudly. One of them was an MBA student, the son of the owner of the largest toy company in the country. The toy-king’s son drove a dark blue Mercedes and had a cell phone, and he was drunker than any of us. He tried to kiss me later that night, but I pushed him away, and he staggered back, wiping his mouth. “Such an ice queen,” he laughed. “Why? Your mummy told you to stay away from boys in college?” I shrugged, but his words cut deeper than I wanted to admit. Each time I caught sight of him across campus from then on, he would hug himself and shiver, then nudge his friends and laugh.

  But apart from that minor unpleasantness, I was all right. I liked my roommate, Rupa. She almost never spoke, but she loved potato chips, had an obsession with them, and so I’d buy her enormous bags of chips from the college canteen and leave them on her bed, just for the pleasure of seeing her face light up when she found them. I know she liked me, too, and if things had been different, if she had been less shy, perhaps, or if I had been less guarded, we might have become real friends, but we never did. As it was, whenever I felt myself starting to want to confess something, to tell her about my mother’s infuriating behavior, for example, I left the room instead, ending up walking alone around campus until I heard the bell for curfew.

  It was with a sense of apprehension that I went home for Christmas. I had never been away from my parents this long, and I did not know how I might find my mother. Would it be the sleeping and the coldness? Or would it be the plotting, the glittering eyes? But it was neither. My mother seemed simply tired and glad to see me, and at first, ashamed as I am to admit it now, I was disappointed.

  How to explain that? To start with, let me say that it would be disingenuous to pretend that my apprehension in going home had to do only with her, or rather, with how I might find her. Because, for the first time in my life, I was also wondering how she might find me. I wanted her to see my new adult mind, my confidence, the way I’d learned to carry myself in college. I wanted, I’ll admit, to impress her. I wanted her to see me as an equal, no longer a child, wanted to outplay her at her own games of wit and derision, and so I was cool to her, made caustic replies whenever she asked me questions (she asked very few), smiled distantly when she spoke to me, bending my head as though I’d risen so far above her that it was difficult to hear her at all. I executed this plan with about as much grace and skill as might be expected of a teenager, and on my third evening home, after I’d said something particularly obnoxious, my mother stood up. Addressing nobody, she said, “The air in here is a bit stuffy, isn’t it? Must be all the college education.”

  She left the room. Seething, I turned to my father. He had seemed preoccupied the past few days, unusually so, even for him, and he barely seemed to notice my mother’s exit.

  “God, what’s wrong with her?” I fumed, wanting him to agree, to become my collaborator, to join with me in condemning her, but he just sat there, drink in hand, while Simon and Garfunkel sang “Mrs. Robinson” in the background. “She thinks the whole world revolves around her,” I went on. “Why can’t she just be fucking normal, like other people?”

  At the expletive, my father blinked and looked up, as I had hoped. But when he spoke, it was only to say, “You know I love you, Shalini, and I’m proud of you, but the way you’ve been behaving to her these past few days, I’m surprised she didn’t walk out sooner.”

  “Why are you shouting at me? I didn’t do anything.”

  “I’m not shouting. I’m just saying that you could be a little nicer to her,” he added softly.

  “Nice?” I stared at him. “After all the things she’s said to me over the years? The things she’s said to you? You want me to be nice?”

  I was trembling. I didn’t know where the rage had come from, or how long it had been growing in me, but I was incandescent with it. But my father only dropped his shoulders and shook his head, and I knew that he would not fight me. I stormed off and shut myself into my room.

  I returned to college early in the new year, carefully nursing the embers of my rage. The same day, I saw the toy-king’s son, who went through his usual hug-and-shiver charade, while his moronic friends fell over themselves chuckling. Instead of ignoring him, as I’d learned to do, I let my feet grind to a halt, then made my way straight up to him. He was sitting on the hood of his Mercedes, and he flinched as I approached, as if I might intend to hit him. I wasn’t sure myself that I didn’t. But all I did was nod my head toward the car and say, “Let’s go for a drive.” His eyes widened, but he did as I asked, while his friends gawped. We drove in silence to the beach, to the black-and-white lighthouse on the rock, at the base of which, surrounded by the detritus of discarded beer bottles, squashed cigarette butts, and cloudy plastic bags, I let him push my knees into the gritty sand, hating myself, hating her. Exactly as she promised I would.

  30

  EVEN BEFORE I OPENED my eyes, the morning after the panchayat meeting, I knew something was amiss in the house. I walked up the corridor to the kitchen; Aaqib was sitting there with his grandmother, who was working on the milk churn that stood in the darkest corner. The churn was a long, thin wooden pole that extended all the
way down from a hook in the ceiling and disappeared into a pot; wound around it was a length of sturdy rope. The ends of this rope were now wrapped around Riyaz’s mother’s knuckles. She pulled first one, then the other, and the pole spun in the milk with a high-pitched moaning sound. When she saw me, she nodded toward the fire, where a pot of tea was simmering. Nobody served me anymore, and I took it as a compliment. I moved to sit on the straw mat and ladled myself a cup of tea.

  “No school, Aaqib?” I asked.

  He shook his head, eyes downcast. Just then Amina entered the kitchen, her face sweating and flushed, a bundle of firewood in her arms. She let it clatter down in a corner, then picked up a few sticks, sitting down across from me and leaning over to place them in the fire. She wouldn’t meet my eyes. She leaned back, her fingers interlaced around her knees, rocking back and forth.

  “Aren’t we going to milk the cow?” I asked her, trying to sound light.

  “I milked her myself,” she said, not looking at me. “I woke up early. You were still sleeping.”

  “Oh,” I said. Then, after a few seconds had gone by, I asked, “Where’s Riyaz?”

  Her mouth tightened. “He went down the mountain,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said again. I glanced at Riyaz’s mother, who had not stopped her churning. The squeak of the churn sounded forlornly through the kitchen. Aaqib was curled into a miserable little ball, watching his grandmother’s hands as they moved back and forth.

  “I’m sorry, Amina,” I said. “I did try talking to him.” But even as I said it, I was aware of my mendacity. Because I had not tried, had I? Not really. Instead, I’d chosen the coward’s way, chosen to stand there, letting his eyes seek out my own, imagining that I saw in them a hunger for me, which had turned out, in the end, to be a hunger for something else entirely.

  Amina looked up. “I know, Murgi,” she said softly. “It’s not your fault. I just hope nothing happens to him, that’s all.”

  I thought of all the stories Bashir Ahmed had told us over the years about this place, of chudails that could snare you and leopards no man could kill, and to these I now added the dangers that I had come to discover: militants and soliders, bears and broken legs, nighttime intruders whose goals were unknown. “Nothing will happen,” I said with a confidence I did not feel. “You’ll see.”

  The atmosphere in the house stayed tense all day. Amina worked, mostly alone, while Aaqib moped around on the front porch. I tried to entice him out of the house, suggesting a walk to the shop to buy sweets, but he just shook his head. When Riyaz’s mother came out of the house with a sickle in her hand, I went up to her on impulse. I pointed at my chest and then at Aaqib and then the sickle. She understood in a second what I was asking, and I could see her hesitate. She glanced at her grandson, and a softer look came into her face. She nodded then slipped on her plastic sandals.

  “Coming, Aaqib?” I asked. When he looked reluctant, I added, “Come on. I need you to teach me. Otherwise, I’ll cut my hand off.” I waggled my hand, then pretended to scream as it was severed from the rest of my body. He finally gave me a smile, tucking his hand into my outstretched one. I caught sight of Amina as we left. She was shading her eyes, watching us, but she said nothing.

  We headed downhill from the house, past the cornfield and the pine tree that marked the boundary of their land. The land dropped off steeply here, but the grass grew thick and plentiful. Riyaz’s mother stepped off the path, her body almost parallel to the mountain, and began to seize handfuls of grass, cutting them close to the base with the same smooth motion. After a few minutes, she gathered up a great sheaf of green then handed the sickle to me. I grasped it, feeling the wood warm where her fingers had been, her sweat making the handle slick. I made my way cautiously off the path, Aaqib following me, showing me where to cut. I squatted and began to hack away. With a frown that reminded me of Amina, he said, “No, not like that. More smoothly.” The grass felt rough in my fingers, but it was a warm, living roughness, like that of a dog’s matted fur. In a few hours, I would start to feel the cuts, the hundreds of razor-thin edges making invisible wounds on my wrists and palms, making them sting, but for the moment, I was aware of nothing but the crisp snap of the stalks, the warm green smell that rose from my fingers, Aaqib, no longer morose, but animated, issuing a flood of instructions, the sun hot and welcome on my back and neck; and when we displayed the bundle to Riyaz’s mother, I thought I caught on her face the faintest flicker of a smile.

  Sania was waiting for me on the porch, as always. We went together into the room with the tall windows. I had her read from her history textbook; then I asked her questions about what she’d read. She answered with her fist clenched, thumb tucked in. When we were finished, Mohammad Din walked in. He was leaning on a thin wooden cane this evening.

  “Salaam alaikum,” he said.

  “Walaikum salaam,” we responded together. “Are you all right?” I asked, when Sania had gone off to make tea.

  He set the cane against the wall and lowered himself down. “Oh, I’m fine, I’m fine. Just tired. Usually I try to forget that I am an old man, but on some days, I am forced to remember.”

  “How was the panchayat meeting?” I asked.

  “Very good,” he replied, though his enthusiasm seemed less convincing than usual. “It went very well. It could not have been better.”

  I glanced at him, wondering whether to say anything about our eavesdropping; then I decided he might not take it kindly. “I’m glad to hear it,” I said.

  “Yes, we made a lot of progress,” he declared firmly. “A lot of progress.”

  “How nice,” I said. “You must be pleased.”

  “I am, I am.” He then proceeded to tell me of the results of the meeting, the committee that had been set up, which he referred to as a “peace committee,” the daily evening patrols that the men of both villages would carry out until everything was judged to be safe. I don’t know what prompted me, but when he fell silent, I asked, “Will Riyaz be on these patrols?”

  “Why do you ask that?” he said, frowning.

  I shrugged. “He seemed a little upset when he got back from the meeting, that’s all.”

  “Ah,” Mohammad Din said. “Well, since you asked, no, I don’t think he will be.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  Mohammad Din’s forehead tightened. “Well, it’s a little complicated,” he said delicately.

  I thought of the look on Riyaz’s face the previous night as all those men melted away, leaving him in a circle of isolation. “I thought maybe you didn’t want him to join because of Bashir Ahmed,” I said, adding, “Because of what people say Bashir Ahmed did.”

  Mohammad Din glanced down. “So Amina finally told you,” he said.

  I nodded. After a second, he shrugged. “Then there is no reason for me to pretend,” he said. “Yes, that is why I think it better that Riyaz does not join the patrol. His presence would cause anger, amongst the Hindu villagers, especially, and that is not what is needed right now.”

  “Then you think it is true, what they say about Bashir Ahmed?” I asked. “You said the other day that it was foreign militants who killed those Hindus, not Kashmiris.”

  “It was foreign militants,” Mohammad Din said quickly. “But it was no secret that Bashir was involved with them.” He sighed. “Look, it is very possible that Bashir did nothing at all. But how can I explain to you what it was like, the time of the militancy? It was a very strange time, and one I hope I never have to live through again. It made people turn into the opposite of what they were, made them do all kinds of things they would never have otherwise done. Bashir was the last person I would have expected to do a thing like that, and yet …” He shook his head. “Now you see why I do not like to talk about this. It is a very sad subject for me.”

  “But,” I objected, “even if it was true, why should Riyaz suffer? He’s done nothing.”

  “I know,” Mohammad Din said, and this time there was a note of real sad
ness in his voice. “Believe me, I have done all I can for him. I give him work when nobody else does. I make sure that Khadijah Begum gets her medicines. I’ve even given them money when they needed extra. But there are times when I also need to think about the others in my panchayat. I need to consider their feelings, too. It isn’t fair to Riyaz, I understand that, but I cannot change the past. All I can do now is make sure the future is peaceful. For all our people.”

  Sania came back in with the tea, and we dropped the subject. We talked about other things for a while, then Mohammad Din set his cup on the floor and clapped his hands. I looked up. His mood had altered completely, the sadness caused by Bashir Ahmed gone. He was suddenly smiling.

  “Now,” he said, “I did not want to rush you, but my daughter here keeps pestering me, and so I must ask: Have you had a chance to think more about what we discussed the other day? About teaching? Have you decided what you would like to do?”

  I don’t know what I might have said if I’d had much longer to think, but at that moment, I caught sight of Sania’s face. It was pinched with anxiousness, and her lips were pale. And I thought, for the first time in years, about Suneyna. After I had said whatever I’d said to her mother in the corridor, I’d come back into the classroom and continued to help Suneyna build her tower. She pointed politely to a red block or a green one, which she had never done before, and thanked me when I handed them to her. It would have killed me to admit it at the time, but this was the thing that prevented me from ever going back to the school. Not shame at my behavior, not the disgusted looks of the other teacher. Simply the idea that she, an eight-year-old girl, was tolerating me. Now I watched Sania, whose thumb was tucked into her fist, as was her habit when she was concentrating, whose lips were moving, as if she were mouthing the words she wanted me to say, and I felt a surge of love that was so strong my vision went dark for a second. And it was impossible for me to say then, as it is now, just who that love stretched to encompass.