A God in Every Stone (17 page)

– So many open doors, why are you waiting outside this one?

From across the street one of the courtesans called out:

– Some Pathans lick the shoes of the English, some want to lick other things.

Along the alley the sound of laughter from the courtesans. Any other questions Qayyum had were cut short by the door opening. A man scented in rosewater stepped out, and the woman in the room came up to the doorway, one hand on her hip, and flicked the other hand in dismissal at the courtesan across the street. Qayyum stepped back, and further back, his spine pressing against the wall. It was an Englishwoman in a long white dress, her arms encased in gloves, a bonnet on her head. Eyes grey, skin lightly freckled, age no more than twelve or thirteen.

– Good afternoon, gentlemen.

She spoke in English but her accent was of Peshawar, and brought with it the understanding that she was only part-English, her father probably a customer of one of the women in the alley.

– We haven't met.

Still speaking English, she stepped forward to Qayyum, her gloved hand extended. The man who said he couldn't stay was glowering, no longer willing to give up his place. Qayyum looked at the extended hand, and found that was a useful way to keep from looking at her face, the monstrous childishness and knowledge of it.

– Don't want to play, good-looking?

He squeezed his eyes closed as she brought her face closer to his, a scent on her breath which he didn't want to think about. Then something moist – her mouth, her tongue? – was on the scars near his eye.

– You taste of death.

Qayyum turned and ran down the alley, the mocking laughter of the Walled City's fantasies following after him.

 

The old man walked down the street in the drab and green of the 40th Pathans; the uniform hung off his frame, rolled up at ankle and wrist. He stopped to look closely at Qayyum's father who was reading a letter out loud to one of his long-standing clients, a man almost completely deaf into whose ear the elder Gul spoke, his palm resting lightly on the back of the man's head. The old man stepped around the almost-embracing duo at the desk with the buffalo horn, neck craning in an attempt to see something hidden from his view. Qayyum, sitting a few feet away on the ground where he'd been relegated since his father's return, raised a hand to draw the man's attention to himself.

– Can I help you while my father's busy?

The old soldier came up close, touched the side of Qayyum's face, just beneath his missing eye.

– A letter, will you write a letter for me?

The old man lowered himself onto his haunches, not sitting across from Qayyum but close to his elbow, so Qayyum had to twist his body round to face him.

– Address it to Sepoy Hakimullah, Mardan. We served together.

– I'll need more than that for the address.

– Just write.

– But . . .

– Write!

Qayyum picked up the pen, and waited. The man cleared his throat, held up one hand, the back of his palm facing Qayyum, and began to orate rather than speak.

– My brother, today we have the news that those brave Sikhs who were put on trial in Lahore for mutiny have received their sentences including death for some. I know if you and I had still been serving we would have been among the honourable soldiers who were ready to support their plans for revolt. But why call it revolt when really it is a fight for freedom?

Qayyum placed his pen on the ground and shook his head, no. The new laws brought into effect to help stamp out rebellion could have him jailed just for writing down this treason, and he would certainly lose his pension. But the old man continued speaking.

– You might remember that the trial itself started on 26 April of this year. On that same date our old regiment was getting torn to pieces on a battlefield in a distant place called Vipers, not knowing what they were dying for, not asking why they were dying for it. Wouldn't they have been braver, and wiser, to fight for their own land, their own freedom?

– What is this? Why are you saying all this?

– Kalam Khan sent me, glass-eye.

Qayyum picked up the paper he'd been writing on and tore it into long shreds, standing up as he did so, turning his back to the man.

– Is this how you treat a messenger from the man who risked his life for you?

– What do you want from me?

– I want to help you remove these chains from your feet. It's what Kalam wants too.

– And how will you do that?

– I'll send you to the Ottoman Empire.

– For what?

– To help turn the Indian prisoners of war who are being held there. You're a soldier – they'll listen when you tell them they're fighting for the wrong side. If they agree to join the Indian Volunteer Corps they'll win their freedom from the prisoner-of-war camps, and then they'll win all our freedom from English tyranny.

– What? The what? Indian Volunteer Corps?

– You are so blind, glass-eye. It gains numbers every day – our brothers, the Turks, promise when the time comes for Ottoman troops to sweep through Persia into India the Volunteer Corps, led by Indian generals, will be part of the army. You could be one of those men, Lance-Naik. A general in the army of Indian liberation.

– You must be mad to come and speak to me of this.

– Kalam said you're one of us, you just don't know it yet. He said if you betray us he'll slit his own throat.

– Tell Kalam to go to the Ottoman Empire then.

– He's already found his place in the world, with Haji Sahib, attacking the English here. When the Volunteer Corps comes through the Khyber Pass the two forces will combine. And what is your place in the world, Lance-Naik? Under a tree, writing letters from a man to his brother complaining about flour prices?

A hand gripped the old man's shoulder, and Qayyum wondered for how long his father had been listening.

– But there is nothing in the world more important than flour prices, his father said. Son, why don't you go home. Your mother needed help with some matter.

Out here, where he was a man whose table had a built-in inkhorn, his father possessed authority. This was his place in the world, a table beneath a tree. The old man quietened, his fierce gaze changing into the slightly resigned expression of someone who realises the moment in which he could impose his will on the situation has passed. He lifted and dropped his shoulders and turned to walk away just as Qayyum realised that the uniform wasn't hanging on the man because his youthful frame had withered away but because it was Kalam's uniform, with stains near its collar that were Qayyum's blood, spelling out a clear message: Repay the debt you owe me.

September 1915

Najeeb walked through the Hall of Statues, a prince visiting his frozen brothers, all under an enchantment which it was his destiny alone to lift. Silence, save for the rotating ceiling fan and his voice speaking to the artefacts in his simple Greek sentences which they all seemed to understand: the winged sea-monster; ichthyocentaurs and fish-tailed bulls; Tritons kneeling before the Buddha; Indra and Brahma adoring Him; a winged figure seated on a fragment of an Achaemenid column, looking out of deep-set eyes. A centaur bearing a shield. The Buddha receiving an image of the Buddha.

Of all the astonishing things in the Peshawar Museum the most astonishing of all was the Pashtun man in an English suit who walked through the Hall of Statues with an air of ownership and knew more about each artefact than even Miss Spencer. Mr Wasiuddin, Native Assistant at the Peshawar Museum. Yes, why not, Miss Spencer had said when Najeeb asked her if one day that might be him. Then she crossed her arms and leaned back in her chair. No, why stop there? Najeeb Gul, Superintendent of the Archaeological Survey, Frontier Circle. It’s a step down from the Herodotus of Peshawar, of course, but it suits you just as well.

Pulling open the doorway to return to the ordinary world, he turned to look over his shoulder. A giant Buddha raised his hand to him in farewell. Solemnly, Najeeb returned the gesture before stepping out. The white sky of summer had finally softened into blue that September morning, allowing for loitering – the weekends, once a time of delight, were now a Miss Spencerless wasteland. He walked towards the station where Qayyum had made his heart contract when he stepped off a train with the face of a stranger, and climbed up onto the railway bridge. From here, the whole of the Cantonment was spread out – wide streets in straight lines, single-storeyed houses surrounded by gardens for people who viewed other people as nuisance rather than refuge, automobiles which looked like steel insects without wings, barracks for soldiers from whom Qayyum had started to veer away, the Governor’s House across from the Museum with its gardens as large as a park which must mean the Governor really disliked other people, and everywhere, Englishmen and women whose mouths formed sounds in inexplicable ways (Miss Spencer always elongated the space between the ‘n’ and the ‘j’ in his own name). Since Miss Spencer it had started to seem less like a place in which he didn’t belong, but even so it was only when he crossed the bridge and walked the short distance to the Walled City that he stopped feeling as if he were in a classroom with a teacher he didn’t yet know well enough to avoid annoying.

He walked through the Street of Storytellers, stopping to listen to snatches of this
badala
or that, but nothing held him in place. All these old stories, not old enough. Perhaps he should go and find Qayyum. It was a heavy feeling to know that this seemed a duty rather than the most wonderful option in the world. His brother looked much as he used to before he went to war, it was true – the redness and swelling had gone from his eye, the scars around it were mere flecks which looked as if a bird had walked on charcoal and rested one claw on Qayyum’s face before flying away, and most days Najeeb even forgot that half his brother’s gaze was glass. But despite the healed wounds, his entire appearance was altered. It’s because he wears different expressions now, their mother had tried to explain to her youngest child. Among the new expressions was that look of disquiet any time someone mentioned the English which meant that Najeeb must keep the most important part of his life from the most important person in his life.

An unexpected sound through the thrum of the street. A woman, calling out:

– Men of Peshawar! Oh, you men of the market! How much will you give me for my daughter?

Najeeb hopped up onto the wooden leg of a rope-bed meant for a storyteller’s audience, looking over the heads of the men who were glancing this way and that at the scattering of women in burqas on the street, trying to pinpoint the origin of the shouting. The other women saw her first, all moving closer together and angling their bodies in her direction as if this were a dance they’d been practising. The men’s heads turned – everyone was silent now, and the caged songs from the nearby Street of Partridge Lovers filled the air – and there she was, a very tall uncovered woman, her hair wild, holding out a child in her arms.

A moment, no more, and a man in a long-tailed turban seized her by the elbow.

– Don’t do this! came a cry from a balcony looking down on the street. The carpet-seller who was a particular favourite with the English was leaning over the balustrade, one palm extended in appeal. The woman looked straight up at the carpet-seller.

– In Allah’s name, save us, she said. But she left the carpet-seller no choice but to look away from her uncovered face, and as soon as he did so the man holding on to her pulled her away.

Curious, Najeeb moved among the knots of men who hadn’t resumed their business and were, instead, either glancing up at the balcony or at the place where the woman had stood.

Before long he had the story. The man with the long-tailed turban was in debt, and refused to borrow money from any of the Hindu money-lenders because his piety wouldn’t allow him to accept the idea of paying interest. So he’d come to an agreement with one of the prosperous merchants – in exchange for the money his infant daughter would be married to the merchant’s son when she was of age. You’d think the man must be some kind of magician to have acquired both money for himself and a husband for his daughter. But the truth was that the merchant’s son had some demon inside him. He’d killed his first wife; the second had killed herself. A third wife had recently been found, but she would certainly be dead or mad before that child grew old enough to leave her parents’ home. And the carpet-seller? He was brother to the first wife.

Ever since Qayyum had returned from England Najeeb had started to feel that the world was filled with sadness. He saw it now everywhere. There, the boy with the crippled arm looking into a cage filled with clipped-winged birds; the man so stooped with age he had to carry a tilted mirror in his hand in order to see the reflection of the world above knee-level; the carpet-seller still on his balcony, making gestures of entreaty as though rehearsing what he could have said, what he should have said, what he would most certainly say if he had another chance to save that child from his sister’s fate.

There had been a moment when the child had looked directly at Najeeb, her green eyes bewildered. She couldn’t have been more than three or four years old, and already it had been determined that her life would be filled with cruelty.