A God in Every Stone (15 page)

– What is that smell?

– An Englishwoman.

Najeeb's mouth opened wide and Qayyum laughed. The first laugh in a very long time.

– She was older than our mother, and had a mouth which looked as if it had been eating lemons all her life. But she was very kind. Open it, look inside. Carefully, carefully.

Najeeb unwrapped the handkerchief as if it were a present. If he was surprised to see an eye staring at him, he didn't show it. Closing his palms protectively around it he lowered himself onto the ground, resting on his elbows, his hands as close to the lantern as was safe. For a long time he simply looked at the glass eye, rotating it slightly this way and that so he could inspect every part of its surface. In this way he could stare at a book, a butterfly wing, a rock. A stillness at the heart of his character. There were some boys in the 40th Qayyum had felt particularly protective towards; now he understood he had seen the shadow of his brother in them.

At length, Najeeb stood up, the same height as the seated figure of his brother.

– What's in there now?

– Look.

Qayyum held his thumb and forefinger like a pair of crab claws around his eye, pulling at the skin to force the eyelid open. He saw Najeeb's fingers extend towards him, found he didn't have to fight against any desire to back away. How strange – not troubling, just strange – to feel his brother's touch against the bone of the eye-socket.

But no; he had imagined it. Najeeb placed his hand over his brother's thumb and forefinger, and simply bent down and peered into the socket which was more than Qayyum could bring himself to do in front of the mirror.

– It's too dark to see anything.

– You can have a look in the morning.

– Thank you.

Najeeb sat down, leaning his weight against his brother.

– I'm sorry I wasn't at home when you arrived, Lala.

– That's all right.

– I went to the train station to meet you. You didn't see me when you stepped onto the platform, though I was right there.

– Why didn't you say something?

The sight of his scarred, one-eyed brother had frightened him. Why else? He held the boy's hand in apology, in forgiveness. Najeeb squeezed his hand in return and then picked up the plate Qayyum had eaten from, turning it over with a laugh to demonstrate that there wasn't even a sliver of onion remaining on it.

– Our mother was worried about what they were giving you to eat in the hospital.

– There were nine kitchens.

Najeeb looked impressed, and Qayyum found himself wanting to say something else, something to temper his brother's look of awe at the bounty of the English.

– Lala?

– Yes.

– Are you still a soldier?

– No.

– Do you wish you still were?

– Go to sleep, Najeeb.

 

The brothers faced each other on the roof; one tense and watchful, the other encouraging, slightly impatient.

– Ready?

– No, wait. One second.

Yesterday, a staccato sound on the roof had made Qayyum drop his cup of tea; when it had gone on long enough to sound more like hail than bullets he had come up to the roof to investigate, and found Najeeb holding one hand in front of his right eye while bouncing the ball with the other hand. He had bounced the ball more than fifty times in a row without fault before he realised he was being watched by Qayyum who spent his days repeating this very action, without anything of Najeeb's fluidity. Qayyum winced to think that all these days while he thought he was engaged in a private act his family below had been able to hear the aching gaps between every few bounces. Tomorrow we'll play catch, Qayyum had said and turned away.

– Now.

Najeeb threw the ball. It travelled in a slow, chest-high loop, beginning a downward path well before it reached Qayyum so that his hands were only waist-high as he caught it.

– Well done! Najeeb called out.

Qayyum looked up slowly from the cupped hands holding the child's toy.

– This is ‘well done' in my life now.

He saw Najeeb turn his face away to the white sky of summer and knew his brother was wishing he were somewhere else.

– I'm sorry, Qayyum said. Najeeb shook his head but didn't look up. Qayyum wasn't sure if he was rejecting the apology or pretending there was no need for it.

– I'm more sick of me than you are.

– I'm not sick of you.

– Do you think I haven't noticed you go away after lunch and don't come back until long after the lessons with the maulvi are supposed to end?

– It's not because I'm sick of you.

– No, don't apologise. It makes me happy to think of you reading in Shalimar Bagh beside a fountain. There was an officer at Vipers – he carried a book in his pocket and in these minutes we were gathered on the slope, waiting for the order to attack, I saw him lie on his stomach, put his head in the book and go somewhere else. I envied him, and then I was happy because I knew my brother also had that in him. Whatever happens in the world, Najeeb can escape.

Qayyum launched the ball back towards his brother. Najeeb fumbled for it – it was obvious he only did that because he thought it a kindness.

– Lala, there's something I want to know. About when you were over there.

– Ask me anything. But don't ask me what happened on the battlefield.

He felt a slight constriction of the mouth as he spoke, as though loose stitches were looped between his lips. Najeeb stepped towards him, right hand raised, palm outwards; a formal gesture that came from outside Qayyum's world.

– Tell me about the Englishwoman who gave you the handkerchief. Was she nice? Did you practise English with her?

– Listen, Najeeb. Don't become curious about Englishwomen.

– I'm not asking it in a bad way.

– The English, they don't think there are any good ways for an Indian to want to know things about their women. Maybe they're right. Would you want Englishmen to come here and ask about our sisters?

– What would they ask?

– Are they nice? Can I practise Hindko with them?

The idea of an Englishman wanting to practise Hindko with any of their sisters was so absurd Najeeb started to laugh. His arm slung back to throw the ball to Qayyum, as though they were in a time before. Arrow-straight, it gathered speed, making for Qayyum's face, his eye. Najeeb shouted out a warning, but his brother's hands came up to catch it with the old deftness, the sound of palms closing around a speeding ball sweeter than all the sitars in the world.

 

Finally there came the morning when all signs of the infection had dissipated. Qayyum placed the glass eye into his socket, and stood for a long time looking in the mirror. Almost himself, but when a man's gaze on the world changes everything shifts with it. He hoisted his knapsack with the soldiers' mementoes onto his shoulders, put on his sturdiest shoes, and went downstairs.

His mother looked up from the peas she was shelling at the dining table, and her face was unknown to him. The colour came and went from it, and she lifted two fistfuls of pea pods from the pan and threw them up into the air as though they were rose petals at a wedding, her voice a cry of delight. Najeeb had been on the way out, schoolbag in hand, but he walked back into the room and embraced his mother around the shoulders.

– Amma, it's a glass eye.

Qayyum silently picked the pea pods off the floor and table and returned them to the pan, slipping his hand away from his mother's when she tried to clasp it.

 

Away from the noise and chaos of the city he was received in villages and small towns as the fulfilment of a dream: a Pashtun soldier returned from war. Everywhere he went he was asked to stay a night and a banquet was prepared in his honour, even when it meant slaughtering the chicken which the family relied on for eggs; the object he brought with him – pebble or bullet or photograph – was passed from hand to hand as if it were a piece of the Black Stone brought by the angel Jibreel himself. On foot he travelled through the Valley's orchards, crossed its rushing streams at their narrowest points. One day, bathing his face in the water, he felt himself rinsing Europe from his eyes. How had he thought the beauty of France superior to this – he opened his arms wide to the rivers bounding down foothills, racing each other to the Valley – this jewelled earth.

His last stop before he returned to Peshawar was Shahbaz Garhi in the Yusufzai lands, home of his forefathers. The brothers of Sepoy Khuda Buksh took the letter and the red feather from the throat of a bird which he had brought for them and told him that the man who had sent these tokens was dead; someone from the Army had come to see them the previous week to deliver the news. So now you are our brother in his place, they said, as if relaying a fact rather than conveying an honour, and allowed him to enter the zenana where the older women kept their tear-streaked faces uncovered while they pressed him for news of the boy who only Qayyum had seen as a man. When it was time to leave one of the old men of the family took him by the elbow:

– There's something you should see, Yusufzai scribe.

His new brothers took him to a giant rock with shapes cut into it. Kneeling, the youngest of them used the end of his turban to wipe away dust from a small section. Faded symbols made up lines which sloped and slanted towards each other like weary battalions. Even before there was paper there were scribes amongst the Yusufzai, the old man said. But what does it say, Qayyum asked. The old man didn't know exactly but they were the words of the King, Asoka, who ruled with blood and fire until one day on a battlefield he looked at the mountain of the dead, heard the sobbing of a woman whose husband and sons had all been killed, and became a follower of the Buddha, renouncing violence and inscribing stones with his belief in peace.

His fingers lightly brushing the ancient words, Qayyum saw Asoka walking through that field at Vipers and saying to himself, No more.

 

There was a small hole in the canvas draped over the branches, and when the sun was directly overhead a narrow shaft of light fell into the inkhorn. Qayyum closed his fist around the buffalo horn – it was warm, heat radiating from the ink contained within.

A few days earlier his father had taken to bed with a fever and Qayyum's mother looked at her son in a way that reminded him that he had obligations beyond those of a postman. So now here he was, beneath a tree, legs squeezed under the table with the built-in inkhorn – his father's pride. As a child he'd disliked the smell of ink, associating it with the boredom of standing behind his father with a fan on hot afternoons, waving a breeze onto his neck while being careful to keep the fan from smearing the ink on the page. And the letters that were dictated were inevitably dull – someone needed money, someone was sending money, someone had arrived, someone was leaving, someone was married, someone had a child, someone was dead. Everyone was well, everyone missed someone, someone missed everyone, the chicken had stopped laying eggs, where were the bolts of silk? Occasionally news of a blood feud or murder enlivened things, but not often. He'd always known he'd choose a different life for himself – he had grown up in the shadow of a fort; how could he stay immune to the soldiers parading on maidans, boots and buttons gleaming?

But in the Army he came to understand the importance of letters, no matter how ordinary their contents. Never more so than on that day in Brighton when a sepoy from Peshawar had come hobbling into his ward, waving a piece of paper in his hand and said, Finally a letter from home. Qayyum had taken the paper and recognised the handwriting. His voice was not entirely steady as he and his father clasped hands across the world to tell the sepoy everything was well, the harvest had been good, the chicken had recovered.

As the morning became afternoon, everything slowed. The muezzin's voice wavered as he sent the call to prayer winging out from the minaret of Mahabat Khan Mosque. A blur descended onto the inkhorn. Qayyum lifted the horn from its holder, and saw a fly struggling to stay afloat in its dark waters. The ink an ocean of death. Carefully, he positioned his quill beneath the thrashing insect and lifted it out, flicking it onto the ground as soon as it was clear of the ink. The fly staggered about, blue smudges its trail, its wings rising and falling impotently. Qayyum took the pitcher near his feet, dribbled water onto his hand and from there dropped the tiniest quantity onto the fly.

– Working hard, Lala?

Qayyum snapped his wrist and the remaining water sprayed Najeeb, who responded with a giant smile.

– Instead of bathing flies, come and listen to a
badala
with me.

The knife-sharpener who shared the canopy with him said he'd look after Qayyum's belongings, his knife cleanly slicing the still-flailing insect in two as he spoke. Najeeb took hold of his elder brother's hand and led him towards the Street of Storytellers, chattering away about how there were so many stories of Peshawar that none of the Storytellers in the bazaar ever told; all his life he'd heard the same old tales and maybe he should be the one to let the Storytellers know that there were other possibilities. There was a particular confidence in him that seemed to grow daily, hard to pin down; it would be necessary to make sure it didn't become arrogance. But for the moment it consisted primarily of exuberance, and Qayyum couldn't help smiling at the thought of his brother approaching an old storyteller, informing him that he had a better story than any of the old tales of the bazaar. Probably something he'd picked up at the Mission School – please let it not be a story of Christianity, or somehow that would get back to their mother who had only grudgingly given in to Qayyum's insistence that Najeeb needed to be educated in the English way if he was to progress through the world.