A God in Every Stone (19 page)

The nights had turned too cold for sleeping outdoors, but Najeeb had closed the door to the room they shared and barricaded it with something – books, probably. He was at the age of grand gestures, when every emotion felt perpetual. I will always hate you, he had said, a statement not of anger but anguish.

Qayyum drew his limbs close to his torso, seeking the warmth of his own body beneath the blanket. The stars were thick in the sky, cold and alone, each one of them. Kalam, on the bare hillside, bleeding to death, would have found no comfort there. Did justice demand the same for Kalam’s killer? Lure him to a lonely spot, push a blade deep into his flesh, and leave him to that terror, that overwhelming terror

– Allah

Pushing the blanket aside, he tumbled onto the ground, prostrating himself, forehead smacking brick. And if they were to come for him and find Najeeb instead and stitch his lips together and stop his breath

– Allah

And if it was him they found, only him, he should be prepared for it, he should be willing to risk anything to avenge Kalam’s death but the stars, so cold, were beautiful and the night air cut him like life itself and he wanted to stay, here, in this world for ever, in the Valley which was sometimes rose and sometimes plum and always varied, infinite. He had never touched a woman in love or watched a tree grow where he had planted it or followed a stream all the way across a valley and up the mountain to the borders of snow. How could he return to a world of blood; how could he refuse Kalam’s ghost

– Allah Allah Allah

Najeeb wouldn’t allow Qayyum to help him with the books, not even when getting into the Victoria. He sat in the carriage, his arms wrapped around them, cheek resting on the top of the pile. As if the scent, the touch of them was something to embrace. Five books, three with hard covers, two bound in leather. One with gilt-edged pages. What world had his brother entered? Classics, Najeeb had said to him in English, as if it was a word he should know.

This morning, while Najeeb was at school, Qayyum had entered the room they shared. It hadn’t been difficult to isolate Najeeb’s schoolbooks from the far more expensive ones given to him by the Englishwoman. There was the one with English on one half of the page, and on the other half letters which looked like English letters but with triangles and pitchforks and other strange symbols scattered between the recognisable ‘a’ and ‘o’. The only English letters Qayyum knew were the ones in LANCE-NAIK QAYYUM GUL. He held a corner of a creamy, gilt-edged page between thumb and forefinger. What had Najeeb been doing in the world of the English who knew so well how to make you feel that you were never so honoured as when they were the ones to honour you?

The Victoria entered the Cantonment, turned into a residential street where there was space enough for each home to sprawl across the ground instead of climbing upwards. Again he felt it, the old shame learned in France. The haphazard constructions of the Walled City a failing, a reason to sneer. He looked at his brother and wondered if any of this shame lived in him too; he could see no sign of it. Four years ago when Qayyum left to join the 40th he had thought of momentum as something he would carry with him out of Peshawar, leaving stasis behind. No one in his family would age, no one fall sick, no one acquire new habits or loves in his absence. He would be the one to come back and require rediscovering, relearning, by all around him. He hadn’t entirely let go of that notion, until now.

– What’s her name, this Englishwoman?

– I don’t want to talk to you about her.

– There are things you don’t understand.

– I understand Greek!

Qayyum pushed gently at his brother’s shoulder, trying to bring the laughter out of him, but Najeeb only angled his body away. Qayyum was still trying to decide if he should deliver a lecture on respecting your elders no matter what the circumstances when the Victoria stopped outside a house smaller in size than those around it, made of brick fronted by climbing plants. The brothers stepped down, and remained standing on the pavement as the horse cantered away; when it turned the corner, silence such as could only exist in an English world remained.

– Are you going to come in with me?

– I’ll stay here. But don’t go in. Remain where you can be seen.

– No one’s looking.

– If no one was looking no one would know that you visit her every afternoon. Stand outside, give her the books, walk away.

– I don’t want you looking at her when she comes out.

– Why not?

– You’ll do it in a way I won’t like.

– When you speak like that I know it’s right to say you can’t see her any more.

But he turned his back to the house all the same, and heard his brother take a deep breath and walk up the pathway. The door opened, a low murmur, a woman’s voice rose and fell. And then Najeeb was striding past him at a furious pace. Qayyum had to run to catch up, and when he caught his brother’s elbow and swung him round he saw a boy’s sorrow, a heartbreaking thing.

– Look Najeeb, I received my pension today. Have you ever eaten ice cream? It’s English
kulfi
.
I’ve heard there’s a shop in the Cantonment which sells it. Let’s find it.

– I’m going to the Museum.

– I’ll come with you.

– You won’t understand anything there.

If he had yelled it out, Qayyum would have cuffed him, and taken him by the hand to find the ice cream which would return sweetness to his temperament. But he said it flatly, as if pronouncing a thought he’d long held to be true. Qayyum let go of his brother, and Najeeb walked on without looking back, pausing only to rub his elbow against a boundary wall as a Brahmin might try to rid himself of the handprint of an Untouchable.

The Museum had been built to make men feel small. Stepping into the high-ceilinged hall Qayyum was flanked by giant stone figures. At the far end, on the upper-level balcony, a Pashtun man in an English suit watched him. Qayyum looked away from him and there was another stone figure standing against the wall, holding out a stump where there should have been a hand. The smell of blood, of dead flesh. Turning, he pressed his face against the giant figure and there was another smell: stone, ancient. Qayyum stepped back to see the statue better. It was a man, the dark interior of his navel visible beneath folds of cloth at Qayyum’s eye level. He couldn’t keep himself from reaching out to touch it; how could you achieve that effect in stone? Stepping further back, he saw the figure had its right arm bent at the elbow, the hand raised at an angle, fingers together, palm outwards. It was a gesture he had seen Najeeb make in his direction soon after his return from Vipers.

– Is this your first time at the Museum?

The Pashtun man in the English suit, now standing beside him, asked the question. Qayyum nodded.

– What does the hand position mean?

– It’s the Abhaya Mudra. A gesture of protection and fearlessness.

Qayyum replicated the gesture, felt himself step into the skin of a boy who sees his brother return from war without an eye.

– I’d be happy to answer any other questions. I’m Wasiuddin, Assistant at the Museum.

– Lance-Naik Qayyum Gul. 40th Pathans.

He didn’t know why he introduced himself in that manner, but this man in the suit, these high walls, those stone figures all made it necessary.

– Najeeb’s brother? Of course. You have the same look. He’s in Pundit Aiyar’s office, examining Kushan coins. Should I take you to him?

– Pundit Aiyar?

– The Superintendent of the Museum. Our commanding officer, Lance-Naik.

– An Indian is in charge?

– Yes.

– And my brother is in his office?

– I don’t wish to interfere in family matters, and I understand the delicacy of the situation. But he has a brilliant mind, and . . .

– I’m glad you understand this is a family matter.

– Of course. Should I take you to him?

He indicated a closed door, and Qayyum said perhaps in a few minutes. First, he’d like to look around, but he didn’t want to keep the Assistant from whatever he was doing. If you need anything, the man said with a dip of his head, and understood enough to leave Qayyum alone.

Several young men were walking around the hallway, pointing to this object and that, some of them writing things down as they stood in front of a cabinet or a statue. University students from Islamia College, he guessed, with very little in age separating them from him. One of them caught another in a neck-hold, laughing, and Qayyum walked swiftly past them – and past the Englishman looking at a moustached statue and patting his own moustache in comparison – to a smaller gallery beyond the main hall. Here, there was no one but him, and the stones.

Men, and winged creatures, and a bird-head with a human expression, and faces which came from the streets of Peshawar and other faces which were from somewhere else. There was beauty here, he could see, but it was a beauty that asked to be admired. Still, and distant, and nothing to do with the world outside. Live among these objects and your heart would turn to stone. He was thinking this, aware that he was building up an argument, when he stepped in front of a bearded man, sitting down, with his knee drawn up against his chest, his hand clasping the back of his own head in despair. Qayyum heard his breath change, become a noise in his throat. A second figure – its face missing so it was impossible to know if it was a man or a woman – curled the fingers of one hand around the man’s upper arm and rested the other hand on his chest. In the angle of the bearded man’s head, turned to one side, away from the embracing figure, the sculptor told the world of the impossibility of comfort when loss pierces the heart. Qayyum covered the lower half of his face with the palm of his hand, and watched his own grief, felt the awful aloneness of it. Kalam.

A hand slipped into his, and Najeeb pulled him away from the broken statue. This, this is what you must see, he said, and took Qayyum back to the main hall, empty now.

– Here, the Buddha, this is him.

The folds of the prophet’s skin suggested the former sleekness of the prince he had been; the sunken eyes bore knowledge of all the world’s sorrow. All you have endured; all you must yet endure. Qayyum rested his hand against the glass-fronted cabinet and leaned in towards the Buddha’s starving face, suspended over the ridged skin of his chest. Stone made flesh; no, stone made bone and skin. If a man rested his hand on that cage he might hear a heart beating within; but gently, gently, the ribs could snap from the pressure of a single finger. He shivered and stepped back; now he understood idolatry.
Bismillah-ir-Rahman-ir-Rahim, he whispered,
and the Buddha continued to gaze beyond him, all of Vipers there in his eyes, every dead soldier, and Kalam Khan bleeding to death, cold and alone. And beyond all the dead men, in the deepest, saddest part of the Buddha’s gaze, was Kalam’s killer, a man who took a life for duty, for family, for tradition.

Qayyum lowered himself to his knees, and Najeeb sat next to him, leaning on his brother’s shoulder, the weight of him a tether.

He followed the sound of the axe, beyond the plum orchards to a field of furrowed soil. Kalam Khan’s father squatted beside a cutting stone, passing the length of a sugar cane along the stone, lopping it into pieces as long as a man’s forearm. His movements so automated they might soon become careless.

– Why are you doing that?

– For planting, city man.

He dipped the axe-head into a bucket of water and ran it along the whetting stone, twice, three times. Qayyum held out his hand and the man placed the axe-handle in it, standing up with a great sigh of
Bismillah
, his hand to the small of his back. Qayyum stepped out of his sandals, crouched low to the ground, and brought the axe-head down on the cane, two nodes from the top. The scent it released was childhood.

– Kalam asked me to help you with the planting.

– Yes.

– That was my promise to him. That’s what I owe him.

– It took you three days to work this out? Are you city Pashtuns even stupider than your cousins in the tribes?

The older man wore a familiar mocking smile.

– An extra pair of hands is more useful to me than another boy dead in the hills. Did you really think I expected you to go up there to have your throat slit before you even got your knife out of your waistband? Don’t look at me like an idiot. Cut! Cut! And come and find me when you’ve finished all of it.

Qayyum looked from the small pile of cut cane to the large quantity of sheaves still intact. He grasped hold of the longest cane he could see with a cry of
Bismillah!

Hours later, his arm ached, his back ached, the muscles of his thighs ached. He had forgotten his own body, its possibilities. Now every jolt of pain as he walked back to the plum orchards was a restoration. Kalam’s father brought him hot tea and cold naan and it was a banquet. Through the late afternoon and into the evening the two men sat beneath a plum tree until the ground was made up entirely of shadows, swapping tales of Kalam the boy and Kalam the sepoy, life in the orchards and life in the Army. Eventually the old man started to talk about the old Pashtun system in which land was never owned but regularly redistributed between the tribes so none could take control over the most fertile, and every man had sufficient wealth to live with honour. It had been centuries since that system worked without corruption, but it had tottered on, with more justice within it than most systems –