A God in Every Stone (27 page)

He caught her forearms and would have pushed her away, but she either mistook his intention or deliberately ignored it, and then it was too late, he was a man like all the other men who came here, and the women, all of them behind the curtained doorways, knew it.

Finally, the space between one bullet and the next widened far enough for the men to leave. They were silent exiting the Street of Courtesans so there would be no need to acknowledge where they had been, what they had done, while their brothers were dying. They knew they should return to the Street of Storytellers to retrieve the dead bodies, but most of them had wives and children at home who would be worrying about them, and it was Qayyum alone who walked directly towards the site of the massacre, knowing Najeeb would have been at the Museum all day, and was unlikely to be able to return home until the soldiers returned to their barracks.

Two cats crouched beside an unexpected rivulet snaking down the street towards Qayyum, their tongues lapping at it in tandem. He thought the scent of blood was in his nostrils, until he saw the colour of the water. It wasn’t necessary to understand it to know some other horror was taking place. He followed the watery blood through streets where the silence was so unnerving he was almost grateful when it was fractured by a crack of gunfire, sporadic bursts of
Inqilaab Zindabad
and the cries of mourners from homes where sons and husbands had returned as corpses. As he approached the Street of Storytellers, the rivulet widened, or the alleys narrowed; either way, he had no choice but to step through the warm liquid, thicker than water as in the English expression.

The Street of Storytellers was in flood. Water raced down its length, carrying debris along with it – shoes, planks, cloth, a half-eaten apple. A crow swooped down onto something shiny, wet its beak, and flew up with a panicked beating of wings. Firemen hosed water onto the street as the cavalry stood guard over them.

Where were the dead, the wounded? He was up to his ankles in water now; no blood, just water.

He saw a man approach the troops stationed beside the closed doors of Kabuli Gate, hands raised above his head; Return home! came the order and the man backed away. So, no one would enter or exit the Walled City tonight. Najeeb would have to spend the night in the Museum, and in the meantime his brother would try to understand what had happened here, how all the bodies had disappeared so quickly.

On the balcony of the carpet-seller’s house, located at the corner of the Street of Storytellers and an alley, three men stood like gods in judgement. One of the men was pointing to something on the street; the second man, elbows resting on the balcony, covered his eyes with his hands. The third man, in a bright green kameez, stood slightly apart, his posture revealing nothing. All the other balconies on the street were empty – those three men were the only witnesses he could see.

Qayyum ducked back into the alley, cut across the smaller side streets, twice hiding in doorways to avoid soldiers, and finally emerged into the alley with the doorway to the carpet-seller’s house. He was raising his hand to knock on the door when someone pushed it open and a man with a bloodied shirt walked out.

– Were you shot?

The man looked confused by Qayyum’s question for a moment, then glanced down at his shirt and shook his head.

– It’s not my blood, the man said. Did she give you water?

– Who?

– The girl.

– Which girl?

But before he received an answer a young man in a red-brown kameez walked out of the house, his features in disarray. Qayyum knew all the Khudai Khidmatgar in Peshawar, and this man was not one of them.

– Where did you leave her? the young man asked the blood-shirted man, who responded in a tone weary with sadness.

– I’m telling you, they took the bodies away.

– I want to see where she was.

– All right. Come, I’ll show you.

The two men walked onto the Street of Storytellers and Qayyum pushed open the door to the carpet-seller’s house and entered. Everything here spoke of prosperity. He was on the first-floor landing when a woman’s voice called out from behind a door which was slightly ajar.

– Come inside. Don’t try to escape – I have a gun.

His instinct was to run, but it would be ridiculous to survive the English troops only to be shot by a woman. Qayyum pushed the door open with his foot and stood in the doorway with hands raised above his head. The shuttered room was vast, carpeted end to end, and lit with electric lamps. At the far end stood an uncovered woman in a green kameez, pointing a pistol at Qayyum.

– Come closer.

Qayyum looked down at his wet sandals, which squelched as he shifted his weight. He lifted a foot out of his sandal and – standing on one leg – dried it as effectively as possible against his shalwar, before repeating the procedure with the other foot. He wished he wasn’t so aware that the woman – just a few years past girlhood but impossible to mistake for a girl – had green eyes and long, unbound hair, and was tall enough and beautiful enough to be part-djinn. He stepped from carpet to carpet as he approached her, his bare feet treading on a startled deer, a parrot’s beak. Two-thirds of the way into the room, he stopped, his eyes trying to look over her shoulder or to the left of her ear but unable to keep from sliding back to her face, which had light reddish smears around the hairline. So he looked up to the ceiling instead – a mosaic of intersecting stars and circles, with pieces of mirrorwork which captured the carpet patterns and made them part of the ceiling’s intricate geometry. But when the woman spoke it was impossible to look anywhere but at her.

– Why are you here?

– I’m sorry. I’ll leave.

Raising his hands he started to walk backwards towards the door, his eyes fixed on the ground.

– Your shirt. You’re one of the Khudai Khidmatgar?

– Yes.

– Where did they take the bodies?

The desperation in her voice made him look up.

– I don’t know what happened, he said. I came up because I thought someone up here might have seen. Was someone from your household . . . ?

– My husband’s sister. She was down there. Diwa.

As she said the name ‘Diwa’ she lowered the arm holding the pistol, and stepped out onto the balcony. He strode quickly across the room to reason with her to return inside. But arriving at the balcony he saw that the fire engines had left, the street was deserted, though troops still stood guard around and on top of Kabuli Gate. The buildings had ripples of sunlight running along their facades. All the windows were shuttered, all the rooftops deserted – no one to see Qayyum standing on a balcony over an urban river with another man’s wife. The woman raised the arm still holding on to the pistol, pointing it in the direction of the soldiers at Kabuli Gate. His hand on her wrist, forcing it down; the leap of her pulse against his fingers. She rotated her wrist and he saw the imprint of his fingers, red against her pale skin.

– Do you think I don’t know a bullet from this gun won’t carry all that way?

– It’s the bullets from the soldiers’ guns which I was worrying about. But I’m sorry, I beg forgiveness from my heart. I shouldn’t have touched you. And your sister –
Ina lillahi wa inna
illayhi rajiun
.

– I don’t want your prayers. Where is she?

– I don’t know. I’ll ask. If I hear anything, I’ll come back. You said she was down there – forgive me, but what do you mean?

– When men become women and approach an enemy armed with nothing but chants then it falls to a woman to take the role of Malala of Maiwand and walk onto the battlefield to show you what a warrior looks like. She was down with the men, and there was more of a man’s fire in her than in all of you.

Her arms, folded together, pressed against her torso as though she were trying to staunch a wound.
Ya Allah
, how many women had been on the street? He had never been comfortable with Ghaffar Khan’s insistence that Pashtun women must be brought into the political movement, and now he saw with complete clarity the extent to which the man he revered above all others was wrong in this matter. In the Khudai Khidmatgar training camps Qayyum knew how to teach the men to meet violence with non-violence, and insults with patience, but what words could he say to prepare Pashtun men for this: women may be shot, their wounded bodies may need to be lifted away by strange hands, you may hear them call out in pain, you may watch them die – and to all this you can respond with nothing but a cry of
Inqilaab Zindabad
. The havoc it would cause (that thrum of terror which ran through the Pashtuns when the girl with the plait walked out from the ranks of men). The green-eyed woman turned her back to him, and then he couldn’t find a way to stay.

He returned home, the elation of earlier in the day gone. His neighbour, the cobbler Hari Das, rushed out to greet him.

– Qayyum Gul, thank God you’re safe. And Najeeb? Is Najeeb with you?

– He’ll have been at the Museum all day. He probably doesn’t even know what’s been going on.

– I saw him walk out of here this morning, wearing an English-style achkan – I didn’t know where he was going. But he left only a few minutes before the first gunshots.

He had been wearing his frock-coat? For the Englishwoman, no doubt. Idiot, Najeeb, are you with her now? Toasting a tarnished piece of silver? If there was one man in all of Peshawar to avoid a protest, stride away from gunfire, it was the Assistant at the Peshawar Museum – Hari Das knew Najeeb well enough to know this. But the old man was looking at Qayyum helplessly, not really wanting an answer about Najeeb so much as seeking reassurance that everything would be all right despite this day of gunfire and blood.

Qayyum moved towards Hari Das to embrace him. But as they touched the cobbler’s mouth formed an Oh of surprise; he stepped back from Qayyum, apologising, a thick needle in his hand, tipped with darkness. Qayyum glanced at his arm to see what Hari Das was staring at. There was no pain, no rip in his kameez, so whose blood was that blooming on his sleeve?

23–24 April 1930

Vivian Rose Spencer rested her hands on the keyboard of the ‘Made in Berlin' piano. Her calloused palms and lined fingers had changed more than anything at Dean's since the last dance she'd danced here. She played the opening bars of ‘Feeling Sentimental' in the empty ballroom and the music bounced off the polished wood floor, skimmed the long mirrors, leapt into the antique arms of the chandelier. If she looked in the mirror long enough would she find, buried deep beneath all the twirling figures and self-conscious glances that it held, the young Vivian Rose Spencer? And at her shoulder, the ghost of Tahsin Bey. He had long since ceased to be the wound in her flesh, had worked himself deeper, invisible to all onlookers, to become the brittleness of her bones, the loneliness for ever in her heart.

She couldn't remember what exactly she'd dreamed earlier in the day when her train had entered the Peshawar Valley; she only knew that she'd dreamed of him, as she hadn't in a very long time, and woken up with a constricted chest and a feeling of disorientation which revealed itself to have a reason other than dreams.

The train was moving in the wrong direction. Trouble in Peshawar, the conductor had said, when she found him; the train was returning to Campbellpur. At Campbellpur station while the other English passengers stood around arguing about whether to wait there until the situation became clearer or to take the train shortly to leave for Rawalpindi Viv walked over to the Pathan couple who had disembarked from the train, and was soon on her way to Peshawar, in a donkey-cart, her purse no lighter than before but her silver-handled hairbrush now in the possession of the man who used it to brush his luxurious henna-dyed beard.

How she hated him! How she hated all the men they passed on the road as they lolled and laughed and held their faces to the breeze and called out to each other in recognition and broke their journey to saunter into an orchard and pull fruit off a branch and eat it in full view of the world, juice spraying the air. All this Viv saw – as did the unspeaking woman seated beside her – through blinkered, meshed eyes. She knew she was passing through a landscape she'd encountered before (standing at the train window with her calfskin notebook, sketching stupas, comparing her observations with Arrian's) but it was almost impossible to identify any landmarks. Her brain didn't know how to translate the criss-crossed images her eyes were sending back, her head ached with the effort of trying. Beneath the burqa she clenched her fists which were themselves restricted in their movements so that if she were to try to reach out for the other woman's arm the touch between them would be doubly cloth-encased. The rage she felt on behalf of the women of the Peshawar Valley as she sweltered beneath the voluminous burqa dispelled any ambivalence she might have started to feel about Indian demands for self-rule. All these Indians talking about political change when really what this country desperately needed was social change. Why should they be allowed independence when they only wanted it for half the population? And, what's more, her back ached.

So, the relief – she had never known anything quite like it – of arriving at Dean's. The liveried man at the gate stopped the donkey-cart from entering, and Viv stood up, hitched up the burqa so that ankles and calves and shins and hemline appeared. With a sweeping gesture of his hand the liveried man waved in the donkey-cart with Viv still in that posture: half-woman, half-tent. When the donkey stopped she stepped past the long-bearded man who started once more to brush his beard as though he were still in a situation of command here in the heart of British Peshawar, and jumped to the ground. With something of the same grandness with which she had cast her first vote she threw off the vile cloth, and didn't look back.