Right of Thirst (19 page)

Late that afternoon, shortly before the sun fell behind the western ridges and cast the valley in shadow, Rai finally stopped us for the night. He'd chosen well—a bend in the river, along a sandy bank flat enough for the tents, where the current was slow and easy. I was tired, aching, and it was an effort to set up my tent. Rai looked at the low bank carefully—it was only a few inches above the water—and then glanced up at the sky.

“Probably is okay,” he said, “for one night. But the river can rise up sometimes.”

“There's been no rain,” I said.

“Yes,” he replied. “But sometimes the snow melts quickly in the mountains. I have seen it before.”

“I don't care,” I said. In fact there was little choice, since the walls rose steeply again a few feet away.

“I think it is okay,” he said, then set Ali and the boy to work collecting water and lighting the stove.

The band of sun rose up the high walls to the east and disappeared. Once again, the transition was abrupt, from sunlight to the pool of shadows, and the temperature plummeted nearly as quickly. I sat there on the bank for a while, in front of my tent, with my rolled-up sleeping bag as a pillow, trying to get warm, watching the
river and sipping the cup of tea that Ali's nephew had brought me. Elise had retreated to her tent as well, Ali and the soldier and the boy sat crouched beside the stove, heating more water, and Rai, for his part, paced uneasily at the water's edge, his cigarette blooming and fading like a firefly. The barrage was gone. Perhaps it had stopped, or perhaps it simply could not be heard that deep in the valley.

After a while, the ridges to the east lost definition—only their sharp, angular tips could be seen, printed against the sky, which glowed, and began to reveal, one by one, the brightest of the stars. And then too, the river began to shine, diaphanous, and the narrow strand of rapids below us leapt out of the background like white cloth. I sipped my tea, cool in my jacket, listening to the rocks knocking along the riverbed, wondering how on earth a man like me had found himself there. How unlikely it seemed, how enormous and strange the world was, and how unprepared I felt. By then my fear had receded to a dull and distant ache, and mingled with my physical exhaustion, so I could not quite tell where one began and the other ended.

I heard a sound, and looked up. It was Rai.

“Can I talk to you, Doctor?” he asked, quietly, reeking of cigarettes, his jacket buttoned up tight to his throat.

“Of course,” I said, and moved over to make room for him.

He crouched beside me, then flicked his cigarette out into the river.

“I am having difficulties,” he said finally. “I am sorry.”

I didn't know how to reply.

“When you are an officer like me,” he said, “you must distinguish yourself for promotion. Whenever there is a chance you must take it, or else you will have nothing. I am thinking about my daughters and my wife. Their education. Their food. Do you understand?”

“I don't know,” I said finally.

He ran his fingers through his hair.

“I am paid very little,” he said. “Every month we do not have enough, or only enough.”

He picked up a handful of stones, and began tossing them, one by one, into the river.

“You didn't only do it for your family. You did it for yourself as well.”

He kept throwing the pebbles.

“Yes,” he said, tightly. “You are right. What you say is true.” He shook his head.

“But there was no hope for them, Doctor,” he continued. “I hope you understand this. They would not have escaped.”

“If you had missed, how could anyone have stopped them?”

“Colonel Raju was ordering Singh to bring out the machine guns from the tents. That is what he was shouting when the corporal missed. Singh was reaching for the radio. It would only have taken a short time.”

“Why didn't they then?”

“Because you cannot hide a machine gun. Without optics you must use tracer rounds at that distance. And so there is a risk for return fire, if there are others. But a single rifle, that is very difficult to see. They could not tell where the shots were coming from.”

He threw more stones in the river.

“You could have captured them,” I said.

“Perhaps,” he said. “But this would be difficult. They were across the river. We could not have reached them quickly. And they were running.”

We were quiet for a while.

“You could have captured the last man,” I said, coldly. “The one with his hands in the air.”

“Yes,” Rai said, softly. “I am also thinking this. It is troubling me a great deal. And I don't know what to do.”

He swore, and threw the remaining pebbles in his palm hard into the water.

“You know,” he said, “when I was looking through the scope, I felt nothing. I thought only of the range, and the lead. I thought only of adjusting for the difference in elevation. That is all.”

“You still pulled the trigger.”

“Yes,” Rai said. “And so now I know.” He shook his head. “I must be stronger. They were spies in our country. They would have done the same to us if they could.”

I said nothing, and we each stared at the river for a while. My body ached, my hips and back.

“Are they just going to leave them up there?” I said, turning toward him.

“No, we will recover the bodies. They will have no identification, but sometimes we find things. This has never happened here before. Probably they saw the camp with aerial reconnaissance, and that is why they came. But in other areas, active ones, this is common. This has happened many times.”

“And you do the same. Send men into their territory.”

“Yes,” Rai acknowledged. “Sometimes we do this also. But not here.”

“And both sides deny it, of course.”

“Yes,” he said. “These are covert operations always. That is why they were not wearing uniforms. It is so things do not get out of control.”

“What am I supposed to say, Sanjit? What do you want from me?”

“I do not know,” he said, falling silent again. We both watched the water for a while.

“Colonel Raju was talking to me afterward,” he continued. “He was telling me that it is a difficult thing, but that I have done my duty. He was telling me that he has felt the same, but that I must calm myself. But I could not calm myself.”

He shook his head.

“He is a good commander. He has also come from nothing. He understands my position. But I should have controlled myself better. I gave Singh another chance at me.”

“Captain Singh?” I said, puzzled.

“Yes. Singh is nobody without his father. But that is enough. He can do anything he wants and he will be promoted anyway. He does not need his pay. He does not need anything. But he tries to damage my position anyway because I speak good English also and we are the same rank and in the same regiment. Always he is telling me to wash his car, or to clean his garden, as if he is joking. But he is not joking.”

Rai spoke with great bitterness.

“If you had his advantages,” I asked, looking at him carefully, “would you have shot those men?”

The question hung between us, and Rai thought for a long time.

“I do not understand what it is like to be given anything,” he said, finally. “My father was nothing. A shopkeeper. He died when I was a child. But I think I would have let them use the machine guns. I did not want to kill them. I only wanted to do my duty.”

He picked up another handful of gravel, and threw it into the river, and suddenly I could see how much he wanted my forgiveness.

A moment passed.

“How did your father die?”

“He was struck by a lorry in the street,” Rai said. I'd ex
pected something else, an illness, perhaps, a poor man's tragedy, untouched by the modern world.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “Your mother raised you?”

“Yes,” he said. “Our relatives helped us. My uncles and cousins. They made it possible for me to go to school. But they are nothing also. They had little to give us.”

“I'm sure your father wasn't nothing. I'm sure he was a good man who did the best he could.”

“He was a good man. It did not help him at all. Or us.”

“You made a terrible choice,” I said finally, because it cost me nothing. “I think it was wrong. But I understand why you did it. When I was your age I might have done the same in your place. That's the truth.”

As I spoke, I thought how easy it was to absolve him, and how easy it was to absolve all the others, caught up in their fates, following orders, doing whatever was asked of them, no matter how dark, or hard, or merciless.

“Thank you, Doctor,” Rai said, after a while, staring at the current. “Thank you for listening to this. It is difficult.”

“So,” I said. “Were you what you hoped?”

He laughed, briefly and mirthlessly.

“No, Doctor,” he said. “I was not. Not at all.”

He stood there for a while longer, as if he did not want to bring the conversation to an end.

“Maybe that's not a bad thing,” I said.

“I must see to the others,” he replied, finally. “Please, it is important to eat even if you are not hungry. We have much walking tomorrow also. And I am sorry I was angry with you today.”

With that, he reached out, and touched my shoulder, and then he turned and walked back toward the stove, and the lantern, where Elise sat alone.

I watched the current a while longer, until it became difficult
to make out, and the stars began emerging in the darkness of the sky overhead. It was strange, I thought, listening to the river, how this place had exposed him, just as it had exposed me. It felt like a blank screen upon which my entire life had somehow been projected. All that depth and absence, all that high empty country, and the waiting of the past weeks, giving way to something else entirely, something I never expected to be part of—I could hardly comprehend it. I had expected to lose myself in work, in a foreign land, freed from the burden of the familiar. Instead I felt as if I was gazing into a clear pool, bottomless, searching for signs in the depths, and all I found was the ghost of my own face, and the faces of all the others, in imperfect reflections.

I stood, stiffly, and made my way down to where Elise and Rai sat in strained silence, waiting for dinner. The small candle in the lantern lit up their faces. Ali and his nephew crouched a few feet off, and occasionally a bit of kerosene smoke made its way into the circle. Rai called out to Ali, softly, and then made room for me to sit beside him.

“It is chapati and dahl only tonight,” Rai said. “I am sorry.”

Ali had always prepared what he imagined was Western food for Elise and me. Cans of corned beef and cans of peeled white potatoes, or rice. Omelets for breakfast, stale moldy bread warmed on the stove. I knew there was a courteous intention there, and so I'd never requested anything else—I just ate what I was given, as did Elise, and Rai. For Rai, I think our monotonous diet was an opportunity to be, however subtly, one of us, as opposed to one of them. Ali and his nephew, however, ate chapati and dahl every day. They'd cooked the chapati—unleavened bread—on flat stones, which they heated on the kerosene stove and had chosen with care. I knew this only because I'd seen them scouring the rocky ground together when we first arrived, and I'd asked Rai what they were doing.

But now, because they were exhausted, they were serving us their own food.

As I sat beside Rai, I heard a slapping noise coming from the direction of the kerosene stove. I turned, peering through the darkness, and I realized that it was Ali, flattening dough against hot stones. After a while I began to smell it—the smell of baking bread. It smelled unexpectedly wonderful, and I watched him, plucking the bread off the hot rock, slapping another ball of dough flat between his dirty hands, then dropping it on the stone again, where it sizzled, hot enough to kill whatever lived on his fingers.

A few moments later, they brought it to us—dahl, and bread. The bread was cooked perfectly, crusty on the outside, soft and latticed in the middle, like a thick tortilla, made from rough white flour, and we dipped it in the stew, full of strange spices, peppers, thick and filling, leaving a pleasant tingle on the lips, which I washed away with cold gulps of iodinated river water. It was easily the best meal I'd had since arriving. It was the kind of food made for cold weather—dense and heavy. The food of the poor, but all the more sustaining for it.

The three of us ate our fill without talking, and the others did the same a few feet away.

“Why don't they come and join us,” I said to Rai. “They shouldn't be over there in the dark.”

Rai called out to them.

They were surprised—I could sense it in the long pause that followed Rai's invitation. But then they accepted—they could hardly refuse—and came out of the dark. Ali bobbed and smiled, uneasy, and his nephew looked only at his feet, although a few minutes later I caught him sneaking glances at both Elise and me. They settled on their haunches a safe distance from us, but within the circle of light cast by the lantern. We ate in
silence—Elise and Rai and me with our spoons, our paper napkins, and Ali and his nephew with their fingers.

Rai reached down to the bottle at his feet, poured the rum into his tea, and took a long swallow.

“Don't leave me out,” I said, extending my cup.

Rai passed me the bottle. It was only three-quarters full.

“Do you want some?” I asked Elise.

“Oh,” she said, as if she had been somewhere else. But then she extended her mug. “Yes. Please.”

The rest of them looked at us, uncertain.

“Do they drink?” I asked. “Can they have some?”

Rai said something in his own tongue.

I turned, and offered the bottle to them. At first, I thought they might refuse, or be offended, but instead Ali leapt to his feet, darted off into the dark, and returned within seconds with two battered cups—one for the soldier, and one for himself. Only the boy went without. I poured several inches into each cup, and we each began to sip at the rum, and finally we were all together, with thousands of empty square miles around us, gathered beside a single lantern. It was a moonless night, and the millions of stars overhead astonished me again, as they always did.