A God in Every Stone (33 page)

– Do you think I had a choice? the Municipal Commissioner said.

– No? Explain it to me. Explain it to Qayyum Gul who has spent all day looking for a man who can’t be found.

Qayyum wanted only to return home with his relief and tell his sisters and nieces and nephews and brothers-in-law that they would find Najeeb tomorrow, and tease him about the English frock-coat which couldn’t keep him from being thrown into prison. He walked over to the
khus
mats, looked through a gap between them at the street below. The numbers seemed to have grown, and someone had taken the place of the man knocking on the door, without disrupting the rhythmic thud-thud thud-thud. Across the street, someone opened a window and said, Enough now, enough! and one of the women below cried out, Where is my son?

– Tell me what else I could have done, the Municipal Commissioner said. Caroe called us together – four of us – and said we had to hand over the bodies. The ones in the Khilafat offices, the ones in the Madrassa, all of them. Do you think he phrased it as a request?

– What?

– Now you hear the truth, Qayyum Gul, the lawyer said. Go on, Mr Commissioner, tell us how you tried to resist. Tell us you said take me to prison, put a bullet through my brain, but I will not be a part of this shameful, criminal act.

The Municipal Commissioner winced at the bite of the word ‘Mr’, but the rest of the sentence had him flicking his hand at the lawyer, dismissing him.

– What do you understand of it, Abdul Hakim? Caroe was right; he said if there’s a mass funeral tomorrow no one – not the Congress, not the Khilafat Committee, not Gandhi and Ghaffar together if they were here – will be able to control the passions of the city. Haven’t we had enough bloodshed already?

– Oh, oh, listen to him! He was acting in Peshawar’s best interests. Oh Qayyum Gul, are you witnessing this?

– Remember Chauri Chaura, the Municipal Commissioner said, his voice stern, reminding the two other men that he was the oldest here. After your Congress volunteers burnt the police station Gandhi called off the entire Non-Cooperation Movement. Do you want something like that to happen again? Here? So that all the rest of India, all the Congress officials, can say those savage men of the Frontier! How can we trust them to be part of a movement of non-violence?

Abdul Hakim spread his hands in Qayyum’s direction as if to say, Can you believe this?

– I don’t understand. What did they do with the bodies? Qayyum asked.

The lawyer made a sound which would have been a laugh if it had contained any humour.

– Probably threw them into the nearest river or in some ditch somewhere.

– Don’t start these ridiculous rumours! They were buried according to full Muslim rites. Caroe swore that.

– What, even the ones who weren’t Muslim?

– Enough, Qayyum said, holding up his hand. His voice was ragged with anger when he said to the Municipal Commissioner, Those people down there, they want to bury their dead. Some way could have been found to allow them to do that.

– Really? said the Municipal Commissioner. You think after a day like yesterday Peshawari men would quietly walk behind row after row of shrouded bodies, including the body of a young girl shot dead by an English bullet. And not just any young girl. The angel on the Street of Storytellers. You should have seen the men in the office when she was brought in, the ones who recognised her particularly. I thought their hearts would burst right there.

– What girl, what angel?

The lawyer stood up.

– Didn’t you see her, Qayyum? Yesterday, on the Street of Storytellers. A figure made of light stood on a balcony, dispensing water to the men on the street below; the water itself liquid light, a miracle. The English officers saw her standing there, a sign of Allah’s grace, and shot her with every single gun in their artillery. She plunged from the balcony, a falling star, and only when she landed, dead, did the light extinguish, and the men saw it wasn’t an angel against whose brightness they had closed their eyes even as they drank her blessing, but a Peshawari girl, blessed by the Almighty.

In the silence that followed the lawyer struck a match and in a completely different voice, flat, slightly cynical, added, That’s what the man who told me about it insisted, though I know he was hiding at home all day. He extended his arm, held the match against the spiked tip of a bulrush and stepped back. A circle of brightness flared; a string of gold unspooled from the circle, wrapped itself around the dense tip of the bulrush, and the flames caught. Within seconds there was a wall of fire, the shapes of individual bulrushes visible within it.

– Have you gone mad, the Municipal Commissioner shouted, backing away from the crackling light.

– No, just letting the people down below know you’re up here. You might as well go and try to explain things to them before they work out the route from your neighbour’s roof. I think you’ll find a way to control their passions. But I might be wrong.

With a great, spat-out curse the Municipal Commissioner descended the stairs into his house. The bulrushes were disintegrating but the night was breezeless, the flames stayed contained. A concentration of heat and brightness and beauty, unapproachable. So might an angel appear to a man, veiled in the fire of heaven.

– Which balcony was she on? Qayyum asked Abdul Hakim.

– There’s no need to say anything to anyone about the girl, the lawyer said, putting a hand on Qayyum’s arm. What can’t be denied we’ll admit, but let’s not start speaking about our allies giving dead girls into the hands of Englishmen. Understand?

– Was it the carpet-seller’s balcony?

– Yes.

Qayyum scooped up hot ash from the trough in cupped palms, and whispered a verse from the Qur’an, his breath scattering grey flecks.

– Their works are as ashes which the wind bloweth hard upon a stormy day. They have no control of aught that they have earned.

25 April 1930

Walking through the train station and across the railway bridge Viv was able to consider the burqa as the Invisibility Cape she had longed for as a child. Beneath the white tent she moved in an entirely private sphere. Unknown, unseen. The policeman standing near the station lavatory who had taken note of Miss Spencer as she entered paid no attention to the woman in the burqa who emerged; the Englishwomen and children who waited on the platform for the train to evacuate them from Peshawar looked straight through her; Remmick who had personally accompanied her here from Dean’s was too busy sneezing loudly into his handkerchief to pay attention to a local woman whose steps didn’t falter as she walked past him though she ducked her head so that the shimmer of her blue eyes wouldn’t be visible beneath the face-mesh.

Beyond the bridge, at the end of a metalled road, Kabuli Gate was open, a doorway into a world entirely unlike the one she was leaving behind. Viv steadied herself against the railing of the bridge, looked over her shoulder towards the train station. She might just have enough time to return before anyone noticed she’d disappeared. Another few minutes, though, and someone would raise an alarm, the woman in the white burqa would be mentioned, Remmick would understand that she’d set out to betray him – to betray the Empire itself.

She tried to see if she could recognise Remmick among all the Englishmen gathered on the station with their wives but her latticed vision made it impossible. She pulled at the face-mesh so it was a few inches away from her eyes, squinted, cursed men, dropped her hand and continued on to Kabuli Gate.

It was true, all the troops had withdrawn from the Walled City, but the cry of ‘Peshawar has fallen’ which had sent everyone at the Club into such a panic the previous night seemed ridiculous as she walked through the wide-open gates and into the bustle of the Street of Storytellers. The smells of cooking meat, the calls of traders, the variety of turbans, it was all as before, but even so, something was off-kilter. It took a little while to decide that the difference was in her – in making her just another local woman, the burqa took away her very English right to be eccentric. Now she couldn’t stop and stare, point to things that struck her as unusual, ask questions, enter all-male domains, expect to be treated with a certain deference (she’d never known she’d expected this) simply by virtue of her race. So it’s me, she told herself. All that’s different is me. But she knew this wasn’t true.

She had left the Peshawar Club as soon as she was able to slip away from Remmick the previous night, returning to Dean’s to sit on the ledge of her bedroom window, smoking cigarettes and drinking gin from a bottle, listening to crickets and night-birds. If she closed her eyes she saw corpses laid on corpses, pale hands lifting the dead out of their own blood and throwing them like broken dolls into the back of a lorry. But what could she do about it? She was just a woman with no authority on either side of the city walls.

She held the gin bottle against her neck, the glass cool. There was a woman in the Walled City who would never have the chance to stand by the grave of someone she loved, or even to know where that grave was – if a tree grew above it, if children played near by, if a god no one believed in any more had left his mark just overhead.
He was buried in Bodrum, beneath a cypress tree, and in 1917 I took his walking stick and Alice’s collar (she had died by then too) and interred them beneath the Split Rock of Zeus
. Wilhelm had written this to Viv after the war, an act of kindness she’d never forget. There was nothing comparative she could offer the green-eyed woman – but she could give certainty where there might be doubt, knowledge where there might be confusion. Yes, there were lorries, a man named Caroe ordered it, and here is the reason why. Perhaps it would matter. After a loss every detail mattered, every acknowledgement of a wrong mattered.
The War Office has nothing to do with that man’s death, Miss Spencer. I must ask you to stop sending those letters for the sake of your own reputation
.

It was well after midnight when Remmick knocked on her door. He’d come to remind her all women and children were being evacuated next morning, and she must be ready to leave first thing. As he spoke he looked around her room in the manner of a man practised at finding anything out of place and, noticing the burqa slung over the back of a chair, walked up to it and stroked the white cotton.

– Put this on, he said.

– Why?

– Put it on and take your dress off.

– Get out or I’ll to scream the roof down.

He left, shrugging, but when he had gone Viv picked the burqa off the chair, and the fabric between her fingers felt like an answer.

But now she approached the carpet-seller’s house and the voice in her head grew louder – Stay out of it! And then this thought, these people are not your people. She looked down the long vista, and saw only Pathans. Despite the burqa she felt exposed, and turned sharply into a street so narrow the man walking in the other direction couldn’t pass her without contact. He flapped his hands at her as if she were a flock of pigeons, and she found herself reversing in rapid but tiny steps so she wouldn’t trip over the hem of her burqa. It was only when a doorway opened and she saw the woman standing there, garishly made up, that she realised what he feared wasn’t the contamination of her touch but a witness to what the men of the city did here. A street for everything in the Walled City. No map, only desire to steer you. The Street of Storytellers. The Street of Courtesans. The Street of Englishwomen. The Street of Inventive Guides. Her young Pactyike, her Herodotus of Peshawar, her Civilising Mission. He was the last person in the world she wanted to see.

Beneath the burqa she was sweating, and it was impossible to wipe the perspiration from her forehead. Back on the broad avenue she saw a woman in the bright clothes of a nomad call out to a man with a wide-brimmed basket on his head who squatted down and allowed her to pluck out the most appealing melons. A man walked along the pavement with a large cone of cloth beneath his arm; from the tapered base of the cone, green and blue iridescence emerged; from the wide mouth three beaked heads peered out. A hat of melons, a bouquet of peacocks. In another time she would have viewed these sights with delight at their Oriental colour. But the melon-seller was standing beneath the burnt remnants of a Union Jack; the peacock carrier was walking towards Kabuli Gate through which the armoured cars and troops had rushed in. This was the world she was now in. Or perhaps she’d been here all along, unseeing.

She looked down to the end of the street and there was Najeeb Gul’s brother, arms crossed, facing the gate leading into a police station.

Until the middle of the previous century river channels ran into the heart of Peshawar, willows and mulberry trees growing along their banks. Everywhere, headiness and shade, grown men of many nations cramming sweet purple fruit into their mouths as they walked along the Street of Storytellers. Now there was a masonry canal, carrying sewage and drain water, where the channels had once flowed. Why sigh over lost mulberries instead of giving thanks to the engineers who saved the city from floodwaters? said Qayyum and Najeeb threw his hands in the air in exasperation. Lala, why can’t you see that the past is beautiful?

Qayyum took a deep breath as he saw a man in khaddar walk out of the police station and come towards the gate. The past was not the beautiful place in which he still had a brother, he could not accept that. Any moment now Najeeb would be released from his cell, any moment now. But the Congresswalla merely took something out of the car parked inside the station grounds and turned and walked back in.