A God in Every Stone (37 page)

– Now I look like a Khudai Khidmatgar too.

There is no response beyond more weeping. Not a sorrowful weeping but a jagged little-girl-who-lost-her-toys weeping. Shrugging, Diwa picks up a glass bottle filled with water and drinks, holding the mouth of the bottle a few feet away from her face. It makes her feel a sense of kinship with the men below.

– Where is my brother? Diwa asks.

– I don’t know. I couldn’t find him.

– How did you get back here?

– The soldiers let me through. They said women shouldn’t be out there.

Zarina lies back, one hand covering her face which is splotchy with dye and emotion. She is clearly in need of some comfort, but Diwa is too annoyed at the manner in which her sister-in-law pulled her away from the men, as though she were a child. It’s clear, she is the heroic one, the water carrier in battle, and Zarina is just a frightened girl. The three-year age gap between them seems to have reversed, and widened.

– Everyone out there could see you, Diwa. So why didn’t your brother come to stand beneath the balcony and shout at you to go inside?

– Why should he? I was helping. Couldn’t you see that?

– I could see you. So could all the soldiers with guns.

She reaches out for the glass bottle in Diwa’s hand and presses her forehead against it.

– I thought I saw him. Your brother. I was standing under the watch-shop awning and one of the men who had been wounded, they carried him there, into the shade, trying to stop the bleeding. I couldn’t see his face at first, but I saw blood everywhere, and I saw his sleeve with a long tear through it. Just like that kameez your brother won’t throw away because he was wearing it the day I walked into your house for the first time.

She rocks herself back and forth silently, and once more it is Diwa who is the child, knowing that she is watching both the shining promise and the dark pain of adulthood, enmeshed. It takes a moment to realise what Zarina has just told her.

– Was he badly hurt? The man with the torn sleeve?

A tiny shrug. A shrug which says, It wasn’t your brother, so what I felt was relief.

– There was a lot of blood, Zarina says.

– Did he say anything? Was he in a lot of pain?

– Why are you so interested? What’s this?

Zarina lifts up the sleeve of the frock-coat, catches a whiff of something which makes her bend more closely towards the fabric. She has no sooner found the bullet hole than she sees the bullet lying on the bedcover.

– Diwa?

Diwa pulls the frock-coat into her own arms, says, Tell me about the injured man.

Zarina stands up, bullet in hand, and walks across to the shattered mirror. She places the bullet against the dark circle and it slides in.

– Where were you when this happened? Whose coat is this?

– Tell me about the injured man.

– Whose coat is this?

– Tell me about the injured man.

– What is there to tell? He was wounded, he was in pain. Probably delirious. He kept shouting, My turban, my turban.

– What about his turban?

– How should I know? He wasn’t wearing one. Whose coat is this? Where were you when this bullet came in?

Diwa puts her hands to her ears and turns away. She has never before noticed how tiny this room is, how oppressive its dark walls. His turban? She has no sooner thought it than she recalls how carefully he pulled the kameez over his head, with what precision. And then the hands clasped to the turban as he fell.

She must act quickly, before Zarina can stop her, or else she could be here for hours, stuck with this cowering, shrill version of her commanding sister-in-law. Before she can give herself time to reconsider, she is on the balcony railing, calling out to the startled men below.

– Catch!

For a long terrifying moment she falls. Then she is in the arms of men, and it is all too brief before they set her on her feet and urge her to go back. She hears Zarina’s voice calling to her from the balcony, but she knows this new version of her sister-in-law won’t follow. She pushes through the crowd. A man puts his hand on her shoulder to stop her – it’s the first of the men into whose mouths she sent a rope of water, the one with the strong hands – and she roars at him, a sound which might have words in it but she’s not sure it does. His hands spring away from her as though she’s a flame. She barrels her way through the crowd, feeling herself on fire, no one must stop her, no one must even try. The men can feel it radiating off her, they step out of her way, some of them saying things she can’t hear because the roaring of the fire is in her ears.

Then she’s beneath the watch-shop awning, and he’s there. Najeeb Gul. Standing on a crate, looking around as if searching for someone or something in the crowd. There’s blood everywhere – seeping through the bandage on his head, staining his clothes. When he sees her, he steps off the crate, grimacing in pain. His feet have barely touched the ground when he almost falls over and has to loop an arm around a slim tree trunk for support.

– How bad is it?

– Nothing like it looks. A brick hit my head, and I fell over onto a bayonet. The soldier looked more surprised than me. Don’t worry, please, it’s just a flesh wound.

– What was beneath the turban?

– It doesn’t matter now.

Then he says the words which she’s been hearing for so many hours she’s stopped hearing them:
Inqilaab Zindabad
.

When she stood on the roof those words meant nothing to her. They belonged to that part of her brother’s life in which he turned most tedious. But down here, amidst the musk and thrum of a suspended battle, everyone waiting for a starting gun, she finds herself moved to emotions she’s never known before. She sees herself unwinding Najeeb Gul’s bloodied bandage and waving it like a flag, joining in the cry of
Inqilaab Zindabad
. But first she wants to know what was beneath the turban.

– Where is it? The turban?

Najeeb Gul smiles. He says, Now we have to get married.

– What?

– Think of the story we’ll tell our children. When they brought me here I saw you on that balcony, dispensing water onto the parched battlefield. There was a light shining from you, I swear it.

She feels herself blush. She doesn’t know if he’s mad, half-delirious with pain or simply as struck as she is by the day’s sense of possibility. She might agree to anything right now. She might agree to step onto a train with a man who she knows only by the scent of his clothes, the muscles of his back and the fact that he works in the same place her brothers go on school excursions. She might find herself in London with him, wearing his turban on her head. Because in London, she has heard, fashionable women wear turbans.

– When he pulled the bayonet out I fell. The turban rolled off my head.

– Where did you fall?

– Near the armoured car. It rolled beneath the wheel, just past where my arm could reach. The turban doesn’t matter now. Stay here. Tell me your name.

But the fire is too much inside her. She tells him her name and lightly touches his wrist – it’s some kind of promise, she feels – and rejoins the crowd. Moving forward gets harder as she nears the front. The men here are on fire themselves, and don’t want to yield an inch of ground. But she keeps insisting she has a message for someone, it’s important, she has to deliver it in person, and they let her go either because she’s convincing or because their attention is elsewhere or because they see they’ll physically have to carry her away and no man wants to be the one to lay a hand on her.

She understands so little of what’s going on here. It has been an age since the bullets stopped, but everyone is still here, waiting. The man who was standing on the fire-truck has gone now, and now that she’s near the front she hears an English voice say, This is your last chance. Disperse. A Peshawari voice replies, with exquisite courtesy, After you.

She can see nothing past the shoulders of the men in front of her. Then, amazingly, a space opens up and she sees it: the long-tailed turban, resting against the wheel of the foremost armoured car. She pushes her way through the tiny space, and steps out into the middle ground between her people and the English, a space wider than any valley, wider than the sky. The startled eyes of men turn to her, voices of different accents and different languages tell her to retreat, in a tone which makes it clear she is nothing but disruption. She is amazed by her own fearlessness. She darts forward, picks up the turban and places it on her head. It’s a little loose, but only a little. As she pushes it down onto her skull her palms encounter some kind of band between the fabric and the hard cap. Very slowly – head up, eyes meeting the eyes of an Indian soldier with his gun trained on her – she steps back into the battalion of Peshawari men. One of the men, his beard white, pats her shoulder.

– I’m sorry for your loss. But go now. Quickly.

He thinks mourning has propelled her here, the turban a memento of a fallen brother or father. Or husband, if she appears old enough for a husband.

The men are content to step aside and let her through now that she’s retreating. As she approaches the watch shop she sees that Najeeb Gul is moving towards her, his eyes on her turban, then on her face, his expression telling her she is a miracle. Diwa runs towards him. So full of elation she doesn’t understand the cracking noises, the screams, the sharp pain in her spine; there is only time to wonder if Najeeb Gul’s arms are reaching for her or the object on her head as he, too, stumbles and falls.

23–25 April 1930

Standing on the balcony between shards of earthenware Zarina watches Diwa charge through the crowd, straight towards the wounded man. The sun catches the mirrorwork on her sleeves, light leaps up from her arms. The man speaks to her and points, she nods in acceptance and, too far away to hear Zarina's loud cries, pushes her way to the space between the troops and protestors. If Zarina tries to follow her onto the street she'll lose sight of her just as she lost sight of her husband earlier in the day when she left the rooftop to call him back home. So there is nothing to do but watch as Diwa picks up a fallen turban – it has to be the one the wounded man was calling out for earlier – places it on her head and disappears back into the crowd. For a few seconds Zarina loses her. Machine-gun fire rips the air; sprays of light; there she is, near the watch-shop awning, there she is.

Did she trip? Did someone pull her down below the line of fire? Did she veer away in the time it took Zarina to blink? The street is in chaos, a chessboard overturned. Some men run towards the side alleys, some fall, some move towards the bullets to help their fallen brothers. Diwa! She draws the name out from deep in her belly, but even so her voice is a thread falling limply onto the street where panic itself is a sound. She is barefoot, but there is no question of taking the time to find her shoes before running down the stairs and out into the alley, through which soldiers are chasing Peshawari men. The ground is hot, sticky; the men run past her as if she isn't there. She rounds the corner onto the Street of Storytellers where the gunfire is so loud it's as if each bullet is being fired into her ear. And the smell! Fresh blood, and hours-old blood, and something else, more rank – men, terrified, have been losing control of their bodies. The flies are thick, fearless.

So quickly, this end of the street is almost empty. The armoured cars are still in place, and troops guard Kabuli Gate but most of the noise of running feet and guns now comes from the alleyways and in the direction of Hastings Memorial. A man runs past, tries to pull her along, but she shakes him off. The ground is unpaired shoes, and men, dead and wounded, and near the watch shop a long-tailed white turban soaking in fresh blood. She runs to pick it up, touches the bloodied fabric and brings her hand to her nose. If it is Diwa's some part of her will know it; how is it possible she can't tell Diwa's blood from a stranger's? But it is only blood, it could be anyone's. There's a sound behind her and she turns to see a man in a red shirt, something strange about his posture which she doesn't understand until she sees the tip of the bayonet protruding from his back. He falls backwards and an English soldier pulls his bayonet clear of the body, blood thickening the blade. Someone else grabs her arm and this time she doesn't resist as a man wearing khaddar pulls her along with him, into an alley.

A doorway opens, women's hands pull her in to safety. My sister, she says, and tries to walk back out, but they stop her, hold her with force until she stops struggling. There is nothing you can do, they say.

One of them will die. This sentence is a thought she can't unthink. Her husband, her sister. One of them will die. She finds an unoccupied corner of the room and sits pressed against the walls, her head in her hand. Outside the bullets don't stop.

Three years ago on a day when she thought she fully understood terror, Zarina walked unrecognised down the street on which she had grown up, her body hunched over so her height wouldn't give her away. Her destination was the carpet-seller's house which overlooked the Street of Storytellers. Entering the house, throwing off her burqa, she said the words her late mother had trained her to say when the time came to be married to a murderer in repayment for her father's death: I come seeking the protection of your house which can only be given to me through marriage. The carpet-seller knew immediately who she was and she understood then that he and her mother had agreed long ago that she would come here and invoke Pashtunwali, allowing him to become responsible for her life.