Текст книги "A God in Every Stone"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

The Only Question

23 April 1930

Qayyum had never known such clarity of purpose as here, on the front line, facing the soldiers with bayonets at the ready.

He had anticipated none of this when he’d woken to a hammering on his door just after dawn, and one of his neighbours from the Congress Party told him there had been arrests during the night ahead of the proposed anti-English protest strikes scheduled for the day, and people were gathering at the Congress headquarters to decide what to do next. He dressed quickly, woke up Najeeb to say he was leaving, cautioning him to look out for trouble during the day. Najeeb, barely awake, flicked his fingers in the direction of his brother’s glass eye as if it were a marble.

– Goodbye, pacifist girl.

– Goodbye, Englishman’s dog.

– Better an Englishman’s dog than an Englishman’s Indian.

But Qayyum’s thoughts were already elsewhere, and the familiar joke of his own devising echoed strangely. He wondered if there was any point warning Najeeb, once more, about the Englishwoman who was due to arrive by train that day, but the younger man had already returned to sleep, and anyway what could Qayyum say at this point.

He was en route to the Congress offices when he became caught up in the procession. Two leaders of the Congress Party, garlanded with roses, were striding towards the Street of Storytellers, with their party members and allies following behind, calling out the slogan of freedom: Inqilaab Zindabad. What’s going on, Qayyum asked a man in the khaddar uniform of the Congress Party, falling into step beside him. The man looked at Qayyum’s red shirt and belt, nodded as you would to a soldier of another battalion, and said the English had come to the Congress headquarters to arrest the men a little while earlier, but someone – and here the man raised his hands in exaggerated fashion as if to say he had no idea who would do such a thing – punctured the wheels of the lorry brought to transport their leaders to prison. Shocking, Qayyum laughed, shocking vandalism! And the Congressman, trying to look grave, nodded, and said so then the leaders told the police they would present themselves for arrest at the police-thana at Kabuli Gate – and here they all were, on their way, showing the English that you can arrest two men or ten but hundreds more will follow behind and demand liberty.

But when they arrived at the police-thana the doors were closed – the policemen thought the crowd was there to storm the station. Qayyum, tall enough to see above the heads of almost everyone else present, smiled at the unfolding spectacle: Congress leaders pleading with the police, insisting they were there to be imprisoned; policemen refusing to let them in. And the crowd, larger in size now, entirely peaceful, urging the police to arrest their leaders between cries of Inqilaab Zindabad. It would be enough to make any Englishman’s head spin. Finally, finally, the doors opened; the Congress leaders entered to great whoops of support from the men outside. Someone threw a handful of petals at them as if they were brides entering their marital home for the first time.

– That was fun.

Qayyum nodded in agreement with the Congresswalla standing next to him, when he saw the face of one of the Indian policemen behind the gates – terrified, blood-drained. Of course, every policeman must be thinking of Chauri Chaura, eight years earlier, when a clash between police and Congress volunteers during the first Non-Cooperation Movement led to the deaths of twenty-six civilians and twenty-one policemen, the policemen all burnt alive in their thana.

You live in your history, we live in ours. The thought made him tired, unwilling to join the group of Khudai Khidmatgar who were dancing in a circle near the jail door, and he had turned to walk away when he heard a sound which didn’t make sense and looked up to see armoured cars driving through Kabuli Gate.

After that the morning spooled dramatically away from anything that was predictable – accelerating cars, men crushed beneath wheels, machine guns, fire, screams of death and slogans of freedom, bullets and stones. The Street of Storytellers turned into a battleground with the troops on one side and freedom fighters on the other. One round of bullets, one round of deaths, then a pause, negotiations – first you withdraw, no, first you withdraw – and the numbers on the Street of Storytellers grew. Not just the red-shirted Khudai Khidmatgar and their Congress and Khilafat allies but other men of Peshawar who had heard what was happening and came to witness, came to cry out Inqilaab Zindabad. Soon the street was crowded. From the balconies and roofs of buildings spectators watched, some threw stones; on the ground the King’s forces – on foot, on horse, in armoured cars, all armed with rifles and bayonets and machine guns – occupied the space between Kabuli Gate and Dakhi Nalbandi. Beyond that, hundreds of Peshawaris planted their feet on the Street of Storytellers and said no, they would not retreat. If a man is to die defending a land let the land be his land, the people his people.

Hours passed; the stand-off continued. You withdraw; no, you withdraw. The men standing further back began to jostle and push. What was all this talk? Qayyum, weaponless at the front, understood that something would shift soon, something would happen. But for the moment he saw no need to stifle the unexpected love he felt for the uniformed men of the British Indian Army, seeing in each one the comrades he had lost at Vipers, and himself, too, as glimpsed through a dead eye. Earlier in the day, when the Garhwal Rifles had refused to fire on the unarmed men ranged against them he felt terror on their behalf rather than any sense of victory at knowing the strategy to shame those who would cut you down without mercy if you fought back was already beginning to work. The Sikh soldiers returned to the barracks with shoulders unslumped, necks unbowed, but Qayyum knew they would already be thinking of what would follow: court martial, perhaps a firing squad. The English would not act gently with Indian soldiers who sided with revolutionaries. No one had forgotten 1857, or even 1915.

And so, rather than enmity, it was love he felt; love and pity. Pity for the lives lost when the armoured cars charged in and the troops opened fire, pity for those Indian soldiers whose minds were enslaved, pity for the families whose hearts would shatter today. Even, a kernel of pity for the English officers. That sense of honour which the English and the Pashtun had in common, as the officers of the 40th Pathans so often reminded their men, was now a weapon wielded by one against the other. Today the officers would give orders to fire on unarmed men, and almost all the soldiers would obey – but tomorrow if asked to return here and do the same, their wills would sag. Or if not tomorrow than next month, next year.

And then, he had his only moment of fear: a girl stepped out from the lines of the Peshawari men, walked through the ranks of sepoys who stepped aside as if she were a djinn whose touch might burn them, and stopped in front of an armoured car. Everyone silenced. The girl – bare-headed, plait swinging – picked up a turban lying near the wheel of the armoured car and moved back into the crowd which parted to make space for her and then closed up again in her wake. Qayyum glanced up towards the rooftops and balconies of the Street of Storytellers. Women and children were leaning down, watching. There must be something wrong in the girl’s head – like the molasses-seller’s son who had to continually be watched so he didn’t present himself to danger as if it were a game. Whoever should have been minding the girl must have been too intent on watching the Street of Storytellers to notice her slip away. He should find her and lead her back to safety, but the press of men made it difficult to move or to know where she had disappeared.

Then the firing started, the bayonets followed. Fall back, fall back – Inqilaab Zindabad, Inqilaab Zindabad. Bullets and the screams of men, and a stench of blood. But this was nothing like Vipers, here he was fearless, here he would die if he must and he wouldn’t ask why. Yet somehow the bullets didn’t touch him though around him men fell; too many of them to lift up and carry away, and more soldiers had arrived, firing now even on those who were bearing the dead; impossible to hold ground any more. Fall back, fall back. Through the alleys, soldiers giving chase, two behind and one up ahead, all converging on Qayyum.

– I’ll rip out my own eye before you can touch me!

He bellowed the words, reaching up and prising out the glass eye with an exaggerated gesture. The soldier up ahead pressed himself against a doorway, bayonet falling from his grasp, and Qayyum held the eye up towards him as he ran past. He could hear the other soldiers stop to ask what had happened, what had the soldier seen, and he laughed as he ran, a warrior who had found his battle.

The buoyancy left him as the sound of bullets and booted feet continued to echo through the Walled City. The troops were chasing men through Peshawar as though it were an English hunt. At any moment he might hear a bugle, or step over a corpse with its lips sewn shut. He turned into a street so narrow it allowed in no light, and a man could press himself against a doorway and become shadow.

Years earlier, Qayyum’s mother had tried to find a wife for him. Everything was agreed on when the girl fell ill and suddenly died. The whispers were quick to follow – Qayyum Gul, the half-blind man, was ill-fated. Any family which gave their daughter to him would risk disaster. Enough, Qayyum told his mother. Don’t search any more. There seemed an inevitability to it; his life was already moving in the direction of politics. From the moment under the blue tarpaulin when he heard Ghaffar Khan speak of the need for Pashtuns to break their addiction to violence and revenge he knew he had found a general he could follow into any battle. When the battle was over there would be time for a wife and children – men didn’t age as women did. And until then, what he wanted with immediacy and couldn’t always deny himself was available here, on the Street of Courtesans.

Now, for the first time he’d ever known, the street was completely silent, its doorways closed, but he saw the curtains move as he walked its length, and ahead of him a door opened and a woman’s hand, flicked at the wrist, urged him to approach. The sound of booted feet, the screams of dying men drew closer as his rapid strides made up the distance between himself and sanctuary. The door closed behind him; he was in a room that he might have been in before, large enough for a bed with frilled covers, in the company of a woman with whom he might have lain upon it, though it was impossible to know; the make-up which disguised rather than enhanced the courtesan’s features was absent so she was just a tired woman past youth, a bruise beneath her eye.

The curtains, identical to those which covered the back walls of all the courtesans’ rooms, were open, and for the first time he saw that there was a doorway behind. Always viewing the women along the street as rivals he had never thought that their lives were interconnected and now he struggled to imagine what they might say to each other at the end of a working day. Did they compare? The thought made the blood rise hot to his cheeks even as he stepped past the curtains, down a hallway and into a large room crowded with men, some in Congress khaddar, two in red shirts, and a few who didn’t wear their allegiances on their sleeves. The room itself was simple, and homely – bolsters and rugs along the floor, repeating motifs of flowers painted in a strip along the wall, faded and peeling, but only slightly. Some of the men sat with their heads in their hands, or stared vacantly ahead, but most of them spoke to each other in urgent whispers which broke off when Qayyum entered the room and started up again when they recognised him as one of their own.

– We’re trying to understand why they sent in the armoured cars, a Congresswalla said as he made space for Qayyum to sit down. There’s Civil Disobedience all across India and nothing like this has happened.

Qayyum knew the answer. It lay in all those speeches by the English officers which had made him feel such pride when he was in the Army and thought there was honour in being identified as a Martial Race: Because they couldn’t believe we were unarmed; they wouldn’t believe we weren’t intent on violence.

– Quiet, idiots! They’re here!

Even the men who hadn’t heard the words of the grey-haired, hard-faced woman who rushed into the room heard the tone of it, and fell silent. Into the void where their voices had been the sound of a fist hammering on a door rushed in, and an English voice demanded entry. The grey-haired woman looked over her shoulder at the girl who had entered behind her. It was obvious by something in her that hadn’t yet been erased that she was new here. The newness gave her beauty, more than her curved kohl-lined eyes or her unpainted lips the colour of crushed rose petals. The room changed, was charged with something unpleasant, slightly dangerous, which Qayyum was as much a part of as anyone else.

The hammering on the door became more insistent and the beautiful girl walked past the men and down the hallway. Despite the whispered protest of the grey-haired woman almost half the men in the room stood up and tiptoed into the hallway so they could hear what happened when the girl opened the door and spoke in English.

– What can I do for you gentlemen?

– We need to search your premises.

– Men only enter here if they pay. Although. . so many of you? All the girls will be exhausted by the end of the day.

– We’re looking for. .

– I know what you’re looking for.

It was impossible to know what she did next; perhaps the words, their tone of power, understood even by the men in the hallway who didn’t know English, were enough; the English officer said nothing more, and before the girl had returned to the hallway the soldiers could be heard marching away. One of the men caught the girl’s sleeve as she passed by him.

– She’s not working, the grey-haired woman said sharply.

– I’ll pay double.

– Your people called for a strike. Well, we’re observing the strike here.

– Triple, then.

The grey-haired woman looked around the room at all the men.

– Triple for everyone, she said.

The men – save the one who went with the girl – returned to the seating area, and were silent now, not looking at each other. Shortly afterwards a few of the women, painted for business, entered the room and one by one men stood up and followed them into the rooms which led onto the street. Like this, over the next few minutes, more than half the men vacated the room. Qayyum, looking around at those who remained, wondered how many sought their pleasure from other men, how many stayed away from courtesans for reasons of morality or fidelity, and how many were hoping that a better option might enter the room. When the next group of women walked in their number included the one he’d been waiting for, who he visited almost exclusively because years of going to her made their relationship something more than transactional, and he smiled to see her ignore the other men and jerk her head in his direction, instructing him to follow her.

They entered her room, and he sat on the bed, watching as she turned her back to him and removed her shalwar; it was both moving and arousing, as always, this facsimile of modesty. He took off his own shalwar, folded it neatly, and placed it on the foot of the bed, hearing her familiar laugh at his military fastidiousness.

– There used to be that girl here, the English one. What happened to her?

– A knife in the heart. Some say it was an Englishman, some say it was a Pashtun. Some say it was the woman whose room was across the street from her, but it’s men who stick knives into the hearts of women who make them weak.

– Who was her father?

She had him in her hand, though he was ready before she touched him, when she answered:

– A man like you.

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?