Текст книги "A God in Every Stone"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

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It was true, all the troops had withdrawn from the Walled City, but the cry of ‘Peshawar has fallen’ which had sent everyone at the Club into such a panic the previous night seemed ridiculous as she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.

Qayyum had been standing outside the station ever since the Army withdrew the previous night, waiting for the policemen who had barricaded themselves inside to come out. For the first couple of hours he rattled the locked gate at regular intervals before it occurred to him that it would only terrify the policemen further. Through the night men he knew from Congress or Khilafat or the Khudai Khidmatgar urged him to join them in taking over policing duties for the city – there was a rumour the British had sent word to trans-border raiders to attack the Walled City so that the Peshawaris would beg the Army to return and save them – but he only said, I’ll join you when my brother comes out, and they left him alone. An hour or more ago a delegation of Congress and Khilafat men had arrived at the police-thana. One of them scaled the walls, and opened the gate from inside, picking the lock with ease.

– No, stay here, the lawyer Abdul Hakim who was part of the delegation had said. If your brother is there we’ll get him out.

The scent of melons caught Qayyum by surprise – it was a fruit-seller walking past – and he wished he were back in the orchards where he understood the world.

– Mr Gul?

He looked round, startled to hear an Englishwoman’s voice, and startled further to find it coming from beneath a burqa. The voice identified itself as Miss Spencer, and he gestured sharply to her to keep her voice down. A little distance away two men were leaning against a tree, reading the newspaper Sarhad which had published a list of over a hundred names of the dead this morning.

– Please go back to the Cantonment.

– I’m more sorry than I can say about what happened here.

– You don’t know what happened here.

The door to the thana opened again and this time the entire Congress and Khilafat delegation came out, and behind them men who Qayyum hadn’t seen go in – the prisoners, in khaddar and red shirts, so great a number of men it was impossible to make out each face. They opened the prison gates and stepped into the street and a great roar went up around the Walled City: Inqilaab Zindabad!

– Najeeb! Qayyum shouted over the roar. Najeeb!

A hand on his shoulder, he spun, his heart so light with relief it might fly out of his chest. But it was Abdul Hakim, shaking his head.

– I’m sorry, the lawyer said. I’m so sorry, he’s not there.

The prisoners streamed past him, embracing men on the street. Inqilaab Zindabad! Qayyum held out his arm to steady himself against something and what he touched was cloth, a shoulder beneath which didn’t flinch.

– Najeeb? the Englishwoman said, her voice carrying barely any sound. Please, not the lorries?

– No, Qayyum said, no. There was no one in a frock-coat. Someone would have seen him in his frock-coat.

The sentence gave him some strength and he repeated it, removing his hand from the woman’s shoulder.

– Of course, she said. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.

– You know about the lorries?

– Yes. But, Najeeb. Where is Najeeb?

– Do you know where the lorries went? Where they took the bodies?

– No. If I did I’d say so, of course I would. That poor woman, I can’t imagine what it must be like. Where is Najeeb?

– Which poor woman?

– There was a woman at the Museum yesterday. You must have seen her when she came in. She said her sister-in-law had been taken away in a lorry.

Now he remembered the figure with her head covered, the height of her.

– Did she have green eyes? he said.

– Yes. You know her?

– Why did she come to the Museum? Her sister-in-law had just died. The gates of the Walled City were closed. Why, how would she be at the Museum?

– I don’t know.

He looked down the Street of Storytellers towards the balcony on which deer chased each other between borders of roses. Without a word to each other both he and the Englishwoman in a burqa started to walk towards it.

It was impossible to keep pace with the Pathan without walking like an Englishwoman. Viv allowed him to stride ahead of her, surprised when he stopped near the carpet-seller’s door to wait for her.

– I can’t go in and ask to see a woman, he explained, knocking on the door. A young servant boy answered and said the family wasn’t back from Kohat yet, all mourners were being asked to come back the next day when they’d all be here. They aren’t all in Kohat, Mr Gul said, and the boy replied that his sahib had gone to Shahji-ki-Dheri.

– Shahji-ki-Dheri?

The boy’s expression grew alarmed at the sound of Viv’s accent, but he answered all the same.

– Yes, he’s gone there for a grave. Even if there isn’t a body there should be a grave.

He held up his fist which was wrapped in a gauzy blue dupatta, a faint scent of coconut oil rising off it, his eyes filling with tears.

What have we done here?

Mr Gul was looking at her and she knew she had to be the one to ask for the green-eyed woman.

– Tell your begum-sahib I’m the Englishwoman she spoke to about the lorries.

– Come with me, the boy responded. Come upstairs.

They followed him into an enclosed courtyard of coloured glass windows and delicate lattice woodwork, and from there up one of the corner stairways, and into a cavernous room she’d been in years earlier as a customer. The boy opened the shutters, and left the room. Along the length of one wall rolled-up carpets were arranged by height like schoolchildren. She remembered the kindly, bearded carpet-seller showing her a rug which had seemed no more than ordinary. I don’t think that’s quite what I had in mind, she’d said. He’d smiled as if he had wanted such a response and with a single flick of his wrist, as though turning the page of an illuminated manuscript, flipped over the rug to reveal sharply delineated arabesques of reds and blues, deep as blood and twilight. Viv’s delight was as much an appreciation of the salesmanship as the rug itself. Now the finely knotted arabesques were laid out in her study in Bloomsbury.

– Do you want to take the burqa off?

– Yes.

Mr Gul closed the shutters, and stood with his back to her while she removed the burqa and smoothed down her dress.

– All right, she said, and he walked away from the shutters and switched on a Tiffany lamp. A dragonfly lit up the gloom and, genie-like, a voice emerged from the lamp:

– What do you want?

Qayyum moved away from the door which had opened just feet away from him, almost tripping on a raised crease in the carpet. His imagination had claimed the woman so entirely, exaggerating the greenness of her eyes, the angle of her cheekbones, that she seemed reduced, disappointing. It was the Englishwoman she was addressing, not him.

– I’m sorry, the Englishwoman said, in English. Then, in Pashto: Forgive me, I can’t find out where the lorries are. They won’t tell me. But there were lorries, I know that for certain. A man named Caroe gave the orders.

– Why have you come here? Do you think I need you telling me what I already know to make it true? If you don’t know where she is, get out. I don’t need an Englishwoman coming in here with her ‘forgive me’s. What forgiveness do you deserve?

All the rage of the Walled City in her voice, and all the grief of a single heart breaking. My life would be better if I knew you – the thought was entirely out of place, and he hoped his face didn’t look as flushed as it felt when he cleared his throat so she would know he was there.

– We were also involved in what happened. My comrades, my brothers, the men of the Walled City.

– The Municipal Commissioners. I know. Why do you keep telling me things I know? Where is Diwa? There is no other question in the world.

He couldn’t look at her. Not because she was uncovered, not because desire might strike him, not because another man might see him looking where he should not. He just couldn’t look at her. And the Englishwoman across the room, he was sure she couldn’t look either.

– Take this.

He felt something thrust at his chest. When he looked up and placed his arms out to take it he saw it was the blanket she’d been holding under her arm. Without explanation she walked through the door and he heard a key turn in the lock on the other side.

Miss Spencer walked across to him. What is it? Just a blanket, he answered, his voice catching. The Englishwoman placed her hands on the upper layer of the folded-over cloth, took hold of its corners, her knuckles grazing Qayyum’s shirt, and stepped back, unfolding the dark fabric. Between her arms and his a frock-coat stretched out, prone, lamplight shining through the bullet-shaped hole in Najeeb’s chest.

On the Street of Storytellers

23 April 1930

Najeeb Gul imprints his hands with the rose carvings on the wooden door, his fingers catching in the deep whorls of a petal, and breathes in the intensity of attar. The rose-scent of springtime Peshawar – could any other city possess a season of such headiness? In England, he knows, the season of choice is autumn with its mists and mellow fruitfulness. ‘Mellow’. Only an Englishman would offer up such an adjective as a delight. It speaks to their subtlety of character. He steps back, allowing himself to feel pride at the ornately carved door, paid for with his salary from the Museum, which signals prosperity. If only his parents had lived to see it.

He pats his head, feels beneath the yards of cloth for the silver band. The previous night he dreamed he was standing on a train platform, and as the train pulled in and a carriage door opened to allow out the only passenger he untied his turban only to realise he’d wound it around nothing more than the ordinary hard cap. He sets off along the alley in large strides, laughing at the cobbler Hari Das’ cry of Viceroy Najeeb! aware how impressive he looks in his long-tailed turban, gleaming white shalwar and the black frock-coat which is the pride of his wardrobe. At the train station she’ll see him, she’ll smile and take his arm and they’ll walk together the short distance to the Museum – and there, in the Hall of Statues, between the two standing Buddhas, he’ll place the end of the turban cloth in her hand and he’ll spin. Round and round like a dervish, one arm bent at the elbow, palm forward, fingers spread apart. The cloth unravelling from the turban. A blur, a circlet! Miss Spencer’s laughter, her delight, her gratitude.

Through the alleys he goes, through one bazaar and then the other. Everything silent and bolted, so it is as though he is looking at a half-finished sketch of his city. Everything static, except for him. Oh, and a large red butterfly drifting lazily through the wafting stench of a caravan of camels.

He is grateful that the clutter of the present is largely absent so that nothing obstructs his view of the Old City walls and arched gateways, the ancient hills and mountains. What he most loves in Peshawar is the proximity of the past. All around the broken bowl of the Peshawar Valley his glance knows how to burn away time. So in a single day he might encounter the Chinese monk Fa-Hien throwing flowers into the Buddha’s alms bowl at Gor Khatri while recalling the eight elephants who with their united strength could not drag the alms-bowl away from the monastery; the Kushan king Kanishka laying the foundation for the Great Stupa which the Buddha had prophesied he would build; the Mughal Emperor Babar, seated on the back of an elephant, hunting rhinos in the swampy marshland where later his descendants would create gardens; the Sikh maharaja Ranjit Singh standing on the heights of Bala Hisar Fort, surveying the city below through his one eye about which his foreign minister wrote, The Maharaja is like the sun and the sun has only one eye. The splendour and luminosity of his single eye is so much that I have never dared to look at his other eye; and Scylax. Sometimes, time braids and there goes Babar’s spear, missing a rhino and wounding Nearchus who falls at the feet of a Gandharan sculptor carving a stupa with Atlas at its base holding up the elevated figure of the Buddha which Marco Polo sketches on a leaf stolen out of his hand by Scylax and buried deep in the ground by an unnamed heroine to protect it from the marauding White Huns.

The weight on his head grows heavier. There is a single irritation brought about by the protest strike – it denies him the chance to bring Miss Spencer from the train station straight to the Street of Storytellers where ‘Darius and the Betrayal of Scylax’ is now a familiar and well-loved tale. But perhaps that isn’t such a terrible thing after all; the last time he’d heard it told Ashfaq the Storyteller had added in extra verses to capture the new mood of the times:

On Caria’s streets Scylax cursed the Persians on parade

But a crown of silver and —! He gave them a country to invade.

In his dreams Darius throws that crown like a disc through the air,

It shears through Heraclides’ neck while his lips part in prayer.

Does Scylax dream of Carian seas or of Persian fountains?

No, in every dream he dreams he’s surrounded by our mountains.

Which man of Peshawar won’t understand those dreams?

Our land’s beauty, its perfume, makes poets write reams.

We stand here with open arms to embrace you as a guest

But instead you try to enslave us, our leaders to arrest.

Qayyum denied he’d told the Storyteller to recite those couplets but Najeeb remains unconvinced. Each day his brother moves deeper into a world in which everything touched by the British is tainted, even Peshawar’s ancient history.

A commotion heads towards Najeeb in the form of several men wearing the red-brown shirts of Ghaffar Khan’s unarmed army. Najeeb sometimes pretends to himself that his disdain for the Khudai Khidmatgar is primarily an urban Peshawari’s response to everything that comes from the rural surroundings, including political movements, but in truth he knows he is the adoring younger brother jealous of those to whom the object of his hero-worship has turned his attention.

– Inqilaab Zindabad!

At the sound of the Khudai Khidmatgar boys’ cry a window shutter opens and an old woman darts her head out like a cuckoo in an English clock.

– What now? What’s happening?

– The English have locked up our leaders at the Kabuli Gate thana. Send your sons to join the protest.

Najeeb reconsiders his route to the train station. There is a new kind of shouting. A man comes running into the alley.

– They’re killing us.

One of the red-shirted boys catches the man by the shoulder. Najeeb tells himself the man is speaking in metaphor, but he knows this isn’t true. Something in his expression has been stripped away or pasted on – it isn’t clear which, but Najeeb knows the man, has seen him hundreds of times selling sweetmeats in the bazaar, and yet he almost didn’t recognise him.

Despite his crazed air, when the man speaks he is lucid: armoured cars drove into the crowd of party workers accompanying the leaders who had presented themselves at the jail, as promised, for arrest, and there are bodies along the Street of Storytellers, how many dead, how many wounded it’s hard to say. He has barely finished speaking when Najeeb takes off, running.

He runs into a tumult. Everyone in the Walled City seems to have heard what has happened, dozens making their way to the Street of Storytellers; people standing on roofs and leaning from balconies catching rumours out of air and tossing them down into the alley. A car on fire. An Englishman knocked down with a stone. A horse, something about a horse. An Englishman run over by a horse. No, an Englishman run over by a motorcycle. No, an Englishman on a motorcycle run over by a horse. No, a horse which refused to fight killed by an Englishman. An armoured car reversing into – a horse? An Englishman? A motorcycle? A gun. A stone. An unarmed crowd.

Then gunfire. Not one bullet, or two, but a machine-gun staccato. Where there were people standing on rooftops now there is sky. Through sheer will Najeeb forces past the paralysing terror and picks up speed.

The noise as he approaches the Street of Storytellers is too dense to separate into its components. A door opens and a woman in a bright green kameez with eyes to match steps out. He calls to her to return inside to safety, but she ignores him and continues forward. He catches the scent of walnuts and plums. The chaddar covering her head is streaked with the red-brown of the Khudai Khidmatgar. It’s still wet with dye, and her face has red-brown smears where the fabric clings to her skin. A knife-blade flashes in her hand before she disappears around the corner.

Sounds from above draw his attention and he sees people moving about on a roof – the carpet-seller’s roof, which commands a clear view of the Street of Storytellers. The woman with the dyed face failed to securely close the door to the house, and Najeeb hesitates only a moment before entering and making rapid progress up the stairs and through the topmost door. There are no men, only women and children up here. The women are standing on the lip of the roof and looking over the matting to the street below, the children sitting on the broad partition wall which divides this roof from the one next door. The sight of the uncovered women makes him hesitate until one, in a blue kameez with mirrorwork on its sleeves and a braid reaching down to the dip of her back, turns to look at him and then shrugs as if to say, Why not? The walnut-plum scent is strong. He passes the bucket from which it emanates. Next to it a clothes line draped with men’s garments dyed red-brown. Sun strikes a dyed shirt – a heart explodes.

He walks to one corner of the roof, maintaining distance from the women; other than the one with the braid they either haven’t noticed him or are ignoring him.

Below, a horse lies dead in the street, its mane drenched in blood. An armoured car is on fire, and something else, a man, is that a man beside the armoured car, his flesh charred. More armoured cars block the exit through Kabuli Gate. A crowd of hundreds of Peshawaris fills the Street of Storytellers. Soldiers with bayonets at the ready face them. In between, the dead. One of the dead starts to crawl. A group of men in khaddar clothes move forward and lift him off the ground. The crowd parts to let them through and a rapid silence races through the street so that his cry can be heard all the way up to the rooftops.

– Inqilaab Zindabad!

The crowd takes up the demand for revolution. They move forward to gather up the dead. But now the English officers are shouting something and the soldiers with bayonets advance, not only forward but also in an encircling movement to place themselves at the mouths of the alleys leading into the Street of Storytellers. He’ll have to find some other route in, if in is where he chooses to go.

Najeeb Gul looks over the boundary of the Walled City. A fire engine speeds towards Kabuli Gate, but everything else is at peace in the Cantonment and beyond, all the way to the distant hills. Lush fields and fruit trees and wide streets and English architecture. A man walking a dog. Someone meandering through the grounds of the Museum. At the train station, the most anxious or eager of those awaiting the train from Karachi have already arrived on the platform. He looks around the jigsaw of roofs and sees how he can leap his way onto and across the City walls. To the train station. Vivian Rose Spencer.

The escape path becomes clear in order for him to reject it. Where is Qayyum? He forces himself to look down among the dead. None of the bodies are familiar, but what does that mean? A dead Qayyum could never look familiar. If only the shadow-fearing version of his brother which had returned from France had left some residue in Qayyum’s character, instead of being replaced by a man who simply chose another army, another leader to march behind, this time without a gun to protect him.

The Peshawaris in the street are passing wooden planks and boxes over their heads to the men at the front of the crowd. No, not a crowd – they are a platoon, a battalion, with a battle cry: Inqilaab Zindabad. Najeeb wants to shout at them. They are unarmed, hemmed in. He has never seen anything so ridiculous. There is a low table next to him, with a mirror and razor and mug of water on it. The razor gleams with possibility. Down on the street, the men in the front rows hold up the planks and boxes like shields and start to advance. Bayonets splinter the wood, but the distraction is sufficient for the men just behind the shield-bearers to lift up the wounded and pass them back through the crowd.

There’s Qayyum. Near the front of the action, of course. A soldier with a bayonet rushes him. Najeeb tastes his own heart. Qayyum holds up a plank; the bayonet catches in it. Qayyum tugs and the bayonet leaps out of the soldier’s grip, its tip firmly embedded in the plank. Qayyum’s strong arms can rip the bayonet from wood, turn it round to pierce the soldier’s belly in a second. But he merely tosses it at the soldier’s feet – wood and bayonet – and moves back into the unarmed platoon which closes around him and cuts him off from Najeeb’s sight. Najeeb understands that in his brother’s mind he has just made defeat impossible. He doesn’t care about victory or defeat – he wants Qayyum alive.

One of the girls on the roof throws a stone. The concentration on her face is tremendous but the stone makes it no further than the shop awning beneath. One of the women pats her head with pride but points out that she’s more likely to hit a Pashtun than an Englishman at this distance; taking another stone the woman slings it, low and fast, towards the troops. The street in front of the soldiers is now littered with stones, though Najeeb sees only one English soldier being helped away, blood pouring from the side of his face.

The girl with the long braid leaves the cluster of spectators and walks past the clothes line, her hand trailing along the hanging clothes as though they are in an entirely different moment, one which allows for a woman to run her fingers along a man’s trouser without either disturbing her modesty or hiding her intentions. She yanks at a kameez which tumbles off the line. And then she is walking towards him, her gaze distant. As she passes by him she slings the kameez over his shoulder. She’s trying to shame him into joining the men who face down bayonets, of course, but he’s just grateful to be able to rid himself of the heavy black frock-coat which has trapped the late morning sun. The kameez is much too large for him, which is useful for pulling it over his neck without disturbing his turban. Its cool dampness pleasing to his skin. He knows exactly the area of fabric near the shoulder which was bunched in her fist. Stepping away from the discarded frock-coat pooled at his feet, he knows it will give him a reason to return. Knows also that while everyone else was looking down at the Street of Storytellers the woman whose handprint is on his shoulder watched him unbutton and shrug off the frock-coat. What did she make of him picking up the razor to cut the undershirt away from his slim body? (He allows himself to imagine the banter of early married life: I did it because I didn’t want to disturb my turban! he’ll say, and she’ll reply, Oh yes, oh really, then why arch your back and rotate your shoulder blades in that way which made every muscle surge, here and here and here?)