Текст книги "A God in Every Stone"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

November 1915

Every day Qayyum waited for another messenger in the bloodstained uniform of the 40th to approach him. The first messenger had been preparation; the second would be the call to action. It was unthinkable for a lance-naik of the 40th to go to the Ottoman Empire to tell soldiers their loyalties didn’t lie with their regiment; but it was even more unthinkable for Qayyum to deny Kalam again. Every day he twisted in his snare, waiting and waiting, but by the time the days had shortened into November he came to believe that Kalam, who loved him well enough to want the power to make him suffer but too well to prolong that suffering, had chosen in the end to allow him to live his life without wrenching him in two.

It was a strange disappointment the day he reached that conclusion. So is this it, he thought, this is my life. His father had stayed home again that day – the cold that had seeped into his bones from decades of sitting outdoors in Peshawar’s winters made the onset of winter an increasing tribulation each year – and Qayyum sat at the desk with the buffalo-horn thinking, this is my inheritance, this is for ever, until the cold or the heat or the boredom kills me.

A woman sat down on the stool across from Qayyum. He wondered if she had a husband or son in the Army – in the last few months he’d lost count of the women who had come to him saying they’d heard he had been at war and would he help them in writing their letters. It wasn’t just a scribe they wanted but someone who might understand their husbands’ lives. Should I tell him his father is dead? Will it make him sad if I say I want him to come home quickly? Forgive me but please be honest; is it true that white women come into the soldiers’ barracks?

These women made him think, for the first time in a long while, of the girls who had been part of the neighbourhood games during his childhood, all of whom disappeared from view when they came to a certain age. In the first few days after their retreat some of them would send messages out with their younger sisters, such as, even with a burqa on I can still run faster than you; and sometimes a window shutter would open for a few seconds and some object of uncertain significance would fly out – a hairclip, an apple with a startled face carved onto it, a blank piece of paper balled up. But eventually all communication stopped. Now, if Qayyum were ever walking past the home of one of his childhood playmates and a figure in a burqa stepped out he wouldn’t even wonder if it was her. Even if it was, she’d be so different she might as well be another person. Boys grew into men as a sapling grows into a tree, but girls became women as a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. His sisters most of all; they were nothing but flapping wings.

But the woman who had sat down did not flap her wings, did not ask about the Army, or even tell him who the letter was for. She only wanted him to write what she dictated with the care of someone who didn’t want the letter-writer to mistranscribe a single word.

Don’t apologise for the danger you put me in by sending that message. It has been the only light in my days. When my daughter is old enough for marriage I will send her to your house for protection.

He tried to keep the curiosity away from his face, as his father was skilled at doing. It was impossible to know very much about the woman from the sound of her voice except that she was young. He asked what address he should put on the envelope and she said there was no need for that. Taking the letter, she walked away, and turned into the Street of Storytellers. The unexpected figure of an Englishwoman with a pith-helmet on her head and clothes which revealed almost her entire arms and part of her legs followed after her. Even here, even in Peshawar, there were different rules for the English. No, especially here.

How he missed Kalam who would mock him for sitting under a tree, sighing about his buffalo-horn inheritance, while an Englishwoman walked through the Walled City as if she had more right to it than any man of Peshawar.

The plum orchard looked incomplete without fruit hanging heavy from the trees. Time here didn’t move in the sluggish way of the Walled City where days moved predictably through the minor variations which separated them. Walking the length of the orchard he realised he didn’t know where he might find Kalam’s father, or which of the adjoining fields belonged to him. He shouted out a greeting but there was no response, so he cupped his hands around his mouth and called out, Kalam! knowing that a father is more likely to hear his absent son’s name than any other sound in the world.

He repeated the call, again and again, and finally a man appeared, Kalam’s angled jawline attached to an otherwise unfamiliar face.

– Why are you calling my son?

– Khan Sahib, I’m Qayyum. Kalam’s friend from the 40th. I’ve come to ask if you’ve had any news from him.

– So you’re Qayyum. Khan Sahib? You didn’t teach my son any of your manners.

The man’s mouth twisted into a smile which was also Kalam. He walked up to Qayyum and pulled him into an embrace so fierce, so passionate it could only mean one thing; Qayyum sagged against the older man who kept him arms around him, holding him upright.

Had he been here a minute, an hour? He was on the grass, a dampness from the morning’s winter rain soaking through his clothes, all the way up to his collar, or was that the tears? He held up his hand, blotting out most of the other man’s face so there was only that jawline, blurred with age. Kalam’s father sat down next to him and patted his back as if he were a child in need of comfort.

– Son, the old man said, my son.

– What happened? The English?

– An old family feud. Kalam’s cousin stuck a knife in him and left him to bleed to death.

Blood and foam around the rabbit’s mouth, its eyes wide. The sweetness of rage, here it came, flooding his veins, as Kalam’s father jabbed a finger into his side to show where the knife had entered.

– You know who it was? Who did it? Qayyum asked.

– Yes. Why?

Before I didn’t know why I was here, but now every German I kill will be the man who did this to you. Those were the last words Kalam had said in his ear before the ambulance took him away. Qayyum stood up, pulled on the low-hanging branch of the tree, and looked around. That endless night beside the stream, Kalam had spoken to him of the life that lay before each of them – one in the Walled City, one in the orchards. You’ll visit me when the air is ripe with plums and every breath you take has a sweetness to it, he’d said. Somehow, in the middle of all that horror, he had allowed Qayyum to see a gentle future: two ageing men, sitting under a tree, occasionally bringing out a faded memory of the 40th Pathans. Kalam – his cynical smile, his hopeful eyes.

– I will avenge his death.

– You’ll kill his killer?

– Yes.

– And his brothers will kill you.

– They can try.

– How many brothers do you have?

– One.

– How old is he?

– Twelve.

– When they come for you they’ll kill him too.

– It’s nothing to do with him.

– In their place, I’d cut his throat before he’s old enough to seek revenge.

Kalam’s father stood up, stretching. A man who understood the rules of the world and had long since ceased to be surprised or dismayed by them.

– Think about it for a few days.

They had buried him on the barren hillside, that boy of orchards and streams. Even in death, a deserter was a fugitive. Qayyum walked in the icy waters adjoining the plum orchard, the current pulling at his ankles.

– Ina lillahi wa inna illayhi rajiun.

We belong to Allah, and to Allah we return.

At Vipers, when the German gunners shot Afroze who chose to cry out his grief knowing the consequences rather than bear the death of a beloved in silence, a whisper burbled across the field: Ina lillahi wa inna illayhi rajiun. The men of the 40th, not all of them Muslim, whispered the words for the two dead men, and the prayer would have reached the gunners as wind on water or the sighs of ghosts. Kalam’s hand on Qayyum’s chest, muffling his heartbeat so the sound of it wouldn’t reach the Germans.

– Ina lillahi wa inna illayhi rajiun.

Hands still cupped in prayer, he bent to the stream, filled his palms with water and poured it over his head. Again and again.

– Ina lillahi wa inna illayhi rajiun.

It was all he could do that night to walk through the Walled City instead of huddled in a quiet alley with memories for company. Near home, he heard a half-cry, more terrifying in the abruptness of its ending than in its tone, and didn’t look round to see if it came from a human or animal. Even when he had two functioning eyes and a fearlessness that was almost a belief in immortality he’d known better than to make the troubles of Peshawar’s nights his own. Opening the door beside the cobbler’s shop, where a single candle illuminated Hari Das stitching a sole onto a shoe with a thick needle, he made his way up the steps. He heard the shouts when he was halfway up, and ran the last few steps, wrenching the door open at the top. At one end of the room his sisters huddled together to form a protective circle around Najeeb, while his mother ripped pages out of a book and threw fistfuls of paper at her youngest child. A scrap landed on a burning candle and the flame ran up the paper, briefly extending its reach to illuminate his father who was standing with his back pressed to a wall.

– Enough.

Qayyum put a hand on his mother’s wrist and took the book out of her hand. It was a ruled exercise book, with symbols all over the pages which included letters of the English alphabet.

– Ask your brother, go on, ask him what he’s been doing when we thought he was with the maulvi.

– Let him be. I know he goes to read in Shalimar Bagh; I told him it was all right. Leave his books alone.

– Read in Shalimar Bagh? Read in Shalimar Bagh?

She snatched the book and slapped Qayyum’s shoulder with it, the sound of the cover smacking his flesh more shocking than the force of the blow.

– Every afternoon he goes into the house of a young, unmarried Englishwoman and doesn’t come out for hours. Everyone in this neighbourhood knows it, they’ve known it for weeks. Tell him!

She gestured at her eldest daughter, who should have been at her in-laws’ house preparing dinner for the family but had obviously come here just to drip venom into their mother’s ear, and now had her arms around Najeeb as though she thought it was possible to be both bayonet and shield. She kissed Najeeb’s hair, which conveniently kept her from responding to her mother, whose gesture became one of dismissal.

– You ask Najeeb what she wants with him, his mother said to Qayyum. Go on, ask him. I’m getting nothing but lies.

– It’s not a lie! Najeeb said. Lala, please, she teaches me Classics. Explain it to our mother.

But their mother didn’t even look at Qayyum, reserving the full power of her fury for her younger son.

– What is this English word, this ‘Classics’? What is she teaching you, what have you been doing there?

Qayyum looked at his brother, who had broken out of his sister’s embrace and was picking up the pieces of paper from the floor, his jaw tightly clenched when Qayyum expected to see him crying. Qayyum kneeled on the ground beside him, and put his hand on Najeeb’s chin, tilting his face up. Soft hair was beginning to appear above his lip; why hadn’t he noticed earlier that the boy wasn’t entirely a boy any longer?

– I told you to stay away from Englishwomen.

He expected a look of betrayal, not this one of disdain.

– You don’t know anything about her.

– I don’t have to. I knew her men.

– Lala, please. You can come with me to my lessons, come and meet her and you’ll see; she isn’t like anyone else. Please don’t make me stop our lessons. Our mother will listen to you if you tell her. It doesn’t have to mean something bad when Englishwomen talk to us.

Qayyum rested his hand on his brother’s shoulder. Najeeb was in that time between boy and man, lurching from one to the other in the space of a single moment. And what would happen in one such moment if the boy looked on a young unmarried Englishwoman with a man’s eyes? What if an Englishman thought he caught the boy looking on one of his women in that way? Not even a Victoria Cross could give a Pashtun the right to deserve an Englishwoman’s attention.

– You must do what our mother says.

He stood up, and turned away so he wouldn’t have to watch Najeeb’s face as his mother told him that she would walk with him to the mosque every day after lunch, and stay there until his lessons were finished, and walk him straight home. On another day, in another time, Qayyum might have had the words, the thoughts, to be his brother’s champion, but Kalam was dead and his ghost pressed its mouth to Qayyum’s ear. Najeeb’s tears – they had started now – were those of a child who has yet to understand the world won’t shape itself to his will.

When they sat down to eat, Najeeb didn’t take his accustomed position but sat on his brother’s right-hand side where Qayyum couldn’t see him.

The nights had turned too cold for sleeping outdoors, but Najeeb had closed the door to the room they shared and barricaded it with something – books, probably. He was at the age of grand gestures, when every emotion felt perpetual. I will always hate you, he had said, a statement not of anger but anguish.

Qayyum drew his limbs close to his torso, seeking the warmth of his own body beneath the blanket. The stars were thick in the sky, cold and alone, each one of them. Kalam, on the bare hillside, bleeding to death, would have found no comfort there. Did justice demand the same for Kalam’s killer? Lure him to a lonely spot, push a blade deep into his flesh, and leave him to that terror, that overwhelming terror

– Allah

Pushing the blankets aside, he tumbled onto the ground, prostrating himself, forehead smacking brick. And if they were to come for him and find Najeeb instead and stitch his lips together and stop his breath

– Allah

And if it was him they found, only him, he should be prepared for it, he should be willing to risk anything to avenge Kalam’s death but the stars, so cold, were beautiful and the night air cut him like life itself and he wanted to stay, here, in this world for ever, in the Valley which was sometimes rose and sometimes plum and always varied, infinite. He had never touched a woman in love or watched a tree grow where he had planted it or followed a stream all the way across a valley and up the mountain to the borders of snow. How could he return to a world of blood; how could he refuse Kalam’s ghost

– Allah Allah Allah

Najeeb wouldn’t allow Qayyum to help him with the books, not even when getting into the Victoria. He sat in the carriage, his arms wrapped around them, cheek resting on the top of the pile. As if the scent, the touch of them was something to embrace. Five books, three with hard covers, two bound in leather. One with gilt-edged pages. What world had his brother entered? Classics, Najeeb had said to him in English, as if it was a word he should know.

This morning, while Najeeb was at school, Qayyum had entered the room they shared. It hadn’t been difficult to isolate Najeeb’s schoolbooks from the far more expensive ones given to him by the Englishwoman. There was the one with English on one half of the page, and on the other half letters which looked like English letters but with triangles and pitchforks and other strange symbols scattered between the recognisable ‘a’ and ‘o’. The only English letters Qayyum knew were the ones in LANCE-NAIK QAYYUM GUL. He held a corner of a creamy, gilt-edged page between thumb and forefinger. What had Najeeb been doing in the world of the English who knew so well how to make you feel that you were never so honoured as when they were the ones to honour you?

The Victoria entered the Cantonment, turned into a residential street where there was space enough for each home to sprawl across the ground instead of climbing upwards. Again he felt it, the old shame learned in France. The haphazard constructions of the Walled City a failing, a reason to sneer. He looked at his brother and wondered if any of this shame lived in him too; he could see no sign of it. Four years ago when Qayyum left to join the 40th he had thought of momentum as something he would carry with him out of Peshawar, leaving stasis behind. No one in his family would age, no one fall sick, no one acquire new habits or loves in his absence. He would be the one to come back and require rediscovering, relearning, by all around him. He hadn’t entirely let go of that notion, until now.

– What’s her name, this Englishwoman?

– I don’t want to talk to you about her.

– There are things you don’t understand.

– I understand Greek!

Qayyum pushed gently at his brother’s shoulder, trying to bring the laughter out of him, but Najeeb only angled his body away. Qayyum was still trying to decide if he should deliver a lecture on respecting your elders no matter what the circumstances when the Victoria stopped outside a house smaller in size than those around it, made of brick fronted by climbing plants. The brothers stepped down, and remained standing on the pavement as the horse cantered away; when it turned the corner, silence such as could only exist in an English world remained.

– Are you going to come in with me?

– I’ll stay here. But don’t go in. Remain where you can be seen.

– No one’s looking.

– If no one was looking no one would know that you visit her every afternoon. Stand outside, give her the books, walk away.

– I don’t want you looking at her when she comes out.

– Why not?

– You’ll do it in a way I won’t like.

– When you speak like that I know it’s right to say you can’t see her any more.

But he turned his back to the house all the same, and heard his brother take a deep breath and walk up the pathway. The door opened, a low murmur, a woman’s voice rose and fell. And then Najeeb was striding past him at a furious pace. Qayyum had to run to catch up, and when he caught his brother’s elbow and swung him round he saw a boy’s sorrow, a heartbreaking thing.

– Look Najeeb, I received my pension today. Have you ever eaten ice cream? It’s English kulfi. I’ve heard there’s a shop in the Cantonment which sells it. Let’s find it.

– I’m going to the Museum.

– I’ll come with you.

– You won’t understand anything there.

If he had yelled it out, Qayyum would have cuffed him, and taken him by the hand to find the ice cream which would return sweetness to his temperament. But he said it flatly, as if pronouncing a thought he’d long held to be true. Qayyum let go of his brother, and Najeeb walked on without looking back, pausing only to rub his elbow against a boundary wall as a Brahmin might try to rid himself of the handprint of an Untouchable.

The Museum had been built to make men feel small. Stepping into the high-ceilinged hall Qayyum was flanked by giant stone figures. At the far end, on the upper-level balcony, a Pashtun man in an English suit watched him. Qayyum looked away from him and there was another stone figure standing against the wall, holding out a stump where there should have been a hand. The smell of blood, of dead flesh. Turning, he pressed his face against the giant figure and there was another smell: stone, ancient. Qayyum stepped back to see the statue better. It was a man, the dark interior of his navel visible beneath folds of cloth at Qayyum’s eye level. He couldn’t keep himself from reaching out to touch it; how could you achieve that effect in stone? Stepping further back, he saw the figure had its right arm bent at the elbow, the hand raised at an angle, fingers together, palm outwards. It was a gesture he had seen Najeeb make in his direction soon after his return from Vipers.

– Is this your first time at the Museum?

The Pashtun man in the English suit, now standing beside him, asked the question. Qayyum nodded.

– What does the hand position mean?

– It’s the Abhaya Mudra. A gesture of protection and fearlessness.

Qayyum replicated the gesture, felt himself step into the skin of a boy who sees his brother return from war without an eye.

– I’d be happy to answer any other questions. I’m Wasiuddin, Assistant at the Museum.

– Lance-Naik Qayyum Gul. 40th Pathans.

He didn’t know why he introduced himself in that manner, but this man in the suit, these high walls, those stone figures all made it necessary.

– Najeeb’s brother? Of course. You have the same look. He’s in Pundit Aiyar’s office, examining Kushan coins. Should I take you to him?

– Pundit Aiyar?

– The Superintendent of the Museum. Our commanding officer, Lance-Naik.

– An Indian is in charge?

– Yes.

– And my brother is in his office?

– I don’t wish to interfere in family matters, and I understand the delicacy of the situation. But he has a brilliant mind, and. .

– I’m glad you understand this is a family matter.

– Of course. Should I take you to him?

He indicated a closed door, and Qayyum said perhaps in a few minutes. First, he’d like to look around, but he didn’t want to keep the Assistant from whatever he was doing. If you need anything, the man said with a dip of his head, and understood enough to leave Qayyum alone.

Several young men were walking around the hallway, pointing to this object and that, some of them writing things down as they stood in front of a cabinet or a statue. University students from Islamia College, he guessed, with very little in age separating them from him. One of them caught another in a neck-hold, laughing, and Qayyum walked swiftly past them – and past the Englishman looking at a moustached statue and patting his own moustache in comparison – to a smaller gallery beyond the main hall. Here, there was no one but him, and the stones.

Men, and winged creatures, and a bird-head with a human expression, and faces which came from the streets of Peshawar and other faces which were from somewhere else. There was beauty here, he could see, but it was a beauty that asked to be admired. Still, and distant, and nothing to do with the world outside. Live among these objects and your heart would turn to stone. He was thinking this, aware that he was building up an argument, when he stepped in front of a bearded man, sitting down, with his knee drawn up against his chest, his hand clasping the back of his own head in despair. Qayyum heard his breath change, become a noise in his throat. A second figure – its face missing so it was impossible to know if it was a man or a woman – curled the fingers of one hand around the man’s upper arm and rested the other hand on his chest. In the angle of the bearded man’s head, turned to one side, away from the embracing figure, the sculptor told the world of the impossibility of comfort when loss pierces the heart. Qayyum covered the lower half of his face with the palm of his hand, and watched his own grief, felt the awful aloneness of it. Kalam.

A hand slipped into his, and Najeeb pulled him away from the broken statue. This, this is what you must see, he said, and took Qayyum back to the main hall, empty now.

– Here, the Buddha, this is him.

The folds of the prophet’s skin suggested the former sleekness of the prince he had been; the sunken eyes bore knowledge of all the world’s sorrow. All you have endured; all you must yet endure. Qayyum rested his hand against the glass-fronted cabinet and leaned in towards the Buddha’s starving face, suspended over the ridged skin of his chest. Stone made flesh; no, stone made bone and skin. If a man rested his hand on that cage he might hear a heart beating within; but gently, gently, the ribs could snap from the pressure of a single finger. He shivered and stepped back; now he understood idolatry. Bismillah-ir-Rahman-ir-Rahim, he whispered, and the Buddha continued to gaze beyond him, all of Vipers there in his eyes, every dead soldier, and Kalam Khan bleeding to death, cold and alone. And beyond all the dead men, in the deepest, saddest part of the Buddha’s gaze, was Kalam’s killer, a man who took a life for duty, for family, for tradition.

Qayyum lowered himself to his knees, and Najeeb sat next to him, leaning on his brother’s shoulder, the weight of him a tether.

He followed the sound of the axe, beyond the plum orchards to a field of furrowed soil. Kalam Khan’s father squatted beside a cutting stone, passing the length of a sugar cane along the stone, lopping it into pieces the length of a man’s forearm. His movements so automated they might soon become careless.

– Why are you doing that?

– For planting, city man.

He dipped the axe-head into a bucket of water and ran it along the length of a whetting stone, twice, three times. Qayyum held out his hand and the man placed the axe-handle in it, standing up with a great sigh of Bismillah, his hand to the small of his back. Qayyum stepped out of his sandals, crouched low to the ground, and brought the axe-head down on the cane, two nodes from the top. The scent it released was childhood.

– Kalam asked me to help you with the planting.

– Yes.

– That was my promise to him. That’s what I owe him.

– It took you three days to work this out? Are you city Pashtuns even stupider than your cousins in the tribes?

The older man wore a familiar mocking smile.

– An extra pair of hands is more useful to me than another boy dead in the hills. Did you really think I expected you to go up there to have your throat slit before you even got your knife out of your waistband? Don’t look at me like an idiot. Cut! Cut! And come and find me when you’ve finished all of it.

Qayyum looked from the small pile of cut cane to the large quantity of sheaves still intact. He grasped hold of the longest cane he could see with a cry of Bismillah!.

Hours later, his arm ached, his back ached, the muscles of his thighs ached. He had forgotten his own body, its possibilities. Now every jolt of pain as he walked back to the plum orchards was a restoration. Kalam’s father brought him hot tea and cold naan and it was a banquet. Through the late afternoon and into the evening the two men sat beneath a plum tree until the ground was made up entirely of shadows, swapping tales of Kalam the boy and Kalam the sepoy, life in the orchards and life in the Army. Eventually the old man started to talk about the old Pashtun system in which land was never owned but regularly redistributed between the tribes so none could take control over the most fertile, and every man had sufficient wealth to live with honour. It had been centuries since that system worked without corruption, but it had tottered on, with more justice within it than most systems –

– Until your English shredded it to ribbons with their laws, Qayyum Gul, in order to create a class of landowners loyal to the Crown. My grandfather lost all rights to the land he’d lived on his entire adult life, and since then my family has had to pay rent for the land we work to a man who knows as much about fruit trees as a fish knows about mountains. All Kalam’s life he heard me say this – and then he joined the Army so he could bleed for the English. We deserve the yoke we wear. Of your generation, only Ghaffar Khan is a true Pashtun.

– Who?

The old man was silent for a while, then nodded firmly as if a decision had been made.

– After you’ve helped me plant the cane fields, you’ll go and find Ghaffar Khan. He’ll teach you what you need to know.

– And what do I need to know?

– How to remove your blindfold, and see your place in this world.

Once you caught the scent of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan you could follow it through the Peshawar Valley. Wadpagga, Sardaryab, Charsadda, Utmanzai and points in between. Twenty-five years old and already he knew how to place a light in the eyes of old men, how to make young boys whisper pieces of his story as though they were couplets of love. Within a few hours of setting out on Kalam’s father’s instructions Qayyum felt he was chasing the story, not the man, finding different pieces of it across the Valley: Ghaffar Khan gave up his Commission in the Guides when he saw an Englishman insult a Pashtun officer; he almost set sail for England but his mother’s tears held him back; Haji Sahib of Turangzai sought him out when he was barely past twenty and together they set up a programme for education and reform; when Haji Sahib declared jihad their paths diverged, and now one was a fugitive in the tribal areas and the other travelled all through the settled districts setting up schools where the Pashtuns could find education untainted by the superstition of the mullahs and the brainwashing of the English.

On the third afternoon, between Utmanzai and Mardan, winter rain was beginning to fall when Qayyum entered the mud-walled complex to which a man on the road had directed him. The sound, familiar but unplaceable, which greeted him was fat raindrops falling on a large blue tarpaulin which four tall men held at each corner, shielding the gathering in the courtyard. A square of sky between the rain and the men. Qayyum ran across the courtyard, ducked beneath the tarpaulin, which the men held up high over their heads though they were tall and the assembled men were seated and their arms must be aching. But it was for him, for Ghaffar Khan, that the extra inches were necessary. Like an angel or a djinn in height, Kalam’s father had said, and Qayyum, six foot tall, found he had to turn his eyes upwards to Ghaffar Khan who stood beneath the other end of the tarpaulin. A smile of welcome for Qayyum sat between the eagle nose and close-cropped beard, even as Ghaffar Khan continued explaining how blood feuds and revenge were eating up the Pashtuns from within. As he spoke a blur in the rain resolved itself into the figure of a boy who had run from one of the doorways surrounding the courtyard to stand just a little distance from the young Khan; filled with excitement or anticipation, the boy stood on one foot, reached behind him to squeeze the other foot in the palm of his hands. A flamingo-boy; the ancient sculptors of Gandhara would have carved him into stone.