A God in Every Stone, page 25
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 wall, 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 near 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.
