The boy squinted up at the sun as he said it, but Viv suspected the answer actually meant he had no idea where Shahji-ki-Dheri was. Even so, the ground was rocking and her head pounding from the sun’s glare magnified by the train window, and she certainly wasn’t about to head out to a site right away. Yes, she said, and waved goodbye, certain she wouldn’t see him again.
Her rooms were spacious and pleasingly modern, with electric ceiling-fans. She barely had time to notice this before there was a rapid knocking on the bedroom window, drawing her attention to a man in the flower beds holding up something which looked like a bracelet strung with red coral. She touched her wrist, thought of emerald seaweed, before opening the window. The bracelet was a length of string with jewel-like fragments threaded through it, pale burgundy speckled with dark burgundy, the pieces suggesting an entirety the size of a grape. The man — he must be the gardener, there was a basket and pair of shears near his feet — shook the string to make the fragments sway and pressed his thumb and forefinger together at the tips to indicate tiny beaks. Pointing in the direction of the second room, he made a revolving gesture with his finger and shook his head sadly.
Uncomprehending, she allowed herself to be directed into the other room. It didn’t take long to understand what he was telling her — a bird had built its nest in the ceiling fan; the tiny chirping sounds which she had taken for a cricket emanated from it. If she switched on the fan it would be a massacre. The gardener, now standing outside this second room, presented her with the bracelet and placed his hands together in supplication.
She pressed her thumb against one of the speckled fragments which crumbled into fine powder. The gardener looked as if he might cry. Here was a gentler world, where the large tragedies of a military hospital didn’t erode compassion for the tiniest of creatures.
Don’t worry; I’d rather melt in a puddle than harm them, she said, and though they didn’t speak the same language he understood the tone of her voice, and touched his hand to his forehead.
She walked back into the bedroom where the ceiling fan was rotating briskly — after sharing a hostel room with four other nurses, the space between these four walls was more than sufficient. Tying the coral bracelet around her wrist, she was grateful to be allowed this moment of largesse.
Stepping from the cool waters of the bath, she walked directly to the bed, pulling a loose Turkish robe over her head without drying off. Air from the ceiling fan rippled across cotton and wet limbs as she lay down; the curtains were carefully drawn but the window ajar so she could hear water burble from the garden hose into the flower beds just outside. Everything spoke to her of pleasure. She tried to hold herself in that shadow-place between sleep and waking where the mind drifts, excavating — Tahsin Bey was there with her, his thumbs splitting a silver fig in two, purple flesh beneath metallic skin.
The next morning Viv stepped out into a breeze which originated from two bearers snapping a tablecloth in the air, dark hands on white cloth. She had come out to see the sun rising from behind the mountains but haze smeared the sky and her presence clearly disturbed the hotel staff’s early morning preparations. One of the bearers apologised — for what? Being visible? Somewhere a rooster crowed, a dog barked in response. If Mary were here they’d return to the familiar, but still amusing, topic of dogs’ accents. The rolled ‘r’s in the bark of a poodle, the guttural growl of an Alsatian. And why was it that everything unacceptable in a man — slobbering enthusiasm, predictability, simple-mindedness — was so charming in a dog? She felt a pug’s disdain, and knew it wasn’t really Mary whose company she was missing.
She sat down at a table beneath a pine tree, picked up a pen and tried to think of what to write which would please Papa. When Mrs Spencer presented, as a fait accompli, Viv’s trip to Peshawar all his visible anger turned towards his wife, and what Viv had received instead was his bafflement. Why? he kept saying, wanting to understand, failing to do so, being wounded by that failure. Every day Viv thought of going down to breakfast and saying, I’ll return to the hospital — but then she thought of the boy with the sandy hair and the blue eyes and stopped herself. So she left with a promise: she’d be back in London by Christmas, and if the war was still on she would return to her nursing duties. Her mother sighed and shook her head when she heard that, but didn’t say anything about it.
One of the bearers brushed leaves and seed-pods off the starched white tablecloth, brought her breakfast, and sent a young boy to stand behind her with a large fan in his tiny fist. In his turban and waistcoat he reminded her of the monkey similarly dressed at an Arabian Nights party in England two summers ago. The monkey held a Japanese fan which it swept up and down the length of its body in a manner so vulgar — head thrown back, legs spread apart — that Mary almost left the party in protest before the host had the animal taken away. Viv gave the boy a coin and told him she didn’t need him. The rising heat of early morning felt like an old friend.
Setting the pen aside, she concentrated on breakfast. Tea and jam and bread in Peshawar. It was all so strange. When she had finished the bearer informed her that a boy had been waiting for her. At first she didn’t know what he meant, but there he was, near the hotel entrance, the boy from the train station, with a Victoria driver who knew the way to Shahji-ki-Dheri.
Through the Cantonment the horse trotted, all creaking harness and clopping hooves, down broad streets shaded by plane trees and cypresses, their familiarity an ache. But then the Victoria drove through the arched gateway of the Walled City and Viv rose out of her seat, exclaiming loudly at the glorious colour and noise and exactly-what-you-want-it-to-be-ness of it all. Birds beating their wings against dome-shaped cages, children sucking on molasses pebbles, sugar-cane sellers slicing whistling sounds out of the air to attract buyers, water-carriers with spines curved beneath animal-skin sacks filled with liquid. Pyramids of peaches and plums in wicker baskets, carpets draped over balconies and branches, clothes lines strung between top-floor windows with men’s clothes hanging from them (Native men of all ages could be seen craning their necks in the hope some female garment might have accidentally or — why not believe this? — deliberately been placed in view). There weren’t in fact any men craning their necks but she would say there were when she and Tahsin Bey found themselves in each other’s company again. She’d tell him tales of Caspatyrus that would make him smile that smile of exceptional warmth, and he would most certainly agree that the fabrication of stories was a form of tribute to Scylax, whose tales of India included impossible wonders.
The Victoria had stopped for no reason, and the boy — Najeeb his name was — said she should sit down. A white tent floated past, and Viv wondered if the woman within felt disdain or envy at the sight of an Englishwoman standing up in a Victoria, looking around, unimpeded. There were no other women, tented or otherwise, but looking up above the storefronts she saw some movement behind the enclosed wooden balconies; the latticework of the wood was replicated on the mesh of the tented woman’s burqa. Much like the grille in the Ladies’ Gallery behind which any women wanting to view parliamentary debates must sit so that men wouldn’t be distracted by their presence. It must be even more hot and stuffy in those burqas than it was in the Ladies’ Gallery, which she had once entered on Mary’s insistence to listen to a debate on Votes for Women — that was before her father had set her right on the issue by sending her to listen to the magnificent Gertrude Bell addressing the Anti-Suffragette League. (If all women were like Ms Bell and you, men would fall over their feet in their haste to give you the vote, Papa had said when she came home to report all that had been said.) She sat down and asked the boy if he had sisters. Yes, three. Didn’t they get cross-eyed behind a burqa? Their eyes learned to focus differently, he said, and she couldn’t decide if this seemed plausible or not.