The Victoria progressed along the famed Street of Storytellers and Najeeb pointed out the Storytellers themselves — men sitting cross-legged on the raised floors of open-fronted stores, audiences seated across from them on rope-beds beneath trees. The stories they told were in the form of poems called badalas, Najeeb said in response to her question, and she repeated the word badala and wondered where she could find a language teacher. Hindko was the language of Peshawaris, Najeeb said, and Pashto the language of Pathans.
— So you speak Pashto, Viv said.
— At home we speak Hindko. We are more Peshawari than Pathan, but we’re also Pathan. But everyone here speaks both Hindko and Pashto and many people Urdu and also English and every language of the world someone here can speak. This is Peshawar.
He said it with evident pride, making an expansive gesture which took in all the variety of the street — every manner of turban and cap and flowing garb. That man is from Tashkent, he said, and that one from Tibet; there’s a Punjabi, that’s an Afridi Pathan and that one is Sikh and those two Hindu. For the first time she gave him her full attention — a smiling boy with excellent but oddly pronounced English, as though most of his vocabulary came from books. He was dressed more formally than the day before in narrow black trousers, a white tunic, and a white turban with a grass stain which suggested he’d been standing on his head.
They turned into another lane and Najeeb said it was the Street of Partridge Lovers, and looked startled when she laughed.
— What else? Tell me all the street names!
— The Street of Dentists. The Street of Potters. The Street of Felt Caps. The Street of Silver. The Street of Money-Changers. The Street of Coppersmiths. The Street of Englishwomen.
— The Street of Englishwomen?
— They buy and sell Englishwomen there. We will try to avoid it.
— Take a detour through the Street of Inventive Guides if you must.
He looked delighted to be caught out, and she found she was delighted to have been teased.
He handed her a plum which he had plucked from the basket carried on a man’s head in the nonchalant gesture of one to whom theft isn’t understood as a crime, and she recalled attending one of Woolley’s lectures in which he’d said it was important to watch one’s workmen on digs in Foreign Parts because they could teach one how to understand man as he once was — how he functioned, how his brain worked in times past. If that was true why shouldn’t the great men of the ancient world have some shadow in the present in addition to the slaves? She might yet find a Herodotus in this city with its Street of Storytellers and its centuries of Greek influence. Herodotus was a Carian, not a Greek! She could picture Tahsin Bey so clearly as he said it, rising to his toes, his sharply angled face a picture of outrage.
They reached another gateway, this one leading out of the Walled City — immediately the noise and rush fell away and they entered a rural world with cultivated fields on either side of a bumpy road. Somewhere in the middle of those fields was the Great Stupa of Kanishka.
Once there was the Great Stupa, seven hundred feet tall. From every point in the Peshawar Valley men and women could look up from the dust of their days to see the pillar ringed with gold which arose from its uppermost canopy of pearls. Surrounding the Stupa, a vast monastery complex. Everywhere a traveller looked there was the Buddha, carved over and over into and around the countryside, in an age when the people of this region had the vision to find the god in every stone. His serene eyes observing everything — here carved of white stone, and there of a reddish-blue which mysteriously turned golden when the sun touched it, and elsewhere the grey of Gandhara.
Now there was devastation cut into wheat fields. The low mound that was the remains of the Great Stupa lay abandoned, the earth around it pockmarked with trial pits and trenches, miniature stupas and rubble. The stupas were badly damaged, their carvings lacking the delicacy of the Gandhara statuary Viv had seen in the British Museum. And the long grass made it clear no one had been here in a long while. This was a place archaeologists had given up on. Too much of it destroyed, too little of value in what remained, to make recovery worthwhile. She wiped a trail of sweat off her neck; the familiarity of the morning’s heat had passed and now the sun burnt so brightly it had turned the sky white.
— Miss Spencer!
An echoing quality to the boy’s voice directed her to the largest of the trenches. She hurried over, scolding herself for not keeping an eye on him. When she looked into the trench she saw it had been dug deep to reveal part of a wall decorated with stucco figures of the Buddha — the boy, replicating the Buddha’s cross-legged pose, was gently stroking the knee of the Enlightened One. From now on when she heard the word ‘trench’ she wanted only to think of this. He turned towards her, grinning a huge grin as if he had been the one to discover the stucco figures. There were steps carved into the trench and she was soon crouching beside the boy. Reaching out, she touched the Buddha’s face, a shiver travelling all the way through her.
— If you like this, you should see what they have at the Museum.
— We can go there? Now?
— Don’t you have somewhere to be? School?
— Summer holidays.
— And your family won’t worry about you if you’re gone too long?
The words tugged all expressiveness off his face. Viv wondered what ‘family’ might mean to him, and why he’d been alone at a train station the previous morning. Best not to make any of that her business.
She looked at her watch. The previous evening, a couple in Dean’s dining room had introduced themselves as the Forbeses, apologised for not being at the train station to meet her — they’d been expecting her to send a telegram from Karachi to let them know which train she’d be on — and asked her to come to their home for lunch. Of course she’d be delighted, she’d said, and not only out of a sense of obligation; there was something about Mr Forbes — the manner of a medical professional perhaps — which she liked immensely, though the wife seemed a little on the nervy side.
— We can go there, but not now. Come to Dean’s again tomorrow.
It was evening already when she shook off the heaviness of an overlong afternoon sleep, brought on by the inexplicable stew for lunch at the Forbeses’, and walked out into Dean’s garden. The air was scented to an almost embarrassing degree — evening jasmine overlaid on whatever else had already been there. The emperor Babur hadn’t been exaggerating about blind men and Peshawar. Sitting down at a table, she looked towards the distant sentinels of the hills, clearly visible now, keeping the rest of the world at bay.
The bearer brought her a cup of tea and as she sipped it she watched the shadow of a man stride across Dean’s facade. When the shadow stopped next to the silhouette of a woman holding a teacup she realised there was someone standing at her elbow.
Red-faced and sweating, with features clustered around the nose so that the cheeks and forehead appeared excessive — those were things the shadows didn’t reveal. The shadow-man beamed at her, called her by name. His name was Remmick, he said; he wanted to welcome her to Peshawar. The Forbeses had told her about him. Remmick’s a Political, they said, as if it were a term she should undersand; he knows everyone’s business.