Finally there came the morning when all signs of the infection had dissipated. Qayyum placed the glass eye into his socket, and stood for a long time looking in the mirror. Almost himself, but when a man’s gaze on the world changes everything shifts with it. He hoisted his knapsack with the soldiers’ mementoes onto his shoulders, put on his sturdiest shoes, and went downstairs.
His mother looked up from the peas she was shelling at the dining table, and her face was unknown to him. The colour came and went from it, and she lifted two fistfuls of pea pods from the pan and threw them up into the air as though they were rose petals at a wedding, her voice a cry of delight. Najeeb had been on the way out, schoolbag in hand, but he walked back into the room and embraced his mother around the shoulders.
— Amma, it’s a glass eye.
Qayyum silently picked the pea pods off the floor and table and returned them to the pan, slipping his hand away from his mother’s when she tried to clasp it.
Away from the noise and chaos of the city he was received in villages and small towns as the fulfilment of a dream: a Pashtun soldier returned from war. Everywhere he went he was asked to stay a night and a banquet was prepared in his honour, even when it meant slaughtering the chicken which the family relied on for eggs; the object he brought with him — pebble or bullet or photograph — was passed from hand to hand as if it were a piece of the Black Stone brought by the angel Jibreel himself. On foot he travelled through the Valley’s orchards, crossed its rushing streams at their narrowest point. One day, bathing his face in the water, he felt himself rinsing Europe from his eyes. How had he thought the beauty of France superior to this — he opened his arms wide to the rivers bounding down foothills, racing each other to the Valley — this jewelled earth.
His last stop before he returned to Peshawar was Shahbaz Garhi in the Yusufzai lands, home of his forefathers. The brothers of Sepoy Khuda Buksh took the letter and the red feather from the throat of a bird which he had brought for them and told him that the man who had sent these tokens was dead; someone from the Army came to see them the previous week to deliver the news. So now you are our brother in his place, they said, as if relaying a fact rather than conveying an honour, and allowed him to enter the zenana where the older women kept their tear-streaked faces uncovered while they pressed him for news of the boy who only Qayyum had seen as a man. When it was time to leave one of the old men of the family took him by the elbow:
— There’s something you should see, Yusufzai scribe.
His new brothers took him to a giant rock with shapes cut into it. Kneeling, the youngest of them used the end of his turban to wipe away dust from a small section. Faded symbols made up lines which sloped and slanted towards each other like weary battalions. Even before there was paper there were scribes amongst the Yusufzai, the old man said. But what does it say, Qayyum asked. The old man didn’t know exactly but they were the words of the King, Asoka, who ruled with blood and fire until one day on a battlefield he looked at the mountain of the dead, heard the sobbing of a woman whose husband and sons had all been killed, and became a follower of the Buddha, renouncing violence and inscribing stones with his belief in peace.
His fingers lightly brushing the ancient words, Qayyum saw Asoka walking through that field at Vipers and saying to himself, No more.
There was a small hole in the canvas draped over the branches, and when the sun was directly overhead a narrow shaft of light fell into the inkhorn. Qayyum closed his fist around the buffalo horn — it was warm, heat radiating from the ink contained within.
A few days earlier his father had taken to bed with a fever and Qayyum’s mother looked at her son in a way that reminded him that he had obligations beyond those of a postman. So now here he was, beneath a tree, legs squeezed under the table with the built-in inkhorn — his father’s pride. As a child he’d disliked the smell of ink, associating it with the boredom of standing behind his father with a fan on hot afternoons, waving a breeze onto his neck while being careful to keep the fan from smearing the ink on the page. And the letters that were dictated were inevitably dull — someone needed money, someone was sending money, someone had arrived, someone was leaving, someone was married, someone had a child, someone was dead. Everyone was well, everyone missed someone, someone missed everyone, the chicken had stopped laying eggs, where were the bolts of silk? Occasionally news of a blood feud or murder enlivened things, but not often. He’d always known he’d choose a different life for himself — he had grown up in the shadow of a fort; how could he stay immune to the soldiers parading on maidans, boots and buttons gleaming?
But in the Army he came to understand the importance of letters, no matter how ordinary their contents. Never more so than on that day in Brighton when a sepoy from Peshawar had come hobbling into his ward, waving a piece of paper in his hand and said, Finally a letter from home. Qayyum had taken the paper and recognised the handwriting. His voice was not entirely steady as he and his father clasped hands across the world to tell the sepoy everything was well, the harvest had been good, the chicken had recovered.
As the morning became afternoon, everything slowed. The muezzin’s voice wavered as he sent the call to prayer winging out from the minaret of Mahabat Khan Mosque. A blur descended onto the inkhorn. Qayyum lifted the horn from its holder, and saw a fly struggling to stay afloat in its dark waters. The ink an ocean of death. Carefully, he positioned his quill beneath the thrashing insect and lifted it out, flicking it onto the ground as soon as it was clear of the ink. The fly staggered about, blue smudges its trail, its wings rising and falling impotently. Qayyum took the pitcher near his feet, dribbled water onto his hand and from there dropped the tiniest quantity onto the fly.
— Working hard, Lala?
Qayyum snapped his wrist and the remaining water sprayed Najeeb, who responded with the giant smile.
— Instead of bathing flies, come and listen to a badala with me.
The knife-sharpener who shared the canopy with him said he’d look after Qayyum’s belongings, his knife cleanly slicing the still-flailing insect in two as he spoke. Najeeb took hold of his elder brother’s hand and led him towards the Street of Storytellers, chattering away about how there were so many stories of Peshawar that none of the Storytellers in the bazaar ever told; all his life he’d heard the same old tales and maybe he should be the one to let the Storytellers know that there were other possibilities. There was a particular confidence in him that seemed to grow daily, hard to pin down; it would be necessary to make sure it didn’t become arrogance. But for the moment it consisted primarily of exuberance, and Qayyum couldn’t help smiling at the thought of his brother approaching an old storyteller, informing him that he had a better story than any of the old tales of the bazaar. Probably something he’d picked up at the Mission School — please let it not be a story of Christianity, or somehow that would get back to their mother who had only grudgingly given in to Qayyum’s insistence that Najeeb needed to be educated in the English way if he was to progress through the world.
The brothers walked through the Street of Storytellers, Qayyum’s elbows jutting out in that posture which had started as self-protection, a guarding of the space around himself, and was already becoming an attitude of ownership. He slowed as they approached the lines of Storytellers who were offering familiar fare, the stories of Peshawar unchanged through generations as Najeeb had said: ‘Laila Majnu’, ‘Hazrat Ali’, ‘The Prince and the Fakir’, Hadda Mulla’s jihad against the English. This last story had gathered the largest crowd, and Najeeb squeezed himself in among the gathering, leaving Qayyum no choice but to follow though he’d have preferred ‘Laila Majnu’.