— 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?