Najeeb brought her a roll of paper and set it down on the writing table which faced out towards the garden. May I? he said, and carefully removed the books and typewriter and lamp so that the table was all surface. He placed a paperweight at one end, and unrolled the paper, which blanketed the table-top and trailed off onto the floor.
— The rock-edicts of Asoka, Najeeb said. From Shahbaz Garhi.
Viv bent over the rubbing of Kharoshti words, inscribed in a wave-like pattern, following the curved surface of the rock they’d been carved into.
— How did you get this?
— It’s on Yusufzai land, he said proudly. This belongs to my tribe.
— Oh yes. The men who fought Alexander at Peukelaotis.
— I can’t believe I thought Alexander was an Englishman!
— If he’d been alive today, he would be. I can’t believe I thought you were without curiosity. My ignorance is by far the more egregious. Thank you for showing this to me.
— It’s yours. I told my brother to bring it for me so I could give it to you. I said it’s for my favourite teacher.
— Thank you, Najeeb. I’ll treasure it.
His smile was the first gleam of a silver circlet unearthed.
Viv stepped from the treasure cave of Avtar Singh’s antiquities shop, eyes blinking in the mid-morning sunlight.
— It will devastate my heart, Miss Spencer, to have to sell Hariti to someone else. You must spare me that.
Viv rolled her eyes at the turbaned Sikh; of late it had almost become part of her daily routine to undertake yet another round of bargaining with Avtar Singh for the Hariti statue, closely resembling the one in the Museum, which had the goddess’s hand lightly resting on her consort’s upper thigh, in a gesture of ownership, fingers wandering. It wasn’t the position of her hand alone which made the statue erotic but also the posture of her consort, the great general Pancika, in his short military-style skirt with his legs forming a diamond — spread apart at the knees, with ankles rubbing against each other. Viv knew she didn’t really have the nerve to buy such a thing, but there was a pleasure in the bargaining over cups of tea, conversation detouring via other sculptures and coins in the shop, some of which she might really purchase at some point when either she or Avtar Singh worked out how to extricate themselves from this dance around Hariti.
— Bring the price down and your heart will be spared, Mr Singh.
Placing a velvet-ribboned pith-helmet on her head she set off. With no destination in mind she meandered, turning into one alley, then another, making sure she didn’t lose sight of the elevated walls of Gor Khatri which served as a landmark. Eventually she found herself in an alley that lad back to the Street of Storytellers. The shop advertising BEST ENGLISH SCHOOL UNIFORMS was familiar, and it took her a moment to work out that this was the alley down which Najeeb had pointed when he informed her, without embarrassment, that his father worked there.
Walking down the alley she saw a letter-writer sitting at a table with an inkhorn holder built into it, shaded by a tarpaulin thrown over the spreading branches of a peepul tree. How had a boy like Najeeb sprung up in a Pathan family from the Walled City where the father worked under a tree? The Indian stories of shepherd boys or slaves who become kings only made sense when you met someone like Najeeb. Did his parents have any idea of the life he had stepped into, the extent to which he was leaving them behind? She’d never asked, and suspected not. She could probably walk right up to Najeeb’s father and say she was Miss Spencer and receive only a blank look in return. But it quickly became obvious, even though the man had his back towards her, that this wasn’t the father of a twelve-year-old boy. His hands, resting on either side of the table, were those of a young man. Perhaps Najeeb hadn’t been entirely honest when he said that his father was the only letter-writer who had a desk rather than squatting on the ground. Imagine the circumstances of a life being such that owning a desk was a boast.
Her interest left the man at the table and alighted on the woman in a white burqa who had just stood up from the chair opposite him, very tall, folding up the piece of paper which he had placed on the table before moving his hands well away from it so she could pick it up without encountering his fingertips. The figure in white hurried away, before remembering that she was a woman of Peshawar and nothing in her behaviour should call attention to itself. Her pace slowed, now she was a white sheet drifting along at the tempo of the other white sheets. Viv followed her on to the Street of Storytellers. She had yet to speak to a woman from the Walled City though she had enough Pashto now to make conversation possible.
Partway down the street, approaching Kabuli Gate, the woman turned into an alley. Viv realised how ridiculous she was being and started to walk towards Kabuli Gate. But something — intuition? curiosity? an unexpected noise? — made her turn and look over her shoulder. There was the woman in the white burqa — Viv knew it was her by her height — walking back out of the alley, no envelope in hand, and crossing over to the other side of the Street of Storytellers. She stood beside a slender-trunked tree looking up at the carpet-seller’s balcony, on the corner of the Street of Storytellers and the alley. It was without doubt one of the most beautiful balconies in the Walled City with roses and arabesques carved above each of the three archways of its wooden frame. At the base of the balcony, deer raced each other from one archway to the next. But the woman in the burqa didn’t seem interested in deer or roses; the stillness of her posture indicated a woman waiting.
Viv walked a few paces closer to the unmoving figure. Men and boys walked along past both women, sometimes hand in hand, flowers behind their ears and bandoliers across their chests. As if they had decided to be both man and woman at once, long of eyelash and broad of shoulder. Viv might as well have been shrouded in a white sheet herself for all the attention they showed her. The lack of staring is a mark of courtesy, Avtar Singh had explained to her when she expressed her irritation at being treated as though she weren’t there; and then he grinned his wolfish grin and said and also, of course, the Pathans want to insist that men mustn’t look at women to ensure that no man looks at their women. A throat-slitting gesture accompanied the comment.
The genial, white-bearded carpet-seller from whom Viv had recently bought a rug stepped onto the balcony. He called down to the apple-seller standing on the street below him, who threw an apple up in the air, almost directly into the carpet-seller’s outstretched hand. A coin, flipped off the white-beard’s thumb, followed the reverse trajectory. The carpet-seller bit into the apple, his eyes passed briefly over the woman in white across the road, and he nodded his head. It was a nod of appreciation for the apple unless you were expecting it to be something else. The woman in white remained unmoving for a few seconds after that, leaning against the tree as if she had stopped only to rest. Eventually she moved away, and turned into one of the alleyways which led to the maze-like innards of the Walled City.
A woman stands in the shade of a tree. A man surveys the street below him while eating an apple. Somewhere in there was a story which Viv didn’t know how to imagine.
The letter from her mother was addressed in black ink. Someone had died, again.
Viv sat down in the garden chair, reaching overhead to pull down on a branch of the willow, brushing its leaves against her face. The squawks and metallic chirps of birds, the booted feet of a regiment marching towards the barracks, her finger picking at the interwoven rattan strips of the chair as though it were a stringed instrument — all this was familiar now. The letters from England came from another world.