Then the firing started, the bayonets followed. Fall back, fall back — Inqilaab Zindabad, Inqilaab Zindabad. Bullets and the screams of men, and a stench of blood. But this was nothing like Vipers, here he was fearless, here he would die if he must and he wouldn’t ask why. Yet somehow the bullets didn’t touch him though around him men fell; too many of them to lift up and carry away, and more soldiers had arrived, firing now even on those who were bearing the dead; impossible to hold ground any more. Fall back, fall back. Through the alleys, soldiers giving chase, two behind and one up ahead, all converging on Qayyum.
— I’ll rip out my own eye before you can touch me!
He bellowed the words, reaching up and prising out the glass eye with an exaggerated gesture. The soldier up ahead pressed himself against a doorway, bayonet falling from his grasp, and Qayyum held the eye up towards him as he ran past. He could hear the other soldiers stop to ask what had happened, what had the soldier seen, and he laughed as he ran, a warrior who had found his battle.
The buoyancy left him as the sound of bullets and booted feet continued to echo through the Walled City. The troops were chasing men through Peshawar as though it were an English hunt. At any moment he might hear a bugle, or step over a corpse with its lips sewn shut. He turned into a street so narrow it allowed in no light, and a man could press himself against a doorway and become shadow.
Years earlier, Qayyum’s mother had tried to find a wife for him. Everything was agreed on when the girl fell ill and suddenly died. The whispers were quick to follow — Qayyum Gul, the half-blind man, was ill-fated. Any family which gave their daughter to him would risk disaster. Enough, Qayyum told his mother. Don’t search any more. There seemed an inevitability to it; his life was already moving in the direction of politics. From the moment under the blue tarpaulin when he heard Ghaffar Khan speak of the need for Pashtuns to break their addiction to violence and revenge he knew he had found a general he could follow into any battle. When the battle was over there would be time for a wife and children — men didn’t age as women did. And until then, what he wanted with immediacy and couldn’t always deny himself was available here, on the Street of Courtesans.
Now, for the first time he’d ever known, the street was completely silent, its doorways closed, but he saw the curtains move as he walked its length, and ahead of him a door opened and a woman’s hand, flicked at the wrist, urged him to approach. The sound of booted feet, the screams of dying men drew closer as his rapid strides made up the distance between himself and sanctuary. The door closed behind him; he was in a room that he might have been in before, large enough for a bed with frilled covers, in the company of a woman with whom he might have lain upon it, though it was impossible to know; the make-up which disguised rather than enhanced the courtesan’s features was absent so she was just a tired woman past youth, a bruise beneath her eye.
The curtains, identical to those which covered the back walls of all the courtesans’ rooms, were open, and for the first time he saw that there was a doorway behind. Always viewing the women along the street as rivals he had never thought that their lives were interconnected and now he struggled to imagine what they might say to each other at the end of a working day. Did they compare? The thought made the blood rise hot to his cheeks even as he stepped past the curtains, down a hallway and into a large room crowded with men, some in Congress khaddar, two in red shirts, and a few who didn’t wear their allegiances on their sleeves. The room itself was simple, and homely — bolsters and rugs along the floor, repeating motifs of flowers painted in a strip along the wall, faded and peeling, but only slightly. Some of the men sat with their heads in their hands, or stared vacantly ahead, but most of them spoke to each other in urgent whispers which broke off when Qayyum entered the room and started up again when they recognised him as one of their own.
— We’re trying to understand why they sent in the armoured cars, a Congresswalla said as he made space for Qayyum to sit down. There’s Civil Disobedience all across India and nothing like this has happened.
Qayyum knew the answer. It lay in all those speeches by the English officers which had made him feel such pride when he was in the Army and thought there was honour in being identified as a Martial Race: Because they couldn’t believe we were unarmed; they wouldn’t believe we weren’t intent on violence.
— Quiet, idiots! They’re here!
Even the men who hadn’t heard the words of the grey-haired, hard-faced woman who rushed into the room heard the tone of it, and fell silent. Into the void where their voices had been the sound of a fist hammering on a door rushed in, and an English voice demanded entry. The grey-haired woman looked over her shoulder at the girl who had entered behind her. It was obvious by something in her that hadn’t yet been erased that she was new here. The newness gave her beauty, more than her curved kohl-lined eyes or her unpainted lips the colour of crushed rose petals. The room changed, was charged with something unpleasant, slightly dangerous, which Qayyum was as much a part of as anyone else.
The hammering on the door became more insistent and the beautiful girl walked past the men and down the hallway. Despite the whispered protest of the grey-haired woman almost half the men in the room stood up and tiptoed into the hallway so they could hear what happened when the girl opened the door and spoke in English.
— What can I do for you gentlemen?
— We need to search your premises.
— Men only enter here if they pay. Although. . so many of you? All the girls will be exhausted by the end of the day.
— We’re looking for. .
— I know what you’re looking for.
It was impossible to know what she did next; perhaps the words, their tone of power, understood even by the men in the hallway who didn’t know English, were enough; the English officer said nothing more, and before the girl had returned to the hallway the soldiers could be heard marching away. One of the men caught the girl’s sleeve as she passed by him.
— She’s not working, the grey-haired woman said sharply.
— I’ll pay double.
— Your people called for a strike. Well, we’re observing the strike here.
— Triple, then.
The grey-haired woman looked around the room at all the men.
— Triple for everyone, she said.
The men — save the one who went with the girl — returned to the seating area, and were silent now, not looking at each other. Shortly afterwards a few of the women, painted for business, entered the room and one by one men stood up and followed them into the rooms which led onto the street. Like this, over the next few minutes, more than half the men vacated the room. Qayyum, looking around at those who remained, wondered how many sought their pleasure from other men, how many stayed away from courtesans for reasons of morality or fidelity, and how many were hoping that a better option might enter the room. When the next group of women walked in their number included the one he’d been waiting for, who he visited almost exclusively because years of going to her made their relationship something more than transactional, and he smiled to see her ignore the other men and jerk her head in his direction, instructing him to follow her.