— Do you think I don’t know a bullet from this gun won’t carry all that way?
— It’s the bullets from the soldiers’ guns which I was worrying about. But I’m sorry, I beg forgiveness from my heart. I shouldn’t have touched you. And your sister — Ina lillahi wa inna illayhi rajiun.
— I don’t want your prayers. Where is she?
— I don’t know. I’ll ask. If I hear anything, I’ll come back. You said she was down there — forgive me, but what do you mean?
— When men become women and approach an enemy armed with nothing but chants then it falls to a woman to take the role of Malala of Maiwand and walk onto the battlefield to show you what a warrior looks like. She was down with the men, and there was more of a man’s fire in her than in all of you.
Her arms, folded together, pressed against her torso as though she were trying to staunch a wound. Ya Allah, how many women had been on the street? He had never been comfortable with Ghaffar Khan’s insistence that Pashtun women must be brought into the political movement, and now he saw with complete clarity the extent to which the man he revered above all others was wrong in this matter. In the Khudai Khidmatgar training camps Qayyum knew how to teach the men to meet violence with non-violence, and insults with patience, but what words could he say to prepare Pashtun men for this: women may be shot, their wounded bodies may need to be lifted away by strange hands, you may hear them call out in pain, you may watch them die — and to all this you can respond with nothing but a cry of Inqilaab Zindabad. The havoc it would cause (that thrum of terror which ran through the Pashtuns when the girl with the plait walked out from the ranks of men). The green-eyed woman turned her back to him, and then he couldn’t find a way to stay.
He returned home, the elation of earlier in the day gone. His neighbour, the cobbler Hari Das, rushed out to greet him.
— Qayyum Gul, thank God you’re safe. And Najeeb? Is Najeeb with you?
— He’ll have been at the Museum all day. He probably doesn’t even know what’s been going on.
— I saw him walk out of here this morning, wearing an English-style achkan — I didn’t know where he was going. But he left only a few minutes before the first gunshots.
He had been wearing his frock-coat? For the Englishwoman, no doubt. Idiot, Najeeb, are you with her now? Toasting a tarnished piece of silver? If there was one man in all of Peshawar to avoid a protest, stride away from gunfire, it was the Assistant at the Peshawar Museum — Hari Das knew Najeeb well enough to know this. But the old man was looking at Qayyum helplessly, not really wanting an answer about Najeeb so much as seeking reassurance that everything would be all right despite this day of gunfire and blood.
Qayyum moved towards Hari Das to embrace him. But as they touched the cobbler’s mouth formed an Oh of surprise; he stepped back from Qayyum, apologising, a thick needle in his hand, tipped with darkness. Qayyum glanced at his arm to see what Hari Das was staring at. There was no pain, no rip in his kameez, so whose blood was that blooming on his sleeve?
23–24 April 1930
Vivian Rose Spencer rested her hands on the keyboard of the ‘Made in Berlin’ piano. Her calloused palms and lined fingers had changed more than anything at Dean’s since the last dance she’d danced here. She played the opening bars of ‘Feeling Sentimental’ in the empty ballroom and the music bounced off the polished wood floor, skimmed the long mirrors, leapt into the antique arms of the chandelier. If she looked in the mirror long enough would she find, buried deep beneath all the twirling figures and self-conscious glances that it held, the young Vivian Rose Spencer? And at her shoulder, the ghost of Tahsin Bey. He had long since ceased to be the wound in her flesh, had worked himself deeper, invisible to all onlookers, to become the brittleness of her bones, the loneliness forever in her heart.
She couldn’t remember what exactly she’d dreamed earlier in the day when her train had entered the Peshawar Valley; she only knew that she’d dreamed of him, as she hadn’t in a very long time, and woken up with a constricted chest and a feeling of disorientation which revealed itself to have a reason other than dreams.
The train was moving in the wrong direction. Trouble in Peshawar, the conductor had said, when she found him; the train was returning to Campbellpur. At Campbellpur station while the other English passengers stood around arguing about whether to wait there until the situation became clearer or to take the train shortly to leave for Rawalpindi Viv walked over to the Pathan couple who had disembarked from the train, and was soon on her way to Peshawar, in a donkey-cart, her purse no lighter than before but her silver-handled hairbrush now in the possession of the man who used it to brush his luxurious henna-dyed beard.
How she hated him! How she hated all the men they passed on the road as they lolled and laughed and held their faces to the breeze and called out to each other in recognition and broke their journey to saunter into an orchard and pull fruit off a branch and eat it in full view of the world, juice spraying the air. All this Viv saw — as did the unspeaking woman seated beside her — through blinkered, meshed eyes. She knew she was passing through a landscape she’d encountered before (standing at the train window with her calfskin notebook, sketching stupas, comparing her observations with Arrian’s) but it was almost impossible to identify any landmarks. Her brain didn’t know how to translate the criss-crossed images her eyes were sending back, her head ached with the effort of trying. Beneath the burqa she clenched her fists which were themselves restricted in their movements so that if she were to try to reach out for the other woman’s arm the touch between them would be doubly cloth-encased. The rage she felt on behalf of the women of the Peshawar Valley as she sweltered beneath the voluminous burqa dispelled any ambivalence she might have started to feel about Indian demands for self-rule. All these Indians talking about political change when really what this country desperately needed was social change. Why should they be allowed independence when they only wanted it for half the population? And, what’s more, her back ached.
So, the relief — she had never known anything quite like it — of arriving at Dean’s. The liveried man at the gate stopped the donkey-cart from entering, and Viv stood up, hitched up the burqa so that ankles and calves and shins and hemline appeared. With a sweeping gesture of his hand the liveried man waved in the donkey-cart with Viv still in that posture: half-woman, half-tent. When the donkey stopped she stepped past the long-bearded man who started once more to brush his beard as though he were still in a situation of command here in the heart of British Peshawar, and jumped to the ground. With something of the same grandness with which she had cast her first vote she threw off the vile cloth, and didn’t look back.
The donkey-cart departed, the gulmohar trees blazed, a bird with an iridescent throat flew past. Viv walked through a frozen world. Same, same, same — as the merchants in the Walled City might insist while trying to draw your thoughts away from the unavailable object of your desire towards an inferior replacement. Same, memsahib, same. The red-tiled roof of the whitewashed barracks-like structure might have faded slightly, but the hedge framing the driveway was the same, the tall pines in the garden were the same, the starched white uniforms of the bearers were the same, the view towards the mountains was the same, the chatter and whistles of birds were the same, even the china teacup on the garden table with its border of roses was the same.