— Oh, she said, cupping her hand around the Buddha’s ankle, running a thumb along his Achilles tendon. Oh, there you are.
She was standing in a trench around the base of the statue, not very deep. Viv crouched, pressed the back of her hand against the soil as a woman might touch the pillow of a departed lover. If it were really here!
A man traced a circle in the sand with the toe of his shoe; a woman dropped fruit and leaves into that circle. Oh there it is, Vivian Rose; you’ve found it for me. She pulled her hand away from the soil and wiped it on her dress. Of course the Circlet wasn’t really here. She wondered if Najeeb knew her curiosity about him was her primary reason for coming — her young Pactyike, the boy she’d rescued from nuns and maulvis, grown into a man whose imagination tracked the Circlet through a thousand years from Alexander to Chandragupta to Asoka to the girl who had no name until he gave her one that was Buddhist and Greek and Hindu and Muslim in origin: Maya, of the Peshawar Valley.
She climbed out of the pit and wheeled her bicycle along the donkey-path. Turning onto the paved road, she saw a small group of men dressed in the white of mourning making their way from the direction of the Walled City towards the graveyard. They walked in two columns, flanking a donkey-cart which must have been carrying the body. Viv stopped — one foot on the ground, one on a pedal — watching the men advance towards her. There was nothing here but fields, and crows, and Pathan men, and fresh graves.
The men at the head of the procession had seen her. They raised their eyes to hers, held her gaze. Viv jumped off the bicycle and ran into the wheat field, body hunched, breath coming fast. Idiot, she swore at herself, and didn’t know if it was for coming out here on her own or for feeling terror because Pathan men looked at her instead of through her. She could hear the tread of the men, the wheels of the donkey-cart. By the laws of Pashtunwali you may not attack a woman, she practised saying in Pashto.
Then the steps grew fainter; the men had turned into the graveyard. Viv wiped sweat from her face, wrinkling her nose at the tang coming from her armpits. And then, a greater terror — not dozens of footsteps, not a group of Pathans among whom at least some could be relied on to insist their brothers hold fast to Pashtunwali, but only two sets of feet walking closer, stepping into the wheat field.
— We know you’re here, said a man’s deep voice in English. We’ve come to bury our dead, not to attack a woman. Please don’t believe what your people say about us.
Viv didn’t move, hardly dared breathe.
— Why is she hiding? said a second voice, and it was a boy speaking Pashto.
Viv gripped a stalk of wheat, used it to pull herself up. She raised her eyes to the faraway mountains, blue against an almost white sky; the first time she’d seen them she had regarded the unexpected colouring as welcome proof that she was in an inverted Europe. The unchanging familiarity of them allowed her to slow her breath as she walked out onto the path. A man was standing there; he had picked up her bicycle from the ground and was holding the very end of one of the handlebars, his face turned away from hers. The boy, ten or eleven, looked straight at her and waved his hand in greeting as she walked out of the wheat field. She caught the other end of the handlebar, and the man holding it let go as he felt her touch travel along the steel frame.
— We will accompany you back to ensure your safety, he said, still not looking at her, and she wanted to thank him, she wanted to say she was sorry about the loss which had brought him to the graveyard, but instead she jumped onto the bicycle and pedalled as rapidly as she could, away from the boy who cried out in surprise and the man who didn’t.
Safety looked like the Peshawar Museum. Viv pushed open the wooden door set in the red-brick facade and there was a sweet familiarity to the weight of it beneath her palm and to the mustiness of ancient stone and fresh ink when she stepped inside. The two giant Buddhas still stood at the far end of the high-ceilinged hall, one raising its hand at her in the Abhaya Mudra. Protection and fearlessness. To enter this place was to feel all the foolish terrors of the day slip away. She raised her hand to the Buddha to return the greeting, and heard a door opening to her left, where the Native Assistant’s office used to be.
— Najeeb?
Surely the man who walked through the door — young, stout, moustached — wasn’t the boy she had known. No, he wasn’t. He looked apologetic, and said the Assistant hadn’t yet arrived, but could he be of any help? It was quickly established that he couldn’t, and Viv said she would wait for Najeeb. The man’s apologetic look grew even more pronounced as he explained there had been an unfortunate incident in the Walled City the previous day because of which some people were choosing to stay indoors, and perhaps the Assistant would be of that number. He was usually here by this hour, he added. Viv fished in her satchel, and pulled out a coin.
— Can you send someone to tell him I’m here? I don’t intend to leave until I see him.
Although he was clearly alarmed by the pronouncement the man took the coin and dispatched the boy who had been mopping the floor to tell the Assistant that a memsahib was waiting for him in the Museum. After ascertaining there was nothing further he could do for her he gestured to the Assistant’s door and said she should wait inside, and not to hesitate to call him if there was anything she needed.
The first thing Viv saw when she walked into the spacious, white-walled office was the chair placed in front of the bookshelves, beside a window. A Bombay Fornicator! On the wall there were framed photographs. She walked close, curious to see whether anything in her memory matched up to the man Najeeb had grown into. In the first photograph the familiar figure of John Marshall looked sternly into the camera, his hand on the shoulder of a much younger man — almond-eyed, crinkled-haired. Najeeb Gul, she said aloud, and the slight figure smiled back at her, recognisable. The next photograph was Najeeb again, holding a stone slab with a sea-monster carved into it in the way other men might hold a large fish they’d just caught. The third frame held his university diploma.
As she turned away from the photographs something on the desk made her walk over to the imposing desk chair and sit down at it. She picked up the paperweight and ran her thumb over the wrist of Atlas. It’s your history after all, Pactyike, she’d said years ago, handing a Pathan boy this crude carving to distract him from the discovery he’d made, accepting as her due the enormity of his gratitude.
Viv stepped into the gallery of Buddhas. There he was in all sizes, all stages of life from young prince to aged ascetic, his expression almost always on either side of the border which separates smug from serene. Only in the deep-set eyes of the starving Buddha did something else emerge, a humanity beyond all other humanities. How much younger she had been fifteen years earlier when the centaurs and Tritons and fish-tailed bulls had arrested her more than this face of suffering, these fragile ribs encasing the strongest of all hearts.
There was a shift in the light. The front door had opened. A Pathan woman entered, very young and very tall, a chaddar covering her head but her face unveiled. Viv, aware that she was wearing a smile of greeting excessive in its brightness, held up her hands in apology. I thought you were someone else, she said in Pashto. The woman moved towards one of the display cabinets near the entryway without responding. Probably never spoken to an Englishwoman, Viv thought, and moved into the anteroom with the statue of Hariti so her presence wouldn’t make the unveiled Pathan feel self-conscious. When she returned to the main gallery the woman was still there, sitting on her haunches in front of one of the cabinets, her hand reaching out to the object on the other side of the glass.