Kamila Shamsie - A God in Every Stone

The emerald green of the grass turned to pine green; the sun sank entirely into the water. His hand had gone to sleep but he was afraid to shake it awake even though the numbness was moving up his arm. There had been a sepoy sitting upright in the field as men advanced around him, one arm ending at the wrist. Qayyum picked up the severed hand he’d almost trodden on, and passed it to the man who thanked him, very politely, and tried to join the hand in place. I think there’s a piece missing. Can you look? he said, and died. Qayyum had forgotten this, though it had happened only hours earlier.

Qayyum tried to pray, but the Merciful, the Beneficent, had abandoned this field and the men within it. Something was moving along the ground, a heavy weight; a starving animal, wolf or jackal, with its belly pressed against the ground, smelling meat; a German with a knife between his teeth. Grass flattened, the thing entered the space between Qayyum and the stream. Any movement was pain, any movement was target practice to the gunners. And then a whisper, his name.

— Kalam, stay there. They’ll shoot you.

— Lance-Naik, sir. Shut up.

One afternoon in the Street of Money Changers, Qayyum and his brother Najeeb had stumbled on an object in the road — a dead rabbit with its lips sewn together, foam at its mouth. A man walked past a hundred cruelties in Peshawar every day, and nothing about the rabbit made him slow his stride, but Najeeb knelt on the street and carefully cut away the thread, the animal’s fur-and-mud-caked head in his palm. When Qayyum put a hand on the boy’s shoulder, Najeeb looked up and asked, Do you think its family was near by and it tried to call out to them? As if that were the real reason for distress, not the needle lancing the animal’s lips, the hand which would have stopped the breath at its nose. Oh Allah, the cruelty of the world. How had Najeeb known this terror, this loneliness of dying alone? Kalam’s hand clasped his ankle and he felt tears dislodge the blood in his eye, which he couldn’t touch without feeling as if he was wiping off his whole face.

— Don’t leave me.

— Brainless Pashtun, do you think I came all this way just to smell your socks?

Time had never moved more slowly than in those minutes — or was it hours? — in which Kalam inched himself along the ground until his face was level with Qayyum’s, and he could see what the fire had done.

— Tell me. How bad is it?

— Don’t worry, Yousuf, all Zuleikhas will still want to seduce you and so will the Potiphars.

— Kalam, don’t joke.

— It’s this or tears. Just be patient, we’ll retreat when it’s dark.

— The sun has gone.

— My friend, you’ve forgotten the moon, large and white as your Frenchwoman’s breast and climbing through the sky. Still a few more hours. But I’m here, don’t worry. Your Kalam is here.

The end of his sentence disappeared in gunfire. Qayyum’s body jerked in anticipation of the bullets that would rip through him, but Kalam had a hand on his chest, telling him to hold still, the gunners were aiming at something else. You stay still too, Qayyum said, but Kalam braced on his elbows and used them as a pivot for his arms, the rest of his body motionless as — again and again — he lowered his palms into the stream and slowly, hardly spilling a drop, brought them to Qayyum’s parched mouth, washed the blood from his face and tried to clean the mess that was his eye. With the stink of blood all around, the only light in the world came from those cupped palms, the shifting water within them.

— I’m sorry, no, it won’t recover like a knife-cut on your arm. We must remove it.

The Indian doctor stepped back and switched off a torch which Qayyum didn’t realise he’d been holding. When the doctor patted his shoulder and moved to the next bed, the white-skinned woman, grey-haired, and with lines all around her mouth, stayed to replace his bandages, her touch impersonal in a way he’d never imagined a woman’s touch could be. Where was it they had brought him? Brighton, they said, but all he knew of it was the pebbled beach, the damp smell of the ambulance, and then this place, this page out of a book of djinn stories into which they’d carried him. Everything ever seen or imagined painted upon its walls, its ceilings — dragons and trees and birds and men from Tashkent or Farghana like those in the Street of Storytellers. Such colour, such richness. More than a single eye could hold. He was floating above it all, beside the gilded dragons on the leather canopy of the ceiling. England had made the pain stop. But the woman was speaking to him, he must return to the bed to hear what she was saying.

— We’ll fit you up with a glass eye, and you’ll be breaking hearts again in no time.

— I don’t want to break hearts.

— Oh, love.

He didn’t know why she looked at him in that way, or what a woman was doing among all these men but when she said ‘love’ in that sad tone of voice he understood, even through the glow of painlessness, that he was maimed now, a partial man, and from here on he would never be admired, only pitied.

He used to be a man who climbed trees just to see the view from the top, one who entered a new city and sought out its densest alleys, a man who strode towards clamour. Now he couldn’t think of a branch without imagining the tip of it entering his remaining eye. Everything everywhere was a threat. Every branch, every ball arcing through the air, every gust of wind, every sharp sound, every darkened room, every night, every day. The elbows of a woman; her sudden movements towards him in desire; her hands searching his face for those expressions that only revealed themselves in the dark. He traced the skin around his bandaged eye. Who was he now, this man who saw proximity as danger?

A warning, brother, if you see me walking through the streets, stay far from me. What I want I will have — women or men, wine or gold. A blade through the heart of anyone who tries to stop me. This is how it is when a man walks into hell and survives it. When you return to Peshawar, tell my father he was right. I should have stayed in the orchards.

Qayyum looked up from the letter. Through the mist, the arched gateway and green dome of the Pavilion entrance seemed insubstantial, a fantasy thrown up against the English sky by the force of the soldiers’ homesickness. He wound his blanket tighter around his shoulders, his eye aching from the strain of reading only a few sentences. Was there a taunt in the letter beneath the rage directed at the world, or did this unease all come from within himself? One day at Vipers, and his war ended. Now here he was in the grounds of a palace in Brighton while Sepoy Kalam Khan wrote to him from the trenches at Aubers Ridge.

He raised his hand to his eyelid, permanently closed, and pressed down gently, feeling no resistance. There were men here who envied him this, his ticket home. ‘When you return to Peshawar’. But he wanted neither Peshawar nor Aubers Ridge — wanted only this domed pavilion by the sea, this place which did all that human hands could do to repair broken men and asked nothing about a soldier’s caste or religion to make him feel inferior but understood enough about these things to have nine different kitchens where food could be prepared separately for each group, and where the meat for Muslims was plentiful and halal. The King-Emperor himself had sent strict instructions that no one should treat a black — and this word included Pashtuns — soldier as a lesser man. The thought of the King-Emperor made Qayyum rest a hand against his chest and bow his head. He had given his own palace to wounded Indian soldiers. What nawab or maharaja would do as much?