Kamila Shamsie - A God in Every Stone

Viv touched the face. The grey stone cool against her palm, the surface smooth except where a spade had left its mark against the forehead, just inches from the raised mole which marked the urna — she touched the scar in apology for the crimes of excavation. Her fingers traced the grooves between the tendrils of hair snaking towards the topknot. When she had first seen a Gandhara Buddha, at the British Museum, she had thought of the hair as Mediterranean but no longer — she looked over to Najeeb.

The boy was standing next to the webbed-fingered, larger-than-life Buddhas with their beautiful drapery which the museum guard claimed to have seen stir in the breeze. As she watched, Najeeb said something to the guard who crouched down and lifted the boy up onto his shoulders.

— Look, Miss Spencer!

He had spotted, and been struck by, the faint, unexpected pupil in the eye of one of the tall Buddhas — one round of the Museum and he’d already worked out that was unusual. For a long time he remained motionless, studying it, until Viv clapped her hands twice, and Najeeb dropped off the guard’s shoulder, agile, unconcerned by the possibility of hurt. Viv’s hand on his elbow, they walked around the high-ceilinged whitewashed halls of the Peshawar Museum, and this time instead of rushing from display to display he asked her to explain those things which had particularly caught his attention. He must be near the same age she’d been the first time Tahsin Bey took her to the British Museum, and answered every question with patience.

— This is all from here, Najeeb kept repeating. This also? This also?

— Yes, all of it. We’ve left it here instead of taking it back to London so you can see your own history.

They walked all along the galleries, until they had circled round to the case which displayed excavations at Shahji-ki-Dheri and Takht-i-Bahi. Here, a fragmented starving Buddha; there, the goddess Hariti holding a cornucopia in one hand, the palm of the other hand resting on the upper thigh of her consort. And most prominently positioned of all, a casket — on its lid the figure of the Buddha seated on lotus leaves, flanked by the Hindu gods Indra and Brahma. Along the rim of the lid wild geese were in flight and, beneath, stood the King, Kanishka himself, in his great boots and cloak; and that old familiar form of Eros draped a garland all around the casket. She pointed the different figures out to Najeeb, explained the word ‘syncretic’.

— I came to Peshawar because of this casket, Najeeb.

The boy wrinkled his nose.

— Why? It’s not very nice.

It was true, the casket was far from the most beautiful object here. Too crude, too fussy. Why did Tahsin Bey choose to draw her attention to this, of all the discoveries in all the archaeological journals of the world? She couldn’t shake the feeling there was something she’d missed.

— So this is a Mughal garden.

Najeeb looked at her, and shrugged.

— It’s where I like best in Peshawar, he said, as if that were more important.

Where-he-liked-best was Shalimar Garden — though he referred to it by the less evocative local name of Shahi Bagh — a vast park with pathways, bordering long rectangular ponds, along which Najeeb and Viv walked to the central, arched pavilion. In each pond, multiple fountains kept up a steady cascade of water which cooled the eye and ear. And the summer flowers dense with colour offered up a consolation for the heat. Najeeb had promised her the Garden’s wonders in exchange for those of the Museum, a boy alive to the reciprocal courtesies of his people.

— I come here after school to read, when I’m supposed to be at the mosque with the maulvi. Only my brother knows. Mr Dickens is my favourite. The maulvi doesn’t care, as long as I take him his money every month. I don’t like to waste my father’s money but my brother says as long as I use that time to learn it isn’t wrong, and I don’t learn anything from the maulvi — he’s so boring, he only makes me read the Qur’an out loud and doesn’t explain anything.

— Sloth is always preferable to zeal when it comes to the religious-minded, in my experience. I’m sure you get a lot more out of Mr Dickens.

— Also, where he teaches me in the mosque is so hot, and here there’s always shade.

— Yes, the importance of shade in Peshawar. A long-standing object of fascination for foreigners.

— It is?

Viv sat on the rim of a pond, scooped up a handful of warm water and sprinkled it onto her neck. Pulling her sketchbook out of her bag, she rested it on her knee, and was about to start drawing the two pavilions in her sight — the solid one, and its liquid reflection — when she caught Najeeb looking expectantly at her.

— Hmm? Oh, yes. There was a man called Scylax who came here long ago. Longer ago than anything in the Museum. He travelled from Peshawar all the way down the Indus, and when he went away he took stories of the tribes who lived here.

— Stories of the Yusufzai?

— Stories of shade. For instance, there was a tribe called the Otoliknoi whose ears were like winnowing fans and could protect them from the sun in the manner of umbrellas.

— What?

— Oh yes. You haven’t ever seen them? No? Keep a lookout. And also for the Skyapods or Shadow-Feet. When it gets too hot the Skyapods lie down on their backs and raise one leg up. Their huge feet cast a shadow so big it gives them complete shade.

— I’ve never seen that.

— Next you’ll be telling me you haven’t seen gold-hunting ants either.

— I haven’t!

He looked stricken.

— Lucky you. So much yet to discover. Where are you going?

He had darted off, in search of something or following something, she didn’t know which. When she caught up with him around the other side of the pavilion he was standing above a Pathan man who was lying on his back, allowing Najeeb to manoeuvre his one raised leg this way and that.

— Look, Miss Spencer, the feet don’t have to be so large. It’s all about the angle of the leg and the position of the sun. See?

She had been close to Najeeb’s age that bright summer’s day when she saw a constable bend his head to hear something a schoolboy was saying, and the sunlight shimmered off his helmet crest, turning him mythical. She had turned to Tahsin Bey, and said, Scylax, coming to London, might have written of the Glaucocephalos — the gleaming-headed man — who had light where there should be a face and drew his power from the sun. Today, for the first time, she entirely understood Tahsin Bey’s delight.

The older Pathan stood up at the sight of Viv, cuffed Najeeb on the head, and stalked away. The boy ran back to her.

— What’s a winnowing fan?

The greater part of Asia was explored by Darius, who desiring to know of the River Indus, which is a second river producing crocodiles of all the rivers in the world — to know, I say, of this river where it runs out into the sea, sent with ships, besides others whom he trusted to speak the truth, Scylax also, a man of Caryanda. These starting from the city of Caspatyrus and the land of the Pactyike, sailed down the river towards the east and the sunrising to the sea. .

Beneath the whirring, nestless fan, Najeeb was barely able to get through the sentence, his tongue thick as he tried to manoeuvre it around the unfamiliar names, his brain clearly defeated by the syntax. He looked up at her, despairing.

— That’s Herodotus, the Father of History. Writing more than two thousand years ago. It’s not a very good translation — Darius trusted Scylax especially. Kai de kai, the emphasising phrase goes. Caspatyrus is Peshawar.

— Peshawar? But there’s no river here.

— The Bara River has changed course through the centuries.