Kamila Shamsie: A God in Every Stone

She knelt on the ground, fastening the gold buttons of the coat. The metal was warm, like a fired bullet. She had just watched men die, and a horse too. It was the horse she couldn’t stop looking at, the horse’s flanks over which she wanted to run her hand, giving it the comfort of her presence as it twitched towards death. The dying men didn’t seem as real as the horse. She’d found herself looking away from them, towards the elevation of Gor Khatri, wondering how the Walled City might appear to someone on top of its Mughal gateway who could look down onto all the roofs of the Walled City, cut off from each other by enclosing walls but open to the sky. An Englishwoman had once described the view to Diwa’s father as looking into a honeycomb made of jewels — but the English spoke this way about things in Peshawar that were entirely ordinary, so it didn’t help. What she wanted to know was if life was proceeding as normal on the roofs a little further back from the Street of Storytellers, where no one could see the horse and the men, the English bayonets and the Peshawari bared chests. Or did everyone feel the strangeness in the air, the sense of possibility?

She stood, the coat in her arms. The crazy stranger was the height of a short man or a tall woman. Zarina’s height. She took the sleeve of the coat in one hand, placed her other hand at its waist. Zarina would wear this, and they would dance as the English dance. Weeks earlier they had watched a couple on the Gor Khatri gateway twirling in the open air, and Zarina had said it was so English to dance in public, as if there was nothing intimate in their embrace, as if it was merely a social transaction and there was no danger that a limb pressed against another limb could lead to desire. No fire in their blood, she said, only half-thawed rivers of ice.

Bullets and shouts from below. Perhaps Zarina would change her mind about the English today.

Diwa continued to hold the coat close as she skipped lightly down the stairs. She’d leave this on Zarina’s bed as a surprise. How soft the fabric. She rested her head against Zarina’s shoulder and they spun together into the bedroom. And there was the crazy man, standing on the balcony railing, about to jump. She raised her hand in command, Don’t! — but he just clutched his head as though a pair of soft palms were enough to keep a head from splitting, and fell. Then the burning smell, the crackling sound, the frozen sun.

She opens the wardrobe door. The bullet has travelled through the mirror and is lodged in the splintering wood. When she touches it, her fingers burn; she doesn’t think of coat buttons in the sun, but of the metallic edge to blood, the stench of which is rising off the street.

She leans back against the wardrobe frame, hands at her temples. A man whose scent and heat is still in the coat she held close to her breast has just looked into her eyes and chosen to die. She tamps down the desire to see what the fall has done to his body, whether it has erased the madness from his features. Even as she thinks that, she understands that she is the one to have been mad these last minutes, not the man who clutched his head just as she is doing now, her brain consumed with terror. Her brother is out there, and Zarina.

Zarina, who never wanted her husband to take part in this protest, who insisted on accompanying him back to Peshawar because every second in his company was an opportunity to dissuade him from becoming a participant in this non-violent army of Pashtuns. Zarina, who took a dagger in her hand and walked out bare-faced, the dye of the Khudai Khidmatgar staining her skin not as tribute but as taunt, so that she could shame her husband, so that all the neighbourhood would say, His woman has to be the man in the family now that he’s turned weak. It is unnecessary; everyone knows that Diwa’s eldest brother has no real commitment to protests and political parties — handsome and good-natured enough to be spoilt by everyone around him, he sometimes flings himself upon a whim for a brief duration. If he wanted to join Congress we’d need to worry, her father said, but an army of unlettered peasants? Everyone understands this, so why can’t his wife leave him alone to become dissatisfied with this new pretence at stepping out of his own life instead of creating such a scene about it. Zarina, the self-absorbed, the unseeing.

This is the first time Diwa has thought of Zarina with such anger. Her palm presses against the tip of the bullet, which is cooling now and doesn’t even have the ability to break her skin, let alone cut through muscle and bone. She prises the bullet out of the wood. A spent cartridge, Zarina called her husband when she went up to the roof this morning, Diwa following behind, to see him plunging white clothes into a bucket, his hands already red-brown from the kameezes which were strung along the washing line. Now, the weight of the bullet resting in her palm, Diwa can’t help thinking there’s nothing so wrong with a spent cartridge.

There are sounds of adult command, and childish protest. The rooftop spectators are making their way down the stairs. One of the neighbourhood women comes into the room and closes the shutters without looking onto the street below.

— They’re firing up at the roofs. Stay hidden.

For a while she does. She sits on Zarina’s bed, one hand clutching a bullet, the other resting on the black coat. She is alone now. For the first time in her life she is alone in this house. What if Zarina and her brother never return? Will she just go on sitting here, holding an inert bullet in her hand while live rounds echo on the street below? How many people live in an empty house? One! She heard her father say this once. It hadn’t made sense at the time. The bullets continue on and off for a while. Then they stop, or perhaps she stops hearing them. Eventually, she crosses the border from fear to boredom and is surprised to find the two emotions lie adjacent to each other. She lies down, propped on one side, the black coat resting beside her on the embroidered bedcover. While stroking the softness of the fabric, from breast to thigh, she feels something beneath the cloth, a rectangular shape. She unbuttons the coat, heat rising to her face as she works her way down the length of the garment, and feels her way along the silk lining until her fingers encounter a pocket, and pull out a metal case which she opens to find business cards.

They’re written in English, and for the first time she’s actively grateful she knows the language. So far its only purpose has been commercial. Her father’s carpet trade has many English customers, and his blurring eyesight has left him dependent on his daughter to make sense of the pen-stroke demands which arrive from as near as the Cantonment and as far away as Calcutta. Sometimes the letter-writers arrive themselves and when she carries in the tray of tea she is able to match up handwriting to person, smug in the knowledge she has derived of them from the written courtesies they extend or withhold, the slash or curl of their penmanship, the punctuation. All this is in the past. Over a year ago her father’s blurring eyesight intercepted something in the glance of one of the Englishmen, and since then it’s been her younger brother who takes in the tea tray. She wishes she had caught the glance herself; it might have made the exile seem worthwhile.

NAJEEB GUL, INDIAN ASSISTANT, PESHAWAR MUSEUM.

Najeeb Gul. That was his name. It’s suddenly unbearable that someone called Najeeb Gul jumped to his death from her balcony. If only she’d known his name — she would have called out, Najeeb! and he would have stopped, climbed off the railing and come towards her. But now he lies broken on the street below. She stands up and sits down again. What is she supposed to do for him, for the dead stranger in a frock-coat who works at the Museum?