Kamila Shamsie: A God in Every Stone

Her bed felt unfamiliar, the colourful motifs of the wallpaper hurt her eyes. Her parents’ voices were raised outside her door, words coming through which made no sense. The shaking had stopped, outwardly, but her mind couldn’t hold a thought for any length of time without splintering apart. She took a deep breath, thought of a cliff above the sea, the taste of figs on her tongue, a man’s index finger touching the jut of her wrist, the sea so blue she thought it might drive her mad though she understood nothing of madness then. She closed her eyes, and slept without dreaming.

— So, your father thinks you’re ready to go back?

Mrs Spencer bent to examine a half-opened bud in Regent’s Park Rose Garden, flicking an insect away from the petals.

— Papa knows best, said Viv, wondering why her mother had insisted that they take a walk together when the swift summer shower ended and a rainbow looped across the sky. There was a sound remarkably close to a snort, before Mrs Spencer straightened and looked at her daughter.

— Are you to spend the rest of your life making up for my womb’s insistence on killing his sons?

Viv scuffed her shoe in the rain-damp grass, and didn’t know what to say to that, the unmentioned topic of their lives.

— There’s a war on. We all have a duty.

— Oh yes, we certainly do. How quickly everything that was inconceivable for a woman has become her duty. Isn’t it miraculous that competence has sprung up in us in the exact shape of men’s needs?

Viv looked around anxiously, hoping none of the other women or the wounded serviceman out for an evening stroll could hear. It had been the most welcome of surprises to find Mama all consideration when Mary half-carried Viv into the house two days earlier, but she had gone right back to being the difficult Mrs Spencer now that Viv was up on her feet and feeling foolish about her behaviour, which her father assured her was down to nothing but exhaustion. Two days of solid sleep and you’re fine, Dr Spencer had cheerfully declared this morning when Viv came down to breakfast and ate three eggs and five rashers of bacon.

— Have you even thought about the fact that you’re almost at the end of your six-month term at the hospital?

— It doesn’t mean anything. Everyone signs on for another term as soon as one ends.

— Everyone isn’t my daughter. Do you have any idea how terrifying it was when Mary brought you home? What you looked like? Empty. Your face — just a shell.

— It was exhaustion.

— That was only part of it. You father, he doesn’t want to see or can’t see, I don’t know which, but I don’t share his blindness. Not about you, not about how far this war is from ending. Will you give your entire youth to it? Give your health, and your heart and your sanity?

— Mama, you’re being dramatic.

— Every time I see you there’s less of you there. I don’t think you have any idea what you want for your life other than pleasing your papa. Making up for the fact that he doesn’t have sons to send into the trenches to have their heads blown off. Next month when you turn twenty-three and he reminds you you’re old enough to join the mobile nursing units at the Front — what will you say then? You know he’ll do it, don’t you?

They walked in silence after that for a while, around the circle of the garden; raindrops dried on the petals of yellow and pink and red roses, and the sun moved further beyond the reach of clouds.

— Peshawar, Viv said finally, tentatively. That’s what I want for my life. I want to go to Peshawar.

She waited for her mother to look outraged or disbelieving, but Mrs Spencer only said, Why?

— Because there’s more past than present there.

— There’s no need to be so coy about it. You mean you want to be away from the war?

— Yes.

— Thank God there’s some sense in you. Why Peshawar?

— Two and a half thousand years of history beneath its soil. How long a list of reasons do you need?

— Tahsin Bey mentioned it in that Christmas card.

— Yes. He knew it’s a place I very much want to see.

The explanation sounded false to her own ears, but Mrs Spencer merely nodded. It began to occur to Viv that this conversation was in earnest.

— Papa would never agree. And I can’t just go off half way around the world, in the middle of the war.

Mrs Spencer picked up a rose which had tumbled off its stem into the grass, and brushed its softness against her cheek, her eyelids drooping with the pleasure of it. Viv had the strange sensation of witnessing her mother as she had been as a very young woman, when the world had more possibilities than disappointments in it.

— You went off to Turkey, to live in a tent, on a hillside, with no one within hundreds of miles known to any of us except an unmarried foreign man. That was your father’s doing. He’s in no position to object when I find you a situation far more conventional than that in the heart of our own empire.

She nipped at a petal, pursed her mouth in distaste and threw the rose back into the grass.

— I don’t understand. What will you say to him? What conventional situation?

— Leave that to me.

Viv began to see she hadn’t the faintest idea what kind of woman her mother really was. Until now, it had never seemed particularly interesting to find out.

Qayyum raised the buttered bread to his nose, the scent of it a confirmation that Allah himself loved the French more than the Pashtuns. Beside him, Kalam Khan, impatient for the taste of fruit, bit right through the skin of an orange to get to the flesh beneath, eyes closed in pleasure as his jaws worked their way around the peel.

— How is it?

— Tasteless.

Kalam wiped a smear of butter off Qayyum’s nose and spat a mix of peel and rind onto the train tracks, grinning — a boy who grew up in fruit orchards delighted to discover that his father’s produce in the Peshawar Valley was superior to anything France could grow in her soil. No matter that everything else here was better than the world they’d left behind — the cows sleeker, the buildings grander, the men more dignified, the women. . what to think about the women? One of the men coming out of the station made a gesture as if holding two plump melons against his chest, and there was a rush of men towards the doorway just as Lt Bonham-Carter stepped out, followed by a Frenchman and a woman whose dress was cut to display her breasts as if they were wares for sale.

— Whore, Kalam said cheerfully, but Qayyum looked away when he saw how the woman first crossed her hands in front of her chest and then, raising her head to stare down the men, lowered them to her hips.

Lt Bonham-Carter asked for the regimental band to gather together. The Frenchman refused to take any money for the cigarettes, coffee, oranges and bread the men had purchased, and had asked instead for the band to play the ‘Marseillaise’, as it had when the 40th Pathans disembarked at the port of that city and processed through town. Lt Bonham-Carter smiled as he relayed the information — he’d been the one to teach the dhol and shehnai band how to play the French tune on the journey from Alexandria. The brilliance of the English was to understand all the races of the world; how the French had cheered the 40th Pathans as they made their way from the docks to the racecourse in Marseilles. Les Indiens! Les Indiens ! A cry of welcome that made the men heroes before they had even stepped onto the battlefield. How much finer this was than Qayyum’s first deployment to Calcutta where the Bengali babus were trying to cause trouble for the Raj and required a few Pathans in their midst to instruct them how to behave.