The Far Field Read online

  THE FAR FIELD

  A NOVEL

  MADHURI VIJAY

  Copyright © 2019 by Madhuri Vijay

  Cover design by Kelly Winton

  Cover artwork © Marigold, Hulme, Frederick Edward (1841-1909) / Private Collection / © Look and Learn / Bridgeman Images

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  “Some People,” from Miracle Fair by Wislawa Szymborska, translated by Joanna Trzeciak. Copyright © 2001 by Joanna Trzeciak. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  This book was completed in part due to an Edwards Fellowship, and the author wishes to thank the Edwards family.

  FIRST EDITION

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: January 2019

  This book is set in 13-pt Centaur

  by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

  ISBN 978-0-8021-2840-9

  eISBN 978-0-8021-4637-3

  Grove Press an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  For MBK, who loved to read

  and

  for X, who makes this island seem a world, and the world seem our island

  Something else is yet to happen, only where and what? Someone will head toward them, only when and who, in how many shapes and with what intentions? Given a choice, maybe he will choose not to be the enemy and leave them with some kind of life.

  Wisława Szymborska, “Some People”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  II

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  III

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Tweleve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  IV

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  V

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  VI

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Back Cover

  I

  1

  I AM THIRTY YEARS old and that is nothing.

  I know what this sounds like, and I hesitate to begin with something so obvious, but let me say it anyway, at the risk of sounding naïve. And let it stand alongside this: six years ago, a man I knew vanished from his home in the mountains. He vanished in part because of me, because of certain things I said, but also things I did not have, until now, the courage to say. So, you see, there is nothing to be gained by pretending to a wisdom I do not possess. What I am, what I was, and what I have done—all of these will become clear soon enough.

  This country, already ancient when I was born in 1982, has changed every instant I’ve been alive. Titanic events have ripped it apart year after year, each time rearranging it along slightly different seams and I have been touched by none of it: prime ministers assassinated, peasant-guerrillas waging war in emerald jungles, fields cracking under the iron heel of a drought, nuclear bombs cratering the wide desert floor, lethal gases blasting from pipes and into ten thousand lungs, mobs crashing against mobs and always coming away bloody. Consider this: even now, at this very moment, there are people huddled in a room somewhere, waiting to die. This is what I have told myself for the last six years, each time I have had the urge to speak. It will make no difference in the end.

  But lately the urge has turned into something else, something with sharper edges, which sticks under the ribs and makes it dangerous to breathe.

  So let me be clear, here at the start.

  If I do speak, if I do tell what happened six years ago in that village in the mountains, a village so small it appears only on military maps, it will not be for reasons of nobility. The chance for nobility is over. Even this, story or confession or whatever it turns out to be, is too late.

  My mother asleep. The summer afternoon, the sun an open wound, the air outside straining with heat and noise. But here, in our living room, the curtains are drawn; there is a dim and deadly silence. My mother lies on the sofa, cheek pressed to the armrest, asleep.

  The bell rings. She doesn’t open her eyes right away, but there is movement behind her lids, the long return from wherever she has been. She stands, walks to the door.

  Hello, madam, hello, hello, I am selling some very nice pens—

  Good afternoon, madam, please listen to this offer, if you subscribe to one magazine, you get fifty percent—

  A long-lashed boy with a laminated sign: I am from Deaf and Dumb Society—

  “Oh, get lost,” my mother says. And shuts the door.

  Somebody once described my mother as “a strong woman.” From the speaker’s tone, I knew it was not intended as a compliment. This was, after all, the woman who cut off all contact with her own father after he repeatedly ignored his wife’s chronic lower back pain, which turned out to be the last stages of pancreatic cancer; the woman who once broke a flickering lightbulb by flinging a scalding hot vessel of rice at it; the woman whose mere approach made shopkeepers hurry into the back, praying for invisibility; the woman who sometimes didn’t sleep for three nights in a row; the woman who nodded sympathetically through our neighbor’s fond complaints about the naughtiness of her five-year-old son, then said, with every appearance of sincerity, “He sounds awful. Shall I slit his throat for you and get it over with?”

  This was the woman whose daughter I am. Was. Am. All else flows from that.

  When she died, I was twenty-one, in my last year of college. When I got the call, I took an overnight bus back to Bangalore, carrying nothing but a fistful of change from the ticket. Eleven people came to her funeral, including my father, me, and Stella, our maid, who brought her youngest son. We stood near the doorway, wedged between the blazing mouth of the electric crematorium and the
March heat. The only breeze came from Stella’s son, who kept spinning the red rotors of a toy helicopter.

  The evening after the funeral, after everybody had gone, my father shut himself into his bedroom, and I left the house and walked. Between the two of us, we had finished several pegs of rum and a quarter bottle of whiskey. I found myself standing on a busy main road with no recollection of having arrived there. People flowed around me, shops and bars glittered and trembled, and I tried to think of the future. In a few days, I would return to college; my final-year exams were just weeks away. After that? I would pack up my things and return to Bangalore. After that? Nothing.

  A bus rattled past, mostly empty, only a few tired heads lolling in the windows. A waiter in a dirty banian dumped a bucket of chalky water onto the road in front of a restaurant. Earlier that day, while a gangly priest droned on and on, my father had overturned my mother’s ashes into a scummy green concrete tank, and then he had continued, somewhat helplessly, to hold on to the clay urn. Without thinking, I snatched it from his hand and dropped it onto a rubbish pile. It was something my mother herself might have done. The look on the vadhyar’s face was of shock and faintly delighted disgust. I waited for my father to bring it up later, but he didn’t.

  I stood in the same spot until the waiter, now with two other men, emerged from the restaurant. They were dressed to go out, in close-fitting shirts lustrous as fish scales. They passed right before me. I heard a scrap of their laughter and tensed, ready for a fight, waiting for the leer, the catcall, the line from a love song. But instead they crossed the road and were gone.

  Though he insisted on all the right rituals for my mother, my father claimed to have shed god and Brahminism long ago, in his own youth, finding a substitute in engineering, Simon and Garfunkel, The Wealth of Nations, and long-haired college companions who drank late into the night, filling the room with Wills smoke and boozy rants about politics, both of which eddied and went nowhere. Three years of a master’s degree at Columbia left him with a fondness for America, especially her jazz, her confidence, and her coffee, which, he liked to say happily, was the worst he’d ever tasted. When he returned to India, he worked for a few years; then my grandfather, as had always been the plan, provided him with the capital to start a factory manufacturing construction equipment, and, when that foundered and fell apart, more capital for a second factory, which flourished.

  My father, in those years, liked to speak of rationality and pragmatism as though they were personal friends of his, yet it was he who inevitably rose to his feet at the end of our dinner parties, who raised his glass and declared, blinking away tears, “To you, my dear friends, and to this rarest of nights.” He had the intelligent man’s faith in the weight of his own ideas, and the emotional man’s impatience with anyone who did not share them. As he grew older and more successful, his confidence did not change; it merely settled and became wider, a well-fed confidence.

  Only my mother could make him falter. She had, apparently, made him falter the day he arrived on a brand-new motorcycle to inspect as a potential bride the youngest daughter of a mid-level Indian Railways employee. He saw a woman standing barefoot on the street, wearing a shabby cotton sari. He asked if he was in the right place, and my mother replied, “Certainly, if what you’re here to do is look ridiculous.” My father used to love to tell this story, and also to tell how she had rejected suitor after suitor before him, one for asking about her family’s dental and medical history, one for inquiring whether the dowry would be paid in gold or cash, one simply for smiling too much. I have no way of knowing if any of this is true, since my mother never told stories, least of all about herself, but I’ve heard they went on a walk, during which my father outlined his plans for his life: grow the company for a couple of years, have a child in three, maybe another child the year after. At the end, he paused for my mother’s reaction. “Well, you do talk a lot,” she said thoughtfully. “But if you’re going to be working all day, I suppose I won’t have to listen to most of it.”

  My mother, with her lightning tongue and her small collection of idols on a shelf in the kitchen. My mother, with her stubborn refusal to admit the existence of meat or other faiths, who crossed the street when we passed a halal butcher with his row of skinned goats, their flanks pink and shiny as burn scars. My father did not eat meat either, but he was quick to add that it was personal preference; according to him, there was “no logic-based argument against the consumption of meat.” I myself had sampled bites of chicken and mutton, even beef, from friends’ lunch boxes, and, apart from an initial queasiness, I liked them all. The one time I made the mistake of telling my mother, she held out her arm and said, “Still hungry, little beast?”

  She could be vicious, and yet there were times, especially in a crowd, when she was pure energy, drawing the world to herself. She was already tall, but at these times, she became immense. Her mouth would fall open, and her crooked incisor, which looked like a single note held on a piano, acquired an oblique seductiveness. Men approached her, even when I was present. During a function at my father’s factory one year, his floor manager tried to flatter her. “That’s a beautiful sari,” he said, his eyes on her breasts. The floor manager was an energetic stub of a man, who had been with my father since the beginning, had slept on the factory floor so they could save on a watchman. I had attended his son’s birthday parties. Now he was looking at my mother’s breasts. She was eating a samosa from a silver-foil plate, and there were crumbs on her cheek. Without pausing in her chewing, she said, “The conference room is empty. Shall we go?” The floor manager swallowed hard then glanced at me, as if I, a child, might tell him what to do. He sputtered something about getting her another samosa, and almost tripped on his flight to the buffet table. My mother shot me a quick, arch look before walking away.

  It was only when she prayed in front of her idols that she shrank, became a person with ordinary dimensions. Every morning, she tucked flowers around their brass necks and lit the blackened lamp and stood for a minute without bending or moving her lips. My father wisely refrained from making his usual speech about the irrationality of organized religion, and she, in turn, chose not to point out that his beloved college LP collection, carefully dusted and alphabetized, was as good as a shrine. Likewise, my mother never insisted that I prostrate myself or learn the names of her gods, though I sometimes wish she had. She never forbade me from joining either, but it was implicit. And in that lay the fundamental irony of our relationship, and the clearest evidence of how she saw the world: my mother considered me, her only child, a suitable accomplice for the greatest secret of her life, but when she prayed, she wanted to be alone.

  Here is another story my father once loved to tell: When I was about two, I went through a phase where I belonged, body and soul, to him. I screamed bloody murder if he was in the room and not holding me, bloodier still when my mother tried to take me from him. I tolerated her while he was at work, but barely. One afternoon, seeing I was in a rare, calm mood, she hustled me out to go grocery shopping with her. It was a mistake. While she swiftly chose flour and oil, biscuits and tea, I’d started to whimper. By the time she was ready to pay, I’d launched into a full-blown tirade, howling, hitting her on the side of the head, clinging to any stranger that passed by. My mother was finally forced to ask the shopkeeper if she could use his phone. She called my father and explained, and thirty minutes later, he burst in with outstretched arms. He carried me home, a shameless, grinning trophy, while my mother trailed behind us, lugging the groceries.

  I don’t know when my allegiance shifted, when I went from being his to being hers. All I know are the facts: I was my father’s daughter first, and then I became, gradually and irrevocably, my mother’s. It’s hard not to wonder how much might have been prevented if only I had loved him more, or, perhaps, loved her a little less. But that is useless thinking, and perilous. Better to let things stand as they were: she, my incandescent mother, and I, her little beast.

 
2

  AFTER THE FUNERAL AND its gritty, exhausting aftermath, I went back to college for my final-year exams, which I barely passed. Without waiting for the inane graduation celebrations, I packed up my things and returned to Bangalore. Apart from my mother’s absence, nothing had changed. My father still woke early and drove to the gym, sweatband around his wrist, towel over his shoulder. Stella still came in the late mornings, after my father left for the factory. She let herself in with her own key, and, over the next few hours, she scrubbed the vessels, ran the washing machine, swabbed the floors, ironed our clothes, dusted the bookshelves, watered the plants, and cooked enough food for a family of five. It was only I, it seemed, who had nothing to do.

  So I began to go out. I agreed to everything. People I hardly knew invited me to clubs to hear their DJ friends play, and later to someone’s flat, where the music was always too loud, the floor gluey with spilled beer, and the inevitable poster of Bob Marley grinned down from the wall like some affable, white-toothed deity. I remember faces floating from unlit corners to ask me questions to which my answer was always the same. Yes, I said when someone asked if I wanted another drink. Yes, I said when someone’s hot breath whispered into my neck, Does this feel good? I lived by the word, kept it ready under my tongue. Yes, I said when they asked if I would be all right.

  Thinking about it now, it seems I wasted the better part of the two years after my mother’s death, but that isn’t exactly true. For about five months, I volunteered as an assistant teacher—a title vastly out of proportion with my actual role—at a government-run school for children with cerebral palsy. I don’t recall anymore how it came about, but for a few hours each day I helped a group of bright-eyed eight-year-olds build tottering colorful towers of plastic blocks, supposedly to improve their fine motor skills, while their mothers, usually tired domestic workers or anxious housewives, hovered in the corridor outside. I think I was probably happier there than I knew, and I might have stayed but for a little girl named Suneyna. From the beginning, I adored Suneyna for her shy smile and her habit of unconsciously reaching out to touch me whenever we were working together. Her little hand would wander out and graze some part of my face, my chin or nose, and then she would go on as before, busily choosing blocks, unaware that she had shaken me deeply. Her mother was a beautiful woman of tiny build, who had four other children and whose loud, lemon-sour voice could be heard as soon as she entered the school premises. She was always complaining, within earshot of the classroom, about how Suneyna seemed unimproved and how the school was wasting everyone’s time. One afternoon, while the children were practicing their gestures for food, drink, and the desire to go to the toilet, her strident voice floated to us: “Every day this girl Suneyna comes home and does soo-soo all over the floor. I really don’t know why I spend all this time bringing her to this useless school. In the end, let me tell you, all that works is a tight slap and a few hours in a room by herself. After that, she behaves like an angel.” I remember standing, blocks tumbling to the ground. I remember going into the corridor and addressing Suneyna’s diminutive mother for minutes together. I have no recollection of what I said, but by the end there was absolute silence in the school. Then I came back into the classroom. The teacher, as I recall, had some trouble meeting my eye. As for Suneyna, she continued building her tower, but she did not reach out once to touch my face for the rest of the day. That afternoon, I got into my car, drove home and never went back.