The Far Field

by Madhuri Vijay

“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,

He asked if he was in the right place, and my mother replied, “Certainly, if what you’re here to do is look ridiculous.”

Hari allowed me the simple luxury of resistance. He allowed me to push back—in a way that was small and mean and unworthy, yes, but nevertheless to push back—against a world that had shown me it could beat me down whenever it wanted.

“When something big happens,” he repeated firmly, ignoring me, “whatever it is, I understand that a person’s first tendency is to freeze, to go numb and wait for something else, equally big, to come along and cancel out the first thing. Believe me, I understand. And I know that’s what you’re doing. But that’s the mistake, don’t you see? It’s faulty, wishful logic. There is no second thing. At least, not

externally. There is, however, action. Action is the second thing. Without action, there is only waiting for death.”

And then I thought of him, returning night after night to an empty house. I thought of him driving alone to this restaurant on Sundays, sitting at this table, reading the menu he already knew by heart, waiting in silence for his food. And, because I’m trying to evade nothing here, I don’t think I ever loved him more than I did at that at that moment, when I pitied him most.

My mother, with her typical, bizarre confidence, never once asked me to keep Bashir Ahmed’s visits a secret, but I did. It seems astounding to me now that I never let it slip out, even by accident; but children are, in their way, the most secretive of creatures, and it was, at the time, the ruling principle of my life: the two of them, Bashir Ahmed and my father, represented different worlds, and to cause those worlds to overlap, even slightly, would have brought nothing short of disaster. To my child’s mind, Bashir Ahmed belonged exclusively to the world of afternoons, with their high, walled shadows and elongated silences, to strange stories and unusual gifts. My father, on the other hand, belonged to the steady world of evenings, to comfortably rumpled office clothes and the house lit up, to homework and dinner, to the fading of energy and the coming of sleep. And it began to seem to me that as long as I kept the two separate in my mind, I could have my reward, which was to continue in this way forever.

For this escapade with the carpet, diverting as it was, could not be the end of what she had in mind. She was after something more, and we both waited to see what it was.

“See how much she’s learned in a few days?” she said, and pride was evident

“Murgi,” she said with a wry shake of her head, “don’t get married.” I smiled slightly, not taking my eyes off my hands. “Sometimes I think,” she said, “that the only way to make him even see that I’m there is to put my nose in the air and bray like one of his mules. Otherwise? Forget it.”

I realize that my parents, despite their drastically different personalities, were both essentially guarded and solitary people, who found it difficult to form true friendships, which would have required risk and revelation beyond what they were prepared to provide.

had yet to understand just how many shapes a person’s desire could take, and how few of them, in the end, took the shape of the body.

“Right,” he said coolly, fully in control of himself and the situation again. “So let me ask you one last time. Do you wish to stay in this place and see what you can fix? Or do you wish to go back to the place you came from and forget about everything?”