The Far Field

by Madhuri Vijay

I glanced at my mother, but she was unreachable now, offering no clue. It was the single most devastating habit she had, to withdraw, to take back the thrilling gift of her joy as casually as she bestowed it. I’d always believed that I was the only one in the world who saw it as clearly as I did, her lightning switch from one self to another. But one look at this stranger’s face told me he understood it, too, and it gave me an odd and unexpected comfort.

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.

sat with my head held high, tasting bitter pride in my own weakness, and hating myself for it at the same time, because, cynical and hardened as I believed myself to be at twenty-four, I had never stopped to consider that pity might, in fact, be just another facet of love.

stepped forward to the table, where I recognized the first dish, a bowl of vermicelli cooked in milk, with raisins and cashews floating in it. “Payasam,” I said involuntarily. “Phirni,” Zoya said from behind me. “We call it payasam at home.” Then I added, “My mother used to make it all the time.”

find that different languages are useful for different things. For instance, it is best to write poetry in Urdu. Urdu words are made for poetry and songs. For stories, Kashmiri is the best.” “And English?” “English?” He smiled. “English is excellent for signboards and maps.”

If he’d had the language, my father might have reacted to my mother’s moods differently, but he had a young man’s temper then, as well as a young man’s pride, and she had an exquisite instinct for zooming in on his frailties.

saw that he spoke to my mother in a way that nobody else did, and that because he spoke to her in this way, she responded to him in a way she did with nobody else. I saw that there was a brightness and merriment that strengthened in her while he was in the room and dimmed when he departed. And that was, for me, enough to begin to love him.

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.

Perhaps there is no explanation other than that I had been weaned too long on secrecy, taught by my mother from earliest childhood the strange and unquantifiable power of keeping one’s counsel. But that is probably too generous an assessment. I suspect the truth was that, like so many who cloak themselves in mistrust and call it independence, I was merely a coward.

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.

To keep approval in reserve, to lead with mockery and distrust, for to reveal affection was to reveal weakness.

It wasn’t hard to recognize, after all, that desire. It was the same desire that had propelled me away from my father, from Bangalore, that had put me on the train to Kishtwar. The desire that had brought me here. The pure, blank promise of escape.

he kept his arm tight around me as we walked to the car, as if to protect me from the world, or, it suddenly occurred to me, to keep me from disappearing into it again.

I probably would have admitted the truth if he’d pressed me, but he didn’t. Ours has always been a story of cowardice, of things left unsaid,

I am aware that I am taking no risks by recounting any of this, that, for people like me, safe and protected, even the greatest risk is, ultimately, an indulgence.