The Far Field

by Madhuri Vijay

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.

We had never been nostalgic people. Growing up, my drawings did not find a place on the fridge, my parents did not lovingly preserve my old report cards. Clothes, outgrown, were given away or ripped up for kitchen rags. Books were promptly donated to the library. We kept pace with the present, discarding as we went.

And I felt at these times a troubled wonder, the kind I imagine a parent feels for a grown child: pride, combined with the bittersweet notion that I had somehow, without noticing, without meaning to, lost him.

Bashir Ahmed understood in about five minutes what took my father decades.

“Is it safe to travel there these days?”

And, suddenly, I imagined that this was my family, that the old man and woman were my parents, and the man in the tracksuit my husband.

Then I understood: the burned building was, or had once been, a mosque.

I tried to make sense of the two things together. My skin and this room. My skin in this room.

the mound growing steadily higher and higher, and I fell asleep, comforted by the thought that she was close.

“I am so sorry,” he said. “I did not understand. I wish you had told me this yesterday. Then I would have told you right away that we could not help you and we would not have wasted your time.”

“Ah,” I said. “What we do,” Abdul Latief said, and here he and his wife glanced at each other, a private, coded look I could not decipher. “What we do is—a bit different. You are not—I mean—” He broke off and shrugged.

he said, “you have a better chance of finding your friend.”

His wife lay closest to the door, a solid barrier against anything that might burst in. Somehow, it was easier to fall asleep after

She was sobbing, dreadful sobs, as a stream of Kashmiri, which I could not understand, poured from her, and I stood there in shock, unable to believe this was the same woman.

my face. “These people, they are not like us.” It was the us that did it, the assumption of a shared intimacy, like a curtain pulled around our bodies. It gave me pause, and I wondered suddenly if he were right.

I find that different languages are useful for different things.

The best thing to do is answer them, and most of the time they let you get on with your business. Well, Riyaz doesn’t answer. He just stands there, so they get angry and

I’m not going to say, ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘No, sir,’ ‘Sorry, sir,’ just because some idiot with a gun wants to feel like a king by treating me like a servant.”

“Lucky for us, Murgi, men usually like to shout.” We heard raised voices

“Sometimes,” Riyaz said. His voice was strange, and there was a weird, fixed smile on his face. “I have a feeling that this isn’t my life. That I’m not even here. That I’m somewhere else . . .”

It was a world in which Kashmiris would keep dying, and everybody else would keep having dinner parties.”

uncomfortably intimate about such prolonged eye contact, and despite all that I had seen, naïve fool that I was, I really thought, for a mad, hopeful moment,