Qayyum moved towards Hari Das to embrace him. But as they touched the cobbler’s mouth formed an Oh of surprise; he stepped back from Qayyum, apologising, a thick needle in his hand, tipped with darkness. Qayyum glanced at his arm to see what Hari Das was staring at. There was no pain, no rip in his kameez, so whose blood was that blooming on his sleeve?

23–24 April 1930

Vivian Rose Spencer rested her hands on the keyboard of the ‘Made in Berlin’ piano. Her calloused palms and lined fingers had changed more than anything at Dean’s since the last dance she’d danced here. She played the opening bars of ‘Feeling Sentimental’ in the empty ballroom and the music bounced off the polished wood floor, skimmed the long mirrors, leapt into the antique arms of the chandelier. If she looked in the mirror long enough would she find, buried deep beneath all the twirling figures and self-conscious glances that it held, the young Vivian Rose Spencer? And at her shoulder, the ghost of Tahsin Bey. He had long since ceased to be the wound in her flesh, had worked himself deeper, invisible to all onlookers, to become the brittleness of her bones, the loneliness forever in her heart.

She couldn’t remember what exactly she’d dreamed earlier in the day when her train had entered the Peshawar Valley; she only knew that she’d dreamed of him, as she hadn’t in a very long time, and woken up with a constricted chest and a feeling of disorientation which revealed itself to have a reason other than dreams.

The train was moving in the wrong direction. Trouble in Peshawar, the conductor had said, when she found him; the train was returning to Campbellpur. At Campbellpur station while the other English passengers stood around arguing about whether to wait there until the situation became clearer or to take the train shortly to leave for Rawalpindi Viv walked over to the Pathan couple who had disembarked from the train, and was soon on her way to Peshawar, in a donkey-cart, her purse no lighter than before but her silver-handled hairbrush now in the possession of the man who used it to brush his luxurious henna-dyed beard.

How she hated him! How she hated all the men they passed on the road as they lolled and laughed and held their faces to the breeze and called out to each other in recognition and broke their journey to saunter into an orchard and pull fruit off a branch and eat it in full view of the world, juice spraying the air. All this Viv saw — as did the unspeaking woman seated beside her — through blinkered, meshed eyes. She knew she was passing through a landscape she’d encountered before (standing at the train window with her calfskin notebook, sketching stupas, comparing her observations with Arrian’s) but it was almost impossible to identify any landmarks. Her brain didn’t know how to translate the criss-crossed images her eyes were sending back, her head ached with the effort of trying. Beneath the burqa she clenched her fists which were themselves restricted in their movements so that if she were to try to reach out for the other woman’s arm the touch between them would be doubly cloth-encased. The rage she felt on behalf of the women of the Peshawar Valley as she sweltered beneath the voluminous burqa dispelled any ambivalence she might have started to feel about Indian demands for self-rule. All these Indians talking about political change when really what this country desperately needed was social change. Why should they be allowed independence when they only wanted it for half the population? And, what’s more, her back ached.

So, the relief — she had never known anything quite like it — of arriving at Dean’s. The liveried man at the gate stopped the donkey-cart from entering, and Viv stood up, hitched up the burqa so that ankles and calves and shins and hemline appeared. With a sweeping gesture of his hand the liveried man waved in the donkey-cart with Viv still in that posture: half-woman, half-tent. When the donkey stopped she stepped past the long-bearded man who started once more to brush his beard as though he were still in a situation of command here in the heart of British Peshawar, and jumped to the ground. With something of the same grandness with which she had cast her first vote she threw off the vile cloth, and didn’t look back.

The donkey-cart departed, the gulmohar trees blazed, a bird with an iridescent throat flew past. Viv walked through a frozen world. Same, same, same — as the merchants in the Walled City might insist while trying to draw your thoughts away from the unavailable object of your desire towards an inferior replacement. Same, memsahib, same. The red-tiled roof of the whitewashed barracks-like structure might have faded slightly, but the hedge framing the driveway was the same, the tall pines in the garden were the same, the starched white uniforms of the bearers were the same, the view towards the mountains was the same, the chatter and whistles of birds were the same, even the china teacup on the garden table with its border of roses was the same.

But the most same-memsahib-same thing of all she saw, when she walked through from the ballroom into the dining room that evening, was the Forbeses, fifteen years older but unchanged save for a few extra creases in their crumpling but lively faces. Viv joined them, was touched by their delight, and said yes, she had only just arrived and yes, she would certainly have a glass of something stronger than water.

The evening wore on, perfectly pleasant, Mrs Forbes regaled her with tales of everyone from all those years ago, most of whom Viv couldn’t remember, though never mind. But at a certain point — during some story about the rumours started by a missing glove at a picnic — she found herself having to concentrate very hard to shut out the increasingly raised voices from the only other table that was occupied at this early hour of the evening.

— Bolsheviks, I tell you, Bolsheviks.

— They’re Muslim fanatics, not Bolsheviks.

— They’d wear green, not red, if they were Muslim fanatics. And why are there sickles on their turbans?

— It’s the Islamic crescent, not a sickle.

Mr Forbes leaned across to the arguing men and said, I say, there are ladies here, and the men apologised, the voices lowered.

Mrs Forbes, pretending the whole exchange hadn’t occurred, moved on to the next topic that came to mind. Such an influx of Jews in Peshawar escaping the Russian Revolution. Had Viv seen the synagogue behind Dean’s? Viv had not. Oh well, said Mrs Forbes, in most ways you’ll find Peshawar unchanged.

Unchanging Peshawar. That had been Viv’s mantra all through the previous year in London as Mary and her parents frowned at newspapers carrying stories of Gandhi and Civil Disobedience; whatever might be going on in the rest of India the Frontier was a place apart, Viv insisted. Her father had been the first one to relent and say no little Indian in a loincloth will stand in my daughter’s way. Dear Papa — the hierarchies of his world had only been slightly shaken by the war and the women’s vote; Englishmen were still at the apex, though Englishwomen now took second place ahead of Native men. Sending Viv off to Peshawar seemed to strike him as an act of defiance against Indian agitation, which would once have pleased Viv and now struck her as faintly ridiculous. Even so, she was glad he was so easily convinced. Mama and Mary, on the contrary, were unrelenting until finally her Pashto teacher Mr Durand-not-Durrani had to be invited to her parents’ home for tea in order to assure the two ladies that yes, indeed, the Frontier is a place apart. Miss Spencer, he had said, you will arrive in Peshawar to find the chicken cutlets and colonial conversations and cries of the bazaar as unchanged as the enclosing hills or the shadow of Bala Hisar Fort. Certainly the cutlets and conversations were unchanged, she thought, taking a bite of her food and listening to the Forbeses talk about their summer plans for Simla.