— We will accompany you back to ensure your safety, he said, still not looking at her, and she wanted to thank him, she wanted to say she was sorry about the loss which had brought him to the graveyard, but instead she jumped onto the bicycle and pedalled as rapidly as she could, away from the boy who cried out in surprise and the man who didn’t.

Safety looked like the Peshawar Museum. Viv pushed open the wooden door set in the red-brick facade and there was a sweet familiarity to the weight of it beneath her palm and to the mustiness of ancient stone and fresh ink when she stepped inside. The two giant Buddhas still stood at the far end of the high-ceilinged hall, one raising its hand at her in the Abhaya Mudra. Protection and fearlessness. To enter this place was to feel all the foolish terrors of the day slip away. She raised her hand to the Buddha to return the greeting, and heard a door opening to her left, where the Native Assistant’s office used to be.

— Najeeb?

Surely the man who walked through the door — young, stout, moustached — wasn’t the boy she had known. No, he wasn’t. He looked apologetic, and said the Assistant hadn’t yet arrived, but could he be of any help? It was quickly established that he couldn’t, and Viv said she would wait for Najeeb. The man’s apologetic look grew even more pronounced as he explained there had been an unfortunate incident in the Walled City the previous day because of which some people were choosing to stay indoors, and perhaps the Assistant would be of that number. He was usually here by this hour, he added. Viv fished in her satchel, and pulled out a coin.

— Can you send someone to tell him I’m here? I don’t intend to leave until I see him.

Although he was clearly alarmed by the pronouncement the man took the coin and dispatched the boy who had been mopping the floor to tell the Assistant that a memsahib was waiting for him in the Museum. After ascertaining there was nothing further he could do for her he gestured to the Assistant’s door and said she should wait inside, and not to hesitate to call him if there was anything she needed.

The first thing Viv saw when she walked into the spacious, white-walled office was the chair placed in front of the bookshelves, beside a window. A Bombay Fornicator! On the wall there were framed photographs. She walked close, curious to see whether anything in her memory matched up to the man Najeeb had grown into. In the first photograph the familiar figure of John Marshall looked sternly into the camera, his hand on the shoulder of a much younger man — almond-eyed, crinkled-haired. Najeeb Gul, she said aloud, and the slight figure smiled back at her, recognisable. The next photograph was Najeeb again, holding a stone slab with a sea-monster carved into it in the way other men might hold a large fish they’d just caught. The third frame held his university diploma.

As she turned away from the photographs something on the desk made her walk over to the imposing desk chair and sit down at it. She picked up the paperweight and ran her thumb over the wrist of Atlas. It’s your history after all, Pactyike, she’d said years ago, handing a Pathan boy this crude carving to distract him from the discovery he’d made, accepting as her due the enormity of his gratitude.

Viv stepped into the gallery of Buddhas. There he was in all sizes, all stages of life from young prince to aged ascetic, his expression almost always on either side of the border which separates smug from serene. Only in the deep-set eyes of the starving Buddha did something else emerge, a humanity beyond all other humanities. How much younger she had been fifteen years earlier when the centaurs and Tritons and fish-tailed bulls had arrested her more than this face of suffering, these fragile ribs encasing the strongest of all hearts.

There was a shift in the light. The front door had opened. A Pathan woman entered, very young and very tall, a chaddar covering her head but her face unveiled. Viv, aware that she was wearing a smile of greeting excessive in its brightness, held up her hands in apology. I thought you were someone else, she said in Pashto. The woman moved towards one of the display cabinets near the entryway without responding. Probably never spoken to an Englishwoman, Viv thought, and moved into the anteroom with the statue of Hariti so her presence wouldn’t make the unveiled Pathan feel self-conscious. When she returned to the main gallery the woman was still there, sitting on her haunches in front of one of the cabinets, her hand reaching out to the object on the other side of the glass.

Viv circled around the room so she could see what the woman was looking at, standing back far enough that her presence didn’t draw attention to itself. She knew at a glance the stucco carving at which the woman was staring, had always been repelled and fascinated by it. Men stood next to a tomb which had broken open to reveal a grotesque figure, one half of its body a skeleton, the other half a living, healthy woman. Her right breast rounded, heavy; on the left side, only ribs. The Nurseling of the Dead Woman. The Pathan woman looked up and spoke to Viv’s reflection in the cabinet glass.

— What is this?

Viv didn’t move closer, but allowed her reflection to be the one to speak to the woman in whose voice curiosity was the barest patina over animosity. Speaking slowly, finding workaround phrases when her Pashto failed to present the most direct options, Viv told her the story. A king’s senior wives filled him with poison against a young and beautiful wife and convinced him to bury her alive in a tomb. But because she was virtuous she was able to give birth to a child after her own death and to miraculously suckle him. For three years the child remained in the tomb with his mother, until the walls crumbled and he escaped into the jungle where he lived during the day; at night he would return to the tomb. This continued for three further years until the Buddha, in his compassion, visited the boy who became a monk as a consequence. Later, the boy converted his father to Buddhism. The story says nothing more about the mother.

The Pathan made a knowing sound at that last part, and for a moment the two of them were bound in a mutual sympathy. Or at least Viv thought as much, but then the woman rose up and turned towards Viv, as Medusa might turn from a reflection to cast a man in stone, and said, Where are the bodies?

— I beg your pardon.

— The bodies. What did you do with the bodies?

— I think you’re mistaking me for someone else.

— You’re English.

— Yes.

— Where did the lorries take the bodies? Give her back to me. Let me wash her corpse, let me pray at her grave, let me touch her face one last time.

The woman advanced on her as she spoke, and Viv moved backwards, thinking she should run — this Medusa, this Amazon, this grief-stricken woman might do anything — but she was transfixed by the green eyes, more haunting than the work of any stonemason.

The light changed again. A man walked through the open door. Crinkle-haired and almond-eyed.

— Najeeb!

24 April 1930

When Qayyum stretched out on his mattress for the tiniest of rests he tumbled straight into dreams in which he wore the uniform of the 40th Pathans to try and reach his brother but at every gate of the Walled City a green-eyed woman held a pistol to his heart and asked why he had killed her sister. Finally at the last gate he felt the weight of a hand on his shoulder and turned round with a cry:

— Najeeb!

— Qayyum, no, it’s me. Wake up now, wake up.

Qayyum raised himself onto his elbow. Through the open window, the morning light was feeble. One of the most trusted of Ghaffar Khan’s men was there, his face discoloured with weariness — darkness below the eyes, pallor everywhere else.