— So that was you. But it was fifteen years ago.

— That’s fifteen years in which I’ve failed to ask for your forgiveness.

— In all the wide world there is no one like the Pathans!

He had come to hear that idea, from other Indians and from the English, as one indicating the hot-bloodedness of the Pashtuns; but here stood an Englishwoman reflecting his people back at him with warmth and admiration. He saw too keenly what there was in her that Najeeb had found so appealing as a boy, and wheeled away, a lumbering creature who didn’t belong in this place where both women and statues were composed of precise gestures of forgiveness and blessing. But the woman seemed to think he had started a conversation, not concluded one, and came to stand beside him in front of the starving Buddha.

— Are you a letter-writer, like your father?

He looked sideways at her, shook his head, wondering what he was supposed to do now. In Brighton he had grown accustomed to Englishwomen — had come to enjoy their company, if he was honest. But they had all been older, and the relationship of patient and nurse clearly demarcated. What was her name — he tried to remember — that nurse in whose handkerchief he still wrapped his eye at night? How shameful to have forgotten.

Everyone, even Najeeb, assumed Qayyum’s stand against Empire stemmed from Vipers, the suffering he’d been led into for a fight that wasn’t his to fight. But he had never felt closer to the English than on that day. Even now, he knew hatred could never truly take root in his breast so long as he remembered Captain Dalmohy shot again and again, getting back to his feet each time as though his body were an irrelevance; and Captain Christopher, dying with Urdu words of gratitude on his lips for the sepoys who had rushed to help him. It was later, at Brighton, that the questions began. It was because of the nurses. His glass eye felt gritty in its socket. Tell them a widow gave a present to a Pathan boy — let the Empire tremble at that! It was something like that she’d said, and he’d been astonished by her audacity, the dismissal of Empire. Everything had started there.

But the only young Englishwoman he’d ever spoken to was that one — how vividly the memory came back — on the train to Peshawar. He was thinking this as the Englishwoman beside him held out a cigarette case to him and offered him its contents, her hand freckled.

— Turkish. The cigarettes are Turkish.

She smiled as if this observation of his, in English, were something wonderful, showing uneven teeth, pink gums. Now he started to think he had recognised her immediately. The large blue eyes, the angular features. But no, he hadn’t. When he thought of her — and sometimes he did — what he recalled was not eyes or jawline but the impatience of her gestures, the hunger of a woman trying to be a man and failing as a result to be either man or woman. But now everything about her was more measured.

— How did you first meet my brother?

— He was my welcome committee in Peshawar the first time I arrived here. Well, not really. But when I stepped off the train, there he was.

— You were right.

— I’m sorry?

— That day, when I told you I was twenty-one years old, you said this is just the beginning. You were right.

Her look of confusion disappeared the moment he pointed to his glass eye, and then her hand covered her mouth and the two of them stood and looked at each other, directly now in a way that hadn’t been possible until this moment, excavating their memories for what remained there of the train journey, one speaking in Pashto, one in English.

— You sketched all the way from the Indus to Peshawar.

— I barged into your compartment!

— You offered me half your bread roll.

— You refused that, but you took the cigarette later.

And then they both said, Turkish! and laughed, as if something miraculous had happened. Qayyum thought, wait until I tell Najeeb.

— Where is he, that brother of mine? In the house with his broken statues?

— He has broken statues at home?

— At home. No. What do you mean, at home?

— Someone went to get him from his house. They say, because of all this trouble, he probably decided to stay in the Walled City. Oh, there’s the fellow who went to get him.

Qayyum turned round, trying to fight the rising, ridiculous panic. The peon at the Museum was shaking his head at the Englishwoman, saying, The soldiers won’t allow me into the Walled City.

— But he’s here, Qayyum said, walking across to the peon, catching hold of his arm. He was here yesterday. He stayed in the Cantonment overnight.

The peon shook his head.

— No, he said, he didn’t come in yesterday at all.

Qayyum pushed the peon aside and strode out of the door. He was here yesterday, Najeeb Gul, my brother, he was here. And the gardener: no, not yesterday. He never came. Qayyum put a hand out, felt rough bark beneath his skin. The Englishwoman had followed him out. Mr Gul? she said, and her voice was shrill, awful. He gritted his teeth against the sound, and ran out of the grounds towards the Walled City.

Kabuli Gate was closed, but as he approached it opened to allow a car driven by an Englishman to drive in. Running, he was through, and within the Walled City again.

— Stop. Stop right there.

Strange, how a command delivered in an English accent still made him want to salute. He turned towards the voice, and there was an English officer with two sepoys on either side of him, their rifles pointed at Qayyum.

— Lance-Naik Qayyum Gul, 40th Pathans. Sir!

The sepoys looked uncertainly at the officer, who signalled to Qayyum to approach him, his expression entirely disbelieving.

— On leave, are you?

— Discharged due to injuries sustained in battle, sir.

— Which battle?

— Vipers, sir. Ypres.

Of all the words known to the English, only Somme had greater power. Not King, not Country, not Christ could stand against Ypres. Even so, he didn’t expect the Englishman to step forward and hold out his hand.

— My father died there. Royal Fusiliers.

Qayyum took the Englishman’s hand, unable to discern if he was feeling anything at all beyond anxiety that a green-eyed woman might be watching him from a balcony down the street, aiming a pistol at his head.

24 April 1930

Viv picked her way among the severed hands, the headless torsos, her shoes leaving faint prints in the dust of the chequered tiled floor. The groupings were by body parts: arms and feet and heads and torsos and legs of all sizes together, like placed with like so that variety might emerge.

The stout man in the Museum had told her that it had been Najeeb’s idea to undertake the cataloguing of detritus: all the excavated pieces too fragmented, too poorly crafted to ever have a hope of being displayed. Such work was a labour of labour, he said, and no one else showed much enthusiasm for it, but Najeeb had obtained permission to turn the elongated reception room of a departed official’s house into a field of broken stone. A notebook lay on the window ledge, and Viv picked it up. Item 1. Takht-e-Bahi 1911–12. Torso with drapery, stump of left arm ending above elbow. 18.7 L. Crude. Late Kushan? She walked over to the cluster of torsos, located the one with the number 1 chalked onto it, walked to the next one, read the accompanying entry. Continued on, feeling the world steadying around her for the first time in the day.

Item 184. SKD 1908–9. Left hand. 5.5 L x 2.8 W. Lower-right palm missing. Three fingers curled into fist. Index finger bent at first and second joint. Effective foot scratcher. Sliding her foot out of its shoe she rested it against the extended index finger of the upturned Gandhara hand and moved it forward and back. There were pleasures large and small here from the foot-scratching hand to the jigsawing together of a fish-tail with a human torso to reconstitute an ichthyocentaur from Takht-i-Bahi. But her favourite thing of all was Najeeb’s pairing of two abraded heads of almost identical size, one Greek in features, one Indian, separated by three centuries or more. He had laid them down in profile so they looked each other in the eye, their mouths inches apart each other. Was this an expression of his own proclivities or an acknowledgement of the passionate intimacy of Pathan men, sexual and otherwise? Who had the boy she’d adored grown into, and how long would it be before movement in and out of the Walled City would become possible again so she could find out?