— Go downstairs and tell those people you’ll find their brothers and sons as well, Abdul Hakim said, sitting on the lip of a trough so the bulrushes formed the high back of a throne of gold behind him.

— Do you think I had a choice? the Municipal Commissioner said.

— No? Explain it to me. Explain it to Qayyum Gul who has spent all day looking for a man who can’t be found.

Qayyum wanted only to return home with his relief and tell his sisters and nieces and nephews and brothers-in-law that they would find Najeeb tomorrow, and tease him about the English frock-coat which couldn’t keep him from being thrown into prison. He walked over to the khus mats, looked through a gap between them at the street below. The numbers seemed to have grown, and someone had taken the place of the man knocking on the door, without disrupting the rhythmic thud-thud thud-thud. Across the street, someone opened a window and said, Enough now, enough! and one of the women below cried out, Where is my son?

— Tell me what else I could have done, the Municipal Commissioner said. Caroe called us together — four of us — and said we had to hand over the bodies. The ones in the Khilafat offices, the ones in the Madrassa, all of them. Do you think he phrased it as a request?

— What?

— Now you hear the truth, Qayyum Gul, the lawyer said. Go on, Mr Commissioner, tell us how you tried to resist. Tell us you said take me to prison, put a bullet through my brain, but I will not be a part of this shameful, criminal act.

The Municipal Commissioner winced at the bite of the word ‘Mr’, but the rest of the sentence had him flicking his hand at the lawyer, dismissing him.

— What do you understand of it, Abdul Hakim? Caroe was right; he said if there’s a mass funeral tomorrow no one — not the Congress, not the Khilafat Committee, not Gandhi and Ghaffar together if they were here — will be able to control the passions of the city. Haven’t we had enough bloodshed already?

— Oh, oh, listen to him! He was acting in Peshawar’s best interests. Oh Qayyum Gul, are you witnessing this?

— Remember Chauri Chaura, the Municipal Commissioner said, his voice stern, reminding the two other men that he was the oldest here. After your Congress volunteers burnt the police station Gandhi called off the entire Non-Cooperation Movement. Do you want something like that to happen again? Here? So that all the rest of India, all the Congress officials, can say those savage men of the Frontier! How can we trust them to be part of a movement of non-violence?

Abdul Hakim spread his hands in Qayyum’s direction as if to say, Can you believe this?

— I don’t understand. What did they do with the bodies? Qayyum asked.

The lawyer made a sound which would have been a laugh if it had contained any humour.

— Probably threw them into the nearest river or in some ditch somewhere.

— Don’t start these ridiculous rumours! They were buried according to full Muslim rites. Caroe swore that.

— What, even the ones who weren’t Muslim?

— Enough, Qayyum said, holding up his hand. His voice was ragged with anger when he said to the Municipal Commissioner, Those people down there, they want to bury their dead. Some way could have been found to allow them to do that.

— Really? said the Municipal Commissioner. You think after a day like yesterday Peshawari men would quietly walk behind row after row of shrouded bodies, including the body of a young girl shot dead by an English bullet. And not just any young girl. The angel on the Street of Storytellers. You should have seen the men in the office when she was brought in, the ones who recognised her particularly. I thought their hearts would burst right there.

— What girl, what angel?

The lawyer stood up.

— Didn’t you see her, Qayyum? Yesterday, on the Street of Storytellers. A figure made of light stood on a balcony, dispensing water to the men on the street below; the water itself liquid light, a miracle. The English officers saw her standing there, a sign of Allah’s grace, and shot her with every single gun in their artillery. She plunged from the balcony, a falling star, and only when she landed, dead, did the light extinguish, and the men saw it wasn’t an angel against whose brightness they had closed their eyes even as they drank her blessing, but a Peshawari girl, blessed by the Almighty.

In the silence that followed the lawyer struck a match and in a completely different voice, flat, slightly cynical, added, That’s what the man who told me about it insisted, though I know he was hiding at home all day. He extended his arm, held the match against the spiked tip of a bulrush and stepped back. A circle of brightness flared; a string of gold unspooled from the circle, wrapped itself around the dense tip of the bulrush, and the flames caught. Within seconds there was a wall of fire, the shapes of individual bulrushes visible within it.

— Have you gone mad, the Municipal Commissioner shouted, backing away from the crackling light.

— No, just letting the people down below know you’re up here. You might as well go and try to explain things to them before they work out the route from your neighbour’s roof. I think you’ll find a way to control their passions. But I might be wrong.

With a great, spat-out curse the Municipal Commissioner descended the stairs into his house. The bulrushes were disintegrating but the night was breezeless, the flames stayed contained. A concentration of heat and brightness and beauty, unapproachable. So might an angel appear to a man, veiled in the fire of heaven.

— Which balcony was she on? Qayyum asked Abdul Hakim.

— There’s no need to say anything to anyone about the girl, the lawyer said, putting a hand on Qayyum’s arm. What can’t be denied we’ll admit, but let’s not start speaking about our allies giving dead girls into the hands of Englishmen. Understand?

— Was it the carpet-seller’s balcony?

— Yes.

Qayyum scooped up hot ash from the trough in cupped palms, and whispered a verse from the Qur’an, his breath scattering grey flecks.

— Their works are as ashes which the wind bloweth hard upon a stormy day. They have no control of aught that they have earned.

25 April 1930

Walking through the train station and across the railway bridge Viv was able to consider the burqa as the Invisibility Cape she had longed for as a child. Beneath the white tent she moved in an entirely private sphere. Unknown, unseen. The policeman standing near the station lavatory who had taken note of Miss Spencer as she entered paid no attention to the woman in the burqa who emerged; the Englishwomen and children who waited on the platform for the train to evacuate them from Peshawar looked straight through her; Remmick who had personally accompanied her here from Dean’s was too busy sneezing loudly into his handkerchief to pay attention to a local woman whose steps didn’t falter as she walked past him though she ducked her head so that the shimmer of her blue eyes wouldn’t be visible beneath the face-mesh.

Beyond the bridge, at the end of a metalled road, Kabuli Gate was open, a doorway into a world entirely unlike the one she was leaving behind. Viv steadied herself against the railing of the bridge, looked over her shoulder towards the train station. She might just have enough time to return before anyone noticed she’d disappeared. Another few minutes, though, and someone would raise an alarm, the woman in the white burqa would be mentioned, Remmick would understand that she’d set out to betray him — to betray the Empire itself.

She tried to see if she could recognise Remmick among all the Englishmen gathered on the station with their wives but her latticed vision made it impossible. She pulled at the face-mesh so it was a few inches away from her eyes, squinted, cursed men, dropped her hand and continued on to Kabuli Gate.