— What are we doing?

— If you don’t know, go home.

It’s only then he realises that every experience of his life feels pallid beside this one, including that moment yesterday in which the shape of the object in the soil of Shahji-ki-Dheri became clear.

— Inqilaab Zindabad!

He shouts the words to see what hearing them in his own voice will do to them. It feels slightly ridiculous until the men around him join in the cry. How wonderful this is.

— My brother; I must go to my brother.

He parts the shoulders of the men in front of him, and steps into the trajectory of a brick hurtling from a balcony.

23 April 1930

The bullet travels through the frock-coat, missing Diwa by millimetres, and burrows itself into a mirror. Her arm is still raised in the direction of the bewildering man who has just dived backwards off her balcony and it takes a moment to understand the smell of burnt fabric, the crackling sound towards which she turns, and the frozen sun in the mirror, glass rays shooting out from a dark circle.

This day has been the strangest of her young life.

By rights she should still have been in Kohat with her parents and brothers, celebrating her cousin’s wedding. But yesterday when her eldest brother heard of the planned anti-British protest in Peshawar he said he was returning to join the nationalists and his wife, Zarina, insisted she would go along too. If it had been any other woman she would have been overruled, but Zarina had made clear the strength of her will when she entered Diwa’s family home two years earlier and said she refused to marry the man her family had chosen for her, and wished to marry Diwa’s brother instead. Under the laws of Pashtunwali I come here seeking the protection of your household, which can only be given to me through marriage, she had said. It was as if a woman from legend had walked through the door.

So when Zarina said she would return to Peshawar with her husband it was quickly understood that there was no point in arguing. The only one who might have tried was Diwa’s mother, but she had seen many of the women of her extended family eyeing her fifteen-year-old daughter as a prospective bride for their sons and, seeing the possibility of losing her only daughter to another city as her own mother had lost her when she married her cousin the carpet-seller, she was grateful for the opportunity to send Diwa back to Peshawar under the pretext of keeping Zarina company.

Diwa hadn’t minded at all, being sent back to Peshawar with her wedding clothes uncreased except where they had been folded for packing. If she could have had one wish in the world it would be this — to be at home with Zarina, and no one else. No one else demanding her time, distracting her attention. Only Zarina with her quick gestures, her stories and poems, her ability to be loved enough to be forgiven everything. Even rushing into a street filled with men, her face uncovered though Diwa’s mother repeatedly warned her against doing that, even this she’d be forgiven. By now she would have found her husband and he would be plying her with endearments, his hand touching hers, both wrapped around the hilt of the dagger. My warrior, Malalai of Maiwand reborn, he’d say.

Everything is turned around today. Diwa woke up to birdsong instead of the tumult of the marketplace, smelt boiling walnuts and plum instead of tea, watched her brother leave his books in order to go out and fight. When an unknown man appeared on the roof she thought, of course, on this upside-down day, why not? But when none of the neighbourhood women or their children noticed him it started to seem possible that he was there for her, not as threat but opportunity. Opportunity for what? He looked half-crazed, sweating in his black coat. And then, more crazed, he cut his clothes off himself in order to put on the kameez she had tossed in his direction as a more ventilated option. Mad, completely mad, she decided as he ran down the stairs again, leaving the coat where it had fallen.

She knelt on the ground, fastening the gold buttons of the coat. The metal was warm, like a fired bullet. She had just watched men die, and a horse too. It was the horse she couldn’t stop looking at, the horse’s flanks over which she wanted to run her hand, giving it the comfort of her presence as it twitched towards death. The dying men didn’t seem as real as the horse. She’d found herself looking away from them, towards the elevation of Gor Khatri, wondering how the Walled City might appear to someone on top of its Mughal gateway who could look down onto all the roofs of the Walled City, cut off from each other by enclosing walls but open to the sky. An Englishwoman had once described the view to Diwa’s father as looking into a honeycomb made of jewels — but the English spoke this way about things in Peshawar that were entirely ordinary, so it didn’t help. What she wanted to know was if life was proceeding as normal on the roofs a little further back from the Street of Storytellers, where no one could see the horse and the men, the English bayonets and the Peshawari bared chests. Or did everyone feel the strangeness in the air, the sense of possibility?

She stood, the coat in her arms. The crazy stranger was the height of a short man or a tall woman. Zarina’s height. She took the sleeve of the coat in one hand, placed her other hand at its waist. Zarina would wear this, and they would dance as the English dance. Weeks earlier they had watched a couple on the Gor Khatri gateway twirling in the open air, and Zarina had said it was so English to dance in public, as if there was nothing intimate in their embrace, as if it was merely a social transaction and there was no danger that a limb pressed against another limb could lead to desire. No fire in their blood, she said, only half-thawed rivers of ice.

Bullets and shouts from below. Perhaps Zarina would change her mind about the English today.

Diwa continued to hold the coat close as she skipped lightly down the stairs. She’d leave this on Zarina’s bed as a surprise. How soft the fabric. She rested her head against Zarina’s shoulder and they spun together into the bedroom. And there was the crazy man, standing on the balcony railing, about to jump. She raised her hand in command, Don’t! — but he just clutched his head as though a pair of soft palms were enough to keep a head from splitting, and fell. Then the burning smell, the crackling sound, the frozen sun.

She opens the wardrobe door. The bullet has travelled through the mirror and is lodged in the splintering wood. When she touches it, her fingers burn; she doesn’t think of coat buttons in the sun, but of the metallic edge to blood, the stench of which is rising off the street.

She leans back against the wardrobe frame, hands at her temples. A man whose scent and heat is still in the coat she held close to her breast has just looked into her eyes and chosen to die. She tamps down the desire to see what the fall has done to his body, whether it has erased the madness from his features. Even as she thinks that, she understands that she is the one to have been mad these last minutes, not the man who clutched his head just as she is doing now, her brain consumed with terror. Her brother is out there, and Zarina.

Zarina, who never wanted her husband to take part in this protest, who insisted on accompanying him back to Peshawar because every second in his company was an opportunity to dissuade him from becoming a participant in this non-violent army of Pashtuns. Zarina, who took a dagger in her hand and walked out bare-faced, the dye of the Khudai Khidmatgar staining her skin not as tribute but as taunt, so that she could shame her husband, so that all the neighbourhood would say, His woman has to be the man in the family now that he’s turned weak. It is unnecessary; everyone knows that Diwa’s eldest brother has no real commitment to protests and political parties — handsome and good-natured enough to be spoilt by everyone around him, he sometimes flings himself upon a whim for a brief duration. If he wanted to join Congress we’d need to worry, her father said, but an army of unlettered peasants? Everyone understands this, so why can’t his wife leave him alone to become dissatisfied with this new pretence at stepping out of his own life instead of creating such a scene about it. Zarina, the self-absorbed, the unseeing.