A God in Every Stone by Kamila Shamsie Page B

obsequiousness. In the Army, hierarchy allowed for pride, insisted on it; the salute of a sepoy to a general was always straight-backed.
    The Englishwoman reached into her bag, pulled out a bread roll and broke it in two. The faint scent of it an echo carried across the sea. Fresh loaves of bread at the station stop in Marseilles on the way to the Front.
    – You’re a Pathan?
    The Englishwoman was standing in the space between the two rows of seats, holding out half the bread roll. Her hand freckled like the shoulder of the French girl. Qayyum shook his head, far more vigorously than was needed to indicate a lack of appetite. She gave him a look before she sat down, one which said, Are you in any position to refuse a kindness? He put a hand up to his face.
    The fluttering of the blinds, the dripping of water which streaked the window and created the illusion of rain – these sounds grew louder, magnified by the silence between the man and the woman which was entirely different to the silence which had preceded it. Qayyum cleared his throat, leaned forward.
    – Yes, I am Pathan.
    He never thought of himself that way before the Army. His great-grandfather had left the Yusufzai lands decades before Qayyum was born, and so Qayyum was a Peshawari, a city-dweller, with Hindko not Pashto as his first language. Those Pashtuns! his grandfather liked to say, with the superior air of a man who believes he has escaped into a better destiny. But in the Army Qayyum was told he was a Yusufzai of the 40th Pathans and, in the company of the other Yusufzai of the regiment who called him their kinsman and said the air of Peshawar couldn’t thin Yusufzai blood, he learned to think of himself as just that. Why, in the Army, would you be anything but a Pathan – the word itself exploded from the lips of the English officers like a cannonball, straight and true.
    – You’re going to Peshawar?
    – Yes. My home.
    – Have you ever heard of Scylax?
    – I don’t know any Englishmen in Peshawar.
    She laughed at that, and he wondered if this Scylax was a Scot, like Captain Dalmahay. He, Allah rest his soul, had understood that to the Indians all the British were English, and wouldn’t have made a man feel foolish for not knowing an English name from a Scottish one even though he could tell Dogra from Pashtun, Hindu from Muslim.
    – I’m sorry, I’m laughing at myself. Did you learn English at school?
    – The Army.
    Until now the Englishwoman’s gaze had been remote, as if she were trying too hard to pretend there was nothing of particular interest in Qayyum’s face, but now she looked directly at the permanently closed eyelid.
    – Mesopotamia or France?
    – France. Belgium.
    – Ypres?
    His nod was brief, asking for the conversation to go no further. The Englishwoman stood up, rolled down the blinds, and for a time there was quiet and fragrance and shade. When she spoke again, her voice was different.
    – There were ferocious arguments in London when it became known an Indian division was being deployed to France. But the old military men who had served in India insisted the loyalty of the Indian troops to the Crown was beyond question.
    Beyond question. It wasn’t a phrase Qayyum knew. Beyond question. If question was the Allied line, the loyalty of Indian troops was somewhere beyond, all the way across the field without cover and up the slope where the German gunners waited.
    He stepped out of the compartment, into the corridor.
     
    The light coming through the gaping compartment door turned harsh. Viv looked out through the open doorway, through the windows on the far side of the carriage. A barren plain scattered with slate, and rock the same reddish colour as the distant hills. As if young giants had gouged them out from the hillsides and hurled them into the plains in competitions of strength. The games continuing on through the centuries. How had the landscape altered so dramatically? But when she lifted a corner of the blind