Thinner Than Skin
by Uzma Aslam Khan
It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.
—Virginia Woolf,
The Death of the Moth and Other Essays
There are one or two murderers in any crowd.
They do not suspect their destinies yet.
—Charles Simic, “Memories of the Future”
She had felt this way once before and it might have been the wind then too.
There had been the scent of the horse right before he ran. The steam rising from the manure he had left in a thick pile on the glacier. The wind carrying the dissipating heat to her nostrils just as the horse’s nostrils flared in panic. Then he was racing forward, straight into a fence of barbed wire masked in a thicket of pine. The mother of his foal lifted her neck. The goats too. They sensed it, even the stupid sheep sensed it, the fat Australian ones the government tricked them into buying. Every living creature had felt the horse impale himself just before his cry rang through the valley like a series of barbed wires.
That was years ago. Now the wind carried a similar foreboding, not in the shape of a scent but of a wingbeat, and the lake froze in anticipation. Maryam waited, and nearby her daughter Kiran waited too. So did the mare and the filly, the three buffaloes, the four goats, and all the stupid sheep. What would it be this time? Whose cry was about to cut through the valley?
She walked along the shores of the lake, feeling the weight of her past, the one she left behind each year when her family moved up from the plains to the highlands. She absently stroked her daughter’s unbraided hair, her brow crinkled as the skin of a newborn lamb.
The trouble with memory: it awakened her mother. When alive, her mother would say that horses are the wings to this world, owls to the next. She had stories for the mountains that enclosed them too, stories in the shape of names. The Karakoram was the black door. The Pamirs the white door. The Himalayas the abyss. At times she saw no point in distinguishing between them, and all the mountains became, simply, the wall. On such days, her mother herself became a wall, pushing Maryam into corners and cracks. “Walk along walls, not toward them,” she would snap. “One foot-loop at a time.” Other times, she would counsel Maryam to look for individual peaks—such as the two lovers, Malika Parbat and Nanga Parbat, the Queen and the Nude—that might appear as windows in a door, or as footholds in a void. And Maryam always looked.
Tonight, the peaks were draped in a deep blue sheet of mist. No windows. No footloops. She had lived with them her entire life and knew that the taller mountain, Nanga Parbat, could not be seen from here so much as felt, and that only on very particular days, when he was drawing closer to Malika Parbat. She understood that the mountains were not as fixed as many believed. She knew too that when undressed, the taller mountain had as many angles as a buffalo hip. He moved in much the same way. A slow slip into a socket, a turn of the tail, a shadow sloping deep into a crotch. In the sunlight his summit was cast in gold, and this was what she looked for each spring, during the trek to the highland pasture, the herd lowing before her, each buffalo hip mimicking the movement in the sky. She looked for it, even if she found it only in her imagination.
It was the snowmelt of the two peaks that created the lake where she now paused. The melt had been too strong this year, obsessive even. As if last year’s vices had not been smoked out completely. They had followed them all the way up from the plains, these vices, hitching a ride on the backs of their horses and even the bells of their goats; if you did not get rid of such things they had a way of getting rid of you.
She gazed into the lake that lay between the mountains, till, gradually, her eye adjusted to the picture surfacing from the water’s depths. It was a picture of a man, his back to her. Though Maryam could not see him she could see the peak on which he lay trapped. She knew every color and curve of this valley; the peak he lay on she did not recognize. What was he doing here, at the foot of the two mountains, at the bottom of the lovers’ lake?
Maryam looked away from the image. Her fingers fussed over Kiran’s chaotic hair with increasing fervor and the girl complained. Her eyes darted back to the water. Nothing, except that thick sheet of mist in the sky, reflected in the lake. The picture of a man trapped on an unfamiliar mountain was gone. Her fingers tried to relax.
Her daughter was squirming but she tried to keep her, whistling softly through her teeth. She was answered with the chime of a bell. She liked the animals.
When you call, they come
. It was the buffalo Noor, gazing casually over her shoulder from the shore, a stalk of grass between her lips that she twirled like a cigarette. There were no barbed wires here. No one tearing down the trees. And no forest inspectors telling the nomads to stretch their limbs barely as far as the length of a blanket, only to deprive them of a blanket altogether. She yanked Kiran’s hair. No! All that had been left behind, down in the plains! Up here, they were free to graze. The highlands belonged to those who had been coming here for so many summers only they knew how the Queen and the Nude behaved when no one was watching.
The wind slackened. The air began to ring with bells as faint yet bright as stars. There was no nervous scent, no echoing cry. No owl’s wingbeat gliding to the next world. Kiran skipped away from Maryam, and Maryam, drawing the night around her shoulders like a shawl, began to chase after her, forgetting entirely that only moments earlier, she had been wondering who would find him, the man glimpsed for just that second in the water, the man who walked into a wall.
Queen of the Mountains: Pagan Rituals
Queen of the Mountains: A Land Outside Land
Queen of the Mountains: Thinner than Skin
Naked Mountain: A View from Above
Queen of the Mountains: The Whisper Chain
Queen of the Mountains: On Justice
Queen of the Mountains: Everyone Is Welcome
It was a barn owl outside my window that night in Kaghan. She—all beautiful things are feminine to me, I make no apologies—perched on the bough of an almond tree at the edge of the river and the moon was high. As I opened the door of my cabin, she swung her neck and looked full into my face. There is no creature more direct than an owl. A rose has thorns, a cat has claws, but an owl the ferocity of her gaze. Unable to pull free from the ruffle of white feathers billowing around her ice-black stare, I delayed ducking back inside for my camera.
It was in my jacket in the closet on the far side of the room. Moving quickly, I remembered the night in San Francisco when Farhana and I had been returning home from a late dinner. The car’s headlights had shone on something large and white on the road. We’d stopped. Farhana fell to her knees, and began caressing the ring of down delineating the eerie, heart-shaped face. Its eyes were open—ah, dead beauty loses her sex!—and a cloud of feathers fluttered around a gaze with a softness that made me shiver. I stroked a limp wing with the pattern of cream and toffee swirls, wishing I had my camera, even if this upset Farhana. As my fingers
moved to the still breast, she said an owl was a symbol of many wonders, evil and wise, and “ours” was wise. I wondered if this would be a good time to propose. And while I’m at it, I thought, I might also suggest a honeymoon (somewhere in a forest, she loved lushness, the propinquity of green), though not immediately after the wedding; I still wasn’t earning enough. In which case, should I wait? When Farhana started to cry, saying she wanted me to look as peaceful as the owl when I died, I decided to wait. I remembered hoping that I wouldn’t die in an accident late at night, tossed on the roadside till some inquisitive passersby stopped to admire my breathless form, only to leave me and drive away.
The living owl was an obliging model. I shot two dozen photographs while she glared, swiveled, and glared again. There was the heart-shaped face and the wings with the delicate markings. There, the heart beneath my fingertip. I could feel it beat this time, caught in a small silver button yielding to my touch. I could squeeze the drumming of an enraged predator’s pulse.
When I returned inside the cabin to review my handiwork, all the images were white. Nothing else. Only a sallow blur. Stupefied, I rechecked the settings, the battery, the light. All as should be. By the time I resolved to try a second time, my visitor had vanished.
Leaving my cabin again, I finally did what I’d stepped out to do. I set out on my nightly walk. I didn’t interpret the owl as evil or wise. To me she only meant that I should have listened to my father and not become a man who “spends his life hiding behind a lens.”
On the other hand, he’d wanted me to be an engineer. If I couldn’t take a few simple shots of a creature who
wanted
herself seen, imagine what else I might have failed at. Who’d feel safe walking across (or even under) a bridge of my design? Such were my thoughts as I headed for the river, inhaling a mid-summer chill deep into my lungs.
Breathing was like sucking a hookah filled with flakes of glass. Strangely, the sensation was pleasant. No doubt it had to do with the
elevation—
five mountain peaks over 8,000 meters, fifty over 7,000
was a common boast—but that would only impress a man impressed by facts. Surely, it had more to do with the purity of the place, which was why it was here, more than anywhere else, that I came closest to feeling I’d rather be here than anywhere else. Rare for me, a man who likes to move. Fitting, then, that I was running beside a river in a valley shadowed and graced by nomads. Even if this hadn’t been the plan.
It was our first night here, on the ancient Silk Route, a route which had never been
the
route at all, not for us, nor for a single man, horse, or fly. There were as many routes through these mountains as veins in a rock, and, true to the spirits of the routes, our own track had changed since our arrival in the country. We were never meant to stop in Kaghan Valley. Which was why, earlier in the day, Farhana and I had argued. We’d barely spoken since and she was sleeping in the cabin while I photographed the owl. Or tried to. It occurred to me as I jogged along the river breathing phantom glass and feeling energized in a way that only happened to me late at night, that had I succeeded in capturing the owl on my screen, I could have shown the images to Farhana in the morning after waking her with a kiss and we might have made up.
Then again, perhaps not. She frequently complained that I was a photographer by day, a happy man by night. Like my father, she saw my passion as a disguise rather than an art, as if the two are dissimilar. She dismissed my camera as a veil that I only removed when the sun set. She was right about the timing. I always leave my camera behind on my nightly walks. She was also right that leaving it behind made me look at the world differently. Sometimes I liked the world more, sometimes less. Since meeting her, I’d begun to think of my two states as “with” and “without.” Without, Farhana weighed more prominently on my mind. But while photographing the owl, I hadn’t thought of Farhana even once.
I met her soon after moving to the Bay Area from Tucson, two years ago. I’d left my job with a design and construction company and couldn’t return home a failure. It would have been hard to explain that, having turned out better at shooting engineering projects than erecting them, I’d become a photographer.
It was landscapes I excelled at, or wanted to. I left Tucson and spent the next few weeks making my way up the West Coast, occasionally veering back into the desert after hitching a ride. I still have them in my portfolio, those who stopped for me, and the shadows of the many who didn’t: pick-up trucks, scuffed boots, silver belts glistening in the sun. There was old man prickly-pear cactus all around and of course the Joshua trees, as the wind blew in from the northwest and purple clouds draped us. For all the tales of murder and kidnapping in these parts, I never chose poorly. I was more often mistaken for Latino than A-rab, even by Latinos, including the one so amused by his mistake he followed me deeper into the desert. Anywhere else, I’d mistake him for Punjabi.
“So, you
Mooz
lim or what?” he asked.
“Or what?” I took his photograph as his shoulders shook and I eventually saw that he was laughing. There is something about large men with quiet laughs. Laughs that boil up slowly from within. A single raindrop splashed his nose. Only his belt, his teeth, and a patch of the distant San Bernardino mountains reflected the sun. After the second raindrop he was still laughing. I thanked him for the ride, walked into the desert, and did what I feared I could spend the rest of my life doing. I really looked at cactus. I really looked at triumph. Blossoming in shocking gimcrack hues of scarlet and gold in a world that watched with arms crossed, if it watched at all. It reminded me of the festive dresses worn by gypsies in Pakistan’s desert borderlands and mountain valleys. The drier the land, the thirstier the spirit.
When I finally arrived in San Francisco, for no reason other than that it was San Francisco, I had a stack of photographs of the Sonora Desert, the Petrified Forest, and Canyon de Chelly. I mailed
off the best and waited for someone to bite, while renting an apartment with two other men. I had two interviews. The first went something like this:
“Why are you, Nadir Sheikh”—he said Nader Shake—“wasting time taking photographs of American landscapes when you have material at your own doorstep?”
“Excuse me?”
“This is a stock-photo agency. We sell photographs to magazines and sometimes directly to customers and sometimes for a lot of money. We might be interested in you, but not in your landscapes.”
“In what then?”
“Americans already know their trees.”
“Do they know their cactus?”
“Next time you go home, take some photographs.” When it was obvious I still didn’t get it, he dumbed it down. “Show us the dirt. The misery. Don’t waste your time trying to be a nature photographer. Use your advantage.”
Back at the apartment, my housemate Matthew felt sorry for me. He said a former boyfriend knew a nice little Pakistani girl. I ate his nachos while he talked on the phone.
I walked along the River Kunhar, thinking of Farhana. My way was lit by the moon and the rush of the current and the silhouettes of the trees and the hut down the way where we’d eaten trout earlier and it thrilled me to know that the others were asleep so I unlaced my boots and peeled off my clothes and stood buck-naked.
I heard a story once. A long time ago, on the banks of the river before it bends to meet the Jhelum, the Mughal queen Noor Jehan paused on her way to Kashmir. She was suffering from an eye infection and decided to dip her hands in the river to wash her face. The water was so cool and pure her eyes were cured. Ever since, the river has been called
nain sukh
, that which soothes the eye. I knew
I was further upriver than the bend where the queen had once stopped, and I knew glacial water was not the cleansing stuff of myth. Yet something compelled me to kneel at the Kunhar’s edge and rinse my eyes, and even to drink her noxious fumes.
Which is what I was doing when I saw her again. The owl, soaring across the opal moon breaking in the water. Flapping twice before circling back toward me, she came to rest on a giant walnut tree. There, looking directly down at me, she spoke.
“Shreet!”
It was the voice, more than her flight from my camera, or her return now, when I was without, that made me feel signaled. No, singled. Singled out.
I was being sighted.
I arranged to meet her the afternoon of my second interview. This time I included in my portfolio a series of photographs taken on a previous return to Pakistan. It was a series of my mother’s marble tabletop, which she’d inherited from her mother, and which dated back to the 1800s. The swirling cream-and-rust pattern changed as I played with the light, sometimes slick as a sheet of silk, sometimes pillowing like a bowl of ice cream. A few frames were, if I say so myself, as sensuous as Linde Waidhofer’s stones.
The second interview did not go very differently from the first.
“Your photographs lack authenticity.”
“Authenticity?”
“Where are the beggars and bazaars or anything that resembles your culture?”
“The marble is a real part of my family history. It’s old, from 1800—”
He waved his hand. “It seems to me that when a war’s going on, a table is trivial.” I wished for the courage—or desire—to ask what images of what war he was looking for.
He stood up. “I’m a busy man. Could’ve ignored you. Didn’t, know why? There’s something there.” He leaned forward expectantly, so I thanked him for thinking there was something there.
I left the office and walked down the corridor to the stairs, passing the photographs that hung on the walls, photographs I loved with an ardor that stung. I’d recognized them all on my way in, of course. There were prints by Linde Waidhofer to taunt me, including one from her
Stone & Silence
series. A Waidhofer can be a nature photographer of the Wild West but a Sheikh must be a war photographer of the Wild East! He must wow the world not with the assurance of grace. He must wow the world with the assurance of horror.
I wound my way slowly through prints from Ansel Adams’
Yosemite
series—it was the wrong moment to view
Bridalveil Fall
, the sheer force of the torrent almost making me weep, and I found myself wishing, childishly,
if only the drop weren’t so steep
—before halting, finally, at
Golden Gate Bridge from Baker Beach
.
The coincidence hadn’t hit me on my way into the interview but it hit me now, as my eye swooped down from the whiteness of the clouds to admit the whiteness of the surf breaking on the shore. I was meeting Farhana on Baker Beach in one hour. It had been her idea, and she’d been specific about where on the beach I’d find her. I stared at the photograph, surprised at the fluttering in my breast. It astonished me that I was hoping to find her on the exact same length of shore depicted in the frame. Worse, I believed that once there, perhaps without her knowing it, I’d look up and see the bridge from exactly the same perspective as I was seeing it now.
Did I want the picture to be a sign? Possibly. It happens this way when you have just been tossed down a roaring cataract. You grope for a raft, anywhere. You even tell yourself that you have found it.
Before the owl swooped across the moon’s reflection in the River Kunhar, I’d been thinking about that word,
Kunhar
, how
kun
sounded like
kus
which sounded like a cross between
cunt
and
kiss
. Do we desire and despise in the same sounds in all tongues? I’d held
the bitter taste of glacier melt in my mouth as the silver disc eased deep into the river’s skin. I’d dipped my head to taste her again, and, gathering filigree into the fold of my tongue, gazed down the Kunhar’s length. She cut through the valley for one hundred and sixty kilometers. I’d been thinking of a long labia.
“
Shreet!
”
The thought scattered like moonseed.
“
Shreet!
”
The second time, the sour glacier water inside me froze and my fingers grew so stiff that when I reached for my clothes, I simply poked at them, as though with sticks. I crouched to my knees for warmth, bewitched by those gleaming black eyes in the pretty heart-shaped face. Instead of the owl, I saw the face of a girl. She had morphed into human at an hour no human should see. She had spoken at an hour no human should speak. How many minutes or hours passed before she shot up into the sky and flew in the direction of the lake we would head for tomorrow?
I eventually returned to my cabin, still naked, and slid into bed beside Farhana. She shifted. I was never more grateful for the heat she radiated under our sheets. I curled into her back and she turned, presenting me with the same gift as on our first night of love: she slipped her finger in my navel. Mocking my “proper Convent-boy English,” she whispered, “I’m going to
have a listen
.” She put her ear to the hollow, exhaling her sweet hot breath over my cold skin till it thawed.