Authors: Uzma Aslam Khan

Tags: #General Fiction

Thinner Than Skin (26 page)

BOOK: Thinner Than Skin

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“What is it then?”

Perhaps Suleiman knew she was there. She had listened to their chatter on many nights, after her family had eaten and the children were in bed. Perhaps each time he returned to her from the baithak, her eyes revealed all that her ears had received.

“Well?” repeated the peeved voice. “If he is not with them, what is it he wants?”

“Justice.”

“Justice?”

Then Maryam heard a sound, unnatural, like winter rain, or summer snow. It fell everywhere around her, from high above the wall. No, it was neither snow nor rain. What fell was far worse. It was the sound of men bonded together in derisive laughter.

She moved away from the wall, out into the open air, into her true home.

The night was moonless and thick with moisture. She searched for stars but not one revealed itself. She searched for Ghafoor but he was gone. Perhaps trailing the foreigners further north. She had heard nothing from him since their last meeting. Remembering the meeting left her aching for the way she used to think of him. Wherever he was now, she hoped he might see some stars. And when he did, she knew he would not point, no matter how inebriated, or enraged.
They only point at what takes away life
.

It pained her, too, the way the people of the valley regarded him. In the past, they had shown him both respect and fear. To the young, especially, he had been a hero, even if, to the old who carried
the burden of honor, he was an embarrassment. But now, while some did not even know of him, others dismissed him outright. Had they not heard of his courage, the way he showed the forest inspector what happened to those falsely accused of a crime? Did they not pass the inspector’s burned house, and cringe? Did they not see his dead wife’s ghost, hear her children scream? No, apparently not. And, apparently, she had been proud of him for doing it, though she had not been able to admit it till now.

Though change was a part of their way, not this change, not this Ghafoor, the one who had become a stray.

She understood now that the way he had looked at her the last time said he was searching for his own worth. If others had rejected him, was she going to do the same? If he could not be a leader of his men, could he not even own a piece of her? Though their alliance depended on restraining desire, he still expected to be desirable to her. This was to be depended on. Though everything else must change, these were the two fixed variables of their love—
never consummate our love, never overcome it
. He had looked at her expecting this assurance, and was angry when he could not find it.

She walked back into the hut. Her free hand pulled a cup from off a plank behind which she hid their remaining supplies, including the brandy. Her children were asleep. On the other side, the men still talked. She poured a little brandy, her mind still churning.

She feared this change the most: could it be that her trader and merchant, the one with the vodka stench in place of the garlic tang, the desperate leer in place of the honey, did not have the fight in
him
anymore? Could it be that he was following the foreigners to the north to no purpose? He clearly needed cradling, but she was in no condition to offer this, even if she wanted to, which she did not. Not after all the effort it took to keep her broken heart from growing cold.

She carried the cup into the forest. No matter how bad things got in the valley, no matter how badly the herders were caught between the government and the militants, what happened to Kiran
could not be forgotten. The fight had not left her. If only she could take Ghafoor’s place, as he trailed the foreigners.

The trees before Maryam rose higher in the dark than during the day. She could name each shadow. Diar, bhentri, chalai. There were also shadows closer to earth, plants whose rhizomes and leaves cured ailments from insomnia to gonorrhea, and even cancer. She recited these names too—asmani booti, birmi, and of course, muther. She rubbed the soil between her fingers, her eye keen, searching for the ginger beloved to the animals.

The year the sheep ate the two ginger stems and they were forced to pay the fine, her mother had said something that now, as the warm, acid sweetness of juniper seeped through her pores, Maryam at last understood. Caressing the ginger root, her mother had said the ewe was wise to eat it. She said the best things in life were like the ginger plant, pungent, plentiful, and most of all, horizontal, with no clear beginning or end. Always on the move, in the middle, between things, between being. Leave the vertical world to trees and mountains. Everything else with any sense at all—including gods and jinns—moved like the ginger plant: parallel to the horizon, to reach whatever space was available.

Well, so would Maryam. Even if it could only be in her head. She drank. The warmth spread through her veins as when she had been a child licking the dregs of her mother’s mana with guilt. Now she was guilt-free.

Fragments of the men’s talk returned to her. As much as the words, it was the way in which they were spoken—distant, elevated—that played in her head. Her mother had taught her that women spoke to each other in a language that was direct and intimate, while men spoke in idioms, to raise them in height. But this did not mean women talked directly
to
men, only to each other, nor that women could not possess the power of public speech. She herself was proof of this. Who had not praised her skills? She would tell Maryam to grasp the nuances of speech before she married. She would ask, “Have you filled your mouth with flour?” It was a way
of urging Maryam not only to speak, but to speak correctly. If Maryam could not fill her mouth with flour, how then could she see that a chasm could be a window, or a mountain a door?

Maryam settled at the foot of a chalai tree, though it could well be the torso of a jinn. She shut her eyes, feeling herself grow flatter and flatter. Trans-limbed, like a worm, buffeted by feathers and leaves. She slithered and she flew. She followed the foreigners north.

Almost immediately, he was there.

In the jaws of a glistening fang—the place where snow was born and ice never melted—a man lay hunkered, his shoulder braced against a fall. He was not going to fall, but he was in pain. How he got there, she could not say. Perhaps he had slipped.

The image was so dazzling in clarity, so fluid in motion, it was as though her hand orchestrated it. She could feel the pain in the right shoulder of the man who had followed her to the graves. It was not only a physical pain. And she could make it worse. If she willed him to moan, he did. If she willed him to look up, he did.

Her first vision, at last.

She heard the heavy wingbeat, just as she had heard it earlier this summer, the first time she saw the image of the man, before she realized what she was seeing. The wingbeat came closer; her vision was going to be interrupted, though she longed to see what would happen next inside the glistening fang, to the man with the pain that was not only a physical pain, the one who, like her, could not stop seeing a girl step inside a boat. It angered her that they had something in common, but they did.

The wings settled. Her vision disappeared. It was gone, the way a star is suddenly gone no matter how hard you stare at the space in the sky where it shone.

In place of the vision of the man in the mountains, there, staring down at her from a bhentri tree, was an owl.

“Hoot!” called the wings to the next world, leaning very slightly forward. Her face was ringed with braided feathers the shade of her own human hair. Her cheek was pale, her eyes, dark as a cave. Of
course she would pick her beloved juniper tree to rest on, the one whose leaves she smoked, whose bark she burned, whose berries she roasted.

Maryam called back. “Have you filled your mouth with flour, Mother?”

The owl adjusted her wings, a hint of a smile at the corner of her beak.

FIVE

A Sudden Peace

I dreamed Farhana slept beside me again, talking in her sleep. I couldn’t decipher her words. Perhaps they were again of her mother, who blew prayers over her flesh. “And I dream of my mother when I am scared …” She slept beside me while I sat up on my elbow, watching as the moon kissed her cheek. It left a perfect circle there, a circle that shuddered very slightly, before dipping to her mouth. Her best feature, even without the moon. How many times had I gazed upon its fleshiness, admired the pale beige tinted with the softest pink, run my fingers along that subtle arch? The moon kissed and it kissed. Farhana continued talking, though I knew she was asleep, and I knew it was left to me to do as her mother had done. I lifted myself into the air like a ball of feathers, and from there, I blew cool air upon her lips, just as the moon planted a second circle, before moving to her throat. “Breath for breath. That is how you love someone.”I loved her. I loved her more than a mother, or a moon. She slept beside me in the cabin in Kaghan, and we had only just arrived, and everything was sweet. Our door was open to the night, inviting it inside. Around us rose scoops of velvet green, and beneath us, a brick red earth. It was for
this we’d come, not to fall into ourselves, apart. But we hadn’t fallen apart yet, we’d just arrived, and the valley undulated like an embrace, cupping in its curves Farhana, me, and nine blue lakes, motionless and pure.

Throughout the night, in my sleep, I blew blessings over her neck, her nails and knees—wherever the moon left circles.

In the morning, I was overcome with a peculiar lethargy. I reached for her hair, a blanket to shelter in, but the space beside me was bare. I registered her absence with dull panic, the fingers of one hand switching off an alarm while the other reached for a dream. And then I recognized it as a dream. We hadn’t just arrived, so much had happened, we couldn’t undo it, any of it. And we weren’t in Kaghan; we were in Gilgit. Farhana’s space beside me had been bare for more days than I cared to count. Now, even Irfan was gone.

I glanced at the clock. Seven in the morning. I left my bed and drew back the curtain, in search of the moss-layered hills of my dream. I couldn’t see beyond the parking lot. The rain pounded Gilgit, leaving the lot slick with red dirt. It hadn’t stopped raining since our jeep pulled into this town two days ago. A mudflow of riverbed sediment had gushed a kilometer up the highway. Our way was blocked. And yesterday, I now remembered, the dream abandoning me so completely it was breathtaking, we were told we’d have to wait at least another day. Yesterday the Gilgit River had thrust into a mosque, sweeping away twelve worshippers, including three children. Two children were still missing, the third was dead. If not floods, raids. The two arrested three days ago, the blind man and the cripple, were never heard from again.

In Pakistan, it was hard to know which tragedy to dwell on most.

I lay in bed, picking at blood-crust. Two days ago, as I’d walked back to my hotel room, I’d knocked into something—a scrap of metal, a skull. My foot, in the damp, was slow to heal. I felt neither
pain, nor even, at this added delay, frustration. Once I’d registered Farhana’s absence, and registered especially that it was a continuous thing, much like rain and roadblocks, I felt very little at all, except, quite unexpectedly, a sudden peace.
We still had time
. The longer our stay in the north, the more opportunities would present themselves to me, to us. In the meantime, I was sapped of energy. It was a peculiar feeling, and I’d never felt a fatigue like this before. It was as though I was being swept in a mudslide, swallowed and crushed. But this was okay, it didn’t hurt. Someone was blowing something over
me
, as I’d blown love and blessings over Farhana in my dream, except, this was neither to love, nor to bless. And it was okay.

Ironically, it was Wes who knocked on my door that day. He came into my room to ask if we should have breakfast together. I agreed. Afterward, we played Scrabble. I noticed he’d stopped shaving. Plenty of clean-shaven men around, so I didn’t think it was to fit in. He arranged his tiles on the board, unable to come up with anything better than
road
, and I laughed and said we were all thinking the same thing. It was very congenial, and even this was easy, because I didn’t really feel I was there with him, and it was peculiar but not unpleasant.

I said, “The beard literally suits you.”

He laughed. “Makes me look skinny, huh?”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

He stood up, stuck his thumbs into the waist of his jeans. “What do you call this?”

“Skinny thumbs.”

He sat back down again. “You’re all right.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

Afterward—the game was so low scoring I didn’t even remember who won—our driver Nur Shah joined us, and we drank salty tea, listening to his many tales of Mirs and forts, listening to the rain and the men who had gone missing.

That night, I felt another absence. It took me longer than it should have to understand that the rain had ceased. I turned to
Irfan’s side of the bed to wake him to ask whether this meant we would leave tomorrow. He wasn’t there.

In the morning, Nur Shah drove us as far up the highway as the road would go. Where the mudslide rendered it impassable, we got out of the jeep, and, carrying our bags on our backs, walked tentatively across a stone pathway slippery with black clay. Our escort, whom I hadn’t seen again after the first night in Gilgit till we set out this morning, leaped across like a gazelle.

Once across, we were met by a second jeep. I’d grown attached to Nur Shah and was sad to lose his company. He made us promise to visit Baltit Fort and, once there, imagine the throne from which the Mirs would command the Eskimo Force to walk on glaciers with bare soles. We promised.

Hunza lay nestled in the Karakoram Range as sweetly as a cat in a closet. I knew that the mountains took their Turkic name of Karakoram, meaning black gravel, from the rubble that covered the glaciers everywhere around us, for we were now in the most densely glaciated part of the globe outside the poles. To pick one to study or photograph was like plucking an apricot to roll along your thumb when granted a basket of thousands.

It was the contrast that took my breath away, the layers and layers of contrast. At the furthest end soared the snow-topped seven-thousanders, including the spear of Rakaposhi, dominating this valley as surely as Nanga Parbat dominated my dreams. A little closer loomed a row of brown and barren peaks, smeared in gray glaciers that, from our perspective below, held none of the dazzling white beauty of the glacier Irfan and I once witnessed in marriage, nor even the one all of us had walked across on our way to Lake Saiful Maluk. Along the valley’s waist rose an erect forest of poplar trees, somber witnesses to the misdemeanors of earth, sky, and ice. Across the valley floor sprawled terraced fields, all the way down to the Hunza River.

Without the mountains, the valley might be too pretty. Without the valley, the mountains too stark. A rose has thorns, a cat has claws, an owl the ferocity of her gaze, and Hunza, location. If geography is an accident, then for thousands of years this one had worked out well.

Hunzakut settlements could reach several thousand feet up the valley; we passed many shepherds and their flocks grazing in these high summer pastures as we stretched our legs that first day. They met us openly and warmly. They hadn’t heard of us here. We were welcome!

Smitten with the way Hunzakut women and men greeted each other—by blowing kisses when apart, and, when near, planting kisses on each other’s fingers—Wes kissed the air and Farhana’s fingers repeatedly. Her attention lay elsewhere. Laughing at Wes’s flamboyant overtures, she pulled away, to walk with the women, who were as visible as expressive, and far more so than in the valleys to the south. She also photographed them. And grew friendly with their daughters. I told myself,
Leave it behind
. Not all girls were about to be annexed, not all women about to be aggrieved.

I tried to hope instead for the freedom we’d have here, Farhana and I, if we allowed ourselves. In my mind, I fed her air kisses. I brushed the tips of her fingers with my tongue.

Though the valley offered up glaciers as easily as fruit, first thing tomorrow, it was still to be Ultar Glacier. The hike was notoriously steep, as we all knew, but, also as we all knew, we were traveling with the incredible hulk, the one with skinny thumbs. And, though I was of course a pale (or dark) shadow by comparison, I’d done a fair bit of daredevilry myself, what with all the places I’d walked in the night without even a flashlight. It was the Hunza River I’d fallen into once, under a moonless sky, on my last visit here. I’d pulled myself out somehow. I could manage Ultar.

The glacier sat near the crest of the incredibly sheer Ultar peak, or Ultar Sar, which rose behind Baltit Fort. Before retiring to our
hotel, we decided to see both. In this way, we’d keep our promise to our driver Nur Shah, who’d been “best of friends” with the grandson of a Mir.

We stopped first at the fort. At a windowless bay window, crisscrossed with spider webs, I recalled another—one that was five-sided—in a world of purple houses and art-glass windowpanes. But Nur Shah had wanted us to imagine the Mir on his throne in this room of the fort, and so I did, happy to inhabit a memory that wasn’t mine. The floor was now thick with debris, and chalk marks in the design of a hopscotch grid. I stepped into the grid, while, through the spider webs across the window frame, I searched the valley for Ultar Sar. The peak lay to my back; for some reason, I hesitated to leave these ruins to look at the mountain directly.

So we lingered at the spider webs and the hopscotch grid, while our new driver, Danyal, deciding he was not to be outstoried, told us that the first people to settle here had walked south from the foot of K2. Like the Eskimo Force that succeeded them, they’d crossed the ice on bare feet. All but two had died in a landslide that, he assured us, originated from Ultar. The survivors were a girl and her grandmother. Those now living here, and in the twin valley of Nagar across the river, were descendants of the girl. She’d been beautiful and had worn on the soles of her feet a skin that could walk across any glacier (and, clearly, any avalanche), gifting her people with both.

The legend wasn’t tough to believe. Everywhere around us, Hunzakuts trudged up mountain slopes carrying hefty loads of fodder on their backs, many without shoes, with stunning features, and most of all, with poverty and age. I saw countless men and especially women, including the very elderly, engaged in all manner of physical work. While the men had been able to move into commerce, owning shops in big cities, or becoming drivers, the women stayed back to manage the small farms and orchards. And children.

Now I could see Farhana walking away from the fort and down a trail, toward a woman carrying a basket of apricots on her head. A girl skipped beside her. Before I saw it, I knew it. She had a black goat.

“What is she doing now?” asked Irfan, standing beside me at the window.

I shook my head.

“It’s been a long day.”

“One of many.”

“I’ll ask Wes to get her.”

“I hear you,” Wes said, behind us.

Nobody moved.

Farhana, the woman, the girl, and the goat were turning into a side lane, presumably to one of the many thatched-roof shacks we’d passed on our way to the fort.

“Not now, Farrah,” Wes mumbled, not without irritation. Despite all the finger-kissing, maybe he was still sleeping on the floor.

Farhana disappeared from our crumbling lookout.

Danyal parted a spider web. “The hike is not so good in the rain. Tomorrow, it may rain.”

We gazed at the sky. Perhaps five minutes passed. Perhaps twenty. Irfan scratched his head. “Have you seen our escort?”

I hadn’t. And I didn’t care. I began walking toward Farhana. Of course the rain didn’t wait till tomorrow. It began as soon as I left the fort, marching with me on the trail.

She was coming out of a shack, with the girl.

“The woman knows a bitan who tells the future.”

“What’s a bitan?”

She was pleased to inform me a bitan was a “religious authority” who inhaled the smoke of burning juniper branches. “She also dances, to her own music.”

“What?”

“And drinks blood, from a goat’s head. Then she goes into a trance. Then she talks, with spirits. And fairies.”

I couldn’t tell if she was making fun of me. “You mean, like the fairy Badar Jamal?”

“I didn’t ask which.”

I wondered briefly what Farhana had smoked.

Behind me, Irfan and Wes were still on the trail, allowing us some privacy, though I could feel them wondering if the strategy was working. All of us were getting slammed hard by the rain, and it was ridiculous, the way we eagerly gave up pieces of our flesh to its teeth.

“Are you cold?” I said with absolute futility.

Wes jogged up to us. “Let’s check out the trail for tomorrow, then go back to the hotel.”

I nodded; Farhana wouldn’t move.

“Are we climbing in the morning or what?” said Wes.

“Not in the morning,” said Farhana.

“Jesus.” Wes wiped his wet beard. “Does anyone even remember why we came here?”

“Why don’t you remind us?” said Farhana.

Oh,
this
was pleasant.

“Hey, I was ready to head back, in Kaghan. After you guys,” Wes pointed, not at me but at her, “fucked up.”

It was possible I could begin to like him.

“People live here,” she said, all shaman-like. “We can’t ignore them. We’re not just here to take a few readings and photographs and be on our way.”

I had to turn my back to her to prevent myself from screaming.