Thinner Than Skin (27 page)

We stared dumbly at each other. If we didn’t leave,
we’d
turn into a sacrifice—for the bloody rain.

“When?” I asked.

“When what?”

“When did you see the shaman?”

“You mean danyal.”

“When, Farhana?”

“She’d smoked already. Before I went to see her.”

“And what did she say?”

“She said we would … You know what? I don’t feel like saying. But I want to spend the day here.”

“We should scope out the trail for the morning.”

She shook her head.

“What?”

“We climb at night. When there are fewer landslides and icefalls. That’s partly what she said.” Her voice was quiet. “She also said you’re not to come.”

The rain and the wind were making me shiver.

“You know how many have lost their lives on this peak,” she added, soothingly.

“Did she say I was going to die?”

“No. Of course not.”

And then Farhana turned around and walked back into the shack.

Ahead of her, the girl and the goat skipped into the field.

Ahead of me rose Ultar Sar, a serrated finger of solid granite, the Hunza River snaking around its knuckle. This much I was already mapping in my head.

I spent my last day in Hunza wondering if it was my last day. I walked in the nearest town, Karimabad, from where Ultar was invisible. The sky had closed around us, a mountain range of rain inside a mountain range of gravel. At these heights, the battle between earth and sky was always won by sky; my visibility was limited to the images playing in my head.

Ultar had never captured my imagination the way Nanga Parbat always did. It wasn’t frequently photographed. Nor written
up as deadly. Nor did it draw mountaineers from every corner of the world. It wasn’t one of the Tallest Ten. Standing at roughly 5,300 meters, it was almost 3,000 meters shorter than Nanga Parbat. It wasn’t a smooth ribald white from top to toe. Sexless, it had no lover.

Even so, that day I learned it did have a jinn. For whatever reason, this jinn stoked the appetite of the Japanese in particular, many of whom had attempted to summit Ultar, and many of whom had died. Years after his death, the valley still remembered Akihiko Ito, for he’d spoken to the people in their tongue, before setting out, in alpine style—as we would—without ropes, porters, or supplemental oxygen. And at night.

Of course, our plan wasn’t to summit. Ultar Glacier was not as high up as, say, Ghulkin Glacier, so we had no need for fancy expedition gear. And though I didn’t want to hear more, I couldn’t help myself. It was like staring at a drop while teetering at its edge. I had to look.

Ito had set out at midnight, expecting to summit before sunrise, before the rocks and ice could heat and shift. He’d succeeded in this. The problem occurred, as it so often does, on the descent. A storm engulfed him, he lost his way, he spent two days on a ledge without food. Even then he survived. It wasn’t till his return to basecamp that the jinn had entered Ito’s liver and, slowly, extinguished all his lights.

I had to pull myself away from the edge. I stopped asking for stories.

I ended up spending the day in a most unexpected way. I spent it with Wes.

I was walking up a dirt road through an orchard. Around me, baskets of apricots had been left to dry in the sun. As I walked, two women greeted me, each with two long braids and a cap. The older woman, her body spry, her face lined by a thousand landslides, offered me a soup made of dried apricots and qurut, a kind of
cheese. When I politely refused, she laughed, pointing to the shade of a tree where Wes sat spooning the remains of his gift. “He is not shy,” she said. “You should be like him.”

But I was unable to accept any more generosity. “You are very kind,” I mumbled, increasing my pace.

He caught up with me. “These are your resources,” he said, “good, kind country folk.”

I thought, built any schools lately?

I said, “You have a strong stomach. Normally, one sip of the water here and even a brown man from the city is shitting liquid.”

“Nice.”

“No. It isn’t.”

“So that’s why you refused?”

“No. That’s not why I refused.”

To my left rose the silver fin of Rakaposhi, bright as a mirror, graciously illustrating the truth of her name: luminous wall. Some called her by an older name, Dumani, mother of mist. But she was free of clothing today. The rain had passed completely, the air was cool and clean, Rakaposhi dazzled after her bath, and I was at liberty with my camera. The longer I stayed in these valleys and the more photographs I took, the more I came to understand how each peak had to be seen apart from all others. Rakaposhi, despite her height, did not inspire dread in me the way the shorter Ultar peak had, earlier today. Nor did she turn her spire against the hearts of men, like Naked Mountain, or open her arms temptingly to us, like Queen of the Mountains, when Farhana and I had gazed upon her in the lake. Rakaposhi’s summit was elegant in its lines—razor-sharp, yes, but with a gentler grade—and it was no surprise that many insisted she was Pakistan’s most beautiful mountain. But this did not mean she hadn’t committed murder; the wild wolves who sheltered in her breast famously claimed her prey.

Wes leaned into my viewfinder. “Farrah’s right. Climbing’s better at night.” A thumbnail of yellow hair was sprouting beneath
the green stripe that lay across his head. The green was fading to a pale copper hue, blending almost entirely with the rest.

“That’s how we climbed Mount Shasta. At night. With lights on our heads and drills to pull out the ice. She carried her own gear. Strong woman.”

“You’re going to drill Ultar?”

“No. Not this time. You could call this a reconnaisance mission.”

He laughed; I didn’t. “For whenever we come back. Depending.”

The road sloped up toward the Hunza River. As we followed it, Rakaposhi began to slip away.

“American Indians believe Mount Shasta’s seven glaciers are the footsteps of the creator, as he descended from the clouds. I’ve wished sometimes, on this trip, that I understood the stories from here.”

Something tweaked in my breast just then; I felt bad for him. In place of the silver fin of Rakaposhi dipping into a tree-lined horizon, I saw a black and white image of Bridalveil Fall plunging down a frame on a wall, and remembered how I’d stared at it, after an encounter with a man who rejected me completely. I remembered the loneliness, the absolute absence of anywhere or anyone to turn to. I didn’t think Wes’s loneliness was that complete—or even if it was loneliness. He had Farhana, after all, and any number of folks who’d happily give him their last bowl of soup. But something in the way he said it made me regret my coldness toward him. It was a regret I told myself I had to overcome.
He had Farhana
.

“It’s beautiful here.” He slipped his hands in his pockets, breathing deeply.

I was being rude. I needed something to say. The sky was the benign blue of a child’s drawing of a sky. Too benign to photograph.

“Course, you don’t always need a drill to read the ice,” said Wes.

I laughed.

“Why don’t you just propose to her?” he said.

“What?”

“What better place do you need?”

“Has she told you she wants me to?”

“Does she need to?”

“What do you talk about? At night?”

“You mean when we’re alone?”

“What else would I mean?”

“Why not give her the pleasure of saying no?”

“Why?”

“You humiliated her.”

What had she told him? Every drop of sympathy I’d felt for him moments ago vanished.

“Humble yourself,” he kept on, “or she’ll find a way to make you.”

“Hasn’t she already?”

“How’s that?”

“You want me to spell it out?”

“Be my guest.”

But I wasn’t going to give
him
the pleasure of humiliating me. I started walking back.

He called after me. “You know that friend of Matthew’s, who hooked you guys up?”

I stopped.

“Guess that was me.”

I turned to face him again. The
former boyfriend
who knew a
nice little Pakistani girl
? It couldn’t be!

“What do we talk about at night, alone? Among other things, if you’re ever going to open your eyes.”

“But you and Matthew …”

“What?”

“You don’t look …”

“What?”

A dryness in my throat prevented me not only from articulating my thoughts, but even admitting them.

“This doesn’t look like Pakistan,” he said. He was very, very amused.

Slowly, the wheels started turning, and as they accelerated, the wheels began to sing. They weren’t fucking. Pure and simple. Wes did not desire women. And Farhana was a woman. Relief! Relief!

Within seconds, the singing came to an abrupt halt, much as the sympathy I’d felt for Wes had done earlier. They’d been mocking me, toying with me,
for days
. Even longer. Why would Farhana accuse me of being jealous, that day in the shop, when she’d discarded the shawl? That was before Kiran, before moving in with him. They were enjoying my misery, even bonding over it. They were enjoying how malicious my misery was making me. The worst part of me cemented their alliance. You could argue that was worse than fucking.

I walked up to him, barely reaching his chin. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“What would I have said?”

“That you’re an insecure bastard who can’t trust a soul. I could’ve helped.”

“I trust Irfan!”

He laughed. “And where is he?”

“What does that have to do with anything? You knew how I’d feel, when she left. You could have told me. You could have said she came to you only as a friend.”

“Yeah. And as her friend, I let her say it. Or not.”

“So why tell me now?”

He paused. “You’ll know soon enough.” He started walking away.

Soon enough? My thought-wheels began to creak.

“One last thing.” He was back, towering over me, copper stripe a tongue sticking out in the sun. “She jumped before you. I saw her braid hit water. You were in the boat. When you did finally jump, you stayed in longer. Too long. But you already know that.”

I buckled then, on the road. My knees in the gravel, scraped raw through the holes in my pants.
It feels good to cry
.

Irfan wasn’t in the hotel room that evening. We needed to eat before setting out later; perhaps he was already at the restaurant.

My body was at ease. I felt as though I’d been washed, as though a thick mud had been scraped off my bones by a torrential rain from within. It was a comfortable fatigue, more comfortable even than my fatigue in Gilgit. I was without rage, without blame, even directed at myself. What I felt when I took off my shoes and socks and crawled under the blanket and stretched my arms over my head before folding them neatly just at the bulge of skull above the bend of my neck was an almost pleasant mist of melancholy. I thought of my family.

First, my sister Sonia and her vivacious chatter, her refusal to ever sit idle and mope. Once, when she was perhaps thirteen or fourteen, Irfan was over at our house. He was already in love with Zulekha then, the two of them bound to each other by hands more powerful than their own, like two budding glaciers tied to the strongest of backs, to be carried, in sacred silence, several thousand kilometers up a mountain slope, to be married in the most perfect bed on earth. But that day he’d looked at her, my sister, for just a flicker, and I believe it was the first time I registered her as a woman. She was lovely and she’d known she was lovely long before I cared to see it. Now the whole world saw it, and I was glad. I came as close to saying a prayer for her as I’d ever come: God keep the madmen stalking the streets of this land far, far away …

As I went up the chain of command, my prayers caught in my throat. I still hadn’t called my mother since leaving Karachi. Sonia I didn’t need to call. She knew I was always with her. But my mother needed guarantees, and I didn’t know what guarantee to give when, aside from comforting others, she spent every part of every day since I’d known her being comforted in prayer. She’d secured her place in heaven; it was her husband and her children who must secure her place on earth.
Are you earning well? Are you coming home? Is Farhana the one?
All this she’d ask the son, and the son, it was clear, failed to answer. So she offered her own solution—how
did she manage it, demanding assurance while supplying her own?—
God will provide
.

Next, my father. Throughout our stay in Karachi, he hadn’t been told about Farhana. She was introduced as Wes’s sister. Did he believe it? With him, it was hard to say. But if she
had
been the one, he would not have thought well of a daughter-in-law who traveled alone—without family, that is—before being married. (My mother refused to think ill of her. That was my mother.) As Wes’s sister, she was adored. With Wes, my father was loquacious, and with her, chivalrous. Too loquacious. Too chivalrous. The way only a brown man sees a brown man become in the presence of a white man and his white “sister.” And it embarrassed me, the way he asked Wes’s opinion on everything, while, with me, it was the same taut silence, sliding around the parameters of our encounters like a striker around a carrom board. At times the striker would fall into the net of Pakistan’s grief, and we might have a conversation. Other times, it rammed into every disc on the board in a spitfire of rage. There was more fury than sound, however.
What are your plans for the future
? would become
I’ll be back in a while
, and the board was deserted as he sank into a deep gloom. He was a man whose conviviality was intimately wed to God, work, and family. When even one of these indicators was amiss—and clearly, thanks to me, all were amiss—his world tilted. Simply put, I upset his conscience. Perhaps he upset mine.

I remembered one particularly painful afternoon with him. Farhana was on a mission to somehow fix things. (It’s a fine line, the one between helping and hurting. She never saw the line.) In this spirit, she showed my father a few prints of my desert shots from outside Tucson. I’d never shown him even one and didn’t know she’d packed them. It was a grotesque tableau that inversely mirrored my meeting with her father in some way I couldn’t quite pinpoint, but if with hers she’d wanted to stay away from the subject of my work, with mine she went too far.