Thinner than Skin. Uzma Aslam Khan
Praise for Uzma Aslam Khan’s
The Geometry of God
“[F]uses the romantic, the spiritual and the political… the characters, the poetry and the philosophical questions she raises are rendered with a power and beauty that make this novel linger in the mind and heart.”
—Kirkus, starred review
“Elegant, sensuous and fiercely intelligent, The Geometry of God takes an argument that is in danger of becoming stale—that of fundamentalism vs. free thinking among Muslims—and animates it in a wonderfully inventive story that pits science against politics and the freedom of women against the insecurities of men.”
—Kamila Shamsie
“Uzma Aslam Khan, a fearless young Pakistani novelist, writes about what lies beneath the surface—ancient fossils embedded in desert hillsides, truths hidden inside the language of everyday life… Khan's urgent defense of free thought and action—often galvanized by strong-minded, sensuous women—courses through every page of this gorgeously complex book; but what really draws the reader in is the way Mehwish taste-tests the words she hears, as if they were pieces of fruit, and probes the meaning of human connection in a culture of intolerance, but also of stubborn hope.”
—Cathleen Medwick, O magazine
“The Geometry of God is a novel that you don’t just read; you listen to it. It can be irreverent, perverse. It can speak with a whole, fluid beauty. It can be curious, wondrous, noncompliant, like the English in Mehwish’s head… Mehwish is the zauq of the book, the sensory pulse of the novel, who pulls you into a world of her own making. Expect a simultaneous rush that has funniness, absurdity, shock, tenderness… [and] great sex.”
—First City, India
“Such wonderful and persuasive writing. No one writes like her about the body, about the senses, about the physical world. Uzma Aslam Khan is the writer whose new novel I look forward to the most.”
—Nadeem Aslam
“Uzma Aslam Khan has boldly tapped uncharted themes in her latest book, The Geometry of God. She carves a sublime story of new and old with contemporary panache, in which people are real and their fears are prevalent and believable. Khan weaves a complex story whose narrative has a casual energy to it: each voice telling his or her story. Khan is not afraid to say anything.”
—Dawn, Pakistan
“Throughout this complex narrative, Khan writes with unfailing intelligence and linguistic magic. For Westerners, she unlocks doors and windows onto Pakistan and its Islamic culture.”
—Claire Hopley, The Washington Times
“[V]ivid and rich. The reader is rewarded with new viewpoints, a welcome change from the sensationalized and often macabre portrayals of Pakistani people and the country they fight so hard to preserve.”
—Story Circle Book Reviews
“Uzma Aslam Khan's novel is an eloquent rebuttal to its own character's claim about modern Islam's single-mindedness. Skipping across eras and registers of culture—and showing devotion to pleasures as diverse as Elvis Presley and the Mu'tazilites, Aflatoon (the Arabic name for Plato) and evolutionary biology—it is both an example of and an argument for the essential hybridity of every society.”
—Ploughshares
“Uzma Aslam Khan comes from a younger generation of Pakistani authors born and raised in the disrupted decades of the 1980s and 90s whose fiction looks back to those earlier times... As in her previous work, Aslam Khan deploys several narrators, both male and female... but it is the abstract perspectives offered by Mehwish, a character who sees the world with her inner eye, tastes its truths and tells them ‘slant’, that are the most original and captivating... we become attuned to her quietly anarchic voice... complex... inventive... ”
—Times Literary Supplement
Thinner than Skin
by Uzma Aslam Khan
First published in the United States in 2012 by
Clockroot Books
An imprint of Interlink Publishing Group, Inc.
46 Crosby Street
Northampton, Massachusetts 01060
www.clockrootbooks.com
www.interlinkbooks.com
Text copyright © Uzma Aslam Khan, 2012
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Granta and to the Massachusetts Review,
where excerpts of this novel have appeared, titled respectively
“Ice, Mating” and "The News at His Back."
Cover painting copyright © Katherine Boland, 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Khan, Uzma Aslam.
Thinner than skin / by Uzma Aslam Khan.—1st American ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-56656-908-8 (pbk.)
1. Photographers—Fiction. 2. Pakistani Americans—Fiction. 3. Nomads—
Fiction. 4. Northern Areas (Pakistan)—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9499.3.K429T55 2012
823'.92—dc23
2012018202
Book design by Pam Fontes-May
Printed and bound in the United States of America
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 footloop at a time.” Other times, she would counsel Maryam to look for individual peaks—such as the two lovers, Malika Parbat and Nanga Parbat,