Thinner than Skin. Uzma Aslam Khan
his phone for a signal. It was about the twentieth time since the morning.
“Nothing,” he snapped it shut.
“What’s wrong with you?” I couldn’t help myself. “You can’t enjoy yourself so nobody should?”
I regretted it at once. His shoulders stooped even lower; his eyes, already mournful (his wife had called them soulful), closed shut, as if my words had torn a nerve and his only comfort was in darkness. I thought of that night in San Francisco, near the park, when I’d been stabbed. My attacker had spared me. Perhaps he’d never intended otherwise. Irfan’s wife had not been so lucky. It could easily have been the other way.
He opened his eyes. “You do know about the arrest in Peshawar yesterday?”
I shook my head. “How would I? Haven’t read a newspaper for days.”
Now he cast me a look of disdain, as if to say, Who has license to shut himself away from the world anymore? The old Irfan would have understood the desire for that privilege, even if the privilege itself eluded us. The old Irfan would have let this day be filled with princesses and mountain love. But the new Irfan was agitated, and he was my friend. If I couldn’t lighten the grief of losing Zulekha, I had to lighten whatever grief I could. Hadn’t he been there for me? All that time in San Francisco, when I couldn’t pay my rent? Irfan had shared my burden without ever acting burdened.
“Tell me.”
“Didn’t you hear the waiter this morning? The man is being blamed for the hotel bombing in Karachi. There have been protests. One protester was shot dead.”
I paused. “Who was he?” It struck me that I was already referring to the man in past tense.
Irfan did the same. “His accusers say he was disguised as a shepherd, and that he had an accomplice who was last seen—around here.”
“Here?” This was a surprise. So far no one handed over to the CIA had come from these valleys. South of here, yes, in Baitullah Mehsud’s Waziristan on the Afghan border, but not all the way here, in this high corner of the North-West Frontier Province, at the foot of the Himalayas. These valleys belonged to the farmers down in the plains, and the herders around us. “That’s impossible.”
“Of course it is. And people here are nervous. They believe the man was innocent—they call both the prisoner and the accomplice ‘the man,’ they’ve become one and the same—but they’re sure he wasn’t from here.” He paused. “They also say that down in the plains, there are more military convoys moving in, and plainclothes spies.” And now he threw me yet another look of disapproval. “You did notice the convoys?”
I briefly regretted my oblivion to all that had been happening outside our cabin, Farhana’s and mine. Yes, I’d noticed the convoys, though barely. Apparently, while I’d been running along the River Kunhar, chased by a crazed owl, another world existed. Amazingly, in this parallel world, another chase was in progress.
“Why?” I asked. “When the police could say he was last seen anywhere, why say here?”
He shrugged. “An accident of geography. To people who don’t care, all geographies are the same, and anyway, accidents can happen anywhere.”
The young girl in the magenta kameez was walking up the hill, and I could see Farhana beside her, holding her hand. They seemed to be having a kind of conversation; Farhana’s broken Urdu would be no less broken than the girl’s.
“I’m not sure it’s a good idea for them to be here,” Irfan nudged his chin at Farhana, and then at Wes, who was getting into a boat. “The tribes are divided about who the man really was. Some say he came down from Kashmir. They say that all the way to Gilgit, people are talking about him, fearing he’s hiding somewhere in their midst. Others say he came from Central Asia, and is connected to the fighting in Waziristan. It’s hard to know one fight from another.”
Both of us were still looking at the lake, at Wes pulling away from the shore.
“Hard times make hard people,” Irfan continued. “These herders would normally never turn away a guest, but they won’t host someone who’ll bring in the ISI, though they fear it may already be too late. Anyone could be a spy. Including a tourist. They want the tourists to leave. It isn’t like them.”
“We’re not tourists.”
“No.” Irfan smiled, and the smile was kind.
“I’m sorry about what I said—earlier.”
He looked away. “If you haven’t brought a tent, at least give me a sandwich.”
Half an hour later, Farhana was walking toward the lake with the girl. Wes was rowing along the far shore. They were waving to him; I doubt he saw them. I set aside the last two sandwiches for Farhana and was filling the gurgling in my still-empty stomach with water when a boy with brown curls strode toward us, bearing gifts. Pears and apricots. Potatoes and hot maize bread. He carried the aroma of salt on a flame, and a cloth rolled in a knot with black thread. When I plucked the knot from the boy my fingers came away sticky. Honey inside. We embraced, telling him to thank his mother for the gifts, Irfan polishing our gratitude in flecks of Hindko, or Gujri, I couldn’t tell which.
I tore the bread and left it on my tongue, letting the heat dissolve slowly. I added an apricot and rejoiced at my menu. Then I poured the topping: a finger of fresh honey. It tasted of flowers unknown to me, flowers vaguely aquatic. Like honey from the bottom of the lake. No one alive had ever touched the bottom, yet here was proof of life in those depths. Next I peeled a roasted potato with my teeth, telling Irfan that part of the thrill of being away from home was mixing dessert with vegetables.
“I always do that,” he replied. “No matter where I am.”
He held half a pear in one hand, half a potato in the other, and, as the clouds rolled across us and the light grew lavender, the two halves mirrored each other. I scraped my pear over the honey cloth and handed the cloth to Irfan, who drew the remaining drops with his tongue. As boys we’d do the same with imli wrappers. And we were boys again.
I’d been missing this, the ease of being with someone without speaking, without suppressing speech. I’d grown up with it in Karachi, where groups of men will congregate in the smallest spaces—the grass between houses, a doorway, a roundabout— spaces made more generous through companionable silence. It existed between women too, this bond. My sister and her friends could spend hours reclining together on a bed, or a carpet. If secrets were murmured, it happened in a style so intuited it was pre-verbal. I hadn’t experienced this very much in the West, where it seemed people had a reason for everything, including intimacy. The only exception I could find was the time I spent with Farhana at her bay window in her purple house. But those moments had been too few in the months before we’d left.
Lying there beside Irfan at the bottom of a hill not far from the nomads’ tents, our wet socks and shoes tossed a few feet away, I was now entirely at peace.
“We’ll save them the potatoes,” Irfan chuckled, setting these aside, gathering fruit peels and seeds into the bag where our sandwiches had been packed.
It was the first time since leaving Karachi that I felt easeful in his company. The way we used to be, when his wife was alive, before she was even his wife. He hadn’t mentioned her once, but of course she was with us. Though he hadn’t mentioned this either, I knew that on our way north, we’d stop and pay homage to the glacier whose mating we’d witnessed with Zulekha. For her. For closure, even, if this were ever possible. And maybe even for God. Surely there was a ritual of departure to this ritual of return, and he needed me with him to complete the cycle, somehow.
He was also lost in thought. I believed I could guess what he was thinking, apart from Zulekha, of course.
It was soon after we’d witnessed the mating of glaciers that Irfan had begun devoting himself to bringing water to these and neighboring areas. And ever since, one question had never ceased needling him. It was this: Do they need it? If for thousands of years people