Thinner Than Skin

by Uzma Aslam Khan

  At the window, we watched others on the street.

  At the window, she asked, “What’s the most beautiful thing you ever witnessed? I mean a moment.”

  At the window, we played opposites. The Mission, where she lived, was once moist, fecund. In contrast, the stark, windswept Richmond, where I lived, was once a desolate bank of sand. We said she sprang from marsh, I from desert. She loved the damp closeness of curves, the rich debris of glaciers and deltas. She loved her gloves and her socks. I, though always cold, hated to cover my extremities. I preferred the raw, violent beauty of the Pacific coast to the secret tides of the protected bays. We said “opposites attract” and we were right. Converging is what divided us.

  On her first birthday after we met, the year before we left for Kaghan, in one hand I held a calla lily with a lip pinker than her own, in the other, a bottle of champagne. As I descended the hill to her purple palace, the sun drew the fog from my flesh, and I was salivating as the scent of refried beans followed me all the way to her door. There she met me, dressed in woolens and boots, saying she knew what she wanted instead.

  “What?”

  “Let me show you.”

  I shut my eyes, counted to ten, opened them. “So, where is it?”

  “Not here, silly. Let’s go for a walk. To your neighborhood, the one you love to photograph, with all the cliffs and cypresses.” She rolled her eyes as though cliffs and cypresses were toys for men. I found her delicious.

  It was an especially cold day in May and though I did love the bluffs, I’d been hoping for a more close-fitting day. Call it role reversal. I chilled the champagne and headed for the bay window, to, well, anticipate some tidal advances. The last time we’d made love I’d teased that her needs were growing as strong as the tides rushing up the channels of a salt marsh, and, inshallah, they’d also be twice daily.

  Well, it was not to be.

  She’d planned the route. First, the ruins of the Sutro Baths, which looked especially green and scummy that day, thick as a Karachi sewer. We watched the pelicans. Dark hunkered shadows, sometimes in gangs of twenty or more, closing in on the fecund orgy at the microbe-gilded pools like evil clouds, like missiles. They launched headlong, scattering the seagulls and the swifts, dropping one after the other in a heavy, gut-wrenching fall. A rain of bombshells. The invasion mesmerized us.

  I moved my camera in search of the prison island of Alcatraz, floating somewhere in the bay, but it was shrouded in fog. Alcatraz. The archaic Spanish word for pelican, from the Arabic al-qatras. It was the rule of silence that drove the inmates insane, reminding them that their exile was complete. I moved my camera back to the baths, and from there, to the austere silhouette of a cormorant. He seemed to be watching the assault of the pelicans with as little interest as God.

  “Nadir, talk to me for a minute, without that.”

  I didn’t have to see through the lens to see her point to it. “In a minute.”

  The pelicans gone, the seagulls multiplied. I watched a pair land on the boulders along the shore. It was the softest landing, the gulls allowing the wind to pull them down gently, lovingly. And the hummingbirds—how did they survive in this wind, and at this height? And the succulents to her side—those red waxy leaves, juicy as capsicum—and the purple flowers with the bright white hearts! Here it was again: the tenacity of the small. What I’d seen in the Sonoran Desert and the valleys of the Himalayas.

  “It’s over a minute.” I put the camera in its case. She cleared her throat. “Nadir, are you as happy here, with me, as you are alone on your nightly walks?”

  “I’m much happier.”

  She looked away. We were balanced on the farthest wall of the ruins. The water here was less slimy; a thin sun shimmered in its depths. As Farhana’s orange scarf blew across the pale green peat, I took my camera out again. She sometimes let me photograph her now, though still not often enough, and only when dressed. I got a beautiful profile of her gazing at the baths, perhaps imagining them as the rambling maze of salt water swimming pools they’d once been, thumb at lower lip, the mist rolling across the steps in the background.

  “Happier than in the mountains of Pakistan?”

  Perhaps I hesitated. “Well, yes.”

  “So,” she tossed her head back, pulled the scarf tight around her neck, “which is more beautiful. The desert, or the mountains?”

  “Hard to say.” I paused, wanting to play along with this birthday guessing game. “Both. Equally. Differently.” How to compare a horizontal wilderness with a perpendicular one? Especially the most impenetrable perpendicular wilderness in the world? What I couldn’t even begin to explain was how both energized me by removing me from myself. Like seeing the world from behind a camera. She wouldn’t understand. She’d call it hiding. She’d call it cowardly. But it was none of these things. It was disappearing. I could see better this way.

  She watched me hesitate. “Okay, which makes you happiest, the desert, the mountains, or these scummy baths with me.”

  This time I am sure I did not hesitate. “I’m happy anywhere with you.”

  She laughed. “You don’t have to say that. But since you did, why?”

  I was still photographing her. From behind the lens, I replied, “Because you don’t remind me of my past.” And as I stepped onto a lower wall to get more of the ruins behind her, I realized that this was exactly so. She wasn’t like any of the women I knew in Karachi. Her energy was—different. It wasn’t sultry, wasn’t eastern. She was walking away from me now, walking away from my lens, and I noticed that her walk was determined and—how can I put it?—unstudied. As if no aunt had ever told her that women walk with one foot before the other. It wasn’t graceful but it was vigorous. There are men on the Pakistan–Afghanistan border who can spot a foreign journalist hiding in a burqa by the way she moves. Farhana would never pass. She could, however, keep up with them on the mountains. Not many women from Karachi could. And yet—of course I didn’t tell her this—they had more patience in bed. Farhana didn’t like to linger, not over food, shopping, or sex. The only thing I’d ever seen her linger over was her hair, and that was not with pleasure. All the languor was in her spine, the part of her she never let me put behind my lens. Everything else about her had the slightly lunatic energy of Nor Cal, uncomplicated and nervy. I mean, for heaven’s sake, she was passionate about glaciers. How many Pakistani women know two things about them? It was Farhana who told me that Pakistan has more glaciers than anywhere outside the poles. And I’ve seen them! I’ve even seen them fuck!

  She was sobbing. I saw it first through the lens. I saw it too late, after I’d taken the photograph of her wiping her nose with the back of her hand. She said it was the worst thing I could have said.

  The seagulls hovered, teetering in the breeze. Before they touched the rock it was beginning to sink in, yet each time I approached a landing, the wind pulled me away again. We loved each other, Farhana and I, for precisely opposite reasons. If I loved her because she did not remind me of my past, Farhana loved me because she believed I was her past. That day I came close to understanding; by the time I fully understood, we were already immersed in separate rituals of silence.

  I expected to keep to the coast to Point Lobos, but, veering inland, she began following the signs for Fort Miley. I said nothing. I didn’t know what to say. How could I apologize for all that drew me to her? Perhaps I’d been crude in trying to sum it up in the first place. (Or she’d been crude in asking.) That’s the line I eventually took, as we clambered uphill. “There’s too much about you that makes me happy to say why.”

  “Too late. You already said it.”

  Silence, then.

  There were picnickers in the grass. Behind them rose a plaque commemorating what had once been gun emplacements, from before World War I. The plaque read,

  Although they never fired on an enemy, coastal batteries here and throughout the Bay Area stood ready—a strong deterrent to attack.

  “You had enem
ies back then, too?” I muttered, before catching myself. “I didn’t mean you you.”

  She cut me a furious look. I bounced foolishly on my toes. She climbed further up to where enormous guns had once pointed out to the Pacific, guarding all three approaches to Golden Gate. There was a sublime view of Ocean Beach, but I knew it wasn’t for the view that she’d brought me here.

  Without looking at me, she said, “Take me back.”

  I assumed she meant to her warm purple house in the Mission. “Let’s go.”

  “Take me back to the places in Pakistan that you love.”

  I was stunned. If she’d never been to them, why did she say back? And why now? And why ever?

  When she said it a third time I understood that she presented her idea as a condition: take me back and I will keep loving you.

  For always? I wanted to ask. No matter where?

  I looked at her boldly now, and she returned my stare. I was hoping she’d understand that this is what my eyes said.

  It was here that a man loved her, a man with whom she could spend an unknowable quantity of time doing just about anything: walking, going to the movies, eating sushi and Guatemalan tamales on the same day, gossiping about a father in Berkeley, a father I’d still not met because, as I was growing tired of hearing, he was unpredictable—I didn’t know whom she was protecting more, him or me—but who’d brought her to this country when she was three and stayed. I didn’t understand why a thirty-year-old woman—yes, she turned thirty today, it was meant to be a happy day!—with a great job and a great house in a pretty neighborhood in a pretty city didn’t feel this was home. All I understood was that she didn’t. She was at a time in her life when other women long for a child. Farhana longed for a country.

  “You’re going home next summer. I’m coming with you. That’s what I want you to give me for my birthday. I want this promise.”

  I didn’t want to return. With her, that is. Nor did I want to explain that for me it was a return, but I didn’t think it was for her. Nor that, just as she took joy in showing me this corner of the world because I was new to it, I could only take joy in showing her mine if she acknowledged it as new to her. Not if she claimed it as her own. I’d spent the past year lingering over northern California and could freely admit there was much I’d yet to learn. How many months was she prepared to linger over Pakistan? How many years? Would she have the patience to wait and yield till the geography really did begin to construct the person, the way the breakers beneath us constructed the shore? Did she want to yield? Of course not. It was a country practically under siege. We might be interested in you but not in your landscapes. What images did she want to see and to which land did she want to return?

  We’d been happy. I wanted to stay happy. I said, “I’m going for work.”

  It wasn’t a lie. The plan was to spend next summer in the Northern Areas with a friend from school, Irfan, to take pictures. Though loath to admit it to Farhana, this past year I’d sought Irfan’s help in paying my share of the rent. Irfan always wired the money without complaining, though of course it was meant to be the other way around. I should be wiring money home, not receiving it. Till I could pay him back, I’d keep working long hours at a brew pub a few blocks from my apartment and take whatever other work I could find, usually as a wedding photographer. I anticipated doing the same even after next summer, no matter how many images I shot of vertical or horizontal wildernesses. Yet her reply stunned me.

  “Work? What’s the point? You’ll never sell any. At least I know glaciers.”

  I stopped rolling on my toes.

  “Perhaps you’re going back for the wrong reason,” she kept on.

  “And being your tour guide is the right reason?”

  She bestowed upon me an ice-black stare, the kind I was to receive the following year from a very different creature, in a very different place. Behind Farhana, I could see the guns that once pointed to the minefields outside Golden Gate. How easy it is to envision enemies lurking in the tide. As I looked over her shoulder, imagining what shapes those phantoms had once taken, I couldn’t have guessed that within fourteen months, she and I would be posted at our own separate lookouts, not on a headland overlooking the Pacific, but near a glacier overlooking Kashmir.

  “What’s the most beautiful thing you ever witnessed?” she’d ask, as we lay together by her five-sided bay window, playing opposites. “I mean, a moment.”

  I always said it was the mating of glaciers. I’d seen the ritual once, with Irfan and his wife Zulekha, on that previous trip to Pakistan’s north. I tried to communicate the wonder of it to Farhana, while she stretched on her stomach, swinging her legs.

  First, I’d say, the village elders discussed at length which glaciers to mate. The female ice was picked from a village where women were especially beautiful and, because this wasn’t enough, talented. Talent meant knowledge of yak milk, butter, fertilizer, and, of course, wool. From caps to sweaters all the way down to socks, the questions were always the same. How delicately was the sheep’s wool spun? And what about the kubri embroidery on the caps—was it colorful and fine? Most importantly, did all the women cooperate?

  “And the male?” Farhana laughed. “I suppose beauty and cooperation aren’t high on that list?”

  He was picked from another village, I said. One where men were strong, and, because this wasn’t enough, successful. Success meant knowledge of firewood, agriculture, trekking, and herding. There was a fifth, bonus area, and this was yak hair. From this, some men could spin sharma, a type of coarse rug. A glacier in a village with such men had to be male.

  She swung her feet, happy in woolen socks. “And where do they consummate their love?”

  “In a hole dug into the side of a cliff.” I told her it was a ceremony I’d only been allowed to watch after swearing an oath of silence. There was a belief that words disturbed the balance between lovers-in-transit. Perhaps I was breaking the oath by describing it to her in detail there in her purple house, miles away from the sacred soil to which the ceremony belonged.

  “The location of the hole had been as carefully selected as the bride and groom,” I continued, “by gauging which side of the mountain attracted the right length of shadow for the snow to hold for ten months, 14,000 feet above sea level. Two porters had heaved the ice on their backs the entire way. We were brought in a jeep, after taking that oath.”

  I remembered Zulekha kissing Irfan’s cheek, hurriedly, making sure no one was looking. She had curls down to her shoulders and features as impish as his. They’d been neighbors in Peshawar and had gone to the same college in Karachi. They’d been in love since the age of six.

  I remembered the girl I was with at the time, Rida, which means inner peace. The chapstick on her lips had the scent of mint crackling in firewood. Later, I’d feed her purple roses that left blood marks on our lips. (Of course, I left this detail out for Farhana.)

  At the marital hole, we all stood, waiting. The porters lowered the ice-bride and ice-groom from off their backs without hurting them. They tossed the male in first. Whooshoo! Whooshoo! A loop of air seemed to dance right back up the hole and circle around again, inside my chest. The female was released on top. She fell without a sound.

  I thought it a beautiful thing. The most beautiful thing I’d seen. A pilgrimage to love.

  We were told it was bad luck for other eyes to watch. Eyes from somewhere else. Karachi eyes. Peshawar eyes. But even then I’d not been able to resist. I’d taken out my camera and aimed. Had it brought us bad luck?

  I left this detail out as well.

  “What happened next?” She rolled onto her back, said the ice imagery was making her thirsty. I put wet glasses in the freezer for dark beer later. Then I told her the rest. The elders waited politely for the male and female glaciers to finish in their marital bed, after which the porters shielded the hole with a mat of grass, wheat husks, and walnut shells that they’d uncover in the winter, so the snow could collect around the t
wo ice blocks. When the female was fat, freshwater children would spring from her womb and the village would drink them and irrigate their fields with them. After five winters, the couple would begin to creep downhill as one, becoming a natural glacier.

  I always concluded by asking, “And you, what’s your most beautiful moment?”

  She never hesitated. “The way you looked at me, the first time, standing down in the sand on Baker Beach in your trousers while I sat sunning myself on the rocks. You compared me to a calla lily. That was the moment.”

  The first time she said it, I had to look away. I was the best thing to happen to her? Me? I did not deserve my luck. I know I did not, or I would have seen that it was when we played together in her window and I received her unguarded love, these were my most beautiful moments. They were not witnessed. They were lived.

  We played differently now.

  Jinn, Jeannie

  Glaciers in the eastern Himalayas are receding. Some say the Alps will be ice-free by 2100. Greenland’s glaciers are melting so fast they could sink southern California and Bangladesh. But in parts of Pakistan, glaciers could be expanding. It was a possibility Wes and Farhana had come to explore.

  We finally left our cabin, though not as early as I’d have liked. Wes and Farhana decided to scrape up every last bite of my cold omelette too; perhaps the air was making them hungry. An hour later, as I watched Farhana trek up the glacier to Lake Saiful Maluk with Wes, I feared her love for me was like a Pakistani glacier. It was difficult to say if it was growing or retreating.

  What did she love about them? Glaciers, I mean. They weren’t shady or concealed, nothing marshy there, except perhaps the slushy, slippery surface. Unlike her, glaciers were slow-moving, sluggish, with bouts of extreme rage. Between stasis and thrust, they rattled and creaked, moaned and bickered, adjusting and readjusting their old, old bones. Like a ghost in the family, and unlike Farhana, they were insistent lingerers. (Granted, she did linger over those damn eggs.) Snails must be born of them. (I once made a photo-collage of a glacier speckled in snails; the snails looked like little glacier turds.) Was that the attraction—the promise of a deep, stubborn rootedness? Rejection of the New World? Here in the land to which she “returned,” she found glaciers that weathered global gas emissions and spurned newness. Except this wasn’t true, of course. Glacial growth and decline were equal indicators of global warming, as she herself liked to remind me, and if glaciers were growing in the Old World, they were also growing in the New. They were growing in Mount Shasta in northern California, for instance, and Farhana was here to compare the rate of growth in the western Himalayas to that of the southern Cascades.