Thinner Than Skin

by Uzma Aslam Khan

  Apart from returning, of course.

  There were others trekking up the glacier with us, as well as a line of jeeps, all heading up to the lake, all leaving brown scud marks across the glittery white expanse. (Snails!) The jeeps slid across the ice, white-knuckled drivers steering wheels that kicked like steeds. To our right was a drop thousands of feet down into the river. I peered over the edge. A school bus lay on its side. I overheard the driver of one jeep tell his passengers that the accident was only two days old. There were no survivors. A whiff of hashish circled us as the jeep continued up.

  Leaning over the edge, Irfan said the schoolchildren had probably been listening to their teacher tell the story of how the lake got its name, just as the bus had skidded.

  “What a happy thought,” I replied.

  “She had probably just gotten to the part about the prince falling in love with a fairy princess,” he added cheerfully. “Or the part about the jinn.”

  I looked at him. With his clipped pointy beard and sharp cheekbones, Irfan had an elfin look about him, except that his eyes, hard with sorrow, belonged to this world. He had a way of hunching his shoulders and pursing his lips when reminded of all that caused him pain, which was most things. His wife Zulekha had died soon after their marriage; she’d died in a car hijacking in Karachi, on her way home from a wedding with her brother. The hijackers had shot them both before driving off with her Honda Civic. Irfan was near Kaghan when it happened, working on a water management project for a Norwegian company. It was before the days of the cell phone. He returned to Karachi to find his wife already buried.

  In America, a shrink would say Irfan needed closure. In Pakistan, he needed God. But he lost Him when he lost his wife, and his brooding posture enfolded a man nothing like the Irfan I’d gone to school with, the one with whom I’d trekked across these valleys before, to see the mating of glaciers. I thought it was to remember being here with Zulekha that Irfan had changed the plan and decided on this detour to Kaghan. I assumed it wasn’t entirely because Farhana loved forests.

  Now I mumbled, “A lot has changed since we were here last.”

  He grinned, somewhat devilishly, as if to say, all for a Honda Civic.

  As I raised my arm to offer something—perhaps a thump of camaraderie to his back—I nearly slipped. I pulled his jacket for balance and we found our footing barely two inches from the edge.

  “Not even a fairy princess is worth falling for,” he laughed as we turned away from the bus to follow Farhana and Wes back up the glacier.

  They were far ahead of us now, two tall figures, both identifiable by the color of their coats—Farhana a red blur, Wes a mustard—the ends of her braid occasionally scattering sunlight across my field of vision like a lens flare. They were probably taking readings as they went; people seemed to be watching them. I walked in the dirt track her shoes left behind as the glacier creaked. There were unimaginable pressures stored in the ice beneath our feet.

  This morning, as we lay in bed in our cabin, before Wes and Irfan disturbed us, I’d told Farhana the story about the jinn and the lovers. She lay on her back, knees slowly tracing arcs in the air, casting spells across her damp bush. Before she pulled the covers over her, for those few moments, we were naked together, enjoying the warmth we still held between us. I was glad there were no dishes to wash in our cabin and no access to email, or I could never have kept her there long enough to whisper the tale in her ear.

  “There was a jinn who fell in love with a fairy princess. The jinn was the guard of Malika Parbat, the mountain that borders the lake.”

  “And Malika Parbat means?”

  “Queen of the Mountains.”

  “Go on.”

  “The fairy princess was called Badar Jamal, and she was a water creature, all silvery and slight, dipping in and out of the lake, stretching pleasingly on Malika Parbat’s slopes. The jinn would watch her. Trouble was, a prince began watching too. He was called Saiful Maluk, and he came from across the steppes.”

  “So the lake is named after him, not her.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Go on.”

  “To Badar Jamal, the prince was everything a man should be. On a horse, in a turban, and most importantly, from a distant land. The jinn, well, he was a household thing. You can imagine the rest.”

  She ran her feet up my calves. “The exotic prince whisks her away to a life of adventure.”

  “Not quite. To put it bluntly, the jinn was a jealous fiend. His scalding fury caused Malika Parbat’s snow to melt with such force it breached the banks of the lake and nearly drowned the poor lovers.”

  “Nearly?”

  “Fortunately, they had a cave to run to.”

  “So, the jinn’s wrath melted the snow? The jinn is global warming.”

  “No, the jinn is an evil spirit that cannot experience love or happiness, but is tormented when others do. The cave is copulation. It’s our only hope.”

  She laughed. “You don’t think there are parallels between mother wit and science?”

  “I think there are parallels between you and heaven.” I blew gently on her skin.

  “Did you ever find the cave?” I asked Irfan on the glacier, pulling myself away from the sweet memory of this morning. “I want to show it to Farhana.”

  “What cave?”

  “You know, the one in which Saiful Maluk and the fairy princess take refuge when the jealous jinn gets jealous.”

  “That cave!” Irfan smiled, casting me a look I couldn’t understand. “Yes. I know where it is. But it’s far from here. We’ll need Farhana’s consent.” This time I understood the look. The old Irfan would have accepted the love between Farhana and me, vacillating though it may be, without judgment.

  I ignored his comment and the look, focusing instead on Malika Parbat looming to the east. The mountain rose just over 5,000 meters, a modest height compared with all the giants to the north. But it was to see her reflection in the lake that lay 3,000 meters above sea level and was named after an alien prince that everyone trooped all the way up.

  Irfan pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, frowning. “We’ve lost contact.”

  “Good.” I’d left my phone behind in Karachi and not missed it once.

  “Maybe not so good,” Irfan muttered.

  I left him to his phone as I increased my speed up the glacier. By now it was packed with tourists and trekkers and I could barely spot Farhana ahead. Take care of her, her father had commanded me, before we left. She is all I have. The sun soared directly above us; her red coat flickered irregularly over an icy horizon now blindingly white. So blinding that I was almost grateful for the filth left behind by those transgressing against the glacier’s beauty, some while slipping to their knees, others while gliding forward, as if on fairy wings.

  In the weeks following our fight at the fort, I returned to the coast often, always alone. A small part of me knew it was to cleanse my palette, as if to revive something that had been lost on that wild stretch of land when it included Farhana.

  My eye was hungry. I photographed the Monterey pines and the valley Quercus. The agave that bloomed before death. The pups that replaced them. California buckeye, star tulips, and bell-shaped pussy ears with stems as thin as saliva. Diogenes’ Lantern, the sweetest of flowers, yellow as the yawning sun.

  How did they survive the onslaught of the Pacific wind? Why didn’t the stems snap, the buds fall? They flourished at the edge of chaos, in a nursery of knotted cypresses, while I was an intruder, a gray wolf with coarse mane unnuzzled, neck arched plaintively to a remote moon.

  I crawled back to her house. Mirror, mirror, I bayed at her glass. Forgive the ugliest of them all! She wouldn’t let me in. Once, through the glass, I saw a small dark man approach the door, and I knew he was going to open it. Before he could, I heard Farhana shout Baba! and he turned away. Another time, a tall white man paused at the door, and Farhana was nowhere. We stared at each other through the glass, his image wavering as
though he were gazing at me from under water, before swimming away.

  I worked longer hours at the brew pub. I gave up trying to push my landscapes, including my mother’s marble-top table. What’s the point? You’ll never sell any. Perhaps she was right. The pub allowed me to advertise my skills as a wedding photographer, for which I was developing a reasonable reputation. The irony of it. A Pakistani goes all the way to the land of opportunity only to end up taking photographs of brides. As if there weren’t enough brides at home. With the exception of Farhana, women seemed to like me photographing them.

  Then one evening, she came into the pub, smiling. It happened as quietly as that. We spent all evening smiling at each other. We smiled through the night, and through the subsequent days. We said very little, and when we did, it was politely coquettish. “How’s work?” “Fine. Yours?” When after several more days additional words were spoken, they were about her father. She was finally ready to introduce me to him.

  The meeting was arranged for an afternoon in October, eight months before we were to leave for Pakistan, though I didn’t know the we part yet. We hadn’t dared revisit the birthday promise she’d tried to extract from me in May, though it filled the air around us more oppressively than the fog. As we walked to the BART station, I decided I wasn’t looking forward to this visit. I’d been kept in suspense about her unpredictable father for so long it was as if now I’d somehow passed a test. (I’d considered wearing a tie.) Perhaps this was part of our patching up, but I couldn’t help thinking that she was allowing the meeting. Worse, the concession was a way to get a concession from me. Our quarrel grew two legs; it walked beside us all the way to the station, demanding, Take me back. It was as if she’d proposed to me. Take me back was to be our marriage. Take me back was to take us forward. (For the millionth time I thought, Dammit, for her, it isn’t even back!) If I said no, she’d move forward by leaving me.

  I stuffed my hands in the torn lining of my windbreaker’s pockets, irritation turning to anger. Is this what marriage would be, the appearance of favor for favor, when, in fact, it’s two to none? Stacking your chips, keeping score? Living in a damn game of mahjong?

  I glanced at her. There was a smile lurking around the corners of her mouth. Not a smile of cunning. A smile of sweetness. I found no justification for my dreary mood. I drew her to me. “I love you.” A kiss without chips.

  She started to laugh. “You can’t kiss me like that in front of him.”

  “So we should kiss like that now.”

  “All right then.” After a time she broke away. “I should warn you. He can be unpredictable.”

  “You’ve warned me many times. I couldn’t be more terrified.”

  “Terrified? But he’s wonderful.”

  “Wonderful?”

  “Well … You just can’t know.”

  I nodded. “Unpredictable. Wonderful. No kissing.”

  “Sometimes he talks a lot, sometimes he smiles happily at the dust.”

  “You make him sound senile.”

  “Oh, don’t be fooled. It only means he’s sizing you up. He never remarried, you know—”

  “You’ve told me.”

  “I’m his only child. He hasn’t been great with former boyfriends.”

  Though I’d heard it before, it was hardly reassuring to hear again.

  I tried to distract myself with stories of a mother she’d described for me many times, a mother whose photograph hung above her bed, inside a carved sandalwood frame that still smelled musky, and always reminded me of my grandmother. Her name was Jutta. She came from Bavaria, and she was of Celtic descent. Every summer, Jutta’s stern Catholic father would lavish his one indulgence on the family, a trip to Kaltenberg castle, to taste the dark lager that had been brewed there since the days of King Ludwig. Farhana had her grandfather’s palette, enjoying beer more than anyone I knew, and she loved to sample the flavors of the brewery where I worked. The more bitter-chocolate, the sweeter she would grow.

  Jutta had come to Karachi when her first husband became the director of the Goethe Institute. Farhana’s father, a gifted musician, according to her, was the tabla player for a concert at the institute one night. It was the player, not the raag, that mesmerized the German woman. Their affair turned them into castaways even before Farhana was born (too few months after her mother left her first husband). Farhana’s maternal grandparents still never answered her letters while her paternal grandfather, recently deceased, never did forgive his son.

  We got off the train in Berkeley. Three blocks later, Farhana spotted her father at a window seat of a dark tavern not unlike the one where I worked. I thought I could recognize him from the time I saw him through the glass, approaching the front door. Was it to let me in or to yell at me? Both?

  She was saying, “Dada’s death has made Baba even more unpredictable. You know the history between them, because of my mother. Still,” she swung her arm in mine (not a kiss, but it was something), “though he hasn’t been kind to other boyfriends, I just know he’s going to like you.”

  And she was right. And it was mutual. At least at first. Our conversation bore no trace of the So what does my daughter see in you? assessment I’d been dreading. In fact, to Farhana’s dismay, we didn’t talk about her at all. At least at first.

  “For heaven’s sake,” he said, sitting back down after shaking my hand, stretching spindly legs in baggy jeans, “don’t call me Mr. Rahim. Call me Niaz.” I could imagine him saying the same while easing into a chair with the same languorous grace (that had skipped Farhana) in mid-seventies Karachi, outside one of the tea shops in the Saddar area that teemed with poets and revolutionaries. Thirty years later, he still had the air of a Saddar hippie. In fact, he still had the same jeans. They drooped around his waist, the belt tied ludicrously loose, forcing him to yank them up each time he moved. It made him look both comical and vulnerable. Maybe this was why women left their husbands for him.

  Somehow it was perfect that the beer he was drinking was called Moose Drool. And that he had a cup of cappuccino next to it. We ordered coffee.

  He looked at me. “So, where have you been hiding all this time?”

  I looked at Farhana.

  “You know how hard he works,” she replied.

  “I’m unpredictable,” I added. Under the table, Farhana pinched my knee.

  He finished his beer, smiling her smile. She asked after his health. Apparently, he had diabetes. He ordered a second beer. They quibbled about his diet. (He also ordered fries.) He didn’t look diabetic at all. He had the body of a young and lean rapper, a Lil Wayne lookalike, while his face was that of an exceptionally gaunt Kris Kristofferson. I was startled when I put his two halves together and came up with Jesus Christ. So startled that when he asked me a question, I nodded without hearing it.

  When the second beer arrived Farhana pushed it toward me. I glanced at her as if to say, Why aren’t you having it? She ignored me.

  He chewed the end of a pipe while his cappuccino got cold. “So, what are they?”

  “Sorry, what?” I asked, embarrassed.

  He frowned. “I asked if there are religious reasons for your father’s dislike of your work.”

  I shot a glance at Farhana. She had an irritating habit of telling the world that my work was a touchy topic. Of course the world wants to touch that.

  I cleared my throat. “I never thought of it that way.”

  “He must have assumed you would. A good son should think about why the Prophet forbade images of himself, and forbade figurative art in general, no?”

  I opened my mouth for no apparent reason.

  He flashed me a toothy grin. “I was not a good son either.” He took a sip of his cappuccino. “Don’t they make hot drinks hot anymore?” He pushed the cup aside and reached for my—his—pint. “About which I couldn’t be happier. I photographed Farhana’s mother many times before she died. Before I knew she was dying.” He sucked on the unlit pipe in silence.

  I shot
another glance at Farhana. It hadn’t occurred to me that the photograph above her bed was taken by her father, nor had the irony struck me till now. She cherished the image, yet she wouldn’t let me cherish enough of hers.

  Farhana moved the beer back toward me. “Let’s sit outside so Baba can smoke.” I chuckled inwardly. He could die of cancer but not diabetes. Carrying my coffee—which was, as usual, too strong—I left the second pint inside.

  We settled around a small table on the sidewalk. There was no milk and I thought it might be rude to go back inside to get it myself. Why did Americans make coffee like mud and tea like rain? When I turned back to Mr. Rahim he was watching me over his pipe, now lit, and over a helix of fries.

  He said, “My father never let me take any photos of him, you know. He said that you can reproduce an image, but you cannot reproduce a soul.”

  “It’s so much warmer out here,” said Farhana, “than in the city.”

  “You cannot reproduce a soul,” Mr. Rahim repeated. “Every picture tears the body from the soul. He saw paintings and photographs as theft, a way of owning and even destroying someone else.”