The same was true for the slopes of Malika Parbat, Queen of the Mountains. Her lovers were not meant to gaze at her directly. We were meant to gaze at her in the lake.
By the time we crossed the glacier and arrived on the banks of Lake Saiful Maluk, Malika Parbat’s reflection was being admired and broken by a stream of exhausted pilgrims and a dozen boats. Irfan warned Wes and Farhana to avoid the boats, declaring, simply, “They sink.”
It was Malika Parbat’s snowmelt that created the lake that reflected her. Her melt, tossed in with that of the surrounding mountains. If you let your imagination soar, far in the distance to the northwest of the Queen appeared a tiny fragment of what might have been the most photographed and feared peak in the Himalayan chain: Nanga Parbat. Naked Mountain. Or perhaps it was just some mystery mountain that only looked like him, for he was too far away to actually be seen from here. Whoever he was, by all accounts, he rarely showed himself as clearly as on that day. Even those who negotiated the lake’s treacherously deep and icy waters in creaky boats to better gaze upon the reflection of the Queen now lifted their chins to gawk across the cerulean sky at that phantom peak, who was her rival, or darling, depending on whom you asked.
Irfan stared in disbelief. “I’ve never seen him. It isn’t possible.”
“This is fairy lake,” I said.
“—Though I’ve heard it can happen,” continued Irfan, still staring, open-mouthed.
Apparently, people believed that on days when the mountain appeared—the one that only looked like Nanga Parbat, but could not have been—the Queen’s snow melted even faster, due either to her rage at having her beauty overshadowed, or her excitement at beholding her lover. And on such days his snow also melted faster, due either to his rage at having his beauty uncloaked—whose eyes were worthy enough?—or his triumph at beholding the Queen’s ferment. Whatever the reason, the lake that day had a strong tide. We could see it from the way the water rolled onto shore; we could have been by the sea.
“I’ve never seen it so rough,” said Irfan, now even more perplexed.
“Maybe the jinn is here,” said Farhana.
“He’s jealous of the love I have for my princess,” I murmured.
“Then step back!”
“But first, look at yourself.” I pulled her closer to the water’s edge.
She was flushed from the hike and her cheeks were as crimson as her jacket. Her hair framed her face in a wild halo of black frizz and her smile was especially radiant. I pulled her, and though our socks and shoes would remain wet for the rest of the day, we waded in further so she could see how lovely she was, and so we could see each other’s reflection in the mirror.
I didn’t know if I was imagining it but at that moment, the water was exceptionally calm. The tide seemed to wait. The lake lay flat as a puddle, and when Farhana craned her neck, the picture that answered back was of a girl as clear and unharried as the water itself, and of a boy beside her, bewitched.
“The jinn isn’t here,” I whispered. “The mountains are making deep, quiet love.”
I would have kissed her then, except it would have offended those around me. It seemed so unjust, the land could express its love but we could not. Later, I thought, gazing at her in the lake.
I caught a slight frown fleet across her reflection before she gave me a smile half of pity, half of promise. In the icy depths below, the Queen’s twin peaks fanned into triangular wings, enclosing us in a jagged cape of blessings. We stored her consent and pulled ourselves back to shore. Behind me, I heard the tide roll again.
Irfan was greeting the semi-nomadic tribes who made their summer homes on the lake’s shores. He spoke in a language I didn’t know, but I also heard some Urdu. I could tell that a lot of their communication involved names: names of those who’d moved to these heights for the summer and those who were staying down in the plains. They’d come with their cattle, horses, and sheepdogs. I spotted a few goats near the lake and several more on the hills to the north. Around us, goat bells chimed. There was a young child in a magenta kameez and a green satin shalwar brandishing a stick, while following a small black goat up a hill and there were half a dozen tourists following her, photographing her. She walked confidently, scratching her head, looking back and grinning. Her hair was the light tawny-blonde shade common to people of the valley, and it was so knotted it didn’t hang over her neck so much as rise from it, as if in the process of becoming dust. Her cheek was stained with dirt; front teeth were missing. I could hear a wet, rattling cough. Around her neck were heavy necklaces and her wrists were encased in even heavier bracelets. The older women must have been inside the tents.
“She’s beautiful,” said Farhana.
“She would be, if she were better taken care of.”
“You should have told me, I would have brought some supplies.”
“Told you what?”
She ignored my question and started following the girl. The small black goat had completely vanished, no doubt finding a tasty bit of scrub between the deodar and pine trees.
Though I knew it was no use, I called out after Farhana, “You know the British called the Gujjars a martial race? You know why?”
“Why?” It was Wes, standing behind me.
To be honest, I’d forgotten him. To be honest, I’d wanted to.
I said, “They’re naturally warlike and deceitful when not on your side, naturally brave and loyal when on your side.”
“Yeah?”
“Point is, that girl doesn’t need Farhana.”
He shrugged. “Maybe Farrah needs her.”
He put it so plainly. Notwithstanding the irritating nickname. “Sandwich?”
“My thoughts exactly.”
I unzipped my backpack and pulled out a plastic bag bulging with chicken sandwiches. They were soggy with butter and I’d lost my appetite for white bread since living in America, but otherwise, I was so hungry that nothing ever tasted better. Despite the company. What did Farhana see in him?
He was on his third sandwich and I on my second when Irfan joined us. In silence, Irfan poured himself a thermos cup of water.
“What did you talk about?” asked Wes.
Irfan pointed to the sky. “The clouds. They say it’s going to rain. They think we should walk back now, or stay the night.”
“Stay where?”
“I brought a tent.”
“Clever,” I murmured, and Wes whistled, impressed.
“You should have too,” Irfan said in our general direction.
“You should have said so,” Wes retorted.
“The weather is changeable.” This time he addressed me. “You know that.”
I’ll admit it, by this time Irfan’s glumness was beginning to irk. First the owl was a bad omen, then the school bus had fallen off the glacier while the poor schoolchildren were learning of princesses and jinns, then that comment about needing Farhana’s permission before we could look for the cave. Did I mention his repeated need to check his cell phone? He’d been pleasant enough in Karachi—not the way he used to be, before Zulekha’s death, but pleasant—so what had happened since? Down in the cabin, he was cordial with the staff; he knew the local khan well, and was friendly with him too. Moments earlier, he’d greeted the nomads with downright warmth. He could have expended some cheer on us. Or at least on me.
“I’m going boating,” said Wes, walking away, daring Irfan to tell him otherwise.
“Will we all fit in one tent?” I asked.
“You and Farhana can take it. Wes and I will sleep outside.”
“In the rain?”
“I can ask them,” he pointed to the nomads.
“Is it easier just to head back?”
“The rain isn’t all we were talking about. The rain isn’t important.”
I waited. Instead of telling me what was important, Irfan again checked his phone for a signal. It was about the twentieth time since the morning.
“Nothing,” he snapped it shut.
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“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 had survived, with varying degrees of success, by building irrigation channels from glacial melt, despite their poverty and isolation, did they need a man from the city bringing them pipes and taps? It was a fine line, the one between helping and hurting. To do nothing could mean b
ecoming a passive witness to a potential calamity. To do something could mean becoming the agent of a worse calamity. In the beginning, Irfan frequently turned to the Quran (remember it was before Zulekha’s death), which placed a high premium on niyat. Intent. He told himself his niyat was good.
I could smell the fire from outside the tents of the nomads. There were two women squatting by the flame, perhaps cooking more bread. One of them stood up, and though I was too far to see her face, I noticed how tall she was, how straight her back. She wore a black shirt with brightly colored embroidery—pinks and oranges as fiery as cactus blooms—and her hair was either tucked beneath a pale-hued cap, or pulled tight into a braid. I could hear bangles chime.
We lay there, me looking behind at the tents, Irfan looking ahead at the tourists trekking back down toward the glacier. He decided the wind was changing direction, the clouds would soon disperse. “They’ll be fine going down,” he pointed to the different groups. “We could leave too, if you still wanted.”
“It’s so calm here. Let’s stay.” From the corner of my eye I could see him reach for his phone. “Don’t. It’s probably still not working anyway.”
“All right.” He pulled his hand away, then crossed both arms behind his neck and reclined again. “Have Farhana and Wes ever been lovers?”
“No.”
“You said that too quickly.”
“No.”
“I believe you.”
In the distance, gray clouds circled the summit of Naked Mountain’s lookalike. Was it possible that the clouds arranged themselves just so, creating mirrors upon mirrors, drawing him closer to us from his real position far to the north? They seemed to be teasing him, offering cover, then withholding it. Irfan was right about the clouds dispersing elsewhere, though. They were breaking above the hill where we reclined. A growing niagara of golden light flowed into the bowl of the lake. Fire falling into honey.
What had made him ask? Getting back at me for his own unhappiness—because I’d dared to remind him of it?
And just like that, our easeful time congealed.
“Maybe you should check your phone,” I said.
Thinner Than Skin Page 7
