Thinner Than Skin

by Uzma Aslam Khan

  Farhana followed the girl.

  Irfan followed me.

  Wes literally inhaled poor Farrah’s sandwiches.

  It was as Irfan said it would be. The girl, whose name was Kiran, appeared fairly neutral to the outing. Her family was against it. Farhana pleaded with them and eventually, Kiran’s father agreed. At least that is how I understood his quiet responses to her fragmented Urdu, and later, while walking us to the lake, how Irfan translated their more rapid conversation. “It’s even harder to say no to a female guest,” Irfan added, Farhana ignoring him. “It’s considered bad manners.”

  Kiran’s father and brother—the same boy who’d brought the food—were standing outside the tent, watching us walk away. I could hear a woman’s voice from inside the tent. Later, as I held the boat so Farhana could climb inside, I turned back to see two women watching us as well. One held a young child in her arms, and she was arguing furiously with Kiran’s father. I saw her black shirt billow in the breeze; the cuffs of her sleeves were rimmed in fluorescent pink thread and I could hear bangles chime as the arms gesticulated in protest. It might have been the same woman I’d seen by the fire. Kiran’s bangles as she arranged herself in the boat—folding her hands in her lap before unfolding them again—were like an echo of the woman’s bangles. There was such perfect synchronicity between them that it had to have been a private conversation. I knew, as we pulled away, that the woman was her mother.

  I rowed backward at first, looking behind me as the bow pierced the lake’s skin, cutting a wide triangle the shape of a fin. Somewhere over my left shoulder must have loomed the actual summit of Naked Mountain, radiant in the evening light, I was sure. I could imagine the clouds circling him like a promise; he was above their promise now. Below us, in the glacial water, Queen of the Mountains’ valleys and crests plunged all the way down to a depth that was surely our own nadir.

  The boat was shaped like a tub and it was heavy. It wobbled. Apart from the ungainly shape, the rocking made no sense; there was almost no breeze. I rowed out about twenty feet before swiveling the boat around to face in the general direction of Naked Mountain. The tide did not recede. It was the same tide that had confounded us when we first got here; it was the tide of his ardor for the Queen, hers for him, and we were intruders, duly rebuked by being splashed from all sides. The further out I rowed, the larger grew the swells. Kiran and Farhana shared the plank in the stern of the boat, and every time the whitecaps hit her, Kiran shifted in her seat, rocking the boat more. She was light but her disquiet was heavy. She’d been talkative with Farhana when they walked into the hills together, but not now. I asked Farhana if it was me.

  “Maybe.” She frowned. Switching to Urdu, she asked, “Are you enjoying yourself?”

  The girl shook her head.

  “At least she’s honest,” I said.

  Farhana wrapped an arm around her. “Is it because you’re cold?”

  She hesitated, then nodded. Her bangles still chimed; there was still the compulsive folding and unfolding of hands in her lap. But there was no longer a reply.

  A pool of water was collecting inside the tub. It was impossible to say how much was coming in from the sides and how much was the leak. The heaviness grew. It was much harder to row that day than it had been the last time I was on the lake. Farhana offered to take over but though her legs were strong, she had no strength in her arms. When I told her this she reminded me that I had none either.

  “Still,” she conceded, “you do have shoulders.” In English, so the girl wouldn’t understand, she said that if we were alone we could both take a break.

  I played along. “I could show you that vein in my shoulders that makes you wonder if I go running at night, or weightlifting.”

  She smiled. “This air suits you. You look—” She glanced at the girl. “She doesn’t seem happy. Maybe I made a mistake.”

  “I look what?”

  She rubbed Kiran’s back. “Should we have brought your goat with us?”

  Kiran grinned, showing two gaps in the front row of her teeth.

  “I look what?” I repeated.

  She met my reflection in the lake. “Like something I’d like to …”

  There were no other boats nearby. If we’d been alone.

  Beside Farhana rolled the Queen’s deepest hollows. She was there, beneath my oar, tempting me to dive, face first. “In Karachi you said a quick fuck is a dead end.”

  “We’ve done it quickly since. Never on the water.”

  I was unutterably aroused. And grateful that I’d worn loose jeans. And mortified. Kiran wrapped her arms around herself, shivering. Couples who have children must have to deal with this all the time. Forced to navigate a third wheel, how do they keep their balance? But she wasn’t even our child. And I wanted this moment with Farhana. We’d made love twice already in under twenty-four hours. Hat trick? This was just the thrill, just the newness, our long weeks before leaving San Francisco had lacked.

  I spoke quickly. “Let’s turn back, drop her, then come out again.”

  “We can’t do that. We brought her with us.”

  We.

  Kiran was looking down at the lake now, and her gaze was one of resignation. She was the child of gypsies, her bare feet caked with the soil of mountains. She sat hunkered in the boat as if in a cage. Water was a solid barrier, a mountain pass she could not traverse. There were no pine trees to lead the way, no goat bells to chase. The only markers were down below, in the lake bed, and these would slip through her fingers before she could tap them. Between the big toe and second toe of her right foot protruded a single pine needle, the thickness of her hair, darker than her hair. It had caught in a toe ring. She lifted this foot out of the pool of water rising past her ankles and rested it on Farhana’s leg. She wiggled her toes. Bells on her toes.

  “Tell Nadir your goat’s name,” said Farhana.

  Kiran looked at me, and I realized she’d been avoiding looking at me till then. She knew I did not want her there. Her large green eyes were the color of sun-quenched grapes. “Kola,” she said, daring me to take an interest.

  “Like Kala Kola hair tonic or Coca-Cola drink?” I made a poor attempt at raising my voice in a friendly, child-accessible way.

  She turned to Farhana as if to register her dismay at the degree to which I was capable of stupid questions.

  “And the others, the ones you didn’t have to chase?” pressed Farhana.

  “Bhuri! Makheri!” She stared ahead, at the shore.

  “And what is your favorite color?”

  “Billoo.” She stared at the sky.

  Farhana laughed. I tried to smile. There was an awkward pause.

  Well, my moment with Farhana on the water was over.

  Or so I thought.

  “Last night—” she began, switching to English again.

  I waited. When she continued to hesitate, I urged, “Your timing was perfect.”

  “I know I’m not patient enough for you sometimes.”

  “You’re just right for me.”

  “Last night, have I ever told you how good you …”

  “What?”

  “Well, better than salted caramel.”

  “Jesus, Farhana! You never talk to me like this when we’re alone!”

  Farhana hugged Kiran, tightly. “I’m sorry! It’s not fair we brought her, even though she wanted to come! We should take her back!”

  “And then return.”

  She nodded.

  I spun the boat around, too quickly, straight into a wave. It crashed over Kiran’s face, dousing her in ice water. She screamed. Then she stood up and the boat pitched and she screamed again. I did not see whether her right foot ever came down or if it was still pressed into Farhana’s leg. But I did see her left foot skid in the puddle as she lost her balance, falling backward into the side of the teetering boat. “Sit down!” I heard Farhana shout, clinging to the opposite end of the boat with both hands. It occurred to me only later that Farhana ha
d been thinking more clearly than I. She’d tried to balance the boat. If she’d reached for the girl instead, the boat would surely have capsized. I have no recollection of what I did. None. Not until I heard Kiran hit something—perhaps her hips. And then she was in the lake.

  How long before I jumped in after her?

  It must be that not even a second passed. Because I had no time to blink or even breathe after I heard the splash and the kick and the shriek that started as a piercing whistle but ended as a dull rattle; I heard it, again and again—how did I hear it, if I wasn’t in the water too? Was it coming from me?

  Then I heard myself shout—and this time, I knew it was me—”It’s freezing!” And then time could not move fast enough. A fist curled around my spine and squeezed, a cold wet eel crushing my lungs, my limbs. My shoulders contorted, my muscles screamed, all of me convulsed. I could feel the feeling bleed from me as I became dead weight, plunging vertically to the bottom of the lake. When the pain in my legs returned, it was killing me. It will kill me. That damn eel was shooting electric currents deep into my veins.

  “Kick!” I yelled, and this time I swallowed the lake.

  “Kick!”

  Surfacing at last, I spat into the air.

  I moved rapidly now. I moved without thinking where I was going, all I knew was that I had to keep moving. When I looked around me, the boat was very far away. I could not see inside it. I did not know if Farhana had jumped or stayed. I could see no one in the water. I began to kick toward the boat.

  No one. I shut my eyes and dived.

  I opened my eyes and saw a downpour of silt. How did the water appear clear from above? How could it reflect us so sweetly when filthy inside? I surfaced. Blinked. Dived again. Again an avalanche of debris, falling softly all around, and then a fish—large, too large. I surfaced. “Farhana!” I dived again. I could now touch the bottom of the boat. I circled the boat. More fish. White, with yellow eyes. Orbiting me as I orbited them. We’d eaten trout every night since arriving in Kaghan but none had looked like this. Curious without a care. Their cold engagement ignited in me a panic of a familiar kind, unrelated to the likelihood of drowning. That was knowing what might be. The panic now creeping under my skin was the panic of not knowing. It was the panic of walking home in the dark with my jacket held out as a flag of peace to anyone, from anywhere.

  I must have circled the boat four times before I heard a keening from above. I pressed my palm to the wood and for a moment, it was as if the boat were weeping. I could comfort her simply by placing my hands here, there. I could wrap myself around her, or, if her girth were too wide, I could receive her embrace of me. And so I did, as yet another form of panic seized me. This was the panic of knowing what might be. Now it was land that frightened me.

  I dived again. That was Farhana in the boat. So where was the girl? I kicked my way deeper, deeper still. I had only ever dived into a swimming pool in Karachi, with Irfan and others from our class. We’d throw coins and believe them hard to see, glistening bronze in the blue sting of chlorine. I could barely make it to the bottom of the pool before the pressure in my ears forced me back up. Now I was looking for a girl in a lake so deep no one had ever measured it. I shut my eyes; I would count to ten then dive again.

  When I opened my eyes Farhana was peering down at me from the side of the boat. Then her face vanished and instead I saw her legs. Dangling muscular. They were naked now; she’d taken off her shalwar. Or were those Kiran’s legs? Limp, skinny. Again a face appeared but it was neither Farhana’s nor the girl’s and it was saying something I couldn’t hear. My ears hummed. My head was screwed in a metal box half its size. I dived again.

  I dived with Farhana’s father. I heard him say, “Even the act of seeing.”

  I dived with my father. I heard him say, “Coward, come out.”

  I dived with Farhana’s mother. I heard her say, “We die so young.”

  I dived with my mother. I heard her say, “God be with you.”

  I dived with Farhana.

  I dived alone.

  I dived alone.

  Kiran’s mother had pale green eyes, like her daughter. But they were smaller, and twice as piercing. Her hair was a shade darker than Kiran’s, though not as dark as the pine needle that had caught between those plump, wiggling toes. She wore the hair in a tight braid woven neatly around her face, framing it like the feathers of an owl. She was a very tall woman, almost as tall as her husband, taller than Farhana, and she carried herself high, with a smooth oval chin perpendicular to a regal neck. Her stride was long and sure as she walked toward us on the shore, the black shirt billowing around her the way it had done barely an hour earlier, as she’d watched her daughter being pulled away from her, carried off in a boat with strangers. If Queen of the Mountains could have taken human form, she would have been Kiran’s mother.

  Her bangles were still.

  They’d heard us out there, watched us dive, understood the screams. Irfan and Kiran’s brother had come for us in another boat. I could barely remember it. I must have gotten back into our boat somehow, and held Farhana, and said something. It was as if the sight of Kiran’s mother joining her husband as he waited for us brought me back to the world, only to remind me that I had wanted to leave it. Still did. I wanted to dive back down to those large white fish and their cold yellow eyes. I wanted them circling me, reminding me of my panic, forbidding my escape. I wanted to live inside that threat. It would free me from the agony of the man and woman awaiting us on shore. Their shore.

  I imagined her wrapping the honey in the cloth, twisting the knot. She’d baked the bread for us, sacrificed a pear, potatoes.

  When we stepped off the boat Farhana began sobbing again. She reached for Kiran’s mother but her mother stepped away. Then the woman fell to her knees and screamed into the dirt, and I knew that this must be the first time she had ever crumpled, let alone allowed a witness, and we were the cause. Her shoulders shook in spasms as she lifted fistfuls of sand and tossed them into her hair and slammed her fists, broken nails digging through the bowels of the world, two lines of saliva hanging from her chin. Her husband stood nearby, weeping quietly into the cloth around his neck. His head was bare now. He had thick, beautiful curls.

  Wes had pitched Irfan’s tent. I was infinitely grateful for this. He stood outside, holding the front flap open. He could not have seen the diaphanous wings approaching us from the direction of Naked Mountain, as if born of the mountain’s collar of clouds, soaring high above the tent before circumnavigating the lake. I knew she’d sleep with us tonight, heart-cut face in mine, ice-black stare inches from my throat. I crawled inside, as if into reprieve.

  Before Prayers

  My dreams were of my mother, of Farhana’s mother, of mothers I couldn’t identify, with children I never knew. Her face a knot of feathers, her neck as thin as air. I was inside: inside wings, inside caves. I was diving in my grandmother’s scent, the scent of Farhana’s mother, hanging on the wall above her bed. A bed in a different place, on which I lay, while a hundred different smells moved beside me. Burritos. Enchiladas. Coriander and lime. Smells I once loved, but that now made me wretch. And then my mother was there, in Farhana’s bay window in the Mission, and I was sorry I’d barely seen her in those few days in Karachi, before leaving for these mountains. I’d call her on Irfan’s cell. I’d tell her I was leaving the valley.

  Someone was feeding me stones. Rolling them on my skin, tucking them in my chin, armpit, groin. They were covered in blood and slime. Coriander and lime. The smell the smell. I’d call my mother. If Farhana let me. She kept waking me. She said to stop clawing deeper into the skin of the tent. I was tearing it, and it was cold. If this was so, why did she leave the front flap open? Why did she keep showing me the way out?

  Early in the morning, she screamed. Did I not care about the smell? I opened my eyes. I saw why she was upset. Between dreams, I’d spent the night vomiting glacial water. Apparently, I’d swallowed buckets of it, the da
y before. The day before. What day was that? A day that couldn’t be! I told her I was sorry about the smell.

  I tried to go back to sleep but now I was awake. I wanted badly not to be awake. I felt feverish, and yet my temperature hadn’t risen, it had dropped. I learned that Irfan had spent the night warming stones with his hands, his breath, and his armpits before placing them in my armpits and even my groin. I wondered weakly if he, or Wes, had done the same for Farhana, who lay swathed in extra blankets. Where did she get them? I groaned: Kiran’s family! Not possible! So too the warm fluids both of us were made to drink! Irfan assured me that mine included herbs to help both my conditions—the vomiting and the hypothermia—as if I had only two.

  “Has her body been found?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” he snapped. He had a deep frown—I could have hidden in the furrow, I would have liked to—and his voice was gruff. He could barely keep from shouting. “Even if you’re too weak to walk, push yourself. Movement will keep you warm.”

  “Let me rest,” I groaned again. “Will it be found?”

  “Shut up. Get up.”

  “Will it be found?”

  “You know how deep the lake is.”

  “Actually, I don’t.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But there was a tide. There still is. I can feel it.”

  Farhana said she could stand it no more and crawled outside with all her blankets. I heard no stones fall.

  “What does Bhuri mean?” I asked.

  “Why?”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Brown.”

  “And Makheri?”

  He glared at me. Eventually, he answered, “Naughty.”

  “They are the names of Kiran’s goats.”

  Irfan was heating them again, long pebbles the shape of pears, and short round ones, so round I wanted to curl myself around them. They went from under his armpits to between his hands, as he juggled and squeezed, as though to soften them, like dough. He was an illusionist entwined in tricks. And in moods. As suddenly as it had begun, the magic act came to a halt, and the softness of his movements was lost. He clenched his fists, pressing furiously to heat those nuggets for me. So angry! So kind! “You’re my friend,” I choked, and he grunted, securing them roughly against my nuts.