Thinner Than Skin

by Uzma Aslam Khan

  It was all a façade anyway, since any policeman stopping them would be an accomplice. And since those who sat on the logs were also made complicit, no one dared complain. By the time Maryam’s guests arrived, their clothes were torn and mud-stained. Some had bought them by saving for months. Others had sewn them on a shared Singer sewing machine that was older than all their children and some of their wives. But when Ghafoor started to sing about Saiful Maluk and his love for Badar Jamal, everybody started to dance and a few even dance-rolled, illustrating their journey on the logs.

  She did not dance. She could tell that despite his merriment, Ghafoor’s war with the officials was far from over. She did not care. He had not bid for her hand.

  On their wedding night, her husband dislodged his wooden leg. She thought of felled trees hidden in water wells. She was his water well. On subsequent nights, she learned to take it all in, the gray and yellow swirls encased in a walnut cylinder, the smoothness, even the scent; it did not frighten her the way he feared it might. How did it happen? She asked. Two bullets, from a rival Sawati Afghan tribe to the west. If not a forest inspector or landlord or policeman or smuggler, it was other herders. They said his cattle grazed on their land, though they did not own the land either. The land owned them. He bandaged the wound himself, as he had done numerous times for his horses. But he was kinder with horses. When the lesion began to ooze, after attempting to ignore it, he cleaned it so roughly he pushed both the bacteria and the bullet—the second bullet was never found—deeper inside. And then one morning, he saw the color creep beyond the blood-encrusted edge of the bandage, the shade of a terrible bruise, like buffalo hide. He lowered his head and inhaled. The stench made him weep.

  “This leg is much prettier,” he said, curling his fingers around her own on the wood. She would stroke the grain of his torn skin too, the rubbery knob without bone. My husband is made of cartilage, she would think. Flexible, yet tough.

  He would say he was a good husband. “You are lucky I am not like the others.” He was right. He did not interfere with her rituals at the shrine, even in recent years, as the pressure to tether her more securely to the Islam spreading toward them increased. He left her to keep the old calendar in place of the Islamic one. They called it Moharram, she could still say Chaitar; they called it Ramzan, she could still say Mangeru; they, Safar, she, Baisakh. And she could continue to mark the date of their departure to the highlands by Nauroz and their return to the lowlands by Het. “Pagan seasons, for a pagan wife,” the others said, but he ignored them, in his calm, dignified way. A dignity as stiff as his leg. The only time he interceded was last year, when she wanted to celebrate Diwali with her children, the way her mother had done with her. He warned, softly, that it would be leaving a sign. A sign too bright, brighter than all the constellations she was free to call by her own names. And so, last year, without his having to say more, she also ceased celebrating Lohdi and Baishakhi. She rejoiced at the passing of the bitter cold only in the privacy of her heart and welcomed the spring only in there too.

  When, after Kiran’s birth, Ghafoor started to leave her signs again, she drew inspiration from her husband’s mild, uncomplaining nature. She would temper her pleasure at sight of a cloth or stone, and temper her longing for more. She would draw strength from restraint. Even if she faltered now and then. When one day, seeing the flash of anger in her eyes—why didn’t you try for my hand—he offered, lamely, more lamely than her husband walked, “I would make a false husband, but I make a true friend,” she laughed in his face. But she did nothing more. She continued to enjoy his stories. She also continued to ignore the rumors floating in the valley ever since the fire had burned down the inspector’s villa: Ghafoor was grown as hard as the company he kept, the company of men from the north who were tough, but not flexible.

  Now he was still inside her hut, this man who would not stand idly by while policemen tore through her home, bullied her son, and mocked her honor. And as calmly as that, Maryam threw open the curtain, ready to talk.

  “At last.” He was smiling.

  “Why are you here?” she snapped.

  “How is Suleiman? Suleimanov?”

  She did not giggle.

  “Where is he?”

  “Why are you here?” she repeated.

  “Don’t you want to know whose feather that was?”

  She was none too pleased when her fury began to scatter.

  “Do you want a story?” he pressed.

  The way he spoke to her, it was not unlike the way she would speak to Kiran, when she was tied to her back. And Kiran would listen to Maryam the way Maryam always listened to Ghafoor, wide-eyed and willing.

  He was talking. As he talked, her eye—unwide, unwilling—moved to the general space where his wedding gift had hung each autumn, on their return to the plains.

  She remembered the day he brought them: two carpets from the north, made by gypsy women who used them to insulate their walls. They were different from the Kashmiri carpets sold in Kaghan. How? he had asked, rolling them out on the floor. She was no expert, and preferred to look, and touch, rather than speak. Kashmiri wool was soft and shiny; these threads were coarse as beards. And the colors! A red so rich it seemed to bleed on her fingertips, reminding her that she had touched herself, there, the night of her wedding, after her husband fell asleep. The red glowed in the center, and she loved how her eye moved from the edging to the bright heart, and back to the edging again. The second carpet did not bleed. It held a resolute zigzag pattern, each line sure and quick—red, orange, yellow, green—each shade sharp and distinct.

  He had looked healthy, even happy, his light brown hair parted to the side, beard gone, sideburns thick enough to braid. Still stroking the carpets with pride (as if he had made them, she thought), he said the women dressed like men, in trousers made of animal skins and belts with clasps that pulled in their waists. Maryam’s shirt was loose but her stomach tight. She rubbed it discreetly as he spoke, wondering how the women could weave with their stomachs cinched.

  When he left, she hung the carpets behind the bed she shared with her husband. When her son was born, she hung the red carpet over his cot. When Kiran was born, the cot became hers, and she moved the second carpet too. Her husband did not question the extravagance of the gift. Being a friend of her brother’s, Ghafoor was considered part of her family. But over time, he said the gift attracted too much attention, not only because of who had presented it, but because it made them look wealthy. Too wealthy for nomads. So she had taken them down, hoping that when Kiran slept, she would fill the bare wall with her own colors.

  She kept staring at the wall, her mind reeling. She hoped her husband had found Namasha in the forest. She ought to prepare lunch. Jumanah would be playing with the goats, as Kiran had done. Younis was at the market, searching for a better life. He wanted to be like Ghafoor, not his father. The convoys were everywhere. A week since Kiran’s death but she only knew it by the number of meals she had coaxed down her family’s throat.

  “You did not like the story,” he said.

  She moved her eye away from the wall and centered them on his. They were light brown, like his hair, and devious, always. She was glad the sideburns were gone. Each time she saw him, he had changed his look in some way; no doubt he had again changed his name. He wore trousers, not a shalwar, and a belt around his waist with a large silver clasp in a pattern she would have liked to see up close. She moved her eye upward from the belt.

  “You did not tell it well,” she replied.

  “Then let me try another.” He smiled slyly. “I have been to the Fergana Valley. I have mounted its famous horses. They are beautiful, but none have Namasha’s temper.” He paused, still smiling. So he had been watching her quarrel with the hag.

  “I should look for her in the forest.”

  “She is fine.”

  Maryam did not move.

  “You know where Fergana is?”

  “You know I do not.”

&nb
sp; “The Chinese took it before the Russians could, calling the horses by many names. Horses from heaven. Horses that sweat gold, even blood. But they could never tame even one.”

  Maryam took a deep breath, pleased that the fury she held in a knot did not scatter again. For today, Ghafoor’s words lacked some honey.

  “… Then came the Arabs, who fought the Chinese and won, and Islam spread through all of Central Asia. So did the horses that sweat gold and blood. The Arabs sold them to the Chinese they had defeated.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  He made a face, looking at her without any trace of a smile. She remembered the rumor. He was keeping the company of hard men now. And even harder women. She wanted to know about them. Not horses. She already knew about horses.

  “I have come to see you at great risk to myself,” he said, still with that sour face.

  Was she supposed to be grateful?

  She thought of Suleiman again, and the gratitude she felt toward him when he took care of Jumanah. Why could he not have looked after Jumanah and Kiran? Why did men always expect gratitude for the smallest gesture, when their largest, most catastrophic mistakes were irreversible? Why did women always bestow it?

  “Bukhara, Tashkent, Samarkand, Fergana,” he continued, impetuously. “The people there are proud, Maryam. They are nomads like us, with centuries of power. They defeated the Chinese. They built the Mughal Empire that conquered India. They defeated the Russians. They did not let themselves become enslaved by fines, or by troops.”

  By loss? She wanted to ask. Did they let themselves become enslaved by loss?

  “Why are the convoys here?” he kept on. “To find a killer? There is no killer! They want us. Our way of life. Our horses. Our children. Our freedom. They want to own us. It is happening to the east, in Kashmir and in Turkestan. To the south, in Waziristan. To the west, in Afghanistan. If not the Russians, it is the Chinese. If not the Chinese, Indians. If not Indians, Americans. And Pakistanis? Traitors who send people to their prisons! If they do not send us there, look what they do to us here, killing our sheep, fencing the land, looting our forests, insulting our women. They know nothing of us, the way we work the land. The way you do, Maryam. They cannot see your hands. Look at your hands!” He took a sudden step forward and before she knew to stop him, he had grabbed her hand. “Look how cut and bruised they are! They will not leave us alone!”

  Maryam quickly pulled her hand away and took two steps back, into the wall. She had never seen him like this. He always liked to toss words at her, it was true, long, foreign words, flaunting his travels, his worldliness. But it was done to impress. Now she was unsure what the purpose was. Before, even when he swaggered, he retained a certain poise, one that was different from her husband’s. Suleiman’s poise stemmed from years of enduring pain and humility; Ghafoor’s, from rejecting pain and humility. But now she did not know what he was rejecting, or enduring.

  He was glaring at her, as if to gauge whether or not to continue.

  If she had to guess, she might say his swagger was filled with fear.

  Still glaring.

  Yes, he was afraid. Like her.

  Something he had said made the upper lid of her right eye flicker. It made her want to say, with a scorn wrapped in the play their previous encounters had always known, You care more for jewels and money. You do not work the land anymore, so what do you care? But she held her peace, burying the thought in her chest, where so many others were locked, including this one she might also have shared in the past: she preferred his stories of gypsy women with pinched waists, and of rare cloth made of the hearts of flowers, to tales of conquests and prisons.

  Perhaps she could steer him back there again. First, she ought to calm him.

  She cleared her throat. “Will you stay for lunch?”

  He frowned. “I am leaving soon.”

  “You just arrived.”

  “I have been waiting nearly a week to speak with you.”

  She nodded, a little embarrassed.

  “There is something I need to know before I go.”

  She looked up.

  “Which one killed her?”

  The question startled her. She took another step back but there was nowhere left to go.

  “Which one, Maryam?”

  “They all did.” The sickness rose in her again. He was like Namasha, pulling her down into the whirlpool of her grief, when she had hoped he would save her from it.

  “Are you going to do something or are you going to be just like the rest—throw your hands up to God and say it was His will?”

  “What would you have me do?”

  “When you see them, what do you want to do?”

  “I do not see them,” she whispered. It was a lie. She had seen him, not too long ago, at the graves. That friend of Irfan’s, the one who was always looking sideways. She had noticed him on the road, when she went to the market to look for her son. And she had wanted to do something, anything, to rid herself of the anger he planted in her breast.

  Ghafoor waited. Now he was more composed than she. Inadvertently, she had calmed him with her sorrow.

  “It was not all of them,” she said at last. “One of them, the smallest one, he speaks to us. He is kind. And one is American.”

  “We cannot touch him.”

  “And one is a woman.”

  “We cannot touch her.”

  There it was again, she could feel it rise, a taste so foul she had to spit, there on the floor of her hut. “It was her idea!” There were tears in her eyes, hot, furious tears.

  “What about the fourth?”

  “Did you not hear what I said? It was her idea.”

  He shook his head. “We cannot touch her. She is with the American.”

  “Then why ask me, if you already know about them? I thought you came for me!”

  “I did. What about the fourth?”

  The one who followed me, she was about to say, but hesitated. The one who gazed upon Kiran when the lake gave her back. The one who killed and blasphemed. What was he doing at the graves? She had heard that he was rummaging around for a secret shrine. Her shrine. Did he want to sink deeper and deeper into hell? Well, it could never be a hell as deep as hers, and anyway, he would never find it! She had ended up following him to the graves; it was the only thing she could think to do. And as she stood there, watching him, something about the way he crouched, gazing at the stones with the horses and the ducks, something about it was too familiar. She had seen him before. Before he had come to the lake. How could it be? The back of that head, the width of those shoulders, the length of the spine, even the shirt—she had seen it! She could not say when. But as she stood watching him, it seemed to her that he was trapped. And she had always known he would be. And he was very afraid. Everyone around her was afraid.

  Ghafoor snapped his fingers, the way he would do when she was younger, trying to pull her back to himself. “What about the fourth?” he said a third time.

  “I do not know,” she formulated her thoughts slowly into words. “He is—strange.”

  “Strange—how?”

  “She is the one who feels no remorse.”

  “The small one, he has been in touch with your husband.”

  She nodded. “He wants to pay. My husband does not want payment.”

  “But your brother feels differently.”

  “So he does.”

  He nodded. “They have struck a bargain. God is all merciful, and with His help, we will find the just rate.” He looked away from her then.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “They are heading north.”

  “I do not care where they go, if they fall off the edge of all worlds.”

  As soon as the words were spoken, before Maryam unfolded a picture so clear it was as though a window had opened, a lake had stilled. Though Maryam could not see him, she could see the peak on which he lay trapped. The one who had followed her. The one she had followed. The one sh
e had seen before. She could not see him, but she knew it was him, surrounded not by small headstones in a graveyard but by vast knife-edged stones on a precipice she had never seen before. The precipice was shaped like a glistening fang, in a place where snow was born and ice never melted. He was trapped. He was very afraid.

  Ghafoor was smiling, honey in his eyes, finally. “At last I see her, the Maryam I used to know.”

  She looked down. The picture of the man on the mountain vanished.

  And now Ghafoor’s voice was low and sweet, as on the morning he had brought her the yellow flower. “Live up to your name, Maryam Zamani. Do not try to walk around this stone, or walk across it. You will only hurt more. It is an obstacle. It has to be removed.” She looked up. “You will not worry.”

  As he continued, she thought, his words are a silken thread. A thread the color of fire. And fire will warm the pieces of me. But remember: more than warmth, I want justice.

  “There are those who are walking toward a wall,” he kept on. “All we have to do is drive them forward. All we have to do is escort them. And you, Maryam, all you have to do is will it. Your mother would have done no less. And you are your mother’s child. As Kiran is yours. I am the legs, but you are the will.”

  Aside from his finger, she had never touched him. Nor had she pulled the flesh around his knuckles with her tongue and teeth for the garlic tint of honey even once since her marriage. Nor would she.

  She walked him to the curtain.

  While stepping outside, he turned back to face her, and she saw that both the fear and the honey were gone. “They ride under the open skies, Maryam, these men and women of the steppe. Just as we do. And, like us, they are not foolish enough to point at the sun or the moon or the stars. They do not point at what gives them life. They only point at what takes it away.”