Why did I keep doing it? Why had I twice stepped so near to my death? It was as though something was willing me to do it. It was not my will! These were not my legs! I wanted to shout, and then I think I did. I think I shouted, These are not my legs! before it dawned on me that this was a terrible time to shout. I had to get off the ledge. I could not afford to stand here indefinitely, the way I’d sat indefinitely on the gravel earlier. I could not afford any distractions. I had to think clearly what to do next. And then I had to stop thinking. I had to act. Stop thinking. Stop thinking. I took two deep breaths, scooped to the left, felt the gap with my toes, jumped. I fell face down in the mud. But it was mud, not air. I was safe. I pulled my bag off my shoulders and fished inside—I could not afford to think about what I had just escaped, I had to think about small things, such as, I could not afford to drop my camera here—I fished inside without upsetting the camera, or the box, for the flashlight. Instead, a flashlight was in my face.
“Not far now,” he said. It was the escort, and he was bloody calm.
“Is there a way up from here?” My voice was shaking.
“Oh yes.” He offered me his hand.
I was hauled up as easily as a twig, though I’d believed him to be scrawnier than myself. I followed him further into the belly of the mountain, away from the torn crook of her arm.
It was raining harder. My jacket had a hood. His didn’t. He seemed unperturbed by this. This was a good thing to focus on. It was a very good thing.
“What’s your name?”
“Askarov.”
“Askarov?” I laughed. “From Kaghan?”
He did not answer.
“What is it you trade?” I tried again.
“Jade.”
“Jade? In return for what?”
“Many things.”
“Such as?”
“Ghee.”
“Ghee? Don’t you make plenty of that already?”
He grinned. It was the first time I’d seen him grin. It wasn’t pretty.
“Is there jade at the glacier, or ghee?”
He lost his grin. I think I preferred it.
“Have you climbed up here before?”
“It is not far now. You will hear it.”
Again he disappeared.
“Hear what? And where are the others?” I called after him, expecting no reply, and getting none. Twice he’d helped me, both times when I was lost, and in danger.
He was watching me.
The sky was growing pale. It was turning on its side, leaving behind a softer shade of black. The perpendicular wilderness began to seem less impenetrable. Just as well, because my headlamp quietly extinguished with a flickering that was not unlike a silent fart. I tore the straps off. I had only my flashlight now. I heard more rocks fall, not the defeaning shatter of the landslide on Ultar’s double, but a rumble nonetheless, followed by a roll of smaller rocks. A leopard or the escort? A ghost or Farhana? There was a creaking too; like the night, the stones were turning in their sleep.
I ate more biscuits. I drank a little water. I must save the rest. I had about half a bottle left. I took one last sip then screwed the top back on. When I looked up, I saw two shins, glowing about twenty feet above my head. Like the mountain, my inhibitions were growing less impenetrable too. “Wes!” I shouted loudly. “Where the hell is everyone?” I was so excited to see him I almost forgot to take my pack.
“Right here,” he turned back. “We’re almost there.”
“Wait!”
But he did not.
I was alone again. Damn Irfan. Damn Wes. And damn Farhana. Wouldn’t she have wanted a word alone with me, just once on our way up?
And “Askarov”—where was he now? Tired of watching me? Just as well! I would not let myself ask—not here, not now—why he was following me. Maybe Irfan had asked him to look out for me. Irfan, who knew I wouldn’t follow Wes. Irfan, to whom I foolishly left all the practicalities of every trip. Maybe Farhana had been right. I did defer to him too much. Maybe I was going about this courtship in a very wrong way. Maybe she needed to see me at the front of the line, not stuck back here, bringing up the rear. Maybe she’d walk beside me if I were leading.
I pushed on. I couldn’t lead now. All I could do was push on. I concentrated on the small circle thrown by the flashlight at my feet. That little glow was just what I needed to coax me into a rhythm again, and nudge all my idle thoughts away. I hoped the battery would last till the sky turned gray, even gold. I tried to focus only on this. Flashlight, don’t die! Flash a little longer!
I began to see colors in my head. A wash of ash gray, charcoal at top, cream below, and a frayed edge that blossomed delicately from the faintest yellow to the most luminous salmon pink. It was so vivid before me I wondered if my sister had a dupatta of that pattern, or perhaps a sari. It might even belong to my mother, a stranger walking down a silver floor to a side street lit with white lamps, the cloth billowing behind her like a cloud. I didn’t know how long the image sustained me but, finally raising my eye past the light at my feet, I noticed there were patches of snow all around me now, mounds that glittered in the night.
The sight was so beautiful I thought I’d stumbled onto the silver floor of my imagining. I was in the middle of an oasis! How thirsty I was! I scooped a snow heap with my fingers; the taste was bitter and familiar. It pulled me back to that moonlit night in Kaghan, a night heavy with the silence of seduction, like tonight, and I was kneeling at the banks of the River Kunhar, gathering silver filigree deep into the folds of my tongue, while a reflection broke in the water. Instantly, I looked up. No owl. No opal moon.
The sky grew even lighter, a gentle gray streaked with gold. I thanked my flashlight and switched it off. More snow crystals stretched awake while others fell asleep. Surely they were stars, fallen from the sky! The hand of a fairy had strewn them on these slopes! I wanted to stuff myself with them, foul taste and all.
With the burn of glacial melt still in my mouth, I started walking again. Yet more snow. The palest apricot sky. I could hear birds now, distant and small, but there was an unmistakable thrill in the air nonetheless, and it was rising. I’d never known a daybreak as joyous as this. I looked toward the sun; it was still invisible to me but I was not invisible to it. I was shivering and sweating and I was alone but I was not alone. Perhaps I was delirious but I did not care. I spun toward the sun, again and again. I laughed.
When I stopped spinning I pulled my feet apart to steady myself, still laughing. In return, I heard a groan. It was not a human voice. It was not a rockfall. This was a groan that came from somewhere else. The first thought that entered my mind, a whale. The second, but I’m on a mountain. The third, a whale on a mountain.
I’d never heard a whale sing but I imagined it might be like this. It was the sound of sheer bulk. A lunge through a dark void of unimaginable weight, as the lungs sought release. And I was carried along, higher, higher, till I heard the first suck of air in the form of a crack. The beast kept pulling me toward itself. As the snapping and heaving grew louder, I heard the distinctive tone of ice, and it was as if an ancient corpse were trying to break free of its colossal tomb.
I was at the glacier.
The portion that met me first was the classic deep blue of polar glaciers, a color I’d never seen in the Karakoram before. But then I’d never been this high up. I climbed higher still. Before me stretched the gray sea of rock and gravelly moraine of the glaciers of the lower valley, but also a dozen ethereal blues, a dozen delicate violets. My mind was clear. I couldn’t remember when I’d taken the camera out, or snapped on the zoom, but apparently I had. I wasn’t thinking of the photographs my fingers took, but I trusted my hand completely.
As the cracking of the glacier continued, it released a memory.
How does sunlight travel through ice? I am asking Irfan. What happens to this light? We are in class eight; I think I am twelve, he thirteen. I am teamed up with Irfan in the physics lab to watch the rainbow i
n a prism, while our teacher says the sun has different colors, each with different quantities of energy. Orange and red hold only a little; violet and blue, considerably more. Irfan says he is blue; I am red. I agree, happily. Beside me, in my plastic thermos cup, floats a single cube of ice. I ask him if light passes through ice in the same way, blue first, and he says yes.
There near the summit, the crystals of Ultar Glacier sucked me in. The reds and yellows were vanished, the blues limning the ice prevailed. When my camera rotated, I saw them. Irfan, his lips on Farhana’s. I believe I photographed them before I knew what I’d let myself preserve.
A prince and a fairy in a crystal, one planting on the other the softest of kisses, his movements so tender they were devotional. Their eyes were shut as they felt each other through layers of clothing—he even kissed the sleeve of her red jacket—and both faces wore identical expressions: a look so sublime it was as though they were soaring on a carpet of feathers. And how united they were in their ascent! Free of haste, free of shame. If till then it had been a secret, they were through with secrets now. In the arms of discovery, they suffered no fear of being discovered. I knew I hadn’t kissed her in this way in a long, long time. For the briefest flicker before my fury set in, I registered the truth of the moment. And captured all of it. My camera clicked; my mind could not stop the hand it trusted so well. It was what had been missing in my work so far and I was ill-prepared for the moment when I would find it: beauty, sweet and true. It was a miracle.
Then came ugliness. I saw the crevasse behind Irfan. I saw the indigo wash of light pouring off the drop, the fin-like gash of ultramarine swirling around the snowy edges now melting in the sun, and farther, the wide black mouth into which he might fall. It would be easy to slip. I couldn’t see the depth; perhaps it would only cause minor injury. Still, it would likely be impossible to haul him out without the gear we hadn’t brought.
My mind stepped in and slapped my hand away. How could I picture Irfan this way? What demons had possessed me? My hand lashed back. Good demons. Easy, just walk up and push. He was too wrapped up in her sleeve to resist. And he might be smarter, but he was smaller. Were he to fight back, you’d win. But first, pull yourself away from the kiss. How? Whose hand would help with that?
My skin burned with the warmth between them. Breathing didn’t come easy. I could feel my resolve crumble. I couldn’t pull away from watching. What was so spectacular about her sleeve? And what was he going to do next—kneel? Kiss her damn shoes? In reply, the glacier groaned. High-frequency lust; low-frequency torture. All that pressure pooling at its surface in the sun! Wasn’t sunrise meant to be the hour of hope? The season of creation some poet or other had once called it. Fucking poet.
Next I was overcome with a desire to vanish myself. That cascade of light pouring down the side of the drop: I could pour with it. It was the only way to free myself of thought, now that I was thinking again. They looked so young, in their union of trust, my former lover, my former best friend. All the shame the two refused to carry was swiftly encumbering me. I needed to be rid of it. I needed to be someone else. Only then would I release all the cracking and heaving from somewhere deep inside.
Vanish me. I squeezed my eyes shut. My legs did the rest.
The day was searingly hot already. I’d left my pack behind. I felt no need to retrace my steps. There was that half bottle of water left inside. I was sure I wouldn’t make it back down without it. Yet I stayed, on a ledge, letting the thirst pool on my tongue. Perhaps it was the same ledge as earlier this morning, when I’d nearly fallen to my death. That would have been better.
The questions I could not leave behind. Their first time? Or with her all those nights away from our hotel? His own desire prompting him to ask, on the shores of the lake, if she and Wes had ever been lovers? Or had it begun even earlier, as early as Karachi? No? At the cabin in Kaghan, then, the day before we left for Gilgit? He said he wanted to return to Karachi for—how did he put it?—personal reasons. Had he been trying to warn me? And what about that look of disapproval, the morning after the owl-sighting, the morning Farhana and I last made love—had it, in truth, been envy? Hadn’t he been different with me ever since? And what of poor Zulekha? He’d come here to say goodbye to her, and in the process, stolen Farhana?
The questions would kill me before my thirst could. What difference did it make? Perhaps she’d found a better man to return to. Or simply, a better man.
I couldn’t hear them anymore.
Which is worse, a crime committed because you don’t look, or because you do? The one that is an accident, or the one that is calculated?
It was a chance calculation. More like an accident.
What exactly had happened when I’d approached them? Had I approached them? I couldn’t remember. I remembered some things only, such as wondering if I’d have the strength to push him. And the glacier had heard. A ray of sun had tickled her rib; she began to sweat. Adjusting her spine, she shrank, expanded, then advanced. They were fools to stand on that rib, but even so, I would not have thought it possible, the way their position moved, sliding closer to the edge, as she oscillated so very slightly, to and fro, a micrometer shrug, and Irfan was slipping backward, while Farhana’s eyes opened at last. He reached for her when he saw me. He reached for that red sleeve he’d been kissing just moments earlier, when the ice was firm, when the sun was still behind Ultar’s spire. And I saw it: she pulled the sleeve away. She did not want to fall with him. She would not hold another drowning body. She had let him go, while crying for help.
Across the chasm, I could see it now. Ultar’s shadow. The sun had peeled off his mask. Underneath lay a russet tongue of gravel between a file of punishing teeth. There was a legend about that mountain but I couldn’t remember it. No doubt it involved a demon and a death. The wind was kicking up now and it probably wasn’t a good idea to keep sitting here; I leaned back and let the gale tear at my flesh. They’d looked sublime. Eyes shut, cheeks flushed. Hands roaming. More sublime than she and I had looked in the water, on the edge of Saiful Maluk.
I’d tossed him my pack. “There’s water left.” He hadn’t moved. I’d also noticed two mithai boxes, not just the one, pushed to the bottom. Both wrapped in red cloth. I decided to take one for myself at the last minute, then I threw the pack. He caught it. I waited for him to look up. When he finally did, I was glad the light obliterated his face.
Wes and Farhana watched me leave. “Are you going for help?” Wes called after me. “I think his leg is broken.” He was asking me? The man who could wrestle polar bears by himself? He could surely haul a small brown man off a slippery shelf.
At least he was kind enough to announce himself this time. The escort cleared his throat, waited briefly, then hopped down to the ledge where I was hiding from the world. By now I could barely open my eyes.
“I need water,” I whispered.
He said nothing.
“Do you have any?”
He shook his head.
“Why are you on this mountain? There isn’t jade or ghee up here.” I didn’t really care how he answered; all my questions were tired now.
He answered with a hideous grin, reminding me of someone else.
“Do you want my jacket?” I asked.
“What for?”
“You’re following me.” It wasn’t a question. It was closer to acquiescence.
He laughed.
“Why are you following me?”
He was nodding and grinning and laughing all at once. “To kill you.”
“What would you be trading then?”
He kept laughing.
My eyes were drooping less. I saw that he was not bad looking. His teeth, the part of him I’d been speaking to, were his worst feature. But the expression in his wide brown eyes was surprisingly mild. It might have been my own desire to see him this way, but see him this way I now did. A silky head of hair, the color of wheat, fell almost to his shoulders. Slightly darker than Kiran’s and be
tter kept. In fact, all of him was better kept. His clothes were good. A thick gray jacket of rough weave, perhaps yak wool, with white embroidery around the buttons. The embroidery was not as smeared with mud as it ought to have been, given the conditions. A necklace of large black stones, jade perhaps, though not in a color I’d seen before; a belt of real leather; solid shoes. I’d thought he went without shoes, he’d been that silent. But this man did not walk on glaciers on the soles of his feet.
A gun lay at his feet. I only noticed it now, while taking in the shoes. If he’d carried it around his shoulder, as, after all, an armed escort should, I might have noticed—though it was dark, how would I? But it wasn’t the kind to sling around the shoulder. It wasn’t the automatic weapon I’d seen him with when we first picked him up, on our way to Gilgit. It was a pistol.
From the inside pocket of his jacket, he pulled out a bottle. Thirsty, I reached out. He gladly proffered it; the scent turned my mouth sour. I shook my head.
So this was breakfast.
“They hibernate, you know.” He pointed behind him. “Like mammals and birds. When the sun shines, and the ice melts, they roll over. The thin ice rolls the loudest.”
So we’d talk first.
It sounded like some kind of Chinese proverb. The thin ice rolls the loudest. Yes? And how did the man on the ledge roll? And which man, the one who’d landed here by choice, or the one on another ledge, higher up, who’d—slipped? I decided not to ask.
Thinner Than Skin Page 30
