That Savage Water

by Matthew R. Loney

  The sky had brightened to an early blue by the time the bow slid onto the sandbank. The melon farmers trimmed the vines with curved machetes, throwing the foliage into woven baskets strapped to their backs. A final spark of conviction shot through Sal. He was excited to tell Vaman what he’d done, the path he’d chosen. He wanted to see the young guru’s eyes light up, to watch that grin crack beneath his beard. Life was uncertainty and Vaman had taught him to embrace its fluctuations without ever trying to manipulate them.

  He arrived at the promontory and looked out at the ghats across the river half hidden in haze. So many ways to live, he thought. Yet underneath, one side or the other all the way down the Ganges to the Bay of Bengal, there was nothing but mud – thick with the sludge of old bones, crumbs from those turtles and the ashes of thousands – that even separated the two banks.

  You are so pensive this day – Vaman called from inside the shelter – What have you been studying?

  Waves. Bones. Catastrophes. Something happened in the ocean yesterday.

  Yes, of course. Happenings as always.

  Many people died. An earthquake and a massive wave.

  Vaman crawled out of the hut, his hair matted and still dripping from his bath in the river.

  You were right. Nature is the best teacher of the human. You said that before.

  The best teacher, yes, of how things truly are.

  Sal suddenly noticed Vaman’s fire was a pit of cold ashes: He’d let it burn out. The stacks of cow manure were missing as well.

  I wanted to tell you – Sal continued – I made a commitment. I mean, that I’m serious about studying. I gave my things away. I burned my passport…

  The sadhu squatted and began picking through the sand. He hadn’t looked at Sal since he arrived. A surprise unease scratched at Sal’s stomach.

  Is everything fine?

  Yes, yes. Fine…yes, fine.

  I’m telling you I came to study for good. I left everything.

  That is good news, Sal. The life of a sadhu is difficult but rewarding. You will learn about a truth not many people know is even existing. I wish you luck and Krishna’s fortune for this…but I must tell you. I have chosen to leave the sandbank.

  The young guru stood and gazed down the beach to the melon farmers and the boats arriving from across the river. He looked at the ghats and then down at Sal’s feet.

  As you know, I have lived here for many years as a sadhu. Every dry season I return and I have experienced much about the joy, the love, about what the human is searching for. But now I have a different curiosity.

  You see I put out my fire. I sold the dung for some rupees to take me to Varanasi. I don’t know how I can do it, but I am curious to discover how humans live on that side. There must be a joy to have children, a family! To have a small room, to live with a wife and a grandmother. To spend the days working diligently as a chai walla or office man, there must be a joy in that too.

  Sal felt the grains of sand burn into his soles. The haze had steamed off and a full Indian sun was beginning its temper.

  What kind of joy? – Sal countered – There’s nothing over there. That’s what I just realized, what you taught me. That’s why I came here…

  The city seemed like a giant wave perpetually cresting on the horizon, the colourful saris and longyis of the people like shattered debris lifting and churning in its momentum.

  You are welcome to my hut – Vaman stared at the ghats that lined the far bank – It will last until the monsoon if you are lucky. Since I was a teenager, I have been only a sadhu. But I keep a curiosity about that shore I can no longer ignore. I need to participate in that fluxing, to share in that movement. Sure, to be a sadhu is easy. You don’t have someone to say to you rules about waking, about clothings or behavior. We sadhus can be free as we like with no one but God to answer to. But there is no challenge to that life anymore. It feels so usual, so standard, so customary. Now I want to try and make the way of a life that will be a challenge to me. To help me grow, to use my practice for who needs it.

  In the laughter of the boys down the bank he heard the guesthouse owner in his dirty undershirt – You’ll be back – Sal’s stomach felt inflated by liquid.

  I am happy you have decided to live in this way. It is a good way and you can learn very much. But I am so curious about this city I have watched from across the river day and night. Yes, I have been there before but as a sadhu, not a citizen. You too have this curiosity, Sal, so you can understand what it means to try.

  Yes… – Sal paused. Except for a scalding breeze that hooked under the fabric of the hut and flapped it against the poles, there was a thick, oscillating silence – We should all try.

  Vaman promised to visit the sandbank as soon as he could. Sal watched him wade down the beach to a boat and the boat was pushed off the sand by the boy holding the reins of the pony. Think you the first white man to come to India and meet a guru? A vapor of sadness collected on the insides of his breath. He pictured the fishing villages on the southern coast, Sri Lanka, the beaches of Thailand full of inquisitive tourists camcording the wave as it grew and towered above them and then swept them away. He saw the surface of the Ganges roil as the turtles snapped hold of an arm bone or pelvis, shredding it of its meat. He watched Vaman’s boat disappear into the chaos of the far shore. In one month, the monsoons would arrive on the horizon, a banister of cloud that would send Sal eastward towards the ocean.

  THE PIGEONS OF PESHAWAR

  SUNRISE – 6:44 AM

  Men wrapped in shawls weave bicycles through oncoming streams of rickshaws. Two-pitched car horns startle the spit from mules. Wagons of bricks rumble past, emphatic and wrestling along the road’s pocked pavement. Gathered at their motorbikes, gangs of Sikh men yawn and toy beneath their fingernails, awakening in the diesel-fumed dawn. Against the wall of Lahore station – a lingering sand-brick fortress of British Imperialism parked on Pakistan’s eastern border with India – the roadside swells in front of my plastic stool as the barber leans in. From the mosque’s turret, a black compass point against the haze of the Punjabi plains, the muezzin sirens out the call to prayer: The holy moans of Islam coat the waking city.

  No turning – his chestnut hand steadies my brow – You want to save your head? Still, still.

  As his razor scrapes my jaw, the cologne of his wrist lands in my nostrils – spiced aftershave mixed with the sweat of his undershirt. His eyes are yellowed, their corners faintly blood-shot; his ebony moustache is coarse and blunt as a broom. Leaning to the barbers next to him, he exhibits the blade he’s drawn. Men in coloured shalwars peer in from behind: Semi-circular, hands hooked, they are curious and indolent at the sight of me, my whiskers, the strangeness of my downhill skis propped against the station’s wall. Their notes of Urdu laughter perch on my shoulders as they study the blond stubble littering the heap of foam.

  Gold beard – he wipes the razor on a scrap of cloth and brings it again to my lip.

  Here is that alien bewilderment, that deeper paralysis of difference. Here the history fields still vibrate in their aftermath like the heartbeat of a bomb. It is right to have come, I affirm, wading through this strangeness alone while Adrian is still farther, stil ahead of me, settled in a guesthouse somewhere high in the Karakoram. We are ten years older and have let the drift of our lives separate us like an ice floe. Our purpose for coming, we reasoned and planned weeks earlier via email, was that once on our skis again, we might finally outrun what had chased us since high school.

  Finished – the barber blots me with a corner of newsprint – Beautiful as a boy.

  Shukria – I say. Thank you.

  You are leaving Lahore? – he inquires – Today? So soon?

  This evening’s train. Lahore to Islamabad and then Gilgit to Karakoram.

  Gilgit? – he worries his eyebrows – Inshallah, you will be safe. They are proud to be bandits there. Lacking shame! Some birds eat
fruit and other birds eat flesh. I pray you encounter only those with beaks made for berries.

  Inshallah – I hand him a five-rupee note, take my skis and pass between the stares of the shalwar men back into the flutter of the station.

  The interior hall is a carnival of travellers, the Pakistani railways churning at full throttle. Turbaned porters ferry sacks of onions and firewood, ticket vendors holler their destinations from speakers wired near the ceiling fans. Like a belt, this station is Pakistan’s buckle to the subcontinent, a suture to the severed shore of the Indian wound.

  After an overnight train from Delhi I arrived in Lahore before dawn. Crossing the border in the dark, my carriage was a party of celebrating Sikh pilgrims. I couldn’t sleep for the heat and noise so I lay on the mid-tier bunk, rocking, staring out the window at the passing countryside. Moonlit palm trees laid indigo shadows onto the fields. The unfamiliar constellations of this hemisphere rotated in the black sky beyond them. I watched as a man on horseback galloped beside the train, the moonlight carving between the animal’s hooves as it ran. I could have sworn the rider caught my eye and grinned as he rode, his teeth gleaming in the milky light. Hunched forward, he galloped faster. I felt drenched in the adrenaline of far, of utter distance, as though I had reached the foggiest corner of the planet that still held some perfect secret, where it was all sights and sounds altered from what I knew or could imagine. Here, the unparallel life-fringed border to the ribbon of travel – roadsides, tracksides, hillsides, waysides. The world, I assure myself, is full of birds that eat berries.

  Adrian and I had arranged for our guide to the glacier, a local man named Akram, to meet my train, and although there’d been an email from him the previous day confirming my arrival, he hadn’t been at the station like he promised. Without a way to get in contact, I resigned to wait out the day alone. I found a cart selling naan and dhal and then paid for a shave with the roadside barber. Now against the wall of the central platform as the sun transforms the city from indigo to orange, I find a clean-swept corner to lay my backpack and skis and wait for him. I’ll watch for him here and if he never shows, I’ll take the train to Islamabad myself. After ten years, face to face with Adrian tonight, I have imagined shaking his hand a thousand times. Adrian, who had frozen some object inside me that had broken off and begun travelling my coasts like an iceberg.

  DHUHR – 11:52 AM

  Shane, buddy! – Adrian’s webcam image stammered in low-res with the poor connection. Behind him the streets of Islamabad ignited my laptop’s screen – Are you really coming?

  Got the skis waxed already.

  Man, you’ve never seen anything like this place. It’s something real, that’s for sure.

  I think I just saw a herd of goats pass behind you. Yeah, I’m coming. Of course I am. You sure those hills are worth the trip?

  Hills? My God, Shane, these aren’t hills. They’re goddamn monsters. But we’re skiing glaciers this time. Biafo, right? She’s got K2 in the background and the largest run of pristine snow outside the poles. You up for it? I know you remember some of the tricks I taught you in practice. Monsters, buddy. Nasty goddamn ghouls.

  The Biafo Glacier, a powder-topped tongue of frozen till edged by mile-deep crevasses. Tucked in a forsaken notch of Pakistan, the glacier creeps between the Karakoram, the icy foothills of the Himalayas, inch by inch toward the ocean.

  You sure you can make it here alone? I’ve told the guys all about you and our crazy times on ski team. Did you know no one else keeps in touch with their mates from high school? Is that weird or what?

  I’ll be coming a few weeks early to see the sights in Delhi so I’ll meet you in Gilgit.

  Man, this place is the real deal, I’m telling you. Those runs we did for team were a driveway compared to these.

  The image of Adrian turned in a sweep of pixels as a group of women clad in burkas entered the café behind him, their curtains of fabric disguising them like bandits caught on security camera.

  Those the goats you were talking about? – Adrian turned back to the screen, all teeth in the webcam – I’m telling you, Shane, it’s the dark side of the moon here. You’ll love it. I’ll send Akram to meet you wherever you want. Lahore’s a fun town. Take the train from Delhi and meet him there. He’s the son of two rich Pakis but British as they come. You’ll see, Shane, he’s hysterical.

  It’ll be great to see you.

  No kidding, buddy. Ten years go by in a flash.

  Ten years since high school, since the ski team with Adrian when we rode to the top of the slope together, our feet dangling above the tree caps. From the chair behind us Mr. Mason called out – Boys, I want to see you work the fall line directly as possible. Got it? Carve tight off the front trough while keeping your pace constant. Adrian always gunned out the deepest moguls with reckless speed. His knees sprung to his chest like bullets, his boots held tight together and with the biggest, boyish grin washing over his face as he flew the jumps in twisters and spread eagles. He could land solidly, purposefully, with all the confidence of an athlete who knew how to make winning look easy. Propped on his poles at the bottom of the run, he stared up at me, his braces glinting through his smile. Come on, Shane! – he called – Hit it dead centre and you’ll fly when you hit the lip! I envied him then, I remember, envied those braces even, linking his teeth like miniature scaffolds. How he knew he had the talent so couldn’t give a fuck about anything else.

  Somewhere down the platform, shouts emerge from an administration office. The static of radios crackles the heat as a squadron of officers pushes from the far end through groups of lingering travellers. The brass details on their military insignia flash as they cut through slats of sunlight angled from the ventilation shafts. As they vanish into the room, drafts of pigeons suddenly loose from the rafters and flap across the stone canopy, arching as one body into a frantic grey landing – a chorus of warbles pecking crumbs from the ochre tile. Squatting at the wall, a toothless woman fans a pot of curry she balances on a charcoal tin. She nods at me, opens her cruddy gums and heaves a laugh in my direction, bringing her hands to her sides in the shape of two gnarled wings. She flaps and laughs again.

  More shouts as the crowd outside the office grows, each man craning to see inside. Curious, I stand, walk down the platform and join the peering men. On the administrator’s desk inside the room sits a small television, its wire antennae kinked and taped to the plaster wall. The screen flickers a newscast of a street scene deep in Pakistan – the grime-caked city of Peshawar. The crowd jostles its heat around me, a human herd damp with beards and turbans, ciphers of Urdu, Pashto and Punjabi. I glance back at my skis left propped against the wall. Strange to see them meet this foreignness, so far from their mountains, so far from where they’d lain for ten years in my garage next to garden hoses, bags of birdseed, rakes and bicycles.

  A voice calls out behind me – You are going to Peshawar? You must alter your plans if you are.

  When I turn I meet the face of a young man, brown and boyish-skinned. Black hair sweeps across his forehead; he is dressed in an olive-green shalwar with eyes the clear tourmaline of glaciers. His black lashes draw out a hint of moustache.

  I would not go to Peshawar if I were you – he continues – Not today.

  Islamabad, but not until this evening. What happened there?

  He pushes in front of a row of grey-bearded men and stands next to me – The Taliban made an assault. A prison has been attacked and they have freed nearly four hundred convicts. I am afraid now Pakistan is very dangerous for you. They will cancel the train to Peshawar until more notice.

  And for Islamabad?

  Wait, wait. I will ask – he presses through to the window. After a jabber of Urdu, the office attendant nods his head, waving him away disinterestedly.

  The boy pushes back to me – There is still a train to Islamabad. This evening, yes.

  Good – I extend him my hand – That’s good.
I’m Shane.

  Sahir. And from Islamabad, where will you go?

  Gilgit and the Karakoram.

  I knew it. The mountains – Sahir’s face frees into a smile. Like the son of some Kashmiri diplomat with high Zoroastrian cheekbones, his teeth are starched, untarnished, shockingly aligned. A descendent of handsome, high-nosed Greeks left in his bloodline from Alexander the Great, he stands like a vintage postcard against the backdrop of the station – They are beautiful, that is what I hear.

  It’s why I came.

  We in Pakistan are very proud of our country. More so, we are proud of the foreigners who dare to come here. But you are alone and there are serious dangers for people of your flesh tone. Your skin is more valuable to some than a tiger’s.

  Everyone prefers to dress themselves in the hides of other animals. My friend Akram, he’s late. He’s taking me to Islamabad this evening.

  Then you have time for a tour of Lahore station – Sahir brightens – I’m sure you must be curious about many things in our history. As my father tells me, it is peace for the soul to revisit the cages of our past as different men.

  ASR – 2:40 PM

  It was nearing the end of first term when the smell of winter hit the air. Something metallic, zinc or nickel, signalled the snow was about to fall. While everyone else dreaded the approaching cold, Adrian and I plotted the length of the coming ski season, how many weekends still ahead, how many runs. We sketched out the tricks we wanted to master in elaborate coloured diagrams. It felt good to embrace what others wouldn’t, to love something others rejected.

  The bright fluorescents of the hallway stoked the red lockers as Adrian came up to me, pulling me into the empty computer lab.

  Check this out – he grinned in the darkness – Guess who.

  His phone’s screen had a series of messages from a number I didn’t recognize.

  Looking forward to the season?

  Sure. I’m keen to try the 360.