by Pasha Malla
Once the pain had subsided to a dull ache, Ash took out Don Quixote. But again he couldn’t focus on the words. Beside him Matt writhed and grunted, stretched his legs into the aisle, wedged a pillow against the headrest, adjusted, flopped, curled sideways, leaned on Ash’s shoulder. Kissed his cheek.
‘Go away,’ said Ash, cringing.
‘But I love you.’
‘No you don’t. Love doesn’t clock people in the balls.’
Matt sat up. ‘How’s the book?’
‘Don Quixote? A masterpiece. Obviously.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘About?’
‘Is it like the Lone Ranger? He’s got a buddy, right?’
‘Sancho Panza.’
‘Right, the sidekick. Like Tonto. Or Robin. The Luigi to his Mario. The Chewy to his Han. The Ash to his Matt.’
‘Of the two of us, I’m Chewbacca?’
‘No way. Don Quixote is all me.’
‘Maybe you’ve forgotten who had to fly across an ocean to rescue you.’
‘Like any good sidekick.’
‘You haven’t even read the book!’
‘Well, let’s hear a scene from it and we’ll see.’
‘A scene?’
‘Story time.’ Matt nuzzled into Ash’s shoulder. ‘Read me something, Papa.’
The seatbelt sign extinguished. A baby wailed at the rear of the cabin. Ash shook his friend away and thumbed the pages, looking for—what? He’d no idea. He didn’t know the book at all. He was only biding his time until Matt gave up, lost interest, left him alone. But the look on his friend’s face had turned intent, almost studious.
And then a line jumped off the page. ‘Okay, here, tell me if this sounds more like you or me: “I am a fire afar off, a sword laid aside.” ’
‘A fire and a sword? Honestly? Me! It’s not even close. You’re more like a puddle and a plastic spoon.’
Ash closed the book.
‘Hey, come on. This is fun. Read more.’
‘No.’ He thought about that fire, everything he’d never done. And the sword not laid but stabbed, the blade twisting—with his own hand on the hilt. But how could he explain this to Matt?
‘Bro! Read!’
Ash sighed, flipped around. ‘Okay, here’s a bit where Sancho is calling Don Quixote “The Knight of the Sorrowful Face.” ’
‘I’ve had those.’
‘Those what?’
‘Nights of a Sorrowful Face.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Those nights, bro. Not that you’d know. Your life is so put together and perfect.’
‘Sorry, my life is what?’
‘I just mean those mornings you wake up and there’s a blank second or two but then the whole night before comes crashing in until you’re drowning in it. And you have to wade through it all day, up past your neck, and you can’t breathe. It’s suffocating you.’
Ash did not correct Matt’s mistake. Nights, knights—what did it matter?
‘Sorrow, yeah, that’s the word.’ Matt nodded, said it again: ‘Sorrow. Sorrow about not just what you’ve done but who you are. And it’s all there on your face for everyone to see. Like those mornings before the sun comes up you’re feeling around for your clothes in the dark and dressing as quiet as you can and creeping out of some woman’s room whose name you can’t remember and past her kid sleeping, but the kid is up watching you through the bars of its crib with big wide eyes. What are you gonna do? You can’t stay. You’re no good for anyone. So you just leave with those sad, sad eyes following you out the door because you effed up again.’ He shook his head. ‘And then you’re hurt and there’s nowhere to put it but on someone else. Again.’
Ash glanced at the man in the window seat. He was asleep. Or pretending to be.
But Matt seemed indifferent to eavesdroppers. ‘Like that kid in Goa. That’s what happened, Dhar. Another Night of the Sorrowful Face.’
‘Errant nights,’ said Ash.
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s what Don Quixote believes in. Kind of.’
‘Errant means bad?’
‘It means lots of things. But, yeah, it can also mean a kind of mistake. And aberrant means something even worse. Like unnatural. But disgracefully so.’
Matt shook his head sadly. ‘Yup. Too many nights like that, bro. Too many sorrowful, aberrant nights.’
Ash held up the book. ‘You want me to read something else?’
‘Nah. That’s enough.’ Matt leaned back and closed his eyes. ‘I’m tired. I don’t want to think about anything. Leave me alone for a bit. Let me sleep.’
—
THE LANDSCAPE TURNED ALPINE so suddenly. Ash wondered if he’d missed the transition through foothills, some slow steady rise of the land. Because in an instant, it seemed, the dun-coloured desert below ceded to snowy peaks. A settlement appeared like confetti speckling the snow, the detritus of some long-gone parade. The suburbs of Srinagar, Ash thought. But it dispersed, leaving only landscape. Then a new valley and a new cluster of houses appeared, and vanished again, and on and on they flew with no sign of descent.
What was out there, Ash wondered; who? Were those villages teeming with militants? Like the tribal lands outside Peshawar—gun markets and sharia law, sleeper cells in mountain caves with rocket launchers propped by the door. Funds pooled, IEDs wired, martyr videos shot against an Arabic-scrawled backdrop. But this was just the stuff of movies and TV. Surely there were other, homier truths out there: two girls cheating off each other’s math tests, workers with pickaxes hacking a roadway to rubble, a spindly grandmother slurping yogurt from the fingers of her daughter-in-law. Lives. People.
And he’d come here to ski.
This trip, and his own willful ignorance, reminded him of the time he’d gone to Cuba with his dad and sister. The Christmas of the millennial New Year, with the fanfare of an Oscar presenter Brij had presented his adult children with envelopes. Inside were flight itineraries and brochures for an all-inclusive resort (Windex-coloured ocean, salt-coloured sand, all-you-can-everything, all the time). ‘All of us, together,’ Brij announced, ‘to ring in Y2K.’ Ash and Mona traded looks of astonishment. Such an extravagant, unlikely gift. Not just misguided but lonesome—and too lonesome to say no to.
The resort was sequestered safely from the nearest town, yet not so removed from civilization that they could ignore the poverty at its gates. The Dhars went snorkelling, played volleyball, gorged at the buffet and dutifully pounded rum and Cokes until they passed out on their deck chairs, the grotesquery tainting the air like smoke from a funeral pyre. Mona had the hardest time of it politically, of course, until two of the more attentive male staff invited her to a party off-site on New Year’s Eve. (Ash, though technically never asked, used his father as an excuse to stay behind.)
Before heading home Ash had unloaded his suitcase on these same guys: clothes and books and toiletries—even a crappy MP3 player with nothing on it but books on tape. Yet this excess of charity shamed him even further. On the flight back to Canada he vowed never again to participate in such decadence, the disgrace of hiding behind barbed wire for all-you-can-eat/drink gluttony while the locals starved just beyond the fence. Or, worse, waited on him and cleaned up his mess.
Yet here he was, heading to Kashmir on another package tour. While nuclear war threatened on either side of the border. While the military ‘disappeared’ suspected insurgents from homes throughout the Valley—maybe those same homes passing below. While mass graves were unearthed and bereaved mothers waited, hearts knotted with hope and despair, for a glimpse of their sons’ remains. While Kashmiri refugees and exiles from Kathmandu to Newark woke homesick each morning; and every night, as they lay down once again in whatever foreign land, their souls crumpled inward a little more: the only home they’d ever known existed solely in their dreams.
Or so Ash imagined.
Beside him Matt snored and drooled, bald head lolling like a beach ball. Mat
t: This lunatic whom Ash had flown across the ocean to help, yet who was now dragging him to this broken, wounded place that had shattered millions of hearts, so they could climb into helicopters, unleash themselves upon mountaintops—and ski.
It occurred to Ash that he ought to stay in Srinagar. He imagined himself sipping kava among the Kashmiri literati in some dingy cafe. They would tell him how hopeless life was here for writers, that their poetry and searing polemics were produced only in samizdat, that they—the voice of the people!—were routinely harassed, beaten, jailed, silenced. Through his publishing connections Ash would bring their work to the masses, igniting a global phenomenon of ‘Writing from the Vale’ akin to the Latin American boom of the seventies. He’d be its saviour and hero; he’d endow an award in Brij’s name.
Meanwhile Matt could ski his big clueless heart out, chopper up to any illicit glacial peak he wanted, and like something out of a spy movie slalom back to base camp amid the crackle of gunfire. If he weren’t kidnapped and executed, after three days of powdery alpine bliss Matt could slink back to Delhi for his day in court. In a bolt of malice, Ash wished for a conviction—not some particularly cruel and unusual punishment, just a little time behind Indian bars. It might do the guy some good, set him straight, force him to admit that the world didn’t revolve around his whims.
Skiing! Ash had not skied in six years, almost exactly. The last time had been at his dad’s place one February, when he and Mona and Harj had all packed into Brij’s Volvo and crossed the highway and spent the day on the slopes.
Brij had picked up the sport in his fifties, much to his children’s astonishment. ‘You expect me to sit in my bloody house and watch people having fun?’ he’d railed. (Mysterious, too, was his sudden interest in ‘fun.’) From a series of private lessons Brij had developed the methodical style of a novice chef obeying, to the letter, a particularly thorough recipe. Skis impeccably parallel, in a strained crouch he made wide, deliberate turns with such precision that a parabolic function could plot the trails he left behind.
Mona had never been much for winter sports (or winter, or sports) and after two bored forays down the bunny hill she fled for the clubhouse. ‘See you two later,’ she told them at the T-bar, unclipping her rented skis. ‘I’m too Indian for ice-capades.’
So Ash spent the day with Brij, riding the lift together, skiing down in tandem (Ash’s technique, his dad pointed out, was more like power-skating from one edge of the hill to the other), meeting at the bottom and then heading back up. They didn’t talk much. Then, near the end of the day, the chair lift stalled. After a minute or two of sitting there, feet dangling, Brij began to speak.
‘I never understood what you Canadians like about this,’ he said. ‘Growing up in Kashmir there was no skiing. Some Europeans, certainly, would go up into the foothills and ski down, and a few would die every year because nothing was cultivated. It seemed absurd. But I suppose now Kashmir is developing some mountains for tourism.’ He was soliloquizing now—gazing into the distance, into the past. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I did try to ski once, however. As a very young boy.’
‘Oh?’
‘We would hear of these idiot Danes and Germans going up into the mountains and sailing down on boards stuck to their feet. So one day we decided to try it for ourselves.’
‘How old were you?’
‘Eight? No, nine.’
‘Cute.’
‘We had some idea that boots were attached to the skis, so we nailed a pair of shoes to some boards—though of course we knew nothing of poles—and convinced our friend Sharif’s father to take us in his Jeep around Dal Lake, up past the Mughal Gardens, into the hills. Then there was much snow in Srinagar. Now, with this global warming, who knows. So he dropped Sharif and me and the rest of our gang, six boys in all, at the base of a path that led to a lookout. Up we went, three of us carrying each ski. Our skis, mind, were ten feet long. Thick chinar timbers. The sort used to build houseboats.’
‘Not exactly Rossignols,’ said Ash.
Brij nodded and smiled. ‘So we reached the lookout and set the skis down—’
‘But, wait. If there was only one set of skis, who went first?’
‘Ah! Precisely the problem. Though we often went sledding, the idea of going down a hill standing up was absolutely terrifying. So we argued about who would be the initiate. Sharif said not him, as his father had driven us. Another boy said not him, as his feet were too small and didn’t fit the shoes.’
‘What about you?’
The lift creaked, hummed, lurched forward. And stopped again. The chair swayed. A cry from somewhere—‘Crisse d’osti tabarnak!’—echoed up the mountain; laughter rippled back down. Ash thought of avalanches, all that billowing annihilation triggered by a few careless words. But this was not the Alps. Just some mound in Quebec. Most of the snow wasn’t even real.
‘So,’ said Brij, ‘we were debating, and it came to my turn, and I had no excuse. They were in fact my shoes. The whole thing was my idea. I had even suggested the spot. So I agreed. Someone took my boots. I slipped my feet into the shoes. They were so cold! I remember the leather had hardened. Like wearing sheaths of ice.’
Below a pair of skiers were winding between the trees, their tracks braiding. In silence Ash and Brij watched them until they were down the hill and out of view.
‘So then what?’ Ash said. ‘How did it go?’
Brij laughed. ‘The other boys had to push me to the edge because the skis were too heavy to move. They had no edges. Just big pieces of lumber strapped to my feet.’
‘Amazing you lived to tell the tale.’
‘Just wait.’ Brij kicked his feet a little, one then the other: the tips of his skis appeared and vanished beneath the chair. The gesture was so childlike. ‘One of my friends took one of my hands, and another had the other, and one steadied me from the front, and another from behind, while Sharif coordinated. They moved me to the edge of the hill so that the tips of those boards were pointing into space.’
‘I love that feeling.’
‘Now, yes. Of course. If you are a skier, that moment before you release is exhilarating. But then? It was only…disembodying. It felt…’ Brij looked up the mountain—or over it, beyond it, to the sky. He nodded. ‘Like dying. Not even that I would die. I wasn’t envisioning an accident. In that moment I remember thinking, “This is what dying is like.” An in-between feeling. On the cusp, before the fall. And then over you’d go, leaving everyone behind, and nothing left.’
‘No heaven?’
Brij snorted. ‘Heaven, idiot? You believe in heaven?’
The lift started up with a groan, and off they were tugged to the top of the run.
‘There,’ said Brij.
‘So did you go down?’
‘What?’
‘The hill.’
‘When?’
‘When you were a kid! What we were just talking about.’
‘Oh.’ Brij seemed irritated; with a dismissive wave he dispatched the story back to the past. ‘I crashed. And that was the end of it.’
Now all that was left of his father was stuffed into a box at Ash’s feet. Bringing it along—on a ski trip to Brij’s homeland!—was a travesty. It, thought Ash, and cringed inwardly. Though him was even more absurd, and them, for the ashes, plural, was hardly better. There was no language for that clump of heavy dust. Father, Ash thought, and pictured himself cradling that grey box to his chest, tears streaming down his cheeks, before dumping the contents between the lily pads of Dal Lake.
What was he meant to do with it/him/them? Brij’s will had provided no instructions. Perhaps a crop-dusting flyover, right now, would be best—his dad’s powdered bones atomizing through the ozone. Ash looked past the sleeping man at the window: the mountains continued, on and on, all that snow streaked with gleaming black ridges where the rock showed through. And the sky, pale and feeble, more like a lack of sky. With a chill he realized that he was in it too: a nothing kind of place.
Ash sat back, shook the thought free from his mind.
And when it was gone, nothing replaced it.
Something had shifted. He felt weightless, untethered.
Had he fallen asleep? He couldn’t remember. No dream lingered. Though it seemed as if he’d snapped out of unconsciousness, or a coma. He looked around: the cabin of an airplane. They were flying…somewhere. Yet he’d no recollection of boarding or any idea where they were headed. And the men on either side of him, who were they? A dark-skinned man at the window, sixtyish; a big bald white man sprawling into the aisle. He searched their faces for recognition, but none came. Strangers.
Where was this? What land passed below? Mountains—the Rockies, the Andes, some range upon the moon? He didn’t know. He sensed only that he wasn’t heading home. Though where or what was home? All he knew was that he had a body, which ended at the tips of his fingers and toes. A man’s body. Everything else was a mystery.
He searched his thoughts for anything that preceded this moment, but it was like peering into a bare-walled room.
There was only desolation where the past ought to have been.
His mind had been emptied. There was nothing there.
Even his name. He tried to summon it and could not. Whoever’s body this was, it was nameless. He had no name.
The edges of panic closed in.
He shut his eyes, took a few slow breaths.
Opened them.
The big man beside him was grinning. An expression that conveyed familiarity. But how to mirror it back? He tried an upturn of his own lips. But this felt orthodontic and forced, and the big man’s smile collapsed into concern.
‘Sheesh, bro. What gives? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
3
SO THIS WAS INDIA; they were in India. The airport was dimly lit and derelict, with black-on-yellow signage (TOILETS, DRINKING WATER, SECURITY) subtitled in Hindi and Urdu—he somehow knew the names of the scripts, but couldn’t make sense of the words. And for India, or what he thought he knew of India, the airport was uncommonly quiet.
Other than the sixty-odd folks unloaded from their flight, the only people in the terminal were a few harried-looking staff and a flock of wild-eyed young men in fatigues, rifles strapped to their backs. There was so much space. But to enter those spaces alone felt perilous, so he hung close to the big man, his companion or keeper, the one who seemed to know him and yet whose face was as unfamiliar as this foreign land.