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  A shadow flickered on the door frame. A lizard, sidling for a mate.

  I courted Farhana with calla lilies. Nothing delighted me more than descending the hill into the Mission District where she lived with a potted plant in my arms. I knew the flower shops with the widest varieties, from white to mauve to yellow, some with funnels as long and slender as her wrists, slanting in the same way her braid embraced her spine that first time we met, and still embraced her each night as she torqued her body to undress. I longed to photograph that spine but she wouldn’t let me. So instead, with my naked eye, I watched her fingers undo the knots of her braid.

  Sometimes, she pulled me out of bed, to recline at her five-sided bay window. It pitched so far out into the street she claimed it was the one that caused the city to pass an ordinance limiting the projection of all bay windows. We’d sit there, nestled in glass in a purple house. Even by San Francisco’s standards, the house was spectacular. Slender spiralling columns at the alcove, each with gold rings, like cufflinks on a white and crinkly sleeve. Halfway down the door of unfinished wood ran a tinted oval glass. Mirror, mirror, she’d giggle, the first few times I kissed her there. The bedroom balcony – with little gold-tipped minarets – is where I left her calla lilies, like an offering to the god of extravagance. Art-glass windowpanes under the roof.

  At the window, we watched others on the street.

  At the window, she asked, ‘What’s the most beautiful thing you ever witnessed? I mean, a moment.’

  At the window, we played opposites. The Mission was once moist, fecund. In contrast, the stark, wind-swept Richmond where I lived was once a desolate bank of sand. We said she sprang from marsh, I from desert. She loved the damp closeness of curves, the rich debris of glaciers and deltas. She loved her gloves and her socks. I, though always cold, hated to cover my extremities. I preferred the exposed, violent beauty of the Pacific coast to the secret tides of the protected bays. We said ‘opposites attract’ and we were right. Converging is what divided us.

  On her first birthday after we met, in one hand I held a calla lily with a lip pinker than hers, in the other, a bottle of champagne. She kissed me and said she knew what she wanted instead.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Let me show you.’

  I shut my eyes, counted to ten, opened them. ‘So where is it?’

  ‘Not here, silly. Let’s go for a walk. To your neighbourhood, the one you love to photograph, with all the cliffs and the cypresses.’ She rolled her eyes as though cliffs and cypresses were toys for men.

  It was an especially cold day in May and though I did love the bluffs, I’d been hoping for a more close-fitting day. Call it role reversal. I chilled the champagne and headed for the bay window to, well, anticipate some tidal advances. The last time we’d made love I’d teased that her needs were growing as strong as the tides rushing up the channels of a salt marsh, and inshallah they’d also be twice daily.

  Well, it was not to be.

  She’d planned the route. First, the Sutro Baths, which looked especially green and scummy that day, thick as a Karachi sewer. We watched the pelicans. Dark hunkered shadows, sometimes in gangs of twenty or more, closing in on the fecund orgy at the microbe-gilded pools like evil clouds, like missiles. They launched headlong, scattering the seagulls and the swifts, dropping one after the other in a heavy, gut-wrenching fall. A rain of bombshells. The invasion mesmerized us.

  From the pelicans I moved my camera to the austere silhouette of a cormorant. He seemed to be watching the assault of the pelicans with as little interest as God.

  ‘Nadir, talk to me for a minute, without that.’

  I didn’t have to see through the lens to see her point to it. ‘In a minute.’

  The pelicans gone, the seagulls multiplied. I watched a pair land softly on the boulders along the shore. And the hummingbirds – how did they survive in this wind, and at this height? And the purple flowers with the bright white hearts! Here it was again: the tenacity of the small. What I’d seen in the Sonoran Desert and the valleys of the Himalayas.

  ‘It’s over a minute.’ Her voice trembled. I put the camera in its case. She cleared her throat. ‘Nadir, are you as happy with me as you are alone on your nightly walks?’

  ‘I’m much happier.’

  She looked away. I took my camera out again. She sometimes let me photograph her now, though still not often enough, and only when dressed. I got a beautiful profile of her gazing at the ruins as the mist rolled across the steps in the background.

  ‘Happier than in the mountains of Pakistan?’

  Perhaps I hesitated. ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m happy anywhere with you.’

  ‘Why?’

  I was still photographing her. From behind the lens, I replied, ‘Because you don’t remind me of my past.’ And as I stepped on to a lower wall to get more of the ruins behind her, I realized that this was exactly so. She wasn’t like any of the women I knew in Karachi. Her energy was – different. It wasn’t sultry, wasn’t Eastern. She was walking away from me now, walking away from my lens, and I noticed that her walk was determined and – how can I put it? – unstudied. As if no aunt had ever told her that women walk with one foot before the other. It wasn’t graceful but it was vigorous. There are men on the Pakistan Afghanistan border who can spot a foreign journalist hiding in a burqa by the way she moves. Farhana would never pass. She could, however, keep up with them on the mountains. Not many women from Karachi could. And yet – of course I didn’t tell her this – they had more patience in bed. Farhana didn’t like to linger, not over food, shopping or sex. The only thing I’d ever seen her linger over was her hair, and that was not with pleasure. All the languor was in her spine, the part she never let me put behind my lens. Everything else about her had the slightly lunatic energy of Nor Cal, uncomplicated and nervy. I mean, for heaven’s sake, she was passionate about glaciers. How many Pakistani women know two things about them? It was Farhana who told me that Pakistan has more glaciers than anywhere outside the poles. And I’ve seen them! I’ve even seen them fuck!

  She was sobbing. I saw it first through the lens. I saw it too late, after I’d taken the photograph of her wiping her nose with the back of her hand. She said it was the worst thing I could have said.

  The seagulls hovered, teetering in the breeze. Before they touched the rock it was beginning to sink in, yet each time I approached a landing, the wind pulled me away again. We loved each other, Farhana and I, for precisely opposite reasons. If I loved her because she did not remind me of my past, Farhana loved me because she believed I was her past. That day I came close to understanding; by the time I fully understood, we were already in transit, immersed in separate rituals of silence.

  I expected to keep to the coast to Point Lobos, but, taking a detour, she began following the signs for Fort Miley. I said nothing. I didn’t know what to say. How could I apologize for all that drew me to her?

  There were picnickers in the grass between the gun emplacements dating to before the First World War. A plaque read: Although they never fired on an enemy, coastal batteries here and throughout the Bay Area stood ready – a strong deterrent to attack.

  ‘You had enemies back then, too?’ I muttered, before catching myself. ‘I didn’t mean you you.’

  She cut me a furious look. I bounced foolishly on my toes. She climbed the hill to where enormous guns had once pointed out to the Pacific, guarding all three approaches to Golden Gate. There was a sublime view of Ocean Beach, but I knew it wasn’t for the view that she’d brought me here.

  Without looking at me, she said, ‘Take me back.’

  I assumed she meant to her warm purple house in the Mission. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘Take me back to the places in Pakistan that you love.’

  I was stunned. If she’d never seen them, why did she say back? And why now? And why ever?

  When she said it a third time I understood that she presented her idea as a condi
tion: take me back and I will keep loving you.

  For always? I wanted to ask. No matter where?

  I glanced at her boldly now, and she returned my stare. I was hoping she’d understand that this is what my eyes said. It was here that a man loved her, a man with whom she could spend an unknowable quantity of time doing just about anything: walking, fucking, going to the movies, eating sushi and Guatemalan tamales on the same day, gossiping about a father in Berkeley, a father I’d still not met – I didn’t know whom she was protecting more, him or me – but who’d brought her to this country when she was three and stayed. I didn’t understand why she didn’t feel this was home. All I understood was that she didn’t. She was at a time in her life when other women long for a child. Farhana longed for a country.

  ‘You’re going home this summer. I’m coming with you. That’s what I want you to show me, for my birthday.’

  I didn’t want to return. With her, that is. Nor did I want to explain that for me it was a return, but I didn’t think it was for her. Nor that, just as she took joy in showing me this corner of the world because I was new to it, I could only take joy in showing her mine if she acknowledged it was new to her. Not if she claimed it as her own. I’d spent months lingering over northern California and I’d freely admit there was much I didn’t grasp. How many months was she prepared to linger over Pakistan? How many years? Would she have the patience to wait and yield till the geography really did begin to construct the person, the way the breakers beneath us construct the shore? Did she want to yield to it? Of course not. It was a country practically under siege. We might be interested in you but not in your landscapes. What images did she want to see and to which land did she want to return?

  We’d been happy. I wanted to stay happy. ‘I’m going for work.’

  It wasn’t a lie. I was going to travel to the Frontier and the Northern Areas with my old friends from school, Irfan and Zulekha, to take pictures. Was I hoping to sell them here? Hoping, yes. Expecting, no. I’d started working long hours at a brew pub a few blocks from my apartment and took whatever other work I could find, usually as a wedding photographer. I anticipated doing the same no matter how many rolls I shot of the Pakistani Himalayas or the American South-west. Yet her reply stunned me.

  ‘What’s the point? You’ll never sell any. At least I know glaciers.’

  I stopped rolling on my toes.

  ‘Perhaps you’re going back for the wrong reason,’ she kept on.

  ‘And being your tour guide is the right reason?’

  She bestowed me with an ice-black stare, the kind I was to receive soon enough from a very different creature, in a very different place. Behind Farhana, I could see the guns that once pointed to the minefields outside Golden Gate. How easy it is to envision enemies lurking in the tide. As I looked over her shoulder, imagining what shapes those phantoms had once taken, I couldn’t have guessed that within two months she and I would be posted at our own separate lookouts, not on a headland overlooking the Pacific, but near a glacier overlooking Kashmir.

  The bathroom sink in my cabin was clogged. I moved to the kitchen, cracking the window as I shaved. I heard voices. It was Irfan, Zulekha and a third voice, perhaps the restaurant cook, discussing the reasons for the heightened security in the valley. Shia–Sunni riots had erupted in Gilgit District to the north and Mansehra district to the south, particularly near the town of Balakot, where the martyr Syed Ahmad Barelvi lay buried. Barelvi had once called for jihad against the British and dreamed of an Islamic state ruled by Islamic laws. Nearly two hundred years later, his followers were still dreaming his dream. They had training camps and, according to the third voice, men from the camps had started harassing the villagers here, trying to recruit their sons.

  On our way to the valley, Irfan had whispered, ‘We carry a heavy responsibility, travelling with them.’ He’d nudged his chin in the direction of Farhana and Wes.

  ‘She wants to return,’ I’d declared, refusing to say more, while he stared at me in disbelief.

  ‘We’ll need an armed guard,’ he said at last.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘This isn’t what we’d planned.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Something happens to them, international fiasco.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Something happens to us, so what.’

  ‘I know.’

  Never was a wind between teeth more exasperated.

  In the weeks following our fight at the Fort, I returned to the coast often, always alone. A small part of me knew it was to cleanse my palate, as if to revive something that had been lost on that wild stretch of land when it included Farhana.

  My eye was hungry. I photographed the Monterey pines and the valley Quercus. The agave that bloomed before death. The pups that replaced them. California buckeye. Desert five-spots. Star tulips, and bell-shaped pussy ears with stems as thin as saliva. Diogenes’ lantern, the sweetest of flowers, yellow as the yawning sun.

  I crawled back to her house. Mirror, mirror, I bayed at her glass. Forgive the ugliest of them all!

  When she flung the door open there was a man behind her. Farhana introduced him as Wesley.

  ‘Call me Wes,’ he said.

  ‘You’re not a Wes,’ she gazed at him.

  I stepped inside.

  ‘I think I’ll leave you with your beau.’

  ‘Oh, stay. You guys should talk.’

  Why?

  ‘Nadir, I can arrange for us to go!’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We’ve applied for funding. We’ll get it.’

  We?

  ‘A month to study glaciers in the western Himalayas!’

  Wes smacked my shoulder. ‘I want to know how those locals manage their water supply. You know, through seeding ice.’

  I glared at Farhana. ‘You will get it or already have?’

  She soared into my arms, flinging all three of us side to side.

  Later that night, when we were alone, she let me photograph her naked spine for the first time.

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why today?’

  She peeled off her sweater, shirt, bra, still delirious with the joy of having skilfully engineered her return. And all this time I’d believed she was waiting for me to say yes. There was no consent involved. We were going.

  ‘Why today?’ I insisted.

  She giggled. It was as if she were drunk and wanting to have sex with me after refusing when sober. It was her choice, yet I was having to make it.

  ‘Come on, Nadir. Pick up your camera. I know you’re dying to.’

  ‘Actually, I’m not.’

  ‘Sure about that?’

  I hesitated. To say yes would mean choosing no. I said no.

  I didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t want Farhana, neither behind my lens nor in the flesh. Even when she wound her braid around her, I couldn’t see the calla lily. It was all too conscious, too rehearsed. And yet, and yet. As I put her through my lens and captured that twisting torso, her ribs protruding, a thought flickered in my mind. Was it her pleasure that was dulling mine? I shook the thought away. It wasn’t even pleasure. More like victory. I could see it in her gaze. It had killed the wonder this moment was always meant to hold. As she adjusted her hips and I kept on snapping, I tried to conjure it up, this wonder, this thing which cannot always be there, which is entirely fleeting and numinous, which, like luck, or talent, or wealth, cannot be equally distributed between those who love, between those who mate. Snap! She was raising her chin so high. She was rising from the bed. She was turning off all the lights.

  What’s the most beautiful thing you ever witnessed?’ she used to ask, when we lay curled together in her bay window, playing opposites. ‘I mean, a moment.’

  I always said it was the mating of glaciers. ‘And you, what’s yours?’

  She never hesitated. ‘The way you looked at me, the first time, standing down in the sand on Baker Beach in your trousers while I sat sunning myself on the rocks. Yo
u compared me to a calla lily. That was the moment.’

  We played differently now.

  The month before we left, I heard her on the phone. I seemed to have come in at the end.

  ‘… it boils down to. One person in the mood when the other isn’t?’

  There was a pause while, I assumed, the listener spoke. Farhana shook her head. ‘I’m not only talking about sex. Sex is just a metaphor.’

  I expected her to elaborate. A long silence instead.

  Finally, she exhaled. ‘Yep, that’s what I mean. Uh-huh.’

  What did she mean?

  ‘I mean, that day on the beach.’

  Now I feared I could guess.

  It had happened the other way more. I mean, my wanting sex while she didn’t. It had happened the other way most of my life. Like a forgiving puppy, I bounced back up again at the merest hint of encouragement. Until recently.

  She was saying, ‘Women still suppress it, I know, nothing worse than letting go just to fall on your face. Though letting him decide, you know, what’s hot, maybe that’s worse.’ Silence. ‘Sure, I have, many times.’ Silence. ‘Uh-uh.’ Silence. ‘No. He doesn’t.’

  I don’t what? And then panic: it was me she was talking about?

  ‘Wes? Oh sure, yeah. It bothers him a lot.’

  What?

  I slammed the door. The door to the house with the five-sided bay window where she now spent more time with her phone. The door in the alcove where the gold rings of the columns now looked prosthetic, like gold teeth on a poor man from Tajikistan.

  Why wasn’t I aroused by her lately?

  Was it our departure? Ours. I told myself I was at peace with her coming too. More importantly, I was excited about what I’d do there, with or without her, and this had renewed interest in my work. I’d bought a Nikon digital camera to go with my beloved F4, bought a 300mm lens and 20mm extension tube. I spent my free time photographing small fry. A California poppy. Farhana’s nipple. The rainbow in a dragonfly’s wing.