Thinner Than Skin

by Uzma Aslam Khan

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s see.” He chewed with his mouth open.

  “They didn’t come out.”

  “What do you mean they didn’t come out?” His smile was an oval of eggy goo.

  “Just that.”

  “With a digital? You’re literally in the wrong business.”

  Farhana laughed. “Don’t tease him. That’s a touchy topic.”

  What if I revealed all her touchy topics?

  “We should leave.” I stood up. “The lake is crowded by noon.”

  Irfan returned to his cabin for his jacket. Farhana picked hot peppers out of a second omelette for Wes. She called him “Wesley” and he called her “Farrah.” She called him “wimpy” and he called her “hella sweet.”

  As I packed my bag with my camera and lens, I resisted the urge to glance again at Farhana. I suppressed a longing to sweep everyone away—like a buffalo clearing its back with a tail!—so we could start again, just us. But what I could not resist—though I knew it would ignite that prickle resting so close to the skin, I knew I would regret it before I could even begin—was replaying the past week in my head.

  The Roads to Kaghan

  Before Kaghan there was Karachi, and that is where the plan had changed. Karachi. To my disgust, this time I had taken photographs of beggars and children running naked in the street, sucking mango pits and smearing their sooty cheeks with orange stains. “For rich men with retirement homes in Napa Valley,” I said to no one in particular, hitting delete.

  We stayed five days. The talk was mostly of disappearances, young men picked up on the streets of Karachi and Peshawar. Every time a plane flew over us, Irfan said it was one of the unmarked ones, the CIA condemning some dead soul to hell.

  Many times in those days I thought of my interview with the man who said I was lucky to come from a place always in the news. If he only knew how rapidly the glamour of chaos recedes the closer you come to it. If he only knew never to slit its belly. It is already slit, and the insides are always raw, and people in Karachi spent a lot of time looking around, trying not to slip in a city damaged not by one but a series of attacks, each more malevolent, more multi-pronged. On any given day, the target would be a mosque and a hotel; on another, a bus and a train. The next, Chinese officials in Balochistan and Pakistani generals in Punjab. Soon, it was just about everything except the two everyone resented most, the army on the ground and the drones in the air, because you can’t kill a drone, it’s a drone. And you can’t kill an army, it’s an army.

  I watched my parents age. Sickness, fear. The multi-pronged pincers feeding on the anguish of growing old in a land consumed equally by terror as by trivia. Getting the phone fixed, the toilet fixed, the air conditioner fixed, the cable fixed, the road fixed. A day lost begging for electricity, the alms lost in an hour. Where was the space for higher aspirations, for revolution?

  And yet, despite the monotony of dread, something lived. Resilience can flower in the muck of death and despair, particularly when it doesn’t even know it. I saw this especially around my sister. Hers was an elasticity I didn’t think Farhana expected to see and I wasn’t sure she was glad to see it. It made her feel … irrelevant.

  I compared them, my sister Sonia and Farhana. I knew Farhana did too. Had she expected to come from a position of—improvement? She was better educated. Wealthier. Sonia taught at a private school that paid 15,000 rupees per month. Farhana made more than two hundred times as much. When they shopped together, Sonia bargained for her as though for herself, and bought her gifts. Farhana never reciprocated. She would have been right in identifying herself in the position of receiver in a culture that took pride in its hospitality. But she didn’t really reveal any desire to give. Wes, on the other hand, frequently presented my mother with flowers and fruit, and I’ll admit I was surprised, surprised also that we were comparing at all, Farhana and I. Sonia to Farhana, Farhana to Wes. Why?

  It didn’t stop. We kept matching them up. Sonia hadn’t enjoyed much freedom or affection from my father; Farhana received much from hers. And yet. Sonia had a comfortable, casual air about her that came from complete ease in an environment she claimed to envy me for leaving. Farhana was seldom as relaxed, not in San Francisco, certainly not here. Sonia laughed more than Farhana. She flirted with shopkeepers. She had a cabal of “best friends.” Her cell phone never stopped ringing. Her benign husband observed everything about her with a benign gaze, no matter how she was dressed. But dress did matter to Farhana.

  She’d come equipped with two outfits, both once belonged to her mother, both with kurtas falling halfway down her shins, both in colors unbecoming. She was too pale for parrot green and mouse brown made her look, well, mousy. Besides, the starched cotton flared around her torso. She complained of looking pregnant, which she did, though I said the best lay underneath. She asked why I hadn’t told her about the latest fashions. I asked why she hadn’t searched the internet. To which she replied, tetchily, “I didn’t know your sister was so fashionable.” To which I didn’t know how to reply.

  How much of this contributed to the quarrel we were about to have? I couldn’t say. Though by the third day she started deferring to Sonia’s taste, and started looking the better for it, Farhana’s feeling of insignificance was only to increase.

  On that third day, we heard it on the news: A bomb exploded in a hotel this morning, killing one foreigner and seven Pakistanis. Wes wondered if instead of heading north for the mountains we should be heading west across the Atlantic.

  “You’re not the target,” I said, and Farhana complained I wasn’t being sympathetic.

  “Sympathetic? One foreigner dies and seven locals. Where’s his sympathy?” I didn’t say, Where’s yours? We were again weighing lives against each other, one against seven, relevance against irrelevance. Instead of answering me she called out to Wes, and, while I watched, they both strode into the kitchen, where my mother was to lavish them with yet another ridiculously complicated meal.

  The next two days, we spent apart. And unfortunately, the nights. We’d barely slept together in the weeks before leaving San Francisco, but since arriving in this city, where lust was a life-size secret, I wanted her again. Farhana was reserved. Why did I want her if I didn’t want to hold her hand? she asked, when I sneaked into her room. The question astonished me because, obviously, the answer was born of it. I wanted her because I couldn’t hold her hand. Or any other part. A quick fuck is a dead end, she said, forcing me back to my room.

  Instead of focusing on events in the house, I focused on events in Waziristan, on the Afghan border, where lust was no secret at all. The local tribes of Waziristan harbored Arabs, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Chechens, and Chinese Uyghur Muslims. Some of them were fleeing the war in Afghanistan, but others were fleeing their own governments. Waziristan’s tribal chiefs welcomed everyone except Pakistanis from outside their own tribe. Call it hospitality. Irfan and I decided the entrance to Waziristan should have a statue holding a Kalashnikov and a Quran. Give me your tired, your poor … the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these to me—unless they’re Pakistani!

  “And what about Pakistan’s hospitality to the US?” I said.

  Irfan thought about it. “Give me your missiles, your drones … the furtive raptors of your teeming war. Drop these on me—because I’m Pakistani!”

  We were sitting in a café with four other friends. The café had tinted windows and a smell that suggested no one ever came here, except our large and fair-skinned waiter, whom we decided looked just like Tahir Yuldashev, the Uzbek mentor of the Waziristan lord Baitullah Mehsud. Until this summer, there’d been a ceasefire between Mehsud and the Pakistan Army. Since the end of the ceasefire, Yuldashev was again supplying Mehsud with Uzbek bodyguards hardened from decades of fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Yuldashev, and Central Asia in general, captured our imagination more than the bombings in our own city. We still didn’t know who’d bombed the hotel. We were already resigned to never know
ing. Yuldashev, on the other hand, was organized and known. For instance, he’d raised an army to avenge the American bombing of Shahi-Kot Valley in Afghanistan in 2002. That was organized.

  Three years later, we still didn’t know why America had called the bombing Operation Anaconda.

  “Ask him,” Irfan pointed to the waiter hovering near the door.

  We waved him over. I said, “Why name the siege of Shahi-Kot in Central Asia after a water snake in South America?”

  The waiter walked outside for a smoke.

  “They think we’re an extension of Vietnam,” answered Irfan.

  “Are there anaconda in Vietnam?”

  “What would you rather they had called it?”

  “Operation Cobra.”

  “Too typical.”

  “Operation Antelope?”

  The war had the benefit of giving me something to discuss not only with my friends in place of my failure as a boyfriend, but also with my father, in place of my failure as a son.

  One morning, the newspaper carried a cartoon that moved the ice between us by a few millimeters. It was this. A white hand belonging to a white man with a top hat and stars and stripes gives a brown man in tattered clothes money. The brown man, delighted, starts sewing together a doll. In the next panel, the same white hand gives the merry tailor twice as much money. This time, the brown man, fuming, tears apart his invention, dress, beard, et al. For those who didn’t get it, the caption read: Pakistan spends billions of dollars destroying what it spent millions of dollars creating.

  My father chuckled. I chuckled.

  Two days later, we were in Islamabad.

  On the bus up, Farhana picked at her lip. She said nothing even when the bus broke down and we waited three hours for another one. All foreigners had to register with the military almost every hour, so the bus kept stopping and everyone was forced to wait for her and Wes. No one complained, not even those with six or seven children at their knee. I didn’t know if Farhana’s aloofness had to do with annoyance at these stops (curiously, Wes was cheerful throughout), embarrassment at keeping the bus waiting, or if it was aimed only at me. Some holdover from Karachi? Or did she imagine I had the power to prevent the stops? Or that I was mocking her for thinking she would be treated as if from here? She was courteous with the passengers; overly courteous, in fact, telling Wes repeatedly how friendly and dignified everyone was, as if he needed to be told. She was even courteous with the military men, who delighted in chatting with her, who would not have delighted in chatting with her had she not been a guest. They were even more delighted to have their picture taken (with my camera! That she despised!) while proudly displaying their guns. Afterward, they offered Wes a free lesson in Automatic Weapons 101 that he gladly accepted. The people on the bus waited, some cheering, others in dignified silence.

  It wasn’t till we reached Naran that I finally learned what was bothering her. We were at a shop that sold Kashmiri shawls and fleece blankets and I bought her one of each saying we were going to need them. I could tell she liked the shawl. It had a silky lightness and a reversible pattern, black on one side, white on the other, and on both, cherry-colored embroidery of interlaced vines. But she turned away and began looking at a row of walnut-wood salad bowls. When I draped the shawl around her shoulders she said it made her feel cheap the way I thought I could win her back so easily.

  “Why do I have to win you back?”

  “You really don’t know, do you?”

  “We buy each other gifts all the time. I don’t do it to gain anything. Do you?”

  “You didn’t hear me.”

  “Did you?”

  “Why is Irfan with us?”

  Irfan and Wes were outside the shop. We could hear Wes telling Irfan that he’d always wanted to see India “from the other side.” We could hear Irfan’s silence. (What would I say to that?) We could hear Wes add, “This doesn’t even look like Pakistan.”

  “Why’s Wes with us?” I turned back to Farhana.

  She sighed. “We’re here on work. You know that.”

  “I thought we were here because you wanted to return to your country?”

  Her neck turned red.

  Finally, she said, “I like Irfan and I know you guys are close. But he acts like he’s the boss and you say nothing. He keeps deciding where to stop and for how long.”

  Well, that was true. But so was this: she was changing the subject. I took two breaths and decided to state another truth. “Irfan knows these mountains better than anyone I know.”

  “We didn’t have to come to Kaghan Valley at all,” she kept on. “We could have gone straight into the Northern Areas, as planned.”

  “Wes doesn’t seem to mind.”

  “So you like him now?”

  “I don’t dislike him.”

  She laughed. It was not her usual laugh.

  “But you’ll like this valley,” I said at last. “It’s a lush alpine forest and you love lush alpine forests! Trust me, when we leave here you’re going to miss all the green. You won’t get that higher up. And it does have glaciers. And it gives us more time together. You’ll love the cabin, you’ll see. It’s by the river and we’ll have time for the lakes. You’ll love the lakes.”

  “Please stop.”

  As she left the shop the shawl fell to the floor. Dusting it lovingly, the shopkeeper handed it back to me.

  So I left out the most important detail about Karachi.

  It was in Karachi that Irfan suggested going to Kaghan first. We were at one of those grand yet rundown old restaurants with long tables meant to seat entire tribes. (The smallest table was for six—who’d eat out with fewer than that?) There were twenty-two of us. Irfan, Farhana, and I sat at one corner. Wes—who, with his lumberjack build and bleach-blond hair with the green stripe had been attracting a lot of attention from the moment he stepped off the plane—was wedged somewhere between my sister’s husband and his mother, who could not stop touching him. She fed him all her seekh kebabs, then her barbecue fish, then everyone else’s.

  Farhana spoke with Irfan. I wasn’t really paying attention. I thought he was helping her with her Urdu, and I registered, vaguely, that their talk was drifting to the rise in winter snowfall in the Western Himalayas and the Karakoram, and how this was feeding the glaciers, and perhaps it was that word feeding which sent my mind whirling. I began thinking how odd it was, the way the best-fed man at the table over there was the one being lavished, when three-quarters of the Pakistani population lived under $2 a day. 40 percent had no access to drinking water. 50 percent no sanitation. I could smell the open gutter out on the street. Where was our hospitality when it came to this? It wasn’t that I was upset with my brother-in-law’s mother, or with Wes, and I’m not sure I was even upset. It was simply a profound sense of—whitewash.

  Farhana began describing to Irfan the redwood forests of California. I looked at her. She’d not been attracting as much attention as Wes. With her pale complexion, dark thicket of hair, and dark eyes hooded by bushy brows routinely pruned, her German-Pakistani ancestry had resulted in a quite Iranian look, and there were plenty of people in the country with her coloring. She stood out less for her features and more for her accent, and her height, and, of course, her walk, her stomp, swinging both arms with rigor, feet to the side, as if cross-country skiing.

  “They like the valley bottoms,” she was saying. “And the floods, though not too often, and they like the fog belt. They like the nonstop drip of dampness. Nadir could never be a redwood.” She turned to me.

  I smiled. She leaned very slightly, as if to kiss me, and I pulled back very slightly, reminding her where we were. She got up to use the bathroom.

  Irfan absently chewed on the burnt edge of a naan and suggested that Farhana would enjoy the forests of Kaghan Valley. “It’s very lush, she’d like that. And not so out of the way. We have time. There are glaciers there too.”

  Then I thought about it. Yes, she would love the valley. It was damp, sha
dowy, fecund. It was Farhana!

  So we decided. And we forgot to tell her till it was time to change buses in Abbottabad. We didn’t take the one to Gilgit in the Northern Areas but the one to the town of Naran in Kaghan Valley, in the Frontier Province. It was just to be a three-day detour before heading north to the landscape of vertical wildernesses I’d described to her once. She sat with Wes on the bus and he must have told her and it must have pained her that he’d been told while she had not—I do remember Irfan explaining it to Wes, but where had she been? The bathroom? Shopping with my sister? I couldn’t remember!—and it was uncharacteristic of her, the way she said nothing till that time in the shop, when she tossed off the shawl.

  But then the night before we trekked up to the lake I believed she’d forgiven me, and I believed the same in the morning. I believed it even when I heard her complain to Wes about the detour, as she fed him those cold, tri-colored eggs, moments before we left the cabin. I believed it even on the walk up the glacier, when she turned her back to me, and I had to—how swiftly she and Wes moved on the ice!—I had to hold back—with what ferocity I wanted her just then!—reminding myself that the best reunions are like the best stories, and the best sex, raising questions while delaying answers. Yes. I believed she’d forgiven me, but I did not entirely believe I’d forgiven her. Because though it’s true that I left out the most important detail about Karachi and that I then disclosed it, it is also true that I continue to leave out the most important detail.

  Kaghan or no Kaghan, what was she doing here at all?

  Ice, Mating

  Sometimes, after Farhana untangled the knots of her braid and tossed a wad of hair in the dustbin, she’d pull me out of bed, to recline at her five-sided bay window in San Francisco. 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 the city’s standards, the house was spectacular. Slender spiraling 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—was where I left her calla lilies, like an offering to the god of extravagance. Art-glass windowpanes under the roof.