I slept deeply this time. If I had dreams, I don’t remember. When I awoke I was lying in a hollow of sound that began in the dark sleeve of some other sleep, from a time before my own. It grew louder, rippling rapidly toward me through that sleeve, till I recognized the echo as a voice, and I knew it was Farhana’s. Except, flatter than hers. She wasn’t speaking so much as reciting, from a letter inscribed on a treasure, perhaps, dug out from somewhere in the hollow. I imagined her shaking out the dust, shining a flashlight, murmuring words in a language I couldn’t understand. Exhausted from trying to decipher her meaning, I went back to sleep.
It happened again. Some time in the middle of the night—or day, the same one? I didn’t know—I heard Farhana beside me. I couldn’t tell if she knew I was listening. I couldn’t tell if she cared. Her voice was unusually melodious this time, yet somehow, still flat. I felt she was speaking to a third person in the tent. Calling to them, giving a testimony of sorts, on whatever she’d unearthed earlier—I briefly pictured her holding an Asokan rock edict—as though speaking into a tape recorder at a police station. Was she dreaming? Sleeptalking? I glanced around me quickly: no one else. Perhaps she herself was the third person. I didn’t look at her. I didn’t want her to look back with eyes open, or shut. I lay still in our tent. The longer she spoke, the more my blood chilled again—where was Irfan with his beautiful stones!—surely it was the voice of delirium.
“And I dream of my mother when I am scared …”
Well, I thought, so do I. We were having the same dreams!
“You could say she is the closest thing I have to God. It is her image that hovers over me as I try to sleep, her image freed from the frame above my bed. It lifts into the sky like a puffy white cloud, blowing cool air down on me. She would do that. I was young but I remember. She learned it from her time here. You don’t just pray for someone, you pray on them. You blow the prayer into their pores, till it reaches their soul. Breath for breath. That is how you love someone. With your breath. Baba said she never truly became a Muslim, except on nights when she would wish something for me—Dear God, please let my daughter have a mother at my age!—and blow it over me.”
I woke up early. This time I was sure it was morning by the way the light filtered through the blue weave of the tent, giving our sleeping bags a thin yellow edge, making the woman next to me identifiable again. My throat was drier than the stones at my side but my temperature was normal. I knew I was the only one awake. I also knew that the lake was resting, even asleep. The tide had turned.
I took my bag. I stepped outside. The nomads rose very early, to pray. They might already be awake, waiting for the sun to break behind Malika Parbat. I looked over my shoulder but she was in darkness. A spray of stars winked in her place and thin wisps of cloud smeared the violet sky. Clouds in the shape of runners and acrobats. Fairies trailing princes. Jinns trailing fairies. Lovers on ice.
I walked to the water’s edge knowing what I would find.
I took my time, my bare feet just outside the lake. Even when the water lapped tenderly at my toes, I was quick to step away. I told myself I avoided contact with the bone-chilling lake out of consideration for Irfan. If my temperature dropped again, he’d sooner smash my head with rocks than warm them. And then he’d be a murderer.
The bundle was in a semi-fetal position, on the northeast shore. It must have washed up as I approached; we arrived at the same time. It lay between the two mountains, at their feet. I couldn’t reach it without passing the tents, which I did, as silently as I could. Two dogs shook themselves awake, one tiptoeing out toward me. Thankfully, it was tethered, though I needn’t have worried. It didn’t even bark. The other lay still, one ear slightly cocked. Of more concern was a horse, dark red in color, and with ferocious eyes, who bared its teeth at me and began to neigh. A smaller horse skipped forward and bucked and kicked the sand. It circled me and bucked again. The third time, it nearly kicked my shin. I kept walking. I was getting closer.
My head was as clear as the air, and with clarity comes coldness. Before sitting beside her I noted the beach was wet. I gathered a bouquet of pine needles and small stones and made myself a cushion of these. The sun would light the west shore before it would touch this spot. She’d washed up on the darkest corner of the lake. I wouldn’t be able to see her face till after prayers.
And so I sat, beside her, listening to the azaan float in from the hills. I must have been too unconscious to notice any call to prayer until now. Though faint, this morning’s call echoed clearly over the lake and across the valley. Within moments, a second and a third call joined in the chorus, each swooping past the other at a different speed, racing through stairwells of air currents, a whole family of owls.
Slowly, Queen of the Mountains’ face began to appear in the water.
I detected the first signs of activity from the tents. I heard pots clanging, water flowing. I saw the dogs scratch themselves. I heard goat bells and buffalo bells and a long, drawn-out low, as soulful as a call to prayer. It was answered by a series of lows and soon the valley was ringing with a second azaan. The tent where I’d slept, on the southwest shore, lay completely still. I had no idea where Irfan and Wes had been sleeping.
The sun crept further along the lake. I could still see fairies in the clouds; I could see peaks and hollows. I did not glance at the body again till I was sure I could see it. I stood up, shook my legs, walked along the shore again. Irfan had said that lakes as cold and deep as this seldom gave up their victims. Without a strong current, it could take weeks. So the current that had cursed us was now a blessing.
I walked east, away from the body, farther than expected; my legs have a habit of taking me away. Perhaps it was this that alerted Kiran’s mother to my presence here. Or that nasty horse and the foal, both of whom would continue bucking and braying all day.
When I turned back I saw a shadow in the sand crisscrossing my own. Gradually, I saw the woman not the shadow, a child in her arms. I remembered she’d held a child that day too. I hesitated. She’d been watching me. I’d heard no footsteps, no clothes rustle, no bangles chime, nor even a cry, not even from the child. For all I knew, they’d been there all along. Should I pull away, return to my tent? She walked with the same sure stride as she always walked; she wore the same black shirt. The child climbed out of her arms and ran toward the body and the woman barely stopped. Nor did she accelerate. Why had she brought the child? Of what use was it for a toddler to see a dead sister?
The little girl had curls like her brother and father. Her plump legs were squeezed into a yellow pajama torn below one knee. Her frock was dark green and embellished in festive gold embroidery. She cocked her head toward Kiran, now fully in the sun. The dead face was marbled bright pink and gray; the neck was darker. The ice water had washed away the stains from her cheek. The eyes glistened, as though alive. The little girl folded onto her knees, tucking her small feet beneath her. A small brown hand reached for a cold blue neck. The living hand stayed there, at the bathed neck, brown on blue, and the girl did not cry. She gazed at death with a sadness as deep and liquid as the lake, a sadness from which, her dark wide eyes said, she was going to have to learn to surface.
That is what her mother wanted me to see.
Queen of the Mountains: Thinner than Skin
Before she had seen twelve full moons, Kiran saw her first disemboweled goat. It lay in a pasture they had stopped in for just that night, for it was full with the tents of nomads from the west, and unsafe. In the morning, the goat’s entrails lay splattered in the green, her juices mixing with those of the wet earth, the flies thick and droopy. It might have been a wolf. It might have been a man. Kiran sat on her haunches, lost in study. The goat’s skin was peeled back, like a shawl, and the sun lit the sheen underneath. Perhaps it was this that left her thunderstruck. The sun, with which they prayed and sang, could cause a hurt to turn shiny before your eyes. Or perhaps it was the frailness of the hide. In later years, she would ask Maryam
if her skin was as thin as a goat’s. And Maryam would tell her the truth. It was thinner. Which meant, of course, that if a goat could be shred that easily, so could a woman.
She would also tell Kiran that, like herself, she would have to grow a second skin to protect the thin one that was eventually left to the sun and the earth, the wind and the flies. This second skin lay beneath the frailer one, not on top. It had to be kept hidden in order to work. But all this she would tell Kiran later. That year, Kiran’s first in the world, she measured the distance between life and death as lying between Kiran’s finger and the goat’s shiny entrails. Then she pulled Kiran away and shrugged, telling herself that Gujjar children were no strangers to death, and this was only the first of many Kiran would have to know. She was right, of course. If that spring death found Kiran in the skin of a goat, by autumn, before they returned to the plains, it would find her again, this time, in the eyes of a buffalo. During the long winter months in the homestead, death would become resident, taking her cousin’s pony, and her grandmother. Wherever they went, it followed them. Death was a wind. He was a gypsy.
By her second year, Kiran had also witnessed the pain of birth and the way a mare will cry if her foal is born still. She was too young to understand the bitterness of age, but not too young to note that bitterness could immobilize two legs and four. Soon after the mare Namasha lost her foal, she gave birth to her second and only living filly, but at a price. She lost the steed that sired it. Early one morning, he dropped his dung high up a glacier and descended at a run, straight into a barbed wire fence. Before they could ask him why, he was dead. Maryam pressed the puncture wound with her palm while Kiran watched, dry-eyed and trembling, the blood running down her arms. She touched the wound without applying pressure to it, as though knowing the bleeding would never stop. Afterward, Namasha only took food from Kiran. At Maryam she snarled and she kicked. It took two years before the mare forgave her, and by then Kiran had learned that forgiveness was thinner than skin.
This year, death had again showed himself in the sun. Their first morning on the move, soon after they unloaded their bags off the animals and while the rest of the dera was pitching the tents, Maryam’s eldest brother-in-law stretched his arms and simply fell, right there in the middle of his flock, at Kiran’s feet. Kiran waited a long time before delivering the news: Baro bai was dead.
It was part of life. The endless roaming, loading, unloading. The bodies that folded, the spirits that fled, when you traveled by caravan, in groups of families bound together by the intimacies of gaiety and grief. The dera of Maryam’s brother-in-law was not the most popular in the tol; there had been opposition to the price at which he sold his butter and milk, down in the plains. But once they left the plains, these disagreements became petty. It always happened this way each year, during the migration. The higher up they moved, the more the spirit was cleansed. The children played drums and the women sang. The men told stories and the horses stretched their wings. Even Baro bai’s death became occasion for renewal. After burying him by a stream, they spent the rest of their month-long trek sharing stories of his youth. This was a death you lived with. It was not a death that made you stop. Stopping was not an option.
Which was why you had to have the necessary kind of death behind you to carry the other kind. You had to have the years. Otherwise you might halt, and then you really were dead.
The baby did not have years. The mother did not have years. And, from the looks of him, the killer did not have years either.
As she watched him move away, she remembered her mother say that none were more cursed than those destined to watch in silence. There was no deeper hell than a pair of eyes without a voice. And she would say that a broken heart should never grow cold. It was the cruelest of burdens. Not even God would carry it. She had experience with this, having asked Him numerous times to carry hers. He always refused. He was not about to carry any other. And so, her mother said, while you cannot stop a heart from breaking, you can keep the pieces warm. Of course, she never told her how.
Now Maryam found that her heart had not merely broken, or even grown cold. It had simply stopped. It was dead weight that only grew heavier as she moved closer to Kiran lying there in the sand, unmoving, without shedding blood, without a trail of shiny guts, without even a droopy fly. This time, it seemed, death had not wanted to find Kiran at all.
She had pleaded with her husband. How could he let Kiran get in the boat with strangers? Kiran was afraid of water. Did he not see the fear on his own daughter’s face?
He replied, coldly, “I am lame, not blind. You know we cannot refuse them. They are guests. Remember where you come from.”
Cannot refuse them, even our daughter?
“It is just for a short while, Maryam.” And now his voice softened. He was like her father in this way, when he called her by name it was never without tenderness.
“And them?” she ventured. “Where do they come from? Is it a place where a child is pulled from her family for amusement?”
His voice curdled. “You were always fond of drama. Kiran will be fine.”
Kiran will be fine.
For the hour Kiran was in the boat, what did her husband do? He sat with the men of their tribe, debating the trouble in the valley. Down where their homestead lay, things had changed. There were military convoys looking for a killer. There were spies. There were accomplices. But there were no eyes, not up here, not for a girl afraid. And there were no ears, not up here, not for the bangles that called. Only Maryam could hear them, while sitting by the open hearth on the shores of the lake, her baby Jumanah beating a tune on the kangri firepot—perhaps she heard them too—in a circle made of copper bowls. They were calling her, but all she could do was listen. Eventually, she could neither see the boat nor hear the bangles. All she could do was nothing. Perhaps in that hour her heart had already begun to stop.
The night the boat returned without Kiran, she slipped out of her husband’s tent. There was a blue tent in the distance, neither sagging nor leaky, like her own, and inside lay the girl who walked like a goat and the man who had no tongue. The two killers. Her husband was asleep. She crept under the moon and over the hills, to her cave.
She did the same the next night. She saw their tent. She ran to her cave. She might have cried freely there, but preferred, instead, to scream and curse. She would leave no more offerings to a goddess that gave her misgivings but no signs. At least none she could read. How many times had she fought with her husband to keep their ancient rituals alive, even as others called her a pagan wife? How many risks had she taken by protecting the shrine down in the plains, a shrine that did not lead all the way to Tashkent, nor encase her like a womb, nor hold the dreams of the dead in the drawings on the wall, but that was dark and lifeless and mean? Was this just payment for her devotion? She kicked the rice, and offered it. She spat on the feather—that meant he was coming—and kissed it. She cried to her mother—where are your footholds now, your doors?—and praised her.
The second night, her baby daughter Jumanah followed her out of their tent. Maryam carried her to the cave, and showed her the drawings, and cursed her luck.
Before dawn of the third morning, she was winding her way back to the lake, only to find him. The man with no tongue, committing a second murder. He would not even allow her the dignity of being the first to welcome her daughter back. He would not even abstain from the sacrilege of looking at Kiran without love, without history.
It was the baby who found a way to punish him. She placed her small hand on Kiran’s cold neck. The child and the child. Neither ready for death. Maryam held his gaze, the killer’s, the one who had stolen their youth. He retreated, tail between legs.
Watching him go, she remembered the legendary Maryam Zamani, who willed a stone to retreat. And she thought of the man who once likened her to the legend, the one for whom Maryam was not just Maryam, the one who had come to her, at first, like a prophet. A color filled her eyes. Blue. Kiran�
��s favorite shade. She had tried to braid Kiran’s hair with a blue thread once, a cluster of braids raining down her back, all gathered in blue. She had almost succeeded. Blue for the still neck lying on the shore. Blue for the feather from a kingfisher’s tail. She was sure Kiran would fly now, with her grandmother, and all the spirits from the plains, and from these mountains, and from the steppe beyond a dark sea, from where they had come, two, maybe three thousand years ago. And as the blue filled her eyes she told herself: He will fix this. Ghafoor is on his way.
She kept her gaze on the killer’s legs, the way they buckled as he hunkered back toward his tent. She watched for so long the baby began to fidget. But she did not cry. When Maryam finally tore her eyes away, she leaned into Kiran and kissed her brow, and stroked her cheek. She ran her hands over her wet clothes. Kiran’s shalwar was torn. From the fall or from a bite? Not a drop of blood, not a droopy fly. The child feared death less than she had feared water. She blew prayers over her cold flesh.
She picked her up. The dead were heavy, after only six years of life. So this was the weight that had permanently lodged itself in her chest. Very well, she would carry it. She adjusted Kiran in her arms till the cold chin of one pressed into the warm curve of the other and broken knees bunched against a heart that had stopped. She breathed in Kiran’s ear. “The sun is hot now, I’ll take you home.”
Beside Maryam, but several feet closer to the ground, Jumanah ran to keep up with her mother. For assistance, she clutched her sister’s bloating feet. She had once seen a man on a bicycle do the same. He held on to a racing bus as it carried him far and away. Now her mother was the bus, Kiran’s feet the two bicycle handles, and her own plump legs the wheels. She needed a third hand, really, to hold onto her mother the bus, but she could pedal faster. The air rushed around them as she heard her mother chant: He will fix this he will fix this he will fix this.
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