It was only me. Wes, Farhana, and Irfan were treated differently.
When children followed Wes, it was not to call him a killer. Nor to will him away. A white man, no matter how pale, is never see-through. Granted, he hadn’t been in the boat. But he’d been with us: he was one of us. Yet, not to them. He casually distributed milk toffees and soggy chips and made them skip and squeal. Clearly, he’d come here to build schools.
If Wes was a guest-savior, Irfan was still a friend. I was glad for him—but, why only me? What about Farhana? She mostly stayed in the cabin, or walked around with Wes, beside whom she’d also be seen as a guest, perhaps even a guest’s wife. Twice a guest! If not, she’d have said. She’d let it be known if people whispered, “It’s her.”
I, on the other hand, was neither guest nor savior nor friend nor wife. I was a murderer, prowling free across their turf.
One day I entered a glass and gem shop for ornaments to take back with me to Karachi for my sister, when I heard a customer ask the jeweler how “Maryam” was coping. Mysteriously, everyone around me now spoke in a tongue laced generously in Urdu. It didn’t take me long to understand that the Maryam he meant was the Maryam: Kiran’s mother. The jeweler answered that she was ill.
“Do not worry,” replied the customer. “She will find how to live up to her name.”
I decided on a different strategy. Instead of sloping away, I’d participate. In a manner I hoped was both casual and confident, I asked, “What do you mean, live up to her name?”
The man behind the counter began dusting a glass vase with an old felt cloth. I waited. He turned his back to me, placing the vase gingerly on a shelf. The shelf was cramped; two glasses grazed each other. The sound gave me goosebumps. The customer and the jeweler began speaking in a language I could no longer understand.
I lifted a clump of pink topaz and cleared my throat. They continued not to acknowledge my presence in any way other than ignoring it. I asked for the price. I was quoted four times the number scratched on the tag. The quote was delivered to the felt cloth. Somehow I knew it would not do to bargain. I left the sum on the counter.
Back at the cabin, Irfan was waiting for me, with food. I assumed Farhana was with Wes, at the restaurant. Irfan was thawing toward me somewhat, possibly because his own treatment here hadn’t soured too much.
“Eat.” He watched me stare at the cubes of chicken tikka on my plate.
That did not stop me from staring at the cubes of chicken tikka on my plate.
He asked, for the millionth time, “Are you ready to leave?”
I shook my head.
“Where will we go,” he persisted, “when you’re ready? Back to Karachi?”
“Not now, Irfan.”
“We have to decide. We have a booking up north that should be canc—”
“—I’m always running. Away. But not this time. I’m not avoiding it, the subject.”
“What is the subject?”
“This time, I’m not running.”
He sighed. “This time, maybe you should.”
The next day, over another plate of cold food, he spoke in a tone more agitated than I’d heard from him yet. Much of what he said sounded like a distant call from somewhere silty and cold. There was heightened security in the valley, worse than before we’d left for the lake, hadn’t I noticed? I couldn’t think what to say. So he continued. Shia–Sunni riots had erupted in Gilgit district to the north, where we were heading, and Mansehra district to the south, close to where I was “merrily” taking the bus each day and night like a mad man. Again he waited for a response. Again I could think of none. It was especially bad near the town of Balakot—
Now I interrupted him. “Isn’t that where Kiran’s family’s from?”
“They’re not from anywhere. They’re nomads. But, yes, they make a winter home near Balakot, near Syed Ahmad Barelvi’s shrine, where his devotees are setting up training camps. Men from the camps harass the villagers, trying to recruit their sons.” He paused. “It isn’t safe.” He threw up his hands. For Irfan, this was akin to smashing a chair. “The Karachi bomber and his accomplice are just a pretext for both sides, the militants and the government.” He paused again. “Don’t you understand? We carry a heavy responsibility, traveling with them.” He nudged his chin in the direction of the wall between our cabin and theirs.
“She wants to return,” I stated flatly, while he stared at me in disbelief.
“We’ll need an armed escort,” he said at last.
I shrugged.
“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.
I walked alone in the valley, aware of being shadowed, hearing whispers before they were spoken, ducking stares before they were launched. Twice I tripped over myself when a green shalwar slid along a wall. Once I saw her chubby toes, a brown stalk caught in a toe ring. I heard her bangles. I heard the goat bells too. I clicked my camera. Nothing. At least the owls on the headstones were there, in my viewfinder, as proof. Proof of what? Perhaps only this: they existed. Ergo, I couldn’t be losing my mind. Or: they existed. Ergo, so did the green shalwar and the toe ring. Ergo, I was losing my mind.
At night I put a pillow over my head, and mostly lay awake. I assumed Farhana did too.
Irfan continued insisting a verdict had to be reached, and now Wes joined in too: were we to go on with our journey to the Northern Areas, or call it off? It was a decision Farhana and I had to make together. The problem was, we couldn’t be together. Even looking at her caused me pain. Once or twice, we snapped at each other—I said I’m not hungry! I said I don’t know if I want to stay or leave!—before withdrawing swiftly into our separate gloom. This was the only way to scrape off the pain. Snarling and retreating. It left us momentarily relieved, until we discovered ourselves erupting in a rash of rawness, followed by more pain, and the desire to scratch with increasing malice.
Many times, I asked myself, What is the pain? The pain of losing the girl, losing face, or—losing Farhana?
And then one night we did not retreat.
I’d come back to the cabin after taking the bus to Balakot to see Maryam. I learned through Irfan that the herders took their cattle to the forest nearby, to graze. I had no other plan besides walking into the forest to find her. I rode all the way there and all the way back without getting off the bus. Terrified of seeing her, I did it a second time. I rode all the way and back, my legs again refusing to move. It was cold and I was hungry. When I finally staggered back to the cabin, I tried to recall the poetry the darkness had evoked for me the night before we set out for the lake. I returned to the river, looking for the moon, and even a damn bird. Instead, I was almost attacked by dogs. I threw pebbles at canines all the way to the cabin. I knocked my toe against something. A carcass, a gun. I opened the door. Farhana was sprawled on the bed, naked from the hip down. Her face was turned away from the door. She wasn’t breathing. She’d taken her own life! I rushed forward. She raised her left foot to scratch a mosquito bite on her right calf. The gesture enraged me. I’d thought her dead while all she did was rest! And what if someone else had walked into the cabin instead? It wasn’t even locked!
And so it started, a himalaya of rage, our bodies exhausted with the effort of holding it back, stone by excruciating stone. I don’t know exactly how it began. I don’t know who said what, or in what sequence. But I do remember watching her lie there—I remember her legs and how, in the midst of my outrage, they triggered a memory, a happy memory, an extraordinarily happy memory—since when did fury come layered in honey?—and the next thing I know, I was saying:
“And do you really want me to say this. Do you really want me to say it? You were the one who started coming on to me!”
“
Oh, so I’m not supposed to speak, while you can slobber over me any time you want!”
“When have I ever slobbered over you?”
“Ha!” She leaped off the bed. “At least I was nice to her. You didn’t even talk to her. You acted like she wasn’t even there!”
“Nice to her? Nice? Forcing her into the boat was nice?”
“She wanted to.”
“Are you blind? Didn’t you notice the way she sat in the boat? She hated it! She even said so! And didn’t you notice her poor mother? Do you even know her name?”
“What has that got to do with it?”
“Everything! It has everything to do with it! You forced her mother. Maryam. That’s her name. You forced her.”
“Maryam. Thank you.”
“And you forced her daughter—”
“Kiran.”
“I was the one who said we should go back and drop her off.”
“Drop her off is exactly right. She was a burden. You make everyone feel they’re a burden.”
“Oh, don’t start.”
“Oh, why not?”
“Because this isn’t about you, Farhana. It’s about someone else. Someone dead.”
“It wasn’t even my idea to come here! It was yours. And that friend of yours!”
“You didn’t want to come to this valley but the girl did want to get in the boat?”
“That’s right!”
“Well, it was your idea to come to your country. Are you having a nice return?”
She threw all the pillows off the bed.
I left.
“It isn’t about you either,” she’d say, in the middle of the night. And I’d pretend not to hear.
The sun had still not risen when we were both out of bed and I was saying:
“It’s a question of finesse. Finesse! You do not barge into a place thinking you can fix it. Who are you? Who are you? What makes you think you can do that?”
She was sobbing. She was in the same shirt. I could still see her bush. “I didn’t barge in. And for the hundredth time, it was Irfan’s decision to come here. Neither of you deigned to even ask me.”
“Irfan made the decision for you, but you made the decision for the girl. Who were you to make that decision?”
“At least I asked! I asked her family!”
“They couldn’t refuse. You call that asking?”
“The girl wanted to come. She was just too shy to show it.”
“You’ll say anything to cover your guilt.”
“My guilt?”
“Everyone’s blaming me. In the market. Even outside the valley, in Mansehra. They call me the killer.”
“They probably do the same with me.”
“Probably? Probably?”
She blew her nose. “Everything would have been fine if you hadn’t turned the boat around so fast.”
“That’s right! You’re blameless!”
“We need to stop this.”
But now I could not stop, not with the crown of the avalanche about to drop.
“Did you even jump in the water?”
“Oh God! You look insane.”
“I need to know. You’re the better swimmer. I learned to swim in a pool in Karachi, for heaven’s sake. You learned in the sea. Did you jump in?”
“Yes.”
“When? How long did you wait after I’d jumped?”
She slumped heavily onto the edge of the bed, her back to me. She started sobbing again. “I had her in my arms.”
Six words that made the edge of the table where we’d had breakfast, all four of us, the morning of the accident, it was an accident, reel.
When I looked up, I was saying, “What do you mean, you had her in your arms?”
“Just that. I jumped, she clung to me. It was so fucking cold, Nadir. And she was heavy. She looked tiny. She wasn’t. Her will to live wasn’t tiny. It was huge. And it weighed a ton. She was pulling me down with her. Would you rather I hadn’t let go?”
I couldn’t understand what she was saying. Even if she had jumped, it would have been after me, and if I hadn’t even seen Kiran, how could Farhana have caught her? “How could you have had her in your arms?”
“You said yourself. I’m a better swimmer than you.”
“I jumped before you. If I didn’t find her, how did you?”
“Because, Nadir, you were swimming away from us.”
“I remember seeing fish. I remember how murky it was. But I don’t remember seeing her.”
“Did you not hear what I said? You were swimming away from us.”
The memory triggered by first seeing her sprawled across the bed, her thick muscular legs bare before me, was an extraordinarily happy one.
It was a memory from the honeymoon period after I was stabbed. It was a memory of her legs. Those steep legs, built by steepness. The slender ankles slanting up to her tennis ball calves. It had made my heart stop, that first time, when the slant was the braid across her back; it did the same the afternoon I shot those black and white photographs. How bright her muscles bulged, against our dark sheets, as we created our own Male and Female Figures in Motion.
Months later she lay across a bed in a cabin in Kaghan, and it was the sheets that bulged, her legs flat in shadow.
I’d seen the medals lining her shelves in her purple house in the Mission. She could ski, swim, dive, and even run better than me.
It was there—in the way her legs now receded in the dark, listless, asexual—that I felt the rawness of our every verbal assault, as if we were trying to scrub each other away with an increasingly astringent soap that broke in furious fists, leaving us more bloody, more exposed. I’d stepped into her shadow; she’d stepped into mine. Somewhere along the way, this war with a spook had become forever.
That day, and the next, Wes and Irfan didn’t disturb us. Wes and Farhana were meant to check in with their boss about their work’s progress, either by phone or fax, if possible. I found out later that when Wes called his boss from Naran, it was to tell him that there’d been a delay. His explanation? There’s been a bomb blast.
“What do you mean by accusing me of swimming away?”
“I’ve had enough. I’m going next door to stay with Wes. Irfan can come here.”
Oh, she was clever. “As usual, you haven’t answered the question.”
“As usual, you’re avoiding the right one. Should I tell you what to ask? Why don’t you ask what made you get in the boat?”
“You wanted me to.”
“No, it was what Irfan said. Don’t you remember? If Wes says it’s safe.”
“I suggested taking a long walk instead.”
“So why didn’t we?”
“Because you said you wanted to go in the boat! Wes has nothing to do with it.”
“Don’t deny that you were trying to prove something to him—”
“I was trying to prove something to you—”
“—that you’ve been jealous of him ever since we got here. From even before we got here. Since the day he practically saved your life!”
“What?”
“Will you deny that too?”
“The wound was shallow, Farhana. It barely pierced my—whatever it’s called!”
“Peritoneal cavity,” she swiveled around on the bed to face me and the light streaming through the window—the sun was clearly up now—legs crossed, arms crossed. She swung those legs, suddenly amused.
“I’ve said it before. You want me to say it again, I will. You could have easily called an ambulance instead. They’d have saved me.”
She started laughing.
“It’s Irfan who saved me, you know. Twice. First by sending money. A second time by pulling me out of the lake. A third if you count how he warmed me, with stones.”
She fell backward on the bed, laughing loudly. Her shirt was yanked up to her waist. Sunlight played across her crotch. “Well, he can come and stay with you here and warm you some more!”
She was so damn plea
sed with herself. “But before you fuck him, maybe you should fuck me!”
I aimed my words below the belt. “Who would want to fuck you?”
Farhana rose from the bed, pulling her shirt down. She packed in silence. She got dressed away from my eyes, in the bathroom, the door shut. (We seldom shut the door, even when pissing.) I followed her out to the adjoining cabin, though I didn’t know why. Irfan was out. Wes, in. He was shirtless and reading Flashman in the Great Game. If he saw me standing behind her, he didn’t show it. He wrapped a comforting arm around her shoulders, murmuring, “You all right?” as he shut the door.
I returned to our cabin. It was still ours. It echoed with the cruelest two accusations made.
Who would want to fuck you?
Nadir, you were swimming away from us.
Or,
Nadir, you were swimming away from us.
Who would want to fuck you?
I sat still for a long time. Really, which was worse?
Two months before we left—it was a sullen day in May, even in the Mission—I overheard 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 hadn’t happened often but, often enough. Okay, increasingly often. Her wanting it while I didn’t. It had happened the other way more. It had happened the other way most of my life. Like a forgiving puppy, I bounced back at the merest hint of encouragement. Until recently.
She was saying, “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.”
Thinner Than Skin Page 16