Thinner Than Skin

by Uzma Aslam Khan

  Such as Maryam’s.

  Irfan believed that Maryam’s family was from the protector group. They’d become laborers, merchants, and soldiers, with some migrating south to the cities, others to the town of Naran, perhaps like the jeweler at whose shop I’d been overcharged for topaz. In contrast, the family of Maryam’s husband, Suleiman, were the producers. They continued to roam the Kaghan Valley as grazers, with little engagement in the world of commerce or defense. And so, while his family kept hers fed, her family kept his alive.

  “They have a private system of justice,” Irfan had said. “Nothing to do with the state. The state couldn’t care less about them.” After a few moments, he’d added, “They have no land, no nation. If you’d killed a child of the nation, well, you already know.”

  I’d listened in the dark, the air in the cabin slowly diminishing.

  “It’s her family, who are less low to the ground, that demanded compensation for Kiran’s death,” he’d continued. “His family are lowly herders. They asked for nothing.”

  I hadn’t asked what the compensation was. It would doubtless involve money, putting me twice in Irfan’s debt. I still hadn’t returned my rent money.

  Now I turned my attention back to the headstone with the three horses. I was not unaware of the presence at my back. I had heard footsteps. I had also heard whispers. I was not imagining it. I did not shine my flashlight behind me, but straight ahead, at the grave with the horses.

  The arc of those necks arrested me. Three crescents on a rock, perfectly aligned. Together, they exposed to the world the most vulnerable part of themselves, inviting judgment. No, seeking it. It seemed to me, as I crouched in the dark, my hand shaking, the light-beam fading (why hadn’t I changed the battery?), that the owls on the headstones were the jury. In contrast, the ducks, carved in profile (unlike the owls, who stared full in your face) with wings beating impatiently, played the role of neutral spectators. Their indifference was not unkind; they might represent absolutely nothing other than the random strokes of a playful mind and a long-forgotten hand. Or else, if one had been placed there on purpose, in all his flapping, noiseless glory as he looked down the barrel of those arcing necks, sleek and defenseless, surely it was to serve as a gentle reminder of a need for mercy.

  Queen of the Mountains: The Whisper Chain

  Maryam kept her back to him.

  He was here, at last, the one who had left her a blue feather in her mountain shrine. The garlic breather and honey carrier. The one who once told her there was a land outside land, outside mountains, even. Now he was back, in her home in the plains, laden with stories, as when she was a child.

  His voice was low and it was sweet. “You remember you used to ask from where the snow came? From where the river first flowed? You wanted to see the farthest away river, above the glaciers. And I would say this was asking to see heaven.”

  He was waiting for a response but she kept her back to him. Sometimes it was desirable to put a mountain between yourself and someone else.

  “Well,” he continued. “I have seen it. Heaven is in the steppe, where there live nomads like us, with names like ours, but with sounds added on, and, unlike us, they live free.”

  “What sounds?”

  “The ones you used to think were funny.”

  She still did not turn to face him but she could never forget these oddities about him, from the signs to the jade—white jade did not bring calm, she would have to tell him now—to the flute, and his many attempts at changing his own name. Russifying, he called it. For instance, Rahman became Rakhmon or Rahminov or Rakhmanov.

  “But you are not Rahman,” she would say.

  “But I could be. And now I’m Rakhmanov.”

  Another time he was Yousuf and his name was changed to Yusupov.

  “Yusupov!” she giggled.

  “Yusupov,” he repeated. “Of Yousuf.” He said they followed Islam, up in the steppe, where the Gujjars once came down from. But their alphabet had no “h.” So they did not say Mohammad.

  “What do they say?”

  “Mamedov. Or even, Mama.”

  She was horrified and grew angry with him for taking the Prophet’s name in jest.

  “But it’s the truth!”

  So now he was spending more time up there, amongst a people without the letter h. From there he had come to her, with stories to chase away her fever dream and return her to this earth.

  He said he had also been to a place called Leninabad and a place called Chinistan, where he made friends who gave him jade in return for leather. Better quality jade than he had traded for in the past—except that once. He cleared his throat, and she could feel his eyes at her back, searching for a way to find the stone around her neck. She said nothing. He started talking again. They drank mare’s milk and ate horse flesh, these new friends. He could drink the milk but not even taste the flesh of the animals so beloved to their tribe. He stuck to mutton and duck.

  Maryam’s only idea of a duck was from the graves lining the road between Balakot and Naran. She did not want to think about graves.

  He told her about flowers. She listened more closely.

  “They have rare cloth, embroidered with flowers. This part of a flower. Look.”

  He leaned over her reclining body, and dropped in her half-open fist a yellow flower. It was larger than her hand and he was pointing to its center, with his own hand, the hand from which she had once licked a honey tinged with garlic from his sweat. A hand darker than she remembered. The heart of the flower was the color of fire. From within the fire grew a cluster of silken threads, each tipped with a pale green bud. When she brushed the buds, she brushed his palm. A hundred pollen grains fell onto their flesh. Into the flower’s heart would dive a bee, she knew, for she had watched this happen many times, though never to a flower such as this. The bee would carry pollen on its fur, and from the pollen would come honey, and from the honey would come bliss.

  The Uyghur, he was telling her, as though their hands had not touched, had at one time sewn those glistening threads in the heart of the flower into their cotton garments.

  She wanted to taste the pollen on her skin. She could not bring herself to do this while he watched. He had stopped talking, but she could hear him breathe. Then, in a whisper as weightless as the gold spores: “The Kazakh nomads have a saying. Everything alive is in movement and everything that moves is alive. Wind and water, flowers and bees.” He paused again. “You must learn to move again, Maryam. Kiran has already found a way.”

  When he left, she pressed the tip of her tongue to the tip of her index finger.

  In the morning, she offered rice to the idol in her hidden lowland shrine, the shrine which did not cup her like the one in the mountains, nor hold any of the drawings that so captured her imagination, but which, in better times, her mother would decorate with ram horns and a yak tail.

  She crouched in this shrine, which offered barely enough room to dream in, remembering how she had covered it in haste this April, in her hurry to leave for the mountains. She had not uncovered it till now. She was not meant to uncover it till September, when her people were meant to return. And now it was too late to properly cleanse her home, the way she was meant to have cleansed it in the spring. No one waved smoking juniper branches through sacred corners in July. So she stooped, thinking.

  Down here in the plains, she needed strength. She needed armor against the sedentary people of this valley, among them those who had attended Kiran’s funeral rites merely to see if they were Islamic. If only they were still on the move, up in the highland pastures, where frictions between the settled and the free became as small as chicken feed. But they had been forced to cut the summer short; tensions rose like mountain walls. Maryam could hear their insults. Nomads were untethered. She could also hear the spirit of her mother answer, Well, better untethered than sedentary. To which the sedentary folk would retort, untethered women always went too far. They did not use the veil. They worked alongside me
n, herding cattle, gathering wood. They sweated like horses. And smelled even worse. Well, sedentary women were fatter than cows. It was good they kept all that droopy flesh covered. It had the texture of wet dough, upon which no man could rise. From behind double chins, they kept retorting, not a single nomad will rise to heaven. And where will you go, if you keep sitting? Still they kept on, nomads were riders. The men might know how to play polo and the women might know how to play men, but did either know how to play landlords? Or forest inspectors? No. They only knew how to kick their heels and run. At least we can run.

  Maryam fingered the jade around her neck. It would not do to keep playing out abuses in her head. This only gave them life, made them fatter. She needed strength, and this meant starving the words that brought her pain. In truth, the valley was envious of nomads. They could tame the wildest steed, while sedentary folk, without even two legs to stand on, could not even saddle a chick.

  When Kiran was a chick, Maryam carried her on her back in a cradle made of jute. She was quiet there, with toes against Maryam’s rib, fist in mouth, slurping a cube of rock candy. Hair loose; even then she never accepted braids. Maryam talked. She told Kiran about the fat Australian sheep the government was selling them, to replace the thin desi kind. They were happy with the sheep at first, despite the cost. Indigenous sheep yielded twenty kilograms of meat and two kilograms of wool. Foreign sheep yielded forty kilograms of meat and eight kilograms of wool. But they were finding out, too late, that fat foreign sheep were not as strong as thin desi sheep. They could not survive the icy winds and sudden snowdrifts of Kaghan Valley. They were fussy eaters. And they were slow-moving, adjusting poorly to nomadic living and complaining too much.

  “Unlike you,” Maryam said, and Kiran kicked her spine.

  “If they don’t live even half as long as our sheep, where is the gain from all that wool and meat?”

  Kiran waved her arm and her bangles chimed. They were tiny bangles, given to Kiran by her grandmother, and as her arm grew pudgy, they rolled along its length less and less. Maryam would have to remove them soon, to replace them with larger ones.

  “Another thing,” she kept on, “their wool. So long it gets all tangled up in thorns as we look for better feed, just for them. No. These foreign sheep are better off staying in one flat dry place.” And she launched her final reprimand, “They are sedentary sheep.”

  After a while, she added, “If you don’t let me braid your hair you will grow wool like theirs. All tangled up, and bald before you know it!”

  In later years, she would tell her daughter more, how the Australian sheep, because of their silly diet, forced the herders into pastures that were closed to them. They were forced to pay fines. Huge fines. One year a fat sheep nibbled two stems of a ginger plant with twelve stems. The plant could afford to lose two stems. But no, they were made to pay a hundred rupees per stem. The government was closing off their freedom to roam the land the way Maryam had done when she was Kiran’s age, and this too was killing the sheep they had been forced to buy. Even their goats were meddled with. The government replaced the sturdy Kaghani goats and the fierce Kilan goats with those that yielded more mutton but ate all the feed and left the indigenous goats bleating in hunger.

  Kiran understood these things. This April, when they set off for Lake Saiful Maluk—the hills around which they were still free to graze in—Kiran had climbed onto the mare Namasha with an Australian lamb tied to her back. It mewed pitifully the entire way, ignoring Kiran’s repeated warnings. Once they were at the lake, she abandoned it. “Go to your mother!” she snapped, and set about chasing her own goats instead. Kola, Bhuri, Makheri. Her own names for the only Kaghani goats left in their flock. Maryam had laughed. Her daughter, like her, would make a restless mother, preferring the child that could play on its own.

  She had watched Kiran recede up the hill and gone back to arranging the hearth, piling up stones to light a fire to cook the maize bread for the guests.

  Ghafoor was watching her at the shrine. His only reason for coming here, to the land that had banished him, was to see Maryam. Now that he had seen her, he could not leave. Kiran, at whose birth he had played the flute, had been killed. He would not leave yet.

  He held to his lips a tall aluminum glass of lassi. What he had been suspecting for some time now was true. The milk of a mare could not compare to that of a buffalo.

  She could feel him at her back, just as she had felt him inside the hut yesterday, when she lay on her side. She thought of silken tendrils and pale green buds and how easily each could snap. They did not speak. She willed him not to come close. She would let the weight of grief pull her to the ground. He would have to watch his one desire for her—never grow old—smack him defiantly in the face.

  How could she keep the pieces of her heart warm? She had asked herself this repeatedly since Kiran’s death. What was the point of a reprise without reprisal? She wanted justice. She wanted justice more than she wanted warmth.

  “Maryam.” He took two steps toward her.

  She shook her head. In the years since her marriage she had tried to think of her husband as the pasture inside their barrier of mountains. She had tried to stop thinking of Ghafoor as her window to the world. The shimmering blue feather he left in the cave had both excited and worried her. And the pain of losing Kiran—it was all too much.

  “Leave me.”

  He waited for her to change her mind but she knew he knew her better than that.

  He left her, for now, but he would be back in a few hours. What was he doing traveling the globe and carrying everyone else’s woes, when he could not even help his own people?

  Before moving away he opened the box and took out the second flower. Still fresh. They will only last as long as you do, the men had said. How long was that?

  He did as he was told and did not look underneath.

  She had taken the bangles off before Kiran was buried. The heavy necklaces, too. The toe rings had to be cut; even after oiling the toes, they were too swollen. She had braided her hair, in both styles. First, a thick knot starting at the top of her forehead and woven all the way around her face. Kiran’s face was so lovely in its oval form and the braid had cupped it as her own hands had done. But then Maryam’s fingers had untied the knot and moved swiftly into weaving a series of thin braids starting from the top of her dead daughter’s forehead and converging down the back of her head as one. For a long time, she had stared at that one braid. The color of maize, the thickness of rope, it scraped the nape of her daughter’s neck, the color of which was turning devilish. And the texture—she could not dwell on it, the cold clamminess against her fingers. In slow, deliberate movements, she eventually untied the braid. Kiran would want her hair as loose in death as in life.

  She had hidden the bangles and the other jewelry in a box in a corner of the shrine. The box also held Kiran’s two front teeth, the first of which had nearly cost Kiran her life. After it fell off, Kiran rolled the tooth on the floor, on her arm, between her palms, and in every corner and crevice she could find. Then she skipped to Maryam with a smile. “Guess where it is.” Mayram could not guess. Kiran tapped her nose. “What does that mean?” Maryam asked. “Guess!” The child eventually revealed that she had stuck it up her nose. She wanted to see how far it would go. She was amazed to find the area “open.” The tooth kept going up! Up! She would have pushed it all the way to her brain had her finger been long enough. “Don’t breathe,” commanded Maryam. “Sneeze!” When this did not work she slapped the back of Kiran’s head, demanding, “Which nostril?” Kiran, now frightened, would not say. In due course, pure instinct told Kiran to squeeze shut the right nostril while, from the left, she blew and blew till a slick white stone shot forward, so large both mother and daughter stared in horror.

  Now, caressing the tooth with her fingers (it was slightly larger than the second tooth, smoother too), Maryam remembered the legend of Maryam Zamani, who could will a stone to cease obstructing her way. And s
he fingered the bangles, the ones she still heard chime, every day and every night, including in her sleep. They had been a sign—don’t let me go in the boat!—but she had not listened.

  When Maryam eventually crawled outside her shrine, she found a second yellow flower waiting for her in the dirt, near the hole that served as entrance. The flower reminded her of a butterfly that had landed on her shoulder once, when she was a child. She had never seen the exact shade of yellow again, not till now. She did not know how to read this sign either. She twirled the stem till the heart of fire grew to the ends of the petals and the ends of her world. The day was too bright. She wanted to retreat into a mountain cave, into darkness lit by ancient markings. She wanted to carry this spiraling flame into the cool cover of her highland shrine, deep in the Karakoram’s womb.

  Mixed in with the weight of grief was the weight of caution. In the months between their departure to the lake and their return to the lowlands, the world had tipped unsteadily. It was not a reliable unsteadiness, the kind that leads from pasture to plain, according to the season’s change. This motion had no rhythm. What it had was men in tanks and spies in plainclothes, all showing up at your door and demanding to be placated with the sugar you were saving for your children, or your guests, or a man who would leave you a sign in a cave.

  And these men were different. They were not the kind who would shoot the guard dogs that warned the herders when a goat or lamb was being stolen. They were not the kind who would leave the dogs poisoned meat. They were not from the forest department either, those men who leashed the forest and then leased it. Men with a list of fines the length of a horse’s mane, and a list of felled trees the length of three times three. Nor were they the policemen who lived in the forest department’s pockets, nestling deeper into its silk linings each time the felled logs were tucked in the water wells of the Kunhar River’s banks. Nor even from the revenue department, demanding taxes for every new buffalo that came bleating into the world. No. These men were, at least at first, as alien to her as Australian sheep, and, from the looks of them, as stupid. They said a man was hiding in their valley. He was a killer, and he needed to be caught. If they sheltered him, they would be caught instead. They accused anyone of sheltering him.