All the way down his long, swooping driveway were parked a convoy of military trucks. The soldiers smoked cigarettes and drank tea and scratched their balls.
Every day since his arrival, Ghafoor had watched them surround his valley. His. Why were they here? To catch militants? If that were so, why did the training camps keep getting stronger as these men moved in? The answer was simple. Each and every one of them slept in two beds: the mafia with the government, the militants with the mafia, the government with the militants.
So what were they going to do next, choke his skies with their planes? His. What was this, Kashgar or Kashmir? Andijan or Afghanistan? It was bad enough that they had been tearing down the forests for as long as he had walked on two feet. Now they were even tearing into people’s homes, including Maryam’s.
If there was one thing he had learned in his years away, it was that nomads everywhere were treated much the same. What the Uyghurs were to the Chinese, the Kazakh cattle-breeders were to Kazakhstan and, in the past, to the USSR. And the Uzbek herders of Afghanistan—how badly they fared, both under Russia and the Taliban. No less pitiful was the condition of shepherds all over Pakistan. Look what was happening in the south, in Baluchistan, with Pakistan selling its coast to China, throwing people off their own land. Or giving it to America. And look at the north, where China built a road straight through the heart of the Karakoram Range, just to reach the coast it had already robbed!
But he was grown tired of everyone else’s wrongs. It was time to right his own. No one needed him more than those he had been told to leave. And yet, no one besides Maryam even wanted him here. He pulled away from the forest inspector’s villa, toward her hut. If he had not been able to avenge the suffering wrought on his people, he could at least avenge the suffering wrought on his woman. Even if she was not his woman.
Maryam spoke tenderly to the two horses tethered outside their hut. Ghafoor was again here this morning, still waiting to talk to her. He could keep waiting.
These were the only horses left, a mare and her filly, both Kaliani. In her father’s time, there had been the Nukra, Bharssi, even the Yarkandi breed, said to have come down from the Fergana Valley long ago, perhaps with her people. The way Ghafoor did now, by himself. Now all of those breeds were lost, forever. By the time Kiran was her age, the Kaliani breed too might be extinct.
She buried her head in the belly of the mare, inhaling deeply. Kiran will never be my age. The thought made her sick. She pushed down the sick, inhaling deeper, pulling her stomach high, all the way to her chest. The belly of the mare shivered. Then it moved two steps away, forcing Maryam to stand up straight.
The mare, Namasha, Kiran had named. After dusk: for the coat she threw around herself, dark and glossy. The coat was losing its sheen ever since their return from the highlands. When Maryam led her to water, Namasha did not drink. Her filly sucked at the waterhole; she merely watched. Maryam wondered if she should tether her again, or take her into the forest to feed. Everything was wrong this year. The animals were meant to graze high in the summer pastures, not down here in the plains. The lowland forests would be overgrazed, with no time to regenerate through the rainy season. And the rain was coming. They could sense it.
Sick of lowland grub, Namasha whinnied. She wanted the air of the mountains, the way it sweetened the grass. She wanted the crunch of snowmelt on her tongue. Why else did she wait for summer each year? Why else did she keep herself handsome, even at her age? Not for this pre-monsoon heat! Not for the flies around her eyes!
The filly, Loi Tara, taking a cue from her mother, tossed her mane haughtily. Then she nuzzled Maryam’s neck. “What do you want me to do?” Maryam asked, stroking first the filly, then the mother. A shudder ran down Namasha’s side again, loud as a thunderbolt this time. “We had to come back down early. To bury Kiran.”
Namasha stared at her, accusingly.
Loi Tara inspected Maryam’s palm. Kiran had named her too. Loi Tara. Morning star. The night and her morning star. Finding Maryam’s palm empty, Loi Tara allowed herself to explore Maryam’s fingers instead. Maryam teased the forelock; she smoothed the silken line of a perfect nose. It occurred to Maryam that her youngest child, Jumanah, had not yet found the words to name the creatures of her world, but when she did, would Maryam know? She was now with her father in the forest. She had been with him every day since their return because Maryam found it impossible to tend to her. Her husband folded Jumanah in his arms each morning as the sun began to stretch its own, at the hour when loi tara was still above their dera, and the girgiti too, pulsing together like a tribe.
The girgiti. The constellation of six stars she had looked for every morning since she could remember, till now, when it became so hard to get herself out of bed. Now she carried a rock around her neck, a rock even the legendary Maryam Zamani would not have known how to remove. So her husband did not wake her up; it would mean waking the rock. He took Jumanah with him without a sound, as he led the animals into the forest and returned them later in the morning, at which point he said that if she felt able, she could take them back to the forest at noon, for the second feed.
The rock lodged in her throat. It did not matter how frequently she swallowed it down. It kept growing, prickly and green, like guilt.
“He let her go in the boat,” she said, returning Namasha’s stare. She was suddenly livid with this animal for stirring the fury she had been holding inside. Now it threatened to spread through her veins faster than a snake bite, just as she struggled to find a routine again, by taking the horses into the forest for the second feed! “Do you think I could have stopped him?” She heard her voice give. “I tried. Do you hear me? I tried!” She stamped her foot, and the filly backed away. The mare stood her ground. “Who would listen to a wife over a flock of stupid foreigners? He said we could not refuse them. He said they were guests! They were not guests. They were thieves!”
Still the evil Namasha kept staring.
“What would you have done?”
The mare turned and walked herself indignantly into the forest.
“You better stay where you should stay!” Maryam shouted. “We are not going to pay any fines for a conceited old hag like you!”
The filly followed her mother, waving her thick brown tail like a taunt.
For a long time, Maryam watched them go.
She finally glanced again at the hut. It was good Ghafoor was inside, even if she was not ready to see him.
Early that morning, two policemen had torn through their hut.
She had been lying in bed listening to her husband move on one leg while Jumanah raced after him on two. He would take her to the forest that day, he said. She grunted in gratitude, though it was strange to feel gratitude toward a man who had given her older daughter away. It required all the effort in the world to sit up in bed. She sat up for her son, not her husband. Younis would need breakfast before he left for the shop. He was standing before an open curtain, the way Kiran had done each morning, gazing up at the sky. The light that poured through was a violet bleeding slowly to gold. Loi Tara would be there, high above his wide shoulders, and perhaps the six stars of girgiti too, in which case, the second from the bottom would be flickering the brightest. It was always the last to leave for the day.
Then came the boots and the police shoving Younis inside and the curtain pulling shut.
A bomber had blown himself up in the Balakot police station, they said, killing four policemen, putting four others in hospital, and leaving the rest in a rage. That last detail she found redundant. They kicked the stove and the bed where she still sat, her hair a mess, she had not braided it yet, and made Jumanah cry. They broke the teacups. “We will find him!” they declared. They took Younis by the ear and pulled him and shook him. “He is your friend, isn’t he? Where is he?”
She watched as her son cried for the second time this year, first when Kiran was buried, and now, as he trembled in their grip. Only when a trickle of urine stained his shalwar
did they release him, laughing. Then they sat down for tea. Then they demanded teacups. Then they demanded eggs.
She would not let Younis out of the house alone so Suleiman went to get the eggs and borrow teacups while the men stared at her. She could not fix her hair while they watched so she kept her hands at her side, folding her fingers. Her shawl was very far away. They asked questions that had nothing to do with the bomber. What was a woman from a family like hers, even if it was only a Gujjar family, doing with a man like him? He could not even walk. What else could he not do? How had he managed to have three children? Where was the third? Oh yes, they had heard. And they were very sorry, but not as sorry as they were to find her with a man like him. It was only a girl, after all, and she still had her son. A very fine boy indeed. He clearly took after her. But why only one son? She was still young or—had her husband not noticed? Did he need them to show him? They delivered their threats to her chest and neck and back again to her chest, grinning, while Younis seethed and Jumanah howled. She had slept in a kameez too thin because it was so, so hot and the rain was coming yet it did not come.
Suleiman returned and she made breakfast.
While they ate the buffaloes lowed in pain, their udders swelling like her shame, but she did not dare step outside to relieve them. The family of four sat in a straight line on the dirt floor—Younis, Jumanah, Maryam, and Suleiman—watching the policemen sit crosslegged on their rope bed with their boots on. They dug those boots deep into the bedding and into the weave of the rope. When the meal was finally finished, the men stood up, plunged their hands in the drinking water in the clay pot, and, still standing inside the hut, pissed against the curtain. “Remember, we will find him.” Then they smashed the borrowed teacups. Then they left.
She scrubbed clean each thread of the curtain and each string of the bed till her knuckles bled and when she put them to her lips the salt was soothing, she wanted no one to disturb her, no one at all.
Now, as she watched her horses disappear deep into the forest, she was glad Ghafoor was waiting for her inside. He would not stand by passively while policemen destroyed her home.
The time he went away, when he left her the red cloth, was a few days after the villa of the head inspector of the forest department had been set ablaze. It was quite possible that this was when the legend of Ghafoor had first begun to take shape, though it was equally possible that it had always been taking shape, from the very first time she saw him, but she never noticed, because she had been too busy watching his fingers play the flute and her taste buds.
The inspector had fined them for grazing on prohibited land, and this time, it was not about a sheep nibbling two stalks of a ginger plant, but an entire flock ripping apart an entire field. It was a lie. The field had been rotten to begin with, and they had been nowhere near it. (The field had been rotten because the land was easily destroyed in the floods the previous year. The land was easily destroyed because it had no trees. It had no trees because the same inspector grew fat each time the forest was torn down. There was always a beginning, hard as it was to keep track of sometimes.) As punishment, the herders were told to pay four thousand rupees, as well as a weekly supply of milk, curd, butter, and ghee for an indefinite period of time. Sugar upon demand.
There were ways of registering resentment.
The night the villa burned, the inspector had been in the kitchen in the front of the house, drinking whiskey. The fire had started at the back, in his bedroom. The wall was made of wood; a walnut tree knocked against the wall. His wife was in the bedroom, his children in the room next to theirs. By the time the fire reached the kitchen, the inspector was intoxicated, though not enough to forget about himself. He tumbled out the kitchen window, drunken head first, and only later, remembered his family. He yelled at his servants—who were not in their quarters; those questions would come later—to go back inside the house to save them. The servants were able to retrieve the children but his wife was lost in a fire hotter than hell, and they would endure the hell on earth the inspector would put them through rather than risk the one in the bedroom.
A crow feather. And then the cloth.
Not one of the servants made to endure the beatings, kicks to the head, or severed pay, dared give Ghafoor away. He was as dependable as a stone come loose from a glacier. What he might do would be worse than anything they suffered now.
She was not proud of him for doing it. The inspector’s children were sent to a city hospital and their burns were crippling. The girl especially, who would marry her now? And without even a mother. The poor woman had played no part in the fine, neither the one imposed on the herders, nor the one imposed on herself, each time she opened her legs for that man whose whiskey tasted of their sweat.
Perhaps it had not been Ghafoor, she told herself, ignoring the rumors spreading through the valley faster than the fire had burned the wife. Faster, even, than Genghis Khan had burned 10,000 villages. From the ashes of the dead, she reminded herself, the King of the Universe had gifted the world its first postal service. Without that gift, she might not have survived her marriage.
He was happy for her when she got married.
He sang for her on her wedding day, the same song about Prince Saiful Maluk and Princess Badar Jamal he had sung before, outside her highland shrine. He suspected she was trying not to listen. She was angry he had not bid for her hand. Many men had come forward to offer their best cattle. Not he. Though his success as a merchant continued to grow, she had been given to Suleiman instead. Suleiman’s family gifted hers almost their entire herd, and when the gift was accepted, members of the tribe had gifted his family some of their cattle. In this way, Maryam was made up for, in part.
He had brought her a wedding gift, that, he could see now, as he waited inside her hut, was nowhere. The two carpets made by women in Tashkent: they had hung on a wall, or so he thought. Would that space there not make a good place? He looked closely above the rope bed, which was unusually disheveled, he thought, but saw no carpets.
The hut was not too clean and not too comfortable. A yurt was lavish and beautifully lit. Kazakh herders were far better off than the Gujjars of Kaghan Valley, and a small part of him regretted coming down here at all. A yurt was sacred, and, after three summers living in one, he decided this was as it should be. It ought to be a replica of the endless hemisphere of the sky. No boots should be allowed to stamp their will inside. No broken teacups should litter the floor. No clay pot should lie empty. Why was there no drinking water here? These walls were not thighs, the smoke hole was an evil eye, and there was no lattice frame, no womb.
The similarities he had found to exist between the Turkic nomads of the steppe and his own tribe suddenly began to fade. It was true they both lived according to the cycles of nature, carrying goods on their backs, sharing their assets, welcoming guests, and driving their herds from one pasture to the next so a field was never overgrazed. But if what he saw in the steppe was abundance in spite of hardship, what he saw here was ruin because of it. Did Maryam still cleanse her home with juniper branches, or had even she given up keeping this ritual alive? He could not imagine a festival taking place here anymore. He was suddenly glad for the woman beneath whom he could lie each night, the woman with the round white arms, who was waiting for him high up the Oxus River and deep in the steppe.
He had to remind himself that he had been happier for Maryam when she got married than when he did. He had to remind himself that he was here now, in the midst of this wretchedness, for a reason. He needed a plan. He believed himself close to finding it.
She was happy for him when he got rich.
He had not bid for her hand, though he could have afforded to. Instead, Suleiman’s family had placed the highest bid, and the marriage suited both their families.
In recent years, her family had increasingly succumbed to the pressure to settle more, and move less. Though the eye of the state could watch them more closely now, they had been left with little choice. They
could not afford to keep ducking the eye. Living solely on cattle rearing was becoming a curse, given all the dying indigenous breeds and the restrictions on grazing in a diminishing forest. So they bought small plots of land and tried to be cultivators.
During her lifetime, her mother had vehemently opposed the change. You can harness a horse, but not a Gujjar! She watched in fury as Maryam’s brother first planted instead of herded, then kicked his ice-encrusted plot, abandoning it for work at a mine. While the contractor pocketed his pay, he took to drink. Others in her family, however, proved more successful. They became traders and merchants, or joined the army. A few, like her brother’s friend Ghafoor, even traveled the world and came home rich. They were welcomed in big shops in big towns. They wore good clothes; they owned good guns. And every now and then, though very rarely, if one went too far, he was asked to leave, and if he returned, the others looked away for as long as they could, without mentioning the crime, without mentioning the legend.
Her husband’s family, on the other hand, had refused to change, a fact which won them immediate favor with her mother. They were herders and always would be. Only with tradition came pride and dignity. Only with seasons and stars, sturdy animals, and fresh spring grass, came peace. They did not own good clothes and avoided even bad guns. But this did not mean they could not benefit from the protection of those who, like Maryam’s more cunning relatives, could knock on the front door of the forest inspector’s new house in a crisp white shirt, carrying silver spoons for his very new wife.
She remembered the horse she rode to her husband’s hut the night of her wedding and all the ghee and sugar her family distributed in celebration. The horse died soon afterward, and she did not know why, but she had cried for it. She remembered too the row of donkey carts that arrived at her wedding with guests who had been made to sit on a pile of felled trees. This was one of two favorite ways for the smugglers to transport their goods. They either sent them down the Kunhar to the big lakes of Mangla and Tarbela, where forest officials lay in wait, or they intercepted public festivities, layering the floors of carts and trucks with logs and forcing family members to pile up on them.
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