It was a fragile town; another flood or earthquake and it might not survive at all. It was already barely keeping afloat. Two years after the 1991 floods, Maulana Sufi first began imposing Islamic laws in the region. Now, many summers later, his followers were moving deeper into the forest, their camps creeping like mold. Maryam could turn her back to him all she pleased, but every herder knew that no agency really wanted to dismantle the camps. Why would they? It was thanks to them that they could keep up the fight in Kashmir and Afghanistan and, most importantly, in the forest that had once looked down from two hundred feet but that now stooped in shame. Everyone here knew it, but no one had a plan.
The sun began to dip when Ghafoor neared Balakot, still deep in thought. The refugees from Central Asia were finding brothers in those camps. And what was he—a brother to his friends or to his enemies? Were they even friends, those men, the ones who had given him rare yellow flowers in Gilgit, the ones with missing toes and soft leather palms? They had told him not to look beneath the flowers. He had not looked. He had delivered it, as promised, to a man waiting above a bend of the Kunhar that was well-known to him. It was a part of the river used for storing smuggled tree trunks. There was a knob in the rock face opposite the bend, about twenty feet high, and Ghafoor had seen the man standing there, waiting. He was from a rival tribe, and Ghafoor had not liked the exchange, not one bit. The man had given him a second, very different kind of box—slightly larger than the other and with a lid he must not even crack—and a second delivery date, after which Ghafoor must return to the men in Gilgit, with news.
He had not cracked the lid. But he was unsure whether to deliver the box. He had buried it, in the most secret place he could think of—Maryam’s shrine, a foxhole, really—and would leave it there while deciding what to do. Before the delivery date, he could be gone. He could reach those men in Gilgit, to whom he was committed to return, before they found out what he had done. He liked this plan, but he had to think.
He kept walking, his footsteps growing surer as he approached another bend in the Kunhar. Here the river laughed gaily as she smacked the rocks on her way to meet the Jhelum. This was where she would cease being his traveling companion. His road twisted west, hers east. At the waterfall made by the river’s pleasure at leaving this valley to meet the next, a Queen had once washed her tired eyes. The bend was still called Nain Sukh.
Ghafoor skipped off the road and down the embankment. He balanced on a rock close to the waterfall. His shirt was wet, his shoes slippery. He was alone with the roar of the cascade and the sunlight flickering between the branches of the pine trees that were suddenly their own true height. He gazed up at those branches that had for centuries trusted the law that said the people of this valley must wait fifty years for each pine, deodar, and fir to reach maturity. Only after maturity could each be cut. Hardly anyone waited anymore, though here, right here in this island where time moved only as it should, the trees had been left alone.
Ghafoor held his breath; he cocked his ear toward the tallest branches. He listened for a very long time. Yes, at last, he could hear them, the reason why the forest to the south was called Chor Mor, the peacock thief. This bend of the river was like a bowl, gathering echoes and swirling them around like tea leaves. The more you waited, the richer grew the cries of those peacocks. He was tempted to hop off the rock and dash into the forest to chase after their feathers, the way he had done many times as a boy.
He stayed on the rock. He leaned forward, and, instead of feathers, he gathered the pure filtered water of the cascading river in his hands. He brushed it over his eyes. His eyes were soothed as lovingly as Queen Nur Jehan’s long ago. He gargled. The water was unpolluted here. He blew his nose. He wet his ears. He rolled the cuffs of his sleeves and let the water roll down the sleekness of his skin, to his elbows. He filled his palms again and poured water back from his widow’s peak, down to the back of his neck, and further, opening his palms, spreading his fingers out like a fan, reaching past his shoulder blades. He took off his shoes, and then his socks. He extended each foot, right one first, beneath the falls. The water was deliciously icy; only now did he realize how much his feet ached. He wriggled his toes. He stretched his ankles. He thought briefly of his wife in the steppe, who did not perform the ritual ablution after sexual intercourse, or after her monthly flow. He decided that when he returned to her, he would make sure she did.
There, his ghusl was complete. He had never felt purer of mind, or intent.
His mind was made up. He had no need to keep walking south. What was in Mansehra anyway? Nothing of relevance to him. He was no mere delivery boy. He did not work for them. He was not their whisperer. He was not their runner. He did not care about their troubles, ultimately. And he told himself again that he was sick of everyone else’s sense of wrong. It was time to right his own. They could find another pair of hands to lock with another pair of hands to cross the canal, or scratch the precipices of the most treacherous land route, or ride the air for all he cared, to wherever a message or parcel needed to reach. He was a free man, like the free men he now lived among. He would do as he wished. He wished to unlock his fingers altogether.
And so he retraced his steps north again, reaching Maryam’s homestead as the moon began to rise. The buffaloes slinked into the night’s shadows, horns blazing white against the darkening sky. He waited. In the middle of the night, when no one was looking, he unearthed the box he had hidden in her shrine. It was the color of earth. He had wrapped it in red cloth to make it easier to find, less for color than texture, in case it needed unearthing in a hurry and he had no means to find it except by the ends of his fingers. He was glad he had done this, for it did help locate it, and rather quickly too—though the cloth felt thinner to his touch, silkier even, and, when he lifted it up, it was lighter than he remembered, much lighter—but he had no time to dwell on this, for he was now in a great hurry. In the dark, it looked about right, and it had to be. He had only left this one. He flattened the earth to ensure that Maryam would not notice the mound he had dug up.
It was while he was leveling the ground that his fingers brushed something else, a bump that felt rough to the touch, closer to the texture he remembered leaving here, and he paused, confused. He began to dig. It was a second box. How could this be? Something was not right. Which one should he take? He had no time to decide. He must leave tonight. Which one was the right size, the right weight. He had no time. He piled both into his bag and again began leveling the earth, this time less thoroughly, so terrified was he of brushing against something else. There was nothing else.
Except, before leaving, he noticed that the ends of the two flowers he had brought Maryam were curling inward, shrinking and drying like mice on their backs, in the slight incline of the shrine just above where the first box had been buried.
Except for the flowers, Maryam did not see any of this, and now Ghafoor was gone and her wrist still hurt. She followed the animals into the forest. They walked themselves, barely glancing back at her, as she cringed at their gauntness. The air filled with their bells and with those of the neighbors’ cattle and she could just about tell the sounds apart.
At one time, each homestead had been spaced far enough apart to allow the herds of each family territory in which to graze, but this was no longer the case. It was another reason to look forward to the summer migration; in the highland pastures, there was space. Kiran’s death had disrupted the rhythm of the entire tol. While some families had stayed in the mountains, others descended the slopes with hers, to help rebuild their lowland dera, leasing timber and thatching grass from the forest department on the aggrieved family’s behalf. Maryam knew that if one of them were in her place, she and Suleiman would do the same. If you ignored their cries, they would ignore yours.
In the days when Maryam was carried on her mother’s back, the way she would later carry Kiran, her mother would explain that timber and thatching grass had once been free. The forest department would take away
the materials each spring, when the families dismantled their huts and headed for the mountains, and give back the same timber each autumn, when they returned. She told Maryam it was the Angrez who invented the whole business, the whole revenue-generating forest policy that bound the herders, forcing them to pay a grazing fee and tree-cutting fee. Before the Angrez, they had been free to graze and chop. And the sedentary folk had been friendly. They let the nomads camp in their fields during the migration, knowing that when the cattle moved on, they left piles of fresh, steaming dung. Free manure; what else did anyone want? The change had begun in Maryam’s mother’s day, and over the years, herders had become no better than the upal that lived in buffalo dung. “Everyone is welcome but us,” her mother would grieve.
Which was why many members of her family had been tricked into buying. Giving up free grazing rights. Purchasing small plots of land from a state that told them what to plant, and when. The same cash crops, year after year, and for whom? The same people who took away their grazing rights. The ones who never smelled the seasons.
It was all very well for Ghafoor to boast that the nomads among whom he now lived were stronger than those among whom he was born, but what were they supposed to do? We have no fight in us. She hoped that whatever fight was left in him, he would apply to the only fight left worth waging.
Such were her thoughts when she noticed Laila, daughter of a nearby dera, trailing her goats a little too close to Maryam’s. But the two knew each other well. They greeted each other by exchanging insults for the sedentary villagers. “Their bottoms stick to cushions like snails to a leaf,” said Maryam, to which Laila added sounds with her tongue that were downright lewd.
Eventually, Laila asked, in a whisper, if Maryam had visited her shrine that day. Keenly aware that the others did not approve of her devotions—even though they had dwindled this year—Maryam began to move away. Laila followed her. “They are here,” she warned, both their herds now feeding on the same shrub. “The men from Balakot.”
Maryam felt the panic rise in her. “What do they want?”
Laila shrugged. “What do they ever want? The glory of Islam!” She giggled. “And no idols! And no shrines!”
Not now, Maryam thought. She mopped the sweat at her lip with her bandage, and winced. It was only a matter of time before they would find it, her little den in the center of a hill, large enough for a fox but not for men with a grudge. Or so she hoped.
They left their goats and tiptoed to a screen of kakwa ferns, from behind which they could see their row of huts. The forked fronds tickled her nose. Pagan seasons for a pagan wife. She was familiar with the taunt, but familiarity never thickened anyone’s skin. Among those who said it were men who called themselves hajis, dangling the boast not only in her face, but in the face of every Gujjar in the area. Not many herders had performed the pilgrimage to Mecca. Of course they wanted to—who did not want forgiveness for her sins?—but how would they get the money? The hajis in the valley wore their skullcaps as though they were horns.
And she could see those fake horns now, from behind the ferns. They were the ones from Balakot. They were the worst. And the most recent. It was not till last year that they started showing up here, which was why her husband forbade her from celebrating Diwali. These men from Balakot knew how the nomads suffered because of the grazing fees and cutting fees and annual permits and taxes and fines and the pressure to be still. Like her mother, they knew the history. Though she was too far away to hear them, she could see them circling two young boys of another tol. The boys were no more than thirteen or fourteen years old. She could guess that the hajis, who did not look much older themselves, would begin their sermon by recalling the policies of the British. That is what the younger hajis with the little horns called them. Not Angrez like everyone else. So smart in their black vests.
The two women were now behind a row of tall bhekkar shrubs, the trunks barely wider than them. “The British colonized your lands and instituted a forest policy for their greedy pockets!” She could hear them clearly now, speaking Hindko in a strange accent. They knew it had never been their land, and never would be. “And before them, that Sikh dog Ranjit Singh and his followers, they also crushed the glory of Islam!” She could now see two older men, with turbans wound differently from Gujjar men. “Until the birth of the great martyr Syed Ahmad Barelvi, who devoted his life to jihad!”
Then issued a long account of the Battle of Balakot, where Barelvi was martyred. She had heard it before. She knew what was next. The martyr was buried in Balakot, making it sacred ground (yet they condemned idolatory!) and an inspiration for their cause. The British had gone, but there was another infidel stalking their land, for whom the government of Pakistan fought repeatedly, first against the infidel Russians in Afghanistan and now against our own Afghan brothers. Would they not join the cause, these brave Gujjar men, whom neither the British nor the Sikhs nor the forest nor the mountains nor the rivers had ever been able to tame?
She could see one boy nodding, while the other scratched the dirt with his broken rubber slippers. His feet were caked in dirt. The two young hajis wore Peshawari chappals, gold embroidered on beige and brown leather. On the center strap of each slipper was a large red pom-pom. The older men wore chappals of scuffed black leather. One of them now began cajoling the boy scratching the dirt. He ruffled his hair. He pinched his cheek. “What do you say?” He made kissing sounds. The boy, still looking down, mumbled something that made the men laugh. The other boy played with a gold chain around his neck. It looked expensive, that chain. He was still playing with it with one hand when he grabbed the bashful boy’s hand with the other and welcomed everyone into a hut. Within seconds, the red pom-poms were leading the way.
Like the forest inspector and tax collector who had always plagued them, and like the policemen, soldiers, and spies who plagued them now, these wrongly turbaned men could also be placated with ghee and sugar, mutton and bread. The more they preached, the hungrier they grew. She did not know what would happen once their supplies ran out.
From what she could hear the men say tonight, outside in the baithak, whose walls did not reach high enough to touch the roof, allowing her to listen freely—for though she must work with men in the forest she must not gossip with them in the hut—this year the patience of the men from Balakot was also running out.
Unlike the preachers of last year, the men said, this lot was not going to stop at words. They were younger and had training camps. They were armed. They had already used their guns against villagers to the south and west. They wanted to recruit; their sons were not safe. They were waging a Sunni jihad against non-Muslims and all allies of the infidel, including anyone linked to the government. This meant the men in convoys, as well as the tax inspector and forest inspector. They were not interested in the forest, unless it was to use it as a camp, should they need to move from Balakot. They had told the Gujjar men that they understood nomadic living.
Maryam pulled away in indignation. Herders did not pray regularly at the mosque, since their migration took them too far. The men from Balakot had at one time chided them for this. Now they called themselves nomadic? She stilled her breast, then glued her ear to the wall again.
One man—it was the voice of a man who had bid for her hand before Suleiman’s family had won—said it was a shame how these men, like their inspiration Syed Ahmad Barelvi two hundred years ago, targeted Muslims. “They say Americans are killing Muslims in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Palestine, and Iraq. Then why kill us?”
“They have not killed us. Yet.” Maryam felt this to be the voice of Laila’s father. It was like distinguishing between bells again.
There was a long pause.
“Who do we cooperate with? The government or the militants?”
“Both.”
“Then they will both be watching us. And they will both strike at us.”
There was another long pause.
“It is true,” a voice broke the silence at
last. “We will neither get dry in the sun, nor wet in the rain.”
There were murmurs of agreement, followed by a different proverb offering the same disturbing truth: they were caught between two sides that rejected them equally.
“Do the convoys even care about Fareebi any more?” This voice was high-pitched and clearly peeved. “That shapeshifter?”
“Did they ever? Who was he anyway?”
“Is,” said a young boy, his voice just beginning to crack. “I saw him just today.”
She heard his head being smacked. “Do not lie.” It must have been his father.
The boy muttered an apology.
“In what shape did you see him?” another man asked, his voice distended in a grin. This man too she could recognize. On her wedding day, he had ogled her, then too with a grin. He had bid for her with one sick buffalo, nursing juniper brandy in his cup.
“The boy is too active in his head,” said the father, and there were mutters of support, the transgression swiftly forgiven.
She could hear teacups secured to the floor, hookahs inhaled. With one breath came eight words that spoke for them all. “Who even knows who is doing what anymore?” Followed by deep grunts of approval. “Dust rises when the cliff falls.” More approval, more gurgles of smoke.
After a while, a voice she did not recognize asked, “What about that man from your wife’s side? The one who has come back?”
On the other side of the wall, Maryam tried to keep very still.
“That crow on a stone.”
She flinched. It was a saying reserved only for the most mistrusted. Ghafoor was being accused of preferring to be by himself instead of with his family. This was not entirely fair, given that they had told him to leave, all those years ago.
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