Our only guarantee of safety was Shakoor’s comforting presence or one of his brothers grasping our horse’s bridle as we went on our evening walks. We had no helmets, no gear normally found in riding schools in the cities. We wore running shoes and held sticks fashioned from tree branches, some of which still had a few leaves attached to the end. The horsemen had even less.
The narrow roads and paths were either muddy or too smooth, and the horses’ hooves squelched in the puddles left from that summer’s monsoons. Anyone with a modicum of caution would imagine that we avoided cantering, let alone galloping. Yet that didn’t stop my brother, my cousins, or any of the other older boys or girls we spent our summers with. If they spotted a clear road, without indication that any cars were coming around the corner, they dug their heels into their horse’s flanks and set off at a gallop. Those of us left behind heard the shouts and the laughter of the horsemen who chased after them, their legs carrying them almost as quickly as the horses.
I was more closely aligned with the little British girl on horseback from Shaikh Muhammad Amir’s painting than I realized. Shakoor’s responses to my questions were matter-of-fact, some brimming with affection, some simply humoring me, but all tinged with a wary distance that I recognized now, tied closely to our vastly different backgrounds. With a willful lack of awareness, I asked him, “Did you ever want to do anything else?”
He laughed. “I’ve never known anything else, or thought about it.”
In 2012 or 2013, during my college years, I returned to Nathiagali after two years away. I had spent previous summers at various internships, traveling the world, racing after a vague idea of a career that my Ivy League classmates had long been plotting.
I was strolling with my mother along a winding road leading to the church when Shakoor appeared around the bend on a cantering horse, a beautiful white beast I hadn’t seen before. His eyes wide in excitement, he pulled his reins and the horse stopped next to us with a scrape of its hooves against the road.
“Nur bibi! I haven’t seen you in years!” he said.
“I haven’t been here for a few years,” I said. “How are you and your family?”
We exchanged pleasantries for a while, and then he asked, “Well, shall we pick you up for a ride soon?”
I hesitated, demurred. I was busy these days. I was more of a walker. His face didn’t lose its smile, but something shifted in his eyes. It was a quiet realization that I was no longer the little girl who loved horses.
The truth was that I dreaded spending an hour searching for things to talk about with the horsemen. I was afraid of walking in silence. But I didn’t even want to canter off on my own because the recklessness of all those childhood escapades had been seemingly stamped out by adulthood. I now feared injury, I feared looking foolish, I feared losing control of the horse, and worst of all I feared all this was a consequence of womanhood. This time Nathiagali could not erase all my years in cities, navigating judgment and scrutiny, and ideas of correct behavior. Even if I believed I was above it all in principle, my self-consciousness had embedded itself far too deeply in me.
Often after a long hike or horse ride, my head spun from the thin oxygen on the mountain. It was an effect that would fade the longer I spent in Nathiagali, and after downing some orange or mango juice. Whenever I became short of breath, I paused to look up at Miranjani looming over the vista, a benevolent and almost perfectly shaped pyramid. The snowcapped Himalayas beyond the peak merged with white clouds and the bright blue sky until they were indistinguishable.
As I took the view in, the mountains appeared to shrink away from me, almost folding into themselves. If I took a step forward, the mountains moved backward. Science—or, as my father would argue, a trick of the tired mind. Whatever the explanation, this shrinking away also made everything about this place feel more mysterious, inexplicable, unattainable.
Gulgee ki Aankh was demolished years ago, the chaotic eye made of broken mirrors, glass, beadwork, and colorful stones replaced with an empty plot of land. We can no longer catch a glimpse of the legendary artist in his studio, darting birdlike from one side of the canvas to another, or hear his raspy laugh.
I often wonder about the men who worked for him, the ones who took his life and absconded with his paintings. What desperation drove them to commit such a shocking crime? And I thought about Gulgee himself; what advantages did he have, who did he serve, to achieve such success?
Without its occupant, the Eye of Gulgee was without emotion, art without a soul. Now that Gulgee’s home has vanished along with him, it is difficult to imagine he was ever in Nathiagali to begin with.
There are many voices left out. We, the ones who put pen to paper, or brush to canvas, are often the ones circling power. Within the margins of every story I encountered, were hundreds more. There were no contrasts, no complete pictures that could show the worlds around us in the clear light of day, only layers upon layers to be unearthed.
Over the decades, Shakoor and his brothers’ faces reddened from long days in the sun. Their wrinkles grew more pronounced. Shakoor now lives in Abbottabad, only two hours away from Nathiagali by car. He is training his sons to follow in his footsteps. They avoid Nathiagali over the winter, as most of the roads are blocked by snow. When the snows melt, his sons take their horses from Namli Maira to Murree, a larger hill station nearby, and to Nathiagali on the weekends. Rising costs followed by the pandemic began cutting into daily wages. Shakoor arrived in Nathiagali late in 2020, almost halfway through the summer, recovering from a long illness.
Ruby Aeroplane made it through our teenage years. The horsemen had to purchase new horses, after others got old or injured, a necessary expense that grew steeper every day. In the early 2000s, a horse like Ruby cost Shakoor 7000 rupees, which is around $44 in today’s money. Back then, most horses cost the equivalent of $15 or $18. Today, Shakoor told me, a horse bought from Lahore or Peshawar would cost them more than the equivalent of $1,200.
Once, I asked Shakoor what happened when he realized a horse could no longer survive. “If the horse’s leg breaks, we have to sacrifice it,” he said simply. “We bury them ourselves. Once, three years ago, another horse’s stomach was hurting. It was in so much pain that eventually it died. But we have to keep going, for the sake of our livelihood.”
“Seeing you kids in Nathiagali is like seeing my own children after a long time,” Shakoor always said when we arrived. “You are our own people.”
Shakoor’s affection for us appeared to transcend the years, my adulthood, and the slow realization that I had grown distant from this world. I was too conditioned to accept our apartness to connect with someone who had spent hours patiently holding my horse’s bridle and walking me up and down the hills.
What I understood to be Shakoor’s affection could also have been his instinctive need to keep the people responsible for part of his livelihood happy. Could he have allowed himself to be grumpy, impatient, frustrated, anxious, while he managed a group of rowdy rich children on horses? Could I be the person to ask him that? Could ours ever be a true friendship, when one person was holding the reins, and the other was just following in their wake, awaiting a daily wage?
Annie Dillard describes the transition to adulthood like a rude awakening. Children wake up, she says, and “discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad? . . . they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or from drowning.”
I don’t remember my awakening. I just know it came in small blasts of understanding over sleepy days that meant nothing. What I once thought was a painting of horses was a painstakingly gathered puzzle of tiny stones, placed so tightly together that even their cracks, fissures, and flaws were only apparent when I looked closely. Awakening involved learning that this beauty, this life, was conditional and inherently unfair. But it was also a call to free myself of ignorance, and to confront the truth of my own story.
I enjoyed horses, not because I felt we understood each other, but f
or the surroundings and people that came with them. Perhaps that’s why horse riding is an activity so firmly imprinted in my past and not my present, so much a part of the sacred days of my childhood summers and not the messy cities I still encounter every day. I don’t want to change my memories of it. I don’t want to replace Gulgee’s turquoise imagination with cold, gray reality.
So many changes, and yet so little has truly changed. My young nieces and nephews continue to ride Shakoor’s family’s horses. Even though our visits to Nathiagali are for shorter periods, and infrequent, we still greet each other with joy. My generation no longer has months to spare in the summer, but someone in our family is always here. We are scattered across the world, building lives elsewhere, but always manage to return.
But these mountains, and their deeper histories, hang on me heavily. I wonder if I have failed to get to the truth of it all, if I am still half aware, with the tricked gaze of a tired mind.
Shakoor’s favorite place to relax is by the small wooden church across from a park in Nathiagali. This church has been painted over numerous times, from its original light brown wood to dark brown to an ugly orange, and now back to dark brown. As kids, we held fake weddings inside, pretending to marry our friends and our crushes, ran along the pews, ate ears of corn on its grounds, and played Frisbee and cricket in the park below. Here Shakoor tied his horses to the fence and settled down on the long barrier by the side of the road where one has an uninterrupted view of Miranjani and the Himalayas. From this perch, the longer one spends staring at the mountain, the farther it recedes.
Turnout
C. Morgan Babst
My mother strides across a pasture, holding a jacket in one hand, a horse in the other. At the end of an arc of long-line, the Arab is in midleap, his left hooves aloft, his right legs planted, all four topped in white socks that gleam from careful brushing. My mother’s face is open, asking the horse something, and his eye is on her, answering, though his head tosses, throwing mane.
It is 1964, my mother a young teenager in bell-bottom jodhpurs. She and that horse are bonded so closely that neither is at all afraid of the other, though one of them carries a whip, though the other’s hooves flash in the air. The look that passes between girl and horse is respect itself. Each honors the power of the other. Each chooses trust, instead of fear.
I must have gasped when I found the photograph on a recent Sunday visit to my parents’ house, hidden in a shoebox under the bookcase, because my mother looked up from where she sat, cross-legged, on the floor.
What is it? she said.
As she reached out for the picture, old Fox Photo envelopes spilled from the lap of her bathrobe. There was my brother, a naked baby dancing on the patio table. My parents in their Mardi Gras costumes, circa 1984. A trip to a beach in Georgia, where I hunted sand dollars in a floppy cotton hat. Gris Gris, the first horse I ever rode.
Look—I handed her the picture. It’s Ruzon.
Oh, Ru. Her eyes grew misty as she took the photograph in her hands, fifty-five years after it was shot. We loved playing like that. We had so damn much fun.
And maybe that’s what got me: her joy, the toss of Ruzon’s mane like a manifestation of equine laughter. My mother loved that horse for his heat, the flare of his rebellion, loved him so much she still mourns his death, by colic, during the first year of my parents’ marriage, forty-six years ago. Though the photograph’s colors have faded to sepia and beige, her hair and her horse’s coat glow the same deep auburn. They are a perfect match: two wildernesses bound by strict upbringing, unleashing one another.
Somehow, though, I’d never seen this picture before. On the bookcase, professional show ring shots and yearling portraits of all her horses stand in frames. In each photograph, my mother’s back is ramrod straight, her cheeks bright with blush and exhilaration, the horse’s shoulders streaked with lather. Someone, I know, is crouching beside the photographer as the shutter clicks, cracking a whip, throwing handfuls of green shavings into the air to make the horse prick his ears.
I haven’t ridden—really ridden—in quite some time. For the first decade after college, I didn’t have the wherewithal; besides, I was living in New York, and trail rides in Central Park will get you only so far. Since moving home to New Orleans four years ago, we’ve had to put down my sweet hunter, Nate, who lived to the unthinkable age of thirty-six, and Pecos, my rescued Quarter Horse, who dislocated his hip in his pasture. I miss them—that’s part of it—but really, I haven’t felt the drive. At some point, what I loved about riding morphed into something else, became all about control, rigor, competition: things I have enough of, already, in my life.
Still, my mother and I have begun to give my young daughter riding lessons. Standing in the middle of the round pen at a friend’s barn, we shout, Up, down. Up, down, while she trots a borrowed pony. That she would learn to ride was never in question. In my family, girls grow up to be horsewomen, almost by default. Looking down at the photograph of my mother in all her glory, I suddenly remembered why.
I called down to my daughter, who was doing cartwheels at the bottom of the stairs. I needed her to see the picture, to understand the freedom my mother shared with Ruzon when she was a child. As the three of us sat together on the carpet, I asked my mother to tell us the stories I already knew by heart, stories of a girl and her horse. How she and Ruzon ran flat out along the top of the levee, faster than the cargo ships on the Mississippi. How they trotted down St. Charles Avenue to her convent school so that a priest could bless him on St. Francis’s Feast.
The nuns wouldn’t let him in the chapel, my mother said, so Ru stayed in the courtyard and ate up the azaleas.
My daughter rang with laughter at this picture-book perfection: A horse with a mouthful of flowers! A horse who tried to go to church!
This, I thought, is where I want my daughter to begin.
Up, down. Up, down. Up, down.
A trotting horse moves her legs in diagonal tandem. Left fore moves forward with right hind; right fore moves backward with left hind. This motion is comfortable for the horse—she can trot, with great efficiency, for much longer than she can canter. But each doubled footfall jolts the rider from the saddle. If she does nothing, she’ll be bounced into the air, her teeth will clack. She might even wind up on the ground. To sit the trot takes strength and continuous, concerted work. Otherwise, the rider must post, using her own legs to rise and fall in rhythm with the horse.
The horses my mother, and then I, grew up riding, though, were built for comfort. We rode Saddlebreds—animals with high tails and even higher knees who had been bred and trained to be both stylish and smooth. These were planters’ horses, creatures designed by and for men who wanted to master everything in sight—land, animals, women, children, other men—so that they could ride, in long coats and hats, for long distances, across their plantations and along the dirt roads into town, and then parade down city avenues in style. To the Saddlebred’s natural walk, trot, and canter, the planters appended two more modes of moving: the slow gait and the rack. These are high-kneed, four-beat gaits: the rack is fast and flashy—the hooves strike in even rhythm—while the slow gait is stylish, more restrained—a shuffle in the rear, out of time. Both are hard on the horse, as each hoof hits the ground independently, carrying for a moment the horse’s full weight, but they are smooth to ride. Both allow the rider to sit straight up on his cut-back saddle as the horse rushes across the fields (or, lately, around the show ring to the sound of organ music), breathing hard.
Though, by this point in the course of guided evolution, some foals rack right up off the ground, most are born three-gaited—just plain horse. To train them to their gaits, some trainers will tether a filly’s back legs with rubber tubing or shackles lined with fleece; others will ask them to serpentine quickly down a slope. The horses take it up easily, usually; once they get into the habit, you’ll see a five-gaited mare racking in her pasture, chasing the chickens. But if they don’t, some barns re
sort to weighted shoes or even soring, a practice in which a bad trainer will paint the tender soles of a horse’s hooves with a blistering ointment, until she flies.
See it: rider and horse spin around an indoor ring deep with dragged footing. The rider’s coattail flutters, the horse’s tail flags—a blond streamer that trails along the ground. The horse’s eyes roll white. Her ears are pinned. Her front feet flinch in unvoiced yelps against the air.
Ask some trainers if this is cruelty, though, and they’ll dismiss you. Pain is beside the point; style is everything. Once a rack is established, the gaited horse is like a car with a luxury suspension. The rider sits at speed.
When my brother was a toddler, my mother bought a five-gaited Saddlebred colt, and I named him Toby, after the basset hound in The Great Mouse Detective, whom he did not resemble even a little bit. Toby did, however, look a lot like Ruzon. With a dark chestnut coat and four white socks, he was the Arab’s echo (unlike Ruzon’s swaybacked half brother Gris Gris, my first love, whom my mother also owned). Toby was fiery, too, like his predecessor—or at least my mother read him that way. To me, he always looked a little wild-eyed, a little spooked, as if he were being asked to do more than he was entirely sure he could.
Toby, alas, was a grown woman’s horse, not a girl’s. He didn’t get to run flat out along the levee or eat a convent school’s azaleas. My mother boarded him at a training barn where he was trained for showing, his back legs tied together with tubing sometimes, his front hooves occasionally blasted by a kid wielding a fire extinguisher until his front knees went up high—Up! Up!—so very, very high. He had a flashy rack. Maybe he’d make it to the World’s Championship in Louisville one day. He’d better, since he was a tax write-off (some lawyer’s idea), a fact that would bring us all a lot of grief down the line.
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