Thinner Than Skin (12 page)

I dived again. That was Farhana in the boat. So where was the girl? I kicked my way deeper, deeper still. I had only ever dived into a swimming pool in Karachi, with Irfan and others from our class. We’d throw coins and believe them hard to see, glistening bronze in the blue sting of chlorine. I could barely make it to the bottom of the pool before the pressure in my ears forced me back up. Now I was looking for a girl in a lake so deep no one had ever measured it. I shut my eyes; I would count to ten then dive again.

When I opened my eyes Farhana was peering down at me from the side of the boat. Then her face vanished and instead I saw her legs. Dangling muscular. They were naked now; she’d taken off her shalwar. Or were those Kiran’s legs? Limp, skinny. Again a face appeared but it was neither Farhana’s nor the girl’s and it was saying something I couldn’t hear. My ears hummed. My head was screwed in a metal box half its size. I dived again.

I dived with Farhana’s father. I heard him say, “Even the act of seeing.”

I dived with my father. I heard him say, “Coward, come out.”

I dived with Farhana’s mother. I heard her say, “We die so young.”

I dived with my mother. I heard her say, “God be with you.”

I dived with Farhana.

I dived alone.

I dived alone.

Kiran’s mother had pale green eyes, like her daughter. But they were smaller, and twice as piercing. Her hair was a shade darker than Kiran’s, though not as dark as the pine needle that had caught between those plump, wiggling toes. She wore the hair in a tight braid woven neatly around her face, framing it like the feathers of an owl. She was a very tall woman, almost as tall as her husband, taller than Farhana, and she carried herself high, with a smooth oval chin perpendicular to a regal neck. Her stride was long and sure as she walked toward us on the shore, the black shirt billowing around her the way it had done barely an hour earlier, as she’d watched her daughter being pulled away from her, carried off in a boat with strangers. If Queen of the Mountains could have taken human form, she would have been Kiran’s mother.

Her bangles were still.

They’d heard us out there, watched us dive, understood the screams. Irfan and Kiran’s brother had come for us in another boat. I could barely remember it. I must have gotten back into our boat somehow, and held Farhana, and said something. It was as if the sight of Kiran’s mother joining her husband as he waited for us brought me back to the world, only to remind me that I had wanted to leave it. Still did. I wanted to dive back down to those large white fish and their cold yellow eyes. I wanted them circling me, reminding me of my panic, forbidding my escape. I wanted to live inside that threat. It would free me from the agony of the man and woman awaiting us on shore.
Their
shore.

I imagined her wrapping the honey in the cloth, twisting the knot. She’d baked the bread for us, sacrificed a pear, potatoes.

When we stepped off the boat Farhana began sobbing again. She reached for Kiran’s mother but her mother stepped away. Then the woman fell to her knees and screamed into the dirt, and I knew that this must be the first time she had ever crumpled, let alone allowed a witness, and we were the cause. Her shoulders shook in spasms as she lifted fistfuls of sand and tossed them into her hair and slammed her fists, broken nails digging through the bowels of
the world, two lines of saliva hanging from her chin. Her husband stood nearby, weeping quietly into the cloth around his neck. His head was bare now. He had thick, beautiful curls.

Wes had pitched Irfan’s tent. I was infinitely grateful for this. He stood outside, holding the front flap open. He could not have seen the diaphanous wings approaching us from the direction of Naked Mountain, as if born of the mountain’s collar of clouds, soaring high above the tent before circumnavigating the lake. I knew she’d sleep with us tonight, heart-cut face in mine, ice-black stare inches from my throat. I crawled inside, as if into reprieve.

My dreams were of my mother, of Farhana’s mother, of mothers I couldn’t identify, with children I never knew. Her face a knot of feathers, her neck as thin as air. I was inside: inside wings, inside caves. I was diving in my grandmother’s scent, the scent of Farhana’s mother, hanging on the wall above her bed. A bed in a different place, on which I lay, while a hundred different smells moved beside me. Burritos. Enchiladas. Coriander and lime. Smells I once loved, but that now made me wretch. And then my mother was there, in Farhana’s bay window in the Mission, and I was sorry I’d barely seen her in those few days in Karachi, before leaving for these mountains. I’d call her on Irfan’s cell. I’d tell her I was leaving the valley.

Someone was feeding me stones. Rolling them on my skin, tucking them in my chin, armpit, groin. They were covered in blood and slime. Coriander and lime. The smell the smell. I’d call my mother. If Farhana let me. She kept waking me. She said to stop clawing deeper into the skin of the tent. I was tearing it, and it was cold. If this was so, why did she leave the front flap open? Why did she keep showing me the way out?

Early in the morning, she screamed. Did I not care about the smell? I opened my eyes. I saw why she was upset. Between dreams, I’d spent the night vomiting glacial water. Apparently, I’d swallowed buckets of it, the day before.
The day before
. What day was that? A day that couldn’t be! I told her I was sorry about the smell.

I tried to go back to sleep but now I was awake. I wanted badly not to be awake. I felt feverish, and yet my temperature hadn’t risen, it had dropped. I learned that Irfan had spent the night warming stones with his hands, his breath, and his armpits before placing them in my armpits and even my groin. I wondered weakly if he, or Wes, had done the same for Farhana, who lay swathed in extra blankets. Where did she get them? I groaned: Kiran’s family! Not possible! So too the warm fluids both of us were made to drink! Irfan assured me that mine included herbs to help both my conditions—the vomiting and the hypothermia—as if I had only two.

“Has her body been found?” I asked.

“Of course not,” he snapped. He had a deep frown—I could have hidden in the furrow, I would have liked to—and his voice was gruff. He could barely keep from shouting. “Even if you’re too weak to walk, push yourself. Movement will keep you warm.”

“Let me rest,” I groaned again. “Will it be found?”

“Shut up. Get up.”

“Will it be found?”

“You know how deep the lake is.”

“Actually, I don’t.”

“That’s right.”

“But there was a tide. There still is. I can feel it.”

Farhana said she could stand it no more and crawled outside with all her blankets. I heard no stones fall.

“What does Bhuri mean?” I asked.

“Why?”

“What does it mean?”

“Brown.”

“And Makheri?”

He glared at me. Eventually, he answered, “Naughty.”

“They are the names of Kiran’s goats.”

Irfan was heating them again, long pebbles the shape of pears, and short round ones, so round I wanted to curl myself around them. They went from under his armpits to between his hands, as he juggled and squeezed, as though to soften them, like dough. He was an illusionist entwined in tricks. And in moods. As suddenly as it had begun, the magic act came to a halt, and the softness of his movements was lost. He clenched his fists, pressing furiously to heat those nuggets for me. So angry! So kind! “You’re my friend,” I choked, and he grunted, securing them roughly against my nuts.

I slept deeply this time. If I had dreams, I don’t remember. When I awoke I was lying in a hollow of sound that began in the dark sleeve of some other sleep, from a time before my own. It grew louder, rippling rapidly toward me through that sleeve, till I recognized the echo as a voice, and I knew it was Farhana’s. Except, flatter than hers. She wasn’t speaking so much as reciting, from a letter inscribed on a treasure, perhaps, dug out from somewhere in the hollow. I imagined her shaking out the dust, shining a flashlight, murmuring words in a language I couldn’t understand. Exhausted from trying to decipher her meaning, I went back to sleep.

It happened again. Some time in the middle of the night—or day, the same one? I didn’t know—I heard Farhana beside me. I couldn’t tell if she knew I was listening. I couldn’t tell if she cared. Her voice was unusually melodious this time, yet somehow, still flat. I felt she was speaking to a third person in the tent. Calling to them, giving a testimony of sorts, on whatever she’d unearthed earlier—I briefly pictured her holding an Asokan rock edict—as though speaking into a tape recorder at a police station. Was she dreaming? Sleeptalking? I glanced around me quickly: no one else. Perhaps she herself was the third person. I didn’t look at her. I didn’t want her to look back with eyes open, or shut. I lay still in our
tent. The longer she spoke, the more my blood chilled again—where was Irfan with his beautiful stones!—surely it was the voice of delirium.

“And I dream of my mother when I am scared …”

Well, I thought, so do I. We were having the same dreams!

“You could say she is the closest thing I have to God. It is her image that hovers over me as I try to sleep, her image freed from the frame above my bed. It lifts into the sky like a puffy white cloud, blowing cool air down on me. She would do that. I was young but I remember. She learned it from her time here. You don’t just pray
for
someone, you pray
on
them. You blow the prayer into their pores, till it reaches their soul. Breath for breath. That is how you love someone. With your breath. Baba said she never truly became a Muslim, except on nights when she would wish something for me—Dear God, please let my daughter have a mother at my age!—and blow it over me.”

I woke up early. This time I was sure it was morning by the way the light filtered through the blue weave of the tent, giving our sleeping bags a thin yellow edge, making the woman next to me identifiable again. My throat was drier than the stones at my side but my temperature was normal. I knew I was the only one awake. I also knew that the lake was resting, even asleep. The tide had turned.

I took my bag. I stepped outside. The nomads rose very early, to pray. They might already be awake, waiting for the sun to break behind Malika Parbat. I looked over my shoulder but she was in darkness. A spray of stars winked in her place and thin wisps of cloud smeared the violet sky. Clouds in the shape of runners and acrobats. Fairies trailing princes. Jinns trailing fairies. Lovers on ice.

I walked to the water’s edge knowing what I would find.

I took my time, my bare feet just outside the lake. Even when the water lapped tenderly at my toes, I was quick to step away. I told myself I avoided contact with the bone-chilling lake out of consideration
for Irfan. If my temperature dropped again, he’d sooner smash my head with rocks than warm them. And then he’d be a murderer.

The bundle was in a semi-fetal position, on the northeast shore. It must have washed up as I approached; we arrived at the same time. It lay between the two mountains, at their feet. I couldn’t reach it without passing the tents, which I did, as silently as I could. Two dogs shook themselves awake, one tiptoeing out toward me. Thankfully, it was tethered, though I needn’t have worried. It didn’t even bark. The other lay still, one ear slightly cocked. Of more concern was a horse, dark red in color, and with ferocious eyes, who bared its teeth at me and began to neigh. A smaller horse skipped forward and bucked and kicked the sand. It circled me and bucked again. The third time, it nearly kicked my shin. I kept walking. I was getting closer.

My head was as clear as the air, and with clarity comes coldness. Before sitting beside her I noted the beach was wet. I gathered a bouquet of pine needles and small stones and made myself a cushion of these. The sun would light the west shore before it would touch this spot. She’d washed up on the darkest corner of the lake. I wouldn’t be able to see her face till after prayers.

And so I sat, beside her, listening to the azaan float in from the hills. I must have been too unconscious to notice any call to prayer until now. Though faint, this morning’s call echoed clearly over the lake and across the valley. Within moments, a second and a third call joined in the chorus, each swooping past the other at a different speed, racing through stairwells of air currents, a whole family of owls.

Slowly, Queen of the Mountains’ face began to appear in the water.

I detected the first signs of activity from the tents. I heard pots clanging, water flowing. I saw the dogs scratch themselves. I heard goat bells and buffalo bells and a long, drawn-out low, as soulful as
a call to prayer. It was answered by a series of lows and soon the valley was ringing with a second azaan. The tent where I’d slept, on the southwest shore, lay completely still. I had no idea where Irfan and Wes had been sleeping.

The sun crept further along the lake. I could still see fairies in the clouds; I could see peaks and hollows. I did not glance at the body again till I was sure I could see it. I stood up, shook my legs, walked along the shore again. Irfan had said that lakes as cold and deep as this seldom gave up their victims. Without a strong current, it could take weeks. So the current that had cursed us was now a blessing.

I walked east, away from the body, farther than expected; my legs have a habit of taking me away. Perhaps it was this that alerted Kiran’s mother to my presence here. Or that nasty horse and the foal, both of whom would continue bucking and braying all day.

When I turned back I saw a shadow in the sand crisscrossing my own. Gradually, I saw the woman not the shadow, a child in her arms. I remembered she’d held a child that day too. I hesitated. She’d been watching me. I’d heard no footsteps, no clothes rustle, no bangles chime, nor even a cry, not even from the child. For all I knew, they’d been there all along. Should I pull away, return to my tent? She walked with the same sure stride as she always walked; she wore the same black shirt. The child climbed out of her arms and ran toward the body and the woman barely stopped. Nor did she accelerate. Why had she brought the child? Of what use was it for a toddler to see a dead sister?

The little girl had curls like her brother and father. Her plump legs were squeezed into a yellow pajama torn below one knee. Her frock was dark green and embellished in festive gold embroidery. She cocked her head toward Kiran, now fully in the sun. The dead face was marbled bright pink and gray; the neck was darker. The ice water had washed away the stains from her cheek. The eyes glistened, as though alive. The little girl folded onto her knees, tucking her small feet beneath her. A small brown hand reached for a cold
blue neck. The living hand stayed there, at the bathed neck, brown on blue, and the girl did not cry. She gazed at death with a sadness as deep and liquid as the lake, a sadness from which, her dark wide eyes said, she was going to have to learn to surface.

That is what her mother wanted me to see.