Thinner Than Skin (24 page)

“A free man,” nodded Irfan.

“How so?”

“Kazakh means free man.” He chewed vigorously. “They are the wandering cattle breeders that fired Dostoyevsky’s imagination. Remember how he exiled Raskolnikov in
Crime and Punishment
?”

“I don’t remember.” This was better than admitting I never finished it.

“He sent him to Kazakhstan.”

“Didn’t he spend time there himself, after prison camp?”

“Yes, after his mock execution. Imagine thinking you’re going to be killed, and then, at the last minute, being spared.”

“I can’t imagine it.”

We were still recovering a sense of freedom and resurrection à la Dostoyevsky, when Irfan noticed her. Farhana, entering the restaurant. Before she could reach our table, he’d caught the old waiter’s eye and ordered fresh food. Her hair was dripping; her skin glowed. She eyed our plates hungrily.

“It won’t be long,” said Irfan.

“Thank you.” She sat down.

We were all getting along so well.

“How’re you feeling, Farrah?” asked Wes. “Think you can eat?”

“Just watch.”

So when the food arrived, we watched Farhana dip her fingers into the plates and suck steaming spinach off her thumb. It was probably the wrong thing for her to eat but I wasn’t going to be the messenger. She spoke of her walk with Nur Shah along the Gilgit River, adding, “Nadir”—this was delivered casually, without looking up—”I’m beginning to understand your love of night walks along rivers.”

“I go alone,” I said.

She laughed, carefree, cold.

There was silence at the table as we continued watching her eat.

“So,” offered Wes. “Ultar Glacier tomorrow? Batura the next day?”

“If the weather permits,” replied Irfan. “We’ll leave for Hunza early. Batura is north of Passu, where the road isn’t good, especially in the rain. And it’s supposed to keep raining. Even if we do get there, the trek will be slippery.”

“Ultar is closer,” said Farhana.

“But steeper,” said Irfan.

She insisted we had to try. Wes supported her. After all, he’d climbed up glaciers in the Gulf of Alaska, Canada, and God-knows-where. Throw in the Andes and Mount Kilimanjaro. Patagonia while you’re at it. Did I mention that he’d fallen down a crevasse in Antartica? There he wrestled with polar bears—the only ones in the Southern Hemisphere—before inching his way back to the top, on bloodied fingernails. Only to confront more polar bears as the nails grew back.

Farhana tossed her head about some episode or other they’d encountered together while taking ice samples on Mount Shasta.

I reminded myself:
Leave it behind
. We were here to go on. Even if we could not get along. I excused myself and headed out into the night. Before leaving the restaurant, I thought I saw one of the men at our escort’s table scoop food into his mouth with a hand without fingers. It was not an image to look at twice.

Kashmiris have names for Indian prisons: Papa-2; Kot Balwal; Gogoland. The way the Indian government disappeared the men of Kashmir, I heard said, was not unlike how Pakistan’s government disappeared the men of Pakistan. Only, no one was sharing names for Pakistani prisons, at least not those I heard around me now, as I walked down the muddy lanes of the main bazaar. The disappearances usually happened in more or less the same way: a boy leaves the house to get paan from the stall across the street, or to play cricket in the field around the block. Never returns.

I did not want paan. I did not know what I wanted, but I found myself staring at a wall, specifically, at a poster on the wall. Sylvester Stallone. Beside him, someone had scrawled,
Inshallah
. I thought of polar bears and kept walking.

It was after nine o’clock but the market was still crammed and I heard more languages spoken here than at an international airport. I learned that some of the people milling around had come from as far away as Andijan and Kashgar, either with bales of cloth, or with no clothes except the ones on their backs. The textile business had been thriving since the end of the Soviet Union; so had the business of war.

At one door, a sign read,
Hitt Fabricks of Sentral Asia
. The greatest hits included fabrics named after heroes and villains: Putin, Osama bin Laden, Tears of Shahrukh, Eyes of Ashwarya. My sister would drool, anticipating how women would whisper enviously at the next wedding,
Did you see her in Osama?

I moved on. Here, as in Kaghan, a tale of occupation was a tale of names. So Gilgit was also Little Tibet and the Xinjiang Province was Turkestan, and almost everyone around me who wasn’t from here was fleeing occupation of some kind.

Outside a different shop, I noticed a cluster of men speaking a language I couldn’t identify, one of whom was definitely missing the fingers of his right hand. After the group left, two of them hobbling, I said to the shopkeeper, “They didn’t look like lepers.”

“Because they’re not,” he replied. “You should see their toes.” He said they were Uyghur refugees, fleeing a quite unique persecution by
China: their hands and feet were hosed with ice water. I was reminded of our driver’s tales of the Eskimo Force, soldiers who were made to plunge their hands in the freezing Hunza River for hours, then wade through ice sheets without shoes. If for one it was torture, for the other, glory.

The men at the restaurant were a foreshadowing of the Gilgit I’d stepped into tonight. Where one group of men shared tales of Kashmiris tortured by Indian troops, another shared tales of Uzbeks fired upon by Uzbek troops. These mountains acted as walls, enclosing us in a lonely pocket where poverty was synonymous with diversity and conflict with hospitality. There was more than one dark-eyed Uyghur from China sipping tea with a blue-eyed Kazakh from Russia, whether at a restaurant, or in among a clutter of cheap chinaware, a mound of jade, or posters of Stallone.

Meanwhile, rumors of the man-and-his-double, Fareebi the shapeshifter, had traveled to these heights long before us. He was fleeing Pakistani torture cells, it was said, the cells with no names, where he would end up, eventually, in the hands of the Americans. But, the rumors continued, vehemently and unanimously, he wasn’t here, in this epicenter of refugees and informers, traders and merchants.

On the walls of yet another shop, I read a telltale scrawl,
Pipelineistan 4 Hu?
Osama silk, dowdy dishware, and persecution weren’t all that brought men to this corridor. There was also oil. Between sweet green tea and salty pink tea, there was much opining about the Kazakh–Chinese deal, in which a 3,000-kilometer pipeline running through the Xinjiang Province would start pumping oil as early as next year. It was a throwback to the ties forged on the ancient Silk Road, but with a twist. Despite the billions of dollars invested, ethnic Kazakhs and Uyghurs still lived below the poverty line, deprived of their ancestral homes. These men were refugees; they were also fugitives. Not all hobbled, and many carried guns.

How many were twenty-first-century Raskolnikovs, seeking banishment most of all from themselves? Perhaps only Dostoyevsky
would know.

It was getting late, and I didn’t wish to linger any longer through the night, not in a town I was only beginning to see. I left the muddy alleys and wound my way back toward the Gilgit River, a thick, brick-red arm of the Indus that chugged down Gilgit Valley like an impetuous train. As my footsteps grew more urgent, the rain started again, softly, yet even this caress seemed to aggravate the river’s march. It kicked; it heaved.

Before I’d left the store with the crippled Uyghur refugees, the shopkeeper, polishing the inside of a chipped teacup with his spit, had said something that now thundered in my head. “Our valley is tight, but not impassable, if you know the way. How we all arrrived at the same corridor from different corners of the world, now that may seem like a mystery, but it is not. We found a way. Why? Trade, yes, but most importantly, freedom. And we know you need three things to be free. Mountains, for security and glaciers; rivers, for drinking and irrigation; farmland, for food and money. Here we have all three. Which is why the government won’t leave us alone.” He put the cup away. “And why we help each other.” He then quoted a saying of the Prophet Mohammad: “In the beginning Islam was something strange and it will one day return as something strange.” I said I wasn’t familiar with the Hadith, but was glad to learn of it. The shopkeeper added, “It is why the Prophet gave glad tidings to the ghuraba. The strangers. ‘Blessed are the outsiders,’ he said, peace be upon him!”

I couldn’t confirm it, but I had a feeling, as I hurried along the rash river, that I was being watched. I would have liked to find the courage to turn left at the mosque, and even left again at the end of the road, where, I was sure of it, soon after leaving the shop, I’d seen our escort slip into the shadows. I would have liked to stare down whatever it was I would meet. But I kept on, till, eventually, I stepped to my right, into the hotel.

The next morning, I was not altogether surprised to find us hit with
more delays.

First, there was the raid. Among the seized items were two cars; 35,000 kilograms of explosives; fifty computers; hundreds of guns; electronic goods (VCRs, toasters, blenders); furniture stolen from schools and banks. And rickshaws. Rickshaws were to be banned for fifteen days. The “found” goods were displayed at a press briefing. There were also two arrests, a blind man and a cripple who had to be propped semi-upright from the hips. These were the cream of the bad crop. They weren’t from Gilgit but from “outside the mountains.” Given how many people here were seeking sanctuary from somewhere else—including, I realized with a start, Farhana and I—it was hard to know who hadn’t come from outside the mountains.

Next, there were no buses leaving for Hunza that morning, and Nur Shah refused to take us in his jeep. We’d have to wait. Our journey’s motif.

By afternoon, the rumor had spread. The real reason for the arrests was to deliver a clear message to those at war with the country. The state could do what it wanted with the grazing grounds and water of the land. It could, if it wanted, give it all to China. Pakistan and China had a history of friendship, and those who tried to undermine the friendship would be arrested under Pakistan’s Prevention of Terrorism Act, and convicted on evidence. The evidence was before our eyes: the seized items, the blind man, the cripple. Those at war with any other government friendly to Pakistan—whether in North America or in Central Asia—would also be arrested.

Gilgit wore a gray cloud that day, thicker than any that cloaked the mountains around us. Everyone wants our land, people said. Everyone wants our rivers, our sea.

Others argued that this too would pass. The land had known many conflicts and many differences, but people had always found common interests on the Silk Road, and always would. Governments, on the other hand, would come and go. As would music. By nightfall, radios blared again from every shop, some with news, others, Bollywood hits.

Our foursome was suddenly a tiny part of the world congregating in this narrow corridor, whether for trade or freedom. I embraced our diminished status with relief. The spotlight here wasn’t on me but on a bigger game being played around me. I stayed in my hotel room that night. Irfan was away till very late; where he went, he wouldn’t say. He hadn’t been in our room the previous night either, when I returned from walking along the Gilgit River in the rain. I’d thought nothing of it. Though it may sound strange, I’d even hazard to say that when I finally heard Irfan climb into bed, after a quick flicking on and off of the lamp by his side, I felt much like the mountains enclosing us. Impenetrable.

Even when he said, in the dark, “In times of unrest, everyone is implicated.”

Always the optimist.

We go on. Leave it behind. Everyone is implicated. Our three mantras, blending into one.

I had this ridiculous image of Farhana and I running toward each other while people blew themselves up around us, and a bird swung circles in the sky, watching our grainy shadows crisscross in jerks. We couldn’t tell if the blood that draped every tree and every rock was caused by the stupid eye in the sky or the stupid bomber on the ground. And in the background, there was jaunty music, and people dancing. And in the extreme background, there was a green shalwar and a magenta shirt.

But it was only an image. We were safe.

They had grown lean. The buffalo, especially; each hip had too many angles. Suleiman had been forced to buy supplementary feed, but once these stocks were gone, he could buy no more. The way the animals moved told Maryam that, like her, they wondered how many would not make it through the winter.

Her wrist still hurt.

On the day she smashed it, Suleiman had returned home with the horses she had left to wander into the field unsupervised.

“You know how valuable they are,” he began. “If we lost them, how would we climb the slopes to the pasture next summer?”

“On our feet,” Maryam muttered.

“Your feet cannot even carry you as far as your daughter.” Jumanah whimpered in his arms. “Though they carry you very well to your shrine.”

She waited, but without offering to take Jumanah from him, for the additional reason that she could not have held her with a broken wrist. She kept the arm hidden behind her back. She did not tell him that the animals did not need her to look after them. They were better off on their own, and perhaps he would be too.

His silence conveyed a thicket of disappointment she wished her body could hack through. Who was he to judge her, after all he had done? He was like the mare Namasha, righteous and mean. Well, she could stare them both down. Suleiman eventually limped away, still holding the baby.

It was hours later, after returning with the animals and herding them into the enclosure for the night, that he noticed. He came into their hut to find her weeping. This time, she only wept because of the physical ache. A current was tearing up her right arm, and, though her left hand tried to squeeze out the pain, the current was strong. It fought her like a snake, his teeth to her blood, while her eye noted, with a precision separate from the rest of her, the way the wrist kept swelling and changing color.

Suleiman kneeled. It was not an easy position for him. “What good would it be?” he whispered, “me with a broken leg and you with a broken arm?”

She thought this funny. As the colors on her skin deepened, she stifled a laugh and the spasm caused the current to shoot through her arm with heightened intensity, causing her to clench her teeth in pain, a gesture she was certain made her look like the mare Namasha, which only made her chuckle and choke and grimace again.

“It is all my fault!” he said, taking her fingers gently in his, tears licking his long lashes. Though he did not say exactly what all, he did not need to. At that moment, she was glad for both the men she loved, the one who wept, and the one who fought.

The next day, her wrist sticky with Suleiman’s balm for broken bones and cradled in a cloth like a child, the other one showed up again. This time, he waited for her outside the hut, near the waterhole. If he had heard about her injury, it was not why he was here. His reason was to tell her that he would either send one of his men to accompany the foreigners north, or do it himself. He would let her know the result. The result of what? she wondered, but instead asked the question to which she already knew the answer.

“How will I know?”

“Through whisperers and runners, Maryam. The way we always survive.”

From inside his good clothes he took out a bottle of clear liquid, unscrewed the top, and drank. He eyed her over the bottle. “Your son, Younis, does he talk to them?”

“Who?”

“The police. They show no sign of leaving.”

“What would he talk to them about?”

“Whatever they want him to say.”

“He has nothing to do with them.”

He drank. The bottle had a red label and was half empty.

“He can come with me, Maryam. After my work here is done. I can find him a job. As a runner—for jade, or a different kind of silk.”

“He stays with me.”

“There is money to be made. And he will be safe. Safer than here.”

“He stays with me,” she repeated, steel in her voice.

“It was just an offer.” He tilted the bottle in her direction, his eyes equally glassy. “Vodka will ease your pain, Maryam.”

So, he was now offering her liquor, in place of honey. Did it taste different from juniper brandy? Many men liked brandy in their cups, in place of tea. Many women liked it too. Once, as a child, she had spied a cup left behind by her mother. When Maryam lifted it to her nose, without warning, her tongue had licked the bottom clean. It had made her blood surge with a warm, acid sweetness. Afterward, knowing that her mother’s nose was even keener than her own, she had rubbed her gums with milk.

But something in the way Ghafoor now tilted the bottle toward her made it a worse trespass than her own secret experiment. He had never looked at her this way, not in all the times he had come to her when she was a child. She pushed his hand away.

He began telling her more stories, about the people of the steppe, their drink, their food. After boiling the head of a sheep,
they divided it between the family. Ears went to the children, eyes to those who would not see, tongue to those who would not speak. “Guess which part would go to you?” he asked.

She watched his eyes shine with a silver glint that made her think of boiling heads. On he went, spewing big words in her face about the world from which he had descended. And she was back to saying nothing more to him.

“They are strong. Stronger than us. What do you think they do, Maryam, when free grazing lands are turned to state farms? Do they become slaves?” His eye was turning from silver to red. “Never! Once we were free to graze in the hills around Saiful Maluk. But even there we are no longer safe. Anyone can rob our cattle, even our children. We have no fight in us! We have no leadership! We have no pride!”

The bottle was dry. His eyes were wet. He was teetering close to the waterhole.

She was suddenly enraged.
Get on with the plan
, she wanted to say.
Get on with it. Whatever it is. Your talk is meaningless
.

“People here do not listen to me, Maryam. I came back at great risk to myself.”

Again he waited for gratitude; again she withheld it. He plunged his fist inside the waterhole, wasting the good drink. He looked like he needed cradling more than the wrist tied to her chest, the one he had not even noticed.

“They drove me away. But I am back! I will prove what I can do!”

“Prove it then,” she hissed, spinning on her heels and walking away. Without looking back she added, “Your war with every man in uniform should leave us strong, not weak.”

After a long pause she heard his reply. “The ones in plainclothes are worse.”

She did not look back at him, and two days later, she saw that the flowers he had left her lay wilting in her shrine.

If she had looked back, and kept on looking, she would have seen Ghafoor slip away, far away, to walk the winding valley of his youth.

First, a few miles north, past Kawai, where the road ascended steeply, and it felt good, the way his thighs tightened to brace for what he knew would soon be a much steeper ascent. If he looked to his left he could see Musa ka Musalla, the prayer mat of Moses. He did not know a single person who could explain why the mountain was called this, for it did not look much like a prayer mat at all. What he did know was that he was unlikely to see it again. So he bowed before it, from one prayer mat to another.

He contemplated taking the road to his right, toward Shogran, the forest in the sky, but he did not like the idea of meeting the city folk who spent their summers there. He turned around and went back down, toward Balakot, intending to head all the way south to Mansehra.

He met several people along the way and some of them met his eye and some of them did not. The River Kunhar moved beside him almost the entire way, sometimes thin as a smile, sometimes wide as laughter. It was laughter that could turn seditious in the rainy season, and he could not forget the floods of 1991, when he was just a buffalo boy hoping to one day see the world. Even though the riverbed was steeply inclined, that year she had climbed to the edge of it, to unleash the worst of her mischief on the town of Balakot.

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.