Thinner Than Skin (29 page)

For the first two days after the rain began to flog them, each time Maryam clicked her tongue and pulled the rope, Loi Tara galloped forward eagerly, before curtsying back to Namasha. “Don’t
be a donkey!” Maryam shouted over the rain. “You are a growing child!” Loi Tara would nuzzle her mother and shake her head at Maryam and shiver in wretchedness under a shelter of graveyard cypress. Namasha would wind her neck around her daughter once before standing upright again, daring Maryam to intercept.

The third day, Maryam took the dare. She went into the forest and brought back something even more tempting than an egg from a sedentary farmer. A peach, covered in golden down with a blush of crimson. There was no hesitation. Loi Tara burrowed her sweet lips in Maryam’s palm. Namasha bucked her once. Loi Tara did not stop eating.

The fourth day, the filly scampered toward Maryam as soon as their eyes met, and once untethered, bounded into the forest. “Will you not follow us?” pleaded Maryam. Namasha gnashed her teeth.

Maryam caught up with the filly, who had found the buffalo Noor at a papra plant, wrapping soft lips around lacy leaves. Loi Tara looked momentarily perplexed: where were the peaches? In truth, Maryam had plucked the peach from a fruitseller, in exchange for butter, and planted it in the forest before bringing it forward to the filly’s ready nose. Now she stroked her smooth, velvety neck, the color of egg yolk in the setting sun, murmuring, “Silly, peaches grow in orchards forbidden to you. And little horses don’t eat papra leaves.” She untangled the wet mane with her fingers. “How to bring your mother back?” Loi Tara nodded, nuzzled, and forgot. She began plucking the tall grass at Maryam’s feet.

The forest dripped with rain. She looked at it: her forest. The slender stems of the kakwa fern glistened jet and violet, glossy emerald fronds tossed as proudly as the filly tossed her mangled mane. In the past, when Kiran complained of toothache, a malady she was prone to, Maryam had boiled those fronds and left the water to cool. Kiran would sip it later, her pain gradually subsiding.
In the past
.

Maryam pulled Loi Tara further into the forest. Around them towered blue pine and long-leaved pine, branches whorled, cones at her feet. Closer to the soil, the small, pink flowers of the khatambal. She could not remember the last time she had seen these. The herb flowered only during the monsoons, when they were in the mountains. She let the filly tear apart the bloom.

She could hear thunder. The buffalo bulls of the goddess clashing their horns. That was how thunder used to be known, in her grandmother’s day, even her mother’s. When the goddess’s bulls were at war, so was the world. Maryam stepped inside a canopy of chir, a warm, dry canopy, where nothing could find her. Not even the rain.

Inside her canopy, she contemplated the life hers had become. Earlier this morning she had stayed in bed, as had become routine, with a listlessness coated in dread. Would policemen bother them? Or would it be plainclothesmen today? Neither had come; she still had to force herself out of bed. It seemed the only thing pulling her into the world was the battle with her horse. That was the power of the occupation: whether the men showed or not, they now resided in their home, just like the news, on a multitude of legs. They could appear at any time. They were already there—behind the curtain, beside the teacups, in the weave of her bed. No one could hide, though they kept on trying. She mostly stayed inside her hut, worse, she stayed inside herself, in a way of life she knew she could never grow used to, even as it became routine.

At night, when she listened through the wall, she heard the men and their radio. When they rolled the dial they could catch the voice of the mullah arrested three years ago, for fighting America in Afghanistan. Though still in jail, he had supporters in Swat, and even closer, in Mansehra. The same men setting up camp around Balakot, and pushing into their huts? She did not know. The voice on the radio always said radio was sin. TV, computers, cinema—all, sin. In Naran, there were stores with computers; her son knew all about them. But the radio? That was not so new, and Maryam
could hear the men roll the dial, as her own father had done, to catch the news as far away as Peshawar. There was the mullah, cursing the radio he was inside, promising that soon this would be a Country of God, with no music, no dancing, and with madressahs in every valley. To fulfill the dream, they needed the local boys.

Through the wall she could hear her husband vow that it would take the hand of God to make the valley surrender to these men. A flood. Or an earthquake.

Inside the canopy inside her forest, Maryam continued stroking Loi Tara. The filly was back to nuzzling the buffalo. Maryam’s eye fell on a drop of rain rolling to the lip of a leaf Noor had missed. The drop halted just at the lip. The leaf seemed to curl, holding it in.

If that drop of rain were her son, how long could she hold him?

This morning, after milking the buffalo, he had told her he wanted to be a trader, like his uncle Ghafoor. He did not want to be like his father, a mere herder. He wanted Ghafoor’s clothes, the trousers with silver belts. He wanted to barter jade and leather, not milk and butter. He wanted to travel, outside the valley, outside the mountains, even. But he had a soft temperament, her son, more like his father than his uncle. And he was impressionable. If yesterday he would rather be a forest inspector, and today, a trader, what would it be tomorrow? A “local boy” in a camp—even if the locals themselves did not consider Gujjars local?

Anger began to well in Maryam’s chest, as she continued staring at the raindrop at the tip of the leaf. If the government knew these men trained in the camps near Balakot, or down in Mansehra, or even as far as Swat, why not get rid of the camps? It was a question she heard the men ask too, as she listened through the wall, their anger almost as bitter as hers when their talk turned to the two missing boys. So much security and the boys had still not been found? Who had taken them, and why? Enemy suspects: buffalo herders? Keepers of stupid Australian sheep?

Maryam was not going to lose a second child. Was keeping Younis here a way of losing him? Was sending him away, with
Ghafoor, a way of keeping him? It seemed the only options that presented themselves brought her right back to the dilemma voiced by everyone around her now. No matter what they did, they would neither be dry in the sun, nor wet in the rain.

The buffalo pulled the leaf that held the raindrop. She caught the drop with her long, purple tongue, her focus still on chewing. “Drink well,” said Maryam. “Eat well too.”

Behind them grew a cluster of wild pistachio trees, one of the most beloved trees in the forest. In late winter would bloom a mass of flowers the color of red dirt. It was a blessing, the way the color lit the freezing air. To Kiran, it had been a sign of an order she trusted in completely. Upon finding them each February, she would smile, but not once did she ever point. (It would take a special kind of jihad to enforce pointing.) And every September, soon after they returned from the mountains, when the red nuts had matured to blue, all the children of all the returning deras would shake the trees, gather the nuts, and carry them home to salt.

This September, Kiran would shake the trees from a different place. Maryam sank her face in the filly’s, and breathed. Over the years, she had cured the coughs of all her children with the tissues of pistachio bark. Now she inhaled the scent of the filly—a fresh manure scent, with hints of wood and incense—and wondered if she could cure the mother too. But of which malady? She smiled, still buried in horsehair. And which mother—the one on two legs or four?

Loi Tara had eaten enough. She raised her head, remembering her stubborn mother. “What should we bring her?” asked Maryam, still untangling that thicket of forelock with the fingers of her left hand. Loi Tara exhaled into Maryam’s stomach. She could feel the warmth through her rain-soaked kameez. She wondered, vaguely, if they should go deeper into the forest, to meet her husband. He would be bringing the rest of their herd back to the homestead. Jumanah would be with him, and Maryam could untangle her hair for a while, instead of Loi Tara’s.

She pulled Loi Tara gently back toward the hut. The rain fell as a series of ruthless barriers, pushing them back as they pulled ahead. They moved in stages, breaching one watery wall, pausing beneath a tree, and charging forward again, into a thicker, heavier wall. She could barely see where they were headed, yet there were others in the forest too, she could sense them, navigating their way through a world of fences, both solid and liquid, singing softly to their cattle, whose bells she had been hearing the entire time the filly fed. The sound was so known to her she could forget to notice it.

On she walked, keeping the rhythm that out-tricked the rain, a rhythm that was almost enjoyable, like a game. She hoped there would be no floods this year. They had endured enough. She hoped the glaciers would behave, and not gallop down the mountain slopes to block their roads and break their bridges. There was nothing more worrisome than a glacier that looked around and decided it no longer wanted to mate and melt gradually, but instead, to run like a horse. You could harness a horse but not a Gujjar—or a glacier.

On she went, in the rain, in the shelter of her game, her thoughts. Through the wall at night, no one had mentioned Ghafoor again, not since the time they had laughed at him. She had even been to the shrine clandestinely at night, risking being caught by the uniforms or skullcaps or both, in the hopes of finding him there. Or finding something—a feather, a cloth. But she found nothing, except the two flowers, crisp to the core. It was unlike him. If he said he would let her know what happened, he would let her know. Perhaps nothing had happened. Or perhaps … If the men were looking for him, had his plan changed? Where was he? Perhaps she ought to pray for him, if only in her heart, because during the day, she kept away from her shrine. Her husband insisted that under no circumstances was she to go anywhere near it. So she never again uncovered the box with Kiran’s jewelry and two milk teeth, the one she had wrapped in red cloth. She said a quick prayer over the place where it lay buried, and let it rest.

In truth, she did not need signs from Ghafoor any more, at least not to tell her where
they
were. She knew. She continued to see them, there at the foot of the mountain, moving toward the serrated brown rock. But each time the man lifted his foot and began the climb, Maryam’s vision would fade. One minute he was approaching the mountain, the next, he was trapped. In between, there was rain, goatbells, and that low chorus of singing and lowing.

Maryam halted abruptly. They were perhaps two hundred feet from the homestead when she realized she was also listening to something else. Loi Tara heard it too, she could tell by the way the filly pulled nervously back. A commotion, a rumble—of voices, or thunder? A landslide? An earthquake?

She could hear a scream, followed by a whole chorus of screams.

A ripple of fear pulsed down the filly’s back. More screams, and wailing too. From two deras away. Not Laila’s family, but the family next to hers. They were in distress, and what was Maryam doing? Listening from afar while stroking Loi Tara? Is this how she repaid the kindness of those who had sacrificed their summer in the highland to return to the plains with her family, in her time of grief?

Maryam pulled Loi Tara toward something heavy and familiar in her gut. If she had to name it, she would name it death, and a whole universe of pain that never existed before death, until, it simply did.

They had found one of the missing boys in his family’s waterhole. The rain filled the hole and he rose to the top and his bloated limbs nearly spilled over the edge of the trough. But they did not. He bobbed in the slime-gilded pool with mango peels and goat entrails. Petals of eritrichum littered his hair. In the sky, a murder of crows. On the ground, too many men and women to let Maryam through. Yet, within moments, she held the history of the boy’s
young life in her flesh while her eyes reflected what others would see. His arms and legs were broken, hands burned, buttocks slashed, and a portion of his head crumpled like an aluminum can stamped on by a horse. From this wound a stream oozed into the waterhole; that was not the blood nor bile of a goat. He was recognized by the chain around his neck, a present from a rich relative that appeared to have helped choke him.

Maryam froze. She recalled the two boys seen several days ago while she hid in the forest with Laila. One boy had been scratching the dirt with a broken slipper. The other had been wearing a chain. She remembered the second one inviting a group of men into a hut. She remembered the red pom-poms.

The second boy was not found. It was his mother who cried the loudest. The one whose son was being dragged out of the waterhole did not cry. She was cursing God so loudly, eventually she had to be slapped into silence. It was a silence that would last the rest of her life.

Meanwhile, the valley talked. It was a talk that began as a murmur and grew and grew. The boys had been taken “for information.” They were “enemy suspects.” They had been taken by plainclothesmen. No, they had been taken by uniforms. Laila said they wore turbans and expensive slippers. Maryam said the slippers had pom-poms. Still others said they were taken by men last seen on the banks of the Kunhar, smuggling trees, in expensive slippers. They were from the camps. No, others insisted, they had come down to the plains from the mountains. No. They had come up to the plains from hell. No, it was the mountains. Which? The mountains to the east. No, the ones to the west. And it seemed to Maryam that those doing the talking kept growing in number, and included both plainclothesmen and men in uniform, and were from the government and from the camps, from the mountains and from hell.

But that day, after the woman whose son was fished out of the waterhole was slapped, Maryam did not really listen to them. Through the noise, she kept her poise, speaking the words she needed to speak, to whom she needed to speak them. She did not
know from where the strength came. Perhaps from listening to the silence of the woman who had been slapped. She could feel the silence begin to consume her and thought it better that she scream her way to the other world, but when she whispered this into the woman’s ear the woman swooned, and Maryam could do no more than hold her, so hold her she did, through the moment she fell silent forever. She blew gently over her face. She brewed her a tea of sweet herbs that made her sleep. Nobody called Maryam a pagan wife, not that day, because she was the only one who could do more than talk and curse and swoon after being slapped into a comatose dream. They watched her, and despair became their glue, and glue became a tangle of arms in which to carry the woman to her hut. It untangled to lay the woman down, over her bed, and then Maryam could not remember where it went. She spent the day moving between the homes of the two families—the one whose boy had been found and the one whose boy had not—her own home—she returned Loi Tara to Namasha, who received her daughter with moderate reproach—and the store where her son Younis worked. On her way she noticed a ginger plant pushing its way into their allowed part of the forest from some disallowed part. At the store she pulled Younis into her arms. He was alive. She held him till he pushed her away. Afterward, she stole into her shrine and, for the first time since the man who played a double flute and told tales like a prophet and danced like a jinn first let her pull the honey from his fingers, she did not wait for any more signs. She did not wait for any more songs either. She made up her own. She sang to the woman whose silence was forever, a melody in which her boy would be with Kiran soon, in a valley of fairies and princes and roasted pistachios and flying horses. She sang to the woman whose silence was forever about heaven. Heaven was not a warm place but a world of ice, a world of placid lakes and two single peaks made of windows and doors called the Queen and the Nude. The Queen more or less stayed in the valley but the Nude had been to places far away, farther than the mountains even, and he would find those
who had taken her child from her and caused a silence as deep as the lake to enter her womb. He would find them and do as he must and the woman should rest peacefully through it all and listen to this song of a heaven made of ice and fairies and roasted pistachios and flying horses, a heaven nestled between two peaks that watched over Kiran and this boy who would soon be with her. They would have good clothes to wear, Kiran and the boy. He might even convince her to braid her hair. He might even braid it for her. He would pay attention to the chime of her bangles. He would feed the goats they had lost down in this temporary world to the greed of fat Australian sheep. They would all be there, and the filly’s father too, the one who had leaped into a barbed wire fence and caused the filly’s mother to grow mean in this other world. The children would ride him together sometimes, over the two peaks, finding the surest footholds, stepping across the flattest stones, through rivers and glaciers and sweet mountain grass. And if they felt sleepy they would rest their heads against his velvet smooth back and their dreams would fill with a velvety smoothness. Their dreams would hold the best colors of their young imagination, which for Kiran would include every breathing shade of blue. Blue as a fairy’s wing, blue as a kingfisher’s tail, blue as the flower of the Jan-i-Adam.