Thinner Than Skin (34 page)

Very slowly, I twisted loose the knot that tied the four ends of the cloth together. It was a style that would have perfectly suited the wrapping of a stack of hot chapaatis.

The box was uncovered now. The box was small and white. I smelled no chapaatis and that was okay because I wasn’t hungry.

I touched the lid of the box.

I tried praying but it didn’t really work. I was angry with God, at that particular moment.

Again I pleaded for life. “I beg you, I’ll do anything!” Again I hated myself.

After what seemed like a very long time, I received an answer in the shape of a kick to my teeth. I lay curled on my side in the dirt and continued to receive the blows.

I did not know how much time passed before I noticed that the sun was drying the blood in my mouth and this was uncomfortable. It is curious how, even when every inch of the body is in pain, it is possible to isolate a hurt, make it a separate thing, cushion it with exclusive attention and care. I tried to wet the dried blood with my spit but moving my lips made me tear the scabs at their corners. I kept trying. I had to wet my lips without moving them. I could do this.

Ahead of me, a field was aflame. If this was delirium, it was not
unpleasant. The fire in the distance had a warm orange glow. At its center sizzled a cluster of seeds with a purple sheen. The chaos was elsewhere, far from that orange glow, and no one would disturb me as I focused all my desire on tending this small corner of a troubled earth: the corner of my mouth.

A small white box lay inches from my nose.

I still concentrated on my lips. I made a very tiny bubble but the sun took it away. I made another. I was having trouble opening my eyes. I could, however, make a slit, a very narrow one, and from between this slit I could still look out at the world, I could face the box.

I pulled the box toward me. I was facing its side. Again I touched the lid. It was not secured with a latch or even a tongue of tape. It would be very easy to tear off. I squeezed my eyes shut. This hurt, so I loosened the muscles of my eyes and counted to ten.
Goodbye
. I counted to twenty. I counted to a hundred.
Goodbye
. Two hundred. I pulled off the lid.

My eyes were still shut. I counted to three hundred. I was not dead. My lips tore as I shouted, “Hurry up! Hurry up!”

Again time passed. Again, against my will, I began to think.

Why had the bomb not detonated? Was it a different kind of device? Which? Why did I know so little? Why was I at the mercy of those who tormented me for knowing so little, when there were those who knew even less?

“Hurry up! Hurry up! You fucking cowards, hurry up!”

I was not pleading for life but for a more predictable death. This seemed reasonable. A quick death had been the promise. I would open the lid and be torn to pieces and not feel a thing. It was reasonable. Instead, the kind of death waiting for me two inches from my nose was unknown. This was not reasonable at all. This was betrayal. “You promised! You sick bastards, keep your fucking promise!” Who would do a thing like this? Who would lie to a man resigned to death?
Who would do a thing like this?

What if the explosion came while I was kicking and ranting? Is that how I wanted to go? Imagine the expression on my face! My
eyes squeezed shut and my mouth wide open, bleeding. What a monstrosity! No, I preferred to go in dignity. I preferred to close my mouth, around a spoon of poise. I preferred to go with hands folded, eyes shut but not squeezed, lips loose. This could not be denied me. This was in my control. I could take my life by holding my breath. It would take longer than a bomb but it might work. I pulled my ribs up to my chin and they screamed but I did not. I held them in my mouth.

“Look inside!” I heard a shout. “Get up and look inside!”

Had I grown deaf or had they grown tired? The shout was wimpy. I lifted my head off the ground, still holding my breath, but I could not see into the box. I lifted it more.

Bangles. A necklace. And what might have been two milk teeth, their ends brown.

The air surged from my mouth and I choked. Then I passed out.

I do not recall clearly what happened after that. The men must have seen for themselves the mystery I’d unraveled. When I regained consciousness, the jewelry lay smashed everywhere around me. I was aware, despite my weakness, that water was to be found somewhere. I was thinking I might scoop snowmelt onto my lips. I was thinking I might follow the migration of buffaloes and goat herders who treated me with tolerance, even kindness, inviting me near their fire for tea. On a grassy hilltop, I know I caught a glimpse of a silhouette with horns longer than my legs. A yak? A demon? I glimpsed, too, a red blur, and, squinting, saw the ends of a dark braid scatter sunlight before my eyes.
She jumped before you. I saw her braid hit water
. And I began to see more, the way she frowned when she untangled her hair at night. It was a very different frown from the one she wore in the boat, as Kiran fell into the water, close to me, and I simply watched. Farhana was screaming. “Grab her!” Before she fell backward into the side of the teetering boat, her left foot had brushed my arm. I heard it—the anarchy of bangles, the
crack of bone—while I only watched. I heard the splash as Farhana jumped, on her side of the boat, so she would have had to swim very fast to rescue Kiran sinking on my side. And I heard the rattle, as Farhana was pulled deeper into the dungeon of silt Kiran was pulling her to. Only now, on that grassy hilltop, long after the men had smashed the contents of the box and left me with a parting kick, only now did I attempt a run toward the vision—I jumped off the boat, finally, I could see myself make that jump—but I did not know what came of it.

Eventually, I must have fallen near someone’s hut. It might not have been far from the mountain, or perhaps it was very far; I did not know where I was. I slept there for a long time, waking to bandages and a watered-down version of apricot soup. This time, I accepted the gift. I would have to consider myself worthy of the generosity of strangers again, somehow. But the gift did not sit well with me. I remembered vomiting, many times. Till one day, I did not.

I also remembered the voice of a radio. I had not been dreaming when I heard it. I had stumbled far from the fort by then, and I had been noticed, and offered water, and help, but I had not accepted the latter—not till I fell in front of that hut—in a part of the valley that was less like a village and more like dotted outcroppings of a shack or two. I remembered stopping in a corner of one such shack, surrounded by soap, flour, a cat, and a shopkeeper who turned the dial of a radio till the static stilled. I wondered if I’d just arrived in Karachi, and none of what happened had happened, because it was the same story, at least at first.

A bomb exploded in a hotel this morning, killing one foreigner and seven Pakistanis …

I left the shack, then hurried back inside when I heard this:

… Reports say the explosive was carried in a box, similar to other devices used this summer. Among the deceased was the
bomber. Witnesses say he had arrived in Gilgit several days earlier, with a broken leg
.

No group has claimed responsibility for the attack
.

Several children were staying in the hotel at the time of the blast. Six persons were killed, including the American national. Three policemen, three women and two children were among the injured. One child succumbed to her wounds on her way to hospital. The family of the deceased American have been notified
.

The woman who tendered the soup had green eyes and wound a braid around her oval face. She wanted to feed me qurut and lamb, almonds and cherries. She kept goats in the cattle pen, and spun a wool so fine it could pass through an earhole. Her children had clear skies in their eyes. Her husband healed without words. I had to ask what he was treating me for, and his daughter, giggling, said bleeding and broken bones. And worms. I must drink the flowers of arusha to expel the worms by stunning them, she added. And to stop the bleeding. And swelling. It was the bitterest remedy, with an aroma that made me see only flat things with too many legs.

Several times, a boy helped me to the hole by the cattle pen. I could not keep anything down, not even water. I told myself: Irfan had made it back down the mountain, with only a broken leg. He’d been alive. He might still be alive, if I hadn’t tossed him my pack.

But then I might have opened the box instead.

The cattle pen had a wretched stench.

Who was the American national? If a woman, the gender would have been specified.

Surely, Farhana was already on her way home to her father. But this would mean it was Wes who was the—how could I say the word
—deceased
. How could I hope for that?

The blast was in Gilgit, which meant they were on their way back south—without looking for me first—I abandoned him; he abandoned me—but I’d never stolen his love, his Zulekha. If he had
looked for me, would I have wanted to see him?

When he opened the box, had Farhana been with him? Had they looked in my pack and noticed the box and, laughing, sat down together to share whatever they hoped to find inside?

The gender would have been specified
.

Wouldn’t it?

Wouldn’t it?
I asked the boy. He stood by and waited till I had finished before carrying me back inside the hut to the woman with green eyes and the man who healed without words.

It might have been days, even weeks—I did not ask to be shown the time—before I could feel the contours of my face again. I could take a shallow breath. I could sip a little soup.

I asked the girl who told me about the flowers of arusha for the way to the nearest bus stop, or even if she knew of a driver who might carry me south to the highway in his jeep, or if she knew anyone at all, a kind soul to take me home. She smiled with warmth, perhaps even pity. Then she called her brother, who had carried me to the cattle pen, possibly for weeks. The brother’s expression was the same as hers, except, perhaps, he exuded a little dismay. He called his father. The father had long slender hands that were cool but my forehead was cooler. He shook his head; I supposed it meant I needed no more cures, at least none his fingers could provide. He called his wife. She entered the room smelling of woodsmoke and sweet oils. She offered me cheese. Good for the spirit, she said. I accepted a small piece, and reiterated the question I’d put to her children and to her husband, but which the whole family was clearly avoiding. At my insistence, and with a little more cheese, she answered me at last. Home? You want to be taken home? There is only one time to come home, and that is after death.

I turned my back to her then. I could still smell her scent of woodsmoke and oil, perhaps it was almond oil. She said I should stay till I felt strong enough to—she hesitated. To come home? I
thought. No, she could not say that now, because then I would be dead.

She kept standing there, basked in a quiet like infinity. Instead of completing her sentence, she gave me another, sweeter proverb, one I will never forget, though I may never have use for it now.
Beware the guest one does not feed
. I’d heard Irfan say it once, on the shores of a lake, after we’d eaten a pear, after the honey. After Farhana had left with the girl. I hadn’t thought to ask him what it meant. I asked my hostess now. She explained that it referred to people who did not do things from the heart, or, even worse, who ignored the heart entirely. The heart is a guest, she stated in a smooth, liquid voice. It must be nourished, made welcome.

So is that what Irfan had decided to do? Feed his guest?

I lay there hunched on the cot—vaguely aware that this was likely the only cot they owned—my back to the woman who smelled of almond oil. I faced a window through which I could see an apricot tree. Hopping between each fur-eared fruit was a warbler, its delicate yellow throat vibrating when the woman spoke, pausing when she paused. The heart is a guest, she kept on in a voice that was as still and rich as the surface of a lake. It deserves the best room in the house.

It was time to lay the needles down. Fresh pine needles for a clean floor and a bed softer than most things, except feathers, or flesh. Her flesh was ruddy as a peach and the child would rest her head of thick brown curls against it when she tired of gathering the needles and the branches. The sheet had to be propped securely if the house was to stay dry, Maryam explained, though she need not have. The girl, at age four, gathered all the materials swiftly without being asked, and brought them to her mother.

Her son had candles. He would be leaving this year. The candles were not too sensible—it was windy here, at the edge of the lake, and it rained—but he said they were better than the little oil lamps and so they lit the long wax sticks with threads that sizzled at the slightest change in weather, while she laughed in private, for her son would cut the wicks and blow the flames back to life with some tenderness and a lot of pride.

Maryam watched them, her two remaining children, Younis and Jumanah. They carried the candles out into the night after the tents were secured.

They had taken longer to reach the mountains this year. After the earthquake, they all moved more slowly, and besides, they had
been forced to change their route. Last year, they had camped at the foot of a glacier, in potato fields that ripened swiftly under the blanket of steaming dung the cattle bestowed. But during the monsoons, the fields had been washed away. It had happened plenty of times before, though never like this, and in her mind, she could hear it, the way the glacier groaned. Done with keeping all that pressure locked inside, it let the world feel its pulse, taking the fields, the homes, the cattle, and the grain. When the earthquake buckled the land, it left behind a small artificial lake. They had been forced to trek around this.

They had also taken longer to leave the plains. A part of her had feared they would never leave at all, and she still could not entirely believe that they were here, nor that her children were slipping out into the night, in secret, excluding her, two candles, two whispers, and one destination, which she believed she could guess. She watched them go. She had to let them go eventually.

Down in the lowlands, the convoys had also left. They left soon after Fareebi, the shapeshifter, was found. They left as silently as they came: every man in uniform and spy in plainclothes, or so the people said. They had been replaced by different convoys, carrying food and blankets for the shocked survivors who stared past the cameras and far into the heavy dust of their past lives.
Balakot is completely lost
, they said. Maryam had never heard so much terror, or breathed so much death. The goddess had finally unleashed upon their valley the full weight of her wrath, and more men, women, and children than Maryam had ever seen now lay buried beneath it.

Even now, months later, she could do no more than isolate a few details of their combined devastation, like the way she had been watching the buffalo Noor in the forest just before it happened. Noor’s eyes had begun to roll high into her head. And her tail! It did not swat her back so much as stand upright, like a snake, jerking and twitching, as though about to drop! Maryam had been staring at the monstrous movements of her most placid beast when Makheri, the goat with the too-high teats, rammed her from behind, saving her
life. In the space where Maryam had been standing crashed a pistachio tree. How could it be? She had been harvesting the nuts of that tree not two weeks earlier. Noor now lay beneath it. Her tail still twitching. A man from Laila’s dera pulled her away from the sight. And as they ran, so did the world.

But up here in the mountains, even this year, time kept defiantly still. Lake Saiful Maluk lay slick and dark, like a cold, sleepy eye. It had kept the eye shut through the wretchedness of the winter, and now, in spring, it was coming awake, lapping the shores beneath the two lovers, the Queen and the Nude. Tonight, Maryam could feel the lovers at rest. They would be watching her children, and watching the tents, but they would have no reason to complain. Except, perhaps, when they noticed that three tents were missing. The first for the family of the boy found in the waterhole last year, the second for the boy who was never found, the third for the family that was crushed by a boulder when the earth moved. The first two families had left for the city, the husbands and remaining sons to work as thekedars, loading and unloading the gunny bags of grain from state farms, the wives and daughters to pull all their silences closer to their now-sedentary hearts. The space for all three tents lay bare.

There had been other deaths, even before the earthquake, and who knows if the goddess had played a hand in these too. A shopkeeper beaten to death by policemen for withholding information. The information he withheld was his identity. There were no papers to prove it, the police claimed. Who was he? To which state did he pledge allegiance? He had no papers to answer for him. And there was a round-up, all the people of the valley—the sedentary, the nomadic, and everything in-between—had to show their identity papers. Maryam had pulled out every scrap they ever owned. Deeds showing permission to graze; taxes paid; materials leased each autumn and one summer, for a temporary home. But there was no proof of her birth. Her husband’s, yes, and he could not remember how and from where the proof had come, it was a gift from God, that little rectangle with his thumbprint
and his name. But Maryam had none. The men had reached for the closest thing they could find. Younis. They pulled his ears and slapped his head, again and again, till his neck hung limp and she screamed and beat her wrists against the hard floor (including the wrist that never again healed). When he fell, and they began to beat his back with their boots and their rifles, she saw the boy in the waterhole, and said anything,
take anything you want but the children
. They took the filly. Loi Tara, with the coat the color of sunset in a yolk. Taken in her third year, still tethered to her shell, still only a mare in name. She had been nuzzling the buffaloes, the rain-kissed leaves, and those who let her go.

Maryam did not dare approach Namasha any more. Only her husband had that privilege now. Only he fed and watered her. Only he administered to her pain. Maryam did not inquire how. But even her husband did not ask the mare to carry a single item—not a lamb or even a copper bowl—on her back on their migration to the highlands. She would have thrown it off anyway, sent it spinning all the way past Naked Mountain to the callused hand of God, Who would have dropped it.

There was a limit to the extent of baggage any creature should hold.

It was soon after they took Loi Tara that she agreed to let Younis go. This time, it was she who left Ghafoor a sign. A red cloth, just as he had done. And he came, with a new look and a new name, still glowing from his success with the foreigners. About that, he had casually declared, “You will never see him again.” She never asked to know more. There was a slight, very slight, unease lurking inside her, born of an image too fleeting to hold, one which she admitted only to herself. It was never clear to her
which
man she envisioned trapped in the serrated mountains, his back to her, because once, just once, he looked up, and she did not think it was the one she had thought. The man she saw had pointy features and a brooding brow, like the good man, the friend of her people, Irfan. Trapped. It had confused her. A mistake? Hers or his? And she thought of the night the forest inspector’s
house had burned, the way the man got away while his wife did not. It made her uneasy—how could there be any likeness?
That
had been a fire,
this
a fall,
this
was easy—and, shaking the image away, she thanked the gods that this particular mutation of it had never returned. So when Ghafoor had assured her, “You will never see him again, no matter how much juniper you smoke,” she did not ask to know more. All she said was that she never smoked; she could see very well without it. He laughed and so did she. He added, “Even your mother, bless her spirit, will never see him again,” and then too she could not help but smile, though it was not altogether respectful, the way he spoke of spirits.

When she asked him to take Younis with him he scratched his thick new beard—black; he had even dyed his hair—wiped her cheek—which had suddenly grown damp—and licked his finger free of her tears the way she had once licked the honey.

Hold on to nothing except your children and your herds, her mother would say. Sometimes, even these possessions were too many.

Maryam quietly crept to the far side of the shore, where the two candles had disappeared. The night was cool and still and she wrapped her shawl close to her chest, and felt the sand give beneath her feet. This was her first night back in the place that had taken Kiran. It was her first touch of the icy water that had pulled the child to itself. She had warned Younis and Jumanah to stay away from the lake, and though she trusted them, she followed nonetheless.

They were heading for her shrine, the one in the cave. The one that could still exist. The one in the lowlands she would have buried before leaving, had the goddess not done this first. She would have had little choice, even after the rumor began to spread that the killer had been found, and the uniforms and the plainclothesmen began to leave, and the relief workers began to arrive. Over them all one voice could still be heard, as Maryam prepared to leave for the mountains. It was the voice of the mullah, claiming victory was coming to every valley in every district, and every city, village, and town. So Maryam had abandoned the cleansing rituals entirely this
spring, pleading in her heart that her family not be punished, it was not her fault the rituals could not be kept alive. She had one further evidence of the degree to which her own way was in danger. Just before the earthquake, she had dug a small patch of dirt in her shrine, for the box with Kiran’s belongings. The box was gone. The shrine had been tainted, and apparently the goddess agreed.

The mullah had still been claiming victory when they began their ascent.

They had seen their mother do it and so they did it too, when they thought she was not looking. They climbed the hill farthest from the boats and the tents and kept on going, toward the mountain that could only be seen when imagined. The candles blew out twice and Younis patted his trousers, the way he saw men do. He pulled out the box of matches, lit two together, cupping the double flare in a tent made of his fist, and re-lit the sticks.

Finally, the two children arrived at the cave.

While Jumanah looked inside, Younis talked. He was telling her all he would do, when he left. He would become a trader and because all good traders had beards—”Ghafoor bai says you trade best when scratching your beard”—he scratched his naked chin, and she scratched hers. As a businessman, he would bring her things, he said, things that would make her blush the way their mother did, when Ghafoor bai brought her flowers. And Jumanah lowered her eyes, practicing how to look pleased. It was easy, because she was already on her knees, arranging on the uneven floor a bed of pine needles. She carried a big bundle in her hands—she had been careful not to let the candle burn them—and now she took her time softening the floor while Younis talked.

When the carpet was made, they sat together, holding the candles out toward the drawings on the cave wall. There was the horse, Loi Tara, in different poses. Sometimes alone, her mouth busy, her head turned to return their gaze. Sometimes prancing
toward a peach. There were buffaloes too, and at times, Loi Tara went to meet them. She was a little yellow and the buffaloes a little blue, but mostly, their world was black and white. There was also a girl. Kiran. She only appeared once, and you had to come very close to see her, so close that the candle left a mark on the wall. Jumanah was standing now, her bare feet absently sweeping the pine needles to and fro, her toes digging into them while she concentrated, holding the candle just so, above the girl and to the left, for this way, the light fell on her face and the face was neither blue nor yellow but the color of the wall. Pinkish, like the real Kiran, though she was no longer sure.

Jumanah steps back—perhaps she will see better from a different angle—and notices a pine needle has caught in her toe ring. Bothered by this, she tries to pull it away. A thought comes to her, a thought-image, blurry yet insistent as an earache. It is of toe rings on a row of bloated toes. She remembers that it worried her. How would her mother get the rings off when the toes swelled like teats? Overcome with a terrible fear that her own toes will be squashed inside these circles of bells, she begins to pull them off.

Delighted, her brother pulls her toes, pulling so hard it hurts, and she wishes she could explain to him why she is afraid, but she cannot. He kisses her only when the tears fall, calling each drop a jumanah, a silver pearl. When she has shed several dozen pearls, she grows mesmerized by how quickly each disappears. Soon, she forgets the reason she cried in the first place and the tears stop falling. There is nothing to hold her attention. They go back to talking.

They decide to mimic their mother and dead grandmother. They make their own offerings, chant their own prayers, drink their own brandy, smoke their own leaves. Younis smacks his pockets, finds the matchbox again, and lights a pretend branch because this is better than going outside to get a real one. And they play pretend vision.

“Say, ‘I see evil’,” says Younis.

“I see evil,” says Jumanah.

“Do not despair, my child!” cries Younis.

Jumanah laughs.

“Do this and say ‘I want more sugar!’“ cries Younis.

Jumanah snaps her fingers. “I want more sugar!”

And with this signal the game has changed. They are mimicking the men who have bothered them all year.

Younis dons a belt that is in fact a drawstring, sticks bullet-stones inside, carries a pine cone beard at his chin, swishes as he walks. “Who am I?”

When Jumanah smiles at him with pearly teeth, he leaves the stage to whisper quickly in her ear.