Thinner Than Skin (6 page)

We got off the train in Berkeley. Three blocks later, Farhana spotted her father at a window seat of a dark tavern not unlike the one where I worked. I thought I could recognize him from the time I saw him through the glass, approaching the front door. Was it to let me in or to yell at me? Both?

She was saying, “Dada’s death has made Baba even more unpredictable. You know the history between them, because of my mother. Still,” she swung her arm in mine (not a kiss, but it was something), “though he hasn’t been kind to other boyfriends, I just know he’s going to like you.”

And she was right. And it was mutual. At least at first. Our conversation bore no trace of the
So what does my daughter see in you
? assessment I’d been dreading. In fact, to Farhana’s dismay, we didn’t talk about her at all. At least at first.

“For heaven’s sake,” he said, sitting back down after shaking my hand, stretching spindly legs in baggy jeans, “don’t call me Mr. Rahim. Call me Niaz.” I could imagine him saying the same while easing into a chair with the same languorous grace (that had skipped Farhana) in mid-seventies Karachi, outside one of the tea shops in the Saddar area that teemed with poets and revolutionaries. Thirty years later, he still had the air of a Saddar hippie. In fact, he still had the same jeans. They drooped around his waist, the belt tied ludicrously loose, forcing him to yank them up each time he moved. It made him look both comical and vulnerable. Maybe this was why women left their husbands for him.

Somehow it was perfect that the beer he was drinking was called Moose Drool. And that he had a cup of cappuccino next to it. We ordered coffee.

He looked at me. “So, where have you been hiding all this time?”

I looked at Farhana.

“You know how hard he works,” she replied.

“I’m unpredictable,” I added. Under the table, Farhana pinched my knee.

He finished his beer, smiling her smile. She asked after his health. Apparently, he had diabetes. He ordered a second beer. They quibbled about his diet. (He also ordered fries.) He didn’t look diabetic at all. He had the body of a young and lean rapper, a Lil Wayne lookalike, while his face was that of an exceptionally gaunt Kris Kristofferson. I was startled when I put his two halves together and came up with Jesus Christ. So startled that when he asked me a question, I nodded without hearing it.

When the second beer arrived Farhana pushed it toward me. I glanced at her as if to say, Why aren’t you having it? She ignored me.

He chewed the end of a pipe while his cappuccino got cold. “So, what are they?”

“Sorry, what?” I asked, embarrassed.

He frowned. “I asked if there are religious reasons for your father’s dislike of your work.”

I shot a glance at Farhana. She had an irritating habit of telling the world that my work was a touchy topic. Of course the world wants to touch that.

I cleared my throat. “I never thought of it that way.”

“He must have assumed you would. A good son should think about why the Prophet forbade images of himself, and forbade figurative art in general, no?”

I opened my mouth for no apparent reason.

He flashed me a toothy grin. “I was not a good son either.” He took a sip of his cappuccino. “Don’t they make hot drinks hot anymore?” He pushed the cup aside and reached for my—his—pint. “About which I couldn’t be happier. I photographed Farhana’s mother many times before she died. Before I knew she was dying.” He sucked on the unlit pipe in silence.

I shot another glance at Farhana. It hadn’t occurred to me that the photograph above her bed was taken by her father, nor had the irony struck me till now. She cherished the image, yet she wouldn’t let me cherish enough of hers.

Farhana moved the beer back toward me. “Let’s sit outside so Baba can smoke.” I chuckled inwardly. He could die of cancer but not diabetes. Carrying my coffee—which was, as usual, too strong—I left the second pint inside.

We settled around a small table on the sidewalk. There was no milk and I thought it might be rude to go back inside to get it myself. Why did Americans make coffee like mud and tea like rain? When I turned back to Mr. Rahim he was watching me over his pipe, now lit, and over a helix of fries.

He said, “My father never let me take any photos of him, you know. He said that you can reproduce an image, but you cannot reproduce a soul.”

“It’s so much warmer out here,” said Farhana, “than in the city.”

“You cannot reproduce a soul,” Mr. Rahim repeated. “Every picture tears the body from the soul. He saw paintings and photographs as theft, a way of owning and even destroying someone else.”

“Baba,” said Farhana, “don’t scare Nadir. He’s given enough flak for what he does.”

This astonished me. It was one thing to steer conversation away from her dead grandfather to protect her father, but another to use me as the pretext! I went back inside for the milk. When I stepped out again, it was her father who tried to defuse the pressure building in my chest. “I think he’s less annoyed with me and more with you for thinking him so easily scared.”

She smiled at him. “Do you want another cappuccino?”

He tapped his cup. “Your smile is warming this one.”

Satisfied, she leaned across the table and kissed him.

He turned to me again. “Where was I? Yes. Maybe it was the time he spent in Malaya during the Second World War. Whatever the reason, my father had a fierce aversion to what he called the fascist eye. He was terrified of its power to replicate an imagination that could not resist it. He bemoaned it, right until his death, the way the Third World is seen by the First World that makes up these terms. What he called
ghoorna
. Their gaze. On us.”

I was startled by the intensity of Mr. Rahim’s gaze, on me.

“Should we go for a walk?” said Farhana.

“He said the public gaze acted no differently from a camera,” continued Mr. Rahim. “For him, even the act of seeing became a theft. Even a murder.”

“Baba,” whispered Farhana. “Don’t go into all that now.”

He stood up, went inside, came out with a pint half-consumed and resumed talking as if there’d been no interruption. “He had seen the gaze in the way the British looked at women in his village, with both desire and disdain, as if it was beneath them to desire
blacks
, as if this justified deepening the gaze. He saw it again when deployed in Malaya, in the way the Japanese regarded local women. When he returned from the war, he returned to an India on the verge of independence and partition, but because his friends had scorned him for fighting for the British, he felt himself under
their
gaze. He returned both decorated and humiliated. He died a complete hermit.”

Farhana asked for the bill.

“But isn’t it ironic?” Her father sat on the edge of his seat, shirt collar pulled to one side, clavicle jutting like a bluff. “He grew so paranoid about the public gaze that he enforced strict purdah, both on himself and his wife, obsessed not with seeing but how we are seen, saving his morality—and that of his family’s—to the point where there was hardly any
spirit
left to save.”

“But you are so spirited!” She curled her fingers around his.

He threw back the pint. “You tell me, was he resisting tyranny or yielding to it?”

I shifted, an intruder in a private conversation between a father and a daughter; no, between a son and a spirit.

Farhana tapped his hand. “Please stop, Baba. You’re meeting Nadir for the first time.”

He regarded her the way he must have regarded her when she was born, and his eyes grew misty. “But I already know him! Why have you told him nothing about me?”

“But he knows everything!” She played along. “Don’t you?” They both looked at me. I looked at the sidewalk.

“Then he knows that you are nothing like me, and everything like your mother. I thank God for that every day!” Now his eyes danced with mischief as he looked from Farhana to me. “At least Farhana is not married.”

I choked on my coffee.

She examined the bill.

His eyes stopped dancing. There it was at last: his assessment of me.

He paid the bill and stood up to leave. “You must show me your photographs some time.” He pulled up his jeans.

I also stood up. “It was wonderful to meet you.” The farewell sounded as stale as his interest in my work.

“Well, I’m glad Farhana is not hiding you from me anymore. The next time we meet, it should be at my house.” This, with more gusto. He had deep vertical worry lines between his brows; they seemed to grow deeper as his face brightened.

“I’d like that.” I shook his hand more vigorously.

He walked away as abruptly as his moods had changed.

Once assured that he would not turn around again, Farhana flung her arm into mine. “Okay, so he was more unpredictable than ever.”

“I like him.” It was all I could think to say.

“Who wouldn’t?” She smiled.

I could imagine a lot of people not liking him, but decided not to say so. We started walking back to the station. “So, you’ve told me everything about him, huh?”

“Well, all the juicy parts. My parents were very in love.”

At least Farhana is not married
.

“What are you thinking?” She looked at me.

“What happened in Malaya?”

She frowned. “I don’t know much.”

“What do you know?”

“Only what Baba told me once, in a fit of despair, after my mother died. Whenever he’s upset, he thinks of his father. Or is it the other way around? Anyway, do you really want to know?”

“Of course.” A curl had caught in her mouth. I pulled it free with my fingers.

“It was soon after my grandfather was sent to the peninsula. A group of Indians and Malayans pointed him to a bombsite littered with reams of photographs of local Chinese women, as Japanese soldiers—many still in boots and belts—raped them. Before the war, Dada had already considered life imagery to be prohibited. These photographs haunted him till his death. The entire village had seen them. In fact, there were those who pointed out the photographs to Indian soldiers the way they’d pointed out the girls to Japanese soldiers. They called them, ‘Cheeni! Cheeni!’ They deliberately left them there, in the open, for all eyes to devour what little was left of the
Cheenis
.”

“They could have been left for other reasons.”

“Such as?”

“To inform.” I shrugged. “Elicit outrage.”

She shook her head. “No one had any idea what happened to the girls and no one cared. Baba said it was this episode that led to Dada’s becoming a recluse later in life—this, and his unpopularity with his friends for fighting for the British. It was as if Dada felt that he too was trapped in those photos. He believed himself to be in the power of everyone who’d picked one up, whether accidentally or deliberately, indifferently or greedily. Sooner or later, every single person who’d ever entered the village became complicit in the crime. Maybe identifying with the victims was a way of feeling less complicit.”

“That is a horrific story,” I whispered.

She nodded. We rode the train in silence, arms entwined.

Back in San Francisco, the fog had cleared and the day was surprisingly warm. I was learning that October was spring in the Bay. “Seems we’re the only ones not jogging, or walking a dog,” I said idly.

She turned to me. “Nadir, I don’t dismiss what you do. You only think I do. I just wish, well, that you were equally happy with me as when you’re alone, at night, running, without your camera.”

“I
am
.”

“What’s the north of Pakistan like?”

My stomach clenched.
Here it comes
. “It’s—isolated. Isolating. Cleansing. I don’t know how to explain. People who live there have names for what we don’t. But—you find your own.”

She did something like a hop before swiveling to face me, walking backward on the pavement as I moved forward, keeping step with me, barely avoiding a streetlamp, her pace growing in speed as she pronounced, “Oh Nadir, I can arrange for us to go!”

“What do you mean?”

“We’ve applied for funding. We’ll get it.”

“We?”

“Wesley. You’ll meet him. A comparative study of glaciers in northern Pakistan and northern California. Call it a fact-finding mission, to see if I
can
work in my country!”

“You will get it, or—already have?”

She soared into my arms, flinging us side to side, before presenting the route she believed we ought to take. We’d fly from Karachi to Rawalpindi, then, depending on the weather, take either a bus or plane to Gilgit. From Gilgit we’d take a bus to Hunza, from where the two glaciers that would best fit the requirements of her preliminary study were easily accessible. These were Batura Glacier and Ultar Glacier. Did I know of them? Of course. Did I know how dangerous they could be? Of course. Did I need to practice climbing around here, first? I shot her a look. She brought that man called Wesley into the conversation too. They’d apparently worked together on Whitney Glacier on Mount Shasta, where they collected and “dated” ice samples. Did I care how? No, I did not.

Naturally, throughout this monologue, there was no mention of Kaghan Valley.

Later that night, back in my apartment, she let me photograph her naked for once, torquing her spine to artificially recreate the image I first fell in love with.

“Why?” I asked. “Why today?”

She peeled off her sweater, shirt, bra, still delirious with the joy of having skillfully engineered her
return
. And all this time I’d believed she was waiting for me to say yes. There was never any consent involved. We were going.

“Why today?” I insisted.

She giggled. It was as if she were drunk and wanting to have sex with me after refusing when sober. It was her choice, yet I was having to make it.

“Come on, Nadir. Pick up your camera. I know you’re dying to.”

“Actually, I’m not.”

“Sure about that?”

I hesitated. To say yes would mean choosing no. I picked up my camera.

I didn’t enjoy it. In those moments, I didn’t want Farhana, neither behind my lens nor in the flesh. Even when she wound her braid around her, I couldn’t see the calla lily. It was all too conscious, too rehearsed. Hadn’t she planned it all—the visit to her father, the walk home, the seemingly innocent question about northern Pakistan, the news,
the news
, and now this? And yet, and yet. As I put her through my lens and captured that twisting torso, her ribs so protruding tonight, a thought flickered in my mind. Was it her pleasure that was dulling mine? I shook the thought away. No, this jeannie was just
fine
out of the bottle (even if she bent so far out of the bottle surely her spine would crack). I snapped another dozen shots. No, that wasn’t it. It wasn’t even pleasure. More like victory. I could see it in her gaze. It had killed the wonder this moment was always meant to hold. As she adjusted her hips and I kept on snapping, I tried to conjure it up, this wonder, this thing which cannot always be there, which is entirely fleeting and numinous, which, like luck, or talent, or wealth, cannot be equally distributed between
those who love, between those who mate.
Snap!
She was raising her chin so high. She was rising from the bed. She was turning off all the lights.