How long before I jumped in after her?

It must be that not even a second passed. Because I had no time to blink or even breathe after I heard the splash and the kick and the shriek that started as a piercing whistle but ended as a dull rattle; I heard it, again and again — how did I hear it, if I wasn’t in the water too? Was it coming from me?

Then I heard myself shout — and this time, I knew it was me—”It’s freezing!” And then time could not move fast enough. A fist curled around my spine and squeezed, a cold wet eel crushing my lungs, my limbs. My shoulders contorted, my muscles screamed, all of me convulsed. I could feel the feeling bleed from me as I became dead weight, plunging vertically to the bottom of the lake. When the pain in my legs returned, it was killing me. It will kill me. That damn eel was shooting electric currents deep into my veins.

“Kick!” I yelled, and this time I swallowed the lake.

“Kick!”

Surfacing at last, I spat into the air.

I moved rapidly now. I moved without thinking where I was going, all I knew was that I had to keep moving. When I looked around me, the boat was very far away. I could not see inside it. I did not know if Farhana had jumped or stayed. I could see no one in the water. I began to kick toward the boat.

No one. I shut my eyes and dived.

I opened my eyes and saw a downpour of silt. How did the water appear clear from above? How could it reflect us so sweetly when filthy inside? I surfaced. Blinked. Dived again. Again an avalanche of debris, falling softly all around, and then a fish — large, too large. I surfaced. “Farhana!” I dived again. I could now touch the bottom of the boat. I circled the boat. More fish. White, with yellow eyes. Orbiting me as I orbited them. We’d eaten trout every night since arriving in Kaghan but none had looked like this. Curious without a care. Their cold engagement ignited in me a panic of a familiar kind, unrelated to the likelihood of drowning. That was knowing what might be. The panic now creeping under my skin was the panic of not knowing. It was the panic of walking home in the dark with my jacket held out as a flag of peace to anyone, from anywhere.

I must have circled the boat four times before I heard a keening from above. I pressed my palm to the wood and for a moment, it was as if the boat were weeping. I could comfort her simply by placing my hands here, there. I could wrap myself around her, or, if her girth were too wide, I could receive her embrace of me. And so I did, as yet another form of panic seized me. This was the panic of knowing what might be. Now it was land that frightened me.

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.

Before Prayers

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?”