Uzma Khan - Thinner Than Skin

“What does it mean?”

“Brown.”

“And Makheri?”

He glared at me. Eventually, he answered, “Naughty.”

“They are the names of Kiran’s goats.”

Irfan was heating them again, long pebbles the shape of pears, and short round ones, so round I wanted to curl myself around them. They went from under his armpits to between his hands, as he juggled and squeezed, as though to soften them, like dough. He was an illusionist entwined in tricks. And in moods. As suddenly as it had begun, the magic act came to a halt, and the softness of his movements was lost. He clenched his fists, pressing furiously to heat those nuggets for me. So angry! So kind! “You’re my friend,” I choked, and he grunted, securing them roughly against my nuts.

I slept deeply this time. If I had dreams, I don’t remember. When I awoke I was lying in a hollow of sound that began in the dark sleeve of some other sleep, from a time before my own. It grew louder, rippling rapidly toward me through that sleeve, till I recognized the echo as a voice, and I knew it was Farhana’s. Except, flatter than hers. She wasn’t speaking so much as reciting, from a letter inscribed on a treasure, perhaps, dug out from somewhere in the hollow. I imagined her shaking out the dust, shining a flashlight, murmuring words in a language I couldn’t understand. Exhausted from trying to decipher her meaning, I went back to sleep.

It happened again. Some time in the middle of the night — or day, the same one? I didn’t know — I heard Farhana beside me. I couldn’t tell if she knew I was listening. I couldn’t tell if she cared. Her voice was unusually melodious this time, yet somehow, still flat. I felt she was speaking to a third person in the tent. Calling to them, giving a testimony of sorts, on whatever she’d unearthed earlier — I briefly pictured her holding an Asokan rock edict — as though speaking into a tape recorder at a police station. Was she dreaming? Sleeptalking? I glanced around me quickly: no one else. Perhaps she herself was the third person. I didn’t look at her. I didn’t want her to look back with eyes open, or shut. I lay still in our tent. The longer she spoke, the more my blood chilled again — where was Irfan with his beautiful stones! — surely it was the voice of delirium.

“And I dream of my mother when I am scared …”

Well, I thought, so do I. We were having the same dreams!

“You could say she is the closest thing I have to God. It is her image that hovers over me as I try to sleep, her image freed from the frame above my bed. It lifts into the sky like a puffy white cloud, blowing cool air down on me. She would do that. I was young but I remember. She learned it from her time here. You don’t just pray for someone, you pray on them. You blow the prayer into their pores, till it reaches their soul. Breath for breath. That is how you love someone. With your breath. Baba said she never truly became a Muslim, except on nights when she would wish something for me — Dear God, please let my daughter have a mother at my age! — and blow it over me.”

I woke up early. This time I was sure it was morning by the way the light filtered through the blue weave of the tent, giving our sleeping bags a thin yellow edge, making the woman next to me identifiable again. My throat was drier than the stones at my side but my temperature was normal. I knew I was the only one awake. I also knew that the lake was resting, even asleep. The tide had turned.

I took my bag. I stepped outside. The nomads rose very early, to pray. They might already be awake, waiting for the sun to break behind Malika Parbat. I looked over my shoulder but she was in darkness. A spray of stars winked in her place and thin wisps of cloud smeared the violet sky. Clouds in the shape of runners and acrobats. Fairies trailing princes. Jinns trailing fairies. Lovers on ice.

I walked to the water’s edge knowing what I would find.

I took my time, my bare feet just outside the lake. Even when the water lapped tenderly at my toes, I was quick to step away. I told myself I avoided contact with the bone-chilling lake out of consideration for Irfan. If my temperature dropped again, he’d sooner smash my head with rocks than warm them. And then he’d be a murderer.

The bundle was in a semi-fetal position, on the northeast shore. It must have washed up as I approached; we arrived at the same time. It lay between the two mountains, at their feet. I couldn’t reach it without passing the tents, which I did, as silently as I could. Two dogs shook themselves awake, one tiptoeing out toward me. Thankfully, it was tethered, though I needn’t have worried. It didn’t even bark. The other lay still, one ear slightly cocked. Of more concern was a horse, dark red in color, and with ferocious eyes, who bared its teeth at me and began to neigh. A smaller horse skipped forward and bucked and kicked the sand. It circled me and bucked again. The third time, it nearly kicked my shin. I kept walking. I was getting closer.

My head was as clear as the air, and with clarity comes coldness. Before sitting beside her I noted the beach was wet. I gathered a bouquet of pine needles and small stones and made myself a cushion of these. The sun would light the west shore before it would touch this spot. She’d washed up on the darkest corner of the lake. I wouldn’t be able to see her face till after prayers.

And so I sat, beside her, listening to the azaan float in from the hills. I must have been too unconscious to notice any call to prayer until now. Though faint, this morning’s call echoed clearly over the lake and across the valley. Within moments, a second and a third call joined in the chorus, each swooping past the other at a different speed, racing through stairwells of air currents, a whole family of owls.

Slowly, Queen of the Mountains’ face began to appear in the water.

I detected the first signs of activity from the tents. I heard pots clanging, water flowing. I saw the dogs scratch themselves. I heard goat bells and buffalo bells and a long, drawn-out low, as soulful as a call to prayer. It was answered by a series of lows and soon the valley was ringing with a second azaan. The tent where I’d slept, on the southwest shore, lay completely still. I had no idea where Irfan and Wes had been sleeping.

The sun crept further along the lake. I could still see fairies in the clouds; I could see peaks and hollows. I did not glance at the body again till I was sure I could see it. I stood up, shook my legs, walked along the shore again. Irfan had said that lakes as cold and deep as this seldom gave up their victims. Without a strong current, it could take weeks. So the current that had cursed us was now a blessing.

I walked east, away from the body, farther than expected; my legs have a habit of taking me away. Perhaps it was this that alerted Kiran’s mother to my presence here. Or that nasty horse and the foal, both of whom would continue bucking and braying all day.

When I turned back I saw a shadow in the sand crisscrossing my own. Gradually, I saw the woman not the shadow, a child in her arms. I remembered she’d held a child that day too. I hesitated. She’d been watching me. I’d heard no footsteps, no clothes rustle, no bangles chime, nor even a cry, not even from the child. For all I knew, they’d been there all along. Should I pull away, return to my tent? She walked with the same sure stride as she always walked; she wore the same black shirt. The child climbed out of her arms and ran toward the body and the woman barely stopped. Nor did she accelerate. Why had she brought the child? Of what use was it for a toddler to see a dead sister?

The little girl had curls like her brother and father. Her plump legs were squeezed into a yellow pajama torn below one knee. Her frock was dark green and embellished in festive gold embroidery. She cocked her head toward Kiran, now fully in the sun. The dead face was marbled bright pink and gray; the neck was darker. The ice water had washed away the stains from her cheek. The eyes glistened, as though alive. The little girl folded onto her knees, tucking her small feet beneath her. A small brown hand reached for a cold blue neck. The living hand stayed there, at the bathed neck, brown on blue, and the girl did not cry. She gazed at death with a sadness as deep and liquid as the lake, a sadness from which, her dark wide eyes said, she was going to have to learn to surface.

That is what her mother wanted me to see.

Before she had seen twelve full moons, Kiran saw her first disemboweled goat. It lay in a pasture they had stopped in for just that night, for it was full with the tents of nomads from the west, and unsafe. In the morning, the goat’s entrails lay splattered in the green, her juices mixing with those of the wet earth, the flies thick and droopy. It might have been a wolf. It might have been a man. Kiran sat on her haunches, lost in study. The goat’s skin was peeled back, like a shawl, and the sun lit the sheen underneath. Perhaps it was this that left her thunderstruck. The sun, with which they prayed and sang, could cause a hurt to turn shiny before your eyes. Or perhaps it was the frailness of the hide. In later years, she would ask Maryam if her skin was as thin as a goat’s. And Maryam would tell her the truth. It was thinner. Which meant, of course, that if a goat could be shred that easily, so could a woman.

She would also tell Kiran that, like herself, she would have to grow a second skin to protect the thin one that was eventually left to the sun and the earth, the wind and the flies. This second skin lay beneath the frailer one, not on top. It had to be kept hidden in order to work. But all this she would tell Kiran later. That year, Kiran’s first in the world, she measured the distance between life and death as lying between Kiran’s finger and the goat’s shiny entrails. Then she pulled Kiran away and shrugged, telling herself that Gujjar children were no strangers to death, and this was only the first of many Kiran would have to know. She was right, of course. If that spring death found Kiran in the skin of a goat, by autumn, before they returned to the plains, it would find her again, this time, in the eyes of a buffalo. During the long winter months in the homestead, death would become resident, taking her cousin’s pony, and her grandmother. Wherever they went, it followed them. Death was a wind. He was a gypsy.