Uzma Khan - Thinner Than Skin

By her second year, Kiran had also witnessed the pain of birth and the way a mare will cry if her foal is born still. She was too young to understand the bitterness of age, but not too young to note that bitterness could immobilize two legs and four. Soon after the mare Namasha lost her foal, she gave birth to her second and only living filly, but at a price. She lost the steed that sired it. Early one morning, he dropped his dung high up a glacier and descended at a run, straight into a barbed wire fence. Before they could ask him why, he was dead. Maryam pressed the puncture wound with her palm while Kiran watched, dry-eyed and trembling, the blood running down her arms. She touched the wound without applying pressure to it, as though knowing the bleeding would never stop. Afterward, Namasha only took food from Kiran. At Maryam she snarled and she kicked. It took two years before the mare forgave her, and by then Kiran had learned that forgiveness was thinner than skin.

This year, death had again showed himself in the sun. Their first morning on the move, soon after they unloaded their bags off the animals and while the rest of the dera was pitching the tents, Maryam’s eldest brother-in-law stretched his arms and simply fell, right there in the middle of his flock, at Kiran’s feet. Kiran waited a long time before delivering the news: Baro bai was dead.

It was part of life. The endless roaming, loading, unloading. The bodies that folded, the spirits that fled, when you traveled by caravan, in groups of families bound together by the intimacies of gaiety and grief. The dera of Maryam’s brother-in-law was not the most popular in the tol; there had been opposition to the price at which he sold his butter and milk, down in the plains. But once they left the plains, these disagreements became petty. It always happened this way each year, during the migration. The higher up they moved, the more the spirit was cleansed. The children played drums and the women sang. The men told stories and the horses stretched their wings. Even Baro bai’s death became occasion for renewal. After burying him by a stream, they spent the rest of their month-long trek sharing stories of his youth. This was a death you lived with. It was not a death that made you stop. Stopping was not an option.

Which was why you had to have the necessary kind of death behind you to carry the other kind. You had to have the years. Otherwise you might halt, and then you really were dead.

The baby did not have years. The mother did not have years. And, from the looks of him, the killer did not have years either.

As she watched him move away, she remembered her mother say that none were more cursed than those destined to watch in silence. There was no deeper hell than a pair of eyes without a voice. And she would say that a broken heart should never grow cold. It was the cruelest of burdens. Not even God would carry it. She had experience with this, having asked Him numerous times to carry hers. He always refused. He was not about to carry any other. And so, her mother said, while you cannot stop a heart from breaking, you can keep the pieces warm. Of course, she never told her how.

Now Maryam found that her heart had not merely broken, or even grown cold. It had simply stopped. It was dead weight that only grew heavier as she moved closer to Kiran lying there in the sand, unmoving, without shedding blood, without a trail of shiny guts, without even a droopy fly. This time, it seemed, death had not wanted to find Kiran at all.

She had pleaded with her husband. How could he let Kiran get in the boat with strangers? Kiran was afraid of water. Did he not see the fear on his own daughter’s face?

He replied, coldly, “I am lame, not blind. You know we cannot refuse them. They are guests. Remember where you come from.”

Cannot refuse them, even our daughter?

“It is just for a short while, Maryam.” And now his voice softened. He was like her father in this way, when he called her by name it was never without tenderness.

“And them?” she ventured. “Where do they come from? Is it a place where a child is pulled from her family for amusement?”

His voice curdled. “You were always fond of drama. Kiran will be fine.”

Kiran will be fine.

For the hour Kiran was in the boat, what did her husband do? He sat with the men of their tribe, debating the trouble in the valley. Down where their homestead lay, things had changed. There were military convoys looking for a killer. There were spies. There were accomplices. But there were no eyes, not up here, not for a girl afraid. And there were no ears, not up here, not for the bangles that called. Only Maryam could hear them, while sitting by the open hearth on the shores of the lake, her baby Jumanah beating a tune on the kangri firepot — perhaps she heard them too — in a circle made of copper bowls. They were calling her, but all she could do was listen. Eventually, she could neither see the boat nor hear the bangles. All she could do was nothing. Perhaps in that hour her heart had already begun to stop.

The night the boat returned without Kiran, she slipped out of her husband’s tent. There was a blue tent in the distance, neither sagging nor leaky, like her own, and inside lay the girl who walked like a goat and the man who had no tongue. The two killers. Her husband was asleep. She crept under the moon and over the hills, to her cave.

She did the same the next night. She saw their tent. She ran to her cave. She might have cried freely there, but preferred, instead, to scream and curse. She would leave no more offerings to a goddess that gave her misgivings but no signs. At least none she could read. How many times had she fought with her husband to keep their ancient rituals alive, even as others called her a pagan wife? How many risks had she taken by protecting the shrine down in the plains, a shrine that did not lead all the way to Tashkent, nor encase her like a womb, nor hold the dreams of the dead in the drawings on the wall, but that was dark and lifeless and mean? Was this just payment for her devotion? She kicked the rice, and offered it. She spat on the feather — that meant he was coming — and kissed it. She cried to her mother — where are your footholds now, your doors? — and praised her.

The second night, her baby daughter Jumanah followed her out of their tent. Maryam carried her to the cave, and showed her the drawings, and cursed her luck.

Before dawn of the third morning, she was winding her way back to the lake, only to find him. The man with no tongue, committing a second murder. He would not even allow her the dignity of being the first to welcome her daughter back. He would not even abstain from the sacrilege of looking at Kiran without love, without history.

It was the baby who found a way to punish him. She placed her small hand on Kiran’s cold neck. The child and the child. Neither ready for death. Maryam held his gaze, the killer’s, the one who had stolen their youth. He retreated, tail between legs.

Watching him go, she remembered the legendary Maryam Zamani, who willed a stone to retreat. And she thought of the man who once likened her to the legend, the one for whom Maryam was not just Maryam, the one who had come to her, at first, like a prophet. A color filled her eyes. Blue. Kiran’s favorite shade. She had tried to braid Kiran’s hair with a blue thread once, a cluster of braids raining down her back, all gathered in blue. She had almost succeeded. Blue for the still neck lying on the shore. Blue for the feather from a kingfisher’s tail. She was sure Kiran would fly now, with her grandmother, and all the spirits from the plains, and from these mountains, and from the steppe beyond a dark sea, from where they had come, two, maybe three thousand years ago. And as the blue filled her eyes she told herself: He will fix this. Ghafoor is on his way.

She kept her gaze on the killer’s legs, the way they buckled as he hunkered back toward his tent. She watched for so long the baby began to fidget. But she did not cry. When Maryam finally tore her eyes away, she leaned into Kiran and kissed her brow, and stroked her cheek. She ran her hands over her wet clothes. Kiran’s shalwar was torn. From the fall or from a bite? Not a drop of blood, not a droopy fly. The child feared death less than she had feared water. She blew prayers over her cold flesh.

She picked her up. The dead were heavy, after only six years of life. So this was the weight that had permanently lodged itself in her chest. Very well, she would carry it. She adjusted Kiran in her arms till the cold chin of one pressed into the warm curve of the other and broken knees bunched against a heart that had stopped. She breathed in Kiran’s ear. “The sun is hot now, I’ll take you home.”

Beside Maryam, but several feet closer to the ground, Jumanah ran to keep up with her mother. For assistance, she clutched her sister’s bloating feet. She had once seen a man on a bicycle do the same. He held on to a racing bus as it carried him far and away. Now her mother was the bus, Kiran’s feet the two bicycle handles, and her own plump legs the wheels. She needed a third hand, really, to hold onto her mother the bus, but she could pedal faster. The air rushed around them as she heard her mother chant: He will fix this he will fix this he will fix this.

He sat in a café many miles north of the lake, in a town called Gilgit. He was taking his time appraising the two men from Xinjiang Province. He was a tradesman; he knew nothing was free. But the choice he faced now was different. The men did not have fingers and toes, at least not all of them. Studying their hands, he calculated the sum of their words.