Uzma Khan - Thinner Than Skin

And what had he done instead?

The flowers in the box were the exact yellow shade of the butterfly, with the exact wingspan, and exact sheen. The man with the leather palms shut the lid of the box, and closed a half-fist around it. He extended both palms toward Ghafoor and Ghafoor cupped them in his.

I was feeling a little better.

As we prepared to leave, I found myself glancing frequently toward the tents. I noticed how shabby they were, each covered in a thin black sheet secured with sticks. The sheet flapped in the breeze and would surely leak in the rain.

Though I wanted another glimpse of the girl’s mother, I feared it. She was young, younger than me, probably younger than Farhana. She must have borne her first child — the curly-haired boy who brought us the honey — in her early teens. Her face. So fierce, so proud. I wanted to talk to her. What I’d say I didn’t know. But I’d developed an incapacity to do anything besides replay the angry glare she’d cast me twice, first when we headed to the lake with her daughter, then when I found the body first. It was absolutely the way I wanted to be looked at. Damn you. I wanted to hear it said in her voice.

Then I wanted her to like me.

Earlier today, after returning from the body to my tent, I looked for Irfan. I found him sleeping at the foothill where we’d lounged together while eating honey-dipped pears. He probably hadn’t been sleeping much, and it was still early, but I shook him awake. I told him he had to go to the family, tell them I was sorry. He shoved me; it was very close to a punch. “Forgiving you is the last thing on anyone’s mind, you fool.”

A fool is absolutely what I wanted to be called.

I couldn’t bear to look at Farhana. She couldn’t bear to look at me. We were settling into the more bearable rhythm of avoiding each other. We were packing our things. At last, after days of listless shock, we had something to do. We threw ourselves into folding away Irfan’s tent (“Let me do it,” she snatched, eyes averted), zipping up his two sleeping bags (“Then let me do this,” I pulled), ensuring the campsite was clean (both of us pacing, gathering imaginary peels and crumbs). Busywork, the mask of the socially impotent. Keep moving, away, except … where to?

We knew we had to head down the glacier back to our cabin to pack up from there and proceed — north or south? The question was growing fat. Many questions were growing even fatter. We waited for someone to make a decision, any decision, casting surreptitious glances at one another when we believed the other wasn’t looking.

One thing was clear: the shores of the lake had grown very small. Our delay had drawn the mountains closer. They loomed over us, warning that no matter where we went, they could follow. And the tribes were also scorning us, though less surreptitiously. Of course they wanted us to leave. But they wouldn’t say it, not to us, though I found out later that they’d said it to Irfan, and he’d had to ask them, much to his disgust, for time for me to heal. “As if you and Farhana hadn’t exploited their hospitality enough.”

Throughout our last day, as we packed — there was hardly anything to pack, but we kept the pace, the pace was key — Irfan met with Kiran’s father, and they talked in low, rapid tones. I couldn’t imagine what words Irfan could find. Green eyes, I thought. Eyes like enormous grapes. The mother’s billowing shirt, ferocious glare, meticulously braided hair. So young. The baby’s brown hand on the cold blue neck. She knew I hadn’t wanted her there, in the boat. Kola, she said, daring me to take an interest, to know that I was making her feel like the intruder.

Somehow I found the courage to join Irfan.

Kiran’s father tilted his head, now in a white turban, and folded his hands behind his back when he saw me. He had small brown eyes, a limp, and a gentle demeanor. He didn’t appear angry or fierce but entirely depleted.

They were also leaving. To bury Kiran down in the plains. They’d migrated to the upper Kaghan Valley with their cattle in April, intending to stay through the summer before returning to the lowlands, where those who’d chosen a more settled way of life cultivated maize, potatoes, and beans. This had been the way for centuries. Their cattle needed to graze in these hills before returning to the plains for the long, merciless winter. But they were cutting the season short to return Kiran to her less transient home, near Balakot, where she’d been born, perhaps like her father Suleiman, and mother Maryam, and both her siblings. It would mean the cattle would starve over winter, or, equally troubling, that they’d spend the remaining summer crossing into fenced-off fields, costing the family hefty fines and possibly even confiscation. But Kiran had to rest.

The rapid murmurs between Irfan and Suleiman involved money. Suleiman’s murmurs were lost to me, but there were more familiar sounds flowing from Irfan’s tongue than I’d bothered to hear till now. I caught Urdu mixed with the Hindko-Gujri hybrid he’d so effectively been using since our arrival, and even a little English, for instance, “crop” and “full enough.” My stomach clenched. Had Kiran understood Farhana and myself on the boat? She’d spent six summers here, around English-speaking visitors to the lake, like us. What had she heard? No, we’d spoken in code. She couldn’t have comprehended us, even if we’d been speaking her very own tongue.

Irfan was saying that there could never be full enough. He was a Muslim, and understood very well that money could never make up for what had been lost. God was watching, and knew that he would sooner go hungry than presume to suggest otherwise. But the fact was, the family was going to suffer even worse in the coming years if their cattle died, or were confiscated. They had two remaining children to feed.

I understood enough of Suleiman’s reply to know he was insisting God would guide them. He added that if needed, neighboring tribes were there to help. To which Irfan replied that the community was a wonderful source of strength, by the grace of Allah, but there was no harm in accepting help from him, Irfan, who was no stranger to this land. As Suleiman knew, from his many years here, Irfan honored and loved the valley and its people. (Irfan’s voice cracked.) To which Suleiman replied by spitting. To which Irfan turned to me, his face red with rage, “Have you no shame? Leave us.”

I wondered briefly why no one had crept into our tent the very first night, and killed either or both Farhana and me.

Her brother played the flute. Her sister dug in the dust with a stick, swaying her head from side to side. A boy from another tent joined them, lightly keeping beat on a tabla. He had only the left-hand drum. This was the boy drum, the bass. The right-hand drum — the girl, the one that dictates the melody — was missing. The heel of his left hand dug softly into the goatskin, cajoling, and the answer was deep and hollow, a swallowing, a sinking. A return to the water’s depths. The brother blew through the bamboo bansuri as if in a prayer, or a kiss. The sister swayed. It was such a plaintive song, of such astonishing sweetness and hope and lasting farewell, that I bowed my head and wept.

There were tourists up here again, white-skinned and brown-skinned, filming.

On the glacier heading back down to our cabin, Irfan snarled, “If this had happened in America, you’d be in jail. If this had happened to the child of a landlord, you’d be in danger, and in debt.” So that’s why our lives had been spared: herders were disliked in this valley. They were considered outcasts. And now, so were we.

I scarcely noticed Wes and Farhana trudging ahead, or the jeeps skating by, or whether the bus that had fallen into the ravine the day before we made our way up had been removed. I noticed broken Coca-Cola bottles, biscuit wrappers, plastic bottle caps.

I didn’t ask how the conversation between Suleiman and Irfan had ended. I didn’t ask if money had been accepted. Or if, when Suleiman spat, he’d spat at me, or about me. I also didn’t ask how damaging this entire sordid episode had been to Irfan’s relationship with the valley and the communities he’d spent so much time with, bringing clean water to their towns. The question he’d spent most of his working life asking himself—do they need it? — had now been answered more brutally than even he might have foreseen. Knowing Irfan, he’d be blaming himself. I dared not speak to him.

Delicate negotiations, I thought. Years and years of delicate negotiations, to build a bedrock of trust. How easily it was spoiled.

An anger began to constrict my lungs.

There was a nagging thought, yes, I could only admit it now, walking back through the gray slush, our footprints ugly in the morning ice. I had no humor for snail-turd imagery, as on my way up. This fury inside me, it was far blacker and thicker than a snail or its turd. It nagged and nagged, though I tried to rub it off like a line of dirt, to tell myself it was only the movement of ice beneath my feet. And then it became a yellow-eyed fish, and I sat on that fish, I said to go down to the bottom of the lake and never again look up at the sun, or rise to the surface, for a sliver of air. But again it appeared, now a mean little fox, racing through the thickest sands of the shiftiest dunes, and I said to never disturb that sand, never kick up soft murky clouds, or shed a hair of that thick, furry tail.

Still my instructions went unheeded! This time it was a seagull, bobbing on a crest of a great, wide ocean, friendly and gay. Follow me! It said, with a flap of its wings. And it happened again, and again, till I had nowhere to hide.