Now I interrupted him. “Isn’t that where Kiran’s family’s from?”

“They’re not from anywhere. They’re nomads. But, yes, they make a winter home near Balakot, near Syed Ahmad Barelvi’s shrine, where his devotees are setting up training camps. Men from the camps harass the villagers, trying to recruit their sons.” He paused. “It isn’t safe.” He threw up his hands. For Irfan, this was akin to smashing a chair. “The Karachi bomber and his accomplice are just a pretext for both sides, the militants and the government.” He paused again. “Don’t you understand? We carry a heavy responsibility, traveling with them.” He nudged his chin in the direction of the wall between our cabin and theirs.

“She wants to return,” I stated flatly, while he stared at me in disbelief.

“We’ll need an armed escort,” he said at last.

I shrugged.

“This isn’t what we’d planned.”

“I know.”

“Something happens to them, international fiasco.”

“I know.”

“Something happens to us, so what.”

“I know.”

Never was a wind between teeth more exasperated.


I walked alone in the valley, aware of being shadowed, hearing whispers before they were spoken, ducking stares before they were launched. Twice I tripped over myself when a green shalwar slid along a wall. Once I saw her chubby toes, a brown stalk caught in a toe ring. I heard her bangles. I heard the goat bells too. I clicked my camera. Nothing. At least the owls on the headstones were there, in my viewfinder, as proof. Proof of what? Perhaps only this: they existed. Ergo, I couldn’t be losing my mind. Or: they existed. Ergo, so did the green shalwar and the toe ring. Ergo, I was losing my mind.

At night I put a pillow over my head, and mostly lay awake. I assumed Farhana did too.

Irfan continued insisting a verdict had to be reached, and now Wes joined in too: were we to go on with our journey to the Northern Areas, or call it off? It was a decision Farhana and I had to make together. The problem was, we couldn’t be together. Even looking at her caused me pain. Once or twice, we snapped at each other—I said I’m not hungry! I said I don’t know if I want to stay or leave! — before withdrawing swiftly into our separate gloom. This was the only way to scrape off the pain. Snarling and retreating. It left us momentarily relieved, until we discovered ourselves erupting in a rash of rawness, followed by more pain, and the desire to scratch with increasing malice.

Many times, I asked myself, What is the pain? The pain of losing the girl, losing face, or — losing Farhana?


And then one night we did not retreat.

I’d come back to the cabin after taking the bus to Balakot to see Maryam. I learned through Irfan that the herders took their cattle to the forest nearby, to graze. I had no other plan besides walking into the forest to find her. I rode all the way there and all the way back without getting off the bus. Terrified of seeing her, I did it a second time. I rode all the way and back, my legs again refusing to move. It was cold and I was hungry. When I finally staggered back to the cabin, I tried to recall the poetry the darkness had evoked for me the night before we set out for the lake. I returned to the river, looking for the moon, and even a damn bird. Instead, I was almost attacked by dogs. I threw pebbles at canines all the way to the cabin. I knocked my toe against something. A carcass, a gun. I opened the door. Farhana was sprawled on the bed, naked from the hip down. Her face was turned away from the door. She wasn’t breathing. She’d taken her own life! I rushed forward. She raised her left foot to scratch a mosquito bite on her right calf. The gesture enraged me. I’d thought her dead while all she did was rest! And what if someone else had walked into the cabin instead? It wasn’t even locked!

And so it started, a himalaya of rage, our bodies exhausted with the effort of holding it back, stone by excruciating stone. I don’t know exactly how it began. I don’t know who said what, or in what sequence. But I do remember watching her lie there — I remember her legs and how, in the midst of my outrage, they triggered a memory, a happy memory, an extraordinarily happy memory — since when did fury come layered in honey? — and the next thing I know, I was saying:

“And do you really want me to say this. Do you really want me to say it? You were the one who started coming on to me!”

“Oh, so I’m not supposed to speak, while you can slobber over me any time you want!”

“When have I ever slobbered over you?”

“Ha!” She leaped off the bed. “At least I was nice to her. You didn’t even talk to her. You acted like she wasn’t even there!”

“Nice to her? Nice? Forcing her into the boat was nice?”

“She wanted to.”

“Are you blind? Didn’t you notice the way she sat in the boat? She hated it! She even said so! And didn’t you notice her poor mother? Do you even know her name?”

“What has that got to do with it?”

“Everything! It has everything to do with it! You forced her mother. Maryam. That’s her name. You forced her.”

“Maryam. Thank you.”

“And you forced her daughter—”

“Kiran.”

“I was the one who said we should go back and drop her off.”

“Drop her off is exactly right. She was a burden. You make everyone feel they’re a burden.”

“Oh, don’t start.”

“Oh, why not?”

“Because this isn’t about you, Farhana. It’s about someone else. Someone dead.”

“It wasn’t even my idea to come here! It was yours. And that friend of yours!”

“You didn’t want to come to this valley but the girl did want to get in the boat?”

“That’s right!”

“Well, it was your idea to come to your country. Are you having a nice return?”

She threw all the pillows off the bed.

I left.

“It isn’t about you either,” she’d say, in the middle of the night. And I’d pretend not to hear.


The sun had still not risen when we were both out of bed and I was saying:

“It’s a question of finesse. Finesse! You do not barge into a place thinking you can fix it. Who are you? Who are you? What makes you think you can do that?”

She was sobbing. She was in the same shirt. I could still see her bush. “I didn’t barge in. And for the hundredth time, it was Irfan’s decision to come here. Neither of you deigned to even ask me.”

“Irfan made the decision for you, but you made the decision for the girl. Who were you to make that decision?”

“At least I asked! I asked her family!”

“They couldn’t refuse. You call that asking?”

“The girl wanted to come. She was just too shy to show it.”

“You’ll say anything to cover your guilt.”

“My guilt?”

“Everyone’s blaming me. In the market. Even outside the valley, in Mansehra. They call me the killer.”

“They probably do the same with me.”

“Probably? Probably?”

She blew her nose. “Everything would have been fine if you hadn’t turned the boat around so fast.”

“That’s right! You’re blameless!”

“We need to stop this.”

But now I could not stop, not with the crown of the avalanche about to drop.

“Did you even jump in the water?”

“Oh God! You look insane.”

“I need to know. You’re the better swimmer. I learned to swim in a pool in Karachi, for heaven’s sake. You learned in the sea. Did you jump in?”

“Yes.”

“When? How long did you wait after I’d jumped?”

She slumped heavily onto the edge of the bed, her back to me. She started sobbing again. “I had her in my arms.”

Six words that made the edge of the table where we’d had breakfast, all four of us, the morning of the accident, it was an accident, reel.

When I looked up, I was saying, “What do you mean, you had her in your arms?”

“Just that. I jumped, she clung to me. It was so fucking cold, Nadir. And she was heavy. She looked tiny. She wasn’t. Her will to live wasn’t tiny. It was huge. And it weighed a ton. She was pulling me down with her. Would you rather I hadn’t let go?”

I couldn’t understand what she was saying. Even if she had jumped, it would have been after me, and if I hadn’t even seen Kiran, how could Farhana have caught her? “How could you have had her in your arms?”

“You said yourself. I’m a better swimmer than you.”

“I jumped before you. If I didn’t find her, how did you?”

“Because, Nadir, you were swimming away from us.”

“I remember seeing fish. I remember how murky it was. But I don’t remember seeing her.”

“Did you not hear what I said? You were swimming away from us.”


The memory triggered by first seeing her sprawled across the bed, her thick muscular legs bare before me, was an extraordinarily happy one.

It was a memory from the honeymoon period after I was stabbed. It was a memory of her legs. Those steep legs, built by steepness. The slender ankles slanting up to her tennis ball calves. It had made my heart stop, that first time, when the slant was the braid across her back; it did the same the afternoon I shot those black and white photographs. How bright her muscles bulged, against our dark sheets, as we created our own Male and Female Figures in Motion.

Months later she lay across a bed in a cabin in Kaghan, and it was the sheets that bulged, her legs flat in shadow.