Uzma Khan - Thinner Than Skin

But I smelled soap on him. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d showered.

He checked his cell phone then switched off the lamp on his side of the bed. “We should avoid Kohistan and head northeast, with an armed escort. Everyone is being checked, and I’m not even sure who they’re checking for. You’ve been so busy with your private battle I don’t know if you’ve even noticed the nervousness of people here.”

He was repeating himself. I let him.

“They don’t know who’s who, spies or militants,” he jabbered on. “And who’s working for who — America, Pakistan, or India. Or someone else we don’t even suspect.”

“You seem more nervous than anyone else,” I said. Spies or militants, murderers or lovers, what difference did it make?

“You know Wes called his boss to say his work was delayed because there’d been a bomb blast? He was right. You and Farhana were generating that much smoke.”

I had to laugh at that.

After a while, I said, “I need to ask you something.”

“I’m listening.”

“When you and the girl’s brother came to get us, was Farhana in our boat?”

“Of course.”

“Was she — wet. You know, as if she’d been in the lake?”

I could hear him turn in the dark. “She was shivering, yes. I didn’t look at her that closely. She had to be wrapped in blankets too, but I don’t think she fell in the lake. Her temperature didn’t drop like yours. Why?”

“Do you think she dived?”

“To look for the girl? What would have been the point? She could never have saved her. Now, if I’d been on your boat.”

I decided not to argue with him.

He reached over in the dark and scratched my head. “Sleep.”

He was taking my betrayal of him remarkably well.

“Tell me more about her,” I ventured.

“Who?”

“The girl. Her family.”

I heard him shift again. “No one knows where they came from. Even they can only agree with each other on three things. They were always wanderers. They were once horsemen. They are still considered outsiders.”

I listened to Irfan in the dark, grateful for the distraction. He spoke for a long time, uninterrupted, and after he fell asleep, I pulled on my jeans, laced up my shoes.

“Stay away from owls,” he mumbled into his pillow, as I shut the door behind me.

I walked repeating his words in my head.

Eventually, a few tribes had lost their horses and, to some extent, their wandering lifestyle, while others retained both. On four legs or two, Gujjars had always been pushed out of grazing grounds by those who came before or after. Yet they’d managed to keep grazing in this valley, and in parts of Kashmir. And somehow, through time and distance, they kept in intimate contact with each other.

I knew where my legs were carrying me. It would be my last night in Kaghan, perhaps ever. I believed myself prepared for the ghosts I’d find. My head was clear. I felt calm, the way I normally felt on my nightly walks, the way I hadn’t felt since the accident — no, I’d stop calling it that. I would call it a murder.

I reached the graves. There they were again, the ones engraved with owls, ducks, and horses. I shone my flashlight on the headstone that had caught my attention earlier, the one of three horses pulling a chariot, necks curved upward, toward the sky. Now I noticed others with chariot wheels, the wheels perhaps symbols of permanence, representing those tribes that had partially settled. And perhaps the ducks joined with floral wreaths represented the harmony between the different tribes, those who remained nomadic and those who became sedentary. No one had told me this; I was only guessing. But I did know that the two needed each other, those who moved and those who stayed. They formed a political system of co-tribes, together deciding on the limits of their pastures and forming ways of guarding against encroaching tribes, such as the Sawati Afghans, with whom the Gujjars of this valley had tense relations. The more stable group was the protector. The more nomadic group was the producer. And the two formed alliances through marriage.

Such as Maryam’s.

Irfan believed that Maryam’s family was from the protector group. They’d become laborers, merchants, and soldiers, with some migrating south to the cities, others to the town of Naran, perhaps like the jeweler at whose shop I’d been overcharged for topaz. In contrast, the family of Maryam’s husband, Suleiman, were the producers. They continued to roam the Kaghan Valley as grazers, with little engagement in the world of commerce or defense. And so, while his family kept hers fed, her family kept his alive.

“They have a private system of justice,” Irfan had said. “Nothing to do with the state. The state couldn’t care less about them.” After a few moments, he’d added, “They have no land, no nation. If you’d killed a child of the nation, well, you already know.”

I’d listened in the dark, the air in the cabin slowly diminishing.

“It’s her family, who are less low to the ground, that demanded compensation for Kiran’s death,” he’d continued. “His family are lowly herders. They asked for nothing.”

I hadn’t asked what the compensation was. It would doubtless involve money, putting me twice in Irfan’s debt. I still hadn’t returned my rent money.

Now I turned my attention back to the headstone with the three horses. I was not unaware of the presence at my back. I had heard footsteps. I had also heard whispers. I was not imagining it. I did not shine my flashlight behind me, but straight ahead, at the grave with the horses.

The arc of those necks arrested me. Three crescents on a rock, perfectly aligned. Together, they exposed to the world the most vulnerable part of themselves, inviting judgment. No, seeking it. It seemed to me, as I crouched in the dark, my hand shaking, the light-beam fading (why hadn’t I changed the battery?), that the owls on the headstones were the jury. In contrast, the ducks, carved in profile (unlike the owls, who stared full in your face) with wings beating impatiently, played the role of neutral spectators. Their indifference was not unkind; they might represent absolutely nothing other than the random strokes of a playful mind and a long-forgotten hand. Or else, if one had been placed there on purpose, in all his flapping, noiseless glory as he looked down the barrel of those arcing necks, sleek and defenseless, surely it was to serve as a gentle reminder of a need for mercy.

Maryam kept her back to him.

He was here, at last, the one who had left her a blue feather in her mountain shrine. The garlic breather and honey carrier. The one who once told her there was a land outside land, outside mountains, even. Now he was back, in her home in the plains, laden with stories, as when she was a child.

His voice was low and it was sweet. “You remember you used to ask from where the snow came? From where the river first flowed? You wanted to see the farthest away river, above the glaciers. And I would say this was asking to see heaven.”

He was waiting for a response but she kept her back to him. Sometimes it was desirable to put a mountain between yourself and someone else.

“Well,” he continued. “I have seen it. Heaven is in the steppe, where there live nomads like us, with names like ours, but with sounds added on, and, unlike us, they live free.”

“What sounds?”

“The ones you used to think were funny.”

She still did not turn to face him but she could never forget these oddities about him, from the signs to the jade — white jade did not bring calm, she would have to tell him now — to the flute, and his many attempts at changing his own name. Russifying, he called it. For instance, Rahman became Rakhmon or Rahminov or Rakhmanov.

“But you are not Rahman,” she would say.

“But I could be. And now I’m Rakhmanov.”

Another time he was Yousuf and his name was changed to Yusupov.

“Yusupov!” she giggled.

“Yusupov,” he repeated. “Of Yousuf.” He said they followed Islam, up in the steppe, where the Gujjars once came down from. But their alphabet had no “h.” So they did not say Mohammad.

“What do they say?”

“Mamedov. Or even, Mama.”

She was horrified and grew angry with him for taking the Prophet’s name in jest.

“But it’s the truth!”

So now he was spending more time up there, amongst a people without the letter h. From there he had come to her, with stories to chase away her fever dream and return her to this earth.

He said he had also been to a place called Leninabad and a place called Chinistan, where he made friends who gave him jade in return for leather. Better quality jade than he had traded for in the past — except that once. He cleared his throat, and she could feel his eyes at her back, searching for a way to find the stone around her neck. She said nothing. He started talking again. They drank mare’s milk and ate horse flesh, these new friends. He could drink the milk but not even taste the flesh of the animals so beloved to their tribe. He stuck to mutton and duck.

Maryam’s only idea of a duck was from the graves lining the road between Balakot and Naran. She did not want to think about graves.

He told her about flowers. She listened more closely.

“They have rare cloth, embroidered with flowers. This part of a flower. Look.”

He leaned over her reclining body, and dropped in her half-open fist a yellow flower. It was larger than her hand and he was pointing to its center, with his own hand, the hand from which she had once licked a honey tinged with garlic from his sweat. A hand darker than she remembered. The heart of the flower was the color of fire. From within the fire grew a cluster of silken threads, each tipped with a pale green bud. When she brushed the buds, she brushed his palm. A hundred pollen grains fell onto their flesh. Into the flower’s heart would dive a bee, she knew, for she had watched this happen many times, though never to a flower such as this. The bee would carry pollen on its fur, and from the pollen would come honey, and from the honey would come bliss.