Now, caressing the tooth with her fingers (it was slightly larger than the second tooth, smoother too), Maryam remembered the legend of Maryam Zamani, who could will a stone to cease obstructing her way. And she fingered the bangles, the ones she still heard chime, every day and every night, including in her sleep. They had been a sign — don’t let me go in the boat! — but she had not listened.
When Maryam eventually crawled outside her shrine, she found a second yellow flower waiting for her in the dirt, near the hole that served as entrance. The flower reminded her of a butterfly that had landed on her shoulder once, when she was a child. She had never seen the exact shade of yellow again, not till now. She did not know how to read this sign either. She twirled the stem till the heart of fire grew to the ends of the petals and the ends of her world. The day was too bright. She wanted to retreat into a mountain cave, into darkness lit by ancient markings. She wanted to carry this spiraling flame into the cool cover of her highland shrine, deep in the Karakoram’s womb.
Mixed in with the weight of grief was the weight of caution. In the months between their departure to the lake and their return to the lowlands, the world had tipped unsteadily. It was not a reliable unsteadiness, the kind that leads from pasture to plain, according to the season’s change. This motion had no rhythm. What it had was men in tanks and spies in plainclothes, all showing up at your door and demanding to be placated with the sugar you were saving for your children, or your guests, or a man who would leave you a sign in a cave.
And these men were different. They were not the kind who would shoot the guard dogs that warned the herders when a goat or lamb was being stolen. They were not the kind who would leave the dogs poisoned meat. They were not from the forest department either, those men who leashed the forest and then leased it. Men with a list of fines the length of a horse’s mane, and a list of felled trees the length of three times three. Nor were they the policemen who lived in the forest department’s pockets, nestling deeper into its silk linings each time the felled logs were tucked in the water wells of the Kunhar River’s banks. Nor even from the revenue department, demanding taxes for every new buffalo that came bleating into the world. No. These men were, at least at first, as alien to her as Australian sheep, and, from the looks of them, as stupid. They said a man was hiding in their valley. He was a killer, and he needed to be caught. If they sheltered him, they would be caught instead. They accused anyone of sheltering him.
But, she wanted to know, if these men knew who sheltered the killer, how come they did not know who he was?
They ripped through their homes, kicking pots and dishes and goats and children. Then they demanded food. Over the course of the past few days, while watching them eat, she came to question whether they were that different, these men. Perhaps they were all in each other’s pockets. The ones who tore down the old, old trees and poisoned the Gujjar dogs and fenced off the land and charged the moon for two stems of ginger and claimed a killer was hiding in their midst. Perhaps they were all exactly the same. Everything alive is in movement and everything that moves is alive. These men were unchanging. They were not alive.
While they ate, they kept on with their questions. Where was her son? He wasn’t with the cattle — where was he? It was no use telling them he was running an errand at the market or studying at the mosque because they would look for him there. And find him. And take him away. No. She kept her son far from these men and offered them more sugar, more yogurt, and more bread.
In the days since her return from the lake, it seemed she did not even have enough time to retreat into darkness to grieve. Her sorrow was swiftly turning to fear for her remaining children, her remaining land, and also, for that palpitation in her chest, warning her of her remaining love for Ghafoor.
The flower in her hand had no smell. The jade around her neck had heat.
Soon after securing that stone, Ghafoor had gotten into trouble. His tumultuous relationship with the forest officials was the stuff of legend, though it was not the kind of legend she only heard about. In fact, she never heard of it at all. It was a legend she had watched take shape for most of her youth, with her own eyes, yet it did not bear repeating, neither in a shop nor at the mouth of a cave nor on horseback on the way to a pasture. Nor was it the kind of legend you could pray to, in a secret shrine, nor the kind to name a child after. This legend was never celebrated or exchanged or put to music with a flute. It was never invited to a wedding or a birth or a funeral. It was left entirely alone, to grow as bitter as truth.
Though Maryam had watched it take shape, this legend, she sometimes lost its exact thread, whether it began with the time they were charged two hundred rupees for two stems of ginger, or the time the thirtieth water well was destroyed by a stash of felled logs, or the time the rain tore another secret stash from out of a nullah and into a bridge, smashing the bridge into pieces that were also lost in the swell. Or it might have been the time the stallion was skewered by a barbed wire fence so slyly concealed in the forest even an owl could not have seen it. Or the time a friend of his was murdered after filing a case against the timber mafia. (Those who killed him were never called killers, thought Maryam, still fingering the stone around her neck.) There were many other possible beginnings to the making of Ghafoor the Legend, though the nub of it was not open to debate: he had been told to leave the valley. His presence was a threat to the entire community. Worse than a threat; it had already resulted in several deaths.
So he left.
Before fleeing, he left her a crow feather, and then a red cloth. These signs she had learned to read.
How did he do it? She asked him once, on one of his rare returns, taken at high risk to himself, and to all of them. How did he find a way to leave his mark with her, no matter where he went? Often, when she needed him most. Often, before she even knew she needed him.
He had answered with stories. The Silk Road had for centuries transported not only goods, but also, voices. Had she heard the name of Genghis Khan, King of the Universe? Founder of the greatest nomadic empire ever known? She shook her head. He had said Silk Road in English, her first words in a tongue she would hear more of in later years with indifference, but at the time, indifference was not known to her. The words had conjured images of a road made of silvery mist, left behind by the trail of a fairy. The silver of her trail fell all the way to the snow-capped mountains and down to the forested plains, and, like a dream, it was never something you could — or should — actually touch.
But Ghafoor described the road differently. While she saw a shimmering in the clouds, he saw the march of Genghis Khan in the dirt. And he tried to make her see it his way. Genghis Khan marched into Bukhara in what is today Tajikistan, he said—names, Maryam, they always change, if you listen carefully, though she did not care about the names, she cared about their color, and whether they tasted as sweet as honey. Again he snapped his fingers. “Are you listening?” She would try to look as though she was. So he continued. After the Great Khan marched into Bukhara and burned 10,000 villages and slaughtered 30,000 villagers, he set about building like a mad man. He constructed thousands of caravanserais and tidied up the Silk Road—she saw fat hands plumping up a glistening haze — and made it into a safe highway, without bandits like him, and also, he built something else. She was asked to guess but she could not guess.
The world’s first postal service, Ghafoor answered with swank. No matter where Rahman or Rakhmanov, Yousuf or Yusupov, Karim or Karimov, Umar or Umarov would go, if she needed him, a message would be sent. When he told her this she smiled, despite his boastful manner (or because of it), remembering her mother’s names for each mountain that enclosed them. Look for windows. Don’t walk into walls. Apparently, Genghis Khan had thought the same. He had torn through them all, the Hindu Kush and the Pamirs, the Himalayas and the Karakorams, as if through mist, leaving behind a chain of whisperers and runners.
A red cloth meant he was going far away, and this was the last sign she received from him before Kiran’s birth. The second last was a crow feather, and this meant he was in trouble. She had not needed to ask what kind of trouble; by then he was a legend of the unsung kind. The shimmering blue feather he left before Kiran’s death had been the first sign in more years than she cared to count. And now there was no sugar to greet him with, thanks to the men who wanted to know if any enemies of the state were being sheltered in her home.
Maryam had kept the red cloth. The box with Kiran’s belongings was tied in it, because Kiran had gone far away. Before burying the box and the cloth in the shrine, she had prayed. May your skies be filled with skins that do not tear, stallions that do not bleed. May you live forever without hurt. Now she walked the distance between her shrine and the hut, shielding her eyes from the brightness of the day. She frowned. Was it a premonition of Kiran’s death that had brought him back, or something else?
What if the killer were really here? What if he did exist? What had he done that was worse than what the men tearing down their homes and forests still did?
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