Uzma Khan - Thinner Than Skin

It was after nine o’clock but the market was still crammed and I heard more languages spoken here than at an international airport. I learned that some of the people milling around had come from as far away as Andijan and Kashgar, either with bales of cloth, or with no clothes except the ones on their backs. The textile business had been thriving since the end of the Soviet Union; so had the business of war.

At one door, a sign read, Hitt Fabricks of Sentral Asia. The greatest hits included fabrics named after heroes and villains: Putin, Osama bin Laden, Tears of Shahrukh, Eyes of Ashwarya. My sister would drool, anticipating how women would whisper enviously at the next wedding, Did you see her in Osama?

I moved on. Here, as in Kaghan, a tale of occupation was a tale of names. So Gilgit was also Little Tibet and the Xinjiang Province was Turkestan, and almost everyone around me who wasn’t from here was fleeing occupation of some kind.

Outside a different shop, I noticed a cluster of men speaking a language I couldn’t identify, one of whom was definitely missing the fingers of his right hand. After the group left, two of them hobbling, I said to the shopkeeper, “They didn’t look like lepers.”

“Because they’re not,” he replied. “You should see their toes.” He said they were Uyghur refugees, fleeing a quite unique persecution by China: their hands and feet were hosed with ice water. I was reminded of our driver’s tales of the Eskimo Force, soldiers who were made to plunge their hands in the freezing Hunza River for hours, then wade through ice sheets without shoes. If for one it was torture, for the other, glory.

The men at the restaurant were a foreshadowing of the Gilgit I’d stepped into tonight. Where one group of men shared tales of Kashmiris tortured by Indian troops, another shared tales of Uzbeks fired upon by Uzbek troops. These mountains acted as walls, enclosing us in a lonely pocket where poverty was synonymous with diversity and conflict with hospitality. There was more than one dark-eyed Uyghur from China sipping tea with a blue-eyed Kazakh from Russia, whether at a restaurant, or in among a clutter of cheap chinaware, a mound of jade, or posters of Stallone.

Meanwhile, rumors of the man-and-his-double, Fareebi the shapeshifter, had traveled to these heights long before us. He was fleeing Pakistani torture cells, it was said, the cells with no names, where he would end up, eventually, in the hands of the Americans. But, the rumors continued, vehemently and unanimously, he wasn’t here, in this epicenter of refugees and informers, traders and merchants.

On the walls of yet another shop, I read a telltale scrawl, Pipelineistan 4 Hu? Osama silk, dowdy dishware, and persecution weren’t all that brought men to this corridor. There was also oil. Between sweet green tea and salty pink tea, there was much opining about the Kazakh — Chinese deal, in which a 3,000-kilometer pipeline running through the Xinjiang Province would start pumping oil as early as next year. It was a throwback to the ties forged on the ancient Silk Road, but with a twist. Despite the billions of dollars invested, ethnic Kazakhs and Uyghurs still lived below the poverty line, deprived of their ancestral homes. These men were refugees; they were also fugitives. Not all hobbled, and many carried guns.

How many were twenty-first-century Raskolnikovs, seeking banishment most of all from themselves? Perhaps only Dostoyevsky would know.

It was getting late, and I didn’t wish to linger any longer through the night, not in a town I was only beginning to see. I left the muddy alleys and wound my way back toward the Gilgit River, a thick, brick-red arm of the Indus that chugged down Gilgit Valley like an impetuous train. As my footsteps grew more urgent, the rain started again, softly, yet even this caress seemed to aggravate the river’s march. It kicked; it heaved.

Before I’d left the store with the crippled Uyghur refugees, the shopkeeper, polishing the inside of a chipped teacup with his spit, had said something that now thundered in my head. “Our valley is tight, but not impassable, if you know the way. How we all arrrived at the same corridor from different corners of the world, now that may seem like a mystery, but it is not. We found a way. Why? Trade, yes, but most importantly, freedom. And we know you need three things to be free. Mountains, for security and glaciers; rivers, for drinking and irrigation; farmland, for food and money. Here we have all three. Which is why the government won’t leave us alone.” He put the cup away. “And why we help each other.” He then quoted a saying of the Prophet Mohammad: “In the beginning Islam was something strange and it will one day return as something strange.” I said I wasn’t familiar with the Hadith, but was glad to learn of it. The shopkeeper added, “It is why the Prophet gave glad tidings to the ghuraba. The strangers. ‘Blessed are the outsiders,’ he said, peace be upon him!”

I couldn’t confirm it, but I had a feeling, as I hurried along the rash river, that I was being watched. I would have liked to find the courage to turn left at the mosque, and even left again at the end of the road, where, I was sure of it, soon after leaving the shop, I’d seen our escort slip into the shadows. I would have liked to stare down whatever it was I would meet. But I kept on, till, eventually, I stepped to my right, into the hotel.

The next morning, I was not altogether surprised to find us hit with more delays.

First, there was the raid. Among the seized items were two cars; 35,000 kilograms of explosives; fifty computers; hundreds of guns; electronic goods (VCRs, toasters, blenders); furniture stolen from schools and banks. And rickshaws. Rickshaws were to be banned for fifteen days. The “found” goods were displayed at a press briefing. There were also two arrests, a blind man and a cripple who had to be propped semi-upright from the hips. These were the cream of the bad crop. They weren’t from Gilgit but from “outside the mountains.” Given how many people here were seeking sanctuary from somewhere else — including, I realized with a start, Farhana and I — it was hard to know who hadn’t come from outside the mountains.

Next, there were no buses leaving for Hunza that morning, and Nur Shah refused to take us in his jeep. We’d have to wait. Our journey’s motif.

By afternoon, the rumor had spread. The real reason for the arrests was to deliver a clear message to those at war with the country. The state could do what it wanted with the grazing grounds and water of the land. It could, if it wanted, give it all to China. Pakistan and China had a history of friendship, and those who tried to undermine the friendship would be arrested under Pakistan’s Prevention of Terrorism Act, and convicted on evidence. The evidence was before our eyes: the seized items, the blind man, the cripple. Those at war with any other government friendly to Pakistan — whether in North America or in Central Asia — would also be arrested.

Gilgit wore a gray cloud that day, thicker than any that cloaked the mountains around us. Everyone wants our land, people said. Everyone wants our rivers, our sea.

Others argued that this too would pass. The land had known many conflicts and many differences, but people had always found common interests on the Silk Road, and always would. Governments, on the other hand, would come and go. As would music. By nightfall, radios blared again from every shop, some with news, others, Bollywood hits.

Our foursome was suddenly a tiny part of the world congregating in this narrow corridor, whether for trade or freedom. I embraced our diminished status with relief. The spotlight here wasn’t on me but on a bigger game being played around me. I stayed in my hotel room that night. Irfan was away till very late; where he went, he wouldn’t say. He hadn’t been in our room the previous night either, when I returned from walking along the Gilgit River in the rain. I’d thought nothing of it. Though it may sound strange, I’d even hazard to say that when I finally heard Irfan climb into bed, after a quick flicking on and off of the lamp by his side, I felt much like the mountains enclosing us. Impenetrable.

Even when he said, in the dark, “In times of unrest, everyone is implicated.”

Always the optimist.

We go on. Leave it behind. Everyone is implicated. Our three mantras, blending into one.

I had this ridiculous image of Farhana and I running toward each other while people blew themselves up around us, and a bird swung circles in the sky, watching our grainy shadows crisscross in jerks. We couldn’t tell if the blood that draped every tree and every rock was caused by the stupid eye in the sky or the stupid bomber on the ground. And in the background, there was jaunty music, and people dancing. And in the extreme background, there was a green shalwar and a magenta shirt.

But it was only an image. We were safe.

They had grown lean. The buffalo, especially; each hip had too many angles. Suleiman had been forced to buy supplementary feed, but once these stocks were gone, he could buy no more. The way the animals moved told Maryam that, like her, they wondered how many would not make it through the winter.

Her wrist still hurt.

On the day she smashed it, Suleiman had returned home with the horses she had left to wander into the field unsupervised.

“You know how valuable they are,” he began. “If we lost them, how would we climb the slopes to the pasture next summer?”

“On our feet,” Maryam muttered.