And now, with all the other kinds of men moving into her valley without a permit — for them, movement was free — now what betrayal was going through her son’s head? He had the fingers of a god when he stroked the teats of a buffalo. But the rest of him was a man. No longer a child. A man.

Ghafoor’s offer, before he left, reverberated in her head. He can come with me, Maryam. He will be safer.

Maryam shuffled her way to the milkpot. Shuffling was new to her. She poured half the milk into a wooden container which she dragged back to the bed, then sat down again, propping the container between her knees. With a long wooden paddle that reminded her of an oar used to row a boat on a lake at the banks of which, not too long ago, her family had camped, she began to churn. It was not easy, agitating the milk with one hand. The day was growing hot; she had to do this now.


Perhaps it was the sound of the butter thickening that pulled her into a strange, sweat-induced dream. She sat upright, her body swaying with the rhythm of the paddle, but her mind drifted so far away she might have called the dream holy. Only, the visions playing in her head could not be called holy, not even by the most devious gods.

She was watching, through someone else’s eyes — the eyes of a man she did not know — a group of Gujjar boys leave their homes early one morning. As she watched, through these strange pair of eyes, a second man began to follow the boys. A cigarette dangled from between his lips, not the bidi cigarettes the herders smoked, but the filtered kind she saw nestled behind her son’s ear one day, Dunhill, he had called it, when she went to the store to give him the lunch he forgot to take that morning. He stalked his prey, this man with the Dunhill dangling from his lips, taking his time before singling out the weakest of the pack, the one with the curly brown hair and trusting eyes and godly fingers, drawing him aside with the promise of a ride into the city in his car, a car the boy could drive. And this man who was watching it all: he was in the car.

The image changed. Now she was herself, Maryam, and she knew that what she saw was not a prophecy but a memory, one from earlier this year, weeks before they packed their belongings to leave for the mountain pastures. She had seen her son bathing in the stream with a group of other boys his age or older. The water was still cold and it was their yearly ritual, before they left for the summer, they had to jump in the stream. This year, as she watched, she told herself that he had only just turned nine. Yet, there was a change, a change she recognized because she had been his age when she licked the honey from the fingers of her brother’s best friend. The boys splashed each other’s smooth, sleek skin and laughed and splashed the hair beginning to stream from between their legs. She knew this laughter was no more innocent than her own had been. She knew too the ritual within the ritual, what exactly they were displaying, those older boys. As a nine-year-old to a nine-year-old was not a boy, so to a twelve-year-old, he was not an adult. The older boys relished the power they pulled from their younger audience, a power that caused the very currents in the river to flow. Hoping that, while they waited impatiently for the same miracle to happen between their own thighs, some boys would never do more than look at the miracles of others, she had steered herself away from the stream.


At the edge of the bed, Maryam opened her eyes. There was a scraping on an outside wall. The dogs did not bark. If this was a knock, the men never knocked.

She waited. She could not identify the sound. She expected the curtain to part. It did not. Whoever was there began to walk away, his footsteps heavy. Or he was still there, and only pretending to leave, to draw her out. More likely, it was all in her mind, a place where too many pictures had lately played. Perhaps it was all a symptom of being trapped inside, like this, instead of moving under open skies, the way she always felt the most at peace.

Still she stayed inside, with the pictures.

She saw a figure walking in the night. Ghafoor was behind him. A cluster of village folk surrounded them. They were all there, the four who had been at the lake that day. It was late at night and the wind was relentless and the rain was worse. Ahead, a serrated spur of rock. The one she had seen three times already. The figure was walking toward the rock, because she knew it had to be just so, she had made it this way. So had the Queen and her lover. So had her mother. So had Kola and Namasha and Noor. So had Maryam Zamani and Kiran and the unnamed thousands who had passed through this valley, or stayed, without committing murder. She could feel the peace slipping away as surely as the long wooden paddle through her fingers. Nothing stuck to her skin anymore, not a paddle or a teat, not sweat, not butter. It was all slipping away.

It began to rain, the same vicious rain that ripped through the man’s jacket as she watched him set his first foot high on the rock. He had a red dot on his forehead, this man. Like a bindi, or a ruby. What kind of man decorated himself like a woman? The rain did not wash it off, no matter how emphatically it lashed his skin. No matter how near it came to her hut. The first torrent of the season, drowning out the sound of boots stomping outside.

Quietly, she began to scoop the butter onto a board, before adding the salt. Quietly, she watched it melt.


With the rain came more mosquitoes and flies and the mare Namasha turned her indignation inward. She continued to cast judgment at Maryam with the ferocity of her gaze, but she now refused to walk herself into the forest. Nor would she allow herself to be walked, even with one wrist. Nor would she accept the maize Maryam cooked for her every morning with extra salt to help with her digestion, though salt was growing scarce. She was on a hunger strike, and hunger made her gnash her teeth. Her daughter, Loi Tara, was learning the price of loyalty to the womb. Did it have to mean starvation?

For the first two days after the rain began to flog them, each time Maryam clicked her tongue and pulled the rope, Loi Tara galloped forward eagerly, before curtsying back to Namasha. “Don’t be a donkey!” Maryam shouted over the rain. “You are a growing child!” Loi Tara would nuzzle her mother and shake her head at Maryam and shiver in wretchedness under a shelter of graveyard cypress. Namasha would wind her neck around her daughter once before standing upright again, daring Maryam to intercept.

The third day, Maryam took the dare. She went into the forest and brought back something even more tempting than an egg from a sedentary farmer. A peach, covered in golden down with a blush of crimson. There was no hesitation. Loi Tara burrowed her sweet lips in Maryam’s palm. Namasha bucked her once. Loi Tara did not stop eating.

The fourth day, the filly scampered toward Maryam as soon as their eyes met, and once untethered, bounded into the forest. “Will you not follow us?” pleaded Maryam. Namasha gnashed her teeth.

Maryam caught up with the filly, who had found the buffalo Noor at a papra plant, wrapping soft lips around lacy leaves. Loi Tara looked momentarily perplexed: where were the peaches? In truth, Maryam had plucked the peach from a fruitseller, in exchange for butter, and planted it in the forest before bringing it forward to the filly’s ready nose. Now she stroked her smooth, velvety neck, the color of egg yolk in the setting sun, murmuring, “Silly, peaches grow in orchards forbidden to you. And little horses don’t eat papra leaves.” She untangled the wet mane with her fingers. “How to bring your mother back?” Loi Tara nodded, nuzzled, and forgot. She began plucking the tall grass at Maryam’s feet.

The forest dripped with rain. She looked at it: her forest. The slender stems of the kakwa fern glistened jet and violet, glossy emerald fronds tossed as proudly as the filly tossed her mangled mane. In the past, when Kiran complained of toothache, a malady she was prone to, Maryam had boiled those fronds and left the water to cool. Kiran would sip it later, her pain gradually subsiding. In the past.

Maryam pulled Loi Tara further into the forest. Around them towered blue pine and long-leaved pine, branches whorled, cones at her feet. Closer to the soil, the small, pink flowers of the khatambal. She could not remember the last time she had seen these. The herb flowered only during the monsoons, when they were in the mountains. She let the filly tear apart the bloom.

She could hear thunder. The buffalo bulls of the goddess clashing their horns. That was how thunder used to be known, in her grandmother’s day, even her mother’s. When the goddess’s bulls were at war, so was the world. Maryam stepped inside a canopy of chir, a warm, dry canopy, where nothing could find her. Not even the rain.

Inside her canopy, she contemplated the life hers had become. Earlier this morning she had stayed in bed, as had become routine, with a listlessness coated in dread. Would policemen bother them? Or would it be plainclothesmen today? Neither had come; she still had to force herself out of bed. It seemed the only thing pulling her into the world was the battle with her horse. That was the power of the occupation: whether the men showed or not, they now resided in their home, just like the news, on a multitude of legs. They could appear at any time. They were already there — behind the curtain, beside the teacups, in the weave of her bed. No one could hide, though they kept on trying. She mostly stayed inside her hut, worse, she stayed inside herself, in a way of life she knew she could never grow used to, even as it became routine.