We’d been happy. I wanted to stay happy. I said, “I’m going for work.”

It wasn’t a lie. The plan was to spend next summer in the Northern Areas with a friend from school, Irfan, to take pictures. Though loath to admit it to Farhana, this past year I’d sought Irfan’s help in paying my share of the rent. Irfan always wired the money without complaining, though of course it was meant to be the other way around. I should be wiring money home, not receiving it. Till I could pay him back, I’d keep working long hours at a brew pub a few blocks from my apartment and take whatever other work I could find, usually as a wedding photographer. I anticipated doing the same even after next summer, no matter how many images I shot of vertical or horizontal wildernesses. Yet her reply stunned me.

“Work? What’s the point? You’ll never sell any. At least I know glaciers.”

I stopped rolling on my toes.

“Perhaps you’re going back for the wrong reason,” she kept on.

“And being your tour guide is the right reason?”

She bestowed upon me an ice-black stare, the kind I was to receive the following year from a very different creature, in a very different place. Behind Farhana, I could see the guns that once pointed to the minefields outside Golden Gate. How easy it is to envision enemies lurking in the tide. As I looked over her shoulder, imagining what shapes those phantoms had once taken, I couldn’t have guessed that within fourteen months, she and I would be posted at our own separate lookouts, not on a headland overlooking the Pacific, but near a glacier overlooking Kashmir.


“What’s the most beautiful thing you ever witnessed?” she’d ask, as we lay together by her five-sided bay window, playing opposites. “I mean, a moment.”

I always said it was the mating of glaciers. I’d seen the ritual once, with Irfan and his wife Zulekha, on that previous trip to Pakistan’s north. I tried to communicate the wonder of it to Farhana, while she stretched on her stomach, swinging her legs.

First, I’d say, the village elders discussed at length which glaciers to mate. The female ice was picked from a village where women were especially beautiful and, because this wasn’t enough, talented. Talent meant knowledge of yak milk, butter, fertilizer, and, of course, wool. From caps to sweaters all the way down to socks, the questions were always the same. How delicately was the sheep’s wool spun? And what about the kubri embroidery on the caps — was it colorful and fine? Most importantly, did all the women cooperate?

“And the male?” Farhana laughed. “I suppose beauty and cooperation aren’t high on that list?”

He was picked from another village, I said. One where men were strong, and, because this wasn’t enough, successful. Success meant knowledge of firewood, agriculture, trekking, and herding. There was a fifth, bonus area, and this was yak hair. From this, some men could spin sharma, a type of coarse rug. A glacier in a village with such men had to be male.

She swung her feet, happy in woolen socks. “And where do they consummate their love?”

“In a hole dug into the side of a cliff.” I told her it was a ceremony I’d only been allowed to watch after swearing an oath of silence. There was a belief that words disturbed the balance between lovers-in-transit. Perhaps I was breaking the oath by describing it to her in detail there in her purple house, miles away from the sacred soil to which the ceremony belonged.

“The location of the hole had been as carefully selected as the bride and groom,” I continued, “by gauging which side of the mountain attracted the right length of shadow for the snow to hold for ten months, 14,000 feet above sea level. Two porters had heaved the ice on their backs the entire way. We were brought in a jeep, after taking that oath.”

I remembered Zulekha kissing Irfan’s cheek, hurriedly, making sure no one was looking. She had curls down to her shoulders and features as impish as his. They’d been neighbors in Peshawar and had gone to the same college in Karachi. They’d been in love since the age of six.

I remembered the girl I was with at the time, Rida, which means inner peace. The chapstick on her lips had the scent of mint crackling in firewood. Later, I’d feed her purple roses that left blood marks on our lips. (Of course, I left this detail out for Farhana.)

At the marital hole, we all stood, waiting. The porters lowered the ice-bride and ice-groom from off their backs without hurting them. They tossed the male in first. Whooshoo! Whooshoo! A loop of air seemed to dance right back up the hole and circle around again, inside my chest. The female was released on top. She fell without a sound.

I thought it a beautiful thing. The most beautiful thing I’d seen. A pilgrimage to love.

We were told it was bad luck for other eyes to watch. Eyes from somewhere else. Karachi eyes. Peshawar eyes. But even then I’d not been able to resist. I’d taken out my camera and aimed. Had it brought us bad luck?

I left this detail out as well.

“What happened next?” She rolled onto her back, said the ice imagery was making her thirsty. I put wet glasses in the freezer for dark beer later. Then I told her the rest. The elders waited politely for the male and female glaciers to finish in their marital bed, after which the porters shielded the hole with a mat of grass, wheat husks, and walnut shells that they’d uncover in the winter, so the snow could collect around the two ice blocks. When the female was fat, freshwater children would spring from her womb and the village would drink them and irrigate their fields with them. After five winters, the couple would begin to creep downhill as one, becoming a natural glacier.

I always concluded by asking, “And you, what’s your most beautiful moment?”

She never hesitated. “The way you looked at me, the first time, standing down in the sand on Baker Beach in your trousers while I sat sunning myself on the rocks. You compared me to a calla lily. That was the moment.”

The first time she said it, I had to look away. I was the best thing to happen to her? Me? I did not deserve my luck. I know I did not, or I would have seen that it was when we played together in her window and I received her unguarded love, these were my most beautiful moments. They were not witnessed. They were lived.

We played differently now.

Jinn, Jeannie

Glaciers in the eastern Himalayas are receding. Some say the Alps will be ice-free by 2100. Greenland’s glaciers are melting so fast they could sink southern California and Bangladesh. But in parts of Pakistan, glaciers could be expanding. It was a possibility Wes and Farhana had come to explore.

We finally left our cabin, though not as early as I’d have liked. Wes and Farhana decided to scrape up every last bite of my cold omelette too; perhaps the air was making them hungry. An hour later, as I watched Farhana trek up the glacier to Lake Saiful Maluk with Wes, I feared her love for me was like a Pakistani glacier. It was difficult to say if it was growing or retreating.

What did she love about them? Glaciers, I mean. They weren’t shady or concealed, nothing marshy there, except perhaps the slushy, slippery surface. Unlike her, glaciers were slow-moving, sluggish, with bouts of extreme rage. Between stasis and thrust, they rattled and creaked, moaned and bickered, adjusting and readjusting their old, old bones. Like a ghost in the family, and unlike Farhana, they were insistent lingerers. (Granted, she did linger over those damn eggs.) Snails must be born of them. (I once made a photo-collage of a glacier speckled in snails; the snails looked like little glacier turds.) Was that the attraction — the promise of a deep, stubborn rootedness? Rejection of the New World? Here in the land to which she “returned,” she found glaciers that weathered global gas emissions and spurned newness. Except this wasn’t true, of course. Glacial growth and decline were equal indicators of global warming, as she herself liked to remind me, and if glaciers were growing in the Old World, they were also growing in the New. They were growing in Mount Shasta in northern California, for instance, and Farhana was here to compare the rate of growth in the western Himalayas to that of the southern Cascades.

Apart from returning, of course.

There were others trekking up the glacier with us, as well as a line of jeeps, all heading up to the lake, all leaving brown scud marks across the glittery white expanse. (Snails!) The jeeps slid across the ice, white-knuckled drivers steering wheels that kicked like steeds. To our right was a drop thousands of feet down into the river. I peered over the edge. A school bus lay on its side. I overheard the driver of one jeep tell his passengers that the accident was only two days old. There were no survivors. A whiff of hashish circled us as the jeep continued up.

Leaning over the edge, Irfan said the schoolchildren had probably been listening to their teacher tell the story of how the lake got its name, just as the bus had skidded.

“What a happy thought,” I replied.

“She had probably just gotten to the part about the prince falling in love with a fairy princess,” he added cheerfully. “Or the part about the jinn.”

I looked at him. With his clipped pointy beard and sharp cheekbones, Irfan had an elfin look about him, except that his eyes, hard with sorrow, belonged to this world. He had a way of hunching his shoulders and pursing his lips when reminded of all that caused him pain, which was most things. His wife Zulekha had died soon after their marriage; she’d died in a car hijacking in Karachi, on her way home from a wedding with her brother. The hijackers had shot them both before driving off with her Honda Civic. Irfan was near Kaghan when it happened, working on a water management project for a Norwegian company. It was before the days of the cell phone. He returned to Karachi to find his wife already buried.