Uzma Khan: Thinner Than Skin

“So the lake is named after him, not her.”

“Well, yes.”

“Go on.”

“To Badar Jamal, the prince was everything a man should be. On a horse, in a turban, and most importantly, from a distant land. The jinn, well, he was a household thing. You can imagine the rest.”

She ran her feet up my calves. “The exotic prince whisks her away to a life of adventure.”

“Not quite. To put it bluntly, the jinn was a jealous fiend. His scalding fury caused Malika Parbat’s snow to melt with such force it breached the banks of the lake and nearly drowned the poor lovers.”

“Nearly?”

“Fortunately, they had a cave to run to.”

“So, the jinn’s wrath melted the snow? The jinn is global warming.”

“No, the jinn is an evil spirit that cannot experience love or happiness, but is tormented when others do. The cave is copulation. It’s our only hope.”

She laughed. “You don’t think there are parallels between mother wit and science?”

“I think there are parallels between you and heaven.” I blew gently on her skin.

“Did you ever find the cave?” I asked Irfan on the glacier, pulling myself away from the sweet memory of this morning. “I want to show it to Farhana.”

“What cave?”

“You know, the one in which Saiful Maluk and the fairy princess take refuge when the jealous jinn gets jealous.”

“That cave!” Irfan smiled, casting me a look I couldn’t understand. “Yes. I know where it is. But it’s far from here. We’ll need Farhana’s consent.” This time I understood the look. The old Irfan would have accepted the love between Farhana and me, vacillating though it may be, without judgment.

I ignored his comment and the look, focusing instead on Malika Parbat looming to the east. The mountain rose just over 5,000 meters, a modest height compared with all the giants to the north. But it was to see her reflection in the lake that lay 3,000 meters above sea level and was named after an alien prince that everyone trooped all the way up.

Irfan pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, frowning. “We’ve lost contact.”

“Good.” I’d left my phone behind in Karachi and not missed it once.

“Maybe not so good,” Irfan muttered.

I left him to his phone as I increased my speed up the glacier. By now it was packed with tourists and trekkers and I could barely spot Farhana ahead. Take care of her , her father had commanded me, before we left. She is all I have . The sun soared directly above us; her red coat flickered irregularly over an icy horizon now blindingly white. So blinding that I was almost grateful for the filth left behind by those transgressing against the glacier’s beauty, some while slipping to their knees, others while gliding forward, as if on fairy wings.

In the weeks following our fight at the fort, I returned to the coast often, always alone. A small part of me knew it was to cleanse my palette, as if to revive something that had been lost on that wild stretch of land when it included Farhana.

My eye was hungry. I photographed the Monterey pines and the valley Quercus. The agave that bloomed before death. The pups that replaced them. California buckeye, star tulips, and bell-shaped pussy ears with stems as thin as saliva. Diogenes’ Lantern, the sweetest of flowers, yellow as the yawning sun.

How did they survive the onslaught of the Pacific wind? Why didn’t the stems snap, the buds fall? They flourished at the edge of chaos, in a nursery of knotted cypresses, while I was an intruder, a gray wolf with coarse mane unnuzzled, neck arched plaintively to a remote moon.

I crawled back to her house. Mirror, mirror , I bayed at her glass. Forgive the ugliest of them all! She wouldn’t let me in. Once, through the glass, I saw a small dark man approach the door, and I knew he was going to open it. Before he could, I heard Farhana shout Baba! and he turned away. Another time, a tall white man paused at the door, and Farhana was nowhere. We stared at each other through the glass, his image wavering as though he were gazing at me from under water, before swimming away.

I worked longer hours at the brew pub. I gave up trying to push my landscapes, including my mother’s marble-top table. What’s the point? You’ll never sell any . Perhaps she was right. The pub allowed me to advertise my skills as a wedding photographer, for which I was developing a reasonable reputation. The irony of it. A Pakistani goes all the way to the land of opportunity only to end up taking photographs of brides. As if there weren’t enough brides at home. With the exception of Farhana, women seemed to like me photographing them.

Then one evening, she came into the pub, smiling. It happened as quietly as that. We spent all evening smiling at each other. We smiled through the night, and through the subsequent days. We said very little, and when we did, it was politely coquettish. “How’s work?” “Fine. Yours?” When after several more days additional words were spoken, they were about her father. She was finally ready to introduce me to him.

The meeting was arranged for an afternoon in October, eight months before we were to leave for Pakistan, though I didn’t know the we part yet. We hadn’t dared revisit the birthday promise she’d tried to extract from me in May, though it filled the air around us more oppressively than the fog. As we walked to the BART station, I decided I wasn’t looking forward to this visit. I’d been kept in suspense about her unpredictable father for so long it was as if now I’d somehow passed a test. (I’d considered wearing a tie.) Perhaps this was part of our patching up, but I couldn’t help thinking that she was allowing the meeting. Worse, the concession was a way to get a concession from me. Our quarrel grew two legs; it walked beside us all the way to the station, demanding, Take me back . It was as if she’d proposed to me. Take me back was to be our marriage. Take me back was to take us forward. (For the millionth time I thought, Dammit, for her, it isn’t even back!) If I said no, she’d move forward by leaving me.

I stuffed my hands in the torn lining of my windbreaker’s pockets, irritation turning to anger. Is this what marriage would be, the appearance of favor for favor, when, in fact, it’s two to none? Stacking your chips, keeping score? Living in a damn game of mahjong?

I glanced at her. There was a smile lurking around the corners of her mouth. Not a smile of cunning. A smile of sweetness. I found no justification for my dreary mood. I drew her to me. “I love you.” A kiss without chips.

She started to laugh. “You can’t kiss me like that in front of him.”

“So we should kiss like that now.”

“All right then.” After a time she broke away. “I should warn you. He can be unpredictable.”

“You’ve warned me many times. I couldn’t be more terrified.”

“Terrified? But he’s wonderful .”

“Wonderful?”

“Well … You just can’t know.”

I nodded. “Unpredictable. Wonderful. No kissing.”

“Sometimes he talks a lot, sometimes he smiles happily at the dust.”

“You make him sound senile.”

“Oh, don’t be fooled. It only means he’s sizing you up. He never remarried, you know—”

“You’ve told me.”

“I’m his only child. He hasn’t been great with former boyfriends.”

Though I’d heard it before, it was hardly reassuring to hear again.

I tried to distract myself with stories of a mother she’d described for me many times, a mother whose photograph hung above her bed, inside a carved sandalwood frame that still smelled musky, and always reminded me of my grandmother. Her name was Jutta. She came from Bavaria, and she was of Celtic descent. Every summer, Jutta’s stern Catholic father would lavish his one indulgence on the family, a trip to Kaltenberg castle, to taste the dark lager that had been brewed there since the days of King Ludwig. Farhana had her grandfather’s palette, enjoying beer more than anyone I knew, and she loved to sample the flavors of the brewery where I worked. The more bitter-chocolate, the sweeter she would grow.