Uzma Khan - Thinner Than Skin

Jutta had come to Karachi when her first husband became the director of the Goethe Institute. Farhana’s father, a gifted musician, according to her, was the tabla player for a concert at the institute one night. It was the player, not the raag, that mesmerized the German woman. Their affair turned them into castaways even before Farhana was born (too few months after her mother left her first husband). Farhana’s maternal grandparents still never answered her letters while her paternal grandfather, recently deceased, never did forgive his son.

We got off the train in Berkeley. Three blocks later, Farhana spotted her father at a window seat of a dark tavern not unlike the one where I worked. I thought I could recognize him from the time I saw him through the glass, approaching the front door. Was it to let me in or to yell at me? Both?

She was saying, “Dada’s death has made Baba even more unpredictable. You know the history between them, because of my mother. Still,” she swung her arm in mine (not a kiss, but it was something), “though he hasn’t been kind to other boyfriends, I just know he’s going to like you.”

And she was right. And it was mutual. At least at first. Our conversation bore no trace of the So what does my daughter see in you ? assessment I’d been dreading. In fact, to Farhana’s dismay, we didn’t talk about her at all. At least at first.

“For heaven’s sake,” he said, sitting back down after shaking my hand, stretching spindly legs in baggy jeans, “don’t call me Mr. Rahim. Call me Niaz.” I could imagine him saying the same while easing into a chair with the same languorous grace (that had skipped Farhana) in mid-seventies Karachi, outside one of the tea shops in the Saddar area that teemed with poets and revolutionaries. Thirty years later, he still had the air of a Saddar hippie. In fact, he still had the same jeans. They drooped around his waist, the belt tied ludicrously loose, forcing him to yank them up each time he moved. It made him look both comical and vulnerable. Maybe this was why women left their husbands for him.

Somehow it was perfect that the beer he was drinking was called Moose Drool. And that he had a cup of cappuccino next to it. We ordered coffee.

He looked at me. “So, where have you been hiding all this time?”

I looked at Farhana.

“You know how hard he works,” she replied.

“I’m unpredictable,” I added. Under the table, Farhana pinched my knee.

He finished his beer, smiling her smile. She asked after his health. Apparently, he had diabetes. He ordered a second beer. They quibbled about his diet. (He also ordered fries.) He didn’t look diabetic at all. He had the body of a young and lean rapper, a Lil Wayne lookalike, while his face was that of an exceptionally gaunt Kris Kristofferson. I was startled when I put his two halves together and came up with Jesus Christ. So startled that when he asked me a question, I nodded without hearing it.

When the second beer arrived Farhana pushed it toward me. I glanced at her as if to say, Why aren’t you having it? She ignored me.

He chewed the end of a pipe while his cappuccino got cold. “So, what are they?”

“Sorry, what?” I asked, embarrassed.

He frowned. “I asked if there are religious reasons for your father’s dislike of your work.”

I shot a glance at Farhana. She had an irritating habit of telling the world that my work was a touchy topic. Of course the world wants to touch that.

I cleared my throat. “I never thought of it that way.”

“He must have assumed you would. A good son should think about why the Prophet forbade images of himself, and forbade figurative art in general, no?”

I opened my mouth for no apparent reason.

He flashed me a toothy grin. “I was not a good son either.” He took a sip of his cappuccino. “Don’t they make hot drinks hot anymore?” He pushed the cup aside and reached for my — his — pint. “About which I couldn’t be happier. I photographed Farhana’s mother many times before she died. Before I knew she was dying.” He sucked on the unlit pipe in silence.

I shot another glance at Farhana. It hadn’t occurred to me that the photograph above her bed was taken by her father, nor had the irony struck me till now. She cherished the image, yet she wouldn’t let me cherish enough of hers.

Farhana moved the beer back toward me. “Let’s sit outside so Baba can smoke.” I chuckled inwardly. He could die of cancer but not diabetes. Carrying my coffee — which was, as usual, too strong — I left the second pint inside.

We settled around a small table on the sidewalk. There was no milk and I thought it might be rude to go back inside to get it myself. Why did Americans make coffee like mud and tea like rain? When I turned back to Mr. Rahim he was watching me over his pipe, now lit, and over a helix of fries.

He said, “My father never let me take any photos of him, you know. He said that you can reproduce an image, but you cannot reproduce a soul.”

“It’s so much warmer out here,” said Farhana, “than in the city.”

“You cannot reproduce a soul,” Mr. Rahim repeated. “Every picture tears the body from the soul. He saw paintings and photographs as theft, a way of owning and even destroying someone else.”

“Baba,” said Farhana, “don’t scare Nadir. He’s given enough flak for what he does.”

This astonished me. It was one thing to steer conversation away from her dead grandfather to protect her father, but another to use me as the pretext! I went back inside for the milk. When I stepped out again, it was her father who tried to defuse the pressure building in my chest. “I think he’s less annoyed with me and more with you for thinking him so easily scared.”

She smiled at him. “Do you want another cappuccino?”

He tapped his cup. “Your smile is warming this one.”

Satisfied, she leaned across the table and kissed him.

He turned to me again. “Where was I? Yes. Maybe it was the time he spent in Malaya during the Second World War. Whatever the reason, my father had a fierce aversion to what he called the fascist eye. He was terrified of its power to replicate an imagination that could not resist it. He bemoaned it, right until his death, the way the Third World is seen by the First World that makes up these terms. What he called ghoorna . Their gaze. On us.”

I was startled by the intensity of Mr. Rahim’s gaze, on me.

“Should we go for a walk?” said Farhana.

“He said the public gaze acted no differently from a camera,” continued Mr. Rahim. “For him, even the act of seeing became a theft. Even a murder.”

“Baba,” whispered Farhana. “Don’t go into all that now.”

He stood up, went inside, came out with a pint half-consumed and resumed talking as if there’d been no interruption. “He had seen the gaze in the way the British looked at women in his village, with both desire and disdain, as if it was beneath them to desire blacks , as if this justified deepening the gaze. He saw it again when deployed in Malaya, in the way the Japanese regarded local women. When he returned from the war, he returned to an India on the verge of independence and partition, but because his friends had scorned him for fighting for the British, he felt himself under their gaze. He returned both decorated and humiliated. He died a complete hermit.”

Farhana asked for the bill.

“But isn’t it ironic?” Her father sat on the edge of his seat, shirt collar pulled to one side, clavicle jutting like a bluff. “He grew so paranoid about the public gaze that he enforced strict purdah, both on himself and his wife, obsessed not with seeing but how we are seen, saving his morality — and that of his family’s — to the point where there was hardly any spirit left to save.”