Uzma Khan - Thinner Than Skin

Two months of bliss. Months that felt like the sunny side of the cut on my skin. Months that did not feel like a hiatus, or a dressing. We had nothing to seek cover from, or to cover up. We were simply returning to the way we’d been. But can we know the interval from the song? And does it matter which it is, if both must end? And when exactly did it end, for us? With her announcement that she was bringing Wes? Or earlier that same day in December, with her father’s visit? Or an email from Irfan? On the banks of a lake in Kaghan the coming year, Irfan would say of the Karachi bomber and his accomplice that it was hard to know one fight from another. Equally sticky was knowing when it even became a fight.

I saw Farhana’s father several times during those months and, as on that first day in Berkeley, each encounter began with him appearing light-hearted, almost childlike. Somewhere along the way, his temperature always changed, without my understanding why. That day in December, two months after our first meeting (and my attack), he arrived at my door brandishing a box of salted caramels with one hand and pulling his jeans up with the other. We agreed that whoever made the caramels had spent time in Pakistan, where salt and sugar have a natural affinity.

“Of course you put salt in your lemonade, your fruit salad,” he said, as Farhana made a face. (I once told her in Pakistan a sexy woman is considered numkeen . Salty.) Settling on the sofa beside me, he pointed to my gut. “Completely A-one?” I nodded respectfully. On the table beside him, Farhana arranged a fruit platter — salt shaker prominently displayed — in a failed attempt at coaxing him away from the chocolates.

I helped myself to a caramel. So did he. While chewing, he sighed. “You never can guess where it’s coming from, the trouble, but also the relief.”

It was anyone’s guess; I nodded respectfully.

“Has Farhana told you how I supported myself when I first came to this country?”

“I’m late for work,” she said, reaching for her purse. In my ear, she whispered, “Love you.” It was the most affection she’d displayed toward me in front of her father.

He shook salt on an orange. It dusted the floor. Farhana left. He returned the orange, picked up a second caramel. Not waiting for me to answer his question, he said, “I didn’t even have money for milk in my tea — the tea of course I brought from home. I worked very hard.”

He kept on about his struggles. I nodded, wondering unkindly when he’d leave. I wasn’t due at the pub for a few hours so had no reason to excuse myself. Nor could I count on my roommates for diversion. Matthew’s new boyfriend lived in Maui so he’d all but moved out, while the other one, Cesar, an up-and-coming aerosol artist, kept strange hours, lifting weights in front of the TV all day, then disappearing for weeks. (According to Matthew, Cesar had been on the verge of converting to Islam till he met me.)

“Yes, I had to work hard. But your relief has come. You did not have to wait.”

My relief? Did he mean Farhana? Was he suggesting I didn’t have to try hard enough to get her? Or hard enough at anything? He waved the caramels under my chin, smiling beatifically. “Finish them. Even with salt they go stale.” It wasn’t even 9:30 in the morning. I took a second.

“ My relief I had to work for. But it came in the shape of …”

I missed the part about how he came to purchase milk for his tea.

I was imagining the woman in the photograph over Farhana’s bed. Jutta, her mother. She reminded me of Robert Frank’s wife. The expression on her face was not entirely the same — Jutta’s gaze being more pensive than challenging — but neither could break free of the frame.

He was saying, “Who would have guessed where the trouble began? Where the cancer in her mother first took root? It was already in the brain when we found out.” He looked at me in a way that made me feel accused, just as he had the first time we met, though for what I couldn’t say. “It always begins before you think it does.”

I ate a third caramel.

“Look after her this summer. She’s all I have.” After a string of truisms justifying why he’d left Pakistan (“society frowned on us, her mother and I”) and justifying why he hadn’t been back (“hard work eventually pays off”), he began justifying why he knew what was happening there better than most (“it is the mentality”).

When he left I checked my email.

There was a message from Irfan, with news from home. It didn’t help. More trouble in Waziristan, where the Pakistan Army’s hunt for Baitullah Mehsud and his “guests” from Uzbekistan and China was turning increasingly bloody. No one believed the drone attacks were launched by Pakistan, at least not only by Pakistan. Irfan called the drones stupid eyes—”If they’re so accurate, how come the war gets bloodier?”—and forwarded links to various articles on their “accuracy.” As if I wanted to read them.

I spent the morning in pajamas. In the afternoon, my life receded in the cool, dark walls of a tavern where I existed only in the moment of pouring drinks and collecting bills and wiping counters and listening to others who also felt their lives recede. At night, I fell asleep on the couch in the living room while leafing through photographs by Robert Frank and Elizabeth Carmel and eating salted caramels.

I awoke to Farhana pushing me deeper into the couch with a kiss. And then she told me. Wes was coming with us. He’d been to India and wouldn’t mind seeing it from the other side.

“The other side?” I tried to sit up. My mouth was gummy and dry.

“Besides, he did save your life.”

“What?” My feet found the floor. “It was a minor stab wound, you know that.”

“And what if you hadn’t made it to the hospital?”

“And what if we had ambulances?”

“Let’s not fight. He’s very experienced. We were on Mount Shasta together, drilling the ice, you know, reading it. He’s taught me a lot. He could teach you a lot too.”

“About what? India?”

She pinched my knee, almost fondly. “I’ve had a long day, while you’ve been eating caramels.” She waved the half-empty box under my chin, reminding me of her father.

On the table beside us lay the copy of Brilliant Waters , open at the photograph of a lake, the surface so rich and still.

Beside me, Irfan lay peaceful and motionless, though his eyes were now open. We said nothing, the evening too dramatic for speech. High above the lake, the mystery mountain was now entirely free of clouds and glistened a silvery amethyst so pure it belonged to another world, a world of princes and princesses, jinns and fairies.

Down below, near where the mortals lay, the lake continued breaking on the shore like a troubled sea, and it was hard to know which to believe: the triumph in the sky or the restiveness in the snowmelt. Goat bells rang like heralds between the two worlds.

To my left, Farhana and the girl had descended the hill. They moved toward us, the goat happily at the girl’s feet. I noticed a dog now too, black as the goat. The two animals casually circled each other, like lovers who know their love was there all along.

“She isn’t still upset about the detour to this valley,” said Irfan. It was a declaration, not a question.

I answered anyway. “I don’t think so.”

He nodded. “This time tomorrow, we’ll be in Gilgit. Two days after that, Ultar Glacier. Then she and Wes can take all the readings they want.”

“She nearly didn’t come at all, you know.”

He twisted his neck to look at me. “I thought it was her idea.”

“It was. But a few months before we left, she started getting cold feet.”