Uzma Khan - Thinner Than Skin

“That is Kazakh,” he said.

“You can read it?”

He shook his head and laughed, adding, “But I can sometimes hear it.”

Irfan was looking over his shoulder at the table next to us.

I’d also noticed them: our escort, talking to two men who kept looking at us, one with dark eyes, the other blue. Our waiters seemed disconcerted by the trio.

Irfan asked the waiters if the men were speaking their language, Shina.

All three shook their heads.

“Kazakh?”

“It is possible,” said the first waiter, before listening more intently. “The men are speaking a Turkic language. It could be any. Kazakh, Uzbek. No, I do not think Uzbek. They could also be Uyghurs. From China. They all come here for business and speak each other’s tongues.” After a longer pause, he added, with some disdain, “We have seen that man before. The one who came with you.”

“He is not liked?” asked Irfan.

“He does not like us.” He looked away.

Our escort snapped his fingers and the youngest waiter was told to answer. It seemed to me that they were all keeping their distance to avoid serving the table.

After a while, the eldest waiter continued, “Nomads have a way of finding each other. It is strange. Their bonds.”

I waited. “And?”

The old man scratched his beard. “The two men over at that end,” he lifted his chin, “I am sure now. One is a Uyghur merchant.” I tried to look back discreetly but the man had shifted; my view was blocked by our escort. “The other is a cattle breeder.”

“A free man,” nodded Irfan.

“How so?”

“Kazakh means free man.” He chewed vigorously. “They are the wandering cattle breeders that fired Dostoyevsky’s imagination. Remember how he exiled Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment ?”

“I don’t remember.” This was better than admitting I never finished it.

“He sent him to Kazakhstan.”

“Didn’t he spend time there himself, after prison camp?”

“Yes, after his mock execution. Imagine thinking you’re going to be killed, and then, at the last minute, being spared.”

“I can’t imagine it.”

We were still recovering a sense of freedom and resurrection à la Dostoyevsky, when Irfan noticed her. Farhana, entering the restaurant. Before she could reach our table, he’d caught the old waiter’s eye and ordered fresh food. Her hair was dripping; her skin glowed. She eyed our plates hungrily.

“It won’t be long,” said Irfan.

“Thank you.” She sat down.

We were all getting along so well.

“How’re you feeling, Farrah?” asked Wes. “Think you can eat?”

“Just watch.”

So when the food arrived, we watched Farhana dip her fingers into the plates and suck steaming spinach off her thumb. It was probably the wrong thing for her to eat but I wasn’t going to be the messenger. She spoke of her walk with Nur Shah along the Gilgit River, adding, “Nadir”—this was delivered casually, without looking up—”I’m beginning to understand your love of night walks along rivers.”

“I go alone,” I said.

She laughed, carefree, cold.

There was silence at the table as we continued watching her eat.

“So,” offered Wes. “Ultar Glacier tomorrow? Batura the next day?”

“If the weather permits,” replied Irfan. “We’ll leave for Hunza early. Batura is north of Passu, where the road isn’t good, especially in the rain. And it’s supposed to keep raining. Even if we do get there, the trek will be slippery.”

“Ultar is closer,” said Farhana.

“But steeper,” said Irfan.

She insisted we had to try. Wes supported her. After all, he’d climbed up glaciers in the Gulf of Alaska, Canada, and God-knows-where. Throw in the Andes and Mount Kilimanjaro. Patagonia while you’re at it. Did I mention that he’d fallen down a crevasse in Antartica? There he wrestled with polar bears — the only ones in the Southern Hemisphere — before inching his way back to the top, on bloodied fingernails. Only to confront more polar bears as the nails grew back.

Farhana tossed her head about some episode or other they’d encountered together while taking ice samples on Mount Shasta.

I reminded myself: Leave it behind . We were here to go on. Even if we could not get along. I excused myself and headed out into the night. Before leaving the restaurant, I thought I saw one of the men at our escort’s table scoop food into his mouth with a hand without fingers. It was not an image to look at twice.

Kashmiris have names for Indian prisons: Papa-2; Kot Balwal; Gogoland. The way the Indian government disappeared the men of Kashmir, I heard said, was not unlike how Pakistan’s government disappeared the men of Pakistan. Only, no one was sharing names for Pakistani prisons, at least not those I heard around me now, as I walked down the muddy lanes of the main bazaar. The disappearances usually happened in more or less the same way: a boy leaves the house to get paan from the stall across the street, or to play cricket in the field around the block. Never returns.

I did not want paan. I did not know what I wanted, but I found myself staring at a wall, specifically, at a poster on the wall. Sylvester Stallone. Beside him, someone had scrawled, Inshallah . I thought of polar bears and kept walking.

It was after nine o’clock but the market was still crammed and I heard more languages spoken here than at an international airport. I learned that some of the people milling around had come from as far away as Andijan and Kashgar, either with bales of cloth, or with no clothes except the ones on their backs. The textile business had been thriving since the end of the Soviet Union; so had the business of war.

At one door, a sign read, Hitt Fabricks of Sentral Asia . The greatest hits included fabrics named after heroes and villains: Putin, Osama bin Laden, Tears of Shahrukh, Eyes of Ashwarya. My sister would drool, anticipating how women would whisper enviously at the next wedding, Did you see her in Osama?

I moved on. Here, as in Kaghan, a tale of occupation was a tale of names. So Gilgit was also Little Tibet and the Xinjiang Province was Turkestan, and almost everyone around me who wasn’t from here was fleeing occupation of some kind.

Outside a different shop, I noticed a cluster of men speaking a language I couldn’t identify, one of whom was definitely missing the fingers of his right hand. After the group left, two of them hobbling, I said to the shopkeeper, “They didn’t look like lepers.”

“Because they’re not,” he replied. “You should see their toes.” He said they were Uyghur refugees, fleeing a quite unique persecution by China: their hands and feet were hosed with ice water. I was reminded of our driver’s tales of the Eskimo Force, soldiers who were made to plunge their hands in the freezing Hunza River for hours, then wade through ice sheets without shoes. If for one it was torture, for the other, glory.

The men at the restaurant were a foreshadowing of the Gilgit I’d stepped into tonight. Where one group of men shared tales of Kashmiris tortured by Indian troops, another shared tales of Uzbeks fired upon by Uzbek troops. These mountains acted as walls, enclosing us in a lonely pocket where poverty was synonymous with diversity and conflict with hospitality. There was more than one dark-eyed Uyghur from China sipping tea with a blue-eyed Kazakh from Russia, whether at a restaurant, or in among a clutter of cheap chinaware, a mound of jade, or posters of Stallone.

Meanwhile, rumors of the man-and-his-double, Fareebi the shapeshifter, had traveled to these heights long before us. He was fleeing Pakistani torture cells, it was said, the cells with no names, where he would end up, eventually, in the hands of the Americans. But, the rumors continued, vehemently and unanimously, he wasn’t here, in this epicenter of refugees and informers, traders and merchants.