Uzma Khan - Thinner Than Skin

“You’re going to drill Ultar?”

“No. Not this time. You could call this a reconnaisance mission.”

He laughed; I didn’t. “For whenever we come back. Depending.”

The road sloped up toward the Hunza River. As we followed it, Rakaposhi began to slip away.

“American Indians believe Mount Shasta’s seven glaciers are the footsteps of the creator, as he descended from the clouds. I’ve wished sometimes, on this trip, that I understood the stories from here.”

Something tweaked in my breast just then; I felt bad for him. In place of the silver fin of Rakaposhi dipping into a tree-lined horizon, I saw a black and white image of Bridalveil Fall plunging down a frame on a wall, and remembered how I’d stared at it, after an encounter with a man who rejected me completely. I remembered the loneliness, the absolute absence of anywhere or anyone to turn to. I didn’t think Wes’s loneliness was that complete — or even if it was loneliness. He had Farhana, after all, and any number of folks who’d happily give him their last bowl of soup. But something in the way he said it made me regret my coldness toward him. It was a regret I told myself I had to overcome. He had Farhana .

“It’s beautiful here.” He slipped his hands in his pockets, breathing deeply.

I was being rude. I needed something to say. The sky was the benign blue of a child’s drawing of a sky. Too benign to photograph.

“Course, you don’t always need a drill to read the ice,” said Wes.

I laughed.

“Why don’t you just propose to her?” he said.

“What?”

“What better place do you need?”

“Has she told you she wants me to?”

“Does she need to?”

“What do you talk about? At night?”

“You mean when we’re alone?”

“What else would I mean?”

“Why not give her the pleasure of saying no?”

“Why?”

“You humiliated her.”

What had she told him? Every drop of sympathy I’d felt for him moments ago vanished.

“Humble yourself,” he kept on, “or she’ll find a way to make you.”

“Hasn’t she already?”

“How’s that?”

“You want me to spell it out?”

“Be my guest.”

But I wasn’t going to give him the pleasure of humiliating me. I started walking back.

He called after me. “You know that friend of Matthew’s, who hooked you guys up?”

I stopped.

“Guess that was me.”

I turned to face him again. The former boyfriend who knew a nice little Pakistani girl ? It couldn’t be!

“What do we talk about at night, alone? Among other things, if you’re ever going to open your eyes.”

“But you and Matthew …”

“What?”

“You don’t look …”

“What?”

A dryness in my throat prevented me not only from articulating my thoughts, but even admitting them.

“This doesn’t look like Pakistan,” he said. He was very, very amused.

Slowly, the wheels started turning, and as they accelerated, the wheels began to sing. They weren’t fucking. Pure and simple. Wes did not desire women. And Farhana was a woman. Relief! Relief!

Within seconds, the singing came to an abrupt halt, much as the sympathy I’d felt for Wes had done earlier. They’d been mocking me, toying with me, for days . Even longer. Why would Farhana accuse me of being jealous, that day in the shop, when she’d discarded the shawl? That was before Kiran, before moving in with him. They were enjoying my misery, even bonding over it. They were enjoying how malicious my misery was making me. The worst part of me cemented their alliance. You could argue that was worse than fucking.

I walked up to him, barely reaching his chin. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“What would I have said?”

“That you’re an insecure bastard who can’t trust a soul. I could’ve helped.”

“I trust Irfan!”

He laughed. “And where is he?”

“What does that have to do with anything? You knew how I’d feel, when she left. You could have told me. You could have said she came to you only as a friend.”

“Yeah. And as her friend, I let her say it. Or not.”

“So why tell me now?”

He paused. “You’ll know soon enough.” He started walking away.

Soon enough? My thought-wheels began to creak.

“One last thing.” He was back, towering over me, copper stripe a tongue sticking out in the sun. “She jumped before you. I saw her braid hit water. You were in the boat. When you did finally jump, you stayed in longer. Too long. But you already know that.”

I buckled then, on the road. My knees in the gravel, scraped raw through the holes in my pants. It feels good to cry .

Irfan wasn’t in the hotel room that evening. We needed to eat before setting out later; perhaps he was already at the restaurant.

My body was at ease. I felt as though I’d been washed, as though a thick mud had been scraped off my bones by a torrential rain from within. It was a comfortable fatigue, more comfortable even than my fatigue in Gilgit. I was without rage, without blame, even directed at myself. What I felt when I took off my shoes and socks and crawled under the blanket and stretched my arms over my head before folding them neatly just at the bulge of skull above the bend of my neck was an almost pleasant mist of melancholy. I thought of my family.

First, my sister Sonia and her vivacious chatter, her refusal to ever sit idle and mope. Once, when she was perhaps thirteen or fourteen, Irfan was over at our house. He was already in love with Zulekha then, the two of them bound to each other by hands more powerful than their own, like two budding glaciers tied to the strongest of backs, to be carried, in sacred silence, several thousand kilometers up a mountain slope, to be married in the most perfect bed on earth. But that day he’d looked at her, my sister, for just a flicker, and I believe it was the first time I registered her as a woman. She was lovely and she’d known she was lovely long before I cared to see it. Now the whole world saw it, and I was glad. I came as close to saying a prayer for her as I’d ever come: God keep the madmen stalking the streets of this land far, far away …

As I went up the chain of command, my prayers caught in my throat. I still hadn’t called my mother since leaving Karachi. Sonia I didn’t need to call. She knew I was always with her. But my mother needed guarantees, and I didn’t know what guarantee to give when, aside from comforting others, she spent every part of every day since I’d known her being comforted in prayer. She’d secured her place in heaven; it was her husband and her children who must secure her place on earth. Are you earning well? Are you coming home? Is Farhana the one? All this she’d ask the son, and the son, it was clear, failed to answer. So she offered her own solution — how did she manage it, demanding assurance while supplying her own? — God will provide .

Next, my father. Throughout our stay in Karachi, he hadn’t been told about Farhana. She was introduced as Wes’s sister. Did he believe it? With him, it was hard to say. But if she had been the one, he would not have thought well of a daughter-in-law who traveled alone — without family, that is — before being married. (My mother refused to think ill of her. That was my mother.) As Wes’s sister, she was adored. With Wes, my father was loquacious, and with her, chivalrous. Too loquacious. Too chivalrous. The way only a brown man sees a brown man become in the presence of a white man and his white “sister.” And it embarrassed me, the way he asked Wes’s opinion on everything, while, with me, it was the same taut silence, sliding around the parameters of our encounters like a striker around a carrom board. At times the striker would fall into the net of Pakistan’s grief, and we might have a conversation. Other times, it rammed into every disc on the board in a spitfire of rage. There was more fury than sound, however. What are your plans for the future ? would become I’ll be back in a while , and the board was deserted as he sank into a deep gloom. He was a man whose conviviality was intimately wed to God, work, and family. When even one of these indicators was amiss — and clearly, thanks to me, all were amiss — his world tilted. Simply put, I upset his conscience. Perhaps he upset mine.