Uzma Khan - Thinner Than Skin

I remembered one particularly painful afternoon with him. Farhana was on a mission to somehow fix things. (It’s a fine line, the one between helping and hurting. She never saw the line.) In this spirit, she showed my father a few prints of my desert shots from outside Tucson. I’d never shown him even one and didn’t know she’d packed them. It was a grotesque tableau that inversely mirrored my meeting with her father in some way I couldn’t quite pinpoint, but if with hers she’d wanted to stay away from the subject of my work, with mine she went too far.

His expression didn’t change as he looked, without interest, at a flaming orange cactus. I’d been especially pleased with the close-up, the way each “petal” of the fiery ball was dotted with feathered white spines that looked almost like flowers. I hadn’t seen the spines as flowers when I took the shot. I saw this only later, which was why the image mattered. It had come together as a kind of miracle.

Setting it aside, my father asked Farhana her opinion of the photograph.

It was as if I wasn’t in the room. “Well,” she hesitated. “I’ve never seen a cactus that color. He didn’t use a filter. It’s — natural.”

“Natural.” He nodded. Still without looking at me, he told me to get Wes, who was watching the BBC in the next room. “What do you think?” he asked him.

Wes looked at the photograph. “Neat.”

My father waited expectantly. When it was clear Wes had said all he was going to say, my father asked, “Do you see talent here?”

Wes scratched his head. “Sure. I see talent.” He went back to watching the BBC.

In the hotel room now, I held my camera. My melancholy was growing sharp around the edges, like the cactus itself. It seemed to change in color too, as though radiating the sun’s glare. Before long, I began to burn. I got out of bed.

Farhana had been on a mission to fix things ever since we’d come to this country, or even before we’d come, but what about her niyat — her intent? Who was I to say?

Should I do as Wes recommended and propose to her, so she could have the pleasure of saying no? I didn’t think Farhana needed to get her pleasure in this way. If she wanted, she could have humiliated me worse, by telling me herself that she’d jumped first. She’d spared me that. It occured to me that Wes might have been lying and no braid had ever hit the surface of the lake. But I dismissed the thought. I knew as surely as I knew the pain in my chest that I was right to believe him.

There were pictures of her, from so long ago. Her somber profile that day at the baths, as we watched the pelicans dive like missiles. Then Farhana stripping, taunting me with her back, hours before my attack in the park. And those shots of us at play, our bodies in motion together. Her mountain legs and lean torso; her slender hips and luscious lips. And me? She’d photographed my scrawny legs, and my penis, resting on my thigh like a petal on a floor. She photographed her finger caressing that petal to life. And more, from that day on the beach, the shots increasingly raunchy, but without play, only appropriation, her ass raised high in the frame.

I skipped forward. I came to my landscapes. I’d taken several in Kaghan — of the lake, the graves, the River Kunhar — but they all left me cold, as did this afternoon’s series of Rakaposhi after the rain. Even the ones of the glacier — that luminous white above a dark gravel, the progression of shepherd into shadow, and then into light, as the glacier descended into darkness — they were missing something. If I could have put into words exactly what, I might not have wanted to be a photographer. But I saw no miracles there.

Her father once said, even the act of seeing can be a theft, even a murder. He might also have said the opposite. The act of not seeing can be a theft, even a murder. It was my refusal to see Kiran — first in the boat, then in the lake — that had killed her. And if Farhana hadn’t seen her, ever, Kiran would still be alive.

So where did this leave us? I wanted her, pure and simple. Tonight, I really would leave it all behind. She was not with Wes. She was still with me. All I had to do was get her back and get her back I would, in the dark, on a climb I was told I shouldn’t make. She said I wouldn’t die, so what reason was there to stay away? It would be even better than courting her with calla lilies. I would court her on ice.

They stood inside the hut.

“What about that man Ghafoor? The one who burned down the forest inspector’s house years ago? We know how dangerous he is. Do you? Do you know the company he keeps? There are bad ones in every flock. They always find each other. And make trouble for others. Especially true believers. Like you. You are a believer?” The larger man poked Suleiman’s chest with his rifle.

“Oh yes,” answered Suleiman.

“Because there are rumors that your wife here prays to another god. Even—” he spit “—a goddess.”

“Oh no, sahibji. You must not believe these things.”

“Because I have heard that she is a kafir.”

“Please! Don’t say such things.”

“Because men have sworn she prays to buth , and is herself quite dangerous.”

“No! I beg you—”

“She practices witchcraft.”

“Kind sir, what you say—”

“But I do not believe it.” He moved the rifle to Suleiman’s wooden leg, and began tapping it through Suleiman’s shalwar. “Because you are God-fearing Muslims who are unfortunate victims of some evil gossip. It is the way of your kind. No unity, no nation. No sense of loyalty at all. Yet I fully believe even you would never go against those who are here in this valley, far from our families and homes, just to protect you.”

“Yes!”

“You will work with us?”

“Yes!”

“For the sake of your family and your home.”

“Yes!”

“Say the first kalma.”

Suleiman began to recite. The policeman kept the butt of his rifle on Suleiman’s leg, but his eyes were on Maryam. Tap tap tap. She moved her lips. She was only halfway through the very short prayer when the tapping was replaced by a shout, “If you are believers, why don’t you treat your guests according to the recommendations of the Prophet, peace be upon him?” She withdrew in mid-recitation to make them breakfast.

When they left, she noticed that the dogs had not barked. She realized that all summer long, the dogs had not barked. They had not barked the day the two policemen — different men, they were always different, yet they were exactly the same — had come looking for the bomber and eaten breakfast and soiled her bed and pissed inside their hut. They had not even barked at the lake, the morning Kiran’s body had washed up on shore. They were gaddi dogs, at one time so fierce no one could come near them. But some time this year, she could not say when exactly, they had grown as listless as the dry grass they slouched on all day.

It was the same the next morning. A messenger came to deliver the news: two boys had gone missing in the valley. The dogs did not stir when the man arrived and, with the exception of the left ear of one, the dogs did not stir when the man left.

Maryam waited for the ear to droop. A tail rose slightly, as if to register her anticipation. She found this more arresting than the news. She could not think about the news. The news could not be allowed even a corner in her home. The news about the two missing boys, especially. It could find a space and it could build a web and then you fell into it and never got out and then the news became you and you turned into the missing boys, or else your children did.