Uzma Khan - Thinner Than Skin

“Jade? In return for what?”

“Many things.”

“Such as?”

“Ghee.”

“Ghee? Don’t you make plenty of that already?”

He grinned. It was the first time I’d seen him grin. It wasn’t pretty.

“Is there jade at the glacier, or ghee?”

He lost his grin. I think I preferred it.

“Have you climbed up here before?”

“It is not far now. You will hear it.”

Again he disappeared.

“Hear what? And where are the others?” I called after him, expecting no reply, and getting none. Twice he’d helped me, both times when I was lost, and in danger.

He was watching me.

The sky was growing pale. It was turning on its side, leaving behind a softer shade of black. The perpendicular wilderness began to seem less impenetrable. Just as well, because my headlamp quietly extinguished with a flickering that was not unlike a silent fart. I tore the straps off. I had only my flashlight now. I heard more rocks fall, not the defeaning shatter of the landslide on Ultar’s double, but a rumble nonetheless, followed by a roll of smaller rocks. A leopard or the escort? A ghost or Farhana? There was a creaking too; like the night, the stones were turning in their sleep.

I ate more biscuits. I drank a little water. I must save the rest. I had about half a bottle left. I took one last sip then screwed the top back on. When I looked up, I saw two shins, glowing about twenty feet above my head. Like the mountain, my inhibitions were growing less impenetrable too. “Wes!” I shouted loudly. “Where the hell is everyone?” I was so excited to see him I almost forgot to take my pack.

“Right here,” he turned back. “We’re almost there.”

“Wait!”

But he did not.

I was alone again. Damn Irfan. Damn Wes. And damn Farhana. Wouldn’t she have wanted a word alone with me, just once on our way up?

And “Askarov”—where was he now? Tired of watching me? Just as well! I would not let myself ask — not here, not now —why he was following me. Maybe Irfan had asked him to look out for me. Irfan, who knew I wouldn’t follow Wes. Irfan, to whom I foolishly left all the practicalities of every trip. Maybe Farhana had been right. I did defer to him too much. Maybe I was going about this courtship in a very wrong way. Maybe she needed to see me at the front of the line, not stuck back here, bringing up the rear. Maybe she’d walk beside me if I were leading.

I pushed on. I couldn’t lead now. All I could do was push on. I concentrated on the small circle thrown by the flashlight at my feet. That little glow was just what I needed to coax me into a rhythm again, and nudge all my idle thoughts away. I hoped the battery would last till the sky turned gray, even gold. I tried to focus only on this. Flashlight, don’t die! Flash a little longer!

I began to see colors in my head. A wash of ash gray, charcoal at top, cream below, and a frayed edge that blossomed delicately from the faintest yellow to the most luminous salmon pink. It was so vivid before me I wondered if my sister had a dupatta of that pattern, or perhaps a sari. It might even belong to my mother, a stranger walking down a silver floor to a side street lit with white lamps, the cloth billowing behind her like a cloud. I didn’t know how long the image sustained me but, finally raising my eye past the light at my feet, I noticed there were patches of snow all around me now, mounds that glittered in the night.

The sight was so beautiful I thought I’d stumbled onto the silver floor of my imagining. I was in the middle of an oasis! How thirsty I was! I scooped a snow heap with my fingers; the taste was bitter and familiar. It pulled me back to that moonlit night in Kaghan, a night heavy with the silence of seduction, like tonight, and I was kneeling at the banks of the River Kunhar, gathering silver filigree deep into the folds of my tongue, while a reflection broke in the water. Instantly, I looked up. No owl. No opal moon.

The sky grew even lighter, a gentle gray streaked with gold. I thanked my flashlight and switched it off. More snow crystals stretched awake while others fell asleep. Surely they were stars, fallen from the sky! The hand of a fairy had strewn them on these slopes! I wanted to stuff myself with them, foul taste and all.

With the burn of glacial melt still in my mouth, I started walking again. Yet more snow. The palest apricot sky. I could hear birds now, distant and small, but there was an unmistakable thrill in the air nonetheless, and it was rising. I’d never known a daybreak as joyous as this. I looked toward the sun; it was still invisible to me but I was not invisible to it. I was shivering and sweating and I was alone but I was not alone. Perhaps I was delirious but I did not care. I spun toward the sun, again and again. I laughed.

When I stopped spinning I pulled my feet apart to steady myself, still laughing. In return, I heard a groan. It was not a human voice. It was not a rockfall. This was a groan that came from somewhere else. The first thought that entered my mind, a whale . The second, but I’m on a mountain . The third, a whale on a mountain .

I’d never heard a whale sing but I imagined it might be like this. It was the sound of sheer bulk. A lunge through a dark void of unimaginable weight, as the lungs sought release. And I was carried along, higher, higher, till I heard the first suck of air in the form of a crack. The beast kept pulling me toward itself. As the snapping and heaving grew louder, I heard the distinctive tone of ice, and it was as if an ancient corpse were trying to break free of its colossal tomb.

I was at the glacier.

The portion that met me first was the classic deep blue of polar glaciers, a color I’d never seen in the Karakoram before. But then I’d never been this high up. I climbed higher still. Before me stretched the gray sea of rock and gravelly moraine of the glaciers of the lower valley, but also a dozen ethereal blues, a dozen delicate violets. My mind was clear. I couldn’t remember when I’d taken the camera out, or snapped on the zoom, but apparently I had. I wasn’t thinking of the photographs my fingers took, but I trusted my hand completely.

As the cracking of the glacier continued, it released a memory.

How does sunlight travel through ice? I am asking Irfan. What happens to this light? We are in class eight; I think I am twelve, he thirteen. I am teamed up with Irfan in the physics lab to watch the rainbow in a prism, while our teacher says the sun has different colors, each with different quantities of energy. Orange and red hold only a little; violet and blue, considerably more. Irfan says he is blue; I am red. I agree, happily. Beside me, in my plastic thermos cup, floats a single cube of ice. I ask him if light passes through ice in the same way, blue first, and he says yes.

There near the summit, the crystals of Ultar Glacier sucked me in. The reds and yellows were vanished, the blues limning the ice prevailed. When my camera rotated, I saw them. Irfan, his lips on Farhana’s. I believe I photographed them before I knew what I’d let myself preserve.

A prince and a fairy in a crystal, one planting on the other the softest of kisses, his movements so tender they were devotional. Their eyes were shut as they felt each other through layers of clothing — he even kissed the sleeve of her red jacket — and both faces wore identical expressions: a look so sublime it was as though they were soaring on a carpet of feathers. And how united they were in their ascent! Free of haste, free of shame. If till then it had been a secret, they were through with secrets now. In the arms of discovery, they suffered no fear of being discovered. I knew I hadn’t kissed her in this way in a long, long time. For the briefest flicker before my fury set in, I registered the truth of the moment. And captured all of it. My camera clicked; my mind could not stop the hand it trusted so well. It was what had been missing in my work so far and I was ill-prepared for the moment when I would find it: beauty, sweet and true. It was a miracle.