Uzma Khan: Thinner Than Skin

At the window, we watched others on the street.

At the window, she asked, “What’s the most beautiful thing you ever witnessed? I mean a moment.”

At the window, we played opposites. The Mission, where she lived, was once moist, fecund. In contrast, the stark, windswept Richmond, where I lived, was once a desolate bank of sand. We said she sprang from marsh, I from desert. She loved the damp closeness of curves, the rich debris of glaciers and deltas. She loved her gloves and her socks. I, though always cold, hated to cover my extremities. I preferred the raw, violent beauty of the Pacific coast to the secret tides of the protected bays. We said “opposites attract” and we were right. Converging is what divided us.

On her first birthday after we met, the year before we left for Kaghan, in one hand I held a calla lily with a lip pinker than her own, in the other, a bottle of champagne. As I descended the hill to her purple palace, the sun drew the fog from my flesh, and I was salivating as the scent of refried beans followed me all the way to her door. There she met me, dressed in woolens and boots, saying she knew what she wanted instead.

“What?”

“Let me show you.”

I shut my eyes, counted to ten, opened them. “So, where is it?”

“Not here, silly. Let’s go for a walk. To your neighborhood, the one you love to photograph, with all the cliffs and cypresses.” She rolled her eyes as though cliffs and cypresses were toys for men. I found her delicious.

It was an especially cold day in May and though I did love the bluffs, I’d been hoping for a more close-fitting day. Call it role reversal. I chilled the champagne and headed for the bay window, to, well, anticipate some tidal advances. The last time we’d made love I’d teased that her needs were growing as strong as the tides rushing up the channels of a salt marsh, and, inshallah, they’d also be twice daily.

Well, it was not to be.

She’d planned the route. First, the ruins of the Sutro Baths, which looked especially green and scummy that day, thick as a Karachi sewer. We watched the pelicans. Dark hunkered shadows, sometimes in gangs of twenty or more, closing in on the fecund orgy at the microbe-gilded pools like evil clouds, like missiles. They launched headlong, scattering the seagulls and the swifts, dropping one after the other in a heavy, gut-wrenching fall. A rain of bombshells. The invasion mesmerized us.

I moved my camera in search of the prison island of Alcatraz, floating somewhere in the bay, but it was shrouded in fog. Alcatraz . The archaic Spanish word for pelican, from the Arabic al-qatras . It was the rule of silence that drove the inmates insane, reminding them that their exile was complete. I moved my camera back to the baths, and from there, to the austere silhouette of a cormorant. He seemed to be watching the assault of the pelicans with as little interest as God.

“Nadir, talk to me for a minute, without that.”

I didn’t have to see through the lens to see her point to it. “In a minute.”

The pelicans gone, the seagulls multiplied. I watched a pair land on the boulders along the shore. It was the softest landing, the gulls allowing the wind to pull them down gently, lovingly. And the hummingbirds — how did they survive in this wind, and at this height? And the succulents to her side — those red waxy leaves, juicy as capsicum — and the purple flowers with the bright white hearts! Here it was again: the tenacity of the small. What I’d seen in the Sonoran Desert and the valleys of the Himalayas.

“It’s over a minute.” I put the camera in its case. She cleared her throat. “Nadir, are you as happy here, with me, as you are alone on your nightly walks?”

“I’m much happier.”

She looked away. We were balanced on the farthest wall of the ruins. The water here was less slimy; a thin sun shimmered in its depths. As Farhana’s orange scarf blew across the pale green peat, I took my camera out again. She sometimes let me photograph her now, though still not often enough, and only when dressed. I got a beautiful profile of her gazing at the baths, perhaps imagining them as the rambling maze of salt water swimming pools they’d once been, thumb at lower lip, the mist rolling across the steps in the background.

“Happier than in the mountains of Pakistan?”

Perhaps I hesitated. “Well, yes.”

“So,” she tossed her head back, pulled the scarf tight around her neck, “which is more beautiful. The desert, or the mountains?”

“Hard to say.” I paused, wanting to play along with this birthday guessing game. “Both. Equally. Differently.” How to compare a horizontal wilderness with a perpendicular one? Especially the most impenetrable perpendicular wilderness in the world? What I couldn’t even begin to explain was how both energized me by removing me from myself. Like seeing the world from behind a camera. She wouldn’t understand. She’d call it hiding. She’d call it cowardly. But it was none of these things. It was disappearing. I could see better this way.

She watched me hesitate. “Okay, which makes you happiest, the desert, the mountains, or these scummy baths with me.”

This time I am sure I did not hesitate. “I’m happy anywhere with you.”

She laughed. “You don’t have to say that. But since you did, why?”

I was still photographing her. From behind the lens, I replied, “Because you don’t remind me of my past.” And as I stepped onto a lower wall to get more of the ruins behind her, I realized that this was exactly so. She wasn’t like any of the women I knew in Karachi. Her energy was — different. It wasn’t sultry, wasn’t eastern. She was walking away from me now, walking away from my lens, and I noticed that her walk was determined and — how can I put it? — unstudied. As if no aunt had ever told her that women walk with one foot before the other. It wasn’t graceful but it was vigorous. There are men on the Pakistan — Afghanistan border who can spot a foreign journalist hiding in a burqa by the way she moves. Farhana would never pass. She could, however, keep up with them on the mountains. Not many women from Karachi could. And yet — of course I didn’t tell her this — they had more patience in bed. Farhana didn’t like to linger, not over food, shopping, or sex. The only thing I’d ever seen her linger over was her hair, and that was not with pleasure. All the languor was in her spine, the part of her she never let me put behind my lens. Everything else about her had the slightly lunatic energy of Nor Cal, uncomplicated and nervy. I mean, for heaven’s sake, she was passionate about glaciers . How many Pakistani women know two things about them? It was Farhana who told me that Pakistan has more glaciers than anywhere outside the poles. And I’ve seen them! I’ve even seen them fuck !

She was sobbing. I saw it first through the lens. I saw it too late, after I’d taken the photograph of her wiping her nose with the back of her hand. She said it was the worst thing I could have said.

The seagulls hovered, teetering in the breeze. Before they touched the rock it was beginning to sink in, yet each time I approached a landing, the wind pulled me away again. We loved each other, Farhana and I, for precisely opposite reasons. If I loved her because she did not remind me of my past, Farhana loved me because she believed I was her past. That day I came close to understanding; by the time I fully understood, we were already immersed in separate rituals of silence.

I expected to keep to the coast to Point Lobos, but, veering inland, she began following the signs for Fort Miley. I said nothing. I didn’t know what to say. How could I apologize for all that drew me to her? Perhaps I’d been crude in trying to sum it up in the first place. (Or she’d been crude in asking.) That’s the line I eventually took, as we clambered uphill. “There’s too much about you that makes me happy to say why.”