B005OWFTDW EBOK (14 page)

T
he bathroom sink in my cabin was clogged. I moved to the kitchen, cracking the window as I shaved. I heard voices. It was Irfan, Zulekha and a third voice, perhaps the restaurant cook, discussing the reasons for the heightened security in the valley. Shia–Sunni riots had erupted in Gilgit District to the north and Mansehra district to the south, particularly near the town of Balakot, where the martyr Syed Ahmad Barelvi lay buried. Barelvi had once called for jihad against the British and dreamed of an Islamic state ruled by Islamic laws. Nearly two hundred years later, his followers were still dreaming his dream. They had training camps and, according to the third voice, men from the camps had started harassing the villagers here, trying to recruit their sons.

On our way to the valley, Irfan had whispered, ‘We carry a heavy responsibility, travelling with them.’ He’d nudged his chin in the direction of Farhana and Wes.

‘She wants to return,’ I’d declared, refusing to say more, while he stared at me in disbelief.

‘We’ll need an armed guard,’ he said at last.

‘I know.’

‘This isn’t what we’d planned.’

‘I know.’

‘Something happens to them, international fiasco.’

‘I know.’

‘Something happens to us, so what.’

‘I know.’

Never was a wind between teeth more exasperated.

I
n the weeks following our fight at the Fort, I returned to the coast often, always alone. A small part of me knew it was to cleanse my palate, as if to revive something that had been lost on that wild stretch of land when it included Farhana.

My eye was hungry. I photographed the Monterey pines and the valley Quercus. The agave that bloomed before death. The pups that replaced them. California buckeye. Desert five-spots. Star tulips, and bell-shaped pussy ears with stems as thin as saliva. Diogenes’ lantern, the sweetest of flowers, yellow as the yawning sun.

I crawled back to her house.
Mirror, mirror,
I bayed at her glass.
Forgive the ugliest of them all!

When she flung the door open there was a man behind her. Farhana introduced him as Wesley.

‘Call me Wes,’ he said.

‘You’re not a Wes,’ she gazed at him.

I stepped inside.

‘I think I’ll leave you with your beau.’

‘Oh, stay. You guys should talk.’

Why?

‘Nadir, I can arrange for us to go!’

‘What do you mean?’

‘We’ve applied for funding. We’ll get it.’

We?

‘A month to study glaciers in the western Himalayas!’

Wes smacked my shoulder. ‘I want to know how those locals manage their water supply. You know, through seeding ice.’

I glared at Farhana. ‘You
will
get it or already have?’

She soared into my arms, flinging all three of us side to side.

Later that night, when we were alone, she let me photograph her naked spine for the first time.

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why today?’

She peeled off her sweater, shirt, bra, still delirious with the joy of having skilfully engineered her
return
. And all this time I’d believed she was waiting for me to say yes. There was no consent involved. We were going.

‘Why today?’ I insisted.

She giggled. It was as if she were drunk and wanting to have sex with me after refusing when sober. It was her choice, yet I was having to make it.

‘Come on, Nadir. Pick up your camera. I know you’re dying to.’

‘Actually, I’m not.’

‘Sure about that?’

I hesitated. To say yes would mean choosing no. I said no.

I didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t want Farhana, neither behind my lens nor in the flesh. Even when she wound her braid around her, I couldn’t see the calla lily. It was all too conscious, too rehearsed. And yet, and yet. As I put her through my lens and captured that twisting torso, her ribs protruding, a thought flickered in my mind. Was it her pleasure that was dulling mine? I shook the thought away. It wasn’t even pleasure. More like victory. I could see it in her gaze. It had killed the wonder this moment was always meant to hold. As she adjusted her hips and I kept on snapping, I tried to conjure it up, this wonder, this thing which cannot always be there, which is entirely fleeting and numinous, which, like luck, or talent, or wealth, cannot be equally distributed between those who love, between those who mate.
Snap!
She was raising her chin so high. She was rising from the bed. She was turning off all the lights.

W
hat’s the most beautiful thing you ever witnessed?’ she used to ask, when we lay curled together in her bay window, playing opposites. ‘I mean, a moment.’

I always said it was the mating of glaciers. ‘And you, what’s yours?’

She never hesitated. ‘The way you looked at me, the first time, standing down in the sand on Baker Beach in your trousers while I sat sunning myself on the rocks. You compared me to a calla lily. That was the moment.’

We played differently now.

T
he month before we left, I heard her on the phone. I seemed to have come in at the end.

‘… it boils down to. One person in the mood when the other isn’t?’

There was a pause while, I assumed, the listener spoke. Farhana shook her head. ‘I’m not only talking about sex. Sex is just a metaphor.’

I expected her to elaborate. A long silence instead.

Finally, she exhaled. ‘Yep, that’s what I mean. Uh-huh.’

What did she mean?

‘I mean, that day on the beach.’

Now I feared I could guess.

It had happened the other way more. I mean, my wanting sex while she didn’t. It had happened the other way most of my life. Like a forgiving puppy, I bounced back up again at the merest hint of encouragement. Until recently.

She was saying, ‘Women still suppress it, I know, nothing worse than letting go just to fall on your face. Though letting him decide, you know, what’s hot, maybe that’s worse.’ Silence. ‘Sure, I have, many times.’ Silence. ‘Uh-uh.’ Silence. ‘No. He doesn’t.’

I don’t what? And then panic: it was me she was talking about?

‘Wes? Oh sure, yeah. It bothers him a lot.’

What?

I slammed the door. The door to the house with the five-sided bay window where she now spent more time with her phone. The door in the alcove where the gold rings of the columns now looked prosthetic, like gold teeth on a poor man from Tajikistan.

Why wasn’t I aroused by her lately?

Was it our departure? Ours. I told myself I was at peace with her coming too. More importantly, I was excited about what I’d do there, with or without her, and this had renewed interest in my work. I’d bought a Nikon digital camera to go with my beloved F4, bought a 300mm lens and 20mm extension tube. I spent my free time photographing small fry. A California poppy. Farhana’s nipple. The rainbow in a dragonfly’s wing.

I suppose the image of the magnified nipple and the blurred contours of the breast preoccupied me more than she did, but then, she wasn’t in a very preoccupying state of mind. Always on the phone, always talking about him, her work, her return. Her breasts. She liked me photographing them. Breasts that had begun to stir me only in the frame. At least I didn’t get off on images of other women.

That day on the beach? It excited her, seeing herself magnified. And colour-filtered. Image pre-processing, not to be confused with post-processing, to enhance maximum photorealism. To make the infeasible feasible. She lay on her stomach; I drizzled sand on the mound of her buttocks. It cascaded down her curves, featherlike, matching her skin tone. When we viewed the images together, the texture of the sandspill on her flesh made her wet. We were nestled between the same cluster of rocks where I’d found her the first time, on the far side of the cypress grove. There were others around, though none in our nest, or so we thought. She rolled back onto her stomach, raised her hips high into my groin. The sand scrubbed my erection. I heard the figure behind me, his breathing. I could feel it on my neck. I assumed she mistook it for mine or would have stopped. There was no way she could have seen his shadow on her spine.

Later, we both lay on our stomachs a long time. When we eventually got dressed, we didn’t speak of it.
He came when I did
. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed.

W
e still call it a fault line, here where the subcontinent conjoins with Asia. I told Farhana I’d seen glaciers mate once before, and I had. The first time, I’d been in love with a girl called Rida, which means inner peace. I gave her purple roses that left blood marks on our lips. By the end of the year, I’d no idea where she was, or what she was doing. By the following summer, I was thinking of her less, and the memory kept on receding, creeping downhill, like a carefully constructed secret.

I knew where Farhana was and what she was doing. She was in Wes’s cabin and they were eating breakfast. It was their laughter I could hear. My cabin was only growing colder. Soon Irfan and Zulekha would knock on my door. It would be time to return to the ice-bride and ice-groom, to see how they were settling in their new home.

The night she left. She lay sprawled across the bed, her legs bare before me. I didn’t stir. ‘I hoped that might change,’ she whispered. ‘Here.’

Now I saw her draped across a different set of sheets. The memory was an extraordinarily happy one. It was a memory from before our troubles and it took place in a purple house and it began with legs. Hers were steep legs built by steepness. Mountain legs; San Francisco legs. The white, tennis-ball calves tapering tidily to the ankles against dark sheets. I traced their stocky slant with a fingertip and moved higher, to where her sartorius cut a ribbony dialogue on her flesh, snaking across a taut inner thigh. I called her my ice queen, whom I alone could melt. And we’d heard our ascent – the rush of wings, higher, higher, through a smooth, silvery sky! And our fall – deeper, deeper, down a silky, slippery skein.
Whooshoo! Whooshoo!

Months later in a cabin in Kaghan it was the sheets, not her calves, that shone. Her legs receded in the dark.

W
hen we got to a place from where we could look across the valley, Irfan asked the driver to stop. We walked to the edge of the road and climbed up a set of rocks. Our armed escort stayed in the jeep.

‘Does this look familiar?’ asked Zulekha.

I nodded. We were facing the hill we’d climbed seven years earlier, the first time I saw the mating of glaciers, that time with Rida. The two ice blocks we’d seen then were now one white smudge of triangle in a fountain of black gravel.

How quickly they grow, I thought. Seven years ago was five years before I met San Francisco, or Farhana.

On the slopes were scattered a few sheep and goats, and closer, juniper trees whose leaves were still burned by shamans on special occasions. The afternoon sun fell just at the lip of the glacier. As I photographed it, I thought of one of the first things I’d learned about seeing through the lens: normalize the view. Which meant the right exposure on the area the human eye is most inclined to drift toward, which, at this moment, was that sliver of bright light at the edge of the white smudge.

‘It looks young,’ said Wes. ‘It has to be sixty feet thick to be called a glacier.’

‘It doesn’t matter what you call it,’ muttered Irfan. ‘I’m glad the tradition of marrying glaciers is coming back.’

‘Here winter temperatures are rising,’ said Farhana. ‘More snowfall, less melt. So, after seven years, that
could
be sixty feet.’

So she’d guessed that was the one.

‘Seven years?’ said Wes. ‘Doubt it.’

‘They’ve always made do without science,’ said Zulekha.

Wes shrugged. ‘How far are we from ours?’

Ours
.

‘Not far. But if we want to return before dark, we should leave.’

Farhana and I were left alone. I lowered my camera.

‘That is the one, isn’t it?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I said.

Below us, a row of military trucks raced up the highway, slowing to examine our group. I could hear them call out to Irfan, asking questions, waving their guns as casually as cigarettes. I let Irfan tackle them.

Ahead, a farmer was watering his wheat field. The sun was creeping off the glacier’s lip and onto the dark gravel. He stopped to enjoy the light, just as we did. A goat grazed at his feet, her bells chiming through the valley. Gradually, the black earth immediately before them ignited, as if the sun had chosen that precise point upon which to rest its fingers, enfolding the man and the goat. We kept at our lookouts, squinting into the glare, waiting for the sun to release the captives. From the corner of my eye, I noticed a rolling, as of a rain cloud. It was the glacier, sliding into shadow.