Wanderlust (16 page)

The Shiite holiday of Ashura fell in August. There would be marches in the street to celebrate—or more accurately to mourn, since the day marked the death of Hussain, grandson of the prophet Mohammed and rightful inheritor of the Caliphate as far as Shiites were concerned. He was killed in battle at Karbala in 680. Someone had a house on one of the streets where demonstrations were expected, and I drove there with David and Nirit and a few others. We milled around in the street as the crowd built up, and then
retreated to a second-story balcony, where we could look through the tree leaves to the street below.

Clutches of women in black stood around beds of hot coals, ululating and cheering each other on. They took turns walking barefoot across the coals, the female way of self-inflicting pain on this day. A sea of men in
shalwar khamis
of the purest, brightest white surged around them. The crowd eddied below our balcony and resolved itself into a circle around a group of men, who started to dance. Each one had an instrument in his hand: a hard leather-wrapped handle with glinting metal at one end. The dancing men curled in on themselves and then arched, curled and arched, over and over.

I didn't understand how the instruments worked until I saw the first bright streak of blood, a jagged crimson line across the white fabric of one man's back. Several lengths of chain were attached to each handle, and at the end of each chain was a metal blade, sharp and thin enough to slice skin with the slightest pressure. The instruments glinted in the sunlight. As graceful as a rhythmic gymnast, one man balanced on his left foot and bent his whole torso backward, right arm over his head, raining the blades down on his own back. The faster the men moved, the more others joined in from the sidelines, and the redder their lacerated garments became. Their faces looked agonized or ecstatic.

The next day Kamran's friend Obaid took us to go water-skiing on the Malir River, blasting “Blister in the Sun” from his car stereo. He skippered his family's speedboat for us, but declined to get in the water himself. Kamran gave him a hard time about that, then suddenly stopped. Later he explained to me: Obaid was wounded from the day before. I was surprised that a person who spoke my cultural language could also be a person who went to extremities of religion that I didn't understand.

I spent a lot of time in my room, in the chair I'd pulled up to my window, which I would open in the evening to let in the heat and look at the circling birds. Here I thought about Graham sometimes, but Stu was sending me vivid and ardent letters, and my thoughts turned more and more to him. Stu was available to me in all my aloneness. I called him—by placing a request with the congen switchboard, then waiting—and told him about my work and the people I met.

In an early phone call I asked Stu if he wanted to join me in Pakistan during the month I had between finishing my internship and returning to school. He agreed right away to come. I thought this said something promising about him and about us. A person who would fly halfway around the world—Karachi was precisely a twelve-hour time difference away from Seattle—for romance and backpacking, on short notice, struck me as the sort of person with whom I belonged.

Nevertheless I felt awkward and confused when he first arrived. After thinking of him for a couple of months, reading his letters, and talking every week or so, it was jarring to have him materialize. It seemed to be almost a rebuke, a warning that I should be careful with my wishes. As we rode in a consulate car from the airport back to my luxurious catacomb, I gripped his much larger hand with my own and stared at him in surprise. I made myself fuck him right away—to put any awkwardness quickly behind us, to break the tension, to establish myself as in control and unfazed. I thought that it would orient me, or get us back to the relationship we had started before I left. It was not especially enjoyable, but pleasure, I figured, would come later.

Stu could not have been more easygoing as he waited out my
last few weeks of work, going wandering by himself into the city, to bazaars where I in my sheltered diplomatic life hadn't ventured. I envied his maleness and his six-foot-four frame, attributes I thought enabled him to go about the world at ease. He came back from his adventures with odd treasures from the building trades: brass hinges, a compass from a ship, centuries-old locks and keys. He would use them all, he said, to build a home. One day Stu told me how he'd wandered to some distant point in the city and then returned by
tuk-tuk,
one of the three-wheeled open taxis, a form of transportation forbidden by the consulate general's security chief. The chief had called me to his office one day to run through a list of no-nos, which included leaving the Karachi city limits and any travel to Yemen. On the other hand, he'd been letting his daughter date Marines since she was fourteen, according to the head of the Marine guards, who shook his head in disapproval as he told me.

The next time Stu and I went out, I insisted we take a
tuk-tuk
.

Inspired by the fluorescent rivulets running through the slum, I filed a report on Karachi pollution. It was picked up in a global weekly roundup compiled in Washington, meaning that maybe it passed before the eyes of an assistant to an assistant to an undersecretary. But most likely not. It was dawning on me that I didn't want to be a diplomat after all. I didn't want to be David in a year's time, stamping visas at the head of an endless line. Nor did I want to be Kevin, the political officer who was my supervisor, who was feeling thwarted in his work on child labor. Congress had one idea, which was to ban all imports of carpets from Pakistan. Kevin thought things were more complicated. “There aren't any schools,” he pointed out. I concluded that foreign service officers didn't have much influence.

Nor did I want to live as I'd been living. I understood the point of barricades but didn't want to live behind them. If I went as a diplomat to all the places I thought were so exotic and weird and difficult, I would end up in a string of enclaves.

This ebbing away of professional direction didn't yet worry me much. I had to complete my final quarter of college after I returned to Seattle, and I could think about it then. What I most wanted to do was travel more, without an end date or obligation in sight. I wanted to wander and feel free.

At the end of the summer, the Pakistani kids I'd met started returning to Florida and Boston, London and Leeds. Jane's prisoners still enjoyed the hospitality of the Pakistani government. Stephen still worked down the hall, behind the locked door, listening to who knew what. And on my last day of work, the line of visa supplicants making its way to David's window looked identical to the line when I first arrived.

chapter twelve

I
t's not possible,” I said,
with a theatrical shrug of my shoulders. We refused to pay that much for a ride from Chitral to Gilgit.

It was dusk, and Stu and I were sitting under a tree, next to a green Jeep, haggling with the driver. To be more accurate, I was haggling, while Stu nodded his assent. By the time we'd left Peshawar, the Mos Eisli of the Northwest Frontier, we'd both adopted the
shalwar khamis,
and the more comfortable I'd grown among its folds, the bolder I'd become. The driver lowered his price for the third time, and but still I said no, and stood up to walk away. Stu hesitated. We really did want the ride, after all, on a road that wound through steep river gorges toward the Karakoram range. I might have been blowing our chance.

Finally the driver relented.

I still wasn't subtle at the game. I didn't understand that you had to spar, not just punch someone out. I often failed to start with a low enough offer, one that I could then magnanimously let rise. I was bullheaded, adamantly opposed to signaling submission. Once I'd won, showing that I was useful and tough, I could relax and let Stu make me feel safe again. I thought of all those explorers from centuries past, the Wilfred Thesigers and the Freya Starks, and how they always seemed to have entourages of native guides. My modern
twist on safety-in-numbers was to bring a boyfriend. I felt guilty for failing to be independent. Independence was still my burning ideal. Most of the time I felt reliant, so whenever I could, I tried to prove myself by driving a hard bargain.

In Gilgit we met up with David and Nirit and rented another Jeep with a driver. I let David, the diplomat, do the hiring. The Jeep took us as far north as a guesthouse in Sost, which, though it was still eighty kilometers from the Chinese border, served as Pakistan's customs and immigration post. Mountains rose behind the wooden guesthouse and all around us. The peaks were white, permanently frozen, and looked edible. Our chests felt tighter when we breathed; I associated the sensation with the cold, but it was because there was less oxygen to go around.

From Sost we shared a bus that had come up from below carrying several dozen Pakistani traders. The road took us along cliff sides above steep canyons, and once we had to drive over a sloping pile of dirt and rock that had tumbled down onto the road. As the bus tipped to a forty-five-degree angle, we discussed how we might escape if it went over, and decided that climbing out the windows would work best. David said he would push Nirit out first, and she said, hell yes, she would go first. Even the Pakistani tradesmen who took this route all the time looked nervous, shifting in their seats with wide eyes. But the driver and the conductor, who had gotten out to direct him over the hump, took us safely back onto the road.

The actual border was at the Karakoram Pass, at an elevation of 18,176 feet. We dismounted briefly on an expanse of glacial moraine, where the snow-covered bowls and peaks rose headily around us. The bus took us on to a Chinese border post, where
we sat around for several hours in the bright dry sun, waiting our turn to pass through customs. Then we switched to a Chinese bus, which took us on to the town of Tashkurgan. It was a dry, cold little outpost where each of the few street corners had a pole mounted with a speaker, which at regular intervals blared martial music and crackly announcements. We and all the other bus passengers checked into the same government-run hotel, our way station en route to the city of Kashgar. It was a drafty, many-storied building with high-ceilinged unlit halls. The four of us shared a room; the bathroom was down the hall. It had no door and was not genderspecific, and every toilet held an unflushed pile of shit. Our dinner was composed of gelatinous dough balls, birds I thought were too small to eat, and Tang. I thought we'd reached a new low, but after dinner Stu collapsed. He'd been getting headachey during the day from altitude sickness, and now became so pained and delirious that I wondered if we should turn back.

But part of me also felt like Stu needed me now, and I liked the sensation. I wanted to take care of him. I'd been dependent on him, and now he was dependent on me. As I watched him in the night, drying his forehead with my towel, I concluded that turning back wouldn't get us to a lower elevation any more quickly than going forward. It wouldn't get us to anywhere easy or comfortable or familiar; we'd come way too far for that. We would continue on to Kashgar.