along the far shore. They were waving to him; I doubt he saw them. I set aside the last two sandwiches for Farhana and was filling the gurgling in my still-empty stomach with water when a boy with brown curls strode toward us, bearing gifts. Pears and apricots. Potatoes and hot maize bread. He carried the aroma of salt on a flame, and a cloth rolled in a knot with black thread. When I plucked the knot from the boy my fingers came away sticky. Honey inside. We embraced, telling him to thank his mother for the gifts, Irfan polishing our gratitude in flecks of Hindko, or Gujri, I couldn’t tell which.
I tore the bread and left it on my tongue, letting the heat dissolve slowly. I added an apricot and rejoiced at my menu. Then I poured the topping: a finger of fresh honey. It tasted of flowers unknown to me, flowers vaguely aquatic. Like honey from the bottom of the lake. No one alive had ever touched the bottom, yet here was proof of life in those depths. Next I peeled a roasted potato with my teeth, telling Irfan that part of the thrill of being away from home was mixing dessert with vegetables.
“I always do that,” he replied. “No matter where I am.”
He held half a pear in one hand, half a potato in the other, and, as the clouds rolled across us and the light grew lavender, the two halves mirrored each other. I scraped my pear over the honey cloth and handed the cloth to Irfan, who drew the remaining drops with his tongue. As boys we’d do the same with imli wrappers. And we were boys again.
I’d been missing this, the ease of being with someone without speaking, without suppressing speech. I’d grown up with it in Karachi, where groups of men will congregate in the smallest spaces—the grass between houses, a doorway, a roundabout— spaces made more generous through companionable silence. It existed between women too, this bond. My sister and her friends could spend hours reclining together on a bed, or a carpet. If secrets were murmured, it happened in a style so intuited it was pre-verbal. I hadn’t experienced this very much in the West, where it seemed people had a reason for everything, including intimacy. The only exception I could find was the time I spent with Farhana at her bay window in her purple house. But those moments had been too few in the months before we’d left.
Lying there beside Irfan at the bottom of a hill not far from the nomads’ tents, our wet socks and shoes tossed a few feet away, I was now entirely at peace.
“We’ll save them the potatoes,” Irfan chuckled, setting these aside, gathering fruit peels and seeds into the bag where our sandwiches had been packed.
It was the first time since leaving Karachi that I felt easeful in his company. The way we used to be, when his wife was alive, before she was even his wife. He hadn’t mentioned her once, but of course she was with us. Though he hadn’t mentioned this either, I knew that on our way north, we’d stop and pay homage to the glacier whose mating we’d witnessed with Zulekha. For her. For closure, even, if this were ever possible. And maybe even for God. Surely there was a ritual of departure to this ritual of return, and he needed me with him to complete the cycle, somehow.
He was also lost in thought. I believed I could guess what he was thinking, apart from Zulekha, of course.
It was soon after we’d witnessed the mating of glaciers that Irfan had begun devoting himself to bringing water to these and neighboring areas. And ever since, one question had never ceased needling him. It was this: Do they need it? If for thousands of years people had survived, with varying degrees of success, by building irrigation channels from glacial melt, despite their poverty and isolation, did they need a man from the city bringing them pipes and taps? It was a fine line, the one between helping and hurting. To do nothing could mean becoming a passive witness to a potential calamity. To do something could mean becoming the agent of a worse calamity. In the beginning, Irfan frequently turned to the Quran (remember it was before Zulekha’s death), which placed a high premium on niyat. Intent. He told himself his niyat was good.
I could smell the fire from outside the tents of the nomads. There were two women squatting by the flame, perhaps cooking more bread. One of them stood up, and though I was too far to see her face, I noticed how tall she was, how straight her back. She wore a black shirt with brightly colored embroidery—pinks and oranges as fiery as cactus blooms—and her hair was either tucked beneath a pale-hued cap, or pulled tight into a braid. I could hear bangles chime.
We lay there, me looking behind at the tents, Irfan looking ahead at the tourists trekking back down toward the glacier. He decided the wind was changing direction, the clouds would soon disperse. “They’ll be fine going down,” he pointed to the different groups. “We could leave too, if you still wanted.”
“It’s so calm here. Let’s stay.” From the corner of my eye I could see him reach for his phone. “Don’t. It’s probably still not working anyway.”
“All right.” He pulled his hand away, then crossed both arms behind his neck and reclined again. “Have Farhana and Wes ever been lovers?”
“No.”
“You said that too quickly.”
“No.”
“I believe you.”
In the distance, gray clouds circled the summit of Naked Mountain’s lookalike. Was it possible that the clouds arranged themselves just so, creating mirrors upon mirrors, drawing him closer to us from his real position far to the north? They seemed to be teasing him, offering cover, then withholding it. Irfan was right about the clouds dispersing elsewhere, though. They were breaking above the hill where we reclined. A growing niagara of golden light flowed into the bowl of the lake. Fire falling into honey.
What had made him ask? Getting back at me for his own unhappiness—because I’d dared to remind him of it?
And just like that, our easeful time congealed.
“Maybe you should check your phone,” I said.
He chuckled softly. “I also saved them a pear.”
I rolled onto my side, my back to him.
“Up in Hunza, they have a proverb. Beware the guest one does not feed.”
What the hell did that mean? I shut my eyes. I wasn’t going to let anything spoil what was turning out to be a sublime afternoon.
Queen of the Mountains: Pagan Rituals
Maryam stood up from the fire and glanced at the water’s edge. Her fingers drifted to the braid around her face, feeling the tightness of the weave. This morning, her daughter Kiran had again refused to have her hair braided, despite being shown both styles, a single braid around the cusp of the face, like Maryam’s, or a cluster of braids down the back, the way Maryam’s mother had preferred. Still Kiran insisted on wearing it loose. She had worn her hair loose all summer, ever since they had left the plains down near Balakot, if you could call the mess on her head a way of wearing it.
Pushing her frustration aside, Maryam said a quick prayer for her dead mother, and for every mountain, and for every name her mother bestowed on every mountain. The black door, the white door, the abyss. And the single peaks, like the ones soaring before Maryam now, the ones that could become windows or footholds, allowing you to scale a void. Her mother’s two beloved peaks, Malika Parbat and Nanga Parbat. Though some might say it was not possible to see him from here, how well he lived up to his name today! He was a naked white spear towering high above the Queen, breathing down the nape of her neck, the slope of her thighs. Not surprisingly, their snowmelt was thick today. Like her daughter when she tried to comb her hair, the lake could barely hold still.
There was a jinn here too.
