10

We 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.

When 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.