2

I met her soon after moving to the Bay Area from Tucson, two years ago, on my way to becoming a photographer. It was landscapes I excelled at, or wanted to. I left Tucson and spent the next two months making my way up the West Coast, occasionally veering back into the desert after hitching a ride.

I still have photos of them in my portfolio, those who stopped for me: pickup trucks, scuffed boots, silver belts glistening in the sun. There was old man prickly pear cactus all around and of course the Joshua trees as the wind blew in from the north-west and purple clouds draped us. When I tired of the rides, I walked into the desert and did what I knew I could spend my life doing. I really looked at cactus. I really looked at triumph. Blossoming in shocking gimcrack hues of scarlet and gold in a world that watched with arms crossed, if it watched at all. It reminded me of the festive dresses worn by women in Pakistan’s desert borderlands and mountain valleys. The drier the land, the thirstier the spirit.

When I finally arrived in San Francisco, for no reason other than it was San Francisco, I had a stack of photographs of the Sonoran Desert, the Petrified Forest and Canyon de Chelly. I mailed off the best and waited for offers to pour in while renting an apartment with three other men. I had two interviews. The first went something like this:

‘Why are you, Nadir Sheikh’ – he said Nader Shake – ‘wasting your time taking photographs of American landscapes when you have so much material at your own doorstep?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘This is a stock-photo agency. We sell photographs to magazines and sometimes directly to customers and sometimes for a lot of money. We might be interested in you, but not in your landscapes.’

‘In what then?’

‘Americans already know their trees.’

‘Do they know their cactus?’

‘Next time you go home, take some photographs.’ When it was obvious I still didn’t get it, he dumbed it down for me. ‘Show us the dirt. The misery. Don’t waste your time trying to be a nature photographer. Use your advantage.

Back at the apartment, my housemate Matthew felt sorry for me. He said a former boyfriend knew a nice little Pakistani girl. I ate his nachos while he talked on the phone.

In the morning, my cabin was colder than the river last night. I lay under the sheets, listening for sounds next door. I registered Farhana’s absence with dull panic, the fingers of one hand switching off an alarm while the other reached for a dream. I could hear Irfan and Zulekha. I thought of the ghostly owl; anything to help tune out the laughter. The bitter taste of the Kunhar – the cunt, the kiss – the walk back in the dark. I’d knocked my toe against something. A carcass, a gun. Under the sheets, I picked at blood-crust.

I arranged to meet her the afternoon of my second interview. This time I included in my portfolio a series of photographs taken on a previous return to Pakistan. It was a series of my mother’s marble tabletop, which she’d inherited from her mother and which dated back to the 1800s. The swirling cream-and-rust pattern changed as I played with the light, sometimes slick as a sheet of silk, sometimes pillowing like a bowl of ice cream. A few frames were, if I say so myself, as sensuous as Linde Waidhofer’s stones.

The second interview didn’t go very differently from the first.

‘Your photographs lack authenticity.’

‘Authenticity?’

‘Where are the beggars or anything that resembles your culture?’

‘The marble is a real part of my family history. It’s old, from
1800–’

He waved his hand. ‘It seems to me that when a war’s going on, a table is trivial.’ I wished for the courage – or desire – to ask what images of what war he was looking for.

He stood up. ‘I’m a busy man. Could’ve ignored you. Didn’t. You know why? There’s something there.’ He leaned forward expectantly, so I thanked him for thinking there was something there.