4

I was on the verge of asking how she got all the way here without my noticing when I saw how her eyes sparkled. So I clambered up without another word, crossing a series of tide pools and a snug sandy enclosure between the boulders that sprawled in a V. I crouched down beside her and looked to her right: there loomed Golden Gate Bridge.

‘Did you think you’d recognize me better with clothes on?’
she giggled.

‘Your clothes are on.’

‘Are you disappointed?’

‘I’m relieved.’

‘How disappointing.’

So I learned this immediately about my Farhana. She was one
of those people who liked to receive a reaction, and she didn’t like to wait very long for it.

We stayed till sunset. I took several shots of the bridge, but none of her. She wouldn’t let me photograph her that day. When we finally stood up to leave, I realized how tall she was. And how boyish.

She knew. ‘I would have gone topless if I had breasts.’ Again, she required a reaction.

I am not an eloquent man and am usually tongue-tied around directness, but directness attracts me. I looked at Farhana and took all of her in, all that she’d spent the afternoon telling me: her work with glaciers, her father in Berkeley, her mother’s death, leaving Pakistan as a young child, her life in this city where she grew up. I took that in while absorbing her height, her leanness, the paleness of her skin, and the way her braid now wrapped around her in a diagonal curve that extended from left shoulder to right hip. I said she looked more like a calla lily than any woman I’d ever met.

‘Not just any calla lily,’ I added. ‘Jeffrey Conley’s calla lily.
Have you seen it?’

She bowed her head, suddenly self-conscious. Turning her
back to me, she took off her T-shirt. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow then.’

I scrambled off the rocks, glancing up a final time before turning toward my apartment. She’d twisted to one side so her long, deep spine was now perfectly aligned with the braid and both encircled her like an embrace.

I walked to Farhana’s side of the bed. On her bedside table lay a map, with Kaghan Valley circled in red at the easternmost corner of the North West Frontier Province, on the edge of Kashmir. Before we’d left San Francisco, I told her that to see the Frontier, you had to imagine it as the profile of a buffalo’s bust, facing west, with the capital Peshawar the nose, Chitral Valley the backward tilting horn, Swat Valley the eye and Kaghan Valley the ear. The Frontier listened to Kashmir at its back while facing Afghanistan ahead, and it listened with Kaghan.

I opened the door, listened to Kaghan. Around me rose rounded hills, scoops of velvet green on a brick-red floor. Like the mossy moistness of rain-kissed tailorbirds. It was for this that I’d come, not to fall into myself in an abandoned cabin. Around me the valley undulated like the River Kunhar that gave it shape, cupping nine lakes in its curves, sprouting thick forests of deodar and pine, towering over 4,000 metres before halting abruptly at the temples of the Himalayas and the Karakoram. The only way through the mountainous block was by snaking along hair-thin passes, as if by witchery. I’d known the witchery once. Now I had to relearn it.

In colonial times, the British considered it a pretty sort of wedge, this ear called Kaghan, nicely if incidentally squeezed between the more considerable Kashmir and the more incomprehensible, and feared, hill tribes of the west. And so they mostly left the valley alone. Today, nearly all of the hotels, restaurants and shops were run, though not owned, by Kashmiris and Sawatis. Even those who couldn’t read, or didn’t own a television, were keenly aware of what was going on, and where. They liked to say that the buffalo is as attuned to what lies behind as what lies ahead. Why else did shivers keep running up and down its spine? Why else did it keep sweeping its hide with the smack of a tail?