7

She cut me a furious look. I bounced foolishly on my toes. She climbed the hill to where enormous guns had once pointed out to the Pacific, guarding all three approaches to Golden Gate. There was a sublime view of Ocean Beach, but I knew it wasn’t for the view that she’d brought me here.

Without looking at me, she said, ‘Take me back.’

I assumed she meant to her warm purple house in the Mission. ‘Let’s go.’

‘Take me back to the places in Pakistan that you love.’

I was stunned. If she’d never seen them, why did she say back? And why now? And why ever?

When she said it a third time I understood that she presented
her idea as a condition: take me back and I will keep loving you.

For always? I wanted to ask. No matter where?

I glanced at her boldly now, and she returned my stare. I was hoping she’d understand that this is what my eyes said. It was here that a man loved her, a man with whom she could spend an unknowable quantity of time doing just about anything: walking, fucking, going to the movies, eating sushi and Guatemalan tamales on the same day, gossiping about a father in Berkeley, a father I’d still not met – I didn’t know whom she was protecting more, him or me – but who’d brought her to this country when she was three and stayed. I didn’t understand why she didn’t feel this was home. All I understood was that she didn’t. She was at a time in her life when other women long for a child. Farhana longed for a country.

‘You’re going home this summer. I’m coming with you. That’s what I want you to show me, for my birthday.’

I didn’t want to return. With her, that is. Nor did I want to explain that for me it was a return, but I didn’t think it was for her. Nor that, just as she took joy in showing me this corner of the world because I was new to it, I could only take joy in showing her mine if she acknowledged it was new to her. Not if she claimed it as her own. I’d spent months lingering over northern California and I’d freely admit there was much I didn’t grasp. How many months was she prepared to linger over Pakistan? How many years? Would she have the patience to wait and yield till the geography really did begin to construct the person, the way the breakers beneath us construct the shore? Did she want to yield to it? Of course not. It was a country practically under siege. We might be interested in you but not in your landscapes. What images did she want to see and to which land did she want to return?

We’d been happy. I wanted to stay happy. ‘I’m going for work.’

It wasn’t a lie. I was going to travel to the Frontier and the Northern Areas with my old friends from school, Irfan and Zulekha, to take pictures. Was I hoping to sell them here? Hoping, yes. Expecting, no. I’d started working long hours at a brew pub a few blocks from my apartment and took whatever other work I could find, usually as a wedding photographer. I anticipated doing the same no matter how many rolls I shot of the Pakistani Himalayas or the American South-west. Yet her reply stunned me.

‘What’s the point? You’ll never sell any. At least I know glaciers.’

I stopped rolling on my toes.

‘Perhaps you’re going back for the wrong reason,’ she kept on.

‘And being your tour guide is the right reason?’

She bestowed me with an ice-black stare, the kind I was to receive soon enough from a very different creature, in a very different place. Behind Farhana, I could see the guns that once pointed to the minefields outside Golden Gate. How easy it is to envision enemies lurking in the tide. As I looked over her shoulder, imagining what shapes those phantoms had once taken, I couldn’t have guessed that within two months she and I would be posted at our own separate lookouts, not on a headland overlooking the Pacific, but near a glacier overlooking Kashmir.