Thinner Than Skin by Uzma Aslam Khan Page A

was the wind, again.
    A little honey stuck to her flesh from the food wrapped for the guests. Licking it clean, she watched the clouds drift and Malika Parbat scatter into segments in the lake like the rungs of a ladder. What
else
did she want to see? She could still find no word for it, though the ladder was there, at the bottom of the lake, and if she wanted, she might step right into the void.

Queen of the Mountains: A Land Outside Land
    Her earliest memories were of movement. On horseback, in her father’s arms, on her brother’s back. She could not say if it was her own crossing she remembered, or that of her mother, grandmother, or some woman whose name she would never know. What she did know was that theirs had always been a fight for mobility. They could only be governed if they stayed. For every way of limiting movement, there was a way to move.
    No one knew this better than Ghafoor.
    So, she could no longer push thoughts of him away.
    Maryam walked to the far side of the lake, which was free of boats. Though the scent lingered, her fingers were licked clean of the honey. The water swayed.
    The first time she saw him, she saw through him. He was the tunnel in the mountain, the break in the hill, the hand in the hollow. He was the air that teased the braid circling her face, the cloud that yawned apart in the lake. He was a door to the other world, the world outside the mountains. And he had left her a sign in the cave.
    She had seen the sign on their way up from the plains, whenher family took shelter from the rain, but she had not dared acknowledge it in their presence. Her husband might say the cave was dangerous, turning would-be saints into thieves, but to her it was many things, and none were dangerous. It was, for instance, a shrine. And a messenger. Because of the cave she knew he was coming. In the months since camping here at the edge of the lake, each time she withdrew to the shrine in secret, she fingered the sign.
    Now Maryam’s footsteps hastened as she reached the far shore. When she thought no one was looking, she climbed up the hill furthest from the boats and tents, looking over her shoulder one last time for just the briefest moment. Their tent, made of plastic sheeting, was still sagging at one corner. Earlier today, she had told Kiran to fix the stick that propped it, but Kiran was with that Angrez woman, the one who walked like a goat, and her other two children were playing with the children of a neighboring tol. No one noticed Maryam. This was her window.
    She walked briskly. Far to the north, hidden behind clouds, hidden from those who could not imagine him, Nanga Parbat kept watch while Malika Parbat admired her reflection in the lake.
    He had come to her, at first, like a prophet. Honey on his fingers and a tale to tell. There was a land outside land, outside mountains, even, and it was where she had come from, and where a part of her would return.
Over the Pamirs
. That far.
    They lingered outside the cave, that first time, and he walked with her, at her child’s pace, this friend of her brother’s, this prophet. He held out his hand. “If it crystallizes, it’s pure,” he said. She sucked his finger clean of the honey. Dark amber crystals conjoined in a hard knot, oozing into a muddy slush around the edges, from his heat. Though young, she was not too young. She looked up, twice, hot and cold sugar in her eyes. He had to tell her to hurry up. He had work to do.
    She fed her own children honey in the same way. Kiran, especially,who pulled her finger like a nipple. But that would happen later.
    Maryam’s mind fled the shores of the lake and even the mouth of the cave to inhabit subsequent days with her brother’s friend, the one who could see the world, and through whom she could see it too. The one she had loved as a not-too-young child. Underneath the honey was the taste of his skin, which, though not pleasant, made something inside her turn to slush. It made her hold the