Postscript

It was time to lay the needles down. Fresh pine needles for a clean floor and a bed softer than most things, except feathers, or flesh. Her flesh was ruddy as a peach and the child would rest her head of thick brown curls against it when she tired of gathering the needles and the branches. The sheet had to be propped securely if the house was to stay dry, Maryam explained, though she need not have. The girl, at age four, gathered all the materials swiftly without being asked, and brought them to her mother.

Her son had candles. He would be leaving this year. The candles were not too sensible — it was windy here, at the edge of the lake, and it rained — but he said they were better than the little oil lamps and so they lit the long wax sticks with threads that sizzled at the slightest change in weather, while she laughed in private, for her son would cut the wicks and blow the flames back to life with some tenderness and a lot of pride.

Maryam watched them, her two remaining children, Younis and Jumanah. They carried the candles out into the night after the tents were secured.

They had taken longer to reach the mountains this year. After the earthquake, they all moved more slowly, and besides, they had been forced to change their route. Last year, they had camped at the foot of a glacier, in potato fields that ripened swiftly under the blanket of steaming dung the cattle bestowed. But during the monsoons, the fields had been washed away. It had happened plenty of times before, though never like this, and in her mind, she could hear it, the way the glacier groaned. Done with keeping all that pressure locked inside, it let the world feel its pulse, taking the fields, the homes, the cattle, and the grain. When the earthquake buckled the land, it left behind a small artificial lake. They had been forced to trek around this.

They had also taken longer to leave the plains. A part of her had feared they would never leave at all, and she still could not entirely believe that they were here, nor that her children were slipping out into the night, in secret, excluding her, two candles, two whispers, and one destination, which she believed she could guess. She watched them go. She had to let them go eventually.

Down in the lowlands, the convoys had also left. They left soon after Fareebi, the shapeshifter, was found. They left as silently as they came: every man in uniform and spy in plainclothes, or so the people said. They had been replaced by different convoys, carrying food and blankets for the shocked survivors who stared past the cameras and far into the heavy dust of their past lives. Balakot is completely lost, they said. Maryam had never heard so much terror, or breathed so much death. The goddess had finally unleashed upon their valley the full weight of her wrath, and more men, women, and children than Maryam had ever seen now lay buried beneath it.

Even now, months later, she could do no more than isolate a few details of their combined devastation, like the way she had been watching the buffalo Noor in the forest just before it happened. Noor’s eyes had begun to roll high into her head. And her tail! It did not swat her back so much as stand upright, like a snake, jerking and twitching, as though about to drop! Maryam had been staring at the monstrous movements of her most placid beast when Makheri, the goat with the too-high teats, rammed her from behind, saving her life. In the space where Maryam had been standing crashed a pistachio tree. How could it be? She had been harvesting the nuts of that tree not two weeks earlier. Noor now lay beneath it. Her tail still twitching. A man from Laila’s dera pulled her away from the sight. And as they ran, so did the world.

But up here in the mountains, even this year, time kept defiantly still. Lake Saiful Maluk lay slick and dark, like a cold, sleepy eye. It had kept the eye shut through the wretchedness of the winter, and now, in spring, it was coming awake, lapping the shores beneath the two lovers, the Queen and the Nude. Tonight, Maryam could feel the lovers at rest. They would be watching her children, and watching the tents, but they would have no reason to complain. Except, perhaps, when they noticed that three tents were missing. The first for the family of the boy found in the waterhole last year, the second for the boy who was never found, the third for the family that was crushed by a boulder when the earth moved. The first two families had left for the city, the husbands and remaining sons to work as thekedars, loading and unloading the gunny bags of grain from state farms, the wives and daughters to pull all their silences closer to their now-sedentary hearts. The space for all three tents lay bare.

There had been other deaths, even before the earthquake, and who knows if the goddess had played a hand in these too. A shopkeeper beaten to death by policemen for withholding information. The information he withheld was his identity. There were no papers to prove it, the police claimed. Who was he? To which state did he pledge allegiance? He had no papers to answer for him. And there was a round-up, all the people of the valley — the sedentary, the nomadic, and everything in-between — had to show their identity papers. Maryam had pulled out every scrap they ever owned. Deeds showing permission to graze; taxes paid; materials leased each autumn and one summer, for a temporary home. But there was no proof of her birth. Her husband’s, yes, and he could not remember how and from where the proof had come, it was a gift from God, that little rectangle with his thumbprint and his name. But Maryam had none. The men had reached for the closest thing they could find. Younis. They pulled his ears and slapped his head, again and again, till his neck hung limp and she screamed and beat her wrists against the hard floor (including the wrist that never again healed). When he fell, and they began to beat his back with their boots and their rifles, she saw the boy in the waterhole, and said anything, take anything you want but the children. They took the filly. Loi Tara, with the coat the color of sunset in a yolk. Taken in her third year, still tethered to her shell, still only a mare in name. She had been nuzzling the buffaloes, the rain-kissed leaves, and those who let her go.

Maryam did not dare approach Namasha any more. Only her husband had that privilege now. Only he fed and watered her. Only he administered to her pain. Maryam did not inquire how. But even her husband did not ask the mare to carry a single item — not a lamb or even a copper bowl — on her back on their migration to the highlands. She would have thrown it off anyway, sent it spinning all the way past Naked Mountain to the callused hand of God, Who would have dropped it.

There was a limit to the extent of baggage any creature should hold.

It was soon after they took Loi Tara that she agreed to let Younis go. This time, it was she who left Ghafoor a sign. A red cloth, just as he had done. And he came, with a new look and a new name, still glowing from his success with the foreigners. About that, he had casually declared, “You will never see him again.” She never asked to know more. There was a slight, very slight, unease lurking inside her, born of an image too fleeting to hold, one which she admitted only to herself. It was never clear to her which man she envisioned trapped in the serrated mountains, his back to her, because once, just once, he looked up, and she did not think it was the one she had thought. The man she saw had pointy features and a brooding brow, like the good man, the friend of her people, Irfan. Trapped. It had confused her. A mistake? Hers or his? And she thought of the night the forest inspector’s house had burned, the way the man got away while his wife did not. It made her uneasy — how could there be any likeness? That had been a fire, this a fall, this was easy — and, shaking the image away, she thanked the gods that this particular mutation of it had never returned. So when Ghafoor had assured her, “You will never see him again, no matter how much juniper you smoke,” she did not ask to know more. All she said was that she never smoked; she could see very well without it. He laughed and so did she. He added, “Even your mother, bless her spirit, will never see him again,” and then too she could not help but smile, though it was not altogether respectful, the way he spoke of spirits.

When she asked him to take Younis with him he scratched his thick new beard — black; he had even dyed his hair — wiped her cheek — which had suddenly grown damp — and licked his finger free of her tears the way she had once licked the honey.

Hold on to nothing except your children and your herds, her mother would say. Sometimes, even these possessions were too many.

Maryam quietly crept to the far side of the shore, where the two candles had disappeared. The night was cool and still and she wrapped her shawl close to her chest, and felt the sand give beneath her feet. This was her first night back in the place that had taken Kiran. It was her first touch of the icy water that had pulled the child to itself. She had warned Younis and Jumanah to stay away from the lake, and though she trusted them, she followed nonetheless.

They were heading for her shrine, the one in the cave. The one that could still exist. The one in the lowlands she would have buried before leaving, had the goddess not done this first. She would have had little choice, even after the rumor began to spread that the killer had been found, and the uniforms and the plainclothesmen began to leave, and the relief workers began to arrive. Over them all one voice could still be heard, as Maryam prepared to leave for the mountains. It was the voice of the mullah, claiming victory was coming to every valley in every district, and every city, village, and town. So Maryam had abandoned the cleansing rituals entirely this spring, pleading in her heart that her family not be punished, it was not her fault the rituals could not be kept alive. She had one further evidence of the degree to which her own way was in danger. Just before the earthquake, she had dug a small patch of dirt in her shrine, for the box with Kiran’s belongings. The box was gone. The shrine had been tainted, and apparently the goddess agreed.

The mullah had still been claiming victory when they began their ascent.


They had seen their mother do it and so they did it too, when they thought she was not looking. They climbed the hill farthest from the boats and the tents and kept on going, toward the mountain that could only be seen when imagined. The candles blew out twice and Younis patted his trousers, the way he saw men do. He pulled out the box of matches, lit two together, cupping the double flare in a tent made of his fist, and re-lit the sticks.

Finally, the two children arrived at the cave.

While Jumanah looked inside, Younis talked. He was telling her all he would do, when he left. He would become a trader and because all good traders had beards—”Ghafoor bai says you trade best when scratching your beard”—he scratched his naked chin, and she scratched hers. As a businessman, he would bring her things, he said, things that would make her blush the way their mother did, when Ghafoor bai brought her flowers. And Jumanah lowered her eyes, practicing how to look pleased. It was easy, because she was already on her knees, arranging on the uneven floor a bed of pine needles. She carried a big bundle in her hands — she had been careful not to let the candle burn them — and now she took her time softening the floor while Younis talked.

When the carpet was made, they sat together, holding the candles out toward the drawings on the cave wall. There was the horse, Loi Tara, in different poses. Sometimes alone, her mouth busy, her head turned to return their gaze. Sometimes prancing toward a peach. There were buffaloes too, and at times, Loi Tara went to meet them. She was a little yellow and the buffaloes a little blue, but mostly, their world was black and white. There was also a girl. Kiran. She only appeared once, and you had to come very close to see her, so close that the candle left a mark on the wall. Jumanah was standing now, her bare feet absently sweeping the pine needles to and fro, her toes digging into them while she concentrated, holding the candle just so, above the girl and to the left, for this way, the light fell on her face and the face was neither blue nor yellow but the color of the wall. Pinkish, like the real Kiran, though she was no longer sure.