A HIDDEN GEM
WELCOME TO GILGIT-BALTISTAN, FORMERLY known as the Northern Areas of Pakistan. The gorgeous scenery promises to stun all visitors. (Please note that it does not promise to restore you, just as the sea by your city in the south never did. Restoration is solely your own responsibility, and the mountains, rivers, and fresh air cannot be held accountable if you fail to heal.) Before going farther north, you must make a stopover in the city of Gilgit. We recommend that you spend no more than one day and one night there. Other travelers say that a small waterfall nearby is a must-see, and it is true that it is lovely, but you are tired. You must give yourself some time to get used to the altitude, to acclimatize to your escape, to ease into your freedom. Take a Xanax and go to sleep.
It is easy to hire a car and a driver to visit the Hunza Valley. Rates can be negotiated—four to six thousand rupees. On the way up, you can spend some of your vacation budget on a local rug, a local hat, a local vase, or a local ashtray (unless you quit cigarettes because your children started to look small and sad through the curling smoke). You can buy several packets of local dried apricots, so your children can transform from the pale, thin ghosts of a broken home to the rosy-cheeked children of this region. It is poor penance for the choices you have made, but it’s a start. Their mother would be pleased by the inoffensive, neutral nature of the gift. You do not need to buy her anything; you have no relation with her now—other than the fact that she has lived with your children in another house for two years. You might not know this, but that day you locked yourself in your car and turned off the air-conditioning so you could sweat yourself to death—and she, dry-eyed and nonwhimsical, broke the back window with a rock so you could breathe—was the day she decided she did not want to know you anymore.
The Karakoram Highway goes through the Karakoram Range. See the snow-covered mountains sloping down to green valleys and the rivers winding through farms and orchards? The result is unbelievably picturesque. The road conditions are excellent and the driver is experienced, so feel free to fall asleep in the back seat without fear of plunging over the highway’s edge.
THE HUNZA VALLEY AND THE SURROUNDING MOUNTAINS
It is best to arrive in daylight to take in the full splendor of the area. Observe the stunning mountains that ring the verdant Hunza Valley: Rakaposhi (seven thousand, seven hundred, and eighty-eight meters above sea level), Ultar Sar (seven thousand, three hundred, and eighty-eight meters above sea level), Bubli-mating (six thousand meters above sea level), and many others. Tear the thin plastic wrapper off your notebook. Unscrew the cap of your shiny new pen to write down these numbers. Write down, as well, that Rakaposhi is the twenty-seventh highest mountain in the world. Note that you are puny, crushable, cowardly. (If you insist upon factual accuracy, add a postscript to your entry: that it was because you cried so easily, in your cubicle and in your bed, that your coworkers shuffled away in awkward silence and your wife left.)
The first sight of these wonders will make you shiver. You will imagine that the cool air entering your lungs has come from puffs of fresh snow falling on those high mountaintops. You will want to drink water from a glacier. You will want to rub snowmelt into your face in a circular motion until all the pores in your skin wake up, then numb, then deaden.
You must get up early to see how the rising sun spreads like melting butter on the snowcapped peaks. It is a glorious sight. When you see farmers already hard at work in the valley, backs bent over rows of furrowed earth, you will feel momentarily ashamed of the sleep you are still rubbing from your eyes. Not everybody here farms, of course. There is a woman somewhere (light-skinned, light-eyed, dark-haired) who wakes early and lies in bed wondering if she should get up today. (You will pass by her later, after you’ve had your breakfast in the hotel dining room.)
The butter, jams, and preserves made by the people of Hunza must be tried. The health benefits of the local diet have been known for centuries. Taste the fiti bread with apricot oil. The flavor will transport you away from memories—away from the confines of your dining table (back at your Karachi home), which your wife placed under the heavy chandelier she bought for herself as a reward for being married to you. Try a refreshing drink called chamus, also made from apricots. Its tartness will dull the memory of the grotesque parody that was your family life, of the unblinking eyes your wife and children turned toward you, their mouths like black holes, needing, demanding, devouring. They did not know they were talking down a dry well.
After breakfast, go for a walk among the poplars and the firs of the hotel grounds. Their scent is better than that of the grass at your home—which you pulled out in handfuls one morning while your children watched and their mother shook her head and tapped her watch. (You went to work that day with grass stains on your pants, and the trash bag covering the broken rear window blew loose on the drive.)
You can also take a brisk walk down to the farms and watch people till the soil, sow seeds, and do other things you think farmers must do all the time. Cows and woolly sheep dot the landscape, grazing the green grass. Their moos and baas appropriately fill the auditory component of the setting. The people there do not speak loudly because they know that voices carry from one end of the valley to the other. This makes them very private, which is also the reason they do not initiate a conversation with you. (It is not because they think badly of you.) Feel free to pick an apple or two from the trees around you. Nobody will ask you, Why or How dare you. Taste the sweetness of the fruit and roll your sleeve back to let the juice dribble down your arm. The farms are also a great place from which to photograph the surrounding peaks. On a clear day, you can easily capture all of them, the landscape’s contrasts coming out beautifully: emerald grass, golden crop, white snow, blue sky, purple flowers, black-and-white cow, and browned, bent farmer. If, in the course of your morning wandering, your brain begins to detect pain, click the shutter faster.
As you walk back up to your hotel, you will pass old people sitting on low walls in front of their homes, their mouths caved in from toothlessness. You might think that if you stop and smile, an aged woman will pat the ancient, sun-warmed stone next to her, inviting you to sit down and put your weary head on her lap while she brushes the hair off your forehead like a mother. You might imagine that her lap will smell of bread and simple white flowers. You might want to stay there until your bones and her bones fuse and petrify, because in stillness is forgetting is peace.
Do not attempt to do so. The older population here speaks only Burushaski and will not understand you. Someone younger than fifty—perhaps a waiter at your hotel—will understand you better in a language in which you are already fluent (Urdu or English), so do not strain your own learning abilities. You are, after all, here to get healed.
HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE
Some say that the Hunzakuts are descendants of the army of Alexander the Great. DNA tests—carried out with enthusiasm—have proven this claim to be false. The people here do not show signs of disappointment. They go on peacefully cultivating their land. What’s more, their language has little or no genealogical relationship with any other language in the world. It stands isolated. (Like you, in your room in your hotel slippers and hotel bathrobe, making garbled alien sounds, saying, over and over again, “Sorry.”)
HISTORY OF THE MOUNTAINS
The Karakoram Range is the result of orogeny and subduction: long ago, before the beginning of your own metamorphosis—before you broke the mirror your wife had insisted on fixing above the dresser because you did not understand who it was you were looking at anymore—the edge of the Indian continental plate was pushed under by the Asian continental plate. You may want to write that down, too.
HISTORY OF THE WOMAN YOU PASSED BY IN THE AFTERNOON
She is thirty years old and watches the people who arrive with the different seasons. She has watched you walk on the road with belabored steps—the incline in places is quite steep. She makes and sells fruit preserves to hotels and shops. You have eaten her apple preserve at your breakfast table. She also takes her two sheep grazing but prefers the smell of the fruit to that of the animals. She cares for an old aunt in whose house she lives. The day she first saw you, she tucked pieces of orange rind in her hair before going to sleep, to kill the smell of the sheep.
HISTORY OF YOU
When you were born, you had thick black hair on your head and a nurse gasped, worrying your poor mother. Your father was patted on his back in congratulations of his achievement. When you went to school, you had a crush on your geology teacher, which is why you still collect rock samples. When you were seventeen, you wanted to live five more lives so you could spend one life each studying history, linguistics, anthropology, literature, and astronomy. When your father found you writing poetry, he ripped your notebook down the spine and across the pages and swept your table clean. He said that you might as well have been born dead, the way you were turning out. You graduated with a degree in business and got married to a lovely, suitable girl; you lived in a pretty house with a pretty garden (it even had a small pond because your wife said the children needed it), the whole of it paid for in easy installments; you went to work and came home and you went to work and came home; and then one day (you’ve come to collapse the years into days, almost all the days indistinguishable, intolerable) you drove into a tree and cut your forehead on the windshield.
THINGS TO DO
On a fine morning, you can walk up to the forts whose rhyming names tickle visitors: Baltit and Altit. They have formal rooms—where rulers met sycophants—as well as prisoners’ cells into which men—and maybe women—were thrown. Listen to the guide tell the histories of such places. The mention of war will make you tighten your jaw and shake your head. You do not like violence.
Touch the ancient walls and lie down with your face on the cool stone floor. Do you hear hooves? The strike of a spoon in a metal pot? The scratch of a quill on paper as someone writes a secret verse? Write down all the details, the unusual facts, and the clichés. The forts are open from 8:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m.
Among the many lakes in the region is Attabad Lake, almost thirty kilometers from Hunza Valley. It is the result of a landslide that blocked the Hunza River; the new lake displaced thousands of people from twenty-one villages. Do not feel bad about admiring the water despite its murderous beginnings, but also, look ashamed that some people have it worse than you. Take a ride in one of the narrow, colorful boats denting the shores of the lake. Locals use them to go from one side to the other; they ride together with their animals and clothes and food. You can choose to hire your own boat if you would rather not have too many feelings crowding one little vessel. Once aboard, turn your attention to the beautiful ripples forming around your boat as you cross. In your notebook, call the water turquoise or teal, not blue. You can also make notes about the locals in those other little vessels, how the gentle rocking of their boats seems to have lulled them into hypnotized silence or perhaps into remembrance of their homes under the water. Ask your guide about the cause of the color of the lake. “Are there tiles at the bottom? Special, teal-colored fish swimming about in there?” He will laugh (probably) and tell you that the only interesting things at the bottom of the lake are the people swelling on their beds. That and the still-alive trees, the frightened leaves peering through the water. (It is recommended that you leave him a generous tip at the end of your cruise.)
As you return to your hotel, write down all the pretty names you have heard so far: Hunza (the river that got choked by the rocks, turning it into a hundred-meter-deep lake), Gojal (the valley that flooded), and Tupopdan (the peak that looked down upon it all). Gulmit, Shishkat, and Ghulkin (the downriver villages that drowned from the water spilling over the dam; the lake lowered, but still remained). You might want to talk about them with the girl who sleeps with orange rinds in her hair.
OFF THE BEATEN TRACK
Borith Lake is a peaceful, small body of water. Your hired driver will be happy to take you there for an extra two hundred rupees. Off the Karakoram Highway, your car will ascend a one-and-three-quarters-meter-wide unpaved path covered with rocks with no guardrail between you and a two-thousand-meter drop. The possibility of dying will push you into your seat and your legs will sweat while your mouth dries out. In no particular order, you will see images of your children, your desk when you were ten, your coffee mug in the office kitchen (World’s Best Manager). Whimpering now, you will wonder if the car will flip over, midair, during its free fall. The driver will turn to look at you and grin, the hairs in his mustache spreading out like an accordion. “Why do you worry?” he will say and laugh loudly. “We all have to die one day. I am an expert at driving here.” The return to level ground will fill you with exhilaration, and you will uncurl and try to joke with the driver. He will smile obligingly. Ask him to stop the car at the orange-rind woman’s shop. It is an unassuming little structure on the side of the road with the name Roshan Bano Crafts on top. Roshan Bano is not the woman’s name, but she is inside, waiting. Buy whatever you can because you are alive.
WORKS OF A LASTING IMPRESSION
There is poverty here, but it is a genteel kind, hidden behind layers of good manners and hard work. You will not find many—or any—people complaining, but take a good look around. The schools are tiny, the clothes are patched, the closest big hospital is two hours away. The more you realize the facts behind the smiles, the more you thrill at the prospect of making a difference, of doing something meaningful, of leaving a legacy, however small. Removing that twig from the path as you walk toward the school near your hotel is a good start. Peek in one of the two windows and see the rows of eager students sitting at desks with chipped corners. See them share books that have been passed down for the last five years, ink stained and a little torn. There are so many ways to convince yourself of your goodness—to thoroughly overwrite the reason for your existence—that you would have to reintroduce yourself to the reflection you smashed. “The doer of good.” “The helper.” “The beacon of light.” It is recommended that you pursue social work only after you’re sure you’ll stick with it, and you are far away from that firmness of mind. Step away from the window before the children see you. Nobody likes a quitter, not even the smiling, gentle locals.
WHAT TO DO ON DAYS YOU CANNOT GET OUT OF BED
Turn on the TV and watch old movies. Find a local channel and learn the language. If, by late afternoon, you feel able to throw off your blanket, shuffle to the window and pull apart the curtains. Watch night descend into the bowl of the valley and then upon the sides of the mountains. Watch lights turn on in houses far below. Watch the stars come out in breathtaking clarity. What do they remind you of? Look again at the light-years of night speeding toward you, and hastily draw the curtains before running back to bed. Take out your notebook and read it, committing all facts and observations to memory. Write what you remember about the woman in the shop, if she smelled like oranges, if your soul contracted or expanded in her presence. As your eyelids get heavy, wonder again about the teal of that lake, if there are rocks in its bed worth collecting.
WHEN TO GO
All four seasons exhibit gloriousness, so consider traveling here the whole year round. If you visit in summer you can choose from mulberries, peaches, and apples. Autumn promises vivid red and yellow leaves. In winter, you can watch snowfall and darkness from your cozy hotel window. On difficult nights, you can eat dried apricots and wait for gray morning light. Remember to wear a woolen hat.
We must say that spring is the best season in which to visit. The slopes of the mountains change color continually, providing many moments of wonder. You can stare at them all day, afraid of what they may say. Sometimes they speak in winds that push down—right into your face—confusing echoes: Who do you think you are? and Who are you now?
SUGGESTIONS FOR THE TRAVELER
The Hunzakuts are a simple, loving people, and legend has it that they live extraordinarily long lives. Most are educated. The orange-rind woman likes reading books on history. If you ask her to go for a walk with you, she will agree, and then stop by her home to tell her aunt that she will be right back. Walk with her as far up the slopes as possible. Wear the hat you bought from her shop. Do not mistake her quietness for shyness. She will gladly tell you all that she knows: that the glaciers are slowly shrinking, that sometimes she thinks the mountains look shorter but then she blinks and they are as they’ve always been. She will not get out of breath—she has climbed these heights all her life—and will wait patiently for your lungs to get used to their new capacity. Like a mountain goat, she will run up steep, rocky hills to pick you hard-to-reach wildflowers as you watch with your heart in your throat, worried about her safety. In the winter, she will cook soup for you and collect firewood. If you tell her that you want to go swimming in the teal lake, she will not say no.
The Hunzakuts have a strong moral compass. Always return to your separate places after your excursions. Negotiate with your hotel for a year’s room rental.
TRAVEL TIPS
In the summer, cut your hair close to the scalp, and in the winter, let it grow. Do not call what used to be home; do not look back. Buy additional notebooks and pens; you are going to come to know more and more still. When you finally decide to explore the teal lake properly, consider walking there from the hotel. Eat a piece of dried apricot every five hundred meters; it will help with any dizziness you might experience. If fear creeps up and covers your heart, run. Do not stop until your chest begins to hurt. Dress in layers. The sun can be quite strong here—sunblock is recommended. When you reach the lake, take off your shoes and your watch. Leave the woman with the orange rinds at the shore to guard your belongings and slowly walk into the water. The cold water and the sight of the mountains in front of you will cover your skin in gooseflesh and make your eyes sting. Your heart will beat faster, but that could be the altitude. Keep walking, feeling with your feet the color of the rocks, picking up the blue ones. When you run out of space in your pockets, start tucking the rocks into the waist of your jeans. You will want to keep walking until the bed of the lake falls away and the heaviness in the cuffs of your pants matches that in your waistband. Swim a little farther and sink a little more, then put your head under the water. Stones, algae, ice, wood, glass, clocks, fossils of faces—puzzled and mocking—are all lit up under expensive, hand-painted lamps. There is movement, you realize. Raise your head out of the water and see the woman gliding toward you. Notice the wind grazing lightly against her eyes and how her pupils don’t waver as her strong arms make circular motions. You are at once surprised and moved by the grip of her muscles around your waist. As she takes out the rocks, she tells you their names before letting them fall back to their depths.