APO, THE GRANDFATHER of the entire village, suspects he is fast asleep even when he is awake. Sometimes, the past is real and the present a half-baked memory. Sometimes, the past is an incomprehensible beast and the future its unrealized shadow. Sometimes, all that Apo can claim to know with any certainty is the ability of clouds to not hurtle away into space and the tendency of the sun to rise day after day.
At the age of eighty-seven, it all feels like a dream. The children, grandchildren, and, now, great-grandchildren. The orchard. The stable. The shed. The crooked mud walls and the rose tree. The row of pearls he wears in his ears, and the turquoise and coral that dangle from his neck—signs of his stature.
It has a strange name, this village. One Mother, One Mule. Each villager can trace their lineage to the original inhabitants: a family of three brothers who shared a wife. So poor were the men, they didn’t just share a wife, they also shared a mule. Since it took two beasts to plow the fields, the brothers would take turns to share the load with the animal.
The village exists as a sharp incline on the Karakoram mountains. Geographically, black gravel and vertical rock faces separate it from the Valley of Blood Apricots, though nothing can entirely explain its severance from humanity. The Silk Route too goes to circuitous lengths to avoid it. Only good friends, bitter enemies, and the truly lost venture here. For all the village has to offer is desolation.
Of late, Apo has begun to spin the Buddhist prayer wheel incessantly, a spiritual practice incongruous with the juniper trees, fairies, and ibexes the villagers worship. It is a relic from another lifetime, spent in Changthang, the plateau of his birth. Life there was conspicuous by its absence. Instead, the plateau was flooded with unrealized beings and forms. Spirits without bodies, demons without kingdoms, oceans without water, and seasons so extreme they took the place of deities at the altar. Hiding among them was a stubborn creature called love. Without limbs and eyes, without a torso, without even a shadow to call its own, it survived as ice in the glaciers and as sand grains in the dust storms. It occupied the few inches by which peaks grew and continents drew closer.
Apo can no longer remember his parents’ names or how many siblings he had. Their faces, in his memory, have been created anew. How else can his mother resemble his great-granddaughter? Yet he remembers his mother’s hand distinctly, spinning the prayer wheel and muttering prayers as she sat on a rock in the snow desert, surrounded by grazing yak and sheep. The half-melted snow that trickled through the meadow, like the wrinkles on her hands and the lilt in her voice, they are all real details.
After the Chinese invasion—the only war he ever fought—Apo had struggled to attain amnesia. The freedom to live, even the freedom to die, was linked to his ability to forget. But now that forgetfulness has set in as a natural process, it hurts him. Back then, amnesia was a deliberate act of hope. Now it is a sign of life unraveling. Flesh peeling off like dead skin. Bones snapping under the weight of the soul. Eyes blinking in the darkness, searching for an image to hang on to.
A widower, Apo is resigned to the loneliness of an empty room. As he sits rooted to the chair, the only piece of furniture around, the sounds of war arrive one by one. Nothing can deter the noise or prevent the visions from enacting themselves upon the bare mud walls. Not his deaf ear, nor the ambiguous fog of cataract.
Apo hears tanks revving up on steep climbs, shells exploding nearby, Bofors guns being fired, sirens going off, helicopters hovering like monstrous bees. He sees entire camps go up in flames. Relieved of his morning chores, Apo sits still, indulging his inner warscape. He tries to isolate the cylinder explosion from the noise of the ammunition as the fire spreads in the camp. With the distance and intimacy only time can afford, Apo has found similarities between the sounds of war and the vulgar display of fireworks.
This morning, the sounds refuse to subside. When they grow louder, Apo gets up and leaves. He can’t risk damaging his functioning ear with memories of noise.
It only becomes worse. The blitzkrieg, he realizes, belongs to the present. Apo tracks it down to his own fields. He stands at the edge of the sea of yellow buckwheat in bloom. He gasps at the sight of a gigantic machine pillaging his precious crop.
“What is this monster?” he yells.
“Apo, it’s a machine that reaps and threshes at the same time. The Kashmiri trader—you know him, he arrived three days ago—he is renting it out to us this season.”
“I don’t like it. Stop it right now.”
“But, Apo, it does the work of ten people. And we have paid for it already.”
“Only monsters do the work of ten people. How dare you, my own flesh and blood, ruin our village? Tell that son of a militant to go back with his artillery. We are peaceful people here. No war!”
No war! No war! Apo stands there and protests. His grandsons treat his senility with utmost respect. They leave him alone.
Eventually, Apo gets tired and resumes his difficult walk home. Everything is either uphill or downhill, an ordeal for the knees. Nor is there a proper path. Instead of alleys, a complicated system of channels connects all homes, orchards, fields, and meeting places. In summers, one just wades through the cold, glacial water. It is a late July morning, and the path is full stream.
Apo struggles with his walking stick through the ice-cold gush. The burning sunlight, checkered by low-lying canopies of apricot, walnut, and almond trees, is in sharp contrast to the freezing force slapping at his feet. The ebb and flow of the rushing water is reflected in the old man’s thoughts. They run all over the place, blaming the governments of the world, technology, and sweet-tongued Kashmiris for his current state of misery. That monster is no helpful savior—it is a missionary that has arrived before the invasion.
“What next,” Apo mumbles, “a winnowing machine?” Winnowing is one of the most graceful activities mankind—rather, womankind—has indulged in. Women toss the gold husk high up in the air, whistling to summon the winds for assistance. Even the sun will go out of its way to shine on them. His wife, long dead, was the best whistler the village had known. The wind, her friends would tease, was her suitor.
Lost in her memory, Apo pauses to pluck an apricot in his path. He spits the dusty fruit out immediately. It is all that cursed monster’s fault, spewing dust for miles, contaminating their souls and fruits alike. Enough is enough. As the Apo of the village, he considers immediate action. He will go up to the Kashmiri, order him to take his monster and return to his homeland.
He trudges on, aided by his walking stick, until his bald head steams with sweat. He halts every now and then, muttering curses under his breath. He removes his headdress, made of cloth and decorated with old coins and pink carnations. Sweat drips onto the furrows of his face. His wrinkles glisten, as if touched by raindrops. The Kashmiri’s house is far out, at the highest point in the village.
In keeping with tradition, outsiders are not allowed to live among the locals. Apo had been the last exception to the rule, but no one remembers it, least of all Apo himself.
By the time he reaches the outsider’s home, Apo is a red-faced baboon, frothing from the gaps between his teeth. Consumed by all the anger and effort, he walks directly into the living room. He is shocked to find an aged Kashmiri woman in place of an unscrupulous young man. She is poised like a painting by the window. His heavy breaths and grunts don’t distract her.
“I am here to meet your child,” Apo announces in broken Hindustani, a language he had learned lifetimes ago.
The woman speaks so softly, a breeze could fly off with her words, scattering them among the snow peaks of the Hindu Kush. Apo doesn’t want to betray his partial deafness to her. Nor can he order her around like a child, demanding that she come closer and speak clearly. Even though her hair is covered by a pink floral scarf and her body is hidden behind a loose purple kaftan and pajamas, Apo can sense the passage of years on her face.
She senses his confusion and points to a chair in the corner. Apo realizes it is a skeleton only after making the deliberate journey to it. The chair has gaping holes in place of the backrest and seat. It would be rude to keep standing. He doesn’t want to disrespect the woman. He is left with no choice but to attempt crashing down upon the carpet.
Ever since his knees stopped complying, Apo hasn’t been able to sit down or get up from the floor without assistance. Had she been younger, perhaps his daughter or granddaughter’s age, he would have asked for help. But the wrinkled skin and characteristic stoop make her a contemporary. As ancient as they both are, he can’t get himself to hold her—a stranger’s—hand.
Apo experiences a free fall, broken only by the ground. Once the shock subsides, a greater shame glares at him. His earring, a string of pearls looped around his lobe several times, is caught in the carpet. He can’t even lift his head.
She rushes to his rescue. With one hand, she gently lifts his face.
With the other, her dexterous fingers untangle the complication.
The earrings are a sign of high status, he wants to tell her. Each pearl has been handed down from generation to generation. No one besides him can wear them here. But she is too close for comfort. Ever since he grew deaf, Apo has forgotten the art of whispering.
He is surprised by her strength as she lifts him by the shoulders and seats him, his back propped against a wall. He is envious. She hands him his prayer wheel. She places his walking stick beside him. She straightens his hat and dusts his jacket. And she leaves the room.
Apo is relieved. It would be worse to relive the embarrassment in her presence by having to make elaborate excuses. If only she were younger, she could have dismissed it all as the unpredictable tragedy of aging, perhaps even pitied him.
Apo’s restless hands reach out for the prayer wheel. He tries to regain his composure by squinting and imagining the view from the window. From here, it is possible to see the Lion River, known to outsiders as the Indus, flowing at the bottom of the abyss. One can see her wave goodbye at the bend as she flows into Pakistan. But for a brief stretch, as she moves across no-man’s-land, she is fierce and free once again.
When Apo first came to the village, a young man told him he was in Pakistan. But the elders, unaware of Partition and its preceding struggle, admonished the young chap for creating a fictitious country to fool the outsider. “Where is Pakistan?” an old woman demanded. “We have heard of China, Tibet, Kafiristan, Russia, Afghanistan, Iran. But what in the half-moon’s name is Pakistan?”
“Pakistan is the land of the pure,” the young man explained.
“Then it must border the region of Kafiristan, the land of the infidels,” the woman conjectured. “That is farther north and farther west, not here.”
Ever since the subcontinent’s independence, these mountains had belonged to Pakistan. A postman and a policeman would visit the village once in three months, as a token of governance. In the absence of letters and lawbreakers, the officials spent their time nailing framed images of the Father of the Nation here and there, bartering foreign biscuits, sunglasses, buttons, and ceramics for local goods. The tin boxes carrying the biscuits turned out to be more popular than the biscuits themselves. Just as the Pakistani currency notes made excellent rolling paper, and British coins were ideal for ornaments.
Barely a decade had passed since Apo’s arrival when an enterprising Indian army officer trekked to the village. His soldiers carried with them sacks of grain, soap, sugar, and cans of diesel as gifts. “Welcome to Hindustan!” the officer announced. He then proceeded to teach them how to make Indian chai, with lots of milk and sugar. It was the first time the villagers had tasted sugar. They couldn’t help feeling fidgety, irritable, and pointlessly exhilarated under its influence.
As the world focused on the creation of Bangladesh from East Pakistan, the Indian army grabbed four mountains from Pakistan in the west. The village was on one such mountain. Greeted by Indian army troops, the elders felt vindicated. Their children had been wrong all along. This was all India. British India, that is. The whole world was British India, including Britain.
Three decades later, the Kargil War changed their fate once again. India retreated from the valley to the peaks behind, even as Pakistan occupied the mountains on the other side, across the Indus. While the village sat on the no-man’s-land in between, the two glared at each other from the peaks. Like two dogs growling and barking but too scared to seize the bone in the middle.
Gradually, the world forgot about the village. The Indian army rushed to another corner to fight Chinese incursions, and the Pakistan army followed to watch the fun. Except for some enterprising traders, the village remained cut off.
Apo knows the lay of this land like the shape of his own being. Before his arrival in the village, he had spent two seasons roaming aimlessly in the surrounding wasteland. Murmuring winds, shape-shifting sands, the pregnant silence of rocks, and the sea’s ghost were all he had for company. Based on vibrations, Apo had learned to sense nature’s fears and dreams and predict the onset of earthquakes, even avalanches and floods.
The invisible political borders are constantly in flux. Apo can sense a shift in their movement, the way a blind man reads the light and dark. From the window, the border looks innocuous. The sun reigns over a clear blue sky, causing the ice-cold water of the Indus to resemble molten lava in its color, igniting the rocks and sands over the mountain with illusory flames. But even senility, the greatest gift of aging, won’t allow him to simply marvel at the view. It fills him with sadness instead. Flailing in the web of borders, the earth is a being as fragile as a seasonal moth.
Soon, nostalgia takes over the sadness, making its presence felt as a sweet, delicately spiced aroma. The old woman has placed a cup of kehwa next to him. Apo sets his prayer wheel down. He stares at the cup—white ceramic with a blue pattern. It could be flowers and leaves, geometric shapes, or human beings, it’s all the same to his foggy eyes. With slow, deliberate sips, he surrenders to the tender infusion of saffron, cardamom, almonds, and cashew.
Like an arrow leaping across lands and time, cutting through skin, flesh, and ribs to pierce the heart, the taste cuts through almost seventy years, to his previous life as a soldier. Back then, Apo was the designated cook for his regiment. In Srinagar, he was given a box of kehwa powder along with the rations. It was a rich Kashmiri tea, to be given only to VIPs when they visited the camp.
“I have tasted this before,” Apo announces to the woman as she walks toward the door. “The special tea of your land. When everyone else was drinking alcohol, I would hide from my seniors and drink a few cups of this. After a few glasses of rum.”
She nods like she understands. A few minutes later, she returns to Apo’s side, this time with a pitcher full of kehwa.
Apo begins to laugh, exposing a chain of exquisitely broken teeth, as she pours him another cup.
“Madam,” he says, “at this age, drinking a pitcher of even water can be dangerous. The body is an animal. It collapses where it is supposed to sit; it urinates when it pleases.”
She bursts into laughter. Embarrassed by her spontaneity, she pulls her headscarf to cover her mouth.
“If you insist on pouring more, I insist we share,” he adds.
“But what will my grandson say?” she asks in confusion. “Entertaining men in his absence…”
“It will serve him right for leaving you alone,” Apo replies. “Does a woman leave her jewels or a man his chhang unattended?”
She blushes.
She walks toward the window that dominates the room, spanning one end of the wall to the other, opening up to the immensity outside. She returns to the reflective state in which Apo had found her when he entered.
“Why do you do this?” she asks, pointing to the prayer wheel on the floor. “What does it mean?”
“Life is wheeling by, swiftly and slowly, slowly and swiftly,” he says as he picks it up.
She closes her eyes. The sounds of the Indus intensify. The water gushes with such diabolical speed and desperation, there is no river here, only rapids and whirlpools. She stands there, like a fresco painted upon the mud wall. Then she speaks.
Life is whispering in my ears with its irresistible melody, offering me the water of immortality
and the earth of transformation.
Far, very far, from the depths of the hollow sky, death is calling out to me in a simple, clear voice.
The verse stays with them like mist on a winter morning. The silence is eventually broken by footsteps. She rushes to pick up the tray from the floor. Her grandson is surprised to find Apo sitting there like the man of the house.
“There you are, my child!” Apo says, attempting to stand up and greet him. The trader rushes to his side to prop him up. “I was waiting to meet you in person. As the village patriarch, it is my duty to welcome and bless you. May you bring more enterprises to our home; may your business grow!”
The trader, relieved by the unexpected kind words, urges Apo to share a meal with them. But Apo declines. “You are our guests; we are the hosts,” he says as he struggles with his walking stick.
As Apo lies restless in his bed that night, the ache in his bones isn’t the only reason for his discomfort. He wonders how she must have looked in her youth. She has a big nose, like most Kashmiris, one that grows bigger with age as the rest of the face melts away. Despite her sunken and faded eyes, Apo sees currents of glacial blue in them, just as he sees dignity in her wrinkles. Her gait and voice have such grace, it is as if a Persian empress has descended upon the village from distant fruit-laden mountains, fleeing marauders. The only thing incongruent with the vision is the stubborn smell of tobacco on her clothes, which he attributes to that good-for-nothing grandson of hers.
When she smiled at Apo’s words, her thin lips parted to reveal peach-pink gums and a flourishing set of teeth.
Though she spoke of death, her verse has the opposite effect. It sends blood rushing into his veins and floods his night with loneliness.
“Who is your god?” she asks, as she gazes out of the window.
“Time,” he says as he stares at her unabashedly.
“And what about life?”
“This life of mine has left me exhausted. When the time comes to be reborn, I will decline. If they don’t listen to me, I will make a fuss until they do. A weary man like me has earned his break from living.”
“But life is hope.”
“What good is hope to dead people?”
“In death, we find the hope we had surrendered at birth.”
Apo is moved. He smiles in his dream as he weeps in his sleep.