IT IS UNUSUALLY FOGGY for a summer morning in June. Monsoon winds have hit the land, creating a vortex of storms and floods. In the shadow of the Karakorams, all the village gets is fog. The trees in the orchards, the buckwheat swaying in the fields, the clustered homes and crooked walls are all specters. The Indus too is a river of rumbling mist.
Apo sits in the orchard. A chair has been permanently placed for him under the walnut tree’s shade. His walking stick leans against it. The world outside resembles the inchoate one inside. At eighty-eight, he finds it a chore to pin a thought down, to focus one’s eyes and articulate a word.
All of a sudden, his heartbeat becomes erratic. An irregular rhythm takes over. After all those encounters with death, after all those decades of seeking it out, is this how it will end? With an opaque sense of arrival? An ancient excitement flows through his veins.
When he was a child, his grandmother had warned his parents that he was a mischievous one. His soul would attempt to escape from his bum, in search of his missing tail. Eight decades have passed since then. And now, when the moment is finally here, Apo feels a strange sensation all over his body. It is as if his soul is evaporating from all the wrinkled pores and dead roots of hair. His diminished senses, waning consciousness, colors, and memories seep into the mist.
She too has surrendered to it in silence. Her heavy breaths and dragging gait, her softly tinkling earrings and bangles, the aubergine color of her kaftan, and her nervous countenance, all lost to the fog.
He awakens to her presence when she reaches out for his walking stick.
“I saw the cheemo,” she says, supporting herself with it. “I offered him apricots and almonds.”
“Did you not believe me?” Apo is shocked. “Did you consider me a peddler of tall tales?”
Ghazala blushes. She is afraid her happiness may betray more than she is willing to.
His initial exhilaration swiftly gives way to indelible hurt, nursed in the silence of the rocks, the phantom heaving of waves, and the fractures of the heart.
“You didn’t say goodbye,” he says. The year apart has beaten his voice into an uncharacteristic softness.
“Who are we to question his wisdom?” she asks.
During the war, Apo had given up on god when he slit a friend’s throat just so that he could die with dignity, while his senior officer, unable to see him suffer, had moved on.
“I don’t believe in his wisdom.”
“It wasn’t in my hands.”
“What is?”
“Separation isn’t in our hands. But this moment is. This moment is evidence of Allah’s compassion.”
“What about your own?”
“O Saki, pour me a goblet of poison”—Ghazala smiles as she recites the couplet—“and I will gladly swallow it. Death has greater honor than a lover’s pity and compassion. All this parched mouth seeks is a drop of heavenly love.”
Apo has grown frailer. The farthest he can make it is the orchard next door. It is Ghazala’s turn to visit his home, something she does daily. Now that Ira’s married and gone, Ghazala gives him his medicines and assists in his movements.
Her grandson joins them for his afternoon meals. He has witnessed the younger and able-bodied relinquish their desires for much less, sometimes nothing at all. Being in the company of his grandmother and Apo is a healthy antidote.
“The village has completed its harvesting,” he tells his grandmother one morning as she serves him tea. “The fields that remain belong to people not interested in using the machine.”
She had known this moment would arrive. How couldn’t it?
“I will leave all my cigarettes behind with you,” he says.
“But this place is no-man’s-land.” She panics. “How can I live here? Even the postman doesn’t come here.”
“What news do you seek?”
“How will I get my rum?”
He laughs. “You seem to like the local chhang. You finished the whole bottle Apo gifted me.”
She giggles. “And what about you?” she asks, as the enormity of his words sink in. “You can barely eat with your own hands. If I don’t wake you up in the mornings, you will sleep until noon.”
“I will grow up.”
“What will your father say? And my other sons and daughters?”
“They will tell the world that you died. They will mourn for a few months. Then they will move on. But if you come back with me, will you move on?”
Ghazala doesn’t answer. The winters are harshest here, even more than in Kashmir or the rest of Ladakh. At eighty-four, she fears, it may be too late to adjust to such extremes. Then she remembers what Apo had said when she met him at the orchard.
At first, he thought he was dying. His heart skipped a beat in anticipation. Then he saw her stand before him and the reasons for living returned.