making my way up the West Coast, occasionally veering back into the desert after hitching a ride. I still have them in my portfolio, those who stopped for me, and the shadows of the many who didn’t: pick-up trucks, scuffed boots, silver belts glistening in the sun. There was old man prickly-pear cactus all around and of course the Joshua trees, as the wind blew in from the northwest and purple clouds draped us. For all the tales of murder and kidnapping in these parts, I never chose poorly. I was more often mistaken for Latino than A-rab, even by Latinos, including the one so amused by his mistake he followed me deeper into the desert. Anywhere else, I’d mistake him for Punjabi.
“So, you Moozlim or what?” he asked.
“Or what?” I took his photograph as his shoulders shook and I eventually saw that he was laughing. There is something about large men with quiet laughs. Laughs that boil up slowly from within. A single raindrop splashed his nose. Only his belt, his teeth, and a patch of the distant San Bernardino mountains reflected the sun. After the second raindrop he was still laughing. I thanked him for the ride, walked into the desert, and did what I feared I could spend the rest of my life doing. I really looked at cactus. I really looked at triumph. Blossoming in shocking gimcrack hues of scarlet and gold in a world that watched with arms crossed, if it watched at all. It reminded me of the festive dresses worn by gypsies in Pakistan’s desert borderlands and mountain valleys. The drier the land, the thirstier the spirit.
When I finally arrived in San Francisco, for no reason other than that it was San Francisco, I had a stack of photographs of the Sonora Desert, the Petrified Forest, and Canyon de Chelly. I mailed off the best and waited for someone to bite, while renting an apartment with two other men. I had two interviews. The first went something like this:
“Why are you, Nadir Sheikh”—he said Nader Shake—“wasting time taking photographs of American landscapes when you have material at your own doorstep?”
“Excuse me?”
“This is a stock-photo agency. We sell photographs to magazines and sometimes directly to customers and sometimes for a lot of money. We might be interested in you, but not in your landscapes.”
“In what then?”
“Americans already know their trees.”
“Do they know their cactus?”
“Next time you go home, take some photographs.” When it was obvious I still didn’t get it, he dumbed it down. “Show us the dirt. The misery. Don’t waste your time trying to be a nature photographer. Use your advantage.”
Back at the apartment, my housemate Matthew felt sorry for me. He said a former boyfriend knew a nice little Pakistani girl. I ate his nachos while he talked on the phone.
I walked along the River Kunhar, thinking of Farhana. My way was lit by the moon and the rush of the current and the silhouettes of the trees and the hut down the way where we’d eaten trout earlier and it thrilled me to know that the others were asleep so I unlaced my boots and peeled off my clothes and stood buck-naked.
I heard a story once. A long time ago, on the banks of the river before it bends to meet the Jhelum, the Mughal queen Noor Jehan paused on her way to Kashmir. She was suffering from an eye infection and decided to dip her hands in the river to wash her face. The water was so cool and pure her eyes were cured. Ever since, the river has been called nain sukh, that which soothes the eye. I knew I was further upriver than the bend where the queen had once stopped, and I knew glacial water was not the cleansing stuff of myth. Yet something compelled me to kneel at the Kunhar’s edge and rinse my eyes, and even to drink her noxious fumes.
Which is what I was doing when I saw her again. The owl, soaring across the opal moon breaking in the water. Flapping twice before circling back toward me, she came to rest on a giant walnut tree. There, looking directly down at me, she spoke. “Shreet!” It was the voice, more than her flight from my camera, or her return now, when I was without, that made me feel signaled. No, singled. Singled out.
I was being sighted.
I arranged to meet her the afternoon of my second interview. This time I included in my portfolio a series of photographs taken on a previous return to Pakistan. It was a series of my mother’s marble tabletop, which she’d inherited from her mother, and which dated back to the 1800s. The swirling cream-and-rust pattern changed as I played with the light, sometimes slick as a sheet of silk, sometimes pillowing like a bowl of ice cream. A few frames were, if I say so myself, as sensuous as Linde Waidhofer’s stones.
The second interview did not go very differently from the first.
“Your photographs lack authenticity.”
“Authenticity?”
“Where are the beggars and bazaars or anything that resembles your culture?”
“The marble is a real part of my family history. It’s old, from 1800—”
He waved his hand. “It seems to me that when a war’s going on, a table is trivial.” I wished for the courage—or desire—to ask what images of what war he was looking for.
He stood up. “I’m a busy man. Could’ve ignored you. Didn’t, know why? There’s something there.” He leaned forward expectantly, so I thanked him for thinking there was something there.
I left the office and walked down the corridor to the stairs, passing the photographs that hung on the walls, photographs I loved with an ardor that stung. I’d recognized them all on my way in, of course. There were prints by Linde Waidhofer to taunt me, including one from her Stone & Silence series. A Waidhofer can be a nature photographer of the Wild West but a Sheikh must be a war photographer of the Wild East! He must wow the world not with the assurance of grace. He must wow the world with the assurance of horror.
I wound my way slowly through prints from Ansel Adams’ Yosemite series—it was the wrong moment to view Bridalveil Fall, the sheer force of the torrent almost making me weep, and I found myself wishing, childishly, if only the drop weren’t so steep—before halting, finally, at Golden Gate Bridge from Baker Beach.
The coincidence hadn’t hit me on my way into the interview but it hit me now, as my eye swooped down from the whiteness of the clouds to admit the whiteness of the surf breaking on the shore. I was meeting Farhana on Baker Beach in one hour. It had been her idea, and she’d been specific about where on the beach I’d find her. I stared at the photograph, surprised at the fluttering in my breast. It astonished me that I was hoping to find her on the exact same length of shore depicted in the frame. Worse, I believed that once there, perhaps without her knowing it, I’d look up and see the bridge from exactly the same perspective as I was seeing it now.
Did I want the picture to be a sign? Possibly. It happens this way when you have just been tossed down a roaring cataract. You grope for a raft, anywhere. You even tell yourself that you have found it.
Before the owl swooped across the moon’s reflection in the River Kunhar, I’d been thinking about that word, Kunhar, how kun sounded like kus which sounded like a cross between cunt and kiss. Do we desire and despise in the same sounds in all tongues? I’d held the bitter taste of glacier melt in my mouth as the silver disc eased deep into the river’s skin. I’d dipped my head to taste her again, and, gathering filigree into the fold of my tongue, gazed down the Kunhar’s length. She cut through the valley for one hundred and sixty kilometers. I’d been thinking of a long labia.
“Shreet!”
The thought scattered like moonseed.
“Shreet!”
The second time, the sour glacier water inside me froze and my fingers grew so stiff that when I reached for my clothes, I simply poked at them, as though with sticks. I crouched to my knees for warmth, bewitched by those gleaming black eyes in the pretty heart-shaped face. Instead of the owl, I saw the face of a girl. She had morphed into human at an hour no human should see. She had spoken at an hour no human should speak. How many minutes or hours passed before she shot up into the sky and flew in the direction of the lake we would head for tomorrow?
I