Word Count: 4860 | Reading Time: 17 min
Air hisses out from a fissure in the limestone – slow, hitched, as though trapped within for too long. It siphons out, marking the stone around it, cracking it open. The splinters burrow into the ground below, fingernails digging into flesh.
No one names it, but it is unmistakable – the sound of the mountain learning to breathe.
#
“Xu, can we leave soon?” I ask again, grinding the toe of my boot against a blunt outcrop.
The rock does not move. Neither does he.
“Yes, yes,” he repeats, still kneeling on the rocky path – his body folded, worshipful. “Leaving.”
I sigh, running an impatient hand against the back of my neck. My fingers graze the silver chain sticking to my skin, and I feel that familiar lurch in my stomach. I push it down, tuck it away like a smooth stone in my pocket, to be examined later.
I turn instead to the small man hunched over in front of me.
He is the project lead, and uses his authority to speed through the day’s tasks and spend the rest of his time poring over rock formations, mulling over something in his mind, hands tenderly tracing the contours of stone in front of him, as though a man learning the face of his new bride.
He speaks to the mountains as though they might speak back.
I know from working with Xu for the past few months that we aren’t leaving anytime soon. I shake my head, turning instead up the path – moving further away from the trail that would lead us back.
I walk for a good while, the moisture beading on my upper lip. My Crushed Rose Medora lips look garish out here in the Balochistan sun. The temperature is in the mid–30s, fairly typical for May here, and I feel the heat soak through my fingers as I graze the rocks while I walk – like the mountain’s attempt to brand itself onto me.
This is my first time on the field with the Tai Yang Mining Co. I’d graduated not too long ago, and had applied everywhere I could to get out of the cloying darkness of my home.
And now here we were – a patchwork of geologists, scientists, interpreters and drivers, Chinese and Pakistani alike – all sampling the rock formations in the Sulaiman Mountains, mapping fields and logging structures before the prospecting companies come in to rend the weighty ores from the peaks.
I walk towards the edge of the path, a sheer break leading to a cascade of blue pines stretching out like an ocean many hundreds of meters below.
As I move, I feel a whisper of cold air across my palm. I pause.
To my left, there is a fissure in the mountain wall, vertical, jagged, like a rocky door slivered ajar. We’ve been crawling all over these mountains for over a week now. We must have missed it.
My hand hovers over it. The cold air persists – not dank and musty, but fresh, sweet, alive.
I turn sideways and shimmy through the crack. It’s a tight fit, and even before I’m on the other side, the stone cuts into my shoulder. I cry out and pause, reconsider, push myself back out.
“Zikra,” I hear Xu crackle on my shoulder through the intercom. “We’ll go now.”
I shake my head, mentally marking the crack in the mountain wall.
As I pass it, it happens. The smell reaches my nose and memory slams into my body. The bitter warmth of mustard oil. The aching sweetness of rosewater. An odd combination anywhere, but especially up here. A frozen palm presses into my heart.
“Zikra?” Xu was louder now, impatient, as though he hadn’t just made me wait till the sun slipped across the sky.
Shaken, I walk back towards him.
Carefully, we make our way down the stony mountain path, and my thoughts drift.
Caves are subtractions. They’re formed where limestone breaks down … rainwater pushing carbon dioxide through the soil, fizzing into an acid that eats away at the limestone, fracturing it into emptiness. Just like people, in a way. We come into the world a solid, impenetrable block of fear and thought and want. And then slowly, parts of us are etched out through the things we go through, the people we meet. A hateful lover will claw out a piece at our center. A childhood friendship will smooth out our blunt edges.
We are subtractions, too.
I think, then, of almond–shaped eyes. Lashes curved outwards – open, friends.
I think of the smell. Of the specificity of it. Of the nakedness of it.
The smell of my dead mother’s braid. Up here in the Sulaiman mountains.
#
Chinese Lunar Deity:
Chang’e is the Moon Goddess – the birther of twelve moons. Often, she is depicted as bathing the moon, tender hands awash with light. Among Hmong people from Southwest China, there is a belief that pointing at the moon is disrespectful. They whisper that Chang’e will slip from the skies to cut off the offender’s ear. The moon changes momentarily when this happens. Though how it changes, none will ever say.
#
I’m back at the guest house. It’s stark, all old wood and cracked tiles, but reasonably clean. I am the only woman on the team, and the men have given me one of only two toilets all to myself. I strip naked there now, my kameez hanging next to the towel like a woman hanged. The sun has not been good to me. My clay–brown skin is breaking out in a heat rash, etched with blue veins, thick and tense.
My silver chain sits in the recess of my collarbone. I hold it with cautious fingers, as though afraid it will choke me. It was the last thing I took from Ammi. Took it off her body, before it had even gotten cold. A crescent moon hangs from the chain – curved like a smile. Or a sneer.
I touch the inside of my wrist to it, where my mother and I had identical moon–shaped birthmarks. It is why my father would call her chanda – moon – and why then my mother would call me chandni – moonlight.
Like I was her grace, her radiance, stretched into flesh.
She used to tell me that moonlight lingers even when the moon itself is hidden behind a shroud of fog. As if what we leave behind can go on shining without us.
It has only been four months. The grief tugs at my eyes, closes around my throat. When I was a child and my grandfather died in his sleep, Ammi said we are only given three days to grieve. It seemed short even then.
I think of her long brown fingers. Of how they’d work lice combs through my hair – my head immobilised between her knees. Of how they’d stroke the tip of my nose when I said something clever. Of how she’d wrap them around the RC Cola at weddings to warm it up enough for me to drink, and when she’d hand the bottle to me, her hands would be red, splotchy with freeze.
I hear a knock outside, on the door to my room. I blink at myself in the mirror. Sometimes, my mother stares back at me. I think of her eyes when I look at mine. Shaped like almonds, but darker. Or were they?
I pause.
I shake a clean kameez over my head. I head out of the toilet, cross my room, throw the door open, heart in my throat.
Because I know this knock, obviously – always twice, and a bit tentative. As though he never knows if I will open the door. But I always do.
There stands Jun. He’s tall. His lips are full and his hair falls over his forehead unfairly. His eyes remind me of cats – languorous and empty of pretense. He smiles at me, in that special way. I smile back. I hope it is special too.
I haven’t touched a man yet – not in that way – and I am nearly twenty. When he looks at me like that, I blush.
He’s a junior petrologist on the Chinese side. He studies rock composition and history. “What they are and what they used to be,” he once told me. Trying to impress him, I had tilted my chin up to him, tapped his little field notebook with a pen.
“Well, if you were a rock, what would you write about yourself in there? What you are and what you used to be.”
He had leaned down towards me. I am small, unassuming. He had had to lean far.
“I used to be waiting,” he’d said. “I’m not anymore.”
I think about that every night.
“Dinner,” he tells me now, and I follow him out to where Xu and the others are sitting. Dara is telling his stories. He is the field guide, the local expert. His moustache is so big it sticks out the sides of his face. Like a walrus, I think. If we had a campfire, Dara would be the one standing up, talking, his face lit up from underneath.
“There you are, Zikra. I was waiting for you,” he says fondly. I imagine I remind him of his daughter, the way he sets down small bowls of pitted cherries next to me sometimes.
“What happened?” I ask, trying to ignore how close Jun sits, my nerves making me curl a hand into my cropped hair.
“Dara here was going to tell us a thirty million year old secret,” Xu says, a little tipsy, the white cans of cheap Chinese beer littering his end of the table.
None of the rest of us drink, but we don’t mind that he does. It makes him tolerable – fewer sharp edges, quicker to laugh.
“What secret?”
Dara smiles wickedly. “You know the Sulaimans have some of the world’s most complex tectonic structures, yes? Thirty million years of folding and unfolding, like the strongest sword, forged by divinity itself.”
At this he pauses, making sure to hold the gaze of everyone at the table, his walrus moustache twitching in excitement.
“Well, they say the prophet Sulaiman climbed the very peaks we are mapping now. He could speak to animals, he could command the wind, but best of all, he controlled the jinn. Hazrat Sulaiman stood at the very top – the Takht–e–Sulaiman – and looked out over Hindustan, dense and feral and covered in darkness. It seemed to him a land thick with corruption and temptation, spiking such a sense of misgiving within his chest that he turned his back on it, slamming his staff to imprison his jinn beneath the mountain – sealed away forever, lest their poison spill forth and feed the ruin he saw.”
At this, Dara slams his hand down on the table, rattling the beer cans. I gasp and immediately feel foolish.
“That is why,” Dara says tightly, “when you breathe here, breathe softly. Every stone holds back a cry, every ridge grips a chain in its stony claw. The mountain remembers what we forget.”
The table is quiet. This is just Dara being Dara – he is indulgent, prone to story-telling. He wants to weave mystery into his work, make the mountain into a myth.
Even so, a few of the others shift uneasily, while I smile. Dara smiles too, his yellowed teeth peeking out from under his curled lip. He knows he has done a good job.
Later, as I lie in bed, I try to remember what animal Dara reminds me of, but I can’t quite call it to mind.
#
Geological Report: On Ophiolite Formations
An ophiolite is a blue–green slice of oceanic crust that has been thrust on top of a continent by tectonic collisions. It is one of the rare times one sees fragments of ocean rock on land, rather than sunken deep into earth.
It is a displacement; whispers of the ancient ocean carried high into the mountains – exiled, alien.
#
“We’ll go around the ledge here,” Xu says carefully. “But mind the scree.”
I nod along, but I’m scratching my head. My scalp itches.
My mind pulls me around the edge of this outcropping, back where I know the fissure is.
I think of Ammi’s eyes – dark like rain soaked earth. Were they always friendly? I wonder. I feel like I should know this, but I am losing detail. That frightens me. Makes it feel like I’m losing her again.
Jun is bent over a solid mass of rock, clinometer pressed flush up against it, reading strike and dip. His hair falls across his forehead, and I swallow, turning back around to listen to Xu.
“… note the location and lithology of it and see if you find more of them further up,” he finishes.
I blink, and realize he means the stylolite – the jagged serrations in the rock where the minerals have dissolved.
I nod, fuss over it with my measuring tape, like a nurse dressing a tender wound. I open my field notes, and scrawl.
Stylolites. 7 cm apart. Embedded in thin–bedded limestone. Like teeth dragging across skin.
I pause, frowning. I scribble out the last line.
Xu is speaking to Jun and the others from Tai Yang, the little suns on their matching vests glowing white–hot in the light.
I slip away. It is farther than I think, but I come to it finally – the seam in the rock. I push through again. I have come prepared today, wearing my own Tai Yang vest. My shoulder scrapes against the rock but the vest protects me.
The air is cold here – and the difference shocks me, makes my blood vessels tighten, my chest prickle.
I turn on the lamp hung around my neck. The click echoes.
All around me is grey limestone, strobed in yellow with my light – rough and shadowed and all-encompassing. I walk into the cave, my boots hissing over the soft sediment on the floor. My eyes adjust to the darkness and pull towards a faint light emanating from my right.
I fumble for my flagging tape and tie it around a stalagmite right where the cave narrows into a ridged corridor.
I know I am going in the right direction, because I smell it. Mustard oil and rosewater.
I walk farther towards the light, but it keeps the same distance from me.
I use up more of my flagging tape – red, slick, like the sticky tongue of a lover.
I am Theseus, and this is my clew.
The scent grows stronger.
I break into a run, the beam of my lamp bouncing along the walls, making faces appear within the stone, carved into expressions of horror.
I stumble, fall, skitter across the stone floor. When I get up, I see it – the mark on the wall just opposite me. It’s a crescent – black as a bruise and pocked into the stone.
I blink up at it, my limbs growing heavy. I press the inside of my wrist to the moon at my neck.
I do not know if it burns, or if I imagine it.
I do not know if I hear her sigh, or if I imagine it.
Zikra, she says. Chandni.
Some ancient instinct makes me put up a shaking finger and point towards where the moon must be.
And just as quickly, I turn, the lamp clawing the cave with light. I run back, away from the light, away from the smell, away from that sigh.
Chandni.
I am almost all the way back. I can tell because the smell is weaker here. I come to a crossroads, and the flagging tape is not at one of the two openings. Instead, it lies there on the ground, fluttering weakly. I swallow, look down both openings. I am cold as stone.
On nothing but a whim, I take one opening.
I see the fissure looming up in front of me.
I chose right. I exhale. I squeeze out.
Later, when Xu asks me where I was, I make up a lie.
When I look down at my arm, my blue–green veins shift, catching the light. Like a seam of ophiolite trapped inside rock.
#
Nine Ways to Ward Off Evil
- Taweez: A taweez is a small amulet – usually leather or metal – holding a Quranic verse or prayer placed against the body to ward off evil. Some say it is protection, but the wearers know it to be more of a bargain – but who knows what it will ask for in return?
#
Today we have travelled to Drazanda, the village nearest to the Sulaiman. It is a bumpy, gravel-filled ride on our two Hiluxes, and I hold the seat in front of me the whole time, knees bumping against Jun’s.
When we arrive, we step out into the clearing – there are katcha houses made of mud and straw, tools strewn about, charpais out in the open with a group of older men sprawled over them. At first they look like shadows cast by gnarled trees. Then I notice them staring at me. The men from Tai Yang close in around me, protective.
We branch off. We have a list of things to find – water and grains and root vegetables and kerosene. I am ushered inside a house – the biggest, with a door rather than the carefully smoothed mud entrances of the other houses.
I meet Nazia Bibi there. Her Saraiki is accented in a way that sounds unfamiliar to my ears. We exchange rice for money. The notes are crisp. I haul the bag over to the Hilux. My heels are cracked – it hurts to walk.
I am reminded of Ammi’s funeral. How the women cried and washed fruit and talked about how beautiful she was. How the men distributed heaped plates of biryani and lugged around chairs and talked about how beautiful she was.
Gurya was convinced that the rice we had set aside as sadqa – charity for the poor – had a handprint on it. Ammi’s hand, she had insisted, but it looked like nothing to me.
I think of her eyes now, and they look like nothing, too.
Once our Hiluxes are restocked, we gather around a small fire on the packed mud, and drink tea from chipped mugs of clay. A small boy serves us from a copper kettle larger than his head.
“Where do you work?” asks an old man, turbanned in cloth and authority, eyeing my Chinese colleagues with distaste.
“Takht–e–Sulaiman,” says our interpreter. “For mapping.”
The colour drains from his face. “There? Do not linger there. In Safar, the shadows open. Solomon’s jinns are free. The mountain takes what it wants.”
Jun stirs beside me.
“The lightest feet are the first to go,” he continues. “This is why we do not let our children wander off during this month. I have taweez I can give you. For protection.”
We all agree enthusiastically, less from fear and more because this is exactly the kind of story we will tell our loved ones back home. We don’t know then that he means to sell them to us – at an exorbitant price – but by then it is too late. The dark leather amulets hug our necks tight like old friends, prayers nestled inside them. I wear mine on top of Ammi’s crescent.
When we are about to leave, the boy who had served us tea comes up behind me, mouthing something.
At first I think he has come to joke with me, but he mouths it again.
Halfway in, his voice breaks through.
“– said you are going to the Sulaiman?” he asks. His eyes are clear. I dimly wonder if I am going deaf.
“I am,” I tell him, my body held awkwardly. I do not know how to act around children.
“I saw a woman there earlier,” he says. “She looked like you, but her hair was long.”
#
Back in the guest house, I am in front of the mirror again. As I brush my teeth, a large chalky deposit breaks off, clattering into the sink like a button.
I am calcifying, I think. I smile at myself in the mirror.
#
Regional Weather Advisory: Pakistan Meteorological Department, Balochistan
A low–pressure system from southern Afghanistan is bringing heavy rain and sustained winds of 50–60 km/h. Localized dust storms have reduced visibility to below 200 meters, and active rockslides have been reported along ridge passes. Suspension of all fieldwork is strongly advised until conditions improve.
#
We are done mapping the Sulaiman. Our field notes are stacked in large acrylic boxes, the transects have been marked, and structural measurements have been jotted down in neat little grids – our English next to their Mandarin, a quiet reminder of identity being inked in the margins of the post–colony.
We leave tomorrow morning, when the sun rises. Everyone is looking forward to going back home – to their families and their gardens and their three square meals a day.
I only think about the cave. After breakfast, I go up to Jun’s room, where I know he is packing. He opens the door before I have even knocked a second time.
“You look sad,” he says softly.
“This is my face,” I reply, and for some reason, that makes him smile.
“Are you feeling better?” he asks me.
I flinch. I did not know he thought I had been feeling anything at all.
“Can I see you when we’re back in Lahore?” he asks. His voice is low, his pupils blown.
The question hangs, stretches. I don’t know what he means by see me.
Does he not see me right now? I think to myself.
I don’t respond. His face blurs at the edges for me, like a page I have to reread.
When I turn around to leave, I feel a weight on my chest, but I am too tired to put it down.
#
I am back inside the cave. I slipped out after lunch. The weather was turning but I made it, just barely.
I shrugged my Tai Yang vest off before I entered the fracture. I wanted to come as Zikra, not as someone branded by those who would soon come to strip these cliffs bare.
Now, my lamp throws light across the limestone, turning the grey warmer.
But the chill of the place has settled into my bones. I think I see faces in the stone, the whites of eyes blinking placidly down at me, but when I turn around, they are gone.
Instead, something dark glints up at me from the floor. I inch towards it and see it is the taweez. I move
/Who knows what it will ask for in return?/
to pick it up and my fist tightens over it, but when I bring it to my face, I see only shadow.
I turn back around. I think I understand now. The mustard oil and rosewater beckon to me.
I follow the scent, stumbling, my joints creaking, cracked heels making my steps small, careful.
I’m at the crescent on the wall now, and it makes its flesh twin on my wrist prickle.
I see the light
/I see the light in your eyes go out/
through the only other path leading off this room.
I move towards it, making sure to use the flagging tape more mindfully now – no turns unmarked, no junctions missed.
The mountain eats paths the way grief eats memory – solidly, without meaning, until all that is left is the certainty of irrecoverability. I tie each strip of tape like a vow, but I know how easily vows fray at the edges, crumble into air.
I walk, whether for minutes or hours I cannot say. The light stays the same – a smooth coin of it, flickering, chiding. My cracked heels chafe in my shoes, and when I look down at my arms, the seams of vein have gotten darker, still – minerals asking to be plundered.
Out of the corner of my eye
/almond–shaped, my inheritance/
I see a figure shambling off into a corner. Small, stiff–legged.
I freeze, whipping my head towards it, but it eludes me, like the bleeding margins of a book.
I turn the page.
I look back, and the tape I have tied onto the mountain’s brow winks up at me like garnets on a shield – blood–red, glowing, promising safety.
There is a tunnel there.
It’s a squeeze, but I am small.
I crouch, hands grazing across the floor as I move towards the light. Soon, I am on my knees. Then, I crawl on my belly.
My lamp scrapes against the sides of the wall. I realize I have been crawling too long, and while the smell gets stronger still, the light stays put – not getting brighter, not getting closer.
Moonlight, I think to myself. Chandni.
As I crawl further, the stone floor scrapes against my belly. My elbow pops. Something wet brushes against my chest.
/Wet like grief on your cheek Wet like need on your thigh Wet like birth on your sheets/
A voice somewhere: Eat, beta, eat. My throat is hot. I swallow. I taste sand, or maybe it’s salt. It burns on the way down. I feel my teeth crack, gums raw.
I continue crawling, and I picture her speaking to me, lips pursed, hands knotted in front of her. I try to imagine her eyes and can’t.
Did she have eyes, my mother?
The cave spits me out into a corridor. I try to stop but my aching limbs force me forward – heavy, as though being pulled under water.
The cave is painted – pink and nursery–bright.
/The crib can go here/
I feel hope, but the paint peels. I look down and the skin on my fingers is sloughing away. I fist my hands, and I am pushed onto my knees again.
I try to breathe, but there is gravel on my tongue. The gravel finds mass, turning slowly inside my throat, fragments fusing to make breccia, small pieces becoming one. My chest heaves.
When you breathe here, breathe softly, he had said. I try to remember his name.
Daraz. A drawer.
Darzi. A tailor.
Dar. Fear.
Dara. The sentinel.
One of these words feels right.
I continue forward, but my legs are fossils. They drag behind me, like wares to be sold.
I am being pushed through the throat of the cave. I am being spit out.
/The cave has no teeth Only echoes/
I reach out – for Ammi’s wrist, with the matching crescent. For a glass of water. For a cool towel to put upon my brow. For penance.
My fingers grasp air.
I try to summon Ammi’s face. I try to summon mine.
In the slip of confusion, I remember Jun. There are fragments –
/I used to be waiting I’m not anymore/
his broad–knuckled hands, his wide stance as he sat next to me, the little chip off his tooth. His smell – firewood and earth and mustard oil and rosewater and –
No.
My finger snaps – the fracture spiderwebs out, and inside, there isn’t flesh, but grey–white chalk.
The mountain screams, pulses, pushes. It is crowning.
/Grief is a cave/
I open my mouth to scream but only sand falls out.
#
Incident Report: Missing Geologist
At approximately 1730 hours, Zikra [Redacted], an employee of the Tai Yang Mining Co., was suspected to have entered the mountains during an unscheduled mapping activity in the Sulaiman Range. Search attempts were impeded by unstable weather conditions and hazardous rockslides. The individual remains unaccounted for. Further retrieval efforts are not advised at this time.
#
When the weather broke, they returned with their lamps and their compasses, fanning out along the ridge like ants over cracked honeycombs. Jun saw it first – her Tai Yang vest folded near the entrance, bright against the stone. They all gathered around the fissure, gaping open unashamed like a hard–won wound. They all commented on how they must have missed it, all those times. They did not discuss how that unsettled them so.
Inside, the cavern opened into a single vast room, the floor scattered with scree and dust and water stains. There were no side passages, no chambers to slip into or get stuck in. No footprints. No flagging tape. No light.
They marked coordinates, exchanged theories in the careful language of bureaucracy. Xu wondered aloud if Zikra might have slipped off the edge. Dara agreed that the cliffs were high enough that they would never see her or find her.
Jun only stared at the opening.
Outside, the Sulaiman stood as it always had.
Rock remembers pressure; it is made by it, steeled and strengthened in its crush. We are softer. We do not turn weight into shape, we shatter in it.
We forget ourselves long before the earth forgets us.