Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [130]
“Long story.”
Ziad didn’t say anything for several minutes. Mulling over what I’d said, he bit his lip the way he had in the car the first night I’d arrived. He fiddled with his cup and dipped his finger into the little remaining bit of tea. He licked his finger and made a sucking sound.
Finally he spoke again. “If you changed your gender,” he asked, “would the covenant lapse?”
“First of all: I like my penis. Second of all: I don’t appreciate you making light of this.”
“I’m just trying to understand,” Ziad said. “Really.”
“I don’t think you can,” I replied.
“Fine,” Ziad said, putting up his hands in surrender. “I’m going to sleep. Let’s go off-roading in the morning. There’s a place I’d like to show you. I’ll wake you up early.”
“I don’t want to go,” I said, sounding as petulant as I felt.
“I’m not hearing you,” he singsonged.
When I got to my room I felt so annoyed that I figured I’d have trouble going to sleep. Lying in bed and thinking back on the confession I’d made to Ziad, I began to feel light and supple. I no longer felt angry. Relief overtook me. It was as if my mind was a walnut that had been cracked open by Ziad’s incessant curiosity. I wasn’t sure where I’d read it, but it was said that sometimes water actually spouted out naturally from stone. I felt now as if a hole had been opened in my ossified conscience. Soon I was drenched in myself.
I slept soundly and dreamlessly. I woke as refreshed as if I had just stepped out of a cool lake. In the morning I wasn’t sure whether I felt so good because the night had spun silvery threads of joy into my heart, or because the forthcoming day held the promise of bounty.
11
After mating with the desert, the city lay on her stomach snoring. There had been a sandstorm during the night, and a smooth, pristine-looking dusting covered everything. It wasn’t yet dawn, and the moon was erotic gold.
When Ziad and I headed outside on our off-roading adventure, we found the black SUV coated in sand—a soft, fine-grained sand that felt like velvet. We used the edges of our hands to clean the windshield and the mirrors and then headed onto the highway.
There were no cars on the streets at that hour, though every now and again we passed a little mosque. The homes became larger the further we got out of the city until suddenly there were no more mosques or houses. We passed a few warehouses and some junkyards; then those disappeared as well.
The landscape resembled a good ghazal. Like that traditional form of love poetry, the desert was repetitious without being tedious. It had a melancholy tinge that was expressed with simple economy. It wasn’t raw or forceful, yet it still felt imposing and impregnable. There was formality in its wickedness. It was ageless without being aged. Very rarely there was a singular man or a lone bird that inevitably disappeared in the sighing sand as the author of a ghazal disappears into his final couplet.
Ziad cut into a marked area and began to follow tire marks from earlier off-roaders. “The sandstorm would have wiped yesterday’s tracks out,” he said, “so someone must have stopped by recently.” The knowledge that there were others in our proximity bothered me. I wanted to be alone with the world.
Ziad pressed the gas pedal down as we approached a looming bank. As he dropped into 4x4 mode, the Jeep roared, leaping into the air and then landing nose-first. He swung the steering wheel from side to side as we lurched down the backslope. The vehicle skidded calmly to the bottom, like a ship getting carried onto shore by a powerful wave.
After we took turns practicing downshifting and drifting, we parked the vehicle, took Ziad’s bike out of the back, and hiked up a meager trail that led through clumps of rocks to a distant tabletop plateau. Ziad, with a camera around his neck, and carrying his bike over one shoulder, rushed ahead of me. He looked back from time to time, and I could see in his eyes a zealotry I’d never been before. His desperation to beat the sun to the plateau made him seem like an ancient Zoroastrian priest