Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [131]
I couldn’t understand Ziad’s maddening pace. I wanted to shout out to him and say, “It’s just the sun! It looks the same every day! It’s just an ancient star that was destroyed billions of years ago!” Instead, I sighed and held my tongue. With one hand on each thigh, I pressed forward. By the time I got to the top, Ziad was contorting his body in myriad ways to capture the sun with his camera. I watched his acrobatic art for a little and then I started riding the bike around the rocks.
When I reached the far end of the tabletop, I stood with my back to the sun, looking across a vast desert. It struck me that just a few hours in that direction sat the city of Mecca, where the Ka’ba, the crown jewel of Allah, sat in the center of a thousand marble minarets, leaking the aab-e-zamzam into the desert to nourish its pilgrims, with the Black Stone, its singular eye, giving God a way to gaze upon the profane world. If I just kept riding this bike, and it turned into a camel, and if I rode and rode, I would be at the place where my existence had started.
I spent the rest of the morning following Ziad around the plateau. It was hard to keep up with him. Sometimes he climbed on the bike and took a suicidal ride partway down at a steep angle, sometimes he stopped suddenly and lay down on his belly to focus his camera on a tiny insect—he took hundreds of pictures—and sometimes he had me stand between him and the sun and he captured my shadows. From time to time he would conceive in his head a scene that pleased him, and then he would hand me the camera and run to the spot—sometimes two or three hundred yards away—and strike a pose and tell me to take a picture. Then he’d come rushing back and look at the job I’d done, usually nodding in approval.
Even when we finally got back down from the plateau he didn’t stop taking pictures. He took pictures of the SUV going up and down the sandy banks, me at the wheel. He stood in the center of a clearing and told me to drive doughnuts around him so he could take pictures of the blowing sand. The jaws of his camera snapped open and shut like the mouth of a voracious lion. Ziad ate everything around him.
Finally we got into the Jeep and, leaving the scant shade of the mountain, drove over to a raised clearing between two hills where the wind was more fierce. Ziad burrowed in the back of the Jeep and brought out a parachute kite, handing me the two-handed controls. Then he ran off and flung the kite into the air. With a powerful whoosh the kite caught an eastern gust and yanked on my arms. I felt as if I were trying to rope down a massive dragon with nothing but string. The gusts were so powerful that I was lifted in the air and even dragged forward a few yards now and then. To control the kite I had to dig my heels into the sand and get in a squat, my quads quivering from the force I exerted. Sometimes I didn’t give the line enough slack or pulled too suddenly and the kite took a nose dive and slammed into the ground. Whenever this happened, Ziad whooped and ran over to untangle the string; then he flung the kite in the air again.
Once I figured out how to control the kite, I began enjoying myself. I sent the kite in threatening swoops over Ziad’s head, which sent him ducking and rolling and running down the clearing in a panic. After a while he became fed up with taking evasive maneuvers and came over to take control of the kite. Now it was my turn to run around the clearing while the kite veered down and pecked at my head or slammed into me from my blind spot and sent me sprawling.
When in a hallagulla of laughter and sweat I fell down into the sand, I spread out my limbs and made sand angels. I left a line of sweat where the spine would be.
We flew the kite until the day became hot and the breeze died down. Finally we made our slow way back to the SUV and had a drink. Our faces were