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rigor, feet to the side, as if cross-country skiing.
    “They like the valley bottoms,” she was saying. “And the floods, though not too often, and they like the fog belt. They like the nonstop drip of dampness. Nadir could never be a redwood.” She turned to me.
    I smiled. She leaned very slightly, as if to kiss me, and I pulled back very slightly, reminding her where we were. She got up to use the bathroom.
    Irfan absently chewed on the burnt edge of a naan and suggestedthat Farhana would enjoy the forests of Kaghan Valley. “It’s very lush, she’d like that. And not so out of the way. We have time. There are glaciers there too.”
    Then I thought about it. Yes, she
would
love the valley. It was damp, shadowy, fecund. It was Farhana!
    So we decided. And we forgot to tell her till it was time to change buses in Abbottabad. We didn’t take the one to Gilgit in the Northern Areas but the one to the town of Naran in Kaghan Valley, in the Frontier Province. It was just to be a three-day detour before heading north to the landscape of vertical wildernesses I’d described to her once. She sat with Wes on the bus and he must have told her and it must have pained her that he’d been told while she had not—I do remember Irfan explaining it to Wes, but where had she been? The bathroom? Shopping with my sister? I couldn’t remember!—and it was uncharacteristic of her, the way she said nothing till that time in the shop, when she tossed off the shawl.
    But then the night before we trekked up to the lake I believed she’d forgiven me, and I believed the same in the morning. I believed it even when I heard her complain to Wes about the detour, as she fed him those cold, tri-colored eggs, moments before we left the cabin. I believed it even on the walk up the glacier, when she turned her back to me, and I had to—how swiftly she and Wes moved on the ice!—I had to hold back—with what ferocity I wanted her just then!—reminding myself that the best reunions are like the best stories, and the best sex, raising questions while delaying answers. Yes. I believed she’d forgiven me, but I did not entirely believe I’d forgiven her. Because though it’s true that I left out the most important detail about Karachi and that I then disclosed it, it is also true that I continue to leave out the most important detail.
    Kaghan or no Kaghan, what was she doing here at all?

Ice, Mating
    Sometimes, after Farhana untangled the knots of her braid and tossed a wad of hair in the dustbin, she’d pull me out of bed, to recline at her five-sided bay window in San Francisco. It pitched so far out into the street, she claimed it was the one that caused the city to pass an ordinance limiting the projection of all bay windows. We’d sit there, nestled in glass in a purple house. Even by the city’s standards, the house was spectacular. Slender spiraling columns at the alcove, each with gold rings, like cufflinks on a white and crinkly sleeve. Halfway down the door of unfinished wood ran a tinted oval glass.
Mirror mirror
she’d giggle, the first few times I kissed her there. The bedroom balcony—with little gold-tipped minarets—was where I left her calla lilies, like an offering to the god of extravagance. Art-glass windowpanes under the roof.
    At the window, we watched others on the street.
    At the window, she asked, “What’s the most beautiful thing you ever witnessed? I mean a moment.”
    At the window, we played opposites. The Mission, where she lived, was once moist, fecund. In contrast, the stark, windswept Richmond, where I lived, was once a desolate bank of sand. We saidshe sprang from marsh, I from desert. She loved the damp closeness of curves, the rich debris of glaciers and deltas. She loved her gloves and her socks. I, though always cold, hated to cover my extremities. I preferred the raw, violent beauty of the Pacific coast to the secret tides of the protected bays. We said “opposites attract” and we were right.