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Converging is what divided us.
    On her first birthday after we met, the year before we left for Kaghan, in one hand I held a calla lily with a lip pinker than her own, in the other, a bottle of champagne. As I descended the hill to her purple palace, the sun drew the fog from my flesh, and I was salivating as the scent of refried beans followed me all the way to her door. There she met me, dressed in woolens and boots, saying she knew what she wanted instead.
    “What?”
    “Let me show you.”
    I shut my eyes, counted to ten, opened them. “So, where is it?”
    “Not here, silly. Let’s go for a walk. To
your
neighborhood, the one you love to photograph, with all the cliffs and cypresses.” She rolled her eyes as though cliffs and cypresses were toys for men. I found her delicious.
    It was an especially cold day in May and though I did love the bluffs, I’d been hoping for a more close-fitting day. Call it role reversal. I chilled the champagne and headed for the bay window, to, well, anticipate some tidal advances. The last time we’d made love I’d teased that her needs were growing as strong as the tides rushing up the channels of a salt marsh, and, inshallah, they’d also be twice daily.
    Well, it was not to be.
    She’d planned the route. First, the ruins of the Sutro Baths, which looked especially green and scummy that day, thick as a Karachi sewer. We watched the pelicans. Dark hunkered shadows, sometimes in gangs of twenty or more, closing in on the fecund orgy at the microbe-gilded pools like evil clouds, like missiles. They launched headlong, scattering the seagulls and the swifts, droppingone after the other in a heavy, gut-wrenching fall. A rain of bombshells. The invasion mesmerized us.
    I moved my camera in search of the prison island of Alcatraz, floating somewhere in the bay, but it was shrouded in fog.
Alcatraz
. The archaic Spanish word for pelican, from the Arabic
al-qatras
. It was the rule of silence that drove the inmates insane, reminding them that their exile was complete. I moved my camera back to the baths, and from there, to the austere silhouette of a cormorant. He seemed to be watching the assault of the pelicans with as little interest as God.
    “Nadir, talk to me for a minute, without that.”
    I didn’t have to see through the lens to see her point to it. “In a minute.”
    The pelicans gone, the seagulls multiplied. I watched a pair land on the boulders along the shore. It was the softest landing, the gulls allowing the wind to pull them down gently, lovingly. And the hummingbirds—how did they survive in this wind, and at this height? And the succulents to her side—those red waxy leaves, juicy as capsicum—and the purple flowers with the bright white hearts! Here it was again: the tenacity of the small. What I’d seen in the Sonoran Desert and the valleys of the Himalayas.
    “It’s over a minute.” I put the camera in its case. She cleared her throat. “Nadir, are you as happy here, with me, as you are alone on your nightly walks?”
    “I’m much happier.”
    She looked away. We were balanced on the farthest wall of the ruins. The water here was less slimy; a thin sun shimmered in its depths. As Farhana’s orange scarf blew across the pale green peat, I took my camera out again. She sometimes let me photograph her now, though still not often enough, and only when dressed. I got a beautiful profile of her gazing at the baths, perhaps imagining them as the rambling maze of salt water swimming pools they’d once been, thumb at lower lip, the mist rolling across the steps in the background.
    “Happier than in the mountains of Pakistan?”
    Perhaps I hesitated. “Well, yes.”
    “So,” she tossed her head back, pulled the scarf tight around her neck, “which is more beautiful. The desert, or the mountains?”
    “Hard to say.” I paused, wanting to play along with this birthday guessing game. “Both. Equally. Differently.” How to compare a horizontal wilderness