Fiction: The discovery of an unknown man in Pakistan’s Black Mountains causes an avalanche of chaos

We are from dust, he said, turning towards his younger companion, his movement gentle, deliberate, a bird weaving a loop around a leafless branch.

Both men reached for a handhold on the steep slope of the Chartoi Nullah. Here four streams met, cutting open the frozen ground.

And only our bones remain separate from the soil that buries us. Otherwise, we are from dust, Hassan Ali. Never allow yourself to believe otherwise.

Noor Hussein paused, not sure that Hassan Ali had understood his words. He watched the younger man wedge his feet between the rocks jutting out from the vertical mass of moraine heaped high before them.

Hassan was staring at a woman’s form veiled in a crimson chaddar, slowly making her way up the precipitous slope. She was at a considerable distance, but it was clear that she was moving up the steep path, placing each foot carefully before the other. Noor had seen her too, and wondered why any woman would undertake such a risky journey. But now, there were perils that lay before them as they, too, climbed up to the tree line, lush with growth and beckoning them with their bounty, sprouting despite the hardness of the soil in years when the rain had forsaken them. Beneath the mesh of random rocks and ancient debris of things long dead and forgotten, a glacier paced out its journey with unbounded patience. Across the slopes, snow spread wide, unblemished, undulating, a freshly washed sheepskin.

Black rocks crouched, hard granite cowering beneath soft snow, leading the two men to believe that all was well, that the path ahead was tame, the breeze gentle. The pattern of the weather had changed in recent years, rain coming when the crop had to be harvested; long, dry periods stretching across the cherished filament of summer, cracking the soil, parched, an old spinster’s skin. The glacier, white where it had fractured with its gathered wealth, its pitted surface littered with mud and debris, melted ice bubbling beneath the rainbow curve, wedged between two black gulleys, bled quicker than before, flooding the fields just as they had been sown, the labour of a hundred men and women destroyed in the time it takes for a falling egg to break. Everything was different now: girls went to school, women tended shop, men sought comfort in bottles of cough syrup swallowed in one long, unbroken gulp.

Life was fragile in these parts. Boulders, lanced through the heart, perched on top of granite spires. Rutted, speckled moraine edged closer to the village; gushing streams dried up before winter; cows calved in autumn, their young not surviving the freezing cold. Spring was no longer heralded with the distant haze of blossoms; fruit died on the stem before it could ripen, empty husks withering like the shunned corpse of a fallen calf. Even the hearts of men and women were more brittle than ever, breaking with the first suggestion that the love they offered passed unnoticed, detritus thrown into a gurgling brook.

Much had changed since the Old Times, save for the uncertainty. It had always been a part of the lives of the people of Saudukh Das, like the fragrance of lucerne and the bleating of goats and the shadows cast by floating clouds upon the fields and mountains and small homes built of stone and the wood of the deodar tree.

Noor Hussein cautioned his younger cousin to slow down, to look carefully at where he placed his foot, to ensure that the soil beneath him was firm and could take his weight. A moment’s miscalculation could be the difference between lying at the bottom of the mountain, bones smashed against rock, or lying before the hearth, a fire stoked by the worn hands of a woman who may not have loved the man but had served his every need.

This was a hard journey, taken twice a year, once in the summer when the cattle had to be shown the grazing land along the glacial streams flowing into the high nullahs. Then again when the animals would be brought back with the first frost of autumn, when the breeze brought with it the bite of the first snow, after the corn had been harvested, apples picked, apricots piled into sacks, walnuts cracked and peeled, their hard, bitter shells carefully collected and stored for kindling.

It was that time now, time to take stock of the year that was almost over, of the many births of baby boys and lambs and calves, of the several deaths: frail old men with gnarled knuckles, garbled memories and disintegrating teeth; fragile girls found with rope tied around their necks, broken reeds, silent vessels. It was that time, a hard time, a time to bid farewell to the calm of summer, to the gold of the fields and the silver of the sky, the burning rust of the trees. It was time to take stock of the sadness and the loss, the occasional glimmer of joy, the parting and return of loved ones, the growth of the orchards, the golden gift of a mare who foaled once in two years. It was time to prepare for the long nights ahead, the only sound the wind raging, firewood crackling in the hearth, the ghostly silence of smoke disappearing into the skylight like a song of lament at daybreak.

This was a land where many had come and struck the hard ground with harder resolve, scraping top soil from near the riverbank and carrying it on backs bent double to terraces which would become fields, pale shoots of barley pushing through the rocky soil.

Excerpted with permission from An Abundance of Wild Roses, Feryal Ali-Gauhar, Canongate.