Pajwak Khan

The valley of Buner was once a cradle of green pastures, majestic mountains, and beautiful waterfalls. Dotted with ancient historical sites, Buner offered a magical escape to an imaginative world extended to other two mesmerising valleys across the hills—Shangla to the northeast and Swat to northwest. To Muska, whose name literally means “smile”, it was a place filled with childhood ghosts and golden memories. Muska truly lived up to her name. She carried her meaning gently and imperceptibly as if it were some sort of a duty or responsibility of her life. Her smile was warm and steady, the kind that made people feel noticed. Those who knew her said she smiled even with her eyes. Though Buner was her birthplace, it was not where Muska lived anymore. She was studying anthropology in the large university of the big city surrounded by concrete, libraries, and restless minds. Muska would always wonder why her grandmother would always get sad when her father would ask her brother to get sacks of corn from the market for which he had already paid to the shop keeper of the village. She would bombard her grandmother with plethora of questions. In response, her grandmother would tell her stories not too old when farms of rice, maize, barley and wheat would produce enough corn for all homes of the village. When the sprawling fruit orchards of the village would provide enough fresh fruit such as oranges, plums, pears, peach and amlook (Japanese fruit) for everyone in the village to eat heartily. These stories seeped into her imagination but would also prick her mind asking herself, “then what happened that this deliciousness of nature no more existed?”.   

While her peers studied ancient ruins, Muska focused on how nature’s plenitude turned into scarcity in her village. How green pastures and green farms that produced abundance tapered off in her ultimate shelter? How the thick dark forest standing like a giant on the back of her village turned into sparsely scattered thin wood? How fast food, cold drinks, plastic wrappers, cell towers, and marble saws had climbed the steep trails of the thick forest to land in small hamlet of her homeland, forever altering its DNA? Because of her studies, Muska rarely visited Buner. Her whole world—her source of imagination, her nostalgia, her flashback—was anchored by a small house in the village, though she was seldom there.

Whenever Muska would return from her indulgence in reveries, created by the stories of her grandmother, to the dry cold present, she would look around to see her father, a quiet man shaped by years of hard work and compromise, had once been a proud farmer but now sat idle. His two elder sons would send enough money regularly from Malaysia where they had set up their business and would visit the village once in every five years but their children and wives lived in the same house.  Her mother was the heartbeat of the house, moving with quiet grace, though her smiles were tinged with the weariness of someone who had to buy plastic bottles of water for a kitchen that once sat beside a crystal stream. She would get silent for a few seconds whenever her younger son—Muska’s younger brother—would bring home new bottles of water. She would perhaps savour the past in her recollection when she would fetch fresh sweet water from the ravines, brooks and fountains along with her coevals of the village. Her brother represented restless change; he wore city-branded shirts and dreamed of leaving the village for some western country, viewing the village not as a home but as a cage of dust. Her grandmother, the oldest soul in the house, had memories richer than any book Muska had ever read.

Whenever Muska visited her village, she spent most of her time with her grandmother, sitting beside her on a woven charpai under the fading shade of an old tree. “There was a time,” her grandmother would say, “when brooks and ravines flowing nearby the village were so clean you could see the stones smiling beneath them,” her hands trembling as she poured tea made from bottled water. “We planted our own crops. We ate what we grew. The land fed us, and we respected it like a mother.”

Then her voice would get broken.

“First came marble factories, Muska.  Mountain rocks were cut down to make planks of marbles. Truckloads of marbles would be transported to cities for selling and earning more money. Water used for cleaning marbles would flow into the clean ravines. This muddied, poisoned crystal clean water of the ravines”, she would take a deep sigh and would get silent for a while. Seeing ‘what next’? in the curious looks of Muska, the grandmother would continue the story lurking deep down her heart with a trembling voice. “Then came Taliban, and we were confined within the surrounding walls of our home. With them, came the (military) operations, the boots, and the fire. They said they were there to bring peace and progress. They cut large swathes of pines in the thick forest that held the soil together. They poured explosives into the veins of the earth. Now the water tastes of gunpowder and looks like a marble slurry, and the soil has forgotten how to grow grain.” She paused, catching her breath, then continued. “People stopped farming; not because they wanted to, but because they could no longer. Now we buy what we once grew with our own hands.”

These stories haunted Muska. She started questioning everything. Her father, who had otherise pampered her despite her mother’s mild protests, would sometimes get scared for her safety. She might land in trouble someday because of her rude, insolent questions many of which made little sense to him, he would think.  

The summer heat was oppressive when Muska returned for a brief break from university. She was resting on a charpai in the courtyard one day when, without warning, rain started falling in torrents with terrifying sounds of thunder and uncontrollable force. All of a sudden, the ground shook with lightening of a deafening shriek and strange colour—perhaps the colour of blood. A violent flood roared through the village like an angry beast. She screamed for her mother, but the water hit the house like a hammer. The roar of water swallowed the village as if nothing existed in the place where once her village of great-great-grandparents stood like a thick shade of chinar in sizzling summer.

When Muska opened her eyes, she wasn’t in her bed. She found herself in a medical tent, her lungs burning with the scent of silt. The scene of flood before her eyes sent a shiver down her spine. Her family had survived through a miracle, but the village was gone. The houses, the marble factories, and the fields lay buried under six feet of sludge. As she recovered, she heard the word cloudburst for the first time in her life. She heard villagers arguing that it was perhaps a punishment from God for their sins, but Muska knew better. The flood wasn’t just God’s wrath; it was a man-made tragedy. The marble mining, the making of the thick forest into a sparsely green patch, poisoning water, diminishing orchards, turning the village into a concrete zone had created a perfect path for the mudslide. The “wealth” the village had chased had literally buried them. Hundreds of families had to bury their scores of loved ones in a single day—so much so that the village Pesh Imam (prayers’ leader) was tired of leading funeral prayers.

When it was time to leave, Muska stood at the edge of what used to be her street. The air was silent now; the marble factories were buried, their machinery silenced by the very earth they had exploited. She looked at her grandmother. “Don’t look for your heart here anymore, Muska,” her grandmother whispered. “We took too much. We let them hurt the mountain, and now the mountain doesn’t recognise us. This land is telling us to go.” Muska realized that her research was complete. The city hadn’t just arrived in the village; it had consumed it and left behind a skeleton. As she turned toward the road leading back to the city, a cold wind blew down from the barren peaks, carrying the scent of wet stone and lost time. The smile that gave Muska her name did not return that day. She understood now that some things, once broken, could not be restored. She walked away, knowing that while she belonged to the land, the land—blemished, poisoned, and angry—had finally told her never to return.