OUT OF EDEN WALK

Walking the world is a dance.

Take one step up a glacier: Slide back two. Cars treat you like roadkill: Pirouette around them. Inch over a suspension bridge rocking high above a river in the Himalayas: Stretch out your arms like a flamenco aerialist. In this way each footstep you place across the surface of the Earth becomes a choreography of anticipation.

Your partner is landscape. She leads. You follow.

We meet the man with the chopped-off leg on the second day of the walk in Pakistan.

Two co-workers carry him up a canyon in the Karakoram. He is a road laborer from Chelas, a wrecked human. A rockslide has taken away his left leg from the shin down. His missing foot lies buried forever under tons of gneiss down by the river. He should be dead. They have been carrying him a long time. He has lost much blood.

Naveed Khan, my Pakistani walking partner, uses his belt as a tourniquet. Villagers lift the amputee into a Jeep. I tie his stump up to a handle above the car door. This is to help stanch the bleeding. The driver, rousted from his sleep, is in no hurry. He wanders about the village in search of a large piece of plastic. He frets over bloodstains on upholstery. The nearest hospital is in Gilgit, a five- or six-hour drive away, on mostly bad roads.

“Hang in there, buddy,” I tell the one-legged man, stupidly, in English. “You’ll be okay.” He is a bearded giant in a shalwar kameez. He gives a thumbs-up as if he understands.

Nothing in this world really works as it should. We get by on a thin soup of hope. We disappoint each other.

But the rest of that day, as we hike down the Chapursan Valley, Khan and I can’t get it out of our heads: The torn man will never dance again, if he survives at all. Yet he didn’t complain once in his agony. He spoke calmly, in a normal voice, while his life dribbled out in red across the dust and rocks. His smile was broad and reassuring. He was comforting us.

Khyber is a small village in Gilgit-Baltistan. Poplars burn yellow above the mudbrick houses.

In Jan Ali’s warm kitchen, a black-haired girl of seven is dancing. I see her through the doorway—singing tunelessly, spinning in circles. Her name in the Wakhi language meant “light.”

“You guys have the best names,” I tell Jan Ali. “All we have is Alice or Mary.”

“Or Sapphire. Or Candy,” adds my partner, Naveed Khan. He is an ex-Marine.

Light has cerebral palsy. Sometimes she bangs her forehead against the wall and spits at the dogs. Her father, Jan Ali, an apple farmer and a follower of the Aga Khan, has bankrupted himself with the doctors. He stands with his family at the front of his house to bid us goodbye: a slump-shouldered man with sad eyes.

But his apples!

He pushes them into our hands as if they are nothing. As if they are a mere trifle. As if their beautiful color, incomparable fragrance, and sweet taste do not carry, as they do, the suggestion of a far better world.

“What do you think of Pakistan? Are we all terrorists?”

Pakistan’s international reputation for military coups, for religious extremism, for corruption, weighs heavily on its ordinary people. I am asked such questions hundreds of times. It is as if Americans were judged solely by their nation’s ghastly and shameful gun violence. A pinch of grievance, of pride, is often served with every cup of tea, with every shared meal, with every spontaneous act of generosity—and in Pakistan these occur daily. It happens even among the police officers assigned to keep an eye on me.

Walking under the gaze of state security is a heavy burden for any storyteller. It is almost impossible to work. It is impossible to breathe. Yet most of the Pakistani agents who shadow us are polite, human, apologetic: “It is for your own safety,” they say. And: “The relations between our countries are not good—what if something happened to you? Who would get blamed? We would get blamed.” And: “Look, sir, I don’t want to be out here walking with you, either.”

And so: a tense pas de deux. A delicate and reluctant rhumba down Pakistan’s highways, through its towns, and across its fields.

One burly military intelligence agent nods considerately when I complain about close tailing, and agrees to pull back. For more than 15 miles through the rumpled Himalayan foothills, he follows far behind, on foot. That night I see him limping into the roadside inn. Naveed Khan and I buy him dinner. He says his pain is nothing. He was shot in the leg up in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

We waltz into Islamabad during a political protest. We shimmy past the police lines holding back crowds demanding stricter blasphemy laws. At the hotel we drink virgin margaritas.

It is Pakistan’s wedding season.

To say that Pakistan is wedding-obsessed is an absurd understatement. Parents start to plan, to save up, for their children’s marriage ceremonies as soon as the babies are born. Weddings are a huge investment. Hundreds or sometimes thousands of guests are invited. The elaborate bridal dress, the dowry in gold and gems, a week’s worth of catered feasting, plus the rental of a gigantic wedding hall can cost a king’s ransom. (Thousands of such banquet facilities line the outskirts of every sizable Pakistani town.) One financial expert in Pakistan notes that a typical middle-class professional can spend 40 times the average annual income (about $1,500) on nuptials. If possible, it should be even more. When the marriage mania of Pakistan and India are coupled, the South Asian wedding fashion industry alone is worth a hundred billion dollars a year.

Two female friends in Islamabad invite me to a wedding. They insist I wear a traditional and elegant shalwar kameez, the national costume. The wedding palace is larger than a hangar for a jumbo jet. It is decorated with hundreds of floral arrangements. Teams of young men and women dance prepared routines under blue flashing lights.

I am the only male in attendance—among hundreds of men dressed in Western suits—wearing traditional garb.

We have spanned more than 600 miles of trail together, Naveed Khan and I.

Then we walk into Lahore.

Lahore is the cultural capital of Pakistan. It was ruled by two fabled dancing empires: the Mughals and the Sikhs. Today its Walled City remains dotted by beautiful and ancient palaces, hot baths, and mosques. Alleyways are jammed with cars, ox carts, motorcycles, pedestrians, rickshaws. How this ceaseless tide of Lahoris manages to dance past each other is a daily mystery: a micro-migration of millions of souls from the outskirts to center and then back again every 24 hours. The government, overwhelmed, has inaugurated a Chinese-made metro. An Australian-designed artificial intelligence computer grapples to keep the buses on time.

We sidestep into Lahore via the busy Timber market. A man named Mohamad Ishfak dances there, stomping, atop lumps of clay. He is maker of tandoor ovens. His rhythmic footwork turns the city sidewalk into a Punjab village.

I visit the Fountain House mental health facility. It dispenses social services to hundreds of destitutekhawaja sara, the transgender court dancers of the old city who are among Pakistan’s most marginalized people. (Months later a khawaja sara dancer will become the country’s first transgender newscaster. Conservative Pakistan is a complex place.)

In Lahore there is sushi and a world-class literature festival.

There is a Sufi shrine—a place of moderate Islamic worship—that was suicide-bombed by fundamentalists in 2010, and a public park that was suicide-bombed by the Pakistani Taliban on Easter in 2016, when minority Christians were targeted. There is the Diwan-i Khas, the Hall of Private Audience: Four hundred years ago Jahangir, the World Emperor, installed a golden bell above his bed there to be rung, with a golden chain, by any citizen with a complaint.

I hardly see another foreigner while trekking 636 miles through Pakistan.

A few Chinese engineers at a dam. Some Western diplomats holed up behind high walls in Islamabad. For five months, since climbing the snowy Karakoram from Afghanistan, I roam freely. I appear to have the entire nation of 193 million people to myself. It is difficult to convey the oddness of this experience at the dawn of the 21st century. It is like walking into Otherness, and the Other is you.

Wagah is one of the few checkpoints between Pakistan and India. It straddles one of the most militarized borders in the world.

The two rival governments stage a peacock display of flags and marching troops at the gated crossing. Yet on the Pakistani side it is also possible see this: a lone man dancing, whirling like a besotted dervish, on one leg. He is an amputee. Naveed Khan has informed me, during the course of our long journey together, that the rockslide victim we doctored in the mountains has in fact survived. I hug Khan goodbye.

Pakistan means “land of the pure” in Urdu. Thankfully, there is no such Pakistan on Earth like that. I miss the real one already.