by Saba Imtiaz
‘Why don’t you take him to Gizri and tell him it’s Lyari?’ Karam offers.
‘You know being a fixer is kind of like being a baby sitter, right?’ I say, still scarred from the time I fixed for a German journalist who needed me to order food around the clock, find him beer, and couldn’t go down to the hotel pharmacy to get a Panadol.
‘He’s a pain. He also wants me to find a Taliban leader, find a fashion show he can attend, and set up an interview with a woman who is married to a Lashkar-e-Taiba member. I think I’ll end up dead by the end of this,’ Akbar says, before stopping abruptly.
‘Hello sir!’ he exclaims.
We turn around to see who Akbar is greeting so exuberantly.
It’s Jamie. I’m so surprised I almost drop my tea on my kurta. Everyone at the table has turned to stare at him. Akbar gets up and shakes hands with Jamie. ‘This is Jamie sir, he’s from CNN,’ he says. Jamie says hi and turns to look at me. ‘These are the wire photographers—AP, Reuters, and AFP—and this is…’
‘Hello Ayesha,’ Jamie says, smiling. Akbar gives me that look I’ve seen being exchanged among fixers and photographers since time immemorial. It usually means: ‘We’re all in this together, don’t screw me over.’
‘Hi Jamie,’ I hear myself say. ‘You’re lucky to be working with Akbar. He’s great.’
‘Ready to go?’ Jamie asks Akbar. He nods and scurries off. I get up too, realizing I’ve been sitting here for ages and still have 2,000 words to file.
I find a rickshaw that blessedly agrees to drop me to work for a hundred bucks. My phone beeps a few times but I’ve hidden it in a fold of my dupatta so muggers won’t be able to spot it when they make off with my handbag. I’m entering the office when I finally take a look at it: Kamran responding to e-mails from pissed off reporters asking when they’re getting paid—‘please do not discuss this over e-mail, it’s inappropriate’, twenty press releases from a political party on today’s National Assembly session, and one message—from Jamie.
‘Free for dinner tonight?’
‘Sure. When/Where?’
‘Beach Luxury? Casbah? 8 p.m.?’
I haven’t seen Jamie since he kissed me outside Saad’s flat. Does the fact that he’s gotten in touch after almost a month mean that he felt a connection too? Or does he just want to be friends? Or is he bored in Karachi and needs someone to hang out with? Oh fuck it. He’s a good looking man who wants to have dinner with ME.
At 8 p.m.—having ignored Kamran’s request to stick around at work to celebrate someone’s birthday for whom he’d been shamed into buying a cake since no one had any money—I leave for home realizing that I have no money to get my hair done, get waxed or buy anything nice to wear. I leap into the shower hoping to at least give my legs a once over with a razor only to botch it and the next thing I know my knee’s spouting a river of blood. Can’t wear a dress unless I want to look like my eight-year-old self who had injured herself in the school playground and attempted to hide it with stickers.
9 p.m.: Standing in the Beach Luxury parking lot, looking up at the gorgeous, flaking, greying, modernist façade. Somewhere, up in one of the rooms, Jamie is getting ready to come down for dinner. I look at my clothes: a tank top with two-year old Zara jeans bought at my favourite store in Zainab Market that stocked the excess consignments made for export. ‘You paid two thousand rupees for this?!’ my cousin Sara shrieked when she looked through my suitcase on a weekend trip to Lahore. ‘I paid three hundred dirhams in Dubai and I don’t even like the colour I got them in.’ I ended up writing a story about the store, which the shopkeeper got framed and hung in what he referred to as a ‘changing room’—a closet-sized storeroom with a mirror and a door. I can’t find Jamie in the lobby, so I walk into the restaurant.
Spot Jamie peering into the giant boat-shaped freezer with glistening pink prawns and lobster laid out in separate compartments. ‘This is priceless,’ he says, as I approach. ‘This place is worth it for the freezer alone.’
Jamie leads me to our table and tells the server to bring us a couple of beers. ‘I wanted to call you yesterday,’ he says. ‘But Akbar and I were working till about midnight and I didn’t want to disturb you.’
We talk about work. I tell him off for picking Lyari as a subject. ‘Every journalist in Islamabad has descended upon it, doing the same story comparing Uzair Baloch to a character in the Godfather or the Sopranos, with an accompanying profile on Chaudhry Aslam, who the press corps have anointed the city’s bravest cop, except the man is a bloody disaster. Seriously?’
Jamie looks thoughtful. ‘You know, no one in Islamabad would say something like that. They’re all pretty much throwing out the same ideas. I mean, everyone wants me to go visit Murree Brewery.’
Jamie and I order copious amounts of fried prawns and tempura and we talk. We talk about journalism, reporters’ safety and Karachi politics. Jamie tells me stories about reporting from Syria, what his bosses in Atlanta think of the Middle East, and how he’s convinced that the person sitting next to him on the flight to Karachi was a military officer. Maybe it’s the sea breeze wafting in from the marina, or the food, or the beer but I can’t recall having felt so lightheaded, so absolutely free. We order coffee to sober up, and I ask the staff to help find me a cab. Jamie holds me in a hug that lingers on. ‘I want you to come upstairs with me,’ he whispers in my ear, ‘but I can see the spy they’ve assigned to tail me is still parked in the lobby.’ I tell him I’ll see him again soon, not especially wanting to be part of the briefing involving Jamie’s activities, in spite of the immense desire to press myself up against him.
‘Right then,’ I say smiling, the kind of involuntary smile you have when you’ve had far too much to drink. Damn it. I actually wore lacy black underwear tonight. As I get into a cab all I can think about is how much I want to rip Jamie’s clothes off.
1 a.m.: That was a pretty fantastic night, I think to myself, as I flip through television channels to see if there’s anything worth watching. I am too wired to go to sleep. I wonder if Jamie is sleeping right now. Or thinking about me. Or…ooh, phone ringing. Maybe that’s him.
It’s the Sipah-e-Sahaba spokesperson. I’m tempted not to pick up, but perhaps it’s some sort of breaking news development. Must answer.
‘Ji, assalamualaikum,’ the guy says, and then clears his throat. ‘Actually we didn’t get to talk much today, but I was hoping to talk to you now.’
Now? I look at the clock. Its 1 a.m. ‘Err, sure.’
‘So how long have you been at Daily News? And you’re a girl, Masha Allah, and you spend all of this time out of the house, how do you do it?’
Oh good god, this is not a breaking news development. The death-mongering spokesperson wants to chat.
‘Well, I’m very busy right now,’ I say, change the channel to News 365 and turn up the volume. ‘I’m at the office still.’
‘Oh, that’s sad,’ he says. ‘Well, please do call me if you ever need anything.’
I cancel the call and wonder if anyone would ever believe me if I told them what had just happened.
CHAPTER 5
Saturday, April 2, 2012
Headline of the day: ‘To ward off evil, Zardari kills one black goat every day’
Jolted awake by the sound of the loudest crash ever. Is it an accident? Has someone thrown a rock through the window? There is something digging into my back. No, focus. What was that noise?
Manage to untangle myself from the comforter and turn the light on. The windows are intact. It is still dark outside. Okay, think. We have no guns. I will have to defend the house with an old decoration piece—a wooden fish that conceals a dagger within.
Look around to see the cat sitting on the floor next to a broken glass. She is playing with my lighter. She must have jumped onto the side table and pushed it off along with the glass.
The cat leaps up on the bed. I pull the comforter over my head, hoping she’ll get the hint and go. ‘What?’ I yell, as I feel a
paw digging into my side.
‘Meow.’
‘Its 5 a.m.’
‘MEOW.’
I do not understand how and when my father spoiled the cat to the extent that 5 a.m. has become an acceptable hour for her to wake up, then wake him up and demand that she be hand-fed breakfast. Couldn’t he just have trained her to find her own food?
I’m not going to give in to this feeding nonsense. I stagger out of bed and put her breakfast—chopped up boiled chicken—on a plate and call her. She looks at me quizzically, trots off to the living room, bounds onto the windowsill and looks at me again. I put the plate there. She glances at me, and then at the plate.
‘You can eat it. I know you can.’
‘Meow.’
We stare at each other for a minute.
I put a piece of the chicken on my palm.
The cat sniffs at it gingerly. I can instantly tell I have failed her by not cutting it into perfect bite sized pieces.
Fifteen minutes later, after she’s been distracted by a crow perched on the electricity wires outside, a cat yowling two lanes away and a car alarm, breakfast is over. She curls up on her chair—a custom built one that is reupholstered every year—and snoozes.
I wish I had her life.
I go back to bed and check what I’ve missed online in the three hours that I was asleep. There seems to have been an epic fight on Twitter but I can’t make head or tail of it. Instagram is full of photos from people’s Friday nights in the civilized world: views from a bar, the ensuing 3 a.m. carb-fest, lots of selfies and close-ups of professionally made cocktails.
I feel terribly sad. I want that life. I want to be in those photos, not pressing the ‘like’ button on autopilot. I recall my last glorious vacation—three years ago, five days in Bangkok with my friend Sam, happily chugging beer in a jazz bar and laughing at the number of women on the streets with fake Louis Vuitton bags and some manner of animal print clothing.
Bangkok reminds me that that was the last time I could wear sleeveless clothes without cringing at the deplorable state of my arms. And that was two years ago. Decide to head to the gym.
An hour later, as I alight from the wretched stationary bike, I realize I may be okay with the way I look. My heart feels like it’s permanently lodged in my throat. I wonder, not for the first time, if my gym has an attendant paramedic.
Lie down on a yoga mat and pretend to do crunches. Oh god, I could lie here all afternoon. I wonder what Jamie is doing. Is he thinking about me? Maybe I should Google what flights to Islamabad cost these days. Or would that be too stalkerish?
‘Ayesha? Are you planning to work out today or are you just here to lie down??’
My trainer is looming in front of me though I made a point of occupying a mat wedged into a corner of the gym. How did she find me here? Sometimes she reminds me of my Islamiat teacher at college, who had the remarkable ability of calling on students just as they were about to doze off and forcing them to recite the long series of prayers meant to be read at a funeral, which always made the class feel like a perpetual wake.
The trainer points me in the direction of the weights. I would hate her, if I wasn’t paying her to get me to lose weight.
After about twenty minutes during which I lose all sensation in my arms and am convinced I’ve fractured my hand, she releases me to go use the treadmill.
The treadmill area at the gym is a remarkable place. There are about five women obsessively discussing whatever happened in last night’s episode of the translated Turkish soap opera that is currently to blame for most of the remote control fights across Pakistan. There are the two teenage sisters who are so super skinny that it makes me sad to see them at the gym at 7 a.m. I want to tell them to go home, eat massive breakfasts and enjoy having flawless skin while it lasts. And then there’s my personal hero—the woman who gave birth two months ago and is running on the treadmill like a maniac. She worked out until she was ready to be shipped off to the delivery room—much to the consternation of the rest of the women—and resumed smoking the first day she was back at the gym. I love her and want her branch-like arms.
I walk out to a remarkably beautiful day. The kind of morning that used to make me so happy to be living in Karachi. It’s breezy and not humid and the sky is overcast. I sit down on the bench outside the gym and light up. A woman passes by and looks visibly shocked. Smokers may be the new pariahs, but a woman smoking is the worst. The end of humanity. A sign that judgment day is near.
I’ve taken the day off work, so I head home, take a shower and flop down on the sofa. In the distance, I can hear my father watching Breaking Bad. My friends find this terribly amusing given that my father’s culinary talents include making killer biryani, not meth, which is what the main protagonist of the show cooks up. I put my feet up on an antique trunk I lugged home from one of the used furniture stalls in Saddar. It looks just like the ones in all those cutesy little apartments in Brooklyn featured on all the home decor websites, usually with a ‘vintage, originally found in a Paris flea market’ description.
‘What is this!?’ my father had shrieked when I’d rung the intercom asking if he could come downstairs and help me bring it up.
‘It’s a trunk!’ I said proudly, running my hands over the pockmarked wood. The lock broke off in my hand.
‘Yes, I know, we had one of these when I was five. Seriously, what is this behemoth!?’
It now took pride of place in our lounge, mostly because the cat decided that it doubled as a great scratching post.
I really have no idea what one does in the daytime anymore. On Sundays I end up sleeping till noon, watching TV shows all day, and in the evening develop what I call ‘the 7 p.m. itch’, a strange restlessness accompanied by the knowledge that it is too late to make a plan and that most organized people have something to do already.
I look up job websites. There are postings for jobs such as ‘social media editor’ (what is that? Do I get to trawl Twitter and Facebook all day?) and ‘ideas editor’ (is that just producing pitches? On what?), and I hastily write a cover letter for the social media editor job at a New York-based magazine.
Twenty minutes later I get an auto-generated reply thanking me for my interest in the job, but that I wasn’t a ‘suitable candidate’.
‘I am never going to get out of here, am I?’ I say out loud. ‘What’s that?’ my father calls out from his room. ‘Nothing,’ I sigh and call Zara to ask what she’s up to.
Instead of ‘hello’, Zara opens with, ‘So you’ve heard?’
‘Heard what? I’ve been at the gym, what happened, god, a bomb?’
‘No, though you might want to sit down for this. Ali has been hired by NBC.’
A flash of anger courses through my veins. Ali—the smarmy, story-stealing reporter—has been hired by NBC? How did this happen?
‘What?’
‘Do you want to go have lunch?’ Zara bursts out. ‘I have the day off work and if I stay home I’ll just keep checking Twitter—where he’s being congratulated like he won a fucking Nobel prize—and feeling miserable.’
Zara and I end up going to our favourite Thai restaurant. She’s twenty minutes late, and walks in lugging her handbag, which I discover is bulging with beer cans. ‘Sorry, sorry. To add to how fucking miserable this day is, the wine store guy didn’t have change so I had to stand around waiting for him to find two hundred rupees while everyone gawped at me. Anyway. Ali. Please. I cannot get over this.’
‘You know Ali is going to get fired the minute they figure out that he actually relies on people like us and his desk for his stories?’ I say.
Zara is beyond consoling. ‘I don’t care. I applied for the same job; except I did it on their stupid job website two months ago and never heard back, while Ali probably made his pitch over drinks in Islamabad and sealed it over those overpriced cappuccinos at Mocca Cafe the next morning. Ugh. Whatever.’
I want to calm Zara down but I know why she’s even more upset than I a
m. Reporting for television is incredibly competitive, with most reporters jumping ship every six months to join another Pakistani television channel, trying to get their hands on the most prestigious beats. The high point for most is to either end up as bureau chief or as the main political correspondent in Islamabad, but being hired by a foreign news channel is joining the major league. It’s a way out of covering press briefings and into doing some actual reporting that gets you attention abroad. She’s already choked back tears twice while talking about Ali’s move: how much it’s going to hurt when everyone in the newsroom is discussing it, the kind of stories he’ll do while she’ll be doing live broadcasts on how much rainwater has gathered on the streets during the monsoon.
I can’t understand why Ali has gotten the slot. In a year, he’s guaranteed a job offer in D.C. or London. Why am I not the one being offered jobs? I resolve to find a story that will catapult me to some sort of stardom. Just as soon as I’ve finished this beer.
‘Hey, do you think his girlfriend will move to Islamabad with him?’ Ali’s girlfriend is surprisingly smart—surprising because she’s dating Ali—and Zara and I often wonder whether we’d be friends with her if she wasn’t sleeping with His Smarminess.
‘Probably not,’ Zara snorted. ‘I bet you anything that he’ll be dating one of the capacity building girls (who, as Saad once pointed out, comprise 90 percent of Islamabad’s eligible population) in a month, be best friends with the TV anchors in two, and after six months at NBC, he’ll quit to join the U.S. embassy.’
‘Don’t forget the op-eds,’ I say, pushing around the last grains of rice on my plate. ‘He’ll obviously become an expert on American foreign policy after he attends his first embassy reception.’