B005OWFTDW EBOK

  Summer. Grandes dames, gospel, pop groups, divas.

  Might I remind you, you’re not on holiday,’ my father said.

  He took me to Westminster, the public school he’d selected for me. (I was meant to follow him to Magdalen in Oxford, and study law there.) I’d spent a year and a half at an all-male school in India, suffering through science classes; when, at Westminster, they told me I’d have to repeat a year and study Latin and maths, I protested. I was sent instead to a tutorial college on the other side of the park, between unfashionable Gloucester Road and Earls Court. The principal, a grey-haired lady with fancy spectacles, suggested I attend a summer class in English before term began. I took the 74 bus from Park Lane to the West London Air Terminal every morning to attend lessons in a language that, although not my mother tongue, was the one I knew best.

  My classmates were Japanese, Greek, Venezuelan, Nigerian, Persian. A curly-haired, bespectacled boy called Giovanni sat next to me. He’d ask me to walk with him to Earls Court station. Though I preferred to take the bus, I’d go along, to be companionable. On Fridays he’d borrow two shillings from me. ‘I go to the seazside to zleep with de girls. You come with me? Do you zleep with de girls?’ I didn’t sleep with girls, not yet. I did fancy one, Kumiko, a very pretty Japanese girl who sometimes rode on the bus with me to Hyde Park Corner. But I soon found out she had an Iranian boyfriend – older than me, and, I thought, better looking.

  I didn’t make other friends in the summer class. My cousins went home, one by one. I depended on books for company. I read about the opera and the theatre in the public library, borrowed, one after the other, Yukio Mishima’s cruel tales, Cyprian Ekwensi’s lowlife chronicles of Lagos, Baldwin’s sexual jigsaw: Another Country.

  Summer ended. The family moved to a first-floor apartment in Hyde Park Place, with picture windows looking right into the park and enough rooms to house all the relatives who wanted to visit. My mother had joined us and for a while all six of us lived there. Then my mother and one of my sisters went off to Karachi for several months. I had my own room, space to read quietly. I learned to fry frozen fish and burgers, eat stuffed vine leaves from cans, make hummus and pitta sandwiches and cups of good instant coffee.

  Late at night, I watched films on TV, Yang Guifei and Onibaba. Polanski, Antonioni, Wajda. Sometimes, on Sundays, my sisters and I watched Indian films at Her Majesty’s, Haymarket. I didn’t enjoy them as much as I once had. I wasn’t homesick. I’d left Karachi and the sea before I was thirteen, to spend two years in small-town India and holiday in Bombay: I couldn’t say where home was any longer. Perhaps the films reminded me of what I didn’t want to lose: I enjoyed speaking and listening to my mother tongue, but I had no need to be English or anything else. London was just another place I’d landed in.

  Classes began in September. I still took the 74 every day, but from another stop. Along with English grammar and composition, I studied biology, history, scriptures and literature. Our teacher of English literature was an elderly dyed blonde who said she was descended from an Indian princess. I found her inspiring; the others laughed at her. I made friends: Lamie, the Palestinian boy; Japanese Naoko; and Yunie, the Korean girl. Naoko, like me, lived with her family; they had a ground-floor flat on Exhibition Road where she sometimes served us Japanese tea and bean cakes. Lamie and Yunie lived in bedsit land around Kensington where foreign students rented narrow single rooms, cooked on single gas rings, shared bathrooms and were allowed two baths a week (no showers). Lamie wanted to be a doctor. He often took me to his room behind our school to share his supper of fried cheese and bread with oil and thyme, while we listened to the plaintive songs of Lebanon’s Fairuz. Yunie’s Earls Court flat was full of friends who brought bottles of cheap wine to supplement the tea, biscuits, crisps and cigarettes she served in abundance.

  Through the autumn, I wrote poems about Naoko, because I needed someone to write poems for. I showed them to Yunie. But that was only after Naoko left for Tokyo in December. Yunie told me that Naoko wouldn’t have responded to my interest: she was dating Lamie and didn’t find me very interesting. Yunie was two years older than I was, and had two boyfriends she couldn’t decide between: one her age, the other ten years older.

  I’d never known leaf-piled pavements and slate-black afternoons. Sometimes I spotted a pale moon rising at three.

  News that winter: JAPANESE NOVELIST MISHIMA COMMITS SEPPUKU, RITUAL SUICIDE.

  Because I’d read so many of his books I felt, somehow, tainted.

  At Christmas, snow: as if London had staged a white pageant, become an ice rink for newcomers. I wore a sheepskin coat and didn’t mind the cold that first year.

  Naoko, before she left, had introduced me to her best friend. Norma was a Colombian with a warm Hispanic manner, near-perfect English and two other languages. She wanted to be an interpreter. Her mother made Japanese prints and sketches.

  I picked up Norma from their maisonette in Olympia, took her for walks in the leafless park. We kissed by the frozen pond in Kensington. Neither of us had money. Easiest to talk in my room, but my sister didn’t like that. ‘Norma has a lazy left eye,’ she said. ‘She wears ugly fur-lined boots and I bet she washes her frizzy hair with Fairy Liquid.’

  We dated through January. Then Norma said she didn’t think we could last as a pair. ‘You’re a good-looking guy but you’re a virgin. You need to learn how to kiss. Let’s just be friends.’ I didn’t really want that, though in some odd way I was relieved.

  Yunie, who didn’t like Norma, found the story of our relationship funny. Yunie was with me in A level English lit now. She had a mysterious way of disappearing for weeks, but when she was around we were best friends. We’d spent hours listening to her favourite singers. Janis Joplin. James Taylor, Carole King, Melanie, Cat Stevens, Leonard Cohen.

  I went out with other friends when she wasn’t around. Lamie surfaced at Easter and competed with me for girlfriends. We saw Ryan’s Daughter and The Music Lovers in 70mm. We both dated a Thai girl for a while, who dumped us in turn for an older Iraqi boy. Then Lamie heard that his sixteen-year-old brother had been imprisoned and tortured in Israel. He left our company and moved to Manchester.

  Another summer. Yunie went away again, leaving her stereo and albums in my room. I read less now, and spent more time listening to her records. I saw Hair and Oh! Calcutta! at the theatre with visiting friends. I was sixteen and my hair was shoulder-length. I smoked cheap Player’s cigarettes, offered them around. I walked barefoot by the Serpentine, with friends or alone.

  The library had a collection of Urdu poems by Faiz, who’d lived up the road from us in Karachi. They’d called him a dissident, an internal exile and a communist. He wrote better about restlessness and loss than anyone I’d ever read. One of his prison poems had been set to music; my sister used to sing it when we were children, and we’d imitate her.

  Though I spoke Urdu well, I’d been forced in India to do exams in Hindi, which now I read and wrote much faster. The Faiz book had poems in English and Urdu on facing pages. It helped me to relearn my native script.

  Pakistan divided. East Wing, West Wing, we’d called its distant limbs, but the body that lay between them belonged to another vehicle, almost all of India: and how long could we fly together with unmatched wings?

  My mother left Karachi before war broke out. My sister returned to London while it was raging. Friends turned their backs on one another, and a few swore enmity.

  At the end of ’71, when Bangladesh declared its independence, I joined a rally at Trafalgar Square, but that was my protest against the role General Yahya, who’d only replaced Ayub as President a couple of years before the troubles began, had played in the conflict.

  Soon after Trafalgar Square, a pneumatic pothead from Boston took me to her bed after a matinee performance of The Devils. (An arranged seduction, I later discovered: a Bangladeshi boy had bet her she couldn’t have me.) I’d thought, as I told Yunie later, that I should rid myself of my irkso
me virginity with someone willing to teach what I needed to learn before I turned seventeen in April. Not that I’d needed to learn much. Yunie laughed, but I think she found it less amusing than she pretended to.

  A few days later, Yunie and I spent a whole night in bed together after a party, kissing and touching. It was only the second time I’d tried alcohol. I was high on champagne, she on hash cookies. Santana music played in the background. I assumed she wasn’t ready to go ‘all the way’.

  She came to stay in my flat for two or three days at a time. We’d end up in bed, in each other’s arms. At some climactic point, she’d push me away.

  ‘I love you, Yunie.’

  ‘I don’t love you. Oh, not in that way, you’re like a brother. We’re just randy.’

  She left for Boston in March.

  I sat my English A level in summer; I’d been in hospital with mumps when Yunie left, and only got a B. I failed history. We gave up the Hyde Park Place flat. (My father was travelling, two of my sisters studying near Nantwich, the third with my grandparents in India. My mother and I were lost in its corridors all winter: there were never more than three of us living together at any given time.) We moved a mile down the road to Sussex Gardens. My English teacher suggested I read literature at Sussex, but my father insisted I prepare for law at Oxford.

  I shifted to a college in Bloomsbury, danced away Saturday nights at parties with my journalist sister’s friends, and drifted away from Kensington.

  I wrote poems for Yunie, but I had a new girlfriend: Pakistani, she lived across a bridge over the Thames. She played piano and guitar. We sang duets, tried to set Faiz to guitar music, performed at a club together. We stayed together for a year. I didn’t learn to love her.

  After classes, I wandered from store to store in Soho, searching for the music that echoed in my head, spending my pocket money on songs in distant languages: Turkish, Malay, Xhosa, Catalan. At home I’d listen to the singers’ soulful voices and sing along with them, though I didn’t know the lyrics or understand the words.

  I was eighteen, bad at history and British Constitution, turned down by Oxbridge, restless in an open city, bored of being young.

  GRANTA

  MANGHO PIR

  Fatima Bhutto

  I was seven years old the first time I visited a Sheedi neighbourhood in Karachi. I had accompanied my grandmother on a campaign tour, visiting homes and receiving applications from men who needed legal aid to fight cases in the perpetually clogged city courts, from others who had lost their jobs and had no way of feeding their families, and from widows seeking stipends from the state. I felt nervous at the sight of crowds, preferred my car rides free of screaming men chanting slogans and wanted desperately to sit at home and talk without the noise of loudspeakers, megaphones and microphones. My grandmother, Joonam – ‘my life’, as I called her in her native Farsi – had been thrust into party politics after the assassination of her husband, my grandfather, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and had been jailed, beaten and elected to congress before I lost my first tooth. I adored Joonam and relished time spent with her, even if it meant engaging in campaigning.

  Karachi was, in my imagination at least, a bustling metropolis. Palm trees lined the city’s wide avenues, children thronged Clifton Beach, buying roasted corn smeared with lime and chilli from street vendors and sidling up to the men who sold camel rides for a couple of rupees. But there were millions who would never benefit from its occasional munificence, even though there should have been plenty to spare. There were no Sheedi on Clifton Beach, smack in the middle of the affluent old Clifton neighbourhood where my family lived. There were no Sheedi in the new electronics stores, buying CD players or shiny fabric from the city’s up-and-coming designers. And yet, although they lived in the shadows, they refused to go unnoticed. The poverty and political dispossession could not hem them in. That first visit with Joonam was a jolt to my mental shaping of a city that I had, until then, only seen on its best and most welcoming behaviour.

  Karachi, like all port cities, is a hub for travellers, traders and settlers. It is a sweltering mix of those who have been brave enough to settle on its shores – Parsis, Jews, Baha’is, Pushtun, Afghans and so many more. The city has no majority; but even in this outrageous muddle of people and shades and colours, the Sheedi are unusual – an ethnic minority displaced among the swell of Karachi’s various populations. While the most successful of the Sheedi – and there are not many who escape the deprivations of their community – enjoy a reputation that spans the world of arts, politics and athletics, they are best known for the northern Karachi shrine they protect and serve. A shrine built upon centuries of myth and modern-day fables that proclaim living breathing avatars of their lost saint and inspire spiritual searching. But no visit to this holy site of pilgrimage can ignore the impoverished environment of the surroundings. The glorious, the divine, and then the rot.

  Mangho Pir, home of the Sheedi shrine, and its environs are covered in white mist. Men walk across haphazardly constructed pedestrian paths in rubber slippers and frayed shalwar kameez, coated in the white talc, dark hair lightened and skin powdered. This is a quarry town – dust escaping from the mines announces that you have arrived at the largest marble market in the region.

  The gritty stone comes from across Sindh Province: from Thar, Sehwan, Jamshoro and Dadu, from Balochistan and, for some reason, perhaps owing to the desolate nature of this conveniently forgotten town, ends up in Mangho Pir. The marble slabs are lined neatly in towers with jagged shards that look sharp enough to cut through skin. Onyx is sold here too but marble is what makes a man’s business in Mangho Pir.

  The keepers of the shrine are ethnically African Pakistanis whose ancestors settled on the Balochistan coast and the Sindhi shores around 628 ce. One narrative identifies them as the descendants of opulent traders. They arrived, the story goes, through Bharuch, a seaport in Indian Gujarat fabled for its spice and silk trade, a crossroads through which traders from the Levant, Ethiopians seeking westward winds, Greeks, Persians, Carthaginians and Romans all passed. Alternative histories identify them as the progeny of brave warriors, descendants of soldiers who came a hundred years later (in approximately 712 CE), combatants loyal to Muhammad bin Qasim’s conquering army that landed on the banks of the Indus, at Bhambore in Sindh, when bin Qasim was only seventeen years old, bringing Islam to the Hindu and Buddhist subcontinent. Bin Qasim’s soldiers were known as Habshi (Abyssinian) or Zinji, ‘Negro’ in the warrior’s native tongue. Still another story points to a forced migration of Bantu-speaking peoples (largely Swahili, a language still heard in Sheedi poetry and folk songs) of East Africa. They were transported to the still flourishing seaport of Bharuch in the seventeenth century by Portuguese slave traders who thought their human booty suitable gifts, to be offered in exchange for protection, as baksheesh if you will, for the Nawab of Junagadh. Those who were not presented to the local ruler were said to have been sold at the port. There are grounds, perhaps, for all three legends to be true. Linguistic, mercantile and political trajectories can be traced in support of all three narratives – soldier, trader or slave.

  Maulabux is a Sheedi political activist whose maternal grandfather came to Karachi when the British were transforming the city into a mega seaport at the time of the Bombay Presidency. Although my parents, and indeed my grandmother, knew him from his work as a dedicated political activist, I remember meeting Maulabux at a funeral; I was eleven years old, maybe twelve. A Sheedi man, another grass-roots worker, had been killed by the Karachi police. He had been tortured and held without charge in police custody. He left behind two small children and a shy, young wife. The mourners screamed angry curses at the government that had killed one of their best organizers, the women wept and hurled their tattered plastic slippers at the police vans perennially parked in the area, the men sat huddled together over a table and worked on a statement condemning the murder and drew up plans for a shutdown of local businesses in protest. Maulabux was one of thos
e men. I remember him, calm but shattered, working quietly that day to ease the grief of the man’s family and planning the community’s response.

  Maulabux is from Lyari, one of Karachi’s oldest Sheedi settlements. He is a tall man, his hair clipped close to his scalp and his face clean-shaven. Although I have never seen him chew paan, his stained teeth betray its use – his smile a reminder that for all his serious political background (and his background is serious) he is a raconteur. Maulabux isn’t sure which line about his people’s antecedents he buys, but he tells me stories passed down to him by his father and grandfather. ‘They brought us over as slaves,’ he says over tea one afternoon in a Karachi garden. ‘They put us in ships and forced us to row to our new prisons – like in the movie Amistad. Have you seen Amistad?’ I nod, more perplexed by the fact that Maulabux watches Spielberg films than anything else.

  I ask him about bin Qasim’s army, and he wagers that there were indeed African troops but that they can’t possibly account for the large population of Sheedi in Pakistan today. He doesn’t call himself Sheedi, he doesn’t use the term the way I do – to refer to an ethnic group. He says blackion instead, adding the Urdu suffix -ion denoting the plural to black, a Minglish – Urdu/mixed English – construction. ‘There are blackion in the Rann of Kutch in India, in Iran, Bahrain, Oman and in the Gulf.’ Maulabux acknowledges that the blackion didn’t face the same sort of discrimination in places like Oman, where they ‘practise the European style of accepting different races’, so tolerant and accepting are the Omanis of anyone who is willing to come and build their sultanate by the sea. The Sheedi Maulabux knew who had settled there were all ‘highly educated, visible in government posts like immigration offices and customs’; they were not shamed into hiding like the blackion in our country.