In the City by the Sea

by Kamila Shamsie

  ‘What a pull shot!’ Aba exalted.

  ‘Oh, dodo, that was a hook shot,’ Gul Mumani said, her face red from the exertion of climbing spiral stairs. In her hands was a rolled-up painting. ‘Like this –’ she swung the roll at an invisible ball in a motion identical to Razzledazzle’s. ‘See?’

  ‘That it?’ Ami asked.

  Gul Mumani nodded. Ami stood up with a half-twisting motion of her body and caught hold of one end of the painting. She and Gul Mumani giggled and whispered to each other like a pair of . . . Hasan couldn’t help but think it . . adolescents. Aba and Hasan rolled eyes at each other, and pretended to be interested only in the cricket. That pretence lasted all of three seconds.

  ‘All right,’ Aba said, turning to face the women. ‘May we prevail on you to unveil the painting.’ He held up a hand. ‘I know. You’ll say, it isn’t veiled at all, but once a week I like to subordinate meaning to assonance.’

  ‘Aba, I don’t think they were going to say that at all,’ Hasan said.

  Ami stood still, holding one end of the painting, and Gul Mumani walked away from her, unrolling the painting as she moved. ‘Ta-dah!’ they said. Ami glanced down at it and exploded into laughter.

  It was not Art.

  Not even a distant relative.

  What it actually was, was hard to say. The backdrop was black, and a sprinkling of bright colours arced across the top of the canvas. Hasan inspected the sprinkles more closely. They seemed to have been created by dipping a toothbrush in paint and running a thumb over the bristles to release the colours. At the bottom of the canvas, in the centre, was a red paw-print. Ogle’s. Hasan began to laugh.

  ‘We’ll call it “Spew of One-Legged Hound”,’ Ami said.

  ‘Beast,’ Gul Mumani said. ‘Not Hound, Beast.’

  Aba shook his head, refusing to be infected by their mirth. ‘You’re not giving that to the General?’

  ‘True. Not giving, selling,’ Ami said. ‘Oh, Shehryar, don’t look so glum. No one will criticize the Emperor’s new clothes.’

  Aba was not convinced. ‘You’d sign your name to that?’

  Ami nodded. ‘Proudly.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s something. Small-scale admittedly, but it’s something. Besides, if I’m tossed in jail for bad art I’ll be happy to have helped set the precedent.’

  Hasan shivered and turned away. He never knew, these days, what tossed-off comment could destroy the equilibrium of his mood and leave him scrambling for ideas, images, poems, even multiplication tables to fill up his mind. Below, Razzledazzle was run out in a mundane moment of miscommunication. Hasan kicked the bed-frame hard enough so that the pain would be overwhelming.

  ‘Hasan!’ Ami ran over to him and helped pull off his shoe.

  ‘Don’t give him that painting,’ Hasan said. ‘Please, Ami.’

  ‘I won’t,’ Ami said. ‘I won’t.’ She held him until the cricket ball flickered and disappeared and the sounds of the game became loud and then soft and were swallowed by the smell of Gul Mumani’s cigarettes.

  When Hasan woke up the match was over and the moon was full and low above his bed. Hasan felt something was amiss, but he was close enough to dreaming to dispel the limits reason set on his mind and know that everything would be all right if he flew up among the clouds and stars. In his imagination he had flown up many times. He had soared up on air-currents, felt the clouds cling to him, their texture that of the ‘doll’s hair’ which street-vendors wrapped around sticks. He had reached past the clouds, his fingers through to the grainy charcoal feel of the sky, and, in that most magic of moments, a shooting star had burned across his palm like a falling stalactite. Hasan tried to reach up towards the moon, but his limbs were heavy with sleep and now he was dreaming again.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Hasan shuddered awake. He had barely a moment to feel thankful for escaping from a nightmare which was already misting over in his memory, when he remembered – thirty-six days left and he had no idea how to discover what Salman Mamoo’s spirit wanted. He squinted upward. Morning light diffused across the City and the sky seemed impossibly far away.

  ‘Oh-ho, Rip Van!’ Uncle Latif called out from Zehra’s balcony. ‘You missed the angels last night. Whole flock of them, leaping and looping above your head, but I shooed them away, told them not to whoosh so close or they would wake you up.’ Hasan didn’t even smile. It seemed entirely probable that if angels had appeared he would have missed them. He hated days that started in this manner. Blah days, Zehra called them.

  ‘Blah blah black sleep, life is full of bull,’ Hasan sang to himself as he descended the stairs. Why bull? he wondered. Oh . . . he grinned. Oh! ‘Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full.’ He giggled his way through the kitchen and into the hall where he collided with Aba and a very large canvas.

  ‘Oh good, I was just coming to wake you up,’ Aba said. ‘Hurry and get dressed. You’re going to the beach in . . .’ he twisted his wrist to look at his watch and nearly decapitated Hasan with the canvas. ‘Sorry. Forty minutes.’

  ‘We’re going to the beach?’ Hasan said.

  ‘You. You’re going to the beach. Your friend Javed called with an invitation last night, but you were already asleep. Help me with this will you? ‘ Hasan and Aba carried the canvas into the drawing room, where Ami was rearranging paintings on the wall for the third day in a row. Today Auntie Poops’ etching of trees had displaced Ami’s watercolour of wrestlers as the central canvas.

  ‘Is it safe?’ Hasan asked. ‘Going to the beach? Why don’t you hang up “Spew of One-Legged Hound” to see how people react?’

  Ami chortled at the suggestion, moved back a few inches and pushed the frame up slightly to the left. ‘Ordinarily we wouldn’t let you go, but Javed’s great-uncle’s a general; he’s organized a military convoy to take you all to the Officer’s Cove.’

  The world was full of generals these days. ‘But we don’t like military men,’ Hasan objected.

  ‘We like this one,’ Ami said, removing the etching from its nail to Aba’s obvious relief. ‘Pass the camel painting. General Jojo. He was a great friend of your Nana’s. I had a huge crush on him when I was thirteen because he could recite Urdu poetry backwards and lock eyelashes with his horse. Salman absolutely idolized him. Do we really want a camel in our drawing room? They spit, don’t they?’

  Hasan left Ami and Aba discussing dromedary drool and went to change. It took him nearly ten minutes to decide whether to wear his new, five-pocket jeans for the purpose of showing off, or his old, knee-ripped jeans which would allow him to climb and slide and jump uninhibited by a fear of tearing the fabric. Uninhibited climbing, sliding and jumping won.

  Zehra was in the driveway when Hasan wandered out. She was wearing her new jeans, Hasan noted. And Ami’s new dark glasses.

  ‘Are you deigning to socialize with the kids?’ Hasan asked.

  ‘You don’t pronounce the first “g” in deigning,’ Zehra said. ‘And no, I’m coming along because Javed’s brother invited me.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were friends with Omar,’ Hasan said. He couldn’t help but feel envious. Omar, at fourteen, was already one of the star batsmen of the Senior School.

  ‘I’m not. But Najam is,’ Zehra said, as though that explained everything.

  There seemed little to say after that. Fifteen minutes of silence passed before a five-car cavalcade rumbled down the street and stopped outside the gate. Hasan could hear members of the Bodyguard exclaim and rise to their feet next door; he rushed out and motioned that all was well. The five cars turned out to be three Nissan Patrols with military licence plates, sandwiched between two trucks filled with armed soldiers. ‘Festive!’ Hasan muttered. A hand opened the door to the blue Nissan Patrol in the middle of the convoy and gestured Hasan and Zehra in. Hasan reached the door first, and backed up when he saw the hand belonged to Najam. Zehra pushed past him – pushed him aside, to be precise – and sat down next to Najam. Javed, and Hasan’s other classmates, were calling out to
him from the lead Nissan Patrol, but Hasan could tell that Najam didn’t want to be in the same car as him, so he leaped in beside Zehra.

  ‘I’m not that large,’ Hasan said to Zehra, gesturing at the space she had left for him on the seat. ‘You can move up a little.’ Zehra looked straight ahead and pretended not to hear.

  ‘Hey, cuz,’ Najam said. He leaned across Zehra and poked a finger through the hole in Hasan’s jeans. ‘What? Can’t Shehryar Mamoo afford to buy you new clothes now that he’s no longer the big-shot barrister?’

  Zehra moved, just slightly, closer to Hasan.

  ‘You’re cousins?’ Rabia – one of Najam’s ‘crowd’ – squeaked up from the row of seats behind Hasan.

  ‘Second cousins,’ Hasan said. That was the thing about Najam. He didn’t have friends. He had a crowd. Omar of batting fame twisted round from the passenger seat and stared at the hole in Hasan’s knee, before instructing the driver to overtake the car in front. Hasan leaned his head against the window and tried not to notice that the expanse of seat between him and Zehra had grown again.

  The cavalcade zipped past the higgledy-piggledy of residential sections which turned commercial for a street or two and then reverted back to driveways and bougainvillaea and satellite dishes as though the interruption had never occurred. It was the first time Hasan had ventured further than Azeem’s house since Salman Mamoo’s arrest.

  The City was clearly attempting to jerk back to normality. All the shops were open, making the most of the first nonstrike day since Tuesday, and there were enough cars on the streets to add a background drone of honking horns to the sounds of Najam and his friends ranking teachers by coolness. Still, there was something very wrong in the City; even tinted windows couldn’t keep Hasan from seeing that. Much hustle, but no bustle, Uncle Latif might have said.

  Over the bridge now, and past plots of land where sprawling houses were being demolished to make way for four-star hotels, though tourism was sharply on the decline. Past the Club; past the kindergarten with its fabulous white-flowered tree which Najam had taught Hasan to climb, years and years and personalities ago; past the financial district where yet another stunted version of a skyscraper was being constructed by a company with too many consonants in its name; past the harbour smelling of rust and fish; past pi-dogs; past beggars; past billboards bent backwards with the force of last summer’s monsoons; past frying samossas, roasting corn, simmering nihari; and slowing now at a traffic light in the dead centre of Gulshan-e-Zafar, right across from the shuttered façade of ACE headquarters. The lock at the base of the shutters was not rusted, Hasan noticed, despite Gulshan-e-Zafar’s proximity to the sea.

  The soldiers in the truck ahead stubbed out their cigarettes and placed rifles at ready. Everyone in the car stopped talking. Omar turned the music down. All the shops were closed here, either in fear or protest or because the shopkeepers lived in nearby sections of the City which were still under curfew – Hasan couldn’t decide which. Pine cones had been spray-painted on three shutters, and walls everywhere were sprayed with political slogans: Salman, Baat maan, Terey hathon mein qoum kee jaan. ‘Salman, Understand, The country’s life is in your hands’. The street was very narrow and there were tyre marks along the pavement. Men milled around a paan-stand – the only place of commercial activity – but there were no barefoot children to be seen running down the street, beating rubber tyres with a stick and seeing how fast they could go.

  If only the lights would change.

  ‘You’d think this area would be under curfew,’ Najam muttered, looking around.

  All the men at the paan stand had turned and were staring at the convoy, their lips and teeth stained red with betel-nut juice. One of the men pursed his lips and then spat. An explosion of red arced out of his mouth and splattered on the window by Hasan. Hasan jerked back from his red-rivuleted reflection.

  ‘Frightened of spit?’ someone at the back jeered.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ Zehra and Najam said in unison.

  ‘Relax, Hasan,’ Omar said. ‘They can’t do anything to us.’

  The man who had spat started to look familiar to Hasan. And that other man – the one in profile, with the beard – he looked a little like someone Hasan had once seen with Salman Mamoo. The bearded man turned towards Hasan, revealing a scar running from eye to chin. Hasan shivered. No, he certainly hadn’t seen him before. Unless the scar was new. And that man, the one in blue, surely, surely . . . Hasan was seized with a desire to roll down his tinted window and poke out his head in full view. The men – ACEmen, no question of it – would see Salman Mamoo’s features just underlying his own, and they would raise their fists in solidarity and remember the days when Salman Haq was nothing more to them than Zafar Haq’s nephew.

  The lights changed.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Officer’s Cove was a strip of beach nestled between a semi-circle of rocks. Would-be visitors had to pass through two checkpoints to reach it, which was often the case with some of the least interesting places in the City. But when the Nissan Patrol pulled up to the cliff overlooking the Cove, Hasan decided it would be well worth his while to draw up elaborate plans involving deception, diversion and disguise that would allow him to gain access to the Cove without the aid of generals.

  The water was clearer here than anywhere outside of pictures. Even from this height Hasan could see the sand beneath the water, with tiny pebbles scattered across the seabed instead of sharp-edged rocks or limb-tangling seaweed. A crab scuttled out of a hole in the sand near the cliff’s base, but it was not of the purple, pincer-clawed variety that could cause so much glee when seen on the end of a crabbing reel yet was a source of terror when it zig-zagged in proximity to bare feet. No, the crab down below was almost a spider, dancing across the sand in a camouflage that suggested shyness rather than subterfuge. At the edges of the cove, where rock arms cradled the beach and prevented it from slipping into the sea, rockpools promised glimpses of strange sea-creatures.

  ‘Cool hut,’ Rabia said. Hasan turned away from the beach and looked at the red ‘hut’ which would not have been out of place in the most upscale neighbourhoods of the City. There was even a satellite dish on the roof, and a garden at the back. Inside, there were two bathrooms, three bedrooms, a spacious kitchen and a large lounge with a dining table at one end. The walls were covered with paintings by Ami and Auntie Poops and the most despised man in the artists’ community, known variously as ‘Oh, Him!’, ‘Not Him!’ and ‘Him Again!’ Hasan wondered if any of the officers realized that the model for Ami’s ‘Departing Man Seen Through Lattice’ was Salman Mamoo.

  ‘So you’re Saira’s son?’

  Hasan turned to face a man who could honestly say that his hair was silver, not white. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  The man smiled and extended his hand. ‘Your Nana was a great friend of mine,’ he said. ‘I’m sure he would be happy to know that the ties of friendship between our two families have extended down the generations.’ He released Hasan’s hand and looked up at Ami’s painting. ‘She’s captured the slope of Salman’s back perfectly.’ Hasan looked at the painting and remembered how it felt to rest his cheek against that back, his arms encircling Salman Mamoo’s waist. He wished he could paint out the lattice. General Jojo filled his cheeks with air, and exhaled slowly. Najam came up to Hasan, and patted his shoulder. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Get changed. Everyone’s already in the water.’ This was worse than when Zehra spoke gently to Hasan.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Hasan said, shrugging off Najam’s hand. ‘I’ll be there in a minute.’

  General Jojo saluted smartly and turned to join Javed’s parents and their friends on the deck-chairs outdoors. Hasan stripped down to his swimming trunks in the bedroom and made his way down the half-broken steps which dissected the cliff-face, jumping off the second-last step so that he could feel his feet sink into the warm sand.

  ‘Come on,’ his classmates yelled from the sea. ‘Come on, Hussar.’ Hasan grinned, a
nd pointed to a spot just behind them.

  ‘Wave!’ he yelled.

  The wave was just beginning to swell, somewhere between the swimmers and the horizon, but already it was obvious that it would be a big one. Hasan started to run, his feet moving too fast to sink in the sand, gathering speed even though there was no question of sinking now that he was on the wet, packed sand, toeprints and tiny indentations of heels marking his rapid progress; the sea backed up a few inches, intimidated by the single-mindedness of his approach, but it could not withdraw fast enough and Hasan’s feet were moving through water, trying to outpace the chill, leaping rather than running now, until the water reached halfway up his calf, and then he dived in, buffeting aside the water with his arms. The wave kept growing. Just ahead of Hasan, Javed lifted his head out of the water just long enough to contemplate the size of the wave and yelled, ‘Oh, dung!’. He turned and began paddling back to shore, Rabia and Ali and Ayesha following.

  Najam was a few feet ahead of Hasan, Zehra beside him. Hasan stopped swimming and trod water. This was where he would meet the wave. It was a vast wall of water now, gloriously terrifying. All the swimmers turned their backs on it, but kept their heads swivelled so they could watch its approach. Through the corner of his eye, Hasan saw Najam, and then Zehra, leap up and forward into the wave as it arced above them, and at that instant he knew Najam had chosen the perfect spot, because just after they leaped the crest of the wave dipped. Now it was bearing down on him, and Hasan leaped but he was rolling, not riding, rolling beneath the water, his body tossed around, water entering nose and mouth and everything and the noise of the world disappeared; there was only a sensation of helplessness and flailing arms and the impossibility of knowing if he was near the shore or somehow being pulled in the opposite direction and was that a leg or a turtle or a pebble that hit him and suddenly there was air again.