In the City by the Sea

by Kamila Shamsie

  ‘You’re not going to sell that, are you?’ Hasan said.

  ‘You don’t like it?’

  ‘I don’t want it to leave the house.’

  Ami cupped Hasan’s cheek with her hand. ‘I thought I would hang it in the bedroom. Speaking of which, I got a call today from the General who wanted to hang me in his drawing room. He reiterated how much he adores the painting with “too much green”, which you so clearly despised.’

  ‘I didn’t despise it. I mean, it’s not in the same category as liver.’ Hasan traced the form of the dancing girl an inch off the canvas. ‘This one is mangoes.’

  ‘You know the story of the Emperor Shah Jahan?’ Aba said, walking into the studio and standing in front of the canvas. ‘He was deposed by his son, Aurangzeb, and imprisoned in a tower. How do you survive something like that? Well, Shah Jahan embedded a diamond in the prison wall, facing the window. When he lay in bed he could see the Taj Mahal, which he had had built in memory of his wife, reflected in every surface of the diamond. That sight kept him alive for eight years.’ He took Hasan’s hand in his own. ‘Zehra told me what happened. How are you holding up?’

  Hasan found he couldn’t talk about his morning in any great detail, but somehow it was enough to smell the combination of Ami’s oil paints and Aba’s aftershave. Or so he thought. But that night, long after Gul Mumani had finished telling Hasan the Laila-Majnoon story, and images of the madman-lover weeping hollows into stone had wisped out of his bedroom, Hasan began to shiver. Majnoon digging a grave for Laila, that was the only part of the story that would not leave him. Laila dead. The answers Hasan thought he had, the answers the Oldest Man gave him about spirits and mangoes and death, they had led him only to a Labrador with a bandaged paw, and now, no hiding from it, the truth was out: people die because of bullets and gravity and rope.

  And because a President is alive to sign the execution orders.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Hasan realized, as he stared down at the blank page before him, that this was the Test. Yes, the one Aba had warned him about; the one which marked the point when flipping through the pages of a textbook on the way to school was no longer sufficient to ensure a comment of ‘Excellent work! Handwriting needs improvement!’ from the teacher.

  Hasan tried to console himself with the thought that at least his handwriting would merit no complaint this time. He had copied the test question off the board with as much care as Uncle Latif took in choosing which chikoos to pluck off his trees. However, just as Uncle Latif’s careful testing of texture, weight and colour failed to compensate for his recently developed allergy to chikoos, the inspired loop of Hasan’s ‘l’ and the compass-created roundness of his ‘a’s failed to detract attention from the stark blankness of the page below the question: ‘What made Alexander great?’

  For a moment, recalling the success of his crescent drawing, Hasan was tempted to answer ‘Allah’ but something in the steel rim of Mrs D. Khan’s glasses convinced him otherwise. All he could remember about Alexander was that he wept when his horse, Bucephalus, died. Finally, recalling Aba and Salman Mamoo’s arguments about history, Hasan wrote ‘Point of view’.

  He leaned sideways in his chair and rested his cheek against the green-painted wall, the stone a far more effective cooling agent than the whirring fan which merely made the warm air in the classroom move faster. His fingers traced the letters scratched into the brown paint of the desk by previous inhabitants with steel rulers and sharp-tipped dividers. ‘Take out the “ SH . . .” from school and what are you left with? Students’, ‘I hate Geography’, ‘Geography hates you’, ‘A.R. and Y.H. forever’, ‘I rock!’, ‘You block, you stone’, ‘I wish I was a koala bear’, ‘Eucalyptus!’, ‘You calyptus yourself’, ‘Cricket – more than an insect.’

  Pages flipping, ink smell intoxicating, pen nibs biting into paper. Thank God school had finally reopened. Poems to learn, highest test-marks to compete for (there would be a lot of catching up to do after today), cricket to play during break time, teachers to mimic, older boys with voices breaking and hair slicked back to tease Zehra about, now that, for unknown reasons, she had reverted to referring to Najam as ‘that cousin of yours’.

  Hasan’s compass scratched intersecting circles on to the desk.

  Eight. Eight. Pieces o’ eight. Figure eight. Days left: eight. Ate. Eight. Next week decides if Mamoo lives or dies. Hasan started to remember mid-term, but forced himself to stop before he had even crossed the driveway and thrown his arms around Salman Mamoo. Remembering Salman Mamoo came perilously close to thinking of him in past tense. Hasan closed his eyes and mentally transported himself back under the blue-sheeted desk. He and Salman Mamoo stood before the Warlock’s castle, Salman Mamoo hunched over to prevent his head from hitting the leaden cast that had thickened so much it almost reached from sky to ground now. Hasan reached up his fingers to the greyness and touched the slime-coated slate.

  ‘Quick!’ Salman Mamoo said. ‘We have to get to the Warlock before his magic crushes us.’

  ‘Time’s up!’

  Mrs D. Khan walked around the class collecting test-books, one end of her dupatta tracing letters on the floor as it trailed behind her. Hasan shut his book before she could see the blankness of his page, but when she picked up the book she balanced it on the tips of her fingers for a second, as though weighing its wordlessness. She collected Javed’s book next, and his pages were so bloated with ink that the front cover would not stay closed without the pressure of a hand on it.

  ‘Do you have cephalopods hidden in your desk?’ Mrs D. Khan said to Javed, staring grimly at his book. Javed gaped, and turned to Hasan for assistance. Hasan chewed the end of his pen and looked distracted. Trrring-trring. ‘The proverbial bell,’ Mrs D. Khan said and swept towards her desk. ‘Line up. Single file. Down to the auditorium, and slowly. Do we know the meaning of slowly, Hasan? Well then, let’s demonstrate it.’

  At the pace that Mrs D. Khan dictated, her class was the last to reach the outdoor auditorium. As befitted their status as the eldest students in the Junior School, Hasan and his classmates sauntered past Classes III, IV and V without acknowledging them before waving and mouthing greetings to the other two sections of Class VI at the back of the auditorium. The principal, Mrs Qureshi, went up on stage and cleared her throat. Hasan almost tripped over Nargis Lotia’s feet in his haste to sit down on one of the steel fold-up chairs which seemed designed to encourage squirming.

  ‘My brother’s friend wants your neighbour’s number,’ Usman Lohawalla whispered, swivelling his head around towards Hasan.

  Hasan shifted in his seat and tried to concentrate on the sonorous tones of Mrs Qureshi who spoke and swayed on the stage in tempo to some untuned iambic instrument in her head. ‘Due to the unforeseen and extended closure of school’ – the other students darted glances at Hasan – ‘we had to delay, and almost cancelled, the school oratory competition, but since the winner of the contest is to represent our school at the National Oratory Competition we felt it was important that the event take place.’

  ‘I don’t know why they bother,’ Javed whispered to Hasan. ‘Everyone knows you’ll win. And I bet you’ll win the national competition too.’

  Hasan tried to look surprised by the compliment. Dragonflies were beginning to flit inside his stomach in a way that had always foretold victory.

  ‘We have just received word,’ sway sway, ‘that there is a new chief guest due to hand out prizes at the National Oratory Competition.’

  Hasan groaned. Javed laughed, ‘Now I don’t envy you anymore. We were all turning green, I swear, at the thought of you shaking hands with Razzledazzle.’

  ‘To fit the new chief guest’s schedule,’ sway sway, ‘the competition has been moved to May nineteenth.’ Sway pause sway. ‘The new chief guest is the President.’

  May 19th. Eight days from now. Salman Mamoo’s trial. The President shaking the hand of the competition winner. Was this a sign? A sign to remind him of
everything the Oldest Man had said? No. Forget spirits. Forget dolphins. Salman Mamoo will – say it! – die because the President doesn’t like him. No need for rings of invisibility. A poem can bring me face to face with the President, and then. And then. I can do something.

  ‘Not “Daffodils” again!’ Javed moaned.

  Nargis Lotia tip-toed circles on the stage, wandering lonely as a cloud, as she had done for the last four oratory competitions.

  Hasan bent over and placed his head between his knees. The dragonflies sped up and began whirling frantically like dusk-fairies struggling to escape from between the enclosed palms of the Warlock. The thought of young Lochinvar coming out of the West held no interest for Hasan, which meant it would hold no interest for the audience either when he stood up to recite it. How would the President react to it? He’d probably applaud politely.

  There was a poem Ami had book-marked in a magazine on her studio shelf. Each morning this last month Hasan had opened to the poem and found a new water-coloured fingerprint on the page.

  ‘Go on,’ Javed nudged Hasan. ‘Your turn.’

  Hasan gripped the chair in front of him and rose to his feet. It was an English translation of a Turkish poem. Hasan formed an image of the fingerprinted page in his mind and scanned it as he walked towards the stage past row after row of grey and white uniforms. His hand reached into his trouser pocket and gripped a pine-cone. Lochinvar rode all alone and rode all unarmed clear out of Hasan’s head. Hasan faced the crowd.

  ‘“Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison” by Nazim Hikmet.’ In the audience teachers exchanged concerned looks and students nudged each other, but it was too late to backtrack.

  ‘If instead of being hanged by the neck

  you’re thrown aside

  for not giving up hope

  in the world, your country, and people,

  if you do ten or fifteen years

  apart from the time you have left,

  you won’t say,

  “Better I had swung from the end of a rope

  like a flag” –

  you’ll put your foot down and live.’

  The words spilled out of him, gushed, tapered off, flowed, crashed down, the pauses and inflections instinctive things formed by Hasan and the crowd and transported through the air which now moved differently, not moved no!, more as though the air possessed strings perhaps, or ribbons of water which tied Hasan to the audience and carried, echoed, magnified each meaning created by the collision of words and moment.

  ‘Part of you may live alone inside,

  like a stone at the bottom of a well.

  But the other part

  must be so caught up

  in the flurry of the world

  that you shiver there inside

  when outside, at forty days’ distance, a leaf

  moves.’

  Forty days. Hasan visualized white sheets. Did the President have nephews? The page blanked in Hasan’s mind. The ribbons of water disappeared. Hasan was alone, staring at the crowd – a boy who had forgotten his lines. The dusk-fairies were dead.

  At the back of the auditorium Javed and Ayesha and Ali leaned forward as though they could restore the words to his mind if they could just narrow the gap between themselves and him. Hasan repeated the last lines in his mind to try and regain the flow. ‘But the other part must be so caught up in the flurry of the world that you shiver there inside.’ Hasan looked off to the side, where the broad-leafed almond tree spread its shadow over the tuck-shop. The ground around the tree was littered with smashed red fruit. Crows hopped around the fruit, pecking and cawing. Shiver, he told himself. There’s reason enough, even without dolphins. Please God, I can’t remember the words. Everyone’s looking.

  He would have liked, at least, to have walked off the stage with dignity, perhaps even a wry smile, but such considerations of panache were buried under his need to get off the stage, away from all those eyes as fast as possible. He ran down the steps and down the aisle, ignoring Nargis Lotia’s outstretched hand and Javed’s shrug of sympathy. Before he had even reached the last row of chairs Mrs Qureshi had ushered on the next orator with a speed she hadn’t exhibited since the bomb scare two years earlier. Mrs D. Khan, spectacles glinting, was standing near the auditorium exit and made no attempt to stop Hasan as he ran out.

  The gush from the water-cooler was brown, but at least it was cold enough to numb. Hasan bent his head under the tap and allowed the water to flow down skull, neck, spine. He stayed in that position long after the spigot spluttered and dried up, stayed there until Mrs Qureshi’s voice from the auditorium announced that Nargis Lotia had won the school oratory competition with her excellent rendition of ‘Daffodils’.

  Hasan stumbled into the adjacent music room and curled up in a darkened corner against the piano legs. His sodden shirt clung to him and picked up dust and cobwebs from the piano’s underside. Eight days eight days eight days eight days eight days. The pine-cone snapped in two between his trembling fists. Two boys, with the swagger of teenagers who have just started to shave, walked through the room.

  ‘Well, do it soon then,’ one of the boys said. ‘Who knows how long school will be closed for riots and things when the trial starts. That’s – what? – a week from now?’

  ‘Eight days,’ said the other. ‘How long do you think they’ll take to find him guilty? My father said trials can go on for months.’

  ‘Nah! Not this one. Listen, I’ve heard when people are hanged their eyes pop out of their heads and their tongues get all black and swollen and twisted . . . oi!’

  Hasan charged out of the building, pushing the boys to the side. He fell to his knees in the front yard, his hands braced against the white cement border of a flowerbed. His chest heaved and his face contorted. ‘Don’t die,’ he sobbed, and it was only when he heard his voice that he knew he was crying at last. And then there was no stopping it; eyes and nose running faster than the back of his hand could wipe, ‘don’t die, please, don’t die’, hands raking through the flowerbed, plastering mud across face and hair, again and again, hands moving up from chin to scalp, stanching and reversing the trail of tears and snot, ‘don’t die don’t die’, a man alone in a grey-walled room hanging from a rope, a rope that did not swiftly snap a neck in two, but squeezed each breath by breath by gasping breath from the only lungs which knew just how to say ‘Hasan’ and make the name extraordinary.

  Hasan’s ribs hurt. The tears finally stopped but in their place came shuddering intakes of air. Hasan drew his legs up against his chest and encircled them with his arms so tightly there was no space for his heart to burst out. His trouser-band cut into his stomach, but breathing was already so difficult that it didn’t matter. And then the gulping stopped too, and there started a different kind of crying. Grown-up tears which could trip out of wide-open eyes yet cause no tremor of voice. You could live with these tears all your life, Hasan thought, watching as the roots he had exposed in the flowerbed splintered and were whole, splintered and were whole, between the slide of one teardrop and the next. He plucked a serrated leaf off a shrub and wiped his nose with it. The action required all the energy and will-power he possessed.

  Overhead, a whir of helicopter blades. The noise was a scattering of lead pencils across the sky. Hasan tried to imagine dragons and a blue tent but his head was throbbing. He really just wanted arms around him and voices, too, telling him ‘Hey Hasan, Huss, pehlvan, son, knobble-knees, Hussy, my dear, jaan, it’s okay’ but it wasn’t okay, it wasn’t, and maybe it never would be.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Hasan watched honey from his teaspoon dribble back into the jar, creating serpent shapes which rapidly sank into the goo from which they had been created.

  ‘If you’ve lost your appetite I’ll lend you mine for a while,’ Uncle Latif said, stretching across the verandah table to take the jar out of Hasan’s hands and replace it with a piece of honeyed toast. ‘Flexible repayment options. And no interest except sel
f-interest. Which is to say, if you don’t post that toast into your mouth, I will, and then I’ll burst like a dream.’

  Hasan pushed the plate away, and looked at his watch: 9.28 a.m. Salman Mamoo’s trial would start at 10.00 a.m. That was the only information about the trial Aba’s contacts had provided. Even the name of Salman Mamoo’s lawyer, if he had one, remained encased in red-taped, top-level, security-sealed, unbribable secrecy.

  Over the weekend, POTPAF (FKAACE) – Formally Known As ACE – had called for the City to show its moral fibre by going on strike once again to protest the trial; the government, in turn, had issued a statement declaring that there was no need to be cowed by terrorist demands; and private schools across the City had suddenly turned egalitarian and decided to create a Day of Reflection Concerning Privileges Of Private School Students, to be observed by staying at home and writing an essay about élitism, on Sunday, 19 May. According to the Bodyguard, many teachers and students at government-run schools were lending support to DORCPrOPriSS by staying at home too. As were Aba and Uncle Latif, though they didn’t seem at all inclined to write essays or even help Hasan with his.

  Only the Widow refused to be interrupted in her work; she had set off early this morning for the Shelter for Battered Women, just minutes after Khalida-the-Heartbreaker had driven up to the gate on – of all things – a motorcycle, with news that a teenaged widow had collapsed at the entrance to the shelter and asked for protection. Gul Mumani had gone with the Widow, and Zehra had wanted to accompany them too, but the Widow and Uncle Latif were adamant in their refusal to let her do so.