In the City by the Sea

by Kamila Shamsie

  Hasan, hurt and somewhat offended that Zehra didn’t seem to think it important to stay with him on the first day of the trial, had not been sympathetic. ‘Battered Women sounds like something out of a cookbook,’ he had said.

  Zehra had kicked him. Very hard. ‘The Widow opened the shelter, so shut up. And just shut up anyway.’

  Hasan’s shins still ached from the kick. He limped off the verandah, without a word to Uncle Latif, and adjusted the limp into a lurch when he saw Zehra walking towards him. She just rolled her eyes and headed for the breakfast tray.

  Hasan climbed over the wall to his garden and heard, on the street outside, a car brake to a stop. Somewhere, right now, someone in a uniform with gleaming buttons was opening the back door of a car. Salman Mamoo stepped out of the car in handcuffs, and smiled at the makeshift military courthouse before him the way a marathon runner might smile at the finish line without even knowing if he were the first or the last in the race to cross it. Salman Mamoo raised his hand and the wind carried the imprint of his palm to Hasan’s cheek.

  Hasan ran inside and picked up the telephone. His phonebook had a pencil marking the page with ‘N’ entries, but Hasan didn’t even have to look at it. His finger jabbed at the phone digits in a ‘P’ formation and a man’s voice answered on the other end.

  ‘Hello . . . Hello? Anyone there?’ A pause, and then: ‘Whoever you are, you’re very punctual. Every half hour on the dot. But take your talents elsewhere, or I’ll get the operator to track you down.’

  Hasan hung up, took a deep breath, and pressed redial. This time, when the voice answered he said, ‘Hello, is Nargis there, please? This is Hasan.’

  ‘Just a second,’ the man said.

  Hasan cradled the phone between ear and shoulder, and wiped his palms on his jeans. What was he going to say? Which of the two prepared speeches should he choose? The ‘Come on, we both know I deserve it’ speech or the ‘Fate of the nation’ speech.

  ‘I’m sorry, Nargis can’t come to the phone. She’s getting ready for the Elocution Contest. You can watch it on television in . . . oh . . . just about an hour.’

  Hasan nodded into the mouthpiece, wiped the receiver and hung up. This crying thing was getting ridiculous. He should never have allowed himself to start it in the schoolyard. He should never have waited this long to speak to Nargis. He heard Ami calling to him, and ran into his room, where the magic place between the desk legs awaited him.

  ‘Huss?’

  Hasan was locked in battle with the Warlock when Ami’s voice brought him back to his room. Ami opened the door to the room and walked in. Her footsteps walked right up to the desk. If she lifts up the sheet and destroys the magic, Hasan swore, I will hate her for ever.

  Ami sat down, her back to Hasan’s bookshelf. Only a few inches and a sheet separated her from Hasan, but she didn’t look in his direction.

  ‘I was just talking to Farah Apa. Your class teacher is a friend of hers,’ she said. There were dots of blue paint on her cheek and Hasan knew she had absent-mindedly dipped the wrong end of her brush into her oils and, just seconds later, tapped the brush against her cheekbone as she considered her most recent brush strokes. Hasan slid his hand under the sheet and touched Ami’s finger with his own.

  ‘So,’ Ami said. She bounced Hasan’s palm off her own for a few seconds, then interlinked her fingers with his. ‘What should we talk about?’

  ‘I lied to you. Nargis wasn’t better than me. I forgot my lines.’

  ‘“She looked down to blush and she looked up to sigh with a smile on her lips and a tear in her eye,”’ Ami quoted. ‘There are worse things you could forget.’ She smoothed down a scab on his knuckle which Hasan had been picking at.

  ‘I wasn’t doing “Lochinvar”. I thought I had memorized the Hikmet poem but I blanked.’

  ‘I see.’ She turned her face towards him. ‘And I believe Mrs Qureshi announced, prior to your recitation, that the President would be the chief guest at the National Oratory Competition.’

  Hasan pushed the sheet to a side and crawled out. ‘Yes.’

  Ami placed an arm around his shoulder and drew him close. ‘Hasan, he has no conscience.’

  ‘Everyone has a conscience.’

  ‘No, his was surgically removed and replaced with paranoia. What’s going on in your head these days?’

  Hasan clenched his fist. How to tell her what he had done, what he hadn’t done? ‘I should have stuck with “Lochinvar”. I would have won then, and I would have won the national competition too. And then I would have gone up to shake the President’s hand and there would be no one, nothing, between us.’

  Ami’s arm stiffened. She caught his shoulders and leaned him backwards so he was forced to stare into her eyes. ‘What would you have done then, Hasan?’

  Hasan didn’t know if it was Ami or himself that caused it to happen, but for the first time ever he could not read the expression in her voice. He wanted to cry again, but instead he stared defiantly back at her. ‘It would have been, could have been my chance. I could have done something. Really done something. And it was so close, Ami. I’ll never get a chance like that again. Not now. It’s too late.’

  Ami ducked her head and watched an ant swaying across the carpet beneath a crumb of bread. She was silent so long that Hasan’s eyes started to droop. ‘Hasan, did you see Azeem die?’

  Her words hung in the air just like Azeem had. Hung suspended in a head-first, backwards dive long enough for Hasan to think, ‘Oh God he’s going to die God God he’s going to die there’s nothing I can do there’ll never God oh God’ but not long enough for him to look away.

  Once upon a time there was a yellow kite, a laburnum tree, a moment of almost flight and a boy’s head hitting the ground. Once upon a time a boy on a roof top saw a neck snap and the only word he could form in his mind was ‘forever’.

  ‘Yes,’ Hasan said, constricting all his muscles. ‘I saw it all.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  Those grown-up tears again. ‘Maybe he was doing it, getting so involved in making the kite fly, because he knew I was watching.’ He had never even thought the words before, but the moment they were out he knew them the way he might know his shadow if he bumped elbows with it in a dark place. Ami gripped his little finger, her head shaking no, my baby, sweetheart it’s not your fault.

  ‘It’s not?’ said Hasan. He pictured the boy so intent from the first on his battle with the wind that he didn’t take his eyes off the kite long enough to blink. ‘It’s not.’ Despite everything else that had happened, he felt as if a scorpion had crawled off his stomach. He rested his head on Ami’s chest and let her heart pace his own out of its frantic thumping.

  There followed the kind of silence that can only exist when another person helps to create it, and Hasan recalled the catch of breath with which he had yesterday woken from a dream of hands clasped in prayer which suddenly spread wide to release a cicada in the air. He knew it was a cicada, even though he had never seen a cicada, and he knew the cicada was miraculous though cicadas were not the stuff of miracles. At the moment of waking he felt that something close to perfection had just occurred and he cupped his hand over his heart so that the feeling would not leave him. Then, as now, the clock seemed to pause, just a fraction, between its ticks and its tocks.

  The hallway door opened and two pairs of feet walked through. Gul Mumani called out, ‘Chalo, Sherry, Saira, next door. Latif’s showing off his new TV. The President has landed, about to emerge from his hell-copter. Crowd of thousands to receive him, chanting his name. So touching, I swear.’

  Aba came out of his bedroom. ‘Crowd of thousands? How much do you think they’re paid for their enthusiasm?’

  ‘Dinner, probably,’ said the Widow. ‘Where are Saira and Hasan?’

  ‘We’ll join you there,’ Ami yelled. The hall door swung closed behind Aba, and Ami began to hum a nursery rhyme. Hasan pressed a finger against her throat and felt her larynx vibrate as her voice rose and
fell along a scale. 9.58 a.m.

  The phone rang.

  With the first sharp trring! Hasan knew it was Nargis Lotia calling, calling to say, ‘I was about to leave the house, but I heard you rang. What’s up?’

  He knew it was her. Knew it as surely as he would later know that at the moment of that first trring! a girl was fighting her way through the helipad crowd to reach the President before he got into the black limousine surrounded by outriders on motorbikes.

  Trring! Hasan sat up straight. It was not too late. It was not too late. He still remembered ‘Lochinvar’, and the Hikmet poem, too.

  The girl tried to break past the police barrier, wilting flowers clutched in her hand. The President motioned the police to let her through.

  Trring! Hasan stood up, thought of Salman Mamoo and dolphins.

  The TV cameras zoomed in on the girl. The cameras caught a flash of green eyes.

  Trring! Hasan walked towards the telephone. He thought of Shehzad who might not have merely struck a match. Thought of Azeem. Thought, for some reason, of Aba and ice and string.

  The President took the flowers with a smile. The girl’s right hand was fisted. She opened the fist.

  Trring! ‘Well, are you answering it?’ Ami said.

  Something conical and segmented lay in the girl’s palm. The dilation of the President’s pupils gave the thing a name: grenade.

  Trring!‘No,’ Hasan said.

  But really it was a pine-cone.

  Hasan disconnected the phone. The girl turned and disappeared into the crowd.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  ‘All at once I saw a crowd, a host of golden daffodils.’

  Hasan pressed a button on Uncle Latif’s remote control and Nargis Lotia’s face turned green. He pressed another button and her cheeks turned so red they started pulsing. Zehra grabbed the remote control and returned the image to normal.

  ‘Ten thousand saw I at a glance . . .’ Nargis Lotia stuck her head forward and opened her eyes wide wide.

  Gul Mumani started out of her chair. ‘We should be at home,’ she said. ‘Suppose someone calls. Someone . . . something about the trial.’

  Aba held up his cordless phone. ‘Thought of that. It’s within range; it’ll ring.’

  Gul Mumani took the phone from him and held it to her ear. ‘No tone!’ she said. Aba pressed a button and Gul Mumani jerked her head away from the high-pitched hum of the phone. She switched the phone off, put it down, picked it up, switched it back on and dialled a number. The phone next to the Widow rang.

  ‘Hello?’ said the Widow into the receiver.

  ‘Just checking,’ Gul Mumani said. She seemed about to turn the phone off, but her finger froze an inch above the button.

  ‘Will it ring if it’s off?’

  ‘For God’s sake, Gul, relax,’ Aba said, taking the phone from her, and punching the ‘off’ button with his finger. ‘I said it’ll ring, didn’t I?’

  ‘What’s your problem, Shehryar? It’s not as if you’re never wrong,’ Ami snapped.

  ‘Now, now, folks and yolks,’ Uncle Latif said. ‘Shakespeare, isn’t it? A child is a yolk?’

  ‘Egg,’ Aba said. ‘Or young fry of treachery. Macbeth. Sorry, Gul.’

  ‘It’s the girl with the pine cone,’ Zehra whispered to Hasan. ‘She’s made everyone jumpy. I wish you had seen her.’

  Hasan looked across at Ami, who winked back.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Zehra said, pointing to the television.

  The camera was pulling back from Nargis Lotia’s face, back and back so that the chicken pox scar above her eyebrow was no longer distinguishable; back to include all the contestants sitting on the stage to either side of Nargis; back to include the spectators turning their heads away from Nargis; and back further to include the two soldiers marching down the auditorium aisle towards the front row where the chief guest sat in a red velvet chair.

  Nargis Lotia, once dubbed by a substitute teacher ‘the sole mouse amongst a pack of rats’, must have sensed her moment of fame being usurped by the uniformed men who didn’t even attempt to muffle their footfall, because she screeched at the top of her lungs ‘In vacant and in pensive mood!’ The camera zoomed right back on to her face.

  And so there was never any visual record of the President’s expression as he turned to hear what the soldier was whispering into his ear.

  ‘The bliss of solitude,’ Nargis finished, and glared at the cameraman so that even then he kept the lens trained on her while the audience applauded, then hesitated, then applauded some more. It was only after Nargis curtseyed and sat down that the camera pulled back again and Hasan saw the auditorium doors swinging, and a man in civilian dress sitting down in the red velvet chair.

  Afterwards, everyone would have a story to tell about, or around, that day.

  Ali Bhai would relate how he had seen several high-ranking military officers in whispered conversation with economic forecasters and financial strategists when he dropped in to pay a visit to General Jojo, just days before the Elocution Contest. ‘Hanh, okay, I didn’t actually hear anything they said, if you must know the minute details, but the looks on their faces . . . those boys weren’t just discussing the weather.’

  Khan would say, yes, of course, the prospect of economic disaster was part of the reason for what happened. ‘But not like your cousin Ali thinks, though maybe that was a part of it. The truth is, at the very moment the girl with the green eyes was opening her fist to the President, eight other people around the country were opening their fists to the President’s eight advisors, and in each fist was a pine-cone. Each of these eight advisors called up the President while his limousine was taking him to the N. E. Uddin Auditorium for the Elocution Contest. By the time the sixth advisor called to say he had been handed a pine-cone while in the bathtub of his high-security mansion, the President knew he was being issued a final warning, and he didn’t even wait for the eighth advisor to call from his secret getaway in the mountains before making a phone call to arrange for foreign asylum. No surprise really in what happened – any idiot could tell you that even if being barefoot is your biggest fear you don’t exchange your car’s engine for a pair of running shoes.’

  Auntie Poops would dominate dinner party conversation for weeks with stories of how she was settling down in the business-class cabin of an aeroplane just prior to take-off, planning all the shopping she would do overseas, ‘though of course it was hard to think of anything other than Saloo, with the trial starting and all. But then, be and lohold! in walked the Prezzie, flanked by two soldiers. On a commercial flight I swear. And not even First Class! So, of course, I scrambled off the plane and said to the airline people “minor heart-attack happening. Unload my luggage, pronto” which they weren’t about to do until I showed them my profile which is a fax of my cousin’s profile and, of course, she’s married to that airline hotshot. Yes, sweetie, the Prezzie spoke before I left; he said, “ Thank God I didn’t have to sit through ‘Daffodils’.” Poor man, unhinged.’

  Zehra, of course, would have her own version of events. ‘See, stupid, the reason I wanted to go with the Widow to the shelter was that I was worried about her. I mean, I wouldn’t leave you alone on the first day of Uncle Salman’s trial just like that, okay?’ Zehra rested her hand on Hasan’s arm and he tried not to notice that she had waxed her arms and her skin no longer seemed that thing which he had so often seen scabbed and gashed and bloodied. The effort involved in not noticing Zehra’s skin was so great that Hasan missed the first part of what she was saying about the early morning hours of 19 May, and only caught up with her story at the point when Gul Mumani was yelling at the Widow, ‘Don’t look at me so superior and manicured as if to say it’s okay if my husband dies, at least I can dream of him. It’s not okay, Widow-kiddo, not by a thousand leagues.’ Ogle chose that moment to start barking hysterically and Zehra went outside to see what was bothering him. It was a chicken; a scrawny, beady-eyed fowl in no way deserving of a place in the t
ale. When Zehra shooed away the chicken and calmed down Ogle, she looked up to the Widow’s balcony and – somehow Hasan never minded that Zehra thought what followed was the real story of the day – the Widow appeared on the balcony, feather pillow in one hand, knife glinting in the other. She slipped the pillow out of its case and held up the knife. In that moment the sun broke out of the clouds to glint off the knife and the Widow carefully placed the tip of the blade against the top corner of the pillow. Zehra looked up and screamed. The Widow slashed a diagonal, gripped the fabric on either side of the tear and ripped the pillow apart.

  The feathers flew out, caught a violent gust of breeze and swirled over Zehra, over Hasan’s house, over Azeem’s rooftop, eddying and twirling dervish dances in the City of no snow, encore after encore until the breeze dropped. The feathers landed on soldiers, economists, ACEmen, the Bodyguard, artists, lawyers, suits, shalwars, a helicopter and a green-eyed girl, and blanketed the City with dreams of love.

  After all, Zehra said, why not?

  Why not? Hasan repeated, and never added, It’s a good sub-plot.

  The main plot? Some days he could not bring himself to talk of it, just as Shah Jahan could not bring himself to look directly at the Taj. On those days, Hasan understood what Ami had meant when she said that there are memories that cannot be spoken of, because to speak of them imperfectly is to rob them of something vital, though to leave them intact, inside, is to leave no space for anything else in your life. On the days when he believed this, Hasan would go to a dictionary and look for words that could first lacerate his tongue, then bind the gashes with blood. Words which were music and picture and meaning at once. Like ‘lacerate’, like ‘cinnamon’, like ‘touch’.

  Other days, Hasan would say just this: on 19 May, a little before sunset, I was crossing from my parents’ room to my bedroom when the hall door opened and a voice said the most extraordinary thing: