‘Hasan.’
Epilogue
The City air whispered of mangoes.
The first fruits of the season had ripened to pungent sweet-sourness, and the scent was so dizzying Hasan would have fallen off the branches of Uncle Latif’s mango tree if Salman Mamoo had not been sitting behind him on the tree limb, holding him around the waist with one arm while the other arm pulled fruit-laden branches towards Hasan’s nose and made him dizzier still.
‘Stop,’ Hasan laughed. ‘Stop or I’ll . . .’ He reached back to try and pinch Salman Mamoo’s nose shut, and his fingers brushed against a razor cut, one of several that Salman Mamoo had acquired over the past two days while trying to adjust to blades that weren’t dulled by rust. This morning Hasan had seen a dot of blood on Salman Mamoo’s sink, glistening. Hasan took the blood on his lips, and passed it down to his tongue and his tooth. Only then could he stop pretending that a part of him was prepared for armed guards to drag Salman Mamoo back to prison, and he knelt on the bathroom floor and touched his forehead to the tiles.
But there was still one thing he needed to know. ‘Mamoojaan?’ he said.
Salman Mamoo plucked a paisley shaped mango off its branch and cut away flesh from seed with his penknife, his forearms still gripping Hasan’s waist. ‘What is it?’ he said, giving Hasan one ‘cheek’ of the mango.
‘The green-eyed girl,’ Hasan said. He took the penknife from Salman Mamoo, sliced the cheek in two, lengthwise, placed his thumbnail between the skin and the pulp of one slice and eased off the skin, making sure no pulp stayed attached to the skin during the separation. ‘She could have got in trouble, couldn’t she? I mean, just for having a pine-cone, let alone for being suspected of having a grenade. All those armed soldiers around and everything.’
‘Yes,’ Salman Mamoo said.
‘So why do you think she did it?’ Hasan slid his thumb across the smoothness of the pulp where the penknife had sliced, while his fingers caressed the slightly coarser underside of the mango-wedge where fibres had connected flesh to skin. He knew if he turned his head he would see Salman Mamoo’s lips composing a dolphin metaphor.
Salman Mamoo said, ‘I don’t think she knew what she was doing.’
Mango juice was trickling down Hasan’s palm, but he ignored it and turned his head to look out on the street where a beige car with a cracked windshield was parked. Salman Mamoo leaned back against the tree-trunk and clenched his fist.
Hasan bit into his mango and leapt down from the tree. ‘Okay,’ he said, staring up at Salman Mamoo, arms akimbo. ‘Enough of this. Don’t think I haven’t noticed. Worrying about Shehzad and his faction, worrying about the military, worrying about pend . . . pending . . .’
‘Pendular time,’ Salman Mamoo said, swinging himself off the tree. ‘The inability of democracies to succeed in this country. The cycle of failure.’
‘Yeah, that,’ Hasan said. ‘You can do a wheelie on a cycle. I’ll teach you.’ And silently he added, Just let today be perfect.
Salman Mamoo took Hasan’s hand, the mango stains on both their palms meshing like jigsaw pieces. Together they walked towards the front garden, where Ami, Aba, Gul Mumani, the Widow and Zehra were sitting in a circle watching the sunset.
‘Here he is,’ Aba said. ‘The Salamander. We’ve decided your party needs a new name. Elections are eighty-eight days away and I, for one, refuse to vote for a party called POTPAF. And let’s face it, much as I like Star Trek, the Anti-Corruption Enterprise didn’t thrill me either.’
Salman Mamoo laughed. ‘The party votes on a new name tomorrow. We’ve had some suggestions already. The best one is Party of Integrity and National Empowerment.’
‘Ugh!’ said Ami. ‘How . . . oh, I see – PINE.’
‘Yes,’ said Salman Mamoo. ‘We’ve got the acronym. We just need the words to fit the initials. Suggestions?’
‘Please, I Need Electing,’ said Ami.
‘Prayer Is Not Enough,’ Gul Mumani added.
‘President Is Now Ejected,’ Hasan volunteered.
The corners of Salman Mamoo’s mouth twitched. He turned away to hide his expression and a pine-cone from a passing car hurtled over the wall and smacked him in the face. ‘I’ll say this much for the last few months,’ he said, sticking the pine-cone behind his ear. ‘They’ve made me understand how this City can get under your skin, and never be sweated out. I mean, it’s still aesthetically traumatic, but it’s got spirit.’
‘About time,’ Ami snorted. ‘You’ve finally recovered from Wordsworth. I may vote for you after all.’
With great dignity, Salman Mamoo stuck out his tongue at Ami. ‘I don’t need your vote, thank you. Polls show that ACEPOTPAFPINE is headed to a landslide victory. Of course, once we win . . .’ He sighed and passed a hand over his eyes.
The Widow cleared her throat.
‘Yes, Wid?’ Salman Mamoo said.
‘Hina,’ said the Widow.
‘Henna? Yes,’ Salman Mamoo said, looking at her hair. ‘Yes, it’s not as bright as usual, but . . .’
‘Oh, shut up Salman!’ Gul Mumani laughed. ‘That’s her name.’
‘But we can still call her “Wid” if we want to,’ Zehra told Hasan.
‘Hina.’ Salman Mamoo tried out the name a few times in different tones of voice, and nodded, satisfied. ‘It suits you. So has my wife convinced you to help out with her schools?’
‘Na, baba, she has other plans,’ Gul Mumani grinned. ‘They might interest you.’
‘Oh, what?’
‘Well, I’m considering three options really,’ the Widow said. ‘ One, to join your party and become Minister of Law when you come into power. Two, to form my own party and stand against you. Three, to stay out of organized politics and create a non-government organization that will be involved in various developmental projects and will rant and rave against the powers-that-be whenever that seems necessary. Close your mouth, Salman, you don’t look dignified.’ The Widow, it appeared, had lied about the feather pillow and death. Hasan thought about it and decided he didn’t mind that it had been a lie. He didn’t mind at all.
‘You’re serious!’ Salman Mamoo said.
‘Of course I’m serious, Salman,’ the Widow said, leaning sideways and smiling at Salman Mamoo, elbow crooked on the backrest of her chair. ‘I realize if I choose Option Two I’ll have limited short-term success, but you know what the wonderful thing about democracy is?’
‘What?’
‘Re-elections in five years. Wait. I’ve got it. I’ll start with Option Three and build up a level of visibility that will help me with Option Two when the next election rolls around. Though if you really beg, I might be persuaded to give more thought to Option One.’
Salman Mamoo ruffled his eyebrows and stared at the Widow. ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’ He grinned, his old boyish grin. ‘You may be just the thing to throw a pendulum out of whack.’
The evening had become night with its usual mixture of subtlety and suddenness, and Uncle Latif danced into the garden, holding up to Salman Mamoo a contract for advertising pine-scented air-freshener.
‘Suno, Salman, I’ve thrown in a clause, my own brilliant inspiration unaided by all except the Divine, stating – see page two, para three – that you may use eight seconds of advertising time to ask for votes. Or, conversely, spout the following lines mixing politics and salesmanship which, let’s face it, is always the case: “Don’t desist from voting for me because of fear of election booths reeking of body odour. Instead, buy Latifbhai’s pine-scented air-freshener and spray it liberally through the booth for your benefit, and the benefit of fellow voters.” This is serious!’
Hasan cut and peeled the rest of the mango that Salman Mamoo had plucked, and handed Zehra a slice, even though she had been talking to Najam on the phone earlier today. He wondered if she knew how much that annoyed him. Probably. Ogle sniffed a piece of mango skin, and began to lick it. Sighs from outside signalled that the Bodyguard, Imran and Aqib were finishing
up their own meal of mangoes, all rivalries and bickering put aside for the moment. Hasan hauled himself up and climbed over the wall to examine the looks of contentment on the faces outside.
‘If the world must end, let it be now,’ Khan said.
Someone Hasan had never seen before was seated with the Bodyguard. Khan’s sister, Hasan realized, looking at her features and her reddish-brown hair. Even though her hand was somewhat obscured Hasan was sure she had a rectangle of paper, covered in newsprint, wrapped around her finger like a wedding ring.
Not now, Hasan told himself. Not now.
He slipped back to his side of the wall, and climbed the spiral staircase to the roof. For a long time he just sat there, watching the two circles of people, catching traces of conversation, waving down at Salman Mamoo when Zehra pointed out where Hasan had disappeared to.
Eventually he stood up, gazed for a moment at Azeem’s roof, and then descended the stairs. Was any of it true? he wondered on his way down. Any of what the Oldest Man had told him about spirits and death?
‘If so, what does my spirit want?’
He stood in his garden, looked up at the stars, impossibly distant, and felt again that oldest desire: to touch the sky.
‘But I can’t,’ he said. ‘Unless I learn to shoot down the sky.’ And then: ‘Or . . .’
Hasan scrunched his eyes tight tight tighter, bent his knees in a diver’s crouch, his arms extending backwards. ‘Now!’ he breathed. He jumped straight up into the night, his hands a pendulum cutting down in the air and then back up again, up in front of his body. The pendulum reached its maximum height, began its downward journey, but no! someone, somehow, caught his hands: Khan’s-brother-in-law-Azeem-the-green-eyed-girl reached down from the stars and grabbed his hands, pulled them further up, beyond the limits of the pendulum’s parabola. The moon glowed behind his eyelids, the wind rushed around him, something – a star! – cut against his palm. He whirled, twirled, felt beneath his fingers: charcoal doll’s hair stalactite.
And Hasan was night.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the following people who, either directly or in some tangential way, made this book possible: Agha Shahid Ali; Alexandra Pringle; John Edgar Wideman; Noy Holland; Shona Ramaya; the Fiction Babes – Tamara Grogan, Lesley Hyatt, Justine Dymond, Therese Chehade and, in particular, Elizabeth Porto; Herman Fong; Karin Gosselink; Brion Dulac; Tushna Kandawalla; and,
A Note on the Author
Kamila Shamsie was born in 1973 in Pakistan. She is the author of four previous novels: Kartography (both shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Salt and Saffron, Broken Verses and Burnt Shadows (shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction). In 1999 she received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literature and in 2004 the Patras Bokhari Award – both awarded by the Pakistan Academy of Letters. Kamila Shamsie lives in London.
By the Same Author
Salt and Saffron
Kartography
Burnt Shadows
First published in Great Britain 1998
Copyright © 1998 by Kamila Shamsie
This electronic edition published 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Grateful acknowledgement is made to Persea Books, Inc. for permission to reprint
‘Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison’ from Poems of Nazim
Hikmet translated Randy Blasing Mutlu Komuk, and to Agha Shahid Ali for
permission to reprint part of his translation of ‘A Prison Evening’ from The Rebel’s
Silhouette: Selected Poems of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, University of Massachusetts Press,
1995
The right of Kamila Shamsie to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages
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In the City by the Sea Page 18