Kartography

by Kamila Shamsie

  I scrambled off the branch. ‘Come on,’ I said to Karim. ‘Let’s go somewhere else.’ But he stayed where he was, running his fingers over the letters, again and again. ‘Stop it,’ I called out from the base of the tree. ‘Stop doing that.’ But he ignored me, and I could not stay to argue for the queasiness in my stomach.

  . . .

  Uncle Chaperoo was supposed to accompany us back to Karachi when our three weeks in RYK were up, but he decided to elope instead. At least, that’s what he wanted everyone to believe, but Uncle Asif saw things a little differently. I was having tea with Uncle Asif in front of the fireplace when Uncle Chaperoo called with the news, and Uncle Asif put the call on his newly acquired speaker-phone.

  ‘Bhai, Umber and I have eloped,’ Uncle Chaperoo said.

  ‘What? You’ve married her! Wonderful. And about time.’

  ‘We’ve eloped!’

  ‘Let me speak to her. I want to welcome her to the family.’

  ‘We love each other. We don’t care what anyone else says.’

  ‘Excellent. Where’s the honeymoon? When you return we’ll throw a huge reception for the two of you.’

  ‘We’re prepared to live on love!’

  ‘I’ll get Laila on the line right away. She’ll be so happy.’

  ‘We’ve eloped, damn you!’

  Uncle Asif hung up, and shook his head. ‘Such assumptions, such assumptions! From my own brother.’ He threw another log on to the fire and watched the sparks fly. ‘At a time like this, Raheen, should I care about anything other than whether he’s happy? Have I not always said that I wish to be the most unfeudal feudal in this country?’

  ‘You don’t seem very decadent to me,’ I said by way of comfort. ‘Though it’s true you live in luxury and don’t seem to spend a lot of time doing anything that looks even a little bit like work.’ I tilted my head and looked at him sideways. ‘I could see you lying on a couch in a toga, eating peeled grapes. Uncle Ali said that’s the real definition of decadence.’

  He threw back his head and laughed. ‘You are your father’s daughter, aren’t you? It requires a certain genetic disposition to say something like that at the age of thirteen and yet manage to be utterly charming.’

  ‘I’m not the charming one,’ I said, putting my feet up on the coffee table. ‘That’s Karim. He’s got natural charm. I mean, you see him across a room and you know you’ll like him.’

  ‘And you?’ Uncle Ali said. ‘What do people think when they see you across a room?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said slowly. ‘But usually if I’m in a room I’m with Karim, Sonia, Zia. One or all of them. And then you’d notice Sonia, because she’s gorgeous, and you’d notice Zia because he’s completely cool, and you’d notice Karim because you can’t help but notice Karim. Me, I guess you’d notice that all three of them choose to be my friends. And that must say something.’ It was true; I knew quite well that there was nothing remarkable about me. This is not to say I suffered insecurities because of everything I lacked. There wasn’t a great deal that I did lack. I was intelligent enough, attractive enough, witty enough, cool enough. On sports day I won silver medals and even, occasionally, a gold; in school concerts I got speaking parts rather than being relegated to ‘a rock’ or ‘crowd scene’; when teams were picked for anything, anything at all, I was never, ever, the last to be chosen; I knew all the words to all the songs on Whaml’s ‘Make It Big’ album, and had been the one to inform a group of sixteen-year-olds that the line from ‘Wake Me Up’ was not ‘You make the sun shine brighter than the darkest day’, which made no sense at all, but rather ‘You make the sun shine brighter than Doris Day’. I could do a dead-on imitation of Qabacha from ‘Tanhaiyan’; Qadir, not Imran, was my favourite bowler. And perhaps all this might have meant that I was remarkable for being a perfect blend of admirable traits, except for the fact that there were other things blended in, colder things. I didn’t know how to embrace the world, the way Karim did; I didn’t know how to make strangers feel at home, the way Sonia did; and I didn’t know how to embody a loyalty so fierce it meant putting myself at risk for others in any fight, even the fights that seemed absurd, the way Zia did.

  ‘Hmmm...’ Uncle Asif stared down at his toes and made them wiggle. ‘But I notice you, even when there’s no one else around.’

  I smiled at him. ‘That’s because I really like you, and you know it.’

  ‘Ah, there’s that charm again.’ He picked up a poker and smiled at me. ‘I liked all my parents’ friends when I was your age. Then I grew up and began to understand what kind of people they were and, you know, a lot of them just weren’t very nice. Maybe one day, when you’re old enough to see beneath the smiling veneer, you won’t like me any more.’

  Unsure if he was serious or not, I curled on to the sofa and looked at the framed black-and-white photograph on the coffee table of Uncle Asif baring his teeth in half-grimace, half-leer, at a camel which had pushed its snout to within inches of his face. ‘Doubt it,’ I said.

  He waved the poker in my direction. ‘An aphorism from the middle-aged to the extremely youthful: you can only know how you feel in the here and now, not how you’ll feel years, months or even days down the line.’

  The tree carving hadn’t been far from my mind since I’d seen it; the memory of it gave rise to an uneasiness in my stomach. ‘Why didn’t my father marry Karim’s mother?’

  Uncle Asif turned away and poked the fire with vigour. Sparks flew up and leapt over the grate. ‘That’s not my story to tell.’

  ‘In other words,’ I said to Karim later that night, as I sat in the bay seat of his bedroom window, ‘there is a story there.’

  He nodded and brought two bowls over to the window from his bedside, liquid sloshing against the sides as he walked. Green dye in one and purple in the other. ‘I got them from one of the nomad boys. In exchange for my marbles. Because green and purple seemed like map colours. But now I don’t know what to do with them.’

  I looked down at the ceramic bowls uneasily. I had the strong suspicion they were expensive items of art; I had a stronger suspicion the dye might not wash off very easily. ‘Good you got rid of the marbles. They were beginning to give me the creeps.’ They really were. They looked too much like the eyes of the nomads’ mad goat with its twisted horns that resembled dried leaves curling in on themselves.

  Karim tore a piece of paper out of a legal pad and sat down across from me. Jackals howled in the distance. I dipped my hand in green dye and pressed it against the paper. Karim dipped his hand in purple dye and pressed it over my palm print. Karim’s hand was smaller but his fingers were broader. Some of the lines of our hands ran together for a while in purple—green, then veered off in different directions. I half-expected the letters ‘Z’ and ‘M’ to appear on the paper.

  ‘How do you think it happened?’ he asked.

  ‘I think the mad goat’s father came untethered and chased your mother around the dunes, and your father came by and saved her. And over on the other side of the farm a crazy bull was chasing my father and my mother waved her red sari at it to make it change course and, olé! Love swap!’

  Karim laughed shortly. ‘My father’s not the kind of guy to walk out into the dunes. Sand in his shoes. He wouldn’t like that.’ He pushed his hair off his face, leaving a purple smudge, like a bruise, on his forehead.

  ‘OK, so what’s your version?’ I wiped my hands on his jeans.

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t think of any reason why someone would marry my father rather than yours.’ He furrowed his brow and I ran my thumb over the creases that appeared between his eyes, leaving green streaks that dribbled down his nose. ‘Maybe your mother saw she was getting the bad end of the bargain and whisked your father away.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’ I walked over to the bathroom to wash my hands. ‘My mother would never do a thing like that to your mother. And if she had, they wouldn’t still be friends, would they?’

  We dropped the topic then
, but I couldn’t get his words out of my mind and later that night I crept down to the drawing room in search of old photographs. Or, rather, one old photograph, which was framed and prominently displayed in both Karim’s house and mine. A few days earlier I had come upon a copy of it, along with stacks of other pictures, in the rosewood cabinet in Laila and Asif’s drawing room.

  I switched on the table lamp, trying to suppress the feeling that I was doing something sneaky, and rummaged through the images of my parents and their friends, partying and holidaying and hamming it up in black-and-white. Picture of my father planting a kiss on Uncle Ali’s cheek, as Uncle Ali—looking unexpectedly like Karim, with his wide grin—held up an aubergine to the camera. Age had made them more restrained. Towards the world, or towards each other? I found the photograph I was looking for, and sat on the sofa with it in my hand, first tilting the lampshade slightly so that light fell directly on the picture.

  Taken at Karim’s parents’ wedding, it showed my parents flanking the bride and groom, all four of them laughing. There was no such photograph at my parents’ wedding, which had taken place just months earlier, because Aunty Maheen hadn’t been present. She’d been in the newly created nation of Bangladesh, spending her last weeks as a single woman with her family there. At least, that was the version I’d always been told.

  As I looked at the photograph, I began to distrust their laughter. Were they laughing together, as a foursome? Or had the photographer said something amusing to make each of them, as individuals, laugh? They were not looking at one another, not at all; Aunty Maheen was not resting a hand on my mother’s wrist to say ‘I get it, I get it. Too funny, darling’, and Aba was not half-turning towards Uncle Ali to see his own laughter mirrored in his best friend’s face, and though Aunty Maheen was leaning towards Uncle Ali in what I had always taken as a sign of intimacy, perhaps she was really just leaning away from my mother.

  The next morning, I went looking for Karim to show him the photograph. I found him in Uncle Asif’s study, looking at the atlas again.

  ‘Karimazov, where’ve you been?’ I shut the door behind me with what I hoped was a conspiratorial air. ‘We have to talk. I’ve been wondering about your parents’ marriage.’

  He looked up at me, blew out air from his cheeks, nodded, gulped, nodded again. ‘OK,’ he said, putting the atlas down and clutching the edge of the desk with both hands. ‘OK.’

  ‘Their wedding, I mean.’ I held up the photograph, then put it down again. I felt I should say something other than what I had planned to say. He was looking at me as though there was something he wanted me to say. ‘The photograph...’ I put it down in front of him. ‘I just wondered, you know, why it’s the only one of the four of them together at the wedding.’

  He didn’t even look at it. He picked up the atlas, cutting off our view of each other, and then swivelled round in the leather chair so that I couldn’t see him at all. ‘Bet you don’t know how many countries border the Soviet Union.’

  ‘Bet you think everyone’s going to be impressed that you do know,’ I said and walked out. Knowledge had never been something we used against each other. The previous year when Ami’s cousin visited from France and taught me foreign words, five new ones every day, I always called Karim at the end of the day to share the words with him. You could put Karim’s brain in my skull, I believed at the time, and I wouldn’t even notice the swap. Why ruin that over the number of countries bordering the Soviet Union? I suspected the real reason for his new interest in maps was the need to feel superior to me. But I couldn’t say that. Couldn’t say, ‘You just like knowing things that I don’t know,’ because then he’d look even more superior and say, ‘Who said everything I do has to be about you?’ And, I had to admit it, he’d have a point.

  I didn’t mention the photograph again that day or the next day, or the day after, but I kept it in my room and whenever I found I’d lost Karim to those infernal maps I’d climb up the nomad girl’s tree, lean against my father’s carving and examine the photograph, searching for clues to the past. That was how Uncle Ali found me, when he came to Rahim Yar Khan to take us home at the end of the winter holidays.

  ‘What are you doing up there?’ he shouted up to me. I stuffed the photograph into the pocket of my jacket, and climbed down.

  ‘Nothing.’ I took him by the hand to lead him away from the tree, but after a few paces he stopped and looked back, up to the branch where I had been sitting, his eyes sliding over to the tree trunk. Surely from this angle and this distance he couldn’t see what was written there? He sighed, and then looked at me curiously.

  ‘What? Why are you looking at me like that?’ he said.

  ‘Do you mind getting sand in your shoes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  We stood and looked at each other for a few seconds, his eyes grave. Uncle Ali always took me seriously, and I loved him for that.

  ‘I was looking at old pictures,’ I said. ‘Karim has your smile. But you don’t have it any more.’

  He looked taken aback for a moment, then laughed without much humour. ‘You’re growing into a perceptive young woman, aren’t you?’ He put an arm round me. ‘Karim has it mainly when you’re around. It’s a moonsmile. No light of its own unless there’s a sun for it to reflect off.’

  ‘I’m no sun. The sun is stationary, and I can’t stay still for even five minutes. Karim can be the sun. I’ll do the orbiting.’ I pirouetted around Uncle Ali. He took my hand in his and twirled me as though we were dancing.

  ‘You’re a cool guy, Uncle Ali.’

  ‘Thank you, sweetheart. If only my son were as easy to convince as you are.’

  When I repeated that comment to Karim, as we were preparing to go to the train station later that day, he snorted in disdain. Of late, that had become his standard reaction to anything to do with his father, regardless of the context.

  ‘Yeah, he’s so cool he’s frozen,’ Karim said. He lifted his suitcase off his bed and carried it to the landing outside, where my suitcase was already waiting for one of Uncle Asif’s innumerable servants to carry it to the car.

  Uncle Asif, Aunty Laila and Uncle Ali were all in the drawing room on the ground floor, and as we made our way down the stairs we heard their voices through the wide-open door.

  ‘But really, Ali, you must all come and stay,’ Aunty Laila was saying. ‘The kids are divine, but we’d quite like to have divinity’s parents’ with us, too. Asif, tell him.’

  Karim and I stopped, hoping to overhear more about our sterling qualities as house guests.

  Uncle Asif grunted. ‘Of course you must all come. And tell Zafar that this time I won’t take him for a walk and get him lost in the kinoo orchards if he starts his ranting about the need for land reforms.’

  ‘God, I had forgotten about that. Asif, really, how could you have?’

  Uncle Asif laughed. ‘Laila, it was sixteen years ago, and before your civilizing influence. Besides, Zaf wasn’t acting the polite guest himself. Still, I understand why he said those things. I mean, Muhajirs will never understand the way we feel about land. They all left their homes at Partition. No understanding of ties to a place.’

  I put out my hand and gripped Karim’s shoulder, stopping him as he was starting to walk, whether towards the drawing room or away from it I couldn’t tell. When my father spoke of the need for land re-forms to break the power of the feudals, he lost his customary languid posture and his soft voice took on an edge of urgency. Even at thirteen, I could link his fervour to a myriad reasons. The socialist professor who set his mind ablaze when he was at university; the capitalist profession he had entered when he started his own advertising agency; the novels he read (my mother always cringed when he referred to Hugo as ‘Old Vic’); the stories he’d heard, firsthand, from employees and prospective employees who left their villages to come to the city, and were willing to do anything at all to earn a living in Karachi, anything but go back to ‘that life’; his analysis of economic reports; his mistrust
of humanity’s capacity to be uncorrupted by power. Some reasons were contradictory and some were contradicted by other parts of his life, but all of them, all, were part of the mesh that made up his character. Yet Uncle Asif had summarily dismissed all that with one word: muhajir. Immigrant.

  I heard a plate—or was it a saucer?—placed firmly on a table, and Uncle Ali said, ‘I share Zafar’s views on land reform. And I’m not a Muhajir.’

  ‘Yes, but you’ve lived all those years in Karachi,’ Uncle Asif said, never losing his jolly tone. ‘It’s made you so urban. Don’t get uptight, Ali. I love Zafar, you know I do. And when the revolution comes, I’ll take refuge in his house and he’ll welcome me with open arms and guard me with his life. You, on the other hand, I’m not entirely sure about. Oh, for heaven’s sake, yaar, smile.’

  ‘What is it with people today and my smile?’ Uncle Ali asked. ‘Listen, Asif. Let’s put aside the old feudal argument. Tell me what’s going on in Karachi. What do your contacts in the government say?’

  ‘That it’s all going to hell. More tea?’

  ‘Asif, this isn’t a joke,’ Aunty Laila said, her voice exploding as though it had been held captive somewhere for a long time. ‘Karachi’s my home, you know. Why did those bloody Muhajirs have to go and form a political group? Once they’re united they’ll do God knows what. Demanding this, demanding that. Thinking just because they’re a majority in Karachi they can trample over everyone else. Like they did in ’47. Coming across the border thinking we should be grateful for their presence.’ I could see her shadow move across the wall as she paced across the room. ‘Do you hear the way people like Zafar and Yasmin talk about “their Karachi”? My family lived there for generations. Who the hell are these Muhajirs to pretend it’s their city!’