‘Laila, Laila,’ Uncle Ali said. ‘Do you hear yourself?’
I must have said or done something then, or maybe it was just that I was so motionless that made Karim touch my shoulder. ‘You OK?’
I nodded and pushed past him. ‘Just going to the loo.’
In the downstairs bathroom, I locked the door behind me and climbed out of the window and into the garden. Ducking low beneath window frames, I stole away from the house and sat in the dark on the swing, my hands clenched around the linked chain that moored it to the red metal frame.
What kind of immigrant is born in a city and spends his whole life there, and gets married there, and raises his daughter there? And I, an immigrant’s daughter, was an immigrant too. I had spent three weeks living in Uncle Asif and Aunty Laila’s house; I’d told her about Zia; I’d sat on his shoulder to untangle a kite from the limb of a tree. If I went back to the house and told them I agreed with my father about land reforms, if I told them Karachi was my home just as much as it was anyone else’s, would they look at me and think: another Muhajir. Immigrant. Still immigrants, though our families had crossed the border nearly four decades ago.
But worse than what Uncle Asif and Aunty Laila had said, far worse than that, was Uncle Ali’s remark: ‘I’m not a Muhajir.’ I had never stopped to think what Uncle Ali was or wasn’t. Aunty Maheen was Bengali, I knew, because every so often aunts or cousins would arrive from Bangladesh to visit, bearing gift-wrapped saris and a reminder that Aunty Maheen grew up in another language. After the relatives left, stray words of Bengali would stay clustered around her tongue, falling off in ones and twos, un-understood and untranslated. And there was another reason, also, why I knew and had known for a long time where Aunty Maheen’s family was from. I kicked at the ground and the swing jerked forward and back...
Forward and back, Zia marched up and down from the tree to the wall of the school building. I didn’t like Zia, even though he and Karim sat together in class and were friends, but I wanted to know why he was moving his arms in that strange way and clenching his little fists—he was so small he could be mistaken for a Prep-E student; not like me, the tallest girl in kindergarten, and should have been the tallest person but wasn’t because of that Ghous boy who had failed Class II and so had to repeat the year.
‘It’s marching,’ he said, when I told Karim to ask him what he was doing. ‘Because there’s going to be a war and then I’ll become a soldier.’
‘Why will you become a soldier?’ I pushed Karim aside.
‘To fight for my country. Then if I die, I’ll go to heaven. You can’t, because you’re a girl.’
‘You’re too little to fight. And I don’t want to be a soldier, so...so... Karim do you want to be a soldier?’
‘What war?’ Karim said.
‘There’ll be war with India,’ Zia said. ‘There always is. There was one only two years before we were born.’
‘That was because of Bangladesh,’ Karim said. ‘That’s where my mother’s from. She’s Bengali. That means I’m half-Bengali.’
Zia pushed. Karim. He fell over without a sound. No one knew it had happened, except the three of us.
‘Donkey!’ I yelled and kicked Zia.
‘Tell him not to lie,’ Zia yelled back. ‘He’s not Bengali, he’s not. He’s my friend. Why is he lying?’ and he raised his foot to kick Karim, raised it back and forward...
Back and forward, higher and higher, the swing hurtled me through the air and I thought, I can do this with no hands, and then I was sprawled in the dirt, the swing thudding to a halt against my shoulder blade.
It had been easy for me to ignore Zia, but Karim’s eyes kept filling with tears for the rest of the day and I didn’t quite believe it was because of the dirt he’d got in his eyes when Zia kicked him to the ground. Because it had seemed to be a big deal to Karim, I repeated Zia’s remark to my parents that afternoon. That’s when everything went a little crazy. Zia’s parents had come over, and Karim’s parents, too, and voices were raised, though I’d been told to stay in my room and so I don’t know who said what to whom and why. It was the first time I used the telephone. I called Karim and said, ‘Why are they so angry?’ and Karim said he really didn’t know, but it just felt to him like Zia had said something really bad. And then Aba and Uncle Ali and Zia’s parents all got into cars and went to Zia’s house, where they called Zia out of his room and asked him why he’d said what he’d said to Karim. Zia told us the next day that it was so strange, they all looked so strange. When Zia said he thought Bengali was a bad word, his father went straight into his room and fired his ayah. But I don’t even remember if she was the one who told me that, Zia said, and his mother yelled at him to be quiet. Talking about it made Karim and Zia friends once more, and when Zia said to me, admiringly, ‘You kick like a boy,’ instead of being angry that I’d ratted on him, I decided that maybe he wasn’t so bad after all. We never mentioned the incident again. To tell the truth, it had all seemed like a fairly minor event in our lives back when our reactions to anything more earthshattering than the rules of playground games were merely parroted versions of our parents’ attitudes, with no real understanding or conviction behind them other than the firm belief that our parents were always right.
But now, years later, I was forced to consider that Karim and I were separate in some way that seemed to matter terribly to people old enough to understand where significance lay. I wrapped my arms around the seat of the swing and rested my head on it. I was Muhajir with a trace of Pathan, and he was Bengali and... Punjabi? Sindhi? what? I considered. Probably Punjabi, I decided. He had relatives in Lahore. These days, with the Civil War treated as a long-distant memory that had nothing to do with our present lives, his Punjabiness would probably be more of an issue on the nation’s ethnic battleground than his Bengaliness. But did any of it really have anything to do with Karim and me?
Despite our closeness from the time of our births, I never made the claim that Karim was like a brother to me. I knew too many brothers to say a thing like that. But I believed that somewhere beneath skin and blood and bone, somewhere beyond personality and reflex, somewhere deep within the marrow of our marrow, we were the same. And so nothing in either of our lives needed to be inexplicable to the other; it was just laziness or stubbornness that created occasional baffled moments between us. But supposing that wasn’t true...supposing there was something standing between us that neither of us could bulldoze our way through. I looked out into the gathering darkness and tried to imagine what I would feel if I ever lost Karim.
Utter, irreversible loneliness.
I stood up and shook my head to clear away those unasked-for thoughts. The breeze rustled through branches and I had the strong desire to put my arms around each haunted tree and weep for the ice-cold existence of ghosts I didn’t, even at that moment, really believe in. But what if, as I embraced a tree, a ghost was to make its presence known to me? There would be no stepping back then from the knowledge that this lonely limbo might await.
I turned and ran towards the house. The door opened and Karim stepped out, his hand seizing my wrist as I tried to push past him.
‘Don’t listen to them,’ he said fiercely. His hand gripped me tight.
I turned my wrist in his grip and caught his arm, the buckle of his watchstrap cutting into my palm.
‘What?’ he said. ‘Tell me.’
‘No, nothing.’
‘Rubbish.’ He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Don’t do that. You’ve started doing that. You disappear. One moment you’re with me, and then next you’ve gone off somewhere and I don’t know where your mind is taking you.’
‘I thought you were too busy looking at maps to notice.’
He gave me one of his exasperated looks. ‘No one’s ever too busy to know when their foot has gone to sleep or their throat is itching.’
‘Our friendship is an itchy throat?’ I didn’t know whether to be amused, annoyed or touched.
‘Don’t
disappear on me,’ he said it more softly. ‘Please don’t.’
I let go of his wrist and sat down, leaning against the brick exterior of the house. Karim had, of late, developed a taste for the dramatic. As if I could ever disappear on him when he knew me as well as he did, when he knew me well enough to finish almost any sentence that I started constructing in my head. I wanted to say that to him, but it seemed almost embarrassing; no, it seemed almost a betrayal of the trust we had in each other’s friendship to have to articulate such a thing. So I said it indirectly, in a way I knew he’d understand. ‘You’re such an idiot,’ I said, and didn’t need to look at him to know he was smiling.
When we boarded the train back to Karachi—after I hugged Uncle Asif and Aunty Laila goodbye with affection (I had meant to be more distant, but he grinned at me and she spread her arms wide and I forgot)—Karim, for once, didn’t retreat into the glowering silence that usually marked his physical propinquity to his father.
‘We had such a great time,’ he said, throwing himself on to the lower bunk of the compartment, having conveniently developed selective amnesia about the fuss he’d kicked up about going to stay on the farm in the first place. ‘Long walks, amazing climbing trees, the most succulent kinoos picked right off the branches. Look at my teeth! Chewing sugar cane has strengthened them. I saw a goat born. We climbed the cotton mountain but then we started sneezing. Tell him about dinner in the desert, Raheen.’
‘We had dinner in the desert,’ I said. And then I couldn’t resist. ‘Karim thought he heard a churail shrieking, ready to come and spirit us away, but then we ate the sand witch, crust and all.’
Uncle Ali rolled his eyes, but he was smiling too. ‘That reminds me. Raheen, your parents are having a party tomorrow. You kids can help with the hors-d’œuvres.’
‘Hello, Begum Ooh-de-la dripping diamonds in your nouveau riche way, would you like some horsed ovaries?’ I said, with a curtsy. ‘How’s that, Uncle Ali?’
‘I think the curtsy needs a little practice. But, Raheen, if anyone asks you anything about Asif’s brother’s wedding, just say Asif was very pleased with the news. And don’t elaborate.’
‘What’s with the nouveau riche line?’ Karim said. ‘Sonia’s parents fall into that category, according to our parents.’
‘And they have the solid gold taps in their bathroom to prove it. Don’t they?’ I turned to Uncle Ali for confirmation.
‘Well at least Sonia’s father doesn’t make fun of her mother all the time,’ Karim said. ‘At least he doesn’t think he can make decisions that will change all their lives without worrying about what anyone else in his family thinks.’
‘Karimazov, sshhhh!’
‘Karim, you’re making Raheen feel uncomfortable,’ Uncle Ali said. ‘So save it for later. Now go to sleep. Both of you.’
Uncle Ali turned off the light above Karim and my bunk bed and lay down to read his newspaper under the remaining light. When my father read the papers it was a noisy affair; paper rustled and crinkled, supplements fell out, the most interesting columns concluded on pages which could not be found until Aba lost interest and moved on to the next article. But with Uncle Ali, all was silent and orderly, and newsprint never smudged on to his fingers.
My leg dangled over the edge of the top bunk but Karim did not kick up his foot to protest the presence of my limb in his airspace. One of the women from the village had waxed my legs and massaged them with coconut oil that morning. I withdrew my leg from Karim’s line of sight and wondered how I could get Zia to see me bare-legged before the ugly stubble appeared.
‘We should go to the beach in the next day or two,’ Karim said.
‘Certes, my lord,’ I whispered down to him. Certes. An anagram for secret. I swung myself off the top bunk and lay down on his mattress, my body turned towards him, head propped on elbow, so that Uncle Ali wouldn’t be able to see the shapes of the words leaving my mouth. Something unfamiliar—confusion? incomprehension?—flashed in his eyes, and I found we were both shifting backward, widening the space between us. No, no, no, I thought. Karim and I can’t be awkward with each other.
‘You’re about to fall off, aren’t you?’ Karim said.
The bed was absurdly narrow. I nodded, considered getting up, realized that would only make things more awkward, and started laughing instead; I would have fallen off then if Karim hadn’t shot his hand forward and pulled me away from the brink.
‘What’s the secret?’ he said, releasing my wrist. As strangely as it appeared, the constraint between us had gone and we were now just lying beside each other as we had done all our lives.
‘What does Zia say about me?’
Karim rested his head on the pillow and folded his arms across his chest. ‘God, I’m sleepy,’ he said and closed his eyes.
‘In other words, Zia couldn’t be less interested and there’s no way you’re going to be the one to tell me that. Breathe if I’ve guessed correctly.’
He kicked me and turned his face to the wall. I poked him in the spine and he started snoring.
‘Raheen, I think my son’s trying to tell you to leave him alone.’
I kicked Karim in one final attempt to get a reaction, and then turned to face Uncle Ali. ‘So why didn’t you marry my mother?’ I said.
Uncle Ali looked at me the way someone wearing half-moon reading glasses might peer at something in the distance. I once heard Ami teasing him about that look, saying he only did it to draw attention to the fact that his eyesight was superb. Aunty Maheen never teased her husband, but Ami teased him all the time.
‘The music changed,’ he said.
I think the four of them chose that bit of imagery—the waltzing couples changing partners—long ago to avoid having to answer the kind of question I’d just asked. It was obvious why, though I hadn’t given it much thought before. Off the dance floor, synchrony cannot exist. What I really wanted Uncle Ali to tell me—what he really wasn’t going to tell me—was who was the first. Of the four of them, who was the first to decide to twirl away; who was the first, and who was the last?
‘Good thing the record got stuck on “repeat play” after that?’ It was meant to be a statement, but it came out as a question.
Uncle Ali folded up his newspaper—rather hastily, it seemed—and switched off the light. ‘Very good thing. Otherwise you and Karim wouldn’t be. ‘Night, sweetheart.’
I wanted to ask him what made them think everything had worked out for the best before Karim and I came along and proved justification enough, but I was suddenly too drowsy to speak. I pulled Karim’s pillow slightly closer to me and put my head down, grateful for being able to sleep spine to spine with Karim as I had done in the days when cameras in the hands of our parents formed the only memories we were ever to have of those earliest gestures of intimacy. Why grateful? Because sometimes you know you’re standing on a cusp, and you know that in knowing it you’ve gone past the cusp over to the other side, or at least almost entirely so, entirely except for one toe that still hangs on to childhood; one toe or one finger or one shoulder blade curving back to meet another shoulder blade which curves forward to meet yours in a reminder that, if you had wings, this, right here, is where they would sprout.
Can angels lie spine to spine?
If not, how they must envy us humans.
. . .
1970–71
He watched the donkey kicking up red-brown earth between the cottonfields, the fury of its hoofs most likely an expression of disdain for the laughing, twittering creatures behind it, but no matter how fast it ran, spraying wet mud on the cotton-pickers, it could not outpace the cart attached to it, the laughter and shrieks getting louder and more high-pitched as the animal gathered speed. Ears laid flat against its skull, and mouth foaming. Such a fine line between laughter and braying.
Ali clicked his tongue, and turned away. It was ignoble to think of one’s friends in that manner. Ignoble. Zafar would laugh if he heard him use the word. And Maheen would laugh
, too, because these days Zafar’s laughter made Maheen laugh, no matter what the cause. He stared gloomily down at the bruise on his thumb. Purple-yellow smudge beneath his nail.
When he looked up again Asif was emerging from the kinoo orchards and walking towards the dunes, the farm manager by his side gesticulating wildly. Asif barely seemed to notice the man as he took a long drag on his cigarette and surveyed his property from behind dark glasses with an air of satisfaction. Who would have thought Asif Marx of Oxford would turn into quite so contented a landowner within three years of returning home? Men who worked on the farm stepped off the path as he approached, their feet sinking in the wet soil of the cottonfields, eyes cast down. Ali wondered if New Year’s Eve meant anything to them.
He followed Asif’s progress through the field and to the sand dunes, where the old nomad woman raised her arms in greeting at his approach and called out to him in a dialect Ali couldn’t understand. But Asif took off his glasses and called back to her, and the nomad woman put her hand on her broad hips and laughed. Ali knew that Asif was going to tell her that, yes, it was all right for her tribe to stay on the dune which belonged to him by law and belonged to her tribe by the laws of tradition. For longer than anyone knew, Asif had told him the night before, the nomad tribe had made this dune part of their migratory patterns. And now some of them wanted to build mud huts and settle, but the villagers and the farm hands considered them untouchables. To tell them that Islam had no concept of untouchables would have been futile, Asif insisted. So instead he had chosen compromise: the nomads could stay as long as they drank water from their own wells, and did not mix with the villagers.
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