Kartography

by Kamila Shamsie

  How many walls can one nation erect and sustain, Ali wondered. Is it possible to circumnavigate one wall without crashing into another? He squinted up at the sun, and pressed his thumbnail to test the level of pain.

  Panes of glass reflected blinding sunlight, but Maheen knew there were faces pressed against the windows of the house, watching Zafar following her into the back garden, hoping for an indiscretion that could enliven coffee parties in its retelling.

  ‘Hey, gorgeous.’ Zafar caught the pulloo of her sari and tugged. She twirled towards him, the train of the white sari diaphanous between them. Her hands pressed against his shoulders, and pushed. Zafar fell back against the grass, laughing. Maheen looked up at the windows again.

  ‘There’s no one there.’ Zafar’s bare feet drummed against her ankles. ‘Come here, come on.’

  ‘No, darling, don’t be silly. Someone could be watching.’

  Zafar lit up a cigarette. He looked like a panther after a rainstorm, with his black turtleneck, catlike eyes, hair slicked down to gleaming, and the assurance with which he reclined on the grass. ‘We’re engaged. We’re allowed to be slightly indiscreet.’

  Maheen kicked off her shoes and sat opposite Zafar, her feet pressed against his. ‘There’s enough talk about me as it is, jaanoo, so why add impropriety to the list of my failings?’

  Zafar raised himself slightly from his supine position. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Last week, at the Sind Club. Rukhsana heard your boss singing your praises. Born to be an ad man, he said. Pity about his fiancée. Number of our clients won’t like working with someone who has a Bengali wife. Still, months to go before the wedding. Maybe he’ll see the light by then.’

  Zafar pivoted round so that he was sitting beside Maheen. He put an arm around her shoulder, a cigarette dangling between his fingers. ‘So, I’ll change jobs.’

  ‘You’ll find that attitude everywhere, Zaf.’

  ‘OK, so I’ll change fiancées.’ He laughed and buried his face in her hair. His hand touched her midriff, between sari and skin, and Maheen covered it with her own hand, pressing his fingers to her flesh for a moment before pulling his hand away, and slapping it lightly. He made a sound of mock exasperation, the fingers of his other hand brushing lightly against her neck as he brought his cigarette to her mouth so she could inhale the headrush. ‘Silly girl. Why do we need the rest of the world?’

  Maheen leaned against him. It was this she loved most in him: he could say everything but love was irrelevant, and come so close to making it seem true that when she looked up at the shifting clouds she almost did not see them pulling apart, rending into pieces, wisps of smoke spiralling...

  ...round the dining table cries of ‘Happy New Year’ stilled as Asif stood up, clinking a fork against his glass.

  ‘I’m too drunk,’ he said. ‘And I’ve been an appalling host. Plus, I’m a decadant feudal, as Zafar so eloquently reminded us all last night. I will now pause so that you can all contradict me.’

  There was silence from the eleven guests around the table, save for muffled sounds behind hands clamped over lips to prevent laughter.

  ‘Well, if that’s your attitude, none of you are invited back for New Year’s Eve next year,’ Asif said, grandly, waving one arm in the air and tangling it among the streamers that trailed down from the chandelier. ‘Oh, hell. Zaf, you do the toast.’ He fell back into his chair, ripping streamers in two.

  Zafar stood up, and held up a glass. ‘Ladies and gentlemen and Laila...’ Cheers and catcalls rang from the crowd around the table, and Laila stood up imperiously and blew a raspberry at him.

  Zafar winked at her, and continued. ‘Before we move on to dessert——’

  ‘Ice cream,’ Rukhsana shouted, leaning across Asif to prong a fork into Zafar’s arm. ‘I want ice cream.’

  ‘Isn’t ice cream a sign of sexual frustration?’ Laila said.

  ‘Nonsense,’ Yasmin said expansively. ‘That’s just a rumour started by those polygamous diabetics.’

  ‘Bastards, the lot of them!’ Maheen yelled.

  ‘Maheen’s drunk!’ Yasmin said gleefully, putting an arm around her best friend’s shoulder.

  ‘Everyone’s drunk,’ Asif said, ripping up streamers and aiming them into wine glasses around the table.

  ‘I want to get more drunk,’ Laila’s fiancé said. ‘Hurry up with your toast, Zafar.’

  ‘Well, if Rukhsana wouldn’t interrupt...’ Zafar said.

  ‘Rukhsana’s a teetotaller,’ Yasmin said. ‘She must be ignored.’

  ‘Guess who’s been doing everything but ignoring Rukhsana? Bunty!’

  Whistles all around the table.

  ‘Come on, Rukhsana, grab him quick,’ Maheen said. ‘I would, if I wasn’t engaged to Thing here.’

  ‘Please, Rukhsana, grab him quick.’ Zafar clasped his hands together. ‘Else she’ll leave me for him.’

  ‘Rukhsana and Bunty. Sounds good together.’

  ‘Sounds awful,’ Ali said, finally catching the mood of the party after three days of near-silence. ‘We’ll have to call him Bukhsana. He looks like a Bukhsana. Rukhsana and Bukhsana.’

  ‘Or Runty and Bunty,’ Maheen said.

  ‘I’m no runt!’ Rukhsana objected.

  ‘Yes, she is.’

  Everyone started thumping on the table. ‘Runty! Runty!’

  ‘Oh shut up and let Zafar propose the toast.’

  ‘Right.’ Zafar cleared his throat. ‘I’d like to formally welcome 1971 to our homeland of Pakistan. This will be the year that signals the end of bachelorhood for me. And the end of divorceehood for Laila. Thank God she got rid of that first guy; we can all say it now. Maheen—I’m a lucky bastard, and I know you won’t let me forget that. And if any of the beautiful single women around this table want to join the wedding bandwagon, allow me to recommend my friend Ali.’

  Ali used his fork to catapult an olive at Zafar.

  Zafar caught the olive in his mouth, and continued: ‘So, 1971, these are the favours we ask of you: may the miniskirt get more mini, may long sideburns go out of fashion, and may something else happen that I’m really not sober enough to think of. Anyone, we need a third thing that we want to happen. May...may...’

  ‘May we not have civil war,’ someone shouted.

  ‘He mentioned politics.’ Laila pointed an accusing finger at the offending party. ‘Into the buffalo swamp with him.’

  Nine people stood up, and ran after the fleeing man.

  Yasmin and Maheen were left at the table.

  ‘May we not have civil war,’ Yasmin said, and moved to clink glasses with Maheen. Maheen’s glass tilted over and red wine streamed down both women’s arms.

  Streamers still wrapped around his arm, Asif pointed up at the bark of the gnarled tree in the back garden. ‘Well, look at that. Zafar, you old romantic.’

  The house guests pressed around him, peering up through the dark, buffalo swamps quite forgotten. ‘Oh, that’s so sweet!’ Laila said. She slapped her fiancé’s arm. ‘You’ve never done anything like that for me.’

  Zafar shook his head. ‘As if it wasn’t bad enough that you abandon me in the orchards at night, Asif, now you have to embarrass me in front of all our friends. Which of your poor minions had to do that?’

  ‘You’re denying it’s your handiwork?’ Asif roared with laughter. ‘No weaseling out of this one, Romeo. Oh, and here comes the much-loved Maheen.’

  Maheen and Yasmin walked arm in arm through the grass, and the crowd parted to let Maheen see the initials carved into the tree’s bark.

  ‘Zafar!’ Something so intimate in the way she said his name that all their friends smiled at one another, not without a trace of wistfulness, and drew away.

  ‘It wasn’t...’ Zafar started to say, looking at Asif.

  But Maheen’s arms were around his neck, and Asif was walking away, so Zafar never finished the sentence.

  Is this a life sentence, or will I wake up one day and find I�
�m free of her? Ali twirled the stem of his glass between his fingers and tried not to think of that look in Maheen’s eyes when she put her arms around Zafar’s neck.

  ‘I know you want to be alone, but I’m joining you all the same,’ Yasmin said, coming to stand beside Ali on the balcony, which overlooked the back garden. She took his hand in hers, and inspected the bruise beneath his thumb. ‘Must have hurt,’ she said. ‘Hammer?’

  Ali nodded. ‘It was dark. Missed the chisel, caught my thumb. How did you know it was me?’

  Yasmin shivered in the cold, and put her hands into Ali’s jacket pocket. ‘Zafar’s too lazy. And I saw the look on your face when Maheen put her arms around Zaf. What made you do it?’

  Ali took off his jacket and placed it around her shoulders. ‘Don’t know. Anger, love, frustration, all of the above. I hate emotions I can’t control. Hacking away at a bit of wood seemed a good way to release all that bottled-up stuff.’

  ‘You should have told me you were doing it,’ Yasmin said. ‘I would have helped.’

  Ali raised an eyebrow. ‘Why?’

  ‘Were you thinking of making some kind of amorous advances towards me about three months ago?’

  ‘No...I mean, it’s not to say I would have any objection...I mean, you are... What? What’s wrong?’

  Yasmin leaned a head against his shoulder. ‘Bugger,’ she said.

  Ali regarded her bowed head with curiosity. Among all the women he knew, Yasmin was the only one he would really call a friend. More than that, she knew him in ways that constantly surprised him. She was probably the only person who would even consider it possible that controlled, aloof Ali could love Maheen enough to gouge her initial, and that of his best friend, into a tree. But why she was leaning her head against his shoulder and releasing a long stream of expletives he could not begin to fathom.

  If she stopped cursing, Yasmin knew she’d start crying. The bastard, the bastard, she said, losing the words in the folds of Ali’s shirt. No one else but Ali whose shirt she’d feel so comfortable weeping into. Zafar, you bastard. He had pulled her on to the dance floor at the Nasreen Room, just as summer was ending and Karachi’s evenings began to invite dancing and festivities again. Pulled her on to the dance floor, black shirt moulded tight to his chest, and said, ‘Don’t you think it would be nice if sometimes we saw each other without seventeen dozen other people around?’ A ‘yes’ seemed too simple an answer, too girlish, so instead Yasmin went the unfamiliar route of coquetry, fluttered her eyelashes, which he couldn’t see in the dark, and said, ‘I don’t know that my parents would approve,’ the laugh in her voice meant to convey what he should have already known: Yasmin was so in the habit of making her parents disapprove that to conform to their expectation would almost constitute filial betrayal. But Zafar’s face went still when he heard her and he nodded curtly and led her off the floor. ‘Good. Good answer. It’s just that I think Ali might put that kind of question to you, and I wanted to make sure you knew how to handle the situation. Reputation, Yasmin, can’t toy around with your reputation.’

  ‘Are you crying?’ Ali said. ‘It’s not that I object, but there’s a handkerchief in my breast pocket which might come in handy.’

  Yasmin stepped back and blew her nose vigorously on the piece of cloth Ali proffered. ‘No one will ever marry me,’ she declared.

  Ali looked out towards the garden. He could hear Maheen’s laughter, though she was somewhere just out of sight. ‘I was thinking the very thing.’

  Without warning, Yasmin’s hand stung across his cheekbone.

  Ali put a hand to his cheek, and smiled. ‘I meant, I was thinking it about myself.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Yasmin, mortified. ‘Oh.’ The pause that followed seemed to require her to say something further, so she said, ‘I’d marry you.’

  And somehow, as they stood and looked at each other, Zafar and Maheen’s laughter floating up from an unseen part of the garden below, they knew they’d re-tell this mad, fumbled, impossible, tear-filled, bruised, cold, miraculous non-proposal scene to their children and grandchildren, and the most absurd part of the story would be how easily it might never have happened.

  . . .

  Karachi’s air was heavy. I could feel it press down on me as I alighted on to the platform, and I had to open my mouth and imagine there was a Hoover in my lungs in order to inhale the amount of oxygen that had flowed through my nasal passages with one swift sniff in the rural atmosphere of Rahim Yar Khan. So the way we breathe is habit, I thought, and paused to wonder what was not habit. What, in my life, would I never forget, never unlearn, never attempt to do without?

  ‘Home,’ Karim said, jumping out of the compartment doorway with no regard for the steps.

  When we were children, Karim always disregarded steps, or disregarded as many of them as he could. He leapt through the world, and not always cleanly. There were twisted ankles, bruised knees and, once, exposed bone, but none of these deterred him from throwing himself at the wind. When I try to understand how memories happen, Karim’s leaps confound me. By which I mean, I cannot remember faces as they used to be before becoming what they were when I last saw them. When, for instance, I remember Sonia at thirteen I do not see a long-haired girl whose body is just beginning to curve into breathtaking beauty. I do not see her at all. But I sense her, I know—I remember—what it is like to be thirteen and angular and standing beside her. When I try harder for a visual image, old photographs come to mind. Sonia leaning on my shoulder as I lean against the orange shutters of the tuck shop; Sonia’s face a scream as Zia holds up a lizard to her face; Sonia and Karim playing tug-of-war with her dupatta. But I cannot move those images forward even one second in time. How Sonia looked when the shutters opened without warning and we both tumbled back; how she looked when she realized the lizard was plastic; how she looked when the dupatta tore. I remember these things happening, I know they happened, but I cannot bring her face, or any of our faces, into focus as I recall the moment. So I want to say, visual memories overwrite themselves. The part of my brain that stores memories of Sonia keeps updating her face so that I can recall it clearly only as it was when we last met. And yet, I know exactly how Karim looked when wheeling through the air. I know how he looked doing it at seven, at ten, at fourteen.

  And, yes, I know how he looked jumping on to the platform at thirteen. Not beautiful, though the notion of a leaping boy is beautiful. Some growth that still hadn’t earned the right to be called a moustache had started to occupy the place between his nose and lip; his face and stomach still clung on to the previous year’s puppy fat but his limbs were beginning to go gangly; his ears...at any age, Karim’s ears were unfortunate. Don’t get the idea that Karim stood out by virtue of his awkward looks; most of the boys I was in class with were going through a similar phase at the time.

  Except Zia, you might expect me to say.

  I keep forgetting how crazy I was about him then. I forget that, and I remember other things which surely can’t be real memories. For instance, the drive home from the train station. I seem to think I remember Karim looking out of the window as we snaked through the congested parts of Karachi with its colourful buses maniacally racing one another, men selling fruit and vegetables from wooden carts on the side of the road, deformed beggars dextrously making their way through traffic, laundry flapping from washing lines on the latticed balconies of low-rise apartment buildings. But I can’t really remember that, can I, because even if Karim had already started imagining what it would be like to be a stranger in Karachi, even if he were jumping ahead of his own life and seeing the city with the eyes of someone who views Karachi as contrast rather than norm, I had no inkling of it at all. And so I would not have paid any attention to buses or beggars or balconies, and I would not have paid any attention to Karim paying attention to them. I would, I’m quite sure, have been thinking of Zia instead.

  He was waiting for us at my house, when Uncle Ali’s driver dropped me off. Something wobbly happened to
my knees when I saw his car parked outside. He was waiting at my house, not Karim’s. He was waiting for me.

  ‘Oh yes, I forgot to tell you. Zia’s whisking the two of you off for breakfast. I told him we’d stop at your house first, Raheen, on our way back from the train station. I’ll call your parents at work and tell them we’ve arrived safely. But promise you won’t go too far away. Things have got better, but they’re not OK yet.’

  Karim and Zia greeted each other with whoops of delight and high-fives while I struggled to pull my suitcase out of the trunk of the car. Uncle Ali rolled down his car window and yelled at the boys and they both came running to give me a hand. Zia smelled of Drakkar Noir. He hoisted my suitcase up on to his head and held it there with one hand while swaying up the driveway as though he were a village woman bearing an earthenware matka full of water. He was so absorbed in being entertaining he had quite forgotten to say hello, let alone that it was good to see me. Uncle Ali gave me a look that seemed almost sympathetic, and then his car drove off.

  ‘Zia, I’ll take that inside. I need to use the Louvre in any case.’ Karim took the suitcase and disappeared indoors, and I was left alone with Zia.

  ‘Hi, Raheen. Suno, if you want to take a shower or something before we go for halva puri, no problem. Karim and I can hang about for a few minutes.’

  I looked down at my crumpled shirt and the caked farm mud that clung to the hem of my jeans.

  Zia laughed. ‘No, I don’t mean you look as though you need to. You look fine. Really good, in fact. Your parents are at work, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, a voice in my head shouting ohmygodohmygodohmygod. ‘Why?’

  He pulled a packet of cigarettes out of the pocket of his denim jacket. ‘Don’t want them to see me smoking.’

  I watched him unwrap the cellophane sheath, flip the packet open with his thumb and turn one cigarette upside down in the pack, for good luck. He took a box of matches out of his pocket, attempted to strike the flint against his shoe, and then realized he was wearing sneakers. He grinned, embarrassed. ‘Good thing you’re the only one around to see that. Which do you think is cooler? A box of matches or a lighter? I mean, obviously if the lighter is a Zippo, that wins. But if your choice is those transparent, brightly coloured lighters or a box of matches with a Ferrari pictured on the box, then which?’