Kartography

by Kamila Shamsie

  ‘Vole,’ I said. ‘Damn vole.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Karim, our friend’s gone mad,’ Zia shouted over my shoulder. ‘She’s talking about voles.’

  ‘Get in the car and drive, Zia.’ Karim came up to me and brought his fist down on my shoulder. ‘Vole, huh? I thought you’d say “I rush cats”.’

  It’s a crush? Lord, no, I thought. If it’s a crush and nothing more, what must love feel like?

  ‘So are we picking up Sonia?’ I got into the passenger seat and passed a bunch of tapes back to Karim. He rejected tapes labelled ‘Grooooves’, ‘Selexions’ and ‘Mewzic Micks’ in favour of one marked ‘Vybs’.

  Zia snorted. ‘Her father’s gone mad. Won’t let her out of the house because he knows someone who died recently in Korangi or Orangi or some such area, and that’s made him completely paranoid about his darling daughter’s safety.’

  ‘It’s not that absurd, Zia,’ Karim said. ‘I mean, our parents made us leave the city, and they don’t even know anyone directly affected by what happened.’

  Zia made another dismissive sound and threw his cigarette butt out of the window. I could see it spark as it hit the asphalt. ‘Yeah, they made you leave because otherwise both of you would have kept wanting to go to the beach or the twins’ farm or some far-flung place and they just didn’t want to deal with the headache of always saying no. Believe me, I’ve driven my parents crazy the last few weeks with driving off for hours and not telling them where I’m going. But Sonia’s father’s not even letting her go as far as Boat Basin. And the really funny part of it is, this guy he knew who died, he fell off a bus. What the hell does that have to do with anything?’

  ‘Fell off a bus?’

  ‘That’s what I’m saying. He was going home from work, and he lived in some area that’s under curfew so there’s a window of about an hour or so in the evening when the curfew is lifted so that everyone can come home, right?’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I say so, Raheen. So, obviously, the buses at that hour are so full they almost topple over and this guy sees his bus and leaps on to it, except there’s no place to even hang on to outside, forget managing to get a foot inside, so he ends up hanging on to this guy who’s hanging on to the wide-open bus door which is flapping back and forth as the bus hurtles on and at one point the door swings and the guy holding on to the guy holding on to the door knocks his head against someone else and loses his grip and there’s another bus speeding past and dhuzhook! next thing you know Sonia’s father doesn’t want her leaving the house.’

  I couldn’t help laughing at the incongruity of it all, even though I knew that Sonia’s father didn’t like any of Sonia’s friends except Karim and me, so our absence must have been the real reason he forbade his daughter from hanging out with what he considered a ‘fast, precocious crowd’.

  Karim saw it similarly, but articulated it differently. ‘Someone died. Someone he knew. And I bet you never even thought of telling him you were sorry.’

  ‘Of course not. He’d just think I was trying to get into his good books.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Karim opened and closed a cassette cover repeatedly. ‘Don’t you think maybe there’s something wrong in us having such fun all the time when people are being killed every day in the poorer parts of town?’

  Zia rolled his eyes at Karim. ‘This is Karachi. We have a good time while we can, ‘cause tomorrow we might not be so lucky.’

  But he couldn’t have said that back in January ’87, could he? Did we already know that something had begun that perhaps none of us would live to see the end of? Perhaps. Although the ethnic fighting had broken out for the first time in my life in 1985, I cannot remember Karachi being a safe city even before that. When Alexander’s admiral, the Cretan Nearchus, reached Krokola he had to quell a mutiny among Alexander’s Krokolan subjects, who had killed the satrap appointed by Alexander to gather supplies for his forces. If Karachi and Krokola are one and the same, recorded instances of violence on its soil go back over twenty-three hundred years. And yet, it is the only place where I have ever felt utterly safe. Who among us has never been moved to tears, or to tears’ invisible counterparts, by mention of the word ‘home’? Is there any other word that can feel so heavy as you hold it in your mouth?

  I am trying to pass, like a needle, through the thread of narrative but my eye is distracted by what lies ahead.

  ‘Everything looks different,’ Karim said, leaning forward between the passenger’s seat and the driver’s, and looking out through the windscreen. ‘It should seem cold. By Karachi standards it’s cold, but compared with RYK it’s not. And arid. Everything looks arid, even the trees.’

  Everything did look different. I’m sure. Maybe my memory of Karim on the drive home from the train station isn’t false after all. Three weeks away from Karachi and I was noticing things that were generally just so much background: the plastic buckets in which flower-sellers stored bouquets of roses encircling the roundabout near the graveyard; the sign on Sunset Boulevard that said ‘Avoid Accidents Here’; the squat-walking street cleaners dodging traffic while sweeping dust and rubbish to the sides of the road; the carpet-sellers who spread their wares on pavements, with the choicest rugs draped above on the boughs of trees; on billboards, the Urdu letters spelling out English words; the illegal tinted glass fitted in cars with government licence plates. And, yes, Karim was right, the trees that looked so arid. I should have told him I agreed, but Zia was smirking at his remark.

  ‘Go and write a poem, Karim,’ I said, pushing him back so that he wouldn’t obstruct my view of Zia any longer. ‘Zee, where are we going?’

  ‘For halva puri. You know, that place we went that time when it rained.’

  ‘Oh. We promised Uncle Ali we wouldn’t go too far.’

  ‘Yeah, but he didn’t define what he meant by too far, did he?’ Zia winked. He had amazing eyelashes.

  ‘Well, fine, but you turned off too early from the road leading to the airport.’

  ‘No, I didn’t. I turned after the petrol pump.’

  ‘I don’t know about the petrol pump, but we should have passed the Chinese restaurant. Remember last time we went past there and Sonia started craving chicken corn soup even though it was six in the morning?’

  ‘Yes, but last time we got lost.’

  ‘We got lost after the Chinese restaurant. We worked that out on the way home.’

  Zia slowed the car and we looked up and down the road, which looked so wide after the little streets of RYK, and tried to find something familiar in the large, and largely hideous, houses behind their high boundary walls.

  ‘You’re right. OK, we’re lost again. Now what, Raheen?’

  ‘What did we do last time?’

  ‘Sonia asked for directions.’

  ‘So ask for directions.’

  ‘OK. What’s the name of the place?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’

  ‘Shit.’

  Zia drove on, frowning, and I watched him chew his lip.

  ‘Wasn’t it something beginning with a “T”?’ he ventured after a few seconds.

  ‘Yes. It was. And with two syllables.’

  ‘Tata’s? Tito’s? Toto’s?’

  ‘Toto sounds familiar.’

  ‘It does. It does sound familiar. Toto’s. It’s Toto’s.’

  ‘Or maybe we’re just thinking of The Wizard of Oz.’

  ‘Shit.’

  Karim finally decided to join the conversation. ‘It’s Shahrah-e-Faisal.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s not.’ Zia shook his head.

  ‘The road leading to the airport. I just remembered. Its name is Shahrah-e-Faisal. How could we forget that?’

  ‘I didn’t forget,’ I said. 7 haven’t forgotten.’ Hadn’t forgotten we always called it ‘the road leading to the airport’. And the year before, stuck in a traffic jam, we had come up with: the road leading to the oar trip; the road lead gin t
o the rapt roi; O, I dare thee, old gnat, hit parrot; pin the aorta or glide to death.

  And how do you glide to death, Karim?

  If you don’t pin my aorta we might find out.

  So what need was there for him to call the road by its official name, when he’d had no part in the naming, when he had no memories stored in the curves of its official consonants? We should have stories in common, I found myself thinking. We should have stories, and jokes no one understands, and memories that we know will stay alive because neither of us will let the other forget; we should have all that when we’ve just spent so much time together in a context unfamiliar to all our friends, and to some extent we do, but over and above the jokes and stories and memories, he has maps and I don’t. He has maps and I don’t understand why.

  ‘Zia, Karim’s decided he’s going to be a cartographer.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Map-maker,’ Karim said. ‘A Karachi map-maker. Have you ever seen a proper map of this city? Not just one of those two-page things that you see in tourist books, but a real, proper map of the whole city?’

  ‘No.’ Zia shrugged. ‘But why would I have looked for one?’

  ‘Well, one might have come in handy right now,’ Karim said. ‘You have no idea where you are, do you?’

  Zia swung the car around. ‘There are really only two places you can ever be. Lost or not. When lost you do a youee until you’re not. Which is what we’re about to do. How about ditching halva puri and going to the airport for coffee instead?’

  ‘What’s a youee?’

  ‘U-turn, Ra, U-turn. Arré, yaar, two weeks on a farm and you’ve fallen behind on the local ling.’

  That stung, whether he intended it to or not. I felt desperately uncool and out of step.

  ‘Strap her cargo,’ Karim said. ‘Crop rag hearts.’

  ‘Huh?’ Zia frowned.

  ‘Go rap her carts.’ I smiled at Karim.

  ‘Chop Ra’s garter.’

  ‘What the hell...?’ Zia said. ‘What? Is this another one of your...what’s that word thing called?’

  ‘Anagram,’ Karim said.

  ‘Nag a ram,’ I shot back. We grinned, enjoying the sound of that.

  ‘Nag a ram. Nag-nag-nag nag-nagaram. Nag-a-ra-a-am,’ Karim sang, drumming his hands on my shoulder.

  And, just like that, life was cool again.

  . . .

  My litany of Karachi winter characteristics runs something like this: dry skin; socks; peanuts roasted in their shells and bought by the pao in bags made of newspaper; peaches that you twist just so to separate them into halves, flesh falling cleanly off seed; the silence of no fan and no air conditioner; hibiscus flowers; shawls; days at the beach (which involve a litany of their own: salted fish air; turtle tracks; shouts of warning from the fishermen just before toes tangle with their near-invisible lines; fishermen’s baskets full of dead fish; fishermen’s nets drawn in to shore; warm sand; wet sand; feet slippery on rock moss; jeans rolled up as we wade, and rolled down again heavy with salt and sea; shells; sparks from the barbecue; the concentrated colours of sunset; stars; the rings of sand on the bathtub; the fog of mirrors in the bathroom; the smell of salt on skin as we fall asleep, despite the earlier soap and scrubbing; the forgetting of everything that bothered us at the start of the day; the sheer childhood of it all). But, really, for Karachi high society, winter is about envelopes.

  Or, rather, about the invitations inside the envelopes. They start to appear, in twos and threes, in early November, and by New Year every house has a shrunken mirror. That is absurdly oblique. I mean, the invitation cards get pushed into those crevices between the dressing-table mirror and its frame, encroaching on the space that exists for reflection. This is true of invitations to parties; the wedding invitations are another matter entirely. Dholkis, mehndis, mayouns, milads, sham-e-rangs, ganas, shadi receptions, valimas—among the absurdly extravagant there is a card for each occasion (except the actual wedding ceremony itself, which hardly anyone attends) and the envelopes that arrive are so bloated with demands on your time that they cannot squeeze into cracks between wood and glass and must have their own space on the dressing-table top to lie back, engorged and insolent.

  I have already invoked the Ghutnas; the Karachi Knees, remember? They are perennial creatures, but most in their element during the winter. It was during a winter wedding that my mother first named them, although really she deserves little credit herself; Aunty Runty all but presented Ami with the name on a platter.

  ‘Oh Yaso, Yaso,’ Aunty Runty sighed, coming upon my mother at a mehndi. ‘Can’t handle, darling, can’t.’

  My mother stepped back. Aunty Runty was swaying, and her cigarette was within dangerous proximity to my mother’s heirloom sari. ‘Can’t what, Rukhsana?’ My mother is the only person I know who refuses to make use of the nickname that was bestowed on her former classmate when she married the dipsomaniacal Bunty.

  Aunty Runty took a deep breath and held one hand up as though silencing a gathered assembly. ‘Can’t take the social scene. Every night, people out drinking until three, four in the morning. Drinking, drinking, they fall on the street, ghutnay chhil gaye, yaar, yes, skin peels off knees and yet they drink on. Can’t. And yet, what to do? Have to show up, be seen, let people know you’re alive so they’ll invite you to tomorrow’s party. Yaar, can’t take the scene, but have to peel knees, have to chhilo ghutnay, have to be seen to be invited.’

  In the days and years after that, the term Ghutna became a euphemism used both as an adjective to describe a particularly social social ‘do’ and a noun to refer to the people who threw themselves into the socializing. For instance, ‘And how was last night’s party? Was it a Ghutna evening?’ my mother might ask one of her friends.

  ‘Oh, the Ghutnas were out in full force. Falling and peeling, falling and peeling, scrambling up the social ladder and falling and peeling. I tell you, the place was just awash with blood.’

  ‘And how are your own knees?’

  ‘Raw, darling, raw.’

  Karim and I always encouraged our parents to go to as many par ties as they could bear. We loved the morning-after parodies. But best of all were parties thrown by his parents or mine, because then we could watch the absurdity up close and, between laughs, pause to admire the elegance and the aplomb of it all while itching to grow up and have lives just like our parents’ lives. The first time I reconsidered that aspiration was at the party my parents threw the day Karim and I got back from Rahim Yar Khan.

  Karim and his parents were the first to arrive, both Aunty Maheen and Karim carrying buckets of roses. ‘They were just so beautiful,’ Aunty Maheen cried out, as she ascended the stairs to the ‘upstairs study’, where my mother was trying to unwind after the hectic party preparations and my father was gamely attempting to aid the process by playing ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’ on the hand-held, battery-powered organ he’d given me for my birthday. I was sitting on the arm of his chair, pulling each of his ear lobes in turn in time to the beat.

  ‘And absurdly cheap,’ Aunty Maheen continued, stepping into the room. ‘So I bought them, buckets and all, from the phoolwalla by the roundabout.’ She bent to place a bucket on the ground, and Uncle Ali whisked it out of her hand.

  ‘Maheen, the bottom’s muddy. You’ll ruin the carpet.’ He placed it outside on the marble floor, gesturing Karim to do the same with his bucket.

  ‘Muddy bottom,’ my father sang, plunking out the tune of ‘Stormy Weather’.

  ‘They’re gorgeous, Maheen. Thanks,’ Ami said. ‘Ali, don’t stand there looking cross. Pour yourself a drink. I refuse to start hosting duties until the actual guests arrive.’

  Uncle Ali looked at the glass table in the centre of the room, with its vase overspilling with flowers, and frowned. ‘You don’t have nearly enough vases for that absurd amount of roses, do you?’

  ‘Who needs vases?’ My mother stood up, leaned outside and plucked a rose from the bucket. ‘We’ll make everyo
ne do the tango.’ She held the rose up horizontally. ‘Like in Some Like It Hot.’ She snipped off the thorns with Aba’s pocketknife, and held the rose to Uncle Ali’s mouth. For a moment he continued glaring and then, snap, his teeth closed around the rose stem.

  ‘Olé!’ Karim and I shouted.

  ‘Duet, duet,’ Aunty Maheen said, and sat down next to my father. ‘One, two, three.’ With more regard for volume than tune, they started bashing out ‘Chopsticks’ on the organ, while Ami and Uncle Ali twirled around the room in dance, Uncle Ali’s feet nimbly avoiding the perils of dancing with a sari. The rose transferred itself from Uncle Ali’s mouth to my mother’s just as the tune ended, even though their cheeks didn’t ever quite touch as they danced.

  ‘Encore, encore,’ Karim said when they finished.

  ‘Absolutely not.’ Ami collapsed on the sofa and slumped against Aba’s shoulder. ‘I’m exhausted. You’re married to an old hag, Zaf.’ She tucked the rose behind my father’s ear.

  ‘I’ve got the old hag on my hands,’ Aba sang.

  Aunty Maheen handed my mother the discarded thorns from the ashtray, and Ami jabbed Aba’s neck with them. Uncle Ali cheered her on.

  My analysis of the photograph at Ali and Maheen’s wedding was clearly embarrassingly out of step with reality. I looked at my father’s hands. Perilously close to being ‘delicate ‘. Some other M, some other Z. Had to be. And if not, so what? Really, so what?

  When the doorbell rang to signal the ‘actual guests’ had started to arrive, Ami said, ‘Oh, can’t we ignore them?’ and I held my breath, hoping she would. But, of course, even as she said that she was already walking towards the door, stopping first to check with Aunty Maheen that the rose exchange hadn’t smudged her lipstick.