‘They didn’t hurt you or anything, did they?’ I said.
Zia shrugged. ‘Nah. I mentioned Uncle Wahab’s name.’
‘He’s been suspended on corruption charges.’
‘I know that, Karim. That’s why they didn’t let me out at the first mention of the first syllable of his name. But they’re underlings, you know, and everyone knows the suspension won’t last. They wouldn’t let me sleep, though. Shook me awake when I tried heading into the land of Z. I tried mentioning another few names to them, of friends of my father’s, but I think I overdid my list of connections and they were sure I was making it up.’ He pulled up to Tony Paan Shop—which was not called Tony Paan Shop at all, but had somehow acquired the name even though no one named Tony worked there—and beeped his horn to signal for a packet of cigarettes.
A young boy standing outside the shop (more a cubbyhole with shutters than a shop) raised his hand to acknowledge the signal and Zia said to Karim, ‘Pay him when he brings it, will you. I’ve left my wallet at home.’
Karim held out his empty wallet. ‘Had to give Saleem Yousuf everything I had.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re months away from turning fourteen and the minimum driving age is eighteen.’
‘Oh, shit.’ Zia leaned out and yelled to the paan shop boy: ‘I don’t have any money.’
The boy came over with a single cigarette. ‘Take this.’
Zia looked at the brand name stamped on the cigarette. ‘I can’t smoke this.’
Karim made a noise of disgust and got out of the car. ‘I’ll borrow some money from Altaf.’
Seconds later, Zia lit up and sat back in his seat. ‘Your turn, Karim. What really happened?’
‘Can you drive us home?’ I said. Tony who wasn’t Tony was pulling down the shutters of his shop, and even the beggars had gone home—or gone away—for the night.
‘Good thinking.’ Zia smiled, and for the first time since the gun shots I remembered I was in love with him.
He started the car again and as we headed towards my house Karim told us why Zia had been treated like a criminal for having a bullet-marked car. There had been a series of burglaries in Phase V, where we all lived, in the preceding weeks, and the police had been unable to apprehend the perpetrators. (The Saleem Yousuf lookalike told Karim this in a mixture of Urdu and Punjabi but he said ‘perpetrators’ in English, pronouncing it as two words: perpa traitors.) Earlier that evening the dacoits had struck again, but this time their getaway car was spotted. The car was red. So the police alerted all the armed guards who were employed to protect the wealthiest houses in the neighbourhood.
‘What exactly does “alerted” mean?’ Karim asked the policeman.
The policeman smiled. ‘We said, if you see a red car, going fast, with two people in the front seat, shoot them. We advised shooting at the tyres, so that the car would stall, but, you know, some of these guards don’t have much skill at marksmanship. Also, they get quite bored, so any chance for excitement... Anyway, one of the guards told us he had shot a red car, near the Sheikh’s palace, which had two people in the front seat. That’s how we knew your cousin was lying to us about being alone. We couldn’t let him go until we knew the truth, just in case he was involved with the thefts. But, of course, if you say a girl was with him...that explains things.’
‘That’s absurd,’ Zia said, pulling up to my gate. ‘It’s a Mercedes. Since when do dacoits drive around in a Mercedes?’
. . .
When bullets have missed you by inches, you should assume you’ve expended your quota of good luck for the night. All the same, I was keeping my fingers crossed as we drove home, hoping my parents were still at the beach, or that they’d returned, exhausted, and gone to sleep without noticing my absence. But when Zia turned on to my street, there was no mistaking Aba standing on the boundary wall, binoculars trained on the Mercedes. Only when we pulled up in front of the gate, just inches away from him, did he lower the binoculars and call out in the direction of the house, ‘It’s them, Yasmin! Phone the others.’
‘I’ll take the blame,’ Zia whispered to me. ‘Get out and explain. Give whatever version you want.’
I was half-convinced he’d drive away instead, which is why I kept sitting in the car, forcing my father to lower himself from the wall and come over to us.
He walked around to Zia’s side, and didn’t lean down to look in, but stood straight, drumming his fingers on the roof of the car. Zia, Karim and I looked at one another, uncertain of how to proceed.
‘Well, he’s your father,’ Zia whispered finally.
‘You’re sitting closer to him,’ I replied.
In the end, I think it was the irritation of that drumming sound rather than any chivalric impulse that made Zia poke his head out of the window. ‘Sorry, Uncle. Got excited about having this car. Mercedes, Uncle Zafar. Could you have resisted going for a spin when you were young?’
‘Oh, very smooth, Zia,’ Karim muttered from the back seat.
Zia tried again. ‘Sorry, really. But back in one piece. If Raheen would just get out, I wouldn’t hold you up any longer. Altaf’s behind us, see? He can drop Karim home and I’ll drive back to my place and then we can all go to sleep, because it is late, I know, and we have school tomorrow and so if Raheen would just get out...’
Aba’s hand reached in, pulled the key out of the ignition and pointed towards the house. ‘Yes, sir, absolutely, Uncle. My parents aren’t still at the beach, are they?’
By this time my mother had come outside, and walked around to my side of the car. Karim groaned. I suddenly realized why Zia had wanted me to get out so that he could drive off. I continued looking straight ahead, so I didn’t see Ami’s expression as she realized what the bullet holes were, but I heard her gasp.
‘Where were you when this happened?’ she asked me, pointing to the bullet holes.
‘Right here,’ I replied, from the passenger seat.
The looks we place on our parents’ faces when we show them the jagged evidence that we are living in violent times, no escape from it. No mere fluke that it came our way, no, not a fluke but something closer to probability, something closer to the roll of a die. Those looks that we have never seen until that moment, but we know they’ve seen them in their imaginations, their dreams, in their mirrors that time last year when we were late coming home from school because there seemed no harm in loitering around the school yard and then there seemed no harm in stopping for sugar-cane juice halfway between departure point and destination. How do they forgive us every time, I wondered, as my father came round to my side of the car, his expression mirroring my mother’s before he even saw the bullet holes; how have they forgiven us already?
Aba leaned through the window to hug me, one hand smacking the back of my head while the other one gripped my shoulder. ‘My baby,’ he said. ‘My baby.’
‘I’m fine, it’s fine.’ For the first time in my life I felt I needed to be the adult, reassuring my father that the world was still in order. But how could the world be in order if I was that one doing the reassur ing? Crack a joke, Aba. Issue a command. Tell me nothing like this will happen again.
But he did none of these things, just held on to me, until Ami pulled him away and said, ‘It’s OK, darling.’ I don’t know which one of us she was speaking to, but it got my father to stand up straight and it got me to climb out of the car. When I explained what had happened Aba put one arm around me and another around Karim, reassuring rather than asking for reassurance this time, but Ami merely took Zia by the shoulder and said, ‘Do you realize how lucky you are that I’m too relieved to be really angry?’ I was completely mortified, of course, but Zia didn’t hold it against me, just said, ‘Yes, Aunty. Sorry, Aunty. Maybe I should call my parents.’
As we were walking towards the house, Ami put a hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Why is it that the only thing you resemble me in is your wilfulness?’
I looked at Aba and then at Zia. �
��And your weakness for gorgeous men,’ I said.
She started to laugh, then forced a stern look on to her face. ‘You’re still in disgrace. Don’t think this matter is over,’ she said, in a voice that suggested terrible rules being prepared to curtail my freedom. I was hardly reassured when she put an arm around me and kissed me on the top of the head. My mother had been sufficiently wilful as a teenager to know exactly how wilful teenagers needed to be handled, and we both knew that a gentle word of admonishment would have as little effect on me as it would have had on her some twenty-five years ago. She left me to ponder the suffering I would have to endure and quickened her pace to catch up with Karim and whisper something that made him smile and look back at me.
Of course Karim wasn’t in disgrace at all, but he was hardly the kind of boy to sit around looking chipper while his two friends were awaiting punishment, so when his parents and Zia’s parents were called and all of us made to sit in the upstairs study to await their arrival, he didn’t gloat or look satisfied but bit his lip and looked as nervous as Zia and I did. It wasn’t long afterwards that we heard Aba open and close the front door, and then open and close it again. There was some conversation that was too soft for us to hear, and then Uncle Ali’s voice demanded, in a raised but unnaturally even tone, ‘For how long do we put up with this kind of thing?’ I remember thinking that unfair. We’d never driven off at night in a stolen car and got shot at before.
Before anyone could answer Uncle Ali’s question, Zia’s father had barrelled into the study, where he picked Zia up by the collar and shook him wordlessly. Zia did nothing more than look down at the floor, but when I saw his father’s face contorted in the manner of someone who’s trying to remember how to cry I recalled that Zia’s brother had been killed by a stray bullet when he was a toddler, back in the days when stray bullets made front-page news.
Zia turned red and extricated himself from his father’s grip. ‘Let’s go, Dad. It’s late,’ he said, and with a final apology to my parents Zia left, his father two paces behind him.
‘If they didn’t spoil him so much,’ said Ami, with a sigh. ‘Still, I understand the impulse.’
Zia never talked about the brother he never knew and the only time I tried to bring up the subject, he said: ‘Stray bullet. Funny expression. As though all that bullet needed was a good home and a bone to chew on.’
Karim went straight to his mother as she entered the room, and threw his arms around her, which seemed a little bit excessive considering he hadn’t been anywhere near the bullets. Another one of his dramatic moments, I thought. I looked at my mother, and wondered if it would help to fling my arms around her. No, she’d see right through me. My father, on the other hand, would melt if I put my arms around his waist and started crying. How good it would be to put my arms around his waist and start crying. If my mother tried to speak strongly to me after that, he might just tell her I’d suffered enough. The question was: if Zia called me up next week and asked me to go for a drive late at night, just the two of us, would I say yes? Yes. And Ami knew it.
I squared my shoulder, ready to face what was to come, but my mother seemed determined to keep me in suspense, and continued some pointless conversation about the flaws in Zia’s parents’ child-rearing techniques. So I was almost grateful to Uncle Ali for saying, ‘Bloody stupid, Raheen. Zero out of ten for responsibility and honesty. And anyway, as Mercedes go, that one’s not very appealing.’ I started to smile at him, but stopped when he turned to Karim and said, ‘As for you, young man. Bribing police officers? Do you think that makes you a hero?’
‘I think it got Zia out of jail.’ Karim crossed one ankle over his knee in an exaggerated posture of adulthood.
‘Shh, Karim, don’t talk to your father like that.’ Aunty Maheen sat down next to Karim and stroked his hair. He half-turned, rested his head on her shoulder, and linked his fingers through hers.
Uncle Ali switched the table lamp on and off and on again. ‘So if you want to be a good friend, you bribe a policeman. If you stand on ethics, you’re a lousy human being.’ He looked at my parents. This was clearly a continuation of some other conversation. ‘This is not about accepting grey areas any more; it’s about a value system that’s totally bankrupt.’
‘And your solution?’ Ami said, her face illuminating and disappearing into shadows by turn as Uncle Ali continued to fidget with the light switch.
‘His solution is to leave,’ Aba said. ‘Isn’t that the most bankrupt choice, Ali? To turn your back on something you love because it’s grown unmanageable?’
‘It’s not as though you were never on the verge of doing the same,’ Aunty Maheen said softly, still stroking Karim’s hair.
What were they all talking about? For heaven’s sake, I’d just been shot at.
Aba picked at something lodged beneath his fingernail. ‘That was completely different: ’71 was madness.’
‘But perhaps it would have been best if you had left,’ Uncle Ali said.
The reaction to that statement was baffling. Ami started plumping cushions into shape, muttering something about drycleaning; Aba leaned forward towards Uncle Ali and said, ‘Have you gone mad, mate?’ and Aunty Maheen’s hand on Karim’s hair started shaking. ‘Oh, Ali,’ she said. ‘Ali, of all the things...’
Uncle Ali put up both his hands in a defensive gesture. ‘I didn’t mean it that way. God, Zaf, you know I wouldn’t. Oh, for heaven’s sake. You’re all being ridiculous. I meant maybe we should all have left and...I mean, there is madness here now and it’s getting worse, that’s what I meant. I meant the country, I’m talking about the country, the government, the people. I don’t mean...it wasn’t personal.’ I had never seen him so agitated. He stood up, sat down again, and resumed switching the lamp on and off. ‘I need a drink, Zafar.’
‘Sorry,’ Aba said. ‘Had to give Bunty my entire supply of the hard stuff. His bootlegger’s gone on Hajj, and he was worried about running short for his party.’
‘This is what I mean! What kind of country has this become?’ Uncle Ali appeared unaware of my mother moving the lamp away from him. ‘Bootleggers! No one in a civilized country should use that word except in jest.’
‘Zia and Raheen get shot at and what’s worrying him? The illegality of alcohol.’ Aunty Maheen rolled her eyes. Precisely. ‘Listen, baba, Prohibition happened in the dark distant past, back when I could eat three chocolate eclairs and still look good in a bathing suit the next day, back when you were still...’ She stopped and looked at Karim, who hadn’t moved at all during this whole exchange. That sick feeling I had begun getting whenever Uncle Ali and Aunty Maheen started on at each other in this manner crept over me now. I wanted to announce that I could still hear the gunshots echoing in my ears. I wanted to lean against Uncle Ali’s shoulder and cry so that Aunty Maheen would sit down right next to him in order to put an arm around me and tell me it was OK. I wanted to stop thinking, as I looked at them, And what else? And what else? I wanted most of all never to mention any of this to Karim.
Uncle Ali turned to my mother. ‘Poor Maheen. Stuck with a husband such as I. How long can any woman put up with such suffering? I think some of the Ghutnas are taking bets on that question. Do you think they’ll let me place a wager?’
‘Karim, Raheen, green tea,’ Ami instructed. ‘Oh, and call Sonia. I think we managed to make her panic about you.’
Glad to have a reason to leave the room, I accompanied Karim downstairs to the kitchen and called Sonia while he put the water on to boil.
‘Oh, thanks God,’ Sonia’s mother said, when she heard my voice. ‘Everything theek-thaak?’
‘Everything’s fine.’ She told me to hang on while she called Sonia, but even after she had gone and there was no one on the line I continued to speak—‘Yes...umm hmmm...I’m sorry to have caused you concern’—just so Karim would think I was sufficiently distracted not to see his shoulders shake with weeping as he stood with his back to me.
‘Who are you talking to
and where were you guys?’ Sonia shouted into the phone.
I ignored the first part of the question and answered the second, the words falling out of my mouth as though they were a recording. I was looking at Karim’s shoulders and thinking how small they looked, how thin, and thinking that if he ever saw me crying he’d put his arms around me, and make me stop.
Sonia said, ‘So did you go back? To find the cat?’
If I stayed put and did nothing, he would stop on his own, out of embarrassment. But if I went to comfort him, perhaps he’d start talking, perhaps he’d tell me what I never asked and he never mentioned: what it was like to live with his parents when my parents weren’t around to re-channel the conversation. I suppose I had known it for a long while, but that evening was the first occasion I really allowed myself to think that Karim lived in sadness some of the time. The thought was so painful to me that I had to let go of it, had to tell myself that being shot at was making me melodramatic.
‘No, idiot,’ I said to Sonia, ducking my head so that I wouldn’t have to look at Karim. ‘We didn’t go back for the cat.’
‘Where did it happen exactly? I’ll tell my father to drive me there. Poor cat could still be limping around.’
‘Your father’s car is red, Sonia.’
Karim turned around at that, and tried to smile. Come on, Karimazov.
‘You think we should just forget the cat?’ Sonia’s voice was uncertain.
‘Put it out of your mind like last term’s vocabulary list.’ Yes, like that, smile. ‘Which of our parents called you?’
Sonia laughed. ‘All three sets. Ama got quite upset. Wanted to know if I minded that the three of you had gone on some joyride without inviting me round. Not that I’d have got permission on a school night.’ She lowered her voice. ‘I know you just wanted to be alone with Zia, but you should be careful. You could get a bad reputation.’
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