‘Sonia, please. I’ll see you in school, OK? ‘Bye.’
I hung up, relieved that Karim was looking like himself again. And sounding like himself, too, as he walked around the kitchen pulling out teacups and spoons, and muttering: ‘Is green tea popular in Greenland? When cannibals in Greenland tell their children to eat their greens are they referring to vegetable or meat? What do you call a cannibal who decides to become vegetarian?’
But when we returned upstairs, the atmosphere there hadn’t improved at all.
‘Things really are going to hell here,’ Uncle Ali said, adding eleven grains of sugar to his green tea. ‘How long can we just go on taking it? Don’t you ever think of getting out, Zafar?’
Aba waved his hand dismissively. ‘I can’t imagine growing old anywhere but here.’
‘Exactly,’ Aunty Maheen said. ‘I mean, London is fine, but I’ll never get used to umbrellas, not to mention the way they talk.’
‘The parrot-all parasol. Those talking umbrellas,’ Karim whispered to me, but he was trying too hard.
‘Really, those accents over there!’ Aunty Maheen went on. ‘Last time we were there, we had just stepped out of Heathrow and this man came up to us with a cigarette in his hand and said, “Cu ah geh a lye fro you, plaiz,” so I thought, “Oh, foreigner. Airport, after all,” but no, he was a local and he was asking if he could get a light from me, please. I thought, Henry Higgins, where are you now? But my point is, if we leave here I’ll spend my whole time missing people in Karachi because there are so, so, many to miss that you can’t just squeeze in all that missing during your morning cup of tea.’
‘If one of those bullets had been aimed just a few inches higher...’
‘Oh, shut up, Ali,’ Ami said so sharply that I knew she’d been thinking the same thing. ‘I hate it when you do this sort of thing. Just drink your tea and think calming thoughts. Think of dry-cleaning.’
Karim and I had got up and walked out by now, and Uncle Ali and Aunty Maheen must have seen us close the door and assumed we’d walked immediately away, away and out of hearing, but we hadn’t because the string of my garnet necklace broke and Karim and I went down on hands and knees outside the TV room to pick up the fallen stones.
‘Not this time, Yasmin,’ Uncle Ali replied. ‘Look, I know you don’t want to think about it, but you’ve got to. This little incident has made up my mind, I’ll tell you that. We’re migrating.’ At Aunty Maheen’s noise of disbelief, he added, ‘At least, I am. And I’m taking Karim with me.’
Karim’s hand closed around a handful of garnets. My hand closed around Karim’s wrist.
Aunty Maheen said, ‘Ali, when did you become this person?’
‘Stop it now, both of you,’ Ami said.
But they didn’t. ‘I’ve become my reflection, dear wife. I’ve become the man I’ve seen reflected in your eyes for so long.’
‘Ali, don’t,’ Aba pleaded. ‘It’s been a tense evening; best not to speak. We’ll only say things we regret.’
‘Regret is an emotion,’ Aunty Maheen said. ‘It doesn’t apply to him.’
I tried pulling Karim away, but he shook me off. ‘Karimazov, come on. Let’s go to my room. You don’t want to hear this.’
While I was speaking I drowned out whatever it was that my father said, but after Karim pushed me away again, the heel of his palm shoving my shoulder, we both heard Aunty Maheen’s response. ‘Please, Zafar. Don’t you, of all people, try to tell me that feelings can’t change. How dare you be the one to say that to me.’
Sometimes you hear the voices of people whose every cadence you think you know by heart. By heart. But then sounds emerge from their throats, sounds that you want to believe cannot belong to them, but it’s worse than that because you know that they do; you hear the sound and you know that this grating cacophony belongs to them as much as does the music in their voices when they call you by nicknames that should sound utterly silly but instead are transformed by affection into something to cherish. I heard Aunty Maheen turn on my father, and I knew that one day, not today perhaps, not even next year, but one day people more familiar to me than the smell of sea air would become strangers and I would become a stranger to them.
‘The kids are still outside,’ Ami said, and Karim and I turned and ran into my room.
‘Now we’ll listen to music and say nothing.’ Karim headed straight for my stereo without waiting for a response. He popped in one of my parents’ tapes and pressed play and the room filled with the morose sounds of ‘Seasons in the Sun’. Karim switched off the music and pulled a jigsaw puzzle out of my desk drawer. ‘Let’s assemble.’
He was so much his father’s son, though I’d never seen that before (and maybe I didn’t even see it quite then, but play along, play along). Both of them sought desperately for the imposition of order in their lives, though how anyone as adept at anagrams as Karim could fail to see the arbitrariness of order I’ll never understand. I finally was ready to say, ‘Let’s talk, Karim,’ but he was already placing all the border pieces into one pile and sorting the rest into piles of co-ordinating colour.
‘You’re putting the sky in the sea,’ I said. ‘And I think that branch is really an antler.’
He sat back and tapped his ankle bone, visible between jeans and sneakers. ‘Where does that road go?’ he asked.
I looked at the cover of the jigsaw box. ‘What road? You mean this path?’
‘No, the main road that cuts past the Sheikh’s palace. Near where you were shot at. Khayaban-e-Shaheen. Where does it go? Does it keep going on to the sea?’
‘Who knows?’
We heard his parents’ voices rise up in anger from the study. I tapped Karim’s clenched fist and when he didn’t respond I prised open his fingers. He could become a hermit, I thought. I could see him alone on a mountain, spending hours observing his fingers’ ability to flex and unflex, and tracing the bones that connected thumb to ankle in the jigsaw of his body. I shook my head. Karim on a mountain? He was such a city boy.
He looked up, suddenly concerned. ‘Are you OK?’
‘Me?’
‘You were shot at.’
‘Oh, yes.’ I let go of his hand and sat back. Already that memory was fading, and I had started anticipating the social cachet I could enjoy in the school yard from having a story like tonight’s under my belt. ‘It’s over,’ I said.
He looked at me and shook his head. ‘But the world is slightly different now, isn’t it?’
They cannot protect you from this. And what else?
‘Not as safe.’ Inexplicably, I started crying. I drew my knees up against my chest, and looked down at the carpet. Tears landed on my jeans and sank into the fabric.
Karim rested his elbows on my knees and leaned forward, his forehead touching mine. ‘Transmitting images into your brain,’ he intoned. ‘Images of teachers in red leather thongs.’
‘Gross!’ I pushed him away, laughing. He fell back, resting on his elbows, the toe of his sneaker pressing against the toe of mine.
‘I almost wish you’d been there,’ I said a little later, when silence had replaced the laughter.
‘I wish I’d been there, too,’ he said, turning a jigsaw piece over and over in his hand, looking at the precise irregularity of its edges. ‘Because then I’d be thinking of how the bullets could have hit me, instead of sitting here imagining those bullets hitting you. All those bullets.’ His face took on one of those expressions again: the one with which he receded away from me.
‘You can’t think things like that. I wish you’d never think things like that.’
‘Tell me something funny, Raheen.’
I’d been saving this one up for him, for a moment when he’d really need it: ‘One of the names the British used to refer to Karachi, in the days when it was little more than a fishing village, was Krotchy.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘Nuh uh. We could all be Krotchians. Or Krotchyites.’
‘Krotchyites! Sou
nds like a kinky communist party.’
I hadn’t yet finished rolling my eyes about that when Uncle Ali opened the door. ‘Let’s go, son. Way past your bedtime.’
In the hallway, my parents stood awkwardly with Aunty Maheen, no one speaking. Ami and Uncle Ali exchanged ‘what-just-happened-there?’ and ‘what-brought-that-on?’ looks. Aunty Maheen started walking quickly towards the door, and Aba speeded up too and touched her lightly on the shoulder. At first I thought she was going to ignore him, but then she turned round and shrugged, half-apologetically, half-not. ‘Forget about it,’ we all heard her say. She looked over Aba’s shoulder. ‘Come on, Karim, let’s go.’
Karim held my wrist for a moment, then followed his mother out.
‘Talk to her,’ Ami said to Uncle Ali.
‘Yasmin, I’ve forgotten how.’
Then he left, too.
Later that night, unable to sleep, I went towards my parents’ room, where I heard them through the part-opened door.
‘Why after all these years?’ Aba said.
‘Given what’s going on with her, why wouldn’t she think of how else her life might have worked out? Why wouldn’t she get angry that things didn’t happen differently?’
‘Do you think Ali knows? You know, about——’
‘I think that’s part of the reason he wants them all to move to London.’
Whatever it was they were talking about, I knew they’d stop if I walked into the room. And, ordinarily, I would have turned and walked away, nothing more discomforting than lurking in shadows listening to conversations that weren’t meant for you, but this had something to do with the possibility of Karim leaving Karachi, so I had to stay. I had to know.
‘Has she said anything to you?’ Aba said, after a hesitation that suggested he wasn’t sure he wanted to take the conversation any further.
‘No, of course not. She knows I’ll feel I’m betraying Ali if I do anything except censure the situation.’
‘You would?’
‘Wouldn’t you?’
Spell it out, I silently urged them on. S-P-E-L-L.
‘I think I would be compassionate about the situation without feeling I’m betraying Ali. And, let’s face it, if we portion out loyalties mine should belong with Ali and yours with Maheen.’
‘Quite the reverse, if we’re honest about it. Come on, Zafar: if Maheen told you she’d robbed an old woman you’d feel compassionate.’ Her voice became accusing. ‘You don’t feel you’re entitled to be anything but compassionate towards Maheen.’
I couldn’t help lifting up my arms in exasperation. Why make compassion seem like a crime?
‘Why so cold, Yasmin?’
‘Because many years ago we decided to square our shoulders and say, this is what we have done; we will live with it. We will make it something less than a waste and an unmitigated cruelty. And you’ve backed out of that, Zafar. You look over your shoulder and squirm as if to say, what is past is past, all I can do is look abashed and change the subject as fast as possible. When Raheen was born we both promised ourselves that wouldn’t happen.’
‘Raheen has nothing to do with this.’
‘Raheen has everything to do with this. Zafar, you were there when Ali told us Raheen’s been asking questions about the past. You were there, but you were the only one of the four of us who seemed to think it’s some passing curiosity that she’ll soon forget about. You want to know what brought on Maheen’s outburst? She knows that when Raheen asks questions, Karim asks them, too. She knows we’re all going to have to start marshalling facts, making our cases. She knows we’re all going to have to start thinking about it again.’
‘Not yet. Yasmin, not yet. We can’t tell Raheen yet.’ His voice was desperate, pleading.
‘Then when?’
‘When she’s old enough to know the impossibility of tracing backwards and saying, here, this is where love ends and this is where it begins. When she’s old enough to understand that sometimes there is no understanding possible.’
‘It’s possible. It’s always possible. It’s just occasionally easier not to interrogate it too closely.’
‘She doesn’t have to know yet, Yasmin.’
‘Zafar, sometimes I think I love you more than is good for either of us.’
‘You mean, you acquiesce.’ There was relief in his voice, and I exhaled deeply as if a hand had unclenched my own windpipe.
‘That’s only part of what I mean. But it’s the only part you’ll remember in the morning. Good-night.’
I made my way back to bed as noiselessly as possible. I had brought this on. Whatever it was that made Aunty Maheen use that terrible voice to Aba, whatever it was that made Uncle Ali and Ami exchange those looks of concern, almost fear, whatever it was that had my father near to tears in his need to protect me, I had brought it on.
I wouldn’t ask any more questions, I swore silently. Not even to myself. Not even if it killed me. No truth was worth such upheaval. My heart was still racing and I found my lips moving in prayer, giving thanks that whatever it was they were talking about, I didn’t know.
My bedroom door opened, and I heard Aba come in. He sat on the edge of my bed, and reached for my hand.
‘Are they going to move to London?’ I asked.
His grip tightened on mine. ‘It isn’t definite by any means,’ he replied, and I knew he said it because he couldn’t bear to tell me the truth.
. . .
Aba drove through the puddles left by the evening’s monsoon shower, his headlights picking out steel billboards in a state of obeisance, bent over almost double by the weight of wind and rain, unable to return to an upright stance. Swish-swish of wheels traversing wet patches. Somewhere in front of us, almost out of hearing, a car with a burst silencer. Scent of a rinsed city.
‘Nice of Bunty to lend us the Pajero. Couldn’t manage six of us and luggage otherwise.’
‘Probably wouldn’t have made it this far in your car. That drain overflowing back there...’
‘Yes. That poor Suzuki...’
‘Remember the time your Foxy stalled and we had to wade home?’
‘Your brand-new Italian shoes ruined.’
Something reassuring about Aba and Uncle Ali’s voices from the front seat, engaged in meaningless talk as though there were no need to inject every statement with the weight of the occasion. Something reassuring also about Ami and Aunty Maheen silently holding hands, as though they were girls again; girls who no longer had pop stars and furtive smoking and shared crushes to bind them together, but who found that friendship was binding enough, even though there was little but friendship that now bound them to the school-yard twosome who broke every rule and got away with it.
But there was nothing reassuring about Karim. We were only inches apart, both swaying cross-legged on the suitcases in the back, but he was too busy looking at streets to pay attention to me. Looking at streets, and whispering street names when we drove past road signs, and drawing a map of the route we were taking from his house to the airport, his pen veering off course every time Aba braked or went over a speed bump or drove through a puddle.
At the airport, he handed me the map, our fingers barely touching. Then he swivelled round and threw his arms around my father and burst into tears. There was so much hugging goodbye between our parents, and between his parents and me, and my parents and him, that I pretended, even to myself, that it hadn’t really registered that the brush of fingers had been Karim’s and my goodbye.
On the drive home, I said, ‘Who’ll speak in anagrams with me now?’
‘Poor Karim is the one who’s left everyone. You’ll still have Sonia.’ My mother winked at me. ‘And Zia.’
Yes, I’d still have Sonia. And Zia. And so many other things that Karim no longer had. I’d still have the Arabian Sea and Sindhri mangoes, and crabbing with Captain Saleem, who had the most popular boat of all because his business card promised ‘Guaranteed no cockroach’, and, yes, there’d still be those b
ottles of creamy, flavoured milk from Rahat Milk Corner and drives to the airport for coffee and warm sand at the beach and Thai soup at Yuan Tung; yes, Burns Road nihari; yes, student biryani; oh, yes, yes, yes, all that, and all that again. So why complain? Why contemplate words like ‘longing’?
After all, it was just the ends of my sentences I was losing.
That night as I cried myself to sleep I knew that, somewhere in the sky, Karim was doing the same; and some of my tears were his tears, and some of his tears were mine.
. . .
The rain had stopped. Water drops shimmered in the gossamer interstices of a spider’s web outside my window. Not so much captured in the web as resting on it. I could, I thought, lift up that web, very carefully, and place it against my throat, where it would adhere, threads retreating into near invisibility and only rain drops remaining to glisten against my skin like some precious inheritance.
Jake’s hand reached across me to close the window. ‘It’s freezing,’ he said. ‘I’ve been asking you for the last ten seconds to get rid of the draught.’
‘Didn’t hear you.’ I swivelled my legs off the window ledge, making room for him to sit next to me, but he remained standing on my bed, head inches away from touching the ceiling.
‘Of course you didn’t. It’s always Grand Central Station in here.’ He jerked his head at all the people, seven or eight of them, crowded into my tiny dorm room.
When the downpour had started, less than an hour earlier, I had been attempting to read a supermarket romance for my ‘Myths of Courtship’ class, but the sudden ferocity of the rain made me set aside my herbal tea and rush outdoors. It was the closest thing to the monsoons I had encountered in the three years I’d been at university in America, rain ricocheting off the ground with the speed of bullets from a Kalashnikov. I half-expected to see little frogs and winged insects appear. People were running for shelter, the ones who knew me shouting as they charged past that I was crazy, ‘Get inside, Raheen.’ I looked down. Crazy I could handle, but crazy in a white shirt was probably not such a good idea. I pulled the clinging material away from my body, hearing with satisfaction the suction release of wet cotton from flesh, and ran up the stairs towards central heating.
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