‘Study break. Ten minutes. My room. Who’s going to make the hot chocolate?’ I yelled down the hallway on my way into the shower.
Someone shouted, ‘But I’ve just started War and Peace,’ and someone else: ‘We’ve been back from the dining hall less than half an hour.’
‘Raheen says study break, ten minutes,’ another of my hallmates declared. ‘You want to argue with her?’
Less than fifteen minutes later, I had a crowd of people clustered in my room as, freshly showered and dressed in sweats and fleece jumper, I poured out hot chocolate with marshmallow bits from a large saucepan into mugs and plastic glasses bearing the university’s crest. Tamara from next door held up my romance novel with a whoop of delight, and the rest of my friends chanted, ‘Read, Raheen, read,’ over and over until, with mock resignation, I took the book from Tamara, sat on the window ledge by my bed, cleared my throat and started reading out loud choice passages in breathy, emotive style.
She stared boldly into his piercing blue eyes, but he was not a man to be daunted by feminine fire and he stared right back, his gaze suggesting X-ray vision that could look right through her blouse and see the rapidly beating heart that lay beneath.
His jeans were so tight they could barely contain him, and she trembled with fear and ecstasy at the thought that he might burst out of them at any moment.
She tossed her head, and wished she could do the same with her emotions.
‘Will you just come?’ He impatiently pushed the door open and gestured her through.
‘Make me,’ she replied, saucily.
He had always been a man to rise to a challenge.
When I finally stopped reading, even Jake, who had come into the crowded room halfway through and was slouching in the door frame, was shaking his head in amusement, though the evening before I’d walked out on him in the dining hall while he was in the middle of yet another rant about how little time the two of us spent together, alone. I had told him he just didn’t understand Pakistani attitudes towards friendship, and he’d sneered. That was, I had to admit to myself, entirely an appropriate reaction. I put the romance novel down. Between the body heat, central heating, cocoa and fleece I was beginning to feel a little hot. I turned to look outside, wondered exactly when it had stopped raining, and opened the window.
That smell in the air. The aftermath of rain. I let the book fall from my hands. Tawdry. Cheap and tawdry. I could hear Jake’s voice, but I didn’t want to have to deal with him, so I continued looking outside at the autumn leaves, vibrant reds and oranges, scattered across paths, plastered on to buildings. A breeze blew up and I came so close to telling everyone in the room to be quiet, just be quiet, so that I could hear the sound of leaves being blown about. Russet rustle. Almost the sound of waves breaking on pebbled sand.
In Karachi, I would never have been able to hold court for as long as I had just done. Hold court or play the jester, whatever it was that I had been doing. One or more of my friends would have sat down beside me, leaned an elbow on my shoulder, scanned ahead of where I was reading to some further point on the page and taken the book from my hands to read aloud the next absurd lines in exaggerated tones, at once competing and collaborating with me. I leaned my head against the window screen. Rain had tinged the mesh with the smell of rust. Not true, not true, that in Karachi I felt my world was perfect, although sometimes I deluded myself into thinking that when I was far from home. But even in Karachi I’d feel this need to turn away from people whose company, just seconds earlier, I had delighted in. Sonia sometimes told me off for my ‘mood swings’, in Sonia’s way of telling people off, which was not to rebuke or reprimand but merely to ask what was wrong. Once, not so long ago, I had finally said, ‘Even when I’m with everyone whom I could possibly want to be with, I feel like something’s absent,’ and Sonia, showing no signs of being hurt by this remark, nodded, and asked, ‘Absent or lost?’
There was a cobweb between the window and the ledge outside. Jake closed the window, and I turned back to my friends, wanting them gone, wanting him gone too.
‘Break over,’ I said.
Almost everyone stood up instantly, as though I had issued a military order, except for the guy who was supposed to be reading War and Peace. ‘But we haven’t even finished drinking our...’ he said.
Tamara nudged him. ‘Come on, finish it in my room.’ Behind Jake’s back she mouthed to me, ‘Should I take him with me?’ and I was about to nod, when Jake said, ‘Tamara, I can see your reflection in the mirror. Goodbye.’
After everyone had left, Jake stepped off the bed, and leaned against my desk, hands stuffed in the pockets of his jeans. ‘You know, after you walked out on me at dinner last night——’
‘Oh, Jacob, for heaven’s sake, I didn’t walk out; I just said I had work to do and couldn’t stay to watch you sip your coffee.’
He scuffed the carpet with the toe of his sneakers. ‘Don’t call me Jacob.’
I rolled my eyes. ‘OK, after I walked out on you...what?’
‘I decided it’s over between us.’ He was looking down at his hands. They were somewhat too soft, Jake’s hands.
I nodded. ‘I understand.’
He raised his head and looked at me. ‘I was about to add, “but then I changed my mind”.’
‘Oh.’
We looked at each other for a few seconds, and then he said, ‘It really makes no difference to you either way, does it?’
A spider was picking its way to the centre of the web, sidestepping the drops of water. The sky cerulean once more. Cerulean is an anagram of acne rule. Imagine a pimply, pustular sky, Ra! I stood up so quickly I banged my head against the potted plant hanging from the ceiling near the foot of my bed. The pot tipped and loose soil showered down my jumper and on to my bed.
‘You OK?’ Jake moved forward, but I held my hands up to tell him to keep his distance. Tears in my eyes, and none of them because of him. I put my hand to my scalp and was almost disappointed to find no trickle of blood, nor even a bump. Jake stepped back and watched me scoop soil from the duvet into a cup and pour it back into the plant-holder.
‘Soiled sheets. Dirt on your fingers. Talk about a break-up scene heavy in symbolism.’ Jake made a sound that might have been laughter had it contained the slightest suggestion of amusement. ‘You know, I finally figured out last night what all of us have in common. Ricardo, Amit, myself. Couldn’t find any common denominator in all your boyfriends before. But it’s this: we’re the kind of guys you’ll always stop short of loving. And that makes life easy, doesn’t it?’
I didn’t want to think too hard about what he had said, so I looked around for tissue to wipe my fingers with. Jake offered the sleeve of his shirt, but I brushed the dirt off against a corner of my duvet instead. Don’t touch him, and this will be easier.
‘Actually, the common denominator, Jake, is that you all have really sexy wrists. Call me shallow.’
I sat on the window ledge again, pressed the nib of my fountain pen through the mesh of the screen, and unscrewed the bottom of the pen. Jake came to stand beside me as I gently squeezed the ink cartridge and a rain drop turned blue.
‘You really have this ability to find beauty in weird places.’
There was a tone of reconciliation in his voice, but when he had said it was over between us my heart had lurched ever so slightly, and if we were to stay together now perhaps it would lurch even more next week, next month or whenever that inevitable ending came. It would lurch especially if the ending didn’t come until early next summer when we would graduate and I would head home to Karachi. I looked beyond him to the mirror. There was a crack in the glass, right at eye level, and for a second I half-fancied I saw a splinter lodged in one of my absurdly large eyes, slashing its darkness.
‘I have work to do, Jake.’
‘So do I. Can I stay?’
I shook my head, without turning to look at him.
He was all the way to the door before he stopped and said
, ‘Ever wonder how other people see you?’
I turned round. ‘Is this the cruel parting blow, Jake? You going to—what’s that funny expression?—hold up a mirror to my eyes?’
‘Your friends adore you, Raheen, because at the end of the day you’ll always forgive them no matter how hideously they’ve behaved. They adore you because they think you offer up your friendship and ask for nothing in return. But that’s not true——’ He took a deep breath. ‘You do ask for something. You ask that we never expect you to need us.’
He blew a kiss at me, and left.
I drew my legs up to my body and rested my chin on my knees. Jake was right. Until then I had always thought my college friends saw me as the entertainer. And as the one who couldn’t keep her opinions to herself. It was true, I supposed, that I didn’t bear grudges or hold people accountable for every slip-up, though that had more to do with my father than with me. Aba had always said that it was easy to condemn people; condemnation was an act of smugness, wasn’t it? Didn’t it arise from the certainty that you would never do what you were condemning someone else for? But how could you say that unless you could slip into their soul, peer around and see what serpents fed there, what abysses gaped? How could you say anything unless you knew how the serpents and abysses had come to be, and what it meant to live with them every single day? Shouldn’t we simply be grateful that our lives allow us to live with grace today? It came naturally to Aba—the ability to be grateful for his life, the ability to look at the Runtys of this world with understanding—but for me it sometimes felt as though I was forcing my nature into a mould I wanted to fit into rather than one that suited the contours of my personality.
I thought of everything Jake had just said, and looked at my watch. In Karachi, it was early in the morning, far too early to call my father without making him panic. But I needed to talk to someone—not just anyone, but someone who had always known me. I could call Zia, half an hour’s drive away in the same time zone, but I rarely spoke to Zia about Jake since that time Zia had landed up on Jake’s doorstep at midnight and announced that, although he had come to like Jake a great deal in the weeks since they’d first met, no white boy could lay hands on a Muslim girl and expect to live. Jake had leapt out of the second-floor window and broken his ankle. (‘How was I supposed to know you’d be seeing someone moronic enough to take me seriously?’ Zia had protested to me the next day. ‘There are white Muslims in the world, for God’s sake. Hasn’t he heard of Cat Stevens?’) No, I couldn’t call Zia and so much as mention Jake’s name without running the risk of him singing ‘Moonshadow’, which in Zia’s rendition became ‘Crescent Moonshadow’.
But Jake wasn’t really the issue here. I looked at my watch again and added ten to establish Karachi time once more. In a couple of hours Sonia would wake up to say her morning prayers. I could call her then, and ask, ‘Do you think I don’t need you?’ And however she answered, however tactfully, however generously, something in her response would remind me that we both knew I felt guilty about Sonia; if anyone asked who my closest friend in the world was I’d say her name without hesitation, but it was the lack of hesitation that comes from years of practice rather than conviction. In my heart, I still carried around the notion of a friendship that no reality could live up to.
I picked up my phone book. The last three years, every time I had been in Karachi packing to return to America, Ami would come into my room with a letter or package for Aunty Maheen, and every time she would say how much Maheen would appreciate it if I delivered it by hand next time I visited friends in Boston, or even if I just called from college to say ‘hello’, and every time I would say, ‘Yes, sure, you gave me the number. Meant to last semester, but things get so hectic,’ and every time Ami looked at me with something so close to disappointment in her eyes that I had to pretend something was lost and busy myself in a flurry of searching for it.
Ami didn’t know that in my first week as a foreigner, I had called that number, feeling excitement, even a touch of nervousness. It had been so long since I’d spoken to her. But it wasn’t Aunty Maheen who answered. It was a man, and as he repeated, ‘Hello?... Hello?’ down the phone, I heard Aunty Maheen’s voice in the background say, ‘Who is it, darling?’ and I thought of Uncle Ali in London, moving from one short-term affair to another, returning periodically to Karachi to tell my parents he didn’t know why he left, he couldn’t imagine returning, he was so afraid of old age. His life such sadness. I hung up, and cried all afternoon. I had never told anyone else about the call. Even now, I couldn’t quite understand it. All these years later, why did it continue to affect me so much more than I could bear?
I opened the phone book to ‘M’.
In my first days of college, I had gritted my teeth through freshman orientation with its attempts to create artificial bonds between everyone in the hall by getting us to share our most private pains, our most personal stories. I lied my way through it, of course, inventing broken hearts, ruined friendships, family disease, all in an attempt to keep up with the tragedies of the eighteen-year-old lives around me. But in my head I kept a chart of the real answers that came to mind to the questions: What’s the hardest thing you’ve had to deal with? What’s your happiest memory? What’syour biggest regret? Has there been one experience that changed your life? If you could pick up the phone and call one person now, who would it be? The questions went on and on, and every one of my answers had to do with Karim leaving and Uncle Ali and Aunty Maheen divorcing.
Of the two events, the divorce had been the worse. The finality of it. I knew about divorced couples; I knew the way their friends divided into his friends and her friends. How to divide my parents between Ali and Maheen? It couldn’t be done. That’s when I really realized that Karim wouldn’t be coming back. Before, some part of me had hoped that Uncle Ali would see the error of his ways. (‘England, man. Mike Gatting, Graham Gooch, John Embury. Versus Pakistan. Wasim, Javed, Qadir. Imran, for God’s sake, Imran! Of course they’ll come back.’ Zia logic, and I had more than half believed it.) But now they wouldn’t come back, because that would mean the two of them living in the same city as my parents but the four of them never being a foursome again. How was that possible? It wasn’t. It simply was not possible. More than Aunty Maheen’s remarriage, or the worsening political situation in Pakistan, it was my belief in the impossibility of that quartet rearranging itself in any way that made my thoughts exile Ali and Maheen—and, by extension, Karim—from Karachi for ever. How I had resented Aunty Maheen then. Resented her so much that I had actually found myself agreeing with Aunty Runty, who came over to our house as soon as she heard news of the divorce and said, ‘Who would have thought it? Maheen, an adulteress! Has she no consideration for her son?’ My father had told Runty to get out of his house, and it was many months before either of my parents spoke to her again. Yes, I had almost hated Aunty Maheen then.
Then.
I put the phone book down. They were clawing at me now, those absurd memories and questions that should be long dead by now. I slipped off my bed, pulled on a pair of jeans and a jacket, grabbed my Walkman and headed out. The sky moved from sunset to twilight to something darker, something not quite night, as I walked from one end of campus to the other and then back, concentrating on the music, changing the radio frequency any time songs from the mid-eighties starting playing. But when I was just steps away from the dorm, I turned the Walkman off, veered away from the lamplit paths, and cut across rain-drenched fields, watching my feet step into the shoeprints of someone with wide toes, trusting to his purpose as he strode away from the dorms and towards the Observatory, then wavering in my faith as the moon disappeared behind a cloud, and turning to walk back towards the campus lights, forging my own path now, the hem of my jeans dark with wet.
To one side of the field was a patch of snow, the only remains of last week’s early snowfall, protected against sun and rain by the overhang of a building’s roof. I bent to pick up a fallen branch, and
trailed its forked end behind me as I walked through the patch, the branch rising and falling as I took each step, leaving marks so faint it looked as though I had been walking alongside a sparrow. Or beside an angel that hovered above the ground, only the tips of its folded wings brushing against the snow.
Can angels lie spine to spine?
I closed my eyes, saw the snow before me transform into fields of white. Tired clouds coming to rest on the ground. My wrist remembered the pressure of a thumb and forefinger encircling it. A boy with ears too large and legs accustomed to leaping touched a cotton boll to my palm and tiny insect feet crawled across my skin.
It was an unexceptional moment, but, lord, how he smiled when he watched me watch a ladybird take flight.
28 October 1994
Dear Uncle Ali,
It was lovely to see you in Karachi over the summer, although I have yet to recover from seeing you give the Ghutnas instructions in how to dance the ‘Electric Slide’. This is what comes of dating Americans who run summer camps! I know, I know. It was a blind date, and you haven’t seen her a second time, but I insist she’s responsible.
It’s good to be back at college again. Weather’s bearable at the moment and there are still some gorgeous autumn (or, should I say, fall) leaves clinging to trees, but I’d appreciate the beauty of it a little more if it didn’t serve to remind that another East Coast winter is about to begin. We’ve already had one round of snowfall. And yesterday there was a thunderstorm that was nothing short of a monsoon. Can’t believe this is my last year up in the snowbelt of America. Although any regret at graduating is more than tempered by the joy of knowing no-more-dining-hall-food. Last night there was something call Noodle Sneeze on the menu. The pizza delivery man is my best friend, even though rumour has it he was once in jail for attempted murder. I’m a Karachiite. I can handle these things.
Kartography Page 12