Just wrote a paper based on Calvino late last night (well, maybe early this morning would be more to the point) for my ‘other (not Other) realisms’ class. Please don’t ask me to explain the course title—I just liked the reading list. Anyway, the point is, I’m enclosing the paper—could you forward it to Karim, whichever part of the world he’s in on his Grand Tour (how nineteenth-century can you get! Or were you just pulling my leg about that?) And yes, you do still have to stick to your promise not to ask any questions about your son and me.
Tons of love,
Raheen
. . .
When I answered the phone he said, ‘And?’ as he always had, as he always did, as though our time apart had merely been a Karachi sunset: swift and startling.
I leaned back against the wall of my dorm room, and opened my desk drawer to look at the photograph of the four of us—Sonia, Zia, Karim and me—which lay, unframed, on top of a clutter of staples, paperclips, sticky tape, pens and drawing pins. My father had taken this picture the day before Karim left for London, and it had stayed hidden yet within reach through all my years at college in upstate New York.
‘Eratosthenes,’ I said. That was the name with which I’d left off the last conversation I’d had in my head with him.
‘What? Can’t hear...sorry, it’s Karim. I’m sorry, of course you don’t recognize my voice, it’s...’
‘Broken,’ I said. Why did he sound so formal? ‘But instantly recognizable all the same.’
‘And yours too.’
‘My voice has not broken, thank you.’ I’d intended flippancy, but I think I sounded annoyed.
‘It’s gone husky.’
‘Not really. I’ve got a bit of a sore throat.’
‘Sick as a dog?’ he said.
‘No, just a minor annoyance.’
‘No, it was a joke. Your voice is husky. Huskie, like the dog. So you’re sick as a——’
‘Oh. Yeah. Got it.’ I attempted a laugh but it came out wrong. The first rule of humour that Karim and I had always subscribed to: if the other person doesn’t get the joke, just move on. I looked out of the window at my hallmates slinging snowballs at one another, the freshly fallen snow tinged blue in the moonlight. One of them, Tamara perhaps, looked up and saw me, threw a snowball at my window in an invitation to join the fun, and for a moment I wanted to end the phone call and run downstairs.
‘I said Eratosthenes. Just now.’
‘Can’t hear properly. I’m at the airport and there are all these announcements and...oh hell, scary demon-baby has just started bawling. I’ll find a quieter phone and call you back. Don’t go away.’
I replaced the receiver on the phone base, and looked out of the window again. Two of my friends were lying next to each other in the snow, their arms fanning out away from their bodies, pushing aside the powdery snow. Watching them, I found I was raising my own arms, feeling remembered water currents tugging against my fingertips as I floated in Karachi’s sea. I lowered my arms. What was I doing here? The two figures outside stood up and stepped out of their outlines, leaving behind a pair of snow angels, the wing of one overlapping with the wing of the other. Siamese twin angels.
I ran my fingers through my hair. Why had I sent him that essay? Of course he had called after receiving it. I sat down, cross-legged, beside my desk, and from the bottom drawer I pulled out four pieces of writing paper, neatly taped together, which constituted Karim’s last communication with me, back in 1990. On one side was a map of Karachi. A useless, partial map of Karachi, which I had brought with me to America to see if it would bring me any kind of comfort, any kind of pain, on the days when I was most homesick. The answer to that question I quickly found was no, and no again. I laid the paper on the ground, map side up, smoothing it flat with the palm of my hand, reminding myself I needed to hoover—sorry, vacuum—my room. Streets leading to other streets, streets named, areas defined, places of interest clearly marked out. This map was Karachi’s opposite. It could only exist through its disdain for the reality of the city: the jumble, the illogic, the self-definition, the quicksilver of the place. As usual, the map did nothing but irritate me. I turned the taped sheet over, and flicked away the crumbs of chocolate-chip cookies that had been squashed between paper and carpet. I really needed to hoover.
Myriad pieces of paper taped together. What had hurt me most was that they were originals. If he’d wanted to make a point surely he could just have made photocopies of my letters and taken his scissors to them. But to cut up the originals...to have such certainty that nothing on those pages would ever make him want to take another look, make another assessment...to have such certainty, and not to hide it. He was never so cruel when I knew him.
He was certainly never so cruel that he unveiled my own cruelty to me, offered it up free of contrasts to make it appear all the harsher. I had written him letters full of laughter, letters in which I expressed how much I missed him. These fragments, which he pasted together, were only extracts, contextless; they did not—oh God, surely they did not—reflect anything but a partial truth of who I was, of who I had become in those defining years when he was in so many ways absent to me.
. . .
I had never posted a response to that letter collage. Oh, it would have been easy to chop up his letters, paste together everything that had annoyed me in them, every question (and there were many) about maps and street names, which he knew I had no interest in, and which seemed to serve only as a reminder of the distance between us. I, too, could paste one side of a sheet with everything he’d said to irritate me. But, and here’s the point I had never understood, Karim and I wrote so often, so copiously, to each other that one side of a sheet was nothing, just a tiny fraction of the whole, hardly indicative of anything at all. Yes, my final letter to him had been an explosion of irritation, but Karim should have known my flare-ups seldom lasted long. The Karim I thought I knew would have written back, his tone half-amused, half-sardonic, and said:
Finally—you’ve let it all out. I could explain to you that you’re not supposed to read letters intended for other people, stupid! but we’ll let your lack of etiquette pass this once. I’ve read between the lines of your letter, and I guess you really miss me, huh? Ra, that’s a two-way street. Oops, I mentioned streets. Can you ever forgive me? All right, seriously though, since you’ve finally stopped making snippy little comments and seem willing to address the matter head-on, here’s why I am the way I am about Karachi and maps and all that stuff...
That’s the sort of letter I’d get from the Karim I thought I knew. But what had I done to set him off in such an unexpected and violent way? To take a pair of scissors to the letters I’d written, that was violence, nothing less. Why cut out the comment about Tom Cruise postcards, as though he really believed that was my greatest regret about his parents’ divorce, when instead he could have cut out what I’d written further down in the letter—I could remember the exact words, I had spent so long composing them: ‘Karimazov, you know I’m really saying I don’t know what to say to you about this when you’re so far away. But speak to me, and I’ll answer.’ And he’d written back: ‘Ra, I have been speaking to you. Endlessly. It’s all that’s kept me sane.’ To dismiss all that, to pretend those sorts of moments weren’t the most significant ones in our letters was a betrayal so profound that I didn’t even know how to respond to it. I could only assume that somehow the maps, the street names, the violence in Karachi, all that had become more real to Karim than our friendship and I had simply been too blind to see it happening. What else could explain the nature and extent of his reaction to my letter? And if my assumption was correct, how could I forgive him that?
That’s what I had thought at the time, but in the years since I had come to realize that holding on to anger towards Karim was not an option I was physiologically capable of exercising. Not when my ears became more alert when his name was mentioned, not when my mouth broke into a smile when I thought I saw him walking down the stree
t towards me.
But how could I expect things to revert to 1987, or even 1990?
I pushed aside the letter collage, stood up and reached for my gloves. I’d make snow angels and snowballs and snowmen, and that would be a far better way of spending the evening than——The phone rang.
I stood and watched it.
The answering machine clicked on and my prerecorded voice started its Marlene Dietrich impersonation: Thank you. You have called. Leave a message. Darling.
‘You are not seriously screening this call, Ra!’
Ra. No one had called me that in seven years. When I thought of her, of Ra, she was a fourteen-year-old who knew nothing about the empty spaces that can press against a person in the most crowded of rooms. I tossed the gloves on to the bed and picked up the phone. ‘Congratulations,’ I said, still in Dietrich mode. ‘You have passed the screen test.’
‘So who’s Erin?’ he said.
‘Erin who?’ I drew curvy lines in the dust on my bookcase. Grey dot on the tip of my fingers. I sucked it off, tasting dust in my mouth. What was he thinking right now?
‘When I called before. Sounded like you said Erin Toss The Knees. Like there was a bunch of Ghutnas standing around and muscle-bound Erin was going to throw them out.’
I walked over to my bed and lay down. So, gaps of years could close so fast we’d wonder if they had really existed.
‘O hell,’ I said.
‘Hello yourself.’
Over four years since we’d written; longer since we’d had any kind of phone conversation. But some part of me had carried on talking to him, keeping up a dialogue about Ghutnas and anagrams, and perhaps I did that so we would never have to talk as strangers.
‘God, Karimazov, it’s good to hear your voice. Why the hell did it take you so long to call?’
‘Didn’t take me long at all. Calling-card number plus international code plus country code plus area code plus phone number all within four seconds. I am the king of speedy dialling.’
‘You are the king of morons!’ I was shouting now, for no reason, standing up on my bed, also for no reason except that I seemed to require elevation, my feet as many inches off the ground as possible. I jumped up and touched the ceiling and came down with cobwebs sticking to my fingers.
‘I’m a marooned moron. Calling from Rome. I should be on a flight to London but the pilot can’t find the keys to the plane. So I’ve been sitting here for the last hour, singing to myself to keep entertained.’
I lay back on my bed, barely noticing the barrage of snowballs that thumped against my window, preceded by a carrot. ‘So you’re saying the only reason you’re calling me after all these years is boredom?’ I said, knowing the answer was no.
‘Your essay finally caught up with me in Rome. Just got here, hours before I left for the airport. It’s been all around the world trying to find me. Australia, Morocco, Lapland.’
‘You went to Lapland?’ I threw my hands up in mock incomprehension at my reflection in the mirror. I looked a lot better than I had when we’d last met—my hair shorter and combed back, not flopping over my face trying to cover the shape and size of my eyes; a little more flesh on my bones so elbows and knees weren’t jutting out awkwardly; greater definition to my calf muscles after all those weeks of playing tennis with Jake. I rolled my eyes at myself. Such self-absorption.
‘No, but it rounds off the sentence so nicely,’ Karim said. It took me a moment to realize he was talking about Lapland. ‘What was that thing you said?’
‘Eratosthenes.’
A boot clunked against my window. I cranked the window open and stuck my head out. ‘Stop ignoring us,’ Tamara yelled up through a megaphone, waving one shoeless foot in the air. ‘We want Chuck’s nose back.’ I leaned out, lifted the carrot—and the boot—off the ledge outside and threw them down.
‘Now go away,’ I yelled.
‘Is that Mr Forehand bothering you again?’ Tamara called up.
I closed the window and lay down again.
‘I had possession of a snowman’s nose,’ I explained to Karim.
‘Who’s Mr Forehand?’
‘Oh, just this guy.’ Strangely embarrassed.
‘Jake?’
‘How did you...?’
‘My cousin, Omar, ran into Sonia in Karachi. She told him Jake’s a tennis player. Is it love?’
‘No, it’s over. Has been for a while, though he keeps suffering memory lapses about that little detail.’
‘Full story, please,’ he said, in the tone of one who is entitled to know everything.
‘He discovered his Hispanic roots. Decided to change the pronunciation of his name. I didn’t take all this seriously enough.’
There was a pause, then laughter so dizzyingly contagious I knew it would have instantly healed my slightly aching heart if I’d heard it when the symptoms of break-up still persisted. ‘Hake?’ Karim spluttered. ‘You were involved with a man who called himself Hake?’
‘It’s worse than that,’ I said, laughing back. ‘He’s Hake Hunior.’
I could almost see Karim doubling over in the airport, oblivious to the stares of the jet-lagged and travel-weary. ‘You’re making up the Junior bit. Admit it!’
‘But it rounds off the sentence so nicely.’
‘God, it’s good to laugh,’ he said. ‘Especially after I’ve been sitting here getting newsprint on my nose, reading about what’s going on in Karachi.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The violence flaring up. One hundred and thirty people killed in the first seventeen days of December. Have you see the new issue of Newsline? It says more people have been killed in Karachi this month than in Bosnia. Bosnia!’
‘Oh, right.’ I kept my voice as neutral as possible, but I was thinking: Bloody, bloody hell. Just when I thought all that rubbish between us had departed with the end of self-righteous adolescence.
‘I can hear you rolling your eyeballs.’
‘Yeah, well. You know.’ I looked out of the window again.
‘No, I don’t, and that’s the problem, isn’t it?’
‘Whatever, Karim.’ I felt drained; I couldn’t imagine ever having enough energy to fully engage in this conversation. I couldn’t imagine having enough patience.
‘That essay you wrote...I thought it meant you were thinking about Karachi.’
I knew he couldn’t see my eyebrows, but that didn’t stop me raising them.
But he was going on: ‘I mean, I’ve been trying for the last few years to come to grips with Karachi’s nature, to face all these things that are so hard to face, and I’m just more glad than I can say that you’ve also started. Reading that essay, it was like you’d reached into my mind and pulled out all these thoughts from there. That cartographer in Zytrow, he was amazing. That you could write that was amazing. I mean, that you see he’s willing to be unselfish—yes, because of the work he’s doing people will stop talking about his great leap, and of course he’s known that from the beginning, but he’s willing to forgo that kind of self-glory in order to bring some order to the place.’ I’d never heard anyone speak so fast or confuse me so much with what they were saying. ‘And those two people in Raya, they have a kind of perfection, but it’s in such a limited way because it’s such a limited city, a city with only two inhabitants, and that’s why they leave, isn’t it? Because they have to see themselves in the context of something larger than just the two of them. It’s like that Faiz poem, you know, mujh say pehli si muhubat, when you’ve seen the sorrows of the rest of the world you can’t go on pretending none of it matters, you can’t pretend two people can really live in isolation telling themselves their love is all that matters in the world. And the two of them, when they come back to the city, that’s when they find out that their love was imperfect because it couldn’t bear the knowledge of everything that lies outside and... Raheen, I see where you’re going with it. I know what you’re trying to say. Or beginning to. And I know it’s not easy, but I’m
here, Ra, I’m here.’
If he had been standing in front of me I would have hit him. ‘You’ve been trying to come to grips with Karachi’s nature and you’re glad I’ve also started? I go home, Karim. Every bloody year. Twice a year. The day classes end. I get on that plane and I go back to Karachi. I’m going there in two weeks. And you, you’d rather go to Lapland!’ I slammed my open palm against the side of my desk. ‘Listen, do me a favour and burn that essay. Because it’s obvious you haven’t understood a word I’ve tried to say, and, frankly, right now I have no interest in pointing out all the places where you went wrong.’
There was silence from the other end. I could make out the noises of the airport, but from Karim I couldn’t hear even a whisper of breath. It occurred to me that he’d simply walked away from the phone.
‘When you go home do you ever catch a flight out of Boston?’ he said at last.
I cranked open the window again and picked up a fistful of white from the ledge. When I opened my fist, my fingerprints were whorls of evidence in the tightly packed snow. I still remembered her number. I had only called it once, but I still remembered her number. ‘Zia saw your mother over fall break. Went there for dinner while he was in Boston. I told him to give her my love.’
‘What is Zia to my mother?’ His voice tired now. ‘You were the closest thing she had to a daughter. Over three years you’ve been on the East Coast, and not once have you bothered to call her. You really are your father’s daughter.’
The mirror on the opposite wall showed my head jerking back in surprise, putting distance between myself and the words that came out of the handset. The only image that came to mind: my father putting an arm around Karim’s shoulder at the airport, the last time our two families were together, and Karim turning one hundred and eighty degrees, wrapping his arms around Aba’s waist and weeping. And I wondered again, as I’d so often wondered, of all those scraps of my letters that he’d chopped and pasted, why he had chosen the one in which I talked about parents and accepting their imperfections.
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