Kartography

by Kamila Shamsie

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ he said. ‘They’re calling my flight.’

  ‘Karim...’ The thought that this was it, the attempt at reconciliation ended, was physically painful.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why did you call?’

  There was silence at the other end again, but I could hear him breathing. Say it. Say, ‘Because I missed you.’

  ‘Because I wanted to see...if we could speak without noticing the palimpsest.’

  ‘What?’ He was receding, I could hear him drifting away, or was that me? Why had we ever thought it would be enough for us to speak to each other in fragments? What had we missed by finishing each other’s sentences, assuming we’d always know the direction in which a thought was going? How many words had remained unspoken, misunderstood, between us at a time when we could so easily have set things right?

  ‘Too many layers of words, Raheen, beneath and behind our sentences to each other.’

  ‘Karim, don’t, please, don’t disappear.’ Salty tracks curving beneath my eye and splashing on to the receiver.

  ‘In that part of my mind that only remembers life before fourteen, Raheen, I’ll love you for ever.’

  He hung up so gently, I didn’t even hear the click.

  . . .

  The boundary walls around Sonia’s house were several feet higher than they had been in August when I was last in Karachi, and when Zia rang the bell no one opened the gate. Instead, a man I didn’t recognize slid open a little flap in the gate and looked through. All I could see was one of his eyes and part of his nose. The eye darted from Zia to me, then back to Zia, where it stayed, narrowing slightly.

  ‘We’re here to see Sonia,’ I said and waited for him to open the gate.

  ‘Names?’ he said.

  Zia and I looked at each other, and Zia shrugged. ‘I must look suspicious. Either that or unnecessary security measures are all the rage with the nouveau ri-chi-chi.’

  ‘That’s a Soniaism, right? Ri-chi-chi. I’d forgotten that one.’ But now that he reminded me I wondered, as I had done when she first coined the term, if Sonia was aware of the way all of us regarded her parents, whose increased sophistication Aunty Laila dismissively compared to a thickening layer of make-up—merely drawing attention to how many blemishes there were and how much had to be done to hide them.

  ‘Name?’ the security guard said again.

  ‘Where’s Dost Mohommad? Where’s Kalaam? They know who we are.’ A part of me felt absurd for demanding the appearance of the cook and driver, but it seemed a point of pride to be admitted into Sonia’s house without being forced to give my name to the guard.

  He clicked his tongue and, stepping backwards, turned to speak to someone else. As his frame receded I was able to see that he had a gun slung over his shoulder and that there were two more armed guards, sitting on a charpai, between the driveway and the flower beds with their masses of canna lilies. A chill was beginning to seep from the cement driveway through my thin chapals, and my determination to win a stand-off with a guard who wasn’t doing anything other than fulfilling the basic requirements of his job began to waver. I stepped away from the shadows.

  ‘Serious weapons,’ Zia said, drawing my attention to the guards’ Kalashnikovs. ‘You’d think this was some bigwig feudal household. Guess that’s the idea.’

  The guard pressed his eye against the flap again. ‘Names?’ he said.

  Zia rolled his eyes and took his mobile phone out of his jeans pocket. He dialled a number and said, in Urdu for the guard’s benefit, ‘Uncle! Salaam! We’re standing outside your house, talking to...just a second...’ He looked up at the guard. ‘Name?’

  The guard closed the flap. There was the squeak of a lock unbolting. Zia put the phone back in his pocket and winked at me. ‘Never mind, Uncle. We’ll be right in,’ he said to the air. I knew that he was behaving like a bit of a jerk, but I couldn’t help thinking that it was so good to be home where we knew how everything worked and so know how to circumvent annoyances. In the air was a smell of something distant burning, which I always associated with Karachi winters.

  We walked past the guards without a second glance, and went straight to the intricately carved front door. Locked. I turned back to the guards and made a gesture of irritation, and one of them went over to the little booth beside the charpai and spoke into the intercom. It was clear he was arguing with someone on the other side. I grabbed the branch of an almond tree and pulled down on it, relishing the weight of a branch without snow, no fear of something cold and wet sliding off and soaking your skin. The joy of breathing in deeply without teeth aching of cold. I heard footsteps inside approach. The tiniest of cracks appeared between the door frame and the door. I leaned close to the crack. ‘Raheen and Zia,’ I said, and Sonia’s cook, Dost Mohommad, opened the door wide, beaming.

  ‘Bored of America again?’ he said. ‘Come in, come in. These guards, they’re useless. What will you eat? What will you drink? When did you get back?’

  The marble floors were polished to a high gleam as always, and there was a new painting on the wall—a Chughtai watercolour of a beautiful woman, her glance poised between cruelty and sensuality—replacing the garish family portrait that used to form the first impression visitors had of the interior. The place had metamorphosed gradually over the years and it had been a long time since Zia had last made a snide comment about the Horror House and leopard-print carpets, though I was sure the gold taps still hadn’t been replaced. On the table in the reception area was a photograph of Sonia’s father standing next to the Pope. Rumour had it he’d paid a computer whiz huge amounts of money to have his image inserted next to that of the Pontiff. What, if not forgery, could explain the rabbit ears he’d formed with his fingers just behind the Pope’s head? Although, if you were going to pay someone to digitally create a picture of you with someone famous, why would you choose the Pope?

  ‘Just got back yesterday,’ Zia said to Dost Mohommad. ‘We’ll call down from Sonia’s room when we decide what we want for tea.’ We both turned towards the stairs.

  ‘Sit, sit in the drawing room. I’ll tell her you’re here.’

  ‘No, no need. We’ll go upstairs.’

  Dost Mohammad made an apologetic sound. ‘I’m sorry, Zia baba, you’ll have to wait downstairs.’

  Zia started to laugh, then saw that Dost Mohommad was serious. ‘Me? Me specifically?’

  Dost Mohommad looked down at his feet. ‘Boys,’ he said. ‘No boys upstairs.’

  ‘What? No, that must mean strangers. Or even friends of Sohail’s. Obviously Sonia wouldn’t want her brother’s annoying seventeen-year-old friends barging into her room. It doesn’t mean me.’ Laughing again, Zia started to head towards the stairs, but Dost Mohommad’s hand shot out and gripped Zia’s arm.

  ‘Last week, Cyrus baba said the same thing and I let him go upstairs. Almost got fired for it.’

  ‘He’s travelling to Egypt,’ I mumbled.

  ‘What?’ Zia said, still looking at Dost Mohommad.

  ‘Gone see-Nile. Look, why don’t you wait down here, just to make him happy. I’ll bring Sonia down.’

  I took the stairs three at a time, and charged into Sonia’s room without knocking. She wasn’t there, but I heard the shower running so I thumped on the bathroom door and yelled, ‘Come out or I’ll un-alphabeticize your CDs.’

  Sonia yelled with delight, ‘I’m quickly, quickly rinsing.’

  I sat down on her desk chair and picked up the magazine lying there, face down. It was the December issue of Newsline, the one that Karim had mentioned in our conversation two weeks earlier. I put it down and picked up the magazine next to it. The November issue of Newsline, with the words KARACHI: DEATH CITY running across the cover. I flipped it open and read an excerpted block:

  Roaming the dark, death-haunted streets of Saddar where even the street lights were off, one would be confronted with the surreal glow of a flower shop not more than a thousand metres away from the troubled area of
Jacob Lines. Asked why his shop was open late into the night when all others were closed, a flower-seller explained: ‘This is the season not of marriage but of death. People come to buy floral wreaths for those who die in the riots.’

  Shivering, I turned to the last page, which was guaranteed to bring comic relief with its round-up of the most absurd lines from Karachi’s English-language press. Sure enough, there I read: ‘Only the other day he was spotted lolloping into a famous disco which was a wee bit abnormal hangout for a bud like him. When interrogated he bleached.’

  I was still laughing when the bathroom door opened and Sonia enveloped me in an embrace that was all softness.

  ‘You hodious creature! When did you get back?’ She pulled back and smiled at me, and I couldn’t help thinking that if she were to walk down 5th Avenue just once, anorexic models would be pulled from the catwalk and a woman’s beauty would no longer be judged by her success in obliterating flesh.

  ‘Early this morning. You’ve put on weight since August. Looks good.’

  ‘Hanh, well, happiness has a high calorie count.’ She laughed and hugged me again. ‘OK, sit, I have news to tell you so big that your eyes will pop out of their sockets and plop on to the floor. But don’t worry: it was swept this morning.’

  ‘First call down and tell Dost Mohommad to let Zia come up.’

  ‘Zia’s here?’ She rolled down the sleeves of her kameez all the way to her wrists. ‘Did you fly back together?’ She bunched her wet hair together and squeezed out water, then reached behind me to the dupatta slung over the back of her chair and placed it on her head. ‘Let’s go down and sit with him.’

  ‘Have I entered a parallel universe here?’ I tugged at the dupatta, but she clapped one hand down to hold it in place. ‘What’s going on?’

  She gave me one of her drop-the-topic looks. ‘We are Muslim women,’ she said.

  I tried to find some sign that she was joking. ‘We were Muslim women four months ago, too.’

  ‘I thought we’d agreed to disagree about religion. Let’s go downstairs. Poor Zia must be getting bored.’

  The intercom beeped three times to indicate there was a phone call for her. She picked up the phone, listened to the voice on the other end, and made a gesture in my direction that said, ‘Go down, I’ll join you there.’

  Thoroughly confused, and more than a little concerned, I walked downstairs. Sonia’s and my friendship had always existed against all probability, our ways of life so tangential that logic should dictate we could only look at each other across a wide gulf, and wave. The reason our friendship had survived and strengthened over the years was that Sonia succeeded in being so self-effacing in her beliefs, allowing nothing in her convictions to act as reproach, and I was well aware that I scarcely extended her the same courtesy.

  As I reached the bottom of the stairs I could see Zia through the open door of the TV room, shuffling through a pile of CDs but not paying any attention to the jackets, his eyes fixed on a framed picture of Sonia instead.

  In America I’d tell people that Zia and I had been friends for ever, but the truth was vastly more complicated than that. When we were both fifteen he became my first boyfriend, a title he managed to retain for less than seventy-two hours. Quite what happened to bring everything to a disastrous end neither of us could now remember, but when it happened, with no Karim around to laugh at us and listen to us and, in so doing, smooth the transition from relationship back to friendship, I had taken to making the lives of our mutual friends unnecessarily difficult by declaring I wanted nothing to do with Zia. Of our entire group only Sonia seemed not to mind, and blithely ripped the ‘Z’ page out of her phone book as a show of her support for my position. When she did that I was, I’ll admit, dismayed; I wanted so much to have cause to dislike her, because it was clear that Zia had not, not for one moment, stopped being in love with her. Truth is, I missed his friendship, particularly since Karim was so far away and there was no one else with whom I could talk about Karim the way I talked about him with Zia. But I saw how much it hurt him to have Sonia put an arm around me and lead me away every time he approached, and so I continued pretending that I wanted to be lead away, my relationship with both Sonia and Zia a murky and tangled thing until Sonia finally let me yell at her, and the yells turned to tears which dissolved all my anger at her. By that time Zia had found his own group of friends; a ‘racy set’, as Aunty Runty put it to everyone at her beauty parlour, and for over a year he disappeared in a haze of drugs and alcohol, and then he disappeared between the covers of textbooks, having decided he was getting out of Karachi even if it meant learning every word on the SAT word-list by heart and taking tuition lessons for every subject, not with the popular tuition teachers who we all went to post-school en masse, but one-on-one teachers whom Zia’s father paid exorbitant amounts to aid Zia in racing to the top of the class, leaving his teachers no choice but to write letters of recommendation to US universities saying, for a while there he fell behind, but I have scarcely ever seen such a passion for learning as he has exhibited, blah, blah, blah.

  America brought Zia and me together again—literally. At university, in the middle of New York state, nostalgic for things we’d never paid attention to, like Urdu music and basmati rice, Zia and I scoured the neighbouring towns and found each other at a moment when familiarity was ready to serve as a synonym for friendship. There was some initial tentativeness on both our parts when he first began to drive the half-hour from his college to mine on the feeblest of excuses, but it wasn’t long before we slipped into our old habit of camaraderie and were even able to laugh at the melodrama of our break-up, which had occurred in the biology lab while we were both dissecting rabbits. ‘I bet you’re imagining that rabbit is me,’ I had hissed to Zia, as he sped his way through the dissection at twice the speed everyone else was going. ‘Impossible,’ he had replied, stabbing a rabbit ventricle with his scalpel to send an arc of blood spurting at me. ‘The bunny’s got a heart!’

  If sometimes in those first months of getting to know him again the whispers and suggestions of my college friends made me look at Zia and recollect first love, first kiss, and I found myself walking that line between remembering a past emotion and reawakening that feeling again, I had only to remind myself of the way Zia continued to look at photographs of Sonia to steel myself against further foolishness. Then Amit came along, then Ricardo, then Jake, and ‘How do you do it, Zee? How do you love the same person at twenty-one as you did at thirteen?’ I would ask, and Zia just shrugged and said, ‘Desiring the unattainable; that’s all this is about,’ knowing I knew him too well to believe it. Every woman he dated at college had at least a touch of Sonia about her and when he was the one to break off the relationship it was always because ‘she wasn’t who I thought she was’.

  I cleared my throat as I walked into the TV room and Zia turned away from the photograph. ‘Just choosing some music to listen to.’ He picked up the CD from the top of the pile—some Eighties compilation—and looked at the titles listed on the back. ‘Remember when Sonia thought the lyrics to the Paul Young song were: “Every time you go away / You take a piece of meat with you”?’

  ‘Yes!’ Sonia walked into the room. ‘And Karim dreamt up this video in which a guy announces he’s running down to the supermarket, and his wife yells, “No! Don’t take the venison!”’

  Zia moved towards her, then stopped. He’d reacted the same way on first seeing her during our first winter back from college, unsure if the resumption of my friendship with him meant that he and Sonia could take their relationship back in time to 1988 as well. Sonia had laughed at his hesitation and reached out to hug him. But this time it was the covered head, and the sleeves she was tugging over her wrists, that made him pause and look to her for the first move. We heard the door to the drawing room open, and her father’s voice came booming through; Sonia smiled at Zia and rested her fingers on the back of his hand. He blushed and, seeing that, she moved away from him, gesturing to us
to sit down.

  ‘Is it your father?’ I asked. ‘Is he making you do the hijab bit?’

  ‘Raheen!’ Zia’s voice quavered. ‘She does have a mind of her own.’

  ‘Thanks, Zia. Raheen, stop asking bakwaasi questions. We have a lot to talk about that’s more interesting than my wardrobe. Most importantly,’ now it was her turn to blush, ‘the seventh of January.’

  ‘Birthday of Millard Fillmore, the thirteenth president of the USA?’ I was thrilled to have the chance to display this piece of knowledge.

  ‘Well, OK,’ Sonia said. ‘But now you have even another reason to burn it into your memory.’

  ‘What, you getting married?’ I laughed.

  ‘Engaged.’

  I did not dare look at Zia. I wanted to reach over and put my arms around him, but I knew the only thing I could do to demonstrate my friendship was to cover up his silence, which was so complete I wasn’t sure he was even breathing.

  ‘You’re getting engaged? Sneaky thing! You never told me there was anyone...’ I reached out to embrace her, but pulled back before we made contact. ‘Is it arranged?’

  ‘I really, really like him, Raheen. He’s twenty-six, his name’s Adel, good family, works with his father in the textile industry, really smart, good sense of humour, two sisters who adore him, we talk for ages on the phone every day, that was him just now calling from the office, and I’m happier than you’ve ever seen, admit it.’