‘Who could deny it? You’re radiant.’ Zia sounded like a child of seven, utterly lost, but trying to repeat a formula that his mother had taught him to get out of trouble.
Sonia looked sideways and down, and I wondered if she finally saw that I hadn’t been inventing things all those times in the last three years that I told her Zia would still walk on hot coals and eat them afterwards if she asked him to.
‘Is Adel the reason Zia is being treated like a potential rapist in your house?’
‘Raheen!’ Zia rose to his feet in an instant. ‘If she’s observing customs of proper behaviour...’
‘Proper behaviour? You can’t see her hair, can’t see her arms, can’t make more than minimal physical contact, can’t enter her bedroom. What does that say about you? As though you won’t be able to restrain yourself if...’ I faltered before the look on his face.
‘Oh, sit down, both of you. You’re such a drama queen, Raheen. And “customs of proper behaviour”...which rubbishwallah sold you that line, Zia? I know you don’t see the point in any of it. Now sit down and tell me if you want Dost Mohommad to bring tea or coffee.’
I sat down and put my arms around her. ‘When do I meet him?’
‘Not for a couple of weeks. In about an hour he’s leaving for London on work. And to buy me an engagement ring.’
‘Well, when I do meet him if he isn’t completely gaga about you I’ll have to punch him.’
‘Not his nose,’ Sonia said. ‘He has a lovely straight nose. Don’t ruin it.’
‘I’ll make sure to aim my punch well below the nose.’
‘Not too much below.’ She giggled. I started laughing too, and she turned red and pulled her dupatta down so it covered her face. ‘Tobah! You are such a bad influence. Zia, promise to keep an eye on her during the mangni; I’m fully nervous she’ll do something to embarrass me.’
‘When have I ever been able to keep her in check?’ Zia was smiling now, fooling Sonia into believing he was all right.
‘True. Only one person ever could. Good thing he’s also going to be here, flying in the day after tomorrow and staying until after the mangni. No way I’d let him miss my engagement.’
‘Seriously?’ Zia said, leaning forward but keeping his knees just a few millimetres apart from Sonia’s. ‘Karim’s coming?’
Sonia nodded and both of them looked at me, Sonia slightly nervous, as though unsure if she’d said something that would delight or appal me, and Zia merely appraising. He’d been the one who had, quite by chance, knocked on my dorm-room door just minutes after I finished that phone call with Karim, and he’d made it clear he thought I was being melodramatic, crying over something that had ended long before the phone had started to ring.
I leaned back against the cushions and watched the thin branches of the bougainvillaea whip against the window. If I closed my eyes I’d still see the red flowers, bright against my cornea, surrounded by black. If I closed my eyes I’d see Karim gather up pruned branches that his gardener had been about to throw into the incinerator; I’d see myself, aged thirteen, lying on the grass, resting my head on a pillow of bougainvillaea flowers, watching Karim fashion a hopscotch grid out of denuded branches. Through all that seeing, I’d hear myself laugh for no reason, no reason at all, and I’d wonder where that particular laugh had gone and I’d wonder if he’d bring it back with him when he walked through the doors of the airport.
. . .
Whoever he was, he wasn’t my Karimazov, my Cream, my hopscotch partner, my shadow-self, my alter ego.
Showing his passport to the airport officials, just feet away from the wide-open terminal door, he was a tall, very tall, stranger with close-cropped hair, perfectly arched eyebrows, and stylish round glasses, dressed in jeans and sneakers. If it wasn’t for those absurd ears waggling out of the sides of his head, I might have mistaken him for a foreigner. ‘Just as I feared,’ I muttered to Zia, as we leaned against the barriers that stood between the terminal door and the crowds waiting to receive foreigners and foreign-returned. ‘He’s become a gora.’
‘What are you talking about? He’s darker than you are.’ Zia was trying hard not to act too excited about seeing Karim again, but the casual air with which he held a cigarette between his fingers was more than offset by the frequency with which he shifted his weight from one foot to the other, pausing only to try and raise his entire body weight with his elbows, which were planted on the barrier.
‘Not skin complexion, idiot. His mode of being. What’s he arguing with the customs guy about?’
‘They’re probably giving him a hard time about his Angrez passport. Or is it Amreekan? He could at least look up and wave. Damn, he’s tall. “Mode of being”?’
‘I still don’t know why he asked to stay with you, not me.’ I tilted my head to one side, as though a change in angle would make him look more familiar.
‘Propriety.’
‘Rubbish. If he came to stay he’d be my parents’ guest; staying with us because he’s Ali and Maheen’s son, not because he’s my one-time best friend.’ A man smelling as I imagined the inside of a local bus would smell tried to elbow me aside so that he could secure a spot right against the barrier, and I wondered how to push him away without actually making any physical contact with him.
‘Here he comes. Stop being moody.’
A swarm of cabbies surrounded Karim as he walked past the barrier without seeing us, and as Zia and I battled our way through the jostling figures we heard Karim say, in Urdu without a trace of hesitancy or rustiness, ‘I have friends coming to meet me,’ and the cabbies saying, ‘Where? Where are they? At this hour, they must be asleep. No one’s coming.’ And one enterprising fellow pulled out a phone card and gestured to the public telephone. ‘Call your friends. If there’s no answer, they’re asleep and you come with me.’ Karim turned the visiting card over in his hands. Strong hands, the kind that make you think instantly of massages. ‘Maybe if they don’t answer it means they’re on their way to the airport.’ But he didn’t sound convinced. Zia and I were standing within touching distance of him now, arms crossed, laughing, but he still didn’t look up and see us.
One of the cab drivers clapped the palm of his hand on the top of Karim’s head and turned it towards us. ‘There are your friends,’ he said.
Zia was closer to him, so it was Zia whom he threw his arms around, and I thought, he still hugs men like a real Pakistani, none of this let’s-pretend-there’s-nothing-intimate-about-our-physical-contact that so many American boys, and also so many Karachi boys who’d been watching too much America and too little Pakistan, were guilty of when they slapped and punched each other in greeting.
When he let go of Zia there was a moment when we just looked at each other, neither quite sure what to do, and I couldn’t say if that was because of the way our letter-writing ended or the way our phone conversation ended or the way some of the men around us seemed to be sizing us up, trying to determine the nature of our relationship, forcing us to wonder the same thing also. And in both our minds the soundtrack of our last phone call was playing. I half-smiled—there I went, thinking I could read his mind again. He laughed, that sudden self-conscious laugh of his, and put his hands on my shoulders, his thumbs resting on bare skin, either side of my neck.
‘Idiot,’ I said, and put my arms around his waist, everything forgotten except how easily we always forgave each other. He disengaged almost immediately, and turned to catch Zia by the elbow.
‘Zee, is that a shaving cut on your chin?’
Zia punched him lightly in the ribs, and Karim grabbed Zia in a headlock and spun him around, both of them laughing. For a moment they weren’t men just past the brink of adulthood any more, but the same two boys who had stood in front of a mirror and made their first attempts at shaving some seven or eight years ago, both of them arriving in school the next day with nicks and cuts all over their faces, even in places where bristles hadn’t started to grow. We would all have laughed at them a lot m
ore if they hadn’t combined their talents and presented such a perfect balance of swagger and self-deprecation.
Karim finally let go of Zia, and looked around him in some surprise. ‘I can’t believe this airport! It’s so spacious and so clean.’
‘So all foreign visitors can have a good first impression of the city. It’s all downhill from here.’ Zia waved the porters away and said he’d bring the car round. Seconds later, it was Karim and me and a suitcase standing by the side of the road, waiting, the cab drivers and porters and onlookers no longer interested in our presence. Cars shimmered in the sunlight like a mirage. Karim’s glasses shimmered, too; perhaps he was the mirage. If I were ever delusional or hallucinating it would make sense for me to conjure up Karim, and not just any Karim but a Karim who looked like this. I looked sideways at him, but didn’t say anything; I wanted to see if we could still be comfortable in silence. He didn’t say anything either; he was too busy looking around, learning the landscape, the squat shrubs and billboards and low-rise buildings just past the manicured airport grounds, and recalling that, yes, this is what Karachi feels like at five-thirty on a winter’s morning; time to wake up to cram in that last round of studying for today’s exam, which we should have finished preparing for last night. These last three years, Karachi nothing more than holiday for me, I’d slept through this early daylight time, awakening only when the sun had been out long enough to glaze over the chill in the air, so now even I couldn’t help a prickle of nostalgia for those school mornings of sweaters and chapped lips and staticky hair. Karim shivered, and I wrapped one end of my shawl around him, without actually making any contact with his skin—that was not through accident and certainly not through disdain. Coyness—or was it self-consciousness?—entered my life as we stood there, and confounded me entirely.
‘It’s not cold,’ he said.
‘You’ve got goosebumps.’
‘It’s not cold.’
Zia pulled up and I told Karim to sit in the front seat. I sat behind the driver’s seat and watched him watch Karachi as Zia drove us out of the airport ground and on to the road, which was free of congestion at this hour, giving us an unobstructed view of the billboards: MOD GIRL! CUTE!—an advertisement for talcum powder; HAIR STOP FACE—an ad for facial-hair remover; WESTMINSTER ABBEY—an upstart rival to the well-established BIG BEN underwear company, attempting to attract customers with its painting of a man in leopard-print Y-fronts swinging his hips and raising his arms in triumph.
Karim pointed at the hip-swinging man. ‘Zia, he looks like you! So that’s what’s become of the heirloom leopard skin that used to hang in your TV room. Are there matching socks?’
‘Oh, go to hell,’ Zia said, but he was smiling along with me to see Karim being so Karim.
We were in view of the Star Gate, which heralded the turn-off to the old airport, the one from which Karim had departed with his parents more than seven years ago, the nuclear family still intact back then, though showing signs of exploding.
‘All right, where are we headed?’ Zia asked. ‘Karim?’
‘Come to my place for breakfast,’ I suggested. ‘My parents can’t wait to see you.’
‘How about visiting the bride-to-be?’ Karim said quickly, so quickly he must not have heard me.
‘She’s in Dubai for the weekend, visiting some relatives. And besides, if she were here it wouldn’t look right if we had her woken up,’ Zia said.
‘Arré.’ Karim laughed. ‘What rot are you on about?’
‘Implies familiarity,’ Zia muttered. ‘Too much of it.’
I repeated the invitation to have breakfast with my parents. Karim looked out of the window. Was he too overwhelmed by the remembered sights and sounds to be able to concentrate on anything anyone was saying? What had he meant by that remark about my father when we’d spoken on the phone? Which of us was going to be the first to bring up all the things we’d said?
‘Ask me directions from here to somewhere I used to know, Zia.’
‘OK. Kindergarten.’
‘That’s easy. Straight down Shahrah-e-Faisal and right on to Abdullah Haroon Road, and the school’s on your right just before Aiwan-e-Saddar Road.’
I couldn’t refrain from adding, ‘Or, in Karachispeak, go straight straight straight straight straight and then turn right just after the Metropole, and when you see a church, stop.’
‘Straight straight straight straight straight, huh?’ Hard to tell if Karim was amused or annoyed, his expression cut off from me as he stuck his head out of the window, taking in the street’s mishmash of tall concrete office buildings, large houses, and the signs, at the entrance to plots of land enclosed by boundary walls, spelling out ‘Hina Marriage Garden’, ‘Diamond Marriage Garden’, ‘Sindbad Marriage Garden’. Zia caught my eye in the rear-view mirror and gave me an exasperated look. I shrugged.
Karim retracted his head. ‘So many new buildings, and the driving is crazier than I remember, even with early-morning traffic. Wait, isn’t that the turn-off for Tariq Road and Mohommad Ali Society? Can we go to Kaybee’s?’
‘You want ice cream at this hour?’
He pulled his ear and looked at me thoughtfully. ‘No, I suppose not. This is all so strange for me...’ He stuck his head out of the window again.
A bus sped past, just inches away, and Zia reached over and pulled Karim back into the car. ‘Look out of the windscreen, OK? You’re no fun when you’re decapitated. So talk to us, yaar, tell us things. What have you been doing since you graduated last year? And why do you have a girlfriend named Spa?’
I tried not to look too interested. Sonia had mentioned the girlfriend after she’d met Karim in London the previous year, though she had no details on how serious things were between them.
‘Don’t really know what I’m doing with life outside uni. So, I’ve put aside the year to travel before worrying about it. And her name’s actually Grace, which is what I call her, but she got her nickname because her parents fell in love while watching “Spartacus”.’
‘That’s about as romantic as it gets.’ I laughed. He couldn’t possibly be serious about someone who allowed herself to be called Spa.
‘And besides, she’s my ex-girlfriend.’
Ha!
Zia blew his horn at a legless beggar crossing the street in a wheeled contraption, just inches off the ground, and swerved away from him. Karim didn’t react, though I had expected him to have a moment of tourist horror.
‘Was it the 1960 version, or the 1967 reissue?’ I asked. ‘Because, you know, the 1967 version cut out that great moment of whatshername looking at Spartacus writhing on a cross and saying, “Oh, please die, my darling.” If that’s not dialogue to fall in love to, what is? I bet it was the 1960 version.’
‘Still the Queen of Trivia,’ Karim said. ‘Hey, QT.’
‘Hey, Bloody Damn Idiot. Can you spot that clever acronym, BD-I? But before we lose track of the conv, tell me, did you and Grace ever watch “Spartacus” together?’
‘Oh, you didn’t,’ Zia said. ‘That would be too weird. Who wants to re-create their parents’ relationship, have to imagine when they were young and hormonal and...’ He looked at Karim, went bright red and started cursing the beggar who was now barely visible in the rear-view mirror. Karim turned to look at me, his expression unfathomable, then looked hurriedly away.
I remembered something I’d been wondering about for a while. ‘So, have you ever visited your mother in Boston in the last few years? While Zia and I were on the east coast? Were you there, too?’
‘Don’t start with the recriminations,’ he said shortly and looked away.
How could I explain to him about Aunty Maheen, when I hadn’t really explained it to myself? He probably suspected that I had flown out of Boston again on my way home and still hadn’t called her, despite his rebuke to me on the phone. It’s not as though I hadn’t thought of it. It’s not as though I hadn’t picked up the telephone and started to dial the number, more than once, more
than twice, more than that even. I wanted to lean across and shake Karim. Why did this have to be so difficult? Although Zia barely ever answered his letters, and hadn’t had any kind of verbal communication with him since we all left school, aside from one phone call last week when Karim asked if he could stay at Zia’s, they were chatting away in the front seat as though no time had passed and nothing had changed since 1987, pausing only to look at each other, still sizing up the changes time had wrought in their physical selves, then laughing, half-embarrassed, as boys do when they’ve been caught paying any kind of attention to the way other boys look. And when Sonia had met Karim in London she had come back and reported that he was the same, their friendship was the same, everything same-to-same, except that now he was gorgeous, but that’s just superfacial change, right?
‘I can’t believe I’m back,’ Karim said.
‘The temptation is strong to say, there is no going back.’
‘Resist it,’ he advised.
Resistance was never my strong suit, so I tried to look only at his ears. They really were his least attractive feature, and I had to concentrate hard to avoid shifting my attention to the triangle of moles on the nape of his neck, and the FromHereToEternity length of his legs, and the supple fingers that were drumming snatches of REM’s ‘Nightswimming’ on thigh, throat, clavicle, and all this I was manag ing quite well, but what was really getting to me were the veins that stood out on his wrist and forearms, even when his hands were relaxed, and one vein in particular that ran all the way from his wrist to his elbow.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked, as Zia turned off the airport road earlier than he would if going to my house or his.
‘I’ve made a command decision. We’re off to Mehmoodabad. I have to look at a billboard that has my face painted on it.’
‘Eh?’ I said.
‘I agreed to pose for this photograph for some ad. As a favour to Cyrus’s cousin—you remember Cyrus from school, Karim?—who’s just started up this ad agency. Anyway, I thought it would be some print ad, but it turns out my long lashes are going to greet you as you ascend Clifton Bridge. According to Cyrus’ cousin the painters have captured my features but missed my essence, so I have to drop in on the painters and radiate essence so that they know where they went wrong. They start work at dawn, poor bastards, so they should be there now.’
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