Kartography

by Kamila Shamsie

  ‘What about my guards? Useless bastards,’ Sohail said. ‘I just fired them all. They said they couldn’t take on the police, and I asked how they knew those men were the police. No uniforms, unmarked car. One of the guards said he was shown some identification. He’s an illiterate Pathan: what kind of identification can he decipher? We’ve been calling around to different police thaanas and no one knows where he is. Listen, do any of you have contacts in the police?’

  ‘Only Uncle Wahab,’ I said. ‘And he’s on holiday in Florida. But he should be back in the next few days.’

  ‘Few days? Oh, great! By the time he comes back wearing a cute little pair of Mickey Mouse ears who knows what could have happened... Raheen, what do you think they’re doing to him? They wouldn’t kill him, would they?’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘If they wanted him dead they’d have killed him right there.’

  ‘No, they wouldn’t,’ Sohail said. ‘Not with our armed guards outside.’

  ‘Oh yeah, I hadn’t thought of that.’

  Zia threw a pillow at me. Karim walked over and took the phone from my hand.

  ‘Pull yourself together, Sohail. For your mother’s sake, you have to stop talking this kind of rubbish.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Zia said. ‘And for Sonia.’

  Great macho moment. And why was I being treated like an outcast? As if anyone had ever taught us the etiquette for dealing with such situations. Oh God, Sonia.

  Karim put an arm around me and pulled me close and for a moment I forgot all about Sonia. Then I realized he did it so that I could hear Sohail’s voice coming through the receiver. ‘They said—it was almost the only thing they said—that they were taking him away for...’ his voice was breaking up and at first I thought there was something wrong with the phone line ‘...for questioning about drug smuggling.’

  ‘Your father?’ Karim said. ‘Sohail, that’s just absurd.’ And then he looked at Zia’s face, and then he looked at mine.

  ‘We should leave if we’re going to be at the airport in time,’ Zia said.

  None of us said anything in the car until we got to Zamzama, and then Karim said, ‘What route are you taking?’

  ‘Via the Club,’ Zia said. ‘My father’s there. I have to ask him something.’

  Zia’s father, Uncle Anwar, was better-connected than anyone I knew. He kept politicians at arm’s length, because they were too apt to fall from power, but the numbers stored in his phone’s memory for single-touch dialling all belonged to bureaucrats, army generals, officials in the intelligence services and high-ranking police officers. No one knew quite how he acquired these people, or to what use he put them beyond the usual uses to which every successful businessman put people of influence, but his speed-dial meant he was right up there with Uncle Wahab on the list of those who the socialites called when their lives fell apart. For all that, he couldn’t get his own son to string together two sentences in his company without turning hostile or contemptuous. Zia’s jaw was clenched as he drove, and I had a feeling this signalled he was about to ask his father for a favour. He loved to boast that he’d never asked his father for anything, a claim I viewed with scepticism because I knew it only meant he asked his mother instead and she acted as intermediary, passing demands in one direction and college tuition money, new car, state-of-the-art computer in the other. I had once berated Zia for his attitude towards his father and he said, in one of those rare and excoriating moments of revelation about his family life, ‘Do you have any idea what it feels like to know that every day of your life your father looks at you and thinks, “This one also could die at any second”?’

  Zia drove through the Club gates and screeched to a halt on seeing his father walk under the covered archway that connected the ‘No Ladies Beyond This Point’ portion of the stone colonial building to the dining area.

  ‘Raheen, deal with the car,’ Zia said, getting out and striding after his father, who was now walking on to the veranda overlooking the Club gardens.

  I drove on and parked by the tennis court.

  ‘So you believe he’s a drug smuggler,’ Karim said.

  I caught his eye in the rear-view mirror and raised my eyebrow in a manner meant to indicate I wasn’t about to discount any possibility. ‘No one makes that kind of money from manufacturing toothpicks.’

  ‘It’s not just toothpicks. He’s got a number of business interests.’

  ‘Yeah, because everyone used to say—to his face—“No one makes that kind of money from toothpicks.”’

  Karim shook his head. ‘I can’t believe it.’

  ‘Why? Because he always liked you? Come on, Karim. Remember Anis, that guy in kindergarten with us, whose father used to dress up as a magician at his birthday parties? Well, the father’s a murderer. Had his brother-in-law bumped off over some inheritance chuker. But, oh, didn’t we all wish we had fathers who would put on black capes and pull giraffe-shaped pencil sharpeners out of our ears?’

  ‘Are you really as casual about this as you sound?’ He was watching me intently.

  I shrugged. ‘Obviously I don’t want Sonia’s father to go to jail.’

  ‘I don’t understand how you can act so detached, as though it doesn’t matter a bit what he’s done, whose lives he’s ruined—and don’t you dare tell me I sound like a foreigner.’

  ‘I was going to say you sound like your father.’ Actually, I was going to say he sounded like a foreigner, but I hated being predictable.

  I expected him to flare up in anger at the comparison to Uncle Ali, but instead he said, ‘Yeah, well, you sound like your father a lot of the time. Think I’d rather have my set of genes, thanks.’

  I turned around in surprise, but he was staring out of the window, making it clear he didn’t want to continue the conversation.

  Come back, Karim.

  Zia opened the car door and I shifted over to the passenger seat. ‘He’s going to make inquiries,’ he said. ‘Hold on, Sonia’s plane should have landed already; I’m going to drive like a maniac.’

  A man of his word, my friend Zia. But when we got to the airport we didn’t see Sonia, even though the arrival board informed us her plane had landed ahead of schedule. I called her house on Zia’s mobile phone only to have Sohail tell me he hadn’t heard from her and maybe she was still waiting by the conveyer belt for her luggage.

  It was almost an hour before she finally emerged—an hour during which Zia carried on an almost relentlesss monologue to try to hide the silence between Karim and me. His voice was beginning to get hoarse by the time Sonia walked out of the terminal, her face bespeaking an anguish that went beyond bumpy landings and cold, greasy in-flight omelettes. But when she saw Karim she smiled and put her arms around him, unconcerned by her dupatta slipping off her head. I saw his arms tighten around her and thought, Not Karim, too. Not this again, and Zia winced and turned his face away.

  ‘Why are you all here?’ Sonia said, putting an arm around me, her other arm still around Karim, and nodding, merely nodding, at Zia, who waved away the porters and started to wheel her luggage trolley towards the car.

  ‘All four of us together,’ Karim said without missing a beat. We had decided not to say anything about her father until she got home; maybe, just maybe, everything would already have been cleared up by then. ‘Couldn’t wait any longer for it to happen. Here we are at last like four peas in a pod.’

  ‘Keys in a cod,’ I said.

  ‘Bees in a bod,’ said Zia.

  ‘Seize in a sod,’ said Sonia, with a smile. ‘What? Why are you laughing? Tobah! Such filthy minds.’

  We were still laughing when we reached the car even though it hadn’t been that funny. Laughing because regardless of circumstances we were together at last, eight years down the line, all together, and despite everything that had changed and was changing we still found one another’s laughter contagious.

  ‘You remember that joke of Zia’s?’ Sonia said, as the boys finished loading her luggage into the b
oot. ‘The one about the guards and the rubber gloves?’

  ‘And you said, “Like the ones you wash dishes with.’” I started laughing again, but Karim put out an arm to stop me.

  Sonia was trying to smile, but her face had turned lifeless, and her hands as she pulled her dupatta over her head were trembling. ‘Yes,’ she said, her voice without expression. ‘Since about half an hour ago, I get the joke.’

  A crow swooped by low, I remember, and I noticed two holes in its beak and wondered if they were nostrils. It swooped past Zia and I saw his face, the tears springing to his eyes, and wondered what my face looked like, because it felt like granite. The crow flew away, something red and glinting in its beak, and I remembered an airport official who had patted me down perfunctorily in the curtained-off area for women travellers the last time I had boarded a flight out of Karachi. Her red nail polish had been chipped at the nail-tips.

  I watched myself put my arms around Sonia’s neck. Karim had her hand in his, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. Her dupatta slipped off her head again and Zia cupped his palm against her head and stroked her hair. When I raised my head and saw him crying, I cried also.

  It was only when Karim got a box of tissues out of the car and handed it to Zia, then me, that I realized Sonia was dry-eyed.

  ‘How will I tell my fiancé?’ she said to Karim above the sound of Zia and me blowing our noses. ‘How will I tell Adel?’

  Afterwards, I was to search my memory for any recollection of Zia’s reaction to that, but I can only remember him seeing me look around for somewhere to throw the tissue and pointing to a flowerbed.

  In the car, on the way to Sonia’s we stopped at a traffic light where a man selling motia bracelets rapped on Zia’s window and said, ‘For pretty ladies.’ Zia had only enough change for one bracelet, which he offered to Sonia, but she said the smell of the flowers was too cloying, though she appreciated the gesture. I slipped on the bracelet and felt the little white buds cool against my wrist. I can’t recall if we drove to Sonia’s house in silence, which must mean we didn’t, but I know our conversation didn’t touch on her father’s situation or allude to the ordeal she had undergone. Round the corner from Sonia’s house, another motiawallah approached our car at a traffic light and held up a row of bracelets.

  Zia rolled down his window. ‘No money. Besides, we’ve already bought. Raheen, show him.’

  I held up my wrist.

  The motiawallah turned to Sonia. ‘And yours?’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t have one.’

  The motiawallah’s eyes widened. ‘You must take this from me,’ he said, slipping a bracelet off the wooden stick on which his wares were arrayed. ‘No, you must. I am your brother; as a brother I’m giving this to you. See, I have three sisters myself. I understand these matters.’ Here he gave Zia and Karim a look of disgust. ‘Please, I won’t sleep tonight if you don’t.’

  ‘That’s so typical,’ Sonia said, as Zia drove on. She had put the bracelet on and was leaning her cheek on her wrist, elbow propped on the window ledge, her nose almost buried in that cloying scent. ‘It’s so typical of our people. That generosity to strangers. I’m going to cry.’

  She cried all the way to her house, tears mixing with flowers, the rest of us unsure what to do since she was in the front seat, which made it hard for Karim or me to put our arms around her. Zia signalled me frantically in the rear-view mirror. Should he pull over? And then what? Exchange positions with me so I could hug Sonia? Should he drive faster to get her quickly home, or slower to delay the inevitable knowledge that would greet her once she got there? I didn’t know. How should I know?

  ‘Just drive,’ Karim mouthed to Zia. So Zia drove and Sonia cried and I felt utterly ineffectual. But, more than that, I felt guilty, because I couldn’t stop thinking of how close Karim held Sonia at the airport and how beautiful she looked, even in pain, and now his hands were resting on her shoulders, and when she reached up to rest her hand on his I almost couldn’t breathe for jealousy. So I was glad when we finally approached the road to Sonia’s house; but when Zia turned the corner all four of us in the car were simply baffled—Sonia for reasons separate to ours—to see Sonia’s father getting into a police car. Before we could react, the car drove away. No fuss, no fanfare.

  . . .

  If we had more reliable systems of law and governance, perhaps our friendships would be shallower. But with no one to rely on except one another, Karachiites come together in times of crises with attitudes which suggest that no matter what else we are in our lives—bankers, teachers, hypochondriacs, cynics, Marxists, feudals, vegetarians, divorcees, bigamists, anorexics, dyslexics, sexists—our real vocation is friendship.

  So by the time Sonia’s father was released by the first set of armed men, Sonia’s house was already filling up with people dropping by to see how everyone was and what they could do to help. And shortly after the second set took him away in the police car, all chairs, sofas and floor cushions were in use, and a dozen different conversations were being conducted on mobile phones by people calling ‘useful contacts’ to try to find out what was going on. All anyone knew was that the first round of men had started questioning Sonia’s father about his business affairs, when they were interrupted by a phone call, which involved a lot of ‘yessirs’ on the part of one of the interrogators, followed by a stream of curses when he hung up. Clearly, everyone surmised, two different agencies were after Sonia’s father, and the first had been instructed by someone in a position of high authority to release their captive so that the other agency could deal with him.

  I looked over at Sonia. She was sitting on the sofa in the downstairs study, our friend Nadia sitting to one side of her, clasping her hand, and Karim perched on the sofa arm on the other side of her, his hand on her shoulder. The room was filled with the hum of our friends talking, keeping the conversation light when Sonia seemed to need that, and discussing all the cases of people wrongfully arrested and soon released, when it seemed that would do her more good. Zia hovered in the doorway, trying to get in touch with his father, but every time he managed to get through to the Club—a difficult feat just days before the Winter Ball—and asked for the call to be transferred to his father he was put through to the bakery instead.

  ‘God, Karim’s looking gorgeous,’ one of my friends whispered to me.

  ‘Normally, we’d flip a coin and one of us would grab him,’ her twin sister said. ‘But you’ve got right of first refusal.’

  ‘This is hardly the time,’ I hissed back, and they exchanged meaningful looks and subsided.

  I saw the front door open and more of Sohail’s friends walked in, followed by one of Sonia’s mother’s cronies. That’s when it struck me: none of Sonia’s father’s friends were here. In households like mine, and Nadia’s and the twins’ and—to some extent—Zia’s, and—once upon a time—Karim’s, there were no set boundaries between our mothers’ friends and our fathers’ friends. But Sonia’s parents lived entirely separate lives, with Sonia and Sohail serving as the only links between them. So where now were Bunty and his cohorts, who for years had been spending their Friday nights drinking Sonia’s father’s whisky out of Sonia’s father’s glasses in Sonia’s father’s living room? I could picture them now, sitting back in their exaggeratedly regal postures, taking bets on whether he’d go to prison or not. And if he didn’t, if he made it through this, they’d say ,yaar, of course we weren’t at your house that day, mate; we were running all over town trying to find out what had happened to you. Pass the Black Label. Well, that’s what you get for trying to ingratiate yourself with high society on the sole basis of money so new the ink on it is barely dry.

  I sunk my face into my hands. Why did I have to think this way? My palms smelt like steel. I didn’t know why. There I’d been searching for specific reasons why Karim was so angry with me, and maybe it was just this: because he knew me. Maybe that was reason enough for disgust.

  ‘Raheen?’

/>   I looked up at Sonia. ‘Are you OK?’ she said.

  Images flashed through my mind. Sonia watching her father accused of drug smuggling in court; Sonia hearing the verdict of ‘guilty’; Sonia visiting her father in prison; Sonia sifting through the evidence and discovering it’s all true; Sonia trying to find a way to still be herself, still be compassionate, forgiving, generous, when looking her father in the eye, knowing the truth of who he is. Then I saw Karim’s hand, still resting on her shoulder, and I knew he would stand by her every moment she needed him. I thought, Please, let the charges he dropped, and I didn’t know if I wanted it for Sonia’s sake or for my own.

  I lifted myself off the floor cushion. ‘I’m fine. I just need some water.’ I edged towards the door. Karim pointed at the jug of water and glasses on the trolley next to him, but I pretended to look distracted and turned away.

  ‘Why would anyone do this to my father?’ Sonia said.

  I hoped it was a general question, and not one addressed to me. I didn’t wait to find out, or turn around to see if she was looking at me. I just squeezed past Zia, who was yelling down the phone: ‘No, I’m not calling about the quiche,’ and went out of the front door, round to the back garden.

  Zia came after me. ‘So where’s this wonderful fiancé of hers? Why hasn’t he called? All of Karachi knows by now. Someone’s bound to have got hold of him in London and told him. And why hasn’t she called him?’

  ‘Go and ask her,’ I snapped.

  ‘Oh, one of those moods,’ he muttered, and stalked back to the house. Then he turned and strode back. ‘What happened with you and Karim in Mehmoodabad when I went to get my sweater?’

  ‘I wish I knew. I just seem to have this knack for saying the wrong things sometimes.’

  ‘If there were prizes awarded for it, you’d win gold, baby.’ He pulled an orange-gold flower out of a flowerpot and handed it to me.