I tucked the flower behind my ear. ‘I can understand Sonia’s friendship with me lasting through the years. She’s a saint. But how the hell have I managed to keep you from slamming the door on your way out?’
‘Well, to start with, we never actually have serious conversations about anything for more than twenty seconds. So there’s a sort of beautiful superficiality to our relationship which sometimes gets covered up by all the genuine affection flowing back and forth.’
‘That must be it.’ I kicked his ankle. ‘So if I actually ever bared my soul to you, it would all be over.’
‘Could be. I know I would never subject you to my bare soul. You, I don’t know. I mean, whether I want to take a joyride in a stolen car, or drive two hundred miles across America to find the perfect milkshake, you’re the girl I call, and you don’t even hold it against me when someone shoots at you or the milkshake machine is broken. But here’s the thing: even in your finest moments you always seems so suspicious of yourself.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Twenty seconds up. End of discussion. I have to try to get hold of my father again.’
I didn’t follow him in, but walked over to the crescent-shaped fish pond, and sat cross-legged on the grass beside it, watching for streaks of gold to fin past between the green pond vegetation. A crow dropped a twig in my lap, and I dipped it beneath the surface of the water and watched the ripples.
A Karim-shaped shadow cast itself over the surface of the water. ‘Whatever your problems are at this moment, they’re totally insignificant compared with Sonia’s, so stop being so bloody selfish and get back inside and at least pretend to be a goddamn friend.’
A fish darted past, a streamlined streak through my reflection. ‘I don’t know how,’ I said.
Karim dropped to his knees beside me. ‘Rubbish.’ But his tone was gentler now.
‘I’m so sure her father’s guilty, Karimazov. And she’s going to know it. I’m such a damned awful liar.’ I shook my head, and swooped my hand down to within millimetres of the water in a bird-of-prey imitation, terrifying the fish into zipping madly about. ‘You know, everyone keeps going on about my wonderful trait of honesty. But it’s only because I know I can’t get away with lying. I squint, or I shift, or I scratch my nose, or I concentrate so much effort on not doing any of those things that I become a statue. It’s pretty pathetic, really.’
‘That is pathetic. And who says your honesty is wonderful? It can be brutal. And will you stop trying to give the fish a heart attack.’ He slapped away my hand, which was still making diving motions towards the water. ‘Maybe you need practice, that’s all. Say something to me that’s a blatant lie. Go on.’
‘I haven’t missed you at all.’
‘Ah, but that’s no good.’ He crossed his legs, and we sat kneecap to kneecap. ‘I would have to believe that’s a lie, no matter how much conviction you put into saying it.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Because I’ve missed you too much to be able to bear the thought that it was all one-sided.’ He linked his fingers through mine and we bounced our clasped hands from one knee to the other. We seemed to be encased in such a fragile moment of perfection that I hardly dared breathe for fear of destroying it.
‘Something you want to ask me?’ he said.
‘When did it stop being awful, your parents’ divorce?’
Never letting go of my hand, he pivoted round on his backside and lay down in the grass, resting his head on my knee. ‘Never.’ He held my hand against his chest, and I could feel his heart beat. ‘But you kept telling me I needed to allow my mother to be happy.’
‘When did I say that?’
‘In my head, always. And you were right.’
I ran my fingers along his scalp, tracing the contours of his head beneath the soft, cropped hair. ‘I think there’s a better me inside your head than there is out here in the world. Is that why I make you so angry, Karim? Because I fail to live up to the person you thought I’d turn out to be?’
In those moments just before he answered I wondered how things might have been different had Karim never left. Perhaps we would have grown apart, the secrets between us multiplying as adolescence took over our bodies and our lives, his parents’ marital woes placing a strain on their friendship with my parents, no one sure where loyalties should lie. But instead he left, and that allowed both of us to remember—or re-imagine—our friendship as something mythic, something fated, something waiting to be renewed and transfigured into a more adult version of itself.
He looked up at me and when he breathed out I could smell oranges on his breath. ‘You turned out great,’ he said.
What we both wanted then was impossible in Sonia’s back garden, and would have been utterly foolish anywhere, and I was close enough to forgetting both those things to know we had to go back inside. But when we returned to the house, Sonia looked at the two of us walk in, and though she would never admit it I know it was something in our faces that made her tell everyone that she wanted to sit with her mother for a while, so could we come back later? I started to protest but Zia whispered, ‘Go. Take my car. I’ll stay here.’ The twins nodded agreement and Nadia handed me her mobile and said someone would call if there was any news of Sonia’s father.
I drove Karim to the Club, stopping at Zia’s house and mine just long enough to pick up towels and swimming gear. I knew there’d be hardly anyone there at this hour, and I was right—the only other people in the pool area were a foreigner sunbathing, a father and his daughter playing ping-pong at the table to one end of the pool enclosure, and a man with the physique of a serious swimmer doing laps.
By the time I was out of the changing room, Karim was already standing under the shower at the edge of the pool, his back towards me; I stood on the hot cement strip outside the changing room, watching water stream down his bare limbs. I dug my nails into my palms, reminding myself how idiotic it would be to do anything that I was so close to doing that I could almost taste it.
Stop it, Raheen. I slapped my knuckles.
Karim called out to me, and I walked over to the deep end, laughing to see him walk away from the shower with tiny steps that tried to keep time with the tick-tick-tick sound of unbreakable eggshells bouncing which echoed from the ping-pong table.
‘All right,’ he said, when we stood side by side. ‘So what are we doing, and do you mind if I put my glasses back on and just look at you for a few seconds?’
I smacked him on the back of the head, and lowered myself into the deep end. ‘Just look? You wimp,’ I said, and fitted my goggles over my eyes, the rubber around the eye-pieces pressing securely against my skin. The world was blue-tinged and smelled of chlorine.
‘Do what I do,’ I instructed him.
I turned on to my back and hooked my legs over the side of the pool to moor me in place, squinting against the glare of the sun. My back, bobbing up and down on the water, formed a ninety-degree angle with my upper legs. After checking Karim was following me, I filled my lungs with air, held my nose and sank beneath the water’s surface, watching my breath bubble as its slow release pulled me down, the ninety-degree angle becoming increasingly obtuse. I continued exhaling until my back was flush against the wall of the pool. One hundred and eighty degrees. I was suspended upside down in water, like a sea-bat.
Karim was just inches away from me and he turned his head, his expression one of confusion. I gestured, Don’t look at me. Look around. He did, and I watched him long enough to see his upside-down smile before looking around myself. It was like entering another world. Everything blue. The blue of the tiles turned the water into the colour of some Mediterranean dream. Bands of sunlight slid along the tiles. The surface of the water was whipped into activity by gusts of wind, and we saw the undulations on the underside of the water’s surface. Troughs transformed into peaks. The swimmer was walking from one side of the pool to the other at the shallow end, and all we knew of him was his body, chest down, and the water cutting off the rest of him. We co
uldn’t hear the ping-pong game any more. The shadow of a leaf moved along the bottom of the pool.
I could feel a pressure build up inside my lungs but I wasn’t ready, not yet, to leave. I opened my mouth very slightly and exhaled just enough to buy me a little more time. Karim’s hand reached through the water to try to catch the bubble of air as it escaped to the surface, but his limbs were in slow motion. His hand, attempting to grasp my breath, brushed against my thigh, and stayed there. Water bubbles attached themselves to every hair along Karim’s arm. There was no world but this.
At last I could take it no more and I burst up to the surface, gasping for breath. But Karim stayed where he was. I took off my goggles, pulled myself out of the pool, lay by the edge in the sunshine, and ducked my face into the water. Without my goggles I couldn’t see him clearly, but I knew he could see my face breaking through the calm surface of the water, and I knew he’d know I took my goggles off for vanity’s sake. With a rush of bubbles he burst out of the water, his arms reaching for me and pulling me in. I pinched his nose shut and we ducked beneath the water’s surface, exhaling again, our arms around each other as we twirled lower, no one in the pool now but us, so no one to see how my hands moved across his back and down, and his hands slid beneath my swimsuit, and legs tangled and muscles constricted and mouths forgot to exhale, and so we rose up and broke through the surface again to find a young girl at the side of the pool staring open-mouthed at us with a ping-pong ball in her hand.
But a little while later, when we lay side by side on the blue sunbeds, enough distance between us for propriety but no more, not one millimetre more, I watched his eyes flutter as he dreamt and I knew we were no closer to making peace with our pasts than we had been on the phone when he said he could not forget the palimpsest.
An insect walked across Karim’s chest toward his stomach. I brushed it off, my fingers straying to trace the lower end of his rib cage. I loved Karim, and I knew he loved me; there was no part of me that disputed that. But it was the kind of love that existed because it had always existed, because it didn’t know how not to exist. It all sounded so romantic, but the truth was it frightened me; love wasn’t going to be enough to keep us together for anything longer than an idyllic afternoon so long as he still had reason to look at me the way he’d looked at me more than once already since he got to Karachi. Disgust was not too strong a word for that look.
But why, goddammit? Why did he weave around the subject, jabbing accusations at me, then twirling away, and turning to glare when I looked baffled? I couldn’t help but strike back, but I hit only his shadow, the blow passing through darkness and crumpling my fist against a wall.
Karim opened his eyes, and stood up with a sudden movement, quite ignoring my hand on his ribs. ‘We really should go back to Sonia’s. Wasn’t very nice of us to leave her.’
I nodded, slipped my clothes on over my swimsuit and followed him out.
There were so many movies in which couples in love found that because of fate, circumstance, prior commitments or differing dreams they simply could not be together and, knowing that, they’d always have one last dance, one last kiss, one last here’s-looking-at-you kid. Glancing back at the pool on my way out, I could not escape from the feeling that we’d just had that.
. . .
‘Now, darlings, let me get this straight.’ Aunty Laila rested a hand on my arm, fingers spread wide in order not to smudge her freshly applied nail polish. ‘No, first help yourself to tea and then evaluate my recap.’
Aunty Laila and Uncle Asif had just got back to Karachi, after ten days on Uncle Asif’s farm—which was about as long as Aunty Laila could spend there at a single stretch once the romance of being newlyweds living in isolation had departed—and Aunty Laila had phoned my house en route from the airport to say I must tell my parents to leave their respective places of work early, pick me up, and arrive promptly at her house. She wanted us waiting in her drawing room, ready to greet her with garlands of gossip when her car pulled in.
‘All right, so——’ Aunty Laila, tired of my vacillations over whether to take a sandwich or a slice of cake, put both on my plate, along with some pakoras, and pushed me back against the sofa cushions. Uncle Asif, more raccoon-eyed and pillow-bellied than ever, entered the room, his freshly washed hair plastered down in a manner that made his bald spot look like a crop circle. Aunty Laila motioned him to sit down silently and then pressed her fingertips against her temples and squeezed her eyes shut. ‘Asif, I have the down-low on GoldTaps. Are you listening?’
Uncle Asif took advantage of his wife’s closed eyes to whisk a piece of cake off the trolley, ‘Yes, yes, go ahead. But don’t break your concentration or you’ll lose your thread.’
‘OK. Sweetie,’ she addressed my mother, eyes still closed, ‘remove the trolley from his reach. I only married him for the agility of his limbs, and the mixture of age and weight is fast destroying the foundation of our union. Asif, stop chewing and listen.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Yesterday afternoon un-uniformed men claiming to be police showed some form of ID to GoldTaps’ guards, who are illiterate Pathans and didn’t know if they were being shown police IDs or library cards, so let the men in, and the men broke GoldTaps’ finger and took him off somewhere. Begum and Baba GoldTaps called all the police stations, but...nothing, nada, zip. Hour or two later, call from GoldTaps saying he’s at Boat Basin. Junior goes to get him, finds him eating kabab rolls, fit as a fiddler, though whether the same was true some hours later we don’t know, because the last time I had kabab rolls at Boat Basin very unglamorous things happened to my insides. But, returning to plot, they return home, five minutes later the phone rings and it’s some toothpick flunkey to say policemen are searching GoldTaps’ office. Door bell rings and it’s the police, with uniforms, and they arrest GoldTaps. Lawyer is called—JP, you know, Tahira’s ex’s brother, the one about whom there were all those rumours involving parrots and masks—and legal things go on. Now GoldTaps is home again, awaiting trial date; his name on the Exit Control List at airports and all border points—even the ones way up north where no one would travel at this time of year—and rumour has it there’s evidence, in documents seized from his office, to link him to the finest poppy-growers of the region.’
Uncle Asif grunted, and eyed the oozing chocolate icing on the cake. ‘Damn fool for leaving evidence lying round. Raheen, how’s your friend Sonia?’
A hard question to answer. She was too busy (holding her mother’s hand, massaging her father’s head to bring him some relief from his blinding headaches, and stepping in to calm down her brother every time he flew into a rage over the tiniest grievance) to stop and think about herself, never mind articulate how she was feeling. That she believed the evidence was planted and that her father was as upright a man as had ever existed since evolution made bipeds of our species was not open to question. When I had dropped in this morning to see how she was, there had been only two instances when she had shown anything other than her customary serenity. The first was when I felt it my duty to prepare her for the inevitable revelation that her father was guilty; I did this by suggesting there seemed no reason for anyone to go through such trouble to frame him—after all, this was no slipshod, half-baked frame job but one that required forging his handwriting on dozens of incriminating documents, and doctoring his phone records to show frequent calls to well-known drug barons.
‘No reason?’ Sonia’s hand gripped into a fist. ‘He’s richer and more successful than any of your lot with your old money and your generations-old friendships with the high and mighty. When a man gets too big for his boots, set them on fire, isn’t that the way?’
She had apologized, as had I, within seconds of that comment, but we both knew that there was no taking back or forgetting her use of ‘your lot’.
The second sign of stress getting to her had occurred shortly after that, when Karim and Zia dropped in, and Karim asked her if her fiancé was cutting short his London trip. Sonia wrapped the end
of her dupatta round her hand and pulled the fabric so tight I could see the imprint of her veins against the block-printed material. ‘I haven’t spoken to him. So many people calling here, the line’s always busy and it’s impossible to get through. Also, I think he’s visiting friends in one of those English towns with unnecessary letters in their names and I don’t have the number. It’s possible he hasn’t even heard.’
‘It must be strange to know what to say to him,’ I said, haltingly, hoping that pauses between words would pass as tact. Tactful people never spoke as quickly as I generally did. ‘I mean, since it’s an arranged marriage——’
‘Arrafection,’ she said. ‘Started as arranged, but ended up as affection. More than affection.’
About her airport ordeal, she hadn’t said a thing.
If I’d been the sort of friend I wanted to be, I would be thinking only of Sonia, but my thoughts couldn’t help returning to the awkwardness between Karim and me that had started on the drive from the pool back to Sonia’s, both of us near mute the entire journey. I had hoped we were just overloaded from all the emotions of the day and everything would be a little better after a night’s sleep, but if anything things were worse when we met at Sonia’s this morning; he had hardly been able to meet my eye when he said hello and neither of us had directly addressed a question or comment to the other the entire time we sat, mere feet apart, in Sonia’s TV room. My head still hurt from trying to understand what was going on.
Aunty Laila put a hand on my shoulder. Are you with us, darling? You’re not upset about how I’m talking about your friend’s father, are you? You know that’s just the way I am. Don’t you?’
Before I could answer, the phone rang and Aunty Laila’s hand lifted off my shoulder, made the most graceful of arcs through the air without the slightest sign of haste, her rings catching the light at an angle that maximized their sparkle, and picked up the phone before it had completed its second ring.
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