Kartography

by Kamila Shamsie

  Ami was looking at him with such terrible sadness.

  Aba looked straight at Karim. ‘Shafiq said, “But then the kitchen door behind Zafar opened and she stepped out into the hall. Maheen. I had started to raise my hand to strike Zafar, but as soon as I saw her my arm just dropped to my side. Maheen. She had taught Bilal how to waltz; he had adored her. And with good reason. I was half in love with her myself. Maheen. Beautiful Maheen, who was looking at me so sadly. Lovely, laughing Maheen. All I could think was, don’t let the war have destroyed her too. The crazy roar in my head began to re-cede, and I turned to Zafar, ready to apologize, ready to fall into his arms, weeping.”’

  Aba turned from Karim to look at me. ‘But Shafiq didn’t do that. He was about to: I believe his version, I really do. But before he could do anything, I spoke. I said, “How can I marry one of them? How can I let one of them bear my children? Think of it as a civic duty. I’ll be diluting her Bengali blood line.”’

  . . .

  He had barely finished uttering the words ‘blood line’, his voice never varying from a robotic monotone, when Ami grabbed me by the shoulder and turned me to face her.

  ‘Before you say or do anything, I want you to think about everything you know about this man. Think about the fact that Maheen forgave him. Ask Asif, ask Laila, the madness that existed in the country in ’71, and how he never succumbed to it, not for an instant, until that final moment. These things have to count. The father, the husband, he’s been all these years, that has to count.’

  ‘Yasmin, stop it,’ Aba said. ‘For God’s sake, stop it.’

  ‘She deserves an explanation. Karim deserves an explanation. Zafar, you deserve an explanation.’

  ‘I deserve? There was an animal inside me. Karim, I’m sorry. Raheen, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Stop it!’ Ami slammed a fist on the tea trolley and sent cutlery flying. ‘There is no animal inside you that made you do it; there is no animal inside you at all, goddammit. Why won’t you accept that and look back at what you did, without feeling that looking back is an attempt at excusing yourself?’

  I looked from one parent to the other. What did something that happened nearly a quarter of a century ago have to do with our lives? Why were my parents looking at me, so terrified, so grave, making me feel my lack of reaction was some sort of failure? Why were they being so...irritating? That was it, they were being irritating. As they so often could be, but that was the nature of parents and I hardly regarded it as unforgivable, so why stand around making a big deal of it? I opened my mouth to say all this, but to my horror I found I got no further than ‘You’re both...’ before my voice cracked and a sob constricted my throat.

  My father’s face crumpled up, as if I had sliced a blade through him. I turned, hands bunching into fists, and yelled at Karim: ‘Who told you to come back, you outsider!’

  I grabbed Aba’s car-keys from the coffee table, pushed past Aunty Laila, who was crying on her husband’s shoulder, and then I was off, fingers scraping against steel while opening the sliding door to the garden, feet pounding towards the car, Aba’s too-large shoes slapping against my soles and against the ground, feet pressing down on the accelerator, down and down, turning the volume of the music up and up...one times two is two two times two is four three times two is six four times two is eight in but an hour it shall be ten and so from our house in the middle of the street where the streets have no name the person you most admire... my father... why? because he’s never given me reason not to... and your mother?... yes, her too, but him first because...because I don’t know why but because he laughs louder and sings more often and always has an answer to any question I ask when the world doesn’t make sense to me and you’d think this sort of adoration wouldn’t last past adolescence but here I am, and everyone says I’m like him, and that makes me proud, hut how will you react when you see his face in shadows for the first time? I’ll, I’ll, I’ll...

  When I finally pulled up in front of the gate to Zia’s beach hut, almost an hour after I’d torn out of Aunty Laila’s house, the fisherman who looked after all the huts on that strip of beach looked at me with a mixture of curiosity and concern, but opened the gate.

  ‘Is Zia Sahib also coming?’ Baba, the caretaker, asked when I got out of the car.

  I shook my head. ‘Just me.’

  ‘Don’t stay long. It’s not safe driving back, particularly after dark. Particularly for a girl.’

  I nodded and bent down to scratch the head of the yellow-brown mongrel who had come running towards me.

  ‘Hey, Puppi. What happened here?’ I inspected the caked black blood at the end of the dog’s ear.

  ‘Some men shot at him.’

  ‘Shot Puppi? Why?’

  Baba shrugged. ‘Because they’re Pakistani. Don’t go on the second beach to the left.’

  Baba wasn’t given to explaining such pronouncements—which could mean ‘bluebottles’ or ‘men roaring up and down the sand on motorbikes’ or ‘smugglers’ or ‘dolphin carcass’—and I didn’t feel myself capable of forming another sentence, so I nodded, kicked off Aba’s shoes, and made my way down to the beach via the natural footholds in the least sheer part of the dun-coloured cliffs. My feet sank in the warm sand when I jumped down from a height of a few feet. There was no one else on the beach. All mine. For a moment my mind actually cleared, and I stood, breathing in the sea air through my nose, closing my eyes to isolate the sound of waves so small they were just bands of water. The first time I had realized I was homesick at college was when I entered a friend’s dorm room and saw a collection of shells arrayed on her desk. I picked each one up in turn and held it to my ear, desperate to hear the sounds of my sea, but most of the shells were too small and even the largest only carried the echo of an unfamiliar ocean.

  I walked further and further away from the cliffs—the sand sloped down, slicked and shiny with the last inrush of tide. I rolled up my shalwar, and waded in. The water was cold, but bearable. I splashed some onto my face. Pulled my feet out of their own prints and watched the sea rush in to take their place. Stood on a partly-submerged rock, unbothered by its eroded unevenness prickling my soles. Wished for a dolphin to leap out of the waves. Wished again.

  I tried to hear my father saying those words in a tone other than the one he’d used to re-tell it to me. I tried to see his face say those words and mean it. But I couldn’t. So why were my fingers trembling as I held my hand out in front of me?

  I closed my eyes to try to think of Karim’s face as it must have been when someone told him why his mother broke off her engagement with my father. It all fell into place, then, all his moments of withdrawal, all those cryptic comments about my father and about the traits he heard echoing through me. Who told him? Which meddling, trouble-making, heartless, disgusting...may you suffer, whoever you are, may you suffer by losing everything you thought most important and most secure, may you love someone who doesn’t love you back... No, worse, may you love someone who loves you but cannot look at you without seeing...what? what?

  And then I saw her. Aunty Maheen. Young, beautiful and in love, but with a heart that was daily further cleft by emotions more complicated than anything conjured up by the words ‘polities’, ‘patriotism’, ‘loyalty’. Who every day heard the news, heard what was reported and what was not reported, heard things that I couldn’t pretend to know because no one ever talked about it, no one ever talked about those days and told us what the people who raised us had to bear and what they made others bear, and what could not be borne. What could not be borne for her was obvious, so obvious: Zafar stepping into history, no more pretence at living outside the world around him (as I know he lived for so long, as he had told me he lived for so long, without explaining when he stopped), Zafar stepping into history, stepping where she could not go, and kicking her away as he stepped there.

  I saw her face as she heard her fiancé’s words, saw her expression register betrayal and, then, register loss, and I sat down hard on
the jagged rock, weeping until my throat ached, weeping until I was past tears, my body convulsing in shudders that I couldn’t understand, couldn’t stop. How would I ever get off this rock, how would I ever go back? How? Karim. How? Aba, Aba, Aba.

  How did my father? How, my mother? How, all those memories I had of the four of them together? When did...? What...? What...

  Near sunset, he found me.

  ‘Zia said you’d probably be here.’ He was holding the shoes I had left at Aunty Laila’s.

  I nodded. It seemed to require an extraordinary amount of effort.

  ‘Uncle Asif gave me his mobile. I called Aunty Laila when I saw your car parked near the hut. She’ll tell...she said she’d let your mother know.’

  I just blinked in response. Why didn’t he go away?

  He put my shoes down on the sand and went away.

  I turned to watch the gulls wheeling between sky and water, and when I looked back again he had gone. I drew my knees up to my chin and hated him.

  I heard his footsteps slosh through the water towards me. He had only wandered off a little way, and now he came towards me, one hand filled with pebbles, the other holding something oblong and white. He pulled himself on to the rock beside me and, his feet dangling in the water, placed the pebbles between us. In silence, we took turns skipping the smooth, grey stones across the water. He threw with a flick of the wrist, and I threw with a hopelessly inadequate technique, but I still managed to make my stones skip more than his.

  When there were only two pebbles left, we picked up one each and threw them out to sea at the same time. They clinked against each other in the air and spun back towards us. We turned our faces away, and this time it was my hand that moved by instinct, shielding the eye that had a glass-splinter scratch just beneath it. The pebbles splashed in the water, feet away from the rock.

  ‘April 1987. Last time I was here. Remember?’

  I remembered it well. Zia, Sonia and I were trying to put a positive spin on Karim’s departure that summer (‘you’ll be able to eat MacDonald’s Quarterpounder with Cheese all the time’, ‘while we’re melting in the sun, you’ll be wearing all those cool sweaters’, ‘concerts, Karim, concerts!’ ‘Lords, man, Lords’, ‘Not the aristos, idiot, the cricket ground!’), and finally decided that the best thing about being in London was that you were likely to run into people who could give you a record deal. We’d form a band and make demo tapes and Karim would get us a contract. The name, Karim and I decided, was key. Once we had a name for our band, everything else would fall into place even though we couldn’t play any instruments and the only one with a halfway decent singing voice was Zia, and he only sang when seated at a dining table, which might make for interesting conc arrangements. But all those concerns were just minor irritations as long as we had a name. Zia confessed he’d once stayed awake until four in the morning trying to find a suitably catchy name for a pop band.

  ‘And?’ I said. ‘Didja?’

  ‘That’s it!’ Karim whooped. ‘That’s our band’s name.’ He used the end of his cricket bat to write in the sand.

  ‘The Didja Djinns,’ I muttered, remembering.

  Karim turned to me on the rock. ‘It’s still a great name.’ He pulled a notebook and tiny pencil out of his back pocket. ‘Let’s resurrect the band.’ He tapped the notebook with his pen. ‘We need song titles. Come on, Raheen.’ I went on looking at him, and he gestured to the note pad again, and wrote:

  Don’t Make Whoopie, Save Your Rupee

  I took the pen from his hand and wrote:

  Paki Up Your Troubles

  Karim made a sound of amusement, and took the pen from me. He wrote:

  By gum, Begum

  And I wrote:

  (Kar)achi, nivals and ousing

  ‘Except Carnival and Carousing are spelt with a “C”,’ Karim pointed out. Somehow, my cheek was resting against his shoulder.

  ‘Not in Karachi. We worship at the alter of K. Haven’t you noticed all the Ks in business names in Karachi: Karachi Kars, Karachi Karpets, Karachi Kards—not to mention Karat Jewellers, Kwick Kababs, Kleen Kleeners.’

  Karim laughed, rocking forward.

  ‘Idi-oh, you’ll fall off,’ I said, catching him by his collar and pulling him upright. He straightened, turned to face me, and, just like that, all laughter was gone. I let go of his collar, and didn’t know what to say.

  Finally, Karim spoke. ‘That essay you sent me. The last city was the City of Friendship. Raya is an anagram of yaar.’

  ‘Yes.’ I ran my finger over a piece of velvety moss that clung to the rock, just inches away from his hand.

  ‘I should have seen that.’ The oblong thing he’d been holding was the bone of a cuttlefish. He started to trace around my hand with its pointy edge.

  ‘You drove over Mai Kolachi to get here,’ I said. ‘You wrote to me about it once, remember?’

  I kept my hand planted on the rock while he traced around it, and reached down to the sea with the other hand to pick up a bit of seaweed. It was rubbery, with bubbles along one side filled with liquid. I handed him one end of the seaweed and we started bursting bubbles between thumb and forefinger, hands moving closer and closer together.

  ‘Yes. I said if they made a road through the mangrove swamps it would cut down the drive to the beach by at least fifteen minutes.’

  ‘Must have given you a thrill. Driving through the road you predicted.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking about roads, Raheen.’

  ‘Not even for a second?’

  He smiled. ‘Maybe half a second.’

  ‘Mangrove swamps are an endangered species,’ I said.

  A wave lurched at us, soaking our lower bodies, washing the seaweed away.

  ‘I don’t want to see him again. My father. Not ever.’ Karim didn’t say anything. ‘Well, that’s what you want me to say, isn’t it?’ I leaned back on the rock, feeling physically sick. ‘All this time I’ve been trying to understand what had gone wrong between us. I thought it had something to do with maps or my reaction to newspaper headlines or telling you that you’ve become a foreigner, and all along you just wanted me to say I hate my father. That’s all.’ I looked out at the waves curling into themselves and breaking, grey-white, and I felt an overwhelming sense of loss. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘I thought you knew. I really thought you knew. You were asking questions before I left, Raheen. You were asking my father and Uncle Asif. In a place like Karachi where everyone knew, and plenty of people love breaking bad news, how could I know you’d never find anyone who’d tell you?’

  ‘Well, a funny thing happened. I stopped asking.’

  ‘Why?’

  It was that gorgeous moment of sunset when the most vibrant colours in the world are pulled towards the sun, the sky shot through with every shade of purple and red and yellow, and everything else darkening. I could remember it all quite clearly now: Aunty Maheen saying to my father, ‘Don’t tell me that feelings can’t change; don’t you dare be the one to tell me that,’ and my parents’ argument afterwards, frightening enough to my sense of order that I had decided I would not ask about this again, not even if it killed me.

  ‘Because I was smart.’ I almost started crying again. ‘Why did I have to know? What does it benefit us to know? He’s been a good father, Karim, he’s been better than that. You knew how much I idolize, how much I idolized—oh, fuck tenses! You thought I knew what he had done and you never bothered to say you were sorry.’

  I jumped down to the sand, lost my footing and fell over in the cold water, my elbow gashing red against a jut of rock. When he reached down to help me, I pushed him away. ‘You found out what he’d said, you thought I’d found out too, and instead of taking even half a second to think of how that would have made me feel you mutilated my letters and sent me maps.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Ra.’ He pushed himself off the rock. ‘If you can’t understand that instead of thinking about you I’d be thinking about my mother and what he pu
t her through, then you really are the most self-absorbed person I’ve ever met.’

  ‘Oh, no, you can’t. You can’t accuse me. I’m the perfect friend now.’ I knew I was being absurd but I couldn’t stop. ‘You wanted me to hate my father. My one failure was my refusal to hate my father. Well, I’ve told you now: I want nothing more to do with him. You happy? You miserable bastard, haven’t I just lived up to all your wildest expectations?’

  ‘I didn’t want you to hate him, Raheen. I wanted you to stop being him.’ He grabbed my hands. ‘He thought he could pretend the war and everything going on had nothing to do with him, or with her; he pretended and pretended that the outlines in which they lived didn’t matter, until one day it was at his door and things inside him that he never acknowledged, never tried to deal with, came out.’

  ‘We don’t know that’s how it happened.’

  ‘And you’re the same. You’re the same, Raheen. The city is falling apart and you’re the same. That’s why I sent you those maps. Because I wanted you to find a way to see beyond the tiny circle you live in.’

  ‘Karim, my world is falling to pieces and you’re still talking about maps!’

  ‘I’m not, I’m not. I’m talking about why I look at you and see him and can’t bear it or forgive you or be with you.’

  Now all colour was leached from the day. We were shadows in a shadow world. The beach was always the one place I could go to and never stumble upon unpleasant memories, and now even that had been taken from me.

  ‘I don’t want anything more to do with either him or you. This friendship is over, Karim.’