When had he told Sonia’s father about the car thief? Had he been to visit Sonia at some point without telling me? How could anyone look at Sonia and not want to drown forever in her serene beauty? How could anyone look at Sonia and not see how easy it was to love her? I put my arms around her shoulders and kissed the side of her head. Karim looked surprised at that. Did he think I wasn’t capable of a single genuine emotion? Did he expect me to say, ‘Pity you won’t be marrying Adel Rana. He would have purified your nouveau riche blood line.’
God, Aba, how could you have?
Dost Mohommad entered the room, with a tray bearing cups of green tea with mint and cardamom. Karim, Sonia and I each took a cup, and went outside. We sat in the garden, forgoing cane chairs for the sprawl of grass, and Sonia raised her cup. ‘To the grey areas of our lives,’ she said. ‘To the slippery slopes, and the absence of signposts.’
What had she begun to suspect about her father?
Karim clinked cups with her and waved away swooping, bewinged insects. ‘Raheen has something to tell you.’
I told her about the newspaper announcement.
She listened, without interrupting, as I spoke, and then laid a hand on my arm. ‘Thank you. I’d rather hear it from you than anyone in the whole wide...’ She closed her eyes, and looked away.
I held my cup against her cold cheek, and understood Zia’s inclination to beat Adel Rana senseless. She didn’t look at me, fidgeting instead with a long fleshy leaf that sprouted from a calla lilly bulb. She wrapped the leaf around her fisted hand and the leaf snapped, just centimetres above the bulb.
I took the leaf out of her hand and knotted it around her neck. She rested her head on my shoulder, and I put my arms around her, and wondered: how had we come to this, all four of us? How had the laughter gone out of our lives?
Karim stood up and walked around the garden, running his palms over the outline of flowers and shrubs. I closed my eyes for a long moment. When I looked again, he was out of the radius of the veranda light, transformed into shadow. When a moth veered past his shoulder I was almost surprised it didn’t flit right through his dark form.
Sonia raised her head from my shoulder, and looked from me to Karim.
‘I’m going in to tell my parents what’s happened. Karim, you and Raheen wait for me.’
She went back inside, and Karim continued staring intently at a cluster of flowers, with more fascination than was necessary for what was just a pink clump of petals trying hard to assert resemblance to a rose. I lay back and tried to find something to focus all my attention on, but my mind simply would not clear of everything whirling around in it. It seemed so easy to curl up in a ball on the grass and never think of anyone or anything again.
At length, Sonia came back outside. ‘Zia just rang. Sounded strange. He said he had to see me. Do you know what this is about?’
I shook my head.
‘Well, he’s driving aimlessly. Refused to come here. And I don’t want to go anywhere we’re likely to run into people we know. So I said the two of you would drive me to Kharadar to meet him. That’s OK, isn’t it?’
I looked at my watch. ‘Your father won’t let you leave the house at this hour. Why Kharadar? I’ve only ever driven through there on the way to the beach.’
‘My father’s feeling too bad about my broken engagement to say no to anything I ask. And you’ve answered “why Kharadar?” Because no one we know goes there.’
And so, for the second time in the day, I drove over Mai Kolachi, the road that cut through mangrove swamps. A few minutes later we were on I.I. Chundrigar Road, just past the Jubilee Insurance House, which, in the dark with some of its illuminated letters fused, spelt out the suggestive command: jubile in ra house.
‘Oh, I always Jubile in Raheen’s house. Don’t you?’ Sonia said, turning to smile at me. I rolled my eyes and then smiled back. It was the only thing she’d said since we’d left her house. It was the only thing anyone had said. Zia’s car streaked past us on I.I., and then reversed back when he realized it was my car he’d overtaken. Karim opened the door without a word and stepped into Zia’s car.
‘What’s happened with the two of you?’ Sonia said, but she didn’t need my pain to add to hers, so I told her ‘nothing serious’.
‘You’ll tell me when you’re ready,’ Sonia said, and touched my cheek, almost crumbling my resolve.
Before long we were in narrow gullies. Zia pulled alongside and asked Sonia if she could find her way around here.
‘Is the map man lost?’ Sonia said, smiling in at Karim.
Karim smiled back and said he’d never seen a map of Kharadar and no one he knew could verbally re-create its twists and turns. I knew nothing about Kharadar as it existed in the present, although somewhere in my head was the information that when Karachi was little more than a cluster of huts within a boundary wall surrounded by marshy ground, there were two points of entry to the town: Kharadar (the salt doorway) and Mithadar (the sweet doorway), named after the quality of water in the wells that stood by each door. So this was as Old Karachi as it got.
Sonia directed me through the narrow lanes, with Zia following behind. She was the only one among us not surprised to see that the shops were still open and the streets bustling with activity, though it was near midnight and most of Karachi had shut down for the night.
A woman was buying a plush animal from a shop that had dozens of toys, individually stored in plastic bags, hanging from hooks outside the store, forcing people walking along the narrow pavement to duck and weave out of the way of footballs, teddy bears, dolls and plastic cricket bats. Through the open door of a travel agency I saw a group of men sitting in a ragged circle with their feet up on a table; further ahead, a sheep poked its nose through the door that stood ajar to a video-game arcade, if arcade is not too elaborate a term for a tiny enclosure with space for only three games. A crowd of children stood around a man who fed long, yellowy sugar cane into a press on a rickety cart and filled old Coca-Cola and 7-Up bottles with sweet liquid. Piles of flattened canes were stacked on the road beside him.
I was moved, absurdly, to tears. A week or two ago people were wary of leaving their houses, particularly after dark, the violence in the city both unpredictable and terrifyingly ordered, causing some to speculate that the factional violence, ethnic violence, sectarian violence and random violence were not unconnected but fuelled by someone who wanted Karachi terrorized. But who? Why? No one was sure, though there was no shortage of theories. We all knew it would start up again—the shootings on a massive scale, the unnatural silence in the evenings, the siege mentality—but for the moment, for today, Karachi was getting back to its feet, as it had always been able to do, and that didn’t just mean getting back to work, but getting back to play: friendship, chai, cricket on the street, conversation. It was a terribly self-involved thought, I knew, but I couldn’t help feeling that, in the midst of everything that was happening, Karachi had decided to turn around and wink at me. And in that wink was serious intent: yes, the city said, I am a breeding ground for monsters, but don’t think that is the full measure of what I am.
Sonia told me to pull over next to a paan shop; Zia parked next to me, and we walked together to a chai shop. There didn’t appear to be any female customers, but no one gave us a second glance. The interior of the chai shop—confusingly called a ‘hotel’—was fitted with white bathroom tiles and fluorescent lights, as was the norm with such establishments, and our collective aesthetic gave one long shudder and sat us down outdoors, on wooden backless benches around a laminated-top long table, with watery imprints of the bottoms of glasses on it. The owner (at least, he appeared to be the owner because he had a note pad and pencil in hand) snapped his fingers and a man in black shalwar-kameez appeared to wipe the table clean. When he was done, Karim, Sonia and I rested our elbows on the table top, though Zia first removed a handkerchief from his pocket and spread that on the table in front of him. When he saw we were about to laugh he whis
ked the handkerchief away, and planted his palms on the table with an air of nonchalance. Sonia ordered parathas and four cups of tea ‘with malai’; Zia interrupted, ‘No malai for me.’ He couldn’t bear even the tiniest speck of cream to mix with the milk in his tea.
A beggar girl came and stood by our table with a cupped palm extended towards us.
‘Move away,’ Zia said.
She stood her ground.
‘Are you deaf? Move away. Can’t we drink tea in peace?’
‘Zia!’ Karim remonstrated.
‘Fine,’ Zia said. He pointed at Karim. ‘He’s the one with the money.’
The girl turned to Karim. Sonia nudged him and pointed out the other beggars who were watching with interest to see if he was a soft touch. ‘Come back when we’ve finished,’ he said. The girl continued to stand her ground, blocking Karim’s view of the street. I couldn’t help getting some perverse pleasure from watching him so torn between the moral code that served him so well in the abstract and the terrible irritation of having someone standing so close, pushing her outstretched palm in front of him and mumbling, without conviction, phrases about her sick mother and sick brother and no money for medicine. These were the sort of things he could remain blithely unaware of when he sat in London or Boston, shaking his head in disgust at the tiny circles in which I lived my life.
‘We’re clearly the rich kids around here,’ I said. ‘She’d be a disgrace to her profession if she gave up on you so easily. Guess no one’s ever shown her a map that lets her know her connectedness to you. Guess she isn’t aware of your great, bleeding heart that sees your life in the context of her world.’
‘Sonia, would you tell your friend to stop directing every conversation back to herself,’ Karim said.
‘What’s going on?’ Sonia said. Neither Karim nor I answered, and Zia seemed to be in another world.
The waiter came back to our table, shooing the girl away, and set down four pieces of paper as place mats. They were shipping schedules, detailing lists of Ships, Ports of Call, ETA and ETD, Voyage Number, Flag, Agents and other indecipherables such as: Line Advert, Service, Terminal and EGM. The last column was To Load For (‘sort of like “to die for” but less intense’, Karim said, and I couldn’t believe how much I wanted to laugh at that) and there were a wealth of place names: Riga, Ashkabad, Fos, Beira, Abidjan, Leixoes, Thessalaniki, Stavanger, Limassol, Monrovia, Lomé, Mouakchott, Port Gentile. I’d never before given thought to what it meant to be part of a port city, to leave the imprint of a tea-wet spoon on names of places that preferred coffee, to have these strange and foreign syllables intrinsically involved in the commerce of the place, to look at the man two tables from you and wonder if, for all his lack of external signs of affluence, he knew the word for ‘ocean’ in thirty different languages or the taste of fish cooked in a hundred different spices, and knew too, despite all his travelling, that home meant this alley and these place mats and those different dialects swirling around him. But to admit any of that out loud would be tantamount to saying Karim had a point about me, and I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.
The parathas arrived, as did the tea, and I gulped when I saw it. The cream rose entire centimetres above the rim of the cup, more frothy than any cappuccino I’d ever seen, and as we watched it in awe it wobbled. ‘The thing’s alive,’ I said.
Sonia, scooping it up with a spoon, smiled at me and said, ‘What were you expecting? A dribble of single cream?’ I continued to stare at the cup and she said, ‘If you eat it up really fast like ice cream on a hot day with the car window open and wind whooshing through, you might get to the tea beneath; but if you leave it it’ll just go on absorbing tea and expanding, expanding.’
Of course it was delicious, once I summoned up the courage to put it in my mouth. But Karim gave up after only a couple of spoons. Too rich, too sweet. If I’d been a little more convinced of my ability to finish the cup of tea-flavoured cream I’d have mocked his fragile foreign stomach.
The beggar girl returned and held out her palm again. Zia raised his hand threateningly. ‘Go away!’
‘Zia!’ Even I was shocked by the violence in his voice.
Zia bit his lip. ‘I hate them. Those beggars. All of them. Particularly the deformed ones.’ He started tearing the place mat into little strips. ‘I had this ayah when I was a kid. She said I should never trust strangers, because Karachi is full of people in the employ of the beggar master, and they kidnap children and lop off their limbs so that they can be effective beggars, pulling the heartstrings of passers-by.’
‘We all heard variants of that,’ I said. ‘Why are you the only one who’s traumatized by it?’
‘I became convinced that my brother hadn’t died, but was kidnapped and no one wanted to tell me that.’
‘So you used to see these young beggars and think one of them might be your brother and no one would know it?’ Sonia said.
Zia shook his head. ‘I used to be terrified that one of them was my brother, and my parents would recognize him, so they’d take him home with us and then I’d have to share my room with this maimed, emaciated creature.’
Karim and I couldn’t help but look at each other, for the first time without rancour that evening, neither of us able to think of any response to this statement, both of us confirming with each other the horror of what Zia had just said.
Sonia spoke up. ‘Zia, I’m sure, I mean...he would have put on weight.’
It was the silliest thing anyone could have said. It was the only thing anyone could have said to make Zia smile. He reached forward as if to put his hand on hers, but drew back before making any kind of contact, and gestured to the beggar girl, who came forward hesitantly.
Zia took his wallet out of his pocket and pulled out a hundred-rupee note. The girl’s eyes widened. ‘If you stay away from us, and keep everyone else away from us until we leave, I’ll give you this money after I’ve paid the hill,’ Zia said. I’m not sure she believed him, but his tone of voice didn’t leave room for any bargaining. The girl moved a few feet away.
‘So why are we here?’ I said.
Zia took a cigarette and a box of matches out of his pocket. He put the cigarette in his mouth and tried to light a match, but only snapped the matchstick in two. When he took out another match and struck it against the side of the box, there was a sound of friction—flint against flint—but no flame appeared. Karim borrowed a lighter from the man at the next table, and lit Zia’s cigarette for him.
‘Storytime,’ Zia said. ‘Let me tell you a story. True story. Once upon a time, it wasn’t a stray bullet that killed my brother.’
My head jerked up.
‘No, Raheen, don’t interrupt. No one interrupt. There was a man who lived next door to us, a powerful man, one of those men who’s in favour with every government. He and my father were friends, not close friends but friends enough that the man invited my parents to go, with my brother, to his beach hut one weekend. At the beach, only a handful of people there, the man pulled out a gun—he had a collection—and started shooting, no reason, just to impress some of the young kids, fishermen’s children, who had heard that a government official with a new gun just bought from...I don’t know where, this was before Afghanistan...but they heard, from the driver or someone, that there was this really cool gun around. So, this guy, he thinks he’ll give them a bit of a thrill: he starts firing in the direction of the sea. My father tells him to stop because those are real bullets after all, and what if someone’s swimming there whom they can’t see? So the guy says, OK, I’ll stop after one grand finale. See that sand castle? Bet I could shoot a hole straight through that flag on top, anyone want to lay bets, and my father says no but the guy’s brother says yes and the guy shoots and loses the bet. It was a huge sand castle, really immense. Large enough that if you stood at a distance, at a certain angle, you couldn’t see my mother and her one-year-old son making sand turtles and mudpies on the other side of the castle.’
I
shivered and, reaching beneath the table, found Karim’s hand reaching for mine. We both gripped hard, my thumb pressing down on the indentation between his knuckles. The smell of salt in the air was overpowering. I held my nose closed and breathed through my mouth.
‘My father knew it would be pointless to press charges, because of the other man’s position. Pointless to press charges and pointless to weep. Yes, no point to tears. My father is a man who believes in every action having a point. So he swore he’d build himself a list of contacts so long, so powerful, that he would never again feel helpless before another man’s clout. And if he ever had another son, his son would not suffer at the hands of anyone, not if my father could help it. No one, no one, would make his son suffer.’
Fathers, again. I released Karim’s hand just as he released mine. Poor, messed-up Zia, who at fourteen could have looked up secret files on every grown-up he knew in Karachi and read about all their flaws and none of their redeeming qualities. Poor Zia, his house always full of people worth cultivating, rather than people worth having in your home. Poor, poor Zia, whose father tried to give him everything and, in so doing, turned him into a boy with whom Sonia could never contemplate being more than friends. As soon as I thought that, I knew.
Zia saw the change that came over my face, and nodded. But Sonia and Karim were still looking at him in pity and bewilderment, forcing him to spell it out.
‘I yelled at him, Sonia. When I heard you were engaged. I asked him what could he do now, after he’d always sworn I could have anything I wanted...what could he do about...’
Sonia flushed, and looked down, seeing the declaration of his feelings towards her, but seeing nothing beyond it.
‘But he proved me wrong. Dad to the rescue. He did something about it, didn’t he? Of course the Ranas wouldn’t let their son marry the daughter of an accused drug smuggler.’
Tears started rolling down Sonia’s face.
‘Helps to have friends in positions of power. Helps a great deal. Accuse and acquit at will. No need for a court of law. Dear Dad. He’s got it all figured out. Was almost too efficient. Got two separate agencies involved. Bit of confusion, but in the end they did the trick. And once the engagement broke off, all charges dropped. No harm done, right? No harm.’
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