‘Just a minute. Aren’t I the loveliest girl in the world?’
‘No, no. You’re not. You’re not, but that doesn’t matter. Not one bit. Just say you won’t go back to Karachi. We’ll escape to the middle of nowhere, and eat roots and berries, and never read a newspaper.’
‘When did love become so dependent on geography?’
‘When personality started to change with location. In Karachi I have to see your reactions to certain things. Amid the roots and berries there’s no cause for those reactions.’
‘I’m sorry if my imperfection makes life inconvenient.’ I jammed my hands in my pocket and stepped further away from him. ‘We can’t all be godlike.’
A twig snapped in his grasp, and birds flew chirping madly out of the tree at the gun-like sound. ‘No, but some of us could try not to be so stubborn and so stupid.’
‘Why don’t you just say whatever you want to say, Karim, before I get really bored? Is there something in my list of faults that you left out when we talked at the beach? You need to get another complaint off your chest?’
‘You’ve had a happy life, haven’t you?’
The shadows were reaching out from the tree trunks, and I shivered and moved into one of the remaining patches of light, but he didn’t follow.
‘You never stopped to consider that your happy family existed at the cost of mine. They should never have got married, my parents. They wouldn’t have, except your father said the most unforgivable thing, and then your mother forgave him for it with such a magnificent show of compassion. Never mind how my mother felt. Never mind that my father might have had feelings about the whole thing. But you haven’t considered that. How could you consider that, when the consideration would disrupt your happiness? How could you consider that if my mother had married him she would have been happy all the years I was growing up, and she wouldn’t have had to cheat and lie and sneak around? You think it’s hard becoming disillusioned with a parent when you’re twenty-one, Raheen? Well, try it when you’re fifteen. God, I was angry with her for over two years. Until I found out what your father said. He was the one who ruined her life, and my father’s, and mine. And don’t you dare look at me as if to say I’m transferring my anger on to your father. This is not transference. It’s the real thing.’
I wasn’t about to defend my father, or even point out how silly it was of him to attack my father and yet simultaneously assume he would have been the perfect husband. ‘I don’t know what this has to do with going back to Karachi. Karim, I don’t understand what we’re fighting about.’
‘You’re going to go back, aren’t you? After everything that’s happened you’re going to go back, because all you really want is to go on the way you’ve been going on. Like your father, who could so easily transfer his affections simply because it was easier to love someone who wasn’t Bengali, you arrange your life around everything that’s easy, even though it means wrapping yourself in a little cocoon and deciding that things that happen away from the street where you live don’t touch you. And then you pretend your street is the world.
‘And what happens tomorrow when you decide that being with me is too hard, what happens then, Raheen? How dispensable will I prove to be? As dispensable as I was when I left Karachi, and all you could do was write letters about how much fun you were having, and how foreign I was becoming day by day, and how you really weren’t interested in anything I had to say about how hard it was, how goddamn miserable it made me, to be away from Karachi, which meant being away from you.’
‘That’s not true, Karim.’ I was pulling a leaf apart between my fingers, the fleshy part separating easily and falling off the veins. ‘Go and read my letters again.’
‘I can’t. I cut them up, remember, and burnt what was left.’
‘Well, I remember what I wrote. I remember I used to tell you everything that was going on in school, every little detail, so that when you came back you wouldn’t have to feel like an outsider for even a second.’
‘You made me feel like the outsider. You told me what was happening without telling me it would be so much better if I were there.’
This was turning into some twisted nightmare. ‘I was only matching the tone you set in your letters, Karim. Your first letter to me, the first correspondence between either of us, started with you saying: Bet you’re boiling in that deadly summer sun, and here it’s cool enough for a sweater. Ha-ha!’ I repeated it again to emphasize the lightness of the letter’s tone. ‘Ha-ha!’
‘How could I use any other tone but “ha-ha!” when it was so obvious you didn’t want to hear anything from me that wasn’t a joke? Raheen, you used to see me crying, before I left Karachi, your best friend since we were born, you used to see me crying, because my parents were always yelling and my father was threatening to take me away and do you know how hard it is for a thirteen-year-old boy to cry in front of anyone? I cried in front of you, only in front of you, because I just needed you to ask what’s wrong and you couldn’t, you couldn’t, you didn’t even care enough to want to know. Go back to bloody Karachi. Go back and turn into Runty and see if I give a damn. Coming here was the stupidest thing I could have done.’
I caught hold of his sleeve. ‘Why did you come, then?’
‘I was going to take you to Boston with me. To see my mother. But I don’t want her to see you.’ He pulled away from me and headed out of the glen.
I threw the bits of leaf at him in frustration but they swirled and came back at me. I could hear his footsteps pick up and become a run, and I knew I’d never catch up with him.
If he’d stayed any longer he would have accused, you still haven’t called my mother. As though it was any easier calling her now I knew what she had suffered at the hands of both my parents. I remembered Aunty Maheen’s voice from that first aborted phone call—Darling, who is it?—and the sudden ache that made me hang up the phone because it wasn’t Uncle Ali she was speaking to. That was four years after the divorce. It made no sense, the strength of my reaction.
Yes, it did.
Yes, it did.
It seemed easier not to see her, that was the truth. It seemed easier not to have to see her and her husband and imagine how Karim must have felt—perhaps still felt—to see them together. Because if I had to imagine how Karim felt about the divorce, I’d have to face how I failed him. I used to walk around all day in those weeks after the divorce trying to shake off the suffocating feeling that came from imagining his hurt, and I felt that if I heard his voice, if I heard him weep, I would break into a million pieces. So instead I told him I didn’t know what to say; when he wrote back, I told myself that if he had my voice inside his head to speak to, that was enough. I never broached the subject again in any of my letters. In doing that, I drew a dividing line between us. I do not want your pain sitting on my heart, boy. Keep it away.
I leaned against the tree. I had done that, and both Karim and I knew it. When he told me I lived in tiny circles, that I didn’t want to acknowledge how I was connected to the outside world, he had been talking about the failure of my friendship to take part of his pain upon myself. Even if he didn’t know that’s what he had been talking about.
I veered off the path, and half-ran, half-slid, down to the river. I sat there a long time, watching the water flow past. Karim’s life after Karachi unfolded in front of me, and I did nothing to stop it, not even when I imagined Aunty Maheen telling him she was leaving. His loneliness then was complete. I stayed by the river long enough to push past tears, past hurt, until what remained was my shame. But I still didn’t leave. I stayed, allowing the shame to grow and grow, until finally there was a tiny exhalation, a release.
I stood up then and made my way back to the present. But when I neared my dorm, there were words etched into the soil near where he had fallen when he leapt from the tree: I’m sorry. I love you.
Or was that a soil-speck, not a full stop, between the first sentence and the second?
. . .
&nbs
p; In Boston, summer was in full swing. Sunlight glinted off the John Hancock building, glinted off the Charles. A convertible sped past, leaving a smell of ice cream in the air. I glanced down at the directions Aunty Maheen had dictated over the phone.
‘At Storrow Drive get into the extreme right lane...’ It sounded simple enough, but no one had prepared me for the rush-hour traffic of Storrow Drive, the horror of being stuck in the extreme left lane with at least three lanes to traverse and not much time to do it. I emptied my mind of all the rule-bound small-town driving I’d been practising in the last few months, further emptied my mind of the thought that I was driving Zia’s beloved black Integra, and reminded myself that I was a Karachiite. Setting my jaw, I slammed on the horn, spun the wheel to the right and, with an utter disdain for the curses that were hurled in my direction, managed to make it over to the requisite lane well before the turn for Aunty Maheen’s flat.
When the concierge asked who I had come to see I realized I didn’t know Aunty Maheen’s last name any more, so I just said, ‘Maheen,’ and the concierge said, ‘Would that be Mrs Ahmed?’ which seemed a fair bet, so I nodded and was directed to the eleventh floor.
I thought I’d cured myself of the habit of fidgeting with my hair when nervous, but as I stood waiting for someone to answer her door bell I kept pulling the ends of my hair, conscious that it was much shorter than the last time she’d seen me. I hoped she was alone. When I had finally summoned up the courage to call her and say I needed to see her, I had been unable to think of a way to tell her I didn’t want to see the Interloper. Not yet. It had been a strange phone conversation, both of us too aware that I’d been in the US almost four years without calling, and that made unsayable all the truths going through my mind: I’ve missed you; it’s so good to hear your voice; I can’t wait to see you.
The door opened. There she stood. There stood a woman who was closer to being family than anyone in my extended family was, and there was that smile of hers which reminded me that of all her child’s friends, and of all her friend’s children, I had always been her favourite.
‘Hello, loveliness,’ I said, and put my arms around her.
She laughed as she hugged me, all my failures of communication forgiven, and I saw immediately that for all her years away from home she was still a ‘Karachi aunty’ in the best possible sense of the term.
‘Inside, inside, move inside,’ she said when we finally drew apart, taking my coat and hanging it on the clothes rack, off which it promptly slipped. Aunty Maheen moved as though about to pick it up, and then waved her hand dismissively in the coat’s direction. ‘Floor’s clean,’ she said. ‘Now take this’—she handed me a cup of tea—‘and go and sit down, while I finish things in the kitchen.’
I watched her walk towards the kitchen and couldn’t stop smiling. She was a plump woman now, but there seemed something so contented about that. And her walk, her mannerisms, were still so familiar that I wanted to run into the kitchen after her and throw my arms around her again.
I walked across the wooden floor into the living-room area, where the furthest wall had large windows looking down on to the Charles River and on to Boston’s skyline. On the console table against the wall were framed photographs. A couple were of Aunty Maheen and her husband, smiling; several showed Karim in various stages of growing up, including a recent one of him and the Interloper doubled over with laughter, pointing at a burning frying pan; the largest of the photographs showed Aunty Maheen in Karachi with eight or ten of her friends—my parents stood to either side of Aunty Maheen and my father had his arm around her shoulder.
How could she ever think back to what he said to Shafiq and not tear up this photograph?
Aunty Maheen walked out of the kitchen with a plate of pakoras, and sat down right next to me, balancing the plate on her knee. ‘So have you heard from my son?’
Every day. Every hour. A million conversations, none of them real.
‘Raheen?’ Aunty Maheen said. ‘Have you heard from him since you left Karachi, because, sweetie, I haven’t; not that it surprises me.’
‘He didn’t come to see you a couple of weeks ago?’
She shook her head and handed me a small plate of pakoras. ‘He’d been planning to, but I don’t know what happened. He’ll show up eventually. He always does. Oh, look at you.’ She held me at arm’s length and beamed. ‘Much too much to talk about, so let’s start with how is everyone. What are all those scab-kneed boys and girls who my son grew up with doing with their lives?’
‘Nothing special. Finishing university, deciding what next. Waiting for proposals to arrive from boys of good breeding who don’t care that your father is a suspected drugs smuggler.’
Aunty Maheen patted my hand. ‘That was awful. Poor Sonia. Laila told me all about the newspaper announcement. Can you believe anyone would do something so low?’
Such questions are usually rhetorical, but Aunty Maheen looked at me as though expecting an answer. I shrugged. ‘Yes, I believe it. It’s awful, but I believe it. Just as I believe Zia’s father could arrange the police harassment. And I believe all of us just assumed he was guilty. And still do, even though all charges are dropped. I don’t like any of it, but I believe all of it.’
Aunty Maheen nodded. ‘I would never have said that at your age. That’s what it did, you see. Bangladesh. It made us see what we were capable of. No one should ever know what they are capable of. But worse, even worse, is to see it and then pretend you didn’t. The truths we conceal don’t disappear, Raheen, they appear in different forms.’
I nodded and nibbled on my pakora. I hadn’t even spoken to Aba since Karachi, though I sometimes called Ami at the office. She kept telling me to come home.
‘Does it get talked about?’ Auntie Maheen said, ‘The Civil War?’
I shook my head. ‘Only in story fragments.’
Speaking of staying up till dawn, remember during the war when we said we’d keep drinking until sunrise, but that was the night they bombed the oil refineries and the smoke covered the sun, so we just carried on drinking until well after noon.
Don’t you remember the scandal, when she was engaged to him but he was a POW in Bangladesh so she married the other one instead?
Never throw anything away. In ‘yi, when the bomb fell in the empty plot next door to us, the heat from the blast was so incredible the blades of the ceiling fan in our bedroom curled up like a tulip, and don’t you think that would have been worth quite a lot as war memorabilia if I hadn’t chucked it out?
‘Those are the kinds of thing we hear about ’71,’ I told Aunty Maheen, and thought to myself, also, the story of you and my father.
Aunty Maheen said, ‘Also, the story of me and your father.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Also that.’
‘I spoke to him a few minutes ago.’
A pakora fell out of my hand and on to the floor, leaving a smear of chutney on the hardwood.
‘What are you so surprised about? It’s not uncommon for me to talk to them on the phone. You know your mother called me just after both you and Karim left Karachi, to tell me what happened at Asif and Laila’s?’
I shook my head.
‘Well, of course she did. And then I called Ali. To find out who had told Karim about the way the engagement broke off. Of course, I knew it wasn’t Ali...or, at least, not the Ali I had known, although it’s been a while and people change. I have. Who would have thought my Ali would turn into a middle-aged Lothario?’ She looked past me, frowning, not necessarily displeased so much as surprised, perhaps even trying to chart the course her life might have taken if both she and Uncle Ali had given each other the room to turn away from the caricature of opposites that their marriage settled into. ‘First proper conversation I’ve had with him in years. Not just some formal talk to discuss Karim’s flight details or school reports. We were never very good at talk, Ali and I. But I think we’ve improved with age.’
‘So was he the one...who told Karim?’
‘Of course not. Don’t be absurd. No, Ali and I did some detective work. Turns out it was Runty. One year when she was visiting London. And a cousin of mine provided confirmation of the details.’ She waved her hand. ‘But that’s not important any more, is it?’
‘What is important?’
Aunty Maheen patted my cheek. Her hand was warm, but the rings on her fingers were cold. ‘You and Karim. When I spoke to your father just now, he told me what you said to him on the Lady Lloyd Pier. He told me you think you and Karim would be together if it wasn’t for Zafar and my story standing between you. Child, that’s ridiculous.’
‘I know,’ I admitted. ‘I know I let Karim down. That’s the real issue between us. But what I did is made so much worse by the fact that it wasn’t just anyone doing it, but Zafar’s daughter doing it to Maheen’s son. I don’t know if he can get past that. I don’t know what I need to do to get both of us past that.’
‘I think that’s why your parents are the best couple I know,’ she said. ‘You feel they know how to get past anything.’
‘But...’ It seemed a desperate breach of form and manners to say this, but I had to. ‘But you and Aba were in love.’
‘God, yes,’ she said, and smiled in a way I might smile if someone mentioned my teenage crush on Zia. ‘But lots of people are in love lots of times. Yasmin and Ali were in love, too, though in a different way. And Yasmin and Zaf were in love, still are. The most surprising thing of all is that one day Ali and I were in love, also, though that came much later. And then, we weren’t.’ She laughed. ‘It would all be very silly if it didn’t wreak such havoc in our lives. The issue is not who paired off with whom—I’ve been trying to learn when to use the word “whom”, sweetie, was that correct?—but who was able to make it work and how. Your parents did.’
‘So it’s not so special, is that what you’re saying? What I feel for Karim.’
‘Oh, darling. The thought of the two of you together brings such tears of joy to my eyes.’ She kissed the side of my head and handed me the entire plate of pakoras.
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