Kartography

by Kamila Shamsie

  ‘I’m really very confused,’ I said. ‘OK, one question: how do you forgive what he said?’

  She stood up and started walking around the flat, hugging her paisley shawl close in the air-conditioned air. ‘I thought I was showing courage by staying in Karachi during all that madness, and I’m still not sure I wasn’t. But, you see, I was a Bengali. I was born that way. So though people turned away from me at parties, and conversations stopped when I entered the room, and all sorts of things went on that no one should have to live through, there was a certain...resignation, almost, in people’s attitudes towards me. I was just a Bingo, nothing to be done about it. But your father...your father was something much worse. He was a turncoat, a traitor. A Bingo-lover.’ She said the words slowly, as if examining them, trying to unravel their mystery. ‘That evening—when Shafiq got the telegram about his brother—Zafar had just come back from hospital. Broken rib, fractured thumb, bruises everywhere. He claimed he’d been mugged and beaten, but no one was fooled. There was violence in the air those days, and why should your father have been expected not to get terrified of it? Whatever he said to Shafiq, awful as it was, I don’t believe he meant it.’

  ‘If you didn’t believe it, you would have married him.’

  Aunty Maheen walked over to the window and looked down at a bridge being raised so a boat could pass through. ‘You weren’t alive in those days. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  She had never spoken to me in that tone before.

  I walked over to the window. It was certainly pretty, the view of the river and the tall buildings, but I wondered what Aunty Maheen saw when she looked out. Did she see home?

  As if she had read my mind she said, ‘I don’t think I could ever bear to go back to Karachi. First it was because I knew the kind of whispers that would go around about me. I think I was afraid almost—of being shunned, of having backs turn on me a second time round. And now...’ She ran her fingers over a book on the console table that had pictures of some of Karachi’s landmarks on the cover. ‘Now, it’s changed so much it might break my heart to see it. To be reminded that, after all, after everything, I’ve ended up a foreigner in that city.’

  I put my arm around her, and thought of all my friends who weren’t planning to return to Karachi after university. Zia was still trying to convince me that I, too, should stay in America. He had even called up one of his father’s contacts who worked in a travel agency in New York and got him to agree to hire me. He meant well, so I didn’t tell him it was the kind of thing his father would have done. Besides, I hadn’t decided to turn down the job yet. What kind of home would home be without my friends in it?

  ‘I need to find a way to forgive my father. I think you’re the only person who can help me do that.’

  ‘No. I’m not. He is.’ Aunty Maheen lifted the Karachi book and shook it. A thin blue piece of paper with writing on either side fell out from between the pages. ‘This may help; it may not.’ Aunty Maheen handed me the blue paper. ‘As soon as you called I knew it was finally time to give it to you. I’ve had it a long, long time. Your father wrote it to me. I’m going down to the store to get something for dinner. You’re staying the night, of course.’

  She left me alone, and I picked up the paper, and started to read.

  Dear Maheen,

  Already I’m thinking ahead to how I’ll end this letter, and in case you haven’t yet scanned ahead to find the answer to that question, let me tell you it will be with the phrase: my love always, Zafar.

  I will show this letter to Yasmin when it is finished. She will approve the ending.

  I’m more glad than I can say that the two of you are reconciled now that Raheen and Karim are born. I have seen you look at your son and then at Ali, and even I’m not vain enough to believe you are thinking of me for even a moment. But I know the first thought you have—will have, have already had, are having even now—of me in conjunction with your child will he: thank God. Because if we had been married your Karim would not have been born, nor would my Raheen—and how can we love the notion of some hypothetical children that might have been more than we love these tiny-fisted creatures who yesterday seemed entirely unaware of each other for fifty-nine minutes of the hour they were together, yet turned to each other in that sixtieth minute, and Raheen—with eyes shut—reached out and put a hand on Karim’s cheek, and Karim kept looking at her without blinking.

  I picture them already as firm friends. And then I picture them growing up, and, Maheen, what will I say to my daughter when she is old enough to understand the truth and all its implications?

  Nothing can excuse or erase what I said. So why am I writing this letter? To tell you that if you want me to stay always silent about how things ended between us, I will. But your heart has always been far greater than mine, so let me first—please, Maheen, don’t stop reading. I should tear this up, it makes little sense, but if I wait to write again until I can craft every sentence, I may never write.

  What I was saying was—oh, I don’t even know. But I know this—it is less than two years since Bangladesh was born, and already we in Pakistan have become so efficient at never speaking about it. That scares me more than anything else. When we do refer to ‘yi, it’s as personalised stories about sitting on the roof, sipping whisky and watching the dogfights in the sky, or about waiting for a dawn that never came because the oil refineries were bombed and a thick cloud of smoke shut out the sun. We tell these stories and contain the horrors of war into four-line anecdotes that we tell over tea and biscuits.

  I don’t claim to be better than any of the people who do this—it’s simply that my war story is you, Maheen, and you will not be contained within four lines; instead, you bring up all the memories the rest of us try to forget.

  What happens when you work so hard to forget a horror that you also forget that you have forgotten it? It doesn’t disappear—the canker turns inwards and mutates into something else. In this city that we both love and claim—even though our families’ histories lie elsewhere—what will the canker become? This is turning into a diatribe, I know, but I must say it because all the silence around me is so terrifying. Yes, I am terrified, Maheen—because this country has seen what it is capable of, but it hasn’t yet paused to take account.

  We should not have kept our name.

  Pakistan died in 1971. Pakistan was a country with two wings—I have never before thought of the war in terms of that image: a wing tearing away from the body it once helped keep aloft—it was a country with a majority Bengali population and all its attendant richness of culture, history, language, topography, climate, clothing...everything. How can Pakistan still be when all of that, everything that East Pakistan added to the country, is gone? Pakistan was a nation with an image of itself as a place that was created because that creation was the only way its leaders saw possible to safeguard the rights of a minority power within India. How can Pakistan still be when we have so abused that image—first by ensuring the Bengalis were minimised and marginalised both politically and economically, and then by reacting to their demands for greater rights and representation with acts of savagery? How can Pakistan still be when the whole is gone and we are left with a part? (When we are willing to treat a part as the whole don’t we fall victim to circumscribed seeing, a thing we can ill afford?) We should have recognised that the Pakistan of dreams died and was buried in the battle fields of ’71. Or...

  Or, Maheen, is it possible to reclaim a name?

  It is a name for which I have great affection, great regard. But what must be done to restore it to what it could have stood for? Perhaps our children will answer that question one day, if we give them the tools—the information—they need for that task.

  We act as though history can be erased. Of course we want to believe that—the cost of remembering may break our wilted spirits. But if we believe in erasure we tell ourselves it is possible to have acts without consequences. The finger squeezing the trigger becomes a thi
ng apart from the bullet that speeds across the sands, which becomes a thing apart from the child looking down at his blood pumping out of his heart. And that child, that bullet, that finger, they become things way, way apart from our lives, here, in rooms where we look upon our own sleeping children.

  I don’t know if I’ve made any sense, and now I’m blotting the ink with these meaningless tracks of tears.

  I will—if you allow it, and I’ll take your silence as ayes—I will tell my daughter what I did—no, let me not phrase that in the past: I will tell my daughter what I have done—when she is old enough to grasp how unforgivable it was. When she is old enough to look within and around, and understand the canker. And this is the form my own canker will take: the fear, the fear always, that when I tell her she will turn away from me.

  So here is my promise to you: I will help Yasmin bring up our daughter in such a way that she will have to look at me in horror when I finally tell her the truth of what I said.

  There is nothing that gives me more joy these days than looking at you and knowing you are happy. My love always,

  Zafar

  . . .

  When I arrived back in Karachi that summer, the summer of 1995, he was waiting for me at the airport. Waiting inside the terminal. Uncle Asif’s contacts again, no doubt.

  I walked towards him, jet-lagged, the strap of my carry-on flight bag cutting into my shoulder. ‘I read the letter you wrote Aunty Maheen,’ I said.

  ‘I know. Did I sound like a self-righteous ass?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and then I quoted the last three paragraphs of the letter back to him.

  When he put his arms around me, there was a hesitation on both our parts, but although I didn’t hug him back I didn’t feel the need to pull away either, and that, at least, was a start.

  I had read all the papers on the Net, detailing showdowns, stalemates, body counts, analyses, but when I stepped out of the airport and headed home what struck me most was the vulnerability of cars. Glass on all sides, barring neither stares nor fists nor bullets. And was that man criminal, lunatic or immortal angel that he could stand on the pavement, smoking a cigarette, as though life’s greatest danger was falling ash?

  Electricity failures and water shortages. Humidity that sheened my skin with sweat, seconds after I stepped out of the air-conditioned car. What water there was, was warm. Electricity repairmen needed police escorts to guard them from Karachiites living in dark and heat for days at a time. But what of those areas the police dared not go to for fear of being attacked themselves? To counter the electricity shortage, there was a ban on neon lights. Driving home from the Club at dinner time was like driving through a ghost town—darkness everywhere save for traffic lights, and who wanted to risk stopping at a red light in those days?

  ‘Aunty Maheen, have you heard from Karim?’

  ‘No, darling, just postcards. He’s teaching English in Mexico somewhere. Hasn’t got a phone, and, frankly, sweetheart, the way things are in Karachi, if I do speak to him I’ll do everything I can to dissuade him from entering those city limits.’

  Rocket launchers and gunfire in Boat Basin. Sonia’s brother, Sohail, was there when it happened. He told us about the incredible illumination of the night sky when the rocket launchers exploded and how the sound of bullets at first resembled firecrackers. How often we’d stopped in that part of town over the years, after school and after parties, scrounging through one another’s purses and wallets for money to spend on meals at Chips and Mr Burger and Flamingo Chaat. How could the violence reach somewhere so familiar?

  ‘Why don’t you just stop reading the papers?’ Zia said to me on the phone from New York.

  There were mornings when that was a tempting idea, but I found I could no longer say to the world, there’s nothing I can do to change this, so why think too hard about it? I still didn’t think there was anything I could do to change the situation, but now it felt like an abomination to pretend to live outside it.

  I learnt about the cyclical nature of violence that summer. Since November when the army had pulled out of Karachi after failing to quell the ‘law and order situation’, law-enforcement had returned to the hands of the Rangers (I had once thought their name amusing, but there was no comedy to be found in the mention of them anymore) and their attempts to bring about security through ruthlessness was only breeding further terrorism. Extra-judicial killings every day. And there was a split in the MQM—the work of the intelligence agencies, so the rumour went, who saw (or thought they did) the efficiency of getting a group to break in two, each side turning bloodily on the other. But all the political analyses in the world couldn’t quite explain what was happening in Karachi—what can explain men on motorbikes spraying bullets everywhere, killing without regard for ethnicity or age or gender?

  From Dawn newspaper:

  June 23: Twenty-four people were killed and several others wounded in targeted attacks, sniping and gunbattles between rangers, police and armed youths on Friday, raising the month’s death toll to 204.

  June 24: Twenty people were killed and many others wounded as widespread violence paralysed the city on Saturday. Two policemen, two MQM workers, two truck drivers, a PPP activist, and a police informer were among those who fell victim to the shooting spree.

  June 25: At least 32 people lost their lives and many others were wounded as the city witnessed one of the worst days of violence on Sunday, marked by several rocket and grenade attacks.

  June 26: 23 people were killed and many others wounded in the city, which remained in the grip of armed youths.

  June 27: Fourteen people were killed on Tuesday as the city tried to limp back to normality

  Every night, the Ghutnas gathered, and though there were interludes of revelry, in the end every evening’s conversation was ultimately unchanging. ‘Haalaat bohot kharab hain,’ they would say, again and again, as if English could not encompass just how bad the situation was; and then the conversation varied in its unvarying way from wondering if those accused of the killing were really guilty or just being set up; and how big a part did the ubiquitous Foreign Hand have in all of this; and could the city fall apart in such fashion without some government involvement; and were drug wars part of the reason for the violence; and which businesses had decided to start working through the strikes called by the politicians; and could the ‘talks’ actually achieve anything or were they merely occasions for both sides to pretend to talk peace while really recouping their losses and getting ready for the next round of firing; and could this city—my city, this ugly, polluted, overpopulated, heartbreaking place—retain its spirit after all this battering? And finally, inevitably, someone would say: It’s like 1971. Except that the army will decimate us before they allow Karachi to break away. And it always fell to my father to say. ‘No one wants civil war. Don’t say it’s like ’71. Don’t even think it.’

  Sonia’s father was more popular than ever in the wake of the dropped drug charges, thanks to the aplomb with which he had sent out poppy-shaped invitation cards to a magnificent party, just after he got back from Umra. Karachi is a city that applauds spunk, so the Ghutnas clasped the Lohawallas to their bosoms for the first time and Sonia’s mother’s dressing table collapsed under the weight of all the party invites. No one mentioned that the proposals for Sonia’s hand had dried up completely.

  But Sonia had to live with the memory of all that had happened, and with the news that our friend Nadia, in London, was on the verge of getting engaged to Sonia’s almost-fiancé, Adel Rana, and I knew she would never tell me how she felt about it all, because I’d always believed her father was guilty and I hadn’t tried very hard to hide it from her.

  In Newsline, the sentence ‘“What we are seeing today in Karachi is a repeat of the East Pakistan situation,” maintains a senior security official.’

  ‘Is that true?’ I asked Ami.

  ‘Ask Maheen that. She’ll tell you never to compare Muhajirs to Bengalis. Being pummelled makes it easy f
or us to wring our hands and forget all we’re guilty of. We left India in ’47—we left our homes, Raheen, think of what that means—saying we cannot live amid this injustice, this political marginalization, this exclusion. And then we came to our new homeland and became a willing part of a system that perpetuated marginalization and intolerance of the Bengalis. No, Karachi is not a repeat of the East Pakistan situation.’ She pressed a red rose petal between her thumb and forefinger. ‘But.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But there are certain parallels. History is never obliging enough to replay itself in all details. Not personal history, not political history. But we can learn how to rise above the mistakes of the past, and that we haven’t done. As a country we haven’t. Not in the slightest. Your father’s letter to Maheen seems to have more than an element of prophecy in it, isn’t that so?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You were right. He looked the country in the eye. And then, he found a way still to want to stay.’ I rested my head on her shoulder. ‘That’s sort of remarkable.’

  I could see his shadow outside the door; I knew he was listening when I said that.