Zia was in New York, working with an investment bank; Nadia was in London on an extended holiday, telling everyone that Adel Rana had nothing but good things to say about Sonia but of course he couldn’t be expected to marry into a family accused of drug smuggling; the twins were on the west coast of America, one working at an architect’s firm in LA, the other immersed in Web design in San Francisco; Cyrus had joined a multinational in Karachi, primarily so that he could get a foreign posting within a couple of years, and he never said a word about Nadia, whom he had loved and been loved by, but to no avail because he was Parsi and she was Muslim; Sonia’s brother, Sohail, was just a few months away from starting college in New York, and there was talk of Sonia going to New York at the same time to visit family, which meant she was to be shown around to eligible Pakistani boys on the East coast, though her father had emphasized that she was to steer clear of Zia. And Karim...
Squash courts were my refuge that summer. We played every evening, a motley group of ten or twelve of us, arriving at the courts at four and staying until eight, returning home too exhausted to think of much beyond dinner and a video and sleep. Cyrus’s sister confided in me, ‘I love the squash courts. There are so many places to hide if gunmen break in.’
Zia came home briefly. His father thought he was dying, though the doctors insisted it was chronic indigestion. His father gave him a spare key to his filing cabinets, which were overflowing with incriminating evidence and rumour and supposition about everyone we knew. ‘Burn the files,’ I told Zia, but Zia said I’d lost my chance at having a say in his life. He didn’t call Sonia at all.
At the airport, we were told our flight to Lahore was delayed, but the airline was offering us complementary breakfast in the lounge. ‘But it’s only cheese sandwiches, and I want halva puri,’ I told the airline official. ‘Sonia, call your car back and let’s go for halva puri.’
The airline official said we couldn’t go. ‘It’s not safe, wandering around town, two girls. Stay here and I’ll call my wife and tell her to send halva puri over with my son.’
‘You’re just afraid we won’t come back and the flight will be delayed because of us.’
The man shook his head and held out his car-keys: ‘If you must go, here, take my car.’
I thought, I must tell Karim about this man. I must tell Karim so much.
In Lahore, I met Uncle Chaperoo, now a government minister. ‘Are you heading south soon?’ I asked him.
‘What? To Multan?’ He tilted his large head to one side.
‘South of the country, not the province,’ I said. ‘Oh God, Karachi. No, of course not.’
Not really so long ago that Uncle Chaperoo’s was the face I imagined when I imagined Romeo; not really so long since he’d cut the romantic figure of a man defying convention by marrying outside his tribe. And now he said the problem with Karachi was that it was such a mishmash, no good could come from rampant plurality. His wife was not around when I saw him. They weren’t divorced, just indifferent.
‘Multan! South! Such circumscribed seeing,’ I said to Sonia. ‘This holiday isn’t doing much for me. Let’s go home,’ and we took the next flight out. On my way home from the airport I remembered that was a phrase from Aba’s letter: Circumscribed, seeing, a thing we can ill afford.
The Prime Minister told reporters the country was doing well. When asked about Karachi, she said Karachi was only ten million people.
Aunty Laila gripped me by the elbow in the doorway to the chemist’s and hissed, ‘We have to get out of here. Act casual.’
Numb could be mistaken for casual. I let her pull me out, my eyes sweeping the area for the glint of sun on trigger. Perhaps we should say something, warn the other shoppers. On the ground, a package. I tumbled into Aunty Laila’s car and ducked low in the seat. Still unable to speak, I gestured to her driver to step on it.
Aunty Laila opened the back door. Slowly, so slowly.
A man reached down to pick up the package.
Aunty Laila put a hand to my forehead. ‘There’s a journalist in there. I don’t want tomorrow’s papers announcing SOCIALITE BUYS SUPPOSITORIES.’
The man pulled a kabab roll out of the bag, and began to chew.
I heard Aba and Ami talking to Aunty Maheen on the phone. They sat right next to each other, his arm around her shoulder, with the phone held between them. They were both laughing.
***
I was supposed to be looking for a job, but what did I want to do with my life?
The memory of his throat beneath my mouth, the sting of aftershave in the cut on my lip...
A nomad from Uncle Asif’s dune begged Uncle Asif to get him a job in Karachi. Even now, even at this time, it was still a city that beckoned. Uncle Asif said that nomad was little older than I was, and I wondered if among his few possessions were a pair of marbles that looked like the eyes of a goat.
‘Why are there no parties, why are there no parties?’ Aunty Runty wept. ‘I can’t bear all this sitting at home, I can’t bear my own imagination.’
Naila hadn’t appeared with her coconut oil at anyone’s house since early May.
Orangi, Korangi, Liaquatabad, New Town, Golimar, Machar Colony, Azizabad, Sher Shah...violence in all those parts of town whose unfamiliarity still felt like a blessing. But then, six died in Kharadar, including a beggar girl. As I read through the newspaper article I saw, between one word and the next, images of bullets and bodies, the wounded weeping for the dead, crushed and broken sugar cane kicked aside by fleeing feet; balloons burst around me and the ground outside the white-tiled hotel rushed up to meet me. Gravel bit into my skin. A man cradled a boy’s blood-dark head in his lap, whispering, ‘Ocean, oceano, samundar, mohit, moa shoagor, umi, bahari, valtameri...’
Sonia called me late one night. ‘Just so sick of it. Everyone is gloom and doom and harpoon happiness. But just listen to what happened to me this evening. Ama and I had gone to my grandparents’ house for dinner—Aboo’s in Islamabad, and who ever knows where Sohail is these days?—and as we were walking to our car to leave, this man, real chichora type, leapt out of the shrubs, caught Amma’s wrist and said, “Give me your car-keys.”’
‘No!’
‘Yes, na, I’m telling you. So Amma became suddenly hysterical and she’s trying to find the key in her bag but the clasp is so complicated it takes real techknowhow to get it open, and even when she finally manages to do that her hands are shaking so much that she can’t really find anything, so then the man starts to put his hand down his shalwar and said, “Hurry up and give me the keys or I’ll take out my TT.” And Ama went completely mental and started throwing the contents of her bag at this guy, yelling, “No, no, anything but that,” and the man got such a shock, what with Ama and also the neighbour coming to see what the commotion was all about, that he ran away. I turned to Ama and I said, “You know, a TT is a kind of gun,” and she said, “Oh, thank God, I thought he was going to show us his privates.”’
I reminded Sonia that before this summer we used to be able to laugh without consciously thinking, Now I’m laughing. Now the suffocation is gone from my lungs for a moment.
She reminded me there hadn’t been much cause for laughter in the winter either.
All mobile-phone services had been suspended because there were strong indicators that such a mode of communication aided terrorist activities.
My car developed a flat tyre when I was driving home from the Club. When I got out of the car to check it, a Suzuki van stopped and three men got out. A cyclist pulled over beside me. A fruit seller walked across the street towards me. I knew why they stopped, I knew what they were going to do. They told me to sit back in the car, with the air conditioning on. It was a hot, sticky day. They changed the tyre for me, and then they all left.
It was exactly the sort of thing you’d expect unknown men to do in Karachi.
I walked into Zia’s room as he was packing to return to New York. He lugged his suitcase off his bed, making room for m
e to lie down. But I felt awkward, said I should leave. He said he wasn’t planning to come back to Karachi and who knows when he’d see me again. So how much did it really matter what happened between us, this once?
I said, ‘Let’s go for a drive. I don’t feel comfortable here, having this conversation, with your parents maybe walking by on the other side of the wall.’ We drove out in his Integra, though all summer I had kept my movements confined to houses and squash courts as much as possible.
I felt no pleasure, no anticipation, as we drove, just some numb sense of inevitability. Zia’s face unreadable. Where were we going? How deserted the streets were, so soon after sunset. Near the submarine roundabout he turned off the main road. We were going to one of Sonia’s father’s offices, the one closest to home. Desk, phone, fax. Makeshift work space for days when it was too dangerous to head to offices in other parts of town. Green carpet. Nothing of real importance there, no caretakers and guards keeping watch. Years ago, Sonia had showed us we could unlock the door with a penknife. Zia swerved, without slowing, around a stalled car blocking the road. A man stepped out from behind the car, right into the path of Zia’s car. Zia spun the wheel. Braked. The man, uninjured, pointed a gun through the window.
‘It must be fate,’ he said.
It was the car thief.
He directed us to get out of the car.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, we’ll get you a job. I thought my friend had arranged it.’ Zia was sweating in the still night air.
The man shook his head. ‘Your friend did arrange it. Lohawalla Sahib tracked me down, found me a job. I owe him a lot. But my brother’s been shot. You don’t need to know details, but he’s been very angry, done a lot of foolishness. Still, he’s my brother. And if I don’t get him to the hospital he’ll die. But if I try driving from here to there, the police will stop me, and then they’ll recognize him. They won’t stop a car with a girl in it.’
He opened the back door of the stalled car. The brother lay there, unmoving. The first-aid box from Sonia’s father’s office was open next to him, its contents strewn around the car. Zia’s expression passed from fear to something more complicated, something that had to do with the shadows he’d always lived among. He took the man’s arms and started to pull him out. ‘Help me, Raheen.’ The car thief still had his gun trained on us. I caught the brother’s feet as Zia pulled him further and further out of the car. That wasn’t sweat, as I had first thought, on the man’s shalwar-kameez. We put him in the back seat of Zia’s car and drove to the government hospital. The private hospitals wouldn’t deal with a gunshot wound. There were Ranger vans everywhere, but no one stopped us.
Outside the hospital, the pavement was covered with bodies, all lined up side by side. The car thief—Mohommad—laughed to see me cover my eyes when I saw them. ‘They’re sleeping,’ he said. ‘They have relatives in there, and they don’t have money for hotels or even transportation. So they sleep here at night, and in the morning they’ll see their family members, or find out if they’ve died.’
In the emergency ward, chaos. So many people there was no room to bring a stretcher through. Zia and Mohommad carried in the brother, conscious now, and slumped him against a wall. No beds available, not even a chair. Not nearly enough doctors. I find myself moving away from the three men, even though I should be telling Zia we can go home now. I am moving among groans and cries and sights I will never forget. Surely someone should be moving faster. Surely the world should be moving faster. A man is talking to a woman who has a crying toddler in her arms. The man is holding a syringe, though he is clearly not a doctor. But he speaks to her and she nods. When he empties his syringe into the child’s vein, pain eases off the child’s face. The woman holds her arm out, too. The man leans very close to her. Some sort of bargaining will go on. A man in a white coat pushes past me. I hear him say, ‘We’ve run out of blood.’ Another replies: ‘Scrape it off the walls of the operating theatre.’ A sleek cat pads past me. This, more than anything, makes me want to throw up. Zia catches my arm. I say, ‘We should give blood.’ He tells me we can leave. I open my mouth to say yes, but a doctor has overheard my previous comment, he’s asking me what blood type I am. I tell him. He asks Zia. Zia pretends not to know, but I know that he’s lying and I tell him so. He pulls his blood-type card out of his wallet. The doctor says we’re both needed to give transfusions, immediately. But shouldn’t someone test our blood first? A patient lying nearby says, ‘Test for what? Fatal diseases?’ There is much laughter around him. I have lost sight of Mohommad and his brother. I think of them as my allies now. No sheets on the bed I am made to lie on. The needle plunges in while I am looking away, and I panic: was it sterilized? Was it new? No one has time to answer me. A man I don’t much like the look of is in the bed beside me. He’s been in a shoot-out. I hear someone say he’s killed people. ‘Was it sterilized?’ I keep asking and someone says, ‘Yes, yes,’ but the tone is impatient. What can anyone do about it now if it wasn’t? Zia comes to find me. His head is spinning. They took more blood, he thinks, than is safe. I ask him about the needle. He hadn’t thought to check. We dare not think about it. We ask about Mohommad and his brother. No one knows. But we don’t leave. We ask every doctor and orderly who passes by about the man with the bullet in his abdomen. Someone tells us Zia’s blood couldn’t save the girl on the bed beside him. My man, they think, will live. His mother is at the hospital. She finds me. She tells me I might think my blood has gone to waste, because it is a certainty, not just a probability, that sooner or later, probably sooner, another bullet will find its way to her son’s heart. ‘Then your blood will be spilled on the streets of Karachi. But for every day of extra life you’ve given him, I thank you.’ We see Mohommad at last. His brother is dead. We offer to stay. He shakes his head. He asks me, ‘Where’s that hero friend of yours? America or England?’ I say I don’t know. He asks me the hero’s name. I say, ‘Karim.’
His name is like cool water in my mouth.
Zia drives us back to his house. We lie on his bed together, and hold each other close, trying not to strain our ears for the sound of some infection coursing through our veins.
. . .
‘Aba, what really happened?’
For two months we had barely spoken, this question unvoiced, unanswered between us. But now he said, ‘I can’t tell you that.’ Before I could respond he held up a hand. ‘But I’ll tell you what I remember. Should we go outside?’
I led the way out of the house into the garden. It was dark, starless, and the day’s heat still hadn’t dissipated despite the welcoming sea breeze. Ami was asleep. He had brought me out here so I could raise my voice at him without waking her up.
In the garden, we stood feet away from each other, and he started to speak before my eyes had adjusted to the dark enough to see his expression.
‘Where do I begin?’ he said softly.
He wasn’t really speaking to me, but I answered all the same.
‘Start with what you were thinking, just before Shafiq walked up to your door with the telegram. Do you remember that?’
‘Oh, yes.’ I could see his expression now, but I couldn’t read it. ‘Oh, I remember that all too well. I was thinking, what if it never ends?’
‘The war?’
‘No, no. The war had ended. Had just ended. The war ended and Bunty and his friends—my friends—had beaten me up in the squash courts because I was, in their words, a Bingo lover.’
That particular insult had no place in my life. All I could think of were old English women playing some incomprehensible game in large, sterile halls.
‘I was still aching from the bruises. Aching, and thinking, what if time only exacerbates people’s wounds, intensifies their madness. I was thinking, suppose I have to leave Karachi to escape all this. And then, it happened.’
‘Shafiq knocked on the door?’
‘No. I thought it. I thought, how much easier my life would be if I wasn’t engaged.’
&nbs
p; Oh, Aba. ‘Was that the first time...?’
‘No. No. Not by a long shot.’
He ran his hand over his face, and I looked away, biting back the words. You weak, selfish man.
‘And then Shafiq rang the bell. I opened the door. He said, “You’re going to marry one of them. You’re going to let her have your children. How?”’
He was looking off over my shoulder now, looking towards the front door as though Shafiq were standing right there, even though that house, that scene-of-the-crime from over twenty years ago, had been long ago demolished to make way for an apartment block.
‘His eyes, Raheen, they were so crazed. Crazier than Bunty’s had been when he hit me. And I saw something glinting in his hand. I thought it was a knife. It wasn’t; it was a tea-spoon, but I didn’t know that. I thought it could be a knife. And Maheen was in the house.’
This was the way out. Oh, thank you, god. Here was the reason, the explanation, the way out. I laughed with relief. ‘You knew what to say to placate him and make him leave, didn’t you? You knew if he believed you were on his side, he’d leave. Before he saw Aunty Maheen and hurt her, he’d leave. That’s all you wanted, Aba.’ I put a hand out and caught his collar. ‘We all think selfish, horrible things. We all do. But right then, you just wanted to protect her.’
His eyes left the front door and returned to me. ‘Yes, you’re right. Completely right and completely wrong. I knew what to say to make him leave. And I knew what to say to make Maheen leave me.’ He took hold of my shoulder. ‘I heard the kitchen door swing open as I stood there. I knew Maheen had walked out into the hallway, where she could hear everything.’
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