Love goes, I learn: hurt remains.
So where, you will ask, has my story gone? Faded away with Madeline, with Tina, colours dimmed almost to sepia?
Sit still. I have other loves to speak of. It’s already April, where my tale began last year. Only five pages of the calendar left to turn.
Waiting. Patiently.
The light flickers.
I wait for my father to come back.
I turn eleven, quietly, without a party.
Mother Tongue
May. There’s a downpour. We come out of a cinema that’s showing The Unsinkable Molly Brown. Outside, among the puddles, our car stands driverless. We have to wait for the chauffeur to come back with the key. When he does, my mother sacks him on the spot and drives the six miles home in the thunderstorm through the swelling flood.
Mother has been looking after Daddy’s fishing trawler business while he’s away. She’s incongruous there; I always wonder how she keeps her fine cottons from soaking up smells of fish. For a while, I go with her to the harbour at West Wharf, where boats come in with nets full of lobsters and prawns, to look over accounts and oversee affairs, as I’d loved to do with my father when he was here; I don’t mind the fish smell.
But then our car breaks down and I sell it as scrap, and Mother decides to send Rahmatullah, a servant she trusts, to work on the boats. He has other ideas. No money comes in for weeks at a time. By the time he’s made off with most of the profits it’s too late to catch up with him.
And Daddy’s had a heart attack in Rome; then another one in London. (He’d probably left Rome because it must have been terrifying to stay in a hospital and try to communicate in a language he barely knew.) So plans for him to come and wind up matters in Karachi, to take us to a new place, are on hold till he’s well enough to conclude arrangements and deals.
We don’t dare to think what might happen if his heart and his health get worse.
The night musicians still pass our lane after sundown, though their songs are more distant now. I can tell some of their stories: of Mahiwal and Rano and Punhal Baloch, heroes damned to misery. I can sing all their songs, but I don’t know the words.
For three or four months I’ve been walking an enchanted tightrope between yesterday and tomorrow, waiting for Daddy to send a message that will be the message. Or I read for hours on the leafy branches of the almond tree while Yasmine works, unpaid, as editorial assistant for my aunt’s fashion magazine, and Shah and Safinaz still go to school in a neighbour’s car. I enter the pages of a glorious past, written, in the cursive loops of a script that always eludes me, into the intimate pleasures of my mother tongue.
June. Sandstorms rise. White grains in waves, blowing on winds hot as iron, harsh as glass. Three days like hell: we draw the drapes and lie beneath the fan. Unbearable. Imam Hussein and the Martyrs were deprived of water on days parched and burnt like these.
Then the locust swarms. Thick and black on the wind, you can’t step out, the mass is too dense. But the gardener is there, screaming: My fruit, my flowers, all gone, everything, in two hours, just two hours, they strip each single tree of foliage. Only thorns survive. And Mother says: Plants always grow again.
There’s a story she once told us, about the boy called Shravan who carried his parents on his back from place to place in search of a cure for their ailment, but when he reached the desert, barren land with its spiky cactus and the angry white sun above, he put them down on the thirsty sand. No water here to drink, he said, only mirages. I can’t carry you any more. Sometimes, in summer, our city looks like her story’s barren land.
In summer, when there’s drought, we turn off the fountain. Leaves from the almond tree fall into its emptiness.
Mother has come home with a headache today. It worsens as the day wears on. Then she’s delirious. Her four children, alone, my oldest sister seventeen and our youngest ten, phone every doctor whose number we can lay hands on. No one agrees to come. It’s the weekend. We’re too busy. I’m a gynaecologist. I don’t do home visits.
Finally a second cousin sends a novice relative who takes one look at Mother and diagnoses meningitis. She’s been ill three days, maybe longer, hours of light and darkness have merged. The ambulance arrives to take her away in just under an hour. Six hours more without a lumber puncture and you’d have lost her, the doctor says. You’d better fumigate the rooms after she’s left.
...When will he come back, the redeemer, the dreamer, with eyes that carry the sea in their shallows, little paper boats of passage on his palms...
That summer, while Mother lies in her hospital bed, the rains come down on us so heavy that the streets flood and for unending days no one will risk driving us over to see her.
... Hands folded in prayer or clutching each other’s, words or wishes soundless on tips of tongues, we lie awake these restless nights, begging the God we never see, save us from rain, Lord of Mercy, bring our missing ones home...
By the time Daddy comes home two months later to relieve us, delayed three times by the hazards of transnational flights, I’ve forgotten Jesus and Mary and all the friends I had there, who’ve gone their way with the leaves of my cabbage. And though I hardly know this now, and I still think my father’s light makes my lost leaves grow back, soon I’ll realise that my mother has taken his place as the one for whom I keep the heart of the cabbage I am.
Mother’s in hospital when Daddy returns. But she comes home a few weeks after. She has to lie down much of the time. She’s so sensitive to sudden noise that we make a bed for her in what had been the dining room. She’ll sit up by a picture window overlooking a bed of sunflowers she planted.
Beside the sunflower grows its papery twin, a flower with a name no one knows.
Daddy sits by Mother’s bed with his head bowed over folded hands. He seems to be praying. Violet shadows spread around his eyes.
Leavetaking
In September, barely a year after the war, when Pakistan’s fraught relationship with India is at its lowest ebb in the nineteen years since independence, we’re invited to my cousin’s wedding in Bombay. When we decide to go, without our parents who’ll follow four weeks later, we have no way of knowing we’re leaving behind the house for ever.
Mehreen doesn’t know how to say goodbye. She taps my cheeks with her fingertips; little slaps in lieu of a caress.
We will come back to Karachi – in April – but by then our landlady has died. In our absence, her daughter and her grandson have reclaimed the house and put our stuff in storage with our aunt next door. We’ve come back only to leave.
Lena the dachschund, boarding with friends, has betrayed my sisters: she’s become so fat she waddles, and she answers now to the name of Lottie. We stay with our aunt till December that year. We never again will have a home of our own in Karachi.
There are days that betray you with their borrowed gold. Childhood pleasures are no armour for future adversity. I won’t see Karachi again for twenty-nine years, and when I do go back my name will have a different spelling.
Electric Shadows
Only five years after leaving, in another country on another continent, I decided, as dreamers often do, that I should be someone, make a mark on life: fill a space, even a small one, with songs, soothe the scars on people’s souls with words, or write and make a difference in the world. When I began to write my tales, that’s what I planned to do, make a difference, I thought stories could right wrongs, dilute injustices, but though it took five years I knew mine never really would, I wasn’t here to make a difference, only to be insignificant, because all I did was work and dream and wait for life to happen to me. And sometimes I’d think of all those wordless songs I’d sung, of Madeline and my sins of omission, how I’d started then the pattern of stillness that wasn’t yet erased, of stepping back and letting someone else speak for me, of writing secret words of love to which I never would admit. I hadn’t even chosen my first love for myself. And my stories, too, are happenstance; electric sh
adows of chance encounters and changing love. But then sometimes I think of what has come to me so easily, much more than I have ever missed, or things I often didn’t want at all; echoes of memories spill their light into my nights, I wish day had more hours and night more places of solace, and I think that for a life so still mine’s really been quite full. And what I’ve longed for, well, longing bears within it the message and the promise of its own fulfilment. The image of a golden head bent over a desk dissolves into the picture of a peach stolen from a farmyard in summer. Fresh lake water trickles down my shoulder blade beneath a white sky. The smell of jasmine wafts in through my bedroom window. The sunflower talks to its papery twin. One hand trembles with the weight of words that make a captive of love.
What Do You Call Those Birds?
The waters of the ocean are pure, my friend
Remember love will last but two days:
And its pain a lifetime endure
(from a Punjabi wedding song)
1
That summer they met, before the storm that brought down branches and set the year apart for Londoners, Iman and Sameer, birds of passage both, were the best of friends. Sameer was thirty-one, beginning to sell stories, and working as an itinerant reviewer of books and films while he researched a thankless thesis contrasting the phenomenological approaches of Sartre and Klein. Iman, four years younger, was the elegant books editor of a politically-orientated current affairs magazine; she commissioned pieces by Sameer on a fairly regular basis, but she’d also decided that her real task was to launch him as a burgeoning talent in a world she knew was fickle.
Apart from a shared love for exotic food and bizarre films, Iman and Sameer also had Karachi in common. In an odd way, though. He had left the city of his birth as a teenager in the year that Iman, still a child, had been relocated there by her family who were evading the ire of Idi Amin. But soon she’d moved back, to boarding schools in East Africa. Though Sameer always thought of her – with her tall, pale Kashmiri prettiness, her gentle Urdu and her almost traditionally formal manners – as a Pakistani, Iman was a child of the new Africa; her mental landscapes, which she would sometimes recreate in oil on paper, were in ochres, browns and greens he found hard to recognise. Iman had spent her life between three worlds and three languages, one world more than Sameer was used to. Karachi, which was gradually fading away from him, was a place she sometimes visited for fun, while Africa to her was a kind of refuge, the place she returned to when she had wounds to heal.
And Sameer soon found out that reticent Iman had wounds, deep and many, that needed to heal. Behind the laughter and the evasions was a fragile, even shattered, sense of her place in the world. Rainy days followed the storm. They were neighbours in Maida Vale; after a film or a Thai dinner they’d often go to one of their flats and settle over a pot of green tea to talk half the night away. Or they’d persuade a friendly local pizzeria owner to keep open till late for coffee and cakes. They became close: Sameer told her he’d recently become involved with a flighty married woman of whose vodka-inspired antics Iman, when she’d seen them together in a cafe, hadn’t approved. Iman confessed that she was on the verge of divorce, from a man who wouldn’t let her go but couldn’t keep her happy; she’d married Yasir when they were still only students, but passion had worn out when seven years of his drinking and profligate spending had dulled her response, and rumours of his polymorphously perverse orgies on Mediterranean cruises had reached her.
2
They’d been friends just over a year, their closeness only hindered by the demands on their time of others who claimed even greater closeness. Then Iman – after a bad experience setting up a fashion magazine on a millionairess acquaintance’s narcissistic whim – suddenly decided to leave London, her nearly-former husband and her brightening career. She decided, too, to give up the book world and go for business economics. She found a job that would send her to Hong Kong. She wrote Sameer loving messages on post cards and once dropped in for a fleeting visit. But for the better part of eighteen months, in which he missed her sorely, their lives diverged.
And by the time she came back, Sameer’s life had changed. His career had taken off – like a raft rather than a plane, but all the same it was moving.
He had three stories anthologised that summer. On Iman’s advice he’d abandoned post-graduate research, but now had a two-year contract teaching in the modern languages department of a university. On the other hand, his relationship with his now-divorced woman friend was in perilous depths. Mona was always jealous, imagining non-existent rivals, particularly after he’d been too friendly for a season with a young – and unmarried – visiting scholar and he’d even, fleetingly, contemplated marriage. That Ayla had soon told him she was on the rebound from someone else was hardly, Mona thought, of any consequence: fantasy betrayals were as bad as the real thing. Of course Sameer, too, had been on the rebound from a relationship that was moving very fast in no direction.
3
‘Sameer?’
He heard Iman’s voice on the phone on a sunny morning in April, after six months of silence. He was recovering from one of Mona’s worst onslaughts on his job, his stories, his friendships and his moral integrity.
‘Iman, where the hell have you been?’
‘Karachi! Didn’t you ever get the card with my address?’
‘What, where, when, why...?’
‘Don’t ask any questions. Just meet me in that new cafe by the canal.’
‘But...’
‘I flew in last night. With Yasir.’
‘Yasir?’
‘Yes, Yasir! He is my husband, you know? We’re back together again. Don’t ask any more questions. Just get yourself over to La Ville for a cappuccino.’
Iman, in those days, was always, notoriously, late. Sameer stood, waiting about fifteen or twenty minutes, for her blue car to drive down Blomfield Road. The café was closed. It was a sunny Monday.
Then she was there.
‘Yes’, she said as they sat over sandwiches and Perriers in a stained-glass and stucco pub they found a minute’s walk away, ‘I went back to Yasir. You know we never really did divorce. He followed me to Karachi...’
‘What’s with the Karachi story? You were happy as a lark in Hong Kong last time we talked...’
‘Hong Kong gets lonely for a single person especially if you aren’t part of an expat set. I didn’t really get on well with the Cantonese. Talk about closed circles. I’d go off to Beijing because I love the people there but the language problem’s even worse. I couldn’t cope with the food, too much offal: I picked up a bug and was sick all the time. I went back to Hong Kong and it was freezing. The sea looked like glass, as if at any moment it might break. Then Desmond – my editor, you’ll remember him – rang me and said there was an office opening in Karachi. I could go there on a longish assignment. I leapt at the chance. Our house there in Clifton was lying empty. It’s beautiful, just by the sea, one of those sandy spots where you can still see the sea in fact, and it never gets too hot because of the sea breezes.
‘Karachi’s fun after London, your phone always ringing, someone inviting you out every day. We were euphoric about having a woman ruling after ten years of seeing that ogre in power. The new regime had things under control, even if you could feel the tension, like a time bomb, under the surface, with policemen on the streets, and people saying it wasn’t really safe to drive around alone as I did. Half the time I was too tired to go out anyway, writing reports and articles and virtually running the office, but it’s nice to know there’s something to do whenever you want to. And the weather...after so many years of rain I’d started hearing dripping water in my sleep. I almost enjoyed the humidity and the heat. I have lots of friends there from my Grammar School days – many of them are married now, some divorced. They’d drag me out to hotels for dinner or to their homes. I never knew there were so many picnic spots a few miles away from the city. Have you been inland to see those lakes and hidden creeks? T
he pollution in Karachi’s bad, but out there it’s as clean as unspoilt parts of Africa.
‘Everyone was always trying to pair me off, get me married. Men call you all the time. And you know me, I’m spontaneous enough, I love having men as friends, but I’m cautious too. Some of those men are ready for a fling with their best friend’s wife or their wife’s best friend ... they call you when their wives are off shopping in Singapore or Manhattan, and you have to learn to be busy all the time. The only problem is, when you brush them off, they look out for you in public places or in the passenger seat of a car with any man, eligible or not, and the next minute you’re either about to be married, or stealing your best friend’s husband. But not everyone’s like that. Take Kashif...’
‘How in hell do you expect me to know who Kashif is without yet another of your long asides, Iman? You were going to tell me about Yasir. How did he track you down? I was convinced that half the reason you were running away from London was to get him off your back. Don’t you remember all those midnight calls after which you’d ring me at two in the morning? And the time he followed us from Knightsbridge and we found him parked outside your garage half asleep...’
‘God, you’ve got a great memory for embarrassing moments. But you know it wasn’t always like that. He can be good company sometimes, generous, and he can make me laugh. You know what the real reason is? I married him just after my twenty-first birthday. At twenty-three I had my first abortion when he said we couldn’t afford a baby because he was thinking of moving us to Harvard so he could do his MBA. And he’d promised to get me back into my post-grad work too. Anyway, after that time and the miscarriage I had later I’ve always thought, if I have a baby, it has to be his. That’s the reason. Now’s the time. I’m thirty.
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