When he emerged from the examination hall, there was a group of his friends clapping him on the shoulder. ‘All done, hero! We really can’t call you Junior any more, college boy.’ One of them – Ali – slung an arm around Raza’s shoulder and called out to a group of girls walking past, ‘Who wants to go for a scooter drive with my friend, the college boy? Top marks this one will get.’ He dropped the keys to his Vespa into Raza’s hand, and pushed him towards the group of girls, two of whom were smiling directly at Raza, no coyness, no pretence, in the way that college girls smiled at college boys. Right then Raza knew he wouldn’t tell anyone what had happened. For a few more weeks he could still be Raza the Brilliant, Raza the Aspiring, Raza the Son Who Would Fulfil His Father’s Dreams.
When his mother sat down in the passenger seat he handed her the newspaper and pulled away from the pavement, his voice strangely calm as he said, ‘I didn’t pass. I left the final paper blank.’
A small noise of shock and disappointment escaped her mouth before she stopped herself and said, ‘What happened?’
‘I don’t know.’ He wished she would shout at him so he could be petulant or resentful in return. ‘I couldn’t understand the words on the exam paper. And then time was up.’
She had been a teacher long enough to know things like this sometimes happened to the best of students.
‘This was your Islamic-studies paper?’ When he nodded, she allowed herself a long, luxurious expression of disgust, though it wasn’t directed at him. Devotion as public event, as national requirement. It made her think of Japan and the Emperor, during the war. ‘And why do you need that to study the law? Ridiculous!’ She stroked the back of his head. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this earlier, Raza-chan?’
The childhood endearment brought tears to his eyes.
‘I don’t want to be the new neighbourhood Donkey.’ Abbas, who used to live down the road from him, had acquired that nickname when he was eight and had to repeat a class year after failing his exams. For three years he barely scraped through, coming at the bottom of the class, and then he failed again. After that, no one called him anything but Donkey. Failure was the ultimate embarrassment in the neighbourhood, a disgrace to the whole family, and the children picked up on this early, distancing themselves quickly from it through insults and jeers.
‘Raza! No one will think of you that way. It was only one paper. You’ll retake it in a few months. Everything will be fine.’
‘But how will I tell Aba?’
‘I’ll tell him,’ she said firmly. ‘And if he says one word in anger to you I will make him regret it.’ At his smile of relief, she said, ‘In return you have to do one thing for me. Tell me what you really want from your life. I know it isn’t the law.’
Raza shrugged and gestured to the electronic shops. ‘I want to have everything that’s in there,’ he said grandly.
‘I’m not asking what you want to possess. I’m asking what you want to do.’
They were stopped at a traffic light, behind a rickshaw that had a pair of sultry eyes painted on it, beneath which was emblazoned, in Urdu, LOOK – BUT WITH LOVE. Raza’s mind found itself instantly translating the words into Japanese, German, English, Pashto – a reflexive response to any piece of writing he glimpsed as he drove through the city’s streets.
‘I want words in every language,’ he said. His hands briefly left the driving wheel in a gesture of hopelessness. ‘I think I would be happy living in a cold, bare room if I could just spend my days burrowing into new languages.’
Hiroko rested her hand on Raza’s, not knowing what to say to that unexpected moment of raw honesty. To her, acquiring language was a talent, to her son it was passion. But it was a passion that could have no fulfilment, not here. Somewhere in the world perhaps there were institutions where you could dive from vocabulary to vocabulary and make that your life. But not here. ‘Polyglot’ was not any kind of practical career choice. She was overwhelmed by a feeling of sorrow for her boy, for that look in his eyes which told her he knew and had always known that he would have to take that most exceptional part of himself and put it to one side. She knew what Sajjad would say if she tried to discuss it with him: ‘If the greatest loss of his life is the loss of a dream he’s always known to be a dream, then he’s among the fortunate ones.’ He’d be right, of course, but that didn’t stop this pulling at her heart. There was something she had learnt to recognise after Nagasaki, after Partition: those who could step out from loss, and those who would remain mired in it. Raza was the miring sort, despite the inheritance he should have had from both his parents, two of the world’s great forward-movers.
When they arrived home she went inside first, leaving Raza outside, leaning against the car, until she talked things over with Sajjad.
First, he was disbelieving, convinced she was playing a ridiculous joke on him. Then he raised his voice, bellowed that the boy didn’t study enough. But when she told him which exam he’d failed, and what had happened, Sajjad just shook his head in disbelief and sat down, his anger unable to sustain itself, as always.
‘He’ll take the exam again in the autumn,’ Hiroko said, sitting next to him and clasping his hand. ‘The results will be in before college starts, and they’ll hold a place for him pending that one result. It’s happened with our students before.’
For a few moments Sajjad was silent, but finally he nodded and brought her hand to his lips.
‘All right, I won’t be angry with him. It might not hurt him to miss a rung on a ladder. Next time, he’ll leap right over it.’
He went outside to find his son, to tell him – Hiroko instructed him to use these words – ‘These things happen’. On his way out he cursed under his breath the government which kept trying to force religion into everything public. His mother, with her most intimate relationship with Allah, would have personally knocked on the door of Army House and told the President he should have more shame than to ask all citizens to conduct their love affairs with the Almighty out in the open.
What Sajjad saw as he stepped outside was this: Bilal and Ali, his son’s closest friends, driving down the street on a Vespa, Bilal waving the exam results in the air like a victory flag, while Raza hunched down behind Sajjad’s car, hiding out of their sight.
15
Flying into Karachi at night, the American, Harry – formerly Henry – Burton, looked down on to the brightly lit sprawl of one of the fastest-growing cities in the world and felt the surge of homecoming that accompanies the world’s urban tribes as they enter unfamiliar landscapes of chaos and possibility. This is more like it, he thought, exiting the airport to a pell-mell of cars using their horns in a complicated and unrelenting exchange of messages about power, intention and mistrust. Even the beggar tossing a twenty-five-paisa coin back at him with a sneer made Harry smile.
God, it was good to be away from Islamabad – the bubble in the hills, a town barely two decades old, characterised by government and not history, where everything had the antiseptic air of diplomacy with germs rife beneath the surface. ‘Dull, but pretty’, they’d described it to him beforehand. But pretty wasn’t enough for a man who’d spent his childhood summers in Mussoorie. Harry wanted chaos of his cities and nothing less than beauty of his hill towns. Only on the one occasion he’d driven out of Islamabad into the hill station of Murree, and stood at Kashmir Point looking at snow-capped mountains in the distance with the smell of pine trees all around him, had he felt the gnarly stuff of space and time which separated him from his childhood thin to cobwebs.
Karachi, Karachi, he almost sang out loud as the car with the diplomatic licence plate sped its way through the city. A truck driving on the wrong side of the road veered away from Harry’s car at the last possible moment and he cheered with delight. Six months in Islamabad, without reprieve. How had he managed it? The sacrifices a man makes for his country, Harry thought, saluting his reflection in the tinted window.
But the next afternoon he was somewhat less buoyant
– at least mentally so, though physically he couldn’t keep from bouncing up and down on the springless seat of a wedge-shaped auto-rickshaw, while fumes from exhaust pipes entered his pores and traffic crowded so close he could see each bristle on the moustache of the President-General whose face decorated the back of the truck that the rickshaw was stuck behind in the slow crawl through the commercial heart of Karachi. Although it was December the afternoon sun was still hot, and the sea breeze which had been so refreshing just a couple of miles back seemed unable to force its way through the thick fumes. Harry distracted himself with architecture, admiring the loveliness of an enclosed balcony jutting out from a yellow-stone colonial building, its lower half fashioned from delicate woodwork, its upper half coloured glass.
But eventually the rickshaw left behind all colonial remnants, left behind the spacious homes of the elite in which he’d spent all his time on his previous visit to Karachi, and snaked through the streets of a city which had grown too fast for urban planning, everywhere concrete and cement and almost no greenery, thorny acacias overtaking all empty plots of land, except where they’d been cut down to make space for the makeshift jute homes of the poor; and the further from familiarity the rickshaw travelled the more Harry began to fear the circumstances in which he might find the man he sought out.
‘What’s Nazimabad like?’ he’d said two nights earlier, in Islama bad, to a businessman at a party, who he found trying to catch fish with his bare hands in their host’s pond while the armed guards employed to shoot predatory birds looked on uncertainly.
The man had barely glanced up.
‘Muhajir depot,’ he replied. ‘Never been there. Very middle class.’
One of the more perplexing things about Pakistan, Harry had found, was the tendency of the elite to say ‘middle class’ as though it were the most damning of insults. He wasn’t quite sure what to make of ‘Muhajir depot’. He knew ‘muhajir’ was the Urdu word for ‘migrant’ – and, as such, was a word Harry himself identified with, though he also knew that in Pakistan it was used specifically for those who had come to Pakistan from what was now India at Partition. But though he knew the word he wasn’t sure what its connotations were for this businessman of whose ethnic background Harry was utterly unaware. The fact was, Harry had been briefed extensively about the different groups within Afghanistan, could expound at length on the tensions, enmities and alliances between Pashtuns, Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazaras, but knew little about any groups in Pakistan other than the Inter-Services Intelligence agency.
What he did know was that Karachi was nothing like Islamabad, though it was clear people in Islamabad were mixed in their feelings about how positive a comment this was on the port city.
The businessman by the fish pond had been far from complimentary about it.
‘Nothing but a city of failed aspirations,’ he said.
But a woman standing near by with hair like black water had disagreed.
‘It’s got life,’ she said simply. ‘People wouldn’t be migrating there from every part of the country if all aspirations failed as they approached the sea.’
It was for this comment as much as for her hair that Harry had gone to bed with her; afterwards, there was no pillow talk, and no mention of phone numbers or last names. In truth, there was barely any afterwards. She was dressed and out of his house just minutes after he’d pulled out of her. Harry had never known sex to so intensify his feelings of loneliness.
It was loneliness, he knew, that had brought him here, in search of a past that was as irretrievable as his parents’ marriage or his own childhood. For months now he had ignored his desire to fly to Karachi and knock on the door of a particular house in Nazimabad and now it was the desire to put that desire to rest more than any kind of hope that had finally persuaded him to seek out the first person he’d ever been conscious of loving.
The rickshaw turned into a quiet street of a residential neighbourhood: a more communal area than the parts of Karachi Harry knew – no dividing boundary walls, no gardens and driveways buffering the space between one house and another; instead, there was a long row of homes abutting each other, a single step leading from each doorway to the street. Harry released a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding – it wasn’t grand, but there was no whiff of failure or disappointment about the street.
The rickshaw driver turned to look at him as he exhaled heavily and Harry shook his head to say he’d meant nothing. The man quoted the fare to Harry, whose raised eyebrows received the response: ‘If I don’t overcharge an American, everyone will know I work with the CIA.’ Though there was clearly no one else around to see how much he was charging, the cheek of the remark amused Harry enough to pay the full amount.
‘I could be a while.’ He pointed to a tree growing at the front of a house, its roots creasing the road. ‘It might be better if you park in the shade.’
The man nodded.
‘Your Urdu is very good.’
Harry eased himself out of the rickshaw – there was an unpleasant sucking sound as the sweating bald patch on his head detached from the vinyl canopy – and nodded towards house number 17.
‘My first teacher is in there. I’ll tell him you said so.’
The group of boys playing cricket further down the street stopped to watch Harry as he strode across to the door and rang the bell. He looked back at them, amused by the cricket sweaters some of them were wearing in the balmy afternoon.
There was a sound of footsteps on the other side of the door, and Harry stepped back as it swung open to reveal a young man – little more than a boy – in jeans and a faded red T-shirt and with facial features Harry immediately identified as belonging to the descend ants of the Mongol tribes – Hazara, probably. Maybe Tajik. Uzbek, even. The intensity of his disappointment startled him. Had he really expected to find the man he was looking for at an address last known to be accurate over twenty years ago? But perhaps – oh clutch those straws, Burton – the present occupants might know where he could be found.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’m looking for Sajjad Ashraf. He used to live here.’
Raza just stared at the tall, green-eyed redhead, whose shiny bald spot and thickening waist did nothing to dissipate the glamour that attached itself to his Starsky and Hutch accent.
Harry repeated the question in Urdu, wondering which language the boy spoke, and what he was doing here.
‘I speak English,’ the boy said, his tone offended. ‘And Japanese and German.’ For the first time in months he had reason to boast, and that made boasting necessary. ‘And Urdu, of course. Pashto, also. What do you speak?’
Harry Burton couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so taken aback.
‘English and German and Urdu. And a little Farsi.’
‘I beat you,’ Raza said in German. There was no arrogance in the statement, just a muted pride which was unsure of its own right to exist.
‘Conclusively,’ Harry replied in English, feeling a ridiculous urge to pull the boy into an embrace. Then, switching to German, ‘I’m Harry. You must be Sajjad and Hiroko’s son.’
‘Yes.’ The boy smiled. ‘I’m Raza. How do you do?’ He extended his hand with the tentative air of someone executing a move he’d only ever practised in front of the mirror, and Harry shook it vigorously. ‘Come,’ the boy said, taking Harry’s arm with the physical familiarity of Pakistani men to which the American hadn’t yet become accustomed, and pulling him indoors. ‘I’ll tell Aba.’
Harry stepped through the vestibule and into a smaller version of the Ashraf home as he recalled it from his childhood: low-roofed rooms built around an open-air courtyard which was dominated by a large tree. But the flowerpots filled with marigolds, snapdragons and phlox which were clustered near the tree brought to mind another Delhi world.
A grey-haired man dressed in a white kurta pyjama was pouring water into the flowerpots, and Harry almost laughed out loud with joy at the sight. Of course it would happen this way. In this
city, where tree roots cracked cement, and broad tree-trunks were canvases for graffiti, and branches became part of the urban architecture as sidewalk vendors draped cloth over them to create makeshift roofs, of course he would find Sajjad Ashraf in a sun-dappled courtyard, surrounded by flowers and leaf-patterned shadows.
‘Aba, Uncle Harry is here to see you,’ Raza said, unsure what to make of the expression with which this foreign stranger was staring at his father.
The grey-haired man straightened – instantly recognisable as the Sajjad of old, the laughter which always suggested its presence beneath the surface now inscribed on his face in fine lines around his eyes and mouth – and looked at the newcomer with no trace of recognition. It was Hiroko, stepping out from the bedroom, who saw in his red hair and the slight droop of his eyelids something familiar but before she could excavate Konrad’s features from her memory the man said, ‘I’m Henry Burton. James and Ilse’s son.’
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