Hands clenched, he turned on to a street lined with compact shopfronts, and saw the familiar sight of young boys playing tape-ball cricket in the middle of the road, cries of ‘O-ho, Khalifa!’ greeting the captain, who had just promoted himself up the order. A car came zipping down the road, swerving away from the boys and the wickets, windows down and the sound of the beautiful teenage girl singing the new hit ‘Boom! Boom!’ spilling out on to the street. A few months ago he and his class-fellows would have been part of that cricket match, or one near by . . . as he thought that he saw two of those former class-fellows strolling towards him, pulling the paper wrapping away from kabab rolls. They were both studying to be engineers and from the gesticulations of their hands he knew they were discussing something they had learnt that day, using kabab rolls to stand in for – what? Aeroplanes? Currents? Railway tracks? He knew nothing of the language in which their days were now steeped. One of the boys glanced in his direction, and Raza backed into the shadows. You could be a bomb-marked mongrel or a failure but not both. Not for a second, both.
And then he thought a single word. America.
He exhaled slowly, unclenching his hands. Yes, he would go there. Uncle Harry would make it happen. None of the rest of this mattered while he had the promise of America.
20
Raza stood in the doorway of his parents’ room, listening to his father’s groans of pain with a mixture of concern and guilt.
‘Oh Allah – the Beneficent, the Merciful – it is this you tried to spare us!’
Raza didn’t know what Allah had to do with throwing Harry Burton out of the house the previous night, but he did know that he was the reason his father had acted so against his own hospitable nature that he was suffering physical agony over it.
He still couldn’t believe how things had turned out. The evening had started magnificently – it was dinner in the courtyard to celebrate Raza’s decision to retake his exams, armed with Uncle Harry’s strat egies for test anxiety. Raza had taken advantage of the cool February breeze to put on his cashmere jacket, which he felt compelled, halfway through dinner, to offer to ‘return’ to Harry. Uncle Harry said no, of course – and, winking, added, ‘Just because I stole your shoes that once doesn’t mean I’m going to run off with your entire wardrobe.’
Everyone was so happy, so filled with laughter – and his parents both extended their hospitality so far as to drink large quantities from the bottle Uncle Harry had brought for Hiroko, even though it was clear to Raza from a single sniff that the liquid was badly fermented. Failure was a world away on a night like this, bombs an entire universe apart.
But after dinner Raza asked if it was true that in New York the city lights were so bright you couldn’t see the stars, because if so he’d take a picture of Karachi’s night sky with him to university and pin it on to the ceiling of his room.
Then he’d turned casually to his parents, who were looking askance at him, and said, ‘Oh yes, I forgot to tell you. Uncle Harry’s going to get an American university to pay for me to go there.’
That’s when things started to fall apart. Uncle Harry said well no, that wasn’t what he’d said at all – though there was no reason Raza shouldn’t get into university if he managed to do well in his exams. Of course, funding wouldn’t be easy – but he’d be sure to get Raza one of those books which detailed all the American universities and their admission and financial-aid policies and procedures.
It took Raza a few moments to realise he wasn’t joking.
‘But you said . . .?’ He turned to his father. ‘He said!’
‘Come on, Raza.’ Harry leaned forward, frowning. ‘I said I’d teach you strategies to combat test anxiety. That was the only promise I made and I’ve delivered on that, haven’t I? Well, haven’t I?’
‘Those stupid exercises won’t do any good,’ Raza sulked.
‘There’s a difference between stupid and simple. Grow up. Christ, it’s ridiculous the way this country makes you believe that if you know the right people everything is possible. Do you really think I can snap my fingers and get you into university?’
‘You said, “I’ll help you out with all the application stuff.” Those were your words.’ He had worn them on his heart these last few weeks.
‘Well, of course I’ll help you figure out the admissions process. Of course I’ll do that. And I’ll give you any information the Embassy has about standardised tests.’ He spread his hands generously. ‘I’ll even look over your personal statement. There’s nothing more than that I can do. If I’d meant anything more – if I’d given any kind of guarantee – I’d have told you there’s no need to retake the Islamic-studies exam. American universities won’t need that. But no, you need to retake it in case you have to fall back on higher education here. I never told you to rely on getting to America.’
Raza was horrified by the tears that started to leak from his eyes, and further horrified when Sajjad slammed down his glass on the table and turned on Harry.
‘You Burtons! You’re just like your father, Henry, with your implied promises that are only designed to bind us to you. He used to tell me there was no one more capable than me – I didn’t understand that meant I was the most willing and uncomplaining servant he’d known.’ Some long-buried outrage, brought to the surface by the crushing disappointment on his son’s face, made him stand up and point towards the door. ‘We Ashrafs don’t need any more Burtons in our lives. Please leave my family alone.’
Now Raza watched his father lying in bed with his hands pressed to either side of his head as though he thought he might be able to squeeze out the memory of yesterday, and wondered why it was so much easier for him to make things worse than better. On a sudden inspiration he bounded from the room into the living room, unplugged Sajjad’s most beloved possession – his tape recorder – and brought it into his parents’ room along with a cassette of sarangi music which he had bought for his father yesterday with his wage from the soap factory. He had thought he would present it to his father after dinner last night, but Harry Burton’s departure had destroyed the necessary mood of festivity.
Raza plugged in the tape recorder, inserted the cassette and pressed play, mouth already forming into a smile in anticipation of Sajjad’s delighted response. But at the first sound of the stringed instrument, Sajjad cried out, ‘Turn it off!’ and Raza, startled, slapped down on the stop button, the force of his hand unbalancing the tape recorder from its precarious position at the edge of the bedside table and toppling it on to the floor with a sickening crash.
Sajjad turned his head, saw the pieces of the tape recorder on the floor and looked at his son only long enough to say, ‘Raza . . .’ in a tone of total despair before turning on his side, his back towards the boy.
Hiroko, entering the room with a piece of toast, saw the broken machine and made a noise of grief.
‘It’s broken,’ she said. ‘Oh, Raza. Your father’s tape recorder.’
Raza backed out of the room.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, but Hiroko was already bending over her husband and telling him to eat some toast.
‘I’m dying,’ Sajjad said. ‘I’m dead already. I’m in hell.’
‘If this is hell why am I here?’ Hiroko demanded, a hand on her hip.
Sajjad opened one eye.
‘You’ve come to rescue me?’ he said hopefully.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘With toast. Eat it and stop complaining, you silly drunkard.’
But Raza didn’t hear any part of this conversation. He was in his room, stuffing the entire wad of his earnings from the soap factory into the pocket of his kurta, an expression of resoluteness on his face.
An hour later he was elbowing his way off a ‘yellow devil’ minibus and heading for the truck-stand by Sohrab Goth’s Bara Market.
Before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Raza knew from the Pathan school-van driver, Sohrab Goth was a village on the outskirts of Karachi, where nomadic Afghans lived in makeshift home
s during the winter months when their lands in Afghanistan yielded nothing but barrenness and the perennial nature of Karachi’s demands – for labour, for goods – beckoned men from their mountains and plains towards the sea. But now Sohrab Goth had sprawled into Karachi, a rapidly expanding part of the city’s ‘informal sector’, serving everyone from the policemen whose meagre salaries left them dependent on bribes to factory-owners looking for cheap labour to smugglers who needed markets and middlemen for shiny new technologies that reflected the gleaming eyes of teenagers searching for some way to make things up to their fathers.
Raza kept one hand jammed into the pocket of his kurta as he walked through Sohrab Goth, clutching the bundle of money, wondering whether he should simply go back to the factory next week instead of wasting his time over another attempt at the exam. The belief that Harry’s strategies for dealing with test anxiety would work now seemed as foolish as the belief that any American university would pay for him to study there. Perhaps he just needed to accept his fate. Failure. Bomb-marked mongrel. No talisman to replace the ‘America’ wrenched from his grasp and stamped beneath Uncle Harry’s heel.
There was no one at the truck-stand beside Bara Market, but in the adjoining plot a child picking through the garbage and slinging what could be recycled into a cloth bag on his back nodded when Raza asked for ‘Abdullah with the dead Soviet on his truck’ and directed him towards a squatter settlement on the other side of Bara Market.
Raza had never walked through slums before, and the fastidiousness that was his Tanaka inheritance almost turned him around as he made his way gingerly through the narrow unpaved lanes and the stench of a rivulet of water announced itself as sewage. But he pushed forward, wondering how he was supposed to find Abdullah in this densely populated gathering of refugee homes. Bare wires looped dangerously low, attached by hooks to the electricity lines beside which this tenement had sprung up. From a distance they had looked like fissures in the sky, revealing the darkness beyond. Raza tried not to think about sanitation as a man walked past him with two buckets filled with brackish water.
‘Abdullah . . . the truck with the dead Soviet,’ he kept repeating to the men who walked past (the women, covered-up, he felt it best to ignore). Some shrugged, others ignored him, but there were enough men who knew who he meant to direct him through the maze of homes – the sturdier ones of mud, the rest flimsy constructions of jute and sackcloth – until he came to a mud hut with a rope bed outside it on which Abdullah was seated next to a very young girl, his finger moving slowly over the words in a picture book, his mouth making encouraging sounds as she slowly read out the syllables and pieced them into words.
‘Abdullah?’
The boy looked up and smiled.
‘Raza Hazara!’ he said without any hesitation, as if he’d revisited the memory of their meeting so often that he’d kept Raza’s image sharp in his mind through the intervening weeks. That look in his eyes – the gleam of awe that replicated the one with which he’d watched Harry Burton kneel in front of Raza – made Raza stand up straighter, reshape his expression from that of a boy who needed help with bargaining to that of a man condescending to stop by and greet a young acquaintance.
Abdullah touched the girl’s arm and whispered something and she slid off the bed and ran into the mud house.
‘Your sister?’ Raza said.
‘Yes, but not by blood. I live with her family here. We’re from the same village.’
Raza nodded, wondering where Abdullah’s real family was.
‘I didn’t know if I’d find you here. I’m glad I did.’
The boy seemed genuinely pleased by that.
‘I’m glad, too. Afridi’s taken the truck to Peshawar but I had to stay here to look after the women. My brother, whose house this is, has gone away for a few days. Sit.’
Raza picked up the picture book as he sat. There had been something intriguing in the concentration of the girl’s face as she translated shapes into sound; he had always slipped into syntax and vocabulary with such ease that he was unable to see it as any kind of accomplishment.
‘Did you go to school?’ Abdullah asked.
‘What? Today?’
‘Don’t be funny.’ Abdullah took the book from Raza’s hand and placed it reverently aside. ‘Ever. Before this.’
It had never occurred to Raza that someone might imagine him uneducated. He wondered if it were because in this boy’s world education was never assumed, or if something in the lexicon of the van driver who had taught him Pashto revealed itself as unlettered.
‘Yes,’ he said, finding this was not something he was prepared to lie about. ‘Before this.’
‘I used to come first in class,’ Abdullah said, leaning back against the mud wall. ‘You lived in the north?’
The young girl pushed aside the cloth which acted as doorway and Raza had a brief glimpse of movement – which he understood to be female, and various – within the house, before he quickly looked away. The girl handed him a cup of green tea, smiled shyly at his words of thanks and ran back inside.
Raza swallowed hard.
‘I don’t want to offend you, but I can’t tell you anything about my life before I came here. I made an oath. When the Soviets killed my father.’ Abdullah said nothing, placing a hand on Raza’s shoulder. His kindness was shaming, but it was too late to stop. ‘I don’t even speak my own language any more, only this borrowed tongue. I will not speak the language of my father, I will not speak my father’s name, or the name of my village, or claim my kinship to any other Hazara until the day the last Soviet leaves Afghanistan. And I will be the one to drive out that last Soviet.’
In the silence that followed, Raza wondered if Abdullah had watched the television show that had gripped him a few months earlier, with Kashmiris and Indians in place of Hazaras and Soviets; and if yes, what was the price of lying in this place where codes filled the vacuum where there should have been laws?
Abdullah tightened his grip on Raza’s shoulder.
‘We may fight over which one of us gets to drive out that last Soviet. But until that fight, we’re brothers.’
Raza grinned.
‘Brother Abdullah, will you help me buy something? I have a feeling the traders here know they can’t cheat you.’
Abdullah crossed his arms.
‘Does “something” come from the poppy fields?’
‘What? No. No!’
Abdullah smiled at Raza’s vehemence.
‘Oh. The other “something”. Wait here.’ He called out, ‘I’m coming in,’ and went into the hut.
Raza traced the outline of the bundle of ten-rupee notes in his pocket as he looked around. Hardly anyone had looked twice at him since he’d stepped off the bus. It was a curious feeling, almost disappointing. He had seen one boy with features that looked as though they could have been cast from the same mould as his and had wanted to cry out, ‘Impostor.’ He ran his hand over his face. Raza Hazara. He ran the name backwards and forwards in his mind. Razahazara. Arazahazar. There was a balance to the name. More balance certainly than in Raza Konrad Ashraf. He took another sip of tea and felt glad he was wearing his oldest, most worn kurta shalwar.
‘Here.’ Abdullah came out cradling something, a piece of cloth covering it. ‘Hold out your arms.’ Raza complied, worried there was something alive under there.
It was cold metal and smooth wood, heavier than he’d expected from the ease with which Abdullah carried it. He ran his fingers along its straight lines, leaned forward and felt the curve of the magazine jut against his stomach. Abdullah plucked the cloth off, like a magician, and the AK-47 gleamed – polished steel and plywood.
‘You haven’t held one before,’ Abdullah said.
Raza shook his head, careful not to let his wandering hands approach the trigger.
‘You can’t drive out the last Soviet without knowing how to use this,’ Abdullah said, lifting the semi-automatic from Raza’s hand, and bracing it against his shoulder
. He looked heroic. Smiling jauntily, he held it out to Raza.
Raza Konrad Ashraf wiped his hands on his shalwar and stood up. But it was Raza Hazara who took the AK-47 in his arms and learnt how everything about a man could change with that simple act. He hoisted the semi-automatic in the air, feeling the thud of it against his shoulder as he imitated Abdullah’s stance, and Abdullah cheered, and Raza knew, he knew, how it felt to be Amitabh Bachchan or Clint Eastwood. A group of children ran on to the path, as if Raza’s handling of the AK-47 had set off a beacon, and Raza pivoted, pointed the gun at them and laughed as they ran off, squealing in terrified delight.
Abdullah allowed him to pose and pivot for a while, then took the gun from him and within seconds had it dismantled.
‘I’ll show you how to put it back together, if you tell me what you were doing with the American.’
Raza picked up the magazine section of the gun, and tried to twirl it casually but ended up dropping it on to the ground. Abdullah swatted him on the leg, picked up the magazine and ran the cloth over it in slow, gliding motions.
‘I can’t tell you what I was doing with the American,’ Raza said, in an attempt to recover some ground. ‘But there are ways of driving out Soviets without directly handing Kalashnikovs. If you see what I mean.’ He settled back on the rope bed, leaning on his elbows, pleased with Abdullah’s look of near reverence.
‘Does he speak Pashto? Your American?’
‘A little. Mostly we speak in English.’
‘You speak English?’
Raza shrugged, as though it were nothing.
‘Will you teach me?’
Languages had always come easily to Raza, but that didn’t mean he was unaware of the weight attached to language lessons. His mother would never have met Konrad Weiss (the German man she wanted to marry! The thought didn’t get any less strange over the years) if she hadn’t taught German to Yoshi Watanabe’s nephew. And she would not have gone to India to find the Burtons if not for Konrad Weiss. In India, it was language lessons that brought Sajjad and Hiroko to the same table, overturning the separateness that would otherwise have defined their relationship. And all the tenderest of his recollections of childhood were bound up in his mother’s gift of languages to him – those crosswords she set for him late each night when he was growing up, the secrets they could share without lowering their voices, the ideas they could express to each other in words particular to specific languages (‘no wabi-sabi’ they would sometimes say to each other, when rejecting a poem or a painting lacking in harmony that Sajjad held up for praise, and it would amaze Raza how his father still hadn’t quite been able to understand the concepts of wabi and sabi which seemed as natural to Raza as an understanding of why being udaas in Urdu was something quite different to feeling melancholic in English).
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