Kartography (10 page)

 

 

 

 

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My litany of Karachi winter characteristics runs something like this: dry skin; socks; peanuts roasted in their shells and bought by the pao in bags made of newspaper; peaches that you twist just so to separate them into halves, flesh falling cleanly off seed; the silence of no fan and no air conditioner; hibiscus flowers; shawls; days at the beach (which involve a litany of their own: salted fish air; turtle tracks; shouts of warning from the fishermen just before toes tangle with their near-invisible lines; fishermen's baskets full of dead fish; fishermen's nets drawn in to shore; warm sand; wet sand; feet slippery on rock moss; jeans rolled up as we wade, and rolled down again heavy with salt and sea; shells; sparks from the barbecue; the concentrated colours of sunset; stars; the rings of sand on the bathtub; the fog of mirrors in the bathroom; the smell of salt on skin as we fall asleep, despite the earlier soap and scrubbing; the forgetting of everything that bothered us at the start of the day; the sheer childhood of it all). But, really, for Karachi high society, winter is about envelopes.

Or, rather, about the invitations inside the envelopes. They start to appear, in twos and threes, in early November, and by New Year every house has a shrunken mirror. That is absurdly oblique. I mean, the invitation cards get pushed into those crevices between the dressing-table mirror and its frame, encroaching on the space that exists for reflection. This is true of invitations to parties; the wedding invitations are another matter entirely. Dholkis, mehndis, mayouns, milads, sham-e-rangs, ganas, shadi receptions, valimas—among the absurdly extravagant there is a card for each occasion (except the actual wedding ceremony itself, which hardly anyone attends) and the envelopes that arrive are so bloated with demands on your time that they cannot squeeze into cracks between wood and glass and must have their own space on the dressing-table top to lie back, engorged and insolent.

I have already invoked the Ghutnas; the Karachi Knees, remember? They are perennial creatures, but most in their element during the winter. It was during a winter wedding that my mother first named them, although really she deserves little credit herself; Aunty Runty all but presented Ami with the name on a platter.

‘Oh Yaso, Yaso,' Aunty Runty sighed, coming upon my mother at a mehndi. ‘Can't handle, darling, can't.'

My mother stepped back. Aunty Runty was swaying, and her cigarette was within dangerous proximity to my mother's heirloom sari. ‘Can't what, Rukhsana?' My mother is the only person I know who refuses to make use of the nickname that was bestowed on her former classmate when she married the dipsomaniacal Bunty.

Aunty Runty took a deep breath and held one hand up as though silencing a gathered assembly. ‘Can't take the social scene. Every night, people out drinking until three, four in the morning. Drinking, drinking, they fall on the street, ghutnay chhil gaye, yaar, yes, skin peels off knees and yet they drink on. Can't. And yet, what to do? Have to show up, be seen, let people know you're alive so they'll invite you to tomorrow's party. Yaar, can't take the scene, but have to peel knees, have to chhilo ghutnay, have to be seen to be invited.'

In the days and years after that, the term Ghutna became a euphemism used both as an adjective to describe a particularly social social ‘do' and a noun to refer to the people who threw themselves into the socializing. For instance, ‘And how was last night's party? Was it a Ghutna evening?' my mother might ask one of her friends.

‘Oh, the Ghutnas were out in full force. Falling and peeling, falling and peeling, scrambling up the social ladder and falling and peeling. I tell you, the place was just awash with blood.'

‘And how are your own knees?'

‘Raw, darling, raw.'

Karim and I always encouraged our parents to go to as many par
ties as they could bear. We loved the morning-after parodies. But best of all were parties thrown by his parents or mine, because then we could watch the absurdity up close and, between laughs, pause to admire the elegance and the aplomb of it all while itching to grow up and have lives just like our parents' lives. The first time I reconsidered that aspiration was at the party my parents threw the day Karim and I got back from Rahim Yar Khan.

Karim and his parents were the first to arrive, both Aunty Maheen and Karim carrying buckets of roses. ‘They were just so beautiful,' Aunty Maheen cried out, as she ascended the stairs to the ‘upstairs study', where my mother was trying to unwind after the hectic party preparations and my father was gamely attempting to aid the process by playing ‘Pack Up Your Troubles' on the hand-held, battery-powered organ he'd given me for my birthday. I was sitting on the arm of his chair, pulling each of his ear lobes in turn in time to the beat.

‘And absurdly cheap,' Aunty Maheen continued, stepping into the room. ‘So I bought them, buckets and all, from the phoolwalla by the roundabout.' She bent to place a bucket on the ground, and Uncle Ali whisked it out of her hand.

‘Maheen, the bottom's muddy. You'll ruin the carpet.' He placed it outside on the marble floor, gesturing Karim to do the same with his bucket.

‘Muddy bottom,' my father sang, plunking out the tune of ‘Stormy Weather'.

‘They're gorgeous, Maheen. Thanks,' Ami said. ‘Ali, don't stand there looking cross. Pour yourself a drink. I refuse to start hosting duties until the actual guests arrive.'

Uncle Ali looked at the glass table in the centre of the room, with its vase overspilling with flowers, and frowned. ‘You don't have nearly enough vases for that absurd amount of roses, do you?'

‘Who needs vases?' My mother stood up, leaned outside and plucked a rose from the bucket. ‘We'll make everyone do the tango.' She held the rose up horizontally. ‘Like in
Some Like It Hot
.' She snipped off the thorns with Aba's pocketknife, and held the rose to Uncle Ali's mouth. For a moment he continued glaring and then, snap, his teeth closed around the rose stem.

‘Olé!' Karim and I shouted.

‘Duet, duet,' Aunty Maheen said, and sat down next to my father. ‘One, two, three.' With more regard for volume than tune, they started bashing out ‘Chopsticks' on the organ, while Ami and Uncle Ali twirled around the room in dance, Uncle Ali's feet nimbly avoiding the perils of dancing with a sari. The rose transferred itself from Uncle Ali's mouth to my mother's just as the tune ended, even though their cheeks didn't ever quite touch as they danced.

‘Encore, encore,' Karim said when they finished.

‘Absolutely not.' Ami collapsed on the sofa and slumped against Aba's shoulder. ‘I'm exhausted. You're married to an old hag, Zaf.' She tucked the rose behind my father's ear.

‘I've got the old hag on my hands,' Aba sang.

Aunty Maheen handed my mother the discarded thorns from the ashtray, and Ami jabbed Aba's neck with them. Uncle Ali cheered her on.

My analysis of the photograph at Ali and Maheen's wedding was clearly embarrassingly out of step with reality. I looked at my father's hands. Perilously close to being ‘delicate ‘. Some other M, some other Z. Had to be. And if not, so what? Really, so what?

When the doorbell rang to signal the ‘actual guests' had started to arrive, Ami said, ‘Oh, can't we ignore them?' and I held my breath, hoping she would. But, of course, even as she said that she was already walking towards the door, stopping first to check with Aunty Maheen that the rose exchange hadn't smudged her lipstick.

Karim and I spent the next half-hour finding vases in different rooms and cupboards, and stuffing them full of roses. In between arranging roses, we did hors-d ‘œuvres twirls around the room, and by the time the first plate of devilled eggs was consumed everyone had arrived.

It wasn't a particularly large party, as Karachi parties go. Fifty people, or thereabouts, almost all of whom had known my parents longer than I had. Designer shalwar-kameezes were still relatively new in Karachi, but I'm quite sure that by then we were past those ini
tial days of designer fever, when every experiment possible with form had been tried on the generic shalwar-kameez, resulting in such absurdities as the dhoti shalwar and the butterfly shalwar—but, let's admit it now, to those of us who had never known the swinging days of Karachi in the sixties there was an exuberance, a delight, in that revival of fashion right under the nose of the quasi-fundamentalist military government.

Though I don't remember specifics about anyone's attire at the party it's safe to say that the person most expensively (though not necessarily most tastefully) dressed was Aunty Runty—Primo Ghutna, as Aunty Laila had once called her. Even while my parents had laughed at that remark, something in the way my father slid his glance around to me said that Aunty Laila was taking the easy option of parody. Easy to laugh at Aunty Runty; far harder to look at her and see, as my mother once said, ‘a woman from whom loveliness has fled'. You only had to look at her once, and then look at photographs of her before she married, to know the difference between beauty and loveliness. For Aunty Runty, as long as I can remember and I can remember only after her marriage, has as much beauty as money can buy, with more than a little help from her genes, but there is something blasted and hollow about that beauty. When I was at university, a friend showed me a videotape of thousands and thousands of lights strung beneath a velvet-black starry sky; I murmured, ‘Beautiful, that's so beautiful,' only to hear her say, ‘Those are the lights of refugee camps,' and as I recoiled from the TV image I thought of Aunty Runty.

But back in 1987 refugees were still, to me, little more than a hassle that streamed across the Afghan border with guns and drugs, and Aunty Runty was a figure of fun as she sashayed her way across my parents' living room and clutched my arm. ‘Raheenie, sweetie, why haven't you wished me a happy, happy, '87 yet?'

‘Nappy Yew Hear,' I said, but it was lost on her.

‘Now, darling...' Her voice lowered to a whisper. ‘Tell all about Asif's brother's elopement. You were there, no?'

‘Nothing to tell. Uncle Asif was very happy when he heard about it.'

Aunty Runty lowered her voice further. ‘It's OK, you can trust me. Here...' She fumbled in her bag and pulled out a tube of lipstick. ‘Boys will die for this colour. Take it, go on. Sign of friendship.'

I put my hands up and backed away. ‘No, really, thank you.' I looked at the bright red stick that she was swivelling up and down before my eyes as though she intended to hypnotize me with it. ‘I'm telling the truth. I was with Uncle Asif when his brother called, and he put it on speaker-phone, so I heard everything, and, really, he was very happy. Planning celebration parties.'

Aunty Runty looked over my shoulder at the mirror and applied a layer of lipstick to her mouth. The previous layer was on the rim of a whisky glass, as was the layer before that and the one before that and the one before that. ‘Clever man, Asif,' she said. ‘He knew we'd ask you what happened, so he put the call on speaker-phone and pretended he was happy.' She popped the lipstick back in her bag and snapped the clasp closed.

‘Why shouldn't he be happy?' I couldn't help asking.

‘The girl's a Shi'a.' When I looked confused, she added: ‘Asif's Sunni.'

‘Yes, but Uncle Asif doesn't seem religious.'

Aunty Runty laughed. ‘What's that got to do with it? Everyone wants everyone in their family to marry same to same.' She looked across at her husband, the ghastly Bunty. ‘And that doesn't mean same tastes in movies and books, OK. Just how they look on paper. The background. Class, sect, ethnic group: that's what a family looks at when considering who they are willing to be related to through marriage.' For a moment I thought I saw something in her that allowed me to understand how she and my mother had ever been friends, and then it was gone, and she said, ‘Though, of course, that worked out for your parents.' She inclined her head to where Ami stood with her hand on Aba's shoulder, talking to Uncle Ali and Aunty Maheen. ‘And Maheen no longer seems to mind that your father didn't want to marry her because she's Bengali. Although, I have to say, I was appalled when I first heard the engagement was broken. I said to your father, she's not even that dark, Zafar. Many people can't even tell where she's from.'

What an idiot, I thought. Does she really expect me to take her seriously?

‘Excuse me,' I said. ‘I have to help Karim with the hors-d'œuvres.'

‘With Karim, you can't tell at all. That he's half-Bengali. Never guess it. But let's see—if one day you decide your friend Karim is husband material, what will Daddy say to that?'

‘Daddy just wants me to be happy,' I said, and left her to her whisky.

‘She's such a bitch,' I said, when I reached Karim.

‘Raheen!'

‘Well, she is. But I'm not going to tell you what she said, because it'll make you sick.' It was making me sick even though I knew it to be a lie. What prompted people to make up this kind of story? I looked around the room and, for a moment, for the first time, the room divided into two before my eyes, and in one group were people who were at the party because they were my parents' friends, and in the other group were people who were there because they wanted to drink, and they wanted to be seen, and they wanted most of all not to have to sit at home with themselves.

‘Ali, yaar, Ali, mate, there you are.' Aunty Runty's husband slapped Uncle Ali on the back. ‘Hear you're thinking of khisko-ing from the country, packing up in Paki-land.'

Beside me, Karim went very still.

Uncle Ali shrugged. ‘Just a thought, Bunty. Nothing decided.'

‘Oh, what's to think about? The place is going to hell. Might as well get out. And when you do, I'm buying your house. Don't even think of showing it to someone else, OK, mate?'