Kartography (34 page)

‘Zia!' Even I was shocked by the violence in his voice.

Zia bit his lip. ‘I hate them. Those beggars. All of them. Particularly the deformed ones.' He started tearing the place mat into little strips. ‘I had this ayah when I was a kid. She said I should never trust strangers, because Karachi is full of people in the employ of the beggar master, and they kidnap children and lop off their limbs so that they can be effective beggars, pulling the heartstrings of passers-by.'

‘We all heard variants of that,' I said. ‘Why are you the only one who's traumatized by it?'

‘I became convinced that my brother hadn't died, but was kidnapped and no one wanted to tell me that.'

‘So you used to see these young beggars and think one of them might be your brother and no one would know it?' Sonia said.

Zia shook his head. ‘I used to be terrified that one of them was my brother, and my parents would recognize him, so they'd take him home with us and then I'd have to share my room with this maimed, emaciated creature.'

Karim and I couldn't help but look at each other, for the first time without rancour that evening, neither of us able to think of any response to this statement, both of us confirming with each other the horror of what Zia had just said.

Sonia spoke up. ‘Zia, I'm sure, I mean...he would have put on weight.'

It was the silliest thing anyone could have said. It was the only thing anyone could have said to make Zia smile. He reached forward as if to put his hand on hers, but drew back before making any kind of contact, and gestured to the beggar girl, who came forward hesitantly.

Zia took his wallet out of his pocket and pulled out a hundred-rupee note. The girl's eyes widened. ‘If you stay away from us, and keep everyone else away from us until we leave, I'll give you this money after I've paid the hill,' Zia said. I'm not sure she believed him, but his tone of voice didn't leave room for any bargaining. The girl moved a few feet away.

‘So why are we here?' I said.

Zia took a cigarette and a box of matches out of his pocket. He put the cigarette in his mouth and tried to light a match, but only snapped the matchstick in two. When he took out another match and struck it against the side of the box, there was a sound of friction—flint against flint—but no flame appeared. Karim borrowed a lighter from the man at the next table, and lit Zia's cigarette for him.

‘Storytime,' Zia said. ‘Let me tell you a story. True story. Once upon a time, it wasn't a stray bullet that killed my brother.'

My head jerked up.

‘No, Raheen, don't interrupt. No one interrupt. There was a man who lived next door to us, a powerful man, one of those men who's in favour with every government. He and my father were friends, not close friends but friends enough that the man invited my parents to go, with my brother, to his beach hut one weekend. At the beach, only a handful of people there, the man pulled out a gun—he had a collection—and started shooting, no reason, just to impress some of the young kids, fishermen's children, who had heard that a government official with a new gun just bought from...I don't know where, this was before Afghanistan...but they heard, from the driver or someone, that there was this really cool gun around. So, this guy, he thinks he'll give them a bit of a thrill: he starts firing in the direction of the sea. My father tells him to stop because those are real bullets after all, and what if someone's swimming there whom they can't see? So the guy says, OK, I'll stop after one grand finale. See that sand castle? Bet I could shoot a hole straight through that flag on top, anyone want to lay bets, and my father says no but the guy's brother says yes and the guy shoots and loses the bet. It was a huge sand castle, really immense. Large enough that if you stood at a distance, at a certain angle, you couldn't see my mother and her one-year-old son making sand turtles and mudpies on the other side of the castle.'

I shivered and, reaching beneath the table, found Karim's hand reaching for mine. We both gripped hard, my thumb pressing down on the indentation between his knuckles. The smell of salt in the air was overpowering. I held my nose closed and breathed through my mouth.

‘My father knew it would be pointless to press charges, because of the other man's position. Pointless to press charges and pointless to weep. Yes, no point to tears. My father is a man who believes in every action having a point. So he swore he'd build himself a list of contacts so long, so powerful, that he would never again feel helpless before another man's clout. And if he ever had another son, his son would not suffer at the hands of anyone, not if my father could help it. No one, no one, would make his son suffer.'

Fathers, again. I released Karim's hand just as he released mine. Poor, messed-up Zia, who at fourteen could have looked up secret files on every grown-up he knew in Karachi and read about all their flaws and none of their redeeming qualities. Poor Zia, his house always full of people worth cultivating, rather than people worth having in your home. Poor, poor Zia, whose father tried to give him everything and, in so doing, turned him into a boy with whom Sonia could never contemplate being more than friends. As soon as I thought that, I knew.

Zia saw the change that came over my face, and nodded. But Sonia and Karim were still looking at him in pity and bewilderment, forcing him to spell it out.

‘I yelled at him, Sonia. When I heard you were engaged. I asked him what could he do now, after he'd always sworn I could have anything I wanted...what could he do about...'

Sonia flushed, and looked down, seeing the declaration of his feelings towards her, but seeing nothing beyond it.

‘But he proved me wrong. Dad to the rescue. He did something about it, didn't he? Of course the Ranas wouldn't let their son marry the daughter of an accused drug smuggler.'

Tears started rolling down Sonia's face.

‘Helps to have friends in positions of power. Helps a great deal. Accuse and acquit at will. No need for a court of law. Dear Dad. He's got it all figured out. Was almost too efficient. Got two separate agencies involved. Bit of confusion, but in the end they did the trick. And once the engagement broke off, all charges dropped. No harm done, right? No harm.'

‘At the airport. What they did to me...' Sonia buried her face in her hands.

Dear God, dear God, take me away from this place.

‘He swears he didn't know. He swears he told them not to hurt you.' Zia started raking the skin of the back of his hands with his fingernails. ‘I'm sorry, Sonia. I'm so sorry. Please, look at me. Sonia, please.'

But she kept her head buried in her hands.

All of us. Everyone who's been here long enough. My father, yes. And my mother, who went ahead and married him despite that. And Zia's father. And Sonia's father, who—I don't care how manufactured the evidence this time round—was certainly guilty of something even if I didn't know what. Aunty Runty, once the sweetest, most light-hearted woman. Uncle Bunty, who borrowed money from Sonia's father but didn't spare a breath to defend him or commiserate when he was arrested. The list went on. Every one of my parents' friends, every one of my friends' parents, guilty. And we were no longer young enough simply to watch from the sidelines. How could any of us face up to the truth, and stay?

I put my arm around Sonia, wanting only to erase all the misery that her bent head and sagging shoulders conveyed. ‘At least it's over now. And you don't want to marry someone who's so fickle. There'll be others, tons of proposals, all better than Adel Rana.'

She pulled away from me. ‘It's not over. Things like this are never over.'

Karim stood up, pushing back the wooden bench. ‘I can't stay here. I don't understand this place. I don't want to.' He looked at me sadly, almost apologetically. He turned to Sonia. ‘I'm going to fly out tomorrow. But I want your permission to see your father first, Sonia.'

‘My father?'

‘Her father?'

‘Karimazov, don't do this.'

‘I'd like to ask his permission to marry you.'

A boy selling balloons moved towards us. The beggar girl knocked him to the ground. One balloon burst; another slipped out of his grasp and flew up, a white oval against the moon-empty sky. Karim and Zia rushed to separate the beggar and boy. I stayed seated on the wooden bench, and watched the balloon. It rose higher and higher and disappeared into a constellation.

‘What's going on?' Sonia said. ‘Will someone tell me what's going on?'

I could see Karim turning to say something to Zia, and Zia shaking his arm off. Sonia was saying, ‘I thought you and Karim...' and I wanted to yell at her, ‘He wants perfection, so he's choosing you.'

That was when it hit me for the first time: I had lost him.

Not to Sonia and not to maps. I had lost him to the past, and there was no changing that. Mine was still the hand he reached for under the table when the world turned awful, but that only made the loss more unbearable. It was as though our instincts to turn to each other, to want each other, remained as strong as ever, but when instinct stopped and thought took over we pulled away, each time with a little more disgust than the time before.

‘Are you angry with me?' Sonia asked. ‘I'm not going to marry him, you know that, don't you? He's yours, even if both of you don't see it.'

‘You're a better woman than I am, Sonia. You're a better woman than my mother was.'

Karim and Zia had finally stopped the beggar girl and the balloon boy from striking out at each other. They started to walk towards us.

‘I don't want to talk to Zia,' Sonia said.

‘I don't want to talk to Karim.'

We turned, ran towards my car, despite the stares and exclamations of the men around us, and drove off. In my rear-view mirror I saw the boys watch us go. Neither of them attempted to stop us.

 

 

 

 

. . .

 

There are two kinds of blessed moments to which we can awake: the first, that moment of realizing a nightmare was unhinged from reality, no place in our lives for it save for those places in which we store memories that make us shudder even though they aren't true memories at all; the second, more elusive—for we don't fully recognize the peace of mind it brings until it's gone—is the moment of believing reality was a nightmare, nothing more. But the morning after Kharadar, covered in sweat despite the December breeze, I awoke to memory.

I looked at the clock. Early. Forty-eight hours ago, at this time, I was standing at the airport, waiting for Karim. I picked myself off the mattress quietly so as not to disturb Sonia, who was fast asleep in bed, just inches away from me.

I brushed my teeth using my finger as a toothbrush and changed from Sonia's T-shirt back into the clothes I had been wearing the night before. They were stiff with sea salt. I took them off again, and borrowed a shalwar-kameez from Sonia's wardrobe. I was unable to imagine how I would make my way through the coming day. Karim was leaving in a few hours. He had called Sonia's house last night to say he had used Uncle Asif's contacts at PIA to get himself a seat on today's flight to London. While he was speaking, Sonia had tried to hand the phone to me, but I refused to take it. He had clearly said something to her about coming to see her father, and Sonia said, ‘Please, don't. Our friendship will be over if you do.'

Sonia and I spent the rest of the night watching tear-jerkers:
Beaches, Dead Poets Society, The Outsiders,
a tissue box placed between us.

‘C. Thomas Howell,' Sonia said, pointing at the screen as the credits rolled for
The Outsiders.
‘He must have thought he was going to be such a big star. What happened to him?'

‘Playing Ponyboy was the zenith of his career,' I replied, and then we both had to laugh at how much that made us cry.

Halfway through
Beaches,
my mother had called looking for me. Sonia said I'd be spending the night at her place. She was too embarrassed to say I refused to talk to my mother so she told her I was already asleep.

I pushed the mattress under Sonia's bed and sat down at her desk. Now what? At some point I'd have to go home. What happens when you spend your life creating yourself in someone else's image and that image festers overnight? How can you point a finger without it turning right round and stabbing you in the throat? I pressed a fingernail against my gullet, ran to the bathroom and threw up all the chai and paratha and sandwiches and pakoras from the evening before.

Afterwards I lay on the bathroom tiles, concentrating on the expansion and deflation of my chest cavity as I breathed in and out. At length, I reached over for Sonia's make-up basket, took out her eyeliner, tore a length of loo paper off a roll and wrote:

 

(1) Why did Zafar make that remark about Bengalis?