Kartography (35 page)

(2) Why did Yasmin and Ali's engagement break off?

(3) How did they all remain friends ?

(4) Who felt what for whom, and when?

 

I tore off another square and wrote:

 

(1) What does 1971 have to do with now?

 

The blank whiteness of the loo paper below that question faced me like an accusation. I pressed the nib of the eyeliner against the paper, and a tiny prick of black spread into a wider and wider circle. I pulled the entire roll of paper off its holder, placed a magazine beneath it, and wrote:

 

Days away from 1995, we are nearly forty-eight years old as a nation, young enough that there are people alive who have lived through our entire history and more, but too old to put our worries down to teething problems. Between our birth in 1947 and 1995, dead bang between our beginning and our present, is 1971, of which I know next to nothing except that there was a war and East Pakistan became Bangladesh, and what terrible things we must have done then to remain so silent about it. Is it shame at losing the war, or guilt about what we did to try to win that mutes us?

 

I put the eyeliner down, looked at the furious scribbling, much of which had torn through the paper and left black squiggles on the Prime Minister's face. Time to find my father.

When I walked into our house, he was pacing the hallway. He clearly hadn't slept all night. I didn't know what I was feeling as we looked at each other, but it wasn't anything I'd ever felt before.

‘Come on,' he said to me.

I followed him outside, but when he got into his car, I hesitated.

‘We're going for a drive,' he said.

‘I think I might feel claustrophobic.'

‘So open the window.'

‘I don't really think you're in a position to tell me what to do.'

He started the engine without responding to that.

I opened the gate so that he could drive out. Our street was just beginning to awaken. The retired army officer down the road was taking his two German Shepherd dogs for a walk; the jamadaar was hosing down the driveway next door, sending bougainvillaea flowers flowing under the gate and on to the street in rivulets of oily water; the newspaperwallah was driving slowly along on his motorbike, tossing papers into houses—but on arriving at the house of the American chairman of some multinational, he had to veer his bike all the way to one side of the street in order to achieve a trajectory that would allow the paper to clear the absurdly high wall. When he reached the house next door, the paperwallah wavered, conscious of the wet driveway; then, seeing me looking at him, he smiled a huge smile and tossed the paper over the wall. The jamadaar stormed out, waving the wet newspaper over his head, and demanding a dry copy. The paperwallah said, ‘Blow on it, it'll dry. If you can water a driveway, you can do that,' and zipped down the street on his motorbike.

Aba reversed out of the gate, and I got into the car. He drove towards Clifton, past the shrine of the Sufi, Shah Abdullah Ghazi, with its surrounding world of pavement fortune-tellers and heroin addicts and shops selling flower garlands, then up the incline from where we could see Mohatta Palace, that decaying pink building which, with its domes and its history and its amalgamation of British, Middle Eastern, Hindu and Mughal styles, had always been my favourite of Karachi's structures. Aba steered his car away from the palace and parked in the large circle overlooking Funland and a green field and, further out, the sea. I followed him down the graffiti-covered steps leading from the circle to the field, and we stopped just before the steps gave way to a stone walkway with carved archways cut into its underside, which ended in a covered stone structure, open on all four sides.

‘The Lady Lloyd Pier,' he said, gesturing at the structure. ‘That's where I proposed to your mother. It stood in the waves once.'

We walked along the stone approach to the pier, a sea of grass and polythene bags around us. The Ferris wheel and Pirate Ship and other Funland rides were motionless to our left, the white minaret of a mosque cleft the air between the pier and the sea wall in front of us, and the rock shaped like man metamorphosing out of stone rose from the water on the other side of the sea wall. The transparent polythene bags looked like balloons where inflated, sleeping giant jellyfish where not. It hits you in unexpected moments, this city's romance; everywhere, air pockets of loveliness just when your lungs can't take any more congestion or pollution or stifling newspaper headlines. A pier in the middle of a field that was clearly used on occasion as a rubbish dump should have been absurd, or sad, but instead was suggestive of both constancy and change.

I'll take constancy. Keep the change.

The rumble of buses behind us sounded as the ocean might sound to someone who had only heard it in imagination. The early morning sea not yet woken up to full colour.

I turned to Aba. ‘Karim wants to marry Sonia.'

Aba tilted his head to one side. ‘Marry! I still think of you as kids. Karim and Sonia? I didn't realize there was...well, to be honest I thought you and he...'

I looked away, rubbing my thumb in the pockmarked stone between my father and me. ‘I thought so, too.'

‘Oh God. Is it because of me...?'

I nodded. I wanted to hit him and hug him all at once. He didn't say anything, and I imagined him thinking back to that day, nearly a quarter of a century ago, when he proposed to my mother. All I knew about the proposal was that when he popped the question she replied, ‘Zaf, yesterday when I told you to give me a ring, I meant a phone call.' I had always thought of their courtship as being rife with humour.

‘If I had told you earlier what I said to Shafiq, how would that have changed things with you and Karim?'

I raised my hands and dropped them, unable to answer. It would have changed everything. It would have changed nothing.

‘People have always said how much I'm like you.' I stood up and put my arms around the stone pillar. ‘I thought I knew what that meant. I thought I was your distilled self. Raheen's like a younger, female version of Zafar, but slightly less charming, slightly less intelligent, slightly less prone to singing tunelessly.' We both smiled at that. The same smile, mouth going up at one corner, head tilting forward slightly, something slightly sardonic about our eyebrows. ‘Slightly less capable of putting aside all biases and prejudices for the sake of justice.'

‘Is that how you see me?' He couldn't keep the pleasure from his voice. ‘Champion of justice?'

‘It was.' I shook my head. ‘I don't know now. Something's changed, something's changed horribly, and I don't even know what it is. But I know this. We are alike. We are alike in this: we don't deserve the people who love us.'

‘Oh, sweetheart.' He stood up and started to come towards me.

‘I'll hit you. If you try and touch me, I'll hit you. I swear I will.'

Neither he nor I were prepared for the ferocity of my reaction. We both looked away from each other, tears running down our cheeks.

‘What do you want me to say?' His voice was unrecognizable. ‘If I knew what to say I'd have said it long ago. There was a moment when I thought that by the time you were old enough to know, I'd be old enough to know what to tell you. But what can I say?'

‘Tell me why. Why did you say that to Shafiq?'

He looked at the sea, at the field, at the ships on the horizon.

‘I swear to you, I don't know.' He clenched his hands. ‘I don't think I even knew at the moment I said it. Raheen, how could I have said it? After everything we'd just lived through, after everything that she'd had to bear.' He leaned his face against a pillar and, as I watched his shoulders shake, a thought sprang to mind so hideous that I cried out loud.

He looked up at me.

‘You've brought me up to forgive you, haven't you?' I backed away from him. ‘Everything you've ever taught me about how to live my life. “Condemnation is an act of smugness... How can you blame a person unless you've slipped into their soul, seen the serpents and abysses that lie there?...Shouldn't we simply be grateful that our lives allow us to live with grace today?” Everything I thought was so damn noble of you, it was just a self-serving attempt to turn me into someone who would forgive you when this moment came.'

‘Raheen, that's not true.'

‘And when it came to ethnic politics, weren't you the great man? Never attacking anyone else, but also standing firm on your position, saying it wasn't ethnicity that mattered
per se
but questions of injustice. Zafar the Just. And what was that all about? So you could say to me, look at my track record, Raheen; see how I've evolved?'

‘You're getting it all wrong. I wanted you to grow up to be someone who would never do what I did. I wanted you to be better than I am.' He reached for me, and I pushed him away, slamming him against a corner of the brick column. He choked in pain.

‘If that's what you wanted you wouldn't have made it so easy for me to love you. You've destroyed our relationship; maybe I could forgive you that. But you've destroyed whatever hope Karim and I had together, and that, Aba, I will hold against you well past the day you die.'

I wrenched the keys from his hand and ran, faster than I had run with Sonia to get away from Karim. But Aba was following. Calling my name and running, his feet echoing in time with mine. Did I even have to run like he did? Men walking down the stairs saw us and called out to me as I drew near them, ‘Is he bothering you? Should we stop him?'

‘No,' I said, hearing his steps falter as age caught up with him. ‘Get him a taxi.'

 

 

 

 

. . .

 

‘Oh, here you are. I've just been looking for you.' Zia strode into his den later that morning, holding aloft a large quiche. ‘You been here long?'

I shook my head and turned down Billie Holiday. ‘Been driving aimlessly for a while. I needed a place of refuge.'

‘So it would be stupid of me to ask if things are OK at home, since you obviously haven't been there since last night.' When I looked questioning he pointed to my clothes. ‘Those are Soma's,' he said. ‘You don't own anything with full-length sleeves.'

‘Well done, Sherlock. You're not entirely right, though. I walked through my front door this morning. Then walked back out. Don't plan to return in any hurry. Basically, I'm avoiding my mother and not speaking to my father. Why are you carrying a quiche?'

‘You have to admit, I win the contest for unspeakable fathers.' He twirled the quiche dish on his fingertips. ‘We always acted like Sonia was the one who had got unlucky when fathers were handed out, but you know what?'

‘Yeah. Your father's some kind of Mafia don, and my father's just a few steps away from being an advocate of ethnic cleansing. Meanwhile, Sonia's father might not even be a drug smuggler for all we know. Why are you carrying a quiche?'

‘Right. I mean, he could be an arms dealer.' Zia grinned, and placed the quiche next to me. ‘I just felt like picking it up from the Club bakery on my way back from dropping Karim at the airport. But I hate quiche. So you can have it.'

‘Such a gent.'

Zia sat on the floor next to the black leather sofa on which I was reclining, resting his head against the sofa arm. ‘You doing OK?' he said.

‘No. You?'

‘Not even close.'

I laid my hand on the top of his head. ‘It's not your fault, Zia. You didn't know what he was going to do.'

‘Doesn't stop me being partly responsible.' He pressed the CD remote control and Billie became Paul Simon. We listened in silence for a while until Paul started repeating
I don't want no part of this crazy love/I don't want no part of your love
again and again. I looked at Zia; he seemed oblivious to the lyrics, and to me, as he sat blowing smoke rings in the air, his expression mired in concentration. I prised the remote out of his hand and switched off the music.

Zia looked up at me. ‘Raheen, I want you to do something for me. I've been thinking about this since last night. I want you to call Sonia and tell her you'll be perfectly happy if she marries Karim.'

‘That's not funny, Zia.'

Zia got up and walked over to the bar. ‘Nothing about this is funny.'

‘You are not having a drink at this hour. Put that down.'

Zia set the Black Label back on the bar and lit up another cigarette. ‘Rumours stick. No good family will want their son marrying her. Not after everyone who knows her father said “I told you so” when he was arrested. Not after she's been so publicly humiliated by those pillars of society, the Ranas. No, the only proposals she'll get now will be from money-grabbing scum. If she means anything to me, I can't let her marry anyone like that. I can't. She breaks my heart if she gets a splinter in her finger; how could I bear to see...' He shook his head. ‘Far better she marry Karim.'