Kartography (37 page)

Ali saw himself and Zafar reflected in the mirror. Zaf movie-star gorgeous with eyes that revealed every emotion, and he, Ali, fastidious and remote. He turned away and closed his eyes.
For how much longer do I have her, how much longer? How can I make her stay ? How will I bear it if she leaves? Who would have thought, who would have thought...

 

...That Zafar could say such a thing. Yasmin sat on the arm of the sofa, and stroked Maheen's hair as she slept. Tears still not dry on her cheeks. Who would have thought he could say it and then allow the days to slip away, no excuse, no explanation.

She heard someone push open the front door, and left the room to see who it was.

‘Hi.' It was Ali. He was looking at her strangely. He'd been looking at her strangely since he'd first heard Maheen and Zafar's engagement was off. ‘Is Maheen here?' he asked.

There was a hollowness in her stomach, the sudden realization of what it meant, what it meant for Ali, that Maheen was no longer engaged.

‘Yes, she is,' she replied, holding her head up. She wasn't going to cry.

How coldly she looks at me.

‘Zafar's at his house. I just came from there. He refused to discuss it with me, but maybe you...'

Can't you be more subtle, Ali, about getting me out of the house so you can be here to comfort her? After a year-long engagement, can't you care a little more ?

‘No point denying the obvious, I suppose,' she said. ‘Things are no longer as they were that night on the balcony when I said I'd marry you.'

No longer the same at all, Ali.

No, no longer the same in any way. My darling, my love.

She took off her engagement ring and handed it to him. ‘Well, thanks,' she said. ‘You've been a thorough gentlemen.'

He bowed clumsily. What else to do?

When she closed the front door on her way out of her house, Maheen heard the sound and woke up.

‘What's going on?' Maheen asked, coming out into the hallway.

Ali's fist closed around the ring.

‘Nothing,' he said, and set the tone for all their years together.

 

‘To get him back must still be possible.' Maheen furrowed her brow, trying to understand why Yasmin wasn't engaged any longer.

If she knows the truth. If she suspects I let him go so he could go to her, she'll push him hack to me with both hands. But I don't want him that way. I couldn't bear to have him that way.

‘I don't want to get him back. He doesn't want to get me back.' She shrugged. ‘It was never this big love thing with us, you know. I thought we could be happy together, that's all.'

‘You were right. What's changed? Nothing's changed.'

No, she'll never even think of him that way. He's been engaged to me, how could she think of him that way? Unless, unless...

‘Something has most certainly changed. There's a new bachelor in town, and he's not too shoddy.'

Maheen looked at Yasmin uncomprehendingly. Yasmin looked guiltily away. Maheen gasped.

‘Love and war,' Yasmin shrugged.

‘Yasmin, don't talk to me. I can't talk to you about this, I can't accept this. Not now, not ever.'

 

‘Everest. Climbing Everest would be easier than understanding you women. Why did you call it off, Yasmin? You think you'll find anyone better than Ali?'

‘I'm just sitting here, trying to drink my cup of tea and read my magazine in peace. I don't require polite conversation from the likes of you.'

Zafar's face fell. ‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘I don't expect you to forgive me what I said.'

Yasmin squinted up at him, standing between her and the Club pool in the bright sunlight. ‘Oh, please! I hardly for a second think you meant it. The unforgivable thing was your refusal to go running after her when she ran out of your house.'

He continued to stand in front of her, shifting awkwardly from foot to foot.

‘Oh, sit down, Zaf. I can't see you properly against that sun.'

He sat down. They looked at each other, nothing to say.

‘Can you see me properly now?'

‘Yes. But you're not much to look at.'

His mouth curved into a smile. ‘Liar.'

She poked him in the ribs, and he laughed and grabbed her hand. Ali's hand on hers had never had such an effect on her spine: warmth and chills radiated from it at the same time. She closed her eyes.

Maheen, I'm sorry.

 

‘There's no call for apology, Zaf. I'm thrilled for both of you.'
What else can I say?

‘But what about you, Ali?'

‘Oh, someone else will come along.'
Yasmin. Yasmin. The sound of my heartbeat.

‘Have you seen Maheen lately?'

‘This is not a waltz, Zafar. We can't just swap partners.'

 

‘All this partner swapping. It's like a square dance.' Maheen pointed to the book she'd been reading when Ali walked into her garden and found her sitting there. ‘I can hardly keep them all straight. Let's see... Hermia loves Lysander and Lysander loves Hermia, but Demetrius also loves Hermia though he used to love Helena, who still loves him and so hates Hermia because Demetrius loves Hermia, not her. I mean Helena. Or do I mean Hermia?'

Ali opened his own copy of the same play. ‘Do you? No, you've got it right. Let me try the next series of steps. Strike up the band, enter Puck. He pours love-juice on Lysander's eyes and Lysander finds he loves Helena and hates Hermia...'

‘And so it goes, on and on, the quartet's affections changing every few minutes...'

‘...Until miraculously, at the end, everyone is paired off—and they all live happily for the next ten minutes, after which the play ends and no one knows anything further.'

Maheen leaned back in her chair, laughing. ‘So the reason you told me to read
A Midsummer Night's Dream
and meet you for tea is...?'

Ali raised an eyebrow. ‘I didn't. You dropped a note off at my place with those very instructions.'

‘Oh. Well, something here is strange.' She handed him a typewritten note with his name signed at the bottom. ‘So you didn't write this?'

Ali laughed. ‘We'll call whoever wrote it “Puck”.' He straightened his tie and remembered the night he had chiselled her initial into a tree. Whatever had brought that out, surely it could be revived again. Not to that extent, perhaps, not enough to make him pick up hammer and chisel, but some echo of it. He watched her run her fingers along her eyebrows, smoothing down the hairs in that familiar gesture of hers which signified uncertainty, and he thought perhaps he heard an echo.

‘How about it, Maheen? Are you in the mood for a wedding?'

 

‘Invitation? For me?' Yasmin ran her fingers along the embossed surface of the card. ‘I half-thought I wouldn't be invited. Zafar neither.'

‘I half-thought you wouldn't either, Puck.' He smiled at her and she didn't pretend to be confused. ‘But Maheen was in a gentle mood after she heard about Laila, so I took the opportunity to add to our invitation list.'

‘I just heard about the miscarriage. Awful, it's so awful. Poor Laila.'

‘She nearly died, you know. Loss of blood. But Dolly was at the hospital, visiting a relative, and she heard there was no blood matching Laila's type, so she called her husband and God knows what strings Anwar pulled but he managed to get hold of a match.'

‘God bless Anwar. And we're always so snide about his newly-found connections.'
Strange how already it seems a dream or a part I once played, all those months I was engaged to you with no thought of wanting anything differently for the rest of my life.

‘Hmmm. There was some half-deranged guy at the hospital who almost attacked the doctors. Seemed to think those last available units of blood were earmarked for his brother, who died without them.'

‘Good God.'

‘Yes. Apparently the police were called to get rid of him. He was led off screaming about how one day he'll be rich and powerful and his house will have running water, twenty-four hours a day, gushing out of gold taps.'
Stay where you are. Don't move any closer. Don't let me smell that scent of jasmine and spice on your hands. At this distance, I can make myself believe you're only an old friend.

‘I am so glad I'm not poor. Particularly not in Pakistan.'

‘I'm so glad I don't know anyone with gold taps.'

 

‘Silver tea set? What do you think, Zafar? As a wedding present for Ali and Maheen.'

Zafar, when we send out wedding invitations, can we say: no silver, please. Show some originality.

Or we couldjust elope, Maheen. How about it? Today?

‘Silver's fine, Yasmin.'

Yasmin raised her eyebrows at him across the Ampi's table. ‘That was a joke. You know Maheen hates silver.'

‘Oh.' He swirled ice cream around in its pewter bowl.

She had to say it. For all their sakes. ‘Zafar, it's still not too late for you and Maheen.'

He found he didn't even have to pause an instant before taking Yasmin's hand and saying, ‘Yes, it is.' Guilt had swallowed up everything else between him and Maheen, and for a while he had thought that regret would swallow him up too. But Yasmin had changed that. He suspected people thought him fickle, and if everyone wasn't so frantically busy trying to put the war and everything associated with it behind them he doubted his engagement to Yasmin would have met with such approval all around.

And Maheen was with Ali. Fine and upstanding Ali.

He didn't think very hard about Maheen and Ali together. He couldn't. Not yet.

His other hand closed around Yasmin's.

But soon.

 

‘So soon? I thought you'd refuse to see me for at least another decade.' Yasmin drew Maheen into an embrace. ‘Oh God, I've missed you more than a little.'

‘Silly girl, as if you thought I could stay angry for ever. I've been picking up the phone to call you every day since Karim was born and twice a day since Raheen was. Did you really imagine I'd turn you away at my doorstep? Ali, what are you doing?'

‘I'm smelling Yasmin's hands.'

‘Is it a pleasant smell?' Yasmin smiled at him.

‘Talcum powder.'
Now I know, we'll all be all right. We'll all be friends for ever. The echo stronger now than it was the day we got married, and surely it can only amplify as the years wear on.

‘Now all you have to do is convince that husband of yours that all is forgiven,' Maheen said. ‘What does he want from me, Yasmin, an official letter of pardon?'
Zafar, when we talked of names for the children we were going to have, neither Karim nor Raheen were on the list. I miss you. I miss the way you made me laugh. Come back, in whatever form it is. I'd rather have you as my friend than watch you sulking in corners ashamed to meet my eye each time we meet.

God, Zaf why didn't you try even once to say you were sorry?

 

 

 

 

. . .

 

One more month, and the reprieve would be over. I lay down on the bed and looked out through the huge window at the lushness of early summer. Odd to think these paths that I'd walked, that glen in which I'd spotted deer, that student diner where I'd braved the most arctic of nights for a plate of curly fries, would soon only be memory.

‘Out into the real world,' my classmates and I would chirp, when thinking of graduation and what lay beyond. To them the real world meant work, bills, the start of a road leading to a mortgage, children, a suburban house and a car in the driveway. But what my real world was, I still hadn't decided.

‘You should stay,' Zia had said to me on the phone the night before, calling from New York, where he'd gone to talk to real-estate agents. ‘You're entitled to a year of practical training with your student visa. You should definitely stay. This isn't about your father any more, Raheen; the way things are in Karachi, you'd be a fool to go home.'

It would be so easy to stay, and convince myself that it wasn't about my father any more. I hadn't seen him since that day on the pier. While I was still talking to Ami in the gallery, Aunty Laila had walked back in, and I told her I wanted Uncle Asif to get me on the next flight back to New York. My old school friend Cyrus was there, and I knew he'd put me up until the start of the semester without asking any questions. ‘I just need to go away and clear my head,' I told Ami, expecting her to argue me out of it, but she had replied, ‘As long as you promise to clear it rather than empty it.' I didn't tell her the main attraction of staying with Cyrus was that he could be counted on to envelop me in a whirlwind of activity that made it possible to live from one hour to the next without any thought of what lay beyond, or behind.