Kartography (38 page)

There had been a flight that evening. My only qualm was leaving Sonia, but when I called her she said her father was taking the family on Umra. I doubted any desire for religious pilgrimage lay behind her father's decision; he probably just wanted her out of Karachi so that she wouldn't have to face the scandal of the broken engagement.

There was a gentle tapping on my door. I ignored it. Probably Zia, back from New York, stopping off to see me on his way to his college. I wanted to lie here and wallow in nostalgia about my college days, not discuss the future and what I honestly thought lay in it for me if I went home. The tapping turned into a loud knocking.

‘Oh, go away,' I said.

There was the sound of footsteps retreating from my door. I rolled my eyes. Sometimes he gave up so easily. Truth was, one of the things I already regretted most about graduation was that it meant moving out of a place where Zia was less than twenty minutes away by car; it meant Zia would no longer be within my local calling zone with his peculiar nocturnal hours that allowed me to wake from nightmare at four in the morning and call him without hesitation. I walked towards the door. The phone rang.

‘Hello,' I said into the receiver.

‘Hey, I've got an idea.'

‘Zia? Who just knocked on my door?'

‘Tooth fairy. Listen, I have an idea.'

‘What?'

‘Don't go.'

I covered my eyes with my hand and fell back on my bed. ‘Zia, not this conversation.'

‘No, I'm serious. Move to New York with me.'

‘What do you mean “with me”?'

‘You know. I mean, no strings or anything. Well, not too many of them. But what the hell, you know. Why not? One day at a time.'

I couldn't tell if he was serious or not. ‘Why ruin a beautiful friendship, Zee?'

‘Come on, Rasputin. Come on. Save me from myself.'

‘Zia, I can't.'

‘It's Karim, isn't it?'

‘Yes.'

I waited for him to remind me that in four months Karim had made no attempt to get in touch with me, and to remind me further that Sonia had still not received any halfway decent proposals and didn't I see how selfish I was being? But instead he said, ‘Abracadabra, baby. Guess there's a part of me that still believes in magic.'

‘Thanks, sweetheart.' I hung up, and opened the door, hoping to find some clue to the identity of the person who had knocked.

‘Ra!'

At first I thought I must have imagined it. The voice came from behind me, it came from inside my room.

‘Open the window, I'm about to fall.'

I swivelled around. One foot on my window ledge, one foot on a tree, head tilted back to prevent the glasses balanced on the edge of his nose from falling off, he was Charlie Chaplin rather than the Romeo I'd imagined when I'd imagined him appearing outside my window.

‘Karim, what are you doing?' I levered open the window, and fumbled with the clips that kept the screen in place.

‘Attempting the splits, fifteen feet above ground. Could you remove that screen?'

‘No, it's stuck. You'll have to go down and use the front door.'

‘I don't think you appreciate my problem.' A gust of wind blew and Karim yelped, removed his foot from the ledge and wrapped himself around the tree limb. ‘I can't get down.'

I put a heavy hiking boot on to my right foot, stood on my bed and kicked the screen. My foot went through the wire mesh.

‘What the hell are you doing?'

‘I thought I'd kick the whole screen off.'

‘Yeah, and then you'd have fallen out yourself.'

I looked at Karim, clutching on to the tree, head still tilted back, and then looked at myself, one foot in a large boot sticking out of the screen. ‘One day we'll tell our children about this moment,' I said.

‘Is that “our” as in your children and my children, or “our” as in our children?'

The wire mesh had left cuts all around my ankle, but I really didn't care. ‘Is that a proposal or a proposition?'

‘I'll take what I can get.'

Karim looked at me, looked at the ground, looked at the branches beneath him, leapt clear of the limbs and leaves, his arms spread wide, embracing the wind. He jumped up, not down. Lifted himself up, Daedalus for a moment, long enough for me to extend my arm through the jagged screen and feel the air that brushed his fingertips brush my fingertips also; then he was rolling on the grass, the gradient of that patch of lawn carrying him away from the concrete dorm and towards the gravel path.

By the time I made it outside, he was standing up, apparently unharmed. I took his face in my hands. ‘I can't believe you're here.'

‘Could you bear not to go back to Karachi?'

‘What?'

‘Let's walk.'

Walk? Who wanted to walk?

We walked. There should have been many questions in my mind, but I was suddenly so happy that all I could think of was something I'd wanted to ask him since he'd yawned and stretched and his shirt had lifted to reveal his stomach in Mehmoodabad.

‘Does that chicken-pox scar on your stomach mark an erogenous zone? Tamara says her boyfriend's chicken-pox scar does.'

‘Every part of me is an erogenous zone when you're around,' he said, as though remarking on the time of day. ‘Now, behave yourself.' I was raising his T-shirt, and he caught my hand and smacked it lightly. ‘I'm here on serious matters.' I felt myself grow tense, and he said, ‘Because I've seriously discovered that I seriously don't want to believe that everything between us is over.'

Was this because things were too convoluted to reason out, so he just clutched on to that instinctive need we'd always had for each other? I was afraid to ask.

‘Karim...' I said, and then didn't have the words to continue.

He kissed me.

When we finally pulled apart I allowed myself a moment to believe everything had been resolved, but he had his serious face firmly in place as he took my hands in his, and sat me down on a bench at the edge of the glen. ‘I can't go back to Karachi. It's starting again. The same kind of stuff that went on in '71.' He ran the tip of a leaf down my face. ‘The desperation, the craziness. The stench from the newspapers. This is how it begins.'

I pulled away. ‘Karim, you're being silly.'

‘Why do you even want to go back, Ra?'

Did I want to go back? Back to a city without glens, without places to sit in public with my arms round his neck, without the luxury of wandering among indistinguishable trees unmindful of the repercussions of getting lost. Back to a city that was feasting on its own blood, the violence so crazy now that all the earlier violence felt like mere pinpricks. Back to a city that bred monsters. Back to a city where I'd have to face my father. Why should I want to go back to any of that?

And yet. When I read the
Dawn
on-line and then looked around me to the pristine surroundings of campus life, I knew that every other city in the world only showed me its surface, but when I looked at Karachi I saw the blood running through and out of its veins; I knew that there were so many reasons to fail to love it, to cease to love it, to be unable to love it, that it made love a fierce and unfathomable thing. ‘Because, Karim, you've shown me that it's not so simple to leave a city behind.'

‘You have to see why I can't go back.'

I nodded. I saw that, for all his obsessing about the city, or perhaps because of his obsessing, Karachi was an abstraction to him, in the way the past is an abstraction, and he lacked the heart to make it a reality. And I saw that everything he had heard about 1971 gave him reason to fear that national politics would again force people he loved to reveal their narrow-mindedness and cowardice and rage, and those people might include Zafar's daughter, so like her father in so many ways.

‘You were the one who said I needed to stop living in tiny circles.'

‘I've found that doesn't matter to me as much as I thought. Or maybe it's just that you mean more to me than I knew.'

I stood up, twigs and dry leaves crunching beneath my feet. If Zia had walked through the opening in the trees, I think I might have said yes to New York City and made it all simple.

‘What about Soma?'

He took a deep breath. ‘She's the loveliest girl in the world. And to marry her because I think no one else will come along for her is such a supreme act of condescension. She said that to me on the phone just the other day.' He smiled. ‘Except she called it an act of condemnescension.'

‘Just a minute. Aren't I the loveliest girl in the world?'

‘No, no. You're not. You're not, but that doesn't matter. Not one bit. Just say you won't go back to Karachi. We'll escape to the middle of nowhere, and eat roots and berries, and never read a newspaper.'

‘When did love become so dependent on geography?'

‘When personality started to change with location. In Karachi I have to see your reactions to certain things. Amid the roots and berries there's no cause for those reactions.'

‘I'm sorry if my imperfection makes life inconvenient.' I jammed my hands in my pocket and stepped further away from him. ‘We can't all be godlike.'

A twig snapped in his grasp, and birds flew chirping madly out of the tree at the gun-like sound. ‘No, but some of us could try not to be so stubborn and so stupid.'

‘Why don't you just say whatever you want to say, Karim, before I get really bored? Is there something in my list of faults that you left out when we talked at the beach? You need to get another complaint off your chest?'

‘You've had a happy life, haven't you?'

The shadows were reaching out from the tree trunks, and I shivered and moved into one of the remaining patches of light, but he didn't follow.

‘You never stopped to consider that your happy family existed at the cost of mine. They should never have got married, my parents. They wouldn't have, except your father said the most unforgivable thing, and then your mother forgave him for it with such a magnificent show of compassion. Never mind how my mother felt. Never mind that my father might have had feelings about the whole thing. But you haven't considered that. How could you consider that, when the consideration would disrupt your happiness? How could you consider that if my mother had married him she would have been happy all the years I was growing up, and she wouldn't have had to cheat and lie and sneak around? You think it's hard becoming disillusioned with a parent when you're twenty-one, Raheen? Well, try it when you're fifteen. God, I was angry with her for over two years. Until I found out what your father said. He was the one who ruined her life, and my father's, and mine. And don't you dare look at me as if to say I'm transferring my anger on to your father. This is not transference. It's the real thing.'

I wasn't about to defend my father, or even point out how silly it was of him to attack my father and yet simultaneously assume he would have been the perfect husband. ‘I don't know what this has to do with going back to Karachi. Karim, I don't understand what we're fighting about.'

‘You're going to go back, aren't you? After everything that's happened you're going to go back, because all you really want is to go on the way you've been going on. Like your father, who could so easily transfer his affections simply because it was easier to love someone who wasn't Bengali, you arrange your life around everything that's easy, even though it means wrapping yourself in a little cocoon and deciding that things that happen away from the street where you live don't touch you. And then you pretend your street is the world.

‘And what happens tomorrow when you decide that being with me is too hard, what happens then, Raheen? How dispensable will I prove to be? As dispensable as I was when I left Karachi, and all you could do was write letters about how much fun you were having, and how foreign I was becoming day by day, and how you really weren't interested in anything I had to say about how hard it was, how goddamn miserable it made me, to be away from Karachi, which meant being away from you.'

‘That's not true, Karim.' I was pulling a leaf apart between my fingers, the fleshy part separating easily and falling off the veins. ‘Go and read my letters again.'

‘I can't. I cut them up, remember, and burnt what was left.'

‘Well, I remember what I wrote. I remember I used to tell you everything that was going on in school, every little detail, so that when you came back you wouldn't have to feel like an outsider for even a second.'

‘You made me feel like the outsider. You told me what was happening without telling me it would be so much better if I were there.'

This was turning into some twisted nightmare. ‘I was only matching the tone you set in your letters, Karim. Your first letter to me, the first correspondence between either of us, started with you saying: Bet you're boiling in that deadly summer sun, and here it's cool enough for a sweater. Ha-ha!' I repeated it again to emphasize the lightness of the letter's tone. ‘Ha-ha!'

‘How could I use any other tone but “ha-ha!” when it was so obvious you didn't want to hear anything from me that wasn't a joke? Raheen, you used to see me crying, before I left Karachi, your best friend since we were born, you used to see me crying, because my parents were always yelling and my father was threatening to take me away and do you know how hard it is for a thirteen-year-old boy to cry in front of anyone? I cried in front of you, only in front of you, because I just needed you to ask what's wrong and you couldn't, you couldn't, you didn't even care enough to want to know. Go back to bloody Karachi. Go back and turn into Runty and see if I give a damn. Coming here was the stupidest thing I could have done.'

I caught hold of his sleeve. ‘Why did you come, then?'

‘I was going to take you to Boston with me. To see my mother. But I don't want her to see you.' He pulled away from me and headed out of the glen.