Kartography (40 page)

‘I'm really very confused,' I said. ‘OK, one question: how do you forgive what he said?'

She stood up and started walking around the flat, hugging her paisley shawl close in the air-conditioned air. ‘I thought I was showing courage by staying in Karachi during all that madness, and I'm still not sure I wasn't. But, you see, I was a Bengali. I was born that way. So though people turned away from me at parties, and conversations stopped when I entered the room, and all sorts of things went on that no one should have to live through, there was a certain...resignation, almost, in people's attitudes towards me. I was just a Bingo, nothing to be done about it. But your father...your father was something much worse. He was a turncoat, a traitor. A Bingo-lover.' She said the words slowly, as if examining them, trying to unravel their mystery. ‘That evening—when Shafiq got the telegram about his brother—Zafar had just come back from hospital. Broken rib, fractured thumb, bruises everywhere. He claimed he'd been mugged and beaten, but no one was fooled. There was violence in the air those days, and why should your father have been expected not to get terrified of it? Whatever he said to Shafiq, awful as it was, I don't believe he meant it.'

‘If you didn't believe it, you would have married him.'

Aunty Maheen walked over to the window and looked down at a bridge being raised so a boat could pass through. ‘You weren't alive in those days. You don't know what you're talking about.'

She had never spoken to me in that tone before.

I walked over to the window. It was certainly pretty, the view of the river and the tall buildings, but I wondered what Aunty Maheen saw when she looked out. Did she see home?

As if she had read my mind she said, ‘I don't think I could ever bear to go back to Karachi. First it was because I knew the kind of whispers that would go around about me. I think I was afraid almost—of being shunned, of having backs turn on me a second time round. And now...' She ran her fingers over a book on the console table that had pictures of some of Karachi's landmarks on the cover. ‘Now, it's changed so much it might break my heart to see it. To be reminded that, after all, after everything, I've ended up a foreigner in that city.'

I put my arm around her, and thought of all my friends who weren't planning to return to Karachi after university. Zia was still trying to convince me that I, too, should stay in America. He had even called up one of his father's contacts who worked in a travel agency in New York and got him to agree to hire me. He meant well, so I didn't tell him it was the kind of thing his father would have done. Besides, I hadn't decided to turn down the job yet. What kind of home would home be without my friends in it?

‘I need to find a way to forgive my father. I think you're the only person who can help me do that.'

‘No. I'm not. He is.' Aunty Maheen lifted the Karachi book and shook it. A thin blue piece of paper with writing on either side fell out from between the pages. ‘This may help; it may not.' Aunty Maheen handed me the blue paper. ‘As soon as you called I knew it was finally time to give it to you. I've had it a long, long time. Your father wrote it to me. I'm going down to the store to get something for dinner. You're staying the night, of course.'

She left me alone, and I picked up the paper, and started to read.

 

Dear Maheen,

Already I'm thinking ahead to how I'll end this letter, and in case you haven't yet scanned ahead to find the answer to that question, let me tell you it will be with the phrase: my love always, Zafar.

I will show this letter to Yasmin when it is finished. She will approve the ending.

I'm more glad than I can say that the two of you are reconciled now that Raheen and Karim are born. I have seen you look at your son and then at Ali, and even I'm not vain enough to believe you are thinking of me for even a moment. But I know the first thought
you have—will have, have already had, are having even now—of me in conjunction with your child will he: thank God. Because if we had been married your Karim would not have been born, nor would my Raheen—and how can we love the notion of some hypothetical children that might have been more than we love these tiny-fisted creatures who yesterday seemed entirely unaware of each other for fifty-nine minutes of the hour they were together, yet turned to each other in that sixtieth minute, and Raheen—with eyes shut—reached out and put a hand on Karim's cheek, and Karim kept looking at her without blinking.

I picture them already as firm friends. And then I picture them growing up, and, Maheen, what will I say to my daughter when she is old enough to understand the truth and all its implications?

Nothing can excuse or erase what I said. So why am I writing this letter? To tell you that if you want me to stay always silent about how things ended between us, I will. But your heart has always been far greater than mine, so let me first—please, Maheen, don't stop reading. I should tear this up, it makes little sense, but if I wait to write again until I can craft every sentence, I may never write.

What I was saying was—oh, I don't even know. But I know this—it is less than two years since Bangladesh was born, and already we in Pakistan have become so efficient at never speaking about it. That scares me more than anything else. When we do refer to ‘yi, it's as personalised stories about sitting on the roof, sipping whisky and watching the dogfights in the sky, or about waiting for a dawn that never came because the oil refineries were bombed and a thick cloud of smoke shut out the sun. We tell these stories and contain the horrors of war into four-line anecdotes that we tell over tea and biscuits.

I don't claim to be better than any of the people who do this—it's simply that my war story is you, Maheen, and you will not be contained within four lines; instead, you bring up all the memories the rest of us try to forget.

What happens when you work so hard to forget a horror that you also forget that you have forgotten it? It doesn't disappear—the canker turns inwards and mutates into something else. In this city that we both love and claim—even though our families' histories lie elsewhere—what will the canker become? This is turning into a diatribe, I know, but I must say it because all the silence around me is so terrifying. Yes, I am terrified, Maheen—because this country has seen what it is capable of, but it hasn't yet paused to take account.

We should not have kept our name.

Pakistan died in
1971
. Pakistan was a country with two wings—I have never before thought of the war in terms of that image: a wing tearing away from the body it once helped keep aloft—it was a country with a majority Bengali population and all its attendant richness of culture, history, language, topography, climate, clothing...everything. How can Pakistan still be when all of that, everything that East Pakistan added to the country, is gone? Pakistan was a nation with an image of itself as a place that was created because that creation was the only way its leaders saw possible to safeguard the rights of a minority power within India. How can Pakistan still be when we have so abused that image—first by ensuring the Bengalis were minimised and marginalised both politically and economically, and then by reacting to their demands for greater rights and representation with acts of savagery? How can Pakistan still be when the whole is gone and we are left with a part? (When we are willing to treat a part as the whole don't we fall victim to circumscribed seeing, a thing we can ill afford?) We should have recognised that the Pakistan of dreams died and was buried in the battle fields of '71. Or...

Or, Maheen, is it possible to reclaim a name?

It is a name for which I have great affection, great regard. But what must be done to restore it to what it could have stood for? Perhaps our children will answer that question one day, if we give them the tools—the information—they need for that task.

We act as though history can be erased. Of course we want to believe that—the cost of remembering may break our wilted spirits. But if we believe in erasure we tell ourselves it is possible to have acts without consequences. The finger squeezing the trigger becomes a thing apart from the bullet that speeds across the sands, which becomes a thing apart from the child looking down at his blood pumping out of his heart. And that child, that bullet, that finger, they become things way, way apart from our lives, here, in rooms where we look upon our own sleeping children.

I don't know if I've made any sense, and now I'm blotting the ink with these meaningless tracks of tears.

I will—if you allow it, and I'll take your silence as ayes—I will tell my daughter what I did—no, let me not phrase that in the past: I will tell my daughter what I have done—when she is old enough to grasp how unforgivable it was. When she is old enough to look within and around, and understand the canker. And this is the form my own canker will take: the fear, the fear always, that when I tell her she will turn away from me.

So here is my promise to you: I will help Yasmin bring up our daughter in such a way that she will have to look at me in horror when I finally tell her the truth of what I said.

There is nothing that gives me more joy these days than looking at you and knowing you are happy. My love always,

Zafar

 

 

 

 

. . .

 

When I arrived back in Karachi that summer, the summer of 1995, he was waiting for me at the airport. Waiting inside the terminal. Uncle Asif's contacts again, no doubt.

I walked towards him, jet-lagged, the strap of my carry-on flight bag cutting into my shoulder. ‘I read the letter you wrote Aunty Maheen,' I said.

‘I know. Did I sound like a self-righteous ass?'

‘Yes,' I said, and then I quoted the last three paragraphs of the letter back to him.

When he put his arms around me, there was a hesitation on both our parts, but although I didn't hug him back I didn't feel the need to pull away either, and that, at least, was a start.

 

I had read all the papers on the Net, detailing showdowns, stalemates, body counts, analyses, but when I stepped out of the airport and headed home what struck me most was the vulnerability of cars. Glass on all sides, barring neither stares nor fists nor bullets. And was that man criminal, lunatic or immortal angel that he could stand on the pavement, smoking a cigarette, as though life's greatest danger was falling ash?

 

Electricity failures and water shortages. Humidity that sheened my skin with sweat, seconds after I stepped out of the air-conditioned car. What water there was, was warm. Electricity repairmen needed police escorts to guard them from Karachiites living in dark and heat for days at a time. But what of those areas the police dared not go to for fear of being attacked themselves? To counter the electricity shortage, there was a ban on neon lights. Driving home from the Club at dinner time was like driving through a ghost town—darkness everywhere save for traffic lights, and who wanted to risk stopping at a red light in those days?

 

‘Aunty Maheen, have you heard from Karim?'

‘No, darling, just postcards. He's teaching English in Mexico somewhere. Hasn't got a phone, and, frankly, sweetheart, the way things are in Karachi, if I do speak to him I'll do everything I can to dissuade him from entering those city limits.'

 

Rocket launchers and gunfire in Boat Basin. Sonia's brother, Sohail, was there when it happened. He told us about the incredible illumination of the night sky when the rocket launchers exploded and how the sound of bullets at first resembled firecrackers. How often we'd stopped in that part of town over the years, after school and after parties, scrounging through one another's purses and wallets for money to spend on meals at Chips and Mr Burger and Flamingo Chaat. How could the violence reach somewhere so familiar?

 

‘Why don't you just stop reading the papers?' Zia said to me on the phone from New York.

There were mornings when that was a tempting idea, but I found I could no longer say to the world,
there's nothing I can do to change this, so why think too hard about it?
I still didn't think there was anything I could do to change the situation, but now it felt like an abomination to pretend to live outside it.