Hiroko watched Harry walk across to Raza and Sajjad, and then take Raza by the shoulder and draw him aside. She wished she believed in heaven so that she could know Konrad was watching this. Her eyes moved from her family members to the other Karachiwallas at ease on the beach. There was that wretched group of children who had danced around Raza earlier, tugging at the skin around their eyes while chanting, ‘Chinese, Japanese, money, please . . .’ until Harry had bellowed and sent them running. The children didn’t bother her so much as Raza’s inability to see their taunts as childish ignorance, without malevolence. She wondered if his acute sensitivity was the result of her anxiety during pregnancy communicating itself to him as he grew inside her.
Her eyes moved away from the children to the various women sitting on the beach. So many sleeves all the way to wrists instead of just part-way down the upper arm, and covered heads here and there. It made no sense to her. ‘Islamisation’ was a word everyone recognised as a political tool of a dictator and yet they still allowed their lives to be changed by it. She didn’t worry for herself but Raza was still so unformed that it troubled her to think what the confusion of a still-forming nation might do to him.
‘Will you walk into the sunset with your husband?’ Sajjad said, coming up to her, and she took the hand he was holding out to her, grateful for the distraction, and stepped off the rocks just as Harry and Raza started to walk in the opposite direction, towards the water’s edge.
‘I haven’t had a chance to give this to you yet,’ Harry said, opening his shoulder bag and reaching inside. ‘Though I still don’t know why you want it.’ He pulled out a transparent bag, which he placed in Raza’s hands. Raza looked down at the cotton-wool-like objects squashed against each other and poked the bag tentatively with his finger.
‘These are marshmallows?’ A wave crashed a few metres away from him, but he barely registered the spray of cold water except to hold a hand protectively over the bag.
‘Uh huh. Now are you going to tell me why I asked my daughter to carry them all the way from New York – in her hand luggage, by the way, so they wouldn’t get completely squashed.’ He’d told Kim they were for the young daughter of one of the consular staff, not wanting to see her reaction to the idea of a sixteen-year-old Pakistani who wanted marshmallows above all else from America.
‘I’ve just always wondered what they were.’ He turned the bag this way and that. ‘They’re in American comics a lot. Thank you, Uncle Harry.’
Harry watched the boy’s face, so vibrant with hero worship it was almost an abstraction. No one had ever called him ‘Uncle Harry’ before, and until he met Raza he hadn’t been conscious of regarding that as a loss.
‘You going to share them with your girlfriend?’
Raza grinned, and it transformed him from a burdened boy to a quick, bright spark, filled with charm. The one ray of light these last few weeks – other than Uncle Harry, and that look of awe in the truck boy Abdullah’s eyes – was the telephone romance he’d started up with Bilal’s sister, Salma. He’d told no one about it until he whispered it in Uncle Harry’s ear earlier in the day.
‘You know who was asking me if you had a girlfriend?’ Harry said conversationally, picking up a pebble and skimming it across the water. ‘My daughter, Kim.’ He watched Raza blush, and tried to imagine Kim with her black lipstick and her ripped T-shirts having anything to say to this boy who had worn his cricketing whites to the beach. It’s true, she had asked if he had a girlfriend, but it was a question that anticipated the no which followed and used that as a way to deflect Harry’s praise of Raza – his intelligence, his fine manners.
‘How is she? Is she well?’ Raza said, as Harry knew he would, with the fine manners which would have Kim screaming with laughter. She’d be running through the waves now if she were here, dismissing with a toss of her head all these people who came to the beach for the sand and the air and didn’t know what to do with their limbs in water. He missed her terribly, even though their recent interaction had consisted of little other than shouting matches and sulky silences.
His ex-wife’s smug phone calls from Paris, where she was on holiday with her fiancé, had done nothing to brighten the situation either. ‘One of us has to deal with real conflict every day, Harry, while the other one is playing boy’s games in exotic locations of the world,’ she said. ‘I’ve earned my break from it.’ As if he didn’t know that his own mother did all the real parenting while his ex flitted from work to social engagements. Sometimes he wondered if she had moved to New York after the divorce simply because of the convenience of having Ilse there as permanent babysitter, with Uncle Willie as backup.
‘Yeah, Kim’s doing great,’ he said to Raza. ‘There was a while there, though, when I was really worried about her. Early adolescence, you know. Some girls get pimples, some get breasts.’ He watched in some amusement as Raza blushed again. ‘Kim got test anxiety.’ Raza looked quizzically at him. ‘It was the damnedest thing. She explained it to me once. She knew the answers to all the questions, right until the moment she sat down to take the exam. Luckily there was a teacher there who understood what was happening. Mrs O’Neill. Kim’s personal angel. She taught Kim certain strategies for overcoming it.’ He was only slightly twisting the truth – Kim didn’t really have test anxiety, but Harry’s colleague in Islamabad, Steve, had once spent a drunken evening toasting his ninth-grade teacher Mrs O’Neill and explaining in great and boring length the ways in which she’d helped him overcome his habit of failure – instilling in him the belief that any problem could be defeated if you only had the right strategy.
Test anxiety. It was a real thing with a real name. And Uncle Harry’s daughter had it, too. Raza caught the other man’s arm.
‘Do you remember them? Any of the strategies?’
Harry nodded.
‘I’ll teach you,’ he said. He’d have to call Steve later. ‘Tomorrow. We’ll get your mother to help you. And once you’ve crossed that hurdle, the world opens up to you, Raza Konrad Ashraf. America is full of universities who’d love to add a bright, inquisitive Pakistani to their student body. You do well in their entrance exams and they’ll want you enough to pay for you to go there. I’ll help you out with all the application stuff. How does that sound?’ For a moment he wondered if he should have discussed this with Hiroko and Sajjad first, but he couldn’t imagine they’d be anything but grateful for the suggestion, given the high premium placed on an American-university education in the middle-class homes of Pakistan.
Raza nodded, trying to appear composed.
‘Cool,’ he said.
‘Cool.’ Harry raised his palm so Raza could slap a high five on it. ‘And then you and Kim can meet.’
‘Kim.’ Raza had never said her name out loud before but the test anxiety created a bond between them. ‘It’s a good name.’
‘Yeah,’ said Harry. Long before the CIA there had been Kipling and a boy astride a cannon. ‘I don’t know how you and Kim will get along but I’m pretty sure you and America will like each other. Forget like. Love at first sight – that’s how it was for America and me. I was twelve when I went there, and I knew right away that I’d found home.’
‘Aba says you loved Delhi.’
‘I did. I truly did. But in India I would always have been an Englishman. I didn’t see that when I was growing up, but it’s true. In America, everyone can be American. That’s the beauty of the place.’
‘Not me,’ Raza said. ‘You look like Clint Eastwood and John Fitzgerald Kennedy. So of course you can be American. I look like not this and not that.’
‘Everyone,’ Harry said firmly, knowing it would hurt Raza if he laughed at the incongruous comparisons. ‘Everyone can be American. Even you. I swear it.’
‘America.’ Raza rolled the word off his tongue.
Harry looked across at the dreamy-eyed young man with a gift for language, an ache for something to believe in, and features that would go unnoticed in many Central Asian states and parts of Afghanistan, too, and a thought flickered across his mind.
Just for an instant, and then he brushed it away.
19
He called three times before she was the one to answer the phone instead of her mother.
‘Hello, Fatima?’ she said when she picked up. ‘I have those notes for you. Wait, let me pick up the extension in the other room.’ He held on a few seconds, grinning to himself while running his hands over the unopened marshmallow packet. When she spoke again, her voice was throaty and sarcastic, nothing like the earlier tone of ordinariness. ‘How nice of you to interrupt your busy life and call me, Raza.’
‘Salma,’ he said, with that melting tone of adoration which he knew she loved. ‘Don’t be like that. I was at the beach with Uncle Harry – I only just got home.’
‘Oh, well, if you’d rather be with your American,’ she said, but he could tell she was impressed.
‘I asked him to bring you a present from New York.’ He pressed a yielding marshmallow through the packaging, and wondered if Salma’s breasts would feel anything like this.
‘You didn’t!’ she said, sounding a little faint. And then her voice changed. ‘You told him about me?’
‘Of course not. I said it was for me. Do you want it? If you do, you’ll have to meet me. Properly.’
‘What does “properly” mean?’
He hesitated a moment. This was delicate. But any American university would be proud to have him! Kim Burton also had test anxiety! His worth glimmered unexpectedly through the room.
‘It means . . . you know. I’m tired of you ignoring me every time I come to your house.’ Which was seldom, these days, but his mood was such he didn’t allow himself to be pulled down by that.
‘And what do you think my brother would do if he knew his friend was meeting me to . . . you know!’
‘I don’t mean “you know” like that, Salma. We’ve been talking every day for over a month now. How can you doubt that I respect you?’
This line met with no further success than it had on every previous occasion he’d tried it. Clearly another tack was necessary.
‘You know, you’ll regret this attitude when I’m gone.’
‘Gone where? To the soap factory!’
It was the first time she’d ever mentioned she knew where he went with his father each morning, and on any other day it would have devastated him. But now he just smiled.
‘I’m going to university there. In America. Uncle Harry says he’ll help me with the admissions, and make sure they even pay me to go. That’s the kind of thing they do there.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘It’s true. Meet me and I’ll tell you all about it.’
‘Why are you keeping on with this? I’m not going to meet you. What would happen to my reputation if someone found out?’
‘What do I have to do, send my mother over with a proposal? I’ll do it. You know I will. Come on, Salma, marry me and we’ll go to America together.’ He only meant it as a way of indicating he would never behave dishonourably with her, didn’t think her fast, but in the silence that followed he realised, sickeningly, that she was taking him far more seriously than he’d intended.
‘Raza, my parents will never let me marry you,’ she said finally, while he was trying to think of a way to extricate himself from the position he’d talked himself into.
He smiled, relieved, extending his arm along the sofa-back with an air of well-being which could have rivalled that of James Burton in his Delhi home.
‘I don’t know why age difference is such a big deal. You’re only two years older than me. But how can we fight against tradition?’
‘It’s not about age. It’s your mother. Everyone knows about your mother.’
‘What about her?’
‘Nagasaki. The bomb. No one will give their daughter to you in marriage unless they’re desperate, Raza. You could be deformed. How do we know you’re not?’
Raza sat forward, gripping the phone tightly.
‘Deformed? I’m not. Salma, your father is my doctor. I’m not deformed.’
‘Maybe not in any way we can see. But there’s no guarantee. You might have something you can pass on to your children. I’ve seen the pictures. Of babies born in Nagasaki after the bomb.’
‘I’ve never even been to Nagasaki. I was born twenty years after the bomb. Please. You don’t want to talk to me any more, OK, say that. But don’t say this. Don’t say you think I’m deformed.’
‘You need to know. This is how people think about you. Go to America, darling.’ The endearment – in English – came out clumsily. ‘And don’t tell anyone there the truth. Goodbye, Raza. Please don’t call again.’
The curved receiver of the telephone gripped Raza beneath the chin as the tone of disconnection pulsed against his ear. Twilight cast the shadows of branches across the window, distorting the sym metry of the iron grille with its curlicues inspired by treble clefs.