Kartography (16 page)

 

. . .

 

The rain had stopped. Water drops shimmered in the gossamer interstices of a spider's web outside my window. Not so much captured in the web as resting on it. I could, I thought, lift up that web, very carefully, and place it against my throat, where it would adhere, threads retreating into near invisibility and only rain drops remaining to glisten against my skin like some precious inheritance.

Jake's hand reached across me to close the window. ‘It's freezing,' he said. ‘I've been asking you for the last ten seconds to get rid of the draught.'

‘Didn't hear you.' I swivelled my legs off the window ledge, making room for him to sit next to me, but he remained standing on my bed, head inches away from touching the ceiling.

‘Of course you didn't. It's always Grand Central Station in here.' He jerked his head at all the people, seven or eight of them, crowded into my tiny dorm room.

When the downpour had started, less than an hour earlier, I had been attempting to read a supermarket romance for my ‘Myths of Courtship' class, but the sudden ferocity of the rain made me set aside my herbal tea and rush outdoors. It was the closest thing to the monsoons I had encountered in the three years I'd been at university in America, rain ricocheting off the ground with the speed of bullets from a Kalashnikov. I half-expected to see little frogs and winged insects appear. People were running for shelter, the ones who knew me shouting as they charged past that I was crazy, ‘Get inside, Raheen.' I looked down. Crazy I could handle, but crazy in a white shirt was probably not such a good idea. I pulled the clinging material away from my body, hearing with satisfaction the suction release of wet cotton from flesh, and ran up the stairs towards central heating.

‘Study break. Ten minutes. My room. Who's going to make the hot chocolate?' I yelled down the hallway on my way into the shower.

Someone shouted, ‘But I've just started
War and Peace,'
and someone else: ‘We've been back from the dining hall less than half an hour.'

‘Raheen says study break, ten minutes,' another of my hallmates declared. ‘You want to argue with her?'

Less than fifteen minutes later, I had a crowd of people clustered in my room as, freshly showered and dressed in sweats and fleece jumper, I poured out hot chocolate with marshmallow bits from a large saucepan into mugs and plastic glasses bearing the university's crest. Tamara from next door held up my romance novel with a whoop of delight, and the rest of my friends chanted, ‘Read, Raheen, read,' over and over until, with mock resignation, I took the book from Tamara, sat on the window ledge by my bed, cleared my throat and started reading out loud choice passages in breathy, emotive style.

 

She stared boldly into his piercing blue eyes, but he was not a man to be daunted by feminine fire and he stared right back, his gaze suggesting X-ray vision that could look right through her blouse and see the rapidly beating heart that lay beneath.

His jeans were so tight they could barely contain him, and she trembled with fear and ecstasy at the thought that he might burst out of them at any moment.

She tossed her head, and wished she could do the same with her emotions.

‘Will you just come?' He impatiently pushed the door open and gestured her through.

‘Make me,' she replied, saucily.

He had always been a man to rise to a challenge.

 

When I finally stopped reading, even Jake, who had come into the crowded room halfway through and was slouching in the door frame, was shaking his head in amusement, though the evening before I'd walked out on him in the dining hall while he was in the middle of yet another rant about how little time the two of us spent together, alone. I had told him he just didn't understand Pakistani attitudes towards friendship, and he'd sneered. That was, I had to admit to myself, entirely an appropriate reaction. I put the romance novel down. Between the body heat, central heating, cocoa and fleece I was beginning to feel a little hot. I turned to look outside, wondered exactly when it had stopped raining, and opened the window.

That smell in the air. The aftermath of rain. I let the book fall from my hands. Tawdry. Cheap and tawdry. I could hear Jake's voice, but I didn't want to have to deal with him, so I continued looking outside at the autumn leaves, vibrant reds and oranges, scattered across paths, plastered on to buildings. A breeze blew up and I came so close to telling everyone in the room to be quiet, just be quiet, so that I could hear the sound of leaves being blown about. Russet rustle. Almost the sound of waves breaking on pebbled sand.

In Karachi, I would never have been able to hold court for as long as I had just done. Hold court or play the jester, whatever it was that I had been doing. One or more of my friends would have sat down beside me, leaned an elbow on my shoulder, scanned ahead of where I was reading to some further point on the page and taken the book from my hands to read aloud the next absurd lines in exaggerated tones, at once competing and collaborating with me. I leaned my head against the window screen. Rain had tinged the mesh with the smell of rust. Not true, not true, that in Karachi I felt my world was perfect, although sometimes I deluded myself into thinking that when I was far from home. But even in Karachi I'd feel this need to turn away from people whose company, just seconds earlier, I had delighted in. Sonia sometimes told me off for my ‘mood swings', in Sonia's way of telling people off, which was not to rebuke or reprimand but merely to ask what was wrong. Once, not so long ago, I had finally said, ‘Even when I'm with everyone whom I could possibly want to be with, I feel like something's absent,' and Sonia, showing no signs of being hurt by this remark, nodded, and asked, ‘Absent or lost?'

There was a cobweb between the window and the ledge outside. Jake closed the window, and I turned back to my friends, wanting them gone, wanting him gone too.

‘Break over,' I said.

Almost everyone stood up instantly, as though I had issued a military order, except for the guy who was supposed to be reading
War and Peace.
‘But we haven't even finished drinking our...' he said.

Tamara nudged him. ‘Come on, finish it in my room.' Behind Jake's back she mouthed to me, ‘Should I take him with me?' and I was about to nod, when Jake said, ‘Tamara, I can see your reflection in the mirror. Goodbye.'

After everyone had left, Jake stepped off the bed, and leaned against my desk, hands stuffed in the pockets of his jeans. ‘You know, after you walked out on me at dinner last night——'

‘Oh, Jacob, for heaven's sake, I didn't walk out; I just said I had work to do and couldn't stay to watch you sip your coffee.'

He scuffed the carpet with the toe of his sneakers. ‘Don't call me Jacob.'

I rolled my eyes. ‘OK, after I walked out on you...what?'

‘I decided it's over between us.' He was looking down at his hands. They were somewhat too soft, Jake's hands.

I nodded. ‘I understand.'

He raised his head and looked at me. ‘I was about to add, “but then I changed my mind”.'

‘Oh.'

We looked at each other for a few seconds, and then he said, ‘It really makes no difference to you either way, does it?'

A spider was picking its way to the centre of the web, sidestepping the drops of water. The sky cerulean once more.
Cerulean is an anagram of acne rule. Imagine a pimply, pustular sky, Ra!
I stood up so quickly I banged my head against the potted plant hanging from the ceiling near the foot of my bed. The pot tipped and loose soil showered down my jumper and on to my bed.

‘You OK?' Jake moved forward, but I held my hands up to tell him to keep his distance. Tears in my eyes, and none of them because of him. I put my hand to my scalp and was almost disappointed to find no trickle of blood, nor even a bump. Jake stepped back and watched me scoop soil from the duvet into a cup and pour it back into the plant-holder.

‘Soiled sheets. Dirt on your fingers. Talk about a break-up scene heavy in symbolism.' Jake made a sound that might have been laughter had it contained the slightest suggestion of amusement. ‘You know, I finally figured out last night what all of us have in common. Ricardo, Amit, myself. Couldn't find any common denominator in all your boyfriends before. But it's this: we're the kind of guys you'll always stop short of loving. And that makes life easy, doesn't it?'

I didn't want to think too hard about what he had said, so I looked around for tissue to wipe my fingers with. Jake offered the sleeve of his shirt, but I brushed the dirt off against a corner of my duvet instead.
Don't touch him, and this will be easier.

‘Actually, the common denominator, Jake, is that you all have really sexy wrists. Call me shallow.'

I sat on the window ledge again, pressed the nib of my fountain pen through the mesh of the screen, and unscrewed the bottom of the pen. Jake came to stand beside me as I gently squeezed the ink cartridge and a rain drop turned blue.

‘You really have this ability to find beauty in weird places.'

There was a tone of reconciliation in his voice, but when he had said it was over between us my heart had lurched ever so slightly, and if we were to stay together now perhaps it would lurch even more next week, next month or whenever that inevitable ending came. It would lurch especially if the ending didn't come until early next summer when we would graduate and I would head home to Karachi. I looked beyond him to the mirror. There was a crack in the glass, right at eye level, and for a second I half-fancied I saw a splinter lodged in one of my absurdly large eyes, slashing its darkness.

‘I have work to do, Jake.'

‘So do I. Can I stay?'

I shook my head, without turning to look at him.

He was all the way to the door before he stopped and said, ‘Ever wonder how other people see you?'

I turned round. ‘Is this the cruel parting blow, Jake? You going to—what's that funny expression?—hold up a mirror to my eyes?'

‘Your friends adore you, Raheen, because at the end of the day you'll always forgive them no matter how hideously they've behaved. They adore you because they think you offer up your friendship and ask for nothing in return. But that's not true——' He took a deep breath. ‘You do ask for something. You ask that we never expect you to need us.'

He blew a kiss at me, and left.

I drew my legs up to my body and rested my chin on my knees. Jake was right. Until then I had always thought my college friends saw me as the entertainer. And as the one who couldn't keep her opinions to herself. It was true, I supposed, that I didn't bear grudges or hold people accountable for every slip-up, though that had more to do with my father than with me. Aba had always said that it was easy to condemn people; condemnation was an act of smugness, wasn't it? Didn't it arise from the certainty that you would never do what you were condemning someone else for? But how could you say that unless you could slip into their soul, peer around and see what serpents fed there, what abysses gaped? How could you say anything unless you knew how the serpents and abysses had come to be, and what it meant to live with them every single day? Shouldn't we simply be grateful that our lives allow us to live with grace today? It came naturally to Aba—the ability to be grateful for his life, the ability to look at the Runtys of this world with understanding—but for me it sometimes felt as though I was forcing my nature into a mould I wanted to fit into rather than one that suited the contours of my personality.

I thought of everything Jake had just said, and looked at my watch. In Karachi, it was early in the morning, far too early to call my father without making him panic. But I needed to talk to someone—not just anyone, but someone who had always known me. I could call Zia, half an hour's drive away in the same time zone, but I rarely spoke to Zia about Jake since that time Zia had landed up on Jake's doorstep at midnight and announced that, although he had come to like Jake a great deal in the weeks since they'd first met, no white boy could lay hands on a Muslim girl and expect to live. Jake had leapt out of the second-floor window and broken his ankle. (‘How was I supposed to know you'd be seeing someone moronic enough to take me seriously?' Zia had protested to me the next day. ‘There are white Muslims in the world, for God's sake. Hasn't he heard of Cat Stevens?') No, I couldn't call Zia and so much as mention Jake's name without running the risk of him singing ‘Moonshadow', which in Zia's rendition became ‘Crescent Moonshadow'.

But Jake wasn't really the issue here. I looked at my watch again and added ten to establish Karachi time once more. In a couple of hours Sonia would wake up to say her morning prayers. I could call her then, and ask, ‘Do you think I don't need you?' And however she answered, however tactfully, however generously, something in her response would remind me that we both knew I felt guilty about Sonia; if anyone asked who my closest friend in the world was I'd say her name without hesitation, but it was the lack of hesitation that comes from years of practice rather than conviction. In my heart, I still carried around the notion of a friendship that no reality could live up to.

I picked up my phone book. The last three years, every time I had been in Karachi packing to return to America, Ami would come into my room with a letter or package for Aunty Maheen, and every time she would say how much Maheen would appreciate it if I delivered it by hand next time I visited friends in Boston, or even if I just called from college to say ‘hello', and every time I would say, ‘Yes, sure, you gave me the number. Meant to last semester, but things get so hectic,' and every time Ami looked at me with something so close to disappointment in her eyes that I had to pretend something was lost and busy myself in a flurry of searching for it.