Kartography (19 page)

I lay back on my bed, barely noticing the barrage of snowballs that thumped against my window, preceded by a carrot. ‘So you're saying the only reason you're calling me after all these years is boredom?' I said, knowing the answer was no.

‘Your essay finally caught up with me in Rome. Just got here, hours before I left for the airport. It's been all around the world trying to find me. Australia, Morocco, Lapland.'

‘You went to Lapland?' I threw my hands up in mock incomprehension at my reflection in the mirror. I looked a lot better than I had when we'd last met—my hair shorter and combed back, not flopping over my face trying to cover the shape and size of my eyes; a little more flesh on my bones so elbows and knees weren't jutting out awkwardly; greater definition to my calf muscles after all those weeks of playing tennis with Jake. I rolled my eyes at myself. Such self-absorption.

‘No, but it rounds off the sentence so nicely,' Karim said. It took me a moment to realize he was talking about Lapland. ‘What was that thing you said?'

‘Eratosthenes.'

A boot clunked against my window. I cranked the window open and stuck my head out. ‘Stop ignoring us,' Tamara yelled up through a megaphone, waving one shoeless foot in the air. ‘We want Chuck's nose back.' I leaned out, lifted the carrot—and the boot—off the ledge outside and threw them down.

‘Now go away,' I yelled.

‘Is that Mr Forehand bothering you again?' Tamara called up.

I closed the window and lay down again.

‘I had possession of a snowman's nose,' I explained to Karim.

‘Who's Mr Forehand?'

‘Oh, just this guy.' Strangely embarrassed.

‘Jake?'

‘How did you...?'

‘My cousin, Omar, ran into Sonia in Karachi. She told him Jake's a tennis player. Is it love?'

‘No, it's over. Has been for a while, though he keeps suffering memory lapses about that little detail.'

‘Full story, please,' he said, in the tone of one who is entitled to know everything.

‘He discovered his Hispanic roots. Decided to change the pronunciation of his name. I didn't take all this seriously enough.'

There was a pause, then laughter so dizzyingly contagious I knew it would have instantly healed my slightly aching heart if I'd heard it when the symptoms of break-up still persisted. ‘Hake?' Karim spluttered. ‘You were involved with a man who called himself Hake?'

‘It's worse than that,' I said, laughing back. ‘He's Hake Hunior.'

I could almost see Karim doubling over in the airport, oblivious to the stares of the jet-lagged and travel-weary. ‘You're making up the Junior bit. Admit it!'

‘But it rounds off the sentence so nicely.'

‘God, it's good to laugh,' he said. ‘Especially after I've been sitting here getting newsprint on my nose, reading about what's going on in Karachi.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘The violence flaring up. One hundred and thirty people killed in the first seventeen days of December. Have you see the new issue of
Newsline
? It says more people have been killed in Karachi this month than in Bosnia. Bosnia!'

‘Oh, right.' I kept my voice as neutral as possible, but I was thinking:
Bloody, bloody hell.
Just when I thought all that rubbish between us had departed with the end of self-righteous adolescence.

‘I can hear you rolling your eyeballs.'

‘Yeah, well. You know.' I looked out of the window again.

‘No, I don't, and that's the problem, isn't it?'

‘Whatever, Karim.' I felt drained; I couldn't imagine ever having enough energy to fully engage in this conversation. I couldn't imagine having enough patience.

‘That essay you wrote...I thought it meant you were thinking about Karachi.'

I knew he couldn't see my eyebrows, but that didn't stop me raising them.

But he was going on: ‘I mean, I've been trying for the last few years to come to grips with Karachi's nature, to face all these things that are so hard to face, and I'm just more glad than I can say that you've also started. Reading that essay, it was like you'd reached into my mind and pulled out all these thoughts from there. That cartographer in Zytrow, he was amazing. That you could write that was amazing. I mean, that you see he's willing to be unselfish—yes, because of the work he's doing people will stop talking about his great leap, and of course he's known that from the beginning, but he's willing to forgo that kind of self-glory in order to bring some order to the place.' I'd never heard anyone speak so fast or confuse me so much with what they were saying. ‘And those two people in Raya, they have a kind of perfection, but it's in such a limited way because it's such a limited city, a city with only two inhabitants, and that's why they leave, isn't it? Because they have to see themselves in the context of something larger than just the two of them. It's like that Faiz poem, you know,
mujh say pehli si muhubat,
when you've seen the sorrows of the rest of the world you can't go on pretending none of it matters, you can't pretend two people can really live in isolation telling themselves their love is all that matters in the world. And the two of them, when they come back to the city, that's when they find out that their love was imperfect because it couldn't bear the knowledge of everything that lies outside and... Raheen, I see where you're going with it. I know what you're trying to say. Or beginning to. And I know it's not easy, but I'm here, Ra, I'm here.'

If he had been standing in front of me I would have hit him. ‘You've been trying to come to grips with Karachi's nature and you're glad I've also
started
? I go home, Karim. Every bloody year. Twice a year. The day classes end. I get on that plane and I go back to Karachi. I'm going there in two weeks. And you, you'd rather go to Lapland!' I slammed my open palm against the side of my desk. ‘Listen, do me a favour and burn that essay. Because it's obvious you haven't understood a word I've tried to say, and, frankly, right now I have no interest in pointing out all the places where you went wrong.'

There was silence from the other end. I could make out the noises of the airport, but from Karim I couldn't hear even a whisper of breath. It occurred to me that he'd simply walked away from the phone.

‘When you go home do you ever catch a flight out of Boston?' he said at last.

I cranked open the window again and picked up a fistful of white from the ledge. When I opened my fist, my fingerprints were whorls of evidence in the tightly packed snow. I still remembered her number. I had only called it once, but I still remembered her number. ‘Zia saw your mother over fall break. Went there for dinner while he was in Boston. I told him to give her my love.'

‘What is Zia to my mother?'
His
voice tired now. ‘You were the closest thing she had to a daughter. Over three years you've been on the East Coast, and not once have you bothered to call her. You really are your father's daughter.'

The mirror on the opposite wall showed my head jerking back in surprise, putting distance between myself and the words that came out of the handset. The only image that came to mind: my father putting an arm around Karim's shoulder at the airport, the last time our two families were together, and Karim turning one hundred and eighty degrees, wrapping his arms around Aba's waist and weeping. And I wondered again, as I'd so often wondered, of all those scraps of my letters that he'd chopped and pasted, why he had chosen the one in which I talked about parents and accepting their imperfections.

‘I've got to go,' he said. ‘They're calling my flight.'

‘Karim...' The thought that this was it, the attempt at reconciliation ended, was physically painful.

‘What?'

‘Why did you call?'

There was silence at the other end again, but I could hear him breathing. Say it. Say,
‘Because I missed you.'

‘Because I wanted to see...if we could speak without noticing the palimpsest.'

‘What?' He was receding, I could hear him drifting away, or was that me? Why had we ever thought it would be enough for us to speak to each other in fragments? What had we missed by finishing each other's sentences, assuming we'd always know the direction in which a thought was going? How many words had remained unspoken, misunderstood, between us at a time when we could so easily have set things right?

‘Too many layers of words, Raheen, beneath and behind our sentences to each other.'

‘Karim, don't, please, don't disappear.' Salty tracks curving beneath my eye and splashing on to the receiver.

‘In that part of my mind that only remembers life before fourteen, Raheen, I'll love you for ever.'

He hung up so gently, I didn't even hear the click.

 

 

 

 

. . .

 

The boundary walls around Sonia's house were several feet higher than they had been in August when I was last in Karachi, and when Zia rang the bell no one opened the gate. Instead, a man I didn't recognize slid open a little flap in the gate and looked through. All I could see was one of his eyes and part of his nose. The eye darted from Zia to me, then back to Zia, where it stayed, narrowing slightly.

‘We're here to see Sonia,' I said and waited for him to open the gate.

‘Names?' he said.

Zia and I looked at each other, and Zia shrugged. ‘I must look suspicious. Either that or unnecessary security measures are all the rage with the nouveau ri-chi-chi.'

‘That's a Soniaism, right? Ri-chi-chi. I'd forgotten that one.' But now that he reminded me I wondered, as I had done when she first coined the term, if Sonia was aware of the way all of us regarded her parents, whose increased sophistication Aunty Laila dismissively compared to a thickening layer of make-up—merely drawing attention to how many blemishes there were and how much had to be done to hide them.

‘Name?' the security guard said again.

‘Where's Dost Mohommad? Where's Kalaam? They know who we are.' A part of me felt absurd for demanding the appearance of the cook and driver, but it seemed a point of pride to be admitted into Sonia's house without being forced to give my name to the guard.

He clicked his tongue and, stepping backwards, turned to speak to someone else. As his frame receded I was able to see that he had a gun slung over his shoulder and that there were two more armed guards, sitting on a charpai, between the driveway and the flower beds with their masses of canna lilies. A chill was beginning to seep from the cement driveway through my thin chapals, and my determination to win a stand-off with a guard who wasn't doing anything other than fulfilling the basic requirements of his job began to waver. I stepped away from the shadows.

‘Serious weapons,' Zia said, drawing my attention to the guards' Kalashnikovs. ‘You'd think this was some bigwig feudal household. Guess that's the idea.'

The guard pressed his eye against the flap again. ‘Names?' he said.

Zia rolled his eyes and took his mobile phone out of his jeans pocket. He dialled a number and said, in Urdu for the guard's benefit, ‘Uncle! Salaam! We're standing outside your house, talking to...just a second...' He looked up at the guard. ‘Name?'

The guard closed the flap. There was the squeak of a lock unbolting. Zia put the phone back in his pocket and winked at me. ‘Never mind, Uncle. We'll be right in,' he said to the air. I knew that he was behaving like a bit of a jerk, but I couldn't help thinking that it was so good to be home where we knew how everything worked and so know how to circumvent annoyances. In the air was a smell of something distant burning, which I always associated with Karachi winters.

We walked past the guards without a second glance, and went straight to the intricately carved front door. Locked. I turned back to the guards and made a gesture of irritation, and one of them went over to the little booth beside the charpai and spoke into the intercom. It was clear he was arguing with someone on the other side. I grabbed the branch of an almond tree and pulled down on it, relishing the weight of a branch without snow, no fear of something cold and wet sliding off and soaking your skin. The joy of breathing in deeply without teeth aching of cold. I heard footsteps inside approach. The tiniest of cracks appeared between the door frame and the door. I leaned close to the crack. ‘Raheen and Zia,' I said, and Sonia's cook, Dost Mohommad, opened the door wide, beaming.

‘Bored of America again?' he said. ‘Come in, come in. These guards, they're useless. What will you eat? What will you drink? When did you get back?'

The marble floors were polished to a high gleam as always, and there was a new painting on the wall—a Chughtai watercolour of a beautiful woman, her glance poised between cruelty and sensuality—replacing the garish family portrait that used to form the first impression visitors had of the interior. The place had metamorphosed gradually over the years and it had been a long time since Zia had last made a snide comment about the Horror House and leopard-print carpets, though I was sure the gold taps still hadn't been replaced. On the table in the reception area was a photograph of Sonia's father standing next to the Pope. Rumour had it he'd paid a computer whiz huge amounts of money to have his image inserted next to that of the Pontiff. What, if not forgery, could explain the rabbit ears he'd formed with his fingers just behind the Pope's head? Although, if you were going to pay someone to digitally create a picture of you with someone famous, why would you choose the Pope?