Kartography (3 page)

When I finally slept, I dreamt I was on a train.

 

 

 

 

. . .

 

‘Sugar cane thataway, kinoos thisaway, cotton everywhichaway.' The decadent feudal, Uncle Asif, pointed his walking-stick in the direction of his crops, all of which were hidden from us by the wall of trees and bushes that separated the creeper-covered house and its garden from the rest of the farm. ‘I suggest a walk. If you get lost, we'll launch a dramatic rescue operation complete with local police, hunting dogs and a few snake charmers for added rural colour.'

‘We've got snake charmers in Karachi.' Karim's tone was sulky. This I had not anticipated, though I was usually so in tune with his moods that I would often claim emotions and realize, hours later, that really they belonged to him. But all the way from the railway station to the house I had been so captivated by Uncle Asif's charm that it didn't occur to me that Karim's reaction might differ from mine. How could anyone fail to be won over by raccoon-eyed, pillow-bellied, pear-headed Uncle Asif?

‘Oh, those snake and mongoose fights at the beach! All fakes! The snakes are defanged, poor buggers, so that the cute little mongooses—mongeese? mongii?—can win every time.'

‘Everyone knows that,' Karim said. I stepped on his foot and smiled at Uncle Asif, my mouth barely bearing up under the pressure of being charming for two. My lips were already beginning to chap in the cold, dry air, and I was afraid if I smiled with any greater force they would split open.

‘Is Aunty Laila here?' I said.

Uncle Asif lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘The snake charmer came and spirited her away in the dead of night.' He straightened up and grinned at me. ‘But he'll bring her back by lunch. She left instructions that you should eat, shower and call your parents the second you arrive, but since the second has passed and we're still out on the veranda you're free to stretch your legs and other body parts also. Just be back in an hour, OK?' He waggled his cane at someone I couldn't see, and walked off towards the sugar-cane fields.

‘Well, he's an oddity,' Karim said, as we turned away from the house and cut through the long, manicured garden with its beds of chrysanthemums and roses.

‘And you, as Sonia might say, are an idioddity. What are you being so moody about?' I had the longer legs, but I was struggling to keep up with him as he strode from the garden on to the surrounding path and from there charged, head down, into the bushes.

There was, just feet away, a two-person-wide opening in the bushes to allow for easy access between house and crops but I was just old enough to worry that I might be turning ladylike, so I ignored the opening and followed Karim. He must have known I was behind him but this didn't stop him from pushing aside a pliant bit of foliage, stepping forward and letting go. The green and prickly thing lurched towards me and I had to put my arms up to fend it off. ‘What the hell, Karim?'

‘Walking, not talking, is a good idea.' He stepped out from the bushes and didn't even stop to take in the sight of those acres of crops rolling towards a distant shroud of mist, but merely continued walking along the mud-path that bordered the cotton, head still down.

This was all very strange. Surliness was my thing in those days. I could summon it up over an egg. All because of the tyranny of bras, I now believe. I had yet to reconcile myself to a lifetime of being so strapped in at the chest. But, my point being, Karim was the peacemaker, the even-tempered one, the joker who dared me to stay sullen in the face of his wit.
Look,
he'd said once, holding up a five-rupee mask of Sly Stallone in Rambo headband looking peculiarly Pakistani,
it's the face of my wit.
He slipped it over my head.
Stay sullen in it. I dare you! Rambo Rehman. Rambunctious. Ram Boloo Pehlvan.

In the middle of the path he came to a stop and closed his eyes. There was a faint roar of farm equipment in the distance. ‘That's the sound of waves breaking,' Karim said, with an extraordinary leap of imagination. He raised an arm and started jabbing at the air. ‘There's Zia's beach hut, and there's Runty's hut. There's the cave where Zia goes to smoke, there's the place where we saw the baby turtle, there's the steep cliff we thought we'd never be able to climb, there's Portal Karim and Portal Raheen, and Sonia Rock is almost lost in the gloom, and there's where my parents built a sand castle together two years ago.' He dropped his arm, his eyes scrunched tight.

Well, I decided, whatever's bothering him, either he'll tell me about it or he'll forget about it. I quickened my step and edged past him. For a few seconds the distance between us widened, and then somehow we were side by side again, our feet stepping in time to ‘Left, right, left right, pyjama dheela, topi tight.' We walked past cottonfields, past buffaloes wallowing in pools of water, past goats, past chickens, past grass greener than any green in Karachi, past more cottonfields, always more cottonfields, and I thought for the first time how strange it was that we never walked in Karachi, not from Karim's house to mine, not from Sind Club to the Gymkhana, not from anywhere to anywhere except at the beach, and even there you could walk only so far before water or rocks or crabs indicated, Enough now. Go back.

On our return to the house, Karim picked a chicken claw off the ground. ‘This could be a starfish,' he said. ‘It should be. We should be home. Planning a trip to the beach. We should be home. Doesn't it bother you that we're not?'

‘Home is an anagram of “oh, me!” Such a dramatic cry. Speaking of which, why are you being the one-minute version of Drama Hour for no reason? This is a holiday; it's cool. We can wander around and explore and stuff. Besides, no one's going to get permission to go to the beach these days, not with all the violence and stuff.'

‘Karachi is an anagram of “hack air”.' He pulled a penknife out of his pocket and slashed at the wind. Women in bright clothes with makeshift cloth bags full of cotton slung over their shoulders walked past and pointed towards us, giggling. I felt oddly foreign.

‘Karimazov?'

‘Just mindless violence,' he said, snapping the blade closed. ‘Doesn't it bother you that we're here because our parents don't feel we're safe at home?'

I shrugged. Our first time away from our parents, and he had to go and do the whole concerned-citizen-of-a-city-in-turmoil bit on me. Imagine if in
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
the four children sat around saying, ‘We're here because there are air-raids in London. How terrible!' They'd never even make it up the stairs, let alone into the wardrobe, with that kind of attitude. I thought of mentioning this to Karim, but we'd decided that it was time to grow out of the Narnia books the previous year, and he might have laughed at my childishness had I invoked them. So instead I said, ‘There's nothing wrong with spending a few days in this place.'

He looked at me as though I were very stupid. ‘He thinks changing locations can alter things,' he said.

‘He
who?
Your father? Well, so what? It can, can't it? Sometimes. Depending on the things.' I began to feel I had no idea what he was talking about.

‘But when we go back nothing will have changed.' He tossed the claw away from him with a jerk, as though just realizing it was part of a dead animal. ‘What does he think he's protecting me from?'

‘Bullets and bombs. Come on, Cream, it's not so bad here.'

He turned away from me and rubbed his hands across his eyes. Probably tired from the journey, I told myself. But he'd fallen asleep before me on the train and woken up only when I woke him up. I knew I should ask him what really was the matter, not just today, but nearly every day for the last few weeks, or was it months? We were all beginning to surprise ourselves with our reactions to the world in those days, anger flaring up for no reason and solitude becoming a sought-after state in which we'd find ourselves thinking about things that formerly would have made us clump together in groups to giggle. So it would have been easy to dismiss Karim's moments of rage towards his father as nothing more than a manifestation of adolescence, and it seemed almost everyone did dismiss it as exactly that—Sonia and Zia did, and so did my parents, and even Uncle Ali was wont to respond to Karim's scowls with some exasperated comment about ‘boys at that age', while Aunty Maheen sighed. But there was a gravity to Karim's anger, a sense of cause and effect, some terrible notion of consequence. Did no one but me see that? While the rest of us were still just changing, Karim was maturing.

‘When we drove into the farm I thought I was seeing snow for the first time,' I said, leaning forward and speaking softly into his ear as he looked out at a distant point in the cottonfields. ‘But really it's tired clouds, coming to rest on the ground.'

He turned away from whatever he was staring at to smile at me, and encircled my wrist with his thumb and forefinger. He was much smaller than I was in those days, but my wrist fitted perfectly into the ‘O' created by his clasp. Then he cut across to the cottonfield, his feet squelching in the mud. He pulled a cotton boll out of its pod and walked back to where I was standing. ‘Here. I found you an angel in disguise.' Sitting on the top of the cotton was a ladybird. Karim touched the cotton to my hand and the ladybird crawled off on to my palm. I wanted to hug Karim then, but was surprised to find myself imagining my breasts pressing against his chest, and so instead I just looked down at the ladybird and wondered out loud, if I touch its back will my finger come away red? The back became wings and the ladybird swooped off my hand.

There was more swooping a few hours later when Aunty Laila found Karim and me sitting at one end of the long dining table pulling faces at our reflections in the polished wood surface. ‘Darlings!' she cried, descending upon us with arms outstretched, and coming to rest in a crouch between our intricately carved chairs. Her arms locked themselves around our necks and she pulled us close in a sudden gesture so that our faces almost bounced off her cheekbones. She pursed her Lancome-enhanced lips into kisses that were presumably intended to ricochet off the opposite wall and on to our cheeks. Ami once said that no one, least of all Aunty Laila, knew where the boundaries existed between Aunty Laila's parody of Karachi high society and her genuine embodiment of the characteristics of a Karachi Knee.

Have I not mentioned the Knees yet? The Ghutnas, rather, in local lingo. This narrative demands tangents, but, for the moment, remain befuddled. Aunty Laila is on centre stage, and deserves her spotlight.

‘Send word back to Karachi that I am bilkul a farmer's wife,' she said, twirling into her chair. ‘Who needs parties? I'm happy to pick cotton and feed goats.'

‘You're out every day with your scythe, cutting down the sugar cane,' Karim said, his mood sufficiently improved to allow him to smile at Uncle Asif who had just entered the room.

‘Standing knee-deep in keechar to birth a buffalo,' Aunty Laila whooped.

‘Every morning, you're up with the cock,' I said.

And regretted it immediately.

Karim covered his face with a napkin. Aunty Laila—beautiful, elegant, coiffed and manicured Aunty Laila—snorted with laughter. I glanced over at Uncle Asif, but he had the decency to pretend to be too engrossed in piling his plate high with food to realize what was going on. Or so I thought.

‘A history lesson,' he said, a few seconds later, cutting through Aunty Laila's chatter and turning his plate towards Karim and me. ‘In 1947, East and West Pakistan were created, providing a pair of testicles for the phallus of India.' He had moulded his rice into the subcontinent.

‘Honestly, Asif,' Aunty Laila said. ‘No genitalia in the dining room.'

I blushed. Karim crossed his legs.

‘We're thirteen,' I said. ‘Maybe you should wait another five years or so before having this kind of conversation in front of us.'

Aunty Laila laughed. ‘Your mothers and I became friends at the age of ten when I told them about the facts of life.'

Karim retreated behind his napkin again.

‘You needn't act so coy.' Aunty Laila pulled the napkin away from his face and slapped his shoulder with it. ‘Your mother told me about the magazines under your bed.'

‘They weren't mine! Zia brought them over. I can't believe she told...I can't believe you're bringing this up.'

‘So to speak,' Aunty Laila said.

‘Look.' Uncle Asif poured daal on to his plate. The liquid suffused and flowed off the rice. ‘The Indus flooding the land and spilling into the Arabian Sea. See, here, the Oyster Rocks and there Manora lighthouse disguised as a carrot. Look at those tributaries engorged. Jhelum, Sutlej, Ravi, Chenab, and whatever that fifth one is. Guddu Barrage overflowing. See, now, I'm crumbling the Himalayas beneath my fork. Nanga Parbat goes down shrouded in lentils.'