Kartography (30 page)

Aba continued speaking, without even noticing. ‘Shafiq was alone at home when the telegram came. Pink. The telegrams were pink. He'd been stirring his tea, still had a spoon in his hand, and it dropped tea on to one corner of the telegram.' It was as though he was talking about a movie he had once seen.

‘He looked across the street and saw my house. I wasn't directly opposite him, but close. Close enough that Bilal could hobble over to visit in the days when he had an injured ankle. He was always injuring himself playing some sport or other, and his ankle was so prone to fractures and swellings we were all convinced he'd end up permanently on crutches by the time he was middle-aged. Weren't we, Laila?' He'd been inspecting a piece of glass all this while, but he finally looked up and smiled at Aunty Laila.

‘Zafar, don't,' she said.

I looked at Ami. She put a hand on my shoulder and gripped tight. I moved away from the contagion of fear in her fingertips, stepping closer to Karim as I did so.

‘Middle age seemed very far away in those days.' Aba held the piece of glass between thumb and forefinger, his fingertip applying enough pressure to cause his skin to dimple but not to bleed. ‘I saw Shafiq run up the driveway, something silver glinting in his hand, and then he was banging on the front door, so hard I thought he'd break it. I opened the door and he just started screaming, “Those bastards, those bastards, those Mukti Bahini bastards! They've won the war, let them have the country, let them have it. I never cared. Not the way everyone else did.”

‘I asked him what had happened. I'd seen the pink telegram, I'd half guessed already, but I couldn't accept it was true. He said, “You, I used to listen to you, and sometimes you made sense. I never said it, I'm no fool, but sometimes I listened to you. Those bastards, those bastards!” And still I couldn't, I couldn't believe it. I asked him again what had happened and he said——' There was blood now on his fingertip, but his voice was still that monotone, though speeded up, and now I felt as though I was the one watching a movie.

‘Shafiq said, “My brother. My brother and all those other West Pakistanis stranded on the other side. The day we surrendered. Not even recognizable, his body. Not even recognizable, you bastard! My baby brother. What the hell do you have to say about your precious freedom fighters now?”'

For the first time I really wondered what it had been like for Aba to be engaged to a Bengali during those days. I knew he'd opposed the West Pakistani action prior to and through the war; I had never heard much about 1971, but I'd heard enough to allow me to know where his sympathies lay. It must have cost him a great deal, but even then, even when he was little older than I now was, he would not back down on his convictions for the sake of expediency. My father. His bravery, more than Shafiq's loss or Bilal's death, brought tears to my eyes.

‘I still couldn't quite believe it. What do you say to someone at a time like that? I said, “Shafiq. I'm so... Not Bilal, oh God, not Bilal.” And his face twisted into such rage as he answered, “You say ‘not Bilal' but I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, it's payback time. You're thinking, our soldiers did as much and worse. You're thinking, maybe Bilal did too. Isn't that it? You're thinking my brother did all those things people say the soldiers did.” Really, I was thinking I would never again hear him turn every tale of an accident into some grand joke; I was thinking, even Bilal couldn't make any part of this seem anything less than horrific. And Shafiq said, “Don't even think of coming to the funeral, do you hear me? Don't even think of it.” And then he rose up on his toes in fury and said, “How can you do it? How?” I asked him, what? do what? and he replied, “You're going to marry one of them. You're going to let her have your children. How?”'

The same way Aba had known the truth when he saw the pink telegram in Shafiq's hand yet had been unable to accept it, I knew, right then, the tenor of what was to come and I turned to leave, to run away, but Karim gripped me fast, thumb and forefinger squeezing my wrist bones, his childhood gesture of intimacy towards me transformed into a grim vice. I looked up at him. Tears mingled with the blood from a glass-cut, just centimetres from his eye.

‘I heard Shafiq tell his version of what happened, months later,' Aba continued, his tone still unvarying. ‘I was standing outside your living room, Laila, the day of your anniversary party. The one you thought we never came to. We were there. Both Yasmin and I were. About to enter, when I heard Shafiq. Yasmin wanted to walk right in and tell him to be quiet or say whatever he had to say to my face, but I said no, we'll stand here, and you listen to what he has to say.'

Ami was looking at him with such terrible sadness.

Aba looked straight at Karim. ‘Shafiq said, “But then the kitchen door behind Zafar opened and she stepped out into the hall. Maheen. I had started to raise my hand to strike Zafar, but as soon as I saw her my arm just dropped to my side. Maheen. She had taught Bilal how to waltz; he had adored her. And with good reason. I was half in love with her myself. Maheen. Beautiful Maheen, who was looking at me so sadly. Lovely, laughing Maheen. All I could think was, don't let the war have destroyed her too. The crazy roar in my head began to re-cede, and I turned to Zafar, ready to apologize, ready to fall into his arms, weeping.”'

Aba turned from Karim to look at me. ‘But Shafiq didn't do that. He was about to: I believe his version, I really do. But before he could do anything, I spoke. I said, “How can I marry one of them? How can I let one of them bear my children? Think of it as a civic duty. I'll be diluting her Bengali blood line.”'

 

 

 

 

. . .

 

He had barely finished uttering the words ‘blood line', his voice never varying from a robotic monotone, when Ami grabbed me by the shoulder and turned me to face her.

‘Before you say or do anything, I want you to think about everything you know about this man. Think about the fact that Maheen forgave him. Ask Asif, ask Laila, the madness that existed in the country in '71, and how he never succumbed to it, not for an instant, until that final moment. These things have to count. The father, the husband, he's been all these years, that has to count.'

‘Yasmin, stop it,' Aba said. ‘For God's sake, stop it.'

‘She deserves an explanation. Karim deserves an explanation. Zafar, you deserve an explanation.'

‘I deserve? There was an animal inside me. Karim, I'm sorry. Raheen, I'm so sorry.'

‘Stop it!' Ami slammed a fist on the tea trolley and sent cutlery flying. ‘There is no animal inside you that made you do it; there is no animal inside you at all, goddammit. Why won't you accept that and look back at what you did, without feeling that looking back is an attempt at excusing yourself?'

I looked from one parent to the other. What did something that happened nearly a quarter of a century ago have to do with our lives? Why were my parents looking at me, so terrified, so grave, making me feel my lack of reaction was some sort of failure? Why were they being so...irritating? That was it, they were being irritating. As they so often could be, but that was the nature of parents and I hardly regarded it as unforgivable, so why stand around making a big deal of it? I opened my mouth to say all this, but to my horror I found I got no further than ‘You're both...' before my voice cracked and a sob constricted my throat.

My father's face crumpled up, as if I had sliced a blade through him. I turned, hands bunching into fists, and yelled at Karim: ‘Who told you to come back, you outsider!'

I grabbed Aba's car-keys from the coffee table, pushed past Aunty Laila, who was crying on her husband's shoulder, and then I was off, fingers scraping against steel while opening the sliding door to the garden, feet pounding towards the car, Aba's too-large shoes slapping against my soles and against the ground, feet pressing down on the accelerator, down and down, turning the volume of the music up and up...one times two is two two times two is four three times two is six four times two is eight in but an hour it shall be ten and so from our house in the middle of the street where the streets have no
name the person you most admire...
my father...
why?
because he's never given me reason not to...
and your mother?...
yes, her too, but him first because...because I don't know why but because he laughs louder and sings more often and always has an answer to any question I ask when the world doesn't make sense to me and you'd think this sort of adoration wouldn't last past adolescence but here I am, and everyone says I'm like him, and that makes me proud,
hut how will you react when you see his face in shadows for the first time?
I'll, I'll, I'll...

When I finally pulled up in front of the gate to Zia's beach hut, almost an hour after I'd torn out of Aunty Laila's house, the fisherman who looked after all the huts on that strip of beach looked at me with a mixture of curiosity and concern, but opened the gate.

‘Is Zia Sahib also coming?' Baba, the caretaker, asked when I got out of the car.

I shook my head. ‘Just me.'

‘Don't stay long. It's not safe driving back, particularly after dark. Particularly for a girl.'

I nodded and bent down to scratch the head of the yellow-brown mongrel who had come running towards me.

‘Hey, Puppi. What happened here?' I inspected the caked black blood at the end of the dog's ear.

‘Some men shot at him.'

‘Shot Puppi? Why?'

Baba shrugged. ‘Because they're Pakistani. Don't go on the second beach to the left.'

Baba wasn't given to explaining such pronouncements—which could mean ‘bluebottles' or ‘men roaring up and down the sand on motorbikes' or ‘smugglers' or ‘dolphin carcass'—and I didn't feel myself capable of forming another sentence, so I nodded, kicked off Aba's shoes, and made my way down to the beach via the natural footholds in the least sheer part of the dun-coloured cliffs. My feet sank in the warm sand when I jumped down from a height of a few feet. There was no one else on the beach. All mine. For a moment my mind actually cleared, and I stood, breathing in the sea air through my nose, closing my eyes to isolate the sound of waves so small they were just bands of water. The first time I had realized I was homesick at college was when I entered a friend's dorm room and saw a collection of shells arrayed on her desk. I picked each one up in turn and held it to my ear, desperate to hear the sounds of my sea, but most of the shells were too small and even the largest only carried the echo of an unfamiliar ocean.

I walked further and further away from the cliffs—the sand sloped down, slicked and shiny with the last inrush of tide. I rolled up my shalwar, and waded in. The water was cold, but bearable. I splashed some onto my face. Pulled my feet out of their own prints and watched the sea rush in to take their place. Stood on a partly-submerged rock, unbothered by its eroded unevenness prickling my soles. Wished for a dolphin to leap out of the waves. Wished again.

I tried to hear my father saying those words in a tone other than the one he'd used to re-tell it to me. I tried to see his face say those words and mean it. But I couldn't. So why were my fingers trembling as I held my hand out in front of me?

I closed my eyes to try to think of Karim's face as it must have been when someone told him why his mother broke off her engagement with my father. It all fell into place, then, all his moments of withdrawal, all those cryptic comments about my father and about the traits he heard echoing through me. Who told him? Which meddling, trouble-making, heartless, disgusting...may you suffer, whoever you are, may you suffer by losing everything you thought most important and most secure, may you love someone who doesn't love you back... No, worse, may you love someone who loves you but cannot look at you without seeing...what? what?

And then I saw her. Aunty Maheen. Young, beautiful and in love, but with a heart that was daily further cleft by emotions more complicated than anything conjured up by the words ‘polities', ‘patriotism', ‘loyalty'. Who every day heard the news, heard what was reported and what was not reported, heard things that I couldn't pretend to know because no one ever talked about it, no one ever talked about those days and told us what the people who raised us had to bear and what they made others bear, and what could not be borne. What could not be borne for her was obvious, so obvious: Zafar stepping into history, no more pretence at living outside the world around him (as I know he lived for so long, as he had told me he lived for so long, without explaining when he stopped), Zafar stepping into history, stepping where she could not go, and kicking her away as he stepped there.

I saw her face as she heard her fiancé's words, saw her expression register betrayal and, then, register loss, and I sat down hard on the jagged rock, weeping until my throat ached, weeping until I was past tears, my body convulsing in shudders that I couldn't understand, couldn't stop. How would I ever get off this rock, how would I ever go back? How? Karim. How? Aba, Aba, Aba.