Kartography (33 page)

At last Sonia and her family arrived home.

‘Have you heard?' Sonia said, rushing forward to put her arms around me.

Karim stood up and shook Sonia's father's hand. ‘I'm so sorry you had to go through that, Uncle, but at least it's over.'

‘Yes, thank God. Over.' Sonia's father thumped Karim on the shoulder. ‘But everyone's going to say I just paid off the police. Never mind. Memories are short in this part of town. Throw a few parties and everyone forgets your crimes. At least, everyone who's invited does.' He grinned at me.

‘You aren't guilty of any crimes, Aboo,' Sonia said softly. ‘Ama, you look exhausted. Go to sleep.' I hadn't even noticed her mother enter the room. No one ever did.

‘Everyone's guilty of crimes,' Sonia's father said. ‘Just not always the ones you're accused of.'

‘And what are your crimes?' I asked.

I saw Karim glare at me, but I thought,
let all truths ring out tonight. Enough secrecy and innuendo.

Sonia's father gestured around him. ‘Look at this place. Look at where I live. Look at all I had to leave behind to be here. That's my crime. I left so much behind.'

‘You did it for us,' Sonia said, in the manner of a second-rate actress who has played a climactic scene so often she can't remember how to inject that quality of revelation into her voice. ‘For Sohail and me.'

Her father kissed her forehead. ‘Yes. I thought you'd be better off in this world. There was a time when I had certainty.' He put an arm around Karim's shoulder; he'd always been fond of Karim. ‘Now that I don't have this on my mind, I'll sort out something for your car-thief friend.'

When had he told Sonia's father about the car thief? Had he been to visit Sonia at some point without telling me? How could anyone look at Sonia and not want to drown forever in her serene beauty? How could anyone look at Sonia and not see how easy it was to love her? I put my arms around her shoulders and kissed the side of her head. Karim looked surprised at that. Did he think I wasn't capable of a single genuine emotion? Did he expect me to say, ‘Pity you won't be marrying Adel Rana. He would have purified your
nouveau riche
blood line.'

God, Aba, how could you have?

Dost Mohommad entered the room, with a tray bearing cups of green tea with mint and cardamom. Karim, Sonia and I each took a cup, and went outside. We sat in the garden, forgoing cane chairs for the sprawl of grass, and Sonia raised her cup. ‘To the grey areas of our lives,' she said. ‘To the slippery slopes, and the absence of signposts.'

What had she begun to suspect about her father?

Karim clinked cups with her and waved away swooping, bewinged insects. ‘Raheen has something to tell you.'

I told her about the newspaper announcement.

She listened, without interrupting, as I spoke, and then laid a hand on my arm. ‘Thank you. I'd rather hear it from you than anyone in the whole wide...' She closed her eyes, and looked away.

I held my cup against her cold cheek, and understood Zia's inclination to beat Adel Rana senseless. She didn't look at me, fidgeting instead with a long fleshy leaf that sprouted from a calla lilly bulb. She wrapped the leaf around her fisted hand and the leaf snapped, just centimetres above the bulb.

I took the leaf out of her hand and knotted it around her neck. She rested her head on my shoulder, and I put my arms around her, and wondered: how had we come to this, all four of us? How had the laughter gone out of our lives?

Karim stood up and walked around the garden, running his palms over the outline of flowers and shrubs. I closed my eyes for a long moment. When I looked again, he was out of the radius of the veranda light, transformed into shadow. When a moth veered past his shoulder I was almost surprised it didn't flit right through his dark form.

Sonia raised her head from my shoulder, and looked from me to Karim.

‘I'm going in to tell my parents what's happened. Karim, you and Raheen wait for me.'

She went back inside, and Karim continued staring intently at a cluster of flowers, with more fascination than was necessary for what was just a pink clump of petals trying hard to assert resemblance to a rose. I lay back and tried to find something to focus all my attention on, but my mind simply would not clear of everything whirling around in it. It seemed so easy to curl up in a ball on the grass and never think of anyone or anything again.

At length, Sonia came back outside. ‘Zia just rang. Sounded strange. He said he had to see me. Do you know what this is about?'

I shook my head.

‘Well, he's driving aimlessly. Refused to come here. And I don't want to go anywhere we're likely to run into people we know. So I said the two of you would drive me to Kharadar to meet him. That's OK, isn't it?'

I looked at my watch. ‘Your father won't let you leave the house at this hour. Why Kharadar? I've only ever driven through there on the way to the beach.'

‘My father's feeling too bad about my broken engagement to say no to anything I ask. And you've answered “why Kharadar?” Because no one we know goes there.'

And so, for the second time in the day, I drove over Mai Kolachi, the road that cut through mangrove swamps. A few minutes later we were on I.I. Chundrigar Road, just past the Jubilee Insurance House, which, in the dark with some of its illuminated letters fused, spelt out the suggestive command: jubile in ra house.

‘Oh, I always Jubile in Raheen's house. Don't you?' Sonia said, turning to smile at me. I rolled my eyes and then smiled back. It was the only thing she'd said since we'd left her house. It was the only thing anyone had said. Zia's car streaked past us on I.I., and then reversed back when he realized it was my car he'd overtaken. Karim opened the door without a word and stepped into Zia's car.

‘What's happened with the two of you?' Sonia said, but she didn't need my pain to add to hers, so I told her ‘nothing serious'.

‘You'll tell me when you're ready,' Sonia said, and touched my cheek, almost crumbling my resolve.

Before long we were in narrow gullies. Zia pulled alongside and asked Sonia if she could find her way around here.

‘Is the map man lost?' Sonia said, smiling in at Karim.

Karim smiled back and said he'd never seen a map of Kharadar and no one he knew could verbally re-create its twists and turns. I knew nothing about Kharadar as it existed in the present, although somewhere in my head was the information that when Karachi was little more than a cluster of huts within a boundary wall surrounded by marshy ground, there were two points of entry to the town: Kharadar (the salt doorway) and Mithadar (the sweet doorway), named after the quality of water in the wells that stood by each door. So this was as Old Karachi as it got.

Sonia directed me through the narrow lanes, with Zia following behind. She was the only one among us not surprised to see that the shops were still open and the streets bustling with activity, though it was near midnight and most of Karachi had shut down for the night.

A woman was buying a plush animal from a shop that had dozens of toys, individually stored in plastic bags, hanging from hooks outside the store, forcing people walking along the narrow pavement to duck and weave out of the way of footballs, teddy bears, dolls and plastic cricket bats. Through the open door of a travel agency I saw a group of men sitting in a ragged circle with their feet up on a table; further ahead, a sheep poked its nose through the door that stood ajar to a video-game arcade, if arcade is not too elaborate a term for a tiny enclosure with space for only three games. A crowd of children stood around a man who fed long, yellowy sugar cane into a press on a rickety cart and filled old Coca-Cola and 7-Up bottles with sweet liquid. Piles of flattened canes were stacked on the road beside him.

I was moved, absurdly, to tears. A week or two ago people were wary of leaving their houses, particularly after dark, the violence in the city both unpredictable and terrifyingly ordered, causing some to speculate that the factional violence, ethnic violence, sectarian violence and random violence were not unconnected but fuelled by someone who wanted Karachi terrorized. But who? Why? No one was sure, though there was no shortage of theories. We all knew it would start up again—the shootings on a massive scale, the unnatural silence in the evenings, the siege mentality—but for the moment, for today, Karachi was getting back to its feet, as it had always been able to do, and that didn't just mean getting back to work, but getting back to play: friendship, chai, cricket on the street, conversation. It was a terribly self-involved thought, I knew, but I couldn't help feeling that, in the midst of everything that was happening, Karachi had decided to turn around and wink at me. And in that wink was serious intent: yes, the city said, I am a breeding ground for monsters, but don't think that is the full measure of what I am.

Sonia told me to pull over next to a paan shop; Zia parked next to me, and we walked together to a chai shop. There didn't appear to be any female customers, but no one gave us a second glance. The interior of the chai shop—confusingly called a ‘hotel'—was fitted with white bathroom tiles and fluorescent lights, as was the norm with such establishments, and our collective aesthetic gave one long shudder and sat us down outdoors, on wooden backless benches around a laminated-top long table, with watery imprints of the bottoms of glasses on it. The owner (at least, he appeared to be the owner because he had a note pad and pencil in hand) snapped his fingers and a man in black shalwar-kameez appeared to wipe the table clean. When he was done, Karim, Sonia and I rested our elbows on the table top, though Zia first removed a handkerchief from his pocket and spread that on the table in front of him. When he saw we were about to laugh he whisked the handkerchief away, and planted his palms on the table with an air of nonchalance. Sonia ordered parathas and four cups of tea ‘with malai'; Zia interrupted, ‘No malai for me.' He couldn't bear even the tiniest speck of cream to mix with the milk in his tea.

A beggar girl came and stood by our table with a cupped palm extended towards us.

‘Move away,' Zia said.

She stood her ground.

‘Are you deaf? Move away. Can't we drink tea in peace?'

‘Zia!' Karim remonstrated.

‘Fine,' Zia said. He pointed at Karim. ‘He's the one with the money.'

The girl turned to Karim. Sonia nudged him and pointed out the other beggars who were watching with interest to see if he was a soft touch. ‘Come back when we've finished,' he said. The girl continued to stand her ground, blocking Karim's view of the street. I couldn't help getting some perverse pleasure from watching him so torn between the moral code that served him so well in the abstract and the terrible irritation of having someone standing so close, pushing her outstretched palm in front of him and mumbling, without conviction, phrases about her sick mother and sick brother and no money for medicine. These were the sort of things he could remain blithely unaware of when he sat in London or Boston, shaking his head in disgust at the tiny circles in which I lived my life.

‘We're clearly the rich kids around here,' I said. ‘She'd be a disgrace to her profession if she gave up on you so easily. Guess no one's ever shown her a map that lets her know her connectedness to you. Guess she isn't aware of your great, bleeding heart that sees your life in the context of her world.'

‘Sonia, would you tell your friend to stop directing every conversation back to herself,' Karim said.

‘What's going on?' Sonia said. Neither Karim nor I answered, and Zia seemed to be in another world.

The waiter came back to our table, shooing the girl away, and set down four pieces of paper as place mats. They were shipping schedules, detailing lists of Ships, Ports of Call, ETA and ETD, Voyage Number, Flag, Agents and other indecipherables such as: Line Advert, Service, Terminal and EGM. The last column was To Load For (‘sort of like “to die for” but less intense', Karim said, and I couldn't believe how much I wanted to laugh at that) and there were a wealth of place names: Riga, Ashkabad, Fos, Beira, Abidjan, Leixoes, Thessalaniki, Stavanger, Limassol, Monrovia, Lomé, Mouakchott, Port Gentile. I'd never before given thought to what it meant to be part of a port city, to leave the imprint of a tea-wet spoon on names of places that preferred coffee, to have these strange and foreign syllables intrinsically involved in the commerce of the place, to look at the man two tables from you and wonder if, for all his lack of external signs of affluence, he knew the word for ‘ocean' in thirty different languages or the taste of fish cooked in a hundred different spices, and knew too, despite all his travelling, that home meant this alley and these place mats and those different dialects swirling around him. But to admit any of that out loud would be tantamount to saying Karim had a point about me, and I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction.

The parathas arrived, as did the tea, and I gulped when I saw it. The cream rose entire centimetres above the rim of the cup, more frothy than any cappuccino I'd ever seen, and as we watched it in awe it wobbled. ‘The thing's alive,' I said.

Sonia, scooping it up with a spoon, smiled at me and said, ‘What were you expecting? A dribble of single cream?' I continued to stare at the cup and she said, ‘If you eat it up really fast like ice cream on a hot day with the car window open and wind whooshing through, you might get to the tea beneath; but if you leave it it'll just go on absorbing tea and expanding, expanding.'

Of course it was delicious, once I summoned up the courage to put it in my mouth. But Karim gave up after only a couple of spoons. Too rich, too sweet. If I'd been a little more convinced of my ability to finish the cup of tea-flavoured cream I'd have mocked his fragile foreign stomach.

The beggar girl returned and held out her palm again. Zia raised his hand threateningly. ‘Go away!'