Kartography (4 page)

I know what I was thinking. I was thinking, is this how people are forced to entertain themselves in Ruralistan? But Karim, when I looked at him for the raised eyebrow that would confirm our synchrony of thought, was staring down at his plate, shifting his rice around with his fork as though he, too, were trying to construct a rice-mould but the picture in his mind kept changing shape, stymieing all efforts to reconstruct it in rice.

Although, to be honest, I just made that up.

But I'm not making anything up when I recall Uncle Asif's friend, whatshisname, the diplomat who stopped at the farm after lunch to drop off a dead quail and, before departing, shook Karim's hand and said, ‘So you're Ali's son? I suppose on meeting a young man your age it's customary to ask what you're going to be when you grow up, but no need for that with you, is there? I expect Ali's already preparing you to take over the linen industry. For three generations your family has kept my family's dining tables looking so elegant.'

‘No,' Karim said. ‘I'm not joining the family business.'

‘Oh! What, then?'

Karim looked around, saw a dribble of daal on Uncle Asif's kameez. ‘I'm going to be a map-maker.'

 

 

 

 

. . .

 

We were without obsessions at the time, a rare occurrence in our lives. A few months earlier it had been birds. We became buyers of bird books, spouters of bird facts (‘the hummingbird eats fifty or sixty meals a day', ‘the Gila woodpecker lives in the desert and never sees wood, only cactus'), imitators of bird walks (moving through the world on our toes, heels in the air), though the fascination with feathered creatures was necessarily short-lived since all we could see in our gardens were crows and sparrows, and what's the point of being bird-obsessed if you can't bird-watch. Prior to that, we'd filled our lives with disguises. We would wander around with cotton balls lodged in our cheeks, sling towels across our shoulders under loose shirts, stick black paper over our teeth, and we even collected hair clippings from Aunty Runty's beauty parlour and attempted to glue straight, long tresses to the ends of our own hair.

How each of our obsessions started and how they ended, and who instigated their beginnings and ends, we never remembered or cared about. But I cared deeply when Karim started pulling atlases out of Uncle Asif's bookshelf, the day after we arrived in Rahim Yar Khan, and traced distances and routes with his index finger, without any regard or concern for my lack of interest in the relationship of one place to another.

‘You can't be a map-maker anyway,' I said to him one morning when I found him in Uncle Asif's desk poring over a large map of Pakistan that had creases where it had been folded and refolded into a neat rectangle. ‘Because all the maps have been made already, right? What are you going to do? Discover a new continent and map it?' I hoisted myself on to the desk and sat down in the ‘disputed territory' of Jammu and Kashmir. ‘Better way to occupy yourself is to come outside and lose a game of badminton to me. Or we could walk to the dunes. Or leap around the cotton mountain.'

He took the glass of orange juice I held out to him, and gulped it down. Bits of pulp clung to the inside of the glass and to his upper lip. ‘If you had to give someone directions to Zia's beach hut, what would you say?'

I looked out of the window. It was a beautiful day; winter sun was beckoning us outside. ‘I don't know. I'd say, go towards the beach, and when you come to the turtle sign take a right and——'

‘No, idiot.' He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. ‘How would you give directions to someone who didn't know the way to the beach? Maybe someone who'd left Karachi years ago and couldn't remember the way there any more.'

‘Oh.' I considered this. ‘Well, I'd just say, “Don't worry, we'll meet somewhere and go to the beach together.”'

Karim glared at me. ‘That's not helpful.'

I glared back at him. ‘There's something you need to know.'

‘What?'

I lifted him up by the collar and slammed him against the chair back. ‘You hate geography!'

‘Yeah, so? Every map-maker has his quirks.'

I couldn't help laughing. ‘Fine. By the way, map-makers are called cartographers.'

‘Cartographers.' He wrote down the word, forming a circle with the letters, and we both bent our heads over the paper.

‘Go rap her carts,' I suggested, rearranging letters in my head. ‘Strap her cargo? Crop rag hearts?'

Karim grinned. ‘Chop Ra's garter.'

‘Listen,' I said. ‘We're adolescents. We're supposed to be rebellious for the sake of it. So if you just want something that has nothing to do with making linen, that's really fine and in keeping with this stage of life and all that. But there are more interesting options than latitudes and longitudes. How about flea-trainer? Or bear-wrestler?'

‘Bare wrestler?
Please!
Let's promise never to imagine each other naked. Oh, sorry, no. Too late for that.'

‘What?'

‘I've seen your baby pictures.'

I crossed my arms and gave him one of my that-is-so-pre-teen looks, attempting an air of superiority, but he waggled his ears at me in return and I couldn't help laughing.

‘OK, but truthfully, Karim, what's so interesting about this stuff?' I picked up the atlas and placed it on his head; you'd never know how flat the top of his head was until you tried balancing something on it. ‘I don't understand the fascination.'

He tilted his head forward and let the book fall on to the desk. ‘It's like a giant jigsaw, the world. All these places connecting.' He opened the atlas to one of the first pages, where all the continents were spread out. ‘See: Pakistan connects to Iran which connects to Turkey which connects to Bulgaria which connects to Yugoslavia which connects to Austria which connects to France. But then there's the sea. And after that, England. It doesn't quite connect, England.' He stared gloomily at the page.

‘But we like seas,' I reminded him, before either of us could start thinking about the increasing frequency of Uncle Ali's threats to move to London. I traced a sea route with my finger from the coast of Karachi to Plymouth. ‘If it were possible to walk on the sea bed, we could step into the water at Baleji Beach and just start walking. And everyone would see us go, and we'd wave back at them and we'd carry on waving at them and walking, even when we couldn't see them any more and just
knew
they were there, and we'd walk and walk and walk, and never know when we crossed out of Karachi's water and were surrounded by some other country's seaweed. And then, look, all of a sudden, there's England. And maybe the sea's colder now, but it's still the sea, you know.'

But he wouldn't be drawn into that vision of things. ‘Even seas have boundaries,' he said. ‘You'd be arrested by the coastguard.'

You?

‘Can't turn everything into a game,' he muttered.

I swung my legs off the table, and shrugged. I wasn't going to let him see how much that stung. ‘You started with the jigsaw puzzle.'

He pushed back his chair and stood up. ‘True. Guilty. But may I say something in my defence?'

‘Nope. You are dismissed as incontinent, irreverent and immaterialistic.' I kicked his shin. ‘Come on. Let's go and find a nonexistent ghost.'

He saluted me, and all was forgiven. I never knew how to stay angry with Karim. We climbed out of the window and wandered to the back lawn, past the slightly sagging badminton net and towards the ancient tree that dominated the garden. Thin, ropy strands fell like veils from its outstretched limbs. A ghost lived in this tree. Ghosts appeared to live in almost all the old trees near and around the farm, but they smelled citydwellers' disbelief emanating from both of us, and hid in protest. The least amount of courtesy you should extend to someone is acknowledgement that they exist, and Karim and I were horribly discourteous towards ghosts. The one in this tree was a nomad, but she'd stayed put here all her afterlife. She had belonged to one of the nomadic tribes that passed through the sand dunes bordering the farm—strange to look around Uncle Asif's land and consider that such a verdant place was reclaimed desert. The people of the town didn't mix with the nomads and whenever two peoples don't mix with each other it means Romeo and Juliet is about to happen. And so it was with the nomad girl and a boy from the village; they were in love, they swore they would die before they allowed themselves to be parted, and before the drama could develop further she died of pneumonia, which wasn't terribly romantic, and he married someone else, which was worse, and she had been sulking in the tree in the back yard ever since. Or, at least, that was Uncle Asif's version of things.

‘How long do they remain nomads?' Karim climbed from one branch to another until he was high enough to see the silver-grey dunes, less than a ten-minute walk from where we were, on which the ‘settled nomads' had built mud huts. ‘They've been in one place for over twenty years now, Uncle Asif said. When do they stop being called nomads?'

I put my arms around the tree trunk, and Karim clambered on to the branch growing out of the other side of the trunk and did the same. Tree-huggers before we'd ever heard the term. The trunk so wide (or we so small?) that even the tips of our fingers didn't reach. The sun's rays were piercing through narrow gaps between the leaves, and it almost seemed possible to grasp a shaft of sunlight and wield it like a lightsabre. ‘Luke, I am your father,' I rasped in my best Darth Vader impersonation. Karim jumped up from a branch and, with his feet dangling, hooked his arm over the branch above. I looked down. We weren't very high up, but high enough that you wouldn't want to slip. I looked down again. The branch I was standing on seemed narrower than I had thought. Narrower, and flimsier.

‘Karim, I'm stuck.'

Faster than I had thought possible, he was on the tree limb right below me, ready to climb up.

‘No,' I yelled, when he put his hand up to take hold of the branch. ‘No, don't. It can't take your weight.' I pressed my body against the tree trunk, willing it to absorb my body mass so that the branch would not give way beneath me.

‘Don't panic,' he said. ‘Just let go of the trunk and step back.'

I looked down again. The grass seemed to rise up towards me. Or was I falling and unaware of it? I gripped the trunk tighter. I knew I mustn't faint whatever happened, mustn't faint.

‘Don't look down. Look up.
Look up!'

I raised my head and looked out towards the dunes. One of the nomad women was sweeping the square of earthen ground outside the cluster of huts. Another was stirring a pot on the outdoor stove. Purple stain on the ground near the fire. Same colour as the woman's clothes. I wanted to point out to Karim that the dye had spread in a boot-shaped pattern. Like Italy. How do you build a hut on a dune? Surely the sands must shift continually. My shirt was drenched in sweat. Would it be enough to suction me to the tree trunk when the branch broke?

‘Ra, let go of the trunk and step back.'

‘I'll fall.'

‘You won't fall.'

‘I'll fall. I'll fall and I'll die.' As I said it, I could see it happening. The foot stepping on air, pulling the rest of my body with it, tree limbs breaking as I plummeted down.

‘No,' he said, his voice assured. ‘You'd never do that to me.'

I let go of the tree trunk, turned, and sat down. The branch was wide and strong. I placed my palm on the branch and pushed down with the full weight of my body. It didn't even quiver. I could jump off the branch and I'd land in mud, entirely unharmed.

Karim touched my knee and then was gone, clambering back to the other side of the tree. I stretched out and lay down. Would it be so terrible to live here? In Karachi we never had this freedom, this space to wander in. Too dangerous to walk around, and too humid to want to walk most of the time. Besides, walk to where? Life compressed into houses and cars and private clubs and school and gardens too small to properly hide in. Zia was in Karachi, I had to remind myself. That was hardly inconsequential. I could hear Karim moving from branch to branch. We had never once talked about my feelings for Zia, and I had only realized that Karim knew how I felt when he backed up my insistence, in front of our whole gang, that there was no picture of Zia in my bedside-table drawer, despite Sonia's claims to the contrary. He backed me up on that, even though I had started keeping the drawer under lock and key and would not tell him why. He backed me up even though Sonia was the new girl in school and she was beautiful. That had been in August, at the beginning of the term, and now Sonia and I were fast friends (‘I'm not fast; I'm fully modest,' Sonia had said, the day I let her look in my bedside drawer again. ‘But you're a real Carl Lewis. Except, where Zia is concerned you're Legcramps-e-Azam'). But Karim still hadn't said another word to me about the picture. Or was it I who hadn't said another word to him? My eyebrows drew closer to each other. How would I feel if he had pictures of a girl in his drawer and never talked to me about it? Not good. In fact, I'd probably walk up to him and kick him hard for such an attempt at secrecy. But Karim didn't kick. Perhaps it was because he knew that he had only to wait and I would tell him everything.