Kartography (42 page)

I said, ‘Let's go for a drive. I don't feel comfortable here, having this conversation, with your parents maybe walking by on the other side of the wall.' We drove out in his Integra, though all summer I had kept my movements confined to houses and squash courts as much as possible.

I felt no pleasure, no anticipation, as we drove, just some numb sense of inevitability. Zia's face unreadable. Where were we going? How deserted the streets were, so soon after sunset. Near the submarine roundabout he turned off the main road. We were going to one of Sonia's father's offices, the one closest to home. Desk, phone, fax. Makeshift work space for days when it was too dangerous to head to offices in other parts of town. Green carpet. Nothing of real importance there, no caretakers and guards keeping watch. Years ago, Sonia had showed us we could unlock the door with a penknife. Zia swerved, without slowing, around a stalled car blocking the road. A man stepped out from behind the car, right into the path of Zia's car. Zia spun the wheel. Braked. The man, uninjured, pointed a gun through the window.

‘It must be fate,' he said.

It was the car thief.

He directed us to get out of the car.

‘I'm sorry, I'm sorry, we'll get you a job. I thought my friend had arranged it.' Zia was sweating in the still night air.

The man shook his head. ‘Your friend did arrange it. Lohawalla Sahib tracked me down, found me a job. I owe him a lot. But my brother's been shot. You don't need to know details, but he's been very angry, done a lot of foolishness. Still, he's my brother. And if I don't get him to the hospital he'll die. But if I try driving from here to there, the police will stop me, and then they'll recognize him. They won't stop a car with a girl in it.'

He opened the back door of the stalled car. The brother lay there, unmoving. The first-aid box from Sonia's father's office was open next to him, its contents strewn around the car. Zia's expression passed from fear to something more complicated, something that had to do with the shadows he'd always lived among. He took the man's arms and started to pull him out. ‘Help me, Raheen.' The car thief still had his gun trained on us. I caught the brother's feet as Zia pulled him further and further out of the car. That wasn't sweat, as I had first thought, on the man's shalwar-kameez. We put him in the back seat of Zia's car and drove to the government hospital. The private hospitals wouldn't deal with a gunshot wound. There were Ranger vans everywhere, but no one stopped us.

Outside the hospital, the pavement was covered with bodies, all lined up side by side. The car thief—Mohommad—laughed to see me cover my eyes when I saw them. ‘They're sleeping,' he said. ‘They have relatives in there, and they don't have money for hotels or even transportation. So they sleep here at night, and in the morning they'll see their family members, or find out if they've died.'

In the emergency ward, chaos. So many people there was no room to bring a stretcher through. Zia and Mohommad carried in the brother, conscious now, and slumped him against a wall. No beds available, not even a chair. Not nearly enough doctors. I find myself moving away from the three men, even though I should be telling Zia we can go home now. I am moving among groans and cries and sights I will never forget. Surely someone should be moving faster. Surely the world should be moving faster. A man is talking to a woman who has a crying toddler in her arms. The man is holding a syringe, though he is clearly not a doctor. But he speaks to her and she nods. When he empties his syringe into the child's vein, pain eases off the child's face. The woman holds her arm out, too. The man leans very close to her. Some sort of bargaining will go on. A man in a white coat pushes past me. I hear him say, ‘We've run out of blood.' Another replies: ‘Scrape it off the walls of the operating theatre.' A sleek cat pads past me. This, more than anything, makes me want to throw up. Zia catches my arm. I say, ‘We should give blood.' He tells me we can leave. I open my mouth to say yes, but a doctor has overheard my previous comment, he's asking me what blood type I am. I tell him. He asks Zia. Zia pretends not to know, but I know that he's lying and I tell him so. He pulls his blood-type card out of his wallet. The doctor says we're both needed to give transfusions, immediately. But shouldn't someone test our blood first? A patient lying nearby says, ‘Test for what? Fatal diseases?' There is much laughter around him. I have lost sight of Mohommad and his brother. I think of them as my allies now. No sheets on the bed I am made to lie on. The needle plunges in while I am looking away, and I panic: was it sterilized? Was it new? No one has time to answer me. A man I don't much like the look of is in the bed beside me. He's been in a shoot-out. I hear someone say he's killed people. ‘Was it sterilized?' I keep asking and someone says, ‘Yes, yes,' but the tone is impatient. What can anyone do about it now if it wasn't? Zia comes to find me. His head is spinning. They took more blood, he thinks, than is safe. I ask him about the needle. He hadn't thought to check. We dare not think about it. We ask about Mohommad and his brother. No one knows. But we don't leave. We ask every doctor and orderly who passes by about the man with the bullet in his abdomen. Someone tells us Zia's blood couldn't save the girl on the bed beside him. My man, they think, will live. His mother is at the hospital. She finds me. She tells me I might think my blood has gone to waste, because it is a certainty, not just a probability, that sooner or later, probably sooner, another bullet will find its way to her son's heart. ‘Then your blood will be spilled on the streets of Karachi. But for every day of extra life you've given him, I thank you.' We see Mohommad at last. His brother is dead. We offer to stay. He shakes his head. He asks me, ‘Where's that hero friend of yours? America or England?' I say I don't know. He asks me the hero's name. I say, ‘Karim.'

His name is like cool water in my mouth.

Zia drives us back to his house. We lie on his bed together, and hold each other close, trying not to strain our ears for the sound of some infection coursing through our veins.

 

 

 

 

. . .

 

‘Aba, what really happened?'

For two months we had barely spoken, this question unvoiced, unanswered between us. But now he said, ‘I can't tell you that.' Before I could respond he held up a hand. ‘But I'll tell you what I remember. Should we go outside?'

I led the way out of the house into the garden. It was dark, starless, and the day's heat still hadn't dissipated despite the welcoming sea breeze. Ami was asleep. He had brought me out here so I could raise my voice at him without waking her up.

In the garden, we stood feet away from each other, and he started to speak before my eyes had adjusted to the dark enough to see his expression.

‘Where do I begin?' he said softly.

He wasn't really speaking to me, but I answered all the same.

‘Start with what you were thinking, just before Shafiq walked up to your door with the telegram. Do you remember that?'

‘Oh, yes.' I could see his expression now, but I couldn't read it. ‘Oh, I remember that all too well. I was thinking, what if it never ends?'

‘The war?'

‘No, no. The war had ended. Had just ended. The war ended and Bunty and his friends—my friends—had beaten me up in the squash courts because I was, in their words, a Bingo lover.'

That particular insult had no place in my life. All I could think of were old English women playing some incomprehensible game in large, sterile halls.

‘I was still aching from the bruises. Aching, and thinking, what if time only exacerbates people's wounds, intensifies their madness. I was thinking, suppose I have to leave Karachi to escape all this. And then, it happened.'

‘Shafiq knocked on the door?'

‘No. I thought it. I thought, how much easier my life would be if I wasn't engaged.'

Oh, Aba. ‘Was that the first time...?'

‘No. No. Not by a long shot.'

He ran his hand over his face, and I looked away, biting back the words. You weak, selfish man.

‘And then Shafiq rang the bell. I opened the door. He said, “You're going to marry one of them. You're going to let her have your children. How?”'

He was looking off over my shoulder now, looking towards the front door as though Shafiq were standing right there, even though that house, that scene-of-the-crime from over twenty years ago, had been long ago demolished to make way for an apartment block.

‘His eyes, Raheen, they were so crazed. Crazier than Bunty's had been when he hit me. And I saw something glinting in his hand. I thought it was a knife. It wasn't; it was a tea-spoon, but I didn't know that. I thought it could be a knife. And Maheen was in the house.'

This was the way out. Oh, thank you, god. Here was the reason, the explanation, the way out. I laughed with relief. ‘You knew what to say to placate him and make him leave, didn't you? You knew if he believed you were on his side, he'd leave. Before he saw Aunty Maheen and hurt her, he'd leave. That's all you wanted, Aba.' I put a hand out and caught his collar. ‘We all think selfish, horrible things. We all do. But right then, you just wanted to protect her.'

His eyes left the front door and returned to me. ‘Yes, you're right. Completely right and completely wrong. I knew what to say to make him leave. And I knew what to say to make Maheen leave me.' He took hold of my shoulder. ‘I heard the kitchen door swing open as I stood there. I knew Maheen had walked out into the hallway, where she could hear everything.'

‘She could hear everything, yes, but you also knew that if she walked a step further, Shafiq would have seen her. You had to get him out of there, right then. That was your first concern.' I banged his chest with my fist. ‘You thought he had a knife. Bunty, your old friend, Bunty, had beaten you up, and he hadn't lost a brother.'

‘I could have pushed him out and slammed the door and locked it.'

‘You don't push men with knives, Aba. You talk them down. You placate them.'

‘I could have said, actually we've just broken our engagement. Let's go to your place and I'll tell you all about it.'

‘He would have guessed you were lying. You had to say something shocking enough that he wouldn't see it as a lie...'

‘I couldn't leave Maheen. Just after the war, how could I bring myself to leave her with everything going on. But if she left me, if I said something completely unforgivable...”

‘You wanted to save her.'

‘I wanted to save myself.'

‘You can't be sure of that.' We both said that, at exactly the same instant, and both fell silent.

‘That look in her eyes, Raheen,' he said eventually. ‘When I turned to look at her, just after I said what I said. I would have given up anything—my city, my friends, my life—to erase that look from her eyes. It's when I knew I still loved her, beyond everything else. But when I opened my mouth to explain, I didn't know. I didn't know why I had said it. Right then two entirely divergent explanations asserted themselves with equal force in my brain. Both, Raheen, seemed possible. Perhaps that was crime enough: that both seemed possible.' He sounded unutterably weary. ‘Which isn't to say it doesn't matter. The truth matters, of course. Was I the protector or the coward? I don't know.' He pulled himself up straight. ‘I'll never know.'

Without waiting for a response, he walked past me, back to the house. As I watched him go, I knew I wasn't watching either the father I adored or the father who had betrayed me with his own weakness, but a middle-aged man who had revealed to me the terror and the pity that I might still just be able to avoid.

 

 

 

 

. . .

 

There are two ways to escape suffering [the inferno where we live every day]. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.